Table Of ContentMonks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts
MONKS &NUNS,
SAINTS & OUTCASTS
RELIGION IN MEDIEVAL SOCIETY
ESSAYS IN HONOR OF LESTER K. LITTLE
EDITED BY
H.
SHARON FARMER &BARBARA RosENWEIN
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright© 2000 by Cornell University
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First Published 2000 by Corndl University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2000
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Monks and nuns, saints and outcasts: religion in medieval society:
essays in honor of Lester K. Little I edited by Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-80I4-3445-9 (cloth : alk. paper)-ISBN o-8014-8656-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Church history-Middle Ages, 6oO-I500. 2. Civilization, Medieval.
3· Europe-Church histoty-600-I500. I. Little, Lester K.
II. Farmer, Sharon A. III. Rosenwein, Barbara H.
Br252.M575 2000
274.03-dc2I 99-056454
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Lester K. Little
CoNTENTS
Preface ix
Abbreviations Xlll
Introduction
Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein
PART I: NEw PARADIGMS, TRADITIONAL TooLS
Monastic Memory and the Mutation of the Year Thousand I9
Patrick]. Geary
2 Perennial Prayer at Agaune 37
Barbara H. Rosenwein
3 Claustration and Collaboration between the Sexes
in the Twelfth-Century Scriptorium 57
Alison I. Beach
PART 2: TEXTs AND CoNTEXTs
4 Sulmona Society and the Miracles of Peter of Morrone 79
Robert Brentano
Female Religious Experience and Society in Thirteenth-Century Italy 97
Luigi Pellegrini
6 Saints and Angry Neighbors: The Politics of Cursing
in Irish Hagiography I23
LisaM Bite!
PART 3: RETHINKING BINARIES
7 The Beggar's Body: Intersections of Gender and Social Status
in High Medieval Paris 153
Sharon Farmer
8 The Leper's Kiss 172
Catherine Peyroux
9 The Colonization of Sacred Architecture: The Virgin Mary, Mosques,
. and Temples in Medieval Spain and Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Amy G. Remensnyder
10 Saints, Heretics, and Fire: Finding Meaning through the Ordeal 220
Thomas Head
Contributors 239
Index 243
PREFACE
This collection of essays honors Lester K. Little on the occasion of his
sixty-fifth birthday. Even without this preface, it would be hard for read
ers to miss how much of this book is inspired by Lester's writings on reli
gious movements, on monastic cursing, and on the social meaning of dis
ease. What might be less obvious is Lester's personal impact as a teacher,
colleague, and correspondent. Many of the contributors, including the
two editors, were once Lester's students. We were transfixed in his classes,
not by anecdotes (though there were certainly some of those), but by
the intensity, passion, high seriousness, and downright good humor that
Lester brought to his subject. He was (he is) a connoisseur of the hu
man condition and its vicissitudes. He was not exactly the Ancient Mar
iner, fixing us with his glittering eye-for one thing he was much too
young, and still is. Yet we felt much the same immediate grip: we were
about to hear the most important thing in the world. "Listen to this!" It's
doubtful that he ever said that; but that's what we heard as Lester launched
into the history of the pilgrimage to Santiago or unraveled a knotty text
by St. Anselm.
We were drawn into these classes as equals, not in expertise (of course)
but in worth. Our ideas counted, and not just as "good student responses,"
but as contributions to a common enterprise. We were creators of his
tory: "Write it as if you're going to publish it," Lester told one of the edi
tors as she started a paper. She did. And it was published.
These experiences were-must have been-magical. How else explain
this largely undergraduate teacher producing so many Ph.D.'s? They
X PREFACE
rival the number of Joseph Strayer's progeny-those students who, like
Charles Radding, William Chester Jordan, Robert Lerner, and Lester
himself, constitute so significant a part of the medieval professoriate in
the United States. Lester's offspring certainly outdo Strayer's in the num
ber of women professors. There is no denying that women would have
entered the profession even if Lester had not been at Smith College. But
so many? One suspects that if Lester had taught at a men's school, there
would now be an even more disproportionate number of men teaching
medieval history.
Not that Lester's influence was or is limited to his students. Consider
the ways in which medievalists interact: at conferences, whether at for
mal meetings, in the corridors, or over drinks; through e-mail; as visiting
professors; as guest lecturers; as fellow laborers in libraries and archives.
Lester was (is) active in all of these ways; and through them he became
important to many of his colleagues and their students, not only because
of his ideas but because of his warmth, wit, passion, and compassion.
But also, of course, because of his ideas. Lester's specific theses are very
important, and we discuss some of them below. But to understand Les
ter's influence, it is important to realize that above all there has always
been one idea: allow your curiosity to get the better of you. Ask what
happened-and cast the net wide. Ask why, and cast it wider. For an
swers, don't be afraid to read anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and
anything else that may shed light. Pursue your interests because there is
delight in doing so. Such delight is ever-present in Lester's classes.
In the introduction we trace the historiography of medieval religious
studies, showing how, in the 1960s, historians began to link religious, po
litical, and social movements. Lester was not interested simply in "links."
He was interested in the "social meaning" of religion: the elements of re
ligious phenomena that expressed a society. In his first book, Religious Pov
erty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (1978), he traced the growth
of the new European money economy and the religious and moral crisis,
then resolution, that it provoked. In Liberty, Charity, Fraternity: Lay Re
ligious Confraternities at Bergamo in the Age of the Commune (1988),
he brought to center stage some little-studied lay religious organizations
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These were lay initiatives, the
product of profound religious, political, and social upheavals. In Benedic
tine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (1993), he stud
ied ritual cursing as a cultural artifact of multiple significance in a society
of monks and malefactors.
The contributors to this collection draw upon and discuss these and
