Peter Lang AG

Review
Author(s): Carolina J. Fernández
Review by: Carolina J. Fernández
Source: Mediaevistik, Vol. 22 (2009), pp. 493-500
Published by: Peter Lang AG
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42586944
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 Mediaevistik 22 • 2009 493
Latin part and must confess that I found
the vernacular part obscure and difficult
to penetrate at times. Although general
introductions to the materials are given,
the discussions presuppose quite some
familiarity with the texts and/or previous
scholarship. Generally, no translations
are given of texts (whether Latin or
Middle High German), even the title of
the book is not translated, although it is
expounded in the beginning of the intro-
duction. The appendix is helpful yet also
with certain obscurities, some of them
clearly editorial errors. Generally, it
would have been helpful to have had
more textual material at hand - and in
larger excerpts - in the appendix. Music
examples 1-6 and 9-22 are given in the
appendix, but example 7 and 8 are found
in the main text (p. 107), seemingly with
no explanation for this editorial incon-
sistency.
Kandleťs writing is dense and in the
Latin part often marked by digressions
to other songs, of which full text and
music, however, are normally not given.
These parallel examples may be quite
relevant but they often interrupt the line
of the argument in confusing ways. This
is then resumed (often more than a page
later) with a stereotype formula "doch
zurück zu . . ." (see for instance pp. 2, 43,
70, 77).
Altogether, the intention of the vol-
ume is laudable. It also contains much of
interest, many thorough, although not
always equally convincing analyses. The
book appears as not very accommodat-
ing for a general readership. As much as
I have been able to judge, it draws on the
main relevant literature although I have
missed (in the Latin part) the work of
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Andreas Haug and Gunilla Björkvall on
word music relations, especially con-
cerning the formal aspects. Also, I have
been surprised not to see Leo Treitler's
work more explicitly brought to use (al-
though he is cited). It could also have
added to the interest of the volume to
have had more principled discussions
about ideas of emotionality in music and
the question of correspondences between
texts and music in such aspects, a
discussion led on by John Stevens in
1986. Stevens is cited but his discussion
not carried on.
Nils Holger Petersen , ph.d. Centre
Leader ; Associate Professor • Centre for
the Study of the Cultural Heritage
of Medieval Rituals • Department of
Church History , The Theological
Faculty • University of Copenhagen •
Koebmagergade 46 •
DK-1150 Copenhagen K
nhp@teol.ku.dk
Damien Boqiiet, L'ordre de l'affect au
Moyen Âge. Autour de l'anthropolo-
gie affective d'Aelred de Rievaulx,
Publications du CRAHM, Caen: 20059
378 pp.
The notions of affection, desire, appetite
and the like, had an age of splendour du-
ring the XII cent.. Afterwards, they be-
came eclipsed until being recovered by
the psychoanalysis. This book, which
focuses on the notion of affections in the
XII cent., is certainly ambitious. Firstly,
it aims to intersect the history of the in-
dividual with that of the society. In the
enlightening preliminary words, the
author and his master, Paillette L'Her-
mite-Leclercq, say that affections called
494 Mediaevistik 22 • 2009
the attention of the social historians long
ago. From the end of the XIX cent, on-
wards, Darwin, the School of Annals
and the contemporary gender studies and
the history of sexuality made of the in-
dividual human emotions a concern of
the Social History. A second purpose is
to integrate the genealogical and the
synchronic perspectives, combining the
lexical and the philosophical analysis of
the medieval texts with a detailed explo-
ration of its Classical and Christian
sources. The genealogical perspective
identifies some nodal moments in the
history of the sensitivity precedent to the
XII cent.. The synchronic, instead,
analyses the lexicon and notions of the
renewed anthropology of the XII cent.
Thirdly, the author aims to correct some
interpreters who read the medieval
sources appealing to some psychoana-
lytical categories, while the medieval
notion of affections remains essentially
strange to our modern sensitivity and
needs to be analysed in its specific terms.
L'ordre de l'ajfect au Moyen Âge is
concerned mainly with the thought of
Aelred of Rievaulx (1110-1167). Com-
ing from a lineage of ecclesiastics very
renowned in Durham and Hexham, in
the Scottish border, Aelred had an active
institutional participation and a generous
pen. That proves how far from the con-
temptus mundi he was: he became the
abbot of Revesby, in the Lincoln-Shire
(1143-1147) and of the powerful abbey
of Rievaulx, in the north of York-Shire
(1147-1167), where he had taken the
habits at the age of twenty-four. As a
conspicuous ecclesiastic of England, he
had personal and epistolary interchange
with the courts of Scotland, England and
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France and the Papacy, and belonged to
the first generation of Cîteaux (1115-
1170), whose spiritual inspirer was Ber-
nard of Clairvaux. Precisely, though
Aelred was the greatest theoretician of
affections and friendship in the whole
monastic milieu of the XII cent., a re-
newed way of approaching the subject of
emotions or affections was ascribable in
general to the "white monks", the Cis-
tercians. That's why Boquet will often
confront Aelred with Bernard, William
of Saint Thierry, Guerric of Igny, Isaac
of l'Etoile and Gilbert of Hoyland.
Eventually, the Cistercians themselves
were not discordant with the cultural
context of the XII cent., coloured by a
singular concerning with affections. A
bare statistical survey shows that the
words affectus/affectio occur more than
29.000 in the Latin Patrology, appearing
more than half of them in sources of the
XII cent., and being recurrent in the vo-
cabulary of the Cistercian writers (see p.
22).
After a whole first part dedicated to
Aelred's sources, Boquet devotes the
following two parts of his book to ana-
lyse three works of the wide Aelredian
corpus: The Mirror of Charity , The Life
of the Cloistered Woman and On Spiri-
tual Friendship. So there it is the plan of
the study: a genealogical inquiry, from
the Classical ages up to Aelred, comes
before the central survey on the Aelre-
dian anthropology, with a special atten-
tion to the place of affections in it. In the
end, Aelred's theory of the spiritual male
friendship within the monastic frame is
understood as the social counterpart of
his "affective" anthropology. In an in-
termediate section, the Aelredian view
 Mediaevistik 22 • 2009 495
of the cloistered woman appears as a
kind of paradoxical confirmation of the
precedent. A synopsis of these contents
will clarify the plan.
What the author calls "a genealogy"
of the Cistercian anthropology is slightly
different from a inquiry, certainly enter-
prising, of its main antecedents in the
Classical age, from the middle of I cent.
BC up to the beginnings of II cent. AC,
and the Patristic, between III and V
centuries AD. During the first, a whole
philosophical terminology around affec-
tions was forged. During the second, that
terminology was partially transferred to
the Christian theology, which would be
the very matrix of the Cistercian anthro-
pology. Notwithstanding all that back-
ground, all along his work Boquet will
stress on the originality of the Cistercian
doctrine of affections, reaching to affirm
that it would lead - even if not deliber-
ately - to undermine the very Augustin-
ián anthropology.
As for the Classical period, a number
of lexical sources are explored, after
which the focus is set on the binomial
Cicero-Seneca. Quintilian and Cicero
drew a distinction between affection as a
baie pre-rational and pre-moral impulse
( hormé , impulsici), and as a positive dis-
obedience to the commands of reason,
being only the second, morally good
(eupathia) or evil (pàthos ). Then Seneca
used this distinction to speak on the
complete process of alienation of the
soul: there would be, according to him, a
first collision (primum animi ictum) or a
"pre-affect" (propátheia ), which is not
under our control, like a reflex. After it,
a voluntary impulse supervenes, which
is affection or passion, taken in the
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proper sense. Yet, only if we follow it,
we can say we have become vicious.
The Cistercians were linked with that
Classical tradition through the long and
complex mediation of the Greek and
Latin Patristic.
It is worth noticing that in the Bible
the notions of affectuslaffectio are cer-
tainly scanty, so the Patristic must have
received them from the philosophical
tradition. In the Eastern Mediterranean,
from Philo Judaeus to Evagrius Pontic,
the author traces a tendency to narrow
the breach between pre-affections and
affections or passions -even if not to an-
nul it-. Not only Philo, but also the fol-
lowing Christian leaders of the school of
Alexandria - Clement, Origen and oth-
ers -, said in different ways that the
Christian would be able to manage hon-
estly his affections, pre-affections or
sensible impulses. The Cappadocians -
Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nice and
Gregory of Nazianzus - introduced the
idea that a rational control of affections
(eupathia) would not be the proper goal
of man, but just a second best, conse-
quence of the Sin, so after the resurrec-
tion he would be strictly apathetic.
Evagrius, stepping after Origen, identi-
fied the "first movements" of the soul
with the demons and temptations that the
Christian is to overcome. On the Latin
side, Boquet registers a number of posi-
tions oscillating between two tendencies:
either seeing affections as natural, or
claiming for a strict purification of them.
John Cassian, Jerome and Ambrose of
Milan represented, respectively, a more
optimistic, a more pessimistic and a
moderate view of this antithesis. As for
Jerome, who annulled the distinction
496 Mediaevistik 22 • 2009
between a pre-moral sense of "affection"
and the properly immoral passion, he
could be said to stress the trend of Ori-
gen and Evagrius, but with a more pes-
simistic tint. The "optimism" of Cassian
resides in his greater confidence in the
man's power to annihilate his bad affec-
tions. St. Augustine ended to ratify those
previous trends to identify affection with
voluntary impulses, which constituted "a
capital moment in the history of the
Western theology" (see p. 86). For him,
it would not be from the body, but from
"flesh" - as opposed to "spirit" -, that
the evil comes. But he said that, as the
human will had been damaged by the
Sin, the man was not able to achieve
apathy in this life, as the superb pagan
philosophers had supposed. In this way,
the Hellenistic apathy was definitively
dismantled. That is why Boquet speaks
of the "emancipation" of the Christian
notion of affection from its Hellenistic
sources. By the way, he adds, Augustine
made a certain concession to a positive
idea of the sensitivity in the celestial life,
and by doing so, he reintroduced the
sensitivity in the man's innermost nature.
From Augustine up to the middle XI
cent., the matrix remained essentially the
same. Anyway, Boquet keeps trying to
be exhaustive: he dedicates some para-
graphs to a number of intermediary
authors (Gregory the Great, Boethius, St.
Anselm, Hugh and Richard of St. Vic-
tor) and even to some discussions be-
tween the historiographers (see pp. 98-
102). Nevertheless, he succeeds in con-
serving the thematic unity through this
sort of marathon. After more than one
hundred pages, we reach the specific
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theme and true core of the study, the "af-
fective" Cistercian anthropology.
Also in this second part, an irre-
proachable analysis of the central texts is
complemented, now and then, with quite
detailed summaries of their respective
Classical and Christian sources. Perhaps
there wouldn't have been a strict neces-
sity to make a synopsis of themes so
known as the Platonic partition of the
soul, with its aftérmath (see pp. 151-
154), or of the trinitarian anthropology
of St. Augustine (see pp. 173-181). The
author begins with the body/soul rela-
tionships as discussed by a number of
Cistercian authors. They dismissed the
likeness between the present man and
the Creator, thinking that it had been lost
because of the Sin and only could be re-
covered through the ascetic and mystic
way. Their anthropologic theorisation
was always subordinated to their strat-
egy of a spiritual restoration. Anyway,
they couldn't avoid dealing with the
classical problems of a Christian anthro-
pology. The scatological compromise
with the resurrection of the body was
connectable with the famous locus of the
creation as a "chain of being", in whose
centre is man, seen as a unity of body
and soul. All this couldn't but conflict
with the dualistic heritage of the Plato-
nism and the ascetic Christian impera-
tive. So the Cistercians came up with a
number of solutions, which Boquet
summarises patiently. They spoke of the
union of body and soul as the result,
now of an ineffable descent, now of a
"zone of contact" between them, and
some like Aelred used the very vocabu-
lary of affections to explain it.
 Mediaevistik 22 • 2009 497
When Boquet introduces the specific
theme of affections, he stresses on the
subtle freshness of the Cistercians dis-
course, which could be dimmed, in his
opinion, neither by the Platonic nor by
the Augustinián backgrounds. Enriching
the metaphors around the heart as the
organ of emotions, obsessed about
making "lists of affections" which gath-
ered the Classical and Patristic classifi-
cations, the Cistercians managed to
"enlarge" - says the author - the impor-
tance of affections, emotions and sensi-
tivity. They connected affections with
the rational as well as with the sensible
faculties of the soul. The Augustinián
triad of memory, intelligence and will,
the true matrix of the Cistercian anthro-
pology, was coloured by a stronger in-
terest in the will than in the intellect, and
in the desire as the strength capable of
leading the whole process of human dei-
fication. To this point, it is brought up
the big Christian theme of love, whose
relationship with affections would be a
sort of circle (love would be a type of af-
fection, and the inverse). Here, in these
final pages of the second part (see pp.
195-219), Boqueťs point gets clearer, as
we find out that was Aelred the only
Cistercian who tried to decode the proc-
ess of loving. He did it in his Mirror of
Charity ( 1142-1143).
According to Aelred, the act of lov-
ing consists of three moments: election,
movement and fruition. It is worth no-
ticing that he was mostly interested in
the third one, and more importantly, that
he affirmed love could be caused by af-
fection, by reason or by both. When he
told that affections themselves impulse
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the human soul, Aelred was indicating
that the will simply would not intervene
at the very beginning of the psychologi-
cal process of loving. For him, "affec-
tions act with purely subjective criteria,
not reasonably, in the sense that they an-
swer to an elementary principle of
pleasure" (see p. 206). Aelred was tear-
ing apart from the Augustinián doctrine
and returning to the Hellenistic pre-
affections, mostly rejected by the Patris-
tic. This is why - Boquet concludes -
the Aelredian anthropology "under-
mined" the whole anthropological
building of St. Augustine. Certainly,
Aelred wasn't alone in this, but he seems
to have gone further than the other Cis-
tercians (see pp. 241-2 and 292). What is
more, he didn't see the man's "affective"
nature as a defeat of his post-Adamic
state. To cap it all, Aelred referred to af-
fections as spontaneous or gratuitous
and self-generated: the desire or the af-
fective impulses are immediately fol-
lowed by pleasure, no matter what is de-
sired. Here, thinks Boquet, there would
be implied a certain idea of a narcissist
self-conscience ( conscientia singulo-
rum), our immediate self-experience as
individuals opposed to the world and the
others. Having reached one of the higher
points of his interpretation (see pp. 214-
219), Boquet immediately limits the ex-
tent of it: in the thought of Aelred, the
inner tension between his new positive
conception of the human sensitiveness
and the burden of the negative Patristic
tradition would remain unsolved. The
Cistercians would not perform an "an-
thropological revolution" (see p. 253),
but at least they would refuse to ampu-
498 Mediaevistik 22 • 2009
tate the sensitiveness off the man, and
believed he could turn it fully towards
the spiritual pole.
The third part of the study is devoted
to Aelreďs "strategies to ordain affec-
tions". In the third book of his Mirror of
Charity , Aelred developed a hierarchical
classification of affections: the spiritual
and the rational affections in the superior
level, the natural and carnal affections in
the inferior, and a sort of intermediary
affection called officialis. Along that
scale, Boquet believes to find traces of
the renewed conception of sensitivity.
For example, when Aelred spoke of the
affectus spiritualise he said again that af-
fections are inner and spontaneous, prior
to will and self-sustained by the pleasure
that is proper of them, even if the origi-
nal stimulation (divine or demoniac)
came from the outside. And when treat-
ing the very affectus carnalis , Aelred
recognised that the affection for the
physical beauty could be the origin of a
virtuous feeling, for the affective im-
pulse was morally neutral in itself. Ael-
reďs strategies to ordain affections re-
sulted in two utterly different models: the
mystic hermit female and the monastic
community of male spiritual friends.
The first model was sketched in his
treatise De vita inclusarum (finished
between 1160 and 1166). Trough Bo-
queťs exposition, the Aelredian view of
women appears to be more delicate and
equilibrated than one may think at first
sight. It's true that Aelred made of the
virginity the ideal of a female life, to the
point of encouraging the woman to obtu-
rate her body as much as possible, and in
many senses - to close her orifices and
her senses, to limit her verbal communi-
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cation, etc. -. But the Aelredian exhor-
tation for the woman to perform an ab-
solute self-control and to be amputated
off sociability lay upon a singular con-
viction. If she would succeed in those
ascetic exercises, she could enjoy a
complete expansion of her sensitivity in
the mystic effusion. While Aelred
thought that female spirituality could
reach his summit only in the loneliness
of a cloister, he dëveloped quite a differ-
ent project for the male.
The second model was drawn in
Aelred's On Spiritual Friendship. Hav-
ing been written, in its most part, be-
tween 1 164 and 1 167, this treatise dated
from Aelred's last years, as well as his
Mirror of Charity (to whom it some-
times refers), the Life of the Cloistered
Woman and the Dialogue on the soul. As
a way to anticipate some polemics with
other interpreters, Boquet points, from
the beginning, that the references to
autobiographical situations should not be
taken literally, but as a part of the whole
literary effect that a dialogue is supposed
to have. The Aelredian treatise on
friendship came out in a time of cultural
flourishing characterised by the redis-
covering of Seneca and Cicero. Directly
inspired in Cicero's De amici tia, it was
taken currently as a bare Christian ad-
aptation of it. In fact, Aelred himself an-
ticipates in the prologue that he is per-
forming an agreement between Cicero
and the Christian authorities. Then, it is
not surprising that he combines some
statements of a neat Augustinián coin
("Ecce ego et tu, et spero quod tertius
inter nos Christus sit") with the classical
definitions of friendship, such as the Ci-
ceronian "rerum humanarum et divi-
 Mediaevistik 22 • 2009 499
narum cum benevolentia et caritate con-
sensio" (see pp. 281-282). It is certainly
suggestive - Boquet will point - that
Aelred substituted John's quotation "God
is Charity" for the expression Deus ami-
citia est , as if he replaced a Christian
concept with a pagan one. But Boquet
will maintain that Aelred did not merely
update the classical theory of friendship,
but made a substantial theoretic contri-
bution.
A quotation of Aelred (see p. 317)
provides a definition of friendly feelings.
There can be seen that, as Boquet had
pointed out, Aelreďs theory of friend-
ship depended on his whole "sensitive"
anthropology. Among a number of feel-
ings founded in love - Aelred says -,
only one comes both from reason and af-
fection. Love can come from nature (the
love of a mother towards her child),
from the good offices (the love of a vas-
sal towards his lord), from reason alone
(the charitable Christian love towards
the enemies) or from affection alone (the
love towards someone physically fair,
strong or eloquent). But when reason
persuades us of loving someone virtuous
and at the same time we feel attracted to
him for his charming behaviour, there
exists a bond of friendship. What fol-
lows in Aelreďs text, and takes more
than half of it, is a detailed codification
of the friendly bounds among the mem-
bers of the monastic community. Cer-
tainly, these contents depend undoubt-
edly on Cicero. But Aelred did make a
contribution: to think that human re-
demption could come from a social, in-
ter-subjective, horizontal bond as friend-
ship, while in the past it had been seen
as essentially vertical (see p. 306).
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Before ending, it is time for Boquet
to review some controversial interpreta-
tions of Aelreďs theory of friendship
(see p. 308-323). For the last thirty
years, the scholars have been discussing
whether the Aelredian exaltation of male
friendship wasn't a defence of male ho-
mosexuality, practised or sublimated.
The polemic arose when the Gender
Studies were growing up; it was initiated
by D. Roby, the English translator of
Aelreďs On Spiritual Friendship (1970)
and J. Boswell, the author of an influen-
tial history of sexuality (1980). Bos-
well's polemical contention was that
Aelred promoted a homosexual life style.
That early thesis was refined later by Mc
Guire (1988 and 1994), to whom Aelred
didn't mean to promote such a life style ,
though he must have been aware of his
homosexuality when he took the habits,
when he wrote, etc.. In the antipodes,
Jaeger (1999) claimed that some erotic
discourses of the past did not express
private feelings, but public gestures of
an aristocratic sociability. Although they
didn't lack emotional contents, the sort
of sensitivity they expressed remains in-
commensurable with ours. Boquet
agrees that homosexuality, as it is under-
stood in contemporary cultural studies,
did not exist in the XII cent.. Judging
from his own position in this polemic,
we could conclude that, the deeper is the
study of the sources, the more cautious
their evaluation: he prefers to speak of
"homo-sociability" or "homo-sensitiv-
ity", that is to say, a sort of crossing
between monastic and aristocratic sensi-
tivities (see pp. 321-322).
We cannot but celebrate that this
study has come out. The author managed
500 Mediaevistik 22 • 2009
to keep the unity through the whole sur-
vey, even when he could have been
more concise in the "genealogical" sec-
tion. His central thesis is quite audacious
so as to get the reader interested, but
also enough prudent to avoid being ac-
cused of anachronism. We wonder,
anyway, if the author has not overvalued
the importance of the so-called "out-
break of affections" within the whole
Cistercian view of the world. Slightly
audacious also seem to be his suggesti-
ons about the later influence of the Ci-
stercian theory of affections, sketched in
the conclusions (see pp. 327-333).
Carolina J. Fernández • Universidad
de Buenos Aires
Canossa 1077 - Erschütterung der
Welt. Geschichte, Kunst und Kultur
am Aufgang der Romanik, hg. v.
Christoph Stiegemann, Matthias
Wemhoff, Hirmer Verlag, München
2006, Essays: 633 S., Katalog: 581 S.
mit zahlreichen, meist farbigen Abb.
Jörg Jarnut, Matthias Wemhoff,
Hrsg., Vom Umbruch zur Erneue-
rung? Das 11. und beginnende 12.
Jahrhundert - Positionen der For-
schung. Historischer Begleitband zur
Ausstellung "Canossa 1077 - Erschüt-
terung der Welt. Geschichte, Kunst
und Kultur am Aufgang der Roma-
nik" (MittelalterStudien 13), Wilhelm
Fink, München 2006, 640 Seiten, 40
s/w Abb.
Obwohl die ,Zeit der Salier' in den letz-
ten Jahren bekanntlich in überreichem
Ausmaß dokumentiert wurde, konnte
man den 900. Todestag Kaiser Heinrichs
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IV. nicht ohne touristisch und buch-
händlerisch vielversprechende Aktivitä-
ten vorübergehen lassen. Die Canossa-
Ausstellung in Paderborn (21. Juli bis 5.
November 2006) hat wie zu erwarten
entsprechende Begleitpublikationen ge-
zeitigt, von denen die drei hier ange-
zeigten schon durch die identische Um-
schlaggestaltung ihre Zusammengehö-
rigkeit demonstrieren. Politische Ge-
schichte, Kirchengeschichte, Kunstge-
schichte sind die Disziplinen, aus deren
Sicht das Thema im Wesentlichen be-
handelt wird, andere wie etwa die Mu-
sikgeschichte sind ganz am Rande ver-
treten, viele wie Sozial- und Mentali-
tätsgeschichte wenig oder gar nicht be-
rücksichtigt.
Es sind weitgehend dieselben, mit
ganz wenigen Ausnahmen deutschen
Verfasser, die sich im Essay-Band und
im Begleitband zu den mehr oder minder
gleichen Themen äußern, und die sich in
früheren Publikationen schon so oft zu
diesen oder nahverwandten geäußert ha-
ben, mit aller Kompetenz, unbestreitbar.
Aber die Spannung hält sich für Leser
aus der Zunft doch in Grenzen, wenn die
Geschichtsschreibung wieder - um be-
liebige Beispiele zu nennen - von Hans-
Werner Goetz, das päpstliche Zeremoni-
ell von Bernhard Schimmelpfennig oder
die Elfenbeinkunst von Hermann Fillitz
behandelt werden. Das ist keine Kritik
an den Verfassern, man wird unver-
meidlicher Weise zu Beiträgen über
Themen eingeladen, die man schon als
Dissertation und Habilitation genugsam
abgehandelt hat, aber ein Hinweis auf
den in allen drei Bänden so deutlichen
Konservativismus der Organisatoren, die
die Möglichkeit, hier einmal neuen Zu-