The trawl through chronicles continues. One of its great benefits is the number of texts I encountered that I didn’t know before, or of re-reading familiar ones with fresh eyes. As a result, there also are lots of ideas for spin-off and follow-on articles and projects. One of them will be an English translation of a wonderful little narrative from eleventh-century Eichstätt. It is splendidly opinionated, splenetic, and unlike so many of the materials that I have been reading of late.
Eichstätt
Eichstätt is home to one of three Franconian bishoprics (the other two being Bamberg and Würzburg). It had been founded by Anglo-Saxon missionaries in the eighth century, in this case, by St Willibald. Its modern patron saint is Willibald’s sister, St Walpurgis (or Walpurga), who wrote a life of her brother before becoming a nun in Eichstätt. Both cults were celebrated extensively in high medieval Eichstätt.
At some point around 1078, a canon (i.e., a member of the cathedral clergy) compiled a history of his community, known today as On the deeds of the bishops of Eichstätt from the beginnings to Gundekar II (De Gestis Episcoporum Eistetensium ab initio usque ad Gundekarum (II) episcopum). Because of his frequent references to Herrieden – a Benedictine abbey under the authority of the bishops – the author is known as the Anonymus of Herrieden (Haserensis in Latin). Nothing else is known - or can plausibly be surmised - about him.
De Gestis is written in the form of a letter from the anonymous author to a brother ‘G.’, who had missed the funeral of Bishop Gundekar II (d. 1075) because he was attending to matters in Würzburg. It recounts the funeral, and promises to offer a more detailed account of the history of the bishopric than the laconic list if names and dates produced by Gundekar. It was copied into De Gestis to explain just why it needed fleshing out. He certainly made true on his word.
The Anonymous created a highly entertaining, wonderfully rich, and idiosyncratic account. He had a good eye for curious yet instructive anecdotes, and rarely let pass an opportunity to offer judgement. Cumulatively, these qualities open up fascinating perspectives on the cultural and religious life of a medieval cathedral, on the tensions between canons, bishops, patrons, rivals and neighbours, about the role and understanding of piety and sanctity, and much more. De Gestis may be a very short text – it stretches to just under 30 pages in the modern printed edition – but it packs a lot into such short space.
Poets and builders
The Anonymous had clear ideas about what a cathedral community should do. He praised prelates and canons who wrote poetry, who composed hymns and who otherwise sought to use their skills both to celebrate the saints of Eichstätt, and to lead a pious life. He was especially fond of Wolfhard, a ninth-century monk of Herrieden, who had composed, at the behest of the bishop, a ‘Liber passionalis’. ‘It was a truly useful work, because it contains all the feasts for every day of the year’. The text survives. Wolfhard also seems to have been a bit of a troublemaker. At one point, he had been thrown into prison by the bishop. That nobody was willing to intercede with the prelate on the his behalf suggests that his transgression had been serious. In the end, Wolfhard decided to become his own intercessor, and set out to write ‘histories’ (liturgical hymns) for the feast of St Walpurgis. When he was finally brought before the bishop, he intoned the new responsoria ‘with a high voice, after which he gained not only forgiveness, but also honour and rewards’. At the same bishop’s command he also produced a Life of St Walpurgis in four books, which became a minor bestseller, extant in at least 13 manuscripts. There is a rather lovely tenth-century copy accessible here, and a no less splendid twelfth-century one here.
Bishop Starchand (933-966) merited praise because he had composed a wonderful psalter, no equal to which, the Anonymous asserted, had since been found. Bishop Reginold (966-89), in turn, was applauded because of the most splendid officium – the liturgical commemoration of a saint – that he had composed for St Willibald. Specifically, he tailored the length of each of the reponsoria to the significance of a particular episode in Willibald's life. Moreover, being fluent in Latin as well as Greek and Hebrew, Reginold composed the responsoria accordingly. When recounting Willibald’s pilgrimage, via Greece, to the Holy Land, the elements relating to his time in Greece were sung in Greek, and those that occurred in Jerusalem, in Hebrew. Even Bishop Heribert (c. 1021/2-1042), otherwise by no means among the Anonymous’ favourites, had composed hymns to the Holy Cross, St Willibald, St Walpurgis, St Lawrence, and to the Virgin.
Much of the recovery of the past was concerned with revising, adding to, commemorating and celebrating the lives of saints. Indeed ‘ystoria’ or ‘historia’ frequently referred to the elements in the liturgy of the saints, where their lives and deeds were recounted. This is certainly how the Anonymous employed the term. It also explains why so many medieval writers of history were cantors – that is, in charge of the liturgy. Praising the saints also required considerable literary skill, a good grasp of music, and a basic understanding of natural phenomena – for instance, in order to calculate the times of day, the precise date of movable religious feasts, but also in order to be able to distinguish the merely unusual from the truly miraculous.
Education was therefore central to the life of canons. The cathedral had its own magister scholarum, in charge of educating aspiring priests and canons, and the sons of the lay aristocracy. In the mid-eleventh century, Gunderam was so accomplished in the teaching and study of arithmetic that even a famous rivals at Würzburg conceded that he should be Gunderam’s student. That he excelled despite not having been trained, as was fashionable, ‘on the Rhine or in France’, but at Eichstätt, only served to underline the Anonymous’ pride in the accomplishments of his community. The priests of Eichstätt excelled at celebrating God and the saints because they excelled at learning, poetry and scholarship.
The celebration of saints was to be undertaken on behalf and for the benefit of the wider community of the faithful. Hence the possessed and sick seeking succour on St Willibald’s feast day. Hence also the rich hangings that pious nuns and noblewomen produced for the cathedral’s interior. By contrast, bishops like Heribert, who kept building ‘new churches, palaces and fortifications’, failed to heed that wider community.
In fact, the Anonymous loathed bishops who preferred erecting shiny new buildings to celebrating the saints and to seeing to the needs of the faithful. He twice reported warnings by St Ulrich of Augsburg: there was no need to expand the cathedral at Eichstätt. Its greatness should be measured not in the size of its buildings, but in the depth of its piety. When Reginold ignored warnings, and decided to translate the relics of St Willibald (i.e. transfer them to a new shrine), the Anonymous noted with a degree of glee that everyone who had been present at the ceremony died within a year. And once Reginold expanded the western part of the Church, the ‘signs and miracles gradually decreased, which previously used to be so numerous.’ Worst of all, Heribert, by forcing the populace to work on his many projects, while also demanding that they pay their dues and taxes in full, ensured that ‘wealth turned to want, and the joyful happiness that had prevailed under previous bishops turned into most bitter sorrow.’ The bishop had pretty buildings, but nobody to pray in them.
Bishops and canons
De Gestis forms part of a genre of texts known as Gesta episcoporum, that is, the deeds of bishops. They record the history of either individual prelates or of successive occupants of an episcopal see. Most were produced for the canons serving the cathedral, rather than the bishop. Few Gesta, however, did portray the relationship between the two as quite so antagonistic as the Anonymous. When Heribert – to the great chagrin of the canons – planned to relocate the cathedral, his plans were thwarted by St Willibald. During the episcopate of Meginhard (991-1015), when the canons were suffering under the bishop’s harsh regime, St Willibald appeared in a vision to one of their number, and ordered him to tell the bishop to be kinder and gentler to the canons. Otherwise the saint would select a better shepherd for his church. And Heribert, having come from Würzburg, was so dismissive of the Eichstätt canons that he had to be publicly humiliated by the magister scholarum before he finally mended his way. The Anonymous paints a picture of pious and long-suffering canons repeatedly forced to make the best of whatever bishop outsiders had imposed upon them.
Sometimes ‘making the best of a bishop’ could be very hard work indeed. Meginhard provides an especially colourful example. He was a glutton, who ‘would rather have a short mass than a short meal’. During Lent, he would have a carefully prepared fish hung up in the cathedral choir, so that the hungry canons would finish singing mass more quickly, and Meginhard could break the day’s fast. When he consecrated a certain Vastolf (pronounced ‘Fast-olf’) as priest, Meginhard demanded that he change his name, as the bishop did not want to have anyone near him who reminded him of fasting. The bishop was also an inveterate swearer. On one occasion, when travelling to Rome, he had secured advance dispensation for cursing one hundred times, but had exhausted his contingent so quickly that he had to return to Eichstätt to have it topped up. Meginhard had little patience for religious ceremonies. He changed the clocks so that he could eat sooner, and even took to consecrating priests not during a festive service, but hurriedly, while travelling through the nearby woods.
Yet Meginhard was also a firm defender of morals and of his cathedral – in striking contrast, the Anonymous stressed, to several of his successors. When a royal servant requested hospitality at Eichstätt, and it transpired that he had lots of provisions already, the bishop had the freeloader dragged from the episcopal table, and whipped in public, as royal servants should not be liars. When a cleric from Würzburg arrived, carrying a gerfalcon, Meginhard took great offence – clerics were not, after all, supposed to engage in hunting. He ordered one of his servants to take the bird off the visiting cleric, and to beat him round the head with it for his rude behaviour.
Meginhard would not allow his cathedral’s possessions to be diminished by outsiders. When the emperor demanded that Eichstätt provide him with provisions for a campaign, Meginhard fobbed him off with some pieces of cloth. And when Emperor Henry II decided to found a new cathedral at Bamberg, he had to provide the new episcopal see with diocesan lands. That would require that neighbouring bishops in Würzburg and Eichstätt surrender some of their possessions. Meginhard refused to do so.
That resistance came to haunt Eichstätt. After Meginhard’s death, the emperor appointed in quick succession two low-born Bamberg clerics, in the hope that they would more willingly do his bidding. Which they did. And then things got worse. The second of the Bamberg clerics squandered estates so that he could acquire hunting. Heribert impoverished the town and diocese with his building mania. And Eberhard foresook the canons to become pope.
De Gestis was a history of decline, though that was rooted not in the failings of the canons – who continued to be great scholars and poets – but in those of the prelates imposed upon them. For the canons, making the best of whatever bishop they had became ever more difficult, frustrating and perilous.
The Anonymous gave voice to the canons and priests who considered themselves to be relentless in the pursuit of their religious calling, but who felt themselves thwarted by leaders who did in fact destroy what they were supposed to protect. Rather than commemorating the saints, they impoverished the people, oppressed the clergy, deprived the poor and suffering of succour, and offended the saints. All in the vainglorious pursuit of worldly splendour and earthly delights.
One may wonder whether the Anonymous would have derived a degree of satisfaction from the fact that, almost a millennium later, the Eichstätt of his contemporaries is remembered not because of Heribert’s buildings or because of Meginhard’s feasts, but because of the Anonymous’ sometimes splenetic, sometimes devout, but always learned and insightful letter to his dear friend G., trapped in distant Würzburg. Maybe some modern leaders imposed upon communities of scholars will take heed (though one worries just what lesson they would in fact draw).
Bibliographical note:
There is, as yet, no English translation of De Gestis. A German translation is appended to Stefan Weinfurter’s edition of the Latin text: Die Geschichte der Eichstätter Bischöfe des Anonymus Haserensis. Edition – Übersetzung – Kommentar (Eichstätter Studien, N.F., 24), Regensburg 1987. A French translation is available in: Rois, reines et évêques. L'Allemagne aux Xe et XIe siècles. Recueil de textes traduits, ed. C. Griaud and B.-M. Tock, Turnhout 2009, pp. 255-280.
Given just how wonderful and rich an account this is, De Gestis has received surprisingly little attention from modern readers. What reception there has been can be found in the relevant entry in geschichtsquellen.de.
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