Toen de Vikingen in de negende en tiende eeuw Bretagne binnenvielen, vluchtten Bretonse geestelijken oostwaards naar Frankrijk. Ze brachten de relikwieën van en handschriften over hun heiligen met zich mee. Hoe werden deze relieken ontvangen in hun nieuwe woonplaatsen, waar men vaak weinig wist over Bretagne en de Bretonse heiligen? In dit artikel wordt het herschreven heiligenleven geïntroduceerd als een middel om enerzijds toegang te krijgen tot hoe Franse religieuze gemeenschappen omgingen met de bijzonderheden van de "Keltische" heiligen van Bretagne, en anderzijds als een manier om te onderzoeken hoe auteurs probeerden deze nieuwe heiligen bekend te maken bij hun publiek. Ook bieden deze teksten de mogelijkheid om na te gaan hoe informatie over deze heiligen zich over middeleeuws Europa verspreidde en om te ontdekken wat er met de verering van Bretonse heiligen gebeurde toen zij Bretagne verlieten.
Meandering between the shelves of the reading room of most research libraries, the distracted reader eventually comes to the section reserved for the Acta Sanctorum. Here, in over sixty folio volumes, are the results of the Bollandist society’s heroically quixotic endeavour to edit the pre-modern narrative accounts of the deeds of the saints, an endeavour begun during the Thirty Years War and only brought to a close in 1940.[1] Intrigued, even if by nothing else than by editors’ perseverance of spirit, the reader selects a volume at random for further examination. Leafing through its oversized pages, turning through the days of the liturgical year and with it the different saints celebrated, it is easy to become quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of Lives and amount of Latin and, more occasionally, Greek text contained within. Perhaps at this point the reader’s own work beckons and, the distraction having passed, they return the volume to its home.
However, if not dissuaded by this initial encounter, various patterns may begin to emerge. One of these is that sometimes, having flicked past the account of the Life of a saint, one meets the same saint again, the text this time introduced by a heading such as ‘vita secunda’ (‘a second Life’), ‘vita alia’ (‘another Life’), or even ‘vita eadem’ (‘the same Life’). The reader has encountered the rewritten saint’s Life, a text produced by an individual or community dissatisfied in some way with the previous attempt to recount the saint’s biography and miracles. Historically, these rewritten Lives have been ignored as sources for the Middle Ages, considered as pious rewritings of earlier texts deemed more useful for reconstructing the historicity, or not, of the saint in question. But for those scholars more interested in exploring how medieval individuals venerated the saints these later reworkings represent a body of literature whose potential has only just begun to be realised.[2]
To the reader who has selected the Lives based on the saints’ distinctively Breton names another pattern may also soon emerge: despite their subject matter, several of the authors rewriting the Lives of Breton saints proudly announce their rejection of Brittany. Most notable in this rejection is Vital of Fleury in his Life of St Paul Aurelian, written around the early eleventh century at Fleury Abbey, near Orléans. In his preface to the work, Vital announces his intention to reject the ‘British verbosity’ of his exemplar and to trouble his reader with as few dissonant Breton names as possible, though he ruefully adds that since this is the Life of a Breton saint he could hardly do away with them all. Good to his word, Vital’s rewritten Life contains far fewer Breton personal and placenames than his source material.[3] Nor was Vital alone in remarking on the strangeness of the names and language which he encountered in his source material—writing at about the same time in Angers, the anonymous author of the Life of St Briocus complains of the inclusion of idioms in a foreign language in the (lost) text from which he worked.[4]
Questions inevitably arise. The literature about the saints of Brittany, like the ‘Celtic saints’ of Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, has generally been treated as inwards looking and as exhibiting distinctive traits (extreme localness, an interest in springs and other natural features, an abundance of animal stories, and a lack of interest in posthumous miracles) which sets the Lives of these saints apart from those composed in other parts of Europe. Why then are individuals from outside of Brittany interested in these saints and these Lives? Why did authors such as Vital of Fleury exert themselves to rework Lives written by Breton authors? How were these Breton saints venerated outside of Brittany? And what can these rewritten Lives tell us about how Breton saints and literature interacted with audiences outside of Brittany?
Breton relics abroad
Connected to, and in many cases driving, this flourishing of interest in Breton saints’ Lives in tenth- and eleventh-century northern France was the exodus of relics from Brittany which occurred in the late-ninth and tenth centuries.[5] By the year 1000 many religious communities in southern England and northern France had come to be possessors of relics of saints traditionally venerated in Brittany. Since the principal source for this movement of relics out of Brittany is the accounts written by these new owners, often over a century later, it can be difficult to establish the exact causes and events of this saintly migration. Viking raids on Brittany, and in particular the destruction of the 920s and 930s, have often been blamed, probably not unfairly. Key to this narrative of the flight and exile of Breton monastic and cathedral communities, accompanied by the relics of their patron saints, is the Translation of St Maglorius to Paris, a text whose vividness is matched only by the dubiousness of its textual transmission.[6] It narrates how, harassed by Vikings and fearing for their lives, Bishop Salvator of Alet and Abbot Junanus of Léhon gathered at Léhon and decided to flee Brittany with the relics of their saints. Welcomed in Paris by Hugh the Great, duke of the Franks, the monks and clerics (and their relics) were installed on the Île de la Cité in a chapel which, in turn, became a monastery dedicated to the Breton saint St Maglorius.[7]The date (twelfth-century based on older material?) and the veracity of the Translation has been debated since René Merlet first brought the text to scholarly attention in the late-nineteenth century, but other accounts of Viking disruption discussed by Deuffic make it likely that at least much of the dispersal of Brittany’s relics in the tenth century was driven by the flight of monastic communities.[8]
Relics of St Maglorius in Paris (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Magloire_@_Eglise_Saint-Jacques_du_Haut_Pas_@_Paris_(32159422712).jpg)
Even once these relics had arrived in northern France their journey was not necessarily over and various factors could cause the remains of Breton saints to find new homes. Foremost among these were the actions of princes, magnates and kings, for whom relics could make useful gifts or desirable tokens of legitimacy.[9] The Translation of St Maglorius to Paris provides some examples: Hugh, having acquired this cache of Breton relics, refused to allow the Breton monks and clerics to remove them from Paris while his grandson, King Robert the Pious, made a donation of the relics of St Samson of Dol to a church in Orleans.[10] More legally dubious options were also available to a ruler determined to get their hands on relics. The monks of Saint Peter’s Abbey, Ghent, recorded how in the 930s King Æthelstan had sent a ‘a certain thief, Electus by name, a Briton by race’ to steal the relics of the British bishop Gudwal from the monastery at Montreuil. Though Electus was unsuccessful in his mission, the Montreuil monks were nevertheless soon deprived of their relics when in the 950s Arnulf the Great, count of Flanders, seized them for his own abbey in Ghent.[11] By the eleventh century many monasteries in Northern France found themselves the guardians of Breton relics, some acquired directly from fleeing Breton communities, others due to the patronage of kings and princes.
Relics, however, pose a fundamental problem: without knowledge of the saints whose remains they are, relics are meaningless and worthless objects. As pieces of a saint’s body or clothing, these relics were only significant to the communities who cared for them if they knew about the saint in question and deemed them worthy of veneration. Without a connection to a saint, relics are only the remains of the dead. This need for knowledge about the saints whose relics they owned appears to have been a major driving force behind the production of the Lives of Breton saints written or rewritten outside of Brittany with which we began. Presented with relics about which they cared much but knew little, communities turned to the manuscripts which the original Breton monks had brought with them to find out more. Often these Lives were deemed inadequate and rewritten versions commissioned to better satisfy the cult’s current needs. For some of these updated texts, the additions and changes to the original serve clear purposes. When rewriting the Life of St Turiaw in the first half of the eleventh century, the author appended accounts of several of the miracles which had been worked through Turiaw’s relics at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris. Turiaw might be unfamiliar to the monks and his relics might no longer rest where he had lived, but this did not prevent him (according to the anonymous hagiographer) from acting as a heavenly patron for his new home.[12] But other reasons and motivations were also often present when choosing to produce a new record of the saint’s deeds. Through study of how and why the Lives of Breton saints were read and reworked outside of Brittany, it is possible to explore the reception of these texts and to examine what northern French communities found important about their new heavenly patrons.
Writers and readers
Alongside authors, medieval texts also had readers. Whether through private study or as part of a public reading, authors hoped and expected that their words would be experienced by their contemporaries and by future generations. Indeed, the authors of many saints’ Lives directly address their readers, asking forgiveness for their rustic style or explaining why they felt a particular miracle was suitable for inclusion. Yet it is more difficult to determine what actual readers (rather than the author’s imagined ones) made of the works in front of them. Unlike loquacious authors, medieval readers are often now silent. Some ways to access their responses do, however, remain. One means is manuscript evidence, such as lection marks, glosses, abridgements, and other texts copied alongside. Another is to explore what a rewriter made of the text which they set out to improve.
Vital, in his preface to his rewriting of Wrmonoc’s Life of Paul Aurelian, is clear about how deficient he found the literary qualities of his predecessor’s work. That someone might desire to rewrite his text would probably not have surprised Wrmonoc: he makes provisions for such an eventuality in his own prologue, giving the endeavour his blessing but asking that the rewriter ‘does not judge me to be blameworthy over this’, since while the rewriter had his text from which to work, Wrmonoc had had to compile his Life of Paul Aurelian from scratch.[13] Despite this, Vital is not kind. Wrmonoc’s Latin is highly influenced by that of Gildas and, with nouns often several lines away from their connected pronouns or adjectives, can at times be difficult to follow. Nor does Wrmonoc introduce the work gently: in Cuissard’s edition the first sentence runs to fifteen lines. Understandably, Vital does not take well to this, saying that:
Similarly, Vital also ignores Wrmonoc’s plea not to remove material. Much of the more florid phrasing is dispensed with. No longer does Zephyr bear ships across the Channel, nor do gentle streams run with a golden, roaring murmur. Gone too are Wrmonoc’s digressions on such varied topics as the origin of thoughts and the basis for a monastic life.[15] Much like Wrmonoc’s lengthy sentences, Vital appears to have found these superfluous to his purpose.
Vital was clearly a hypercritical reader who found much in Wrmonoc’s Life of Paul Aurelian which displeased him. Vital wanted a concise and comprehensible account of Paul Aurelian’s life and deeds, with the expectation that it might prove useful to his fellow monks at Fleury who did not know about the saint for whose relics they cared. Instead, he found the lengthy and challenging work which Wrmonoc had written. The changes that Vital made to this work in his own Life of Paul Aurelian offer us a glimpse at how some readers responded to Wrmenoc’s literary affectations.
‘Breton’ saints
But rewritten saints’ Lives enable us to do more than just glimpse how some readers reacted to the literary qualities of the works they sought to improve. They also offer us an opportunity to observe and understand how northern French monks and clerics engaged with the different saintly and hagiographical norms which the saints of Brittany presented to them. Breton saints, with their ‘dissonant names’ and alien customs, could seem a long way from the more usual sort of saints — the Late Antique and Merovingian martyrs, abbots, and bishops of Gaul — venerated in central medieval France.[16] When criticising the veneration of the relics of some unworthy saints, it is the example of Breton saints that Guibert of Nogent uses, unfairly singling out Abbot Piro, who fell down a well drunk and drowned.[17] For some, there was clearly something dubious about these Breton saints. How, then, did rewriters attempt to make the subjects of their texts more suitable for the expectations of their non-Breton audiences?
The adjustment of Breton saints to fit the expectations of sanctity held in Northern France could take a range of forms and vary drastically depending on the needs of the cult in question. Some changes could be relatively minor, leaving the narrative of the saint’s deeds largely unchanged, but adding details which made these deeds more familiar to the text’s new audiences. One example of this may be present in the Life of St Briocus, although the loss of the rewriter’s source material makes it difficult to state definitively what is an addition to the text. In the Life of St Briocus, the author four times quotes from or alludes to the Rule of St Benedict, making Briocus eager to fulfil the rule’s commands as a child and demonstrating that in later life he held to its precepts too.[18] For the Benedictine monks of the abbey of Saint-Serge d’Angers, it must have been reassuring to know that even if their heavenly patron, Briocus, was alien by birth and language, in monastic custom he was one of them.
Translation of St Benedict to Fleury, as depicted on a lintel above a portal at Fleury Abbey (source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Translation_des_reliques_de_saint_Beno%C3%AEt_%28portail_nord_de_l%27abbaye_de_Saint-Beno%C3%AEt-sur-Loire%29.jpg/1600px-Translation_des_reliques_de_saint_Beno%C3%AEt_%28portail_nord_de_l%27abbaye_de_Saint-Beno%C3%AEt-sur-Loire%29.jpg?20110910204605)
The changes made to a saint’s biography could, however, be far more drastic than just the introduction of Benedictine references to the Rule of St Benedict. In some cases, they could even involve the complete removal of a saint’s ‘Breton-ness’. In the 960s Bishop Hesdren of Nantes, arrived at Fleury, bringing with him the body of a saint Maurus. Who this saint was in life may have been as obscure to following generations of monks as it is to modern scholars. Although Hesdren had bought the monastery a ‘treasure more precious than gold’, he appears to have failed to provide the monks with a Life from which they might know who Maurus was.[19] Faced with this quandary, the monks found a solution: the Maurus whom Hesdren had brought them was the same Maurus who had been martyred in modern-day Croatia during the fourth-century Diocletian Persecution. Adapting an already existing Passion of this Maurus by appending an account of how the relics had been translated to Brittany and then on to Fleury, the monks were able to make a fundamentally unknowable Breton saint into a Late Antique martyr.[20] For many authors, the relics of Breton saints came attached to texts with unfamiliar settings or unknown individuals. In rewriting them, northern French monks were able to make these Breton saints their own.
Networks of knowledge
In addition to showing modern scholars how later authors responded to earlier texts and ideas of sanctity, rewritten saints’ Lives offer a window into how information about Breton saints circulated during the Middle Ages. Behind every saint’s Life and miracle collection lies a range of stories which the author has brought together, mediated and adapted, be these biographical tales about the saint told by fellow monks, local topographic knowledge, accounts of miraculous cures from pilgrims, or even repurposed excerpts from the Lives of other saints. Sometimes, through a passing authorial remark about the sources of parts of their text, it is possible to glimpse this world of saintly tales and the efforts of authors to find out about Breton saints.[21] For some, the collection and collation of stories had already occurred; Vital relied almost exclusively on Wrmonoc for his knowledge of Paul Aurelian. But for others, their sources were more varied and hint at a series of conversations and stories told across Europe.
One of Vital’s contemporaries at Fleury, Isembard, exemplifies this well. In the early eleventh century he too embarked upon the endeavour of writing the Life of a Breton saint, Judoc. Judoc’s cult had had a turbulent tenth century. Originally a Breton prince, Judoc was venerated at the monastery which he had founded, Saint-Josse-sur-Mer, Picardy. However, in 901 Judoc’s relics had been translated to Winchester and the community dispersed following Viking raids. In Winchester Judoc’s cult appears to have flourished and in the later part of the century his Life was versified.[22] These claims were not to go unchallenged, and as part of the restoration of the monastery, the monks of Saint-Josse claimed that their Abbot Sigebrand had actually rediscovered Judoc’s relics in 977. In this context, Isembard was asked to write a new Life of Judoc for Saint-Josse, relating both the saint’s biography and the recent miracles which his relics had worked. To achieve this Isembard drew on a range of sources: alongside an earlier Life of Judoc, the monks must also have provided him an account of the recent miracles at Saint-Josse. Isembard also attaches a genealogy of the saint to his Life, connecting him to many famous figures from the Breton past, though where he obtained this information is less than clear.[23] Isembard’s own text would soon become known to the monks at Winchester — it survives in the early-eleventh-century manuscript British Library Royal 8.B.xiv, copied alongside a dossier of other Judoc material.[24] In Isembard’s Life of St Judoc it is possible to see a network of communication spanning the channel and a range of conversations taking place, some oral, some written, about a Breton saint and his relics.
Conclusions
Rewritten saints’ Lives, produced outside of Brittany but about Breton saints, present the opportunity to study the afterlife of saints. Contained in the Acta Sanctorum are Lives introduced as ‘vita eadeam’ (‘the same Life’), yet these works are more than just inferior versions of earlier texts. Rather, they offer insights into the veneration of Breton saints, how these saints were adjusted for new needs, and what changes were deemed necessary for new audiences. Alongside this, through them we are offered a rare chance to see how some readers responded to the literary qualities of such authors as Wrmonoc and to glimpse the world of oral communication and lost texts which accompanied the saints’ relics. The study of the rewriting of Breton saints’ Lives is an area which has only just begun to be explored, and little attention has yet been paid to the rewriting of Lives outside of Brittany. Nevertheless, these Lives still have much to say about the religious and literary connections of early medieval Brittany.
Notes
Bibliography
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