medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
From: Revd Gordon Plumb <[log in to unmask]>
> Yes, but not at $205!!!
> Gordon
well, that's why God, in Her Wisdom, invented the photocopy machine, Gordon.
and, later, as an afterthought, the digital scanner.
when reading this last week, i saw that Constance Berman hadn't lost her
Amateur Standing as a remarkably careless "scholar," noting the construction
of "the Gothic cathedral at Saint-Denis."
oh, well, i suppose that all those Big churches look pretty much alike --and,
after all, St. Denis *is* a cathedral (now).
c
> In a message dated 17/09/2012 16:22:40 GMT Daylight Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> Of interest?
>
> Rosemary Hayes
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "The Medieval Review" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 2:44 PM
> Subject: TMR 12.09.08 McGuire, A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux
(Berman)
>
>
> McGuire, Brian. A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux. Brill's
> Companions to the Christian Tradition 25. Leiden and Boston: Brill,
> 2011. Pp. 406. $205. ISBN 978-9004201392.
>
> Reviewed by Constance H. Berman
> University of Iowa
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> The volume testifies to the continued importance in the first decade
> of the new millennium of Cistercian studies and studies of Bernard of
> Clairvaux. As always Brian McGuire is an astute and appropriate
> editor and his gentle introduction and survey of Bernard's life and
> work (1-61), reflect an expertise on all things Cistercian developed
> over a lifetime. Calling on a diversity of contributors, each
> approaching Bernard from a specific viewpoint, McGuire as editor
> encourages new modes of analysis. The volume throughout is solid and
> intelligently produced. Anyone beginning work on either Bernard or
> the early Cistercians will benefit from this wealth of information,
> but even those long familiar with the field will find new
> interpretations and analyses. My personal preferences were articles
> by Christopher Holdsworth, Michael Casey, M. B. Pranger and Mette
> Bruun. I find it hard not to comment on the work of so many authors
> who have become friends over the years and my remarks beyond the
> descriptive or exclamatory are often mere quibbles.
>
> Michael Casey, "Reading Saint Bernard: The Man, the Medium, the
> Message" (62-107), is a carefully nuanced view of Bernard and his
> writings. Again and again, Casey tells us not to take Bernard too
> literally. We should not fail to appreciate Bernard's humor,
> self-deprecation, admission of mistakes, collaboration, appreciation
> of others, and personal attraction; these are the topics of
> subsections in Casey's analysis. Thus Casey points to Bernard's
> Apologia to argue for taking things with a grain of salt: "No
> medieval reader would believe that the descriptions of gigantic meals
> supposedly served to Black Monks or the pontifical splendour of their
> abbots were meant to be true-to-life pictures. They were making a
> point about values, not creating an historical record" (67). I want
> my students to read this statement over and over! Hear! Hear! We
> need to stop treating medieval voices as somehow devoid of rhetoric!
> Casey argues, similarly that Bernard was a collaborator with his
> fellow abbots and open to a certain amount of trial and error in their
> early reform efforts: "Bernard is often regarded as a man of solitary
> brilliance, charging forward and expecting others to follow. Although
> we cannot be certain of all the details concerning the exact working
> of the collectivity that came to be known as the Cistercian Order, it
> is clear that its first decades were strongly collegial" (72).
>
> Similarly M. B. Pranger on "Bernard the Writer" (220-248) argues that
> Bernard's writing is not only religious writing and that its
> rhetorical and literary aspects must be appreciated by modern readers
> as they were by medieval ones. Pranger turns to Chapter Twelve of
> Robert of Basevorn's De Arte Praedicandi (written in 1322) to
> show that medieval appreciation of Bernard's writing was based on
> admiration of its skill in rhetoric and its incorporation of the
> language of Scripture: "using every rhetorical color so that the whole
> work shines with a double glow, earthly and heavenly" (225). Pranger
> argues that often a surface meaning turns out to mean something else.
> Thus regarding "the subtle structure of Bernard's text" (241), he
> describes how a spontaneous-seeming outburst found unchanged in a
> carefully revised set of sermons is obviously not a spontaneous
> outburst at all, but a carefully planned one. Similarly Bernard uses
> satire in his description of cooking eggs at Cluny--something that may
> easily be recognized as such, but then Pranger asks, why would we take
> literally his description of Abelard as the monk without a rule?
> Pranger, like Casey, reminds us that reading Bernard is not easy.
>
> Mette Bruun does something of the same in an elegant analysis of
> "Bernard of Clairvaux and the Landscape of Salvation," (249-78), in
> which the unending war between Babylon and Jerusalem is just one
> element in the topics of Biblical soteriology incorporated into
> monastic praise. Psalm 137's opening "By the rivers of Babylon, I lay
> me down and dream of Zion," is as evocative to Bernard then as it has
> become to us today because of its use in popular music and sometimes
> reversed in slogans for the Arab spring. Brunn thus describes Bernard
> "as the cartographer who maps the landscape of salvation" (255) from
> Eden to Egypt to the crib of Jesus, and as Brunn points out, Bernard's
> monastic murmurers wanting to depart on Crusade are compared to the
> Israelites Dathan and Abiron who murmured against Moses and Aaron, and
> were therefore swallowed up by the earth.
>
> Christopher Holdsworth's "Bernard as a Father Abbot" (169-219) shows
> Bernard as a different kind of leader. Letters from Bernard as
> father-abbot at Clairvaux to his daughter-houses are here discussed
> under categories such as recruitment. This allows Holdsworth to place
> the oft-told story of Bernard's young cousin Robert (who entered
> Clairvaux after Cluny, returned to Cluny, and so on) in the context of
> similar cases that Bernard handles. Under the category letters to
> patrons and benefactors, he presents Bernard's thank-you notes and
> encouragement for gifts to daughter houses. Under those about
> foundation and affiliation are requests that Bernard send monks to
> found new houses, or commendation of affiliation to the practices of
> his monastery, such as that to Toulouse commending Grandselve for
> becoming a daughter of Clairvaux. Also included are letters about
> abbatial elections, visitation, and meetings of the chapter at
> Citeaux, which while Holdsworth calls it the General Chapter, are
> carefully set out by the degree to which they had become annual,
> universal chapters with mandatory attendance of all abbots. Under
> letters on pastoral care, Holdsworth describes Bernard's practical
> approach to a lack of wine in the chalice over which consecration had
> been said, his plea to the pope to reinstate a supporter of Anacletus
> who had become a monk at Clairvaux, and how to handle the problem of
> someone trained at Clairvaux who had become abbot of a Benedictine
> house wanting to be affiliated with Clairvaux. [1] On page 208
> Bernard is quoted as referring to a popular saying, "Remember that the
> rougher the thistle the softer the cloth." This reference to the
> teasel plant, whose prickly dried flowers or seed pods were used as
> bristles to bring up the matte when finishing fine woolen cloth,
> suggests that Bernard knew more about textile production than might
> have been thought. Holdsworth's Table One provides a useful list of
> foundation or affiliation dates for Clairvaux's daughter-houses and
> which ones received letters from Bernard, and Table Two provides a
> distribution of dates for different types of letters, which may add to
> our understanding of the dating process. Overall Holdsworth brings
> alive that aspect of Bernard as abbot of community over which he takes
> his abbatial duties seriously, missing his community when away, and
> developing solutions to common problems in what Casey called his
> collegial collaboration with other abbots.
>
> If Bernard was abbot and leader, we also begin to learn in this volume
> that Bernard could sometimes be led. Thus, in "Bernard and William of
> Saint Thierry" (108-32), E. Rozanne Elder remarks on the mens' complex
> interactions. It was not always clear about who was the leader and
> who the follower, who was inspired, who was manipulator. Sometimes
> not Bernard, but William, was the leader, as Elder asserts: "In the
> affaire Peter Abelard, there is no doubt that William took the
> initiative in embroiling Bernard" (120). As for Bernard and Abelard,
> Constant J. Mews in "Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard," (133-
> 168), discusses a different William--William of Champeaux, bishop of
> Châlons-sur-Marne (1113-22)--whose early interactions with Bernard,
> recounted here, suggest William's manipulation of Bernard with regard
> to the theological issues at the Council of Sens. Mews concludes
> that: "Geoffrey of Auxerre, the secretary who kept the correspondence
> relating to the [Abelard] affair, had a vested interest in preserving
> this image of Abelard [that the latter's excommunication had not been
> lifted]" (168).
>
> Diane J. Reilly, in "Bernard of Clairvaux and Christian Art," (279-
> 304), raises a problem, but then seems to avoid the obvious solution:
> that some of Bernard's letters need to be re-dated. Good points are
> made in discussion of Bernard's Apologia and the early
> manuscripts at Cîteaux (dated 1109-1111) in Reilly's incorporation of
> findings in a recent (2004) doctoral dissertation by Kathleen Doyle.
> Reilly reiterates what Doyle has observed regarding the descriptions
> of sculpture in the Apologia, which "conform closely to antique
> rhetorical models," (289) and about how much Bernard's rhetorical form
> follows that of the standard late antique oration. Reilly goes on to
> pose the question of how Bernard could be so ill-informed in his
> letter to Suger, abbot of Saint Denis, that he says, "Now the vaults
> of the great abbey that once resounded to the hubbub of secular
> business echo only to spiritual canticles" (295-296). According to
> Reilly, traditional dating has assigned the letter from Bernard to
> Suger to c. 1127 and the Apologia to c. 1124, yet as she points
> out "the renowned vaults commissioned by Suger would not be begun for
> another fifteen years." This is peculiar according to Reilly because,
> as she points out: "Bernard oversaw the construction of monastic
> buildings at Clairvaux and its daughter houses, and he arranged for a
> consistent building plan to be transmitted to new houses as far away
> as Yorkshire, Flanders, and Germany, suggesting that William of Saint
> Thierry's tales of Bernard's indifference to vaults and windows
> notwithstanding, Bernard took a lively interest in the stunning
> structures built under his leadership" (293-294). One cannot resist
> describing Reilly here as making a perfectly good argument for dating
> those writings later and then missing the forest for the trees. If
> the dating given by Reilly about the beginning of the Gothic cathedral
> at Saint-Denis to circa 1140 and the dedication of the new choir to
> 1144 is correct, then Bernard's letter to Suger and Apologia
> must come from considerably later in his life and stretch even further
> the dates between the early illuminated manuscripts from Cîteaux and
> the Apologia than is their traditional dating.
>
> James France, in "The Heritage of Saint Bernard in Medieval Art,"
> (305-346), looks at how Bernard was represented in medieval art
> starting with an author portrait dated 1135 showing Bernard writing
> The Steps of Humility in Oxford Bodleian Library MS 530 fol.
> 15r. France's fascinating analysis has eleven figures including this
> one, but refers to many more available only in his 2007 Cistercian
> Studies publication Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of
> Clairvaux with CD Rom appended to it. This is frustrating for
> those of us who do not have the earlier volume. A minor quibble:
> France's sources have garbled the reference on page 317 to Duke
> William of Aquitaine, converted outside a church during Bernard's
> "visit to southern France to combat heresy." At the time of Bernard's
> visit to southern France, usually dated to 1145, the last William Duke
> of Aquitaine was dead. He had died in April 1137 and his heir was his
> daughter Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had married Louis VII of France in
> August of that same year.
>
> Finally, I have several quibbles with McGuire's overview (18-61).
> While Bernard bravely argued that Crusaders at the outset of the
> Second Crusade should not attack the Jews, earlier he was not above an
> attack on Innocent II's rival, Anacletus, as the grandson of a
> converted Jew. Similarly, in his analysis of Bernard's relationship
> with women, McGuire seems to have overlooked Bernard's interactions
> with the nuns at Jully, stating that, "A later Cistercian generation
> would publicly embrace devout women, but Bernard seems to have
> reserved his feelings for women to his mother and the Virgin Mary"
> (25). It is also incorrect to refer to the monastery at Tre Fontane
> outside Rome as a "foundation," by Clairvaux, as opposed to a
> "refoundation" or "translation" from one monastic practice to another.
> He falls into a retrospective view with regard to the Savigniac
> congregation's affiliation saying, "Not all their abbots wanted to be
> part of the success of Cîteaux" (56); a different word than success is
> what is wanted there.
> --------
> Notes:
>
> 1. Here a quibble: on p. 181 the reference should be to the monastery
> of Saint-Germer at Fly (not Flay) in the diocese of Beauvais.
>
>
>
>
>
> -----------------------
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> > https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3631
> >
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