Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages

Albrecht Classen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135309879
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collectoion brings together an outstanding group of historical, cultural, and literary scholars to investigate the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union and desire and dread associated with the figure of the foreign Other in the Middle Ages--represented variously by Muslims, Jews, heretics, pagans, homosexuals, lepers, monsters, and witches. Exploring the diverse manifestations of the foreign in medieval literature, historical documents, religous treatises, and art, these essays mine the traces of unprecedented encounters in which fascination and fear meet.

1

The Saracen and the Martyr:

Embracing the Foreign in Hrotsvit’s Pelagius

LISA WESTON

All saints are foreigners of a sort among other, less holy human beings. However potently they may model correct behavior and subjectivity, their perfection ultimately exceeds imitation. If not, that is, literally foreigners in the national or ethnic sense, they incorporate the distinction as they straddle the boundary between the human Same and the transcendent Other. As Thomas Heffernan has argued, the meaning of saints for their communities arises from exactly this collision, the collision and the conflation of the imperfect earthly and perfect heavenly significations and identities.¹ In this respect martyrs prove especially problematic: as the martyr suffers at the hands of persecutors who are more explicitly and simplistically foreign (in the sense of outside the community which reveres the saint’s memory) he or she draws from the faithful responses not only of emulation, affection, and desire, but also of awe, horror, and pathos. And yet, the tortures these foreign persecutors enact upon the martyr’s body are precisely what establish the martyr’s sanctity—and therefore ironically create the saint’s cult. In some measure, then, the persecutors, however foreign, respond to the saint by acting out passions and desires which those who most revere the saint both recognize and refuse.² Produced within and serving the needs of a cultic community, hagiographic narrative enacts this inherent negotiation of licit and illicit desires, and the subsequent formation of boundaries between “us” (the saint’s community) and “them” (the persecutors and other non-believers) upon the textual body of the saint.

Making manifest the difference of sanctity in a perfect (and adamantly defended) corporeal integrity, the bodies, both physical and textual, of a virgin martyr constitute a particular and provocative focus for such boundary formation. Such is particularly the case in the Pelagius of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (c.935–c.975), a poetic legend in which paradoxical attractions and disavowals bind martyr, murderer, and cult followers within a complex economy of desire and horror, of identification and denial which ultimately troubles and undermines categories like “foreign,” “different” and “same.” Throughout the corpus of her works, saintly Christian bodies, whether subjected to martyrdom or to the rigors of extreme monastic eremitism, become the site of moral struggle, of literally or metaphorically violent distinction between corporeal integrity and pollution, truth and falsehood, good and evil.³ The majority of the legends and plays remove the setting of the struggle to the distant, quasi-mythological past of the Age of Martyrs. By contrast, although it deploys similar rhetorical tropes and follows similar narrative structures, Hrotsvit’s Pelagius related a contemporary tenth-century martyrdom based on eyewitness accounts rather than written sources. Chronological proximity renders interaction with the explicitly foreign persecuting agents more immanent a political possibility for Hrotsvit and her audience, and issues of identification with the foreigner—whether martyr or persecutor—more urgent. The Islamic Spain of the legend constitutes not only a more “realistic” site for definition by religious difference, but also—as the setting is deployed in Hrotsvit’s poem—a locus for other contemporary, local cultural anxieties about gender and sexuality.

Although the persecutor of the tale enjoys the same combination of lust and political power as any Dulcitius—to draw an example from one of Hrotsvit’s better known dramas—and although the virginal hero resists as adamantly chaste as any Agape, Chionia, or Hirena, Pelagius is male. And his gender matters. Granted, male virginity is by no means unknown in medieval hagiography; indeed, in many ways virginity as a construct defies and confounds gender distinction. Hagiographic trials of male virginity rarely, however., involve explicit same-sex desire, seduction, and/or assault. In fact, the text’s overt invocation—and subsequent refusal—of same-sex desire characterizes its engagement with the foreign. As Mark Jordan notes, Hrotsvit’s text depicts same-sex desire “not as something present within the Christian world, but as alien, repulsive, imposed from without,” a relegation in which the “sodomitic vices” of the persecutor are localized and eventually exorcized by being “confme[d] … to a single, sinning soul,” that of the Saracen king.⁴

That explicit disavowal of illicit, foreign desire stands, however, as but one part of a more complex rhetoric of gender and sexual difference. From the first lines, the narrating Hrotsvit’s relation to the saint and especially his bod)'—the beauty of which, physical and/or spiritual, effectively stimulates both licit and illicit desire—is uneasy. In an eleven-line prefatory prayer she addresses the saint as “Glorious Pelagius, most valiant martyr of Christ and soldier of the King who reigns forever.”⁵ His status as martyr thus equates here with a male identity as soldier of Christ; his virginity is not an issue. Hrotsvit by contrast is his “obedient handmaid.”⁶ The conjunction of power and gender difference between the soldier and the handmaid underscores the particular (hetero)sexual model for poetic inspiration implicit in her subsequent request that the saint “refresh the dim cave of her understanding with dew from heaven.”⁷ That metaphorical fecundation creates a worthy song, a new and proper textual body. It also reifies and enacts a heteroeroticism perhaps problematic in a monastic woman like Hrotsvit, and certainly at issue in her other narrations of (female) virgin martyrs.⁸

The gender difference between the saint and the hagiographer and the het-erosexuality of the hagiographic process prefaces a narrative set within a virtually complete male homosocial world. From the moment the victorious Saracen king “defiled the ancient mother of pure faith [Cordoba] with barbarian rites,”⁹ until such time as the Christian community, explicitly “persons of both sexes,”¹⁰ gather to sing hymns as Pelagius’s relics are tested for sanctity, an anxious lack of gender difference pervades the poem. During this time Cordoba is void of songs such as those the learned Hrotsvit might have created; what songs are attempted—by, significantly, “just men who burned to compose sweet songs to Christ and to rebuke in words foolosh idols”¹¹—are silenced by martyrdom.

The result of the metaphorical “rape” of Christian Cordoba is a kingdom in which difference both exists and does not exist. That is, the text and its narrator clearly distinguish the Christians and their defeated king from the rather overdetermined barbarous, violent pagan forces and their first leader: the “perfidious race of Saracens,” “the leader of a barbarian people,” “a man perverse and profane,” “a perverse tyrant.”¹² Within the text’s depicted Cordoba, however, these foreigners co-exist with Christians despite their barbaric customs and religious difference within a status quo marked by integration and tolerance. And while tolerance may be a virtue for modern audiences, within Hrotsvit’s text it constitutes a paradoxically dangerous erasure of distinction and of the (appropriate) het-erosociality from which devotion and reverence arise. After the conquest “pagans are mingled with righteous inhabitants in order to persuade them to discard the customs of their fathers and corrupt themselves.”¹³ Although initially desiring to erase the difference of Christianity entirely, the conqueror pragmatically issues an unjust decree (unjust in that it eliminates the distinction of just Christians from unjust pagans): Christians are free to follow their religion so long as they do not blaspheme the rites of their Islamic overlords. A peace, albeit a false one, of denial of difference quiets the conquered nation, despite the presence of a now marginalized group of Christians led by saintly zeal to break this mandate by composing songs.

Within the usurped Cordoba of the text, a place of carnivalesque reversals, excesses, and failures of discrimination, these self-determined martyrs represent an element of ironic foreignness which both disrupts civil peace and (at least for Hrotsvit and her audience) seeks by that disruption to recreate true peace. Within that Cordoba the second Saracen king, Abderrahman, the villain of the legend, is rightful heir and dutiful son but also, the text tells us, inferior to his paternal line.¹⁴ Metaphorically if not literally Abderrahman is the product of intermarriage between Christian Cordoba and her Saracen conqueror. In the narrative logic of the legend it is the miscegenation and erasure of ethnic and religious difference which creates him a man “stained with carnal luxury” and sullied (as is later made explicit) by “sodomitical vices.”¹⁵ That is, the genesis of his sodomitical desires, his individualized refusal to discriminate between licit and illicit sexualities, is Cordoba’s previous lack or denial of difference, her surrender to the embrace of the foreigner.¹⁶

The fullest evidence of Abderrahman’s sin is his decision to make war on Christian Galicia, for if Abderrahman is defined as the paradoxically rightful son of an unrighteous foreign line, Galicia and its rulers are both foreign,, marginal to Cordoba as the center of political and cultural power—it is a remote place¹⁷—and the rightful inheritors of the older Cordoba: like the ancient, pre-conquest Cordoba Galicia is proudly warlike as well as staunchly Christian. Indeed it is a more vigilant Cordoba, for while the city was noted for its many pleasures, and perhaps therefore susceptible to Saracen luxury and false peace, Galicia is robustly zealous and single-minded in its devotion.¹⁸

The battle between the Christian Galicia and the Saracen Cordoba narratively restages the earlier conquest with a different ending. It is even more allegorically overdetermined: in this psychomachia-like struggle against temptation, the Christian province fights an overtly satanic Abderrahman who “burn[s] with demonic ire, bearing in his heart the Serpent’s ancient bile.”¹⁹ The leader of the Galicians, Pelagius’s father (in earlier legend his uncle, a bishop) doubles the defeated king of Cordoba displaced by Abderrahman’s father. Pelagius as his heir thus doubles both Abderrahman and, in the sexual threat of his martyrdom, the compliant raped Cordoba. (He also allegorically echoes Christ in his role as ransom for a soul captured by the devil.)

Within Abderrahman’s court, to which Pelagius comes as a marginalized foreigner, a prisoner, Christian and Galician, the body of the saint, and the differing ways that body is read inside and outside the text, becomes the narrative focus. Pelagius is the only character for whom Hrotsvit provides an extended physical description, and the only character whose physical appearance becomes the object of variously desiring gazes. Read correctly, from outside the text, his corporeal beauty is appropriately emblematic of inner spiritual beauty. Noble in birth and character, Pelagius is “handsome in every part of his physical form, beautiful in the splendor of his body and prudent in counsel, shining with goodness, in the first flower of his youth.”²⁰ Seen as an outward sign of inner goodness, his beauty provokes moral desire, emulation and devotion; it occasions, for instance, Hrotsvit’s own poetic expression of that chaste, licit desire. Within the legend, however, other erroneous readings of Pelagius’s body are played out. The body of the virgin martyr becomes a locus of difference and distinction: the way its beauty and the significance of that beauty is acknowledged and interpreted defines and distinguishes the narrative’s internal audiences.

Once Pelagius, the “glorious friend of Christ,”²¹ is incarcerated in the dark dungeons of Cordoba he is subject first to the pitying interpretation of Abderrahman’s courtiers who respond to his beauty and his eloquence in ways which echo Hrotsvit’s own descriptions, if in an overly literal fashion. They see his physical beauty and “taste the words of his sweet mouth, flowing with the honey of rhetoric” and desire his liberation from the shackles that hold him. Their appeal to Abderrahman repeats the same words: if only the king “could see his exceptional beauty and taste his honey speech,” he could not but long to make him part of the royal court, to reward him with the military rank he ironically already possesses in Christ’s court.²² Thus far, their reaction i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Self, the Other, and Everything in Between: Xenological Phenomenology of the Middle Ages
• Chapter 1 The Saracen and the Martyr: Embracing the Foreign in Hrotsvit’s Pelagius
• Chapter 2 Foreigner, Foe, and Neighbor: The Religious Cult as a Forum For Political Reconciliation
• Chapter 3 Hungarians as Vremde in Medieval Germany
• Chapter 4 The Face of the Foreigner in Medieval German Courtly Literature
• Chapter 5 Visitors from Another Space: The Medieval Revenant as Foreigner
• Chapter 6 The Foreigner Within: The Subject of Abjection in Sir Gowther
• Chapter 7 Sir Gowther: Imagining Race in Late Medieval England
• Chapter 8 Margins in Middle English Romance: Culture and Characterization in the Awntyrs Off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne and the Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell
• Chapter 9 Cannibal Diplomacy: Otherness in the Middle English Text Richard Coer de Lion
• Chapter 10 Anselm Turmeda: The Visionary Humanism of a Muslim Convert and Catalan Prophet
• Chapter 11 Social Bodies and the Non-Christian ‘Other’ in the Twelfth Century: John of Salisbury and Peter of Celle
• Chapter 12 Religious Geography: Designating Jews and Muslims as Foreigners in Medieval England
• Chapter 13 Foreigners in Konrad von Würzburg’s Partonopier und Meliur
• Chapter 14 The Intimate Other: Hans Folz’s Dialogue between “Christian and Jew”
• Contributors
• Index