Our Lady’s Tumbler leads off a section in the Arsenal manuscript that mainly comprises miracles of the Virgin. Not one of the codices gives the faintest indication of authorship:
in all five the poem is anonymous. The poet’s name may have been present in the archetype but gone missing between it and the earliest codex, or the author may have kept his identity a deliberate cipher. Anonymity would have been consonant with medieval Christian values as a fitting assertion of modesty. Such self-suppression
would have been especially appropriate if the writer had been a monk. Remember that the central figure of the poem is likewise unnamed. Since the tale is all about modesty and simplicity, it is apt for both the poet and his protagonist to be nameless.
For application to the Middle Ages, the Shakespearean question “What’s in a name?”
could be reformulated with equal relevance as “What’s in namelessness?” The anonymity of the title character befits his humble occupation as well as his personal humility. For that matter, the anonymity of the poem itself could be construed as an apt touch of modesty.
Despite the lack of an ascription, many translators and authors who have adapted the story have credited it unequivocally but wrongly to a specific northern French poet and musician in the Benedictine order (see Figs. 1.2 and 1.3). Particularly in France, this Gautier de Coinci has enjoyed favor and name recognition among literati far beyond the degree to which he has been translated and read. He was born in the village of Coinci-L’Abbaye, south of Soissons, probably in 1177 or 1178. Notre-Dame de Soissons was the abbey there, with a church dedicated to Mary. A good-sized portion of the monastery as it existed in the times of this monk withstood the hazards of time until the French Revolution (see Fig. 1.4). At that point the complex of buildings suffered a blindingly rapid demise, from which little now remains (see Fig.
1.5). In Marian relics, the church possessed a slipper of the Virgin that became revered for the miracles associated with it.
Fig. 1.2 Gautier de Coinci at work. Miniature by Fauvel Master, 1327. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek 71 A 24, fol. 49v. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gautier_de_Coinsi.jpg
Fig. 1.3 Gautier de Coinci (detail). Miniature, 1260–1270. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert I, MS 10747, fol. 3r. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque royale Albert I, Brussels. All rights reserved.
Fig. 1.4 Postcard depicting Notre-Dame de Soissons in the eighteenth century (Soissons, France: Nougarède, 1903).
Fig. 1.5 Ruins of Notre-Dame de Soissons.
Photograph, 1938. Photographer unknown. Fig. 1.6 Postcard depicting the Abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes (Paris: Levy Fils et
Cie, early twentieth century).
Fig. 1.7 Postcard depicting the cloisters at the Abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes (Paris: Neurdein et Cie, early twentieth century)
Fig. 1.8 L’Abbaye de Saint-Médard, Soissons. Engraving, date and artist unknown.
Gautier grew up in a region tied particularly closely to the Mother of God. Sometime after 1143, a Latin author by the name of Hugh Farsit composed a prose collection of miracle stories, many of them connected with the local Madonna. He was a regular canon of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, a monastery of Augustinian canons in Soissons (see Figs. 1.6 and 1.7), and his book of traditions about Mary from the vicinity records the miraculous healings she performed in this municipality during the fast-spreading epidemic of ergotism that swept over northern France in 1128. This outbreak is often identified by referring to the French victims as ardents “burning people.” The qualifier alluded to the discomfort that they experienced: the hot and bothered.
At the age of fifteen or sixteen, Gautier himself entered as a novice monk into the Benedictine house of Saint Médard at Soissons in 1193 (see Fig. 1.8). He remained there for more than two decades. In 1214, he became prior of Sainte Léocade at Vic-sur-Aisne, a village within hailing distance of Soissons, and served there nearly twenty years. In 1233, he was appointed Grand Prior back at Saint-Médard, an office that an uncle of his had held. If he had been the author of Our Lady’s Tumbler, he would have
had good cause to be impressed by the chilly crypt of Saint-Médard and to think of it as the venue for the tumbling of the lead character in the poem (see Fig. 1.9). The space would have been as striking then as it is today. The poet died in 1236, in the same monastery where he had begun his monastic calling.
Fig. 1.9 The crypt of the abbey of Saint-Médard, Soissons.
Engraving by Léon Gaucherel, date unknown.
Between 1212 and 1236, Gautier composed two books of verse Marian miracles known as Miracles of Our Lady. This chronology means that he had two staging grounds for his poetic creation. Although he wrote the individual segments mostly in Vic-sur-Aisne, he began and finished them at Saint-Médard in Soissons. His text achieves an extraordinary range in its language and rhetoric, holds to a careful and goal-oriented plan, and puts on display a discriminating and satirical perspective on both the secular and ecclesiastical society of his day. Many of his versified tales touch at least in passing upon images of the Mother of God. In numerous instances he introduces Madonnas when they were not mentioned in the Latin sources upon which he draws.
Eleven of his stories go so far as to involve such representations as characters within their narratives. If Marian miracle tales qualify as a specific literary genre, ones about statues or paintings of the Virgin form a distinct and multipart subgenre within it.
Time and again, such narratives were associated with sites where relics of Mary were held, and where pilgrims devoted to her would come.
Gautier’s Miracles of Our Lady were enormously popular, to judge by the total of 114 extant manuscripts. This figure plants his composition squarely in the realm of bestsellers of the day, although none of the codices dates to his lifetime. A dozen of these copies contain extensive musical notation. Twenty-nine have the added drawing power of being beautifully illustrated. Likenesses of Madonnas and of Madonnine
miracles constitute a salient feature of the codices. The depictions emphasize figures as they kneel in supplication before images of the Virgin. In the Byzantine world, the act of genuflection was intrinsic within the veneration of icons. In the West, it became anachronistic by the thirteenth century. In writing, Gautier verged on describing himself as a jongleur, or at least as a trouvère or minstrel of his lady, Notre Dame. The stance the poet takes in his text correlates nicely to the pose in which he is presented in one manuscript portrait, where he is portrayed as a musician in black Benedictine monastic garb. While bowing the fiddle-like stringed instrument called the vielle, he looks down at a big sheet of parchment with two facing folio sides of musical notation that lies on the bench beside him (see Fig. 1.10). Thus, like the hero of Our Lady’s Tumbler, he managed to combine in himself strains of minstrelsy and monasticism.
Fig. 1.10 Gautier de Coinci. Miniature, 1260–1270. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1, MS 10747, fol. 3r. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque royale Albert I, Brussels. All rights reserved.
When all is said and done, the fact that Gautier was a highly successful poet from Picardy who wrote extensively in verse on miracles of the Virgin does not suffice to ascribe to him the authorship of Our Lady’s Tumbler. For better or worse, we have become acclimated today to requests that we identify ourselves by our names and birthdates, commit to memory and reel off numbers that have been affixed to us by states and businesses, and even surrender to biometric analysis of our fingers, faces, eyes, or more. Naturally we expect the past to bestow upon us at least some of the same trivia about its authors.
But here we must reconcile ourselves to the anonymity in which much medieval literature has been engulfed. Some authors cloaked themselves in this kind of impersonality by choice, for reasons of Christian humility or owing to differing conceptions of authorship. The indifference of scribes or the happenstances of sloppy transmission imposed namelessness upon others. In any case, the identity and individuality of authors mattered far less, or at least far differently, in the Middle Ages than now. Many works traveled under aliases. Along with Pseudo-, Anonymous was the most prolific of medieval authors. She or he composed Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and Aucassin et Nicolette, to name only three texts from the many that spilled out from the cornucopia of anonymity.
In the same company, the poet of Our Lady’s Tumbler has no name right now. Indeed, none is likely ever to be accorded that will win general agreement. In medieval times, stories tended to be treated as in the common domain, whether they surrounded legendary figures of late antiquity or the early Middle Ages such as Arthur and Charlemagne, were connected with the heroic wars and haphazard wanderings of classical myths relating to Troy and Thebes, or celebrated the travails and triumphs of saints. No conventions of copyright existed, let alone of royalties, and the conception of plagiarism differed starkly from our own. Both copyright and unacknowledged borrowing have been under constant renegotiation since the advent of personal computers. The authors, collectors, scribes, readers, and hearers of medieval literature appear often to have been untroubled about the fine points of authorial rights.
Many authorless texts from the Middle Ages are subject to a high degree of textual variance. With each rewriting by a scribe, they have been affected by variations in dialect, minor changes in lexicon here and there, thoroughgoing expansion and contraction, and sometimes even more drastic redrafting. This sort of textual mobility, a hallmark of manuscript culture, is alien to the fixity that has become expected of printed texts. It has been described with an imported French word, mouvance.
No deduction about the author of Our Lady’s Tumbler is unquestionable or unimpugnable, beyond the fact that a poet was at work—and a very fine one at that.
Yet when all is said and done, the anonymity need not deal us as expositors a crippling blow. All is not lost. We can still gain some sense of him, and an even greater one of the characters in his Our Lady’s Tumbler. The challenge is to exercise caution and not, in our eagerness to know the writer, to draw any hasty inferences. The unnamed poet
had his finger on the pulse of monasticism, but he need not have been a monk. He knew the minstrelsy, but he does not have to have been a minstrel himself. Regardless of his status, we have a fighting chance of determining the pecking order of human values in which he participated. In that valuation, the spiritual was privileged over the material. The ne plus ultra was to attain heaven through a mystical communion with the divine. But let us get both feet back on the ground, by examining the language and region with which the poet and poem are associated.
Picardy
Of the five medieval manuscripts, the earliest witness for Our Lady’s Tumbler survives from the second half of the thirteenth century. As mentioned, the poem has been described as being in Old French, the tongue spoken in the northern half of modern France and related regions from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. Yet attaching this linguistic tag to the tale may oversimplify and distort the situation.
The study of French in the Middle Ages, like that of most medieval languages, was established in the nationalistic atmosphere of the late nineteenth century. To serve the end of buttressing nation-states, the major languages of Europe that existed or were being willed into existence at that time were read back into the medieval past.
The dialect that became modern French was in fact hardly the most important in the literary production of twelfth- and even thirteenth-century France, but its later centrality was retrojected upon it by the philologists who constructed the field of Romance philology.
The patriarchs of Old French in the glory days of the field lived in a world of nationalism. Furthermore, their nation under the Third Republic revolved around a clearly defined and outsized capital city. If Paris was the axle, it was set into a hub, the greater Parisian region known as Île-de-France. This conceptualization does not apply to the Middle Ages, but it was forced upon it by simultaneous anachronism and anatopism. By the late nineteenth century, dialects existed on the margins of a standardized official language, French. The concept of Old French assumes the existence of a similarly standard idiom already during the medieval period.
By the touchstone of today’s population distribution, at the very northern tip of what is now France, Picardy may look peripheral. The territory is extrametropolitan, since it lies outside Paris. France has many cities but at the same time the country has been centralized for centuries now around the capital. The national transportation systems and governmental reporting structure may be visualized as a set of spokes radiating from what is now the City of Light and reaching out to the felly of the French frontiers. Yet this was not the organization of communication and power in the early thirteenth century, when Our Lady’s Tumbler was written. Localizing the poem in this northern area and in the Picard dialect likely means that the poet in fact was born, reared, and lived in that region. Those credentials place him at a long distance
geographically from daily life where the events of Our Lady’s Tumbler reputedly occurred. Clairvaux was a monastery in Champagne. Among other things, it was the abbey of Saint Bernard, from its foundation as daughter house of Cîteaux Abbey, mother house of the Cistercian religious order of monks and nuns, until Bernard’s death in 1153. The white monks sought to reignite strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict, framed in the day of the founder himself, and to hammer home self-sufficiency through manual labor, as early Benedictinism had done.
Obviously, the poem cannot have been written after the earliest datable manuscript in 1268, but the earliest surviving record of a text can come from long after the time of its writing. In this case, a frequent conjecture suggests that the text was composed around 1200, or even in the late twelfth century. The most thoroughgoing analysis has pegged the dating approximately in the late third decade of the thirteenth century.
The linchpin of this chronology rested upon resemblances to the poetry of Gautier de Coinci, who died in 1236. As to place of origin, the most cogent hypothesis has been that the poet settled as a white monk in Ponthieu, a feudal county in northern France.
Yet this reasoning, close to being a sophism, capitulates to the fallacious argumentation that is called the thin edge of the wedge. The premise that the writer was a Cistercian arises from the glowing praise that he gives to retreat from the world. The supposition that he belonged to a community in this particular locality has only one toehold: he singles it out for mention once. Both inferences are tenuous at best.