What garnered the story its modest success in the Middle Ages? A fact beyond speculation is that whatever the relative priority of the Latin, the medieval French, and any hypothetical versions no longer extant, the piece of poetry in the spoken language alone accounts ultimately for the impact of the tale from the late nineteenth into the twenty-first century. Here we are probably very fortunate that the author opted to express himself within the vernacular literary tradition. At the time when the poem was composed, most writers working in the learned tongue and its heritage would have felt obliged to pull out all the rhetorical stops. The results would have made a verse or prose version in the language of liturgy and learning less attractive to us.
Yet the mere fact that Our Lady’s Tumbler was set down in French is not the whole story. From the twelfth century on, the laity was incited ever more strenuously by the clergy to attend church and hear sermons. On the supply side, the clerics were bidden to preach publicly far more often than had once been customary. The papal assembly of 1215 (Fourth Lateran Council) enjoined preachers to indoctrinate lay folk in virtuous living. As a result, the application of exempla became more entrenched, with the hard-minded aims of enticing listeners and holding their interest so that they would not slip away before the preaching had finished. Finally, it bears mentioning that from early in the second half of the twelfth century, the Cistercians were exceptionally active in collecting and employing exempla. A case has been made that they intended their digests of such stories for brethren in their order, as a means of corroborating collective identity, memory, and values.
Of course, sermons had to vie with other forms of amusement. The types of entertainment furnished by professionals would have posed acute challenges to sermonizers. We must not forget that traveling preachers jockeyed with jongleurs for audiences. At times, sermonizers entered into rivalry with singers, dancers, and jugglers, as well as with very different performers of public speech-making (construing the word broadly) such as lawyers and heretics. Yet the two different groups were not always at each other’s throats. They may have journeyed together in company sometimes and would have by various avenues been familiar with each other’s techniques and practices. Because medieval churches were not merely official places of worship but also de facto social centers, most of these different professions plied their trades at least some of the time either outside the churches or even inside them.
Under the circumstances, speakers would predictably have resorted to techniques we would associate today more with stand-up comedy in an open-mike club than
with church, especially when they were delivering sermons before open-air crowds in cities.
Entertainment and edification have always intersected. In English literary history, two anecdotes set in Anglo-Saxon times make the matter perfectly clear. One is a legend told in the twelfth century by the monk and historian William of Malmesbury about what allegedly took place four hundred years earlier, in the seventh century, when the abbot, bishop, and Latin author Aldhelm would attract audiences in Malmesbury by playing a proselytic pied piper. He would sing Old English lays on a bridge to listeners whom he would then lead to church. The other is a celebrated episode related in Bede’s Ecclesiastic History of the English People. In this blow-by-blow account in Latin, a simple herdsman named Cædmon cares for the animals at what is now known as Whitby Abbey during the abbacy of Saint Hilda. The herder is illiterate and therefore, it goes without saying, a layman. One evening, when the brethren croon to the strumming of a harp after dinner, this poor fellow absents himself out of the equivalent to stage fright on an amateur night. Like the tumbler, he feels shame at his inability in a skill possessed by the monks with whom he lives. Subsequently, he has a dream in which he is asked to sing of creation. Soon thereafter, he inaugurates Christian song in Old English oral-formulaic verse by performing a short encomium to God as creator of heaven and earth. On the following morning, he adds to his earlier composition. The foreman of the farm, after hearing of Cædmon’s vision and gift, has him visit the abbess, who first puts his compositional acumen to the test and then has him take monastic vows.
The animosity toward non-Christian pastimes is typified by the later Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, who in a Latin letter written in 797 denounces monks for regaling themselves with narratives about pagan protagonists, rather than Jesus Christ in his role as Messiah. Referring to one such hero, he asks, “Let God’s words be read at the episcopal dinner-table. It is right that a reader should be heard, not a harpist, patristic discourse, not pagan song. What has Hinield to do with Christ?” Yet in both the legend of Aldhelm and the anecdote of Cædmon, the non-Christian diversion is something to be set aside or transcended. The legendary Aldhelm seduces his auditors into leaving behind secular pleasantries. Cædmon gains notice through the innovation of directing toward Christian ends the conventions of Old English verse-making, otherwise to be eschewed or at least forgotten. In fact, the herdsman passes muster as an old Germanic jongleur of God. He bears comparison with the tumbler in his dithering about the value of what he can offer in his devotion, as well as in his fix about participating in collective activity.
In the relationship between the French and the Latin treatments of the tale, the vernacular verse of Our Lady’s Tumbler is less likely to have been informed by the prose of the learned language than vice versa. Alternatively, the two works could have been prompted by other sources, written, oral, or both. No evidence has come to light thus far to suggest that anyone paid the slightest heed to the story from when the
Latin prose fell out of fashion in the late fifteenth century. For reasons both linguistic and cultural, the medieval vernacular form could have ceased earlier to be readily intelligible. To all intents, the tale of Our Lady’s Tumbler and its Latin equivalent evanesce for four hundred years, until the late nineteenth century.
In the Middle Ages, people had the desert fathers for inspiration and imitation. In the twentieth century, avid readers called their utmost favorites “desert island books.”
These were readings that they fantasized they would take with them if marooned as castaways on an isolated atoll with only the smallest of libraries. The two gravitations, toward the fathers and islands, are not unrelated. Human beings crave a furlough from distractedness in direct proportion to their addiction it. We are at once extroverts and introverts, herd animals and lone wolves. The little story of the tumbler can tell us about both poles of our shared condition. In fact, medieval monasticism has much to teach on the same topic, since in a certain sense it constitutes a system of social solitude.
Let us follow in the footsteps of the minstrel made monk, first into the entertainment world and then into the cloisters of the Middle Ages.
I would only believe in a God that knew how to dance. […] Now a God dances in me.
—Friedrich Nietzsche To make sense of Our Lady’s Tumbler, we must transport ourselves to the Middle Ages.
We have delved into the manuscripts, and we have begun to come to terms with the texts and the single image that they transmit. For all that, we have not advanced very far in decoding what the narrative portends. The words are never mere words. They constitute our best guides to the meanings that individual writers, their communities, and, even more broadly, their societies hoped to relay across the chasms of time and space to others—including, now, us. All the same, the verbalism is, at the risk of appearing flippant, only part of the story. To wrest the richest and deepest significance from the tale, we will be obligated to go beyond the strictly and solely lexical level.
Through the lexicon and subject matter, we may identify and reconstruct discourses.
In the poem and exemplum, we need to uncouple the conceptual framework of the entertainer from that of the monk. The two are overlaid, like electrochemical cells in a battery or conductors in a capacitor, to create the extraordinary electricity that the lay brother and jongleur in this tale discharges.