It must have happened all the time. In the standard prayer cycle of medieval monks, nuns, and canons, one service, called Vigils or Matins, took place in the middle of the night. What if, during the wee hours in a dim church, somebody dozes off? The text reviewed here, written for the use of a community of canons following the Rule of St. Augustine, gives a detailed answer to the question. The one who notices the trouble picks up a lamp and passes it in front of the sleeping brother's face: three times with the light showing and three times with it covered. If that doesn't work, the lantern is to be set on a lectern in front of the sleeper's face. All this is to be done in complete silence--that is, the liturgy is interrupted. Once the lantern-bearer has returned to his place, someone next to the sleeper wakes him, softly, so the rest are not disturbed. Upon awaking, the canon at once genuflects pro culpa indebite dormitionis. He then picks up the lantern and silently goes around the choir to make sure everyone else is awake. If not, he repeats the process, which continues until nobody else is found asleep.
These instructions come at the end of the first chapter of the text entitled "Constitutions of the Premonstratensian Order," concerning the service it calls Matins. Like the awakening instructions above, this chapter, and indeed the entire document, is a mélange of liturgical and organizational or disciplinary prescriptions, neither an ordo nor a customary but both, sometimes in the same sentence. There are many such texts, dating back to the ninth century. The Rule of St. Augustine used by many medieval canons is only about 2,200 words long, a sixth of the size of the Rule of St. Benedict, which is brief enough. Since the ninth century, these were the two Rules most widely followed in the Christian West, and glosses on them began to appear in the Carolingian era. These were useful because, as the Constitutiones notes, there are many matters only touched on or omitted altogether in the Rule of St. Augustine (106). Benedictine monks thought the same of their Rule. Dozens of glosses on these two rules have been edited in the last half-century: there are fourteen volumes of a series called Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum. Scholars like Susan Boynton in her study of Farfa--to name just one outstanding recent study--have used them to great effect to illuminate the nature of medieval religious life and thought.[1] Previously unknown, however, is the text Marvin L. Colker discovered in a manuscript auctioned by Sotheby's in 1994, now Dublin Trinity College Library MS 10810. It constitutes the final forty-seven folios of a 155-folio codex in a highly legible hand (two pages are nicely duplicated between pp. viii and ix) Colker dates to about 1200.
The edition is splendid, which is no surprise for a volume in this series, but there are several reasons why it must have been a labor of love to create it. First, the manuscript provides, in effect, two texts: an original by a scribe Colker calls A and then a series of "frequent and sometimes extensive alterations" (x) that both adds and deletes material (B). Colker reproduces A as the main text and then notes changes by the B hand at the bottom of each page. The text is a challenge, too: there are eighty-seven chapters in a table of headings, but ninety divisions in the text, most of which are only numbered, that often incorrectly or even bizarrely, as when XXXI is followed by XXVIIII and then XXXV. Colker has chosen to divide the text into 591 numbered sections, which helps the reader but does not explain a chapter (XLIII in the edition, XLV in the manuscript) that first prohibits anyone from hogging the good pieces of meat on days it is served and then, with only an item for transition, proceeds to prescribe the deportment for a brother receiving judgment or punishment in chapter and further punishment for ignoring the instruction (94-95). Such peculiarities reflect the nature of the document itself, the very loose organization of which makes it almost certain to have been created in stages. Activities and behavior in chapter, for example, were discussed almost 30 folios earlier than chapter XLIII/XLV. More than once, the text notes that something has been left incomplete and needs more discussion, or that it is time to return to a subject, or that a subject will be covered further on. The effect is a kind of mental whiplash. The level of detail is positively Leviticus-like in some of the directions concerning liturgy: it takes ten printed pages--about eight percent of the entire text--to lay out instructions for Mass on major feasts. The instructions for how boys are to be supervised and organized at every moment, distributed throughout the text, are nearly as detailed and exacting. They leave no doubt, if there is still any, that medieval people recognized childhood as a distinct stage of life--and perhaps not just childhood. Concerning youths who are leaving the boys' school, at age 14 or so, the text notes that it is fitting that they be carefully restrained since "this age is quite ready and prone to [perhaps sexual] frivolity" (quia hec etas promtior et pronior est ad lasciuiendum[124]).
Then there is the language, of which the preceding quotation gives some idea. Sometimes this is merely a matter of non-classical orthography, e.g. dicad and accipiad for dicat and accipiat, or heremitte. He for hae is a bit unnerving, especially when it comes in the middle of a sentence. There are unusual contractions, so to speak, like siquis and annon. The manuscript features hyperurbanisms like ęcclesia, which Colker transcribes as aecclesia ; he draws the line at hęę, correcting it to hae. Many words are spelled inconsistently, e.g. octavus/octabus and sollemniter/sollenniter. Word order is sometimes odd, as concerning a brother doing penance: Nemo ei nisi unus tantum cui iniunctum fuerit loquatur (26). Or perhaps that is pseudo-Ciceronian balance; this is after all a text that can get the supine right (as in Tum dormitum eant [130]).
Faced with these various challenges, Colker triumphs. If there is a manifest misspelling of a Latin word, I didn't find it. There are three levels of notes at the bottom of each page: one identifying quotations or citations to other texts, the second noting oddities, mistakes, or omissions in the A hand, and the third transcribing the alterations of the B revision. The notes also refer to standard handbooks of liturgical prayers, usually identified in the text only by their first few words. There are indices of scriptural citations, of other authors and works, of liturgical prayers, and of proper names. Certain editorial matters are a matter of taste: I would have punctuated to reduce the number of sentence fragments (although there is no way to eliminate them) and capitalized sancta trinitate. Although Colker notes the close relationship of the discussion of the cellarer (118) to that in chapter 31 of the Rule of St. Benedict, there is no similar reference on the previous page, which is made up almost entirely of close paraphrases from chapters 2 and 3 of Benedict's Rule. The delightfully worded prohibition on canons' acting ponpatice aut inhoneste vel incomposite (108) is a quotation from the late Carolingian revisions to Chrodegang of Metz. These are tiny omissions in a painstakingly accurate, erudite, useful, and useable edition.
There remain some real mysteries about this text, now the only surviving witness of a document of which there was apparently once another copy in Spain that was destroyed in 1936-1939 (xviii-xi). The first hint is that Colker has titled his book an edition of "so-called" Premonstratensian Constitutions. While introducing St. Norbert of Xanten and the beginnings of his order of Prémontré, whose canons pledged themselves to the Rule of St. Augustine 1121, the editor asks: is the work's title accurate? Colker dates the text to Southern France in the twelfth century, implying without ever quite stating that before 1150 is likelier than after. This is partly on linguistic grounds, including Latin versions of vernacular French words and some of the orthographic eccentricities noted above. Further, the text does not mention any popular northern French saints; finally, its indiscriminate mingling of liturgical with disciplinary and organizational concerns suggests composition well before 1200.
After many pages of careful analysis of the language and contents of the Constitutiones, with comparisons to other early Premonstratensian materials, Colker concludes that this text, which assumes a large, affluent, and highly articulated community and furthermore fails to mention such features as nuns' roles and annual chapters, which Premonstratensians began as early as 1128, is very unlikely to be an early Premonstratensian production. Fifteen pages is a lot for an entirely negative conclusion, especially when it is followed by another seven to demonstrate that the Constitutiones was not intended for the Order of Saint-Ruf, either. There is significant compensation for the teasing in excellent bibliography through 2005 on Norbert, the Premonstratensians, and Saint-Ruf. In the end, the editor declares that "The identity of the particular congregation to which the Constitutiones was directed is unknown" (xlv), but that it does appear to be intended for the use of multiple houses, an order of Augustinian canons (liv). He furthermore notes that the manuscript with its A and B texts is "a religious code in a state of revision" (liv), although he does not specify what general direction(s) those revisions indicate.
One of the oddities of the A text is that the word "abbot" appears nowhere in it. Instead, it has an archbishop officiating at numerous ceremonies. The B text eliminates all but one instance of "archbishop" (which Colker suspects is an oversight) and usually replaces it with "abbot." The substitutions are listed on pp. xi-xii. If this is an early Premonstratensian text, the medieval equivalent of a find-and-replace command would appear to be in perfect harmony with the contention of Bernard Ardura (quoted on p. xxiv) that for a few years after he was elected archbishop of Magdeburg in 1126, Norbert returned to Prémontré as its superior before the burden became too great and another official had to be appointed. But there is no medieval evidence for such a period of transition for Norbert and Prémontré and Colker's multi-layered argument that this cannot be an early Premonstratensian document is completely convincing.
My only real criticism is that a number of the findings in the introduction are negative. I offer the following observations in the interests of further research.[2] If the text originated in southern France during the first half of the twelfth century, there is a good candidate for an archbishop with strong connections to houses following the Rule of St. Augustine and a possible place of origin. The archdiocese of Bordeaux was a center of Augustinian canons in the early twelfth century. In about 1110, an already established community at St-Emilion was reformed at the behest of Archbishop Arnaud-Geraud and thereafter followed the Rule of St. Augustine; the house of St-Vincent de Bourg followed the same rule from about 1124. Into this ecclesiastical province came Geoffrey of Louroux (or Lauroux or Loriol), who is probably the same person as Geoffrey Babion, director of the cathedral school in Angers in the 1110s. Geoffrey of Louroux was a hermit and then leader of three communities that followed the Rule of St. Augustine, including Fontaine-le-Comte, about five miles southwest of Poitiers. It was founded by Duke William X of Aquitaine sometime between his accession in 1127 and the election of Geoffrey as archbishop of Bordeaux in 1136.
Geoffrey may be best remembered as the man who married Eleanor of Aquitaine, daughter of William X, and King Louis VII of France, in 1137. However, he was an energetic and accomplished archbishop outside the glamorous spheres of legendary aristocrats. He was an important writer of sermons, dozens of which survive, and the member of a circle of ecclesiastical figures that included Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable, and Suger. It is far likelier Geoffrey would have been able to keep close relations with a house of canons in his archdiocese than that Norbert could regularly travel the 400 miles (as the crow flies) from Magdeburg to Prémontré. The chronology works for the A and B recensions of the Constitutiones, with a first version from ca. 1150 envisioning the frequent presence of an archbishop and a revision after his death, perhaps by 1170 or so, as Colker suggests (xxv). As Colker points out, the house for which the Constitutiones was designed was unlikely to be recently founded. But what about the monasteries of canons in Bordeaux founded or reformed in the second, third, and fourth decades of the twelfth century, many in connection with Geoffrey of Louroux?
Fontaine-le-Comte appears to be the likeliest of those at which the Constitutiones might have originated. It was founded with the patronage of no less than the duke of Aquitaine. After Geoffrey of Louroux, its second leader was his archiepiscopal vicar, Prior Johannes. The first person called abbot, Ademarus, appears in a document of 1148. By 1150 or so, perhaps already in existence for two decades, it was a well-endowed house--it had certainly weathered challenges to control of its properties by neighboring monasteries, the ancient abbey of St-Cyprien in Poitiers and the newer Cistercian community of Bonnevaux. This could have been the populous, organizationally complex community the Constitutiones reflects. And in terms of provenance, the manuscript now in Dublin came from the same library, "probably from Poitou," as another manuscript in an adjacent lot of the Sotheby's auction that contained a Poitevan Benedictine gospel lectionary of the early thirteenth century (vii, note 5).
I see no obstacles to identifying the archbishop of the Constitutiones as Geoffrey de Louroux, even if direct evidence is so far lacking. To designate Fontaine-le-Comte as the point of the text's origin is trickier. The most important problem is that the Constitutiones assumes an urban setting, especially in its discussion of Palm Sunday processions specifying that boys should be atop the city gate singing Gloria laus as the canons go back in (74). The possibility of washing the feet of 120 pauperes on Maundy Thursday (76) would seem to demand a population more dense than that of twelfth-century Fontaine-le-Comte. However, the Vita Norberti notes that when Norbert departed Prémontré for Magdeburg, he provided for 120 paupers in a locale more isolated than Fontaine-le-Comte. Perhaps in both cases pauperes are not the destitute but simply those who are not, in the language of the day, potentes. Still, Fontaine-le-Comte is 130 miles from Bordeaux, not as far as Magdeburg to Prémontré but a long way to go on a regular basis.
Although a ten-mile round trip to Poitiers is not an easy walk, it would have been possible for the canons of Fontaine-le-Comte to make one such procession annually (which, admittedly, does not solve the problem of the canons entering the city and having the gates close behind them). At one point the Constitutiones refers to the environs of the monastery as a villa, a much better description of twelfth-century Fontaine-le-Comte than the urban milieu suggested elsewhere. Another consideration: Geoffrey had hostile relations with the canons of his cathedral and withdrew from Bordeaux for several years until returning in 1145. Perhaps he was a resident archbishop in a house of Augustinian canons for a time? That, too, could explain the origin of the Constitutiones toward the end of the first half of the twelfth century and its subsequent revision. Was this both a practical and a visionary text, inspired by the presence of a learned, energetic, and seemingly charismatic archbishop, that set out detailed rules for daily life in an abbey that envisioned itself the motherhouse of a federation of canons following the Rule of St. Augustine? Documentary, linguistic, and architectural/archeological evidence could be brought to bear.
In any case, Colker is quite right that the Constitutiones offers a "vivid picture of life in an institution of canons" (liv), its practices, and its values, from the elaborate and emotional ceremonies for a dying brother to where the community's lost-and-found should be (on a stone in the chapter room). And this meticulous book is only one of the achievements of a remarkably productive retirement!
Notes:
1. Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006.
2. My remarks are based on the following: J. Brutails, "Geoffroi de Loroux, archevêque de Bordeaux de 1136 à 1158 et ses constructions," Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des chartes 83 (1922), 54-64; J. Gardelles, "L'église haute de Saint-Emilion et les abbayes augustiniennes d'Aquitaine aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles," Annales du Midi 70 (1958), 391-401; Bernard Guillemain, Le diocèse de Bordeaux (Histoire des diocèses de France, 2), Paris, 1974, 40-49; G. Pon, "Fontaine-le-Comte (Notre-Dame)" in Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques 17: 841-844; and M. Redet, "Notice historique sur l'abbaye de Fontaine-le-Comte, près Poitiers," Memoires de la Société des antiquaires de l'Ouest 3 (1837), 226-261.