medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
the reviewer's comment
"_The Monodies_ only survives in an
early modern exemplar; _On the Relics of the Saints_ in a single
autograph manuscript of the twelfth century. In short, there is no
evidence to suggest that Guibert's writings had any lasting impact on
his contemporaries or any postumous legacy until the discovery of his
work by the Maurists in the seventeenth century."
fuels my on-going interest in the question of "Survivals, Lost Monuments and
the Consequences of Loss."
might write a chapter in my book on that subject.
c
------ Original Message ------
Received: Thu, 29 Nov 2012 09:45:51 AM EST
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: TMR 12.11.21 McAlhany and Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent (Bruce)
McAlhany, Joseph, and Jay Rubenstein, trans. <i>Guibert of Nogent,
Monodies and On the Relics of the Saints: The Autobiography and a
Manifesto of a French Monk from the Time of the Crusades</i>. New
York: Penguin Books, 2011. Pp. xxxix, 395. $20.00. ISBN-13:
9780143106302.
Reviewed by Scott G. Bruce
University of Colorado at Boulder
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Nobody knows Guibert of Nogent better than Jay Rubenstein. Most
medievalists first encountered this prolific twelfth-century author
during college through John Benton's translation of his most
accessible work, the <i>Monodies</i>, which appeared in 1970 as
<i>Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert
of Nogent (1064-ca.1125)</i>. As Benton's title suggests, Guibert's
uneven, yet often riveting, account of his own upbringing and life in
the church provides a window not only onto the personal and spiritual
development of a Christian prelate in the aftermath of the Gregorian
Reform, but also onto the social world of northern Europe in the
decades around 1100. Still, Guibert garnered very little attention
from historians until the publication in 2002 of Rubenstein's
monograph <i>Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind</i>, which
was the first modern study to examine in tandem the many texts
composed by this abbot in order to identify and understand the common
strands of thought braided through the whole of his surviving oeuvre.
[1] In the volume under review, Rubenstein and Joseph McAlhany
provide new translations of two of Guibert's most important
compositions, the <i>Monodies</i> and <i>On the Relics of the
Saints</i>, along with a short introduction to this author's life and
works.
Guibert's <i>Monodies</i> (c. 1115) is a much more complicated
composition than it first appears to be. Divided into three books,
this work is part memoir, part history of cities and events in
northern Europe, and part unrestrained digression on a variety of
themes. Book I presents the author's upbringing, his relationship
with his parents, relatives, teachers and patrons, and his personal
struggles with lust, pride and self-loathing. It relates the story of
his life from his childhood to his entry into the abbey of Saint-
Germer-de-Fly to his election in 1104 as abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy.
It ends with a series of digressions, most of which are moral tales
about the failings of monks. A very short Book II provides a history
of the city of Nogent, with a brief aside concerning the death of
Guibert's mother. Book III abandons all discussion of the author's
personal life and relates instead, in vivid detail, the urban
destruction and horrible violence that resulted from the communal
uprising in the city of Laon in the spring of 1112. The
<i>Monodies</i> has often been called the first work of autobiography
written in Latin since the <i>Confessions</i> of Augustine of Hippo
(c. 400). Aside from the fact that both works are unusually self-
referential they do not merit such close comparison (cf. ix). As many
historians have shown, Augustine's work is not primarily about
Augustine at all; it is about Augustine's God. [2] The
"autobiographical" narrative of the early books of the
<i>Confessions</i> cannot be fully grasped without the final
epistomological chapters on the meaning of Scripture, creation and
redemption. In contrast, while Guibert's insights into his upbringing
and his theories about the workings of the human mind in Book I are
fascinating in their own right, they are not easily wedded to the
narrative of unrest, murder and destruction that he relates in Book
III. In short, Guibert's work lacks both the internal coherence and
the incantatory power of Augustine's <i>Confessions</i>. Literary
comparisons aside, Guibert's <i>Monodies</i> does offer an unparalled
account of the anxieties attendant with the implementation of the
Gregorian Reform among church prelates and the explosive tensions
surrounding the rise of urban commerce and social reorganization in
northern Europe in this period.
The second work translated here, Guibert's <i>On the Relics of the
Saints</i> (c. 1119), is just as complex and enigmatic as his
<i>Monodies</i>. This is first and foremost a polemical treatise, in
which Guibert openly ridicules the boast of the rival abbey of Saint-
Médard of Soissons to possess a baby tooth of Christ. But the work is
also full of digressions on the abuse of the cult of relics by greedy
prelates, the nature of Christological relics and their relationship
to the Eucharist, and the role of material objects in general in the
quest for communion with God. As Rubenstein points out in his
introduction, Guibert's disdain of dubious relics has made it easy for
readers to view him as "a Counter-Reformation apologist or a proto-
modern mind" (xvii). But as Rubenstein notes, Guibert did not disavow
the miraculous in principle. Rather, what bothered him most were
"pointless wonderworks perpetrated through obvious fraud and spread by
clerics mainly anxious to collect cash" (xvii). The translation of
this treatise is particularly welcome, because it has never before
appeared in English in its entirety, and its topic is directly
relevant both to the study of relics--always a subject of interest to
historians of medieval religion--and to the more general "material
turn" in recent medieval scholarship. [3]
Translations of important works of medieval history and literature in
the Penguin Classics series are always a cause for celebration and
this volume is no exception. The translations of these two texts by
Guibert of Nogent are clear, accurate, and accessible to North
American undergraduates. The introduction to the volume does a good
job of presenting the author and his intellectual mileau, but scholars
will want to visit (or revisit) Rubenstein's monograph for a more
sustained and nuanced treatment of the relationship between Guibert's
compositions. If I have one complaint about the volume, it is the
tendency of the introduction to over-emphasize the importance of
Guibert's work. The abbot of Nogent was indeed a prolific author, but
I cannot agree that any of his texts represents an achievement
"comparable to Anselm of Bec's demonstration of God's existence in the
<i>Proslogion</i>, or to Bernard of Clairvaux's monumental series of
sermons on the Song of Songs" (viii). His contemporaries evidently
did not think so either. The <i>Monodies</i> only survives in an
early modern exemplar; <i>On the Relics of the Saints</i> in a single
autograph manuscript of the twelfth century. In short, there is no
evidence to suggest that Guibert's writings had any lasting impact on
his contemporaries or any postumous legacy until the discovery of his
work by the Maurists in the seventeenth century. Moreover, the
introduction could have done more to help the reader to understand the
contradictions between these two works. How are we to reconcile
Guibert's narrative of a relic translation as a pious event in the
<i>Monodies</i> with the criticism of the same kind of ritual voiced
only a few years later in <i>On the Relics of the Saints</i>?
Finally, students in particular would have benefited from a bit more
guidance regarding the respective genres of these texts and what
pitfalls to avoid while reading them. The claim that "[his] books
speak for themselves" (viii) is not very helpful in this regard; they
are both very complex and require a good deal of elucidation to make
them intelligible, especially for the uninitiated. The value of these
translations for those of us who teach upper-division courses on the
history of medieval religion or the so-called Renaissance of the
Twelfth Century is not in question, however. This volume is a very
welcome addition to the Penguin Classics series and I look forward to
using it in the classroom.
--------
Notes:
1. Jay Rubenstein, <i>Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval
Mind</i> (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).
2. See, for example, Paula Fredriksen, "The Confessions as
Autobiography," in <i>A Companion to Augustine</i>, ed. Mark Vessey
with the assistance of Shelley Reid (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012),
pp. 87-98, with references to earlier literature; and Gary Wills,
<i>Augustine's Confessions: A Biography</i> (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011).
3. See, most recently, Caroline Walker Bynum, <i>Christian
Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe</i> (New
York: Zone Books, 2011).
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