4

Reforming monks in the temporal world: John’s devotional principles cultivated in the secular landscape

John of Fécamp found many ways to teach his monks how to distinguish between devotion that was truly felt and devotion that was merely performed: his Confessio theologica, his letters, and the devotional culture at this monastery all embraced his contemplative instructions. But John also acknowledged that there were limited benefits to being wholly absorbed in the ‘cloister of the soul’; in fact, to John, the world outside of the monastery was surprisingly useful to a monk’s religious cultivation. In his CT, John explicitly admits that ‘it is necessary for us to believe rightly and to live well, for the one without the other has no perfection’.¹ John, as abbatial pastor of his flock, trusted that engaging in the temporal world also nurtured attention to prayer for both his monastic brethren and himself.

In this chapter, I will argue that part of John’s interest in the world outside the monastery stemmed from his responsibility to care for the souls of his monks. His chief source for understanding these pastoral responsibilities was Gregory the Great. In the Moralia in Job, a foundational text for John’s CT, and in his Pastoral Care,² Gregory the Great addresses the pastoral role of the abbot to his brethren.³ Gregory explains that a good pastor does not care for his flock by selfishly withdrawing from the world around him, but by engaging with it – by directing and correcting his sheep and by providing for them.

There are some who undertake the care of the flock, but desire to be so at leisure for their own spiritual concerns as to be in no way occupied with external things. Such persons, in neglecting all care for what pertains to the body, by no means meet the needs of those who are put under them. And certainly their admonition is for the most part despised; because, while they find fault with the deeds of sinners, but nevertheless afford them not the necessaries of the present life, they are not at all willingly listened to. For the word of doctrine does not penetrate the mind of one that is in need … Let pastors, then, so glow with ardor in regard to the inward affections of those they have the charge of as not to relinquish provision also for their outward life. For, as we have said, the heart of the flock is set against preaching, if the care of external succor be neglected by the pastor.⁴

Pastors, Gregory argues, must care for both the spiritual and the worldly needs of those entrusted to them, for those in their care cannot tackle larger spiritual issues when their most essential material needs are unmet. The proper pastoral care of souls, therefore, requires an abbot to pay attention to both the internal spiritual world and the external, physical world. The abbot pastor plays the role of Christ, attending to the souls and the bodies of the monks in his care.⁵ Gregory goes on to say that a good pastor builds his own spiritual knowledge in four stages: first he learns about Christ through the Scriptures; next he experiences Christ through his own suffering and contemplation; then he uses ‘experience in life’ to help him comprehend God; and finally he uses ‘experience in discerning the needs of the Church and its subjects’ to fortify his understanding of the divine.⁶

In this section, I will show how John’s political and economic actions in the world beyond the cloister were at their core pastoral, attempting to affect proper devotional emotions directly or indirectly in the wider Norman world, and ultimately serving to bolster contemplative and devotional feeling in others and in himself.⁷ As abbot of the monastery of Fécamp, John had significant administrative, political, and economic duties that would seem to distract from the focused introspection required by his CT. In fact, in John’s time, the monastery of Fécamp gained such plentiful economic revenue that it allowed the abbey to remain prosperous well into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, indicating that its abbot was most likely spending significant time away from his devotional duties in securing these resources.⁸ Historians analysing important abbots have often interpreted abbatial engagement with the world in a black-and-white way, either as a task despised by brilliant spiritual abbots longing for the solitude of the monastery or a task revealing of the cunning minds of abbots who were actually political lords in their hearts.⁹ Some historians have even claimed that abbots only engaged in the world when they were so spiritually exceptional that they could claim to be able to withstand the temptations of the world. Here, I will paint a more nuanced picture, showing how John’s worldly, pastoral actions, though seemingly far from prayerful, were also directed towards his contemplative prescriptions and his desire for being awake to proper devotional emotion.

Scholars have long recognised that medieval monasteries regularly broke with the ideals of heavenly isolation from the secular world, engaging synergistically in the aristocratic and economic world and requiring monks and abbots to develop shrewd economic skills and political acumen.¹⁰ Property administration was considered a necessary evil by abbots of monasteries from the time of Benedict of Nursia, who begrudgingly understood that monasteries needed material support for their devotional activities.¹¹ Moreover, many historians have cited this monastic engagement with the world as the chief cause for the ‘Gregorian’ reform of the eleventh century and the ‘new monasticism’ of the twelfth – that monks had become so worldly that the Church sought to finally separate the secular and ecclesiastical spheres, and that new orders of monks sought to correct the opulent worldliness of older monasteries.¹² Few historians, however, have shown how sometimes monastic engagement with the world ultimately served to reinforce and intensify devotional practices in the monastery.¹³ This chapter will do just that, and, in so doing, will work to change the way in which historians of monastic reform have understood the role of the secular world in eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic transformations.

I will begin this chapter by detailing how John understood his role as a pastor. I will then show how he performed that role, sometimes providing direct spiritual ministrations to the world outside his monastery’s walls, at other times tending to the physical needs of his monks as a means of indirectly facilitating their salvation. In his fight against the Eucharistic heresy of Berengar of Tours, in his correspondence with male and female lay outsiders, and in his interactions with lay members of the confraternity of Fécamp, John directly provided for Christian souls in matters of spiritual import. In his care for the monastery of Fécamp’s material property and rights, John attended to secular matters while more indirectly nurturing monastic spiritual potential and affluence. In the end, John’s worldly engagements were in service of his Confessio theologica’s spiritual purpose: they worked to elicit more genuine cravings for the contemplative life and for proper contrition, serving as distractions or tests that would ultimately effect the profession of (confessio) and return to (conversio) God. In the Moralia, Gregory remarks that ‘some monks flee from the action of the world, but they exercise in themselves no virtues. These [monks], indeed, sleep from stupefaction, not from serious design, and therefore they never behold the things of the interior, because they have laid their head, not upon a stone, but upon the earth.’¹⁴ John’s material trials served as active means to interior, contemplative heavenly ends.

The Fécamp abbot as pastor in the temporal world

In the period between 1055 and 1065, Fécamp’s library acquired one of its most opulent eleventh-century books: a copy of De civitate dei (Paris, BnF, ms. lat 2055).¹⁵ The manuscript was modelled after an exemplar at Mont Saint-Michel and was lavishly decorated with gold and illuminations (unfortunately excised in the centuries since the Middle Ages). Though we know that John had a robust curatorial influence on less lavish documents in the Fécamp library, such as Ephraem’s De compunctione cordis or Augustine’s Confessions,¹⁶ the expense of this new book, and the decision to outsource it to the finer scriptorium at Mont Saint-Michel, suggests that in this case especially Abbot John ordered the work himself. John likely did this in part to fill in a gap in the Fécamp library, which did not have a copy of the classic Augustinian text. But I would argue that with this particular illuminated volume as a showpiece in his monastery’s library, John’s understanding of the value of his pastoral abbacy is affirmed: De civitate dei represented more to John than just a reminder of the ultimate monastic goal (the heavenly City); it was also a text that clarified the ‘religious imperative to the quotidian interactions of a high medieval world’.¹⁷ Fécamp’s copy of Augustine’s De civitate dei particularly highlighted the value of monastic interactions with the world through the fact of its sumptuous illuminations and the content of its marginal annotations.

Augustine’s De civitate dei was one of the chief texts read by medieval monks, particularly those seeking information on how terrestrial peace could guarantee the city of God.¹⁸ Jocelyn Hilgarth has noted that medieval monks were therefore more interested in the second half of Augustine’s opus, where the Church Father details how the city of man might reflect the city of God.¹⁹ Corroborating Hilgarth’s observation, the Fécamp copy of De civitate dei chiefly evidences monastic reading through marginal annotations following Book 9, bespeaking an interest in the spiritual use of worldly action.²⁰ But the notations in Fécamp’s De civitate dei particularly worked to point its readers to models of good pastors, those whose worldly behaviour had a spiritual valence. On fol. 150v of the Fécamp copy, for instance, the marginal notes highlight Augustine’s interpretation of Abel as a prefiguration of Christ the Shepherd (or, to put it in Gregory’s terms, Christus pastor). Augustine distinguishes between Cain (founder of the Earthly City) as a bad pastor, and Abel (a type of Christ) as a good one.²¹ Likewise, on fol. 171r, the annotator highlights Augustine’s interpretation of Melchisedech as another good pastor.²² To Augustine, Melchisedech reveals the potential for a good pastor to be both king and priest, both an acceptor of tithes and a purveyor of the Eucharist.²³ Like Abel with his sheep or Melchisedech with his offerings, John, even in his worldly activity, was invested in the spiritual care of his monks.²⁴

The pastors highlighted as models in Fécamp’s copy of De civitate dei may have resonated personally with John of Fécamp because of his childhood: Melchisedech, Abel, and Abraham were chief models for the monks at Sant’Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna, where John was a novice. The church in Ravenna contains seventh-century apse mosaics of the Transfigured Christ as Shepherd (a kind of transfigured Christus pastor, in the dome of the apse, Figure 4) and of Melchisedech, Abel, and Abraham (to the left of the altar, Figure 5).²⁵ The iconography of the latter mosaic presents the three Old Testament figures as types for Christ: just as Abel sacrificed his sheep to God, Abraham offered his son Isaac, and Melchisedech offered bread and wine to Abraham’s army, so too did God sacrifice Christ, who was at once a lamb (Abel), a son (Abraham), and the Eucharist (Melchisedech). These three figures, therefore, would have been linked together in John’s mind not only because of his reading of Augustine, but also because they presented some of the earliest Christian images from John’s childhood in Ravenna. Additionally, John’s former mentors were also outspoken about the ‘pastoral responsibilities’ of abbots. Romuald of Ravenna considered abbots pastors in the world (despite being at times a reclusive hermit), as did Odo of Cluny, William of Volpiano, and Leo IX, the pope for whom John served as legate.²⁶ William, in fact, according to Rodulfus Glaber, went out of his way to rebuild Fécamp as a pilgrimage church and to open a school at the monastery because he was ‘father and pastor’: he was invested in both his interior spiritual life and his worldly actions.²⁷

Figure 4 Apsidal vault mosaic from Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna (sixth century)

Figure 5 Sacrifices of Abel, Melchisedech, and Abraham mosaic from Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna (sixth century)

The combined impact of John’s library, the mosaics of his early childhood, and his mentors primed him to value the role of abbot as pastor. So, it is no surprise that later in life, John became a champion of the pastor-abbot. Sometime between 1055 and 1067, John joined forces with Archbishop Maurilius of Rouen (d. 1067, a former Fécamp monk) to write to the bishop of Evreux. In the letter, John and Maurilius condemn bishops who do not grant abbots autonomy in their practice of the cura animarum.²⁸ In his own Confessio theologica, following Augustine’s Confessions, John repeatedly addresses Christ as pastor²⁹ and distinguishes Christ’s duties as a good pastor:

You have set me loose from original bonds and have joined me to the flock among your adopted sons … I give thanks to you who separated me from the empty commerce of this world and grants me the enjoyment of the love and company of your slaves: you give me salvation and rest of body and soul, and freedom suitable to your holy service, you free me from the emptiest encumbrances of this age for the profit of my soul for the sake of your mercy alone.³⁰

Since the RB refers to the abbot as the Christlike figure who pastors the monks in the monastery,³¹ one can imagine that these duties were easily transferable to the abbot. It is then not hard to read the passage in this way:

You [the abbot] have set me loose from original bonds and have joined me to the flock among your adopted sons … I give thanks to [the abbot] who separated me from the empty commerce of this world and grant[s]‌ me the enjoyment of the love and company of [the abbot’s] servants: [the abbot] give[s] me salvation and rest of body and soul, and freedom suitable to [Christ’s] holy service, [the abbot] free[s] me from the emptiest encumbrances of this age for the profit of my soul for the sake of [Christ’s] mercy alone.

John likely understood his pastoral responsibilities to his flock as both physical and spiritual, as did Christ.³² Like Melchisedech, John could both deal in the world and be a holy man. In order to keep his monks from the corruption of the world, to provide them with food and health, and to give them the leisure to go to church and to ultimately ‘profit’ their souls, the abbot must himself be in the wider world. So, while some of John’s interactions with the world outside of the monastery were obviously for the spiritual good of those with whom he was interacting, other interactions were only indirectly undertaken for spiritual purposes. In the case of those especially, John, like Christ, had to sacrifice his own leisure and safety for the good of his flock.

Directing devotional behaviour in the wider world

Berengar of Tours

Around 1050, a new heresy became the grave concern of elite churchmen in medieval Europe: Berengar of Tours had written in several places that the bread of the Eucharist was merely symbolic and experienced no material change in the mass.³³ Pope Leo IX (1002–54) had denounced Berengar in 1050 and called both John and Abbot Lanfranc of Bec to Rome in summer 1050, hoping that they might assist him in Berengar’s final condemnation.³⁴ Several Italo-Norman monks also wrote treatises denouncing Berengar and upholding the real presence in the mid-1050s, most of them engaged with the secular world: Lanfranc (De corpore et sanguine domini);³⁵ Guitmund of Aversa (d. 1094, from Bec); Durandus of Troarn (d. 1088), abbot of Saint-Martin of Troarn but formerly a Fécamp monk and John’s own ‘cross-bearer’ (De corpore et sanguine domini);³⁶ and our own John, who in the 1050s completely reworked his Confessio theologica into what scholars have called his Confessio fidei, transforming large passages so that they would serve to combat Berengar and reassert the real presence.³⁷ John’s alterations in the 1050s have been called less ‘personally fervent’ and ‘more discursive’ than the original CT, ‘confront[ing] heresy by affirming an array of orthodox tenets including Trinitarian doctrines’.³⁸ Indeed, John transforms the first three parts of his Confessio theologica for his Confessio fidei, omitting his Libellus’s prayers and infusing his Confessio fidei with many more quotations from the Fathers. But, most significantly, John adds a fourth part to his original three, a part entirely dedicated to the theology of the Eucharist. He uses this fourth part to emphasise the real presence of Christ³⁹ and the process of transubstantiation,⁴⁰ but he also uses this discourse on the Eucharist to build on themes already present in his original CT and to connect the sacrament to his own devotional interests.⁴¹

It is not surprising that one of John’s chief fights outside his monastery’s walls was against Berengar. Monks celebrated mass daily, making this threat to the central focus of their lives no small matter.⁴² The Fécamp monks had in particular been responsible for converting much of Normandy to orthodox Christian practice.⁴³ But, by exercising his duty to combat the Eucharistic heresy, John was also taking the opportunity to reassert his specific devotional priorities regarding prayer. The connection between the sacrament and prayer was by no means John’s own – Gregory the Great considered the Eucharist to be ‘the most important and most potent form of prayer’ because it allowed Christians to experience momentary harmony and union with Christ.⁴⁴ But the way that John depicts the Eucharist in his Confessio fidei ties the sacrament specifically to his idea of interior prayer: John sees a Christian’s taking of the Eucharist as a literal embodiment of that emotional work. For instance, he says:

O holy bread, O living bread, O beautiful bread, O clean bread, you who have descended from heaven and give life to the world, come into my heart and cleanse me from every defilement of the flesh and spirit, enter into my soul and sanctify me both without and within.⁴⁵

Here, John asks that the ‘bread’ come into a sinner’s heart. On the one hand, the ‘bread’ is a metonym for Christ, and John simply asks for Christ to descend into the sinner’s heart in symbolic form. But throughout the Confessio fidei, John seems to embrace the action of the Eucharist as a literal ingestion of the divine that might inspire the Christian, now a vessel literally containing Christ, to do the inner emotional excavation required to retain proper interior contemplation. For instance, in another passage, John says:

For it is correct that the sacrament is great and ineffable, in which your actual flesh is eaten and your actual blood is drunk. O mystery to be feared and revered, the human gaze is beaten back for gazing at [your majesty]. Through the very sacrosanct and vivifying mystery of your body and blood … shine brightly on me, ignite me, illuminate and sanctify me, your vessel, empty me of malice, fill me with grace, and wholly preserve me, in order that I may eat the food of your flesh for the salvation of my soul: for by eating you I may live according to you, may advance thanks to you, may arrive at you, [and] may rest in you. For the very one who eats you lives on because of you.⁴⁶

John here holds the internalisation of Christ in the Eucharist as a real physical practice that might direct a Christian to an authentic emotional practice. He sees the Eucharist (Christ) as the match that will relight the spark of Christological devotion in the sinner through intuition (intuitus) and introspection (inspicium).⁴⁷ By penetrating the interior of the sinner, the Eucharist will be inside the sinner while the sinner is still outside himself,⁴⁸ and will suddenly become ‘the sweet food of [his] heart’⁴⁹ that will activate the sinner’s true devotion. Berengar’s theory – that the Eucharist does not provoke a physical, material change in bread, but is merely a change of being and spirit – reduces the power of this parallel for John, who wants this material internalisation of God to elicit the physical results of tears (which are related to Christ’s bleeding wounds,⁵⁰ and which in turn are related to the Eucharistic wine⁵¹). Moreover, Berengar proposed that a Christian use his senses to ascertain truth, concluding that, since the Eucharist tastes like bread and not like flesh, there is no real presence; but this runs contrary John’s Confessio fidei’s method of ‘knowing’ God through a process of introspection. John therefore needed to attack Berengar’s privileging of essence and representation over introspection.⁵² And this is why, unlike Lanfranc and Durandus, John was not interested in refuting Berengar’s heretical positions about the involvement of the will of God in his Confessio fidei,⁵³ but was instead focused on combating the parts of Berengar’s heresy that allowed him to highlight and further empower his own spiritual programme.

The fight against Berengar raged much beyond John’s spiritual prerogatives, however, and likely required John to get involved in the world in ways that tested his own contemplative focus. William the Conqueror (fl. 1066–87) summoned Berengar to a court at Brionne so that scholars from around Normandy (including John) could publicly condemn his position.⁵⁴ At the council of Rouen around 1055 (which John likely attended), Archbishop Maurilius (the former monk of Fécamp) required Norman clerics to regularly read and enforce a profession of Eucharistic orthodoxy against Berengar.⁵⁵ John’s words were even excerpted as a prayer for ordained priests – both monks and non-monks – to say during the mass that incorporates this profession against Berengar.⁵⁶ Still, John made sure that his Confessio fidei made its way to the monks of whose souls he was primarily in charge. The only complete surviving eleventh-century copy of John’s revised text (Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Montpellier, H309) is from Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, the very monastery where John trained and where he was abbot from 1052 to 1054,⁵⁷ right at the time of the Berengar controversy.⁵⁸ A second eleventh-century copy, now lost, was at Glastonbury, an English monastery connected with Fécamp in the late eleventh century.⁵⁹ As he did with his CT,⁶⁰ John spread his Confessio fidei around his own monastic network, taking the opportunity to channel his energies towards the further emotional reform of monks. In a way, John follows a pattern from prayer (Confessio theologica) to polemic (Confessio fidei) that is seen elsewhere in medieval Christian writings; Anselm, for instance, writes prayers in the 1070s and then moves on to more polemical treatises.⁶¹ Paul Arne-Dannenberg argues that the late eleventh and twelfth centuries become moments of systematisation, when more emotional Christian values are turned into juridical forces in order to better build the institution of the Church.⁶² That is what we see here from John, who uses a diatribe against a heretic to set in stone (or, at least, in parchment) his ideas about prayer.

Letters to monks and women

As with his penning of the Confessio fidei, John’s tending to monks and abbots outside of Fécamp’s walls was more often than not an attempt to provide spiritual advice. Most of his letters, therefore, preach a contemplative focus rather than an active one – ironically, John engages with the world to encourage others to leave it in order to focus on devotion and prayer.

We have already seen ways in which John took care of the souls of other monks in Europe: he passed around the works of Ephraem and Augustine’s Confessions to Norman houses that William had reformed.⁶³ John’s Confessio theologica itself also made its way to monastic houses associated with Fécamp: Metz, Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, and Bec all had copies.⁶⁴ John’s lasting impact on these monasteries is confirmed by his presence in their necrologies after his death in 1078.⁶⁵

But in addition to disseminating books he found to be important around his monastic network, John also wrote to his fellow abbots around Normandy. Some of John’s letters are simple bureaucratic necessities, recognising the authority of new abbots for abbeys among Fécamp’s dependent houses.⁶⁶ Others, however, are more pastoral, making sure that abbots near and far from Fécamp are themselves good shepherds to their monastic flocks. We have already seen three such letters, two between John and the Abbot Warin of Metz and one from John to the rebellious monks, all attempts by John to discipline monks and abbots into performing what he feels are the correct practices.⁶⁷ Another of these letters, known as the Tuae quidem letter, actually circulates as a preface to John’s full CT.⁶⁸ Tuae quidem shows us that John was as interested in monastic friendship as his contemporaries were,⁶⁹ and that he was specifically interested in the caritas that was exchanged in correspondence.⁷⁰ Such caritas was often corrective advice coming from John, who took it upon himself to shepherd his fellow monks towards truths that would benefit their spiritual selves.⁷¹ This letter is no exception: John is concerned with the decadence of clerics and abbots surrounding him, and is reminding his abbot-correspondent of the tears and penance needed for every contrite sinner to eventually be united with the divine. Abbots, John claims, have become richer than bishops, so that there is no more difference between the clerics of the secular world and the abbots cultivating their friendship. John here particularly criticises abbots who use the example of the work of greater abbots in the world (like Maiolus of Cluny, who is mentioned in certain copies by name) to justify their conduct as political operatives removed from the tasks of the cloistered life.⁷² Instead, John states, abbots should follow the example of Christ himself, who in the Sermon on the Mount models how clerics should eschew money and the temptations of this world. Monks, he claims, have only one task: ascending the contemplative ladder to God.⁷³ John’s Tuae quidem letter therefore serves as the perfect preamble for the Confessio theologica: it is a guide for divesting oneself of the secular world and renewing one’s own contemplative aspirations.

Even when writing to female recipients, John is sure to instruct the male clerics and monks who will also read those letters on an abbot’s proper pastoral duties.⁷⁴ In his letter to the Empress Agnes of Poitou (1025–77), written around 1063/64, John lashes out at the ‘dogs of Scylla’ who might question whether it is proper for a monk to speak to women.⁷⁵ With the same acerbic ferocity that characterised his letter to disobedient hermit monks, John launches into an extensive discourse (irrelevant to his female addressee) for the ‘wretched’, ‘prevaricat[ing]’ ‘blind leaders of the blind’ who might criticise his address to the empress as an unmonastic distraction.⁷⁶ John asserts that his address to this ‘venerable handmaid of Christ’ (venerabilis Christi ancilla) is also for the self-proclaimed virtuous male religious who should learn a lesson from Agnes’s desire for contemplative instruction:

There are some less proficient [Christians] who pretend [to have seen] God in their imagination, since they do not know how to intelligently contemplate that wondrous and uncircumscribed light, scattered formless in temporal things. What is the eye of contemplation to them, then, other than a snare of perdition? Such people are to be admonished that, content with the exercise of the active life alone, they not presume to ascend the mountain of contemplation. For it is written that the animal man does not perceive the things which are of the spirit of God, and that it is death to know things according to the flesh. For the human spirit, unless it repulses the desire of external things, does not penetrate internal things, since the more subtly it looks on invisible things, the more perfectly it scorns visible things.⁷⁷

The ‘less proficient’ here addressed is not Agnes, who has, by writing to John, already established herself as part of a group interested in proper contemplation. Instead, John momentarily ignores Agnes to instruct the religious around him of the need for contemplation in their distractingly active lives. Many medieval church leaders and abbots upheld women as paradigmatic spiritual exempla for their male monastic brethren (Aelred of Rievaulx, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, even Augustine in the Confessions⁷⁸), and here, John proves himself to be no exception.

Of course, John is not just writing this letter for the male readers who might intercept it; he is also writing it to his female lay addressee, Agnes.⁷⁹ Like many male monks before and after him, John saw his care of lay and religious women as part of his pastoral duties, particularly by improving their devotional practices.⁸⁰ John performed these duties in Normandy by establishing female monasteries like Montivilliers and bestowing the veil upon several noble women; but his most famous exercise of these duties came through his letters to women. In 1030–50, John wrote a letter to an anonymous nun, likely of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnais in Troyes;⁸¹ a few years later, in 1063/64, he wrote to the Empress Agnes, who by then had ceased serving as regent and had committed herself to a convent in Rome. Like the Tuae quidem letter, John’s letters to Agnes and to the anonymous nun survive because they circulate with his copies of the CT as prefaces, indicating that they were initially sent along with copies of John’s treatise and then kept in the subsequent copies made thereafter.⁸² These letters have prompted some scholars to claim that John of Fécamp would not have written his Confessio theologica’s affective prescriptions at all were it not for the requests by these women.⁸³ While the work of this book should dispel the notion that John’s affective tendencies were exclusively geared to or prompted by a female audience, it is indeed important to note women’s role in perpetuating and disseminating John’s ‘script for the performance of prayer’ more widely:⁸⁴ Agnes, having heard of his CT elsewhere, seems to have written to John wanting a copy for herself;⁸⁵ and John, in sending it, encouraged her to disseminate it to other interested parties.⁸⁶

John’s letters to women indicate his own desire to share his method for contemplation with women as well as men, encouraging all Christians to remain focused on devotion to Christ in the face of worldly pleasures.⁸⁷ In the letters, John explicitly praises both Agnes and the anonymous nun for avoiding the temptations of this world.⁸⁸ He suggests that, to best combat these temptations, Agnes and the nun replace them with a truly felt interest in holding ‘sacred vigils and [singing] psalmody, not sleepily but intently’.⁸⁹ In both of his letters, John cites concepts and uses language which come directly from his CT: the nun must ‘take pleasure in the solitude of prayer, as much as is allowed’;⁹⁰ ‘sweetly and frequently cr[y]‌’;⁹¹ her soul must ‘repel exterior desires from itself, so they do not penetrate the interior’;⁹² in praying, she ‘tastes of what sweetness lies within with the palate of his heart’⁹³ and ‘chooses the best part always, as much as is allowed for herself, with the blessed Mary’.⁹⁴ John’s letters, therefore, become for these women précis of his longer treatise advising them in contemplative matters.

The crux of my argument, however, is that letters were instructive to more than their addressees: they were also instructive to John himself.⁹⁵ After summarising his contemplative method in his letter to Agnes, John says, ‘And it is just by [teaching readers like you] that the one practising the active life [i.e. John] converts, assuming the wings of the contemplative life.’⁹⁶ Here, John claims that it is precisely through his pastoral actions, for example, teaching lay women about contemplation, that his own devotional life is enabled. Through his ministry to these women, through their longing for better connection with God, he too can awaken his own contemplative engagement. John explicitly characterises Agnes’s letter as a potential moment for his own spiritual ‘warming’.⁹⁷ Initially, impressed with her fervour, John muses ‘if only there were a fire in me to make my heated mind develop’.⁹⁸ By the end of his letter, he finds himself kindling his own devotional emotion: ‘Brilliant exemplar of holy widowhood, accept, I ask, this little anthology from my waking mind.’⁹⁹ The occasion to deliver Agnes advice, and the ‘brilliant exemplar’ of her spiritual desire, has awakened John’s contemplative soul. By ministering to these women in the world, John is able to spread the word about his spiritual practices. But it is through this outside engagement that he is given the opportunity to augment his own spiritual practices, refreshing his own desire for God in the process of awakening others’.

John’s administration of Fécamp’s property and its devotional effects

While John was explicit about the spiritual benefits he received from corresponding with laywomen, the benefits are not always obvious in his interactions with laymen in more secular matters. Certainly, there are moments where John’s interactions with laymen had a direct spiritual purpose, which was to enable layfolks’ souls to be saved through donations or letters of advice. However, the majority of John’s relations with and ministrations to the secular sphere have more hidden spiritual benefits. What were the benefits of John’s negotiating Fécamp’s exemption, for example, beyond political autonomy from the interference of bishops? How were his confirmation of donations and land rights in accordance with the contemplative focus of his Confessio theologica? While many scholars have studied these lay endowments from the nobleman’s point of view, noting how, for example, monastic patronage was essential to ducal control of Normandy,¹⁰⁰ the monks’ interpretation of these actions remains less frequently investigated. As a result, in the historiography, the common perception is that the monks’ motives were identical to their lay correspondents’, that is, contrary to monastic spiritual purpose:¹⁰¹ if ducal patronage of monasteries was a manifestation of Norman ‘predatory kinship’,¹⁰² or more about consolidating and projecting power than it was about religious feeling,¹⁰³ then surely the monks were also engaged in a ‘politics of holiness’.¹⁰⁴ Here, I will take a different view and will piece together John’s understanding of his handling of Fécamp’s secular engagements, showing how, to him, these interactions eventually served pastoral (and, ultimately, devotional) purposes.

Even if John and his monks had wanted to imagine themselves hermits in the desert, myopically focused on spiritual exercises, they could not have done so at Fécamp: until the 1060s, the main Norman ducal palace was literally across the street from the monastery (see Map 2).¹⁰⁵ Though Sant’Apollinare and Saint-Bénigne de Dijon were located in or near towns, allowing for frequent lay visitations and interactions, never in John’s life had he been so spatially confronted by the secular world.¹⁰⁶ Not only could the monks of Fécamp see the ducal palace from their windows; their scriptorium served as the ducal chancery from the time of Richard II until the Conquest;¹⁰⁷ Duke Richard I (932–96), Duke Richard II (978–1026), and Richard II’s son William (d. c. 1087, monk at Fécamp) were buried at Fécamp;¹⁰⁸ the monks even incorporated the palace gate into their liturgies, stationing processions there.¹⁰⁹ Monks at Fécamp were thus forced to reconcile the world to their spiritual lives. Sometimes these interactions were direct spiritual exchanges, requests by laymen for prayer or for the monks to perform certain spiritual duties. But at other times the spiritual benefits of these exchanges were more indirect, connected with John’s interpretation of a good pastor’s material concerns for the sake of his flock’s spiritual welfare.

Fécamp’s most obvious duty to the outside world was its monks’ obligations to pray for the members of their confraternity.¹¹⁰ While some gifts were given to the monastery for diplomatic purposes, many lords were interested in donating to the monastery out of spiritual need or to feel an affinity with their kin, rather than out of political motivation.¹¹¹ Altar gifts especially were considered sacrifices aiming towards redemption, in direct parallel with the gifts of the bread and wine of the Eucharist.¹¹² There has been some debate over why and how monks responded to or elicited such donations – whether they did so out of a spiritual interest or from a more worldly political acumen.¹¹³ But the Fécamp monks took their confraternity seriously as a means for both mutual survival and mutual salvation.¹¹⁴ Monks were not merely hypocritically performing these prayers in exchange for donations; indeed, they remembered these patrons in their prayers for significantly longer than was socially necessary to cultivate their relationships.¹¹⁵ They also enlarged their churches to accommodate more lay pilgrims and to increase the number of altars to accommodate their lay guests.¹¹⁶ And they even used this language of gift-giving in their prayers and theological writings, allowing it to inform their indebtedness to God’s mercy.¹¹⁷

Through their interactions with secular folk, one of the goals of Norman monks in this period was indeed ‘imparting to the secular world the blessings and spiritual rhythms of monastic communities, those islands of ‘“realized eschatology” in a fallen world’.¹¹⁸ The Fécamp monks in their own chronicles even characterised the Norman dukes as monks, further legitimising their interactions with such pious laymen: Richard I was a ‘precious son of Christ dressed in the habit of a layman’;¹¹⁹ Richard II was ‘constant in his worship of Christ, so that he was rightly called most devout father of clerks and indefatigable supporter of the poor’;¹²⁰ and Rodulfus Glaber called the dukes of Normandy a ‘clan or family united in unbroken faith … the needy, the poor, and all pilgrims were treated with the constant care with which fathers treat sons’.¹²¹ Richard II and his sons in fact served as monks at Fécamp every Easter:¹²²

The duke was in the habit of holding his Easter court almost every year at Fécamp, and, at a time of his choosing, he and his wife would carry a box full of books, thuribles, candlesticks, and other ornaments, covered with a beautiful cloth, up to the altar of the Holy Trinity, and she and he would offer it there to God for their sins. On Easter Day itself, after mass and before he would go to his palace and eat with his men, he came with his two sons Richard and Robert to the monk’s refectory. The two sons would carry the dishes from the kitchen, as the monks usually did, and give them to the father. He would himself place the first course before the abbot and afterwards served the monks. When this was done, he would approach the abbot with great humility and when he had his permission would go happily and cheerily to his palace.¹²³

Here, the author of the Brevis relatio not only makes Richard II monklike in his piety, but also depicts the duke subverting his own power to that of the monks of Fécamp in a gesture suited to his ultimate goal of salvation. This sanctification of the Norman dukes was perpetuated into the thirteenth century, when the bodies of Richard I and Richard II began to be treated as saints’ bodies at the monastery. The Fécamp monks likely saw this sanctification as evidence of their effort and influence on the lay donors around them.¹²⁴

The monks’ participation in the secular world did not just benefit the dukes of Normandy; it also trickled out to the rest of the laymen in the region. In a rare instance, John bestowed a neighbourhood church upon a priest, allowing him to minister to the people in the area.¹²⁵ He promised that an abbot or monk from Fécamp would serve mass at a small priory on the feasts of the Nativity, the Purification of the Virgin, and the Assumption.¹²⁶ He provided the opportunity for the oblation of a son of one Wigrinus and one Adeliza, for the sake of their sins.¹²⁷ Under his watch, Fécamp might have even have continued to serve as a school for priests in the region.¹²⁸ And John’s abbey, at ducal requests, sent its own monks to private monasteries to reform their foundations and implement right spiritual practices.¹²⁹ Fécamp, then, provided the manpower and locus for laypeople to perform penance and save their souls. As Richard II funded pilgrimages to Jerusalem for abbots and monks, providing the funds to enable the devotion (and increasing his own devoutness thereby),¹³⁰ so John provides the inverse: devotion in exchange for the goods, enabling the sacralisation of the secular world (and increasing his own devoutness thereby).

The religious benefits from empowering lay devotion were not only the abbot’s, however: a monastery’s interactions with the secular world (including an abbot’s on behalf of his monastery) yielded a communal benefit for its monks in return. Most of John’s declarations in charters specify that he speaks with the counsel and approval of the community. Personal friendships on an individual basis were discouraged among the monks in Norman communities; but, by emphasising the corporate religious body in its secular agreements, an abbot could join the whole community in friendship (or confraternity) with secular people.¹³¹ As we have seen, John condemned monks who decided to defy these communal bonds and live as individual hermits; to John, a monk is not ‘exceptional’:¹³² he is obedient. As Gregory the Great warns in the Moralia, individuality yields pride, and ultimately moves the individual away from his divine aspirations. The Fécamp monks’ interactions with the wider world as a community, then, allowed for the group to make spiritual strides for their neighbours and for themselves, gaining the benefits of caring for others’ souls without the risk of pridefulness and exceptionalism.¹³³

The skilful acquisition of property by the monastery – and the resulting accumulation of land and material goods – was also considered a sign of spiritual prosperity by the monks at Fécamp.¹³⁴ To Rodulfus Glaber, the monastic acquisition of land across Europe was a much-needed sacralisation of the landscape: instead of land being in secular hands, ‘the whole world [was] shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches’.¹³⁵ Norman monks explicitly encouraged laity to donate resources that would support the work of this sacralisation:¹³⁶ the richer the monastery’s resources, the more its monks’ elementary needs became ancillary, the more focused they could be on their spiritual work.¹³⁷ But, more than that, Dominique Iogna-Prat has shown how, for Cluny, secular gifts would regenerate from temporalia into spiritualia (an experience described as a conversio). Peter the Venerable argued that once a castle was given to a religious house, ‘it cease[d]‌ to be a fortress and start[ed] being a place of prayer’.¹³⁸ Like the Eucharist’s transformation from bread to the host, or a monk’s movement from tepidity to warmth in prayer, the surrender involved in a lay person’s gift caused a type of spiritual conversio. Fécamp’s chronicles’ treatment of Richard I and Richard II, discussed above, even reflect this belief: because of their donations, the Norman dukes themselves transformed from secular lords into holy monks. The resulting wealth of the abbey was just a side-effect – the dregs of the transformation process – and a sign of the spiritual success of a monastery in its respective landscape.¹³⁹ Even the wealth was a means for ‘rousing’ people into ‘holy rejoicing’:¹⁴⁰ Dudo of Saint-Quentin (c. 965–1043) describes Richard I’s building and decoration of Fécamp as enabling the monastery to ‘be the mother of wonderful regeneration through the bath of symbolic washing’.¹⁴¹ Just as twelfth-century lords would grant land to allow for a literal road to be built for pilgrims to Fécamp,¹⁴² so, too, did these eleventh-century donations provide a spiritual path for both its monks and the surrounding community. While it is naturally hard to ignore the real political significance of land (or the potential for wealth to cause laziness among its monastic recipients), it is also quite easy to forget that the monks saw their worldly prosperity as evidence of the efficacy of their spiritual project.¹⁴³

Even without the idea of a sacralised landscape, however, material contentment and physical safety were essential to the monks’ ability to perform their spiritual tasks. As quoted above, to Gregory the Great, pastors, ‘in neglecting all care for what pertains to the body, by no means meet the needs of those who are put under them’. John was very invested in the preservation of his monks’ safety, in part to ensure that they did not entangle themselves in the secular world more than necessary. For instance, John gave a viscount of Rouen estates that an earlier viscount had given the abbey, asking him to enrich and improve the estates during his lifetime, and then to entrust them back to Fécamp after his death.¹⁴⁴ In this way, John skilfully tended to the physical health of the lands that fed and funded the Fécamp of the present and of the future, while protecting his monks from distraction with the procurement of their bread. In a letter to Leo IX, whom John addresses as the ultimate pastor of sheep,¹⁴⁵ John advocates for the safety of all the Normans – laymen as well as religious – with whose souls he has been entrusted¹⁴⁶ and who are constantly threatened with violence when they are travelling in Italy ‘even if [they] be on a devout pilgrimage’.¹⁴⁷ The safety of prosperity, material support, and political advocacy enabled obedience and devotion.¹⁴⁸

But John did not only feed and clothe his monks to ensure and protect the more physical and material aspects of his monks’ lives. More often than not, John’s secular-world dealings aimed at allowing his monks to have the freedom to follow the rules and regulations that their spiritual livelihood required – a freedom that, even with all of the material comforts of the world, could not always be guaranteed. For instance, by fighting against William the Conqueror’s violation of monastic abbatial elections,¹⁴⁹ John worked to preserve his monks’ ability to fully follow the RB by electing their abbot without ducal interference.¹⁵⁰ By fighting for Fécamp’s exemption against the interference of bishops, John cleared the way for his monks to be solus Deus colitur as much as possible, keeping them from being distracted by conflicts with bishops or secular lords and allowing them to be more focused on their own prayer.¹⁵¹ As he says to the new abbot of the monastery of Saint-Berthe of Blagny, a dependency of Fécamp, there is a direct link between Christ as heavenly shepherd and abbots as the shepherds of the Christians with whom they are entrusted.¹⁵² Like the martyr Christ, John’s attention to the secular world was a sacrifice for his monks: his political dealings allowed them to have the secure space they needed to best devote themselves to God.

John’s worldly action as enabling further devotional awakening

John himself, it seems, was keenly aware of the sacrifices he was making on behalf of others’ spiritual needs. In a short work called the Lamentation for Lost Solitude (hereafter Lamentation), written later in his life,¹⁵³ John mourns the burdensome duties of the abbacy that prevented him from engaging with contemplation as he should have done:

It shames and sickens me to appear in public assemblies, to enter the city, to speak with the powerful, to look at women, to be concerned with the chattering masses and to endure many such things as the world does.¹⁵⁴

Speaking here in his role as an abbot, John observes that the outside world encroaches on the world of the monastery and robs him of the otherworldly solitude he has prescribed in his own writings. Scholars have understood John’s Lamentation solely as a yearning for the solitude of the cloister, as a sign that the secular duties of an abbot had no bearing on an abbot’s spiritual life.¹⁵⁵ But, if we listen closely to how John mourns the loss of solitude, we see that he builds up the stakes of his grief about its loss expressly so that he can turn (in a conversio, temporalia to spiritualia), exasperated, back towards God. As he explicitly expressed in his letter to Agnes, John actually sees his interactions with the secular world to be a means for genuinely redirecting him with reawakened desire towards a deep hunger for the divine. After pages of mourning about the distractions of the world, John concludes his Lamentation with passages in this vein:

Have mercy on me just as you began [to do], free me from this malignant age and do not allow me, your servant, to be implicated in it on any occasion … from these tumults of instigations and the manifold noises of advances, from this great age which I suffer in the monastery (among this concourse of brothers who daily I offend in many things), and give me that recess of solitude and the spiritual leisure of freedom suited to you, as well as purity of heart and jubilation of mind, so that I may most sweetly merit to love [you] perfectly and to praise [you] worthily all the days of my life.¹⁵⁶

It is this recognition of the ‘malignant age’ with its ‘tumult of instigations’ that makes John long for the time and space to ‘love’ God ‘perfectly’. Without the sufferings of this world, John’s desire for God would not be nearly so fervent. John identifies the need for such adversity in his CT when he credits those tribulations as inspiration for prayer. John says there that ‘placed in the midst of snares … [human beings] easily grow cold in our heavenly longing’. His CT is written in hopes ‘that [the reader] might always have a short and handy word about God with [him], and from the fire of reading it, as many times as [he] grow[s]‌ cool, [he] may be reignited in [God’s] love’. But John notes that one needs to be inspired to seek reignition through adversity, ‘a constant defence, so that, after being roused, we run back to [God], our true and highest good, whenever we slide away’.¹⁵⁷ It is only with a burning heart that the soul is ready to embark on its contemplative task, and one must be reminded of that burning need by hardships. If one contemplated all day, every day, the contemplation would become rote; and what could be more reviving than the opposite of that contemplation, the vita activa?

The tension between opposing ideas (or, in this case, lifestyles) is a popular discourse in the Middle Ages. Dialectics are often proposed to stimulate genuine responses in medieval readers and thinkers.¹⁵⁸ Monastic and lay culture are therefore interdependent – each uses the other to define itself.¹⁵⁹ One effect of John’s pastoral obligation to worldly affairs is that he has the distance and frustration that he needs to effect a genuine desire for the contemplative life; his secular experiences enrich his contemplation. As he asks in the Lamentation: ‘Who was giving me swift feathers and quick wings in order that I may fly back to [God] and rest in you as before?’¹⁶⁰ It is a revolem ad God that John desires, and his worldly affairs enable and foster this contemplative hunger.¹⁶¹

This interdependence of worldly and spiritual duties is why most of the extant medieval manuscript copies of John’s Lamentation are paired with his CT.¹⁶² By bemoaning worldly distractions, the Lamentation serves to rekindle desire for God in its reader, creating an emotional base that is then ripe to engage with John’s longer work. The Lamentation essentially prescribes reading works like the CT as the antidote for such a lamentable predicament: ‘It is pleasing to read repeatedly of your peace and rest and to review frequently the things read in my heart, so that any repose between these whorls is accompanied by your memory.’¹⁶³ John’s shorter Lamentation is filled with images that appear in the CT as well – talk of the heart,¹⁶⁴ internal contrition and connection to God,¹⁶⁵ and images of fountains and rivers of tears flowing from the eyes of the speaker¹⁶⁶ abound. Medieval compilers, therefore, did not simply bind the two texts together because they share an author; the Lamentation served to preview and hook the reader into developing a need for the CT, or to recall and revive in the reader the devotional emotion of the CT, just as John’s secular duties worked in part to rekindle his true emotional desire for God.

Conclusion

It is worth noting, in conclusion, that these observations reveal an important insight for historians of the ‘monastic reform’ of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The historiography of monastic reform is in the midst of a re-examination. Traditional studies have often insisted that a separation between the clerical and secular worlds was an essential facet of Gregorian reform.¹⁶⁷ To scholars of the past, ‘reform monasticism’ also often signified a concern for the proper remission of sins¹⁶⁸ and the proper rule and customs by which to live.¹⁶⁹ In looking at John’s interactions with the larger world, we could cast him in the light of an abbot operating as a ‘reformer’ in what scholars have heretofore considered the Gregorian style: implementing and enforcing the RB (cf. the disobedient monks), opposing lay investiture (cf. his chastisement of William the Conqueror’s appointment of abbots), writing against heresy (cf. Berengar of Tours), asserting autonomy against encroaching bishops (cf. his letter to the bishop of Evreux with Maurilius of Rouen).

But it is important to note that John’s most important reform prerogative as defined by the Confessio theologica – emotional reform of the individual contemplative – is enabled by these secular interactions. Perhaps, then, we can complicate our understanding of monastic rhetoric that seems to desire the eradication of secular influence. The ideal is not a monastic rejection of the secular, but rather a monastic tension with the secular in order to cultivate genuine devotional emotion. Giles Constable has noted that medieval monks and clerics often used ‘rekindle’ (recalescere) or ‘recoup’ (recuperari) or ‘conversion’ (conversione) as reform vocabulary when hoping to limit secular interference.¹⁷⁰ But these are words also employed by John in his descriptions of emotional devotion, as reheating or returning or reconfessing or reprofessing love of God, and such secular involvement was essential to the achievement of that desired emotional devotion. We may be making it harder to understand monastic reform in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by insisting that monks desired seclusion and autonomy and by neglecting the ways that the monastery’s involvement in the world was actually useful to its emotional, interior, devotional reform goals.¹⁷¹ Right contemplation and true connection with God did not require a retreat to the ‘desert’, as later Cistercians might write¹⁷² – for John and his monastic contemporaries, the world outside the monastery could be used to the benefit of such heartfelt prayer.

John of Fécamp has by and large been studied by historians of spirituality. Showing up in works by scholars like Jean Leclercq, Thomas Bestul, Rachel Fulton, Duncan Robertson, and Bernard McGinn, John’s Confessio theologica and Lamentation have been interpreted for their spiritual desires in isolation from the wider responsibilities of monastic life. But when reinserted into the wider context of John’s life and duties, the CT and Lamentation are seen in a more medieval light: a genuine commitment to contemplation that required a little worldly knowledge for practical purposes, certainly, but also in order to rekindle a true desire for God. John’s whole CT is about the difficulties of maintaining the right emotional awareness for interior contemplation. By exploring his commitments to the world outside of his monastery, we can truly appreciate how he used those difficulties and distractions to achieve his deepest desire: an affective, prayerful focus on God.

Notes

1Italics my emphasis. ‘Sed quia oportet nos et recte credere et bene vivere (unum enim sine altero nihil perfectionis habet), ideo’ (CT, p. 121).

2See Chapter 2. A copy of Pastoral Care was in Fécamp’s library in John’s time; now lost, the manuscript was no. 35 on the monastery’s eleventh-century library list (Branch, ‘Inventories’).

3Pastoral Care was read more often by monks than by bishops in the eleventh century, see Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 68. The pastoral role of the abbot dated as far back as Basil of Caesarea at least; see Dilley, Monasteries and the Care of Souls, pp. 227–32.

4Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), The Book of Pastoral Rule and Selected Epistles of Gregory the Great, trans. James Barmby (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1895), Part II, ch. 7; as cited by Neslihan Şenocak in Care of Souls in Medieval Italy, 600–1300 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

5In his CT, John actively describes Christ in this way: ‘You give me salvation and rest of body and soul’ (‘Das mihi salutem et quietem corporis et animae’), CT, p. 130. One can imagine, then, that the abbot, in the footsteps of Christ, would need to care for both the body and soul of his monks.

6As quoted in Steven Vanderputten, ‘The Mind as Cell and the Body as Cloister: Abbatial Leadership and the Issue of Stability in the Early Eleventh Century’, Innovationen durch Deuten und Gestalten: Klöster im Mittelalter zwischen Jenseits und Welt (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014), p. 109. See also Jestice, Wayward Monks, pp. 190–1.

7Jean-Hervé Foulon discusses the actions of the abbots of Bec as ‘pastoral’ in ‘Les investitures abbatiales en Normandie: Quelques réflexions autour du cas de l’abbaye Bec-Hellouin’, Anglo-Norman Studies 35 (2012), 204–5.

8Musset, ‘La vie économique de l’abbaye de Fécamp’.

9On the separation between political and religious duties, see, for instance, John Nightingale, Monasteries and Patrons in the Gorze Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 4, 14–15, 30–8; Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism, pp. 189–91, 316, 350, 361; Jean Truax, Aelred the Peacemaker: The Public Life of a Cistercian Abbot (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2017), pp. 2–3; License, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, pp. 7–8; Constable, ‘The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life’, p. 236; Romig, Be a Perfect Man, pp. 30, 133–4, 149–51, 154; Vanommeslaeghe, ‘Wandering Abbots’, pp. 6, 7, 22–3.

10This idea contrasts with the idealised picture painted by George Duby in The Three Orders: Feudal Society Reimagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 179 and Alexis Wilkin, ‘Communautés bénédictines et environnement économique IXe–XIIe siècles. Réflexions sur les tendances historiographiques de l’analyse du temporel monastique’, in Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns (eds), Ecclesia in Medio Nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages (Leuven: Leuven University Press), pp. 101–50.

11John Howe, Church Reform and Social Change in Eleventh-Century Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 90; Truax, Aelred the Peacemaker, p. 231. See also RB 7: 99–115.

12Van Engen, ‘The “Crisis of Coenobitism” Reconsidered’, pp. 269–304.

13More often than not, scholars limit their analyses of the spiritual use of worldly engagement to the idea that a conscientious abbot would live his life according to religious principles, therefore supporting charity in the world or caring for the poor (see, for instance, Truax, Aelred the Peacemaker, pp. 33, 138). There are certain exceptions. Romig’s Be a Perfect Man, especially his discussion of Gregory the Great on pp. 16–30, accounts for less distinction between spiritual and worldly behaviour. On p. 3 of Constance B. Bouchard, Holy Entrepreneurs: Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), Bouchard argues against the idea that ‘spirituality and economics are and were antithetical’. John Van Engen asserts that Rupert of Deutz believed that ‘those who soar aloft in contemplation can expect to have their material needs provided’, in Rupert of Deutz (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), p. 302. Still, with the exception of Romig, these authors do not dwell on how economic and worldly activity may have heightened spiritual practice, instead simply noting how providing for worldly needs enabled and sustained monastic livelihoods.

14The ‘stone’ here refers to the pillow that gave way to Jacob’s revelatory dreams. As quoted by Choy, Intercessory Prayer, p. 186. The quotation is from Mor 5.55.

15Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, pp. 477–9. Lecouteux notes only five such lavish manuscripts that survive from Fécamp: a copy of the Moralia in Job, now lost; Augustine’s De Trinitate (important perhaps because Fécamp was dedicated to the Trinity); a Gospel book; and a collection of Ambrose’s writings.

16See Chapter 2.

17Jehangir Malegam, The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 291.

18Choy, Intercessory Prayer, p. 141.

19J.N. Hilgarth, ‘L’influence de la Cité de Dieu de saint Augustin au Haut Moyen Âge’, Sacris Erudiri: A Journal of Late Antique and Medieval Christianity 28 (1985), 7–8.

20Note that these annotations were copied from Mont Saint-Michel’s copy of De civitate dei; Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, pp. 477–8.

21The notes on fol. 150v highlight the last line of City of God 15.7: ‘But Cain received that counsel of God in the spirit of one who did not wish to amend. In fact, the vice of envy grew stronger in him; and, having entrapped his brother, he slew him. Such was the founder of the earthly city. He was also a figure of the Jews who slew Christ the Shepherd (pastor) of the flock of men, prefigured by Abel the shepherd (pastor) of sheep.’

22Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe notes that Abraham and Melchisedech are also good examples of obedience to monastic readers in Stealing Obedience, p. 29. A book of sermons from Fécamp, Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 989, also has a sermon with an extensive encomium to Melchisedech (starting on fol. 82v), where his example is discussed as a paradigm of obedience. The prominence of Melchisedech is seen in several other Fécamp manuscripts; he is highlighted in Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 564, ms. lat. 989, ms. lat. 2055, and ms. lat. 2628; and in Rouen, BM, ms. 546 (A301), ms. 477 (A191), ms. 532 (A395), ms. 553 (A452).

23De civitate dei 16.22: ‘He was then openly blessed by Melchisedech, who was of God most high, about whom many and great things are written in the epistle which is inscribed to the Hebrews … For then first appeared the sacrifice which is now offered to God by Christians in the whole wide world, and that is fulfilled which long after the event was said by the prophet to Christ, who was yet to come in the flesh, “You are a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedech” – that is to say, not after the order of Aaron, for that order was to be taken away when the things shone forth which were intimated beforehand by these shadows.’

24An abbot’s spiritual care of the souls is also discussed by Brian Patrick McGuire, ‘Taking Responsibility: Medieval Cistercian Abbots as Their Brothers’ Keepers’, Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses 39 (1988), 249–68.

25Melchisedech also appears in the sixth-century mosaic in San Vitale in Ravenna (albeit not with Abraham and Isaac). Melchisedech was associated with Abraham and Abel in the eleventh century as well, such as in a portable altar from Fulda, Germany, in the Musée National du Moyen Âge (i.e. Musée Cluny) in Paris; see Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 273.

26Jestice, Wayward Monks, pp. 76–86, 133, 141, 151–60, 216; Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, p. 235; Giles Constable, ‘Monasteries, Rural Churches, and the Cura animarum’, in Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto Medieoevo (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1982), pp. 367, 373; Kathleen G. Cushing, Reform and Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 34, 95, 131–2.

27Glaber’s Life of William of Volpiano in Rodulfi Glabri opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 280–1, ch. 10: ‘patrem atque pastorem’; Jestice, Wayward Monks, pp. 141, 174–8, 186–9; Mark Hagger, Norman Rule in Normandy, 911–1144 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017), p. 213.

28‘For when the care of the souls is placed upon an abbot by a bishop, the pastoral care of the sheep of Christ handed over by him is entirely entrusted to [the abbot]. For unless the bishop should be invited by the abbot for the sake of any sort of business, the bishop is determined to have no right in [the abbot’s] monastery; and if, however, anyone attempts to oppose these things which we are asserting, we set forth to him the Rule of St Benedict.’ (‘Quando enim abbati cura animarum imponitur ab episcopo, pastoralitas ovium Christi sibi traditarum ei commendatur omnimodo. Nisi enim ab abbate episcopus invitetur pro qualicumque negotio, nullum jus episcopus habere decernitur in eius monasterio; si autem contra haec quae dicimus aliquis repugnare tentaverit, regulam sancti benedicti sibi proponimus.’) Latin taken from the Thesaurus novus anecdotorum: complectens regum ac principum (Paris: Gregg, 1717), vol. I, pp. 206–7. Translation my own.

29CT, p. 121: ‘How have you loved us, O good shepherd (pastor)! How much have you cherished us, O holy creator, who also did not spare your own Son, but handed him over to the wicked for us? That one, having subjected himself to you unto death, even death on a cross, bore the bond of our sins and, fixing it to the cross, crucified sin and death … For us he is both, victor and victim, and for you he is victor because the victim. For you he is both priest and sacrifice, and therefore for you he is priest because of his sacrifice.’ (‘Quomodo nos amasti, pastor bone? Quantum nos dilexisti, pie conditor, qui etiam proprio Filio tuo non pepercisti, sed pro nobis impiis tradidisti illum? Subditus ille tibi usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis, tulit chirographum peccatorum nostrorum et affigens illud cruci, peccatum crucifixit et mortem … Pro nobis tibi victor et victima, et ideo victor quia victima. Pro nobis tibi sacerdos et sacrificium, et ideo sacerdos quia sacrificium.’) Note that, as in the mosaics, Christ is priest and victor, victim, sufferer and sacrifice.

30‘ab originalibus vinculis expedistit et inter adoptionis filios aggregasti … Gratias tibi ago qui me a vano huius mundi consortio separasti et das mihi servorum tuorum caritate et societate perfrui: das mihi salutem et quietem corporis et animae et opportunam ad tuum sanctum servilium vacationem, liberas me a vanissimis istius saeculi implicationibus ad profectum animae meae propter solam misericordiam tuam’ (CT, p. 130).

31RB, ch. 2.

32Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 194. This parallel between pastor-abbots and Christ is also firmly made by Aelred of Rievaulx in his Pastoral Prayer; Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘The Pastoral Prayer’, in Treatises and Pastoral Prayer, trans. R. Penelope Lawson (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1971), pp. 103–18.

33Charles M. Radding and Francis Newton, Theology, Rhetoric, and Politics in the Eucharistic Controversy, 1078–1079: Alberic of Monte Cassino against Berengar of Tours (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 15; Jean de Montclos, Lanfranc et Bérenger: La controverse eucharistique du XIe siècle (Leuven: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1971), pp. 448–51.

34Van Houts, ‘Qui étaient les Normands?’, p. 144. The letter from Leo IX summoning John is preserved in PL 143, col. 647B, letter 38.

35This treatise may have been written by someone on Lanfranc’s behalf; see Toivo J. Holopainen, “‘Lanfranc of Bec” and Berengar of Tours’, Anglo-Norman Studies 34 (2012), 105–22.

36Gazeau, p. 372. Durandus’s work is best preserved in a Fécamp manuscript from the late eleventh century, Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 2720; see PL 149, cols 1418–21. On Durandus as cross-bearer, see Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, trans. Thomas Forester (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), ch. II, line 298.

37Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels, pp. 128–30; Toivo J. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology in the Eleventh Century (New York: E.J. Brill, 1996), p. 116; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 283; Leclercq and Bonnes, Un maître, pp. 31, 72–6. In ‘Étude comparée’, Serralda has claimed that the Confessio fidei was not written by John. Warren Pezé makes a more convincing argument that large parts of the Confessio fidei might pre-date John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica and might have served as inspiration to John in the way that Augustine’s Confessions also did (in ‘Aux origines’).

38Martineau, ‘Envisioning Heaven’, p. 121.

39See Confessio fidei, PL 101, col. 1087.

40See Confessio fidei, PL 101, col. 1088.

41Piroska Nagy, ‘Larmes et eucharistie. Formes du sacrifice en Occident au moyen âge central’, in Nicole Bériou, Béatrice Caseau, and Dominique Rigaux (eds), Pratiques de l’eucharistie (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 2005), pp. 1073–109.

42Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 140.

43Hagger, Norman Rule in Normandy, p. 209.

44Straw, Gregory the Great, p. 105. Scholars have located the Eucharist’s connection to the larger medieval narrative of affective piety some years after John’s death, with Baldwin of Ford (c. 1125–90); see Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, p. 192. John’s passionate defence of the Eucharist within his early affective text contradicts that assumption.

45‘Panis sancte, panis vive, panis pulcher, panis munde qui descendisti de caelo et das vitam mundo, veni in cor meum et munda me ab omni inquinamento carnis et Spiritus, intra in animam meam, et sanctifica me interius et exterius’ (Confessio fidei as quoted by Cottier, Anima mea, p. 110). This quotation is not found in the CT, but is often excerpted as the so-called Summe sacerdos prayer, contained in Metz, Mediathèque de Metz, ms. 245. For more on the medieval life of this prayer, see Cottier, Anima mea, pp. 101–11; Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels, pp. 101–25.

46‘Magnum quippe et ineffabile constat esse sacramentum, in quo tua caro in veritate editur, et sanguis tuus in veritate bibitur. O pauendum reverendumque mysterium, ad cuius intuendam altitudinem humanus reverberatur intuitus. Per ipsum sacrosanctum et vivificum mysterium corporis et sanguinis tui … resplende mihi, accende me, illumina et sanctifica vas tuum, de malitia evacua, imple de gratia et plenum conserva, ut ad salutem animae meae manducem cibum carnis tuae: quaetenus manducando te, vivam de te, vadam per te, perveniam ad te, repausem in te. Qui enim manducat te, ipse vivit propter te’ (CT, pp. 173–4).

47See Confessio fidei, PL 101, col. 1087B.

48Cf. Chapter 1.

49‘dulcis cibus cordis mei’ (CT, p. 135).

50Cf. Chapter 1.

51Nagy, ‘Larmes et eucharistie’.

52Michal Kobialka, This is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 106–7, 115.

53Noreen Hunt, Cluny under Saint Hugh, 1049–1109 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), pp. 111–12.

54De Montclos, Bérenger et Lanfranc, pp. 91–4.

55Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, ‘The Papacy and the Berengarian Controversy’, in Peter Felix Ganz, Robert Burchard Huygens, and Friedrich Niewöhner (eds), Auctoritas und Ratio: Studien zu Berengar von Tours (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990), pp. 135, 138; Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux’, I, pp. 463, 543, 546.

56See n. 45 above.

57Note that John was simultaneously abbot of Fécamp and of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon during these years.

58My attribution here comes in part from provenance, and in part from an examination of script. In terms of provenance, the manuscript is part of Jean Bouhier III’s collection at the École de Médicine in Montpellier, and Bouhier’s manuscripts were for the most part from upper Champagne and lower Burgundy, where Saint-Bénigne de Dijon was located; several of Bouhier’s manuscripts are even from Saint-Bénigne itself. The manuscript’s script also compares with that of two manuscripts confirmed to be from Saint-Bénigne, Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 13370 and Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier, H159. Note that another manuscript from Saint-Bénigne, Troyes, BM, ms. 2142, also contains in fols 180v–189r the first nine pages of the text of John’s Confessio fidei. For more on this Troyes manuscript, see Gazeau, Guillaume de Volpiano, pp. 40–1.

59Glastonbury’s copy is in a catalogue of the thirteenth century; see J.P. Carley R. Sharpe, R.M. Thomson, and A.G. Watson (eds), English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues (London: British Library, 1996), p. 198. The abbot of Glastonbury was uncle to Henry Sully, abbot of Fécamp in the twelfth century, and it is said that both Glastonbury and Fécamp had blood relics in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries because they were so closely linked (see Robert Jaffray, ‘Glastonbury and Fécamp’, in John Matthews (ed.), Sources of the Grail (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996), pp. 347–55; and Chapter 5).

60See Chapter 1.

61Sweeney, Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word, p. 3.

62Arne-Dannenberg, ‘Charity and Law’, pp. 13, 18–19, 23.

63See Chapter 2; Bougaud and Garnier, Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, pp. 156–60.

64See Chapter 1.

65For John’s entry in the Saint-Arnoul de Metz necrology, see M. Müller, Am Schnittpunkt von Stadt und Land. Die Benediktinerabtei St. Arnulf zu Metz im hohen und späten Mittelalter (Trier: Kliomedia, 1993), p. 22. For his entry in the necrologies of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, Saint-Germain des Prés, Saint-Faron de Meaux, and Mont Saint-Michel, see Stéphane Lecouteux, ‘Deux fragments d’un nécrologe de la Trinité de Fécamp (XIe–XIIe siècles). Étude et édition critique d’un document mémoriel exceptionnel’, Tabularia 16 (2016), 6–7.

66See John’s letter to Abbot Vital of Bernay (PL 147, col. 464D) or to the new abbot at Saint-Berthe de Blangy (PL 147, cols 474D–475C).

67See Chapter 3.

68See CT manuscript copies Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088 and Zwettl, ms. 164. Niskanen notes that introductory or dedicatory letters were often copied into medieval editions from the original manuscript, likely preserved either as a kind of preface or because they had import for the monastery copying the larger work; see Samu Niskanen, The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), p. 63.

69Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 195.

70CT, p. 204; Jean Leclercq, Otia monastica: Études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au moyen âge (Rome: Orbis Catholicus, 1963), pp. 96–102.

71See Chapter 3.

72CT, p. 199. Note that Maiolus’s name was rubbed out in Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088; Leclercq speculates that another name – perhaps William of Volpiano’s or that of another abbot more closely connected to the recipient of ms. lat. 3088 – might have been written there to better customise John’s point for the manuscript’s audience.

73CT, p. 204.

74Medieval letters, after all, were not written solely for the eyes of the addressed recipient (Niskanen, The Letter Collections, p. 63).

75‘Be silent, dogs of Scylla; with my ears stopped, I shall transcend the obstreperous rage of your lacerations. In your assemblies, as they say, this letter resounds from the canine nostril: “When you acknowledge that it is proper for a monk of the monastic religion to be silent, why do you then speak to women? Where do you get the authority to sit in a master’s chair and without blushing teach those women with writings?’” (CT, pp. 211–17; translation from Joan Ferrante’s Epistolae project: https://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/129.html).

76‘Be quiet, wretches. You say these things because you are blind, and leaders of the blind. Go back, you evaders, to your heart and diligently consider where you lie down shamefully. If only your malicious mind would come to its senses and strive somewhat to imitate the pious works of honourable women’ (CT, pp. 211–17).

77CT, pp. 211–17.

78Olson, ‘Did Medieval English Women Read Augustine’s Confessiones?’, p. 84.

79Agnes appointed John abbot of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon in 1052 (till 1054), a contact that likely precipitated this correspondence; Wilmart, ‘Deux préfaces spirituelles’, p. 35.

80Albrecht Diem, ‘The Gender of the Religious: Wo/Men and the Invention of Monasticism’, in Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 432–46.

81This is the only female house in the Norman monastic network where John is also commemorated in the necrology; Véronique Gazeau, ‘Femmes en religion, personnes d’authorité: Les abbesses normandes (XIe–XIIe siècles)’, Anglo-Norman Studies 35 (2012), 30.

82For instance, the twelfth-century Zwettl ms. 164 circulates with the letter to the Empress Agnes.

83McNamer, Affective Meditation, pp. 58–85.

84McNamer, Affective Meditation, p. 73. Others also have credited women with introducing monastic piety to wider lay culture: Richard Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 37; S.G. Bell, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’, in J.M. Bennett (ed.), Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 136; Kathleen Quirk, ‘Men, Women, and Miracles in Normandy, 1050–1150’, in Elisabeth van Houts (ed.), Medieval Memories: Men, Women, and the Past: 700–1300 (New York: Longman, 2001), pp. 53–71.

85‘I learned from friends that you also desire and request what I have uttered about the divine contemplation and love of Christ and about that supernal Jerusalem, the mother of all the faithful’ (CT, 211–17); unfortunately, it seems that John’s CT edition for Agnes has not survived. In the letter, John promises to send Agnes a copy of excerpted writings from the Fathers (likely akin to those at the beginning of BnF, ms. lat. 13593, see Mancia, ‘Praying with an Eleventh-Century Manuscript’) and a sermon about the life and customs of virgins along with a copy of his CT. While the letter to Agnes does circulate with other copies of John’s Libellus recension (cf. Chapter 1), no manuscript circulates with a sermon about the life and customs of virgins.

86‘I ask your love that if you find any who want to have this little book, admonish them to transcribe it diligenty and reread it frequently, so that they allow nothing to be added or subtracted or changed in it. We say this because of the carelessness of scribes, who not only corrupt the truth but also add lies to lies’ (CT, 211–17).

87Compare John with Augustine, William of St. Thierry (1085–1148), Adam of Dryburgh (1140–1212), Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (b. c. 1040), Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–67), and Anselm of Canterbury, who also thought to share their devotional practices with women and men alike. Olson, ‘Did Medieval English Women Read Augustine’s Confessiones?’, pp. 72–3.

88The nun ‘do[es] not allow [her] mind to be darkened by carnal desires and earthly longings’ (‘mentes suas carnalibus desideriis et terrenis concupiscentiis obtenebrari non sinunt’). She also ‘avoids outward business as much as she is able, provided obedience be preserved’ (‘Forinseca negotia quantum valet, salva oboedientia, devitat’) (CT, p. 206).

89‘Sacris vigiliis et psalmodiae, non somnolenta sed intenta, studet interesse’ (CT, p. 206).

90‘Solitudinem in oratione, quantum licet, pro deliciis habet’ (CT, p. 206).

91‘Dulce est ei frequentius flere’ (CT, p. 206).

92‘Nisi exteriorum desideria a se repellat, interna non penetrat, quia tanto subtilius invisibilia conspicit, quanto perfectius visibilia contemnit’ (CT, p. 206).

93‘Tunc mitis lector ipso cordis palato sapit quid dulcendinis intus lateat’ (CT, p. 206).

94‘Optimam partem semper, quantum licet sibi, cum vera Maria eligit’ (CT, p. 206).

95Fiona Griffiths has shown that men’s pastoral care of women was often viewed by the men themselves as the one of the tools for their own redemption: Fiona Griffiths, ‘Men’s Duty to Provide for Women’s Needs: Abelard, Heloise, and Their Negotiation of the Cura monialium’, Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004), 1–24.

96‘Iustum namque est ut qui in actuali vita bene conversatus est contemplationis pennas assumat’ (CT, p. 206).

97Cf. Chapter 1 on John’s Confessio theologica’s notions of spiritual warming.

98‘Utinam ille in me igniculus foret, qui vaporatae menti aliquid incrementi adolere posset’ (CT, pp. 213–14).

99Italics my emphasis. ‘Praeclarum sanctae viduitatis exemplar, accipe, quaeso, pervigili mente illud quod expetis meae per Christi gratiam deflorationis opusculum’ (CT, p. 214).

100Potts, Monastic Revival and Regional Identity, p. 42.

101This is the position of, for instance, Isabelle Rosé, who believes tenth-century abbots were primarily interested in gaining and cultivating an ‘aristocratic lordship’, in ‘Circulation abbatiale et pouvoir monastique de l’époque carolingienne au premier âge féodal (IXe–XIe siècles)’, in Des sociétés en mouvement. Migrations et mobilité au moyen âge. XLe Congrès de la SHMESP (Nice, 4–7 juin 2009) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), pp. 260–6. Such duplicity seems antithetical to the monastic project of sincere intercessory prayer; see Giles Constable, ‘The Concern for Sincerity and Understanding in Liturgical Prayer, Especially in the Twelfth Century’, in Irene Vaslef and Helmut Buschhausen (eds), Classica et Mediaevalia: Studies in Honor of Joseph Szöverffy (Washington, DC: Classical Folia, 1986), pp. 17–30.

102Searle, Predatory Kinship.

103Brooke, ‘Princes and Kings as Patrons of Monasteries’.

104Lucile Tran-Duc, ‘Le culte des saints dans la Normandie médiévale (IXe–XIIe siècle). Enjeux de pouvoir dans les établissements bénédictins du diocèse de Rouen’ (PhD dissertation, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, 2015).

105After the Conquest, William the Conqueror’s primary residence was in Caen, but the palace was still often occupied by ducal associates if not the dukes themselves. Richard I, founder of the monastery of Fécamp, could see the monastic buildings from the entrance to his palace: ‘While [Richard I] was standing on the raised platform at the entrance to his own house, he noticed that the house itself was taller and more capacious than the basilica dedicated in honour of the deific Trinity. He summoned a stonemason who was skilled in the art of architecture, and said to him: “It is right and fitting that the house of God and prayer should be roofed superlatively well, with particular beauty and appropriate height, to be super-eminent over all the buildings of the city”’ (Dudo of Saint-Quentin, History of the Normans, trans. Eric Christiansen (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1998), Book 4, lines 290–1, pp. 165–6). Once the dukes abandoned the palace, it became a palais de Dieu, with the abbey assuming some of the buildings, according to Renoux, Du palais ducale.

106Some Fécamp monks could not stand the proximity: an English monk named Clement left Fécamp for Saint-Bénigne because his contemplative peace was constantly being disturbed by visitors; Bates, Normandy before 1066, p. 220.

107Cassandra Potts. ‘The Early Norman Charters: A New Perspective on an Old Debate’, in Carola Hicks (ed.), England in the Eleventh Century: Proceedings of the 1990 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1992), pp. 33–4.

108Richard II’s wife Judith is buried at Bernay, a dependency of Fécamp. Lucien Musset, ‘Sepulutres des souverains normands: Un aspect de l’idéologie du pouvoir’, in Jean-Michel Bouvris and Jean-Marie Maillefer (eds), Autour du pouvoir ducal normand, Xe–XIIe siècles (Caen: Centre d’études normandes, 1985), p. 30. Musset asserts that Richard III (c. 997–1027) and Robert the Magnificent (1000–35) would have been buried at Fécamp as well, had they not both died under special circumstances requiring burial elsewhere (Richard III was mysteriously murdered near Caen, and Robert died while returning from Jerusalem). See also B. Golding, ‘Anglo-Norman Knightly Burials’, in C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey (eds), The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1986), pp. 35–48.

109Chadd I, pp. 212–13. Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, p. 235.

110See, for instance, John’s acceptance of a priest named Mainard into the community of Fécamp in exchange for all of his goods after his death; see Bloche, ‘Le chartrier’, charter no. 49, p. 352.

111In charters, the Norman dukes explain that they give donations expecting salvation from God and prayers and intercession on their behalf (see, for example, Faur nos. 4, 9, 31, 34) or because the donations are good works required of all Christians (see Faur nos. 9, 25, 86). Additionally, Richard II demonstrated the spiritual motivations behind his gift-giving by making occasional gifts that had no potential for political implications or worldly results at all, which were instead simply gifts to ensure the benefit of his soul. For instance, Cassandra Potts describes an unpublished document in the Musée de la Bénédictine de Fécamp where Richard asks the monks to feed one poor man in his name in return for exemption of tolls on the ships of the abbey. Richard does not gain anything from exempting the monks of Fécamp from tolls except their favour and his own salvation, and such a donation shows a true commitment on Richard’s part to giving in order to achieve heavenly rewards (Potts, Monastic Revival and Regional Identity, p. 49.) See also C. Harper-Bill, ‘The Piety of the Anglo-Norman Knightly Class’, Anglo-Norman Studies 2 (1979), 66–7; Julie Ann Potter, ‘The Friendship Network of the Abbey of Le Bec-Hellouin in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2014), pp. 68, 241–68.

112David Ganz, ‘Giving to God in the Mass: The Experience of the Offertory’, in Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (eds), The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 31.

113The most infamous debate on this subject took place between Richard Southern and Sally Vaughn in the 1990s. Vaughn, in Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), challenged Southern’s interpretation of Anselm as a good spiritual leader (and bad administrator) in Saint Anselm and His Biographer. Southern then replied to her in ‘Sally Vaughn’s Anselm: An Examination of the Foundations’, Albion 20 (1988), 181–204 and also in Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Vaughn persisted, representing her views of Anselm again in ‘Anselm: Saint and Statesman’, Albion 20 (1988), 205–20; in ‘Anselm of Bec’, p. 111; and in Archbishop Anselm, 1093–1109: Bec Missionary, Canterbury Primate, Patriarch of Another World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).

114Potter, The Friendship Network, pp. 89–91. See also Anselm of Canterbury, The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, trans. Walter Fröhlich (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), letters 3 and 45.

115Stéphane Lecouteux, ‘Associations de prières et confraternités spirituelles: Des unions éphémères ou pérennes? Enquête autour du réseau de confraternité de l’abbaye de la Trinité de Fécamp (XIe–XVe siècle)’, in Nicole Lemaitre (ed.), Réseaux religieux et spirituels: Du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: CTHS, 2016), pp. 75–92; Chadd I, pp. 692–5.

116Carolyn Malone discusses this when characterising the reform of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, ‘Saint-Bénigne in Dijon as Exemplum of Rodulf Glaber’s Metaphoric “White Mantle”’, in Nigel Hiscock (ed.), The White Mantle of Churches: Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millennium (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 160–79.

117Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, pp. 185–7.

118Richard Landes, ‘The White Mantle of Churches, Millennial Dynamics, and the Written and Architectural Record’, in Nigel Hiscock (ed.), The White Mantle of Churches: Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millennium (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 249–64.

119William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, ed. and trans. Elisabeth van Houts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 130–5. The above excerpt is from William of Jumièges’s original text from 1050.

120Gesta Normannorum Ducum, pp. 38–41. The excerpt is from William of Jumièges’s original text from 1050.

121Glaber, p. 37.

122William the Conqueror also spent Easter at Fécamp in 1067, 1075, and 1083; see H.W.C. Davis and R.J. Whitwell (eds), Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum (Oxford, 1913), pp. xxi–xxii. In 1066, he likely celebrated his triumphant Conquest, especially since he had launched his ships bound for England from Fécamp; see van Houts, ‘The Ship List of William the Conqueror’, pp. 159–83. William issued several ducal charters from those meetings (including Faur no. 230); see Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Political Relations between Normandy and England before 1066 According to the Gesta Normannorum Ducum’, in Raymonde Foreville (ed.), Les mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XIe–XIIe siècles (Paris: CNRS, 1984), pp. 85–97.

123From the Brevis relatio, in Chronology, Conquest, and Conflict in Medieval England. Camden Miscellany 34 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 46. Excerpt and translation from Potts, Monastic Revival and Regional Identity, p. 40. This story also shows up in Robert of Torigini’s revision of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum, pp. 288–9.

124The translation of the dukes’ bones was celebrated in the liturgy of Fécamp in the years to come; Chadd I, fols 196v–199r. Miracles were even recorded as having happened at the tombs of the dukes Richard I and Richard II, and the ducal tombs became a popular stop for pilgrims visiting the blood relic (see Chapter 5).

125See Bloche, ‘Le chartrier’, charter no. 49, p. 352. For the location of Saint-Leger, see Map 2.

126See Bloche, ‘Le chartrier’, charter no. 51, p. 355. Constable discusses monks occasionally serving such pastoral needs in Constable, ‘Monasteries, Rural Churches, and the Cura animarum’, p. 351. Constable notes on p. 364 that at William of Volpiano’s monastery at Fruttuaria, 70 per cent of the monks were ordained and 30 per cent were not.

127See Bloche, ‘Le chartrier’, charter no. 52, p. 356.

128Bates, Normandy before 1066, p. 193. An eleventh-century charter mentions a priest who was trained at the Fécamp school, Faur no. 29; Rouen, Archives départementales de Seine-Maritime, 7H, 2143. This is the lone mention of a school at Fécamp in the charter evidence; the remaining proof is from the chronicles of the abbey. For monks’ duties at the comparative example schools at Bec and (perhaps) Caen, see Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop (New York: Oxford, 2003), pp. 19–22; Kuhl, ‘Education and Schooling at Le Bec’; David S.Spear, ‘The School of Caen Revisited’, Haskins Society Journal 4 (1992), 55–66; and Mia Münster-Swendsen, ‘Regimens of Schooling’, in R.J. Hexter and D. Townsend (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 403–22.

129Faur nos. 70, 117. The Council of Rouen (1072), for instance, made it mandatory for monasteries to observe the RB (Lackner, The Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux, pp. 119–23) – this is the kind of ‘reform’ that the monks were providing.

130Dom Hubert Dauphin, Le bienheureux Richard, abbé de Saint-Vanne de Verdun (Leuven: Peeters, 1946), pp. 56–7.

131Potter, The Friendship Network, p. 89. See also Anselm’s letter 20 as proof of this transference of amicitia to the corporate body. On the corporate body shielding its monks from the sin of uniqueness or personal wealth, see Bouchard, Holy Entrepreneurs, p. 189; Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, pp. 302–3, 322.

132See Chapter 3.

133This idea of group versus individual is also shared by Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 82–109.

134John Nightingale has spoken about this for Gorze, another of William of Volpaino’s monasteries, in Nightingale, Gorze Reform, p. 235.

135Glaber, pp. 100–5.

136Sheila Bonde, Clark Maines, and Alba Serino, ‘Mastering the Landscape: A Comparative Analysis of Monastic Domain Formation’, conference paper, Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting, Knoxville, TN, April 2013; Potter, The Friendship Network, p. 88; Vaughn, Archbishop Anselm, 1093–1109, p. 29.

137Anne Müller, ‘Presenting Identity in the Cloister: Remarks on Benedictine and Mendicant Concepts of Space’, in Anne Müller and Karen Stöber (eds), Self-Representation of Medieval Religious Communities: The British Isles in Context (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2009), p. 169.

138Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 215–16.

139Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, p. 30. Emphyteotic contracts, which were particularly popular among Fécamp’s land transactions, could even have been seen as rental behaviour that was more spiritually advantageous than economically savvy: Jean-Claude Hélas sees these transactions as more beneficial to the lessee than to the landlord (i.e. than to Fécamp), and as the establishment of communal wealth. Such contracts, then, would have been made in opposition to the monastery’s own economic interests, and would have allowed the monastery to reassert itself as a community (rather than a collection of sinful individuals), thereby prioritising spiritual considerations over economic ones. See Jean-Claude Hélas, ‘Emphyteusis Tenure: Its Role in the Economy and in the Rural Society of Eastern Languedoc’, in Kathryn L. Reyerson and J. Drendel (eds), Urban and Rural Communities in Medieval France: Provence and Languedoc, 1000–1500 (Leuven: Brill, 1998), pp. 193–208, especially 206.

140Dudo of Saint-Quentin, History of the Normans, Book 4, line 220, p. 96.

141Dudo of Saint-Quentin, History of the Normans, Book 4, lines 290–1, pp. 165–6.

142Leroux De Lincy, L’abbaye de Fécamp, p. 214; Soulignac, Fécamp et sa campagne, p. 130.

143A masterful analysis of how monks saw their material property as an allegory for their spiritual purpose is Peter Fergusson, ‘Canterbury Cathedral Priory’s Bath House and Fish Pond’, Anglo-Norman Studies 37 (2014), 115–30.

144Potter, The Friendship Network, pp. 54–5.

145PL 143, col. 797C.

146PL 143, col. 799A.

147PL 143, col. 798C.

148O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, p. 26.

149PL 147, cols 463C–464D, 476A–476C. In one letter to William, John claims to only moleste acciperem (to accept, in a vexed manner) and accuses William of acting sine licentia nostra (without the rightful consent of the abbot).

150Barbara Rosenwien, Thomas Head, and Sharon Farmer, ‘Monks and Their Enemies: A Comparative Approach’, Speculum 66.4 (1991), 792; Foulon, ‘Les investitures abbatiales en Normandie’, p. 191.

151The claim that Fécamp had been granted an exemption in 1006 by Duke Richard II seems to have been invented by the abbey sometime between the 1050s and 1080s. On Fécamp’s assertions about exemption in the monastery’s chronicles and elsewhere, see Mathieu Arnoux, ‘Les premières chroniques de Fécamp: De l’hagiographie à l’histoire’, in Pierre Boulet and François Neveux (eds), Les saints dans le Normandie médiévale (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 1996), pp. 71–82, and Mathieu Arnoux ‘La fortune du Libellus de revelatione, edificatione, et auctoritate Fiscannensis monsterii’, Revue d’histoire des textes 21 (1991), 135–58; Pohl and Vanderputten, ‘Fécamp, Cluny, and the Invention of Traditions’.

152PL 147, cols 475A–475B.

153CT, p. 35; Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels, p. 128, n. 2.

154‘Pudet me ac piget publicis conventibus repraesentari, urbem ingredi, potentes alloqui, feminas intueri, verbosae multitudini interesse et talia multa pati qualia mundus agit’ (CT, p. 195).

155Jestice, Wayward Monks, pp. 66–7; Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991), p. 130; C.H. Laurence, Medieval Monasticism (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 149; Feiss, ‘John of Fécamp’s Longing for Heaven’, p. 66. Similar complaints are noted from many of John’s contemporaries, including Lanfranc (see Watkins, ‘Lanfranc at Caen’, p. 75).

156‘Miserere mei sicut coepisti, libera me ab hoc maligno saeculo et ne sinas me famulum tuum ulla occasione implicari in eo … ab his causarum tumultibus et multiplici adventantium strepitu, ab hoc multo saeculo quod patior in monasterio, inter hanc frequentiam fratrum ubi cotidie in multis offendo, et da mihi illud solitudinis secretum et spiritale oportunae ad te vacationis otium, necnon et cordis puritatem et mentis iubilationem, ut perfecte diligere et digne laudare merear dulcissime cunctis diebus vitae meae’ (CT, p. 195).

157Cf. Chapter 1; CT, p. 182.

158Cf. Sic et non, or God and man (Christ). ‘Discourse of opposites’ is a term taken from Constance B. Bouchard, Every Valley Shall Be Exalted: The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 4. Barbara Newman recasts this as ‘Both/And’ in Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), p. 9.

159Maureen Miller, ‘Religion Makes a Difference: Clerical and Lay Cultures in the Courts of Northern Italy, 1000–1300’, American Historical Review (2000), 1129.

160‘Quis mihi dabat pennas praepetes et celeres alas, ut revolem ad te et sicut prius requiescam in te?’ (CT, p. 188).

161This compares with a like complaint from one of John’s contemporaries, Richard of Préaux (b. c. 1000), who ‘amidst the stresses and the great disorder of mind’ seeks and longs for the ‘consolation … that I may return to the streams of sacred scripture by which the filth may be cleansed from my feet and that in gazing upon them my troubled mind may be quieted, made calm, and become itself again’. William L. North notes that, while Richard constantly harped on the ‘deleterious effects of his pastoral office on his contemplative abilities, he spoke with equal conviction about the redemptive power of the sacred text’. Here, I take this one step further: that indeed Richard (and John like him) craves that redemptive conversion from the ‘filth’ of this world to the ‘calm’ of an escape to contemplation. William L. North, ‘St. Anselm’s Forgotten Student: Richard of Préaux and the Interpretation of Scripture in Early Twelfth-Century Normandy’, in Sally N. Vaughn and Jay Rubenstein (eds), Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe, 1000–1200 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), p. 186.

162See Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1919; fragment Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088; and fragment Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 152, fols 47–47v. The sole manuscript (unplaced, from late eleventh century) containing John’s Lamentation without his CT, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, McClean College, no.7, puts it at the back of a manuscript with the biblical books of Job, Wisdom, and Ecclesiastes, and with Cassiodorus’s De ecclesiastico.

163‘Libet … de tua pace et requie cotidie lectitare et lecta frequenter sub corde revolvere, ut tua memoria sit inter hos turbines aliqua repausatio mea’ (CT, p. 187).

164For example, CT, p. 186.

165For example, CT, p. 196.

166For example, CT, p. 187.

167Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, p. 210; Vanderputten, ‘The Mind as Cell and the Body as Cloister’, pp. 106–7; and Florian Mazel, ‘Amitié et rupture de l’amitié: Moines et grands laïcs provençeaux au temps de la crise grégorienne (milieu XI–milieu XII siècle)’, Revue historique 307 (2005), 53–96.

168Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 122; Cushing, Reform and the Papacy, p. 156.

169Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century, p. 176, Cowdrey, Cluniacs and Gregorian Reform, pp. 134–5.

170Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century, p. 44.

171Charles West has also questioned the ‘fundamental antagonism between’ monks and the laity in his article ‘Monks, Aristocrats, and Justice: Monastic Advocacy in a European Perspective’, Speculum 92.2 (2017), 403.

172Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism, pp. 351, 360.