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 Religious Transformations
in New Communities of Interpretation
in Europe (1350–1570)
 New Communities of Interpretation
Contexts, Strategies, and Processes of Religious
Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Volume 3

General Editors
Sabrina Corbellini, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
John Thompson, Queen’s University Belfast

Editorial Board
Pavlína Rychterová, Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews
Géraldine Veysseyre, Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes
(CNRS), Université Paris IV-Sorbonne
Chiara Lastraioli, Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance
(CNRS), Université François Rabelais, Tours
Pawel Kras, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin / Katolicki
Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II
Marina Gazzini, Universita degli Studi di Milano Statale
Marco Mostert, Universiteit Utrecht
Rafael M. Pérez García, Universidad de Sevilla
Religious Transformations
in New Communities of
Interpretation in Europe
(1350–1570)
Bridging the Historiographical Divides

Edited by
Élise Boillet and Ian Johnson

F
© 2022, Brepols Publishers n. v., Turnhout, Belgium.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission of the publisher.

D/2022/0095/209
ISBN 978-2-503-60177-9
eISBN 978-2-503-60178-6
DOI 10.1484/M.NCI-EB.5.130893

Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents

Contributors 7

Introduction: Investigating and Reconsidering Medieval and

Early Modern Divides and Connections
Ian Johnson11

Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative

Identity of the Cambrai Benedictine Community
Marleen Cré21

Helper Saints and their Critics in the Long Fifteenth Century

Ottó Gecser43

Censoring Popular Devotion in French Protestant

Propaganda: The Reformer Pierre Viret, the Rosary, and the
Question of the Proper Honouring of the Virgin Mary
Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci71

Changes in the Grammar of Legibility: Influences on the

Development of ‘New Communities of Interpretation’?
Marco Mostert83

Biblical Genres through the Long Sixteenth Century: Italy as

a Case Study
Erminia Ardissino99

Printed Italian Vernacular Biblical Literature: Religious

Transformation from the Beginnings of the Printing Press to
the Mid-Seventeenth Century
Élise Boillet115

Communities of Interpretation of the Bible along the

European Margins: Hussite Teachings, the Hussite Bible, and
the Bogomils, from the South of Hungary to the Periphery of
Eastern Europe in the Long Fifteenth Century
Melina Rokai133
6 ta bl e o f co n t e n t s

Language as a Weapon: Hilarius of Litoměřice and the Use of

Latin and the Vernacular Language in Religious Polemics in
Fifteenth-Century Bohemia
Václav Žůrek161

The Legitimacy of Making Alliances between Christians and

Infidels: Arguments of Polish Jurists in the First Half of the
Fifteenth Century
Wojciech Świeboda189

Peasants and ‘Sectarians’: On the Ineffectiveness of

Evangelical Persuasion in Sixteenth-Century Poland
Waldemar Kowalski209

Religious Transformation on the Early Modern Periphery

– Law and Gospel: Image, Place, and Communication in
the Multi-Confessional Community of Sixteenth-Century
Moravian Ostrava
Daniela Rywiková239

Index of Persons and Places 267

Contributors

Erminia Ardissino ([email protected]; PhD, Yale University;

Dottorato di Ricerca, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan) is Associate
Professor at the University of Turin. Her research deals with Italian literature
from Dante to the Baroque Age, with particular attention on its relationship
with the history of ideas and religious experience. She has published several
books and articles in the main journals in the field of philology and literary
studies. Among her most relevant publications are Tasso, Plotino, Ficino: In
margine a un postillato (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003); Tempo
storico e tempo liturgico nella ‘Commedia’ di Dante (Vatican City: LEV, 2009);
Galileo: La scrittura dell’esperienza: Saggio sulle lettere (Pisa: ETS, 2010);
L’umana ‘Commedia’ di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2016), and Le donne e la
Bibbia nell’Italia della prima età moderna: Riscritture e comunità ermeneutiche
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2020). She has also edited critical editions of ancient texts
such as Giovanni di Bonsignori’s Ovidio Metamorphoseos Vulgare, Giambattista
Marino’s Dicerie sacre, and Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s Poemetti biblici.

Élise Boillet ([email protected]) is a CNRS researcher at the Centre

d’études supérieures de la Renaissance of the University of Tours, France. She
is the author of a monograph on Aretino’s biblical works, L’Arétin et la Bible
(Geneva: Droz, 2007) and published the critical edition of these texts for
the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere (Rome: Salerno, 2017). She is also the
author of several papers on Renaissance Italian literature on the Psalms. She
has co-edited several collections of essays on European and Italian biblical
literature and culture. An important bibliographical tool in this field, Repertorio
di letteratura biblica a stampa in italiano (ca 1462–1650) (Turnhout: Brepols),
co-edited with Erminia Ardissino, is forthcoming [2023]. She has recently
directed a research project on religious practices and European urban space
during the modern era (EUDIREM, https://eudirem.hypotheses.org/),
which has resulted in several collections of essays on this topic.

Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci ([email protected]) is Professor of

Cultural and Religious History, and currently Director of the Institute of
Reformation History at the University of Geneva. Her field of research covers
anticlericalism, religious dissent, confessional identities, women, and gender
roles in the Reformed communities of the French-speaking regions in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among her latest publications are La
construction internationale de la Réforme et l’espace romand à l’époque de Martin
8 co n tr ibuto r s

Luther, ed. with Nicolas Fornerod, Karine Crousaz and Christian Grosse
(Paris: Garnier, 2021); Pierre Viret et la diffusion de la Réforme, ed. with Karine
Crousaz (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2014), and the article ‘Le chapelet entre
dénonciations et défenses: La critique du rosaire dans la littérature religieuse
et la culture visuelle réformées du XVIe siècle’, in Connecteurs divins: Objets de
dévotion en représentation dans l’Europe moderne (XVIe-XVIIe siècle), ed. with
Frédéric Cousinié and Jan Blanc (Paris: Éditions 1 : 1, 2020).

Marleen Cré ([email protected]) is Maître de Langues Principale

in English and Professor of Civilisation of the English-Speaking Countries
at the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels and is an associated researcher at
the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on
late medieval mystical and devotional texts in their manuscript contexts, on
devotional compilations and on authors Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, and
Marguerite Porete. She has published Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse:
A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790 (Turnhout: Brepols,
2006) and with Diana Denissen and Denis Renevey co-edited the collection
Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020).

Ottó Gecser ([email protected]) is Associate Professor in the Faculty

of Social Sciences at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He holds an
MA and a PhD in Medieval Studies from the Central European University,
as well as an MA in Sociology from Eötvös Loránd University. His research
has focused on preaching and the cult of saints between the thirteenth and
fifteenth centuries, as well as on religious and medical interpretations of
the plague in the later Middle Ages. His publications include “Fuir ou bien
faire une procession? Peste, religion et peur de la contamination à Pérouse
au XVe siècle”, in Textes et pratiques religieuses dans l’espace urbain de l’Europe
moderne, ed. by Élise Boillet and Gaël Rideau (Paris: Honoré Champion,
2020), pp. 51–72 and The Feast and the Pulpit: Preachers, Sermons and the Cult
of St Elizabeth of Hungary, 1235–c. 1500 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2012).

Ian Johnson ([email protected]) is Professor of Medieval Literature

and Head of the School of English at the University of St Andrews. He was
Co-Director of the Queen’s Belfast-St Andrews AHRC-funded project
Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of
Christ, 1350–1550 (2007–2011). With Alastair Minnis he edited The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism: Volume II. The Middle Ages (2005). He is founding
General Editor of The Mediaeval Journal (Brepols) and was for many years
General Editor of Forum for Modern Language Studies (Oxford University
Press). His latest books are The Middle English Life of Christ: Academic
Discourse, Translation and Vernacular Theology (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); The
Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition,
edited with Allan Westphall (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); The Impact of Latin
Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, edited with Alessandra
 co nt ri b u to rs 9

Petrina (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018); Geoffrey Chaucer

in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Religious
Practices and Everyday Life in the Long Fifteenth Century (1350–1570): Interpreting
Changes and Changes of Interpretation (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), edited
with Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues. He was a Working Group Coordinator and
Management Committee member of the COST Action New Communities of
Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious Transformation in
Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2013–2017).

Waldemar Kowalski ([email protected]) is Professor of Early

Modern History at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland. He is
interested in popular religiosity c. 1500–1650 in its medieval and Tridentine
contexts and also in early modern emigration from Scotland. His major
publications include The Great Immigration: Scots in Cracow and Little Poland,
circa 1500–1660 (Leiden: Brill, 2015); ‘“Verily, This Is the Sheepfold of that
Good Shepherd”: The Idea of the “True” Church in Sixteenth-Century Polish
Catechisms’, Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce [Renaissance and Reformation in
Poland], SI 01 (2016), 5–47; ‘Man and God: The First Three Commandments in
the Polish Catholic Catechisms of the 1560s–1570s’, in The Ten Commandments
in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. by Youri Desplenter, Jürgen Pieters,
and Walter Melion (Leiden: Brill, 2017); ‘The Reformation and Krakow Society,
c. 1517–1637: Social Structures and Ethnicities’, in Krakau – Nürnberg – Prag:
Stadt und Reformation, ed. by Michael Diefenbacher, Olga Fejtová, and
Zdzisław Noga (Prague: Červený Kostelec, 2019).

Marco Mostert ([email protected]) is Professor of Medieval History at

Utrecht University. He is interested in the social history of communication
in the Middle Ages. His publications from 1996 onwards can be found at
https://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/MMostert/Publicaties. He is Editor of
Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy (https://medievalliteracy.wp.hum.uu.nl/
home-2/utrecht-studies-in-medieval-literacy/).

Melina Rokai ([email protected]) is currently a Senior Research

Associate at the Department of History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of
Belgrade. She was a member and a Management Committee Substitute member
of the COST Action 1301 New Communities of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies
and Processes of Religious Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Her interests encompass cultural history, women’s history, and the history of
concepts and ideas in late medieval and modern Europe. Her latest publication is
‘Continuity and Discontinuity in Everyday Religious Life in Southern Hungary
before 1526 in the Light of Supplications to the Holy See’, in Religious Practices
and Everyday Life in the Long Fifteenth Century (1350–1570): Interpreting Changes
and Changes of Interpretation, ed. by Ian Johnson and Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues
(Brepols, forthcoming 2022). With a PhD from the University of Belgrade and
an MSt from the University of Oxford, she is the author of two monographs.
10 co n tr ibuto r s

Daniela Rywiková ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of

Art History at the University of Ostrava, where she focuses her research and
teaching on Central European and Czech Late Medieval Art History and
Christian Iconography, and the relationship between the visual culture of
the high and late Middle Ages and devotion and religious practice. At the
University of Ostrava, she teaches courses in Czech medieval art, European
Gothic art, iconography, and the historiography of art. She has published a
number of books and scholarly articles dedicated to, for example, Eucharistic
devotion and medieval art, visualization of the Seven Deadly Sins, visual
culture in Bohemia after the Fourth Lateran Council, and Death as personified
in late medieval painting.

Wojciech Świeboda ([email protected]) has a PhD from Jagiellonian

University, Cracow. He is a Polish historian, medievalist, and researcher
at the Manuscript Department of the Jagiellonian Library, Cracow. He is
co-author of two printed catalogues: Catalogus diplomatum pergameneorum
quae in collectione Bibliothecae Jagellonicae Cracoviae asservantur (Cracow:
Towarzystwo Naukowe Societas Vistulana, 2014) and Catalogus codicum
manuscriptorum medii aevi Latinorum qui in Bibliotheca Jegellonica Cracoviae
asservantur, xi (Cracow: Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Księgarnia Akademicka,
2016). He focuses on the relations between Catholic Church and non-Christian
world and the Inquisition in medieval Europe. He has published Innowiercy
w opiniach prawnych uczonych polskich w XV w. Poganie, żydzi, muzułmanie
(Cracow: Towarzystwo Naukowe Societas Vistulana, 2013) and Universitas
contra haeresim: Działalność antyheretycka Stanisława ze Skarbimierza jako
przedstawiciela Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego (Cracow: Towarzystwo Naukowe
Societas Vistulana, 2021).

Václav Žůrek ([email protected]) received his PhD in 2014 from Charles

University, Prague and École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.
He is Research Fellow in the Centre for Medieval Studies at the Institute
of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is author of Karel IV:
Portrét středověkého vládce (Prague: NLN, 2018) and, with Pavlína Cermanová,
Jaroslav Svátek, and Vojtěch Bažant, is co-author of Přenos vědění: Osudy čtyř
bestsellerů v pozdně středověkých českých zemích (Prague: Filosofia, 2021). He is
co-editor, with Julia Burkhardt, Martin Bauch, and Tomáš Gaudek, of Heilige,
Helden, Wüteriche: Herrschaftsstile der Luxemburger (1308–1437) (Cologne:
Böhlau, 2017) and, with Pavlína Cermanová, co-edited Books of Knowledge
and their Reception: Circulation of Widespread Texts in Late Medieval Europe
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2021). He works on late medieval Central Europe, political
thought, and medieval historiographies.
 Ian Johnson

Introduction
Investigating and Reconsidering Medieval and Early
Modern Divides and Connections

This volume brings together medievalist and early modernist specialists,

whose research fields are traditionally divided by the jubilee year of 1500, in
order to concentrate on the role of the laity (and to a lesser extent those in
holy orders) in the religious transformations that occurred during the ‘long
fifteenth century’ from the flourishing of the Devotio Moderna to the era of
the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
Recent historiography has described the Christian Church of the fifteenth
century as a world of ‘multiple options’, in which the laity was engaged with
the clergy in a process of communication and negotiation leading to the
emergence of hybrid forms of religious life. The religious manifestations of
such ‘new communities of interpretation’ appear in an array of biblical and
religious texts which widely circulated in manuscripts before benefiting from
the new print media. In addition to the reconsideration of vitally important
developments in textual culture, recent historiography has provided new
perspectives on such turning points as the posting of the ninety-five theses
by Luther in 1517 and the institution of the Roman Inquisition by Pope
Paul III in 1542, thereby invigorating the investigation of the rich, creative,
long-lasting, and at times violent, damaging, and prejudicial religious debates
in which laypeople and clergy in both the Protestant and the Catholic worlds
participated to varying degrees.
These essays have their origins in an international colloquium, ‘Religious
Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Bridging the
Chronological, Linguistic, Confessional and Cultural Divides (1350–1570)’,
hosted by the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance at the University
of Tours in October 2015 as part of the ongoing programme of activities under
the umbrella of the European Union-funded COST Action IS1301, New
Communities of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious
Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, which ran from

Ian Johnson • ([email protected]) is Professor of Medieval Literature and

Head of the School of English at the University of St Andrews.

Religious Transformations in New Communities of Interpretation in Europe (1350–1570):

Bridging the Historiographical Divides, ed. by Élise Boillet and Ian Johnson, New Communities of
Interpretation, 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 11–20.
© FHG DOI 10.1484/M.NCI-EB.5.131211
12 i a n j o hn s o n

September 2013 to September 2017. This COST Action involved over 300
researchers from twenty-four countries. Its remit was to re-examine, and open
up dialogues about, the traditional religious, cultural, social, linguistic, and
geographical rifts and connections of late medieval and early modern Europe,
as well as the common national narratives that have influenced and distorted
(and continue to influence and distort) the construction and maintenance
of historical identities and beliefs.
The essays in this volume therefore develop the philosophy and approach
of the COST Action by modifying and adding to existing scholarship (or the
lack of it) on religious change in the ‘long fifteenth century’. The Action’s
‘Memorandum of Understanding’ spells out the context for this:
In spite of the pivotal importance of the analysis of the long fifteenth
century as a turning point in European history, the period is relatively
understudied in its complexity, multiplicity and fluidity, i.e. as a period in
which the simultaneous presence of tradition and innovation and old and
new media and modes of communication, offered multiple and divergent
options for the formation of religious and cultural identities.1
Following on from the sentiments and goals of the ‘Memorandum’, the
studies in this collection, as with all activities of the Action, aim to cast
a spectrum of new yet profoundly historical light on themes of seminal
relevance to present-day European society — doing so by analysing patterns
of inclusion and exclusion, and examining shifts in hierarchic and non-hi-
erarchic relations articulated through religious practices, texts, and other
phenomena featuring in the lives of groups and individuals.2 The academic
team assembled for this particular collective output of New Communities
of Interpretation (with editors from France and the United Kingdom and
contributors with institutional affiliations in Belgium, the Czech Republic,
France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, and Switzerland) is
internationally European as well as interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary
in its methodology.
The authors of the contributions to this book have developed studies on
the multiplicity, complexity, and fluidity of religious transformations promoted
by laypeople (and to a lesser extent the clergy) during the so-called ‘long
fifteenth century’. In so doing, many of them explore two main directions:
the religious textual traditions which ran from the late Middle Ages to
the early modern era, and the uses of religious texts in various historical,
social, and cultural contexts. This collection accordingly participates in the
re-nuancing of traditional historiography on the subject of religious change.
Value and evidential force are added to this nuance by the range and variety
of comparable/contrastable and mutually informing subject matters — from

1 ‘Memorandum of Understanding’, p. 5.
2 See ‘Memorandum of Understanding’, p. 2.
 i nt ro d u ct i o n 13

recusant English-speaking nuns in the Francophone Spanish Netherlands

to Bohemian Hussites in the Balkans; from pagan-friendly donnish Latin
juridical theorizing to reactionary Catholic lowborn lay vernacular polemic;
from a multi-confessionally hospitable Moravian wall painting to a ferociously
sectarian Swiss denunciation of the Rosary’s alleged Mariolatry. This collection
therefore combines and juxtaposes, in fresh ways, reconsiderations of the
continuity and transformation of textual traditions and text-based practices
alongside such familiar and important factors as the print ‘revolution’, the
‘Protestant paradigm’, and the effects that ecclesiastical censorship and the
Inquisition had on the religious life of Christian society and the religious
lives of individuals within it.
Some of the essays in this book are more overt than others in addressing
the themes of bridging chronological, linguistic, confessional, and cultural
divides; others do so more obliquely — whether, in their different ways,
commuting back and forth over a combination of particular divides, or
straddling them connectively, or blurring them concealingly yet revealingly.
Though the topics of individual chapters show rich variety and range, it
is the hope of the editors that readers of this volume, bringing their own
expertise and interests to bear on the book, will be prompted to form their
own comparative insights and connections that may gather in momentum
and complexity as readers move through its chapters and develop a sense of
the volume as a whole.
The eleven chapters of this book have been arranged loosely into five
groups. These groups are far from being mutually exclusive, as all essays have
considerable, if shifting, thematic and methodological affinities with their
cousins in other groups, and each offers perspectives on others. The first group,
‘Lay and Clerical Cultures on Heaven and Earth: Divides, Interactions, and
Negotiations’, is a trio of studies focusing on how medieval and early modern
people negotiated the most fundamental and life-shaping divide of all — the
one between this mortal life on earth and the heavenly otherworld and its
celestial inhabitants. They deal respectively with a nun’s contemplation of the
divinity in prayerful meditation, layfolk’s transactions with saints, and the
pieties of praise or prayer to be offered (or, rather, disapprovingly denied)
to the Virgin Mary.
In the opening essay of the collection, Marleen Cré’s ‘Gertrude More’s
Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity of the Cambrai Benedictine
Community’, we are given a richly contextualized account of the textually
articulated attitudes of a significant contemplative who crossed some key
divides. The English recusant Helen (later Gertrude — after Gertrude of
Helfta) More, a great-great-granddaughter of Thomas More, co-founded and
became a member of a Benedictine Convent in Cambrai in the Francophone
Spanish Netherlands. Her Confessiones Amantis is not only a work that
crosses the divide between earth and heaven, but it also reaches back over a
chronological gap into traditions of late medieval vernacular theology and
monastic contemplation. She also crosses interpersonal divides by revoicing
14 i a n j o hn s o n

Julian of Norwich and making aspects of her textual interiority her own. In
the same vein, the shareable voice and experiences of her Confessiones are
designed to be relived intersubjectively by a following community of nuns.
Gertrude’s text aims not only to be formative of her own spiritual self but
also of the larger collective selfhood and identity of a community of nuns
projecting themselves into the future. Gertrude, it would appear, bequeathed
to her sisters their own programmatic spiritual identity, one in defiance, over
a gender divide, of their Douai Benedictine confrères, who would have them
behave otherwise in their devotional lives.
With the next essay, Ottó Gecser’s ‘Helper Saints and their Critics in the
Long Fifteenth Century’, we are still poised petitioning on the heaven-earth
divide, only this time it is the one between layfolk and their helper saints. It
was one thing in this period for a saint to be petitioned in penitential sincerity
for intercession with the Almighty; it was another thing altogether to bargain
with a saint as a craft specialist in order to effect rescue from an unwelcome
earthly plight or, worse, to procure worldly advantage or benefit. This study
examines the gaps and clashes between Catholic and Protestant views on this
topic, thereby refining the larger study of the cult of saints. It also enlightens us
about contemporary discussions and attitudes surrounding the specialization
of the labours of saints in German-speaking territories in the sixteenth century,
and on the programmes of reformists to critique, criticize, and invalidate their
cults. Gecser rightly points out that although individual helper saints have
enjoyed a fair deal of modern scholarly attention, the topic of helper saints
in general, and the disquiet that the cult of such saints provoked, has been
relatively overlooked.
We move next from disquiet and fractiousness over saints to contention
over the most powerful heavenly intercessor of them all, the Virgin Mary,
who is at the centre of the third essay, ‘Censoring Popular Devotion in
French Protestant Propaganda: The Reformer Pierre Viret, the Rosary,
and the Question of the Proper Honouring of the Virgin Mary’, by Daniela
Solfaroli Camillocci. The Lausanne reformer Pierre Viret’s extraordinary
sustained textual attack on the cult of the Virgin sought both intellectually
and psychologically to discredit and displace an emotionally charged
tradition of devotional practice that evidently needed a major effort to
dislodge — an effort he was prepared to make with passionate zealotry.
For Viret, the beads of a rosary were no less than snake eggs. Clearly, he
wanted to shatter any confidence or credence that any laypeople may have
invested in the powers of the Virgin to protect or intercede for them. Viret
even went so far as to manipulate the divides of class, sex, and gender for
his own ends, condemning and stereotyping Marian devotion as essentially
the practice of bawdy females of low social status and greedy monks. It is
interesting, however, that later in his polemical career, Viret took a slightly
more moderate tack that seemingly adjusted his downgrading of the Virgin’s
cult by highlighting the right kind of honouring due to the mother of Christ.
Praise of Mary, then, was acceptable in a way that petitioning her was not.
 i nt ro d u ct i o n 15

Perhaps he did this because his onslaught on Mary could have been perceived
as having gone too far. Perhaps, too, there may have been a process of having
to accommodate an invincible pre-existing tradition of Marian devotion?
Viret, it would appear, simply had to soften a border that he wanted to be
bright, sectarian, and very hard.
The next two essays in the collection, constituting a group entitled ‘Lay
Literacy and the Press: Forms and Transformations of Religious Writing and
Rewriting’, are both about the adaptability and portability of texts — and in
particular the forms they take. Each study complements the other; the first
attends to the disposition and redisposition of the authoritative material text in
the formal terms of its layout and punctuation, whereas the second addresses
the diverse adaptabilities of the biblical text via the formal terms of genre. In the
first, the presentation of the physical text is adapted — made legible — to meet
the perceived needs of its users; in the second, the biblical text is re-articulated
variously through generic adaptation and transformation. In both cases, the
divide between production and reception is to be negotiated through strategies
and repertoires of readability. Accordingly, Marco Mostert, in ‘Changes in the
Grammar of Legibility: Influences on the Development of “New Communities
of Interpretation?”’, explains, and illustrates through textual examples, some
of the most important ways in which, through the material disposition of the
letters, words, spaces, and rhetorical and linguistic structures on the physical
page, legibility functioned variously in manuscript and printed texts. At a time
of profound change from predominantly manuscript to predominantly print
culture, the changing grammar of legibility is an important topic. Another
vital divide addressed in this study (one relevant to so many other studies
in this book) is that between whoever wrote the text and whoever used it,
whether by reading it aloud to others, or by taking it in themselves silently,
or by quietly mouthing the words on the page. Consideration too is afforded
to a repertoire of, on the one hand, punctuation geared to the effective oral
delivery and thereby the aural comprehensibility and affective impact of the
text, and, on the other hand, punctuation designed to direct and safeguard
its legibility and also to communicate desired meaning through the eye of
the beholder.
The historically evident variety with which texts were remade to be read
is also at the centre of the next essay, Erminia Ardissino’s ‘Biblical Genres
through the Long Sixteenth Century: Italy as a Case Study’. Wycliffites,
Hussites, Lutherans, and Calvinists had the Bible in their vernacular languages.
It would, however, be a mistake to continue to think that pious mainstream
medieval readers and hearers and early modern Catholic users of holy books
were ill served or not served at all when it came to the Bible. This erroneous
assumption, one that persists even in recent scholarly accounts, is put right
by our contributor in her substantial case study of Italian print culture in
the early modern period. Here, she taxonomizes and explains the various
literary genres (for example, history, meditation, sermon, translation, and
even the novel) that were deployed in order to disseminate the Bible and
16 i a n j o hn s o n

its teaching to diverse readers and places throughout Italian culture in the
long sixteenth century. Particularly fascinating in this chapter is the account
of how the biblical text was tactically reshaped in response to the pressures
of ecclesiastical censorship. Our contributor remarks appositely on the
surprising potency of literary forms in adapting the Bible: ‘It may seem
strange that a literary perspective can determine research in a religious field
and especially research into the use of the foundational religious text, the
Bible’. Here, then, is a disciplinary crossing of the methodological divide,
from literary-textual studies to religious and historical studies: a divide
well bridged.
The same corpus of Italian biblical literature is also the subject matter
of the next essay, which commences the third group of studies, ‘Vernacular
Culture and Ecclesiastical Censorship’, whose two chapters shed light on
people and texts subjected to ecclesiastical prohibition. In ‘Printed Italian
Vernacular Biblical Literature: Religious Transformation from the Beginnings
of the Printing Press to the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, Élise Boillet provides
a careful recalibration of familiar chronological frameworks and reference
points for the massive catalogue of Italian biblical literature that she has
prepared with Erminia Ardissino. At the same time as accommodating the
‘long fifteenth century’, the ‘long sixteenth century’, and the important
year of 1570, this essay incorporates, for the purpose of consideration of its
materials, the notion of ‘religious transformation’ that is intrinsic to the overall
approach of New Communities of Interpretation. This it does with reference to
the never-ending processes of negotiation amongst various ecclesiastical and
lay forces, whose interaction provides an informative context for the nature
of the Italian biblical texts that found their way into the print market and the
hands of their readers.
The next essay, by Melina Rokai, homes in not on the prohibition of texts
but on the prohibition of whole communities, and on where and how these
people went where they went, did what they did, and taught what they taught,
as indicated by its title, ‘Communities of Interpretation of the Bible along the
European Margins: Hussite Teachings, the Hussite Bible, and the Bogomils,
from the South of Hungary to the Periphery of Eastern Europe in the Long
Fifteenth Century’. Here, it is explained how a group of Hussites initially
managed to thrive, remarkably enough, in a part of southern Hungary now
in Serbia, but how in due course they were persecuted by the Inquisition,
which drove them to flee to what is now eastern Romania, where their
community survived until the early seventeenth century. The chronological
and geographical spans covered by this study are unusually vast, to say the
least, extending to Hussite activities persisting well after the early modern
period in territories as far flung from central and south-eastern Europe as
Norway, Greenland, and the Danish West Indies (now the American Virgin
Islands). One of the most fascinating achievements of this study is the light it
sheds on the complex mutuality of relations between Hussites and Bogomils,
evidenced most eloquently in a telling comparative analysis of the similarities
 i nt ro d u ct i o n 17

and differences there were in the transmission of the textual details of the
Paternoster in the teachings of the Hussites of southern Hungary and the
Bogomils of Bosnia. In this single example (representative of an approach
that may be carried out elsewhere), we are presented with a significant new
interpretation of mutual influence and a new understanding of the porosity
of social, theological, and textual divides.
The next pairing of essays forming the fourth group, ‘Political and Religious
Cultures’, sees academics in dispute about how the Church should deal
with and live with the sharpest of confessional divides: those concerning
heretics and infidels. The first essay in this group discusses a debate about
not only whether the Eucharist should be taken in one or both kinds but
also about the legitimacy of using the vernacular for theological purposes.
The second essay has as its topic the dilemma, as addressed by medieval
jurists, of whether it is virtuous or not to make alliances with non-Christians
in pursuit of war.
In the first essay of the pair, ‘Language as a Weapon: Hilarius of Litoměřice
and the Use of Latin and the Vernacular Language in Religious Polemics
in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia’, Václav Žůrek analyses the remarkable
debate of 1464, which took the form of letters exchanged between, on the
orthodox Catholic side, Hilarius of Litoměřice, and on the reformist side, the
Utraquist Václav Koranda the Younger. Both of these men were academics,
well learned in Latin. What divided them theologically was the question of
whether the wine as well as the bread should be taken at the Eucharist by
laypeople. This dispute was complicated, however, by Hilarius conducting
his side of the debate in Latin, whereas Koranda insisted on the vernacular.
To a theological divide was thereby added a linguistic divide that was often
taken to typify division between laity and clergy. This debate raises the issue
of divided audiences as well; for Koranda (who, for all his education and
his professional distinction as a University of Prague academic, advertised
his lay status) addressed his arguments not just to his opponent but also
opened them up to the burghers and gentlefolk who typically supported his
party, and, most vitally, to the Utraquist King, George of Poděbrady — not
forgetting any Catholic laity and whom he might additionally win over. The
choice, however, of Latin and the vernacular is not always as straightforward
as it would appear to be in this debate. Although in this exchange of corre-
spondence Hilarius condemned the use of Czech for matters theological,
he was happy to use it elsewhere when trying to win over layfolk to his
position. Conversely, Koranda was a notable theological writer in Latin. In
multi-confessional Bohemia, then, the divides of heterodoxy/orthodoxy and
Latin/vernacular were able, for tactical reasons, to switch within themselves
and also with each other.
For tactical reasons also, a rather more dramatic flipping was at the
heart of a ferocious military and legal struggle at the beginning of the 1400s
between the Poles and the Teutonic Knights. In ‘The Legitimacy of Making
Alliances between Christians and Infidels: Arguments of Polish Jurists in
18 i a n j o hn s o n

the First Half of the Fifteenth Century’, Wojciech Świeboda describes the
response of Polish jurists to the Teutonic Knights’ allegation against the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that they had committed grave mortal
sin by allying themselves with non-Christians in warfare. The jurists argued,
by drawing on authorities in the best academic manner of the age, that it was
acceptable to ally with infidels in a just war. Moreover, whereas the Teutonic
Knights afforded no rights to infidels and saw them as fit only for slaughter
or subjugation, the Polish legalists took the position, coherently argued, that
pagans had a right to their own territories and jurisdiction over them: neither
should non-Christians be converted by force. This rather tolerant position
did not enter the traditional mainstream of European intellectual culture,
however. Our contributor points out that when, in the 1500s and the 1600s,
European intellectuals came to discuss once more the issue of what powers the
pope should be able to exercise over infidels in newly discovered territories,
they did not come up with anything like the same degree of rights that the
Polish jurists judged appropriate at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Both essays in the final section deal with everyday problems and practices
encountered by various players in the multi-confessional societies that endured
for quite a while in Central Europe until they were extirpated by the forces of the
Counter-Reformation. The group commences with two tales of ‘Confessional
Coexistence, Conversion, and Confusion’, staying in Poland with Waldemar
Kowalski’s ‘Peasants and “Sectarians”: On the Ineffectiveness of Evangelical
Persuasion in Sixteenth-Century Poland’. This chapter provides some rather
intimate insights into how and why Protestantism was moderately successful
in Lesser Poland. Our contributor here rightly points out that, amongst the
peasants, Protestantism was not necessarily making many inroads either
before the Council of Trent (1545–1563) or in the decades when Tridentine
reforms renewed the vigour of Polish Catholicism. At the heart of this essay
is a revealing account of two Polish neighbours in the Cracow palatinate,
showing how they managed to get along across a confessional and social divide
without rancour even though one was an Evangelical gentleman trying to
win his peasants over to the new religion and the other was the local Catholic
priest. That we know so much about this is due to the survival of the collected
letters between the two neighbours, both gentlefolk who presumably knew
each other of old. In this astonishing correspondence, the priest, for example,
writes at one point to the squire, telling him that his peasants are coming along
to him, in his priestly vocation, for spiritual support and are definitely not
turning into good Evangelicals. Evidently, in this part of Europe Protestant
teaching and indoctrination were not as well organized or as penetrating as
they were elsewhere. Moreover, the local Catholic establishment and popular
culture were robust enough to fend them off. Harking back to the different
tactical uses of Latin and the vernacular detailed in Václav Žůrek’s chapter, it
is interesting to note in this context that, as Waldemar Kowalski assumes, ‘the
letters were published in Polish — to retain the expression and authenticity of
speech, while the comments were formulated in Latin — for the convenience
 i nt ro d u ct i o n 19

of the Papal Nuncio’. These letters have an illuminating companion text in a

verse polemic, published in Polish in 1549, stoutly defending the traditional
practices of the Catholic laity. In claiming to be a text by a lowborn man, this
work provides telling evidence of how and why the Polish laity were reluctant
to leap over the confessional divide into reformism or Protestantism, even
when Evangelical persuasion was the tool and motivating force of powerful
and prestigious local landowners. For all that Polish Protestantism failed to
gain a lasting hold, it is nevertheless salutary to observe a substantial period
of multi-confessionalism in this part of Europe — one in which it can be
shown that people were able to live together cooperatively in civility and
even good-willed cordiality, despite their differences.
For the purposes of Waldemar Kowalski’s study, the divide across which
neighbours communicated was a relatively straightforward one between the
Evangelical nobility and Catholic clergy. In multi-confessional Moravia, however,
there was a more complex triple divide amongst neighbouring Catholics,
Utraquists, and Lutherans. The next essay shows how this divide was maintained
at the same time as being breached via a subtle visual and exegetical medium of
shared devotional material circumstances. In ‘Religious Transformation on the
Early Modern Periphery. Law and Gospel: Image, Place, and Communication
in the Multi-Confessional Community of Sixteenth-Century Moravian Ostrava’,
Daniela Rywiková sheds instructive light upon another mixed community, this
time in Ostrava, the focus of her study of an intriguingly ambiguous religious
wall painting made and used in the years before the Jesuit annihilation of
multi-confessionalism in this Moravian town. The painting in question, an
allegory of the Old and New Testaments in the local church, seems to have
been a site of religio-cultural hospitality for Lutheran, Utraquist, and Catholic
alike. Our contributor suggests very credibly that the local priest may have
been behind the design of an artwork accommodating ‘a sort of umbrella-like
Christian “supra-identity”’ that would sustain both diversity and cohesion
by pragmatically ignoring yet recognizing confessional divides. From such
a perspective, divisions and meeting points start to look like each other. It is
fitting that the book should end with a complex divide bridged so intriguingly.
Repeated themes and observable features and processes have emerged
during the assembly of this collection: the exceptionality yet comparability of
local circumstances; the incompleteness and ambivalence of many cultural/
educational processes and directives; the proximity of hospitality and conflict; the
richly innovative and sometimes fragile means used to address or accommodate
multi-confessional cultures. All in all, the individual studies in this collection
uncover, and engage with, familiar yet strange composites of continuity and
transformation across chronological, linguistic, confessional, and cultural
divides — divides that may sometimes also be seen and re-understood as
junctures, joins, and meeting points.

Acknowledgement: The editors would like to express their considerable

gratitude to Abe Davies for compiling the index.
20 i a n j o hn s o n

Works Cited

Online Resource

‘Memorandum of Understanding for the implementation of a European

Concerted Research Action designated as COST Action: New Communities
of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious
Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe’ (Brussels:
COST Association, 2013), accessible at: https://www.cost.eu/actions/IS1301/
[click on: MoU]

—
 Marleen Cré

Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and

the Contemplative Identity of the Cambrai
Benedictine Community

Helen More: A Catholic Nun in Exile

In 1623, a seventeen-year-old girl called Helen More (1606–1633) journeyed

across the Channel to Cambrai, France, to co-found and become a member
of the Benedictine Convent of Our Lady of Consolation. A great-great-grand-
daughter of Thomas More, and daughter of Cresacre More (1572–1649) and
Elizabeth Gage (died c. 1611), Helen grew up in a recusant family. Her father
Cresacre (named after his paternal grandmother) went to the Jesuit school
of Eu when he was twelve, and later trained for the priesthood at the English
College at Rheims and studied theology at the English College at Douai.
On his brother’s death, he was called back to England as his father’s heir.
Cresacre and Elizabeth had three children: Helen, Bridget, and Thomas. Both
their daughters would become Benedictine nuns.1 Thomas, too, wanted to
become a priest, but, like his father before him, was called upon to continue
the family name and marry.
In early seventeenth-century England, for Catholics to pursue a vocation
meant exile to the Continent, more particularly to France and the Spanish
Low Countries. The Douai, and later Cambrai, that Helen More and her seven
companions travelled to at the instigation of Benet Jones, her Benedictine
confessor, was at the time part of the Southern Low Countries (the Seventeen
Provinces) under the governance of Isabella Clara Eugenia, daughter of

1 See Anderson, ‘More, (Christopher) Cresacre’ and Bolton Holloway, ‘More, Helen’ [name
in religion Gertrude]’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and The Life, ed. by
Wekking, pp. x–xv.

Marleen Cré • ([email protected]) is Maître de Langes Principale

in English and Professor of Civilisation of the English-Speaking Territories at
the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels and is an associated researcher at the
Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp.

Religious Transformations in New Communities of Interpretation in Europe (1350–1570):

Bridging the Historiographical Divides, ed. by Élise Boillet and Ian Johnson, New Communities of
Interpretation, 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 21–42.
© FHG DOI 10.1484/M.NCI-EB.5.131212
22 marleen cré

Philip II of Spain. This was a time during which cultural and religious life
prospered.2 Benet Jones wanted to found a new convent for Benedictine nuns,
and the dowry that Cresacre More was willing to give his daughter would
make this possible. Despite the absence of a clear vocation, and despite her
age, Helen resolved to go. She kept this resolve throughout the difficult early
years of her life as a monastic at Our Lady of Consolation: she was clothed
on 31 December 1623 and took her vows on 1 January 1625.3
Helen, who in religion had taken the name of Gertrude, did not have a happy
spiritual life. Her inability to settle truly into her life as a nun was exacerbated
by the uncongeniality for her of the Ignatian method of prayer introduced
to the convent by the three sisters who had joined the eight English novices
from the English Benedictine Monastery of Brussels.4 When Augustine Baker
was appointed as the confessor to the sisters in 1624, initially only Catherine
Gascoigne stuck to Baker’s instruction, while More ridiculed his teachings,
which sought to help the sisters follow their personal paths to the divine as it
manifested itself in their souls — paths that could be completely different for
each sister, just as their personalities, needs, and inclinations were different.5
Some months after More took her vows, she was persuaded by the
novice-mistress once again to try going to Baker for spiritual counsel, and
this time, his reading of a passage of Constantin de Barbanson’s Les Secrets
Sentiers de l’Amour Divin struck a chord. This moment would prove to be a
turning point and the start of a fulfilling contemplative life in which writing
played a major role.6

The Author Gertrude More

Indeed, like many in her family, More was not only a devoted Catholic, but
also a writer. Her literary legacy — in printed form and in research — is

2 Isabella had been Governor of the Spanish Low Countries with her husband Albert of
Austria from 1598 to 1621, when Albert died. After Albert’s death, she governed on her own
from 1621 to 1633, roughly the years that Helen More lived in Cambrai. See also Histoire de
Cambrai, ed. by Trenard, pp. 125–44.
3 The Life, ed. by Wekking, p. x.
4 These eight novices included Catherine Gascoigne (1600–1676), who would become the
Abbess of Our Lady of Consolation in 1629. One of the Brussels nuns was Frances Gawen
(1576–1640), who became the first abbess of the new house. Prudentia Deacons was another.
She became novice-mistress. The Life, ed. by Wekking, p. xi.
5 Baker’s methods were controversial, and Francis Hull, the chaplain and confessor of the
Cambrai Benedictine nuns, questioned his orthodoxy. Baker’s works were examined in 1633
and declared orthodox. The Life, ed. by Wekking, p. xxii. Hull’s actions were in keeping with
the post-Tridentine Church’s suspicion of creativity and any deviation of controlled methods
in personal worship. McNamara, Sisters in Arms, p. 506.
6 The Life, ed. by Wekking, pp. 37–38. De Barbanson’s Les Secrets Sentiers was printed in French
by Jean Kinckius in Cologne in 1623.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 23

closely intertwined with Augustine Baker’s.7 He wrote The Life and Death
of Dame Gertrude More and edited her Ideots Deuotions (which he named
Confessiones Amantis). More’s devotions were prepared for a printed edition
by ‘F. G.’, Francis Gascoigne, Catherine Gascoigne’s brother, most likely from
documents left by Augustine Baker, and were printed in 1657 and 1658 by
Lewis de la Fosse in Paris, twenty-four years after More’s death and sixteen
years after Baker’s. In The Life, which is a life of Gertrude as well as a lengthy
discussion of Baker’s spiritual method he taught to the Cambrai nuns, Baker
often quotes More’s Confessiones.
The text of the Confessiones Amantis also survives in full in one manuscript,
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 581, and in fragments in Paris,
Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 1202;8 York, Ampleforth Abbey, MS 127; Stafford,
Colwich Abbey, MSS 22 and 23, and Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Downside Abbey,
Baker MS 33. In what follows, I use the form of More’s Confessiones Amantis as
it occurs in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 581 as edited by J.P.H.
Clark. This is a mid-seventeenth-century manuscript copy — in two English
hands — of the Confessiones, which is preceded by three poems also by More:
Amor ordinem nescit, Of suffering and bearing the crosse, and To our blessed Laidy
the Aduocate of sinners.9 The provenance of this manuscript is uncertain. The
differences from the 1658 edition suggest that the work may have been copied
regularly, and that F. G.’s edition does indeed present a version ‘stiled’ by ‘Her
only Spiritual Father and Directour, the Ven. Fa. Baker’, as the title page records.10
The manuscript version of the Confessiones Amantis is used here because in
its handwritten form it is a more direct witness of the intimate spiritual culture of
the small Benedictine convent in Cambrai. Rather than evidencing a process of
dialogue between the female monastic communities and lay urban communities
in Cambrai or Catholic communities in England, both text and manuscript show a
very different type of negotiation within a community that sought its place in the
early modern town. Exiled from a country hostile to their religion and life choice,
the Cambrai nuns sought to conserve the Catholic monastic tradition. Though
the catalogue of the books owned by the Cambrai nuns c. 1793 shows that their
spiritual reading included contemporary as well as more traditional texts,11 this

7 The extent to which this is the case shows in the title of the edition of More’s Confessiones
Amantis used in this paper: Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark. The title of this edition
seems to have been taken from the 1658 print rather than from Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Rawlinson C. 581, which is the text Clark edits. The edition is also part of Analecta
Cartusiana’s efforts to publish editions of all of Augustine Baker’s writings and related texts.
All references to this edition are by Confessio number, followed by page and line numbers.
8 For an edition of this manuscript, see ‘Colections’, ed. by Holloway.
9 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, pp. 1–17.
10 See Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, p. ii.
11 Catalogue des livres, ed. by Rhodes. As Rhodes edits the catalogue made by the French
authorities after the expulsion of the nuns from their convent by the French Revolutionary
authorities on 18 October 1793, I assume that the date in the title of the edition is a
typographical error, and should read 1793 rather than 1739.
24 marleen cré

essay will focus on Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis as a text that both records
the author’s personal search for her identity as a monastic and functions as a text
that helps define the community’s identity as enclosed and inward-looking, thus
conserving the community’s roots in centuries-old contemplative monasticism.
More’s personal struggle with her enclosed life and her coming to terms
with it through Baker’s teaching can also be placed in the wider context of
the Catholic response to the Reformation in the aftermath of the Council
of Trent (1545–1563). When women began to adopt roles in the religious life
that previously were the prerogatives of men, the Church authorities imposed
claustration and strict observance on women’s communities. Mary Ward, a
contemporary of More’s, is an interesting example of a woman who chose
an unenclosed and missionary life, founding schools on the Continent, and
travelling to England as a missionary. Initially, Pope Paul V supported her, but
as she came to be criticized by the Jesuits, she was condemned as a heretic
‘because of her refusal to accept cloistering’.12 Though her excommunication
was lifted, the damage done to her work was irreversible in her lifetime.13
In the broader context of the post-Tridentine Church, with its restrictions
placed on female religious, More’s text offers an interesting example of how
one individual woman made her life of claustration meaningful to both
herself and others.
The text of the Confessiones presents itself as Gertrude More’s outpourings
of feeling and thought during moments of inspiration, written down to help
her through times of spiritual barrenness when such inspiration was lacking:14
And to hearten & encourage my soule by speakeing & writing thus to
thee, was the cause that these things haue bin mentioned by mee, which I
read ouer when I cannot (for some indisposition in body or minde) other
wayes thinke vpon thee; and when I am ouerwhelmed in any miserie, it
becometh most tolerable by haueing this such conference with thee, who
neuer disdainest me; for withall glorie be giuen to thee, who art my Lord
& my God, blessed for all eternitie. Amen. Alleluia.15
Ffor, as thou well knowest, if I should not, when I enioy some more
interior light, set down in writing some things which I may peruse att
other tymes, I should be apt to forgett to praise thee, yea & euen wither
away with the griefe & anguish, which ofteen by thy sweet permission
ouerwelmeth my soule.16

12 McNamara, Sisters in Arms, p. 463.

13 See Lux-Sterritt, ‘Mary Ward’s English Institute’ and McNamara, Sisters in Arms, pp. 462–63.
14 The Confessiones are silent on the question on whose initiative More started writing. In
the quotations from the text, I follow Clark’s edition of MS Rawlinson C. 581. I reproduce
its many idiosyncratic spellings, though I have silently expanded abbreviations. When the
meaning is unclear from the spelling, I add the emendation in square brackets.
15 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 8, p. 56, ll. 3–9.
16 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 15, p. 79, l. 21 – p. 80, l. 1.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 25

Writing is just another form of communication with God:

And verily, my God, to whome I speake & writt with much content to
my soule.17
Yet More’s Confessiones were soon regarded as suitable for reading by Gertrude’s
fellow sisters (and, possibly, English Catholics more widely)18 as part of their
spiritual practice, which under Augustine Baker, and, ostensibly, after his
time as well, was explicitly bookish.19 In The Life, Baker suggests that, even
though More’s writings were indeed intended as ‘prayers with the hands’
that she could return to when her inner life was barren and she lacked divine
inspiration, they quickly became part of the convent’s store of edifying texts:
She sticking to her Praier, and being diligent and industrious, as she was,
by reason of the aforesaid Propension aided or caused by the divin grace,
and using at the first onlie out of necessitie such ejaculations, as she gotte
out of bookes, she camme in a short time to use other meerelie of her
owne framing, as suggested to her by her owne nature or spirit, or by the
divin spirit, which often times she used to sette downe in writing for her
helpe in times of more ariditie. And those so expressed in writing, some
others in the howse coming to see them, liked so well of them, that they
used to copie them out. By this meanes there was in the howse great store
of those Amorous affections of her collection or framing, that were written
or scattered heere and there in divers and sundrie bookes and papers. The
2nd, or 3rd parte, or both of them of the bookes called the Idiots Devotion,
that are in this howse, do consist of her said doengs, the Author having
onlie reduced them into some order and into certein exercises.20
This passage from The Life nuances both Wekking’s assertion that ‘after
More’s death papers were found in her room, which constitute the body
of her devotional writings’ and Bolton Holloway’s statement that More’s
writings were ‘discovered after her early death in 1633’.21 Clearly, her writings
were read and copied by her fellow-sisters before that time. This reminds us
that, in spite of her enclosed state, More was not an isolated mystic, but was

17 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 18, p. 87, ll. 7–8.

18 It seems likely that Lewis de la Fosse’s 1657 and 1658 print of More’s Confessiones was first
and foremost aimed at the ‘English nuns, friars, monks, and other regulars on the continent’.
Further research will have to establish whether the book also made its way to England.
English Catholic Books, ed. by Clancy, p. x. An intriguing question, also, is whether a
manuscript version of More’s works would ever have made its way to England to her family,
or whether the Confessiones remained enclosed reading as its author remained enclosed.
19 ‘She redde over all the bookes, that were in the howse, or he could gette from abroade for her
purpose, printed and Manuscript, and redde them seriously: and store of bookes there were
in the howse’. The Life, ed. by Wekking, p. 22.
20 The Life, ed. by Wekking, pp. 44–45.
21 The Life, ed. by Wekking, p. xv and Bolton Holloway, ‘More Helen’ [name in religion
Gertrude]’.
26 marleen cré

an author whose texts played an important role in shaping the identity of

her community.
Though The Life might give that impression, Baker does not seem to
have urged More to write as part of her spiritual life just so that his teaching
method could be vindicated, and her sanctity and orthodoxy proven (vidas
por mandato).22 Nor, would I argue, are Gertrude’s Confessiones spiritual
autobiography only, though the text came to serve as both vida por mandato
on Baker’s behalf and as spiritual autobiography. I would contend that both
in writing and reading, re-reading and copying the text, More and her fellow
sisters were bridging a historical divide: in More’s writings and her fellow
sisters’ appropriation of them (mediated by Baker or not) these Cambrai nuns
were shaping an enclosed spirituality continuous with medieval traditions.
Augustine Baker describes More as a great reader,23 yet More’s voice
is authorial rather than compilational — she does not rely on passages
from existing texts to form a new, unified text,24 but confidently writes her
own work. Her writing is conventional: she is God’s lover, full of desire for
him, eagerly enjoying his presence and yearning for it in his absence. Like
medieval religious writers before her, she quotes from the Bible — a text
Baker reports that she had read in great detail — to illustrate a point she
has been making, thus anchoring her book to the Book.25 In this essay, the
focus will be squarely on the Confessiones as Gertrude’s text. I am fully aware
that this focus at present excludes issues that need to and will be addressed
elsewhere: first and foremost the relationship between all versions of More’s
Confessiones Amantis, both printed and in (fragmented) manuscript form, and
the question whether Gertrude’s text can be extricated from later appropriations
of it, and the connections of More’s work with medieval and early modern
contemplative texts,26 in particular the influence of Augustine’s Confessions
and the writings of More’s namesake Gertrude of Helfta, both of which she
names as inspirations in her text.27 Equally crucial is the question of to what
extent More may have been influenced by Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation
of Love and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, texts that we know Augustine

22 Van Hyning, ‘Expressing Selfhood’, pp. 219–20.

23 See The Life, ed. by Wekking, p. 22.
24 This is the definition of what is called a ‘compilation’ as opposed to an authorial text. See
Dutton, Julian of Norwich, p. 3 and the introduction to Late Medieval Devotional Compilations
in England, ed. by Cré, Denissen, and Renevey, pp. 1–2.
25 The Life, ed. by Wekking, p. 22.
26 For two assessments of More’s literary and spiritual legacy, see Norman, ‘Dame Gertrude
More’ and Latz, ‘The Mystical Poetry’.
27 As the Latin edition of The Herald of Divine Love was published by the Cologne Carthusians
in 1536, it may have been known by Gertrude More. Seven copies of Gertrude of Helfta’s text
(edited between 1578 and 1687) occur in the catalogue of books owned by the Cambrai nuns
around 1793. One of these copies is an English translation (in manuscript). More may have
known the earlier copies. Catalogue des livres, ed. by Rhodes, pp. 68–69.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 27

Baker was interested in and that were available to the Cambrai nuns,28 and by
Constantin de Barbanson’s Sentiers Secrets, which Baker read to her, translating
from the Latin (De semitis occultis) into English. The possible influence of
Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation on More’s text will be briefly treated below.
Starting from the assumption that the text as it survives in Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Rawlinson C. 581 was copied by scribes (fellow sisters?) close
to Gertrude herself,29 the focus will be on the themes in More’s text — the
themes that define her and her fellow sisters’ spirituality: apology for her
sinfulness and her lack of ardour at the start of her life as a nun, love of God
related to knowledge of him, and religious instruction and the role of teacher
that More evolves towards in the later Confessiones.

Gertrude More’s ‘Confessiones Amantis’

Apology

Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis, in Rawlinson C. 581 a collection

of fifty confessions of varying length, is loosely inspired by Augustine’s
Confessions in their combination of meditative prose addressed to God and
autobiographical elements, though More’s collection is not as vast and detailed
as Augustine’s, whom More names as an inspiration at several points in her
text.30 Like Augustine’s Confessions, they are apologetic in character, but

28 The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, p. 16. Baker may have been
instrumental in acquiring the medieval manuscript(s) that the seventeenth-century copies
of A Revelation (in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Fonds Anglais 40 and London, British
Library, MS Sloane 2499) are based on. More may have read the Paris text. The Sloane
manuscript may have been copied by Sister Clementina Carey, a Cambrai nun who later
became the abbess at the Paris daughter house, years after More’s death, around 1650. See
The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, p. 458. The Catalogue des livres
lists printed copies of Revelations (the 1670 Serenus Cressy version) and Hilton’s Scale (1653
and 1659) that postdate More. See Catalogue des livres, ed. by Rhodes, pp. 76 and 81. These
could of course be printed copies bought to replace manuscript copies. That the Cambrai
nuns owned fifteen copies of Revelations might point to a longer-standing popularity of the
writer among the nuns. Margaret Gascoigne (d. 1637) wrote meditations on Julian’s text. See
The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, pp. 437–46.
29 This is a working assumption that will need to be backed up by further research. It is based
on the fact that Rawlinson C. 581 contains five more Confessiones than the 1658 print
(Confessiones 46 to 50), and that — even though the provenance of the manuscript is
unknown — it would be exactly the kind of volume to be the result of More’s fellow sisters
copying out her text, as Baker describes it (see The Life, ed. by Wekking, pp. 44–45).
30 See for instance Confessio 18, p. 88, l. 25–p. 89, l. 3: ‘and also my beloued ffather & patron
St Augustine, whome thou hast giuen me in a most particular manner to be an helpe to mee
in doubts & ffeares, an incouragement by his bookes to hope for pardon ffor my innumerable
sinnes, & as a fire in all his words to sett my soule also on fire to seeke after & aspire to thy
diuine loue, & to wish only þat that may wholy possesse my soule; which grant ffor his sake,
as also for thy owne, who art blessed ffor euer. Amen’.
28 marleen cré

whereas Augustine, as a public figure, may have felt a more pressing need to
explain his tumultuous past, More’s Confessiones initially present themselves,
in Walter Hilton’s words, ‘intimate love letters between a loving soul and Jesus
who is loved’.31 They gradually also include more didactic commentaries on
biblical passages read out in the offices (or read during private prayer), and
— especially in the later Confessiones, meditations in which More expresses
her own sinfulness more explicitly.
Gertrude’s apologetic statements initially refer to the sorry state of her
religious practice in the early years of her life in Cambrai, to her realization
that her behaviour was unworthy of a nun, and to her gratitude that Augustine
Baker (who is not named in the text, just as he is called ‘Father Anonimus’ in
The Life) showed her the way out of the dead-end life she was living:
Ffor till I resolued, what difficulties so-euer I endured, to make thy will
my law, & thy disposition my consolation, I found noe stabilitie in any
thing or exercise what-soeuer; & since that time I haue ffound certainty
& quiett in all the incerteinty of contrarie occurrences.32
In a later Confessio, More discusses her difficulties and their solution in
greater detail:
Ffor when I sinned, he recalled me, & forsooke me not in that my miserie
of offending such an infinite goodnes so shamefully, & when entering into
wholy [holy] religion before I knewe the happinesse thereof, by which
meanes I grew wearie of bearing his sweet yoake and light burthen, which
is heauy only through our one fault, & not of itselfe, & through which
default & ignorance of mine it grew so greiuous and intolerable to me, that
I wished often that it mought haue bin shaken of lawfully by me, pretending
that it was so incompatible with my good, that I could scarcely worke my
saluation in this my state & profession, & this, my God, thou art witness
of, is true; & so did it continue with me three yeares after I had in shew
forsaken thee world, & the world indeed forsaken me; when, I say, after
this plight entering into religion, did my Lord in these my bitter afflictions
forsake mee? No, no, but he prouided such an helpe for me by meanes of
a faithfull seruant of his, that quicly was my sorrow turned into ioye; yea,
into such an vnspeakbable ioye, that it hath sweetned all my sorrowes that
since that tyme haue befallen me. Ffor as soone as my soule was sett in a
way of tending to God by abnegation, I found al my misseries presently
disperse themselues and come to nothing. Yea, euen in 5 weekes my soule
became so enamored with the yoake of this my deare Lord, that if I must
haue made not only 4 but 4000 vowes to haue become wholie dedicated
to him, I should haue imbraced his state with more ioye and content then

31 ‘swete lettre-sendyngys made atwix [a] louynge soule and Jesu loued’. Hilton, The Scale,
Book II, Chapter 43, ed. by Hussey and Sargent, p. 336.
32 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 18, p. 87, ll. 14–17.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 29

euer I did desire to obteine that whicheuer I most of all wished or desired.
Yea, and as thou knowest, my God, by 6 weekes my soule, being putt into
a course of prayer, I seemed to haue found a true meanes whereby I might
loue without end or measure, & that without any perill or danger. Ffor
who can loue thee, my God, too much?33
It is worth quoting this passage in full, for it gives us a very clear view of
Gertrude’s aims and themes. A first theme is her own spiritual history, which
is shaped as a conversion story: the shameful life of misery and ignorance,
which is turned around by the help of God’s faithful servant (the unnamed
Augustine Baker), whose methods of setting the souls in his care on the way
to abnegation (the true humility of recognizing that, compared to God’s all,
the soul is infinitely small, yet can obtain the fullness of his love in humility)
provided her with the true means to love God without end or measure, and
without any danger, in a period of five to six weeks. That this is a relatively
short period in which to emerge from a spiritual crisis that lasted for years,
shows the soundness of Baker’s spiritual method — and can thus be seen as a
strong endorsement — and simultaneously proves God’s endless mercy and
willingness to forgive the contemplative’s sins. One can see how this would
have been considered edifying reading for all the Cambrai sisters, while at
the same time it presents More as both completely dedicated to the spiritual
life and especially blessed.
More’s own predicament leads her to take strong positions on what she
considers a good ‘souperiour’ or spiritual adviser:
souperiours reflecting one theire owne authority rather then on what in
thy behalfe they ought to exact in this or that case, & rather on what by
theyre power they ought to exact in this or that case, & rather on what by
their power they may commaund, then on what according to thy pleasure
were best to be done, gouerne more in theire owne power then in thine;
& the effect, (vnles it be very streight betweene his subiects hearts and
thee), will consequently be more humaine then diuine; & then they (whilst
sensible of theire one honour onely) doe abuse the power giuen by thee,
& euen loose whate otherwise they would haue found; & the subiects,
lookeing rather to discouer the defects of theire superiours then performe
theire one obligations & offices, both faile in theire duties towards thee,
to thy dishonour, who so sweetly & iustly disposest all things, so long as
we doe not peruert thy order with seekeing not thee & thy honour, but
our-selues & our owne honour.34
In this passage we see a confident early modern woman speaking her mind.
She suggests that superiors who seek their own authority before God’s create

33 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 25, p. 104, l. 16 – p. 105, l. 20.

34 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 14, p. 77, l. 11 – p. 78, l. 4.
30 marleen cré

disobedient communities who fail to give God his due and fail to find God
in true contemplation, losing themselves in worldly friendships. She reports
what she experienced in herself, and — possibly — observed in others, as
seems to be suggested by her use of the plural:
But being ignorant how to conuerse with thee and haue in all things
relation to thee, theire yoake becomes more & more burdensome to them,
and euery day, they fall into new deficulties & inconueniences, and are in
danger att last to fall into open rebelion with their lawfull superiours, and
some into strang ffrindshipps; a thing which is worthy to be bewailed with
bloody teares, that hearts capable of thy love & wholy consecrated thereto,
should soe miserably loose them-selues in poring out them-selues where
& from whome noe true comfort can be found or had.35
A good superior can guide any contemplative to the spiritual life that suits
her by making her find the way in which to ‘converse’ with God most suited
to the individual nun, but always leading to the ardent, exclusive love for God
that overcomes worldly attachments:
But I wish that those that do this [i.e. hold the internal spiritual life in
contempt] simply by being vnapt for a spirituall life, might giue them-
selues to that, which by superiours should be found for them most fitt;
and not be a cause that thy sweet mercy and goodnesse should haue
such wrong, as that other soules that are fitt should be hindred ffrom
haueing relation to thee, by which theyre soules would be turned wholy
into loue, by a vehement desire and longing after thee, that one thing
which is necessary.36
The soul can only match God’s infinity, his ‘all’, in her boundless love for him.
More even expresses this boundlessness in figures: even when she would
be bound by four thousand rather than four vows (obedience, chastity,
poverty, and stability of abode), she would desire God more ardently than
she ever desired any worldly thing. Again, the spiritual bedrock on which
all More’s statements rest is the contemplative soul’s realization that, in
comparison to God, she is nothing, and that she can only receive the
fullness of God in her soul in true humility. Because only God is fullness
of being, the soul cannot find rest in the worldly things from which God
is absent. In her writings, rather than marrying the practical requirements
of convent life — More was the Cambrai Abbey’s cellaress — with the
spiritual side of it, More resolutely turns inwards, stressing the spiritual
consequences of physical enclosure — a radical renunciation of the world
and its creatures, in which and in whom no comfort can be found. More

35 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 1, p. 21, ll. 18–26.

36 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 5, p. 43, ll. 9–15.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 31

expresses this repeatedly throughout the Confessiones, but most eloquently

and succinctly in the following passages:37
therefore misserable are wee, when wee seeke any-thing besides thee38
Lett vs leaue pretending anie-thing but thee.39
O lett all creatures be to me as if they were not, to the ende I may fully
attend to thee in the bottome of my soule, where I will in silence hearken
to thee.40
In a passage in Confessio 45 in which More discusses the transience of
people’s opinions, we might possibly see More dealing with her fellow sisters’
responses to her writings, urging herself not to set too much store by their
appreciation or lack of it:
O how little true peace doth the soule enjoy, who careth for the praises of
men, or feareth their dispraises, since nothing is more slippery, nothing
more vnconstant, nothing more vncerteine, then men! To-day one will be
thy friend and extoll thee to the skeyes, and to-morrow none shall haue
thee lesse in esteeme then he. And thus it standeth with all human flesh:
this is the frailty of man.41
Though the sentiment she expresses is commonplace — the slippery and
changeable world full of inconstant people is opposed to the stability and
certainty found in the love of God, who never wavers and is ever present — the
later Confessiones have other characteristics that can be read and understood
as the consequence of Gertrude’s growing reputation as a spiritual writer and
exemplary nun.42 Thus, in the later Confessiones, More repeatedly presents
herself as a sinful wretch in language absent from the earlier Confessiones.
Fairly neutral expressions such as ‘I haue bin twenty-fiue yeares in my infirmity
of most loathsome sinnes’43 make way for expressions of self-abasement in
stronger language:
If it were euer possible to be lawfull for thy creatures to exclaime against
thee, & taxe thee of iniustice, it might be admitted them, in this thou
hast done and doest for me, the most sinfull and contemptible of all thy
Majesties creatures.44

37 Other passages that express the same teaching are Confessio 20, p. 95, l. 18 – p. 96, l. 4;
Confessio 43, p. 132, l. 23 – p. 133, l. 2, and Confessio 45, p. 140, ll. 16–22.
38 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 14, p. 79, ll. 5–6.
39 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 37, p. 124, l. 22.
40 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 40, p. 128, ll. 18–20.
41 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 45, p. 140, ll. 16–22.
42 That she indeed had this reputation can also be seen in the deathbed accounts written by her
fellow nuns included in The Life. See The Life, ed. by Wekking, pp. 312–26.
43 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 14, p. 76, ll. 3–4.
44 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 33, p. 116, ll. 15–18; italics mine.
32 marleen cré

Thou only art just, thou only holy, and I the most vile and contemptible of
all creatures. Thou who discernest most clearly how it standeth with me
for my pride, and other abominable sinnes, wash me in thy blood and I shall
yet become whiter then snowe.45
These passages of self-abasement are also linked to the spiritual commonplace
that ‘happy [are] they that are approved by thee, my God, though here they be
despised, neglected and contemned by the whole world’,46 and they also play
on the consciousness that, compared to God’s ‘strong and faithfull seruants’
of the past, his little children’s sufferings are but ‘flies and gnatts’.47

Love and Knowledge

More frequently responds to her experience of God’s overwhelming ‘all’ with

boundless desire for him. God is the lover ‘who is more mine then I am my
owne’,48 and who draws the soul to him and showers it with his abundant mercy:
O lett me melt wholy into loue, to record these thy most abundant mercies!
Lett me be neuer werie in singing thy praise, who thus hath inuited &
drawne me euer, whether I would or noe, to a perfect contempt of all
created things, that I may adhere to thee aboue all guifts what-so-euer!
This I doe so particularly writt downe, because my frailty is so great, that
I may perhapps growe vnmidnfull of thee, notwithstanding all this that
thou hast done for me.49
More’s love of God is closely linked to the urge to write. She has to record her
love, lest in her insufficiency she forgets God’s greatness. Yet the urge to write
equally derives from those moments in which More is sick with love for her
absent lover, when writing to or of him is one of the only consolations she has.
In her reference to other people who speak to her about her beloved, we once
more see More as a member of her community, as she suggests conversations
with her fellow sisters and her spiritual adviser and confessor:
To speake with him is impossible, the distance of place being so great;
but yet she may heare others who speake of him, which a little mittigateth
her miserie, though while his absence is all irksome to her, because the
delaye afflicteth her heart: but is shee yet without all comfort? Noe, for she
may writt to & of him; & if none will carry it to her deare beloued, it shall
remaine / by her, that he may see att his returne hou shee languished for
loue, & could take comfort in nothing all creatures could offer or propose

45 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 45, p. 137, l. 31 – p. 138, l. 2; italics mine.
46 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 45, p. 138, ll. 12–14.
47 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 24, p. 103, ll. 4–9.
48 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 13, p. 69, ll. 11–12.
49 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 25, p. 105, l. 21 – p. 106, l. 3.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 33

to her soule, & how shee possessed not what shee only desired, her life
by loue being more with her beloued then where shee liued: for which
cause shee heareth & yet mindeth not what is said; vnless perhapps they
treat feelingly of her absent loue, & speake in his praise, shee seeth & yet
cannot take comfort in what shee beholdeth; shee sleepeth, but yet her
heart waketh: & in fine, whilst she canot enioye her beloued, nothing
cane satisfie her vnquiett heart.50
For More, as for religious writers before her, her loving experience of God and
her amorous desire for him also desires greater knowledge of him, and this
knowledge of him comes in contemplation. This realization is expressed early
on in the Confessiones, and is repeated throughout the text. In these passages,
More also expresses the overwhelming greatness of God in hyperbolical
figures, as she did earlier when speaking about the vows she would like to
take for God:
For one learneth more in prayer of thee in one houer then all the creaturs
in the world could teach one in 50 yeares; for that which thou teachest
is sound, solid & secure, because it tends to nothing but to loue thee &
neglect itselfe; thy words bring force & strength in themselues, thy words
are words of peace to the soule; thy words are not like þe words of men,
which passe as sound through the ayre; but thine peirce the very bottome
of oure soules.51
Because once to haue seene thee is to haue learned all things.52
This loving knowledge of God, how it can be acquired and what it can lead
to, is further nuanced. In Confessio 5, More teaches that knowledge of God
and of the self can be acquired not just in private prayers, but in the saying
of the Office too:
and sometymes thou teachest a soule to vnderstand more in [the Office]
of the knoweledge of thee and of them-selues, then euer could haue bin
by all the teaching in the world shewed to a soule in 500 yeares.53
Because of God’s fullness, knowledge of him is a multiplication of knowledge of
the world arrived at by other means. Later in the Confessiones, More expresses
again that knowledge of God and knowledge of the self are ‘inseparable
companions’, quoting and expounding Augustine’s Soliloquies 2. 1. 1:
In this light the glorious St Augustine walked in an extraordinarie manner,
when he cried out with a most amorous heart: ‘Lord, lett me knowe thee,
& lett me know my-selfe’.

50 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 13, p. 71, ll. 3–16.

51 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 1, p. 23, ll. 9–16.
52 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 19, p. 90, l. 18.
53 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 5, p. 39, ll. 27–29.
34 marleen cré

These two knowledges are inseparable companions, and increase the one
by the other. Ffor who can knowe thee, vnles he knowe himselfe? And
who cane knowe himselfe, vnles he be tought by thee? Those that would
knowe something of thee, and would be fauored by thee, for any end but
to loue thee and to learne to dispise them-selues, shew them-selues to
be in perill of a most dangerous ruine: for those that walke the true way
of loue, which is the way of the Crosse, desire noe fauour, but to be able
without all comfort to be faithfull to thee, my Lord God.54

Religious Instruction

If we take the Confessiones at face value, and read them as letters to God by
Gertrude More that have been transmitted in the order in which she wrote
them, we can see her developing into a commentator on the Scriptures and
a teacher. She may first and foremost be pondering the texts she reads or
encounters in the Office for herself, but if it was the case that her fellow
sisters started reading her Confessiones as she was still writing them, she
may also have been teaching them. An interesting recurrent interest in the
Confessiones, more particularly in Confessiones 27, 36, and 39, is in Mary
Magdalene. She is a person More identifies with, and she ponders Jesus’
responses to her in the Gospel, seeking to draw conclusions about how he
deals with a contemplative soul, and how contemplatives should respond to
him. In Confessio 27, Mary Magdalene is understood to be one of the women
going to Jesus’s grave early in the morning on the third day, bearing spices
to anoint his body (Luke 24. 1–10).55 Here Mary Magdalene is presented as
the soul yearning for God and looking for him, and satisfied by nothing or
no one but him:
Was it any comfort to Marie Magdalen, when she sought thee, to find two
angelles, which presented them-selues instead of thee? Verily, I cannot
thinke it was anie ioye vnto her.56
In Confessio 36, we follow More as she is thinking while she writes, groping
for answers after she heard what could have been John 20. 11–18, the Gospel

54 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 8, p. 52, ll. 16–26.

55 The Gospel does not explicitly name one of the women as Mary Magdalene. The women
going to the tomb carrying spices are not named in Luke 24. 1, and are referred to as
‘mulieres quae cum ipso venerant de Galilaea’ (the women who came with him from
Galilee) in Luke 23. 56. Though in Luke 24. 10, Mary Magdalene is named, it is unclear
whether of the group of women mentioned, she was one of the two who went to the grave:
‘erat autem Maria Magdalene et Johanna et Maria Iacobi et ceterae quae cum eis erant quae
dicebant ad apostolos haec’ (and it was Mary Magdalen and Joanna and Mary, mother of
James and the other women that were with them, who told these things to the Apostles).
56 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 27, p. 110, ll. 20–22.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 35

for Easter Sunday in the Tridentine Rite.57 More contrasts John 20. 17 (‘noli
me tangere’) with Luke 7. 38 and 7. 45, where ‘a woman who was in that city,
a sinner’ — commonly identified with Mary Magdalene in the medieval
period and beyond — washes Jesus’s feet with tears, kisses them, and dries
them with her hair. More is struck with bewilderment that Jesus will allow
Mary Magdalene, still a sinner, to kiss his feet, whereas later, when she ‘had
bin a long time trained vp in thy schoole of perfection, and had accompanied
thee in thy Passion, and morned for thee at thy tombe, takeing noe rest till
thou, her beloued, returned to her againe’,58 he no longer allows her to kiss
his feet (or, as John 20. 17 has it, to touch him). Would it be possible, More
ventures, that as contemplatives love God more, he loves them less? ‘Noe,
God forbid I should euer admitt of such a thought’.59 She then explains that
God asks Mary to lift her love for him ‘to a loue more spirituall then that with
which shee loued thee, when thou conuersedst with her before thy death and
Passion’.60 God becomes more severe with his advanced contemplatives so
that they do not fall into the temptation of attributing their progress in the
spiritual life to themselves. By giving them stronger trials, he aims to show
them their frailty. Like Mary Magdalene, advanced contemplatives should
consider themselves unworthy to kiss Jesus’s feet, and should ‘conuerse with
thee in a more spirituall manner then before’;61 and like her, they should
not reflect on the pain and suffering Jesus’s denial causes them, ‘for, as thou
knowest, loue feeleth no labour, nor complaineth of anie burthen; and onlie
to haue seene thee aliue againe was sufficient to haue made her forgett all
former afflictions’.62
In Confessio 39, More meditates on Luke 7. 36–50, the reading ‘in tertio
Nocturno’ on 22 July,63 and more particularly on verses 7. 47 and 7. 48.
Returning to Jesus’s reaction to Mary Magdalene (‘the sinner who was in that
town’), she despairingly asks ‘O my Lord and my God, if none haue much
forgiuen them, but those that loue much, what will become of me’.64 More
laments that she is not like the woman who had ‘the necessarie disposition
for a soule to heare that comfortable word, “Thy sinnes are forgiuen thee, goe
in peace”’ because her soul ‘is destitute of that pure loue which soe preuaileth
with thy diuine Majestie’.65 She describes herself as ‘blown downe with the
least blast of temptation’, and unable to ‘endure anie disgrace, desolation, or

57 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, p. 121.

58 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 36, p. 121, l. 27 – p. 122, l. 1.
59 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 36, p. 122, ll. 6–9.
60 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 36, p. 122, ll. 9–10.
61 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 36, p. 122, l. 23.
62 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 36, p. 122, ll. 24–27.
63 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, p. 126.
64 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 39, p. 126, ll. 7–8.
65 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 39, p. 126, ll. 18–19.
36 marleen cré

difficultie what-soeuer, as it beseemes a true lover of his’.66 At the end of the

meditation, she identifies herself with Mary Magdalene again, and imagines
herself at Jesus’s feet, where she will
sigh & weepe, both for my sinnes and for my defect in loueing thee, who
art so worthy of all loue & praise and what-so-euer. There I will begge this
loue, so much to be desired. There I will wish & long for it, and from thy
feete I will not depart, till thou denounce to me: ‘Thy sinnes are forgiuen
thee’, and sayest to my soule: ‘Goe in peace’.67
We can see here how More’s very personal response to readings in the Office
takes shape in writing, and how the writing process helps her express the joys
of contemplation (in the exclamation of Confessio 27 that the angels at the
grave cannot have been a source of joy for Mary Magdalene) as well as deal
with the difficulties she experienced in the life she has chosen (the realization
of the insufficiency of her love and her sinfulness). We can equally imagine
how, in this textual embodiment, her meditations and commentaries could
have been useful for her fellow nuns, who I argue would have had access to
her writings even when she was alive.

More and the Medieval English Mystical Tradition:

Julian of Norwich’s ‘A Revelation of Divine Love’

Because More writes in an authorial rather than a compilational voice, the

medieval influences on her work do not show in the explicit borrowing of
passages that can be isolated and identified. Her work does, however, linger
on themes that were important to the medieval mystics, and this may mean
that More’s response to her experience continued on from what she had
read (or had heard Augustine Baker read aloud) in the medieval texts, such
as Julian’s A Revelation.
More’s assertion that, ‘enamored with the yoake of this my deare lord’
she would ‘haue made not only 4 but 4000 vowes’68 to completely dedicate
her life to God, she might well be appropriating Julian of Norwich’s repeated
expression of Christ’s boundlessly abundant gifts to the soul:69

66 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 39, p. 126, ll. 27–29.

67 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 39, p. 127, ll. 3–7.
68 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 25, p. 105, ll. 12 and 14.
69 A similar idea occurs in an exclamation in Confessio 2: ‘O noe, but if I had tenn thousand
hearts, all were too little to bestowe on thee’ (26/15–16) and in Confessio 5, a passage
quoted earlier: ‘sometymes thou teachest a soule to vnderstand more in [the Office] of the
knoweledge of thee and of them-selues, then euer could haue bin by all the teaching in the
world shewed to a soule in 500 yeares’. Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 5, p. 39,
ll. 27–29.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 37

For methought that alle the pain and traveyle that might be suffrede of
all living men might not haue deservede the wurshipful thank that one
man shalle have that wilfully haue servede god.70
(For it seemed to me that all the pain and travail that might be suffered
by all living men might not have deserved the worshipful thanks that
one man, who has willingly served God, shall have.)
Though Christ suffered only once, not only did he suffer ‘more paine than
alle men might suffer […] from the first beginning into the last day’,71 he
repeatedly assures Julian that, if he ‘might suffer more’, he ‘wolde suffer
more’.72 These words lead to Julian’s understanding of Christ’s love for the
soul which she expresses in terms of large numbers. More’s four thousand
vows express the soul’s reciprocation of Christ’s gift of his suffering in similar
terms of love and dedication.
And in these wordes — ‘If I might suffer more, I wolde suffer more’ — I
saw sothly that as often as he might die, as often he wolde, and love sholde
never let him have rest tille he had done it. And I behelde with grete
diligence for to wet how often he wolde die if he might. And sothly the
nomber passed my understanding and my wittes so ferre that my reson
might not, nor cold not, comprehende ne take it. And when he had thus
ofte died, or shuld, yet he wolde set it a nought for love.73
(And in these words – ‘If I might suffer more, I would suffer more’ – I
saw truly, that as often as He might die, as He often would, love should
never let Him rest till He had done it. And I beheld this with great
diligence in order to know how often He would die if He were able
to. And truly, the number passed my understanding and my wits so
far that my reason was not able and could not comprehend or take it
in. And when He had in this manner so often died or should die, yet
He would set it at nought for love.)
In Confessio 1, More points out that those who cannot arrive at connecting
with God in meditation and prayer ‘soo miserably loose them-selues in
powring out them-selues where & from whome noe true comfort can be
found or had’,74 and she prays to God ‘to remoue these impediments from
those that are thine by soe manie titles; lett them knowe thee and of thee,

70 All references to The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, by chapter and
page numbers. A Revelation, p. 14, ll. 14–16.
71 The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, A Revelation, p. 20, ll. 3–5.
72 The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, A Revelation, p. 22, ll. 4­–5.
73 The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, A Revelation, p. 22, ll. 21–27.
74 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 1, p. 21, ll. 21–27.
38 marleen cré

that they may loue nothing but thee’.75 Again, her text is reminiscent of A
Revelation, where Julian teaches that too many people look for comfort and
rest where they cannot be found:
For this is the cause why we be not all in ease of hart and soule: for we
seeke heer rest in this thing that is so little, wher no reste is in, and we
know not our God, that is al mighty, all wise, and all good. For he is very
reste. God will be knowen, and him liketh that we rest us in him.76
(For this is the reason why we are not all at ease in heart and soul: for
we seek here rest in this thing that is so little, in which there is no rest,
and we do not know our God, Who is almighty, all wise, and all good.
For He is very rest. It is God’s will that He be known, and it pleases
Him that we rest ourselves in Him.)
A third instance in which More seems to be appropriating Julian’s voice is
when she discusses the importance of the common over the singular in the
context of spiritual exercises:
Ffor this proceeding [i.e. observing one’s personal path towards God]
doeth not make a soule singuler in her acctions & carriage (for singularity
is a vice wch thou extreamly hatest), but rather makes one exceedingly loue
the common obediences & externall exercises, all of them putting ones
soule in mynde of her duetie towards thee in all things.77
The aside in parentheses may well be an echo of Julian’s understanding that
God prefers the general, the common, and the all to the singular:
And when God almighti had shewed so plentuosly and so fully of his
goodnesse, I desired to wit of a serteyn creature that I loved if it shulde
continue in good leving, which I hoped by the grace of God was begonne.
And in this singular desyer it semed that I letted myselfe, for I was not
taught in this time. And then was I answered in my reson, as it were by a
frendfulle mene: ‘Take it generally, and beholde the curtesy of thy lorde
God as he sheweth to the. For it is more worshipe to God to beholde him
in alle than in any specialle thing’.78
Further research will have to establish whether or not More gleaned these
ideas from a reading of Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation, or whether they could
have come to her through other channels, from contemporary authors such
as Constantin de Barbanson, whose Secrets Sentiers is itself continuous with
medieval mystical texts such as John Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals. It could
be argued that More would have mentioned Julian as an influence directly in

75 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 1, p. 21, l. 26 – p. 22, l. 1.

76 The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, A Revelation, p. 5, ll. 21–25.
77 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 5, p. 39, ll. 13–17.
78 The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, A Revelation, p. 35, ll. 1–7.
 Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 39

her text, but she does not. Here, too, she might be seen to follow medieval
examples, as recent authors were far less likely mentioned as sources, whereas
authors of authoritative texts were.79

Conclusion

In the Confessiones More can be seen to bridge a historical divide as she

adopts contemplation as the only valid and fruitful way to live her vocation,
a way of life that in her text she also offers to her fellow sisters as the one that
defines them as a true Benedictine community. By returning to the roots
of the monastic life — the renunciation of the world to turn inwards to
God — More is able to break her spiritual deadlock. In addition, when her
text becomes part of her community’s spiritual legacy, she is also pointing
to what she believes is the way forward for the Cambrai community. Just
as Gertrude More’s Confessiones shored up her hard-won stability in
spiritual exercises, and ‘certainty & quiett in all the incerteinty of contrarie
occurrences’,80 as taught her by Augustine Baker, this text, both in its initial
manuscript transmission and later in its printed form, may also have given
the Cambrai community a sense of its contemplative Benedictine identity,
turning inwards to prayer and meditation so that the nuns could transcend
the world, and turn to God:
Ffor this is a rule, thou knowest, giuen to me by a faithful seruant of thy
diuine Majestie, who indeed gaue most generall rules, that we might not
be tied to him or anie other creature, but being leaft more free to thee, flie
alsoe more freelie with the wings of diuine loue, which carieth a soule,
euen in humain flesh, aboue all that is not thy verie selfe; of such force
is thy grace concurring with our will, which is by nature capable off an
infinite extent towards thee, when as it neither seeketh, intendeth, desireth,
willeth or resteth in anything but thee.81
It is intriguing to see that this inward movement (not only evidenced in More’s
work, but also in the defence of Baker when his orthodoxy was investigated
in 1633,82 as well as in the tenaciousness with which the community held on
to Augustine Baker’s contemplative writings when they were ordered to give

79 Though the compiler of The Chastising of God’s Children borrows extensively from John
Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals and Alphonse of Pecha’s Epistola solitarii ad reges, neither
author is acknowledged in the compilation. The Chastising, ed. by Bazire and Colledge.
80 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 18, p. 87, ll. 16–17.
81 Confessiones Amantis, ed. by Clark, Confessio 20, p. 95, l. 18 – p. 96, l. 4.
82 See Appendix D in The Life, ed. by Wekking, pp. 347–50, which has ‘A Protestation of Father
Anonimus and his Scollers: or a Declaration of his doctrine and practise in the matter of the
Divine Call […] penned by Father Anonimus; but at the instance of Dame Gertrude’.
40 marleen cré

them up in 1655),83 coincided with an outward movement sometime after

her death. We have seen that her text was copied, and was printed in 1657
and 1658, and therefore disseminated outside the boundaries of Cambrai
Abbey. In addition, the community was disseminated too, when in 1651 the
Cambrai’s daughter house, The Monastery of Our Lady of Good Hope, was
founded in Paris, with Gertrude’s sister Bridget as its first prioress.84 The
inward movement is in keeping with the post-Tridentine Church’s strict
enforcement of female enclosure. However, the Cambrai English Benedictines’
insistence on their right to shape their contemplative lives according to their
personal needs and away from any kind of method imposed by the Douai
Benedictine monks who were critical of the freedom Baker’s teaching afforded
can be seen as an anomaly. It illustrates the diversity of religious practice in
the period and the strength of these relatively small convents in exile in the
Spanish Netherlands.

Works Cited

Manuscripts and Archival Sources

London, British Library, MS Sloane 2499

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 581
Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 1202
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Fonds Anglais 40
Stafford, Colwich Abbey MSS 22 and 23
Stratton-on-the Fosse, Downside Abbey, Baker MS 33
York, Ampleforth Abbey, MS 127

Primary Sources

Augustine Baker, O.S.B.: The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More, ed. by
Ben Wekking, Analecta Cartusiana, 119.19 (Salzburg: FB Anglistik und
Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 2002)
Catalogue des livres provenant des religieuses angloises de Cambray: Book List of
the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai c. 1739, ed. by J. T. Rhodes, Analecta
Cartusiana, 119.42 (Salzburg: FB Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität
Salzburg, 2013)
The Chastising of God’s Children and the Treatise of Perfection of the Sons of God, ed.
by Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957)

83 For epistolary evidence of Abbess Catherine Gascoigne’s reluctance to do as she was asked,
see English Convents in Exile, iii, ed. by Hallett, pp. 285–93.
84 Rowell, ‘Baker’s Continuing Influence’, p. 82.
Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis and the Contemplative Identity 41

‘Colections’ by an English Nun in Exile: Bibliothèque Mazarine 1202, ed. by Julia

Bolton Holloway, Analecta Cartusiana, 119.26 (Salzburg: FB Anglistik und
Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 2006)
Constantin de Barbanson, Les secrets sentiers de l’amour divin: Edités en 1623 chez
Jean Kinckius libraire à Cologne (Paris: Desclée, 1932)
English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Volume 3, Life Writing, ed. by Nicky Hallett
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012)
Fr. Augustine Baker O.S.B.: Confessiones Amantis: The Spiritual Exercises of the
Most Vertuous and Religious Dame Gertrude More, ed. by John Clark, Analecta
Cartusiana, 119.27 (Salzburg: FB Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität
Salzburg, 2007)
Hilton, Walter, The Scale of Perfection, Book II: A Critical Edition based on British
Library MSS Harley 6573 and 6579, ed. by Stanley Hussey and Michael Sargent,
Early English Text Society, o.s., 348 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
The Writings of Julian of Norwich: ‘A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman’ and ‘A
Revelation of Love’, ed. by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, Medieval
Women Texts and Contexts, 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)

Secondary Studies

Anderson, Judith H., ‘More, (Christopher) Cresacre (1572–1649), in Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
<https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19174> [accessed 15 September 2022]
Bolton Holloway, Julia, ‘More, Helen [name in religion Gertrude] (1606–1633),
in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19178> [accessed
15 September 2022]
Dutton, Elisabeth, Julian of Norwich: The Influence of Late Medieval Devotional
Compilations (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008)
English Catholic Books 1641–1700: A Bibliography, ed. by Thomas H. Clancy
(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996)
Histoire de Cambrai, ed. by Louis Trenard (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1982)
Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England, ed. by Marleen Cré, Diana
Denissen, and Denis Renevey, Medieval Church Studies, 41 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2020)
Latz, Dorothy L., ‘The Mystical Poetry of Dame Gertrude More’, Mystics Quarterly,
16.2 (1990), 66–82
Lux-Sterritt, Laurence, ‘Mary Ward’s English Institute and Prescribed Female
Roles in the Early Modern Church’, in Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality,
ed. by Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen M. Mangion (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), pp. 83–98
McNamara, Jo Ann Kay, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)
Norman, Marion, ‘Dame Gertrude More and the English Mystical Tradition’,
British Catholic History, 13.3 (1976), 196–211
42 marleen cré

Rowell, Benedict, ‘Baker’s Continuing Influence on Benedictine Nuns’, in

That Mysterious Man: Essays on Augustine Baker OSB (1575–1641), ed. by
Michael Woodward, Analecta Cartusiana, 119.15 (Salzburg: FB Anglistik und
Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 2001), pp. 82–91
Van Hyning, Victoria, ‘Expressing Selfhood in the Convent: Anonymous
Chronicling and Subsumed Autobiography’, British Catholic History, 32 (2014),
219–34
—
 Ottó Gecser

Helper Saints and their Critics in the Long

Fifteenth Century

The title page of the second edition of Thomas More’s A Dialogue Concerning
Heresies (1531, first published in 1529) advertised it as a work ‘wherein be
treated divers matters: as of the veneration and worship of images and relics,
praying to saints, and going on pilgrimage.1 With many other things touching
the pestilent sect of Luther and Tyndale’.2 Even though the Dialogue is not
about heterodox views on saints and their worshippers in the first place, the
printer, William Rastell, or the author himself, apparently found this topic
the most characteristic of the ‘sect’ in question or the most interesting for
potential customers. This advertising strategy was not entirely unfair, as the
interlocutors of the dialogue — the young Messenger, whose role is to present
the views of the ‘heretics’, and the narrator who has to confute them — discuss
a wide range of arguments concerning all aspects of the cult of saints in sixteen
chapters (2–17) of book i and again in five additional chapters (8–12) of book
ii, that is, in roughly a quarter of the whole work.

1 This article is based on research carried out at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
with the support of the Herodotus Fund. The finishing touches were put on the text during
a research stay as a Humboldt Fellow at the Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte of
the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen. I am grateful to Dorottya Uhrin for her feedback
on a previous version of the text, and to the editors of the volume for their thorough
comments on it. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations and emendations of the quoted
sources are mine.
2 More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. by Gottschalk, p. 3. Gottschalk’s edition relies
on More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. by Lawler, Marc’Hadour, and Marius
with corresponding page numbers but provides the text with standardized spelling and
modernized punctuation. For the work itself, see Duffy, ‘“The comen knowen multytude of
crysten men”’; for the cult of saints as discussed in it, see Mitjans, ‘On Veneration of Images,
Praying to Saints, and Going on Pilgrimages’.

Ottó Gecser • ([email protected]) is Associate Professor in the Faculty of

Social Sciences at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

Religious Transformations in New Communities of Interpretation in Europe (1350–1570):

Bridging the Historiographical Divides, ed. by Élise Boillet and Ian Johnson, New Communities of
Interpretation, 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 43–70.
© FHG DOI 10.1484/M.NCI-EB.5.131213
44 ottó gec s e r

In chapter 10 of book ii, upon admitting to the narrator that ‘ye have in
my mind very well touched the matter concerning that it is not in vain to pray
to saints, nor to worship them and to have their relics in some reverence’,
the Messenger goes on to expound his objections to ‘the manner of the
worship’.3 Firstly, he criticizes worshipping the saints as God himself; secondly,
worshipping the images of saints as the saints themselves; and thirdly, ‘the
harm that goeth by going of pilgrimages — roiling about in idleness, with
the riot, reveling, and ribaldry, gluttony, wantonness, waste, and lechery’.4
Finally, he turns to the specializations of saints, their assignments to specific
kinds of assistance, in the following way:
‘What say we then’, quoth he, ‘to that I spoke not of yet in which we do
them little worship, while we set every saint to his office and assign him
a craft such as pleaseth us? Saint Eligius we make a horse leech and must
let our horse rather run unshod and mar his hooves than to shoe him on
his day — which we must, for that point, more religiously keep high and
holy than Easter Day! And because one smith is too few at a forge, we set
Saint Hippolytus to help him. And on Saint Stephen’s Day we must let
all our horses’ blood with a knife because Saint Stephen was killed with
stones. Saint Apollonia we make a tooth-drawer, and may speak to her of
nothing but of sore teeth. Saint Zita women set to seek their keys. Saint
Roch we set to see to the great sickness, because he had a sore. And with
him they join Saint Sebastian because he was martyred with arrows. Some
serve for the eye only. And some for a sore breast. Saint Germanus only
for children. And yet will he not once look at them but if the mothers
bring with them a white loaf and a pot of good ale. And yet is he wiser than
Saint Wilgefortis; for she, good soul, is, as they say, served and content
with oats. Whereof I cannot perceive the reason but if it be because she
should provide a horse for an evil husband to ride to the devil upon. For
that is the thing that she is so sought for, as they say. Insomuch that women
hath therefore changed her name, and instead of “Saint Wilgefortis” call
her “Saint Unencumber” — because they reckon that for a peck of oats
she will not fail to unencumber them of their husbands’.5
It is the ‘manner of the worship’ concerning these specialized saints that
constitutes the last objection to the cult of holy men and women not only
in this chapter but in the entire work as well. The remaining two chapters of
book ii are reserved for the narrator’s answer and further comments. The
problem of specialization (which the Messenger ‘spoke not of yet’) has been
left to the very end. Why? Was it a minor issue considered only for the sake
of completeness? Or was it a major issue of the day to be treated at the end

3 More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. by Gottschalk, p. 226.

4 More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. by Gottschalk, p. 226.
5 More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. by Gottschalk, pp. 226–27.
 h e l p e r s a i n ts an d t h e i r c r i t i c s i n t h e lo ng f i f t e e nt h ce nt u ry 45

to make the most lasting impression on the reader? Was it an issue easy to
examine due to a large body of arguments made available by others? Or was
it an issue requiring much rhetorical invention to discuss?
Answering these questions (or, at least, attempting to do so) needs the rest
of this article. My main goal is to reconstruct how the cult of helper saints or
holy helpers — that is saints specialized in particular kinds of assistance —
emerged as a problem in its own right in the course of the fifteenth century.
The holy helpers in general have received little attention by scholars even if
the cult of specific saints who came to be venerated as helpers or that of the
famous Fourteen Holy Helpers have been studied by many experts in many
publications. I have already tried to fill parts of this gap in an article focusing
on the differences between holy helpers and other types of patron saints as
well as on the growth and diffusion of their cults.6 Here I will concentrate
on the criticisms, tracing them back to their presumable origins, following
their transformations, and placing them in a broader context as a contribution
to the history of debates on the cult of saints on the eve of the Reformation.

The Identity of the Helpers

Helper saints constitute a rather elusive category as it is difficult to know when

a saint is venerated qua helper saint. Art historians frequently run into this
problem when trying to explain the representation of a particular saint. In
many cases, it seems to work as an ultima ratio: if the saint in question cannot
be shown to have been a patron of the church or other ecclesiastical institution
where his or her image is located, or a former member of the religious order
that commissioned it, or a generally venerated local holy man or woman, or
a personal favourite or protector of a rich donor, then his or her (alleged)
specialism may serve as a last resort. Unfortunately, however, the sources for
such specialisms are very limited, so it is difficult to be certain if that particular
specialism was known to have belonged to the saint in question in that place
and time. A large part of the information we have about the assignment of
specific kinds of assistance to specific saints in the Middle Ages comes from
critics like More’s Messenger. At least one of these critics, Erasmus, also
noticed the variability of such assignments, that they ‘differ with each nation,
so that in France Paul has the same importance that Hiero has for us, while
James and John are not equally powerful in all places’.7
In addition to such variability, going back in time we find less and less
information about specialisms altogether. The 178 authentic chapters of the
Legenda aurea, reconstructed by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, tell the story of

6 See Gecser, ‘Holy Helpers and the Transformation of Saintly Patronage’.

7 Erasmus, The Handbook of the Christian Soldier, trans. and ann. by Fantazzi, p. 64. See also the
comments at footnotes 56–57 below.
46 ottó gec s e r

153 different saints or groups of saints.8 Out of these 153, five — Blaise, Giles,
Katherine, Leonard, and Margaret — are portrayed as having a particular
commitment to help. Although their capability to do so always appears as a
divine gift, they differ among themselves in its reception and scope. Leonard
is said to have obtained it from God (‘a deo […] impetrauit’) without any
specification of how or why; the martyrs — Blaise, Katherine, and Margaret
— pray for it right before their death and a celestial voice announces a positive
answer; Giles receives it as an extra, without asking for it, as he is praying
for the remission of a horrible unnamed crime of King Charles (the Great).
As to its scope, only three saints of this group had a real specialism: Blaise is
said to help against ailments of the throat, Margaret in giving birth to healthy
children, and Leonard against being imprisoned; Katherine’s responsibilities,
by contrast, are extended to help ‘in exitu anime uel in quacumque necessitate’
(at the end of life or in any necessity), and ‘quisquis sanctum Egidium pro
quocumque commisso inuocaret, si tamen ab illo desisteret eius meritis sibi
remissum non dubitaret’ (whoever invokes St Giles with regard to any crime,
and refrains from doing it again, should not doubt in being pardoned through
his merits).9 Later on (at least) two further saints promising assistance
to anyone were added to the corpus: Barbara and Dorothy. Both of them
received this gift of God in the same way as the other three martyrs, and its
scope remained rather general. Barbara is said to have been invested with
securing the remission of sins for her faithful worshippers, while Dorothy was
credited with seeing to it that they ‘in omnibus salvarentur tribulationibus
et praecipue a verecundia, paupertate et a falso crimine liberarentur et in
fine vitae contritionem et remissionem omnium peccatorum obtinerent,
mulieres vero parientes nomen ejus invocantes celerem sentiant in doloribus
profectum’ (be saved from all tribulations and freed, in particular, from shame,
poverty, and false accusation and, at the end of [their] lives, have contrition
and pardon for all [their] sins, as well as that women in labour invoking her
name experience quick relief from their pains).10
What characterizes these seven saints is not specialization in the first
place but socially unrestricted assistance. They are willing to help anyone,
that is not only a specific group of worshippers, be it from a given city, region,
ethnic group, or dynasty. Even in the case of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the
helper saints par excellence, it was, most probably, not the complementarity
of their specialisms, not their being a well-selected team of experts that
made them attractive to their earliest worshippers but their independence

8 James of Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. by Maggioni. I deducted the Christological and the
other non-hagiological feasts, and I counted once only those saints who have more than one
feast and thus more than one chapter in the book (like the Virgin Mary or St Paul).
9 James of Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. by Maggioni, i, 294 (Blaise); i, 692 (Margaret); ii, 988
(Giles); ii, 1188 (Leonard); ii, 1356 and 1358 (Katherine).
10 James of Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. by Graesse, pp. 901 (Barbara) and 911 (Dorothy).
 h e l p e r s a i n ts an d t h e i r c r i t i c s i n t h e lo ng f i f t e e nt h ce nt u ry 47

and their collectivity.11 They were not (known to have been) ‘reserved’ as
the patron saints of others somewhere else and thus they were free to help
anyone. Plus, they could be invoked as a group which made them look more
powerful and enhanced the aura of the individual members as well. Readers
of the Life of St Erasmus in the Middle High German legendary Der Heiligen
Leben, composed in Nuremberg around 1400, were informed that ‘er is der
vierzehen nothelfer ainer vnd mag avch alln menschen wol zv helf kvmen jn
alln irn noten an sel vnd an leib’ (he is one of the fourteen helpers in need
and he is willing indeed to come to the help of all people in all their needs
of the soul and the body).12 He is not yet the helper specializing in intestinal
diseases; his identity comes from belonging to a group of powerful saints
who are willing to help anyone with anything.13
They were also addressed as a whole in the oldest known written sources
featuring all fourteen of them (in the selection called the Normalreihe), in
variants of the following short prayer transmitted by Bavarian manuscripts
from around the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: ‘Georgius
Blasius Erasmus | Pantaleonque Vitus Christophorus | Dyonysius et Cyriacus
Achatius | magnus Eustachius Egidiusque | cum Margareta cum Barbara cum
Katharina | pro nobis orent et celica munera rorent’ (George, Blaise, Erasmus
and Pantaleon, | Vitus, Christopher, Denis and Cyriacus, | Achatius the Great,
Eustace and Giles, | with Margaret, with Barbara, with Katherine, | let them
pray for us and make heavenly favours pour forth).14
Of course, the fact (if it is one) that the Fourteen Holy Helpers were
initially venerated as a group of unconditionally helpful generalists does
not exclude the possibility that some of their members were individually
venerated as specialists as well. As we have seen above, Blaise and Margaret
were singled out as veritable specialists already by the Legenda aurea. In
addition, if the cult of holy helpers was a phenomenon of popular religion,
as it is sometimes assumed, then a large number of saints could be venerated
as specialists without their specialisms appearing in written sources until the
coming of the critics at the end of the Middle Ages.
There is, however, a major difference between the cult of few helper saints
and that of many. On the one hand, the veneration of some saints as specialists
is very old. St Blaise, for example, was regarded as particularly helpful against
diseases of the throat in Eastern Christianity as early as the sixth century. The

11 For the origins of their cult, with emphases which partly differ from mine, see Guth,
‘Vierzehnheiligen und die Anfänge der Nothelferverehrung’ and Pötzl, ‘Die Verehrung der
Vierzehn Nothelfer vor 1400’.
12 Der Heiligen Leben, ed. by Brand, Freienhagen-Baumgardt, Meyer, and Williams-Krapp,
p. 136.
13 The importance of group formation in this cult and related ones is emphasized by Schreiber,
Die Vierzehn Nothelfer in Volksfrömmigkeit und Sakralkultur, pp. 11–15.
14 Dünninger, ‘Sprachliche Zeugnisse über den Kult der Vierzehn Nothelfer’, p. 345 (quoting
from München, BSB, MS lat. 26926).
48 ottó gec s e r

Byzantine doctor, Aetios of Amida, suggests that, when trying to remove a

bone or another sharp object stuck in the throat, the practitioner has to say
the following incantation: ‘Blasios the martyr and servant of God says, “Come
up, bone, or go down”’.15 Similar practices may have stood at the beginning
of other saintly specializations as well.16
On the other hand, for many saints being (also) helper saints, a sufficient
number of saints must be venerated in a given place and at a given time. In
the simplest model, with one specialty per saint, there must be as many saints
as kinds of assistance. Counting saints venerated in a given area in a given
period is quite a difficult task in itself,17 and it becomes even more difficult
if the question is that of how many saints were venerated by the same larger
community of worshippers in a given area in a given period. Diocesan calendars
would count as obvious sources but most of their feasts were observed by the
canons of the cathedral or some other local clerics alone. And even the feasts
of precept do not necessarily imply any involvement on behalf of most laymen
and laywomen beyond not working and hearing Mass. Sources reflecting the
appropriation of cults on behalf of the laity, like donations or last wills, are far
more difficult to study than calendars, especially in a comparative framework.
Nevertheless, as it has been pointed out by Jacques Chiffoleau for the diocese
of Avignon, there was a major shift in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
in the number of saints whose benevolence testators wanted to secure for
themselves and for members of their families.18 If this was the case elsewhere
too, then, other things being equal, the conditions in the later Middle Ages
were more favourable for the emergence of an extensive division of labour
among saints than before.
In other words, even if we regard the cult of holy helpers as a phenomenon
of popular religion and explain its invisibility or difficult visibility in written
sources as a consequence of this social position, it could hardly have been a
typical feature of the cult of saints right from its beginnings in late Antiquity,
as this would have required the appropriation of a sufficient number of cults by
the laity. The when of reaching such a sufficient number was probably different
from region to region, but may well have been catalysed to a significant extent
by the growing importance of preaching about saints. Separate volumes of
sermons dedicated to this purpose became more frequent from the thirteenth
century onwards, including not only collections of sermones de sanctis but
also those of sermones de communi sanctorum.19 The latter type — by offering
sermons not on specific saints but on general categories of them, such as

15 Quoted in Zellmann-Rohrer, ‘The Tradition of Greek and Latin Incantations’, p. 16 (see also
pp. 140–41).
16 For early incantations invoking St Zachary against bleeding in the Eastern Church, see Barb,
‘St Zacharias’.
17 See Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, pp. 137–50.
18 Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà, pp. 386–87.
19 Bériou, ‘Les sermons latins après 1200’, p. 388.
 h e l p e r s a i n ts an d t h e i r c r i t i c s i n t h e lo ng f i f t e e nt h ce nt u ry 49

martyrs, confessors, virgins, and so on — enabled any preacher having such

a sermonary to preach about, theoretically, any saint. Another sign of the
growing importance of preaching about saints is the parallel emergence of
abbreviationes or legendae novae, that is, collections of short vitae arranged in
the order of the ecclesiastical calendar, primarily as background material for
preachers, with the Legenda aurea being the most famous among them.20
Apart from preaching, the number of saints venerated by the same larger
community could also increase as a function of the gradual replacement of
relics by images as the privileged means of contact between the saints and
their worshippers. From the thirteenth century onwards, the diffusion of
images of saints, in various formats, in more and more geographical areas
and social circles, first in Italy, contributed to the dissociation of cults from
pilgrimage sites. Worshippers could dedicate themselves or pray to a saint
in front of a local image instead of visiting his or her tomb and, eventually,
they could even hope for a miraculous cure from their bodily contact with
or proximity to an image just as they could from touching or approaching
the relics.21 Such a ‘delocalization’ of devotion to holy men and women, as
André Vauchez put it, made the importation of new cults to any given place
easier and the ‘reservation’ of saints as local patrons more difficult.
Nevertheless, the transition from cults of saints centred on the grave to
their counterparts centred on visual representations was gradual and far from
absolute. Pilgrims visiting ‘glorious bodies’ remained crucial for processes
of canonization, and miraculous images gave rise to new pilgrimage sites.
Specialization was not in the interest of the orchestrators of new cults even
at the end of the Middle Ages, since any filtering of the potential worshippers
diminished the chances of success. Without pilgrims there is no spread of the
saint’s fama sanctitatis, no possibility of hearing witnesses to the saint’s virtus,
and thus no inquisitio in partibus, and no canonization. New saints have to
be generalists. This must be the main reason why canonized sancti moderni
were slow to appear among the holy helpers in the late Middle Ages.22 The
latter tended to be old saints, in the first place, whose cults nobody wanted
or could keep local and general.

Invoking the Helpers

It seems that the first theological reflections on the cult of saints qua specialists
also go back to the thirteenth century. They appear in commentaries on the
Sentences of Peter Lombard, more precisely the forty-fifth distinction of the
fourth book. Here, in the sixth chapter, the Lombard inquired into ‘[q]uomodo

20 Philippart, Les Légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques, pp. 45–48.

21 Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 444–53.
22 See the end of the next section.
50 ottó gec s e r

Sancti et glorificati et Angeli audiunt preces supplicantium et intercedunt pro

eis’ (how the saints and those in glory and the angels hear the prayers of their
supplicants and intercede for them).23 Originally, his problem had nothing
to do with the holy helpers, but in the thirteenth century new questions were
added to it. Thomas Aquinas may well have been the first to reflect on the
cult of holy helpers in this context. With reference to the same passage of the
Sentences, he asks ‘[u]trum debeamus sanctos orare ad interpellandum pro
nobis’ (if we have to pray to the saints to intercede on our behalf), and considers
the following point among the potential arguments for a negative answer:
[S]i eos ad orandum pro nobis interpellare debemus, hoc non est nisi
quia scimus eorum orationem esse Deo acceptam. Sed quanto aliquis
est sanctior inter sanctos, tanto ejus oratio est magis Deo accepta. Ergo
semper deberemus superiores sanctos pro nobis intercessores constituere
ad Deum, et nunquam minores.24
(If we need to request them to pray for us, this can only be the case
because we know that their prayers are heard by God. But the more
someone is saintly among the saints, the better God hears his prayer.
Therefore, we should always choose greater saints as our intercessors
with God and never lesser ones.)
In his solutio for this objection, Aquinas points out that ‘quamvis superiores
sancti sint magis Deo accepti quam inferiores, utile tamen est etiam minores
sanctos interdum orare; et hoc propter quinque rationes’ (even if greater saints
are better received by God than lesser ones, sometimes it is useful to pray to
the lesser ones as well; and this is because of five reasons). One of these five
is that ‘quibusdam sanctis datum est in aliquibus specialibus causis praecipue
patrocinari, sicut sancto Antonio ad ignem infernalem’ (certain saints are given
special patronage over some particular matters as St Anthony over hellfire).25
Anthony was another early example of saintly specialization, if not as
early as Blaise mentioned above. Anthony emerged as a healer of a range
of pathological conditions referred to as ‘fire’ (ignis) — typically exhibiting
gangrenous symptoms including, quite probably, the effects of ergotism as
well — in the course of the twelfth century, in connection to his relics in
Saint-Antoine-de-Viennois.26 Aquinas’s reference to ‘hellfire’ is baffling at first
sight, but the disease name ‘fire’ was frequently qualified as sacer, infernalis,
or ‘of St Anthony’, which some authors considered semantically identical.
Thus, for example, Aquinas’s contemporary and fellow Dominican, Stephen
of Bourbon, discussing the immense destructive potential of hellfire in the
literal sense, asks that ‘si ignis iste qui dicitur sacer uel sancti Anthonii, uel

23 Peter Lombard, Libri IV sententiarum, bk. iv. dist. xlv. ch. vi, vol. ii, 1009.
24 Aquinas, Commentum in quartum librum Sententiarum, ed. by Fretté, dist. xlv. qu. iii, p. 382.
25 Aquinas, Commentum in quartum librum Sententiarum, ed. by Fretté, dist. xlv. qu. iii, p. 383.
26 Foscati, Ignis sacer, pp. 121–33.
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 “An apparition! an apparition!” exclaimed Baron Moïse.
“Oh!” rejoined Wood, “one can’t reappear from any very remote
quarter. The world is small.”
“Do you know what the Princess is saying about you, my dear
Wood? She declares that you are nothing but a mystic. Now is that
true?”
“Well it depends on what you mean by mystic.”
“The word is self-explanatory. A mystic is one who is preoccupied
with the concerns of the next world. Now you are too well
acquainted with the affairs of this world to trouble yourself about the
next.”
At these words Wood slightly contracted his eyebrows.
“You are quite in the wrong, Moïse. The affairs of the other world
are of far, far greater importance than those of the world we live in,
Moïse.”
“What a man he is, this good Wood of ours!” exclaimed the Baron,
with a sneer. “He is positively witty!”
The Princess replied very seriously—
“Mr. Wood, tell me that you are not witty. I thoroughly detest witty
men.”
Upon this she rose, and said—
“Mr. Wood, will you take me to the buffet?”
An hour later, when Monsieur G—— was holding both men and
women spell-bound with his songs, I came across Leslie Wood and
the Princess Zévorine again, alone in front of the deserted buffet.
The Princess was speaking with almost vehement enthusiasm of
Count Tolstoi, whose friend she was. She described this great man
who had descended to the lowliest life, donning the dress, and with
it the spirit, of the moujik, and using the hands which had indited
literary masterpieces in the manufacture of shoes for the poor.
To my great surprise, Wood was expressing approbation of a kind
of life so completely opposed to common sense. In his slightly
panting voice, to which the beginnings of asthma had given a
singular sweetness, he said—
“Yes, Tolstoi is right. The whole of philosophy is contained in that
phrase: ‘May the will of God be done!’ He has realized that all the
woes of humanity are the outcome of the exercise of human will as
distinct from the will divine. My only fear is that he may impair so
noble a doctrine by fantastic and extravagant additions.”
“Oh!” returned the Princess in a subdued voice, and hesitating a
little, “the Count’s teaching is only extravagant upon one point; that
is, in inculcating the extension of the rights and duties of husbands
to an extremely advanced period of their lives, and imposing on the
saints of these latter days the fruitful old age of the patriarchs.”
Wood, himself elderly, replied with a restrained exaltation—
“And that again is excellent, very saintly even. Physical and natural
love is becoming to all God’s creatures, and so long as it does not
involve either dissension or restlessness, it maintains that divine
simplicity, that saintly fleshliness without which there is no salvation.
Asceticism is nothing but pride and rebellion. We must always bear
in mind the example of that holy man Boaz, and let us remember
that the Bible calls love the bread of old age.”
Then, all of a sudden, transported, illuminated, transfigured,
ecstatic, and invoking with eyes and arms and his whole soul some
invisible presence, he murmured—
“Annie! Annie! Annie, my best beloved, it is true, is it not, that our
Lord desires his saints, whilst they are men and women, to love one
another humbly, even as the beasts of the field?”
Upon this he fell exhausted into an arm-chair. A terrific inhalation
shook his broad chest, and in this condition his appearance was
fuller of vitality than ever, like those machines that appear more
formidable when they are out of gear. The Princess Zévorine,
without any show of astonishment, wiped his forehead with her
handkerchief and gave him a glass of water, which he drank.
For my part I was dumfounded. In this clairvoyant I was unable to
recognize the man who in his study, littered with blue-books, had so
many times conversed with me with the utmost clear-headedness
upon Oriental affairs, the Treaty of Frankfort, and critical situations
on the money market. As I allowed the Princess to observe my
uneasiness, she said, with a shrug of the shoulders—
“It is easy to see you are French! You look upon every one as a
madman who does not think exactly what you think yourself. You
need not be uneasy; our friend Mr. Wood is level-headed enough,
perfectly level-headed. Let us go and listen to G——.”
When I had conducted the Princess to the principal salon, I
prepared to leave. In the ante-chamber I found Wood putting on his
overcoat. He did not appear to feel any ill effects from his attack.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “I think we are neighbours. I suppose
you are still living on the Quai Malaquais, and I have taken up my
quarters in a hotel in the Rue des Saints Pères. In dry weather like
this it is a pleasure to go on foot. If you are willing we will stroll
along together and chat.”
I agreed readily. On the doorstep he offered me a cigar, and held
out a pocket electric torch for me to light it by.
“I find it very convenient,” he said, and proceeded to explain the
principle of it very lucidly.
I recognized the Wood of old times again. We moved on perhaps a
hundred paces along the street chatting on indifferent subjects.
Then suddenly my companion put his hand quietly on my shoulder.
“My dear friend,” he began, “some of the things I said this evening
cannot have failed to surprise you. You would probably like me to
explain them.”
“I was intensely interested, my dear Wood, pray do.”
“I will do so willingly. I have the greatest admiration of your
character. We may not regard life from the same point of view. But
you are not one of those who repel an idea because it is new, and
that is a disposition sufficiently rare, in France especially.”
“I fancy, however, my dear Wood, that for liberty of thought——”
“Oh! no, you are not, like the English, a race of theologians. But
enough of that. I want to tell you in as few words as possible the
history of my convictions. When you knew me fifteen years ago I
was the correspondent of the London World. With us journalism is a
more lucrative profession, and is held in higher esteem than with
you. My appointment was a good one, and I fancy I reaped the
greatest possible advantages from it. I am familiar with business
transactions, and I carried through some very profitable ones, and in
a few years I achieved two very desirable things: influence and
fortune. You are aware that I am a practical man.
 “I have never worked without a goal in view. And, above all
things, I aimed at attaining the supreme goal of life. Fairly
exhaustive theological studies undertaken in my youth had
convinced me that that goal lay outside the sphere of this terrestrial
life. But I was yet in doubt as to the practical means of attaining it.
As a result, I suffered cruelly. Uncertainty is absolutely insupportable
to a man of my temperament.
“In this state of mind I turned my attention seriously to the
psychical researches of Sir William Crookes, one of the most
distinguished members of our Royal Society. I knew him personally,
and needed no assurance that he was both a man of learning and a
gentleman. He was at that time giving his attention to the case of a
young woman endowed with psychic powers of an altogether
uncommon nature, and, like Saul of old, he was fortunate enough to
evoke the presence of an indisputable disembodied spirit.
“A charming woman, who had passed through the experience of
earthly life and was now living the life beyond the tomb, lent herself
to the experiments of the eminent spiritualist, and submitted to
every test he could exact from her within the limits of decorum. I
considered that investigations such as this, bearing on the point at
which terrestrial existence borders on extra-terrestrial existence,
would lead me, if I followed them step by step, to the discovery of
that which it is above all necessary to know, that is to say, the true
aim of life. But it was not long before I was disappointed in my
hopes. The researches of my respected friend, although conducted
with a precision which left nothing to be desired, did not result in a
theological and moral conviction sufficiently unequivocal.
“Moreover, Sir William was suddenly deprived of the co-operation
of the incomparable dead lady who had so graciously attended
several of his spiritualistic séances.
“Discouraged by the incredulity of the public, and irritated by the
sallies of his colleagues, he ceased to give any information relative
to his psychic experiences. I communicated my discomfiture to the
Reverend Mr. B——, with whom I had been on friendly terms from
the time of his return from South Africa, where he had laboured as
an evangelist in a devoted and systematic fashion truly worthy of old
England.
“Mr. B—— is, of all men, the one who has at all times exercised
the most powerful and decisive influence over me.”
“He is very intellectual, then?” I asked.
“His knowledge of doctrine is profound,” replied Wood. “But better
than all else he has a strong character, and you are aware, my dear
fellow, that it is by force of character that men are swayed. My
mischances occasioned no surprise to him; he attributed them to my
lack of method, and, above all, to the pitiable moral infirmity I had
shown on this occasion.
“‘Scientific experiments,’ he declared, ‘can never lead to
discoveries in any other domain than that of science. How is it you
did not understand this? Leslie Wood, you have been strangely
heedless and frivolous. The Apostle Paul has told us that the Spirit
searcheth all things. If we would discover spiritual truths we must
set our feet on the spiritual path.’
“These words produced a profound impression on me.
“‘How then,’ I asked, ‘shall I enter on the spiritual path?’
“‘Poverty and simplicity must be your guides!’ Mr. B—— replied.
‘Sell your goods and give the purchase money to the poor. You are
renowned. Conceal yourself. Pray, and devote yourself to works of
charity. Put on a spirit of simplicity and a pure soul and you will
attain truth.’
“I resolved to follow out these precepts to the letter. I sent in my
resignation as correspondent to the World. I realized my
investments, which were in great part in commercial enterprises,
and, fearing to repeat the sin of Ananias and Sapphira, I conducted
this delicate operation in such a way as not to risk the loss of a
penny of the capital which was no longer my own. Baron Moïse, who
kept an eye on my negotiations, conceived an almost religious
reverence for my financial genius. By direction of Mr. B——, I handed
over to the treasurer of the Evangelical Society the sums I had
realized, and when I expressed to that eminent theologian my
delight at being poor—
 “‘Have a care,’ said he, ‘that in your poverty you do not indulge in
exaltation at your prowess. It will serve you but ill to strip yourself
outwardly if within your own breast you cherish a golden idol. Be
humble!’”
Leslie Wood had reached this point in his narrative when we
arrived at the Pont Royal. The Seine, upon whose surface the lights
threw flickering reflections, flowed beneath the arches with a dull
moan.
“I shall have to cut my story short,” Wood began once more.
“Each episode of my new life would occupy a whole night to recount.
Mr. B——, to whom I was as obedient as a child, sent me to the
Basutos, commissioned to fight against the slave trade. There I lived
under a tent alone with that hardy bedfellow whose name is danger,
and through fever and drought became aware of the presence of
God.
“At the end of five years Mr. B—— recalled me to England. On the
steamer I met a young girl. What a haunting face she had! She was
a vision a thousand times more radiant than the phantom presence
which appeared to Sir William Crookes!
“She was the orphan daughter of a colonel in the Indian army and
she was poor. She had no particular beauty of features. Her pale
complexion and emaciated face indicated suffering; but her eyes
expressed all that one can imagine of heaven; her body seemed to
glow gently with an inward light. How I loved her! At sight of her I
fathomed the hidden meaning of all creation! That simple young girl
with one glance revealed to me the secret of the harmony of the
spheres!
“Ah! she was simple, very simple, my monitress, my well-loved
lady, sweet Annie Fraser! In her translucent soul I could read the
sympathy she felt for me. One night, one serene night, when we
were alone together on the deck of the ship in the presence of the
seraphic company of the stars, which throbbed in chorus in the sky, I
took her hand and said—
“‘Annie Fraser, I love you. I believe that it would be good for us
both for you to become my wife, but I am debarred from planning
my own future in order that God may dispose of it as He sees fit.
May it be His will to unite us! I have surrendered my own will into
the hands of Mr. B——. When we reach England we will go together
in search of him; will you, Annie Fraser? And if he gives his sanction
we will marry.’
“She gave her consent. For the remainder of the voyage we read
the Bible together.
“Immediately on our arrival in London I accompanied my fellow
passenger to Mr. B——’s, and told him what the love of this young
girl meant to me, and with what clear insight it inspired me.
“Mr. B—— gazed for a long time on her with kindliness.
“‘You may marry,’ he said at length. ‘The Apostle Paul has declared
that the husband is sanctified by the wife, and the wife by the
husband. But let your union resemble those held in honour amongst
Christians in the primitive Church! Let it remain purely spiritual, and
see that the angel’s sword lies between you in your bed. Go, now,
and remain humble and secluded, and let not the world hear your
name.’
“I married Annie Fraser, and I need scarcely tell you that we
complied rigidly with the condition imposed on us by Mr. B——. For
four years I delighted in that brotherly and sisterly union.
“By grace of simple little Annie Fraser I advanced in the
knowledge of God. There was nothing now that could cause us
suffering.
“Annie was ill, and her strength declined, and we repeated joyfully
in union, ‘May the will of God be done on earth as it is in heaven!’
“After four years of this life together, there came a day, a
Christmas day, when Mr. B—— summoned me to him.
“‘Leslie Wood,’ he said, ‘I have put you to the proof for your soul’s
sake. But it would be to fall into papistical error to believe that the
union of His creatures after the flesh is displeasing to God. Twice He
blessed both animals and mankind in pairs, in the earthly Paradise,
and in the ark of Noah. Go, and live henceforth with your wife, Annie
Fraser, as a husband with his wife.’
“When I arrived home, Annie, my well-loved Annie, was dead....
“I own my weakness. It was with my lips and not with my heart
that I pronounced the words, ‘O God, Thy will be done!’ and thinking
upon Mr. B——’s tardy removal of the restrictions upon our love, I
felt my mouth full of bitterness, and as it were ashes in my heart.
“So it was with a forlorn soul that I knelt down at the foot of the
bed where, beneath a cross of roses, silent and white and with the
faint violets of death on her cheeks, my Annie slept her last sleep.
“O thou of little faith! thou didst bid her adieu and remain a whole
week plunged in barren sorrow that approached despair. How much
rather shouldst thou, on the contrary, have rejoiced, both in body
and soul!...
“On the night of the eighth day, as I was weeping, my forehead
bowed upon the cold and empty bed, I had a sudden conviction that
the beloved was near me in my chamber.
“Nor was I deceived. When I raised my head I saw Annie, smiling
and radiant, holding out her arms to me. But how find words for
what remains to tell? How express the ineffable? And is it
permissible to reveal such mysteries of love?
“Clearly when Mr. B—— said to me, ‘Live with Annie as a husband
with his wife!’ he knew that love is stronger than death.
“Learn, then, my friend, that from that hour of forgiveness and joy
my Annie has returned nightly to my side distilling celestial odours.”
He spoke with appalling exaltation.
We had slackened our pace. He stopped in front of a hotel of
Moorish exterior.
“This is where I live,” he said. “Do you see that window on the
second floor with the light in it? She is waiting for me.”
He left me abruptly.
Eight days later I learned from the newspapers of the sudden
death of Leslie Wood, former correspondent of the World.
 GESTAS

TO CHARLES MAURRAS

GESTAS
“‘Gestas,’ dixt li Signor, ‘entrez en Paradis.’”
“Gestas, dans nos anciens mystères, c’est le nom du larron crucifié à la droite de
Jésus-Christ” (Augustin Thierry, la Rédemption de Larmor).[3]

3. “‘Gestas,’ said the Lord, ‘enter into Paradise.’”

“Gestas, in our ancient mystery plays, was the name of the thief
who was crucified on the right hand of Jesus Christ” (Augustin
Thierry, The Redemption of Larmor).

olks say that we have amongst us at this very day a sad

rogue named Gestas, who writes the sweetest songs in
the world. It was written on his flat-featured face that he
would be a sinner after the flesh, and towards evening
evil exultation shines in his green eyes. He is no longer
young. The protuberances on his skull have taken on the lustre of
copper; the long hair falling about his neck has taken a greenish
tinge. Nevertheless he is ingenuous, and has kept fast hold on the
naive faith of his childhood. When he is not in hospital he occupies a
little room in some squalid hotel between the Panthéon and the
Jardin des Plantes. There, in the old impoverished quarter, every
stone is familiar with his tread, the gloomy byways are tolerant of
him, and one of these narrow lanes is entirely after his own heart;
for, lined though it is with dram shops and boosing kens, it boasts on
the corner of one of the houses an image of the Virgin in a blue
niche behind bars. Of an evening he progresses from café to café,
and at station after station, with pious orderliness, he takes his beer
or his spirits: the exacting duties of the devotee of debauchery call
for method and regularity. The night is far gone when, without
knowing how, he once more reaches his den, and by a daily miracle
discovers the sacking bed, upon which he falls fully dressed. There
with clenched fists he sleeps the sleep of the vagabond and the
child. But that sleep is brief.
As soon as dawn casts its pale radiance upon the window, and
between the curtains darts its luminous shafts into the attic, Gestas
opens his eyes, rises, shakes himself like an ownerless dog
awakened by a kick, hurries down the long, spiral staircase, and
once more sets his eyes delightedly on the street, the kind street
which is so indulgent to the vices of the lowly and the poor. His
eyelids wink at the clear light of the early morning; the nostrils,
which recall Silenus, inhale the clean air. Vigorous and upright, one
leg stiffened by rheumatism of long standing, he goes on his way
leaning on his dog-wood stick, the ferrule of which he has worn out
with twenty years of wandering. But in his nocturnal adventures he
has never lost either his pipe or his stick. And at the beginning of the
day his appearance is that of a man perfectly simple and perfectly
happy. Which is what he actually is. His greatest joy in life, which he
buys at the sacrifice of sleep, is to go from bar to bar in the morning
drinking white wine with the workmen. It is an innocent sort of
tippling: the transparent wine, in the pale light of early morning,
amongst the white blouses of the masons; there you have a
symphony in whites which enchants this soul, of which vice has not
yet subdued the candour.
Now one spring morning when he had sauntered in this fashion
from his lodging as far as The Little Moor, Gestas had the
satisfaction of seeing the door, over which appeared a Saracen’s
head in cast iron, gay with paint, thrown open as he came up, and
so he reached the tin counter in the company of friends with whom
he had no acquaintance: a gang of workmen from La Creuse, who
clinked their glasses, talked of their own part of the country, and
indulged in boasting after the manner of the twelve peers of
Charlemagne. They drank a glass and cracked a crust; when one of
them thought of a good thing he laughed very loudly at it, and so
that his comrades might understand it the better gave them a good
thump or two on the back with his fist. The older men, however,
dispatched their potations slowly and silently. When these had all
departed to their work, Gestas, the last left, quitted The Little Moor
and made his way to The Juicy Quince, with the lance-headed
railings of which he was familiar. Here, again, in excellent company,
he had a drink, and even offered a glass to two mistrustful but mild
guardians of the peace. After this he visited a third bar, the ancient
wrought-iron sign of which represents two little men staggering
under an enormous bunch of grapes, and there he was served by
the lovely Madame Trubert, famous all the quarter through for her
prudence, her strength, and her jollity. Then as he neared the
fortifications he had yet another drink at the distillery where, in the
shadow, the gleaming copper taps of the barrels attract the eye; and
still another at the general shop where the green shutters were still
fast closed between the two boxes of laurels; after which he
returned to the most populous districts and ordered vermouth and a
sort of mixture of dregs in various cafés. Eight o’clock struck. He
walked very erect, with a steady, rigid, solemn gait; he was
astonished when women, running to buy provisions, with bare head
and their hair twisted in a knot low on the neck, ran against him
with their heavy baskets, or when he came into collision with some
small girl grasping an enormous loaf in her arms. Still, at times, if he
crossed the road the milkman’s cart, with its clinking, rattling tin
cans, would pull up so close to him that he could feel the horse’s
warm breath on his cheek. But he continued his way unhasting and
careless of the imprecations of the rustic milk-vendor. His gait,
secure of support from his dog-wood stick, was calm and haughty.
But internally the old man was staggering. Nothing was left of his
early morning gaiety. The lark, whose joyous trills had thrilled
through him with his earliest sips of the pale-hued wine, had sped
away at a single flight, and now his soul was a murky rookery, where
crows croaked hoarsely upon inky trees. He was mortally sad. A
great disgust of himself welled up in his heart. The voice of his
repentance, his shame, cried out in him: “Hog, hog! What a hog you
are!” And he marvelled at that clear, angry voice, that superb angel’s
voice, which spoke mysteriously within himself, repeating: “Hog!
hog! What a hog you are!” A yearning desire for innocence and
purity woke in him. He wept; great tears fell down on his goat-like
beard. He wept over himself. Obedient to the words of his Master,
who said, “Weep for yourselves and for your children, O daughters
of Jerusalem,” he shed the bitter dew from his downcast eyes upon
the body he had delivered up to the seven deadly sins, and upon the
obscene fancies born of his drunkenness. The faith of his childhood
revived in him, and spread out fresh vigorous tendrils. From his lips
pathetic prayers flowed forth. He said under his breath: “O God,
grant me to become once more even as the little child which once
was I!” At the moment he offered up this simple petition he realized
that he was standing under a church porch.
It was an old church, once white and comely beneath its lacework
of stone, which time and the hand of man had marred. Now it had
become as black as the Shulamite, and its beauty could only appeal
to the hearts of poets; it was a church “little and poor and old,” like
the mother of François Villon, who perchance in her day came to
kneel in its precincts, and saw on the walls, nowadays whitewashed,
that painted paradise, the harps of which she believed she could
hear, and that inferno where the damned suffered fiery torment,
which caused the worthy soul to be much afraid. Gestas entered into
the House of God. He saw no one within, not even any one to offer
him holy water, not even a poor woman like the mother of François
Villon. Ranged in seemly order in the nave, a congregation of chairs
alone bore witness to the faith of the parishioners, and seemed to
sustain public worship.
 In the cool, moist shade afforded by the vaulting Gestas turned to
his right towards the aisle where, close to the porch, before a statue
of the Virgin, a pyramidal frame of iron displayed its pointed teeth,
on which, however, not a single taper now burned. Then as he
gazed on the image, white, pink, and blue in colour, smiling from the
midst of little gold and silver hearts hung up as votive offerings, he
bent his stiff old legs, wept tears like St. Peter, and sobbed out
tender, disconnected words: “Holy Virgin, Mother, Mary, Mary, your
child, your child, Mother!” But very speedily he rose up again, took
several rapid steps, and stopped in front of a confessional. Framed
of oak, darkened by the passage of time, oiled as are the beams of
an olive press, this confessional had the irreproachable, homely,
intimate appearance of an old linen cupboard. On its panels religious
symbols carved in shell-like lozenges and rusticated work called up
the memory of the townswomen of the olden time, who had come
hither to bow their caps with lofty erections of lace and lave their
housewifely souls in this type of the cleansing piscina. Where they
had set their knees Gestas set his, and with lips close up to the
wooden grating called in a hushed voice: “Father! father!” As no one
answered his call he knocked very gently with his finger on the
wicket.
“Father! father!”
He wiped his eyes so as to see better through the holes in the
grating, and thought he could make out through the dimness the
white surplice of a priest.
He repeated—
“Father! father! pray listen to me. I am in need of confession, I
must cleanse my soul; it is black and dirty; it disgusts me; it turns
my stomach. Quick, father, the bath of repentance, the bath of
pardon, the bath of Jesus. At the thought of my impurities my heart
comes into my mouth, and I am ready to spew with disgust at my
uncleanness. The bath, the bath of cleansing!”
Then he waited. Now fancying he perceived a hand, which made a
sign to him from the depths of the confessional, now failing to
discover in the alcove anything more than an empty seat, a long
time passed. He remained motionless, his knees glued to the
wooden step, his gaze intent on the wicket, whence he awaited the
outpouring of pardon, peace, refreshment, health, innocence,
reconciliation with God and himself, heavenly joy, submission to the
divine love, the sovereign good. At intervals he murmured tender
supplications—
“Monsieur le curé, father, monsieur le curé! I thirst! give me to
drink, give me that which is yours to give, the water of innocence, a
white robe, and wings for my poor soul. Give me penitence and
pardon!”
Receiving no reply, he knocked still harder at the grating, and said
aloud—
“Confession, I beg of you!”
At last he lost patience, and rising, showered heavy blows with his
dog-wood stick on the walls of the confessional, shouting—
“Ho, there, monsieur le curé! Ho, there, monsieur le vicaire!”
And in proportion as he raised his voice he knocked more loudly.
The blows fell furiously on the confessional, causing clouds of dust
to arise from it, and only evoking in reply to his violence the
vibration of its worm-eaten old planks.
The verger, who was sweeping out the sacristy, ran forward with
his sleeves turned up on hearing the noise. When he saw the man
with the stick he stopped short for a moment, and then advanced
towards him with the cautious reserve common to the officials who
have grown white in the service of this lowliest of police. Arrived
within earshot he demanded—
“What is it you want?”
“I want to confess.”
“Folks don’t come to confess at an hour like this.”
“I want to confess.”
“Be off with you!”
“I want to see the curé.”
“For what purpose?”
“To make my confession.”
“The curé can’t be seen just now.”
“The senior vicaire, then.”
“Nor he either. Now off you go.”
 “The second vicaire, the third vicaire, the fourth vicaire, the
youngest vicaire.”
“Be off with you.”
“Ah, then! would you let me die unshriven? It’s worse than it was
in '93, it seems!... Any little vicaire. How will it hurt you if I make my
confession to some little vicaire not any taller than my arm? Take
word to some priest that he must come to hear my confession. I’ll
undertake to disclose to him a batch of sins rarer, more
extraordinary, more interesting, you may take my word for it, than
all those his chattering women penitents can trot out before him.
You can tell him that he is wanted for a really fine confession.”
“Get away now!” $1“$2”$3.bn 145.png
Although he did not rejoice in the majestic stature of the verger of
a rich parish, this official staff-bearer was vigorous enough. He took
our poor Gestas by the shoulders and hurled him outside the doors.
Gestas, once in the street, had only one idea in his brain, which
was to get back into the church by one of the side doors, so as, if
possible, to steal a march on the verger from behind, and perhaps
lay hands on some underling vicaire who would consent to hear his
confession.
Unhappily for the success of this manœuvre, the church was
surrounded on all sides by old houses, and Gestas was soon
hopelessly entangled, without hope of delivery, in an inextricable
maze of streets, lanes, courts, and alleys.
Amongst them, however, he discovered a wine merchant’s, and
there the poor penitent tried to find consolation in absinthe. He
managed to do so. But a fresh fit of repentance soon overtook him.
And it is this which supports his friends in the hope that he will win
salvation. He has faith—simple, firm, childlike faith. It is works alone
which he is lacking in. Nevertheless there is no need to despair of
him, since he himself never despairs.
Without entering on the difficulties as to predestination—and they
are not inconsiderable—nor weighing the opinions expressed on this
subject by St. Augustine, Gottschalk, the Albigenses, the Wycliffites,
the Hussites, Luther, Calvin, Jansenius, and the great Arnaud, one
may venture to believe that Gestas is predestined to eternal felicity.
“Gestas,” said the Lord, “enter into Paradise.”
THE MANUSCRIPT OF A VILLAGE
DOCTOR

TO MARCEL SCHWOB
 THE MANUSCRIPT OF A VILLAGE
DOCTOR

octor H——, who recently died at Servigny (Aisne), where

he had practised medicine for more than forty years, left
behind him a journal never intended for the public eye. I
should not feel justified in publishing the manuscript in
extenso, nor even in printing fragments of any considerable length,
although, like Monsieur Taine, there is a large number of persons
nowadays of the opinion that it is above all things desirable to print
and circulate what was never planned for publication. Whatever
these worthy folk may say, the fact that a writer is an amateur does
not afford any guarantee that what he has to say will be interesting.
The memoirs of Doctor H—— would be wearisome from their mere
monotonously moral note. And yet the man who wrote them, in his
lowly environment, possessed an intellect quite out of the ordinary.
This village doctor was philosopher as well as physician. Perhaps the
closing pages of his journal might be perused without any
exceptional distaste. I venture to transcribe them here:—
Extract from the Journal of the late Doctor H——,
Physician at Servigny (Aisne).
“It is an axiom of philosophy that nothing in this world is either
altogether bad or altogether good. Pity, the tenderest, the most
natural, the most useful of the virtues, is not at all times in place
either with the soldier or the priest; both with priest and soldier
there are occasions when it must be held in restraint—when
confronted by the enemy, for instance. Officers do not make a
practice of recommending it on the eve of battle, and in some old
book I have read that Monsieur Nicole held it in distrust as the
motive principle of concupiscence. There is nothing of the priest
about me, and still less of the soldier. I am a doctor, and amongst
the most insignificant of that profession, a country doctor. I have
practised my art for long years and in obscurity, and I would assert
that if pity alone can be a worthy stimulus to the adoption of our
profession, we must lay it aside finally when we encounter those
miseries which it has inspired us with the desire to alleviate. A
doctor whom pity accompanies to the bedside of his patients will
find his observation not sufficiently acute, his hands not sufficiently
steady. We go wherever compassion for the human race calls, but
we must leave pity behind us. Moreover, doctors for the most part
find it an easy task to attain the callousness which is so necessary to
them. That is a mental condition which cannot long elude them, and
there are moral reasons for this. Pity speedily becomes blunted
when brought into contact with suffering; there is less disposition to
deplore those misfortunes for which alleviation can be procured;
finally, to the physician an illness offers a succession of interesting
phenomena.
“From the time when I began the practice of medicine I flung
myself into it with ardour. In the bodily ills disclosed to me I saw
only opportunities for the practical application of my art. When a
complaint developed without complications, I was able to see beauty
in its conformity to the normal type. Those phenomena of disease,
which offered apparent anomalies, awakened curiosity in my mind;
so that I was enamoured of disease. What am I saying? From the
point of view I espoused disease and health were possessed of
indisputable personality. As an enthusiastic observer of the human
mechanism, I found as much to admire in its more baleful affections
as in its most healthy compliance with law. Willingly should I have
exclaimed with Pinel: ‘What a magnificent cancer!’ That was a fine
attitude of mind, and I was on my way to become a philosopher-
physician. I only needed to have a genius for my art in order to
enjoy completely, and enter into possession of, the full beauty of the
theory of disease classification. It is the privilege of genius to unveil
the splendour of things. Where the ordinary man would see only a
disgusting wound, the naturalist worthy of the name stands
enraptured before a battlefield on which the mysterious forces of life
struggle for supremacy, in an encounter more inexorable, more
terrifying than any that the strenuous abandon of Salvator Rosa ever
depicted. I only caught glimpses of that spectacle of which the
Magendies and Claude Bernards were familiar witnesses, and it was
a distinction for me to do so; but though resigned to the career of a
humble practitioner, I fortified myself, as a professional duty, in the
habit of confronting grievous situations unemotionally. I gave my
patients my energies and my intellect. I did not give them pity. God
forbid that I should place any gift, howsoever precious, above His
gift of pity! Pity is the widow’s mite; it is the incomparable offering of
the poor man, who with generosity outstripping that of all the
wealthy in this world of ours, gives with the gift of his tears a piece
torn from his heart. For that very reason it is that pity must be
dissociated from the carrying out of a professional duty, how noble
soe’er that profession may be.
“To enter upon more particular considerations, I would say that
the folk in whose midst I am living evoke in their misfortunes a
sentiment which is not pity. There is something of truth in the theory
that a man cannot inspire in another an emotion which he is
incapable of experiencing himself. Now the peasantry in our part of
the country are not tender-hearted. Harsh to others as to
themselves, they drag out an existence morose in its gravity. That
gravity, too, is contagious, and in their company sadness and
dejection affect one’s mind. What is fine about their moral outlook is
that they preserve unscathed the nobler features of humanity. As
they are not accustomed to think with any frequency or profundity,
their thoughts assume naturally in certain circumstances a solemn
tone. I have heard some of them give utterance at the point of
death to brief, forcible speeches worthy of the patriarchs of the Old
Testament. They can call forth one’s admiration, but do not awaken
one’s sympathies. With them everything is quite simple, even their
illnesses. Their sufferings are not accentuated by their imagination.
They are not like those over-sensitive creatures who construct from
their ills a monster more harassing than the ills themselves. They
meet death so much as a matter of course that it is impossible to be
greatly disturbed. To sum up, I might say that they are all so much
alike that no shred of individuality vanishes as each one passes
away.
“For the reasons which I have just set down it follows that I
practise my profession of village doctor very peacefully. I never
regret having chosen it. I sometimes think I am a little above it; but
if it is vexatious to a man to feel himself above his position, the
annoyance would certainly be greater if he felt unequal to it. I am
not rich, and never shall be so long as I live. But of what use would
money be to one who leads a solitary village life? My little grey
mare, Jenny, is as yet only fifteen years old, and she still trots as
easily as in the days of her first youth, especially when we are going
in the direction of the stable. I do not, like my illustrious fellow-
physicians in Paris, possess a gallery of pictures for the
entertainment of my visitors, but I can show pear trees which the
townsmen have nothing like. My orchard is famous for twenty
leagues round, and the owners of the neighbouring châteaux come
to beg cuttings from me.
“Now on a certain Monday—it will be a year ago this very day—as
I was busy in my garden inspecting my espaliers, a farm servant
came to beg me to call as soon as possible at Les Alies.
“I asked him whether Jean Blin, the farmer at Les Alies, had
sustained a fall the previous day as he came home in the evening.
For in my part of the country a sprain is a common Sunday
occurrence, and it is not at all rare for a man to break two or three
ribs that day on leaving the public-house. Jean Blin is not exactly a
bad sort, but he likes drinking in company, and more than once he
has known what it is like to wait for Monday’s dawn at the bottom of
a miry ditch.
“The farm servant replied that there was nothing the matter with
Jean Blin, but that Éloi, Jean’s little son, was seized with fever.
“Without another thought for my espaliers, I went in search of my
hat and stick, and set out on foot for Les Alies, which is only twenty
minutes’ walk from my house. As I walked, my thoughts were on
ahead with Jean Blin’s little boy in the grip of a fever. His father was
a peasant much like every other peasant, with this peculiar
difference, that the Intelligence which created him forgot to provide
him with a brain. This great hulking Jean Blin has a head as thick as
his fist. Divine wisdom has only furnished that particular skull with
what was strictly indispensable, there’s no getting over that. His
wife, the best-looking woman in the place, is a noisy, bustling
housewife, stolidly virtuous. Well, well! To this worthy couple a child
had been given, who was easily the most delicate, the most spiritual
little being that ever adorned this old world of ours. Heredity is
responsible for some of the surprises in nature, and it has been well
said that nobody knows what he is about when he father’s a child.
Heredity, according to our honoured Nysten, is the biological
phenomenon which is responsible for the fact that, in addition to the
normal type of the species, ancestors transmit to their descendants
certain peculiarities of organization and of aptitude. I admit it. But
what peculiarities are transmitted and what are not, that is what is
not very clear, even after a perusal of the learned works of Doctor
Lucas and Monsieur Ribot. My neighbour, the notary, lent me last
year a volume by Monsieur Émile Zola, and I observe that that
author takes credit for particular discernment in this respect. ‘Here,’
he says, in substance, ‘is an ancestor afflicted with neurosis; his
descendants will show neuropathic tendencies, that is to say, when
they do not do so; amongst them will be found some foolish and
some intelligent individuals; one of them may even be a genius.’ He
has gone to the trouble of drawing up a genealogical chart to make
his idea more easily apprehended. Well and good! The discovery is
not particularly novel, and its expounder would unquestionably be ill-
advised to vaunt himself upon it; it is none the less true, however,
that it embraces practically all we know on the subject of heredity.
And this is how it came about that Éloi, Jean Blin’s little son, was an
embodied intellect. He had the creative imagination. Many a time,
when he was no higher than my walking-stick, I have come across
him playing truant with the village urchins. Whilst they were
reaching after nests, I have watched the little fellow constructing
model mills and miniature syphons with pipes of straw. Inventive
and unsociable he turned to nature. His schoolmaster despaired of
ever making anything of so inattentive a child; and, to tell the truth,
at eight years old Éloi was still ignorant of his letters. But at that age
he learned to read and write with astonishing rapidity, and in six
months became the best scholar in the village.
“He was the most affectionate and the most clinging child. I gave
him a few lessons in mathematics, and was astounded at the fertility
that his mind displayed at this early age. In fact—I own it without
any fear of being ridiculed, for in an old man cut off from civilization
some exaggeration is pardonable—I rejoiced to have detected in this
little peasant the premonitions of one of those enlightened spirits
which at long intervals shine forth in the midst of our purblind race,
and, impelled alike by the need of lavishing their affection and the
desire for knowledge, are bound to effect something useful or
beautiful wherever fate may assign them a place.
“My mind was occupied with musings of this kind as far as Les
Alies. Entering the low-ceiled room, I found little Éloi ensconced in
the big bed with cotton hangings, to which no doubt his parents had
removed him on account of the gravity of his condition. He was
lethargic; his head, though small and delicate, nevertheless made as
great a dent in the pillow as if it had been of enormous weight. I
stole near. His forehead was on fire; there was a disquieting redness
about the conjunctive membrane; the temperature of the body was
altogether too high. His mother and grandmother kept close to him,
anxiously. Jean Blin, whose uneasiness prevented him from working,
not knowing what to do, and being afraid to go away, stood with his
hands in his pockets looking inquiringly first at one and then at
another. The child turned his drawn face towards me, and
scrutinizing me with an affectionate but heartbreaking glance, said in
reply to my questions that his forehead and his eyes were both very
painful, that he could hear noises which he knew were imaginary,
and that he knew perfectly well who I was, his dear old friend.
“‘First he has shivering fits, and then he is feverishly hot,’ said his
mother.
“Jean Blin, after ruminating for several minutes, remarked—
“‘My belief is that what ails him is his inside.’
“Then he relapsed into silence.
 “It had been only too easy for me to diagnose the symptoms of
acute meningitis. I prescribed revulsive applications to the feet, and
leeches behind the ears. I drew near to my little friend a second
time, and tried to say something cheerful to him, more cheerful,
alas! than facts warranted. But I was suddenly aware of an entirely
new personal experience. Although I was completely self-possessed
I seemed to see the sick child through a veil, and at such a distance
that he appeared quite, quite small. This upsetting of my ideas of
space was speedily followed by an analogous upheaval of my ideas
of time. Although my visit had not lasted above five minutes, I
received the impression that I had been in that low-ceiled room, in
front of that bed with its white cotton hangings, for a long time, for
a very long time, and that months and even years had rolled by
whilst I was held motionless.
“By a mental effort which is perfectly natural to me, I there and
then put these singular impressions under analysis, and the cause of
them became quite clear to me. It was simple enough. Éloi was dear
to me. At the sight of him so unexpectedly and so seriously ill I
could not ‘get my bearings.’ It is the popular phrase, and it is
appropriate. Moments of anguish appear to us unnaturally long. That
is why I received the impression that the five or six minutes I had
passed beside Éloi had something interminable about them. As to
the fancy that the child was at a distance from me, that came from
the idea that I was about to lose him. This idea, impressed on me
against my will, had from the first moment assumed a character of
absolute certainty.
“The following day Éloi was in a less alarming condition. The
improvement continued for several days. I had sent into the town to
procure ice, and this had had a good effect. But on the fifth day I
recognized that he was in violent delirium. He talked a great deal,
and amongst the disconnected words I heard him pouring out I
could distinguish these—
“'The balloon! the balloon! I have hold of the helm of the balloon.
It rises. The sky is inky. Mamma, mamma! why won’t you come with
me? I am steering my balloon to a place where it will be so
beautiful! Come, it is stifling here.'
 “That day Jean Blin followed me up the road. He slouched along
with that air of embarrassment a man has who wants to say
something and is yet afraid to say it. At last, after walking some
twenty paces with me in silence, he stopped, and laying his hand on
my arm said—
“'See here, Doctor, it’s my belief that what ails the little chap is his
inside.'
“I continued my way sorrowfully, and for the first time in my life
my eagerness to see once more my pears and apricots did not avail
to mend my pace. For the first time in forty years of practice I found
the plight of one of my patients heartrending, and in my inmost self
I bewailed the child I was powerless to save.
“Distracting pangs soon came to magnify my grief. I feared that
my treatment had contributed to the development of the disease. I
caught myself forgetting in the morning what I had prescribed the
night before, uncertain in my diagnosis, nervous, and worried. I
called in one of my fellow-practitioners, a clever young fellow, who
had a practice in the next village. When he arrived, the poor little
fellow, whose sight was already gone, was plunged in a profound
coma.
“The following day he died.
“A year having elapsed after this misfortune, it happened that I
was called in consultation to the county town. The fact is singular.
The causes which led up to it are extraordinary; but as they have no
connection with what I am relating, I do not record them here. After
the consultation, Dr. C——, physician to the prefecture, did me the
honour to invite me to lunch with him and two other members of the
profession. After lunch, where I found refreshment in conversation
at once erudite and diversified, coffee was served to us in the
doctor’s sanctum. As I approached the mantelpiece to put down my
empty cup, I saw hanging upon the mirror-frame a portrait which
aroused in me so profound an emotion that it was with difficulty I
refrained from crying out. It was a miniature, the portrait of a child.
This child resembled in so striking a fashion the one I had been
unable to cure—the child of whom I had been constantly thinking for
a year past—that for a moment I could not avoid the thought that it
was he himself. That supposition, however, was of course absurd.
The black wooden frame, with the circlet of gold surrounding the
miniature, proclaimed the taste of the end of the eighteenth century,
and the child was depicted in a vest of pink and white striped
material such as the little Louis XVII might have worn; but the face
was out-and-out the face of my little Éloi. The same forehead,
imperious and powerful—the forehead of a man beneath the curls of
a cherub; the same fire in the eyes, the same suffering grace on the
lips! Indeed, to the very same features was joined the identical
expression!
“I had probably been examining this portrait for quite a long while
when Dr. C——, clapping me on the shoulder, said—
“‘Ah, my friend, you have before you a family relic which I am
proud to possess. My maternal grandfather was the friend of the
illustrious man whom you see painted there in the days of his early
boyhood, and it was from my grandfather that that miniature came
into my possession.’
“I asked him to be good enough to tell me the name of his
grandfather’s illustrious friend. Upon this he unhooked the miniature
and held it out to me:
“‘See,’ he said, 'on the exergue ... Lyon, 1787. Doesn’t that recall
anything to you? No? Well, that child of twelve was the great
Ampère.'
“Then, in a flash, I had an exact perception, an unequivocal
estimate of what death had swept away one year previously in the
farmhouse of Les Alies.”
MEMOIRS OF A VOLUNTEER

TO PAUL ARÈNE
MEMOIRS OF A VOLUNTEER[4]
 I
was born in seventeen hundred and seventy in the rural
outskirts of a small town in the Langres district, where
my father, half townsman and half peasant, dealt in
cutlery and tended his orchards. In this place certain
nuns, although they only educated girls, consented to
teach me to read since I was but a child, and they were good friends
of my mother. On leaving their hands I took lessons in Latin from a
priest in the town, a shoemaker’s son, well grounded in the
humanities. In the summer the shade of some old chestnut-trees
served as a schoolroom, and close beside his hives the Abbé
Lamadou interpreted Virgil’s Georgics to me. I never dreamed that
any one could be happier than I, and between my master and Mlle.
Rose, the marshal’s daughter, I lived in great contentment. But in
this world no happiness is enduring. One morning, as my mother
embraced me, she slipped an écu of six livres into my coat pocket.
My luggage was packed. My father leaped on his horse and, taking
me up behind him, carried me off to the college at Langres. All the
time the journey lasted I was dreaming of my own little room,
scented towards autumn time with the perfume of the fruit stored up
in the loft; or of the close where my father took me on Sunday to
gather apples from the trees he had grafted with his own hand; of
Rose, of my sisters, of my mother; even of myself, unhappy exile! I
could feel my heart thump, and it was with difficulty that I held back
the tears which filled my eyelids. At length, after five hours' journey,
we reached the town and set foot to ground in front of a huge door,
on which I read with a shudder the word College. The principal,
Father Féval, of the Oratory, received us in a big saloon with
whitewashed walls. He was still a young man, of impressive
appearance, and I found his smile reassuring. On all such occasions
my father had displayed a naturalness, vivacity, and candour which
never deserted him.
 4. All the incidents in these memoirs are authentic, and may be
traced to various documents of the eighteenth century. Not a single
detail, however apparently insignificant, is made use of for which
indubitable authority cannot be produced. (Author.)

“Reverend Father,” he said, placing his hand on me, “I bring you

here my only son. His name is Pierre, after his godfather, and Aubier,
his father’s name, which I have handed on to him as stainless as I
received it from my late dear father. Pierre is my only boy; his
mother, Madeleine Ordalu, having presented me with one son and
three daughters, whom I am bringing up to the best of my ability. To
my daughters will fall the lot which it shall please God in the first
place, and later on their husbands, to assign to them. They are said
to be pretty, and I can’t help believing it myself. But beauty is only a
gay deceiver which it is best not to take into account. They will be
handsome enough if they are only good enough. As to my son Pierre
here before you (as he pronounced these words my father put his
hand so heavily on my shoulder that he made me flinch), provided
that he fears God and knows enough Latin, he is to be a priest. Very
humbly then, reverend father, I beg you to examine him at your
leisure, so as to ascertain his genuine capacities. If you find any
merit in him, let him remain with you. I will willingly pay whatever is
needful. If, on the contrary, you consider that you can make nothing
of him, send me word, and I will come and fetch him away at once,
and teach him how to make knives like his father. For I am a cutler,
at your service, reverend sir.”
Father Féval agreed to undertake what was asked of him. And
upon this assurance, my father took leave of the principal and of me
also. As he was very moved, and had some trouble to restrain his
sobs, he assumed a stiff and harsh expression, and under the
semblance of a farewell embrace bestowed a terrific thump. When
he was gone, Father Féval drew me away from the parlour into a
garden surrounded by a thick hedge. Then, as we passed beneath
the shade of the trees, he said to me—
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