“3. Jerome and the Noble Women of Rome” in “Nuns’ Priests’ Tales”
CHAPTER 3 Jerome and the Noble Women of Rome
The blessed priest Jerome often honored holy Paula and her daughter Eustochium with many writings.
—Hugh of Fleury, Historia ecclesiastica
Medieval men searching the Scriptures for models of licit spiritual involvement with women found rich material in the life of Christ, whose concern for women and inclusion of them among his closest supporters offered clear authorization for women’s participation—alongside men—in the religious life. Exegetes cited Jesus’s involvement with women as an example of his “benevolence” and “humility,” as Hugh of Fleury did in his writings for Adela of Blois.1 Yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, priests and monks who engaged directly with religious women rarely depicted themselves as emulating Christ, invoking him more often as the absent bridegroom of professed women than as their own exemplar. Such men found a more fitting model in John the Evangelist, who, acting in obedience to Christ’s dying command, had taken the virgin mother of Christ to live with him, in sua.
John’s care for Mary was accepted through the ages as having been spiritually inspired and wholly blameless. As Jesus’s favored disciple and a presumed virgin, his innocence was never in doubt. Even so, John’s example was wanting in one important respect: very little was known of his care for Mary beyond the fact of Christ’s commendation of Mary to him and his apparent acceptance. The biblical record is silent concerning the practical details of their relationship—how the two interacted, what support John provided, and the ways in which they were perceived by their contemporaries. A second saintly figure offered a more richly textured, yet still supposedly virtuous, model of care for women: the fourth-century church father Jerome.2 In contrast to John, Jerome’s relations with noble Christian women in Rome were abundantly documented, allowing medieval men a deeper understanding of how, and why, he had engaged spiritually with women. The fact that Jerome’s friendships with women had prompted significant controversy during his own lifetime made him all the more relevant as a model for medieval men, who often faced criticism. Jerome chronicled these controversies in various letters and other texts, turning to biblical examples as he defended himself. His writings are littered with references to John the Evangelist, the apostles with their “sister” women, and the holy women at the tomb—subjects explored in the previous chapter.
By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Jerome’s relations with women were celebrated as blameless and pure, despite the scandal they had provoked in his own day. To medieval men, Jerome therefore offered a saintly model of male spiritual care for women that, in their view, closely paralleled their own: his involvement with women was presumed to have been chaste and spiritually inspired, yet he had nevertheless been attacked by critics, who accused him (unfairly, as medieval audiences believed) of base motives. For modern scholars, Jerome’s example is instructive for a further reason: unlike John the Evangelist, who was consistently viewed as pure, Jerome’s reputation for pious involvement with women had developed over time—from the fourth century, when his friendships with women had been denounced as improper (and probably immoral), to the twelfth century, by which time they were accepted, and even celebrated, as a central component of his saintly reputation. The evolution of Jerome’s reputation, which I trace in this chapter, demonstrates the lengths to which medieval men went to find, and to fashion, appropriate models for their involvement with women. As I show here, Jerome was adopted as a model largely because he had been ostracized for his friendships with women—an experience that John the Evangelist (so far as we know) did not share, but that medieval men knew all too well.
Reginald’s Life of Malchus: Jerome’s Virgin Saint Reimagined
An important indication of Jerome’s growing centrality to eleventh- and twelfth-century ideas about women and men in the religious life can be found in the writings of Reginald of Canterbury (d. c.1109), a Benedictine monk from France, possibly Poitou, who came to England in the late eleventh century and became abbey poet at St. Augustine’s in Canterbury. Reginald was the author of an epic verse Life of Malchus, the fourth-century Syrian saint whom Jerome had celebrated for his lifelong dedication to chastity.3 According to Jerome’s telling of the Life, Malchus had fled his family as a young man in order to avoid marriage and had adopted the monastic life in the desert. After some years, he left the monastery to visit his mother, was captured by Saracens, and was taken into slavery. Forced by his master into marriage and, facing yet again the dreaded prospect of losing his virginity, the unhappy Malchus despaired: only his wife’s suggestion that they pursue a chaste marriage dissuaded him from suicide. After some years of chaste cohabitation, the two escaped. Malchus returned to the monastic life and placed his wife in the spiritual care of devout virgins.4
Reginald’s retelling of the Life of Malchus, some seven hundred years after Jerome, added significantly to Jerome’s short prose text. Most interesting for the purposes of this study are the additions that appear in the third book of the Life, which opens as Malchus and his wife—identified by Reginald as Malcha—return to Malchus’s cell as a newly married couple. As in Jerome’s Life, Malchus threatens suicide, and is dissuaded by Malcha. However, in Reginald’s account this episode is significantly amplified. Although Jerome had described in brief the chaste life of the two, whom he claimed to have met in the Syrian desert (the woman “very withered” and “already close to death”), Reginald added specific details concerning the organization of their domestic and spiritual life.5 Malcha plays a new and larger role, in keeping with Reginald’s decision to identify her by name. In Jerome’s life, she had been the one to suggest chaste marriage (offering that Malchus should “take me as your partner in chastity”).6 Reginald expanded Malcha’s proposal in his version. Inviting Malchus to make her his partner in a spiritual union, Reginald’s Malcha declared, “I shrink from a carnal association with you, I wish a spiritual one, without the squalor and pestilence of filth.”7 In Jerome’s account, Malchus had accepted the suggestion of chaste marriage and little more was said.8 Reginald’s Malchus, by contrast, overwhelmed at his narrow escape from death, praises Malcha enthusiastically, calling her his “savior” (salvatrix) and “enlivener” (vivificatrix) and thanking God for her:
O happy woman, your prudence and clever speech,
Saved me and prepared for you a companion and a husband.
I count myself happy and you my mother,
You are my savior, you my hope, you my enlivener,
You my sister and mother, my spouse, I your brotherly husband.9
Not content with praising Malcha directly, Malchus then turns to thank Christ for having provided such a companion:
Christ, I give you thanks for the many advantages
Which you gave to a wretch by the merits of this woman.10
As Reginald’s third book draws to a close, Malchus and Malcha live chastely together. Malchus becomes Malcha’s spiritual guide and teacher, familiarizing her with the monastic life and instructing her in the psalms while she, in turn, teaches him the domestic arts. In describing Malchus and Malcha in the period after their marriage, Reginald went so far as to adopt monastic terminology: in his account, the married-yet-chaste Malchus is a monk (monachus) and his wife, Malcha, a nun (monacha).11
Reginald’s depiction of Malchus as a saint who, although he would rather die than lose his virginity, “did not shrink to live with a nun” was evidently not controversial at the turn of the twelfth century.12 Once he had completed his reworked Life of Malchus, with its new emphasis on Malcha and her role in Malchus’s spiritual life, Reginald circulated the poem to a number of friends in England and northern France, monks and churchmen like himself.13 Among the men who received his text were the monk and hagiographer, Goscelin of St. Bertin (who was also resident at St. Augustine’s, Canterbury in the 1090s), the poet and cleric Hildebert of Lavardin (bishop of Le Mans from 1096–1125, but in exile in England between 1099–1100; archbishop of Tours from 1125–1133), and Anselm, abbot of Bec and then archbishop of Canterbury from 1093—men who were likely to be sympathetic to his positive portrayal of Malcha as salvatrix.14 Each of these men was involved spiritually with women in some way. Goscelin had served as spiritual advisor and tutor to the recluse Eve of Wilton, devoting himself to her spiritual instruction, composing the Liber confortatorius for her, and—significantly—depicting her as his spiritual superior. Echoing Malchus’s spiritual esteem for Malcha, Goscelin wrote to Eve: “I have the building materials of comfort in you, which I do not find in myself.”15 Hildebert, too, corresponded with several religious women, and was the author of (among other things) a Life of Mary of Egypt, a fourth-century prostitute saint who had retreated into the deserts of Egypt to atone for her life of sin.16 Hildebert’s Life tells of Mary’s encounter with the monk Zosimus, a man well advanced in holiness, who, despite the apparent spiritual disparity between them, found in her a source of inspiration and even spiritual superiority. According to Hildebert, Zosimus praised the former prostitute to Christ, describing her as: “the woman whom I wish for, whom I seek, [and] in whose heavenly prayer I hope.”17 Anselm of Canterbury, a third recipient of Reginald’s Life of Malchus, may also have been receptive to Reginald’s optimism concerning the possibilities of chaste spiritual friendships between the sexes, despite his role in enforcing clerical celibacy in England. Before becoming archbishop, Anselm had been abbot of the Norman monastery of Bec, a male community that included several women. As archbishop, he maintained close epistolary friendships with a number of women and composed spiritual works for them.18 He also founded a house for women in honor of Mary Magdalene, and clearly approved of other men who devoted themselves to women’s spiritual care.19
Jerome as Spiritual Advisor and Friend to Women
Reginald’s carefully orchestrated circulation of the Life of Malchus suggests a context quite unlike the one normally associated with clerical celibacy and reform, one in which ideas concerning the licit involvement of men with women within the religious life could be shared between like-minded churchmen and in which a common language was developed, which argued for the blamelessness and, importantly, the spiritual merit of contact between the sexes within the religious life. Yet Reginald’s Life of Malchus does more than simply indicate a literary vogue for heroic tales of chastity preserved, or even for saintly relations between holy men and women. By choosing Jerome’s Life of Malchus as his subject, Reginald participated in a trend that had begun in the ninth century and that gained considerable momentum during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a trend that consistently highlighted Jerome’s relations with women and depicted him as a model for men’s spiritual attention to women.20
Evidence of Jerome’s concern for women was not hard to find: more than any other late antique Christian author he had devoted himself to the spiritual care of pious women.21 Indeed, from the moment of his arrival in Rome in 382, Jerome had been at the center of a circle of pious noblewomen who had abandoned lives of comfort in favor of ascetic renunciation. These women sought him as a teacher and ascetic exemplar; Jerome, in turn, embraced these roles, lavishing attention on his female disciples, showering them with spiritual advice, and addressing their theological questions in lengthy letters.
Jerome’s spiritual involvement with women left a significant impression on his writings, a fact that made him particularly accessible as a model for medieval men.22 In his translations, biblical commentaries, and even in the Vulgate itself, Jerome acknowledged the intellectual acuity and spiritual inspiration of his women friends—above all, the mother-daughter pair, Paula and Eustochium. Many of his works were written either for women or at their instigation. Of Jerome’s twenty-three extant biblical commentaries, for instance, twelve were dedicated to women; of the ten he wrote in Bethlehem between 386 and 393, nine were dedicated to Paula and Eustochium.23 Jerome’s Life of the desert saint Hilarion may have been dedicated to the consecrated virgin, Asella.24 Some of his works were composed in response to women’s requests. Paula’s daughter Blesilla commissioned his commentary on Ecclesiastes, while Hedibia and Algasia, two women from Gaul, each sent him a series of knotty theological problems, to which he responded in long letters (Epist. 120 and 121).25 Marcella, Jerome’s closest and most scholarly disciple in Rome, inundated him with theological questions, leading him to call her his “slave driver.”26 Altogether, women requested from Jerome many more works than he could possibly produce: in the preface to his translation of Origen’s commentary on Luke, which he undertook at the express request of Paula and Eustochium, he recalled how Blesilla had pressed him to undertake the translation of Origen’s twenty-five volumes on Matthew, five on Luke, and thirty-two on John, a task that he admitted was “beyond my powers, my leisure, and my energy.”27
Jerome’s theological writings and translations showcase his commitment to providing women with religious instruction and guidance. However, the spiritual intimacy of his friendships with women is most clear in his surviving letters. Almost a third of these were addressed to women, and many more were certainly written, but lost.28 Indeed, Jerome reports that he wrote to Paula and Eustochium every day in Bethlehem; only a small number of these letters have survived.29 He wrote so often to Marcella (his most frequent addressee of either sex) that he seems to have intended that his letters to her constitute a work of their own. In De viris illustribus, Jerome listed among his writings “one book of Epistles to Marcella,” suggesting that his letters to her were meant to be read together.30 Some of Jerome’s letters to women must be considered as works of spiritual guidance in their own right, notably his famous Epist. 22 on virginity, which he addressed to Eustochium.31 Others are quasi-hagiographic, praising the lives of holy women: Paula (Epist. 108 to Eustochium),32 Marcella (Epist. 127 to Principia), Asella (Epist. 24 to Marcella),33 Lea (Epist. 23 to Marcella), Blesilla (Epist. 38 and 39 to Marcella and Paula respectively), and Paulina (Epist. 66 to her widower, Pammachius). These texts reflect not only Jerome’s friendships and fascination with pious women, but also his clear desire to be remembered in conjunction with them. As Andrew Cain has argued, Jerome intentionally presented himself as the spiritual guide and trusted friend of the Christian noblewomen of Rome in a bid to establish his reputation as an exegete and ascetic—to position himself, so Cain writes, as a “figure of virtually apostolic proportions.”34
Jerome’s writings for women were extensive, comprising a significant portion of his oeuvre. Yet his friendships with women were rarely discussed in the period after his death. In the Lausiac History, Palladius praised Paula as a “woman highly distinguished in the spiritual life,” but dismissed Jerome as envious, bad tempered, and a hindrance to her.35 Some three centuries later, the biographer of St. Sadalberga (c. 605–670), abbess of Laon, invoked Jerome’s portraits of holy women, but commented only on Sadalberga’s imitation of Melania and Paula (and not directly on Jerome’s relations with these women).36 Only in the late seventh century did Jerome’s dedication to women begin to attract positive attention.37 In a treatise on virginity composed for the nuns of Barking, Aldhelm (d. 709) remarked on the many commentaries that Jerome, “driven on by the intelligence of the mother (Paula) and the diligence of the daughter (Eustochium), laboriously produced.” (Like Jerome, Aldhelm was later remembered for his writings for women: a late tenth-century image shows him presenting De virginitate to the abbess Hildelith of Barking, together with a group of nuns).38 The Life of the Frankish saint Hiltrude (d. c. 785) commented that she and her brother Guntard were “another Jerome and Eustochium,” with Hiltrude living in a cell adjoining the monastery where Guntard was abbot.39 However, apart from these few and scattered references, Jerome’s involvement with women was rarely mentioned before the ninth century. Indeed, the two earliest biographies of Jerome—Plerosque nimirum, dating to the second half of the sixth century, and Hieronymus noster, written between the sixth and the eighth centuries—are silent on the subject.40 Jerome’s many friendships with women are also absent from early depictions, which tended to present him as a biblical scholar and ascetic, but never alongside women. The earliest image of Jerome, produced at Corbie in the seventh or eighth century, shows him as an old bearded man, in Byzantine dress, holding a stylus and wax tablet.41
Jerome in the Ninth Century: Alcuin, Paschasius, and the Nuns of Chelles and Soissons
It was not until the middle of the ninth century that Jerome’s connections with women began to feature in texts and images from the Continent, a development linked to the intellectual renaissance in which his translations and other writings figured prominently.42 At that time, several things happened. First, Jerome’s letters to women were mined for inclusion in the Institutio sanctimonialium, the rule for women promulgated by Louis the Pious at the Synod of Aachen in 816.43 The Institutio drew so prominently on Jerome that it was sometimes later referred to as the rule of Jerome (as at Lippoldsberg in the twelfth century, where the women promised to fulfill “St. Jerome’s instructions for nuns”).44 Second, Paschasius Radbertus, abbot of Corbie (abbot 843/4-849/53, d. c. 860), adopted Jerome’s relationships with women as a framing device for his sermon on the assumption of the Virgin. This text, which Paschasius composed for the nuns of Soissons at their request, was written in Jerome’s voice and addressed to “Paula” and “Eustochium,” reinforcing Jerome’s model as a provider of spiritual care to women.45 Finally, the makers of the First Bible of Charles the Bald, a manuscript produced at St-Martin, Tours and possibly presented to Charles the Bald in 845, took the unprecedented step of featuring Jerome as a teacher of women in one of the manuscript’s frontispieces (Figure 11).46 The image narrates Jerome’s life following his flight from Rome to Bethlehem in 385 and shows him teaching Paula and Eustochium (identified in a titulus) alongside two other women, one of whom appears to be transcribing his words onto a scroll on her lap.47 A second monumental Bible, the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura (c. 870), probably from Reims, also shows Jerome addressing two women, one of whom holds an open book, the other a scroll (Figure 12).48 A monk hovers behind them, and a third woman stands just beyond the door.49
The emphasis on Jerome as a teacher of women in these two Bibles marks an important departure from earlier traditions, which had tended to favor images of Jerome as a scholar, monk, or ascetic. Their appearance—at this precise point in the ninth century—has puzzled scholars. As Herbert Kessler declared, “These are among the most enigmatic ninth-century paintings.”50 No pictorial precedents have been found, despite the best efforts of art historians, and the precise subjects and sources of the two images remain unknown.51 According to Rosamond McKitterick, it is likely that the images were, in fact, entirely new compositions that were designed to reflect the cultural context in which they were created: one marked by the engagement of Carolingian noblewomen in learned spiritual discourse with leading theologians and scholars—men like Alcuin of York (d. 804) and Paschasius Radbertus.52 These women were sometimes explicitly compared with Jerome’s circle of female friends, while the men, whether explicitly or implicitly, often modeled themselves after the example of Jerome.
Figure 11. Scene from the Life of Jerome. First Bible of Charles the Bald, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 1, fol. 3v.
Figure 12. Scene from the Life of Jerome. Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura, Abbazia di San Paolo fuori le mura, s.n., fol. 2v.
Alcuin’s friendships with religious women at the turn of the ninth century would have been known to the scribes and copyists at St-Martin and may have played some role in inspiring their depiction of Jerome. An Anglo-Saxon scholar trained at York, Alcuin had been the leader of Charlemagne’s court school in Aachen and the emperor’s trusted advisor before retiring to St-Martin, where he served as abbot from 796 until his death in 804.53 Alcuin’s friendship with Charlemagne was close: he addressed the emperor playfully as “David.” He was on familiar terms, too, with Charlemagne’s sister, Gisela (“Lucia”), and his daughter, Rotrude (“Columba”).54 Gisela (d. 810) was abbess at Chelles, a sixth-century foundation that, at least in its early years, had housed both men and women.55 By the time that Gisela was abbess, Chelles had become an important intellectual center with an active scriptorium in which texts were not only copied but also composed.56 Rotrude (d. 810) was a nun at Notre Dame, Soissons, having previously been kept by Charlemagne at court for many years, with certain unfortunate consequences, as Einhard noted.57 Both Rotrude and her sister, Bertha (who later became a nun at Chelles), took lovers by whom they had children, before entering the monastery.58
Alcuin’s relationship with Gisela and Rotrude was similar in many respects to Jerome’s friendship with Paula and Eustochium. Like Paula and Eustochium, Gisela and Rotrude were powerful noblewomen who had chosen to pursue the religious life. Both sets of women were, moreover, socially superior to their male teacher.59 Both were learned, and both were praised for their learning. Jerome wrote that Paula had learned Hebrew so well that she could “enunciate her words without the faintest trace of a Latin accent”—a facility that he attributed to Eustochium as well.60 The theological questions that Eustochium sent Jerome struck him like a fist, he wrote, leaving him regretting his own stupidity.61 Although Alcuin was less effusive than Jerome, he honored Gisela as a femina verbipotens in an early verse addressed to her and her brother Pippin (“Julius”) and, like Jerome, wrote a series of letters to Gisela and Rotrude.62 Finally, just as Jerome had dedicated many of his theological and exegetical works to women, Alcuin addressed his commentary on John to Gisela and Rotrude, at their request.
Alcuin knew Jerome’s work and was influenced by it. His quest to secure a corrected text of the Bible meant that he engaged deeply with Jerome’s scholarly writings and, of course, with his Vulgate.63 The library at St-Martin included many of Jerome’s works, among them copies of his letters and the Commentariorum in Esaiam, a work that Jerome dedicated to Eustochium and in which he defended women, commenting famously that “in the service of Christ it is not the difference of sexes but the difference of minds that matters.”64 Jerome’s influence can be seen in Alcuin’s writings.65 Alcuin’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, in particular, is heavily reliant on Jerome’s commentary, which he wrote in Bethlehem and dedicated to Paula and Eustochium. In his preface, Jerome recalled how Blesilla had asked him to produce the commentary after they had studied Ecclesiastes together.66 Although she died before he began the work, Jerome memorialized her—in part—through the text.
It is possible that Alcuin’s involvement with Gisela and Rotrude influenced the Tours artists in their depictions of Jerome, inspiring the new attention to Jerome’s relations with women that the Bible images showcased. Yet despite similarities between the two men, Alcuin never cited Jerome as his model in writing to women; instead, it was Gisela and Rotrude who invoked Jerome, encouraging Alcuin to answer their theological questions just as Jerome had devoted himself to the pious women in Rome. When Gisela and Rotrude asked Alcuin to compose a commentary for them on John, they reminded him that “most blessed Jerome did not spurn the prayers of noble women by any means, but dedicated many works … to them.”67 Copies of Alcuin’s commentary on John often circulated with Gisela and Rotrude’s letter of request as a preface, making Jerome’s model of writing for women (and Alcuin’s implicit adoption of that model) part of the textual tradition. Subsequent men, too, may have taken Gisela and Rotrude’s request as a prompt: an early ninth-century copy of Alcuin’s commentary, prefaced by both the women’s letter (fol. 1r-2r) and Alcuin’s response (fol. 2r-5r),68 was given to the female community at Essen by a certain Liudo.69 Although Liudo’s identity remains unknown, his gift of the manuscript placed Gisela and Rotrude’s appeal to Alcuin in the hands of the Essen women, furnishing them with an explicit claim to male spiritual care based not only on Jerome’s original example, but implicitly also on Alcuin’s emulation of him. It is tempting to imagine that Liudo, too, sought to identify himself with Jerome, as a man who supported the religious lives of women. Liudo may even have been one of the many priests and laymen who served the women at Essen; however, on this question the sources are silent.70
Gisela and Rotrude’s invocation of Jerome offers evidence of the growing willingness during the period to acknowledge Jerome’s relationships with women, and even to view these as exemplary: the two women approached Alcuin in some measure as their own “Jerome.” As with the Essen copy of Alcuin’s commentary, manuscript evidence confirms the association of Jerome with women. During Gisela’s abbacy, Chelles owned a manuscript containing more than one hundred of Jerome’s letters, the largest extant Carolingian collection of his correspondence.71 The structure and organization of the manuscript suggest that Jerome was thought to be especially relevant to women readers. Almost one-third of the letters included in the manuscript were addressed to women. These were grouped together at the end of the manuscript, beginning with letter 22 to Eustochium and emphasizing, above all, Jerome’s correspondence with Marcella. The later history of the collection confirms the connection to women. At some point, probably in the tenth century, the manuscript passed to the canonesses at Quedlinburg, a community that (like Essen) housed noble and highly educated women, many of them linked to the Ottonian dynasty.72
Alongside Alcuin’s example of care and involvement with women, there were other sources of inspiration that may have motivated the Tours artists in their depiction of Jerome. Around the time that the Tours artists were completing the First Bible of Charles the Bald, Paschasius Radbertus adopted both Jerome’s voice and his persona in a sermon that he wrote for the nuns of Soissons, a community with close institutional and familial ties to Corbie (and where, according to Engelmodus of Soissons, Paschasius had been raised from babyhood).73 The sermon, known by its incipit “Cogitis me,” was addressed to “Paula” and “Eustochium,” and provided material to be read, both in the chapel and the refectory, for the Feast for the Assumption of the Virgin.74 Paschasius’s decision to write as “Jerome” was probably inspired, at least in part, by the traditional use of nicknames at the Carolingian court: “Paula” and “Eustochium,” the recipients of the letter, have been identified as Theodrada, abbess of Notre Dame at Soissons, and her daughter Imma, a virgin living in the same community.75 The mother-daughter pairing naturally called to mind Paula and Eustochium. Even so, Paschasius’s decision to present himself as “Jerome” in writing to these women is significant, indicating once again the growing association of Jerome with the spiritual care and encouragement of religious women and his importance as an exemplar for medieval men.
Unlike Alcuin, whose association with Jerome had been prompted by Gisela and Rotrude, Paschasius explicitly identified himself with Jerome and was deeply influenced by him.76 As we saw above, Jerome had often written in direct response to the requests of his female correspondents, acknowledging the forcefulness of their requests: “cogis me” (you compel me), he wrote to Eustochium in his commentary on Isaiah, as elsewhere.77 In the same way, Paschasius noted the entreaties of the women of Soissons as the inspiration for his work. His sermon on the Assumption begins in typical Jeromian style, “Cogitis me, o Paula et Eustochium” (you compel me, o Paula and Eustochium), highlighting his relationship with the women. Jerome’s influence is clear, too, in Paschasius’s choice of the Assumption of the Virgin as his subject for the sermon. Emphasizing physical purity and encouraging the Virgin as a model for Theodrada and Imma, Paschasius advocated a celibate life of prayer for women, much like that which Jerome had prescribed for Eustochium in his famous letter 22.78
Paschasius’s imitation of Jerome was so convincing that his sermon “Cogitis me” was accepted as authentic even during his own lifetime.79 In subsequent centuries, the sermon’s popularity contributed significantly to Jerome’s reputation as a spiritual guide for women. Bishop Hincmar of Reims (d. 882) had a deluxe copy of the work made, despite the protestations of Ratramnus of Corbie that Paschasius was its true author.80 The sermon was incorporated quickly into the liturgy of the Feast of the Assumption, with excerpts read during Matins.81 It was known in the eleventh century at Monte Cassino and at Cluny, where it formed the basis for lessons. In fact, the customs of Cluny require that the sermon be read for the Vigil of the Assumption, in place of the gospel.82 Odilo of Cluny (d. 1049) referred directly to “Cogitis me” in his own sermon on the Assumption, which was preached to a mixed audience of women and men.83 At Farfa, it provided all of the readings for nocturns for the Feast of the Assumption.84
During the twelfth century, “Cogitis me” was read and cited as an authentic part of Jerome’s oeuvre. It was known as the work of Jerome to Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129) and William of Newburgh (d. c. 1201), authors who offered Marian interpretations of the Song of Songs.85 Gerhoch of Reichersberg (d. 1169) allowed that “Cogitis me” might be read for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin (in a letter responding to the query of an unidentified community of women, possibly at Admont).86 Gerhoch also cited the text in his own commentary on the Psalms, specifically noting “Jerome’s” writing for women.87 For Abelard, Paschasius’s text was proof that “Jerome” had never been able to refuse the requests of women.88
Making Jerome Blameless
Jerome’s fourth-century contemporaries would have been more than a little bit surprised by his emergence in the ninth century as a model for the legitimate interaction of religious men with women. During his own lifetime, Jerome’s relationships with Roman noblewomen had been viewed with a mixture of suspicion and anger. At best, he was seen to have encouraged for these women a dangerous form of asceticism, which in the case of Blesilla was thought to have led to her death.89 At worst, he was blamed for discrediting Christians through his stinging caricatures of priests who frequented the homes of women, particularly in his letter to Eustochium (Epist. 22), which caused an uproar.90 In later years, Jerome referred to this upset in derisive terms, commenting to Marcella that, “the one thing that I have unfortunately said has been that virgins ought to live more in the company of women than of men, and by this I have made the whole city look scandalized and caused everyone to point at me the finger of scorn.”91
In fact, Jerome drastically underestimated the outrage that his writings had provoked. His criticisms of worldly priests, “who seek the presbyterate and the diaconate simply that they may be able to see women with less restraint,” was met with horror by Christians who thought he had provided an opening for pagan critics of the faith. Jerome’s gift for satire is most clear in his denunciation of these men, whom he urged Eustochium to avoid:
Such men think of nothing but their dress; they use perfumes freely, and see that there are no creases in their leather shoes. Their curling hair shows traces of the tongs; their fingers glisten with rings; they walk on tiptoe across a damp road, not to splash their feet. When you see men acting in this way, think of them rather as bridegrooms than as clerics.92
The irony, of course, is that while Jerome warned both men and women against contact with the opposite sex, he did not practice what he preached, but maintained close relations with a tight circle of female friends in Rome. That irony was not lost on Jerome’s clerical contemporaries, who found themselves on the receiving end of his biting criticisms, while watching in astonishment as his familiarity with women deepened. It may not have mattered to them that Jerome’s contact with women took place in the context of shared Bible study and prayer, and never at the dinner table (or worse).93 In 385, the third year of his residence in Rome, matters came to a head: Jerome was forced to leave the city for the Holy Land, never to return.94 Details concerning the circumstances under which he left are unclear (although some years later, Rufinus threatened to make public an account of the verdict against him). Jerome himself chose not to elaborate on the reasons for his departure, reporting in a letter to Asella only that, “men have laid to my charge a crime of which I am not guilty.”95 The tone of his letter nevertheless hints at allegations of a sexual sort. Defending his behavior—and particularly his relationship with Paula—he protested: “If they have ever seen anything in my conduct unbecoming a Christian let them say so.… Has my language been equivocal, or my eye wanton? No; my sex is my one crime, and even on this score I am not assailed, save when there is a talk of Paula going to Jerusalem.”96
Of all Jerome’s relationships, it was evidently his intimacy with Paula, a widow with five children, which attracted the malicious attention of gossipmongers (indeed, Jerome may have written the life of Malchus to defend his spiritual intimacy with her).97 As Jerome later remembered: “Before I became acquainted with the family of the saintly Paula, all Rome resounded with my praises.… But when I began to revere, respect, and venerate her as her conspicuous chastity deserved, all my former virtues forsook me on the spot.”98 Still, Jerome refused to deny his fascination with Paula, freely admitting that “Of all the ladies in Rome but one had power to subdue me, and that one was Paula.” Asceticism was the basis of her appeal, as he wrote: “She mourned and fasted, she was squalid with dirt, her eyes were dim from weeping. For whole nights she would pray to the Lord for mercy, and often the rising sun found her still at her prayers. The psalms were her only songs, the Gospel her whole speech, continence her one indulgence, fasting the staple of her life.”99
Jerome’s critics might have found it difficult to accept his protestations of innocence, given that Paula and Eustochium left Rome in his wake, joining him in Cyprus and continuing with him to the Holy Land, where they founded a community for women alongside his house for men (anticipating the sort of monastic organization that Abelard, for instance, would later recommend).100 When Paula died, Jerome chose to bury her beneath the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, identifying her with one of the holiest places of Christianity and launching what he must have hoped would be a saint’s cult—one that would be directly associated with his own activities as Paula’s spiritual director and friend.101 At his death in 420, Jerome’s body, too, was laid beneath the Church of the Nativity, near the graves of both Paula and Eustochium.102 Although his relics were later moved to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the connection to Paula and Eustochium remained: a thirteenth-century mosaic in the apsidal arch of the basilica depicts Jerome, clad as a bishop, reading to Paula and Eustochium.103 The incipit of the open book from which he reads is clearly visible in the mosaic: “Cogitis me,” the beginning of Paschasius’s pseudo-Jeromian sermon for “Paula” and “Eustochium” (Figure 13).
In the centuries immediately after his death, Jerome’s terse comment that he had been charged with a crime of which he was innocent attracted little attention. The biography Hieronymus noster reported simply that Jerome’s enemies—men whose own lax behavior he had criticized—had left a trap for him, without mentioning the nature of the trap, Jerome’s controversial relations with women, or the suspicions that these relations had raised.104 By the twelfth century, however, Jerome’s relations with women were highlighted in accounts of his exile from Rome—albeit to emphasize his innocence: the “trap” was identified as a “woman’s garment,” as the twelfth-century French theologian and liturgist Johannes Beleth reported.105 The thirteenth-century Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine offered still greater detail, noting that Jerome’s enemies had placed a woman’s garment near his bed in the night. Waking for Matins, “as was his custom,” he put the garment on and proceeded to church (a comical scene reproduced in the Belles Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry; Figure 14).106 As Jacobus explained, “His adversaries, of course, had done this in order to make it look as if he had a woman in his room.” For Jacobus de Voragine, as for other men during the central Middle Ages, the legend confirmed two central assumptions: first, that Jerome was innocent of all charges; and second, that the allegation of sexual misconduct—the “trap” that had been set for him—was the work of malicious men. Jacobus commented that Jerome “had denounced some monks and clerics for their lascivious lives, and they were so resentful that they began to lay snares for him.”107
Figure 13. Jerome with Paula and Eustochium. Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.
Jerome’s trials did nothing to detract from his medieval appeal. If anything, they recommended him still more to men during the central Middle Ages, who saw in him not only a model of men’s legitimate spiritual care for religious women, but also one of innocence accused. Since Jerome’s virtue was unquestioned during the medieval period, the accusations against him were understood to have been fully unjust. Suffering them patiently, Jerome therefore exemplified the spiritual ideal of Christian sacrifice: his example suggested that service to women, and the malicious accusations that such service almost always provoked, could be spiritual ends in themselves for medieval religious men, whose endurance of false accusations might be interpreted as a form of imitatio Christi. Jerome himself had suggested the connection. Invoking John 15:18—in which Jesus had comforted his disciples that “If the world hate you, know that it hated me before you.”—Jerome declared as he left Rome: “I thank my God that I am counted worthy of the world’s hatred.”108 A decade later, in a letter to Furia, he associated himself once again with Christ in his experience of unjust accusations: “Men … will cry out that I am a sorcerer and a seducer; and that I should be transported to the ends of the earth. They may add, if they will, the title of Samaritan; for in it I shall but recognize a name given to my Lord.”109 By highlighting the innocent suffering of Christ, Jerome at once defended himself and painted his accusers as corrupt and wicked men. Medieval men who invoked Jerome as a model for their spiritual involvement with women achieved something similar: by invoking Jerome, they underscored the purity of their relations with women, the injustice of accusations against them, and the wickedness of those who attacked them.
Figure 14. Jerome Donning Women’s Clothes. The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1), fol. 184v. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jerome in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Jerome’s reputation for licit spiritual involvement with women was considerably advanced in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as his works received renewed attention and were copied, read, and studied widely. As in the ninth century, interest in Jerome as a translator and interpreter of sacred scripture grew in conjunction with intellectual renaissance and concern for the reform of the religious life.110 Around the time that Reginald of Canterbury produced his poetic rewriting of Jerome’s Life of Malchus, Guigues de Châtel (1083–1136), the fifth prior of the Grande Chartreuse, produced a new edition of Jerome’s letters.111 Some years later, Nicolò Maniacutia, a Cistercian monk at the abbey of Trois Fontaines near Rome, produced a new Life of Jerome, in which he highlighted Jerome’s friendship with Paula and Eustochium and reported the trap laid for him by his enemies (identified as pseudo-clerics and—monks), who tricked him into wearing a woman’s garment.112 Women, too, were engaged in reading, copying, and transmitting Jerome’s works. At the Bavarian monastery of Wessobrunn, the female recluse and scribe Diemut copied several works of Jerome, including a substantial collection of his letters, his Contra Vigilantium, and his De hebraicis questionibus.113 Manuscripts of Jerome also feature in the twelfth-century collection of Zwiefalten, another Hirsau reform monastery that included both a female community and female scribes.114 Alongside the many works of Jerome in the Zwiefalten collection was a copy of the Institutio canonum Aquisgranesium, which included, appropriately enough, both the Institutio canonicorum and the Institutio sanctimonialium, with its extensive prefatory excerpts from Jerome.115 At Lamspringe, female scribes copied “Cogitis me” alongside Bede’s commentaries on Ezra and Nehemiah, toward the end of the century.116
At Corbie, too, Jerome’s works received new attention during the twelfth century. Indeed, it may be no coincidence that Jerome and Paschasius were both copied and read at Corbie at this time. In each case, the monks chose to highlight the men’s relations with women. The monk artists who copied Paschasius’s commentary on Psalm 44 prefaced the commentary with a remarkable image of Paschasius presenting the work to a group of five canonesses—suggesting a willingness at Corbie to remember, and perhaps also to celebrate, Paschasius as a man who had devoted himself to religious women (Figure 15).117 At around the same time, Corbie scribes and artists collaborated in the production of a manuscript that included Jerome’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, a work that had been commissioned by Blesilla, but was dedicated to Paula and Eustochium. The Corbie artists privileged Jerome’s relationships with these three women, depicting Jerome at his desk, flanked by Paula and Eustochium (Figure 16).118 A titulus identifies the patron or scribe of the book as the priest Ivo.119
Religious men during the central Middle Ages invoked Jerome’s example of relations with women in several different ways. Some referenced him to explain and exalt their own writing for women. In his epitaph for the empress Adelheid, Odilo of Cluny commented that, had Jerome been alive during Adelheid’s lifetime, he would have commended her just as he had “Paula and Eustochium, Marcella and Melania, Fabiola and Blesilla, Leta and Demetrias.”120 Although Odilo intended to pay tribute primarily to Adelheid by this reference, placing her among the company of women whose sanctity had captured Jerome’s attention, he also implicitly identified himself with Jerome as a man who eulogized holy women. Other men cited Jerome to justify their decision to write for women in the first place, often noting—as Bishop Azecho of Worms did—that Jerome had preferred to write to women, rather than to men.121 Abelard also made this point. Noting that Jerome had responded with alacrity to the requests of Paula and Eustochium, while he neglected to write to Augustine, Abelard commented: “we know that Jerome toiled over the copying or composition of so many lengthy volumes at the request of the women we mentioned, showing them far more respect in this than he showed a bishop.”122 In dedicating the Historia ecclesiastica to Adela of Blois, Hugh of Fleury likewise defended his work with reference to Jerome: “To those who will take it amiss that I have dedicated this work to you, I answer: the blessed priest Jerome often honored holy Paula and her daughter Eustochium with many writings.”123 In the latter part of the twelfth century, Gerhoch of Reichersberg similarly claimed Jerome as a model, likening his writing for women to Jerome’s compositions for Paula and Eustochium.124
Jerome’s appeal to men such as these, who wrote theological and other texts for women, lay not only in his saintly example of literary attention to women, but also in his defense of men’s writing for women. Jerome’s letter 65 to Principia (a commentary on Psalm 44, written at her request) included a prologue in praise of holy women, which functioned equally as a vigorous defense of his writings to women. “I am blamed by many,” Jerome commented, “since now and then I write to women and prefer the more fragile sex to the manly one.”125 Defending himself, Jerome noted the biblical precedence of women over men: Deborah went into battle because Barak refused to go alone (Judges 4:8); Hulda was prophetess while Jeremiah was in jail (IV Kings 22:14); and Mary Magdalene had faith, while the apostles doubted. Adding to these examples a catalogue of notable women from the Old Testament (Sara, Rebecca, Miriam, Rachel, Ruth, Esther, Judith, Hannah, and others), Jerome also noted Jesus’s attention to women: “Women followed the Lord and ministered to him from their resources. He who from five loaves, fed five thousand men, excluding women and children, did not refuse to receive the food of holy women.” Continuing, Jerome observed that Priscilla and Aquila had taught the apostle Apollos (Acts 18:26), prompting him to ask: “If it was not disgraceful for an apostle to be taught by a woman, why should it be disgraceful to me to teach women after men?”126 A similar defense of writing to women appears in the prologue to Jerome’s commentary on Sophonia (Zephaniah), a work dedicated to Paula and Eustochium. Writing that “it seems necessary to respond to those who judge me worthy of mockery, because omitting men, I should write especially to you, o Paula and Eustochium,” Jerome noted the various holy women of the Old and New Testaments, as well as examples of the Greek and Roman women with whom ancient philosophers had contact—proof that “philosophers of the world sought differences in souls not bodies,” a claim Jerome had made, too, in his Commentariorum in Esaiam.127 Turning, finally, to the example of Christ, whose attention to women would inspire men throughout the medieval period, Jerome noted simply that “the Lord at his resurrection appeared first to women and … they were the apostles of the apostles.”128 In his letter 127 to Principia (written in praise of Marcella), Jerome revisited the theme: “The unbelieving reader may perhaps laugh at me for dwelling so long on the praises of mere women; yet if he will but remember how holy women followed our Lord and Savior and ministered to Him of their substance, and how the three Marys stood before the cross and especially how Mary Magdalen—called the tower from the earnestness and glow of her faith—was privileged to see the rising Christ first of all before the very apostles, he will convict himself of pride sooner than me of folly. For we judge of people’s virtue not by their sex but by their character (non sexu sed animo).”129 As we saw in the previous chapter, medieval men drew on many of these same biblical models in defending themselves, sometimes citing Jerome directly as they did so.
Figure 15. Paschasius with Canonesses. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 12298, fol. 177v.
Figure 16. Jerome with Blesilla, Paula, and Eustochium. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 13350, fol. Bv.
During the central Middle Ages, Peter Abelard found particular solace in Jerome’s example, celebrating him as “the greatest doctor of the Church and glory of the monastic profession” and styling himself in large measure as a “second Jerome.”130 Abelard cited Jerome repeatedly in his writings for the women of the Paraclete, finding key justifications for his own involvement with women in Jerome’s letters and commentaries. Abelard’s letter 9, sometimes called De studio litterarum, is so rife with excerpts from Jerome (drawn chiefly from his letter 107 on the education of Paula) that Jean Leclercq dismissed it as a mere florilegium of extracts.131 But Abelard did not simply copy Jerome’s advice on education, he also rehearsed several of the arguments that Jerome advanced for writing to women in the first place. As Abelard reminded readers of his letter On the Origin of Nuns: “Everyone knows too that St. Jerome harvested a great number of holy books which he left to the Church at the request of Paula and Eustochium.”132 Abelard was clearly familiar with that harvest, citing in his own writings Jerome’s Epist. 39 (to Paula, after Blesilla’s death), Epist. 108 (to Eustochium, after death of Paula), Epist. 127 (to Principia about Marcella), Epist. 45 (to Asella), Epist. 46 (from “Paula and Eustochium” to Marcella), Epist. 130 (to Demetrias), Epist. 54 (to Furia), and two letters to Eustochium—Epist. 31 and Epist. 22—as well as Epist. 107 and Epist. 65.
Abelard’s affinity for Jerome is not surprising: both men were divisive figures, intellectually arrogant, and controversial. Hounded by their enemies (real and imagined), both men found comfort in the company of religious women—Abelard at the Paraclete, which he described once as a “haven of peace away from raging storms,” and Jerome in the friendship of wealthy Roman women.133 Both men wrote substantial texts for women, with whom they shared close, spiritual friendships: Abelard for Heloise and the nuns under her authority, and Jerome—as we have seen—for Paula, Eustochium, and Marcella, as well as others. Both men, moreover, faced opposition to their involvement with women. While Jerome was expelled from Rome, Abelard’s relations with Heloise were mired in scandal: their affair, their botched marriage, and Abelard’s castration. By the time that he wrote his Historia calamitatum, sometime around 1132, Abelard was deeply embittered by the continued accusations that his involvement with women provoked. In frustration and anger at the false charges hurled against him—that he continued to be “in the grip of the pleasures of carnal concupiscence”134—Abelard turned to Jerome, “whose heir I consider myself as regards slanders and false accusations.”135 Finding particular solace in Jerome’s letter to Asella (Epist. 45)—written as he left Rome, in disgrace—Abelard recalled Jerome’s complaint that he had been praised throughout Rome before he knew Paula. “Often I repeated to myself St. Jerome’s lament in his letter to Asella about false friends,” Abelard remembered, quoting Jerome: “The only fault found in me is my sex, and that only when Paula comes to Jerusalem.”136
Abelard cited Jerome to comfort himself, but also to underscore his innocence, to defame his accusers (whom he depicted as jealous and evil men), and to claim the virtue that was to be found in suffering unjust accusations. In his Historia calamitatum, Abelard cited Jerome’s self-justificatory comments to Nepotian (“if I still sought men’s favor … I should be no servant of Christ”) and to Asella (“Thank God I have deserved the hatred of the world”).137 Of course, Jerome also offered a rich example of men’s pious devotion to women—one to which Abelard, and other men, could turn in justifying their involvement with women as “saintly” and theologically sound. Jerome’s writings, too, shaped Abelard’s sense of his role at the Paraclete, as a monk ministering to nuns—one of whom was his former wife. Jerome’s life of the saintly and chaste Malchus was evidence, in Abelard’s view, that holy men could involve themselves in pure relations with women. “What would my detractors have said,” Abelard asked, “if they had seen Malchus, the captive monk of whom St. Jerome writes, living together with his wife? In their eyes it would have been a great crime, though the splendid doctor had nothing but high praise for what he saw.”138 For Abelard (as also for Reginald, whom Abelard does not appear to have known), Malchus’s example of chaste marriage was a sign that such pure spiritual relationships between the sexes were possible and that they had been approved by no less a figure than St. Jerome, the “famous doctor.”
A central argument of this book is that Abelard was not alone among medieval men either in his attention to women or in the arguments that he made concerning men’s spiritual involvement with women. Others, too, invoked Jerome in situations where accusations of wrongdoing might be leveled. A generation before Abelard, Goscelin of St. Bertin had cited Jerome’s relationship with Paula and Eustochium in order to defend the spiritual companionship of saint Edith of Wilton and her mother Wulfthryth with their chaplain Benno of Trier (just as he had invoked the example of John the Evangelist in characterizing the relationship of Dunstan and Edith): in Benno, Goscelin wrote, the mother-daughter pair Edith and Wulfthryth (whom he likened to Paula and Eustochium) “had as it were their own Jerome.”139 Goscelin may have found personal validation in Jerome’s example, styling himself as a “Jerome” in his relationship to Eve of Wilton. In the Liber confortatorius, which Goscelin wrote for Eve following her decision to become an anchorite in Angers, Goscelin encouraged Eve to model herself on the examples of Paula and Eustochium, implicitly suggesting himself as her “Jerome.”140 Similarly, Christina of Markyate’s mid-twelfth-century biographer described Christina as Paula to Geoffrey’s Jerome, in a move that was designed to cast them both as innocent victims of scandalmongers. Referring to the rumors and “fictitious tales” that circulated concerning their friendship, Christina’s biographer wrote that “listening to them you might think that one was Jerome, the other Paula.”141 Directly echoing Jerome’s complaint to Asella that his reputation had been secure before he met Paula (a complaint adopted by Abelard as well), Christina’s biographer continued: “Before they had come to love each other in Christ, the abbot’s well-known integrity and the virgin’s holy chastity had been praised in many parts of England. But when their mutual affection in Christ inspired them to greater good, then the abbot was slandered as a seducer and the maiden as a whore.”142 As Dyan Elliott rightly notes, the identification of contemporary men with Jerome in these cases seems to have been founded on “scandal, not sanctity.”143
The Bride of Christ as “Domina”
Jerome’s model offered medieval men much-needed comfort, helping them to understand why the care for women that they believed had been divinely ordained (based on the commendation to John) could nevertheless provoke vicious attacks. Yet Jerome also offered more, presenting in his writings a compelling case for women’s spiritual superiority founded on his identification of devout women as brides of Christ. As I argued in the previous chapter, when men wrote to and about religious women during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they stressed their chastity and the innocence of their intentions. But they did not dwell long on their earthly relationships to women. Instead, they focused attention away from themselves as potential lovers, embracing the traditional characterization of religious women as brides of Christ. Of course, the bridal motif was not invented by reformist ideology, but had a long history, stretching back at least to the second century when Tertullian had applied the metaphor to consecrated virgins in North Africa.144 However, it gained significant early traction through the writings of Jerome, who adopted the idea in his letter to Eustochium, both to exalt her and to stress her spiritual intimacy with Christ.
In his famous letter 22, Jerome addressed Eustochium as his domina (his “lady,” or literally, his female “lord”), commenting by way of explanation that “I am bound to call my Lord’s bride ‘Lady.’ ”145 Later in the same letter, he elaborated on Eustochium’s “rank” in relation to his own, addressing her as his domina once again: “my Eustochium, daughter, domina, fellow-servant, sister (germana)—these names refer the first to your age, the second to your rank, the third to your religious vocation, the last to the place which you hold in my affection.”146 Of all the ways that Jerome felt himself bound to Eustochium, it was this second, her “rank,” that most influenced him. Since Eustochium was Christ’s “bride,” she was logically Jerome’s domina, given that he imagined himself primarily as Christ’s “servant.” Addressing Eustochium as his domina was one way in which Jerome could articulate his primary relationship of servitude to Christ, and thereby remove both Eustochium and himself from suspicion of wrong-doing.
The spiritual love triangle that Jerome imagined bound him to Eustochium, and both of them to Christ, was deeply compelling for religious men during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.147 The fiery reformer Peter Damian adopted the idea in his letters for the countess-turned-nun Blanche of Milan. Addressing Blanche as domina mea, Peter explained: “I call you my domina, or better, my queen, espoused to my Lord, the king of heaven.”148 Hildebert of Lavardin, a recipient of Reginald’s life of Malchus, echoed Jerome’s subordination to Eustochium in writing to the countess-turned-nun Adela of Blois: “The bride of my lord is my domina.”149 So, too, Goscelin of St. Bertin addressed Eve as domina mea, calling to mind Jerome’s positioning of himself in relation to Eustochium. Like Jerome, Goscelin linked his description of Eve as his domina to her relationship with Christ, “for whom alone,” as he wrote to her, “you have gone into enclosure.”150
Abelard, too, refusing Heloise’s post-conversion claims on him as her husband, situated himself rather as her servant, writing to her in the 1130s: “you must realize that you became my superior from the day when you began to be my lady (domina mea) on becoming the bride of my Lord.”151 In his letter On the Origin of Nuns, Abelard once again invoked Jerome’s rhetorical subordination to Eustochium, presenting biblical women as mothers and dominae of the apostles.152 However, his most far-reaching application of Jerome’s model of religious women as dominae appeared in a sermon (Sermon 30) that he preached for the Paraclete in its early years.153 At this time, Heloise’s community of religious women was newly established at the Paraclete, under circumstances that were evidently austere. Seeking to raise much-needed funds for the new community, Abelard addressed himself to an audience of potential donors, encouraging them to view the nuns as their dominae—women who not only deserved their support, but whose heavenly bridegroom would ensure that earthly supporters were amply rewarded. Citing Jerome’s subordination to Eustochium as his domina, Abelard explained to his audience that all nuns were brides of Christ, and were therefore superior to all men (who could, at best, be “servants,” but never brides). Advising that nuns “join themselves to a heavenly bridegroom and, made brides of the highest king, become ladies (dominae) of all his servants,” Abelard urged that “You should not delay in assisting their poverty.” A reward would be waiting for donors in heaven, where they would “reap eternal rewards through those women who here receive temporal goods from you, by the gift of their bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Christ.”154 As we shall see in Chapter 5, the privileged spiritual status of nuns as brides of Christ had important implications for perceptions of their efficacy in prayer, since the prayers of nuns were—literally, as Abelard and others believed—the prayers of brides. Begging Heloise’s “bridal” prayers, Abelard wrote explicitly of the vicarious salvation that he expected to gain through her: “Whatever is yours cannot, I think, fail to be mine, and Christ is yours, because you have become his bride.”155 In Abelard’s view, even salvation could come to him through Heloise—a spiritual benefit that he promised to male donors who supported the female religious life.
Abelard’s ideas about religious women have typically been thought of as “daring,” yet ultimately irrelevant in his own time. However, Abelard’s fundraising sermon for the Paraclete, with its claims to women’s spiritual superiority as brides of Christ and dominae of men (an idea inspired by Jerome), was known and read by other religious men within a few decades of its composition in the early 1130s.156 The sermon survives now in a single manuscript from the second half of the twelfth century: Colmar, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 128.157 The manuscript’s provenance gives a valuable indication of Abelard’s readership, hinting at the reception of his ideas concerning men’s support for women’s religious life. Colmar MS 128 was preserved in the library of Marbach, an Augustinian reform monastery that seems to have been a double community at some point (possibly even from its foundation in the late eleventh century). By the middle of the twelfth century, Marbach supported a female daughter house at nearby Schwarzenthann, where several of the Marbach canons served as priests.
The presence of Abelard’s sermons in the collection at Marbach is suggestive of Abelard’s twelfth-century influence and appeal: like Reginald’s Malchus, Abelard’s sermons seem to have circulated among communities of like-minded men. Concrete evidence that the Marbach canons found Abelard’s ideas concerning women compelling, and that they worked to implement his model of mutuality between the sexes in the religious life, is provided in the mid-twelfth-century Guta-Sintram Codex, a manuscript that was produced through the joint efforts of Guta, a canoness at Schwarzenthann, and Sintram, a canon of Marbach. The codex is known primarily for its depiction of Guta and Sintram paying homage to the Virgin Mary, with Sintram to the Virgin’s right and Guta to her left (Figure 2).158 In a text on the dedication page, Guta claims responsibility for the writing of the manuscript and reports that Sintram was the author of its miniatures.159 However, Sintram also seems to have served in a scribal capacity: it is likely his hand—Hand “B”—that appears alongside Guta’s at times, suggesting that their cooperation involved close working conditions, possibly even in the same room.160 Most interesting is Sintram’s presumed role (as Hand “B”) in copying several selections from Abelard’s Sermon 30 (with the incipit Beati pauperes) into the codex—placing them prominently on the folio facing the dedication to the Virgin (Figure 17).161 The idea that pious women were brides of Christ, and therefore dominae of men, features prominently in the selections from Abelard’s sermon that Sintram chose to copy. As brides, Beati pauperes claims that nuns deserve men’s care; yet the text also offers the assurance that nuns can reward men through their intimacy with the bridegroom and the gendered efficacy of their prayers.
The appearance of Beati pauperes in the Guta-Sintram Codex indicates not just that Abelard’s monastic writings were known and read, but also that Jerome’s ideas about men’s rhetorical subordination to nuns, as brides and dominae, had a role in shaping relations between religious women and men in German-speaking lands, even some eight hundred years after his death.
A final example from the turn of the twelfth century offers a slightly different vantage point from which to consider Jerome’s influence, showing how women may have viewed the bridal motif. Baudri of Bourgueil (d. 1130) (author of the first Life of Robert of Arbrissel) wrote to Constance, likely a nun at Le Ronceray, sometime around 1096–1106, addressing her as “the bride of my Lord” (sponsa mei domini).162 In her response, Constance initially resisted Baudri’s overtures of friendship, only to convince herself—on the basis of Jerome’s bridal motif—of her obligation, as a nun, to love religious men, whom she characterized as “servants of the bridegroom,” or “friends of the bridegroom” (language that might be seen to invoke John’s service to Mary at the cross):
Figure 17. Beati pauperes. Guta-Sintram Codex, p. 8. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque du Grand séminaire, MS 37, fol. 3v. 1154.
The bride of God should love God’s servants.
You are a servant of the bridegroom, you are brother and co-heir;
You, too, you are worthy by my bridegroom’s love.
The bride should respect the friends of her bridegroom.
Therefore I respect you, I love you vigilantly.163
Although the attribution of this poem to Constance is contested, these lines confirm the importance of the bridal motif as a way for men and women to characterize relations between the sexes in the religious life and to emphasize their purity and saintly motivation.164 Presenting women as brides of Christ and men as his servants or friends underscored the centrality of Christ to these relations; women (like men) could imagine their relations with opposite-sex religious figures as mediated through their primary allegiance and loyalty to Christ. Religious women could justify their affection for monks and priests on the basis that brides should love their bridegroom’s servants. Viewing each other through the lens of the bridal relationship, both men and women found cause to admire and support each other—in service, ultimately, to Christ.
Conclusion
Reference to Jerome in the context of men’s spiritual involvement with women was never just a trope.165 Men who invoked Jerome as a model did so consciously and intentionally, in a bid to defend their involvement with women, linking themselves to a tradition of innocent, and even saintly, relations between religious men and women. As a respected theologian, biblical commentator, and translator, Jerome offered a model of men’s care for women that was beyond suspicion—if not during his own lifetime, then certainly by the ninth century, when his saintly reputation was firmly established. His depiction in both the First Bible of Charles the Bald and the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura, his prominence in the Institutio sanctimonialium, and his association with Paschasius’s widely known sermon “Cogitis me” confirm his ninth-century reputation for chaste, spiritual involvement with women, as does the manuscript witness of the Chelles letter collection. By the twelfth century, Jerome’s reputation for the spiritual guidance of women was secure; allegations of impropriety in his relations with women were firmly understood (and dismissed) as the machinations of jealous and evil men.
Women, too, recognized the usefulness of Jerome’s model, invoking him in order to prompt contemporary men to engage spiritually and intellectually with them. As we saw, it was Gisela and Rotrude who encouraged Alcuin to view himself as Jerome’s heir, consciously fashioning themselves as the spiritual and intellectual successors to Jerome’s female disciples. In the twelfth century, too, Heloise claimed Jerome as a model of men’s care for women. While Abelard may have pictured himself as Jerome’s heir in “slanders and false accusations,” a persecuted genius like the famous church father, it was Heloise who encouraged him to consider himself as Jerome’s heir in his role as the author of spiritual works for women. References to Jerome appear in her letters first in letter 6, in which—putting aside reflections on the past—she asked Abelard to write both a Rule for the Paraclete and a history of the order of nuns.166 From that point on, Heloise referred increasingly to Jerome, although perhaps not as Abelard intended. Where Abelard encouraged the Paraclete women to model themselves on “the blessed disciples of St. Jerome, Paula and Eustochium,”167 Heloise evidently preferred Marcella as her spiritual and intellectual ideal.168 The distinction is important. Paula and Eustochium received Jerome’s dictates with unquestioning devotion, following him to the Holy Land and even dying there with him. Meanwhile, Marcella had remained in Rome, where she maintained her own spiritual circle, interacting with Jerome regularly, but at arm’s length. Marcella was, moreover, the most scholarly and even critical of Jerome’s female friends. Jerome remembered her intellectual acuity, commenting in a letter to Principia that “she never came to see me that she did not ask me some question concerning them [the scriptures], nor would she at once acquiesce in my explanations but on the contrary would dispute them.”169 In a letter complaining of enemies who attacked him for altering the biblical text, Jerome anticipated Marcella’s concerned response: “I know that as you read these words you will knit your brows, and fear that my freedom of speech is sowing the seeds of fresh quarrels; and that, if you could, you would gladly put your finger on my mouth to prevent me from even speaking of things which others do not blush to do.”170
Heloise saw herself more in the mode of Marcella than of Eustochium and Paula, whose main advantage was their fierce asceticism rather than their intellectual agility. Abelard, too, may have recognized that Marcella was a more fitting model for Heloise than either Paula or Eustochium. In his letter 9, on the education of women, he noted the consolation that Jerome had taken in his exchange of letters with Marcella—the sort of epistolary consolation that he had once considered as one of Heloise’s chief attractions as his prospective lover.171 Even so, in writing to Heloise, Abelard tended to emphasize Marcella’s humility more than her intelligence. Although Marcella was often called upon to settle theological disputes after Jerome’s departure from Rome, Abelard noted that she never took credit for her answers, but—in obedience to Paul’s prohibition of women’s teaching—attributed them either to Jerome, or to some other male teacher.172
Heloise’s Marcella was less demure than Abelard’s. If Abelard’s Marcella refused credit for teaching men, Heloise’s Marcella refused to be taught without engaging in debate; like Heloise herself, her Marcella continually questioned her male teacher. In the preface to the Problemata, the series of questions that she sent Abelard, Heloise invoked Marcella, reminding Abelard of Jerome’s many letters to her, often written in response to Marcella’s theological questions. Still, it was not Marcella’s questions that Heloise emphasized, but rather Jerome’s praise for her, which—as Heloise commented to Abelard—“your wisdom knows better than my simplicity.”173 In fact, Heloise cited Marcella not primarily as a questioning woman, but rather as one who could scarcely be satisfied with the answer she was given. Remembering Jerome’s commentary on Galatians, Heloise noted Jerome’s recollection of Marcella as his intellectual counterpart: as Heloise reported, Jerome had written that Marcella did not “accept whatever I may answer as correct.… Instead, she investigates everything, and weighs it all in her sagacious mind, and so she makes me feel that I have not so much a pupil as a judge.”174
In the final analysis, Heloise cited Marcella primarily in order to goad Abelard into action. If Jerome had written for women, and if Abelard fancied himself a second Jerome, then, as Heloise hinted broadly, he should answer her questions. “To what purpose then are these things, O dear to many, but dearest to us?” she asked, once she had rehearsed Jerome’s praises for Marcella. “They are not mere testimonies; they are admonitions, reminding you of your debt to us, which you should not delay in paying.”175 Heloise’s strategy—of using Jerome’s dedication to women to shame Abelard into taking her requests more seriously—is one that Gisela and Rotrude had used to good effect. Abelard, like Alcuin, may have seen himself as Jerome’s intellectual heir. Heloise, like women before her, reminded Abelard that concern for women, and engagement with them, had been a hallmark of Jerome’s spiritual life—providing a saintly model that medieval churchmen would do well to emulate.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.