The source, properly so called, of the poet is still unknown.
The gist of Our Lady’s Tumbler is relayed in an exemplum that is compartmentalized in the Table of Exempla under the rubric “Joy.” If we set aside the preoccupation of Our Lady’s Tumbler with penance and devotion, its placement under this heading is altogether appropriate, since gifted performers were thought to display and to engender jubilation. They could render joyful their audiences of both human attendees and heavenly onlookers, such as God, angels, and saints. Such euphoria has been expressed in life by the faithful whose commitment to dance has been documented extensively over the past century and a half.
The essentials of the narrative in this Latin version from around 1277 are summarized telegraphically.
Fig. 1.34 Excerpt from Liber exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti, chap. 49, no. 28,
“Gaudium.” London, British Library, MS Additional 18351. Image courtesy of British Library, London. All rights reserved.
The whole of the closely packed two-sentence original reads in translation as follows:
A certain entertainer, forsaking the world, entered a religious order and, when he saw his peers singing Psalms, since he did not know his letters, thought how he could praise God with the others. For that reason, when the others sang their Psalms, he began to dance and leap for joy, and when asked why he did such things, replied, “I see everyone serving God in accord with his faculty, and for that reason I wish to celebrate God in accord with mine, as I know how.”
The relationship between this later, roughly fifty-word exemplum in Latin prose and the earlier 684-line poem in medieval French verse cannot be established conclusively.
One sure thing is that this in-a-nutshell version differs radically from the piece of poetry in more than length alone. The Madonna and Virgin are suppressed in favor of God. We hear nothing of the crypt, nothing of the venomous monks, nothing of the abbot, nothing of the miracle, nothing of the jongleur’s death, and nothing of his soul’s fate.
Nearly a third of the short text comprises the closing utterance of the entertainer.
The exemplum is sheer paradox, being made all of words but all about deeds. Then again, it embodies the famous principle of writing, “Show, don’t tell.” Its hero is a man who expresses himself most effectively through private acts. Yet here the physicality of the earlier tale is shucked to make room for an uncensored statement by the solo artist, almost like the moral to a fable. He has the last word—and then some. We know only a little about him. It is as if he entered the monastery—the order is not even specified—in a fugue state that made him an amnesiac. In our times, names are essential to being and identity, but, again, as in the vernacular verse, the tumbler and the poet resemble each other in their anonymity. The protagonist is notable in both the poem and exemplum for his namelessness. Lacking a name makes him even more exemplary. For being a nobody, or at least a no-name, he becomes an everyman. Does he have a specific identity at all, or is he incognito deliberately? Does his virtuousness support the argument that he is made up—that he must be fictitious because he is too good to be true?
Fig. 1.35 Postcard depicting Thomas Frederick Crane (left) and David Hoy (right), ca. 1910.
Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Archives. Image from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Davy_and_TF_Crane_1910.jpg
No evidence exists that would facilitate illuminating the interconnections between our two surviving attestations of the narrative. The exemplum is the merest scrap of a tale. In 1911 an American folklorist asked, “Is this prose story the hitherto undiscovered original of the French poem?” (see Fig. 1.35). The question is astute. The Latin in the Table of Exempla could transmit, even word for word, a text as the author of the French verse read it. Then again, the early twentieth-century researcher could have gotten it backwards. The prose from the late thirteenth-century compendium could be a distillation that the anonymous Franciscan made directly from reading the medieval French piece of poetry, or indirectly from hearing it performed verbatim or its contents related less punctiliously.
Underlying the folklore scholar’s question is his conjecture that the medieval poet did not personally invent the fundamentals of the story as we have it. But accepting that hypothesis does not force the conclusion that the version passed down by the Franciscan author lay any closer to a notional original. Both the French versifier and the Latin prose writer could have been indebted to a common written source, without any intermediary; or another exemplum in the learned language could have predated the medieval French poem. The short Latin prose version could have inspired both Our Lady’s Tumbler and the exemplum. Then again, the poet and prose writer alike could have picked up the tale orally from sermons or some other form of anecdote.
Possible explanations could be constructed in abundance if not ad infinitum, but potential shreds of proof for any of them are regrettably elusive.
The likelihood is that both the French and the Latin survive, by a mere twist of fate, from a much larger multitude of lost versions, as the story pulsed back and forth between oral and written, popular and elite, lay and clerical, short and long, vernacular and Latinate. Both the poem and the prose are likely to have been under an obligation somehow to an exemplum that achieved diffusion through the Cistercian monastic order. Initially, such a tale would have been recounted by itself. A monk who heard or witnessed a miracle might relate it, others might press the point, and ultimately the head of an abbey might employ it in speaking with the brethren in the chapter house. It might be retold for hosts at another monastery. A choir monk could relate it to a lay brother, or vice versa.
In a later stage, such exempla agglutinated within collections, often produced for and by the monasteries where many are thought to have originated. The white monks were great collectors and carriers of edifying and entertaining short narratives, especially those that bore on miracles relating to the particularities of their monasteries.
During the period from roughly 1140 to roughly 1200, the Cistercians put together the stories of both monks and lay people, particularly lay brothers. When recapitulating what they had heard, the compilers presented the tales in succinct and straightforward Latin, with a minimum of rhetorical flourishes. These assemblers may be imagined as having relied heavily on oral reports and even on what we might call oral literature.
They were prototypical oral historians.
The activities of the Cistercian collectors coincided with the emergence of a new form of transmission for vernacular literacy in what were in those days the two principal tongues of France: Occitan (the language of Languedoc, including what was formerly known as Provençal) and what is now called French. The designation
“minstrel manuscript” has been applied to simple codices, with texts invariably in single columns, written in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Such handwritten books, small and portable, could have been carried as manuals in the literal or etymological sense. The best-known exemplar of all the ones to which this name has been attached conserves the text of the famous French epic, The Song of Roland. In the past quarter century, the longstanding assumption has been rejected or at least strongly critiqued that such objects were produced by dictation from oral poets for their use in rehearsal or recitation. The extant texts are not actual working copies, and we must take pains not to project upon them romantic views of minstrels. At the same time, it has not been misconceived to seek connections between surviving medieval literature and the contents of oral performances that took place without being recorded or successfully transmitted.
From the mid-thirteenth century, the early Cistercian exempla collections were tapped by friars. Both Franciscan and Dominican tabulators of these illustrative stories resembled the white monks of the order’s first few decades in aiming at narrative brevity and rhetorical simplicity. Like many mendicants of his day, the anonymous author of the Table of Exempla drew systematically upon such accounts available from contemporaneous and earlier friars and Cistercians. The line of descent that has been laid out has emphasized the roles of first white monks and later fraternal orders. It demands little imagination to devise a mental image of an abbot relating the short narrative in the chapter house to choir monks, to motivate them to be kind to lay brothers. Alternatively, the same teller could recount the tale when recruiting prospective lay brethren. The story could spur them to act on their impulses by converting to join the Cistercians.
The likeliest venue for the hypothetical lost exemplum is a Cistercian monastery, specifically the one at Clairvaux. As with so much else, we cannot be certain.
Interestingly, many exempla associated with this order do seem to have emanated from that very abbey. As rotten luck would have it, the chief early collection of Claravallian anecdotes has not weathered the storms of time. Consequently, we can only speculate about whether our poem, set as it is in Saint Bernard’s institution, ever formed part of it.
In all periods, the tale has lent itself remarkably to compression and subsequent re-expansion. Even visually, the whole of the story can be expressed by the most economical of metonymies. For example, one artist active in the early twenty-first century called the entire narrative to mind by illustrating an orb caught in the air at the top of a soaring pointed arch (see Fig. Pref.1). The ball stands in for other objects being juggled, but not pictured, by a likewise unrepresented juggler. The lancet recalls
a whole Gothic church, presumably a Notre-Dame, or even a cathedral dedicated to the Virgin, with a Madonna, though Mary too is not shown. In sum, the jongleur is reduced to the rounded geometry of a sphere; Our Lady, to the pointed one of a lancet.