Miri Rubin

EUROPE REMADE: PURITY AND DANGER IN LATE MEDIEVAL EUROPE

SOME of the most cherished arrangements, the most comforting statements, the most confident claims about the nature of a society living under a divinely sanctioned sacramental–sacerdotal order, were given very different meanings in late medieval Prague, Paris and Pontefract. Such divergence and difference had always been a pattern of European life, as variety applied not only to climate, economic systems, language and political institutions, but also to devotional styles. The consolidation of sameness which was attempted – and to a significant extent achieved – by the church between 1100 and 1300, was offered through a single system of law, of preferment, of ritual. This was embedded within a set of understandings about the relationship of ecclesiastical hierarchy to salvation as well as to social order. Yet by around 1400 doubt and discomfort had attached to several of the touchstones of this world view – eucharist, pope, clergy – and thus hindered the flow of communication and cooperation which both underpinned and represented it. The authority to discern truth was in the hands of rulers and prelates who, in turn, were empowered or catalysed by professional thinkers and communicators – scholars, preachers, teachers, lawyers and poets. Words mattered greatly because they could conjure a vision of possible peace and remedy. They were spoken in tens of universities, hundreds of city councils, in a growing number of representative assemblies. Polities – be they territorial lordships, cities or even at times the Emperor – were pressing these thinkers and communicators to help in the work towards revival, purification and healing, away and against schism, pollution and war. How is the confidence to judge and discern spiritual and ethical truth ever regained by institutions or by individuals? More than ever before we witness preoccupation with the re-ordering of a Christian world through the re-establishment of social, economic and ethical order.

Desecration of the Host: The Birth of an Accusation

A New tale entered the circle of commonplace narratives about Jews which were known to men and women in the thirteenth century: the tale of Host desecration. This new narrative habitually unfolded (i) an attempt by a Jewish man to procure (buy, steal, exchange) a consecrated Host in order to (2) abuse it (in re-enactment of the Passion, in ridicule of bread claimed to be God), (3) only to be found out through a miraculous manifestation of the abused Host, which leads to (4) punishment (arrest and torture unto death, lynching by a crowd). The tale was a robust morality story about transgression and its punishment, and it always ended with the annihilation of the abusing Jew and often of his family, neighbours, or the whole local Jewish community. It was a bloody story, both in the cruelty inflicted on the Host/God and in the tragic end of the accused abuser and those related to him. This basic narrative was open to myriad interpretations and combinations, elaborations at every stage of its telling. It is a particularly interesting narrative inasmuch as it was often removed from the context of preaching and teaching, of exemplification, into the world of action and choice. The Host-desecration tale was not only a poignant story about Jews, it was also a blueprint for action whenever the circumstances of abuse suggested themselves in the lives of those who were reared on the tale. The story’s fictionality was masked from the very beginning of its life: it was always told as a report about a real event, with no irony or explicit elaboration. It was a concrete, new tale, which provided tangible knowledge about Jews, and through the actions of Jews, about the Eucharist.

Christians and heretics

This chapter discusses the principal archaeological remains, namely the large numbers of manuscript books which contain the churchs views of the topic. It also shows how these groups were fashioned and reshaped in these texts. During the twelfth century the texts proliferate. They combine the older language and themes with the notion that there were new heretics and heresies, and some contain the direct description or refutation of a specific new heresy. During the thirteenth century there is amplification, for example the 1184 decretal forms part of the section on heresy in Gregory IXs Five Books of the Decretals. The chapter explains a more direct description of the two major heresies of the period, those of the Cathars and the Waldensians, while continuing to use the churchs vocabulary. The chapter relies on these texts to access the two major heretical movements of the High Middle Ages, and finally provides comment on the main distortions of these texts.

The legal underpinnings

The legal underpinnings of the Western church experienced a major transformation during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This was a period in which papal legislation found its stride, in the form of conciliar decrees and papal decisions. Canon law collections provide a window into the rediscovery of Justinians compilations, because they incorporated snippets of Roman law as it became available. Later papal legislation appears in other similar collections, including the Liber sextus of Pope Boniface VIII. Law professors at Bologna and elsewhere lectured on the collections of decretals, producing commentaries and summas. Medieval legal procedure relied heavily on both Roman and canon law. With respect to the laws of the church, the move towards complexity was also a product of the encounter with Justinians Roman law. The thematic scope of canon law was in the main laid down with the Gratians Decretum, which took its cue from the wide range of matters that French bishop Ivo treated in the Panormia.

Christians and Jews

Like Muslims, Jews were outside the Christian faith but, unlike the Muslims, they were present within Christian society. The concept of boundary and that of the imagined Jew are both keys for deciphering the code of the relations between Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages, particularly in the thirteenth century. Medieval ecclesiastical legislation upheld the rights of Jews to protection and to an existence with a modicum of honour in the Christian world, and several popes issued protective bulls. An important milestone in the attitude of the church towards the Jews was the Fourth Lateran Council, convened in the Lateran Palace in Rome by Pope Innocent III. In the Middle Ages conversion generally operates in a single direction, from Judaism to Christianity, and traditionally the church continued to oppose forced conversions. The first recorded instance of Jews being accused of the ritual murder of Christians is in the mid-twelfth century.

Whose Eucharist? Eucharistic Identity as Historical Subject

Through the experiences of a medieval historian and the experiences which have led to her engagement with the Eucharist in the Middle Ages this paper traces some of the ways in which medieval people assumed or discarded identities through their relationships with the Eucharist. The many ways in which the image encompassing an incarnate God in a wheaten disc allowed individual and groups to assert selfhood, difference and specificity are considered through examples of liturgical, mystical and theological relationships, articulations, of the Eucharist. The centrality of Jews as affirmers of Eucharistic truth in late medieval culture through the rejection and violence attributed to them is offered as a necessary facet of the Eucharists suggestive possibilities. Eucharist is shown as a symbol of interiority and intrinsic value, opposed to Jewish literality and misrecognition of value, ideas which created a link between talk about the Eucharist and discussion of usury. Lastly, some of the historical interests of Jewish writers in the historical links between Jews and the Eucharist are explored.

Monastic and religious orders, c. 1100–c. 1350

This chapter shows that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries manifest an embarrassment of riches: the number, variety and development of monastic and religious orders in this period is overwhelming. It also discusses traditional Benedictine monasticism, and considers the changes that came in the twelfth century. The Cistercians were one of the great historical enterprises of Western monasticism. The Premonstratensians belongs to the family of Augustinian canons. In the Augustinian mould the Premonstratensians combined community life with a pastoral mission. The Cistercians were more positive in their dealings with the Templars. In 1119 Hugh de Payns, a knight from Champagne, organised his companions into soldier-monks. Their founder Bruno, a teacher at Cologne, was fascinated by the stories of the hermits of the desert in Late Antiquity. The foundation of the Franciscans and the Dominicans shortly after 1200 resulted from a new surge of religious feeling and desire for vita apostolica, in imitation of the lives of the apostles.

Mary and the Middle Ages: From Diversity to Discipline

For just over a thousand years the Virgin Mary was central to any attempt to defend or explain Christian Orthodoxy. From the formulations at Ephesos and Chalcedon Mary formed part of the understanding of a God made Flesh and of a picture of redemption which was all-embracing in its promise and tantalizing in its accessibility. This essay shows just how wide and diverse were the medieval ways of thinking about Mary and the ways of exploring the possibilities inherent in the figure of the Mother of God. In liturgy and prayer, in homilies and devotional poetry, in a vast array of material forms Mary was made familiar, above all as mother, as intercessor and companion. Unlike the sacraments, among them the all-important Eucharist, Mary was rarely a subject of discipline or of scrutiny; she entered people’s lives early and seemingly effectively. She stood, however, as a boundary-marker of Christian identity, the quintessential barrier between Christians and Others. Mary did become a subject of discipline to people in the lands of conquest and disease outside Europe.

Reviews : Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992; xiv + 352 pp.; US

In recent decades Reformation historians have been lured into the world of the later Middle Ages. Be it to seek antecedents of Protestantism in medieval traditions of dissent (Dickens), or to identify enduring elements in popular religion and daily life (Scribner), be it to regret the passing of a rich world of community religion (Bossy), or to paint in bright colours and with amazement the rich religious universe which was to be lost (Duffy), this has been a fruitful historical turn. The movement into the

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List of tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Map 1. Introduction 2. The economic background: supply and demand for charity 3. The idea of charity between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries 4. The charitable houses of medieval Cambridge and its surroundings 5. Life in a medieval hospital: the hospital of St John, Cambridge 6. The religious and economic functions of the hospital of St John 7. Corporate and individual acts of charity 8. Epilogue Appendices Bibliography Index.