In the Middle Ages the Latin noun conversio designated simultaneously retreat from the secular world and consecration of a spiritual life to God, within either the isolation of a hermitage or the community of a monastery. Consequently, it is not at all preposterous that a man such as the tumbler would be attracted to the notion of becoming a lay brother. Medieval historical sources and literature bristle with portrayals of jongleurs who convert, particularly late in life, to become hermits or monks. In the twelfth century, converts who elected to spend their last-chance final years among the Cistercians hailed from many slices of society. Rulers, noted laymen from various professions, and ecclesiastics from priests through abbots to primates—
individuals from all these ranks and callings took on the habit of white monks.
In the Latin Lives of the Fathers, the Egyptian desert father Paphnutius, who had been a disciple of Saint Anthony, is said to have converted a jongleur who had already
become esteemed for his good deeds. A tradition attested from the early twelfth century held that such an entertainer built a hermitage dedicated to the patron of his native town. In turn, the site on a hill known as Publémont became the center of an abbey in Liège, in what is today Belgium. The late twelfth and thirteenth centuries provide numerous cases in which a performer saw the light and converted. Quasi-legendary would be the short life entitled The Monk of Montaudon (see Fig. 3.13). The man in question enters (no surprise here) a religious foundation at Montaudon. He subsequently becomes head, first of this otherwise unidentified priory and later of another near Villafranca in northern Spain, in the province of Navarre. Reportedly, he composes poetry but gives what he earns to his monasteries. Eventually, the monk is released from his vocation to join the court of King Alfonso II of Aragon, where he is appointed lord over the poetic society of Puy-Saint-Mary at Le-Puy-en-Velay. Sadly for our purposes, Saint-Mary has no relation to the Virgin: no tangible Marian connection is to be found. In other well-documented instances, poets and other entertainers converted to monasticism, including Cistercianism. A shining example would be the famed troubadour and later fanatic in the anti-Cathar Crusade, Folquet of Marseille.
He disavowed his profession, repudiated his poems, torched the texts of them in his personal possession, and became a Cistercian. Eventually, he was elevated bishop of Toulouse (see Fig. 3.14). His songs included a dawn song in praise of the Virgin that Pope Clement IV, himself a former troubadour, certified. Folquet’s conversion was itself made the stuff of an exemplum.
Fig. 3.13 The Monk of Montaudon. Miniature, thirteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
de France, MS Fr. 854, fol. 135r. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Fig. 3.14 Folquet de Marseille. Miniature, thirteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
de France, MS Fr. 854, fol. 61r. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
A robust list can be constructed of other troubadours who became Cistercians. To take another instance, a man known as Guiot de Provins lived at the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century. While young, he studied in Arles and elsewhere in Provence.
After serving as a court poet and composing love lyrics, he became a white monk at Clairvaux, but he was not there to stay. He left his life as a trouvère definitively four months later to enter Cluny. At the beginning of 1206, twelve years after taking up the habit, he completed the social satire known as Bible Guiot, or “Guiot’s Bible.”
The roll call does not end with Guiot. Far from it! Helinand of Froidmont also put his career as a minstrel behind him to become a Cistercian at the monastery from which he takes his name. Jean Renart, the thirteenth-century author of the Old French romance Guillaume de Dole, may also have finished his days in an abbey. Perhaps the most pertinent of the many virtuosi among lyricists who converted to Cistercianism is the thirteenth-century Adam of Lexington, from Melrose in Scotland. To honor the Virgin, he passed his winter nights in playing the lute and singing before her altar in the abbey church. The Scot was an antibusker who would hand out provisions to others rather than solicit alms for himself. To give the gritty (or at least grainy) details, he would take a seat near the church doors and pore over the psalter with a basket of bread at the ready to allot to the helpless and needy.
The decorum of conduct within houses of God now differs materially from what it was in the Middle Ages. The buildings served as places not merely of worship but also of congregation more broadly. Children were unruly, babies cried, mothers breastfed. Scuttlebutt would be exchanged, loudly. Mongrels barked and bayed, ran about nipping at each other, and even urinated on pillars. The churches were at once communal recreation centers and homeless shelters, providing soup kitchens and social services, as well as entertainment. Accordingly, in many regions of medieval Europe, it would not have struck anyone as odd that jongleurs frequented cathedral closes, churchyards, and even the interiors of cathedrals or larger churches, at least for certain types of performance.
But what would reactions have been to a jongleur-become-monk who wished to ply his trade within cloisters or even inside a monastic church? The Cistercian General Chapter of 1199 passed a statute that in theory issued an all-inclusive call for the routine expulsion of monks who composed poetry. Given medieval perspectives on performance, recrimination could have been even stiffer against brethren who sought to engage post-conversion in gymnastics, instrumental music, or most other performing arts. Yet the world, even the rule-reverencing monastic one, can be an inconsistent place. Policies and practices are often at odds, sometimes noisily and sometimes tacitly. Not ten years after the passage of the statute, a brother of Clairvaux wrote a statement against versifying by monks that would have been fit for chiseling into a stone tablet. The only hitch was that the memorable line itself took the form of a verse in a poem by him.