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Dicta mea sunt dicta patrum?: tradition and innovation in John’s Confessio theologica

Of all the texts John could have written, why a treatise on right feeling in prayer? Why not instead a treatise on proper liturgical behaviour, or a commentary on the RB, or some other work regulating monastic action as was typical for monastic reformers at the time? John’s choice to write about emotional reform instead of behavioural reform in his Confessio theologica was in many ways a natural extension of his experience of monastic policies and training in Ravenna (from his early life until c. 1010), at Saint-Bénigne de Dijon (from c. 1010 to 1023), and at Fécamp (from 1023 to 1028 as prior under William of Volpiano, and then from 1028 to 1078 as abbot). But, in other ways, John’s Confessio theologica went beyond his models, both selectively excerpting extant ideas and elaborating his own focus on an emotional experience of prayer and meditation, which would come to be embraced by monks and other Christians until the end of the Middle Ages.

This chapter will trace John’s sources for the Confessio theologica, and, in so doing, will show how John’s monastic training and particular pedigree combined to inspire a distinctive text that was all his own. I will begin by showing how John’s treatise was very much a product of his monastic context. Relying on foundational texts present in the majority of monastic libraries (psalms, the Song of Songs, libelli precum, and Gregory on Job, among others), John’s CT was, as he claimed, ‘the words of the Fathers’.¹ Even the extensive excerption and quotation in his writings followed monastic practice promoted by Benedict of Aniane (747–821) and Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel (760–840).² I then turn more specifically to the particular combination of sources John encountered as a novice in Ravenna and as a young monk in Dijon. I will show how John’s unique formation created a perfect storm of ideas on introspection, emotion, and contemplation without which the CT could not have been written. I will also show how John’s use of sources from his own monastic education and formation was an intentional extension of reform ideals popular in the eleventh century: taking cues from Ravennate hermits, Cluniac abbots, and his own mentor William of Volpiano (960–1031), John likely felt compelled to embrace, perpetuate, and deepen their ideas of reform at Fécamp. Yet, even with its extensive quotation and excerption of patristic and biblical authorities, and even with its implicit citation of the reform ideals popular at the time, John’s Confessio theologica would have read as innovative to his monastic readership. First, many of the ideas John quoted from his Ravennate or his Saint-Bénigne training were new to Normandy. Second, John revived ideas long dormant in the wider medieval world, adapting the tone of Augustine’s Confessions, for example, or training a spotlight on Hannah. Finally, even the traditional ideas cited were rewoven to create an innovative text filled with longing and a focus on interior reform.

By understanding the sources of John’s Confessio theologica, we can understand how he positioned his treatise within the frameworks of age-old monastic discourse and eleventh-century reform rhetoric; how his particular biography shaped his ideas and allowed for an introduction of Italian and Byzantine ideas into Normandy; how he recombined the words of the Fathers to reveal his particular devotional interests; and how the ideas he revived were very much connected to monastic reform ideals. Moreover, in exploring John’s sources, we can assess the extent of John’s invention, and we can acknowledge the deep-rooted early medieval and monastic foundations of later medieval affective piety that have been largely overlooked by scholars.

The influence of monastic culture and curriculum

First and foremost, John was inspired by the monastic curriculum of the eleventh century. To some extent, this was required: the extensive citation of patristic authorities was so essential in the central Middle Ages that Lanfranc, for instance, refused to approve Anselm’s Monologion in their absence.³ That John embraced the words of these monastic authorities, though, does not indicate that his own texts were not original – indeed, as we will see, the sources he selects emphasise the problems in which he is most interested. Some of the sources for John’s CT were staples of the daily life of medieval European monastics, like the libelli precum of the early and central Middle Ages or the psalms. Others might have been taught in the schoolroom of the monastery, like Gregory the Great’s (fl. 590–604) Moralia in Job. In this section, I will outline the ways in which John’s CT drew on these monastic sources.

The influence of psalms and the libelli precum

Penitential prayer was a mainstay of monastic life. From Columbanus (543–615) to the Carolingians, the medicine of penance was essential for a sinful soul and was best achieved through prayer.⁴ The original book of prayer for medieval Christians, the psalter, deeply influenced John’s sense of metaphor, depiction of heaven, and penitential tone.⁵ Modelling the proper approach to God and devotional feeling, the psalms served medieval Christians as formulae for prayer.⁶ Quotations from the psalms would be appropriate to a treatise like John’s, which prescribed the most effective devotional practice, and they were interspersed throughout the Confessio theologica’s text, seamlessly undergirding John’s observations and invocations. As an example, one of the psalms that appears most frequently in the CT is Psalm 41. Reading its full text here, one can see whole phrases that serve as essential refrains in John’s work:

As a deer longs for flowing streams, / so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.⁷ / When shall I come and behold the face of God? / My tears have been my food day and night,⁸ / while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’ /… Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? / Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. / … Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts / all your waves⁹ and your billows have gone over me. /… I say to God, my rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’¹⁰ / As with a deadly wound¹¹ in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’ Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?¹²

John’s CT has first and foremost taken its tone from the psalm above: it, too, questions God and the sinner’s soul and is filled with deep longing for God.¹³ Actual metaphors employed by the psalmist are also employed by John: the deer, the tears, the waves and thunder.¹⁴ Most important, though, are the two lines that John lifts from this psalm. First, ‘[m]‌y tears have been my food day and night’ is a line that John repeats again and again; and second, the idea that sins are glaring ‘wound[s]’ in the sinner’s body is also adopted by John – likely made more attractive by the antecedent echo of Christ’s wounds.

Beyond the psalms, the prayer texts that were most directly influential for the CT were those physically appended to the psalter in medieval books: the libelli precum produced in monasteries from the Carolingian period through the eleventh century.¹⁵ While no libellus precum survives from the monastery of Fécamp, it is unlikely that John did not encounter such books in his lifetime. The confessional formulas and themes that are seen in John’s work are found in the private prayers to the Trinity, Christ, the Virgin, and others of the libelli;¹⁶ and the prayers to the Cross and rituals for confession found therein were also likely influences on John’s CT.¹⁷

The libelli precum often address the crucified Christ directly in the prayers for the Adoration of the Cross and Good Friday with the goal of eliciting proper penitence and confession on the part of their monk-readers.¹⁸ See, for instance, this passage from a libellus (Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, MS I 17, fols 123r–124v):

Almighty and merciful God … although I am wounded and weighed down with all evils, I cry out to you and await mercy from you, so that, by these psalms which I have sung in the sight of your divine majesty, you may deign to give indulgence for all my sins, most holy Lord, and deign to bestow pardon and eternal rest on all my living relatives and the deceased faithful.¹⁹

One can hear in this passage the desperate call for a vision of God and the tone of the sinner’s attentive wail, both reminiscent of John’s own work. Elsewhere, prayers in libelli precum contain what Renie Choy calls a ‘“litany of possessives,” containing the grammatical construction, ‘You are my [noun] … I confess to you my Lord God … my king. My author. My life. My salvation …”’²⁰ Such litanies are more than just definitions of Christ; rather, they are absolutes for a proper Christian life,²¹ and John uses them to this end.²² Moreover, the prayers for the Adoration of the Cross invite the sinner to kiss Christ on various parts of his body, engaging the reader in a performative relationship with the body of Christ in addition to emphasising the salvific mechanism of prayer.²³ The libelli precum’s prayers attempt to instruct readers with their words and immerse them in a scene that engenders correct feelings.

However, prayers to the crucified God in the libelli more often focus on the cross’s power to save and the crucified Jesus’ s promise of salvation rather than the humanlike suffering of God. Prayers for the Adoration of the Cross from libelli exemplify this embrace of the cross’s salvific power (rather than the suffering of Christ):

Made in the likeness of men, and found dressed as a man, indeed taking on a true man in the true God, humbled and obedient unto death, even death on the cross. You have redeemed us with your precious blood, unstained lamb rising from the dead, ascending to heaven, you sit on the right hand of God the all-powerful Father, whom the angels worship, and I, unhappy sinner, I adore you prayerfully, confessing my sins and I pray that just as you have made me, through the cross, partake of the mysteries of your death and redemption, so through the power of this sacrosanct cross you may extinguish and destroy all my vices and sins and against all spiritual evils and artifices of the ancient enemy.²⁴

Lord Jesus Christ, maker of the world, who – although shining in glory and coeternal and coequal with the Father and the Holy Spirit – deigned to assume flesh from the immaculate virgin and suffered your glorious palms to be nailed on the gibbet of the cross, that you might break asunder the gates of hell and free the human race from death, have pity on me oppressed with evil deeds and the weight of my iniquities. Do not abandon me, most pious father, but indulge me in those things which I impiously bear. Hear me, prostrate before your most glorious and worshipful cross, so that in these days I should merit to stand by you, pure and pleasing in your sight, freed from all evil things, and consoled by your help, always my lord. Through you Jesus Christ, savior of the world.²⁵

These prayers emphasise the redemptive power of Christ crucified. In the first prayer, the cross inspires confession on the part of the sinner so that he might ‘through the power of this … cross’ ‘extinguish’ all sin and achieve redemption. In the second prayer, the body of Christ is emphasised, but it is resplendent because it promises salvation: Christ’s palms are ‘glorious’, his body ‘shining’, his cross ‘worshipful’. While the crucified Christ hangs ‘nailed on the gibbet of the cross’ in this prayer, he is not pathetic (as is the ‘impious’ sinner); rather, he is ‘coeternal and coequal with the Father and the Holy Spirit’ and the ‘savior of the world’.

John’s prayers also admit that redemption is made possible through the act of the crucifixion. But, in contrast to those in the libelli precum, John’s prayers, with their enumeration of Christ’s torments, their conflation of Christ’s wounds with the sinner’s tears, and their comparisons of the pathetic body of Christ with the pathetic state of the sinner, are actually quite distinct in their focus. By comparing the body of the sinner with the body of Christ and creating a voice for the sinner that actively longs for a simultaneous suffering and co-crucifixion between sinner and God, John proves himself more interested in the pathos and emotional use of the image than its salvific power. With his references to the vulnera of his sins, John finds the wounds of Christ important loci of empathy. Like the libelli precum, John bombards the reader with images of the crucified God in order to cause the sinner to feel pathetic by comparison; but, unlike the libelli, John also hopes that the image of the crucified God will incite feelings in the sinner that will be the first step to righting his spiritual attentions.

Sources from the monastic library

The monastic practice of lectio divina – the tradition of mastering a text so that ‘the page is literally embodied, incorporated’²⁶ – made it only natural for John’s writing to reflect his education and, even more, his internalisation of texts found at the monasteries in Fécamp, Dijon, and Ravenna. In the following section I will show how major themes in John’s Confessio theologica were accessible in the texts populating the monastic libraries of the eleventh century. Where I can, I will note when a copy of such texts was found in the library of Fécamp. I will also indicate the ways in which John’s CT elaborates on extant ideas found in the writings of many of his contemporaries. But I will likewise show how John sometimes deviates from the authorities and from his contemporaries writing on the same issues, honing traditional themes for new purposes.

The literature of contrition in the monastery was extensive before the eleventh century, and it is from this corpus that John primarily draws. Chief among these texts was Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, of which Fécamp had not one, but two copies.²⁷ The Moralia speaks of the ‘two-edged sword of compunction, piercing with terror and tenderness, fear and delight’.²⁸ The Moralia is a prescription for ‘self-examination and self-restraint … a roadmap for the soul’.²⁹ Like Augustine’s Confessions (John’s chief model, to be discussed below), John’s CT, and the Book of Job itself, the Moralia speaks from a place of personal crisis: in all four sources, its speakers attempt to clarify the relationship between a sinful man and his omnipotent God.³⁰ Further like the CT, the Moralia insists that ‘one must always scrutinise the soul for hidden sins and repent of them, even if one does not know what they are’.³¹ Gregory insists ‘Job’s sin was assuming he was not guilty. When afflicted with such terrible losses, he ignored the opportunity – indeed, the obligation – to repent.’³² The contrast between Job and Christ is a lesson that Gregory extracts for his monks. By refusing to submit to God’s will because he believed himself perfect, Job sinned; Christ, perfect, submitted to God’s will anyway, out of obligation. Gregory’s statement is exhortatory: he used the biblical story of Job as a warning to his monks. Even the most humble and ascetic monk could not think himself free from the need to do penance; the embrace of suffering (in the mode of Christ on the cross) and tears was required both for contrition and as evidence that the monk was wholly subservient to the will of God.³³ Gregory states that the more advanced a monk, the more diligent he needs to be with his self-scrutiny: ‘the more I subtly understand [God’s] speaking, the more humbly I examine myself’.³⁴

In view of Gregory’s instructions, John’s obsessive desire for self-examination through proper emotion appears justified. While the relentlessness of John’s longing is unprecedented in Gregory, his longing itself mimes Gregory’s prescriptions. He adopts Gregory’s phrases. He implements his concepts. He paraphrases excerpts from Job itself.³⁵ His writings are given titles attributed to Gregory when they circulate in manuscript elsewhere in Europe.³⁶ And yet, there are some differences. While Gregory insists that Job’s problem is his ignorance of God’s plan,³⁷ John remains keenly aware of the grace needed. Yet the tone and sense of John’s CT borders on hysteria and self-abnegation, pre-empting consolation (let alone the level of consolation attained by Gregory in the Moralia). Moreover, though he prescribes contrition and observes Job’s sin, Gregory does not model the process of interior examination to the extent that John does in his CT. It is almost as if John created the introspective text a monk would turn to after being convinced by Gregory that he needed to engage in self-examination.

The chief distinction between the Moralia and the Confessio theologica is the absence in the former of any passage or link to interiority prescribed by the latter. While the distinction between ‘interior’ thought and ‘exterior’ action comes from a monastic rhetoric that existed before the eleventh century,³⁸ the investigation of the interior homo became more widespread in the eleventh century, reflecting a new anxiety about sinfulness and proper self-excavation.³⁹ But John’s CT, a book that allowed a monk to ‘always have a short and handy word of God with [him]’,⁴⁰ was a unique vehicle focused on the means to facilitate a monk’s interior cultivation. Paul Saenger, in fact, notes that John is the first Christian writer to use the word meditatio in a text intended for spiritual use.⁴¹ Perhaps taking a cue from Augustine, but certainly unlike Gregory, John emphasises that to gain knowledge of God through contemplation, it is required that one first gain knowledge of oneself.

Alongside the Moralia, many monastic texts prescribing contrition longed for the so-called ‘gift of tears’ as a sign of having achieved true repentance – just as the CT’s speaker cries out repeatedly for his tears to flow. Following Augustine’s model in the Confessions, Athanasius, Cassiodorus, Bede, Alcuin, Ambrose Autpert, Isidore, Benedict of Aniane, Gregory the Great, and Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel (among others) advocated for weeping as evidence of a true spiritual practice.⁴² Each of these authors believed that inner experience was not wholly cultivated by outward discipline and that tears, therefore, were emitted as a sign of true inner humility, compunction, inspiration, and grace.⁴³ Weeping as a ritual for compunction, therefore, could not be prescribed or adopted in the way that genuflecting, singing, or any other exterior action could be: only the grace of God could give a sinner the ‘gift’ of tears.⁴⁴ Crying was evidence of God’s affect working on the sinner, bestowing grace and penitence; it was evidence that God was present.⁴⁵ As we will see below, several of John’s other models also drew upon this early tradition.

Tears in monastic practice, then, were a sign of God’s grace. Ademar of Chabannes (988–1034), John’s contemporary at Saint-Martial in Limoges, for instance, writes of a monk who envisioned ‘the Lord, hanging on the cross, weeping a great river of tears. [The monk] who saw this, astonished, could do nothing other than pour forth tears from his eyes.’⁴⁶ The difference, however, was that John depicted tears as a reflection of an interior emotional attitude purposefully cultivated, not merely as a God-given inner grace. Further, according to the CT, tears were a sign of the sinner’s recognition of his own imperfection. Tears were a sign of the sinner’s preparedness for seeing God on this earth, a sign of the sinner’s open emotional state and inward awareness as he plans to meet and recognise God: they are not in this context evidence of contact with God himself. The self-scrutiny described in the CT results in tears if done correctly; the tears are an outward sign of the contemplative work the sinner has done (not just that God’s grace has bestowed). In John’s conception, God’s grace is needed in the election of the sinner to heaven and for the sinner’s ultimate salvation, but not in the sinner’s readying of himself for contemplation. That transformation, rather, is controlled and channelled in the method outlined by John in his CT, and tears are the desired result of that work (if they are to be effective). Tears are achieved; they are not spontaneous outpourings solely resulting from grace, as they are for Ademar’s visionary monk.

The combination of self-scrutiny and explicitly cultivated emotion found in John of Fécamp’s writings also affects his use of the image of the crucified Christ. There is a long-standing misconception that Christ’s crucified suffering was invented by John or Anselm of Canterbury. This is not true. The suffering Christ is incontestably present in earlier Anglo-Saxon writings, and even, to some extent, in Carolingian writings.⁴⁷ Contemporaries of John were manifestly interested in the crucified Christ. Richard of Saint-Vanne (970–1046) was apparently particularly devoted to the crucified Christ,⁴⁸ making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1027 that was sponsored by John’s literal next-door neighbour, Duke Richard II of Normandy (978–1026) (see Map 2).⁴⁹ An influx of relics connected to the Crucifixion were sent to the West in the tenth and eleventh centuries and were collected and celebrated by John’s contemporaries Ademar of Chabannes, Odilo of Cluny (d. 1049), and Richard of Saint-Vanne.⁵⁰

Despite the presence of the crucified Christ in earlier writings, John’s use of the crucified figure is distinct, specifically in the manner in which Christ figures in John’s approach to emotional reform. Each of John’s contemporaries, however, limited devotion to the crucified Christ to an elite group, either as proof of a person’s religious exceptionalism or in reference to an abbot’s role as the Christlike head of a monastery. Richard of Saint-Vanne, for instance, ‘relied on his devotion as a means of demonstrating his exceptional situation as someone gifted with exclusive charisma, a status continuously nurtured by means of explicit identification with Christ and his suffering … It also underscored the notion that his virtuosity was beyond reach for most others.’⁵¹ John, instead, was interested in every sinner’s potential likeness to the pathetic state of the crucified God. Indeed, what makes John unique is the ‘possibility of identity between Christ and the desiring soul’ in his prayers:

I call to you, I cry out to you in a loud voice, and with all my heart I call you into my soul; enter into it, mold it to your likeness so that you may possess it as a soul without a spot or wrinkle. Sanctify me as the vessel which you made for yourself; rid it of sin, fill it with grace, and keep it full. Thus I will become a worthy temple for you to dwell in, here, and for all eternity.⁵²

The conflation between sinner and God in this excerpt (‘mold it to your likeness’ … ‘as the vessel which you made for yourself’ … ‘I will become … worthy for you to dwell in’) draws parallels between sinner and God, no matter the sinner’s status or identity. Whereas contemporary writers call the suffering Christ to mind only in association with certain chosen Christians, John’s prayers democratically present meditation on the crucified Christ as a method useful to any sinner. By isolating his own sinful inadequacy, and by connecting it with the pain suffered by the crucified God, the sinner can recognise the distance between himself and God and use that pain, along with tears and meditation, to assess his relationship with the divine. The crucified then becomes a tool in the emotional work required for the sinner’s interior self-excavation that is unique to John’s CT.

Sources from John’s novitiate in Ravenna

The monastic sources discussed above for John’s Confessio theologica were common to most European monks. Other texts influencing the CT, however, were shared only with those who had John’s particular formation, those from Ravenna at Sant’Apollinare in Classe⁵³ and those at Saint-Bénigne de Dijon in Burgundy. Sant’Apollinare exposed John both to ideals local to Ravenna – such as those of Romuald of Ravenna (951–1027) – and, thanks to its proximity to Byzantium, also to those Eastern Christian motifs more alive in Ravenna than elsewhere in Europe. And John’s time at both Sant’Apollinare and Dijon allowed him to gain a familiarity with Cluniac ideals as well, since Maiolus of Cluny (d. 994) had reformed Sant’Apollinare about twenty years before John became a novice there, and William of Volpiano, his mentor at Dijon, had trained at Cluny.⁵⁴

In this section, we will assess the influences on John from Ravenna. Though John likely left Sant’Apollinare in the early days of the eleventh century, his connection to the Ravennate monastery was one he maintained throughout his life. John brought the vita of Sant’Apollinare to the monastery of Fécamp during his abbacy.⁵⁵ He corresponded with Romuald’s hagiographer Peter Damian (1007–72) while abbot at Fécamp.⁵⁶ Most relevant to this study, he used Romuald’s example as direct inspiration for his CT. The ideas planted when he was an oblate in Ravenna bore fruit when he was writing as a prior at Fécamp.

Though Romuald was an abbot at Sant’Apollinare in the 970s, he left the monastery to live as a hermit many years before his death in 1027.⁵⁷ Peter Damian’s vita of Romuald depicts a solitary devotee who uses both the language of monastic life and liturgy to talk directly to God⁵⁸ and the example of the desert fathers who lived as hermits to better foster that divine connection.⁵⁹ Hermits were more and more prevalent in the eleventh century, appearing in the forests around John and William of Volpiano’s monasteries in Normandy and Lorraine; but the inspiration for such an eremitical movement emanated from Byzantium through Italy (namely Ravenna).⁶⁰ Importantly, unlike other hermits, Romuald seems to have been able to model the lifestyle of a hermit without contradicting the obedience to the abbot required in coenobitic monasticism. Colin Phipps argues that while Romuald himself retired to a hermit’s cell, he advocated that his coenobitic followers use the cloister of the heart – the retreat into individual, interior prayer – as their cells. Phipps says that while Romuald was thus ‘properly eremitic’, his model nevertheless provided an ‘institutional answer’ to those monks bound by the RB.⁶¹ This promotion of interior retreat, combined with Romuald’s core principles of solitude and humility, had a particular influence on John’s CT.⁶² We can imagine that as an abbot, John might have been particularly relieved to find in Romuald an exemplar that could promote trendy eremitical ideals while still encouraging obedience among his coenobitic readership.⁶³

The greatest impression on John, however, came through Romuald’s use of tears in devotion. Romuald’s vita shows its subject addressing God in the overwrought way found both in John’s CT and in Augustine’s Confessions: ‘Dear Jesus, well-loved Jesus, why do you abandon me? Have you lifted me entirely from the hands of my enemies?’⁶⁴ But, as with Hannah and Mary Magdalene, weeping was key to Romuald’s route to perfection. Tears marked Romuald’s conversion from his life as a duke’s son to his life as a penitent hermit;⁶⁵ Peter Damian claims that they were an outward sign of his internal reform and true internal piety.⁶⁶ In the vita, it is tears that evidence a great ‘compunction’ in Romuald’s ‘whole heart’, melting him so that he is no longer kept from feeling.⁶⁷ Such an invocation of the palatium cordis parallels John’s desire for continual weeping in his CT.

Ideas of Byzantine origin that he encountered in Italy appear in John’s work as well. Evidence for the transmission of Greek ideas to Normandy through Italians can be found in works of Italo-Norman intellectuals⁶⁸ like Anselm of Canterbury and Lanfranc of Bec, whose writings evidence a tremendous familiarity with eastern Byzantine sources and motifs.⁶⁹ Rouen, just a short distance from Fécamp, was one of the foremost western repositories of Byzantine icons from Sinai,⁷⁰ and the Norman Duke Richard II had a particularly strong connection to St Catherine’s monastery there.⁷¹ Despite of the lack of direct evidence of the connection between Byzantium and Sant’Apollinare,⁷² evidence of connection between Byzantium and John’s CT hints at what John might have learned during his time in Ravenna. The Byzantine liturgical rite practised at Sant’Apollinare in Ravenna and elsewhere in eastern Italy was likely a particular source of inspiration for John, with its feasts for the Invention and Exaltation of the True Cross, which did not come to the rest of western Europe until the mid-eleventh century.⁷³ The Byzantine focus on the suffering (as opposed to the divine triumph) of Christ on the cross in art and prayer could have inspired the enumeration of Christ’s torments and the focus on Christ’s bloody crucifixion in John’s Confessio theologica.⁷⁴ And the Byzantine writers present in Latin translation in Fécamp’s library might also provide a clue to John’s intellectual formation at Ravenna. For instance, one Greek author, John Chrysostom (d. 407), wrote a series of sermons on Hannah,⁷⁵ works that are found only at Fécamp among the monastic libraries in Normandy, though none of them showcases Hannah as a prayerful model, but instead as a symbol of the Church.⁷⁶ John’s insistence on an internal, embodied piety towards Christ and on an emotional approach to Jesus instead of a rational one was a technique favoured by middle Byzantine authors like Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022).⁷⁷ The tearful brand of asceticism embraced by Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90) and Ephraem the Syrian (306–73) also reappears in John’s CT.⁷⁸ John’s Ravennate pedigree from Sant’Apollinare in Classe could, therefore, have brought him into contact with eastern sources, albeit now untraceable, which likely inspired certain of the most innovative pieces of the CT.

The influence of William of Volpiano

As his mentor at Dijon and his abbot at Fécamp, William of Volpiano was perhaps the most influential and persistent monastic presence in John’s life. A disciple of Maiolus of Cluny,⁷⁹ William of Volpiano concurrently served as abbot at the monastery of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon from 990, the monastery of Saint-Arnoul de Metz from 996, and the monastery of Fécamp from 1001,⁸⁰ along with thirty other houses. John likely first encountered William’s reform policies upon his arrival at Saint-Bénigne de Dijon around 1010. Beginning in 1023,⁸¹ John worked directly under Abbot William as prior of Fécamp, striving to implement William’s ideas on the reforming community at Fécamp while the abbot travelled between his various monasteries. By the time John succeeded William as abbot of Fécamp in 1028, he had lived for at least eighteen years under his influence.⁸² He maintained William’s liturgical reforms at Fécamp after William’s death⁸³ and worked to honour William’s legacy both by burying him in the crypt of Fécamp in 1031 and by acquiring (and maybe even editing) one of the first copies of his vita for the monastery of Fécamp.⁸⁴ Bearing in mind John’s efforts to preserve his predecessor and mentor’s legacy, what of William’s ideas persist in John’s Confessio theologica?

Over the course of the early eleventh century, William developed an international reputation for reforming monastic houses with ‘severity’.⁸⁵ William’s reforming zeal was influenced by his experiences at Cluny.⁸⁶ While the extent of Fécamp’s corruption before 1001 might have been a fiction constructed to legitimise both the piety of the Norman dukes and the role of William as a founding father,⁸⁷ William’s efforts seem to focus on material and behavioural changes rather than emotional or internal ones. According to contemporary chronicles, vitae, and charters, William is depicted as a reformer regulating external action at his monastic foundations. In the Libellus de revelatione, aedificatione et auctoritate Fiscannensis monasterii (a chronicle from Fécamp written in the late eleventh century), William was called on by monastic houses to better impose the RB on monks,⁸⁸ to introduce proper liturgical customs and the proper singing of psalmody,⁸⁹ to reform the scriptoria at each monastery,⁹⁰ and to rebuild the monastic schools so as to improve the practice of reading at each monastery.⁹¹ The charter given by Duke Richard II to William of Volpiano in 1006 to formalise his position at Fécamp asserts that Richard enjoined William to eliminate the depravity and ‘increase the religious rigour’ at Fécamp by aligning its monks’ activities with those prescribed by the RB.⁹² Rodulfus Glaber (985–1047) chronicles William’s transformations: improved liturgical rites, increased interest from pilgrims, new pedagogical resources, and reconsidered relationships with lay donors.⁹³

At first sight, therefore, it might seem that William of Volpiano’s reforming zeal was grounded in external regulation; as such, it may seem not to bear on John’s emphasis on emotional reform. But there are some clues in the very few extant texts that William’s reforms went deeper than external behaviour and penetrated realms relevant to the CT. We can even go beyond explicit descriptions of William’s reforms to the vehicles of their dissemination, first, to the books that were in the Fécamp library during William’s abbacy from 1001 to 1028, and, second, to a perpetuator of William’s reform, that is, to one of his most effective disciples, John of Fécamp.

Eleven manuscripts survive from the time of William’s abbacy at Fécamp.⁹⁴ The majority of these books were made at Fécamp itself between 1001 and 1028, though two, Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1714 and pieces of Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1805, were likely brought from Saint-Bénigne de Dijon by William in 1001 or even by John in 1023.⁹⁵ These books reveal the cross-pollination between the multiple houses of which William was abbot (St Bénigne’s vita, for instance, numbers among those included at Fécamp),⁹⁶ and each of these manuscripts certainly speaks to one or more aspects of William of Volpiano’s external, behavioural reforms. Four of the books contain collections of vitae, intended to help in revising Fécamp’s liturgical programme and in teaching grammar at Fécamp’s school.⁹⁷ Several of the books likely worked to facilitate reading at the monastery, allowing for more rigorous exegetical instruction.⁹⁸ Two of the books, Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel’s Diadema monastica and Expositio in regular sancti Benedicti, were explicit regulators of monastic life according to the RB.⁹⁹ Jean Leclercq states that Smaragdus’s impetus for writing his works on monastic life was the monastic capitulary of 817, formulated at Monte Cassino: ‘Let the abbots scrutinize the Rule, word for word, in order to understand it well, and, with their monks, let them endeavor to practice it.’¹⁰⁰ One can thus imagine William following this well-established principle, guided by Smaragdus in his reform of the lifestyle of Fécamp’s monks. John’s CT also reflects the principles of these texts, reasserting the importance of obedience to the RB and alluding to it both implicitly and explicitly.

John’s Confessio theologica absorbed more from these texts than simple behavioural instructions, however: the quality of John’s emotional reforms also stems from these books. Two codices among these early texts, Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3330 and Paris 1714, seem to have been principal influences on John. Each codex is a thematic collection that focuses on fostering internal as well as external reforms. Paris 3330 contains Smaragdus’s Diadema monastica, which could have influenced John’s understanding of the use of tears in his CT, as it contains sections on compunction, prayer, penitence, and, most distinctively, a whole chapter on the gift of tears.¹⁰¹ Paris 3330 also contains a collection of vitae of the desert fathers, whose eremitic spirituality and emphasis on individual compunction greatly influenced John’s own.¹⁰² When bound together, the volume with Smaragdus on tears plus the exempla of the hermits’ spirituality might have been an especially practical codex of inspiration to John when writing his CT.

Paris 1714 was arguably an even stronger influence on John’s Confessio theologica. Stéphane Lecouteux has concluded that the book was taken from Saint-Bénigne after 1001, likely by John of Fécamp himself as he made the trek to take up his priorship.¹⁰³ Whether John took the codex after a request from William or on his own volition, we cannot be certain. This manuscript, however, confirms a source at the monastery of Fécamp for John’s brand of tearful, interior piety, one that stems from Saint-Bénigne de Dijon. After all, John could have read Smaragdus anywhere¹⁰⁴ – his was a very popular monastic text, by no means exclusive to the monastery of Fécamp.¹⁰⁵ But the particular combination of texts in Paris 1714 did not circulate in Normandy until it was brought from Saint-Bénigne. That either John or William then chose to bring the manuscript from Burgundy to Normandy in this early moment tells us something about the reforming spirit at Fécamp by 1023.

Paris 1714 contains several texts: the sermons of St Ephraem;¹⁰⁶ the Rule of St Basil (329–78);¹⁰⁷ the vita of Mary of Egypt (344–421);¹⁰⁸ the sermons of Caesarius of Arles (470–542);¹⁰⁹ an unedited sermon;¹¹⁰ a sermon of John Chrysostom to Theodore of Mopsuestia (350–428);¹¹¹ and, at the end of the original manuscript, an unedited sermon purportedly of Isidore of Seville (560–636).¹¹² At first glance, Paris 1714 seems to be a collection of sermons warning against sinful practices,¹¹³ read aloud during mealtimes and other moments during the monastic day by the abbot himself.¹¹⁴ In accordance with William’s efforts to reform the Fécamp monks’ external behaviours, Caesarius’s texts, for instance, instruct the reader on how he must control himself in order to guarantee his soul’s salvation. Caesarius records a litany of sins easily committed by sinners in this life, and then prescribes the medicine of penance (medicamentum paenitentiae)¹¹⁵ in order to guarantee the health of the soul. Caesarius’s prescription for penance is described only in general terms, and only once does he order a penitent to engage in tears as John would.¹¹⁶ But, like John’s CT, written to ‘make [the reader] penitent night and day for the sins of [his] soul’,¹¹⁷ the mandate of contrition is the theme of the collection of writings in Paris 1714. The Rule of St Basil and the two concluding sermons likewise laid out rules for external practices of penitence learned from ascetic models, including prayer, vigils, and fasting.

Thematically, then, this collection imported from Saint-Bénigne is typical for a monastery of its time, aligned with the general prescriptions of Gregory’s Moralia. However, the specific texts included to explore this penitential theme are not. The De compunctione cordis of St Ephraem¹¹⁸ was more often encountered indirectly in medieval Europe through the writings of other authors like Smaragdus.¹¹⁹ Even so, there are copies of Ephraem’s text at three of the monasteries associated with William of Volpiano’s reform (Gorze, Saint-Arnoul de Metz, and Cluny), suggesting that Saint-Bénigne’s copy may have derived from (or inspired) these manuscripts as part of William’s own reform programme.¹²⁰ Yet, regardless of where William had originally encountered the text of St Ephraem, it is clear that Ephraem’s text influenced John’s CT.

Ephraem’s De compunctione cordis, as the name suggests, is, like the other sermons contained in Paris 1714, a text about penance. But unlike the rules and sermons with which it is collected, Ephraem’s penance is actually about interior contrition, about self-knowledge as demonstrated by tears, and about the usefulness of crying for the redemption of the vulnera of sin. Ephraem makes two key arguments in his De compunctione cordis that later show up in John of Fécamp’s CT: one regards the need for crying, and the other is the conflation of sins with wounds (vulnera) that bleed and putrefy like Christ’s, and that are healed by the salve of tears. Ephraem asks for a ‘fountain of tears’, as does John.¹²¹ Nowhere in his De compunctione cordis does Ephraem invoke images of the suffering Christ. Yet, interestingly, Ephraem has a very particular ‘physiognomy of asceticism’, one that characterises a monastic life as an ‘institution of penitence’ achieved by ‘introspection as a spiritual form of mortification’.¹²² The compiler of Paris 1714 highlighted the tearful motifs in Ephraem’s text by including the sermon from John Chrysostom at the end of the collection, which also is about tears.¹²³ And the two eremitical texts at the end of the manuscript – the Rule of St Basil¹²⁴ and the vita of Mary of Egypt¹²⁵ – bring an ascetic flavour to Paris 1714’s collection, perhaps alluding to Romuald’s tearful eremitism.¹²⁶ One can then imagine that the extremity of the behaviours described by Ephraem, Chrysostom, Basil, and the author of Mary of Egypt’s vita modelled the longings for tears and suffering for John, making a strong argument for Paris 1714 being at the CT’s root.

We know that Paris 1714 was present at Fécamp during the time of William’s abbacy. But can we be sure that its ideas were a part of the reform principles preached by William himself, or was the adoption of this manuscript’s ideas in the CT a product of John’s will alone?¹²⁷ Steven Vanderputten has observed that monastic reform movements happen at monasteries in generational waves, and that the first waves are often more logistical (implementing rules, customs, etc.), while the second wave can be more nuanced.¹²⁸ According to that model, William’s reforms could have been solely regulations of external behaviour, while John’s reforms (as part of the second generation at Fécamp) could have delved deeper, addressing the emotional.

But three records of William’s voice indicate that the prescriptions of Paris 1714 might also have been encouraged by Fécamp’s first abbot. At William’s monastery of Fruttuaria, in the Easter Sepulchre drama central to the Easter liturgy, the tearful Mary Magdalene was a particular focus, and the monk who was playing her was instructed in the customary to prostrate himself repeatedly before both the tomb and the resurrected Christ.¹²⁹ A particular emphasis on proper contrition and tearful penance was also preached and modelled by William himself at Saint-Bénigne de Dijon in a sermon on the feast of St Bénigne. On that day William, ‘burst forth tearfully with these words: “You have come together, brothers and sisters, the flock redeemed by the price of Christ’s blood … In [the Church] you are washed and renewed from the guilt of ancient sin by the waters of saving baptism” … [when he was finished], it [was] impossible to record what weeping, how many tears, what lamentation was made throughout the whole church.’¹³⁰ William’s rhetoric on renewal from the guilt of sin therefore instigated a ‘fountain of tears’ from his audience, perhaps indicating that Ephraem’s tearful model was embraced by William as well. Finally, a prayer attributed to William and recorded in the eleventh-century copy of John’s CT collected at Saint-Arnoul de Metz (Metz, Médiathèque, ms. lat. 245) also hints that William valued characteristics similar to those reflected in Paris 1714.¹³¹ The prayer contains a penitential refrain from the abbot on behalf of his monastic brothers, ‘Absolvas me et omnes fratres nostros’ (‘Absolve me and all of our brothers’); it also argues that monks must remember the model of Augustine, the ways he confessed to God with heartfelt emotion (cordis affectu) and asked for tears to cleanse his sinful soul,¹³² much as John himself does in his CT.

These hints indicate that by focusing on Mary Magdalene’s penance, devotional tears, and the Augustinian rhetoric of the heart in his CT, John of Fécamp could have been extending the model of William of Volpiano’s reforming influence. In light of this evidence, we may imagine that William requested John bring Paris 1714 with him from Saint-Bénigne de Dijon in order to deepen the penitential education of the monks at Fécamp now that their correct behaviours had been established by William himself. We can further imagine that the writing of the CT might, in some way, have been an extension of the spirit of William’s reforms on the part of his prior, John of Fécamp. And yet, these scraps of evidence of William’s tearfulness and devotional advice pale in comparison to John’s CT and the affective devotional focus at his monastery in his time.¹³³ Therefore, while it is possible that John’s work focused on kernels planted by William, its extensive elaboration on these themes likely registered as distinct from William’s own promotion of them to the monks at Fécamp.

The influence of Cluny

Tracing William’s influence on John makes the strongest case for John’s Confessio theologica to have emerged out of the reforming spirit sweeping medieval monasteries. When dealing with the eleventh century, such spirit cannot be divorced from the influence of Cluny. Still, because William of Volpiano was himself a monk at Cluny, it is difficult to fully distinguish which influences on John’s CT were Volpianian and which were Cluniac.¹³⁴ Moreover, though the monastery of Saint-Evroult was the only Norman monastery to administratively connect itself to the great abbey,¹³⁵ many monks came from Cluny to Fécamp and other monasteries in Normandy.¹³⁶ John’s particular pedigree was strongly connected to the abbey of Cluny, for he was a novice at a monastery that had itself been reformed by the abbot Maiolus of Cluny in the years 971–72.¹³⁷ It is unsurprising, then, that Cluniac priorities generally infuse John’s CT. On the simplest level, John’s emphases on the RB, the virtues of obedience, and the idea of a spiritual army are all principles shared with contemporary Cluniac writings.¹³⁸

John’s Confessio theologica, however, was also inspired more directly by certain idiosyncratic aspects of Cluniac exemplars. In the late eleventh century, there were two manuscripts from Fécamp that contained lives of the abbots of Cluny: Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 5290 contained the lives of saints Odo (d. 942), Maiolus (d. 994), and Odilo of Cluny (d. 1049);¹³⁹ and Rouen, BM, ms. 1400 (U3) contained a different version of the life of Odilo of Cluny involving a Eucharistic miracle as proof of Odilo’s sanctity.¹⁴⁰ Moreover, Fécamp manuscripts Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 5329 and Rouen, BM, ms. 1404 (U20) both also contained sermons of Abbot Odo’s.¹⁴¹ Since Maiolus and Odilo were both still alive during portions of John’s lifetime, the example of Odo was potentially more legendary for him, though the examples of each of these Cluniac abbots likely contributed to the emotional practices prescribed in the CT.¹⁴²

Like William of Volpiano at Fécamp, much of Odo of Cluny’s reforming zeal was directed towards questions of monastic rules and exterior reforms.¹⁴³ But both Odo’s Occupatio and his vita emphasise his concern for the interiors of his monks as well. His Occupatio emphasised the importance of the mental discipline of monastic practice, hoping that monks would not only follow the rules but also align their physical behaviours with the desires of their hearts, much like the interior reform prescriptions of John.¹⁴⁴ According to the vita of Odo written by John of Salerno (d. 990),¹⁴⁵ Odo advocated combating the depravity of the world with private prayer, focusing both on constructing spaces for private prayer (such as oratories in buildings) and on advocating for an intimacy with Christ (best fostered by prayer’s inward gaze).¹⁴⁶ Odo was also particularly interested in proper contrition,¹⁴⁷ and his ideas about contrition were associated especially with Mary Magdalene’s tears.¹⁴⁸ Though the feast of Mary Magdalene was established by Gregory the Great before Odo’s time,¹⁴⁹ it was not regularly celebrated at Cluny until Odilo’s abbacy. Yet in Odo’s time, her example had become particularly poignant¹⁵⁰ as an example of proper contrition, advocating access to repentance through suffering.¹⁵¹ A sermon of Odo’s¹⁵² contained in the Fécamp library uses Mary Magdalene’s exemplum to foster proper penance: Odo claims that the Magdalene’s tears allowed her to experience a spiritual resurrection, one that paralleled the physical resurrection of her brother Lazarus, and one also accompanied by tears.¹⁵³ In this way, both Mary Magdalene and Lazarus fell into the category of proper penitents, as Mary of Egypt (in Paris 1714) was a penitent woman who was ultimately promised salvation.¹⁵⁴ In his sermon, Odo says:

She enters continuously the palace of her heart, and in the cavern of her breast she erects for herself a worthy consistory, makes her conscience a piece of papyrus, her groaning the pen, and her tears the ink … she has considered herself, examined herself, has herself become her own judge and advocate, has placed herself before her own face, has examined her pieces of papyrus, which are written with the ink of iniquity, has opened her own filthiness, has acknowledged her own badly fallen life.¹⁵⁵

The example of the Magdalene, therefore, served as a model for the recognition of the sinful self that Odo felt was required in the process of contrition and prayer.¹⁵⁶ Odo thus anticipated the embrace of the Magdalene which occurred in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries.¹⁵⁷ And such internal reform through the Magdalene’s repentance was not only prescribed for the individual at Cluny: Hallinger and Leclercq both claim the repentance demonstrated by the Magdalene was also a metaphor for the reforms of the Church embarked upon by Cluny in Odo’s time.¹⁵⁸

There is much of Odo’s influence in John’s Confessio theologica. Like Odo, John shows that proper penitence is achieved when one delves into one’s interior soul and confronts one’s sins properly through prayer and intimate connection with Christ. Like Odo, John’s need for proper contrition is expressed through the example of Mary Magdalene. The presence of the Magdalene in other texts in Fécamp’s eleventh-century library testify to the efforts made to collect evidence of her example in John’s spiritual environment.¹⁵⁹ Yet, John goes beyond Odo in his use of the Magdalene and her tears as a model for contemplation.¹⁶⁰ To John, it is not just her penitence that one should admire, and it is not just her behaviour that models internal reform. Rather, Mary Magdalene’s tears and ‘spiritual ardour to see’ God are what John finds most exemplary. It is how she suffers and waits to see God, how she longs to make a connection with him in contemplation, that is the model of reform for John’s reader. By using the Magdalene to exemplify contemplative emotional and penitential behaviours in his texts, John distinguishes himself from Odo’s model of contrition and of reform, and from earlier medieval writers who draw on Mary Magdalene as well.¹⁶¹

Unlike Odo, who died before John’s lifetime, Maiolus and Odilo of Cluny were John’s contemporaries and might have served as living exemplars. Maiolus’s stress on humility and obedience may have proved foundational for John’s writings, though this is hard prove, since Maiolus left no writings of his own behind.¹⁶² Odilo’s embrace of the cross and its devotion in penitential practice potentially served as active inspirations for John.¹⁶³ Odilo’s devotion to the cross may have been particularly influential, since, like John, he used the image of the crucified Christ to foster proper compunction in the sinner.¹⁶⁴ According to Peter of Blois (1135–1203), Odilo’s devotion to the cross was inspired by the example of the desert fathers, who Odilo claimed meditated each day on the Passion upon receiving the Eucharist.¹⁶⁵ Odilo, like Odo, believed that reform began with monastic penitence: the cross, Christ’s instrument, inspired the act of penitence required for such redemption,¹⁶⁶ and the behaviour of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene around the cross inspired the penitential behaviour required of Christian devotees.¹⁶⁷ Despite this parallel emphasis on the cross, however, Odilo’s image of Jesus crucified remains a triumphant image, not a suffering and pathetic one, as in John’s work.¹⁶⁸ Therefore, by using the images of the Magdalene and the cross to foster contrition, John was likely speaking in accordance with the Cluniac abbatial rhetoric of his time; but by focusing on the Magdalene’s longing for God and for communion with a suffering God, John had created his own distinctive approach that highlighted the emotional involvement required in proper penitential behaviours.

John’s revival of Augustine’s Confessions

The sources for John’s work discussed in the previous sections of this chapter are all texts that were being read in one way or another in John’s time: the Ravennate sources might only have been read in Ravenna, and the focus on the Magdalene might have been particularly popular at Cluny, but these ideas, adopted by John, were alive in Europe in the eleventh century. The final section of this chapter details John’s interest in a source that was by and large not being read by his contemporaries: Augustine’s Confessions (c. 397–400).

Before the eleventh century, Confessions was one of the least-often-read texts from the Augustinian corpus. When it was read in the early Middle Ages, it was typically mined for doctrinal excerpts and was largely limited to a manuscript presence in florilegia of quotations of Augustine’s writings.¹⁶⁹ Pierre Courcelle argues that John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica changed the way that medieval people read the text of Confessions: with John, it was no longer a resource to buttress orthodoxy, but instead became interesting for its affect, its tone, its prayerful nature. Courcelle observes that John adopted Augustine’s manner of addressing God and his vocabulary of prayer, and that it was only after John’s model that a multiplicity of authors (including Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux) did the same.¹⁷⁰ In addition to adopting Augustine’s tone, John embraced Augustine’s notion of ‘inwardness’¹⁷¹ and his desire for God following Augustine’s characterisation of his own text in his Retractiones.¹⁷² Most importantly, John re-excerpted Augustine’s text in order to interpret it as an advice manual for the proper contemplation of God so that it might serve as the backbone of John’s own method of contemplation.¹⁷³ John quoted so extensively from the passages of Confessions that pertain to the problems encountered during contemplation that if one knew Augustine’s text only through John’s excerpts, one would not learn the story of Augustine’s life, nor would one have a strong sense of Augustine’s doctrinal or exegetical expositions.

John excerpts Augustine’s spiritual journey in order to make it universally applicable, eliminating autobiographical details. Like Augustine, John advises a sinner to force himself inside his own heart, where he can best confront and acknowledge his sinfulness to better repent and prepare himself to see God.¹⁷⁴ Once inside the heart and in touch with God, the sinner then can hope to be so possessed with love for God that he will abandon all of his worldly cares and focus on prayer to God without cease.¹⁷⁵ However, just as one of the most distinctive characteristics of John’s Confessio theologica was the unachievable nature of divine solace and satisfaction, Augustine’s own path away from sinfulness is never fully achieved or complete.¹⁷⁶ John’s sinner remains uncertain of his abilities to feel and love God with the appropriate fervour and inadequate to the task of fully eradicating his own sinfulness, just as Augustine, despite his revelatory conversion in Book 9 of Confessions, is constantly aware of regressive tendencies:

And sometimes you cause me to enter into an extraordinary depth of feeling marked by a strange sweetness. If it were brought to perfection in me, it would be an experience quite beyond anything in this life. But I fall back into my usual ways under my miserable burdens. I am reabsorbed by my habitual practices. I am held in their grip. I weep profusely, but still I am held. Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be, but do not wish to be. There I wish to be, but do not have the power.¹⁷⁷

Imperfect in this life like John’s sinner, Augustine is also left inadequate in God’s sight with only the solace of his own tears. For both John’s and Augustine’s sinners, these tears, then, allow for continual conversion, the repeated turning away from and confessing to sin.¹⁷⁸ To both Augustine and John, a Christian is never stable in his purity; rather, he is always striving to be more perfect, moving towards or away from perfection. The goal of a Christian, then, is to always approach Christ with the fervour of a convert who has only just recognised him as God. Each regression, each moment of tepidity, is cherished because it allows for the potential for a Christian to reawaken his desire for God as if he was falling in love with him (reconverting to him, turning back towards him, performing a conversio) for the first time.

John’s interest in Augustine’s Confessions seems to have informed his own text as well as to have inspired a revival of the text around the Norman monastic world.¹⁷⁹ At Fécamp itself there was a fervent campaign to acquire Augustinian texts between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, perhaps due to John’s central interest in Confessions.¹⁸⁰ By the twelfth century, Fécamp’s copy of Confessions had been passed around the Norman network, allowing copies to be made at Jumièges,¹⁸¹ Bec, and Saint-Evroult; and, by the Late Middle Ages, it appeared in the monasteries of Saint-Ouen¹⁸² and Lyre.¹⁸³ Moreover, subsequent medieval authors famous for drawing extensively from Augustine’s Confessions were themselves likely inspired by these Norman copies: Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (d. c. 1107), whose Liber confortatorius was written from the Flemish abbey of Saint-Bertin (linked to Norman houses through its manuscript exemplars)¹⁸⁴ and Guibert of Nogent (d. 1124), once a monk at the Norman abbey of Saint-Germer-de-Fly, whose autobiography was famously modelled on the Confessions.¹⁸⁵ Therefore, while John’s depiction of contemplative experience was in no way new to the corpus of Christian writings, his reliance on Augustine’s Confessions was new and effective for his historical moment such that one can trace the impact of his revival of this text on the medieval world after him.

John’s mix of influence and innovation

By looking at John’s sources, one can better understand the ways that his monastic readers might have seen his work both as part of their tradition and as innovative. Drawing on sources written and compiled by monastic authors as early as Gregory and as contemporary as William of Volpiano, John wrote a treatise that reflected his identity as a Benedictine monk and drew on sources specific to his education in Ravenna and Saint-Bénigne de Dijon. Moreover, because of his adoption of certain ideas that were part and parcel of the reforms of William of Volpiano, Romuald of Ravenna, and the abbots of Cluny, one imagines that John considered his Confessio theologica as an extension of those reforms, as a furtherance of the ideas put forward by the great abbots who went before him. If John as a young oblate was taught by Romuald that a proper monk fostered certain eremitical values, it would make sense that he would integrate those values into his CT. If John as a young prior was in charge of implementing the reforms begun at Fécamp by William of Volpiano, it would likewise make sense that he would write a treatise to apply those teachings to his brethren’s devotional practices. In these ways, by writing his CT, John was following the reforms of his abbatial exempla and the mentors of his life.

But John did not take others’ ideas verbatim without elaborating on them and making them his own. John pieced together prescriptions for contrition from others, creating a full-fledged interior reform process: the idea of forging an internal connection with God came from Odo of Cluny; the idea of opening one’s heart came from Augustine;¹⁸⁶ the idea of suffering and crying came from Ephraem and Romuald. But the packaging of these ideas and the resulting emotional, interior reform proposed by John, was entirely John’s own. While William chiefly was interested in the rules, liturgy, and behaviour of the newly reformed monks of Fécamp, John chiefly was attentive to the proper interior behaviour of Fécamp’s monks. The cultivation of an intense longing for God through prayer, the particular employment of the models of Mary Magdalene, Hannah, and the suffering, crucified Christ, and the unrelenting cycle of striving towards perfection were pieced together by John from various sources, allowing John to stand on the shoulders of monastic authorities while saying something new about the desperate spiritual ardour required in contemplation. It allowed him to paint a picture of the correct emotional attitude one should have in prayer. And his new prayerful attitude, his fresh use of the suffering Christ as a model for the suffering sinner, and his lengthy elaboration on how a Christian should examine his inner self to rouse proper feelings for the divine, allowed John to be considered a reformer in his own right by the generations of Fécamp monks who came after him.¹⁸⁷ Beyond Ravennate, Cluniac, Volpianian, and general monastic precedents, John’s CT specified the detailed emotional excavation required in a monk’s prayer process, elevating the stakes for monastic introspection as never before.

Notes

1‘My words are the words of the Fathers. Read that which we say in such a way that you consider yourself to be rereading the words of the Fathers, and with the whole striving of your mind, render eagerly and sincerely to your redeemer what thanksgiving you are able’ (‘Dicta mea dicta sunt patrum. Sic ista quae dicimus, lege ut putes te patrum verba relegere, et toto mentis adnisu quas vales actiones gratiarum tuo redemptory alacriter sinceriterque persolve’) (CT, p. 121).

2Choy, Intercessory Prayer, pp. 10–12, citing Smaragdus’s Diadema monastica.

3Eileen Sweeney, Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), p. 6.

4Albrecht Diem, ‘The Stolen Glove: On the Hierachy and Power of Objects in Columbanian Monasteries’, in K. Pansters and A. Plunkett-Latimer (eds), Shaping Stability: The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 64–5.

5Cottier, Anima mea, pp. xl–xli, lii–liii; André Wilmart, ‘Formes successives’.

6Rachel Fulton, ‘What’s in a Psalm? British Library MS Arundel 60 and the Stuff of Prayer’, in Valerie Garver and Owne Phelan (eds), Rome and Religion in the Medieval World: Studies in Honor of Thomas F.X. Noble (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 235–52.

7Cf. CT, p. 159.

8Cf. CT, p. 136.

9John refers to waves and tempests several times in the CT, pp. 143, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 168.

10This series of questions, and the series of questions that end this quotation from the psalm, are all reminiscent of both the CT and Augustine’s Confessions.

11This compares with John’s reference to his sins as wounds (vulnera).

12‘Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus sitivit anima mea ad Deum fortem; vivum quando veniam et parebo ante faciem Dei fuerunt mihi lacrimae meae panis die ac nocte dum dicitur mihi cotidie ubi est Deus tuus … quare tristis es anima mea et quare conturbas me spera in Deo quoniam confitebor illi salutare vultus mei Deus meus ad me ipsum anima mea … abyssus ad abyssum invocat in voce cataractarum tuarum omnia excelsa tua et fluctus tui super me transierunt … dicam Deo susceptor meus es quare oblitus es mei quare contristatus incedo dum adfligit me inimicus dum confringuntur ossa mea exprobraverunt mihi qui tribulant me dum dicunt mihi per singulos dies ubi est Deus tuus. quare tristis es anima mea et quare conturbas me spera in Deum quoniam adhuc; confitebor illi salutare vultus mei et; Deus meus.’

13This is common in monastic prayer; see Aden Kumler, ‘Handling the Letter’, in Kristen Collins and Matthew Fischer (eds), St. Albans and the Markyate Psalter: Seeing and Reading in the Twelfth Century (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017), p. 81.

14Robertson, Lectio divina, p. 139.

15Pierre Salmon, Analecta liturgica: Extraits des manuscrits liturgiques de la Bibliothèque vaticane (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1974); André Wilmart, Precum libelli quattuor aevi karolini (Rome: Ephemerides Liturgicae, 1940); Susan Boynton, ‘Libelli Precum in the Central Middle Ages’, in Roy Hammerling (ed.), A History of Prayer (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 255–318; Boynton, ‘Prayer as Liturgical Performance’.

16The tradition of John’s Confessio theologica in manuscript also reflects his connection to the libelli precum tradition. The libelli precum manuscripts often were connected to psalters or flores psalmorum; prayers were not contained in independent collections until Anselm. John’s own works were also collected on occasion with the Psalms (for instance, in Metz, Mediathèque, ms. 245). For more on this, see Thomas H. Bestul, ‘The Collection of Private Prayers in the “Portiforium” of Wulfstan of Worcester and the “Orationes Sive Meditationes” of Anselm of Canterbury’, in Raymonde Foreville (ed.), Les mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XIe–XIIe siècles (Paris: CNRS, 1984), pp. 357–60.

17Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 89.

18Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity, p. 102.

19As translated by Boynton in ‘Libelli Precum in the Central Middle Ages’, p. 920.

20Renie Choy, ‘“The Brother Who May Wish to Pray by Himself”: Sense of Self in Carolingian Prayers of Private Devotion’, in Santha Bhattacharji, Rowan Williams, and Dominic Mattos (eds), Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Benedicta Ward, SLG (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 102.

21Choy, ‘“The Brother Who May Wish to Pray by Himself”’.

22Cf. CT, p. 140.

23Boynton, ‘Libelli Precum in the Central Middle Ages’, p. 915.

24Translation is as cited in Boynton, ‘Libelli Precum in the Central Middle Ages’, p. 922.

25As cited in Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, p. 150–1.

26Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 54.

27The Moralia is listed on the eleventh-century library list for Fécamp, even though its manuscript has not been identified as extant: Branch, ‘Inventories’, p. 170.

28Gregory’s Moralia in Job, Book 23, PL 76 col. 292; as quoted by Benedicta Ward in her Introduction to Anselm, p. 55. Cf. John’s ‘You are the living Word of God, and efficacious and more piercing than every sharpest sword. You, double-edged sword, cleave my hardness of heart and wound this sinful soul, and pierce more deeply to the inmost parts with your powerful virtue’ (CT, pp. 180–1).

29Carole Straw, ‘Job’s Sin in the Moralia of Gregory the Great’, in Franklin T. Harkins and Aaron Canty (eds), A Companion to Job in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brill, 2016), pp. 72–3.

30Straw, ‘Job’s Sin’, p. 74.

31Straw, ‘Job’s Sin’, p. 100.

32Straw, ‘Job’s Sin’, p. 100.

33Gregory is cited as the first medieval writer to define the gift of tears; Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Sensible moyen âge: Une histoire des émotions dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Seuil, 2015), p. 72.

34Mor 32.3.4: ‘nunc quanto te loquentem subtilius intellego, tanto memetipsum humilius investigo’.

35Cf. CT, p. 153–4.

36Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 13593, for instance, is called the Reclinationem anime, a title usually given to Gregory’s works; see Elizabeth Kuhl, ‘Education and Schooling at Le Bec: A Case Study of Le Bec’s Florilegia’, in Benjamin Pohl and Laura Gathagan (eds), A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th–13th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 248–78.

37Straw, ‘Job’s Sin’, p. 92.

38Piroska Nagy, ‘Individualité et larmes monastiques: Une experience de soi ou de Dieu?’, in Gert Melville and Markus Schürer (eds), Das Eigene und das Ganze. Zum individuellen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2002), 107–30; van ’t Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life, p. 16.

39Susan R. Kramer and Caroline W. Bynum, ‘Revisiting the Twelfth-Century Individual: The Inner Self and the Christian Community’, in Gert Melville and Markus Schürer (eds), Das Eigene und das Ganze. Zum individuellen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2002), p. 65.

40Cf. Chapter 1.

41Saenger, Space between Words, p. 144.

42All of these authors are counted among the listed and extant manuscripts from Fécamp’s library in the eleventh century.

43McEntire, The Doctrine of Compunction, p. 38.

44Nagy, ‘Religious Weeping’; Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge.

45Patrick Henriet, La parole et la prière au moyen âge: Le verbe efficace dans l’hagiographie monastique des XIe et XIIe siècles (Brussels: DeBoeck Université, 2000), p. 146.

46As quoted in Daniel Callahan, Jerusalem and the Cross in the Life and Writings of Ademar of Chabannes (Turnhout: Brill, 2016), pp. 22–3, from Ademar’s Chronicon 3.46.

47See Introduction, above.

48Steven Vanderputten, Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 67–8; Giles Constable, ‘The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life’, in David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (eds), Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), pp. 242–3.

49Callahan, Jerusalem and the Cross, p. 10.

50Callahan, Jerusalem and the Cross, p. 11.

51Vanderputten, Imagining Religious Leadership, pp. 69, 71. See also the discussion of exceptional abbots in Liège in Helena Vanommeslaeghe, ‘Wandering Abbots: Abbatial Mobility and stabilitas loci in Eleventh-Century Lotharingia and Flanders’, in Steven Vanderputten, Tjamke Snijders, and Jay Diehl (eds), Medieval Liège at the Crossroads of Europe: Monastic Society and Culture, 1000–1300 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), p. 6, 7, 22–3.

52Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, p. 163.

53Leclercq and Bonnes, Un maître, p. 130; E. Bougaud and M. Joseph Garnier (eds), Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon (Dijon: Darantiere, 1875), p. 152; Neithard Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen Wilhelms von Dijon (962–1031) (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid, 1973), p. 40.

54With a link to the hermits in and around Ravenna, William may have been another of John’s sources for Romuald’s teachings: Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen, p. 40; Mathieu Arnoux, ‘Un Vénitien au Mont-Saint-Michel: Anastase, moine, ermite, et confesseur (d. vers 1085)’, Médiévales 28 (1995), 73; and Jean-Marie Sansterre, ‘Ermites de France et d’Italie, XIe–XVe siècle’, in André Vauchez (ed.), Le monachisme bénédictin d’Italie et les bénédictins italiens en France face au renouveau de l’érémitisme à la fin du Xe et au XIe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2003), p. 41.

55Apollinare’s vita is added to the back of Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1632 in a mid- to late-eleventh-century hand.

56Peter writes a defence of the hermitic life in a letter to John of Fécamp in Peter Damian Letters. The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), letter 152.

57Derek Baker, ‘“The Whole World a Hermitage”: Ascetic Renewal and the Crisis of Western Monasticism’, in Mark Anthony Meyer (ed.), The Culture of Christendom (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), p. 213. Special thanks to Edward Schoolman and Kathryn Jasper for their bibliographic advice on Romuald and Ravenna.

58Margaret Gibson, Lanfranc of Bec (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 1–2.

59Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge, p. 223; Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism: A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe, 1000–1150 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 24–5; Lackner, The Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux, p. 131–50, 167–216; Jestice, Wayward Monks, pp. 157–8.

60Baker, ‘“The Whole World a Hermitage”’, p. 207. There were several hermits in Normandy in the eleventh century: Anastasius the Venetian was near Mont Saint-Michel; there were hermits around Saint-Wandrille and Saint-Evroult; and Herluin of Bec was near Bec; see Marjorie Chibnall, The World of Orderic Vitalis: Norman Monks and Norman Knights (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1984), p. 81; Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism, p. 16.

61Colin Phipps, ‘Romuald – Model Hermit: Eremitical Theory in Saint Peter Damian’s Vita Beati Romualdi, Chapters 16–27’, in W.J. Shiels (ed.), Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition: Papers Read at the 1984 Summer Meeting and the 1985 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 74–5.

62Anne Wagner, ‘De l’humilité de l’abbé Richard’, in Noëlle Cazin and Philippe Martin (eds), Autour de la congrégation de Saint-Vanne et de Saint-Hydulphe: L’idée de réforme religieuse en Lorraine (Bar-le-duc: Société des lettres, sciences et arts, 2006), pp. 231–63.

63See also Chapter 3.

64Peter Damian’s Vita Romualdi, ch. 2; as quoted in Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge, p. 171.

65Henriet, La parole et la prière, pp. 146–59, 363–8.

66Nagy, Le don des larmes, pp. 150–1, 163, 229; Bouquet and Nagy, Sensible moyen âge, pp. 105–8.

67Peter Damian’s Vita Romualdi, ch. 16; as cited in Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge, p. 174. Patrick Henriet and Anne Wagner say that ‘l’insistance sur “le don des larmes” est une nouveauté liée à la réforme monastique du XIe siècle’, in ‘Les moines du XIe siècle entre érémitisme et cénobisme’, in Anne Wagner (ed.), Les saints et l’histoire (Rosny-sous-Bois: Bréal, 2008), p. 235.

68Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Qui étaient les Normands? Quelques observations sur des liens entre la Normandie, l’Angleterre, et l’Italie au début du XIe siècle’, in David Bates and Pierre Bauduin (eds), 911–2011: Penser les mondes normands médiévaux. Actes du colloque international de Caen et Cerisy (29 septembre–2 octobre 2011) (Caen: CRAHAM, 2016), pp. 129–46.

69Maylis Baylé has attributed the presence of Italian and Byzantine motifs in Normandy to the same Italo-Normans: Maylis Baylé, ‘L’influence des Italiens sur l’art roman de Normandie: Légende ou réalité?’, Cahier des Annales de Normandie 29 (2000), 45–64. See also Giles E.M. Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and His Theological Inheritance (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 30, 34, 53; Mathon, ‘Jean de Fécamp, théologien monastique?’, p. 487; Stephen J. Shoemaker, ‘Mary at the Cross, East and West: Maternal Compassion and Affective Piety in the Earliest Life of the Virgin and the High Middle Ages’, Journal of Theological Studies 62.2 (2011), 593–4, 598.

70Barbara Baert, ‘Heraclius, l’exaltion de la croix et le Mont-Saint-Michel au XIe s.: une lecture attentive du ms. 641 de la Pierpont Morgan Library à New York’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 51 (2008), 3–20; Christine Walsh, ‘The Role of the Normans in the Development of the Cult of St. Katherine’, in Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine J. Lewis (eds), St. Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Western Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 19–35; Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge, pp. 235–41, 248–53; Anselm, p. 27; Shoemaker, ‘Mary at the Cross, East and West’, 591.

71Shoemaker, ‘Mary at the Cross, East and West’, 601; Callahan, Jerusalem and the Cross, p. 10.

72A library list does not survive from Sant’Apollinare from John’s time, so we cannot be sure of the Greek titles collected there.

73Joseph Szövérffy, ‘“Crux Fidelis”: Prolegomena to a History of the Holy Cross Hymns’, Traditio 22 (1966), 1–41.

74Shoemaker, ‘Mary at the Cross, East and West’, 580; Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Derbes, Picturing the Passion; see Introduction, above.

75Robert C. Hill, ‘St. John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Hannah’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 45.4 (2001), 333–4.

76Giles Gasper has noted that Fécamp is the lone house in the Anglo-Norman world to collect the works of John Chrysostom; Giles Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and His Theological Inheritance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), p. 51. John Chrysostom’s works also appeared at Fécamp in: Rouen, BM, ms. 440 (A298) and BM, ms. 82 (A208); Paris, BnF, mss. lat. 1872, 1919, 2101, 2079, 2401, and 3776; and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Reg. lat. 633 pt. 1 and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Ottob. 120. For more on early medieval models of Hannah being about her symbolic nature rather than her prayerful nature, see Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales, pp. 164–6 and Altvater, ‘Barren Mother, Dutiful Wife, Church Triumphant’, pp. 1–29.

77Hannah Hunt, ‘The Reforming Abbot and his Tears: Penthos in Late Byzantium’, in Eugenia Russell (ed.), Spirituality in Late Byzantium: Essays Presenting New Research by International Scholars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), p. 15.

78Compare the CT with Gregory’s words here: ‘O fountains of tears, sowing in affliction that they might reap in joy! O cry in the night, piercing the clouds and reaching unto Him that dwelleth in the heavens! O fervor of spirit, waxing bold in prayerful longings against the dogs of night and frost and rain and thunders and hail and darkness!’ As quoted in Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gregory of Nazianzus: Rhetor and Philosopher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 149. Sally Vaughn has written on Gregory’s influence on another Italo-Norman, Anselm of Canterbury; Sally Vaughn, ‘Anselm of Le Bec and Canterbury: Teacher by Word and Example, Following in the Footprints of His Ancestors’, in Benjamin Pohl and Laura Gathagan (eds), A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th–13th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 57–94.

79Maiolus’s role as William’s mentor is discussed extensively in ch. 5 of Glaber, p. 265. The comparisons between Cluny and William’s first foundation at Saint-Bénigne are extensive; for more on the architectural and liturgical comparisons between the houses, see Carolyn M. Malone, Saint-Bénigne de Dijon en l’an mil, “Totius Gallie basilicis mirabilior”: interprétation politique, liturgique, et théologique (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Carolyn M. Malone, ‘Interprétation des pratiques liturgiques à Saint-Bénigne de Dijon d’après ses coutumiers d’inspiration clunisienne’, in Isabelle Cochelin and Susan Boynton (eds), From Dead of Night to Dark of Day (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 221–50; Kenneth John Conant, ‘Cluny II and Saint-Bénigne at Dijon’, Archaeologia 99 (1965), 179–94; Watkin Williams, ‘William of Dijon: A Monastic Reformer of the Early XIth Century’, Downside Review 52 (1934), 525.

80The chronicle of Saint-Bénigne says that William arrived at Fécamp with fifty monks from Saint-Bénigne (Bougard and Garnier, Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, p. 156).

81Stéphane Lecouteux has recently revised this date, changing it from 1016 to 1023: Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, p. 71.

82Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen, p. 40. John’s ultimate election as abbot is also detailed in Bougard and Garnier, Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, p. 197.

83Chadd I, pp. 2, 25.

84Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 5390, fols. 222–230r. On John being a potential editor of the text, see Gazeau and Goullet, Guillaume de Volpiano, pp. 19, 26. On the primacy of Fécamp’s copy, see Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen, p. 322.

85Sigebert of Gembloux’s Chronicon says ‘[c. 1027], monastic observance flourished through notable abbots: in France and Burgundy Odilo of Cluny, notable for his piety, and William of Dijon, honorable for his severity’ (‘Florebat hoc tempore aecclesiastica religio per abbates nominabiles; in Francia quidem et Burgundia per Odilonem Cluniacensem pietate insignem, per Guilelmum Divionensem severitate reverendum’), in Ludwig Conrad Bethmann (ed.), Chronicon, MGH Scriptores 6 (Hanover, 1844), p. 356.

86Libellus de revelatione, aedificatione, et auctoritate Fiscannensis monasterii, PL 151, cols 701–24, at col. 726. For the complete list of monasteries reformed by William, see Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen, p. 160.

87Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Christopher Brooke, ‘Princes and Kings as Patrons of Monasteries: Normandy and England’, in Il monachesimo e la riforma ecclesiastica (1049–1122) (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1971), pp. 125–52; Potts, Monastic Revival and Regional Identity.

88Libellus de revelatione, PL 151, cols 720–1. The Libellus emphasises that William’s customs derived from those of the church of ‘B. Majolum’, in other words, Maiolus of Cluny. Glaber also mentions William’s imposition of the RB: ‘Then this man of the Lord gathered to that place a group of monks under the RB, so numerous in their persons and abounding in the study of virtue that they exceeded three times the number of the past clerics’ (Glaber, p. 273).

89Glaber, p. 273. For more on William’s reforms at Fécamp, see David Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 578–80; Gazeau and Goullet, Guillaume de Volpiano; Neithard Bulst, ‘La réforme monastique en Normandie: Étude prosopographique sur la diffusion et l’implantation de la réforme de Guillaume de Dijon’, in Raymonde Foreville (ed.), Les mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XIe–XIIe siècles (Paris: CNRS, 1984), pp. 317–30; Gregorio Penco, ‘Il movimento di Fruttuaria e la riforma Gregoriana’, in Il monachesimo e la riforma ecclesiastica (1049–1122) (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1971), pp. 229–39; Williams, ‘William of Dijon’.

90John Munns, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotion (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016), p. 53.

91For more on the establishment of schools as part of monastic reform programmes, see David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of Its Development from the Times of St Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 943–1216 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 85; Lackner, The Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux, p. 132.

92‘crescende religionis preesse institui’ (Faur, p. 80).

93Gazeau and Goullet, Guillaume de Volpiano, pp. 50–5, 64–9, 111–15, 21–2; Libellus de revelatione, PL 151, col. 726.

94Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, pp. 390–2. These include Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 989, fols 8–75 (hagiographies); Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1714 (containing writings of Ephraem the Syrian); BnF, ms. lat. 1805 (saints’ lives, including the passio of St Bénigne); BnF, ms. lat. 1872, fols 104–9 (life of Saint Maur); BnF, ms. lat. 3330 (Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel’s Diadema monachorum and De vita sanctorum patrum heremitarum); BnF, ms. lat. 4210 (Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel’s Expositio in regula sancti Benedicti); BnF, ms. lat. 5359 (saints’ lives); Rouen, BM, ms. lat. 465 (A217) (Augustine’s De consensu evangelistarum libri IV); Rouen, BM, ms. lat. 524 (I49) (Isidore’s Liber officiorum and Bede’s De temporum ratione); Rouen, BM, ms. lat. 528 (A362) (Bede’s Expositio in Marcum); and Rouen, BM, ms. 532 (A395) (Augustine’s Enchridion, De diversis haeresibus, and Contra haereticos).

95Saint-Bénigne’s chronicle describes William as wanting to bring things with him to Fécamp: Bougard and Garnier, Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, p. 89; Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, pp. 390–2, 472, 499.

96Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 989, BnF, ms. lat. 1805 (which includes the passio of Saint Bénigne), BnF, ms. lat. 1872, and BnF, ms. lat. 5359.

97Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, p. 512. Lecouteux argues that William of Volpiano likely also introduced a sacramentary, antiphoner, tonary, and customary at Fécamp, all now lost.

98These include Rouen, BM, ms. lat. 465 (A217) (Augustine’s De consensu Evangelistarum libri IV); Rouen, BM, ms. lat. 524 (I49) (Isidore’s Liber officiorum and Bede’s De temporum ratione); Rouen, BM, ms. lat. 528 (A362) (Bede’s Expositio in Marcum).

99Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3330 (Smaragdus de Saint-Mihiel’s Diadema monachorum and De vita sanctorum patrum heremitarum); BnF, ms. lat. 4210 (Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel’s Expositio in regula sancti Benedicti).

100From the Capitula Aquisgranensia I, Consuetudines Monasticae III (Monte Cassino, 1907), p. 116, as quoted in Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, p. 46.

101PL 102, cols 674–5; Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge, pp. 147–8.

102Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3330 contains vitae of the hermit desert fathers. Note that Romuald was also inspired by these vitae; see Emily A. Bannister, ‘“From Nitria to Sitria”: The Construction of Peter Damian’s Vita Beati Romualdi’, European Review of History 18.4 (2011), 501.

103Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, p. 551.

104Teresa Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral, c. 1075–c.1125 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 114.

105In one edition of John’s Confessio theologica, Vienna, Cod. 1580, John’s text is collected with both Smaragdus’s Diadema and the De compuctio cordis of St Ephraem.

106From fols 1–52v. The text is edited in Joseph Mercati (ed.), S. Ephraem Syri opera: textum Syriacum Graecum Latinum ad fidem codicum recensuit (Rome: Sumptibus Pontificii Instituti Biblici, 1915). Any Latin quotations from Ephraem, however, are transcribed directly from Paris 1714.

107From fols 53r–63v. This text is edited in PL 103, cols 683–700. The text is titled Regula S. Basilii in the manuscript, but it is elsewhere called the De admonitio ad filium spiritualem; James Francis Le Pree, ‘‘Pseudo-Basil’s De admonitio ad filium spiritualem: A New English Translation’, The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 13 (2010), www.heroicage.org/issues/13/lepree2.php.

108From fols 64r–78v; BHL 5417.

109From fols 79r–143r; Caesarius of Arles, Sermones, nunc primum in unum collecti et ad leges artis criticae ex innumeris mss. recogniti, ed. Dom G. Morin (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953).

110Incipit reads ‘Jeronimus dixit: Scire debemus quia diabolus’ at fol. 143.

111At fol. 146v. Text is edited in PG XLVII, col. 309.

112Incipit reads ‘Occultam malitiam blandi’ at fol. 149. Note that a similar collection is considered a reformed monastery’s ‘syllabus’ in Steven Vanderputten and Tjamke Snijders. ‘Echoes of Benedictine Reform in an Eleventh-Century Booklist from Marchiennes’, Scriptorium 63.1 (2009), 77–88.

113While only Caesarius explicitly speaks to an audience of monks in these particular sermons, all four sermon authors warn against the kinds of sinful behaviour that the world outside of the monastery encourages. John also warns against the sins of the body, and praises the solitary retreat of monastic life as an antidote to such sin in CT, pp. 134, 137.

114Leclercq notes that sermon collections like these often were read from twice a day, once in the morning, before manual work or in the refectory, and then in the evening, when work was over: Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, pp. 167–72. There is a record of the lectiones ad prandium of Fécamp from the thirteenth-century ordinal of Fécamp: Denis-Bernard Grémont (ed.), ‘Lectiones ad prandium à l’abbaye de Fécamp au XIIIe siècle’, Cahiers Léopold Deslisle 20 (1971), 3–41. According to that edition, it appears that this book was read from during mealtimes in April on the feast day of Mary of Egypt (‘IIII. Non. Aprilis, Marie Egyptiacae, in Libro Effrem’).

115Fols 100v, 110v, 121r, and 123v, among others. Cf. CT, p. 132.

116Fol. 83v: ‘in abstinence or in tears’ (‘in abstentia vel in lacrimis’).

117‘Et pro vulneribus animae meae nocte et die paenitentiam faciam’ (CT, pp. 135–6).

118I have quoted the Latin as it appears in Paris 1714. For more on Ephraem’s transmission to the medieval west, see: Albert Siegmund, Die Überlieferung der griechischen christlichen Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert (Munich: Filser-Verlag, 1949); Scott G. Bruce, ‘The Lost Patriarchs Project: Recovering the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition’, Religion Compass 12 (forthcoming); and David Ganz, ‘Knowledge of Ephraim’s Writings in the Merovingian and Carolingian Age’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 2.1 (1999), p. 40.

119See Diadema monachorum of Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel at PL 102, cols 680–1; Margot Schmidt, ‘Influence de saint Ephrem sur la littérature latine et allemande du début du moyen-age’, Parole de l’Orient: Revue semestrielle des études syriaques et arabes chrétiennes 4.1 (1973), 325–41; G. Bardy, ‘Le souvenir de S. Ephrem dans le haut moyen-âge latin’, Revue du moyen âge latin 2 (1946), 297–300.

120For a transcription of the eleventh-century library list at Gorze, see Anne Wagner, Gorze au XIe siècle: Contribution à l’histoire du monachisme bénédictin dans l’Empire (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), p. 166. There, at item no. 273–4, is Libri Effrem duo in singulis volumnibus. Morin confirms this in his edition of the Gorze catalogue: Dom G. Morin, ‘Le catalogue des manuscrits de l’abbaye de Gorze au XIe siècle’, Revue bénédictine 22 (1905), 1–14. Wagner notes that the sermons of Ephraem were contained in volumes at Saint-Arnoul de Metz lost in 1944 (Metz, Médiathèque, ms. 223 and Metz, Médiathèque, ms. 134). The library list from the monastery of Cluny from the twelfth century, published in Léopold Delisle, Inventaire des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale: Fonds de Cluni (Paris: Librarie H. Champion, 1924), contains the Rule of St Basil (at nos. 65 and 71), and a copy of St Ephraem (no. 77), both no longer extant. A borrowing list from the library of the eleventh-century monastery of Cluny indicates that the Vitae Mariae Egyptiacae, the Dicta Sancti Basilii, and the Effrem de compunctione were all at Cluny in the mid-eleventh century, if not earlier; see André Wilmart, ‘Le convent et la bibliothèque de Cluny vers le milieu du XIe siècle’, Revue Mabillon 11 (1921), p. 110. The Cluniac Ephraem, however, appears to have been in the tradition of Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 18095 rather than Paris 1714, though whether it pre- or post-dates William’s time at Cluny is unknown.

121Ephraem says: ‘Blessed is he who remembers to be dedicated to that tremendous one, he who swims in a fountain of tears to wash and cure the wounds of his soul. Blessed is he who will create such clouds as to put forth a shower of tears, through which the flames of sin can be extinguished’ (‘Beatus quis per recordatus fuerit dedice illa tremmenda et festi naverit lacrimarum fontibus ablvi et animae suae vulnera per curare. Beatus qui fuerit effectus tamquam nubes ad proferendam pluviam lacrimarum per quas possit extinguere flammas peccatorum’) (fol. 34r). John similarly says: ‘And so that I can be delivered [into heaven] with the most purity and devotion, give me the compunction and the peace to flee, keep silent, and remain quiet, and make me penitent night and day for the wounds of my soul … Tear my hardened heart so that desire might flow very ardently from this fountain. Make it so that [this fountain] waters me from the base to the head’ (‘Et ut hoc purius et devotius agere possim, da mihi luctum et quietem ut fugiam, taceam et quiescam et pro vulneribus animae meae nocte et die paenitentiam faciam … Scinde duritiam cordis mei ut emanet fons iste cuius desiderio nimis astuat anima mea. Da mihi irriguum inferius et irriguum superius’) (CT, pp. 135–6).

122Arthur Vööbus, Literary Critical and Historical Studies in Ephrem the Syrian (Stockholm: Etse, 1958), pp. 94, 96, 106.

123Chrysostom’s sermon addresses two biblical passages having to do with tears: Jeremiah 9:1 (‘O that my head were water and my eyes a fountain of tears!’) and Isaiah 22:4 (‘Let me alone, I will weep bitterly; labour not to comfort me’). Chrysostom writes in his sermon that the only way to save one’s lost soul is to submit to the depths of tearful mourning.

124On the Rule of St Basil’s connection with hermitic movement, see Baker, ‘“The Whole World a Hermitage”’, p. 216. Ephraem and Basil had a long tradition of mutual association: see Vööbus, Literary Critical and Historical Studies, pp. 34, 42, and Dom. O. Rousseau, ‘La rencontre de saint Ephrem et de saint Basile’, in L’orient syrien: Revue trimestrielle d’études et de recherches sur les églises de langue syriaque 2.1 (1960), pp. 261, 269, 271.

125The specific version of Mary’s life included in Paris 1714 is told by an Abbot Zosimus, who narrates her story as an example of an intensely penitent former sinner. Ruth Mazo Karras interprets this particular story as one that, for the Middle Ages, would have emphasised the eremitic over the coenobitic life; Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Holy Harlots: Prostitute Saints in Medieval Legend’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 1.1 (1990), 6–7; Jane Stevenson, ‘The Holy Sinner: The Life of Mary of Egypt’, in Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (eds), The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 19–50.

126Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism.

127Stéphane Lecouteux believes that it was John who transported the manuscript from Saint-Bénigne de Dijon. Perhaps he brought it not at William’s request, but rather of his own volition; Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, p. 551.

128Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process, pp. 143ff.

129Alain Rauwel, ‘Circulations liturgiques, circulations dévotes dans l’espace abbatial: Autour de Guillaume de Dijon’, in Michael Lauwers (ed.), Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval (Turnout: Brepols, 2014), p. 383. The Quem quaeritis play was widely circulated in medieval Europe; see David A. Bjork, ‘On the Dissemination of the Quem quaeritis and the Visitatio sepulchri and the Chronology of Their Early Sources’, Comparative Drama 14 (1980), 46–69.

130Glaber, p. 293.

131This prayer is edited in Jean Leclercq, ‘Prières attribuables à Guillaume et à Jean de Fruttuaria’, in Monasteri in alta Italia dopo le invasioni saracene e magiare (sec. X–XII) (Turin: Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, 1966), pp. 159–66. William reformed Saint-Arnoul de Metz in 996/97; Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen, p. 160.

132Leclercq, ‘Prières attribuables à Guillaume et à Jean de Fruttuaria’, p. 161.

133There is more on this in Chapter 3.

134Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, p. 520.

135David Bates, Normandy before 1066 (New York: Longman, 1982), p. 223.

136Véronique Gazeau, ‘Les abbés bénédictins dans la Normandie ducale’, in L’étranger au moyen âge (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2000), pp. 248–9.

137Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen, p. 317.

138Steven Vanderputten, ‘Oboedientia: Réformes et discipline monastique au début du XI siècle’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 53 (2010), 255–66; Steven Vanderputten, ‘Crises of Cenobitism: Abbatial Leadership and Monastic Competition in Late Eleventh-Century Flanders’, English Historical Review 127.525 (2012), 259–84.

139BHL numbers 6292, 6294 (Odo); BHL 5182 (Maiolus); BHL 6282 (Odilo).

140BHL 6281.

141Incipit Exigitis domini mei divites in opem eloquente in BnF, ms. lat. 5329; and his sermon for the feast of St Benedict in Rouen, BM, ms. 1404 (U20).

142Henriet, La parole et la prière, pp. 55–70, 207–18.

143Lackner, The Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux, pp. 47–8.

144Note that the Occupatio enjoyed limited popularity in its own moment in the Middle Ages: Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis Occupatio, ed. Antonius Swoboda (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1900); Christopher A. Jones, ‘Monastic Identity and Sodomitic Danger in the Occupatio by Odo of Cluny’, Speculum (2007), 1–53.

145This is the same edition contained in the Fécamp manuscript Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 5290, BHL 6292, 6294.

146Gerard Sitwell (ed.), St. Odo of Cluny: Being the Life of St. Odo of Cluny by John of Salerno (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 135; Carolyn M. Malone, Saint-Bénigne de Dijon en l’an mil, ‘totius Gallie basilicis mirabilior’: Interprétation politique, liturgique et théologique (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), p. 227; Isabelle Rosé, Construire une société seigneuriale: Itinéraire et ecclésiologie de l’abbé Odon de Cluny (fin du IXe–milieu du Xe siècle) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 519–22.

147Rosé, Construire une société seigneuriale, pp. 609–10.

148Dominique Iogna-Prat, ‘La Madeleine du Sermo in veneratione sanctae Mariae Magdalenae attribué à Odon de Cluny’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 104.1 (1992), 37–70; Dominique Iogna-Prat, Agni immaculati: Recherches sur les sources hagiographiques relatives à saint Maieul de Cluny (Paris: Cerf, 1988).

149Stevenson, ‘The Holy Sinner’, p. 25.

150Iogna-Prat, ‘La Madeleine’, p. 58.

151Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge, p. 260; Madeleine Fournié, ‘L’unum necessarium à Jumièges: Le culte de sainte Marie-Madeleine’, in Jumièges: Congrès scientifique du XIIIe centenaire (Rouen: Lecerf, 1954), p. 991.

152Odo’s sermon, Iogna-Prat believes, was not actually written by Odo, but was instead likely written at Vezelay, circulating under Odo’s name. The sermon happens to circulate with one of John’s prayers – the Lamentation – in an eleventh-century manuscript from southern England, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, McClean ms. no. 7, fols 113–16 (discussed further in Chapter 4). The sermon was read on Easter Sunday in the Fécamp refectory (see ‘Lectiones ad prandium’, ed. Grémont), a nice accompaniment to the Easter drama featuring the Magdalene and performed at Fécamp (discussed further in Chapter 3).

153Zombory-Nagy, ‘Les larmes du Christ’; Iogna-Prat, Agni immaculati, pp. 45–50.

154Iogna-Prat, Agni immaculati, p. 53.

155‘Intrat continuo palatium cordis sui et in spelunca pectoris, collocat sibi dignum consistorium, facit cartham conscientiam suam, stilum gemitum, et lacrymas atramentum … consideravit se, quaesivit se a se, facta est ipsa sibi iudex et advocata, posuit se ante faciem suam, aspexit carthas suas, atramento iniquitatis scriptas, aperuit foeditatem suam agnovit male lubricatam vitam suam’; from Homelie II, n. 11, as quoted by Iogna-Prat, ‘La Madeleine’, p. 56.

156Rachel Fulton notes that Mary Magdalene was considered by medieval Christians to be particularly ‘other’ to Christ, unlike the male saints, who were thought to be more akin to him. Such a feeling of separation might therefore have been useful to a monk who felt himself to be distant from Christ on account of his own sin. See Rachel Fulton, ‘Anselm and Praying with the Saints’, in Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (eds), Studies on Medieval Empathies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), p. 130.

157Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales, pp. 60–7.

158Kassius Hallinger, ‘The Spiritual Life of Cluny in the Early Days’, in Noreen Hunt (ed.), Cluniac Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan 1971), p. 42; Jean Leclercq, Regards monastiques sur le Christ au moyen âge (Paris: Mame-Desclée, 2010), p. 117; Jean Leclercq, Monks on Marriage: A Twelfth-Century View (New York: Seabury, 1982), pp. 123–46; Malone, Saint-Bénigne de Dijon en l’an mil, p. 135.

159Several Fécamp manuscripts from the eleventh century contain sermons on the Magdalene, including a Pseudo-Augustinian sermon contained in Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 2019 (on fol. 56v), and one from Hrabanus Maurus in Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3776/2253, in addition to that from Rouen, BM, ms. 1404 (U20) discussed above.

160Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge, p. 264.

161Note that the Magdalene had a prominent role in the Easter drama at William of Volpiano’s monastery of Fruttuaria, as well as at the monastery at Fécamp (see Chapter 3). Alain Rauwel, ‘Circulations liturgiques’, p. 383.

162Maiolus’s vita by Syrus of Cluny conveys these ideas, BHL 5179: see Iogna-Prat, Agni immaculati, pp. 119, 329.

163Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, p. 179; Jacques Hourlier, Saint Odilon: Abbé de Cluny (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’université, 1964), pp. 145–6.

164Odilo apparently meditates on the cross on his deathbed for this reason, invoking proper penitence: ‘Un opuscule inédit de saint Odilon de Cluny’, Revue bénédictine 16 (1899).

165Peter of Blois says this in Ep. 123, PL 207, col. 363, as quoted by Hourlier, Saint Odilon, pp. 146–7. See also Dominique Iogna-Prat, ‘La croix, le moine, et l’empereur: Dévotion à la croix et théologie politique à Cluny autour de l’an mil’, in Michel Sot (ed.), Haut moyen âge: Culture, éducation, société. Études offertes à Pierre Riché (Paris: Publidix/Éditions européennes Erasme, 1990), pp. 449–75.

166See Sermon 15 in PL 149, col. 685, as cited by Leclercq in Regards monastiques sur le Christ, pp. 119–20.

167Iogna-Prat, ‘Le croix, le moine, et l’empereur’, pp. 449–75. Odilo even adopted the feast of Mary Magdalene and the feasts for the Exaltation and Invention of the Cross for the first time at Cluny.

168CT, p. 124.

169Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire: Antécédents et postérité (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1963), p. 254.

170Courcelle, Les Confessions de saint Augustine, pp. 263–4.

171Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 66.

172In his Retractiones (the relevant passages of which were excerpted at the beginning of most medieval copies of Confessions, including Fécamp’s), Augustine states that his Confessions should ‘praise the just and good God, and into him excite the human intellect and affection. At least, as far as I’m concerned, they accomplished this in me when they were written and they do when they are read’; as quoted by Linda Olson, ‘Did Medieval English Women Read Augustine’s Confessiones? Feminine Interiority and Literacy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Sarah Rees Jones (ed.), Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), p. 71.

173Mancia, ‘Reading Augustine’s Confessions’.

174Cf. CT, p. 144; Confessions 1.5.5.

175Cf. CT, p. 149; paraphrasing Confessions 1.6.7.

176Cf. CT, p. 161.

177Confessions 10.40.65.

178Confession as a tool for continual conversion has been discussed by Karl Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Richmond, VA: University of Virgina Press, 1992), p. 47; it is also mentioned by Gregory the Great, St Benedict, and other earlier medieval monastic authors.

179See Part II of Mancia, ‘Reading Augustine’s Confessions’.

180Twenty Augustinian texts were collected at Fécamp in the eleventh century.

181Though Jumièges has no extant medieval library list, an extant eleventh-century manuscript of Confessions from that library contains an ownership note from the twelfth century on fol. 214v, placing a copy of the book in the Jumièges library from at least the twelfth century onwards; see Nortier, Les bibliothèques médiévales, p. 149.

182By the late fourteenth century, Saint-Ouen had a copy of Confessions: the earliest library list from Saint-Ouen is from between 1372 and 1378, contained in Rouen, Archives départementales de Seine-Maritime, 14H17, fol. 7v, a register of loans made between 1372 and 1378 from the library. On that list, Confessions is listed as article number 36; see Henri Dubois (ed.), Un censier normand du XIIIe siècle: Le Livre des jurés de l’abbaye Saint-Ouen de Rouen (Paris: CNRS, 2001), pp. 12–14.

183The manuscript is recorded to be at Lyre in a seventeenth-century catalogue of manuscripts from that monastery, in Paris, BnF, Dupuy 651, fols 252r–252v, listed as D. August. Lib. Confess. on fol. 252v.

184Alexander, Norman Illumination, pp. 1–64.

185See Chapter 5.

186Augustine likely got it from late antique Christian monks, see Paul C. Dilley, Monasteries and the Care of Souls in Late Antique Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 110–47.

187See Chapter 5; Leroux De Lincy, L’abbaye de Fécamp, p. 263; Bates, Normandy before 1066, pp. 195, 213.