A(n) Historiographical Note on Researching Twelfth-Century Cluny

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A(n) Historiographical Note on Researching Twelfth-Century Cluny

Bibliography

There are two key summaries of the current state of Cluniac studies, both from French scholars:

Dominique Iogna-Prat et Christian Sapin, "Les études clunisiennes dans tous leurs états : rencontres de Cluny, 21-22 septembre 1993", Revue Mabillon, t. 66,1994, p. 233-265, à compléter par D. Iogna-Prat, " (1993-1999)", Revue Mabillon, t. 72, 2000, p. 269-277.
Sébastien Barret, "," , n.s., t. 22 (= t. 83), 2011: 291-303.

The state of the question

One of the primary challenges for students and scholars of twelfth-century Cluniac monasticism is the nature, amount and diversity of evidence that has survived. The early-modern Wars of Religion and the secularization of monastic houses centuries later meant that libraries and archives were scattered or destroyed. The almost complete demolition of the monastery of Cluny at the turn of the nineteenth century, moreover, eliminated most evidence of its extensive twelfth-century architectural and decorative program. Nonetheless the documentary history of Cluniac monasticism still remains relatively rich. The material written by, to, and for the abbots of Cluny alone includes a sizeable body of letters, hagiographic writings, liturgical verse, sermons, theological treaties, panegyric and polemical poetry, charters, policy statements and more – much of which is unread and which offer many unexplored areas of study.

While modern critical editions of Cluniac writings have been steadily appearing since the mid-twentieth century, many texts are accessible only in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions, such as the Bibliotheca Cluniacensis (1614). Some sources, (e.g. Ralph of Sully’s Life of Peter) no longer have extant manuscripts. More generally, the lack of critical editions often means that scholars still need to decipher the context of the writing and the dissemination of major Cluniac texts. This task has been made easier as archival repositories expand access to digitized manuscripts, which allows scholars with the requisite language, paleographical and codicological skills to more readily consult medieval exemplars. Few texts, unfortunately, are available in translation – a situation which has likely limited the appeal of the subject and thus has hindered recruiting scholars to the field.

There is also a problem of an uneven chronological distribution since the majority of surviving material dates from the abbacy of Peter the Venerable (r. 1122-1156). Studies of the twelfth century (and I include my own work among them) tend to place greater emphasis on his abbacy simply because the evidence forces scholars to extrapolate from Peter’s time. This preponderance owes as much to Peter’s prolific writing and his active cultivation of a Cluniac literary culture, as it does to the disinterest in recopying other abbatial writings. Peter the Venerable benefitted from having his secretary Peter of Poitiers collect, archive and disseminate his writings during his lifetime and afterwards. The survival of his writings was also helped by their reputation for learnedness – an idea promoted by Peter of Poitiers, Bernard of Cluny, Ralph Tortarius and Richard of Poitiers during Peter’s lifetime and cultivated posthumously in the Life of Peter the Venerable. A prestige manuscript (Paris, BNF, ms. lat. 17716) compiled for abbot Hugh V (r. 1199-1207), shows that Hugh I of Semur and Peter the Venerable were already codified as the key figures for commemorating the twelfth-century Cluniac past as early as the beginning of the thirteenth-century. In contrast, there is much less extant material from the twelfth-century abbots before or after Peter. While Peter left almost two hundred letters which circulated widely, only a handful of letters survive for all the other twelfth-century abbots. Several letters from abbot Hugh III (r. 1157-63), for example, are extant only because they were preserved as responses in the letter collections of the Peter of Celle, of Bishop Gilbert of London and of the Bishop Stephen of Tournai. Only a single letter written by Hugh III is preserved in a Cluniac source – collected in the cartularies (currently no. 4193) for its legal value.

Only the barest biographical outlines exist, moreover, for the twelfth-century abbots after Peter. The laconic Chronicle of the Venerable Cluniac Abbots is of fundamental importance for reconstructing a Cluniac chronology of their twelfth-century abbots. This text was likely first begun at Cluny during the abbacy of Hugh I of Semur (ca. 1088) and the earliest exemplar (Paris, BNF, n.a.l. 1497) record additions for the years 1088 to 1215 made by several different hands. More an annal than a chronicle in nature, it gives the dates of abbots’ election and death, as well as conferring an assessment of their reign. The chronicle, however, is not altogether trustworthy and seems to knowingly suppress information about Cluniac history. It does not record the abortive reign of Robert Grossus, Peter’s immediate successor. It deliberately obscures the details of Hugh III’s abbacy in order to conceal his forced expulsion by Pope Alexander III – preferring to declare him dead in 1161 (more than twenty years early) rather than to admit his support for the Anti-Pope Victor IV. Giles Constable’s analysis of this text demonstrates how chroniclers far from Cluny and Hugh III’s few letters preserved elsewhere can help to reconstruct the incomplete and skewed picture given in this Cluniac source, but it also underscores the sheer paucity of material for doing so.

The problem of source material is deepened when exploring the abbacy of Pontius of Melgueil (r. 1109-1122), whom Cluniac writers have consciously misrepresented. Pontius is presented in a positive light in the Lives of Hugh written during Pontius’ abbacy and in several brief descriptions appearing in chronicles written far from Cluny.An addition (ca. 1135) to the Chronicle of Venerable Cluniac Abbots initially praises Pontius at the time of his election, but segues into a condemnation of his subsequent betrayal of Cluniac monasticism – first when he “abandons” Cluny and later when he drives others to attack it. Around this time Peter of Poitiers wrote the Panegyric of Peter the Venerable which inveighs against Pontius as a demonic-inspired antagonist in order to highlight the justice of Peter’s abbacy. A third Cluniac description of Pontius appears in one redaction (surviving today in a single manuscript) of Peter the Venerable’s Two Books on Miracles, which combines the very negative representations of the Chronicle and the Panegyric, depicting Pontius as a fearful tempest, the cause of a Cluniac civil war, and a despoiler of the monastery. After the appearance of Bouthillier’s edition of the Two Books on Miracles, Didier Méhu concluded that these two chapters are interpolations added at a later time. This forged authority of Peter the Venerable’s false authorship, however, has lent weight in scholarship since the sixteenth-century to the negative portrait of Pontius as being the most accurate representation (despite being at odds with much of what was known about Pontius from other sources). This image of Pontius is likely part of the posthumous written tradition at Cluny designed to recast Peter the Venerable as Hugh of Semur’s true successor. The success of this problematic commemoration is evident as it forms the dominant interpretive framework for understanding twelfth-century Cluniac history to this day.

These interpretive problems and the evidential inequality discussed above have meant that the historiography of twelfth-century Cluny has been composed in the tragic mode as the autumn of the Cluniacsever since seventeenth-century monks first began to set down a history of Cluniac monasticism. Historians have seen the death of Hugh as marking the end of Golden Age Cluny and the beginning of Cluny's decline, with Pontius as the major villain. The narrative, while somewhat abandoned, continues to exert an influence since it successfully relegated the twelfth century to being a sort of epilogue to Cluny’s main story. Cluny-after-Hugh (and Cluny-after-Peter even more so) has not attracted the attention nor has its evidence received the analytical scrutiny as is the case for the tenth- and eleventh-century.

For the archival practices and loss of the ecclesia cluniacensis, see the work on archival organization and memory by Sebastien Barret.

On the destruction of Cluny, see the work of Janet T. Marquardt, including “The politics of Burgundian Romanesque: Destruction and construction in Cluny and Macon during the nineteenth century,” in: Architecture and armed conflict. The politics of destruction, Joanne Mancini and Keith Bresnahan, ed. (London: Routledge: 2015), 167-181.

The best synthesis of the writings under abbot Peter the Venerable’s remains Jean Leclercq’s Pierre le Vénérable (Saint-Wandrille, 1946) and Jean-Pierre Torrell and Denise Bouthillier’s Pierre le Vénérable et sa vision du monde. Sa vie son oeuvre, l'homme et le démon, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, Études et documents, 42 (Leuven, 1986). Didier Méhu’s Paix et communautés autour de l'abbaye de Cluny (Xe-XVe siècles), Collection d'histoire et d'archéologie médiévales, 9 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2001), 16-41 provides an introduction to the main sources. Poetic works of the period have been largely unexamined – though a renewed interest is signalled by Franz Dorveck’s edition and French translation of Peter of Poitiers and Peter the Venerable’s poetry in Petrus Venerabilis Carmina cum Petri Pictaviensis Panegyrico (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2014) as well as Drew Jones and Scott Bruce’s edition and translation of Bernard of Cluny’s Relatio metrica de duobus ducibus, Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin, 8 (Tournhaut: Brepols, 2017).

Bibliotheca Cluniacensis in qua SS. Patrum Abb. Clun. Vitae, Miracula, Scripta, Statuta, Priuilegia Chronologiaque duplex[…]ex MS. Codd. collegerunt Domnus Martinus Marrier Monast. S. Martini a Campis Paris. Monachus Professus, et Andreas Quercetanus Turon. qui eadem disposuit, ac Notis illustravit (Paris: Robert Foüet, 1614). This contents of this work is reprinted in several volumes of the Patrologiae cursus completus omnium SS. Patrum, doctorum scriptorumque ecclesiasticorum sive Latinorum, sive Graecorum, J.-P. Migne, ed., 221 vols.(Paris: Migne, 1844-1865).

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