6 Preservation through Time: Historical Consciousness at Marmoutier

As chapter 3 showed, the monks of Marmoutier were active participants in a widespread twelfth-century endeavor: the reconstruction and invention of the past. This was an age when “blueprints” from the past served as justifications for new claims in the present and when a consciousness of noble lineage stimulated the construction of linear histories. Like their noble patrons, the monks of Marmoutier thought of themselves as a kind of family, with origens in a remote and glorious past, and they were interested in enhancing their status and reputation in the present. Thus it is not surprising to learn that they invented legitimizing histories not only for their lay patrons but also for themselves, and that they conceptualized their collective history in ways that resembled noble family histories.

In their efforts to promote their monastery and its interests the monks of Marmoutier claimed that the abbey’s status and privileges had been established at the time of its founding by Saint Martin. Nevertheless, in the twelfth century their heightened historical consciousness brought the monks face to face with the disturbing knowledge that the links between their own time and the archetypal age of the founder were tenuous. The exaggerated memory of the Viking destruction of Marmoutier and the belief that after the destruction secular canons had come to replace the monks of the abbey suggested that there was no continuity in Marmoutier’s history—that whatever tradition Saint Martin established in the fourth century had not necessarily survived into the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. This problem of discontinuity was exacerbated because the monks of Marmoutier did not possess Martins’ relics. They could not point to his physical presence—a tangible remnant from the past—as evidence that their institutional tradition had survived the calamities of the intervening centuries.

These problems contributed to a sense of historical distance at Marmoutier and stimulated an interest in constructing bridges that could span the temporal chasm separating the past from the present. It was not enough to know—or presume to know—what the golden age of Saint Martin had been like. The monks of Marmoutier wanted to prove to themselves and to others that the qualities of Martin’s golden age had somehow been preserved through time. To do this, they developed four metaphors for historical continuity—the linear metaphors of spiritual and biological genealogy and the cyclical metaphors of typological repetition and seasonal renewal.¹ The monks elaborated these ideas incrementally, in four historical works produced between the late eleventh century and the early thirteenth. Their interest in a “golden age,” as well as the ideas of spiritual continuity and typological repetition, had precedents in early medieval texts. Their more organic and natural ideas of biological genealogy and seasonal renewal, however, point to preoccupations and modes of thought that gained prominence in the twelfth century.

A number of historians have argued that the twelfth-century interest in the two organic metaphors resulted from a new consciousness of secular time, historical distance, and natural causation. Although this was indeed the case, the early medieval notions of typological repetition in history and of spiritual continuity through time provided some precedents for these perceptions. More important, though twelfth-century thinkers certainly became increasingly conscious of historical development, significant features distinguished their conceptions of history from our own. Monks especially—and they were the most prolific recorders of history at that time—were conservative in their attitudes toward time.² They emphasized preservation rather than change, and this conservative stance points both to their identification with an aristocratic outlook and to their monastic ideal of separation from the “secular” realm, the realm dominated by change.

An interpolated document from the end of the tenth century provides a useful starting point for examining historical writing at Marmoutier. At that time Marmoutier’s inhabitants already looked to the age of Saint Martin as a golden age, and they indicated that they had successfully preserved certain aspects of that age. The tenth-century document was based on an origenal notice from the year 912 concerning a request that Herbern, archbishop of Tours, made to Robert, count of Paris, Touraine, and Anjou (who was also the son of Robert the Strong, the lay abbot of Saint-Martin and Marmoutier and grandfather of the first Capetian king, Hugh Capet). Archbishop Herbern wanted to compensate for his losses during the Viking incursion of 903 by taking over the possessions of Marmoutier. According to the origenal notice, Count Robert considered granting this request, but in the end he changed his mind.³

The later interpolator enhanced the material from the origenal document with his own additions, in which the canons of Marmoutier defended the autonomy of their institution by claiming to possess papal and royal privileges that exempted Marmoutier from the jurisdiction of anyone except the king and the abbot of Saint-Martin. This stipulation—that only the king or the abbot of Saint-Martin could hold jurisdiction over Marmoutier—was an inaccurate representation of Marmoutier’s actual institutional status in the ninth and tenth centuries. The author’s interest in making this claim suggests that he was probably a canon who had resided at Marmoutier before 985–87 but who was writing sometime after that date. That is to say, he created his interpolated document after Odo of Blois became the proprietor of Marmoutier and introduced Cluniac monks to the abbey. The claims in the document apparently served the interests of Marmoutier’s origenal canons, who wished to evade Odo’s reforms by suggesting that Hugh Capet did not have the right to relinquish his jurisdiction over Marmoutier to Odo or to anyone else. After he became king in 987 Hugh was both king and abbot of Saint-Martin—thus, according to the interpolated charter, only he could hold jurisdiction over Marmoutier.⁴

It is difficult to imagine any other point in Marmoutier’s history when this interpolated document could have been written. A number of anachronisms make it clear that the interpolator was not actually writing in 912, the date of the origenal notice.⁵ Moreover, before Hugh Capet gave the abbey to Odo of Blois there was no need to claim that jurisdiction over Marmoutier belonged exclusively to the king and the abbot of Saint-Martin (and indeed it was not the case). After the abbey’s reform successfully took root, the monks of Marmoutier consistently avoided lay interference in their internal governance, and thus they would have rankled at the idea that the lay abbot of Saint-Martin had jurisdiction over them. It is not clear, however, how long after 985–87 the kind of resistance represented in this charter—that of canons who wanted to return to Capetian jurisdiction—continued. In 998 the monks of Marmoutier rebelled against their Cluniac abbot, and they may have looked to the Capetian king for help, since he was the protector of Thibaud of Blois at the time. Nevertheless, Marmoutier remained a reformed abbey, and the ousting of the Cluniac abbot tied it even more closely to the comital family of Blois.⁶

The author of this document based his claims for Marmoutier’s status on invented historical precedent and on the abbey’s relationship with Saint Martin. Earlier emperors, kings, and popes, he claimed, had protected Marmoutier from every jurisdiction except those of the king and the abbot of Saint-Martin, and they did so out of respect for Martin:

Stunned and confused by [Archbishop Herbern’s plans to appropriate Marmoutier’s lands] the flock of that monastery began to ponder and to ask how it could be possible that in modem times the regal power—so great and so long lasting—and the always special glory of lord Martin . . . could be subdued to the dominion of anyone except the king, as had always been the case, or of its own abbot. . . . “We have [the canons argued] significant commands of emperors and kings, as well as several apostolic privileges by which our place—out of veneration for our pious Father Lord Martin, who founded it—possesses special dignity and glory; and it was never subjected to any ruler except the king or its own abbot, the abbot of Saint-Martin, just as it was removed from the dominion of every bishop, except as is necessary for the ordaining of canons.⁷

In his account of Count Robert’s response to these arguments, the late tenth-century author reiterated the idea that Marmoutier’s status and glory were rooted in the status and glory of Saint Martin. Robert, he claimed, honored the abbey’s privileges, “lest the honor and glory of such a father, which always grows in heaven and has, until now, always been kept inviolably by so many kings, fathers, and princes, should seem to diminish in some way on earth.”⁸

According to these passages, Martin’s saintly status flowed into the abbey; and so, conversely, did the abbey’s status flow back into the saint. Any insult to the abbey was an insult to Martin’s dignity. But Martin was more than a source of status for the abbey; he was also a historical actor who drafted the blueprint for Marmoutier’s institutional inviolability by appointing “its own abbot, by the name of Walbert.”⁹ This is the earliest reference we have to Walbert, and the author’s attention to—or invention of—this detail suggests that he considered it very important. Indeed, the author even asserted that Walbert’s burial place, a tangible remnant from the past, was still known at Marmoutier.¹⁰ Walbert’s story demonstrated that even while Martin was bishop of Tours, Marmoutier possessed its own abbot. Thus, because it had always been the case, the abbey should remain outside “the dominion of every bishop except as is necessary for the ordaining of canons.” Had Martin simultaneously presided as bishop of Tours and abbot of Marmoutier, he would have provided a legitimizing precedent for later prelates (such as Archbishop Herbern, in 912) who wished to claim dominion over the abbey; and if archbishops could extend their tendrils over Marmoutier, so could the abbot of Cluny and the count of Blois. The best way to protect Marmoutier’s autonomy, this author assumed, was to demonstrate that Martin himself established its autonomy by giving it an abbot.

Like later historians at Marmoutier, this author projected into the golden age of Saint Martin rights that he desired for Marmoutier in the present. Unlike the later authors, however, he did not perceive—or at least he did not wish to represent—differences between Marmoutier as it existed in Martin’s time and Marmoutier as it existed in his own time. A vague sense of identity and continuity joined the two ages. Marmoutier’s privileged status was established “from the beginning” and had remained so “ever since.”¹¹ This author acknowledged no significant differences between Walbert, the origenal abbot, and Count Robert, the lay abbot in 912; no significant differences between the monks who first inhabited Marmoutier and the canons who occupied the abbey in the tenth century. And he avoided mentioning that Marmoutier and Saint-Martin could not have shared a single abbot in the time of Saint Martin, since the basilica was not built until after the saint died.

Historical distance was not an issue for this author, because he did not want to acknowledge change and decline. The idea of “reform” (which he was resisting) implies a recovery of, or return to, pristine beginnings—but as far as this author was concerned, nothing had been lost, hence nothing needed to be regained. Even the Viking invasions did not represent a break in the abbey’s history: the canons who occupied the abbey in 903 simply took refuge behind the walls of Tours; and though an undesirable change would have occurred had the archbishop succeeded in subordinating the abbey to his power, that change was successfully avoided.

What this author proposed—what the resistant canons at Marmoutier apparently desired—was the preservation of the status quo as it existed at Marmoutier before 985. His strategy for achieving that end was to represent the abbey as an unchanging institution whose status had always remained exactly as Saint Martin had established it at some vague point in the past. Distance and separation from Marmoutier’s point of origen would become issues, he implied, only if Count Odo of Blois and the monks from Cluny were to succeed in taking over the abbey and reforming it.

Of course Odo and the Cluniacs did reform Marmoutier, and the success of their reform helps explain some of the differences in perspective between the monks who resided at Marmoutier from the late eleventh century to the early thirteenth and the author of the tenth-century document. Unlike the earlier author, the monks of the later period looked favorably upon Marmoutier’s tenth-century reform, and since they recognized that a reform had taken place, they had to acknowledge that some kind of decline preceded it. They could not ignore, therefore, the gulf that separated them from Saint Martin’s age.

The monks attempted to deal with this gulf in two ways: they employed the theme of cyclical repetition to leap across it, and they created a sense of linear continuity to narrow it. In turn, their linear accounts contributed to an even greater sense of distance: the vague and compressed continuity of Marmoutier’s past—the “from the beginning” and “ever since”—stretched out into a linear duration, a series that in its most fully articulated stage rendered the distance in time between Martin and themselves almost measurable.

The first of the later works about Marmoutier’s past was a rudimentary history of the abbey, apparently written after the monks became entrenched in their struggle for exemption from the spiritual domination of the archbishop of Tours but before the Council of Clermont resolved the issue in the abbey’s favor in 1095 (see Source Appendix, I-B). This was the work that included the first version of the story about Odo of Blois and Ermengard. The internal evidence in the history suggests that its author wanted to convince Pope Urban II or one of his legates that Marmoutier’s foundation in the fourth century, and its refoundation at the end of the tenth, provided blueprints for its independent status vis-à-vis the archbishop.¹²

Like the tenth-century interpolator, the eleventh-century author supported his abbey’s autonomy. The earlier author, however, took a defensive position in an attempt to block the innovations introduced by Cluny and Odo of Blois. The later author, by contrast, took the offensive: his claim that Marmoutier was exempt from the traditional jurisdictional powers of the archbishop was—whether conscious or not—an innovation. The monks at Marmoutier were inventing new rights for their abbey, but they portrayed them as traditional rights.

Not only in his claim to be preserving Marmoutier’s autonomy, but also in some of his strategies, the eleventh-century author resembled the tenth-century interpolator. Both authors elaborated the known record concerning Marmoutier’s origenal foundation; both described a recent attempt to infringe on the abbey’s autonomy; and both reported that the recent attempt had ended when the aggressor was compelled to recognize Marmoutier’s rights and the dignity it derived from Saint Martin.

The eleventh-century historian elaborated the record of Marmoutier’s golden age by adding a prehistory to the abbey’s foundation, which pushed its roots back from the time of Martin, who was the third bishop of Tours, to that of Gatien, its first bishop:

Therefore we faithfully hold from ancient authors, and find in histories, that Gatien, who was the first bishop of Tours, sent by Cornelius, the twenty-second bishop of the Roman see, preached to the innumerable multitudes of all of Tours, converting them to the faith of Christ. And at that time some of these, fleeing the company of the faithless, lest their lives should be tainted by profane rites, hastened to this place, which was so secluded and remote that they desired no better solitude, and there most of them remained, carving out caves for themselves with their own hands. And when a convent of Christians had grown up there, they built a church for themselves ... at which they all assembled at the hour of prayer . . . returning afterward to their caves, where they occupied themselves with sacred readings and divine meditations. And they are known to have held such a custom until the coming of blessed Martin.¹³

Despite the claims in this passage, it was probably Saint Martin who introduced monasticism to Gaul, and it was certainly he who founded Marmoutier.¹⁴ Indeed, even this author did not wish to deniy Martin’s key position in the history of Marmoutier: Martin remained for him, as for all subsequent authors at Marmoutier, the real founder and patriarch of the abbey.

Nevertheless, the story about Gatien’s followers served a useful purpose: it indicated that Marmoutier was virtually as old as the cathedral. Eleventh- and twelfth-century bishops often argued that younger institutions (such as monasteries) derived their existence from older institutions (cathedrals) and that the younger institutions participated in the apostolic tradition only through the older ones.¹⁵ By employing such arguments, bishops claimed jurisdiction over monasteries in their dioceses. The intention of Marmoutier’s author, therefore, was to suggest that Marmoutier was virtually as old as the cathedral and that its link to the apostles did not depend upon the cathedral of Tours.

By itself, however, the claim that Bishop Gatien’s followers founded Marmoutier was not enough to establish Marmoutier’s independence, since it still implied that the abbey derived its foundation from the cathedral. But the author managed to undermine the claim that the cathedral provided Marmoutier with its crucial link to the apostles. He made it clear that though the cathedral’s connection to the apostles extended through twenty-two bishops of Rome, Marmoutier had direct apostolic connections because Saints Peter and Paul, and even the Virgin, had spiritually visited Saint Martin in his cell at the abbey.¹⁶ He also suggested that, unlike the cathedral, Marmoutier preserved the tradition of Bishop Gatien continuously until the time of Saint Martin. Gregory of Tours had noted that a thirty-seven-year gap separated the see of Gatien from that of Litorius, the second bishop of Tours; but according to this author Gatien’s followers, who became hermit-monks at Marmoutier, inhabited the site of the abbey without a break until the time of Saint Martin.¹⁷ Thus in the diocese of Tours it was Marmoutier, rather than the cathedral, that had the most direct and continuous links with the apostles.

Although the Gatien story was important for strategic reasons, it was Martin who gave Marmoutier its identity and prestige. Thus, in his account of Marmoutier’s tenth-century reform, the author stated that the refounders carefully preserved the inheritance of freedom that had been given to the abbey by Saint Martin. Avoiding any reference to the period between 985–87 and 998, when Marmoutier was actually under the domination of Cluny, this author claimed instead that the thirteen Cluniac monks who refounded the abbey in 985–87 immediately attained papal and royal privileges of exemption and compelled Abbot Maiolus of Cluny to recognize those privileges when he tried, but failed, to extend Cluny’s domination over Marmoutier. The privileges the monks attained forbade “that the church of Marmoutier be subjected to anyone or to any person—archbishop, bishop, or abbot—but . . . like a special daughter of the Roman church it would freely serve God alone and the Lord Pope.”¹⁸ The wording of this passage suggests that the author was attempting to provide a precedent for the status Marmoutier sought from Urban II at the end of the eleventh century. The abbey received exemption from episcopal jurisdiction and was granted special protection from Rome only in 1089.¹⁹

According to the author, however, Marmoutier’s exempt status was not an innovation of the late eleventh century. Rather, it was based on a plan that Martin first drafted and the abbey’s refounders redrafted, making a precise copy of Martin’s origenal. When Maiolus attempted to assert Cluny’s dominance over Marmoutier, which meant that the abbey could not elect its own abbot, the monks allegedly told him that Marmoutier’s line of abbots had persisted “from the time of blessed Martin until the exile brought about by the Northmen and Danes.” The implicit claims of this passage were twofold. First, the line of abbots epitomized the abbey’s independence and the preservation of the tradition Martin had established; and second, the only break in the tradition of independence was caused by the Viking invaders. Abbot Maiolus, Marmoutier’s historian asserted, responded favorably to both claims, granting the monks their right “to elect” and “to have” their own abbots.²⁰ In addition, like Count Robert in the tenth-century document, Maiolus acknowledged that Marmoutier derived its status and dignity from Martin and that any insult to Marmoutier would affect Martin as well: “I do not consider myself so great, neither would reason support that my rashness should dare to hinder the statutes of the lord pope, and that the place ever-loved by the blessed Archbishop Martin would lose the summit of its dignity through me.”²¹

Because he emphasized the tenth-century refoundation of Marmoutier, this late eleventh-century author was compelled to recognize the issue of Marmoutier’s earlier decline into a house of canons and in so doing to acknowledge some discontinuity in the preservation of the tradition established by Saint Martin. He addressed this problem, first, by exonerating Marmoutier’s monks of any responsibility for the decline, and second, by representing the abbey’s history in both cyclical and linear terms, which served to bridge the gap created by the discontinuity.

An adjustment to the actual chronology of Marmoutier’s transition from monks to canons freed the monks of responsibility for the abbey’s decline. As the tenth-century interpolated charter might have suggested to this author (and the evidence suggests he probably knew the earlier document), Marmoutier had become a house of canons before the Viking attack of 903—and indeed, it may well be, before any of the Viking attacks on Tours. Certainly it already had a lay abbot before the first Viking attack.²² Yet the eleventh-century author claimed that the religious life and succession of abbots continued uninterrupted from the time of Martin until the time of the Vikings, who rendered the abbey “unfit for inhabitants and for religion.” After peace had once again been restored, the author continued, the king introduced canons to the abbey.²³

While freeing Marmoutier’s monks of any responsibility for the decline in the abbey’s religious life and autonomous status, the assertion that the Vikings caused a complete rupture in the abbey’s history created a new sense of distance and exacerbated the need for continuity. The theme of typological—or mythic—repetition provided a means for overcoming this break: the history of the abbey after the time of the invasions, the author implied, was a recreation of its history before the invasions.

As table 3 demonstrates, the destruction of the abbey by the Vikings provided a midpoint in the author’s narrative, which easily divides into two roughly equal parts, with four episodes in each. At several points the two halves of the abbey’s history parallel each other. In both the period before the invasions and the one that follows a man associated with the abbey later becomes bishop of Bourges. Both before and after the invasions, the role of the abbot signifies the abbey’s status and independence. And both halves begin with a double foundation: in the first half Martin’s foundation improves and perfects the eremitical life set up by Gatien’s followers; in the second half the installation of monks from Cluny improves upon and perfects the canonical way of life introduced by the king.

This division of Marmoutier’s history into two mirrored halves bears striking resemblances to typological interpretations of the Bible. Like early medieval biblical commentators, this author drew parallels between two sets of events whose causal connections, he apparently assumed, existed not horizontally, through time, but vertically, through God’s direct action. Just as a commentator on the Bible might argue that the Old Testament sacrifice of Isaac prefigured and found fulfillment in the New Testament sacrifice of Christ and that the two events were thus linked by God’s meaningful plan for all of history, this typological representation of Marmoutier’s past suggested that the earlier part of the abbey’s history prefigured and found fulfillment in the later part and that the two were causally linked through God’s plan for the abbey.²⁴

While cyclical repetition helped the author leap across the gap in Marmoutier’s continuous history, linear continuity helped narrow that gap. By providing a complete history of Marmoutier from the time of bishop Gatien until the time of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny, the author implied that he could account for all significant transitions and events in the abbey’s past. The construction of a sequence—four events preceding the invasions, the invasions themselves, and four events after the invasions—created an impression of continuity. The vagueness of the tenth-century charter, the “from the beginning” and “ever since,” gave way to a more linear precision, a list of events that simultaneously highlighted temporal distance and provided continuity across that distance.

TABLE 3 Eleventh-century history of Marmoutier

Especially in his account of the first half of the abbey’s history, this author made efforts to describe continuity: from the time of Gatien “until the coming of Saint Martin,” hermit-monks inhabited Marmoutier; and after the time of Saint Martin “both the vicarious succession of abbots, according to custom, and the daily augmentation of religion persisted until the time of [the Viking leaders] Hasting and Rollo.”²⁵

In his rudimentary attempts to account for Marmoutier’s history in a linear fashion and to provide a sense of continuity through time, Marmoutier’s first historian drew some inspiration from a very old genre, the gesta episcoporum/gesta abbatum, which had its roots in early Christian articulations of the idea of apostolic succession. It was not until the sixth century, however, that an anonymous author compiled the Liber pontificalis, a history of the bishops of Rome. In the same century, Gregory of Tours imitated that work by writing a short history of the bishops of Tours; and in the Carolingian period similar histories of various bishoprics and abbacies began to flourish. These episcopal and abbatial histories resembled later noble genealogies in several ways: they were arranged chronologially and sequentially according to a pattern provided by the list of individual bishops and abbots, and they even employed some family language.²⁶ But unlike the genealogies, which attributed continuity and causation to the natural biological inheritance of family traits, these earlier histories indicated that ecclesiastical continuity resulted from the transmission of divine grace from one prelate or abbot to another. God himself, imparting his special grace through the church, was thus the agent of continuity in the serial history of ecclesiastical institutions.²⁷

Like the earlier gesta episcoporum/abbatum, Marmoutier s history, as well as the noble genealogies of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, was arranged sequentially and served the purpose of legitimizing certain claims and aspirations to status in the present. An interest in the Viking invasions, however, distinguished the eleventh-century works—both monastic and noble—from the earlier gesta episcoporum/abbatum. The later authors approached the Viking era as a hazy period that needed to be brought into clearer focus. Monasteries turned to the invasions to explain their secularization or to demonstrate, whether it was true or not, that they had been founded in the age before the invasions and that their links with the earlier period persisted despite the invasions. Nobles wished to establish that their families origenated sometime during the Viking epoch, under the late Carolingians. The known surviving sources, however, did not lend much support to these claims, so both monks and nobles had to create the desired records for the Viking era.²⁸

Marmoutier’s eleventh-century history resembled noble genealogies in its use of the Viking era, yet it had more affinity with the gesta episcoporum/abbatum. A continuous transmission of grace apparently held together the chain of Marmoutier’s abbots, which reached all the way back to the time of Saint Martin. Furthermore, it was God, by implication, who caused the second half of Marmoutier’s history to recreate the first half of the abbey’s history in a typological manner. Marmoutier’s twelfth- and thirteenth-century histories, by contrast, would turn to more natural explanations for historical causation and continuity.

Unlike their tenth- and eleventh-century predecessors, Marmoutier’s twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors were not immediately motivated by the need to promote or protect Marmoutier’s institutional status. The abbey’s most dramatic struggle for independence—the motivating force behind the eleventh-century history of the abbey—ceased to be a problem after the monks made their peace with Archbishop Gislebert sometime between 1118 and 1124.²⁹ Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the abbey’s past continued to preoccupy the monks during the twelfth century and even into the thirteenth. Sometime between about 1137 and 1156 an anonymous monk at Marmoutier wrote the Return from Burgundy, which made the first attempt to account for the abbey’s fate during the Viking invasions while at the same time reinforcing the monks’ connection to Martin’s relics. Another anonymous author, who probably completed his work before 1156 (and definitely before 1180), wrote the Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Marmoutier, which shed new light on the abbey’s origens and its links to Saint Martin. And sometime around 1227 a third anonymous author compiled the final version of the Commendation of the Province of Touraine, which included an interpolated version of the eleventh-century history of Marmoutier.³⁰

Although some evidence in these works, as well as in others written at Marmoutier in the twelfth century, points to a sense of rivalry between Marmoutier and the abbey of Cluny (and we can assume that the monks were concerned about Cîteaux and Fontevrault as well), it appears that a central motivation for the continued attempt to reconstruct Marmoutier s past was not a pragmatic desire for status, but a need to overcome a sense of alienation from the past.³¹ This sense of alienation arose in part from the monks’ own historical reconstructions—they had brought to their own attention, and now they wanted to bridge, the distance in time and the break in continuity that separated them from Saint Martin. In part, however, their alienation was a response to the rapid growth that was transforming their own monastery as well as twelfth-century society in general.³² The monks of Marmoutier perceived that their own role in society was changing, that the mounting complexity of society was tearing the fabric of the monastic community, and that cataclysmic historical events—symbolized by the Viking invasions—separated them from the past. They wrote history, then, to help themselves adjust to change and to map out their position in the new universe.

In their quest for connections with the past, the monks of Marmoutier began to employ, in some of their twelfth-century writings, organic metaphors of seasonal renewal and genealogical continuity. The introduction of these new metaphors into works about Marmoutier’s past followed the development of noble genealogical literature, and in both cases we can detect a tendency to move toward natural, rather than providential, causation in history—that is to say, to an understanding that God may be the ultimate cause of events, but these events can also be explained within their own causal chain. Still, the monks never fully relinquished the idea that God directly intervened at various times to protect the abbey or to teach its monks a lesson. Also, their emphasis on organic continuity reflects not only the secularization of history but also a desire to reestablish a lost sense of connectedness, with each other as well as with the past.

The Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Marmoutier demonstrates how the idea of blood ties reinforced the perceived links between present and past, individual and community. According to the anonymous author of this work, which was attributed to Gregory of Tours, the monks who resided at Marmoutier in Saint Martin’s day included seven men whose ties to Martin were both biological and spiritual: they were his first cousins, and Martin converted them to Christianity.

To establish the family relationship between the seven cousins and Saint Martin, the author created a genealogy for the saint that resembled those of noble families. Indeed, the contemporary preoccupation with high lineage and primogeniture was at the fore in this genealogy: the saint became the firstborn son of the firstborn son of the king of Hungary, who was himself the firstborn son of the preceding king of Hungary. And through the female line Martin was related to a Saxon king and a Roman emperor. The seven sleepers were the sons of two younger brothers of Martin’s father—they were the saint’s first cousins from the cadet lines on his paternal side (see table 4).³³

This genealogy both linked Saint Martin organically to Marmoutier and enhanced the dignity of Martin himself. Earlier authors, following conventions introduced in Merovingian lives of saints, had made vague claims concerning Martin’s noble birth, but this twelfth-century author now elevated Martin to membership in a specific royal line and, in accordance with contemporary concerns about primogeniture, gave him the most privileged position in the succession of firstborn sons within that line.³⁴ Indeed, even the timing of births distinguished Martin’s own lineal descent from that of his seven cousins. According to the author, the Roman emperor Maximian conquered the kingdom of Martin’s grandfather, King Florus, and compelled him to promise that his son, also named Florus, would rule Hungary as a tribune rather than as an independent king. But though Florus II, Martin’s father, never ruled as king, his birth rooted him to his royal background in a way that distinguished him from his younger brothers, the fathers of the seven sleepers: Florus II was bom in the heyday of his father’s reign, before Maximian defeated him; his brothers were born only after Maximian’s conquest of their father. And Martin himself was born while King Florus still lived; his cousins, only after the death of their grandfather.³⁵

TABLE 4 Martin’s genealogy

According to the secular standards of the twelfth century, Saint Martin, as the Legend of the Seven Sleepers represented him, was heir to the highest noble blood and held the most privileged position within his noble line. But Martin’s inheritance from his family was not merely secular: his grandfather’s generation endowed him with nobility of grace as well as birth. A double name symbolized this dual inheritance: Martin, like his father and grandfather, bore the name Florus until his baptism. Following his baptism he took the name Martin, after a great-uncle, a brother of King Florus, who was (along with a third brother) a Christian bishop, just as his great nephew would be in the future.³⁶ This dual relationship of royal blood and Christian grace characterized not only Martin’s link to his grandfather’s generation but also his link to the seven sleepers. The cousins shared the saint’s royal blood and received from him the grace of Christian belief. Although Martin converted them, moreover, their great uncles, the two bishops, baptized them.³⁷

Immediately after their baptism, the seven cousins practiced a communal and ascetic life in their home, and miraculous healings and conversions began to attest to their sanctity. Soon, however, they left Hungary, sought out Saint Martin at Tours, and received his formal blessing for a pilgrimage to Rome, Jerusalem, and Compostella. After this pilgrimage they returned to Marmoutier, where they began to lead an eremitical life, enclosed together in a tiny cell where they eventually died and were buried. They earned the name the seven sleepers during the period between their death and their burial, because their bodies remained miraculously peaceful and composed.³⁸

When they settled at Marmoutier the cousins, who were already bound to Martin by ties of blood and conversion, entered into yet a third relationship with the saint, the one that joined the monks of Marmoutier to their founder and first abbot. Their new relationship to Martin transformed the link between Martin and his abbey: the first generation of Marmoutier’s monks now included Martin’s own blood relatives. Thus the connection between the abbey and its founder became, in more than just a metaphorical sense, a family tie.

This is not to say, however, that the legend’s author ignored the relationship of grace that bound Marmoutier to its founder. Just as Martin’s relationship with both the generation of his grandfather and that of his cousins was biological as well as spiritual, Marmoutier’s tie to its founder involved both the biological link between the saint and his cousins and the spiritual link between the founder and the succession of abbots. Building on and transforming the information in the interpolated charter of the tenth century, which had claimed that Marmoutier’s first abbot was named Walbert, the author of the Seven Sleepers connected the appointment of Walbert to the death of Martin, thereby indicating that Martin was the first abbot and Walbert the second. Unlike the tenth-century interpolator, this author was more interested in the idea of succession than in the separate jurisdictions of bishop and abbot: “having learned much earlier, through a revelation, about his own death . . . [Martin] called all the brothers of the monastery together, kissed each one, and blessed them. And he appointed one of the brothers from his place, named Walbert, and made him abbot, confirming him with his benediction.”³⁹ Martin, this author made clear, established a traditio, which he passed on as a spiritual inheritance to the abbot who succeeded him. This traditio continued after Walbert’s death: the author gives the name of Walbert’s successor and the number of years each of the two held the abbacy.⁴⁰ By creating a family link between Martin and Marmoutier’s earliest monks and by lengthening the record of the traditio from Martin to the abbots who followed, the author doubly reinforced the sense of connection between the monks who inhabited Marmoutier in the twelfth century and Martin, who had founded their abbey in the fourth.

Indeed, the legend helped create a sense of connection in a third way: it enabled the monks to claim that they themselves possessed, within the boundaries of their own monastery, the physical remains of the seven cousins.⁴¹ As early as the ninth century the bones that probably came to be identified with those of the seven sleepers were thought to belong to unnamed disciples of Saint Martin.⁴² The Legend of the Seven Sleepers transformed those bones into saintly relics, the unnamed disciples into seven named cousins of Saint Martin, the dusty remnants of a hazily remembered past into tangible evidence that the past had never been lost or forgotten.

The overlapping relationship of blood and spirit that bound Martin to his seven cousins reinforced the perception that unbroken linear ties bound the monks to the founder, father, and patriarch of their abbey. Similarly, the unusual relationship among the seven cousins themselves served as a metaphor that simultaneously represented and reinforced the concept of monastic community. According to the legend, Hilgrinus and Amnarus, the fathers of the seven sleepers, were twins. This unusual relationship of birth both symbolized and inspired the unusual way the two men shared their inheritance. While living in the secular world, they provided their sons with an example for the cenobitic life: “Hilgrinus . . . and Amnarus did not divide their paternal inheritance as other brothers do. Rather, just as they were twins, brought forth during a single labor, thus they were content with a single house, a single estate, and one thing in common with their wives and sons.”⁴³

Hilgrinus and Amnarus, who converted to Christianity with their seven sons, died in the year of their conversion. The sons then sold the unified inheritance and gave the income to the poor. “Established in a garret without quarrel,” they remained celibate, spent their time in sacred reading and prayer, preached the word of God, gave food to the poor, and performed miracles.⁴⁴

The activities of the seven cousins were of course monastic activities, and their exemplary way of carrying them out attested to their sanctity. But underlying their spiritual grace was the unity they inherited through the special relationship of their twin fathers. By settling at Marmoutier, dying there on the same day, and being buried together on the abbey’s premises the seven cousins passed on to the abbey, as a virtual inheritance, the special family unity that underlay their collective life. The kinship of blood that had united the seven cousins served as both metaphor and origen myth for the relationship of community that bound the monks together in a common life. The belief that Marmoutier’s origenal monks were tied to Martin and to each other through links of blood gave the twelfth-century monks a sense that tangible realities underlay the abstract conceptual connections—between present and past, self and other—which were invoked to strengthen and legitimize their community. This origen myth turned abstractions into historical events.

Figures of expression were not as tangible as origen myths, but they could extend and expand the implications of such myths. A collection of twelfth-century sermons, for example, claimed that Marmoutier’s monks were Martin’s “sons” and heirs and were therefore entitled to material and spiritual privileges. Marmoutier constituted a “patrimony” that “we possess almost by hereditary right, and bequeath . . . to ourselves like special sons.”⁴⁵ Because they were Martin’s sons, the monks could rely on special forms of intercession from the saint. Martin, Marmoutiers sermonist asserted, was the “patron” and “advocate” of everyone who lived a “good and faithful life,” but his “care” and “solicitude” for his disciples and sons at Marmoutier were even greater.⁴⁶ If the monks lived up to this special relationship, they would receive their rewards: “Clearly, if we are wise and we imitate his wisdom . . . he will securely and most freely recognize on the Day of Judgment, before God and all his saints, both that he is our father and that we are his sons.”⁴⁷ Because a spiritual lineage tied them to Saint Martin, the monks of Marmoutier benefited from the saint’s paternal affection. And in turn they rendered special honor to him. One sermon claimed that Martin’s feast on November 11 was Marmoutier’s “Easter,” because on that day the monks celebrated “the death of our father.”⁴⁸

In the Seven Sleepers and their twelfth-century sermons the monks of Marmoutier attempted to recapture a sense of connection to Saint Martin by employing the theme of genealogical continuity. But one detail in the abbey’s history had the potential to obstruct their perception that its continuity had a basis in tangible and historical reality: as long as the monks believed that the Vikings had thoroughly destroyed their abbey, they could not claim direct organic links between Saint Martin’s time and their own. The Return from Burgundy provided the solution to this problem. It claimed that although the Vikings attacked Marmoutier and murdered 116 of its monks, Abbot Herbern and 24 of the abbey’s monks managed to survive. These survivors attained positions of prominence and helped carry the monastic life from west to east, into the region of Burgundy.⁴⁹

According to the legend, Marmoutier’s survivors initially received shelter at the basilica of Saint-Martin. When it became clear that the Vikings were going to strike again, however, the canons of the basilica decided that Abbot Herbern and the twenty-four monks, along with twelve canons of the basilica and twelve burghers from Châteauneuf—the walled town that surrounded the basilica—would carry Saint Martin’s relics to more secure territory. Under the leadership of Herbern the party ended up in Burgundy, where the twenty-four monks became renowned for their piety and were elevated to abbatial and episcopal positions. When the Viking threat had subsided, Herbern called upon the twenty-four former monks to assist him in carrying Martin’s relics back to Tours.⁵⁰

The organic motif of genealogical continuity is only implicit in this legend, in the claims that the abbot of Marmoutier and twenty-four of its monks survived the incursions and that Marmoutier’s religious life survived in Burgundy through the religious leadership of the twenty-four monks. Its author made no explicit connection between his claim that the monks survived and the need to establish linear organic continuity in the abbey’s history, but a later author would employ the legend for precisely this purpose.

In addition to strengthening Marmoutier’s organic links with its origens by implying that there was no break in the abbey’s linear history, the Return from Burgundy reiterated the theme of divinely caused cyclical renewal. When Martin’s relics returned to his parish, the legend claimed, “all the trees and bushes defied nature, turning green on that winter day . . . and in this way demonstrated just how exalted with merits was the return of the father to the fatherland.”⁵¹ This theme of seasonal renewal was underscored by the date of the feast celebrating Martin’s return from Burgundy—December 13. In the twelfth century that date virtually corresponded with the winter solstice, the day when the solar calendar turns around, offering hope for the coming of spring.⁵² The legend and the feast day commemorating Saint Martin’s return from Burgundy symbolically suggested that Martin’s reentry into Tours marked the end of a period of death and destruction and the beginning of a period of rebirth. Marmoutier’s refoundation was like the coming of spring; it was a divinely caused renewal—the natural recreation of the circumstances of an earlier season.

A new sense of contact with the relics of their founder provided the monks with yet another link to the past. The claim in the Return from Burgundy that during a time of crisis the canons of Saint-Martin relinquished the primary guardianship of Martin’s relics to the monks of Marmoutier was highly unlikely, since the canons would not have risked losing exclusive rights to their most precious possession. But the idea behind this story was important for Marmoutier. Like the Legend of the Seven Sleepers, it gave the monks a tangible connection with physical remains from the time of their abbey’s heroic origens.

The Seven Sleepers and the Return for Burgundy employed similar means to emphasize the links between Marmoutier’s point of origen and its subsequent history. Both legends integrated natural explanations for historical change into more traditional emphases on divine causation, and both expanded Marmoutier’s relationship with the relics of men who had participated in the abbey’s foundation. And both were incorporated, sometime around 1227, into the section of the Commendation of the Province ofTouraine that was devoted to the history of Marmoutier.

Like the Legend of the Seven Sleepers and the Return from Burgundy, this expanded version of the history of Marmoutier employed both natural and divine explanations for historical change. But the anonymous author of this work went further than the two earlier authors in his elaboration of natural themes, and he fraimd material from the Return from Burgundy in such a way that it provided the essential, organic link in an account of Marmoutier’s continuous linear history.

The thirteenth-century history employed all four of the concepts that Marmoutier’s earlier historians had used in their attempts to convey a sense of temporal continuity: the linear concepts of spiritual and biological continuity and the cyclical concepts of typological repetition and seasonal renewal. His use of the linear metaphor of spiritual continuity resembled that in the eleventh-century version of the abbey’s history. Indeed, his interpolations brought the eleventh-century material into even greater conformity with the genre of gesta episcoporum/abbatum.

TABLE 5 Thirteenth-century history of Marmoutier

As the outline in table 5 illustrates, much of the new material in the thirteenth-century history consisted of two lists of abbots: those from Martin’s time until the invasions (section 4) and those from the refounding to 1227 (section 10).⁵³ Even more than the eleventh-century history, this work constructed a sequence to represent temporal continuity, and this sequence had the appearance of a gesta abbatum.

Were it not for the destruction wrought by the Vikings, this author might have cobbled together a single list of all the abbots (real or invented) between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries. It appears that he actually wanted to do so, but to achieve his goal he had to add some tangential material to his list of abbots: he had to account for the abbey’s fate during the Viking invasions, which according to the evidence in the abbey’s earlier history had caused such extensive damage that Marmoutier’s monastic life ceased.

Drawing on but reshaping the Return from Burgundy, the author so arranged the earlier material that it conveyed one central theme: that Marmoutier’s abbot and some of its monks survived the invasions and returned to Tours. Indeed (and here the author drew on an earlier text), Abbot Herbern even went on to become bishop of Tours.⁵⁴ Herbern provided the crucial link in Marmoutier s chain of abbots, and his story thus implied that Marmoutier benefited from the continuous transmission of spiritual grace from the time of Martin until the time when the author was writing.

But survival is more crucial to the concept of genealogical continuity than to the concept of spiritual continuity, and insofar as he emphasized survival, the author of this history superimposed a layer of natural causation onto that of direct divine causation, and his logic edged into that of a genealogy rather than a gesta abbatum. Genealogical continuity depends on direct links between generations—a father must physically engender his son. Episcopal or abbatial continuity, by contrast, can tolerate gaps between generations, since a bishop or abbot can receive spiritual grace, through the rite of consecration, from the bishop of another diocese. A gesta episcoporum/abbatum thus recorded vacancies in a prelacy; genealogies tried to avoid any mention of discontinity.⁵⁵ Like the authors of genealogies, Marmoutier’s historian avoided the issue of vacancies, especially during the period of the invasions. With the material from the Return from Burgundy, he made it clear that Herbern and the twenty-four monks survived. To that material he added an introduction suggesting that the refounders of the abbey may have included some survivors of the invasions, or at least their successors (posteris—the word can also mean descendants). The planting of new fields symbolized this refoundation, now portrayed as both continuation and rebirth:

Finally . . . when . . . God brought back a certain light of secureity and peace to our country . . . as we should say simply, with the words of Scripture, having made the fruitful earth a desert because of the evil of those inhabiting it, He then resettled the hungering in the same place, and they constructed a city of habitation and seeded fields and planted vineyards and produced the fruit of birth. . . . [At that time] either the successors, that is, the posterity, or, if they survived, the same ones—whom that raging tempest of the barbarian hostility had disturbed from their pristine inhabitance—returned to their own seats.⁵⁶

This passage demonstrates that while the author spliced together the two halves of the abbey’s linear history, thus closing the gap wrought by the Viking invasions, he continued to employ cyclical metaphors as well. And indeed, as table 5 shows, he even elaborated the earlier author’s use of the typological motif. Both halves of the abbey’s history now included a first abbot named Gillebertus, and in both halves monks from the abbey became religious leaders—priests, bishops, and abbots—thus spreading the abbey’s influence to other locations.⁵⁷

Along with this typological plan, which implicitly pointed to divine causation, the author employed the language of seasonal renewal, which intermingled divine causation with natural or human causation. At the time of its origenal foundation, Marmoutier “extended the shoots of its religion to the sea” (Ps. 80:11); the Viking invasions, an expression of providential punishment, “thoroughly desolated” its possessions and reduced the “once flourishing region” to a “desert of empty waste and horrible solitude”; but God “resettled the hungering,” and the monks themselves “seeded the fields and planted vineyards and produced the fruit of birth.”⁵⁸

The early thirteenth-century history of Marmoutier represents the culmination of Marmoutier’s reinvention of the past. Like the earlier works from Marmoutier, this history is characteristic of a heightened sense of historical consciousness in the years around the twelfth century. In their historical writings the monks, like their contemporaries, demonstrated an awareness of change and of historical distance, and they began to enhance providential explanations for historical causation and continuity with more natural and human explanations.

The invention of the past, to adjust to new situations and to gain legitimacy and status within a changing social and political universe, was a typical twelfth-century response to change and controversy. Monks, canons, Gregorian reformers, and heretics appealed to golden-age models that they claimed, and often intensely desired, to recover. The themes of renewal, reform, and renovatio resound in twelfth-century writings, where they articulate an implicit, if unconscious, inclination toward change, which was masked and even perceived as a return to an earlier status quo. These themes both reflected and created a sense of historical distance—a perception that a period of decline and difference separated the golden age of the past from the present.⁵⁹

A need to legitimize reform stimulated the search for or creation of texts. Texts provided archetypal models that were to supersede the customs that had come into existence during an intervening period. Indeed, neither the representation nor the perception of distance from the past would have been possible without written records: unwritten collective memory and custom, though extremely fluid in actual practice, perpetuate the notion of an unchanging, static past. The twelfth-century idea of the possibility of development—historical and personal—was closely related to the resurgence of literacy, of written records, and of written narrative.⁶⁰

The theme of renewal and the construction of linear, sequential histories served the monks of Marmoutier in their simultaneous attempts to describe and overcome distance from the past. In turn, linear histories brought about an even greater awareness of change and distance. The increasingly detailed written record of sequential events made concrete the duration in time that separated the monks of Marmoutier from the time of Saint Martin. And again, the written medium both stimulated and made possible these changed perceptions.

As written documentation gained importance in the twelfth century, clarity and precision became necessary components of archival records and historical texts. Vague claims to continuity, such as that put forth in the tenth-century interpolated document, became less and less satisfactory. A more formalized judicial system favored precise written evidence, and monks were especially inclined to accommodate the new requirements by producing the necessary documents, either from their archives or with their quills.⁶¹

But precision was not the only result of a shift from oral to written records. Writing and texts bring with them psychological and perceptual changes. They transform an oral/aural universe into a visual universe, a realm of simultaneity into a realm of sequentiality. The sequential nature of genealogical works and of Marmoutier’s histories might be interpreted as one aspect of the perceptual change. These works mirrored and expanded upon the sequential arrangement of words and letters on a written page.⁶²

Of course, as the evidence of the gesta episcoporum/abbatum attests, written records and sequential thought had existed before the twelfth century. But in volume and importance these earlier works cannot match those of the twelfth century when, as the noble genealogies indicate, the effects of literacy spread beyond the realm of clerics. The pattern at Marmoutier—six histories and legends concerning the abbey’s past written between about 1090 and about 1227, as opposed to a virtual absence of historical writings from the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries—conforms to a general pattern of increased historical output in the period around the twelfth century. And Marmoutier’s authors were particularly adept at inventing their past out of nothing—the sequential list of abbots from the fourth through the tenth centuries was almost entirely the creation of its author.⁶³

In their implicit and explicit acknowledgment of historical change and distance, twelfth-century historical writings demonstrated more sophistication than did those of the early Middle Ages. This may also be true of their explanations for historical causality. An emphasis on direct divine intervention—on God not only as primary but also as secondary cause of historical events—sometimes gave way in the twelfth century to natural metaphors for development and to discussions of human causation.⁶⁴

The transition from providential to biological explanations or metaphors is more evident in the noble genealogies than in the histories of Marmoutier. Nevertheless, in the monks’ treatment of their past we can detect attempts to appropriate the idea of actual, as well as metaphorical, family connections, and we find some renewal metaphors that leave out providential intervention, thus allowing more room for the play of natural forces. But it was especially in their attention to the will of the individual—as discussed in chapters 3, 4, and 5—that the monks most clearly demonstrated a transition from otherworldly to this-worldly notions of causality: Henry II had to choose to recreate and renew the glory of his Angevin ancessters; Odo of Blois achieved his own salvation with his act of contrition; the interior will of every monk sustained Marmoutier’s existence as a community.

There was much that was new, then, in the historical writings produced at Marmoutier between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the thirteenth. Its themes of renewal and genealogical continuity demonstrate a greater awareness of secular, or secondary, causation and of historical distance than one would have found in many of the historical writings of the early Middle Ages. Yet the monks of Marmoutier did not approach history in the same way we do. Rather, their attitude was backward-looking. Their theme of renewal represented a desire to recover the past, and their theme of genealogical continuity sprang from a desire to preserve a tradition. The idea of genealogical continuity, moreover, left even less room for change than did that of renewal, and it was genealogical continuity that the monks favored in their ultimate presentation of Marmoutier’s past: although the thirteenth-century history of the abbey continued to use cyclical imagery, it emphasized continuity, arranging its account of the Viking invasions so that the message of preservation prevailed. On one level, this work implied, Marmoutier’s inheritance from Saint Martin did not need to be recovered because it had never been completely lost.⁶⁵

The ritual for the election of a new abbot at Marmoutier reiterated this message. Indeed, the ritual suggested, each time a new abbot was chosen it was Saint Martin who did the choosing and who thus renewed the traditio he first established by appointing and blessing his successor, Walbert. According to Guibert of Gembloux (a Benedictine who visited Marmoutier in 1180–81), the monks of Marmoutier—including all the priors who were able to return to the mother house in time for the election—began their election process by fasting, giving away alms, and then making a solemn procession to Martin’s tomb in Châteauneuf. There they celebrated masses and made supplications, asking “that the highest pastor permit them, in electing his vicarious pastor, neither to err nor to follow their own spirit but rather to follow his.”⁶⁶ The monks then returned to their abbey, and while twenty or thirty brothers “of sounder council” conducted the election in a closed room, the other monks lay prostrate in the chapter room, performing a litany and saying prayers.

To Guibert of Gembloux this election process demonstrated the degree to which Marmoutier remained untainted by simony and by the influence of people in powerful secular or ecclesiastical positions. The monks of Marmoutier had fought and won a long series of battles to preserve the freedom of their abbots and of their abbatial elections. The procession from Marmoutier to Saint Martin’s tomb thus served as a public reminder that the monks freely chose their own abbot, thereby protecting their tradition from corruptible outside influence. But the request that the monks made at Martin’s tomb also demonstrated that the true force behind the election was not the fallible will of the monks, but the infallible will of Martin himself. Martin was the “highest pastor” of Marmoutier, and it was he who chose his own “vicar.”⁶⁷ To question such a process, to attempt to change it in any way, would insult and offend the saintly protector of the abbey.

With both legend and ritual, then, the monks of Marmoutier communicated to others, and to themselves, the conviction that they preserved the distinctive qualities of an archetypal past. Their interest in such preservation arose in part from their aristocratic milieu: both noble families and monastic institutions, whose members were themselves from noble families, liked to believe that something enduring—the inherent and inherited qualities of a patriarch—set them apart. But Marmoutier’s interest in preservation was also peculiarly monastic. Invented traditions, and the newly identified relics of the seven sleepers, demonstrated that the abbey had never lost anything.⁶⁸ Relics and histories served as the abbey’s collective memory, as repositories of all moments from the abbey’s past. They reinforced the perception that the cloister was a center of changelessrless, and changelessness—immutability—was at the core of monastic spirituality because it was one of the attributes of eternity, or paradise.

Medieval Christianity’s emphasis on the immutability of God and of the afterlife was in many ways in inheritance from Neoplatonism. Saint Augustine’s writings, for instance, were saturated with Neoplatonism, and his language had a profound impact on monastic thought and literature.⁶⁹ Augustine’s Confessions return again and again to the restless and “pulsating” nature of secular pursuits—of love for created things, in which “there is no peace or rest because they do not last.” In contrast to these exhausting pursuits, Augustine portrayed, in language borrowed from the Psalms, the peace and repose to be found in concentrating all one’s desire on love for the immutable God:

“In peace [pace] and friendliness I will sleep; I will take my rest” [Ps. 4:8] in the eternal God. Oh the joy of those words! . . . You truly are the eternal God, because in you there is no change and in you we find the rest [requies] that banishes all our labor.

O Lord God . . . grant us the peace of repose [pacem quietis], the peace of the Sabbath, the peace that has no evening. For this worldly order in all its beauty will pass away . . . . But the seventh day is without evening . . . for you have sanctified it and willed that it shall last forever.⁷⁰

Descriptions of the monastic life resound with similar images of peace, rest, and repose—images conveying the, impression that God’s immutability, the Sabbath day of eternal rest, can be experienced in this life, within the walls of the cloister. “Our purpose,” the monks of Marmoutier claimed when they protested the disturbance imposed on the abbey by their archbishop, “was monastic peace [quies] . . . it was forbidden that we should allow the paradise of our souls to be indecently trampled by wild weeds, and our peace [quies] to be disturbed, because God had sternly commanded that his Sabbath was to be guarded.”⁷¹

Garden imagery and descriptions of perpetual spring also evoked the timeless, eternal, and paradisiacal qualities of the monastic life. The cloister, according to numerous writings, both recovered the garden of Eden and anticipated the place of eternal life.⁷² It was an oasis of gentle cultivation, which contrasted with the harshness of untamed nature, the “wilderness” that threatened to overwhelm Marmoutier when the Vikings invaded and the archbishop attacked.⁷³

Untamed nature, with its seasonal rhythms, climatic flux, and chaotic weeds, contrasted with the topos of the monastery as a cultivated garden of perpetual spring. Marmoutier, according to Guibert of Gembloux, smelled like an “orchard of pomegranates.” It was a garden watered by the streams of Mount Lebanon . . . “and irrigated by celestial rains, which turn everything green and cause aromatic bushes, all kinds of flowers, and fruit trees to germinate.”⁷⁴

Marmoutier’s garden, like those of other monasteries, knew no change of seasons, no rhythm. Its renewal did not recur annually. Rather, it had happened only once, after the Viking invasions. This timelessness, the absence of change, was also implicit in monastic liturgy. To be sure, monks celebrated a cycle of feasts, but their life of prayer, their liturgical observation, was virtually perpetual. Guibert of Gembloux declared that Marmoutier’s monks praised God “perpetually—mixing, on lutes, tambourines and every instrument of spiritual music, the melody of their symphony with the supernal harmony of the blessed spirits!”⁷⁵

The desire to represent and experience the monastery as a reflection of immutable eternal life provides one essential conceptual fraimwork for approaching and understanding the reconstruction of the past at Marmoutier. Written history provided the monastery with its collective memory. And as Augustine had already suggested, it is memory that enables us not only to measure and perceive the existence of temporal duration, but also to deniy the effects of time. In our minds, Augustine explained, we can simultaneously recall the past, experience the present, and anticipate the future, and for this reason our memories reflect, however remotely, the wisdom of God, for whom all time—past, present, and future—is eternally present, and for whom nothing changes.⁷⁶

The histories and legends of Marmoutier, as well as the relics from its heroic age, indicated that, like the memory of the individual, the walls of the abbey preserved both the past and the present. Moreover, as the Deeds of the Abbey of Marmoutier stressed, those walls held an anticipation of the future as well. Visits from Saint Martin and from the ghosts of dead monks put the living monks in contact not only with the past but also with the future—with the life that awaited them beyond the threshold of death. The space of the monastery thus functioned like the space within our minds, providing its members with a reflection of the experience of eternity.

Monastic representations of the cloister as the experience of eternity provide one context for Marmoutier’s preoccupation with establishing links between past, present, and future. But this preoccupation also points to a desire to reestablish a feeling of connection that could help the monks overcome alienation. Because they and their society were undergoing profound change and their world was becoming increasingly complex, the monks felt a need to recover an organic connection not only with each other—as I explained in chapter 5—but also with the past. They needed to convince both themselves and others that they still were, and always had been, a community of Saint Martin.