Emotional monasticism

Affective piety in the eleventh-century monastery of John of Fécamp

Lauren Mancia

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526140203
• eBook ISBN: 9781526140227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Medievalists have long taught that highly emotional Christian devotion, often called 'affective piety', appeared in Europe after the twelfth century and was primarily practiced by communities of mendicants, lay people and women. Emotional monasticism challenges this view. The first study of affective piety in an eleventh-century monastic context, it traces the early history of affective devotion through the life and works of the earliest known writer of emotional prayers, John of Fécamp, abbot of the Norman monastery of Fécamp from 1028–78. Exposing the early medieval monastic roots of later medieval affective piety, the book casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in Europe before the twelfth century and redefines how medievalists should teach the history of Christianity.

1

Reforming the reader’s interior: defining emotional reform and affectivity in John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica

To the best of our knowledge, John of Fécamp wrote only one major treatise in the course of his fifty-five years at the monastery of Fécamp. Unlike the expansive corpus of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) or Lanfranc of Bec (1005–89), John revised a single work at different moments in his priorship and abbacy, choosing not to write new works.¹ This is a significant fact. Ultimately, as this book will show, John seemed to have felt that his Confessio theologica was the core of what he had to teach his monks, his noble female acquaintances, and the wider Anglo-Norman audience of his work.

The Confessio theologica’s central argument is the following: Christians desiring a connection to the divine needed to work to reform their devotional emotions, not just their devotional actions. John demands readers ‘enter into the interior of [their] mind[s]‌’.² For John, even the most devout Christian was in need of a conversio – a turning back to God – because even the most devout Christian relapsed into habitual behaviours, dulling his or her awareness of the divine. At the pinnacle of that divine awareness was the paradoxical experience of caritas – suffering that heals, pain that soothes, love that wounds. Each time it was read, John’s CT was meant to create such an awareness – and, thereby, an inward conversio – in its Christian reader.

John outlines a comprehensive theory of contemplative practice in his Confessio theologica; in its printed edition, the treatise includes over seventy pages of prose alongside four oft-excerpted prayers. To provide the foundation for the chapters that follow, this chapter will examine the CT in its entirety. I will analyse John’s theory of contemplative practice through a close reading of his text, defining terms, ideas, and devotional objectives which will lay the foundation for the rest of my book.

The Confessio theologica as a book for monks

When André Wilmart, Jean Leclercq, and Jean-Paul Bonnes wrote their pioneering studies of John of Fécamp, they postulated that John initially composed the Confessio theologica (Theological Confession) for his own spiritual edification when he was prior of Fécamp.³ They believed that John also revised the CT two more times before his death in 1078: two copies of a second recension, which a scribe called the Libellus de scripturis et verbis patrum collectus ad eorum presertim utilitatem qui contemplativae vitae sunt amatores (Little Book of Extracts from the Scriptures and Words of the Fathers, Especially Useful for Those Who are Lovers of Contemplation, hereafter Libellus), were sent first to an anonymous nun, c. 1030, and then thirty years later to the Empress Agnes of Poitou (1025–77), c. 1060. A third recension, called the Confessio fidei (Confession of Faith) by a scribe in its lone surviving manuscript, was written in response to the Berengar of Tours (c. 999–1088) Eucharistic controversy, around 1050.⁴

Before I jump into the content of John’s treatise, a brief discussion of the questions of recension and reception is important to our understanding of John’s text’s construction and, more importantly, of John’s audience. Few scholars since Wilmart, Leclercq, and Bonnes have examined the complete first recension of the CT in their work on John; most rely instead on his work’s more famous extracts, four prayers excerpted from the Libellus and published in the late medieval Pseudo-Augustinian collection of prayers called the Meditations of St Augustine.⁵ This selective reading of John obscures the meaning of John’s words and prevents an accurate identification of John’s contemporary audience.

Since the only published critical edition of the Confessio theologica dates to 1946, and since that edition only examines the so-called first recension, relying on only one manuscript and one manuscript fragment, it goes without saying that the recensions of John’s work demand further study (work that, admittedly, I will not do here).⁶ Leclercq and Bonnes relied on these two manuscripts for their edition because they were (and continue to be) the only identified surviving manuscripts of the earliest recension of the Confessio theologica: Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088 (fols 1–6v), an eleventh-century fragment of unknown origin and of only six folia,⁷ and Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1919, a twelfth-century manuscript from a Cistercian or Premonstratensian abbey in Champagne, perhaps around Troyes.⁸ In contrast, second recension manuscripts of the Libellus version surviving from the later eleventh and twelfth centuries far outnumber those of the first and third – there are eleven in total – indicating that this was the version of John’s work most widely read by his contemporaries. Only one known manuscript of the third Confessio fidei recension survives, making that recension even harder to trace than the first, and also causing some scholars to doubt it to be authentically John’s at all.⁹

No matter the recension, though, John’s Confessio theologica was read extensively by, and was likely initially composed for, a male monastic audience. Wilmart argued that John of Fécamp’s writings were effusions de sa prière intime,¹⁰ sincere records of John’s own private prayer that were then disseminated to his monastic brethren once they got wind of the existence of such personal texts. To support this notion (and to support his dating of the CT to John’s priorship at Fécamp), Wilmart cited the passage below, where John refers to the need to be obedient to his own abbot in his daily life:

Grant, O Lord, that I always love my abbot, your servant, and all my seniors and brothers with sincere and humble charity [RB, ch. 71]; that from my heart I feel deep sorrow in their evils and sins and adversities; that from my heart I feel deep joy in their goods and virtues and advances; that I never set anything before your love, but love you in all things and above all things [RB, ch. 72]. Give me true humility and obedience, true submission and mortification, so that unrestrained judgment lives not in me, nor my own will to lead [cf. RB, ch. 5]. Give to me simplicity, innocence, and wholeness of mind, continuous custody of my heart and mouth, so that I condemn and despise no one, doubt the merits of no one, render evil for evil to no one, but walk in the simplicity of my heart before you always.¹¹

Wilmart takes John’s first-person supplications literally, and interprets them as biographical facts: John refers to his abbot, therefore he is composing this text when he was prior; John speaks in the first person, therefore the CT is a private confessional text written from John’s point of view. In 1946, Leclercq and Bonnes followed Wilmart’s lead, likewise claiming that John’s CT was ‘liée à sa vie personelle’ and was initially a product of his own monastic life.¹²

It is certainly likely that John wrote the Confessio theologica as Fécamp’s prior. It was not uncommon for a prior to write a manual of spiritual advice to his monks: Anselm of Canterbury wrote his Prayers and Meditations while he was prior at Bec, which served to model proper devotional behaviours to the monks in his care.¹³ But Wilmart, Leclercq, and Bonnes’s confidence that John wrote the CT for his own spiritual edification is problematic: the passage above merely shows that the Confessio theologica was initially written with a monastic audience in mind, long before John sent the manuscript to a nun or Agnes. The passage above constantly draws from the precepts of the Rule of St Benedict, as I indicate in brackets, both directly excerpting the RB’s prescriptions and indirectly reflecting them in original prayerful language. John also emphasises loving ‘all [his] seniors and all [his] brothers’, an explicit reference to the monastic community. These comments suggest that John certainly composed his first recension with fellow followers of the RB in mind.¹⁴ These and other RB-inspired passages from the CT are the principle passages that are omitted in the second Libellus recension, likely as part of an effort to make John’s text more accessible to a wider, non-monastic audience, chiefly of noble women.¹⁵

In addition, it is clear from manuscript evidence that all three of the recensions of John’s text, even the Libellus recension, were read by a substantial male monastic audience in John’s lifetime. The evidence for this conclusion is as follows: all three manuscripts of John’s complete text that survive from the eleventh century (two Libellus, one Confessio fidei¹⁶) are from male monastic houses; all nine (seven Libellus, one Confessio fidei, one Confessio theologica¹⁷) that survive from the twelfth century are too; and these numbers do not include the likely countless unidentified monastic manuscripts that feature unattributed excerpts of John’s prayers and other works (like Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088’s edition of the CT, mentioned above).¹⁸ Moreover, many of these early manuscripts survive from monasteries that were strongly connected to Fécamp’s monastic network, foundations that were either reformed by John’s mentor and Fécamp’s first abbot, William of Volpiano (962–1031), or whose abbots maintained strong connections with John himself during the eleventh century.¹⁹ Thus, while the Libellus sometimes circulated with a dedicatory letter to an empress or a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Figures and maps
• Acknowledgements
• Note on translations and editions
• List of abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Reforming the reader’s interior: defining emotional reform and affectivity in John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica
• 2 Dicta mea sunt dicta patrum?: tradition and innovation in John’s Confessio theologica
• 3 Reforming the monastic community: the uses of John’s devotional method within the walls of Fécamp
• 4 Reforming monks in the temporal world: John’s devotional principles cultivated in the secular landscape
• 5 John’s medieval legacy: the monastic roots of affective piety
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index