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Reforming the monastic community: the uses of John’s devotional method within the walls of Fécamp

The devotional method prescribed in John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica was not confined to the pages of that abbot’s treatise; rather, an eleventh-century monk would have been presented with John’s emotional devotion in a variety of media at the monastery of Fécamp. In examining the manuscripts, sermons, liturgical rituals, letters, and images that were circulating around John’s eleventh-century monastery, one can see that the ideas of emotional reform contained in the Confessio theologica were being reinforced at many other junctures of the monastery’s spiritual and intellectual life. The importance of right interior feeling, the emphasis on wounding love and caritas, and the emotional avatars of the crucified Christ, Mary Magdalene, and Hannah were all stressed in a variety of ways throughout a monk’s day and year over a lifetime at the Norman monastery. Some of these motifs contained in texts or ceremonies would have been present at any monastery in the eleventh century; but some of them were unique to John’s monastery. In view of the pervasiveness of these themes at Fécamp, the emotional reforms prescribed by John’s CT begin to seem less like the hopeful musings of an abbot and more like the thoughtful expression or even codification of a wider programme of emotional reform at the monastery.

I: The Confessio theologica’s motifs in the Fécamp monk’s wider devotional curriculum

At every stage of his life at Fécamp, a monk would have encountered aspects of the Confessio theologica’s prescriptions for emotional devotion. He would have received instruction about proper feeling, prayer, and caritas – and the efficacy of the examples of Christ, Mary Magdalene, and Hannah in cultivating all three. The emotional shaping of monastic readers attempted by John’s CT was therefore writ large with a strong, mutually reinforcing devotional and intellectual programme at his monastery, some elements of which were typical for monasticism of the time and some of which were unique.

Sermons given to novices entering the monastery

These are the words that every eleventh-century monk at Fécamp would have heard his abbot speak on his first day at the monastery:¹

Our cross is the fear of the Lord. Therefore just as someone crucified no longer has the power of moving or turning his own limbs any way in accord with the motion of his own mind, so also ought we to fasten our wills and desires, not according to that which is pleasant to us and delights us at present, but according to the law of the Lord, to the place where that [law] has bound us.²

And indeed, my brothers, as long as we are in the body, we sojourn apart from the Lord. Sojourners do not long for the native land without a tear. If you long for what you do not have, shed tears. For whence will you say to God: ‘Thou hast set my tears in thy sight’? Whence will you say to God: ‘My tears have been my meat day and night’? They have been my meat: they have consoled the one who groans, they have fed the one who hungers. My tears have been my meat day and night.³

From his very first moments at Fécamp, therefore, a monk would have heard the teachings that were fundamental both to John’s CT and to Fécamp’s devotional message.⁴ The first passage quoted above asks novices to become Christ through their commitment to the monastic livelihood, ‘apply[ing] to [them]selves’ a metaphorical crucifixion of discipline and rule, just as John’s CT asks for the image of the crucified to wound its reader, making him into Christ. In the second passage above, tears are upheld as a chief and right desire for every monk, and the paradoxical idea that weeping and pain serve as comfort is here introduced to the Fécamp novice in his first moments as a member of the community. These passages laid the foundation from which the new monk would extract his purpose and motivation for the rest of his life. When such a monk encountered passages alluding to the crucified or the consolation of tears as ideals in the CT and other devotional documents at Fécamp, then he would already have been primed by the background of this introductory sermon to recognise them as foundational, to perceive their meaning, and to integrate them into his monastic life. And, fittingly, when the monk performed the death ritual for one of his brethren, which also involved performing the crucifixion,⁵ he would likely think back to his orientation at the monastery, aware that the crucifixion bracketed a monk’s life at Fécamp, ushering him in as a novice and out as a corpse.

Manuscripts from Fécamp’s library

When a Fécamp monk was assigned a book to read at Lent,⁶ or when he took a book out of the monastery’s new library to read after Matins or Prime,⁷ treatises in the spirit of the Confessio theologica that were exclusively dedicated to contemplation were few and far between. Nevertheless, of the books collected in Abbot John’s time, many of which are listed on Fécamp’s eleventh-century library list,⁸ several titles supplemented the CT as models of proper contemplative behaviour and interior feeling for the monastic reader. Some of these texts were typical for an eleventh-century monastery: Smaragdus’s Diadema monastica⁹ or Ambrose’s (c. 340–97) De fuga saeculi¹⁰ are just two of the books from the monastic canon that show up in the Fécamp library that advocate rejecting the world and embracing suffering and the contemplative life. In De fuga saeculi, for instance, Ambrose encourages readers to use Christ’s passion to model the rejection of the world.¹¹ If a monk were seeking to supplement his understanding of devotional models of the CT, such as Hannah, for example, whose canticle the monks would sing in the liturgy and on ferial Wednesdays, he need not look further than the lavish eleventh-century copy of Augustine’s De civitate dei, which could provide a reader with more background on Hannah.¹² There, in Book 17, Augustine spends a chapter glossing Hannah’s canticle; the monk-reader could thereby enhance his understanding of this pious woman by learning Augustine’s exegesis of her prayerful words.

Other texts in the Fécamp library, however, were less common elsewhere and more closely aligned with the CT’s prescriptions. Ephraem the Syrian’s De compunctione cordis, for instance, calls for a contemplative to cultivate tears in order to open his heart.¹³ A Fécamp monk even had the unique opportunity to read the earliest copy of Augustine’s Confessions in Normandy, a book whose tear-filled pages and mournful tone directly inspired the Confessio theologica and was subsequently introduced by Fécamp to the other monasteries in its network.¹⁴ Most striking of all, several books in Fécamp’s eleventh-century library prescribing proper penance contain readers’ markings highlighting the passages that recommend tearful contrition.¹⁵ Therefore, while there were many titles whose messages would have dovetailed nicely with John’s own available at the monastery, several may have been specially collected, or at least could have been particularly read, with John’s devotional prescriptions in mind.

The abbot’s performance in Good Friday’s depositio drama

The Fécamp monk not only heard the words of sermons and read the words of books that accorded with the ideas of the Confessio theologica; he also witnessed the actions of his abbot, who would often model certain devotional behaviours to his brethren. The monastic ideal of teaching by example was widespread: in Normandy, in the generation after John, Lanfranc at Saint-Etienne in Caen and Anselm at Bec embraced this precept,¹⁶ and the Bec priors and abbots who came before Anselm emphasised similar modelling.¹⁷ This teaching by example yielded a kind of affectus: the abbot’s model would not only work to instruct his monks intellectually, but would also affect them emotionally, bringing them into another habitus, a new state of mind and heart.¹⁸

Above all other motifs from the Confessio theologica, it was the utility of the image of the suffering Christ that was chiefly modelled by the Fécamp abbot for his community. The Fécamp monk would have most memorably encountered this in the ritual of the deposition (depositio) drama that took place during the Good Friday liturgy, two days before Easter Sunday. The depositio drama played at Fécamp much as it did at many of the monasteries reformed by William of Volpiano.¹⁹ At all of these monasteries, during the depositio, the celebrant imitated the events after the crucifixion, taking the cross down from the altar, cradling and kissing the body of Christ on the cross, and then burying the cross in a kind of sepulchre.²⁰ At Fécamp, however, the depositio drama had its own customs that on occasion were distinct from those practised elsewhere. For instance, at Fécamp, the drama was chiefly performed by the abbot (which, in the eleventh century, would mean John of Fécamp). Moreover, while elsewhere the celebrant was assisted by deacons and priests,²¹ at Fécamp, the abbot alone would cradle and kiss the cross before performing the entombment of the body of Christ along with his assistants,²² and then the abbot alone on Easter Eve would remove the cross from the sepulchre, unaccompanied when miming Christ’s resurrection.²³ Additionally, at Fécamp, after the abbot took down the cross, the congregation watched him take a private moment to make a ‘very long genuflection’ (tam longa fiat genuflexio) and handle the cross with ‘great reverence’ (cum magna reverentia).²⁴ At Fécamp, I would argue that such a pronounced genuflection would have been a moment of prayerful devotion to a crucified body that was seen in the CT and elsewhere as an enactment of right caritas; it would have been a moment to try out the contemplative methods that centred on the suffering images that filled the devotional culture of Fécamp. Phrases from the Confessio theologica such as ‘I ask you through that most holy effusion of your precious blood … give me contrition of heart, even a font of tears, especially while I … stand in attendance at your altars’²⁵ may have been constructed so as to be recalled during this exact moment both by John as abbot and by his monks looking on. What John’s prayers yearn for – a reflection on the imagined vision of the scene of the crucifixion – the abbot here literally and materially demonstrates for the benefit of his community. Annually, the Fécamp monk witnessed a dramatisation of the kind of appreciation of the crucified Christ that was preached in his novitiate, emphasised in the Confessio, and apparent in other readings from the library.

Audience participation in the drama of the Easter liturgy

Monks at Fécamp were not only witnesses to such liturgical productions; they were also participants in its performances, learning by enacting concepts prescribed by John’s treatise and emphasised elsewhere. A chief example of the kinaesthetic opportunity given to Fécamp monks to dramatise their devotional lessons came two days after the depositio drama in the Easter Sunday Quem quaeritis play.²⁶ The Easter drama as it was performed at Fécamp particularly encouraged a dramatic embodiment of the example of Mary Magdalene, paralleling the function of the avatar that was encouraged in the Confessio theologica and in the relic of Mary Magdalene that was at the monastery.²⁷ Like many Easter dramas from the same period, the Quem quaeritis play occurred in the Fécamp liturgy between Matins and Lauds at Easter after the abbot had enacted the resurrection of a cross that he had buried in the sepulchre during the depositio drama two days before.²⁸ During this short play, four of the Fécamp monks were chosen to play the roles of the three Marys who visited Jesus’s tomb and the angel who appeared to them there. In front of the congregation, these four monks engaged in a dialogue where they re-enacted the biblical scene, annually witnessing the revelation of the resurrection in real time.

Like the depositio drama, the Easter drama occurs in liturgies elsewhere, but Fécamp’s has some particularly local distinctions. For our purposes, there are two significant ways in which the Fécamp Easter play is distinct, both of which resonate with John’s Confessio theologica’s themes. First, the Fécamp customs explicitly outline its actors’ particular costumes, props and stage directions.²⁹ Because of this, we know that Fécamp’s play is the earliest extant to distinguish Mary Magdalene from the other two Marys: while other plays dress all three Marys in white, Fécamp’s play puts the Magdalene in red.³⁰ A thirteenth-century antiphoner-hymnal from Fécamp accords with this distinction, featuring an initial in which three women – the central one in a red cloak – stand behind a sepulchre and next to an angel (Figure 1).³¹ This dramatic highlighting of the Magdalene would have followed on the heels of a special sermon that every monk at Fécamp would have heard the night before, in which Mary Magdalene is called the most devout of all the women at the tomb because she desired to see the testament of Jesus’s blood at his sepulchre.³² It also would have followed the ritual washing of the feet that the monks performed three days before, on Maundy Thursday, through which Fécamp monks ‘entered more deeply into the role model of the sinful woman [than at other contemporary monasteries]’ by specifically ‘using the hair of their tonsure to dry the poor people’s feet’ just as the Magdalene supposedly did.³³ Easter week, then, was a time for Mary Magdalene to be presented as the prime exemplar of caritas for the monks at Fécamp, just as John uses her in the CT.³⁴

Figure 1 An initial with the three Marys at the tomb (thirteenth century)

Fécamp’s drama also differs from other Quem quaeritis plays in the directions it gives to the three Marys at the tomb. While elsewhere the Marys are advised to wander as if seeking something before meeting the angel at the sepulchre,³⁵ at John’s monastery, the Mary’s need to wander quasi querela, as if mourning. This emotional dimension is not delivered with the exact language that John himself uses in the CT; nevertheless, it is parallel to John’s way of seeking and connecting with God through tears and conveys the prescriptions for weeping seen elsewhere in the library. Because of this liturgical drama, the Fécamp monk would not just have read about the importance of Mary Magdalene as a model mourner in John’s CT, he would not just have heard about the virtues of her devotion in sermons; he also would have witnessed or even performed the concept at Easter, absorbing yet more deeply another consistent theme of Fécamp’s devotional culture.

II: Caritas, harming to help, and monastic discipline

The foregoing discussion presented the moments when the Fécamp monk might have encountered in his devotional practice the emotional reform instructions inhering in John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica. Comparisons between the CT and Fécamp’s other devotional literature extends our exploration of affectivity at Fécamp beyond re-enactments either by abbot or monk in religious practice. In this section, I present evidence of its further use. The evocation of caritas actually served a practical use as well as a religious one: it promoted a certain style of monastic discipline alongside its more interior, spiritual objectives.

To examine this pragmatic application, I turn now to another work of John’s, one that is, in fact, the only specimen of his writing found in Fécamp’s eleventh-century library.³⁶ The work is a letter ‘to unruly monks’ (ad monachos dyscolos), a missive that John sent to renegade monks who had left Fécamp to live as hermits in the Norman countryside. John’s letter is a warning to the rebellious monks that their spiritual deliverance could occur only by living under the will of an abbot – not by the guidance of their own will or religious fervency. He says:

Read among the rest where it is said [in the RB, ch. 49]:

‘Whatever each wants to offer to God, let him bring it before his abbot, and let it be done with the abbot’s prayer and consent, because what is done without the blessing of the spiritual father will be attributed to presumption, and for vainglory, not for heavenly reward’ … Hear, brother, and understand plainly: if long-lasting testing, and the rooting out of vices, and the rule and will or permission of the abbot has led you to so exceptional a life, or rather if your own will has seduced you.³⁷

At first glance, this letter appears to be about obedience, about John’s desire as a leader of coenobitic monks to contain the pestilence of eremitism that threatened his abbatial control. After all, it is John’s job as abbot to enforce the RB and to keep his monks in line. What makes this letter most intriguing for our purposes, however, is that John goes on to employ what we have heretofore identified exclusively as devotional rhetoric in his condemnation of such disobedient behaviour. Drawing on the meaning of caritas used in his Confessio, John emphasises the salutary nature of ‘cruel’ punishment and the healing properties of suffering:

Finally, if some deceit or transgression has intervened, we commit what must be expunged to your philosophical argumentation; caritas does not hide. Surely your inner eye did not rightly discern that I [John] am shedding innocent blood or that I am cruel in the death of our sons.³⁸ Notice who of us is crueller: for we know that God is the one who kills and makes alive,³⁹ and that it is proper to himself to forgive sins … and [God] teaches his disciples to absolve the one whom he resuscitates; nevertheless, even this we discover, as long as the fault remains, no one is by any means able to be absolved.⁴⁰

Taken in part from Hannah’s own biblical language, John emphasises here that abbatial obedience is a devotional instruction as well as a practical one: it is required for salvation, even if it appears to be ‘scatter[ing] blood’. It follows, then, that abbatial punishment for acts of disobedience, while seemingly cruel, is in fact caritas, because it effects correct absolution through suffering. Were he not to punish the disobedient, but rather rely on the wayward monk to correct his behaviour by means of his own ‘inner eye’, he would be denying proper caritas, and thus, would actually ‘kill’ the disobedient monk’s spiritual self by leading him, instead, to damnation.⁴¹

John then ends his letter using the example of Christ to explicitly connect the practical concerns of obedience to the higher aims of devotional practice:

If you boast of speaking with the tongues of angels through the goal of contemplation, you have lost caritas, which is the bond of perfection. God is caritas; he who feels in opposition to caritas loses God; he who loses God has nothing; he who hates himself, or feigns to love another than himself, that very one kills himself, who of his own accord flees from the yoke of obedience; he who flees from the yoke of obedience, who withdraws from obedience, withdraws from Christ, who became obedient to the father unto death. For in this you have lost the benefit of obedience, when you have at the base shaken the neck from under the yoke of the rule: he who brandishes arms against obedience acts against Christ; he who acts against Christ is the antichrist. In this indeed it more clearly stands evident than the light of day that I have not poured out the blood of our sons, but those very sons have killed themselves. What more [can I say]?⁴²

Here, John comes full circle, making clear the adaptive use of the devotional model of the crucified Christ. Christ’s suffering through his obedience evidenced a closeness to God that a monk must strive to imitate in his own obedience to his abbot, to the RB, and to the yoke of the monastic life. A monk who decides that he can live alone as a hermit without the RB of an abbot has lost the ‘yoke of obedience’ and the ability to feel right caritas, and has therefore distanced himself from Christ both in action and in feeling and thus, in essence ‘killed’ himself.⁴³ Without the right brand of exterior discipline, John argues, a monk has no hope of finding God in his interior practice of contemplation; such exterior discipline, no matter how ‘cruel’ it may seem, is certainly less fatal than a life without it. In order to enforce monastic discipline at Fécamp, therefore, John enforces contemplative discipline as well, using the concepts of salutary suffering, caritas, and Christological avatarism that are encouraged by the CT and in other devotional practices around his monastery to link monastic obedience and divine punishment.⁴⁴ In John’s formulation, the pairing of pain and suffering with devotion in the CT and elsewhere in Fécamp’s devotional culture incited an interior reform that paralleled, enforced, and upheld the exterior reform that John undertook.

If we apply the precepts of John’s letter to the image of the Fécamp monk witnessing the abbot cradle the body of Christ in the depositio drama on Good Friday, we can see how abbatial modelling at the monastery could have served to promote the abbot’s own authority. In the drama, the abbot alone is with Christ and therefore assumes the role as his vicar and as the supreme judge of his monks while they are on earth.⁴⁵ The CT often stresses that the crucifixion itself is an implicit reminder of Christ’s obedience to God;⁴⁶ and this is a fact that was also stressed by the abbot in his sermon for novices when he asked them to cultivate obedience by ‘crucify[ing]’ their wills and desires.

Our modern sensibilities might cause us to approach these recommendations cynically, assuming the abbots used this devotional rhetoric simply to enforce their power and manipulate their brethren. Indeed, the concept of ‘affective lordship’ has been applied by Thomas Bisson to ‘lord-abbots’ like Robert of Torigny (1106–86), who used such domineering behaviour to keep others in line.⁴⁷ Abbots like Geoffrey of Vendôme (1093–1132) used similarly violent rhetoric in his letters to Hildebert of Lavardin (1055–1133), attempting to control the archbishop or his own disobedient monks.⁴⁸ As early as the fourth century, abbots like Shenoute (348–466) literally beat their misbehaving monks to death at the White Monastery in Egypt, using the threat of death as an intimidation tactic while simultaneously claiming to have acted in concert with God.⁴⁹ Affective instruction has been used by many cultures and many time periods as a means of effective physical discipline and emotional control,⁵⁰ and, by the twelfth century, emotional practices of caritas specifically often led to legal conventio with juridical (and, sometimes, physical) force.⁵¹ It is therefore not a stretch to imagine that the emotional devotional prescriptions at Fécamp could have had a purposeful disciplinary use in their monastic context, and that John and other abbots could have chosen the devotional reform most useful in promoting their own power and stability.

Yet, despite the authoritarian tone that John and others used to exact obedience, and despite the ways in which Fécamp’s devotional motifs helped to position the abbot, to the eleventh-century monk, the emphasis on monastic obedience and abbatial authority would also have been a rhetorical means to a devotional end. While the monastic emphasis on obedience worked to elevate abbatial power, it was not blind surrender to authoritarian rule, but rather willing submission that ultimately generated authentic virtue in the obedient monk.⁵² Obedience was not seen as oppression by a power-hungry abbot, but rather a way towards perfection for all; it was desperately sought after by monks so that they could attain God with the support of a community of equals.⁵³ Disobedience and free will yielded evil and sin (cf. Adam and Eve), so obedience in community (cf. Christ) was the only answer. As Amy Hollywood says, ‘although the monk begins following the RB and obeying the abbot out of fear, through the repeated practice of injunctions, he will come “to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit, and delight in virtue” (RB 7:67–9)’.⁵⁴

This observation thus reveals a practical-cum-devotional use for Fécamp’s particular set of devotional motifs, a use that I here call ‘harming to help’: the idea that discipline, though seemingly causing suffering and ‘spilled blood’, ultimately leads to deliverance and salvation (it is, in John’s words, ‘innocent blood’). In revisiting what we have already learned about John’s CT, we come to see how many of its themes come together in this larger theme of compassionate cruelty: suffering, crying, and feeling pain were the means to achieving efficaciousness in prayer. In revisiting Fécamp’s wider devotional culture, we can also trace this idea of ‘harming to help’ in library books, letters, and even in manuscript frontispieces. John’s devotional prescriptions for seeming cruelty in the CT (suffering, wounding, and tears), and his elevation of the image of the crucified were understood and applied in his eleventh-century monastic context in specific ways. While requiring exterior discipline and obedience, ‘harming to help’ rhetoric was likely embraced by the monks of Fécamp as a device to kindle obedience and simultaneously cultivate their own interior divine virtue and ability to move closer to God. It was, in Karl Morrison’s words, ‘cruelty as a method of redemptive love’.⁵⁵

‘Harming to help’ in John’s Confessio theologica

Throughout the Confessio theologica, John of Fécamp speaks of spiritual death in the same terms that he used in his letter to the disobedient hermit-monks: man is ‘killed’ by his faults and saved by Christ’s grace. In the case of the monachos dyscolos, these faults are incorrect exterior practices (the monks have left the RB and their abbot to live as hermits); however, in the CT, disobedience is internal and is determined by a process of self-reflection outlined by John in his text. To ‘break the bonds of sin’ through contemplation, the reader of the CT must cultivate a state of constant lamentation, always straining to be conscious of his unworthiness and sinfulness. The devotee, newly aware, must ultimately ask God to ‘tear out with loving hands’ his sinfulness (notice how the violence of ‘tear out’ is softened with the adjective ‘loving’).⁵⁶ In his treatise, John of Fécamp depicts God as a force of violent correction, a sword that would ‘write on the tablets of [the reader’s] heart [God’s] commandments and will, your laws and right doing, so that I may always and everywhere have you, Lord of immense sweetness, and your precepts before my eyes’.⁵⁷ Inner discipline, to achieve salvation, needed to be cruelly inflicted and inscribed, much as outer discipline was achieved in John’s monachos dyscolos.

Nowhere is this ‘cruel’ corrective clearer than in John’s final prayer of the CT:

Through those saving wounds which you suffered on the cross for our salvation and from which flowed the precious and vivifying blood by which we have been redeemed with propitious graciousness … wound this sinful soul of mine for which you were willing even to die; wound it with the fiery and powerful dart of your excessive caritas. You are the living Word of God, 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. Give me an abundant source of water and pour into my eyes a true font of tears running day and night out of excessive feeling and desire for the vision of your beauty, so that I may grieve constantly all the days of my life, taking no consolation in the present life, until I merit to see you, my God and my Lord, as a beloved and beautiful spouse in your heavenly chamber.⁵⁸

In John’s prayer, the monk-reader is a sinful soul, disobedient and deserving of punishment by the powerful, piercing dart of God’s love. John uses the vision of the crucified Christ as a mechanism to transform the monk’s emotional approach to God: the monk, wounded by that image, can finally be led to spiritual health; his internal disobedience can be violently corrected and reshaped into the right emotional affect so that it may ultimately lead to salvation. When read next to John’s letter to the monachos dyscolos, this passage from the CT resonates with the disciplinary language employed in the monastery. John prescribes right caritas and obedience to his disobedient hermit-monks; he argues that his abbatial ‘cruelty’ works to ‘make [his brethren] alive’ and is ‘proper’ to their correction. Like Christ, who is ‘both victor and victim, and therefore victor, because the victim’,⁵⁹ the corrected monk (only seemingly victimised) will triumph through his suffering.⁶⁰ In this light, John’s authoritative letter is of a piece with his Confessio theologica, both documents working to lead his brethren towards spiritual health through harsh physical and emotional discipline. Christ, then, is invoked as an example of such right discipline in the eleventh century, not as an example of relatable humanity as he will be in later centuries.

‘Harming to help’ in Fécamp’s library

Such salutary ‘cruelty’ is not John’s own invention – it is a convention that he is drawing on from earlier precedents, particularly from the RB and patristic texts against heresy. The RB is very clear on how ‘harsher corrections’ for the most delinquent brethren are signs of right ‘compassion’ and caritas that will restore spiritual health to sick brothers. The RB explicitly states that punishment is executed so that ‘false’ monks may be ‘heal[ed]’,⁶¹ dovetailing nicely with John’s ‘harming to help’ rhetoric. It is likely, then, that it was not eremitism per se that catalysed John’s writing to the monachos dyscolos,⁶² but rather the monks’ throwing off of their obedience and deference to John as abbot – an abuse that could only, according to the RB, be corrected by the compassionate cruelty of the abbot himself.⁶³ For this reason, John’s letter likely had important didactic potential for non-hermit monastic audiences at Fécamp that merited its prominence in that monastery’s eleventh-century library.

The ‘harming to help’ philosophy espoused by John and by the RB had an even earlier precedent: Augustinian texts against early Christian heretics. According to Augustine, Christian heretics needed to be treated differently from non-Christian unbelievers. Unlike pagans, Augustine claims, one needed to repress ‘false’ Christians like the Donatists or the Arians in order to save them.⁶⁴ The Donatists were an especially good example for Augustine, because they saw themselves as rigorists – holding that their behaviour was saintlier than that of mainstream Christians. In his letter On the Correction of the Donatists, Augustine demanded that despite their self-proclaimed sanctity, despite their appearance of godliness (cf. John’s description of the proud hermits), imperial officials must recognise the danger of the Donatists and ‘use force to snatch [their] souls from hell’.⁶⁵ Here again is ‘cruelty as a method of redemptive love’: the Donatists are being punished in order to save them.⁶⁶ Augustine says:

What does it profit [the Donatists], therefore, if they have both the voice of angels in the sacred mysteries, and the gift of prophecy [1 Corinthians 13:1–2, cf. John’s monachos dyscolos letter⁶⁷] … yet because they do all these things apart from the Church, not ‘forbearing one another in love’, nor ‘endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace’; insomuch as they have not caritas, they cannot attain eternal salvation, even with all those good things which profit them not.⁶⁸

Augustine justifies this forcefulness, because he believes the Donatists were not ‘“endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace”’. Moreover, he uses the same Corinthians quotation and reference to caritas that John does in his letter to the hermits.⁶⁹ For both Augustine and John, a heretic’s heart had to be opened to the truth by means of forceful discipline (like the dart of love in John’s Confessio theologica).⁷⁰

Augustine’s letter was known to the eleventh-century monks at Fécamp: it is bound in at least three different Fécamp manuscripts from John’s time.⁷¹ Furthermore, it seems that under John, the monastery of Fécamp was particularly fond of collecting texts against heresy: over the course of John’s abbacy, 18 per cent of the titles collected fall into this category.⁷² Part of this might reflect the Fécamp monks’ involvement in combating many of their own eleventh-century iterations of the Donatists found both in Normandy and around Fécamp’s network: in the early eleventh century, ‘Manicheans’ and other heretics were condemned near John’s hometown of Ravenna and William of Volpiano’s hometown of Turin, among other places.⁷³ In one manuscript from the library, the letter from Augustine mentioned above is bound with the Fécamp monk Durandus of Troarn’s refutation of the eleventh-century heretic Berengar of Tours, thus tying Durandus’s contemporary efforts directly to the patristic model.⁷⁴

Still, more often than not, monks using such anti-heretical rhetoric around eleventh-century Fécamp were writing not against heretics in the traditional sense but rather against ‘false’ monks who were practising an ‘incorrect’ faith, and therefore, like the Donatists, may have claimed to be rigorists but were actually ‘false’ Christians.⁷⁵ John applied this Augustinian rhetoric in much of his writings concerning spiritual guidance,⁷⁶ especially throughout his CT, when Christ is often explicitly thanked for guiding the reader against any kind of ‘heretical perversion’.⁷⁷ John’s fellow abbot, Warin of Metz, also uses such rhetoric in a letter to John, working to correct what he felt was John’s un-monastic arrogance, which he likens to ‘the heresy of the Donatists’.

Although we [at Metz] are indeed sinners, nevertheless we confess Christ. We hold the catholic faith: we take the baptism and Eucharist of Christ, we read and keep to the extent of our ability the RB, we stand in the battle line of Christ against the common foe; we strike, and we are sometimes struck; with God sustaining, we stand, and sometimes, with infirmity impeding, we waver; if we fall due to frailty, we rise again with God lifting us up, and yet we do not sink to the point of despair in our faltering moments. And I believe that each faithful monk is just as able to keep and to save his own soul with the help of God in our poor and meagre place [i.e. Metz], won with respect to both riches and (that which is more dangerous) religion, as in any wealthier and more religious [place, implying Fécamp]; unless perhaps someone, knowing more than it is fitting to know, should transfer the heresy of the Donatists, who said that the ‘true religion’ was only in Africa, and should transfer that same pestilence from Africa to Normandy, asserting that no monk is able to be saved except in the monastery of Fécamp.⁷⁸

Warin is not here condemning John of Fécamp as a Donatist – instead, he uses the heretical label to assert his abbatial independence. Warin’s reference to Donatism thus shows how earlier heretics served as examples when John and his contemporary abbots argued about proper monastic behaviours. No matter how fervent in their devotion, no matter their appearance of orthodoxy, even fellow abbots could run the risk of becoming Donatists in need of compassionate correction when they misinterpreted monastic rules.

‘Harming to help’ in Fécamp’s manuscript images

Only two frontispiece illustrations remain among the extant eleventh-century books from Fécamp, likely saved from post-medieval excision because they were left unfinished by their medieval artists. It turns out, however, that these two remaining images from Fécamp also promote the ‘harming to help’ motif popularised in various guises at the monastery. The manuscript images, both those from anti-heretical texts and depictions of Church Fathers triumphing over heretics, feature parallel programmes with a unique iconography.⁷⁹ Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 2079 (Figure 2) is a copy of Augustine’s Contra Faustum featuring a frontispiece on fol. 1v of Augustine triumphing over Faustus the Manichaean (fl. c. 383).⁸⁰ Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1684 (Figure 3), also made at Fécamp during the second half of the eleventh century, is a copy of Athanasius’s (296–373) Contra Arianos, and it features a frontispiece on fol. 1r of Athanasius triumphing over the heretic Arius (c. 256–336). Also included in the codex in the same scribal hand is Vigilius Tapensis’s (d. c. 490) De trinitate, another diatribe written against a heretic who did not believe in the Trinity.⁸¹

Figure 2 Augustine triumphing over Faustus the Manichean (eleventh century)

Figure 3 Athanasius triumphing over Arius (eleventh century)

Though likely made by two different artists, the visual parallels between these two frontispieces are striking. In both images, we see the Church Father haloed and wearing the clerical vestments of a monk-bishop: in Athanasius’s case, as per the Eastern tradition, his monastic status is denoted by a simple belted robe; in Augustine’s case, as per the Western tradition, his monastic status is denoted by a tonsure.⁸² The heretics are both wearing shorter garments, indicating their lower (and perhaps even their courtly or military) ranks, showing themselves to be more of this world than of the Church. The Fathers’ robes are noticeably plainer and more kempt than those of the heretics. Both bishops have cuffs that are not ornamented⁸³ in contrast to Faustus’s and Arius’s more opulent, decorated cuffs. In Paris 2079 (Figure 2), Faustus looks dishevelled, with the stubble of a beard growing, and perhaps even with an unkempt tonsure. Both pairs are contained within similar architectural frames: rounded arches with simple, undecorated capitals and bases. Important for the purposes of this chapter, both heretics are tonsured, shown to be monks, seeming as legitimately Christian as the Fathers who discipline them; and Augustine uses an abbatial crosier to silence Faustus – a crosier whose shape would have been recognisable to Norman monks in the late eleventh century as an arm of abbatial authority.⁸⁴ The crosier and dress of the monk-bishop figure in each image would have been conflated with the dress of a Norman abbot. In Paris 2079, Augustine, for instance, looks very similar to a Norman-made image of St Vulfran (c. 640–703), the founding abbot of Saint-Wandrille, a monastery closely linked with Fécamp.⁸⁵ While the positioning of the figures in each of the images is not precisely the same, the desired effect is identical. In Paris 2079 (Figure 2), Faustus topples down mid-argument, pointing at his book defiantly all the while, his gaze locked with Augustine’s; Augustine, silent and commanding in his stance, raises his own book, which he gingerly clutches in the folds of his robe, and uses the point of his crosier to spear Faustus directly in the mouth. In Paris 1684 (Figure 3), Arius also continues to gesture towards his book while being wrestled to the ground; Athanasius points his long finger accusingly at Arius, while using his left foot to step on the heretic’s throat and his cross-lance to pierce through the heretic’s heart. Such intense targeting of the throat and mouths of Arius and Faustus is likely connected with metaphors addressing the dangers of heresy from Augustine’s own writings and with more contemporary writings from the eleventh century: Augustine describes Faustus as being able to ‘lure [with his] smooth language’;⁸⁶ Paul of Saint-Père de Chartres (fl. c. 1000), in 1022, characterised heretics in Orléans as ‘reply[ing] with the tongues of snakes’,⁸⁷ as, indeed, it was the mouth of a snake through which ‘humankind had been seduced to disobey God’.⁸⁸ The spear through the mouth of the vanquished also calls to mind iconographic precedents. Particularly rich for the monastic houses of Normandy was the image of the scribe Gelduin (fl. tenth century) and St Michael triumphing over the devil, who is shown speared through the mouth in several manuscripts from Mont Saint-Michel.⁸⁹ Given the close relationship between the Mont Saint-Michel and Fécamp scriptoria, it would not be surprising if a shared illustrator made these images, or if the Fécamp artist was inspired by the Mont Saint-Michel manuscript.⁹⁰

Despite the hints of inspiration from images of Michael and the dragon, the two Fécamp images share an otherwise unique iconography for their time. I have not found another illustrated medieval image of Athanasius and Arius in any format; and, while there are many depictions of Augustine and his heretical interlocutors, they are more often than not depicted in mid-disputation. Two manuscripts from Mont Saint-Michel, one of the Contra Felicianum and one of the Contra Faustum, share certain characteristics with the Fécamp manuscripts: here, again, we see the heretic wearing shorter garments and tonsured; both heretic and Augustine are arguing from the authority of a codex; and, even without his crosier, Augustine in each case is given a halo, less-ornamented dress, and a more distinguished seat to the right of the image to emphasise his triumph and favour.⁹¹ The parallels between the bodies of Augustine and Christ in this image also make a clear point about who is in the right.

I have found only one other example of a full figure triumphing over a heretic in the manner of Michael and the dragon: in an image from Canterbury from 1020, Arius lies beneath John the Evangelist’s feet, summarising his central heresy, which claims that the Son of God was created.⁹² He says in the picture: erat tempus quando non erat (‘there was a time when [Jesus] was not’), and he is bested by John’s opening words in principio erat verbum et verbum erat apud deum et deus erat verbum; hoc erat in principio (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; by this we know that [Jesus] was in the beginning’). By this we see the authority that John uses to subvert Arius’s heresy is scriptural authority: his pen is raised, but he does not pierce Arius’s throat, and he does not even make contact with Arius’s body, which lies cramped between the frame of the image and the platform on which John stands. Significantly, it is not the authority of a monk-bishop that triumphs here, as it is in the Fécamp images; and it is also not a violent triumph, as it is in the Fécamp images.

The iconography of these two Fécamp frontispieces, with their tonsured figures and their violent victories, parallels the ‘harming to help’ rhetoric used elsewhere in the Fécamp monastery. In a like manner to Warin, John, and Augustine, the Fécamp artists’ depictions of Faustus and Arius emphasise ‘false’ religion’s deceptive power and threat in the monastic sphere. In the Fécamp images, Arius and Faustus have tonsures: they look like monks. Like the renegade monks from Fécamp, or like John of Fécamp to Abbot Warin, they are not pagans or dragons or devils, but appear to be true religious;⁹³ and only abbots Augustine and Athanasius can see them (and punish them) for the dissemblers they are. Once Augustine’s, Benedict’s, and John’s approaches to the correction and reform of ‘heretical’ behaviour and ‘false’ monks are considered, the meaning behind the violence of the Fécamp iconography comes into even sharper focus: in the Fécamp images, Augustine and Athanasius are not disputing the heretics (as they are elsewhere) but instead are dominating them, stepping on their necks and piercing their mouths and hearts. They are acting as disciplining abbots and good pastors,⁹⁴ harming ‘false’ monks, stifling their words, in order to help them and to save them from being misled. We can then imagine Faustus as one of John’s disobedient hermits, and we can imagine Augustine’s spear as a ‘dart of love’.⁹⁵ When a monk at Fécamp opened his monastery’s copy of Contra Faustum or Contra Arianos, he would have understood the opening images not just as depictions of the Fathers triumphing over heretical devils; he also would have seen these postures of dominance as gestures of compassionate correction, acts for the good of the heretic’s spiritual self.

All of this helps to further uncover the eleventh-century meaning of the Confessio theologica’s passages on wounding and Fécamp’s emphasis on the crucified Christ and the crying Magdalene: they rest on the foundation of this ‘harming to help’ trope. John finds in the crucifixion a pairing of cruelty with love, epitomising his definition of caritas and resonating with the method that he and other abbots were employing against disobedient monks of all types. The pairing of pain and suffering with devotion in John’s CT incited an interior reform that paralleled the rhetoric of exterior reform that John and others employed for disobedient Christians elsewhere. By noting this rhetorical resonance, we see that John’s insistence in the CT on the suffering of Christ is not an attempt to emphasise Jesus’s humanity, nor is it purely an attempt to bolster his own abbatial power. He uses Christ’s wounded example as a model for proper affective correction that would lead to the promise of heaven, and which the Fécamp monks, with the reinforcement of their wider devotional culture, would have understood as such.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that John’s devotional prescriptions in the Confessio theologica were not idiosyncratic; rather, they were part of a much larger effort at the monastery of Fécamp to reform exterior behaviour and interior spiritual practice, to align it with the examples of Christ, Hannah, and Mary Magdalene, and to cultivate caritas for the sake of redemption. Moreover, when seen within the wider devotional context at Fécamp, John’s early prayers to a wounded, suffering Christ in the CT are revealed as clear extensions of rhetoric alive elsewhere in the monastic context. To a monk at Fécamp, Christ’s obedient acts and his painful emotions would have worked hand in hand as exempla for the monastic experience enforced by the CT, the RB, the Fécamp liturgy, sermon literature, frontispiece images, and patristic curriculum. John put forward Christ on the cross not in order to stress how human he was in his flesh, but rather to demonstrate his monklike obedience, his willing submission to punishment and pain. As a result, John’s CT would have been particularly calibrated to the concerns of a monastic audience in their cloistered confines with their disciplined, contemplative, emotional goals.

The parallels between Fécamp’s devotional culture and John’s text, and between eleventh-century monastic rhetoric of obedience and Fécamp’s wider devotional rhetoric, stand alone as sufficient testament to the pervasive and complicated devotional experience of which John’s CT would have been a part. But who created such a complicated programme at Fécamp? Did it all stem from John’s guidance, from the template of the CT? Or was it all in place already, and did John’s CT simply strengthen an already richly complicated heuristic environment?

The question of intentionality cannot easily be answered. There is some evidence that John was indeed in charge of the transformations at the monastery of Fécamp and that it was he who implemented the inflections of the monastery’s devotional culture. We have already discussed the innovations of John’s CT next to his influences,⁹⁶ so the appearance of the particular novelties of the CT elsewhere at Fécamp could be a sign of John’s influence on the monastery’s culture. Moreover, it was John under whose watch the Fécamp library grew from thirteen codices in 1028 to eighty-seven in 1078.⁹⁷ As abbot, John likely dictated the speed of the copying in the scriptorium and prioritised which text was to be copied first.⁹⁸ Therefore, it is under John’s gaze that the anti-heresy titles in the library grew, that the frontispiece programme was made, and that Augustine’s Confessions were copied.⁹⁹ Further, as abbot, according to the RB, John was responsible for assigning each monk a book to read during Lent;¹⁰⁰ and he even had a hand in guiding the reading habits of the patrons of the monastery, William the Conqueror and his wife.¹⁰¹ All of this evidence seems to suggest that John had a pre-eminent role in shaping both the devotional culture and instruction at and around the monastery in the eleventh century.

But, even if these emphases at Fécamp were John’s own, it is unclear that he would have described them as such. Drawing from age-old patristic precedent and the guidance of the RB, John likely saw himself as forming a series of prescriptions and rituals that solidly adhered to monastic tradition and purpose while simultaneously, subtly refreshing an inner connection with God. There are no extreme elaborations of John’s devotional philosophy at Fécamp – no gory crucifixes survive dating from the eleventh century, no radical deviation from tradition in John’s motifs. But that is what is so brilliant about John’s CT’s suggestions for reform: he is making the space for invigorating affective engagement with God within the limits of the orthodoxy and obedience required. He is conservative while still being innovative enough to reinvigorate devotional culture at the monastery. His reform is incremental while still being particularly directed towards emotional, interior transformation. After all, to him, his words are merely the words of the Fathers (dicta me sunt dicta patrum).

These investigations are significant for scholars of affective piety who have often in the late medieval context attributed the devotee’s focus on Christ’s suffering to his God’s relatable humanity. With this chapter’s investigations, we can add another oft-neglected dimension to our understanding of the medieval embrace of the suffering Christ in affective devotion: his obedient caritas, or his embrace of suffering and correction for its salvific importance. Monks reading John of Fécamp wanted to embrace the image of the suffering Christ because it modelled the perfect devotee: one who would suffer his vulnera because of their healing power. His words resonated with and were informed by reform prescriptions, exterior and interior, that pervaded the culture of his monastery in the eleventh century. The crucified Christ and his particular suffering were indeed useful to monks, inspiring affective prayer even in the eleventh century in ways foundational for, if different from, later medieval interpretations.

Notes

1This sermon is found in Fécamp homiliary Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3776. Betty Branch dates the book to the second half of the eleventh century, claiming that it was once bound with Paris, BnF, mss. lat. 2253 and 5390. Branch, ‘The Development of Script’, pp. 94–6.

2This sermon is attributed to Cassian, and is contained in PL 49, col. 196A: ‘Crux nostra timor Domini est. Sicut ergo crucifixus quis iam non pro animi sui motu membra sua quoquam movendi vel convertendi habet potestatem: ita et nos voluntates nostras ac desideria, non secundum id quod nobis suave est ac delectat ad praesens, sed secundum legem Domini, quo nos illa constrinxerit, applicare debemus.’

3This sermon is attributed in the Fécamp manuscript to Isidore of Seville, but elsewhere to Augustine, PL 38, col. 195: ‘Etenim, fratres mei, quamdiu sumus in corpore, peregrinamur a Domino. Non desiderat patriam peregrinatio sine lacryma. Si desideras quod non habes, funde lacrymas. Nam unde dicturus es Deo: Posuisti lacrymas meas in conspectu tuo? Unde dicturus es Deo: Factae sunt mihi lacrymae meae panis die ac nocte? Panis mihi factae sunt: consolatae sunt gementem, paverunt esurientem. Factae sunt mihi lacrymae meae panis die ac nocte.’

4We can see similar language being used in other eleventh- and twelfth-century sermons for novice formation: Jean Leclercq, ‘Textes sur la vocation et la formation des moines au moyen âge’, in Corona Gratiarum: Miscellanea Patristica, Historica, et Liturgica Eligio Dekkers O.S.B. XII Lustra Complenti Oblata (Bruges: Sint Pietersabde, 1975), vol. II, p. 178; Isabelle Cochelin, ‘Peut-on parler de noviciat à Cluny pour les Xe–XIe siècles?’, Revue Mabillon 70 (1998), 17–52; Caroline Walker Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-Century Spirituality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 122ff.; Constable, ‘The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life’, pp. 236–7.

5Jörg Sonntag, ‘On the Way to Heaven. Rituals of Caritas in High Medieval Monasteries’, in Gert Melville (ed.), Aspects of Charity: Concern for One’s Neighbor in Medieval Vita Religiosa (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2011), p. 45: ‘The cilice was strewn with ashes in the form of a cross; the dying monk was positioned on the cilice in the form of a cross; a wooden cross was laid on his head; he wore his cuculla – the symbolization of the cross; if the brother was still conscious, the monks read him the episode of Christ’s crucifixion.’

6RB, 67–9. This practice is supported by loan lists that survive from monasteries from the Carolingian period onwards: Anne Lawrence, ‘Anglo-Norman Book Production’, in David Bates and Anne Curry (eds), England and Normandy in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), p. 79; Bates, Normandy before 1066, p. 81; James Westfall Thompson, The Medieval Library (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. 231; Karl Christ, ‘In Caput Quadragesimae’, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 60 (1943), 33–59.

7This prescription is from William of Volpiano’s customs at Fruttuaria; see Luchesius G. Spätling and Petrus Dinter (eds), Consuetudines Fructuarienses-Sanblasianae (Siegburg: Franciscum Schmitt Success, 1985), vol. I, pp. 19, 30. It is likely that Fécamp’s customs were modelled on those of Fruttuaria, which was William’s earlier, major foundation.

8Rouen, BM, ms. 1417 (U45), fol. 55v. For more on the date of these lists, see Branch, ‘Inventories’. Manuscripts not on the eleventh-century inventory may have been housed in the chapter house, or in some other location that caused them to be left off the list from John’s time; see Teresa Webber, ‘Monastic Space and the Use of Books in the Anglo-Norman Period’, Anglo-Norman Studies 36 (2013), p. 238.

9Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3330 (fols 7–60v), a late-tenth-century manuscript.

10Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 2639, an eleventh-century manuscript.

11On fols 89r–v, Ambrose invites his readers to scourge themselves for their sinfulness in a way reminiscent of Christ’s own scourges. This passage is marked with an ‘r’ in the margins, so, at one point in Fécamp’s history, it resonated enough with a monastic reader to merit a reader’s mark; for more on readers’ marks, see M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), p. 67.

12Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 2055 is discussed in Branch, ‘The Development of Script’, p. 73. In Book 17, ch. 4, of De civitate dei, Augustine glosses Hannah’s canticle. For more on this, see Chapter 4, below.

13Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1714, as discussed in Chapter 2. There is a record of a reading from this manuscript in the lectiones ad prandium of Fécamp from the thirteenth-century ordinal, published in ‘Lectiones ad prandium’, ed. Grémont, p. 20.

14Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Reg. lat. 755, which dates to 1051. For more on the dating of this manuscript, its resonance with the CT, its primacy in the Norman context, and its possible solicitation by John himself, see Chapter 2, and Mancia, ‘Reading Augustine’s Confessions’.

15See n. 11 above; the same manuscript contains Ambrose’s De paradyso and has several passages on the use of tears notated by the same monastic reader; see, for instance, the highlighted passage on fol. 152r. Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1684, another eleventh-century manuscript, contains the later addition of an anonymous prayer on fol. 128v, which includes a passage on the use of tears. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. reg. lat. 500, also from the eleventh century, contains a collection of the sayings of the Fathers; on fol. 146r a reader has marked the sayings of Abba Arsenius, who always kept a handkerchief on his person, because tears of compunction so often fell from his eyes.

16Priscilla D Watkins, ‘Lanfranc at Caen: Teaching by Example’, in Sally N. Vaughn and Jay Rubenstein (eds), Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe, 1000–1200 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 70–97; Sally N. Vaughn, ‘Anselm of Bec: The Pattern of His Teaching’, in Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe, pp. 98–127.

17Vaughn, ‘The Pattern of his Teaching’, pp. 104, 106, 114.

18This definition of affectus follows Cassian’s; see Chapter 1 and Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book’, p. 67.

19Comparable liturgies were at Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, Fruttuaria, and Cluny. For more on the depositio drama, see Pamela Sheingorn, The Easter Sepulchre in England (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1987); Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Parker, ‘The Descent from the Cross: Its Relation to the Extra-Liturgical Depositio Drama’ (PhD dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1975); Sandro Sticca, ‘The Montecassino Passion and the Origin of the Late Passion Play’, Italica 44.2 (1967), 211; Wm. L. Smoldon, ‘The Easter Sepulchre Music-Drama’, Music and Letters 27.1 (1946), 2; Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), p. 13; Solange Corbin, La deposition liturgique du Christ au Vendredi Saint: Sa place dans l’histoire des rites et du théâtre religieux (analyse de documents portugais) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960). The depositio drama is said by Parker to have originated at Metz (Amalarius of Metz discusses it in his work, see Parker, ‘The Descent from the Cross’, p. iii); if this is true, William of Volpiano may have encountered the drama at Metz or the monasteries under the Gorze reform that he visited before his journey to reform Fruttuaria and Fécamp.

20Munns, Cross and Culture, pp. 146–54.

21I have compared Fécamp’s liturgy to that of houses influenced by William of Volpiano’s customs, namely, Cluny, Fruttuaria, and Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, and to that of Norwich, which was directly influenced by Fécamp’s customs. Cf. Kassius Hallinger (ed.), Consuetudines Cluniacensium antiquiores cum redactionibus derivatis (Siegburg: Franciscum Schmitt, 1983); Petrus Dinter (ed.), Liber tramitis aevi odilonis abbatis (Siegburg: Franciscum Schmitt 1980); Spätling and Dinter (eds), Consuetudines Fructuarienses-Sanblasianae; J.B.L. Tolhurst (ed.), The Customary of the Cathedral Priory Church of Norwich (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1948). The Saint-Bénigne customary is contained in Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 4339; there, the feast for Good Friday (De passio domini) begins on fol. 82v. See more comparative liturgies in Yvonne Rokseth, ‘La liturgie de la passion vers la fin du Xe siècle’, Revue de Musicologie 31.89/92 (1949), 1–58; Louis van Tongeren, Exaltation of the Cross: Toward the Origins of the Feast of the Cross and the Meaning of the Cross in the Early Medieval Liturgy (Leuven: Peeters, 2000).

22Chadd I, p. 231.

23Chadd I, p. 237.

24Chadd I, pp. 230–1. For more on the sorrowful significance of such a long genuflection, see Richard C. Trexler, ‘Legitimating Prayer Gestures in the Twelfth Century: The De penitentia of Peter the Chanter’, History and Anthropology 1 (1984), 97–126. Susan Boynton has commented on the potent drama of a similar moment in the liturgy at the abbey of Farfa: Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity, p. 98.

25‘Rogo te per illam sacratissimam effusionem praetiosi sanguinis tui, quo sumus redempti, da mihi cordis contritionem, et lacrimarum fontem, praecipue dum sacris altaribus … assisto’ (CT, p. 173).

26The earliest incarnation of the Fécamp drama survives in a liturgical manuscript from the early twelfth century, Rouen, BM, ms. 244 (A261); a thirteenth-century version is in Chadd; and an additional copy from the fourteenth century is Rouen, BM, ms. 253 (A538). David Chadd argues that the late-twelfth-/early-thirteenth-century ordinal contained customs copied from an earlier Fécamp ordinal, perhaps made under William of Volpiano or, more likely, John of Fécamp (Chadd I, p. 15); Lecouteux agrees that the liturgy at Fécamp was very conservative, in ‘Réseaux’, I, pp. 461, 484; these observations help argue that the Easter drama was practised under John. I have compared this with similar Easter plays at Gorze from the tenth century (Dominique Berger, Le drame liturgique de Paques du Xe au XIIIe siècle: Liturgie et théâtre (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1976), p. 80); from the tenth-century Regularis Concordia; and from monasteries reformed by William of Volpiano, namely Fruttuaria, Saint-Ouen, Mont Saint-Michel. For more on comparable liturgies, see Diane Dolan, Le drame liturgique de Pâques en Normandie et en Angleterre au moyen-age (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975), pp. 72–3; David A. Bjork, ‘On the Dissemination of the Quem quaeritis and the Visitatio sepulchri and the Chronology of their Early Sources’, in Clifford Davidson, C.J. Gianakaris, and John H. Stroupe (eds), The Drama of the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays (New York: AMC Press, 1982), pp. 1–24.

27Cf. Chapter 1.

28Chadd I, p. 237.

29See, for instance, Chadd I, p. 238.

30A comparison between Fécamp’s dramas and others can be found in Dolan, Le drame liturgique de Pâques, p. 58.

31The initial is on fol. 120v, Rouen, BM, ms. 245 (A190); here, the Marys are in red, white, and blue; as the manuscript is from the thirteenth century, the blue may have been a development in the later customs of the monastery. This scene is also emphasised in a Gospel book made for Fécamp in the late eleventh century, Rouen, BM, ms. 29 (A165): on fol. 66r, the name of Mary Magdalene is specially flourished, causing it to stand out from the names of Maria Jacobi and Salomae.

32The sermon read on Holy Saturday is contained in the Fécamp eleventh-century homiliary Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3776, fols 47v–49v; it is from Hrabanus Maurus’s Commentary on Matthew and examines Matthew 23.

33Sonntag notes that the monks at Hirsau and Fruttuaria, unlike other places in Europe, added the hair to this drying ritual (Sonntag, ‘On the Way to Heaven’, pp. 38, 47).

34Such an emphasis on the Magdalene could also have been connected to Fécamp’s relics from her; see Chapter 1.

35C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘Medieval Liturgy and the Arts: Visitatio Sepulchri as Paradigm’, in Eva Louise Lillie and Nils Holger Peteren (eds), Liturgy and the Arts in the Middle Ages (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1996), p. 16.

36Epistola ad monachos dyscolos was bound as part of a larger codex with the letters of Augustine in Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1928; see Branch, ‘Inventories’, p. 171. In the same hand following this letter, on fol. 173v, there is an excerpt from a synod at Caen dated to 1042. This suggests that John’s letter was written before 1042. Jean Leclercq notes that often such letters were read aloud as sermons to monks by their abbots in Jean Leclercq, ‘Recherches sur d’anciens sermons monastiques’, Revue Mabillon 36 (1946), 1–14.

37‘Lege inter caetera ubi dicitur: “Quidquid unusquisque offerre vult Deo, abbati suo suggerat, et cum eius fiat oratione et voluntate, quia quod sine benedictione patris spiritalis fit, praesumptioni deputabitur et vanae gloriae, non mercedi” … Audi, frater, et subtiliter intellige: si diuturna probatio vos, et vitiorum excoctio, et abbatis imperium et voluntas vel permissio ad tam egregiam vitam provexit, aut potius propria voluntas illexit’ (CT, p. 218).

38The rhetoric here refers to spiritual death, following Hannah’s canticle, John’s CT, and Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 2:4.

39This is a direct quotation from Hannah’s canticle: ‘The Lord puts to death and gives life’ (‘Dominus mortificat et vivificat’) (1 Samuel 2:6).

40‘Denique, si aliquis simulatio vel transgressio intercursit, vestrae philosophicae argumentationi committimus expurgandum: charitas non quaerit angulos. Sane non rite discrevit interior oculus vestrorum me sanguinem innocentem fundere, aut crudelem in filiorum nostrorum morte fore. Quis nostrum crudelior existat advertite: scimus namque quia Deus est qui mortificat et vivificat … et quem resuscitat, discipulis praecipit absolvere: verumtamen et hoc rescimus quia, quamdiu culpa manet absolui quisquam nequaquam valet’ (CT, p. 219).

41This dovetails with prescriptions found in the Moralia in Job (cf. Chapter 2), where Gregory discusses the ‘divine whips’ that are ultimately salutary for the sinner. See, for instance, Mor 32.4.5. Note that here, ‘inner eye’ is a kind of bad interiority, in contrast with the good introspection prescribed by John’s CT.

42Italics my emphasis. ‘Si linguis hominum loquar et angelorum, charitatem autem non habeam, nihil mihi prodest. Si gloriamini angelorum lingua loqui per scopon contemplationis, charitatem perdidistis, quod est vinculum perfectionis. Deus charitas est: qui contra charitatem sentit, Deum perdit; qui Deum perdit, nihil habet: qui seipsum odit, alium se fingit amare; ipse seipsum perimit, qui sponte sua obedientiae iugum refugit; qui obedientiae iugum refugit; qui obedientiae derogat, Christo derogat, qui factus est patri obediens usque ad mortem. In hoc enim fructum obedientiae perdidistis, cum de sub iugo regulae collum fundis excussitis: ergo qui contra obedientiam arma vibrat, contra Christum facit; qui contra Christum facit, antichristus est. In hoc siquidem luce clarius patet quia non ego effudi sanguinem filiorum nostrorum, sed ipsi filii se peremerunt. Quid plura?’ (CT, pp. 219–20).

43The vincula caritatis is an assurance against vainglory even among monks in the Carolingian period, see Choy, Intercessory Prayer, p. 93.

44Monasteries, in fact, were often called caritatis schola; Sonntag, ‘On the Way to Heaven’, p. 52.

45Fécamp abbot’s demonstration of this special relationship with the crucified Christ through the depositio drama is not wholly surprising; according to the RB, the abbot was considered the special vicar of Christ, acting in the place of Christ in the monastery (RB, 2.1–3).

46CT, p. 138.

47Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

48G. Giordanengo (ed. and trans.), Geoffroy de Vendôme, Oeuvres, Sources d’histoire médiévale 26 (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1996), letter 32 (from 1102), and letters 92 and 93 (1107–10), concerning disobedient monks.

49Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 40–50; Dilley, Monasteries and the Care of Souls, pp. 130–1.

50Catherine Lutz, ‘Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category’, Cultural Anthropology 1.3 (1986), 287–309.

51Bruce C. Brasington, ‘From Charitable Sentiments to Amicable Settlements: A Note on the Terminology of Twelfth Century Canon Law’, in Gert Melville (ed.), Aspects of Charity: Concern for One’s Neighbor in Medieval Vita Religiosa (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2011), pp. 1–10; Lars Arne-Dannenberg, ‘Charity and Law. The Juristic Implementation of a Core Monastic Principle’, in Aspects of Charity: Concern for One’s Neighbor in Medieval Vita Religiosa, pp. 11–28.

52Cochelin, ‘Obedience or Agency?’; Talal Asad, ‘On Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monasticism’, in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 125–67; Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Giles Constable, ‘The Authority of Superiors in the Religious Communities’, in George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel, and Janine Sourdel-Thomine (eds), La notion d’autorité au moyen âge. Islam, Byzance, Occident (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982), pp. 189–210; Gert Melville, ‘Der Mönch als Rebell gegen gesatzte Ordnung und religiöse Tugend. Beobachtungen zu Quellen des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts’, in Gert Melville (ed.), De ordine vitae. Zu Normvorstellungen, Organisationsformen und Schriftlichkeit im mittelalterlichen Ordenswesen (Munster: Lit Verlag, 1996), pp. 153–86.

53Leon Strieder, The Promise of Obedience: A Ritual History (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001).

54Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book’, p. 64.

55Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’, p. 36.

56‘Da mihi, quaeso, lacrymas ex tuo affectu internas quae peccatorum meorum possint solvere vincula, et coelesti jucunditate semper repleant animam meam’ (contained in John’s Libellus only, also in Meditations of St Augustine no. 36, PL 40, cols 931–2).

57‘Scribe in tabulis cordis mei mandata et voluntatem tuam, legem et iustificationes tuas: ut te immensae dulcedinis Dominum, et praecepta tua semper et ubique habeam prae oculis meis’ (CT, p. 172).

58‘per illa salutifera vulnera tua, quae passus es in cruce pro salute nostra, ex quibus emanavit ille pretiosus et vivificus sanguis quo sumus redempti propitiabili dignatione … vulnera hanc animam peccatricem, pro qua etiam mori dignatus es; vulnera eam igneo et potentissimo telo tuae nimiae charitatis. Vivus es, sermo Dei, et efficax et penetrabilior omni acutissimo gladio. Tu gladius bis acute cordis duritiam scinde, et vulnera hanc animam peccatricem, atque altius penetra ad intima potenti virtute, et sic da capiti meo aquam immensam, oculisque meis verum lacrimarum fontem nocte ac die currentem infunde ex nimio affectu et desiderio visionis pulchritudinis tuae, ut lugeam iugiter cunctis diebus vitae meae, nullam in praesenti vita recipiens consolationem, donec te in caelesti thalamo merear videre dilectum et pulcherrimum sponsum Deum et Dominum meum’ (CT, pp. 180–1).

59CT, 122: ‘Pro nobis tibi victor et victima, et ideo victor quia victima.’

60Sonntag, ‘On the Way to Heaven’, pp. 29–54.

61See RB: ch. 27 (how the abbot should care for ‘brothers who have behaved wrongly with the utmost concern’, and how such caritas is a sign of ‘compassion’ and love); ch. 28 (on how ‘harsher correction’ should be applied to brothers who do not amend after repeated corrections in order to ‘heal’ this sick brother ‘like a wise physician’); ch. 30 (on how boys who cannot understand the seriousness of the penalty of excommunication should ‘be subject to strict fasting or punished with severe beatings to heal them’); ch. 64 (on how only once the abbot is satisfied can the excommunicated be totally satisfied); ch. 70 (on how punishments should be doled out only by the abbot, and not at random). For more on the connection between ‘harming to help’ and the RB, see Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’, p. 35.

62In fact, once in a while, John granted his consent to certain monks who desired to become hermits during his abbacy, showing that he did not have a problem with hermits per se. Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism, pp. 18–19, 78–86; Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, p. 33; M. Arnoux, ‘Ermites et ermitages en Normandie (XI–XII siècles)’, in André Vauchez (ed.), Ermites de France et d’Italie (XIe–XVe) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2003), pp. 119, 124.

63John might also have been following the example of his mentor William of Volpiano, who the Chronicle of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon claims was harsh in the disciplining of his own monks; see Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 184 and Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen, p. 195.

64Romig, Be a Perfect Man, pp. 22–7, 144; James J. O’Donnell, ‘Augustine: His Time and Lives’, in Eleaonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 14.

65Augustine, letter 185, ch. 2, Almut Mutzenbecher (ed.), Retractionum libri II, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 57 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1984), pp. 47–51; as cited by Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’, pp. 36–7.

66Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’, p. 36. Morrison also discusses the paradox of love and hate (a ‘malevolent sympathy’) and the role of ‘correcting punishment’ in the other works of Augustine in ‘I Am You’, pp. 89, 152, 188.

67The full quotation from 1 Corinthians 13:1–2 is: ‘If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not caritas, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not caritas, I am nothing.’ (‘Si linguis hominum loquar, et angelorum, caritatem autem non habeam, factus sum velut æs sonans, aut cymbalum tinniens. Et si habuero prophetiam, et noverim mysteria omnia, et omnem scientiam: et si habuero omnem fidem ita ut montes transferam, caritatem autem non habuero, nihil sum.’)

68‘Quid ergo eis prodest si et linguam in sacris mysteriis habeant angelicam, et prophetiam … tamen quia separati haec agunt, non sufferentes invicem in dilectione, neque studentes servare unitatem spiritus in vinculo pacis, charitatem utique non habendo, etiam cum illis omnibus quae nihil eis prosunt, ad aeternam salutem pervenire non possunt’, from Philip Schaff (ed. and trans.), St. Augustine: The Writings against the Manichaeans and against the Donatists. Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church 4 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1974), p. 417.

69Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’, p. 37; Augustine, Retractionum libri II, pp. 12, 18, 31–2, 39–40.

70Peter Brown likens this kind of Augustinian discipline to the Christian struggle ‘inside’ reflected by Augustine’s Confessions. Syllogistically, it could be likened to the practice of interior, emotional reform in John’s CT. For more on Augustine’s policy of disciplining the Donatists, see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 227, 236, 245.

71Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1970, where the letter is found on fol. 1r; Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Bongars ms. 162, where the letter is found on fol. 33v; and Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 2720, where the letter is found on fol. 1r.

72Most of these titles were acquired as part of collections of texts against heresy, and not merely as happenstance or as parts of the opera of a single author. Other patristic works – theology, letters, sermons – make up 20 per cent of the library. About 25 per cent of the remaining collection was made up of Gospel books or Bible texts or texts of biblical exegesis, 10 per cent was hagiographical texts, and 27 per cent was other miscellaneous texts: law, rules, histories, etc. (see Branch, ‘Inventories’). The library at Fécamp acquired the following contra heretics texts under John: Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 2055 (Augustine’s De civitate dei contra paganos); BnF, ms. lat. 2079 (Augustine Contra Faustum); BnF, ms. lat. 1872 (Augustine, Contra Rufinum); BnF, ms. lat. 2019 (Augustine’s homilies against the Arians); BnF, ms. lat. 1805 (Jerome against heretics); BnF, ms. lat. 989 (anonymous sermons against heretics); Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Bongars ms. 162 (Augustine, Contra Donastistas); Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Reg. lat. 107 (Augustine, Contra Manicheos); Rouen, BM, ms. 477 (A191) (Augustine, De catechizendis rudibus, Contra Arianos, De vera religione); Rouen, BM, ms. 471 (A271) (Augustine, Contra Felicium); Rouen, BM, ms. 489 (A254) (Boethius, Liber contra Eutychen et Nestorium); Rouen, BM, ms. 427 (A143) (Ambrose, Contra Arrium); Rouen, BM, ms. 532 (A395) (Augustine and Bede, Contra hereticos); Rouen, BM, ms. 2101 (Augustine, Contra Julianem, a Pelagian heretic); Rouen, BM, ms. 478 (A71) (Augustine, Contra academicos); Rouen, BM, ms. 425 (A178) (Athanasius, De singulis nominibus adversus novellam heresem). Soon after John, Fécamp also acquired: BnF, ms. 1970 (containing a letter of Augustine against the Donatists); BnF, ms. lat. 2628 (Macarius of Rome against Arianism); BnF, ms. lat. 2720 (Augustine’s sermons against the Donatists, bound with Durandus of Troarn against Berengar); BnF, ms. lat. 5080 (Petrus Alphonsus against the Jews).

73Lauren Mancia, ‘John of Fécamp and Affective Reform in Eleventh-Century Normandy’, Anglo-Norman Studies 37 (2015), 167. See also Chapter 4.

74Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 2720. Durandus was a Fécamp monk and John’s cross-bearer before he became abbot at Saint-Troarn (Gazeau, p. 372). See also Chapter 4.

75Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1980), p. 71.

76John of Fécamp, in a prefatory letter to his CT sent to an anonymous nun, explicitly gives the name of heresy to incorrect practices of devotion: ‘From which place it is known that the perusal of this book must be especially for those who do not allow their minds to be made dark by carnal desires and earthly longing. Therefore, when this is read with tears and enough devotion, then the meek reader tastes of what sweetness lies within the palate of her heart. Light cannot penetrate blind eyes; if it is thus, no indeed, because it is thus, prideful and disdainful minds cannot presume to touch the secret and sublime words of divine language, lest by chance they slip into error. From [this state of blindness] it also happens that the majority fall into a pit of eternal damnation through heresy, dragging others with them into death, because the mysteries of the divine scriptures, the roots of which are in heaven, become clear to no one among the perfect.’ (‘Unde sciendum est quod huius libelli lectio illis praesertim debetur qui mentes suas carnalibus desideriis et terrenis concupiscentiis obetenebrari non sinunt. Quando autem ista leguntur cum lacrimis et devotione nimia, tunc mitis lector ipso cordis palato sapit quid dulcendis intus lateat. Si ita est, immo quia ita est, eloquiorum divinorum archana et sublimia verba tangere non praesumat superba et fastidiosa mens, ne forte labatur in errorem, quia caecis oculis lumen intueri non potest. Hinc etenim actum est ut plerique per haeresim in aeternae damnationis baratrum ruerent, alios secum in mortem trahentes, quia Sacrae Scripturae mysteria, quorum radices in caelo sunt, nemini perfectorum hic tota patent.’) (CT, p. 207). See also Chapter 4.

77‘haeretica pravitate’ (CT, 141).

78Italics here are my emphasis. Warin of Metz, Letter to John of Fécamp, PL 147, cols 470A–B: ‘Etenim etsi peccatores sumus, Christum tamen confitemur; catholicam fidem tenemus, baptismum et eucharistiam Christi suscepimus, regulam Sancti Benedicti legimus, et pro posse servamus, in acie Christi contra communem hostem stamus; ferimus, et ferimur aliquando; Deo sustinente stamus, aliquando infirmitate impediente vacillamus; si fragilitate cadimus, Deo relevante resurgimus, nec tamen usque ad desperationem deficimus. Et credo ita in nostro, et divitiis, et (quod periculosius est) religione exiguo et paupere loco, quemque monachum fidelem posse animam suam cum Dei adjutorio servare et salvare, sicut in quocunque ditiori et religiosiori, nisi forte aliquis plus sapiens quam oportet sapere, haeresim Donatistarum, qui dixerunt in sola Africa veram esse religionem, eamdem pestem ab Africa in Normanniam transferat, et asserat nullum monachum, nisi in solo Fiscamni monasterio posse salvari.’ For more on the battle imagery here, see Katherine Allan Smith, War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011); Constable, ‘Renewal and Reform’, p. 42.

79These frontispieces have been noted in various iconographical studies as having similar programmes, but no conclusions have been drawn about the significance of this iconography: Alexander, Norman Illumination, p. 102, n. 1; p. 234, n. 1; Avril, ‘Notes sur quelques manuscrits bénédictins normands du XIe et du XIIe siècle’, pp. 504–14; François Avril, Manuscrits normands XI–XIIeme siècles (Rouen: Musée des Beaux Arts, 1975), pp. 25–7. Further discussion of these frontispieces can be found in Mancia, ‘John of Fécamp and Affective Reform’.

80The Contra Faustum is contained on fols 1–172 of the manuscript, written by a single scribe. There are then some later additions of miracle texts and homilies on saints in the back pages of the manuscript. The Fécamp scribe Antonius produced the book at Fécamp during the later years of John’s abbacy (Branch, ‘Development of Script’, pp. 128–9).

81Branch, ‘Development of Script’, pp. 113–16. The Athanasius text is incomplete (fols 1–67); it is followed by various other writings (mostly letters) of Athanasius, and also includes another anti-Arian text by Vigilius Tapensis, Solutiones objectionum Arianorum (fols 117–26).

82Thanks to Jennifer Ball for her help in identifying the vestments in these illuminations.

83Athanasius’s cuffs are green here; the green could have served as an undercoat for a simple gold (in contrast with the heretic’s jewelled, ornamented cuffs).

84The iconography of Athanasius’s cross-lance type specifically comes from Ottonian ivories of Last Judgment scenes, invented in Germany or in England in the late tenth century. See Alexander, Norman Illumination, p. 91. For more on the comparative shape of eleventh- and twelfth-century Norman crosiers, see Pierre Bolotte and Paul Feuilloley, Trésors des abbayes normandes (Rouen: Musée des Antiquités, 1979), object nos. 270, 272, and 275, pp. 243–4.

85An image is in Trésors des abbayes Normandes, object no. 167, p. 140. This image of St Vulfran is in a late-eleventh-century manuscript of the Gesta abbatum Fontanellensium from Saint-Wandrille, Le Havre, BM, ms. 332, fol. 62.

86Augustine, Confessions 5.3.3: ‘per inlecebram suaviloquentiae’.

87Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, p. 71: ‘viperino ore responderunt’. This rhetoric is likely following Psalm 108, whose language of vengeance includes a reference to the ‘lying tongues’ (lingua dolosa) of heretics.

88Herbert L. Kessler, ‘A Sanctifying Serpent: Crucifix as Cure’, in Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (eds), Studies on Medieval Empathies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), p. 166.

89Mont Saint-Michel, Avranches, BM, ms. 50, fol. 1v. A picture is in Monique Dosdat, L’enluminure romane au Mont Saint-Michel (Rennes: Ouest-France, 2006), p. 35. Alexander discusses the iconography of St Michael in Avranches, BM, ms. 50 as from Byzantine sources in Alexander, Norman Illumination, p. 86. Another Mont Saint-Michel-made copy of Michael and the dragon is in a copy of Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos from before 1060, Avranches, BM, ms. 76, fol. Av. A picture is in Dosdat, L’enluminure romane, p. 13.

90On the connection between Fécamp and Mont Saint-Michel, see Alexander, Norman Illumination, pp. 235–6.

91I here refer to an image in an eleventh-century manuscript of Contra Felicianum from Mont Saint-Michel: Avranches, BM, ms. 72, fol. 97; and to the frontispiece of an eleventh-century Mont Saint-Michel manuscript of the Contra Faustum: Avranches, BM, ms. 90, fol. 1r. For more on the Contra Felicianum image (and for a picture), see Alexander, Norman Illumination, pp. 86, 101, plate 22. For more on the connection between the Contra Faustum image and the proliferation of dialogue and disputation in the eleventh century (and for a picture), see Alex J.Novikoff, ‘Toward a Cultural History of Scholastic Disputation’, American Historical Review 117.2 (2012), 330–64. Pierre Courcelle notes that the earliest image of Augustine with a heretic comes from the tenth-century Contra Jovinianum from Einsiedeln in Pierre Courcelle, ‘Quelques illustrations du Contra Faustum de saint Augustin’, in Jeanne Courcelle-Ladmirant (ed.), Oikoumene (Catania: VDM Publishing, 1964), pp. 1–99. For heretics and manuscripts elsewhere, see Diane J. Reilly, The Cistercian Reform and the Art of the Book in Twelfth-Century France (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 181–8.

92The image is from Christ Church, Canterbury, c. 1020, now Hanover, Kestner-Museum WM XXIa 36, fol. 147v.

93Italics here are my emphasis.

94In De civitate dei, Augustine notes in Book 15, ch. 7 that his notion of a ‘good pastor’, like Abel or Melchisedech, is also relevant to his treatise against Faustus the Manichean. For more, see Chapter 4.

95Compare this image and Figure 8; for more on the ‘dart of love’ as actualised in the Rothschild Canticles, see Chapter 5.

96See Chapter 2.

97Branch, ‘The Development of Script’. Note that the thirteen codices under William are merely those identified by palaeographers; in the absence of a library list, it is hard to have a definitive number.

98Herman A. Peterson, ‘The Genesis of Monastic Libraries’, Libraries and the Cultural Record 45.3 (2010), 320–32; Karl Christ, The Handbook of Medieval Library History, trans. Theophil M. Otto (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984); Karl Christ, ‘In Caput Quadragesimae’, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 60 (1943), 33–59.

99John as prior of Fécamp also likely had a hand in the organisation of the Fécamp library’s collection. A letter survives in which the prior of Fécamp requests that of Saint-Bénigne to return certain books to Fécamp’s library, indicating that such was the prior’s responsibility at John’s monastery: Georges Chevrier and Maurice Chaume (eds), Chartes et documents de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon: Prieurés et dépendances des origines à 1300 (Dijon: Imprimerie Bernigaud et Privat, 1933), pp. 14–15.

100RB, chs 67–9. This practice is supported by loan lists that survive from monasteries from the Carolingian period onwards: D. Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, ‘Les listes médiévales de lectures monastiques. Contribution à la connaissance des anciennes bibliothèques bénédictines’, Revue bénédictine (1930), 271–327; Lawrence, ‘Anglo-Norman Book Production’, p. 79; Bates, Normandy before 1066, p. 81.

101In Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1872, on fol. 102v, there is a letter from John to William, bestowing ten books as gifts.