Marcia Kupfer
The Art of Healing
©The
isbn 0-271-02303-1
N.b. Les premières pages de l’ouvrage
sont reproduites ci-dessous (à l’exception des renvois et des notes) avec la
permission de l’auteur.
La maladie
et les préoccupations religieuses sont les éléments principaux
qui permettent de reconstruire l'univers mental et matériel des saint-aignanais
des XIIe-XIIIe s. et d'en comprendre la signification.
INTRODUCTION
"CONFESS YOUR
SINS"
To see works of medieval
art solely with the naked eye is to remain blind. It is the central premise of
this book that, for medieval audiences, looking at pictorial images engaged the
entire person. The sense of sight to which art appealed was but one aspect of a
fuller, bodily experience that stimulated the emotional and mental receptivity
needed for understanding. A choreographed physical encounter with images,
whether in handling objects or moving through architectural space, facilitated
comprehension, a taking possession of the seen for the purpose of creating
meaning. Images gathered in with the eyes, visually ingested, so to speak,
demanded to be spiritually consumed and digested. Vision meant incorporation
and eventual self-transformation, a dynamic of special relevance to the
practices of ritual healing with which the following study is concerned.
Because seeing in such a manner implicated the psychosomatic unity of the
person, images could serve as potent adjuncts to therapeutic regimes.
My position on what
viewing entailed for medieval users of images builds on recent discussion of
the unabashed physicality accorded thought processes and, conversely, the
body's instrumentality in achieving higher consciousness. Complementary lines
of inquiry by Mary Carruthers into the bodily nature
of mental activity and by Caroline Walker Bynum into the body as the locus of
spiritual struggle have tapped a wealth of sources pertinent to the monastic
and religious life. Meditation, for example, required the mastication of sacred
texts: the oral/aural repetition of syllables through which one learned to read
Latin laid the foundation for the intellectual stages of silent rumination and
cogitation. Prayer similarly began with a piercing or wounding of the heart,
the literal meaning of compunction: intense grief over one's own sins,
recollected so as to be excreted, prepared the soul for communion with Gods The exercise of memory involved a consciously directed
journey, a displacement of the self, along associative routes through networks
of emotions, sensory perceptions, and ideas. But that self could not be imag(in)ed
apart from the body in which psychic activity transpired as a function of human
physiology.
Commonplace corporeal
metaphors for cognitive practices and affective states were thus ultimately
grounded in an ontology of the embodied self. To be
sure, the self was more than the mortal body-since possessed of, informed by, a
soul, which survived death. Yet the self was also not an amorphous spiritual
entity-since utterly identified with the particular sentient body that the soul
inhabited on earth. Although irreducible to the body, the self was nevertheless
inextricable from it. Flesh, subject both to desire and will, had to
collaborate in the soul's spiritual advancement. When the body rose at the
Resurrection on the Last Day, it would be rescued from corruption to partake
eternally of the soul's blessedness in heaven or torment in hell. Salvation
rewarded, damnation punished, soul and body jointly. Both were equally
constitutive of the person.
I explore the role of
medieval wall painting in articulating the body/soul relationship for a lay
public, a relationship that the decorated church not only placed at the
territorial nucleus of the parish but also made the defining element of
Christian community. Already during earthly existence, infirmity and healing
brought into play the interdependence of matter and spirit, body and soul. The
root causes of disease, disability, deformity, and psychic distress belonged to
an invisible, supernatural order, affliction and cure, the province of higher
powers. Saints, of course, intervened in nature. By miraculously provoking or
eliminating malady, they not only reflectively manifested God's glory in the
present but also offered a foretaste of future justice. Priests, too, dispensed
divine medicine. Their sacramental treatment of the soul benefited the ailing
person whether or not it restored the sick body to wholeness. In fact, physical
suffering, when patiently endured, would aid the soul in its search for
deliverance, just as pursuing worldly satisfaction and carnal pleasure without
care for the soul would inevitably bring everlasting pain.
Spiritual health
achieved in this world determined the well-being of the self in the hereafter.
To heal and be healed was to enter into an economy of redemption in which the
exchange of gifts and services, suffrage and sacrifice, crossed the boundary
between material and spiritual planes. The problem I investigate is how the
built environment, architectural space, and pictorial representation combined
to structure viewers' approaches to the sacred so that the very act of looking
at images opened a way into the circulation of grace. How, I also ask, did the
decorated church organize a complex, multiparty cycle of gift exchange so as to
guarantee the health of the social body?
The second premise of
this book, corollary to the first, is that if we are to understand the cultural
work performed by medieval art, we cannot rely merely on what we now see.
Buildings and artifacts, sundered from their proper settings in the vanished
communities that interacted with them, are deposited across our world like so
much inert geological sediment. Visible surfaces and current surroundings are
altogether misleading. Excavating and reconstructing the historical conditions
of meaning production are necessary prerequisites to our vision. The monument
on which I focus below reveals its therapeutic functions only when restored to
the twelfth- and thirteenthcentury landscape that it
dominated and to the populace living within its ken.
Go today to Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher (Loir-et-Cher), a small town in
central
This theophany
of divine traditio is at the same time a scene of ritual propitiation
in which healing comes through God's forgiveness of sin. Three small paupers,
crutches at hand, humbly petition for grace. Offering votive
gifts and prayers at the feet of Christ and the apostles,
the supplicants receive blessings in turn. They bear the attributes of the
infirm and the pilgrim but represent, in the fullest sense of the term, the
faithful to whom (Christ through) James addresses the passage that culminates
with the inscribed words. "Is there any one among you sick? Let him bring
in the presbyters of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with
oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick man,
and the Lord will raise him up, and if he be in sins, they shall be forgiven
him. Confess therefore your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that
you may be saved" (James
The New Testament
exhortation to confession reverberates in radial chapels, where paintings
extant from the same date dilate upon the relationship between penance and
healing. Saint Giles, whose life is recounted in the south chapel, not only
performs miraculous cures
but also miraculously obtains divine proof that repentance wins
God's pardon. The east chapel combines the Raising of Lazarus, prototype of
spiritual rebirth and triumph over death, with gospel episodes featuring his
saintly sisters. Mary of Bethany, widely believed in the Middle Ages to be none
other than the Magdalen, is represented, as one might
expect, in the role of penitent par excellence as she anoints Christ's feet;
she is also shown conversing with Christ in the garden after his resurrection.
Quite surprisingly, by contrast, Martha is identified here as the woman healed
of her issue of blood at the moment she touched Christ's garment.
Resurrection and
redemption, subtexts of the Romanesque program, were much later explicitly
depicted in a second ensemble of medieval frescoes introduced into the quasi-subterranean
space. Fifteenth-century murals encompass the Majesty in the semidome of the apse, making it the centerpiece of a new
program, and extend westward into the choir
Emerging from open tombs, the dead go forth to greet Christ returned as
Judge. Noble donors in the company of patron saints take their place on the
base of the apsidal concha to either side of the old
image of pauperes christi received by God.
At first glance, the
Saint-Aignan paintings may seem an odd choice for
close examination. The Romanesque ensemble is only partially preserved and,
from a strictly technical viewpoint, is of uneven quality. Nor does any as-yet-unacclaimed masterpiece of the fifteenth century here await
discovery. Although not unknown to specialists, the murals in question hardly
rank among the "great works" of medieval art." Indeed, their
modesty poses a challenge to art historians. Scholarship in the medieval field
has traditionally concentrated on powerful abbeys and cathedrals, renowned patrons
and theologians, sumptuously illuminated manuscripts and precious ornaments.
Our disciplinary narratives, revolving around a canon created by learned
elites, take little notice of la culture moyenne. What story can
be extracted from the Saint-Aignan paintings,
and what larger implications might it have for our understanding of the Middle
Ages?
The artistic record of
parishes, passed over in silence by contemporaries and down to us in degraded
condition, is caught in a double bind. Previous generations of art historians routinely
judged the sanctuaries of smaller corporate bodies, village churches, and
rural chapels to be second-rate, and thus unworthy of serious study. When
considered at all, the extant material was typically granted limited reflective
value, acquiring visibility insofar as it fleshed out developments at major
centers or bore on prestigious monuments. Consequently, little in the way of
basic documentation, let alone more probing discussion, is available to
historians who today seek to understand how ordinary people of the past dealt
with everyday issues. Yet we cannot tease out what artistic activity at the
parish level may reveal about medieval society without first inventorying
dispersed archaeological remains-not an especially rewarding project in our postpositivist era. Once regarded as the province of
antiquarians and now left to conservators in charge of national patrimonies,
the medieval parish eludes the historian's gaze. I hope to show, however, that
this arena of cultural production merits another look.
A serendipitous finding
precipitated my interest in Saint-Aignan. The
Romanesque paintings in the crypt of the church can be correlated with the
contemporary operation of several hospitals surrounding the town. Highly
unusual to say the least, this remarkable connection is puzzling indeed. Why
would the decorative scheme inside the church be linked to outlying charitable
institutions? Just what might be at stake in the spatial organization of the
medieval parish that the concomitant organization of pictorial images in
architectural space addressed? Pondering these questions led me to investigate
the painted crypt in relation to the urban development of the site, the proliferation
of institutions for assistance to the sick poor, and the local topography of
healing and burial.
My attempt to retrieve a
dimension of medieval culture from a singular evidentiary trace draws
inspiration from the goals and techniques of "microhistory."
Perhaps the genre's best-known examples are the now classic studies by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie on the Occitan village of Montaillou, Carlo
Ginzburg on the cosmogony of a Friulian
miller, and Jean-Claude Schmitt on the cult of a dog-saint in the Dombes.12
The recovery of peasant mentalities for which these books are justly celebrated
is not the defining feature of microhistory, however.
Certainly my project, which centers on church decoration in
the context of official ecclesiastical patronage, in no way pretends to bring
the worldview of twelfth-century peasants to life. Rather, the
above-named studies, among others, have carved out a distinctive historiographical niche by training attention,
methodically, in craftsmanly fashion, on localized
formations and anomalous instances. Underpinning the work at hand is a similar
value placed on the reduced scale of observation, which permits insight into
tensions and possibilities, tactics and accommodations, that
belie normative accounts of social, and artistic, order.
Whereas Le Roy Ladurie,
Ginzburg, and Schmitt took isolated texts as their
starting points, I instead decipher spatial practices from a nexus of uniquely
interconnected buildings and images. This configuration, of which only scattered,
discontinuous fragments survive, must be painstakingly reconstituted through
intensive analysis of archaeological, iconographic, archival, and ethnographic
materials. Only when the painted crypt and the world outside the church are
brought together within a mutually explanatory framework, each term the
hermeneutic of the other, does the case study yield new insight into space
"as a cultural system" (to borrow a phrase from the titles of several
articles by Clifford Geertz). The restricted scope of
my inquiry means that the exemplary status of its results remains uncertain.
All the same, the experiment suggests that "lesser" works formerly
thought to lack visual and intellectual interest may indeed generate stories
worth telling.
The book moves
cinematically, as it were, from a global view of medieval Saint-Aignan (Part i) into the collegiate
and parish church (Part ii). The first chapter unravels the intertwined strands
in the joint history of castle town and church. The second pieces together the
"medical" landscape from the built environment. My concern here is to
place the secular canons of Saint-Aignan and their
church at the crux of relations between the local lord, a flourishing burgher
population, and pilgrims to the crypt as well as to sites of healing in the
marshy lowlands outside borough walls. Chapter 3 mobilizes seemingly inconsequential,
banal details gleaned thus far as clues to meaningful patterns articulated in
and through space. One set of coordinates maps relations between corps and terroir; another, giving priority to spiritual health,
returns the ailing body to the church and its paintings. Both systems, I
propose, participated in the representation, inchoate and unverbalized,
of competing therapeutic regimes. Each deployed images, symbolic in one case,
pictorial in the other, within contrasting protocols designed to alleviate pain
and suffering.
The second half of the
monograph scrutinizes the central monument of ecclesiastical power. Chapter 4
considers how the architectural fabric of the church, significantly altered in
the course of construction, orchestrated the transition from an exterior
terrain marked by disease and death to an interior in which pictorial images
prescribed a remedy for body and soul. Chapter 5 reconstitutes the iconography
of the Romanesque ensemble in order to explicate its programmatic richness.
Crucially, however, what the paintings show does not exhaust what they do. I argue in Chapter 6 that the work recruited
a diverse audience within an economy of salvation by exploiting differences in
social status and gender roles. Visual images insinuated sexed and stigmatized
bodies into spiritual transactions negotiated in the invisible realm of the
soul. Having earlier clarified the crypt's multiple functions as consecrated
space, I now reflect on the inverse problem: how was the sacred spatialized? By what means, in other words, was the sacred
converted into institutional structures that inscribed populations in
geographical space? The crypt's painted decoration cooperated in
ecclesiastical strategies for consolidating the territorial integrity of the parish.
Membership in Christian community, dependent on penance and
critical especially at death, bound souls and bodies to the land.
Acts of appropriation
thread their way into the story of the crypt's use over time. Built in the late
eleventh century, the crypt initially served to commemorate and perpetuate seigneurial domination of the plateau overlooking the
FROM CASTLE TO TOWN
Were I a filmmaker, this
chapter would dissolve into opening footage designed to set the stage for my
unfolding story. Kaleidoscopic cinematography would artfully evoke
"life" around I200 in the thriving town of
A quickly paced sequence
of introductory vignettes would follow. The camera would penetrate the private
apartments of the donjon to spy on the lord and his family,
observe devotions at church, tag along behind a funeral cortege, and
tour the market, near the prison and pillory, at the hub of narrow winding
streets crowded with ateliers and houses. Out of a preliminary collage of
myriad disconnected tableaus, the protagonists would come into focus and the plot gradually take shape.
Of course, I am not
writing a scenario for a film in the vein of Martin Guerre.' I recount no intrigue, ponder no tragic predicament. I
neither re-create intimate relationships nor overhear conversations of the
sort that sparked confessors' probing inquisitions: readers should not expect
to meet characters resembling the colorful villagers of Montaillou
or the sympathetic Menocchio, the miller from the
region of
The story I have to tell
is, in a very real sense, about place. Retracing here the configuration of the
medieval site will allow me to say more later about
how the collegiate
INSIDE THE PAINTED CRYPT
The Romanesque church of Saint-Aignan,
subordinated to the donjon and dominating the borough, is the most significant
material fragment of the medieval site. I will return in subsequent chapters
to treat the specifics of its architecture and painted decoration. Suffice it
to remark for now that the oldest and least restored part of the building, the
crypt, dates from the late eleventh century. By the time construction began,
the radial plan adopted for the east end had become fairly common. Still, a
crypt in which the apse is encased in a spacious ambulatory giving onto three apsidioles harks back to a disposition traditionally
associated with the presentation of saints' relics. Work on the building
proceeded in stages over the course of the next hundred years, and at the end
of the twelfth century, the lower church was embellished with murals.
The core scene of God's Majesty in the semidome of the apse, the crypt's main chapel, features the
apostles Peter and James with diminutive figures, weak, lame, or crippled, at
their feet. The trio of sibling saints, Lazarus, Mary, and Martha,
appear in the axial chapel, each the beneficiary of Christ medicus: he stops Martha's flow of blood as she touches the fringe of his robe, purifies Mary of her demons, brings Lazarus back to life. Together the
episodes form a prelude to Christ's own resurrection, by which he
vanquishes death and redeems fallen humanity of its original sin. The
miracle-working Saint Giles, whose epic legend spanned
A preliminary survey of the painted crypt would thus
make it entirely appropriate to posit as a working hypothesis that relics were
housed there and attracted pilgrims in search of healing. No wonder, then, that
images portray contemporary suppliants begging pardon for sins as well as
miraculous cures. But this scenario, for which I will provide compelling, if
circumstantial, evidence, is quite incomplete, failing to take into account the
multiple functions of the space. Missing from the purview of on-site inspection
is the richly textured fabric of patronage and clientele that only deeper
investigation into the historical record can begin to delineate. Saints were
not the only dead honored in the crypt, nor pilgrims the sole visitors there.
The cult activities sustained by the lower church grew out of its
interconnections with the castle, town, and nearby charitable houses. Unless
the local nobility, secular canons, and burghers are factored into the balance
sheet, we are left with a shallow impression of how the shrine complex actually
worked.