What Makes a Story Popular? - and to purchase copies of this book in:

Mind the gap.

—Warning phrase on the London Underground (1969–) Our Lady’s Tumbler has been described in ways that make its narrative seem anything but time-bound. Yet the timelessness has hardly been unqualified and unobstructed.

As it turns out, the narrative has not been immune to the repercussions of cultural change. For as much as one half millennium, it apparently went unrepeated in any form—untold, unsung, unpainted, and unwritten. In all candor, the tale underwent a death and long interment, before the investigators of literary history exhumed it and reactivated it inside the Frankensteinian operating theater of philology. From there, artists, especially an author, a composer, and a diva, wheeled it out on its gurney for recuperation and rehabilitation so that it could reenter the world triumphantly once again, as a kind of medieval revenant. Never count this story out: each time the jongleur has pulled a vanishing act, he has popped up again—a humanized bolt from the blue, a loose cannon in the literary canon.

What makes a tale gain or lose popularity? Many storytellers, whether oral poets, dramatists, or screenplay writers, have wrestled with this question, and laid bets on the answer. Some have elected, or at least professed, not to care. In the case of Our Lady’s Tumbler, we must wonder why a narrative would enjoy modest success for a couple of centuries from around 1200 before vanishing from sight for roughly five hundred years. Despite being anything but a hollow man, the gymnast went out not with a bang but with a whimper. In the late Middle Ages, he performed a centuries-long disappearing act.

Terms and phrases such as “Our Lady’s Tumbler” and “Jongleur de Notre Dame”

may now be keyboarded into search engines. Algorithms enable nearly instantaneous trawls through corpora of digitized texts that encompass a restricted but still meaningful fraction of all writings published in English over the past two centuries.

The quantity suffices for generating line graphs that track the relative frequency of both titles across time (see Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). The results show visually the diachronically rising and falling cultural impact of individual translations, literary and musical compositions, performers, and more. With the help of such graphic aids, we can correlate upward and downward spikes. We can map the increasing and decreasing effects of translations into modern languages and other artistic developments, such as Anatole France’s adaptation, Jules Massenet’s opera, and Mary Garden’s arrogation of the leading role in the opera to herself. When comparable tools become available for data mining in earlier bodies of literary resources, what patterns will the ripple effects reveal to us? So far as is now known, only two versions of our story survive from the Middle Ages. The French one bears a different title in each of the five manuscripts.

Our textual repository could swell slightly with the discovery of a new version or two, and I would not be surprised if someday a hitherto-unknown exemplum came to light. In the much-quoted words of Alexander Pope, hope springs eternal. Yet even in the most felicitous circumstances, we will never possess enough medieval evidence of Our Lady’s Tumbler to permit credible statistical analysis. The margin of error is too high. Literature from long ago does not always even allow the geometric certainty that two points determine a line. Words may be made into big data, but in the end, poetry and story—like all art—defy datification.

Fig. 4.1 Google Books Ngram data for “Jongleur de Notre-Dame,” showing a sharp rise in the first decades of the twentieth century and then a steady decline. Vector art by Melissa Tandysh,

Fig. 4.2 Google Books Ngram data for “Our Lady’s Tumbler.” As with “Jongleur de Notre-Dame,”

the phrase peaks before 1920; unlike “Jongleur,” the decline is more fitful, dropping deepest only after 1980. Vector art by Melissa Tandysh, 2014. Image courtesy of Melissa Tandysh.

The thin dribble of the narrative into written culture before the Reformation indicates much in its own right. Even before the first millennium, Marian miracles were established in Byzantium. These tales became archetypes on which subsequent adaptations were based in the West. The more different the versions in circulation, the less likely a story was to ebb away altogether, either permanently or temporarily, without being retrieved and reanimated. In contrast to the French poem, we have only two versions of our Latin narrative, the one in a very cursory exemplum. The exiguity of transmission made the survival of the story insecure.

Rather than seek vainly for information that pertains specifically to Our Lady’s Tumbler, we would do better to probe by comparison and analogy what we can learn from the sizable medieval literature of Marian miracles. The distribution of this trove across regions, languages, and literary traditions may procure at least some enlightenment. We discover speedily that the impetus toward collecting miracles ran particularly strong in England in the twelfth century. Yet it did not evidence itself commensurately in the mother tongues. In fact, the meager residue of miracles of Our Lady in medieval English and Anglo-Norman pales alongside the multitude in Anglo-Latin versions and even alongside ones in other Western European vernaculars.

The outpouring of literature, at its most intense from the late twelfth through the thirteenth century, matched a devotion to Mary that cut across geographical, linguistic, and social boundaries. Around the time Our Lady’s Tumbler was set down in writing, Louis IX ruled as king of France. His piety was legendary, and he was canonized in 1297. With good reason, he is commonly designated merely as Saint Louis. Every day he heard the offices of Our Lady. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, the Mass was dedicated to her. On the vigils of the four principal feasts of the Virgin, the king would

mortify his flesh. Two of the six times a year on which he took communion were feasts of Mary. Finally, he made pilgrimages to Marian shrines such as Chartres and Rocamadour.

The Middle Ages and early modernity overlap in multiple ways. The periodization that differentiates between them deserves to be tested and refined. In fact, it has been so sharply faulted that some would favor scrapping any hope of a meaningful division.

All the same, the two periods still constitute distinct time zones in the evolution of European culture. Many systems rest on gradations that can be at variance, but even so we rely upon them. In this case, the separateness of the medieval and early modern worlds appears strongly in religion, not only in those regions where Protestantism threw down the gauntlet to Catholicism.

During the Reformation, the whole world of faith implied in Our Lady’s Tumbler was desecrated and deserted, deteriorated passively from dereliction, endured active destruction, or underwent some composite of such sea changes. In England, one important aspect of the dismantling has become known formally as the dissolution of the monasteries. In the late 1530s, close to one thousand Catholic religious houses were disbanded at the instigation of King Henry VIII. Among the manifold consequences, much of medieval material and textual culture hung by a thread or was even lost. In many places, the iconoclasm of the switch in religions obliterated imagery that had accumulated for centuries. In architecture, the outcome was what Ralph Adams Cram, an early twentieth-century American apologist for the preceding medieval culture (and pre-Reformation Catholic religion), could describe as “the eviscerated, barren, and protestantized cathedrals.” Thus, a reality wrought by Reformation and civil war prompted William Shakespeare to allude to “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Throughout England, the churches of monasteries and abbeys were dispossessed and devastated in rapid-fire succession, with the disappearance of both the physical trappings of Catholic Christianity and the human presence of chanting monks.

True, the changes took hold to varying degrees in different locales. The baring and the ruining were not ubiquitous. In fact, the spectrum could be large within a country such as Germany where a geographical division emerged between Catholics and Protestants. For all that, in general Protestantism of the time acquired an anti-Marian accent. Concomitantly, the Reformation had the effect of diminishing the prominence of the Virgin in Christianity. Even in what remained a mainly Catholic region such as France, medieval culture came under a cloud. More than buildings were affected. In confronting the cult of the saints, the reformers felt bound to reshape or eradicate shrines, relics, images, and miracle tales. Protestants were anti-pilgrimage. A logical extension of the same compulsion was to obliterate the narratives underpinning them. Those who disavowed Catholicism had to confront and calumniate all these interrelated phenomena without granting a special dispensation for the worship of Mary. The Mother of God was not given a free pass in the sectarian violence—on the contrary.

Protestant zones, and Catholic hot spots located close to the battle lines between the factions, came to the boil. It became increasingly dangerous there to claim to have witnessed a Marian apparition. The wrath of the Inquisition could be threatened, and supposed visionaries were executed. At the same time, the cultures that came to be bracketed within the catchall designation of the Middle Ages became suspect too.

Afterward, it took a long time to overcome the lingering reserve and even disdain for the period. By the seventeenth century, French highbrows could be found who expressed admiration for medieval times and affinity for its literature. But their attraction skewed toward knights and the major protagonists of heroic poetry, not toward monks and monasteries.

The most intemperate reformers in England, Germany, and elsewhere, such as Calvinists, were intent on extirpating from popular culture and discourse all saints, but foremost among them the Virgin. They challenged the extremely slender scriptural, and in fact primarily apocryphal, evidence undergirding some of the beliefs and worship that had burgeoned around Mary. They paid the mother of Jesus her due as the Mother of God, and recognized that she conceived as a virgin, but they emphasized more vehemently than the Catholics the preeminence of Christ, and they denied that the Virgin had escaped from original sin. To accord Mary more attention was Romanism, papism, and idolatry.

The Mother of God had been associated especially with lilies, but now the flower show was over. After being in full bloom in the late Middle Ages, the plants were fading fast. The second of the Ten Commandments enjoins the faithful from worshiping graven images. Out of antipathy to idols, the reformers systematically uprooted, tore asunder, and even incinerated the traditional cult and images of Mary like so many overgrown weeds.

This recrudescence of iconoclasm within Christianity deprived the faithful of the direct engagement that Madonnas facilitated with the characters and events of the New Testament. At the same time, it ruled out the danger of ignorant believers becoming confounded and regarding the objects themselves as inherently divine, rather than as stepping-stones toward the divine. Along with the Virgin, the rabble-rousing reformers got rid of monastic orders, many of which had cherished a special devotion to her. Where monasticism was outlawed, monasteries fell into abeyance and monks disappeared. Additionally, the reform movement contributed to the demise of jongleurs, not because of Mary but because the leaders of the Reformation harbored general reservations about entertainment and art of all sorts. The reformers were antitheatrical and therefore perforce antijongleur.

English Protestants, whose religion acquired the backing of the state, achieved success in their full-force and head-on assaults on the cult of the Virgin. England had bestowed upon the Mother of God a favor second only to that for Christ himself; in fact, the entire country had earned recognition as “Mary’s dowry” in acknowledgment of its especial devotion to her. Two and a half centuries earlier, a bishop of Exeter had mandated that every church in his diocese should contain an image of the

Virgin, but now Madonnas incurred acute risk. Depictions of her and of other saints caused consternation because of their anthropomorphism. The importation of the Italian madonna, or “my lady,” to designate a picture or statue of Mary is attested in England first in 1644, well after Protestantism had asserted a firm grasp there. By then such images were alien and foreign. They were talismanic, objects possessing extraordinary powers, whose veneration was dissonant with the anti-idolatrous and antisuperstitious tenets of Christianity.

In the fundamentalist process of editing the Virgin back to the rather faint contours she had in scripture, the iconoclast reformers felt obliged to wipe out the images of Mary around which para- and postbiblical traditions had ramified into a primordial jungle. Wooden figures of the Mother and Child, enclosed often in tabernacles, were a fixture of most English parish churches, as medieval inventories confirm.

Of all these numberless Madonnas, only one from the early thirteenth century has survived. A particularly painful episode to contemplate is the iconophobic (or miso-iconic) vandalization of the Lady Chapel attached to Ely Cathedral (Fig. 4.3). Today the space is strikingly austere, its niches bald of statuary. The sole representation only accentuates both the neat-as-a-pin beauty and the unrelieved bareness. In 1541, reformers beheaded nearly all the dozens of brightly colored statues and smashed almost every single stained glass window that illustrated the biblical typology of the Mother of God and her life story. In 1643, William Dowsing, as commissioner with the charge of destroying “monuments of idolatry and superstition,” carried out a further round of iconoclasm, with close attention to image of the Virgin Mary.

Fig. 4.3 Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral. Photograph by Max Gilead, 2010. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © Maxgilead (2010), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

File:DSCF0563,_UK,_Ely,_Cathedral,_Lady_Chapel.jpg

Another notorious episode took place in England in 1538, when zealots effectively imprisoned cult statues of the Virgin in a large storage closet known as Thomas Cromwell’s wardrobe of beds. Eventually, they put these images on trial. The reformers were not swayed by the defense mounted on behalf of the admittedly tight-lipped sculptures. Instead, they publicly executed them by burning. The punishment approached state-sanctioned murder. The objects of wood and stone themselves were almost living heretics. By having their statuesque feet put to the fire, they were treated with no more and perhaps even less respect than what was due to common criminals.

The point was iconoclastic, to demolish the worship of idols. In that context, the effigies were lightning rods that took a hit for the whole Catholic Church.

Yet inadvertently this treatment of the images by the firebug fanatics perpetuated the very assumptions that it sought to end. In the process, it conceded to them the status of living beings: they were old flames in more than one sense. To the executioners, the broiling of the representations was retributive justice. To their impassioned devotees, the mass cremation must have seemed tantamount to martyrdom. Cult statues of the Virgin were hauled in from such sites as Cardigan, Caversham, Coventry, Doncaster, Ipswich, Lynn, Penrhys, Southwark, Willesden, and Worcester. Then this rogues’

gallery was raked over the coals so that Mary could go out in a blaze. To take one out of alphabetical order, a final Madonna hailed from the most hallowed late medieval English shrine of Our Lady, Walsingham in north Norfolk. Along with her sanctuary, she deserves further discussion.

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