Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  71. OS 5.6 in OSB 5: 365.

  72. Dil 11.30 in OSB 3: 144; trans. in On Loving God, in Selected Works, 197.

  73. OS 1 in OSB 5: 350; OS 3.4 in OSB 5: 352; trans. in All Saints, in Sermons for the Seasons, 365, 369.

  74. See Bynum, “Conception of Community,” in Jesus as Mother, esp. 69–75, 80–81.

  75. It is not clear whether there is a causal relationship between loving God fully because desire for the body has been quieted and seeing God as he is. Bernard wants to insist that souls are at rest before the resurrection and that souls cannot be fully at rest—because not fully satisfied—until they get their bodies back. He does, nevertheless, seem to believe that bodies do add something, in addition to the cessation of distraction, to the soul’s ability to experience in heaven; Dil 11.30 in OSB 3: 144–45. See Leclercq, Vocabulaire de la contemplation, 126 and Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 163–66.

  76. Bernard’s thought was at the center of the controversy that erupted over the beatific vision in the 1330s. For that controversy, see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, esp. 283–85. Tugwell discusses the controversy and points to the significance of Bernard’s thought in it; Tugwell, Human Immortality, 130–55.

  77. See M.-D. Chenu, “Monks, Canons, and Laymen in Search of the Apostolic Life,” in Nature, Man, and Society, 202–38; Bynum “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?”; and, largely in response to Bynum’s essay, Colin Morris, “Individualism in Twelfth-Century Religion: Some Further Reflections,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 3, 2 (April 1980): esp. 204–5.

  Heaven in View: The Place of the Elect in an Illuminated Book of Hours

  Versions of this paper were given at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in January 1997 and a colloquium connected with the Paris exhibition L’art au temps des rois maudits in June 1998. I am grateful to many colleagues, both at these conferences and in correspondence, for their comments and suggestions.

  1. Cambrai, Bibl. Mun., ms. 87 fols. 16v, 17v. Auguste Molinier, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France 17 (1891), 21–22. See National Gallery of Canada, Art and the Courts: France and England from 1259 to 1328 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1972), no. 18 (by M. Montpetit); Paris, Musée National du Moyen Age—Thermes de Cluny, and Cologne, Schnütgen-Museum der Städt Köln, Un trésor gothique: la châsse de Nivelles (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996), no. 51 (by A. von Euw); Andreas Bräm, Das Andachtsbuch der Marie de Gavre, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. nouv. acq. fr. 16251. Buchmalerei in der Diözese Cambrai im letzen Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1997), 177–80; and Paris, Galleries Nationales du Grand Palais, L’art au temps des rois maudits: Philippe le Bel et ses fils 1285–1328 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998), no. 210 (by François Avril).

  2. In addition to the Hours of the Virgin, Office of the Dead, Canticles, and Creed, the manuscript contains a number of texts in French, including the Hours of the Cross, a short version of the story of Christ, and prayers in prose or verse to Mary and the guardian angel. See Jean Sonet, Répertoire d’incipit des prières en ancien français (Geneva: Droz, 1956), nos. 321, 330, 587, 588, 1100, 1278, 1599. On Sonet nos. 321, 330, 587, 1100, 1599, see Keith Val Sinclair, Prières en ancien français (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978), and on nos. 588, 1278, R635, R1305, see Pierre Rézeau, Répertoire d’incipit des prières françaises à la fin du Moyen Age: addenda et corrigenda aux répertoires de Sonet et Sinclair (Geneva: Droz, 1986). See also Rézeau, Les Prières aux saints en français à la fin du moyen âge (Geneva: Droz, 1982–83), 515–18.

  3. Molinier identified the arms as those of Mahaut d’Artois, wife first of Robert I d’Artois and then of Guy de Châtillon, count of St. Paul; because of his attribution, the manuscript is sometimes referred to as the Hours of Mahaut d’Artois. All subsequent writers, however, have followed Sydney C. Cockerell’s suggestion in the catalogue of the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts (London, 1908), no. 141 that the arms are those of Isabeau de Rumigny. Bräm, Das Andachtsbuch der Marie de Gavre, 178, citing Michel Pastoureau, seems to adhere to the earlier identification.

  4. Avril, L’art au temps des rois maudits, 310.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Christ’s nimbus is orange rather than gold, like the others in the miniature.

  7. Beside the figure wearing a papal tiara are two men wearing bishop’s mitres, and nearby is a priest with a chalice and the eucharist as well as a king in a plain blue robe. Only some of the figures in the rest of this all-male group are tonsured.

  8. The men include St. John with his cup and possibly St. Paul with the sword; the others are presumably other apostles, martyrs, and confessors. Among the group of virgins and female martyrs are Margaret standing behind or in a small dragon, Ursula holding an arrow, and Katherine, who puts a sword in the mouth of the crowned Maxentius, as she does in illuminations accompanying the litany in the closely related Ruskin Hours, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, ms. 83. ML. 99; see Anton von Euw and Joachim Plotzek, Die Handschriften der Sammlung Ludwig (Cologne: Schniitgen-Museum, 1982), 2: 74–83, Fig. 39.

  9. The armored figure wears a decorated helmet and carries a lance and shield. His shield and the horse coverings are decorated with his arms, which appear to be argent a cross gueles, the arms of St. George.

  10. Florence, Bibl. Laurenziana ms. Plut. XII.17; C. M. Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066–1190, Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 3 (London: Harvey Miller, 1975), no. 19. For later manuscripts of the City of God, which follow another tradition, see Alexandre de Laborde, Les manuscrits à peintures de la Cité de Dieu de Saint Augustin (Paris: E. Rahir, 1909).

  11. See Gertrude Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, vol. 4. 1 (Götersloh: Gerd Mohr, 1976), 101. Marie-Louise Thérel, Le triomphe de la Vierge-Eglise: sources historiques, littéraires et iconographiques (Paris: CNRS, 1984), 180, notes that while the text would suggest that this figure is the Church in the midst of the elect, she connects the flowering scepter and its dove with Isaiah 11: 1–2 and thus sees here an allusion to the Mother of God.

  12. Augustine, De civitate Dei, bk. 20, chap. 9, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 43 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1955), 716.

  13. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Rosalie B. Green et al., Studies of the Warburg Institute 36 (London, Warburg Institute, 1979), no. 302. The text identifies the figure as “Ecclesiam qui dicitur Virgo Mater.” See also Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus Deliciarum, commentary and notes by A. Straub and G. Keller, ed. and trans. Aristide D. Caratzas (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas Bros., 1977), 205, pl. 59.

  14. The diverse ranks we see here and in the Cambrai manuscript clearly reflect larger social structures, such as Peter Dinzelbacher has shown for textual descriptions of the next world. See his “Reflexionen irdischer Sozialstrukturen in mittelalterlichen Jenseitsschilderungen,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 61, 1 (1979): 16–34; and “Klassen und Hierarchien im Jenseits,” in Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstsverstandnis des Mittelalters, Miscellanea Medievalia 12, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 20–40.

  15. Hortus Deliciarum, 204 (“per obedientiam in suis ordinibus cottidie laborant et adventum sponsi, id est Christi, fideliter negociantes exspectant”).

  16. Munich, Bay. Staatsbibliothek, clm. 835; Nigel J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 1, 1190–1250, Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 4 (London: Harvey Miller, 1982), no. 23 (attributed to Oxford).

  17. They hold scrolls inscribed “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus,” “Gloria in excelsis deo,” and the like; there is also a nonliturgical hymn, the Laus deo. See Reinhold Hammerstein, Die Musik der Engel: Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung Bern: Francke, 1962), 221.

  18. For Haimo, Expositio in Apocalypsim, PL 117 cols. 1169 A–D, 1170 B–C; for Richard, In Apocalypsim Libri Septem, PL 196 cols. 847C–848C. Also see Richard (PL 196 col. 759D–760C) and Rupert of
Deutz (Commentarium in Apocalypsim, PL 169 col. 939A), who interpret the twenty-four elders of Revelation 19: 4 as the prelates and judges of the Church. The distinction in gender among the groups of saints in these miniatures may also be a function of the spousal imagery: see Berengaudus, Expositio in Apocalypsim, PL 17 (mistakenly attributed to Ambrose), col. 1010A, who discusses the marriage of Christ and the Church in terms of the joining of male and female into one flesh, as in Genesis 2.

  19. Lionel J. Friedman, Text and Iconography of Joinville’s Credo (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1958), 48; and I. P. Mokretsova and V. L. Romanova, Les manuscrits enluminés français du XIIIe siècle dans les collections soviétiques, 1270–1300 (Moscow: Isskusstvo, 1984), 194–231.

  20. For the relation to contemporary apocalypse illustration, see Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 176.

  21. In the Munich Psalter the facing page represents the Last Judgment (fol. 30) and is followed by the related Torments of Hell (fol. 30v). The reading of this Credo page is unusual because the text of the eleventh article of faith (Carnis resurrectionem) and the Last Judgment are at the bottom of the page and the text of the twelfth article (Vitam eternam. Amen) and banquet scene are above. Because the previous texts and miniatures all read normally, from above to below, it is likely that the artist reversed the order so that the subjects illustrated would follow that of Revelation.

  22. Thérel, Le triomphe de la Vierge-Église, 174–82 and passim.

  23. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, acq. 1970.324.7a–b. See Peter Barnet, ed., Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), no. 9 (by C. Little); and Christian Heck, L’échelle céleste dans l’art du moyen âge: une image de la quête du ciel (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 141.

  24. Raymond Koechlin, Les ivoires gothiques français (Paris, A. Piccard, 1924), nos. 234, 348, 524.

  25. See my “Narrative Structure and Content in Some Gothic Ivories of the Life of Christ,” in Barnet, ed., Images in Ivory, 95–114.

  26. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 309.

  27. The theological issues have been recently surveyed and discussed in detail in Christian Trottmann, La vision béatifique des disputes scolastiques à sa définition par Benoît XII, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 289 (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1995). I have found especially useful the shorter discussions in Nikolaus Wicki, Die Lehre von der himmlischen Seligkeit in der mittelalterlichen Scholastik von Petrus Lombardus bis Thomas von Aquin, Studia Friburgensia n. f. 9 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1954); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), esp. ch. 7; and Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 122–46.

  28. For example, Albertus Magnus, in Tract IV, Questo 1, Art. 9 sec. 3, distinguishes the visio dei in patria from lesser visions in via; see De Resurrectione, in Opera omnia (Cologne: Bernhard Geyer, 1958), 26: 330–31. For his discussion of “across the Jordan” as a metaphor for the interim of the blessed, see ibid., p. 270. For a similar discussion of the sinus Abrahae, see Alexander of Hales, Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum Petri Lombradi, Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastici Medii Aevi (Florence: Quaracchi, 1952), Liber IV, Distinctio I, 19. In contrast, Bonaventura, one of the strongest exponents of the beatific vision, leaves no doubt that souls are in heaven and of the “curia coelestis”; see Dist. XXI, part. I, art. III, quaest. II, in Saint Cardinal Bonaventura, Opera omnia, ed. A. C. Peltier (Paris: L. Vives, 1864), 6: 101–2. Elsewhere (Dist. XLV, quest. II, p. 512) he refers to this heavenly place of quietude and waiting as Gloria and likens it to the bosom of Abraham.

  29. See Wicki, Die Lehre, esp. 209–12. For Mary as the ladder on which angels and, for that matter, the son of God and we ourselves ascend and descend, see Albertus Magnus, Biblia Mariana, in Opera omnia, ed. Augustus and Aemitius Borgent (Paris: L. Vives, 1890), 37: 369, on Genesis 23: 12–13 (“Vidit Jacob in somnis scalam, id est, Mariam. Per eam enim descendit Filius Dei ad nos, et nos per ad eam eum. . . . Ipsa etiam est porta regni, et nostrae ingressionis in regnum . . .”).

  30. Wicki, Die Lehre, and Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 8, 235–47, and passim. See also Eileen C. Sweeny, “Individuation and the Body in Aquinas,” in Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter, ed. Jan Aertsen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Medievalia 24 (Berlin: de Gruyter 1996), 178–96.

  31. PL 212 cols. 1059–60 (“Campus iste floridus locus est animarum sanctarum, quae in bonus operibus exierunt de corpore, et regnum Dei exspectant cum magna laetitia et exultatione.”

  32. See Giles Constable, “The Vision of Gunthelm and Other Visions Attributed to Peter the Venerable,” Revue Benedictine 56 (1956): 92–114, at p. 107. For the exempla of Stephen of Bourbon (c. 1260) describing visions in which Mary is the guide, see A. Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirées du receuil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Libraire Renouard, 1877), nos. 115 (p. 99) and 125 (p. 107). Caesarius of Heisterbach (c. 1220) has numerous exempla in which Mary shows the living a vision of the coelesti patria, usually in which she presides, often in the company of saints; see Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Josephus Strange (Cologne, 1858; rep. 1966), 2: 280–81, 351–53, 357–58, 360–61. For a similar situation seventy years later, see Anne-Marie Polo de Beaulieu, ed., La scala coeli de Jean Gobi (Paris: CNRS, 1991), no. 659, no. 445.

  33. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 1: 212–13.

  34. For the former, see the All Saints window in the cathedral at Cologne, c. 1315, where the whole grouping is surmounted by Christ blessing Mary, both of whom are crowned, and there is a hierarchy of both saints and angels, in Herbert Rode, Die mittelalterlichen Glasmalereien des Kølner Domes, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Deutschland IV, 1 (Berlin: Deutsches Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1974), 65–68. For the latter, a striking example is the All Saints illumination from a Laudario, c. 1340 possibly made for the Company of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington; see Medieval and Renaissance Miniatures from the National Gallery of Art, ed. Gary Vikan (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1975), 29–32, no. 8.

  35. In the Ascension, Christ and Mary are enthroned together in a mandorla raised by angels, with Christ to Mary’s right, possibly a reference to the bride and bridegroom of Canticum Canticorum, 2.6, 8.3; see I. Hueck, “Cimabue und das Bild-programm der Oberkirche von S. Francesco in Assisi,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz 25 (1981): 279–324, esp. 301–5. These themes are also stressed by J. Poeschke, Die Kirche San Francesco in Assisi und ihre Wandmalereien (Munich: Hirmer, 1985), 24, 73.

  36. For example, the Clarisse Master’s painting in Siena in James H. Stubblebine, Guida da Siena (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 67–69, fig. 34; the panel in Santa Maria Novella reproduced in Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting (New York: College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1930), sec. III, vol. 2, pt. 1, 58–59, pl. XXV; or the painting attributed to Giovanni del Biondo in New Haven, reproduced in Lotte Brand Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), fig. 78. For Christ crowning Mary from her right, see the unusual drawing of the group in the gable of the Siena Baptistry in H. Keller, “Die Bauplastik des Sieneser Doms,” Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 1 (1937): 139–222, fig. 128. Such images are rarer in northern Europe; see, however, examples such as the Bonmont Psalter and others cited in Philippe Verdier, Le couronnement de la Vierge: les origines et les premiers dévelop
pements d’un thème iconographique (Montreal: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1980), 146–49.

  37. See Francis Lee Pitts, Nardo di Cione and the Strozzi Chapel Frescoes: Iconographic Problems in Mid-Trecento Florence, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1982, esp. 265–71.

  38. Ibid., 256–61.

  39. Ibid., 219–45, especially for the way the blessed and angels are ordered according to distinct physical and psychological qualities. The author sees the frescoesin part as a response to the continuing controversies surrounding Aquinas’s teachings and recent canonization (141–56). The painting is usually referred to as the Paradisio; for the parallel to Dante’s poem, canto XXXII, see Hans Belting, “Das Bild als Text:Wandmalerei und Literatur in Zeitalter Dantes,” in Belting and Dieter Blume, Male-rei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit (Munich: Hirmer, 1989), 23–64, esp. 52–53. For a discussion of Dante’s poem in relation to the visio dei, see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 298–305. Citing the angels sounding trumpets in the lower corners of the dark area below the enthroned Virgin and Christ, Bynum (306 n. 102, pl. 25) interprets the blessed as already resurrected and thus as “ ‘real’ and paintable.” However, Pitts, Nardo di Cione, 244–45, links the two trumpets to the two tambourines in the upper corners of this area and shows that both were used heraldically at the time and are part of an elaborate setting of musical instruments. Bynum’s connection between what is resurrected and what is paintable raises the interesting question of whether it is possible, in a visual context in which the soul must always express itself in body, to distinguish between the resurrected and the unresurrected. Some distinctions are possible, I believe, such as between different levels of reality or of representation, as discussed below.