The time has come for full disclosure of veiled references. Likewise, the moment is upon us for picking up for the first of many times the thread of an argument about textiles. Bernard was hardly the last Cistercian to do obeisance to the Virgin. To take just one example, Helinand of Froidmont (d. after 1229), himself a former jongleur or troubadour, composed sermons for Marian feasts. In his writings, he declared that his brethren in the Cistercian order “do homage to this great lady and avow everlasting service to her.” If Venn diagrams had existed in the Middle Ages, the categories of Cistercian and Marian would often have come close to total eclipse. The white monks were bound in a privileged rapport with Mary in myriad ways. To rehearse only one more instance, they are often presented in exempla as receiving special guardianship from the Virgin. Her intervention in the tale of the tumbler speaks to the willingness of the white monks to show ordinary monastic authority tempered or even subverted by her maternal power. The Mother of God was permitted to be the exception to the Rule.
In art, Cistercian iconography gives graphic form to the notion of the special favor that the order enjoyed from the Virgin. One type of representation depicts the Mother of God as Our Lady of Mercy. In this capacity, she provided asylum to her faithful beneath her mantle. Before and beyond its strictly Cistercian lineage, the portrayal of “Mary of the Protective Cloak” was due ultimately to Byzantine literature and art.
In the tenth century, Saint Andrew the Blessed witnessed a miraculous apparition in the Blachernae church in Constantinople. In this episode, the Virgin cloaked the congregants with her maphorion. A still of her stretching out this veil or robe came to signify the unfailing tutelage that she extended to her devotees. The sanctuary that the Mother of God afforded through her intercessions was celebrated in the liturgical feast of the Veil of Our Lady.
Depictions of Mary’s protection in Cistercian art give the motif a special torque.
The diminutive figures who take refuge beneath the Virgin’s garment are all white-hooded monks (see Fig. 3.7). Like a posse of tots clinging to their mother’s shins, they are medieval mothers’ boys who have not the faintest desire to do whatever would have been the medieval equivalent of cutting the apron strings. The motif can be traced back to an episode in the Dialogue on Miracles by the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, eventually repeated by many others. In this incident, a brother had an eschatological vision in which he encountered Our Lady in the afterlife. In heaven, he could not find his fellows. In due course, the visionary queried the Mother of God. In response, she hiked her cloak to reveal the monks, lay brothers, and nuns of the order who were protected beneath it.
Fig. 3.7 Master of the Life of the Virgin, The Virgin of Mercy, ca. 1463–1480. Tempera on oak panel, 129.5 × 65.5 cm. Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Master_of_the_Life_of_the_Virgin_-_The_Virgin_of_Mercy_-_
WGA14594.jpg
In Our Lady’s Tumbler, the Virgin comes to assuage a lay brother whose sole mode of veneration is his body. In general, the tumbler clings fast to Cistercianism by making purgation and purification of his anatomy a means of penance. That said, his choice of bodily self-mortification is atypical. Yet however much outside the norm the performer’s conduct may fall, for Mary to weigh in and signal her approval is altogether appropriate. Her cult made a priority of the ways in which the very humanness of her physique brought salvation, through pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. She constituted living proof that the corporeal frame need not be detested as solely sinful. On the contrary, the body could be a vehicle for the expression of goodness and virtue.
The fanning or mopping of the tumbler with a textile belonging to the Virgin may ring a humbler change upon this popular motif. Two exempla, only crudely datable, constitute cases in point. To the best of our present knowledge, they are preserved first in the early 1600s in a book produced by a Jesuit. This volume is itself based on an anonymous collection that was printed first at the end of the fifteenth century, and compiled materials from earlier assemblages of exempla. In one exemplum, Mary appears to the dying in their final throes. With her little kerchief or handkerchief, she dries the sweat of mortality from them. In the other, she ventilates them.
The text of Our Lady’s Tumbler leaves unspecified what the Virgin used to cool her devotee. She is said, with no further explanation, to be holding a cloth. In the French text, the textile is called a white towel. Both the etymology and meaning of the medieval vernacular noun used here are fraught. Touaille could denote a piece of fabric to be carried in the hand or worn on the head, including what we would call a napkin, hand towel, handkerchief, kerchief, veil, scarf, or rag. In Romance languages, the most vigorous living relatives are the Italian for tablecloth and table napkin. As the last two words suggest, the cloth could be meant for household use as well as for personal cleanliness. In English usage worldwide, the noun napkin has bifurcated. The split fossilizes the two potentials within it. It can denote either a sanitary napkin in feminine hygiene, or a table napkin or serviette. But let us not allow lexical semantics to distract us from the physical reality of the object in question. In the bas-de-page with the sole medieval illustration of the tale (see Fig. 1.17), the item in question looks very much like white terrycloth. No one is throwing in the towel, but it is being projected downward from a heavenly thunderhead by a haloed figure, perhaps an angel. The cloth has not come directly from the crowned Madonna and Child nearby, but instead presumably indirectly through their mediation.
Could the fabric be of her own making? Like many women in premodern literature, Mary had an up-close-and-personal connection with textile production in her own life. As a girl, she reputedly dedicated six hours daily to weaving, with a regularity reminiscent of monasticism. More to the point, what is the material? The stuff could be a corner of her veil, the velvety sleeve of her dress, or soft goods of some other sort that would have been on or near her person. A modern viewer not grounded
in Christian art may be surprised to realize that the Mother of God is customarily portrayed, particularly in Byzantine and Italian art, wearing a head-covering that resembles the hijab worn nowadays by some Muslim women as an expression of modesty. Often blue, brown, red, or purple, the cloth overspreads the head and chest.
While not so extreme as the type of veil called the niqab that covers all the face apart from the eyes of its Muslim wearer, it can still be so extensive as to function effectively as a one-way window. The opposite of a blindfold, it wards off the gaze of others while allowing the wearer to see out.
We may forget that in much medieval art the Virgin typically wore a multipurpose kerchief. Taken by itself, the last word derives from the French phrase meaning “head cover.” As the elements of the compound presuppose, such a fabric wraps around the skull and encircles the face as a scarf. In the kit of textiles and paper goods available to us today, the covering is largely restricted in its use to fulfilling the tasks that the original sense of the term conveys. The many purposes to which headgear could be put are fossilized etymologically in the near oxymoron of “handkerchief.” Parsed element by element, the noun would mean a head covering kept in hand. This item is then a cloth of a size, texture, color, and general appearance that could function as a headscarf or veil. In a pinch, or a sneeze, it could also meet other needs. Along similar lines, a cowboy’s bandana could serve as sweatband or neck-cloth, facemask or dust mask, tourniquet, or all-round handkerchief. It was a one-item ragbag. Nowadays, people will most likely use cloth towels for blotting or wicking away dampness, and disposable plies for facial hygiene. Whatever we call Mary’s fabric, she uses its edge to comfort the man who has danced madly in her honor: it is the lunatic fringe.
In Marian iconography, the jumbo-sized veil is known as a maphorion (see Fig.
3.8). This Greek term designates a head-covering in which noblewomen in Greece customarily enveloped themselves. These ladies were tradition-bound both literally and figuratively. The Virgin’s textile has been equated at different times also to a shawl, mantle, and outer robe. Often represented as a long length of cloth, it not only draped her head but beyond that fell in deep swags down her arms and chest to her knees or even ankles. One color renders the fabric Virginal: if blue is present, the dye is cast. In representations of the oversized veil, the garment is decorated at Mary’s forehead and shoulders with four pellets, positioned to suggest a cross. Later in the Middle Ages, the points were sometimes made stellar. Such foursomes of dots around stylized crosses may be discerned in the background of the miniature to illustrate the miracle in the story of the tumbler. The Mother of God was often associated with stars, but usually singly or in threes, to represent the threefold nature of her inviolate virginity. The unstated message of the four-star iconography in all cases may be that the Nativity led continuously to the Crucifixion, which brought salvation to humankind.
Fig. 3.8 Virgin and Child enthroned between angels. Mosaic, sixth century. Ravenna, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, north wall. Image from Wikimedia, © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro (2016),
CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madonna_and_Child_-_Madonna_and_
Child_between_Angels_mosaic_-_Sant'Apollinare_Nuovo_-_Ravenn.jpg
The maphorion serves multiple uses. Veneration of relics was deeply ingrained in medieval Christianity. After the Virgin’s death, the length of material doubled as her shroud. As Mary’s body was never found on earth, her grave-clothes became powerful for the immediacy that they granted to the purity and incorruptibility of her last corporeal presence before her Assumption into heaven. Such contact relics enjoyed lofty prestige and occupied a place of special privilege in the cult of Mary, since they granted the closest possible approach to an otherwise altogether absent body: they gave it a common thread. By a very easy to use and apply principle of transference, the fabric embodied her materiality. At the same time, the lack of bodily remains helped to make the Virgin the most universal among saints. She became present everywhere, capable of performing miracles anywhere.
However we translate the Greek term, the textile in question was believed to have been found in the Holy Land at the latest in the fifth century. Initially, it was transferred, along with Mary’s girdle, to a church in Jerusalem; later, the cloth was moved to Constantinople, where it belonged to the glitz and glamour of the many
major Marian relics possessed by the great capital city. The fabric was showcased in a chapel close by the seacoast that the Byzantine emperor and empress Leo I and his wife Verina added to the Church of the Blachernae. Together with the icon known as the Great Panagia, or “All-Holy,” the maphorion perished in a fire that destroyed the church in 1434, not even two decades before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The waistband, ostensibly dropped as a token by the Virgin as she ascended from earth, survived the conflagration. It was preserved in a church in the Chalkoprateia quarter of the Byzantine metropolis, near Hagia Sophia.
A tidal wave of Byzantine influence struck Latin Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Roman Catholics were immensely indebted to Eastern Marianism in things plundered, purchased, and imitated, as well as (to a degree) in practices emulated and replicated. Byzantium contributed substantially to the fascination with cloths and clothing connected with the Virgin in the cult of Mary in the medieval West. During the Crusades, ever more travelers had opportunities to see and hear of such relics. After the looting of Constantinople in 1204, many such valuables were carried to the West, or at least the claim was made that they had been taken there.
In ways that warrant much further inquiry, the treasure trove of Marian textiles was greatly expanded by contact between the crusaders and the Byzantines. But the Fourth Crusade was not the very beginning. The acquisition of fabrics pertaining to the Mother of God had begun even earlier.
The Church developed a vested interest in textiles of the Virgin. Mary was associated with many types of cloth, such as girdles, corsets, sashes, and veils. No pains were spared in procuring them, through diplomacy, trade, despoliation, theft, or manufacture. The most famous, the object of a flourishing relic cult, was undoubtedly the chemise, camisole, or “interior tunic” of the Mother of God at Chartres. Charlemagne acquired this trophy in the Holy Land. After he brought the precious item back to France, four armed sentinels guarded it twenty-four hours a day.
The actual garment, by all accounts worn by the Virgin on the night she gave birth to Christ, was seldom seen directly but was depicted nonstop on locally produced leaden badges. These little images of the chemise were known by the diminutive
“chemisettes.” The tokens were purchased and taken away by pilgrims to Chartres as travel trinkets, as proof and reminder of their visits. Another major item, sometimes identical and often confused with the chemise, was Mary’s veil.
One of these cherished fabrics occasioned a brouhaha at Chartres after a blaze in 1194. When the old cathedral was destroyed in the raging fire, this famous former possession of the Virgin’s was thought to be lost. Days after the all-clear was sounded, the prize was found by a rescue team and unearthed from the crypt. Along with a few monks, it had been interred there beneath rubble. Thanks to Mary, both the treasured thing and the pious people had been kept safe and sound. The poet of Our Lady’s Tumbler may have lived near a site with a relic of such a fabric. In that event, the poem may have helped to promote a cult associated with the cloth. The place need not have been Chartres, or for that matter anywhere else named in this book.
Mary’s intimate apparel was often the focus of intense devotion from women who hoped to have a healthy childbirth at the end of uninterrupted pregnancies. Somewhat contrarily, a spotless towel, symbolizing purity, is also a Marian attribute. At times, the Mother of God is portrayed cuddling her divine infant in her lap with a linen blanket or handkerchief. The most influential image of her along these lines is the Virgin and Child from around 867 in the mosaic apse of Hagia Sophia (see Fig. 3.9). This representation belongs to the Byzantine genre known by the Greek epithet Theotokos, or “God-Bearer.” Because of Mary’s immaculateness, an undyed towel made an ideal symbol for her. Many textiles connected with her were reputedly without seams, in keeping with the seamlessness of her body. Her very physical structure as a living human being was a garment in which Jesus had been clothed. As his mother bore him during her pregnancy, so he wore her as a covering.
Fig. 3.9 Virgin and Child enthroned. Mosaic, ninth century. Istanbul, Hagia Sophia, apse semidome. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © SBarnes (2007), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hagia_Sophia_Interior_Virgin_2007.JPG
If the trading in objects relating to Mary was heavy, ideas and stories flowed even more abundantly. The Virgin was an unica, but she came in almost as many forms as there were believers. The same observation holds true today as well. Both laymen and churchmen cherished her, but often very differently. The tumbler’s simple and unlearned attachment typifies what might have been encountered within a parish church, or even in the fields among country cousins. His determination to express his love through a solitary and purely physical ritual of his own making runs counter to monastic norms and rituals in all ways except frequency. Remarkably, his teeth-gritting mode of devotion outperforms all that the brethren do in the choir above him.
The uneducated but passionately sincere lay brother smuggles his own peculiarly efficacious reverence for the Mother of God into the theologically more rarefied ambience of a Cistercian abbey. Now let us scrutinize the relationship between choir monks and lay brothers.