In 1111/12, Sigebert of Gembloux, by then well over 80, completed what proved to be his final work: the Catalogus de viris illustribus (catalogue of illustrious men). The title is a modern one (Sigebert referred to the text as his ‘little book (libellus) on illustrious men’), but it is apt. The Catalogus is a catalogue – of 172 prominent authors from the first century AD to the early twelfth. It covers a remarkably broad range of writers, including legal scholars, theologians, poets, composers of liturgical texts, authors of treatises on music, and writers of history. Thus, the Catalogus gives us a pretty good idea of what Sigebert and his brethren may have considered to be canonical texts, the kind of works of which any self-respecting monk should at least have heard (there is more to be said on the genre, but I’ll leave that to Antoni Grabowski, who is currently working on the topic).
Entry no. 122, on St Boniface, is shorter than most, but conveys a sense of the general pattern: ‘Bishop Boniface wrote a book in metrical style about virtues and vices.’ That is, the Catalogus was not a set of biographies as they were popular in the earlier medieval Islamic world, but an outline of literary works for which their authors deserved to be remembered. St Boniface mattered not because he had led the conversion of much of what became Germany, but because of an especially important treatise on questions of moral theology. This was a writer’s guide to writers.
Born probably c. 1030, and feasibly near Namur, Sigebert seems to have been placed with the Benedictine abbey of Gembloux while still a boy. Apart from a short sojourn at Metz, where he acted as scholarius (schoolmaster, but more in the sense of a nineteenth-century German Gymnasialprofessor: a grammar school teacher who also engaged in advanced scholarly work). He eventually returned to Gembloux, where he acted in a similar role, and where he stayed until his death in 1112. Sigebert is most famous for the Chronica, a world chronicle that became something of a high medieval bestseller, with 44 extant copies (plus at least another 20 or so, now lost, of which we know). It exerted enormous influence upon writers as diverse as John of Salisbury, Robert of Torigni and Ralph of Diss. It formed part of the foundations for the flourishing historical culture of twelfth-century Europe.
Sigebert of Gembloux in the Catalogus
The Catalogus is a useful reminder that there was more to the Gembloux monk than the Chronica. The final of the 172 authors discussed was Sigebert himself. The entry is revealing, but it is also quite long, and a summary will have to suffice. While placed at the monastery of the Church of St Vincent at Metz, he wrote a vita of St Theodore, the founder of said church, and in which he included a poem in praise of Metz. He furthermore composed a Passio of St Lucie, whose relics were kept at St Vincent, and several sermons that traced the transfer of her remains from Sicily to the Italian mainland and thence to Metz. These were followed by a Life of King Sigebert, the founder of St Martin, just outside Metz. On returning to Gembloux, Sigebert composed a carmen (song) on the passion of the Theban legion, and a Life of Guibert, the founder of Gembloux. From that, Sigebert took excerpts to be used for readings on celebrating Guibert’s translation. He furthermore composed antiphons and responsorial (liturgical songs) on SS Maclovus and Guibert, revised lives of SS Maclovus and Theodore in a more elegant fashion (urbaniori stilo), and wrote a history of the abbots of Gembloux.
If this reads like a very long list of texts about saints, that is precisely the point. Recovering the past was about preserving the memory, celebrating and instilling knowledge of exemplary lives. Sometimes, this was about filling gaps, as in writing the lives of a community’s founder, or a history of its abbots. Sometimes it was about ensuring that ancient testimonies remained accessible to modern readers, as when Sigebert updated the lives of saints. Recovering the past also served pragmatic ends. Vitae provided the raw material from which to extract what was useful for the liturgy, and recovering the past included the composition of chants and songs for use in Church.
The religious utility of knowing the past extended beyond divine services. At the behest of the canons of St Lambert of Liege, Sigebert traced they origins of their privileges. He also helped draft a response to a letter by ‘Pope Hildebrand’ (Gregory VII) to Bishop Herman of Metz, in which the pontiff had insulted the king’s dignity; a defence of the emperor; and, at the latter’s behest a letter to Pope Paschal II (Hildebrand’s successor). On behalf of the men of Liege, Sigebert then wrote to the archbishop of Trier, explaining why their liturgical practices diverged from those of the latter, before penning a poem about the literary, allegorical and mythological interpretation of texts. Knowing history provided the information with which to rebut false popes as well as archbishops meddling in matters that were none of their business.
The religious and the practical aspects of knowing the past informed Sigebert’s Chronica, which he described as a continuation of Jerome’s ecclesiastical history to 1111. That was not an easy task as it may seem (and here I am moving beyond the Catalogus). One problem was that the Bible is notoriously averse to giving dates, complicated by a Jewish calendar fundamentally different from the Christian one. And then there was the problem of how to fit events in Roman history (with yet another calendar) into an overarching chronological framework, let alone making sure that the right dates were assigned to the right event. This mattered if one wanted to make use of history: it was difficult to offer allegorical or mythological (or, as modern historians would say, tropological) readings of the past, to figure out the moral and religious meaning of events, and to discern God’s hand in ordering human affairs, if one didn’t know when precisely something had happened. Identifying the correct chronology of events was a major concern to most authors of history, and made writing it a painstaking, laborious and inherently scholarly undertaking. It was not for the faint of heart, the impatient, the credulous or those without access to a good library.
Sigebert (and now we’re back to the Catalogus) began by diligently re-reading (diligenter … relegerem) Bede on the course, and studied Pseudo-Dionysius on the cycles of time. Lo and behold, problems soon became apparent: the dating of the Passion of Christ seemed out of line with the Gospel of John, and Sigebert thus found himself confronted with the need to revise and correct dates. He also drew on the writings of Marianus Scotus – an Irish scholar, who, having spent some time in a cell sealed off with bricks, wrote another immensely popular chronicle (we do not know how many manuscripts of it existed, not least because there still is no critical edition). Yet Marianus was overly reliant on Pseudo-Dionysius, so needed to be corrected and revised, and Sigebert therefore came up with another set of cycles with which to measure years (and, most importantly, to identify the correct date of Easter [which, being a moveable feast, changed every year]). He therefore composed a preface in the form of a dialogue, designed to teach how to measure time and how to apply the system he had developed. For Sigebert, writing history was never just about recording what happened. But it could not be used without first establishing the proper course of events.
Sigebert in context
The final entry in the Catalogus is one of only a few examples of a literary autobiography to survive from high medieval Europe. That alone makes it significant, but still more can be done with it. There is, obviously, the question of what Sigebert’s selection of authors reveals about the literary and intellectual culture of eleventh-century Lotharingia (the region surrounding Gembloux). There also are glimpses of the role of fame and reputation (not just anyone got to write letters on behalf of the emperor), and of what tailoring representations of the past to different purposes and audiences entailed. And that’s just for starters. Both the Catalogus and Sigebert deserve far more scholarly attention than either have so far received. For now, though, let’s stick to what the Catalogus reveals about the religious underpinnings of high medieval engagements with the past.
Sigebert’s approach was, in fact, quite conventional. In eleventh-century Eichstätt, the Anonymus of Herrieden defined praiseworthy literary activity first and foremost as composing poems and chants for the liturgical veneration of saints. It was a far more praiseworthy activity than wasting money on building projects. The Anonymus was especially fond of Wolfhard, a ninth-century monk of Herrieden, who had composed, at the behest of the bishop, a ‘Liber passionalis’. Wolfhard was also a bit of a troublemaker. At one point, he had been incarcerated by the bishop. With nobody daring to intervene on his behalf, Wolfhard decided to become his own intercessor, and did so by witing ‘histories’ (liturgical hymns) for the feast of St Walpurgis. When he was finally brought before the bishop, Wolfhard intoned the new responsoria ‘with a high voice, after which he gained not only forgiveness, but also honour and rewards’. Recovering the past was about commemorating and celebrating the saints – and about preserving the memory of monks and prelates who practised, enabled and rewarded such endeavours.
Around 1158-61, Reiner of Liege (previously mentioned here) composed De ineptiis cuiusdam idiotae libellus. Reiner was a far more prolific, but also much less accomplished writer than either Sigebert or the Anonymus. Think of him as the William Walton of the twelfth century. Or of his oeuvre as its Star Trek Discovery. In short, a farrago of plodding and pompous mediocrity. Still, the libellus is important. It celebrated the literary accomplishments of Reiner and his brethren, did so in great detail, and culminated in a discussion, among other topics, of how to use the past in relation to the liturgy. To give a taste of what this literary culture entailed, here are some of his own works that Reiner mentioned: two books on the Old and New Testament, a poem on the Maccabees, ‘melodies’ (liturgical works) on SS Sixtus, Felicissimus and Agapitus, a guide on penance, libelli on the conversion of St Pelagius and the passion of the Virgin Mary of Cappadocia, guide to leading a pious life, one libellus on a conflict between two dukes, and a second on a captured knight miraculously released through his devotion to the Host, 14 books on the First Crusade, a verse poem on the translation of the relics of St Lawrence from Rome to Liege, three verse books on the victory of St Michael the Archangel, hymns for SS Servatius and Begga, seven hymns on the Holy Spirit, five books on the conquest of the castle of Bouillon, two hymns for the martyrs Evenmarus and Urbanus, and numerous epitaphs and letters. The pattern is familiar.
Beyond Sigebert
A sheer endless variety of narratives about the past was produced during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And different religious communities developed different traditions and preferences. St Lawrence, the Benedictine abbey of which Reiner was a member, prided itself on its religious learning – one of its members had been Rupert of Deutz, among the leading theologians of the twelfth century. Gembloux was similarly part of an intellectual and literary network that included Hildegard of Bingen and Berengar of Tours (and that overlapped with Liege’s). These were precisely the sort of communities that would encourage the endeavours of Sigebert and Reiner. They had the libraries, institutional knowledge, resources, as well as abbots and patrons necessary to do so. This does not, however, make them representative of how things usually were. In Prüfening, for example, a major centre of literary production, historical writing limited itself to a series of entries on Easter tables, and a slightly more extended set of annals. But there were enough similar communities to suggest that Gembloux and St Lawrence reflected a common type. And the sentiments underpinning the writings of Sigebert and Reiner did surface in Eichstätt, as well as in Farfa in Italy and St Albans in England (to name but a few). Recovering the past was often also a religious undertaking.
Accepting this premise has profound practical implications. Much of what high medieval writers of history did may seem familiar to many of their modern readers. They weighed up conflicting evidence, sought to make sense of fragmentary information, filled gaps in the record with more or less informed and plausible guesses, searched through the writings of their predecessors, revised and updated earlier works, and collected information from eyewitnesses, material evidence and even the landscape. They sought to preserve the past and to draw lessons from it. But such similarities should not deceive as to the rather different cultural and intellectual parameters with which they operated. They were brought up on a distinctive diet of canonical texts, of reading and interpreting evidence, and of the kind of lessons to be drawn from it. They were not post-enlightenment thinkers trapped in the bodies of medieval monks. What, though, does this mean in practice?
For starters, there is no point maligning someone like Sigebert for being interested in monkish things (a surprisingly common statement even in quite recent work). When Ralph of Diss produced an extensive collection of extracts from earlier works that gives us rare glances of the intellectual environment within which he operated. We can’t ignore those and simply focus on the bits where he wrote about contemporary matters, seemingly in a manner familiar from modern writers of contemporary history. And we shouldn’t dismiss chroniclers for copying extensively from earlier works (theirs was a manuscript culture: they couldn’t just click a link to get access to a pdf of Eusebius – another surprisingly difficult insight for some modern scholars to grasp). But all that is basic stuff.
More far-reaching questions also arise. For instance, lay interest in religious matters was far more widespread than historians have often assumed – and so was lay literacy. I’ll return to this on another occasion. For now, let’s just note that it was Sigebert’s reputation as a religious scholar that led to him being commissioned to write on the emperor’s behalf. Similarly, the Anonymus dwelled on the interest that lay patrons had shown in shaping the commemoration of saints. And when Theodore of Echternach compiled the Liber aureus, that was both for the commemoration of past benefactors, and to encourage their descendants – how would that have worked? For the earlier Middle Ages, there is a very recent piece by Mateusz Fafinski that highlights practices that can equally be surmised for the central Middle Ages. Secular and clerical cultural spheres overlapped.
Let’s spin this further. If, as Sigebert, Reiner and the Anonymus suggest, literary production, including the writing of history, was something that facilitated and reflected religious excellence, could the simple fact that clerics did what clerics were meant to do not be both sufficient vindication of earlier patronage, and a way of soliciting more of it in the present? Even if liturgical materials or the lives of saints did not circulate beyond the cloister walls, does this preclude the possibility of a wider – including a lay – audience? What was the role of patrons in shaping religious interests? What does it say about their receptiveness towards and their familiarity with religious debates? What does this signify about the wider relevance of clerical ideas and concepts to lay life? For instance, in relation to warfare, conflict, or kingship? By taking seriously the religious dimension of high medieval writings about the past, we gain new ways of tackling fundamental questions concerning how we approach, interpret and write about the medieval past in turn.
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