Ecclesiology, the study of the church as a community or institution, was thought in the Middle Ages to be the special purview of monastic theologians and canon lawyers. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski's new book successfully widens this narrow focus, demonstrating how the medieval Catholic church's most profound crisis, the Great Schism (1378-1417), provoked strong (if not always influential) responses from many outside these professed and professional circles: poets, mystics, and ordinary lay folk.
Blumenfeld-Kosinski explores here what she calls the "imaginaire or Vorstellungswelt" of the Schism, "the ideas, conceptions, and even prejudices that informed the creation of texts and images" in response to the event (13). Although medieval popes were isolated beings, the symbolic nature of the office guaranteed that the Schism, which resulted in the concurrency of two and then three rival popes, would send shockwaves throughout the church's corporate self. Those who, before the age of television and Popemobiles, might never have seen St. Peter's successor, nevertheless would fear the implications of the office's instability--and could encounter images inspired by papal chaos in the multiple texts, manuscript illuminations, and caricatures Blumenfeld-Kosinski discusses here.
Blumenfeld-Kosinski prepares her readers well for the bulk of her argument with "A Twelfth-Century Prelude" (Chapter 1), a punchy introduction to her subject and method in terms of the less serious papal schism of 1159, which provoked literary responses by such prominent figures as Hildegaard of Bingen and John of Salisbury. The tone of these pages, at times, can seem more appropriate to a class lecture than to a scholarly monograph (e.g., "We shall look at each topic in turn," p. 34; Elisabeth of Sch?nau, for all of her mental vigor, "did not enjoy a posthumous reputation as a schism expert," p. 27). The chapter ultimately succeeds, however, at pinpointing in a manageable space the chief concerns of the rest of book--the surprising and revelatory intersections of personality and history that characterized a major crisis in the medieval church, but which many historians, in their preoccupation with chronologies, tend to neglect.
The strongest moments in this book, in my view, are those that explore the vivid and agitated images of madness, paralysis, whoredom, smoke, leprosy, captivity, plague, and poison that characterize the Schism-induced writings and "shewings" of well known figures such as Catherine of Siena and (hitherto) lesser known personalities, such as the demon-haunted widow, Ermine de Reims. Blumenfeld-Kosinski makes a good case for what she calls "mystical activism" (34), the negotiation by figures such as Catherine of the thin border between propaganda and prophecy. This argument is a useful corrective to the active-contemplative dichotomy (represented by the biblical Martha-Mary dyad) that has dominated for too long academic studies of medieval mysticism. It also underscores the proximity, and at times identity, between medieval political and religious concerns that the Great Schism itself exemplifies.
I was especially impressed by Chapters 4 and 5 of the book, which are devoted to "poetic visions" of the Schism. (Chapters 2 and 3 deal with "visionaries" and Chapter 6 with "prophets.") Blumenfeld-Kosinski displays a keen sensitivity to the generic variety inspired by the Schism, particularly in the dream-vision form and other types of personification allegory, but also in lesser verse media such as the ballade. She is likewise clear in these middle chapters when explaining the very different solutions the major ecclesiastical figures of the Schism and Schism-inspired authors proposed to the crisis (e.g., the voie de fait or armed conflict vs. conciliarism) and the implications of Schism writers' use of the vernacular to reach a much wider lay audience with their ecclesiological concerns. It seems to me extravagant to maintain that we should regard figures as different as Philippe de M?zi?res, Eustache Deschamps, Honor? Bovet, and Christine de Pizan as "a group of friends or colleagues" (105) simply because the three male writers were in contact while writing about the Schism and because all four shared the catastrophe as imaginative subject matter. Nor does Blumenfeld-Kosinski herself seem committed to the observation, preferring instead to discuss not the sameness in the texts at hand, but rather their multiform poetic responses to history. (See, for instance, the useful points of contrast she draws between Bovet and M?zi?res as allegorists on p. 142.) In a sense, allegories such as Bovet's L'Arbre des batailles ("The Tree of Battles"), for all their concerned engagement with the Schism, must remain enigmatic--mysterious and thus secure against charges of propaganda because of their dense traffic in similitudes. Blumenfeld-Kosinski is an informative guide to a text like L'Arbre, which was apparently a very popular chivalric manual (seventy-three manuscripts survive). In the end, however, for all the enthusiasm of Bovet's text and Blumenfeld-Kosinski's commentary, one can feel about the narrative the way Huck Finn did about Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: "The statements was interesting, but tough."
This reaction undoubtedly results from the distance modern readers, even trained medievalists, will feel from the spiritual angst registered in word and picture by Blumenthal-Kosinski's subjects. Perhaps this is why her book's fourteen illustrations (most of them from manuscripts), which she scrutinizes deftly, are critical to her argument's success. The depiction of Pope Urban VI as a beaver (Figure 8, p. 177) or the drawing of the Avignon cardinals lassoing Urban's papal keys (Figure 12, p. 205) bring the old anxieties of the Schism--and the humor medieval people sometimes used to deal with them--vividly to life, complementing effectively Blumenfeld-Kosinski's astute readings of medieval texts. Because of my own disciplinary allegiances, I was disappointed that the author had little to say about English responses to the Schism, which she indicates in her Introduction (14-15) were relatively minor compared to those on the Continent. (She does, after all, remark in her later chapters about M?zi?res and Bovet and the English king, Richard II.) Chaucer himself was in Italy when the Schism broke out and refers admiringly in the Canterbury Tales to one of its chief commentators, John of Legnano, professor of canon law at Bologna, whose works he may have known. Such concerns, however, can be explored by other scholars under Blumenthal-Kosinski's instructive tutelage. This is a handsomely produced and minutely argued book, a monograph that is admirable for its refusal to allow history to rest with a bald summary of the facts of the Great Schism itself. (There is a table of "Popes during the Great Schism" on p. xi, but the book would have benefited from a fuller chronology of events, which students can find conveniently summarized in the Catholic Encyclopedia or the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church.) Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism takes an innovative scholarly approach to a tired subject and will generate new scholarly attention to the role non-clerics played in responding to-if not, as the author admits in her Conclusion, actively influencing-some of the important ecclesiological crises of the medieval past.