One old saw declares, “Clothes make the man.” Another holds, “The habit does not make the monk.” Does the second saying suggest that a male not in the monastic uniform may still be a monk, or only that a person who dons it may not make the grade as one? Let us turn now to the tumbler’s clothing (or scantiness of it). As his fellow monks in the choir above fulfill their liturgical duties, he peels off his cowl and other outer garments and enacts an elaborate gymnastic sequence in the crypt to honor the Mother of God. What exactly was he wearing, when he dressed in next to nothing? The text and the illumination are at variance. In medieval art, men who strip down to their most intimate underclothing are depicted as having on a filmy undergarment that covers their lower body. Not so our performer, when he performs his strange equivalent of rolling up his sleeves for hard work.
We learn that the entertainer has on nothing but a “little coat” that serves as hardly more than a shirt. The coatlet that constitutes his undergarb could be pictured as a short smock or kirtle or, to resort to a shade more familiar term, a short nightshirt.
Perhaps we should go so far as to envisage something along the lines of a romper, the one-piece outer garment worn by a young child. In all cases, the item would have had a T-shaped cut with an oval neckline, so that it could enclose parts of the arms, the whole torso, and a mite below the midriff and upper thighs. Whatever we call it, the de facto jumpsuit would have concealed enough of his body in a critical situation to be decent (even though he was not expecting to be seen by anyone terrestrial, just
celestial, and he was most certainly not out to air any dirty linen). That said, his outfit would not normally have been sufficiently long to provide seemly covering for the active movements in which he reportedly engaged.
The nightshirt-like item would shield mainly the trunk and above. For the nether limbs, men could rely on linen breeches and fabric hose on their shanks. The Cistercians elicited many sniggers because they refrained from sporting such coverings except when they served at the altar. The white monks were as distinctive for their underwear (or lack thereof) as for their outerwear. Remember the metonymy that gave them one of their principal names. Being whispered about as the brethren who wore no undergarments was a gossipy equal-and-opposite reaction to the designation of “white monks.” The practice of not bothering to wear underpants under clothes is known now in slang as “going commando,” but in the Middle Ages it could have been called “going Cistercian.”
The Latin author Walter of Map (d. ca. 1210) offers a slurring explanation in the anecdote-ridden Latin prose of his twelfth-century De nugis curialium (Courtiers’
Trifles). In it, the habit of dispensing with underclothes was allegedly intended to maintain coolness in the sexual organs, for fear that flashes of heat would stimulate their possessors to lechery—an alternative etiology for “some like it hot.” Whatever the real rationale for forgoing the lowest layer of clothing, non-Cistercians rolled into the aisles in sidesplitting laughter at the hazards of accidental exposure to which white monks were purportedly prey. Thus, the same Map recounts the scurrilous anecdote of a hapless member of the order who inadvertently mooned King Henry II of England. While scrambling from the path of the oncoming royal cavalcade, the poor unfortunate fell head over heels. With nothing covering his bottom, he went once more into the breach (but breechless) and exposed his posterior to the monarch.
In these cases of a bottom-up process gone awry, the covering the monks failed to wear was breeches. They dispensed with unmentionables altogether, opting not to be encumbered even by a shortened form that extended only so far as the upper thighs.
The tale of the tumbling lay monk in the French poem and Latin exemplum is not concerned with exhaustively documenting the practices of the order regarding monastic unmentionables, as engrossing as such an investigation could have been.
Rather, it brings into higher resolution the peculiarities of an individual. To go further, it concentrates on the minimalism of clothing and not on the absence of underthings.
Thus, the story lacks any clear-cut connection with the Cistercian sartorial convention against undergarments. That is probably a good thing, because if it had one, we would have to delve into the issue of the order’s policy on underclothing for lay brothers, which may well have been different and more lenient than for the choir monks.
The tumbler’s near nakedness as he goes about his business contrasts with the wealth he waived upon entering the monastery, since the tangibles of a successful jongleur included without fail a sumptuous wardrobe. Clothing forms part of the
stock in trade for professional entertainers. In their compositions, those who compose and perform songs and poems, like medieval jongleurs, strike a pose of operating within a well-developed sartorial economy. At work, they petition, even beg, their patrons for cloaks. At play, they win and lose such items in gambling.
Yet the wardrobe that jugglers of words earn for their craft stands far apart from the representations in art of the physical entertainers as they do their routines. Medieval performers of the physical sort were known for their scandalously insufficient attire.
In practical terms, it made sense for the gymnastic jongleurs to strip in preparation for their acts. Both gymnast and gymnasium are built upon the Greek adjective gumnós, or
“naked,” by way of a verb meaning “to exercise naked.” The various words reflect the reality that the backbreaking movements of gymnastics require skintight and scanty clothing, or even none at all. The medieval legends of Alexander the Great perpetuated knowledge of the so-called gymnosophists or “naked wise men” of long-ago India, who among other things eschewed conventional dress to achieve greater purity of thought (see Fig. 3.16). The tumbler resembled them in keeping little under wraps: he lives by a principle of unveiled truth. Millennia later, similar claims for the spiritual and epistemic benefits of shedding clothes continue to be advanced by nudists and naturists. Anatomized etymologically, the designation gym suit is a contradiction in terms—an antithesis of the first order. The only suit on view in ancient gymnasia was the birthday suit.
The jongleur of Our Lady’s Tumbler is atypical to the extreme in the sartorial sacrifices that he makes unprompted. Upon becoming a monk, he relinquishes his entire collection of worldly clothes. Whether he wears breeches beneath or not at the commencement of his acrobatic routine of performing for the Madonna is a footnote (or a note on some other body part) best left to the imagination, but the light clothing heightens the physicality of his skills as a dancer-acrobat. At the end of his self-inflicted ordeal, the physical crumpling of his nearly unclothed person can call to mind the Passion of Christ or the martyrdom of any number of saints. Having been stripped down for at least part of the torture that culminated in the cross, Jesus was shown consistently as dressed in next to nothing for the Crucifixion and Deposition.
The four soldiers who crucified him took his clothes and divided them in four shares among them, leaving him with only his undergarment (see Fig. 3.17). After he was taken off the cross, Jesus had on next to nothing when cradled for the last time by his mother. Thus, being nearly undressed was part of the overall sacrificial offering.
At the same time, it belonged to the deliberate humiliation to which Jesus was subjected, and which he embraced. The humbling imposed by involuntary nakedness becomes a routine part of legends of saints, perhaps particularly virgin martyrs. Such harassments can be depicted with a meticulousness that might strike a viewer today as verging on pornographic.
Fig. 3.16 Alexander the Great encounters gymnosophists in India. Miniature by Maître François, 1475–1480. The Hague, Museum Meermanno, MS 10 A 11, fol. 93v. Image courtesy of Museum
Meermanno, The Hague.
Fig. 3.17 The crucifixion of Christ, with soldiers shown casting lots at the foot of the cross.
Miniature by Queen Mary Master, 1310–1320. London, British Library, MS Royal 2 B VII, fol. 256v.
Image courtesy of the British Library, London.
Outside the context of martyrdom, being in the buff or close to it was viewed negatively in the Middle Ages. To be seen unclothed by accident was customarily found ridiculous and comic in medieval culture. The tumbler’s look may verge on black comedy. For him to be nearly nude in the presence of the Virgin may also raise gender issues, just as his virtual nakedness near fully clad monastic brothers may point to a difference in status between entertainers (as a subset of lay brothers) and monks. Yet the juggler’s gym suit signals on a textile level his true simplicity. In this sense, his minimal attire outshines even monastic garb; his nakedness is not merely virtual but even virtuous. In the end, the poet need not have been scoring any special point, either comic or commendatory. The reality of athletic performance would have required jongleurs in the world outside the cloister to strip down, which could have contributed to the poor reputations accorded them by the Mrs. Grundys of their day.
To view the tumbler’s disrobing from an utterly different vantage point, the medieval commentary tradition, in both exegesis of the Bible and interpretation of secular writings, emphasized peeling away protective layers of the surface text to arrive at the hidden meaning of subtexts. Tropes developed to express the hermeneutic process. Thus, interpreters could winnow to separate wheat from chaff, crack shell to reach kernel, shuck husks to get at the ear of corn (had Europe had maize), and so
forth. Two comparisons, ever present in the twelfth century, involved the Latin terms signifying “wrapper,” “covering,” or “envelope.”
At the same time, the tumbler’s appearance nudges the scene close to the borderline of the sexuality and even promiscuity that are sometimes detectable in miracles of the Virgin. Sexual sinners are far from abnormal among those saved by Mary. The whorish meretrix, “prostitute” in the learned language, could be spared thanks to the virginal mediatrix, the Latin qualifier of the Virgin in her capacity as mediator between earthly sinners and heavenly redeemer. As the junction where God and humanity intersected, the Mother of God was ideally suited to help individual human beings and her child meet each other halfway. By interceding with her son and being heard by him, she has access to the heavenly father who can bring a magic solution through salvation.
As the chant rises, the tumbler’s leaps and skips grow more arduous. He coordinates his physical devotions with the verbal and musical worship of the monks in the church above him. In straining to execute his service, he goes so far as to extemporize hitherto unseen and unattempted new moves for the Virgin. Finally, the heavy-breathing exertion causes him to collapse, sweat-slicked from head to foot. A simile that likens the wetness exuding from him to fat oozing from meat on a spit may bring home how he treats his fleshly self like a dray animal. In this self-inflicted physical mortification, the tumbler resembles Arnulf, a lay brother from the Cistercian monastery at Villers in Belgium, whose life was celebrated in the second decade of the thirteenth century by the monk Goswin of Bossut. According to the macabre minutiae, the masochistically inclined, devout brother scourged his body with all manner of homemade devices to cause himself exquisite pain. Another lay brother from the same institution afflicted his flesh to the point where a witness likened him to one of the desert fathers. In any case, the entertainer’s sweatiness in Our Lady’s Tumbler is reemphasized in a later performance, when his perspiration dribbles down into the middle of the crypt. In his one-man sweatshop, we can picture the paving stones whitened by the salt from the effusion of sweat and tears. Let us scrape a sample and submit it to a little testing in the laboratory of language and literary history.