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Writing Normandy

Writing Normandy brings together eighteen articles by historian Felice

Lifshitz, some of which are published here for the first time.
The articles examine the various ways in which local and regional
narratives about the past were created and revised in Normandy during the
central Middle Ages. These narratives are analyzed through a combination
of both cultural studies and manuscript studies in order to assess how they
functioned, who they benefitted, and the various contexts in which they
were transmitted. The essays pay particular attention to the narratives built
around venerated saints and secular rulers, and in doing so bring together
narratives that have traditionally been discussed separately by scholars.
The book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural history and
medieval history, as well as those interested in manuscript studies.

Felice Lifshitz is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and of Religious

Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her publications include
Gender in Historical Film and Television (2018), co-edited with Carol
Donelon and Siobhan Craig, and Religious Women in Early Carolingian
Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture (2014).
VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES

Writing Normandy
Felice Lifshitz

Writing Normandy
Stories of Saints and Rulers
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition © 2021 Felice Lifshitz

The right of Felice Lifshitz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-13953-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-02934-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1095

This book is dedicated to the memory of Caroline Allen Pripps Marin. May
she rest in power and in peace.
CONTENTS

List of abbreviations
Preface

Part I: “Hagiography” and historical representation

1 Beyond positivism and genre: “hagiographical” texts as historical narrative

Viator 25 (1994): 95–113, republished here with permission of the
University of California Press.

2 Still useless after all these years: the concept of “hagiography” in the
twenty-first century

Part II: Historiographic discourse and saintly relics: the archbishops and
Rouen

3 The “Privilege of St. Romanus”: provincial independence and

hagiographical legends at Rouen
Analecta Bollandiana 107 (1989):161–170, republished here with
permission of the Société des Bollandistes.

4 The Acta Archiepiscoporum Rotomagensium: a monastery or cathedral

product?
Analecta Bollandiana 108 (1990): 337–347, republished here with
permission of the Société des Bollandistes.

5 Eight men in: Rouennais traditions of archiepiscopal sanctity

 The Haskins Society Journal: Studies in Medieval History,
vol. 2, ed.
Robert B. Patterson (London: Hambledon Continuum, 1990), pp. 63–74,
used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

6 St. Romanus of Rouen: Frankish missionary in Viking Normandy

“S. Romain: Missionnaire franc dans la Normandie des Vikings,” in Voix
d’ouest en Europe, souffles d’Europe en ouest: actes du Colloque
international d’Angers, 21–24 mai 1992, ed. Georges Cesbron (Angers:
Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1993), pp. 23–30, republished here (in an
English translation by the author) with permission of the University of
Angers.

7 The politics of historiography: the memory of bishops in eleventh-century

Rouen
History and Memory 10 (1998): 118–137, republished here with permission
of Indiana University Press.

8 The cults of the holy bishops of Rouen from 396 to 996: the role of oral
traditions and popular actions
“Les cultes des saints évêques de Rouen de 396 à 996: Le rôle des traditions
orales et des actions populaires,” in 396–1996: XVIe centenaire de la
cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen: Colloque international, 5–7 décembre
1996, ed. Yves Lescroart (Rouen: Direction régionale des affaires culturelles
de Haute-Normandie, 2005), pp. 49–56, republished here (in an English
translation by the author) with permission of Yves Lescroart and the
Direction régionale des affaires culturelles de Haute-Normandie.

Part III: Historiographic discourse and saintly relics: beyond Rouen

9 The “exodus of holy bodies” reconsidered: the translation of the relics of St.
Gildardus of Rouen to Soissons
Analecta Bollandiana 110 (1992): 329–340, republished here with
permission of the Société des Bollandistes.
10 The migration of Neustrian relics in the Viking Age: the myth of
voluntary exodus, the reality of coercion, and theft
Early Medieval Europe 4 (1995): 175–192, republished here with
permission of John Wiley and Sons.

11 Apostolicity theses in Gaul: the Histories of Gregory and the

“hagiography” of Bayeux
The World of Gregory of Tours, eds. Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood
(Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 211–228, republished here with permission of
Koninklijke Brill NV.

Part IV: Dudo of St. Quentin and the Gesta Normannorum

12 Dudo’s historical narrative and the Norman succession of 996

Journal of Medieval History 20 (1994): 101–120, republished here with
permission of Taylor and Francis.

13 Viking Normandy: Dudo of St. Quentin’s Gesta Normannorum

ORB Online Library, http://163.238.55.65/orb_done/dudo/dudintro.html,
1996, © Felice Lifshitz.

14 Dudo of St. Quentin (fl. late tenth century)

A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, ed. Daniel R. Woolf, 2 vols.,
(New York: Garland, 1998), vol. 1, p. 248, © Daniel R. Woolf. Republished
with permission.

15 Carolingian Normandy: an essay on continuity, using neglected sources

“La Normandie carolingienne. Essai sur la continuité, avec utilisation de
sources negligés,” Annales de Normandie 48 (1998): 505–524, republished
here (in an English translation by the author) with permission of Annales
de Normandie.

16 Translating “feudal” vocabulary: Dudo of St. Quentin

 The Haskins Society Journal: Studies in Medieval History,
vol. 9, ed.
Christopher P. Lewis (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2001), pp. 39–56,
reprinted by permission of Boydell and Brewer Ltd.

Part V: Women and gender

17 The Encomium Emmae Reginae: a “political pamphlet” of the eleventh

century?
The Haskins Society Journal: Studies in Medieval History, vol. 1, ed.
Robert B. Patterson (London: Hambledon Continuum, 1989), pp. 39–50,
used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

18 Sifting for fictions: women in Dudo of St. Quentin’s androcentric Gesta

Normannorum

Manuscripts cited
Index
ABBREVIATIONS

Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, vel a

AASS catholicis scriptoribus celebrantur,
eds. Société des
Bollandistes, 68 vols. (Antwerp: Meursius, 1643–1940).
AB Analecta Bollandiana

AHR American Historical Review

BC Bibliothèque du chapitre
Bibliotheca hagiographica latina, eds. Société des
BHL Bollandistes, 2 vols. and supplements (Brussels: Société des
Bollandistes, 1898–1911 and 1987).
BM Bibliothèque municipale
BN Bibliothèque nationale de France
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 13 vols. (Rome: Istituto Giovanni
BSS
XXIII nella Pontificia Università lateranense, 1960–1970).
c. circa
Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum
antiquiorum saeculo XVI qui asservantur in Bibiotheca
CCHP
Nationali Parisiensi, eds. Hagiographi Bollandiani, 3 vols.
(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1889–1893).
Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum
CCHR bibliothecae publicae Rotomagensis, ed. Albert Poncelet,
AB 23 (1904): 129–275.
coll. columns
d. died
 Dudo of St. Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum
Dudo, De Normanniae ducum, ed. Jules Lair (Mémoires de la Société
moribus des Antiquaires de Normandie 23; Caen: F. Le Blanc-
Hardel, 1865).
Dudo of St. Quentin, History of the Normans, trans. Eric
Dudo, HN
Christiansen (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1998).
eds. editors
esp. especially
et al. and others
Recueil des actes des ducs de Normandie de 911 à 1066,
ed.
Fauroux,
Marie Fauroux (Mémoires de la Société des Anti-quaires de
Recueil
Normandie 36; Caen: Caron, 1961).
fl. floruit
fol. folio
Gallia Christiania in provincias distributa, 16 vols.(Paris:
GC
Coignard, 1715–1785 and Didot, 1856–1865).
Bénédictins de la Congrégation de Saint-Maur, et.
HLF al.,Histoire littéraire de la France, 46 vols. (Paris: Imprim-
erie Nationale, 1733–2018).
lat. latin
Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre”
Felice Lifshitz, “The Dossier of Romanus of Rouen: The
Lifshitz,
Political Uses of Hagiographical Texts” (Ph.D. Dissertation;
“Dossier”
Columbia University, 1988).
Lifshitz,
Felice Lifshitz, “Dudo’s Historical Narrative and the
“Dudo’s
Norman Succession of 996,” Journal of Medieval History 20
Historical
(1994): 101–120.
Narrative”
Lifshitz, Felice Lifshitz, The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria:
Norman Historiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics, 684–1090
Conquest (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1995).
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica

MGH SRG MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum

MGH SRM Scriptores rerum merovingicarum

MGH SS Scriptores

MM Médiathèque municipale
nal nouvelle acquisition latine
no. number
nos. numbers
Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic
OV Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968–1980)
Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne,
PL
221 vols. (Paris: Petit-Montrouge, 1844–1864).
s.v. sub verbo
SB-PK Staatsbibliothek-Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto
Settimane
medioevo

St. saint
trans. translator
“Vita Sancti “Vita Sancti Gildardi, episcopi Rothomagensis et eiusdem
Gildardi,” ed. translatio Suessiones, anno 838–840 facta,” ed. Albert
Poncelet Poncelet, AB 8 (1889): 389–405.
vol. volume
vols. volumes
PREFACE

This collection brings together sixteen essays published between 1989 and
2005, three of which are here translated into English from their original
French, alongside two new contributions (Chapters 2 and 18) written
specifically for this volume. The majority of the essays explore medieval,
Latin-language narratives about saints (primarily bishops) and/or rulers
(primarily dukes) of Normandy. The main theme running through the entire
book is the different ways in which narratives about the local and regional
past (historiography) were created, revised, and instrumentalized in what is
now Normandy (and very closely related areas, such as England) primarily
during the central Middle Ages. I analyze a number of different Latin
narratives (above all Dudo of St. Quentin’s Gesta Normannorum and the
lives, miracles, and relic translation accounts of various Norman saints, but
also the Encomium Emmae Reginae) utilizing a combination of cultural
studies (how does it function, what does it conceal, and who benefits?) and
manuscript studies (in what context do we find the narratives? precisely
when and where were the copies made?) approaches.
In these essays, I treat both narratives built around figures venerated as
saints and narratives built around secular rulers as generically identical, that
is, as historio-graphical constructions and representations of the (always
unstable) past. One goal of this collection is to collect and publish together
articles that might have found two separate sets of audiences in the past:
“political” historians may have been focusing only on the narratives about
secular rulers, while “religious” historians may have been focusing only on
the narratives about saints. In fact, the “religious” and the “political” aspects
of the narratives are inextricable from each other, across all the narratives
discussed. In order to more persuasively justify my grouping together of
narratives that are conventionally handled separately, as if they belonged to
two separate genres of “historiography” and “hagiography,” I include in the
collection my 1994 Viator article in which I set forth the rationale for
dissolving the artificial and misleading generic wall between these
(purportedly) divergent types of historical narratives. One of the newly
composed essays (Chapter 2) expands on the themes of that 1994 article in
light of subsequent developments in the field.
The idea to publish a collection of my articles first came from Beverly
Kienzle, and I am tremendously grateful to her for having suggested it to
me; without her encouragement, I would not have had the chutzpah to
approach Routledge. I am grateful to Routledge’s Michael Greenwood for the
excellent suggestion that I make English translations of the three articles I
originally published in French and that I include two new essays. I am
extremely grateful to the two anonymous readers for Routledge who
supported the publication of this collection. I also owe a real debt of
gratitude to Kamal Ranaweera and Thomas Welz of the University of
Alberta, who gave me access to the equipment, and showed me (repeatedly,
until I finally got it!) how to use the relevant software necessary to process
the various articles from a range of starting points (sometimes as
unpromising as a poor photocopy of an old article) to where I could create
new, usable Word files.
I have heard it said that these collected essay publications are vanity
projects, but my experience of working through my older articles was rarely
flattering to my vanity. To the contrary, it was often mortifying to discover
typographical errors and faulty citations in my previously published work,
but I am glad to have had the opportunity to correct those errors in the
process of uniformizing and regularizing the texts and the citations styles of
all the articles for (re)publication in a single consistently formatted volume. I
have also moved innumerable footnotes from the middle to the end of
sentences (which has sometimes meant combining multiple footnotes into a
single end-of-sentence note), and smoothed out or clarified some of my
more awkward (or incorrect) linguistic formulations, and introduced some
abbreviations that recur throughout this collection but that did not require
abbreviation in the individual previously published articles. I have not,
however, updated or corrected any errors of substance. As before, all errors
are my own.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Caroline Allen Pripps Marin, my
birth mother, to whose company during the very beginnings of my life, I
believe, I owe some of my knowledge of the French language; without that, I
would have been a much inferior Normanist.
Edmonton, Alberta
June 10, 2020, in the midst of the Pandemic.
Part I
“Hagiography” and historical
representation
1
BEYOND POSITIVISM AND GENRE
“Hagiographical” texts as historical narrative

Historia est quae praeterita narrat,

Prophetia quae futura narrat,
Hagiographa quae aeternae vitae gaudia jubilat.1

1 Honorius of Autun (fl. ca. 1100), In Psalmos, PL 172.273B. The main outlines of this essay
were first presented as a paper before the Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium on “Saints
and Their Cults in the Middle Ages” in April 1993. I thank the audience, the other
panelists, and particularly Thomas Heffernan, for the useful discussion which followed
the paper, and Magdalena Carrasco, Patrick J. Geary, Cynthia Hahn, Thomas Head, and
Thomas F.X. Noble for helpful informal discussions outside the framework of the panels.
Funding for the research and preparation of the colloquium paper and for the expanded
article was provided by a Faculty Development Mini-Grant from Florida International
University. Earlier drafts of the typescript were read and improved by the comments of
Dan Cohen, Walter Goffart, and Alan Kahan; my failure at times to follow their
excellent advice leaves the fault for more than simple errors of fact squarely at my
doorstep. An especially large debt is owed to Benjamin Arnold, whose efforts went well
beyond the call of duty.

Over the past century, “hagiographical” materials have been approached

from every conceivable perspective.2 A critical trend has been to move away
from bobbing for data to reconstructing mentalities and, consequently, to
move from searching for the original version of each particular saint’s
biography to studying all extant versions, each in its particular
compositional context. Instead of seeing “legendary accretions” as dross to
be sifted and cleared away, scholars have seen transformations in a saint’s
character as crucial indicators of many different sorts of changes over time.3

2 For a bibliographically rich survey of the field see Friedrich Lotter, “Methodisches zur
Gewinnung historischer Erkenntnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen,” Historische

Zeitschrift 229 (1979): 298–356.

3 The seminal works here are Joseph-Claude Poulin, L’idéal de sainteté dans l’Aquitaine

carolingienne d’après les sources hagiographiques (750–950) (Québec: Presses de

l’Université Laval, 1975), and Charles W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and

Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Although an archetype-fetish no longer prevails, and professional

historians have ceased dismissing re-workings out of hand, the fact that
“hagiographical” narratives (both original and revised versions) have
frequently been stigmatized as “untrue” can still blind us to their function as
historical writing, despite their increasingly enthusiastic rehabilitation as
historical sources. In fact, there has even been something of an industry
involved specifically in discovering the characteristics which distinguish
historical writing, or historiography, from “hagiography,” a scholarly effort
which, despite a century of labor, had yet, in 1979, to solve the “problem.”4 A
similar conundrum concerning definitions has plagued historians of visual,
rather than verbal, representation, some of whom have begun to assert the
complete impossibility of distinguishing generically among modes of visual
representation, for instance between an icon and a pictorial narrative.5 This
essay, however, will be confined to the problems raised by literary genres.

4 Lotter, “Methodisches,” p. 306. There is also a brief review of the literature on the issue of
genre up to approximately the same year in Pierre-André Sigal, “Histoire et
hagiographie: les Miracula aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Annales de Bretagne 87 (1980): 237–
257, at 238–240. Whoever examines the century’s worth of literature devoted to generic
definition will witness the spectacle of authors painstakingly erecting criteria for the
“hagiographical” genre, as distinct from the historiographical genre, only to admit that
many “hagiographical” texts do not fit into the category of “hagiography,” which indeed
happens with Lotter himself (“Methodisches,” p. 306; also see pp. 312–313 where he
admits that translationes are not “hagiographical” but historical). Voss, too, eventually
declares that, “in practice,” his two branches of historiography are frequently mixed up
(Bernd Reiner Voss, “Berührungen von Hagiographie und Historiographie in der
Spätantike,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 4 [1970]: 53–69, at 61). Sigal, after arguing
throughout for two distinct genres, ends up admitting that there is a large
“hagiographical” component in “historical” works and ultimately concludes that
“hagiography” is part of “history” (“Histoire et hagiographie,” pp. 246–248 and 257).
Ludwif Zoepf (Das Heiligen-Leben im 10. Jahrhundert [Leipzig: Tuebner, 1908], pp. 34–
35) distinguishes within his ideal genre of “hagiography” (from which he has already
excluded most texts as perversions of the pure genre) among “biography,” “vita”
(biography plus miraculous occurrences), and “legend” (biography with a very large or
even dominant supernatural element), then immediately declares that many texts
cannot be fitted into the categories and that in any case the modus operandi of the
“hagiographer” is identical for all three subgenres. Only a few examples of the points on
which the generic projects capsize will be noted here as illustration; the interested
reader should consult directly the literature concerning generic definition. The prologues
of works that nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians have considered to be
historiography follow exactly the same tripartite schema that Zoepf constructed as
characteristic of “hagiography:” a description of how the work was commissioned by a
superior, though the author at first balked due to consciousness of his limited erudition;
a plea to the patron to protect, correct or destroy the work; an assertion that the tale
about to be told is true (Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben, p. 40; Antonia Gransden, Legends,

Traditions and History in Medieval England [London: Hambledon Press, 1992], pp. 125–
126; Dudo, De moribus, pp. 115–120). “Both” historiographers and “hagiographers”
favored the form of the “virtue catalog” to describe a hero’s main attributes, and
ascribed to their heroes identical virtues; Fredegar describes Claudius as “genere
Romanus, homo prudens, iocundus in fabolis, strenuus in cunctis, pacienciae deditus,
plenitudinem consiliae habundans, litterarum eruditus, fide plenus amiciciam cum
omnibus sectans” (Fredegar, Chronicon 4.28, ed. Bruno Krusch [MGH SRM 2; Hanover:
 Hahn, 1888], p. 132). It has even been conclusively demonstrated (bizarrely enough in
the context of arguing that “historiography” and “hagiography” are two separate genres)
that the entire thematic complex of a hero’s fama and his virtues as exemplars for
imitatio, which is often seen as the hallmark of a “hagiographical” text, was central to
the narratives of Xenophon, Polybius, Sallust, Tacitus, and Livy, “historiographers” to a
man (Voss, “Berührungen,” pp. 56–63).

5 This was the conclusion of the editors of the proceedings of the 1985 National Gallery of
Art conference on Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, eds. Herbert
Kessler and Marianna Shreve Simpson (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in
the Visual Arts, 1985), p. 8.
I will address directly only one of the many definitions of “hagiography”
that have been proposed, because this particular definition has been very
frequently cited: the oracular definition of Hippolyte Delehaye. Delehaye
contends that “hagiography” intends primarily to engender, propagate,
6
strengthen, etc. the cult of a saint. Yet there are many writings about saints
which seem never to have served for any functioning cult, and many in
which the dominant motives for composition are unrelated to any kind of
liturgical veneration.7 Even the many narratives preserved and transmitted
in legendaries are frequently bereft of festival dates, indicating the absence
of ties to a cult.8 Nor can we simply take “cult” in its very broadest, rather
than in its specifically liturgical, sense as a general fame or revered
reputation; for that would lead us down precisely the same road we are
already on, heading toward a broad “genre” of biographies of famous people,
people among whom a “saint” cannot be distinguished without a liturgical,
rather than a merely fanatical, cult. Furthermore, when tenth-century
authors did wish to refer to the liturgy of anthems, responses, readings, and
prayers that had developed in connection with the celebrations of saints’
cults, they did not use “hagiographical” words; rather, they called such
compositions “historiae.”9

6 Hippolyte Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes,

1906), pp. xiii and 2. Among the authors discussed in this paper alone, the definition is
 cited by Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben, p. 5; Lotter, “Methodisches,” p. 307; and Baudouin De
Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie: Quelques aspects du problème,” Settimane 17
(1970): 139–166, at 140.

7 Biographies of saints provided communities and institutions with written traditions;

they defended the independence of communities and institutions against those who
wished to subject them; they defended property rights and territorial endowments; they
fueled episcopal rivalries; they conveyed political and theological stances; they
propagated an individual author’s or group’s notion of “the holy;” they served, in short,
for manifold purposes. See the catalog of functions in Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben, pp. 6
and 12–30, and in Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); the latter is essentially an encyclopedic
compendium of the uses of “hagiographical” materials, most of which turn out to have
very little to do with cults. Episcopal lists likewise had long been assumed to possess
primarily cultic or liturgical functions, simply because their historiographic functions
were unappreciated; for a corrective, see Jean-Charles Picard, Le souvenir des évêques:

sépultures, listes épiscopales et culte des évêques en Italie du Nord des origines au Xe

siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 1988), pp. 520–538.

8 Guy Philippart, Les légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques (Turnhout:

Brepols, 1977), pp. 24–25.

9 Jones, Saint Nicholas, pp. 112–113; Ritva Jonsson, Historia: Études sur la genèse des

offices versifiés (Stockholm: Almqvist et Wiskell, 1968).

If an actual cult is not always a significant part of “hagiographical”
writing, then the fact that a narrative hinges upon a saintly hero or heroine
becomes a tangential concern, and the glue of the generic label qua
“hagiography,” rather than biography/historiography, dissolves. Biography,
of saints or of other figures, seems to have been the most popular form of
historical narrative in the Middle Ages, just as it is today. The libraries of
medieval monasteries were stuffed with biographies, as are the libraries of
today’s bibliophiles and history buffs. But these modern collections are not
divided into separate genres on the basis of the profession or status of the
subject. The hero or heroine may be a politician, a sports figure, or a movie
star, and within each realm there will be a number of similarities in their life
stories, crucial turning points such as first campaign, dramatic injury, bout
with substance abuse, trauma at loss of privacy. Does the presence of such
10
topoi impose a generic differentiation within “biography?”

10 To the argument that “hagiographical” materials also include relics, reliquaries,

iconographic representations, breviaries, etc., I would respond that, logically, we are
therefore also required to erect a genre “politicalia” comprised of biographies of
politicians, reports of office-holders to constituents, campaign posters, bumper-stickers,
and souvenir sponges.

Such arguments aside, the main problem with Delehaye’s definition of

“hagiography” lies elsewhere, a problem which has marred all the definitions
of “hagiography” that have been erected, and especially those which seek to
distinguish “hagiography” from historiography: the very attempt to discover
a single definition that can be universally valid. There can be no simple
definition of “hagiography” or of historiography that does not
conscientiously take into account changing political contexts.
The points I wish to make in this essay are more suggestive than
exhaustive. It is not possible to cover the history of European historiography
in a single article; instead, I wish only to emphasize certain twelfth- and
nineteenth-century developments. Even then, the discussion must be
sketchy. It will not be possible, for instance, to distinguish among the
different courses of national development followed by England, France, and
Germany, or among the different rhythms of academic professionalization in
those countries, or even to differentiate among the concerns of the various
individuals who contributed to the relevant changes. Nevertheless, it is
possible to suggest how some already well-known twelfth- and nineteenth-
century political developments affected European conceptions of the proper
subject of history. My intention is to connect changing conceptions of
historiography and major political developments, both of which are already
recognized, with the problem of the “genre of hagiography.” The point is to
warn against applying definitions of historiography, and by extension of
“hagiography,” that make sense for a twelfth- or a nineteenth-century
context, anachronistically to ninth-, tenth-, or eleventh-century Francia.11

11 Two recent works on European historiography have argued for the centrality of the
socio-political context in determining the style and content of historical narrative.
Morrison’s 1990 discussion of high medieval scholastic historiography analyzed the
analogous programs of visual and literary representers of the past to show that both
functioned so as to exclude “pagans,” Jews, women, peasants, and a variety of “Others”
from the stuff of “history;” see Karl Morrison, History as a Visual Art in the Twelfth-

Century Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Christina Crosby

analyzed how nineteenth-century authors produced “history” as “man’s truth” by using
“women” as their intrinsically unhistorical Other, a development which formed the
background for the establishment of “history” as a university discipline; see Christina
Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and “The Woman Question” (New York:
Routledge, 1991).

We cannot ignore political contexts,12 or fail to look historically at all the

terms of the debate, including “historiography.” The historiography against
which “hagiography” has been defined is scientistic in its methodology, as
we shall briefly see, but it has also been secular and nationalistic in its
content. It is a historiography whose emergence coincided with that of the
administrative monarchies of Western Europe in the twelfth century and
after, and whose development culminated with the entrenchment of the
nation-states of the nineteenth century. It is a historiography inseparable
from that political connection. Yet the Frankish kingdoms in the late
Carolingian and early Capetian periods, whether vilified as anarchic and
chaotic or hailed for their creative methods of preserving peace and order
without cultural, political, ethnic, and linguistic barriers, are famous for the
“weakness” of the “state.” The late Carolingian and early Capetian realms
had no universities and no law schools, no interest in Aristotelian categories
or Roman law, practically no bureaucracies or methods of recordkeeping. I
would suggest that, as a result, the west Frankish lands between the ninth
and the eleventh centuries also necessarily lacked any conception of
“historiography” that even could be distinguished from “hagiography.”

12 Mark Van Uytfanghe’s attempt to replace “genre” with a different literary conception,
namely “discourse,” only came to my attention after this article had been accepted for
publication, and I cannot do his arguments justice here (“L’hagiographie: un ‘genre’
chrétien ou antique tardif?” AB 111 [1993]: 135–188). I would consider his approach
incomplete, due to the continued isolation of “hagiography,” both from historiography
and from the political context, in a world of literary theory; narrative discourse rarely
exists in isolation.

In 1988, Tilliette drew attention to the enormous output of metrical verse

biographies of saints that marked the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries,
but that had prior to his article been completely ignored by historians. He
counted over seventy extant verse biographies of saints composed in
Northern Francia between 800 and 1100, with a marked concentration of
production from the late ninth century through the early eleventh.13
Tilliette’s explanation of why these verse biographies had been so ignored is
extremely instructive: because, as Tilliette rather dramatically put it, they
are almost all marked by the fundamental flaw, the original sin, of being re-
workings of earlier prose texts.14

13 Jean-Yves Tilliette, “Les modèles de sainteté du IXe au XIe siècle, d’après le témoignage
des récits hagiographiques en vers metriques,” Settimane 36 (1988): 381–409, at 387–388.

14 They “porte[nt] la tare originelle d’être, dans une large mesure, une littérature de
réécriture” (Tilliette, “Les modèles de sainteté,” pp. 381–382; emphasis mine).

Until 1988, this revisionist literature had been studied exclusively by

literary scholars who were concerned with the stylistic and linguistic
differences between the original and the reworking. The assumption
governing discussion of the verse biographies had long been that their
authors simply wished to clean up grammatical errors and ameliorate the
degraded and garbled syntax of predecessors. But Tilliette argued that
authors who possessed the learning and skills necessary to compose an epic
poem in hexameters or elegiac distiches were scarcely likely to have spent
their effort in the puerile paraphrasing of narratives considered insufficiently
elegant.15 When one considers that the ubiquitous and omni-influential
Alcuin of York himself began the Continental vogue for verse (and prose)
rewritings with his twin biographies of St. Willibrord, one can hardly cling
to the notion that such a politically active man was interested in mere
grammar, or disinterested in what vision of the past would be dominant. It
appears that the leading intellectuals of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh
centuries felt compelled to rewrite early medieval texts specifically because
the latter clashed with their own historical perspectives, not because the
grammar was poor.

15 Tilliette, “Les modèles de sainteté,” pp. 383–384.

The verse biographies cited by Tilliette will be a good place to start if we

wish to understand what historiography meant in the late Carolingian and
early Capetian periods. First, we have to recognize re- visions and re-
writings as historiographical.16 The metrical re-workings in question
concern almost exclusively missionaries and monastic founders of the late
Roman and Merovingian eras (the fourth through the seventh centuries).
Furthermore, the metrical biographies depart from their models in order to
enmesh the saint’s activities explicitly within a larger historical context: the
most cherished aim of the “hagiographers” was to relate their own past to
the history of salvation.17 Such narratives, whether verse or prose, were
among the main vessels into which the curious and the creative poured their
images of the past, particularly concerning issues of burning concern such as
when and how an area was first converted to Christianity. Frequently, and
this is the case with Tilliette’s corpus of verse biographies, medieval
historians revised the pictures of the past which had been transmitted to
them by their predecessors, much as we do today, to bring those images
more in line with contemporary needs. In order to recognize these narratives
for what they are, and to understand the historical consciousness of the
period, we must go beyond the anachronistic application both of positivist
theory and of the concept of a “hagiographic” genre. Nothing authorizes us
to excise from the history of historiography everything which is now
perceived as “false,” or to excise from the rollcall of historians everyone
whose methods and conclusions we do not accept.

16 Heinz Lowe addressed the issue of central medieval “historiography” and included
certain “hagiographical” works in his discussion; however, he only considered narratives
describing contemporary events worthy of mention (Lowe, “Geschichtsschreibung des
ausgehenden Karolingerzeit,” Deutsches Archiv 23 [1967]: 1–30, at 18–23). Such a limited
perspective still misses the vast majority of the historiographical output of the period
and presents a false vision of the period as lacking interest in the historical past.
Hofmann has begun the interrogation of this artificial boundary between historiography
focused on the past and historiography focused on the present; see Heinz Hofmann,
“Profil der lateinischen Historiographie im zehnten Jahrhundert,” Settimane 38 (1991):
837–905, at 839.

17 “Les hagiographes ont à coeur de rapporter leur propre passé à l’histoire du salut”
(Tilliette, “Les modèles de sainteté,” pp. 389–397).

Positivism
The lines along which the generic debate has been drawn over the past one
hundred years have taken as the ideal standard of historiography, against
which “hagiography” is measured, a particular form of historical writing
which may be called “empirical.”18 In effect, the emphasis in all fully fledged
discussions of the issue by historians has been whether “hagiography” can be
as “factual” and “scientific” as historiography, evidently perceived by the
participants in the debate to be an objective science, while historians have
ignored the fact that historiography, at least in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh
centuries, was as “literary,” as “moralizing,” and as much a rhetorical art
form, as was what they have labeled “hagiography.”19

18 Thomas Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 15–18 and chapter two, “Sacred Biography
as Historical Narrative,” pp. 38–71. Even more recently, two authors have mounted full-
scale attacks on anachronistic conceptions of historiography being applied to the works
of pre-modern writers and artists; see Morrison, History as a Visual Art, and Jack
Greenstein, Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 27–28.

19 The whole problematic as formulated by Voss is askew: he begins by asking “ob und in
welchem Ausmaß hagiographische Schriften als Werke der Geschichtsschreibung im

heutigen Sinn angesehen werden können” (“Berührungen,” p. 53). For historiography as

a branch of rhetoric, see Roger Ray, “The Triumph of Greco-Roman Rhetorical
Assumptions in Pre-Carolingian Historiography,” in The Inheritance of Historiography

350–900, eds. Christopher Holdsworth and T.P. Wiseman (Exeter: University of Exeter
Press, 1986), pp. 67–84.

Consider two contributions to the 1970 Spoleto conference on

historiography, namely, the communications of Edmond-René Labande and
Baudouin de Gaiffier, along with Pierre-André Sigal’s review of the generic
debate ten years later.20 Labande employs a more or less tacit notion of the
proper definition of historiography in order to exclude most output from
consideration, such that only at the very end of the eleventh century does
Normandy, for example, “[entre] dans l’ère de l’Histoire au sens le plus noble
du terme” (“enter the age of History in the most noble sense of the term”)
with the work of William of Poitiers, who made of history “une science, une
discipline exigeante.”21 De Gaiffier’s view likewise is positivistic, standing
firm on his conception of historical inquiry as a scientific and objective
search for Truth. He argues that “hagiography” is not historiography because
“hagiographical” materials have a number of traits which are, in his opinion,
not characteristic of historiographical narrative: they are intended to glorify
their subject;22 they are intended to inspire emulation;23 they express ideals
which change over time as a result of larger societal transformations;24 their
authors are inspired by earlier models within the genre and by texts such as
the Bible;25 their authors are sometimes more concerned with the tastes of
the public or with some didactic aims than with “the painstaking search for
truth;”26 and the visions they present of the subject or hero are unstable and
constantly changing so that they do not provide scientifically certain
knowledge.27 Sigal, by way of explicitly endorsing the views of De Gaiffier,
established boundaries between the genres of historiography and
“hagiography” on the dual grounds that “moralizing” is a distinguishing trait
only of the latter,28 and that the true Historian is little more than a conduit
for the Spirit of Historical Truth:
alors que l’historien a pour mission de faire le récit le plus complet possible, de raconter
tous les événements qu’il connaît dans le cadre qu’il s’est fixé, meme si ces faits sont
douloureux et tragiques et déchirent l’ecrivain chargé de les transmettre à la posterité,
l’auteur de miracula peut se permettre de choisir.29

29 “Whereas the mission of the historian is to create the most complete account
possible, to narrate all the events of which he is aware which fall within the
framework which he has set for himself, even if those facts be painful and tragic and
wrench the heart of the historian who is burdened with the duty of transmitting
them to posterity, the author of miracula can permit himself to choose” (Sigal,
“Histoire et hagiographie,” p. 249).

20 De Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie,” pp. 140–166; Edmond-René Labande,

“L’historiographie de la France de l’ouest aux Xe et XIe siècles,” Settimane 17 (1970):
751–791; Sigal, “Histoire et hagiographie.”

21 Labande, “L’historiographie de la France,” pp. 762–763, in reference to William’s Gesta

Guillelmi ducis Normannorum et regis Anglorum. Labande seems to consider only

writings about relatively contemporary events as qualifying as “récits historiques.” He
uses his scalpel even to excise self-conscious historians such as Dudo of St. Quentin,
 whose De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum he dismisses, following Lucien
Musset, for “nullité intellectuelle” (“L’historiographie de la France,” p. 760). For Musset’s
vicious attack on Dudo, see his “Le satiriste Garnier de Rouen et son milieu (début du
XIe siècle),” Revue du Moyen-Age latin 10 (1954): 237–266, at 240–241.

22 De Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie,” p. 141.

23 De Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie,” p. 140.

24 De Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie,” pp. 142–143 and 148.

25 De Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie,” pp. 143, 153, and 162.

26 De Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie,” p. 148.

27 De Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie,” pp. 148–151. Neither De Gaiffier nor

Delehaye, both positivist-leaning Bollandists (Jesuits), ever reached the intensity of the
most extreme defender of “hagiography” as a separate genre, the Benedictine monk, Jean
Leclercq; for instance, see Jean Leclercq, “L’écriture sainte dans l’hagiographie
monastique du Haut Moyen Age,” Settimane 10 (1963): 103–128. Leclercq (on pp. 116–
122) argues (with almost no evidence) that every action in a saint’s biography must be
based on a biblical model or precedent, and since every action is actually biblical,
therefore “hagiographical” writings, like the Bible, are only to be submitted to exegesis
because their authors are interested only in what the events meant sub specie

aeternitatis.

28 Sigal, “Histoire et hagiographie,” pp. 255–257.

The anachronistic nature of this sort of empiricism or positivism has been
laid bare by Thomas Heffernan, a literary historian who has taken the care
to remind “historians” of their rhetorician roots.30 As soon as one dispenses
with the anachronistic positivist yardstick applied by De Gaiffier, Labande,
and Sigal and measures late Carolingian and early Capetian “hagiography”
against late Carolingian and early Capetian historiography, rather than
against nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, it becomes
impossible to distinguish two separate types of literary narratives, just as it
is impossible to distinguish two categories of authors, for again and again
the very same people wrote works that are now considered to pertain to the
genre of “historiography” as well as those considered to be “hagiography.”31

30 Heffernan’s thesis is “that much of our current understanding of medieval hagiography

has been unwittingly shaped by the Enlightenment response to sacred biography, the
parent of the dominant positivist tradition to which much biographical scholarship is
still heir” (Heffernan, Sacred Biography, p. 54). Heffernan rejects the term “hagiography”
in favor of “sacred biography.” However, were we simply to replace “hagiography” with
“sacred biography,” as he proposes, we would still be faced with the herculean task of
deciding which biographies are “sacred” and which are not. Witness the debate over the
proper classification of Helgaud of Fleury’s Epitoma vitae regis Rotberti pii (Vie de

Robert le Pieux: Epitoma vitae regis Rotberti pii, ed. and trans. Robert-Henri Bautier and
Gillette Labory [Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1965]; the extensive
literature on the subject is listed by Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the

Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1990], p. 270 n. 155), or the discussions that have swirled around Ruotger’s Vita

Brunonis (see Ruotgers Lebensbeschreibung des Erzbischofs Bruno von Köln: Ruotgeri

Vita Brunonis Archiepiscopi Coloniensis, ed. Irene Ott [MGH SRG n.s. 10; Weimar:
Böhlau, 1951], p. x, where it is argued that the biography of this particular saint “ist kein
Werk der Hagiographie im üblichen Sinn”).

31 Zoepf’s list of the major central medieval “German” “hagiographers” could simply be
relabeled a list of the major central medieval “German” authors: Alcuin, Einhard,
Walafrid Strabo, Ermanrich of Ellwangen, Rudolf of Fulda, Hucbald of St. Amand, Adso
of Lobbes, Rather of Verona, Walter of Speyer, Heriger of Lobbes, Notker the Stammerer,
Notker of Liège, John of Gorze, the Cluniac abbots, Widukind of Corvey, Hrotsvitha of
Gandersheim, Bruno of Querfurt (Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben, p. 32). Meanwhile, the
historiographical projects of all those authors, plus those of Eusebius of Caesarea,
Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, John of Biclaro, Bede, and
Dudo of St. Quentin (to name just a few) were fundamentally shaped within a biblical
or sacred historical crucible, combining the “classical” tradition of exempla with the
hand of God, although every author used the Bible in his or her own manner. See Beryl
Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Rev. ed. 3; Oxford: Oxford
 University Press, 1983), and Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London:
Scribner, 1975); Erich Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen

Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958); Ward, Miracles, pp. 201–205,
esp. 202–203; Lifshitz, “Dudo’s Historical Narrative”; Paul Lehmann, “Der Einfluss der
Bibel auf frühmittelalterliche Geschichtsschreiber,” Settimane 10 (1963): 129–140. Not
only the Bible but also the liturgy played a role, particularly in the works of historians
who did not receive a scholastic education; see Leonid Arbusow, Liturgie und

Geschichtsschreibung im Mittelalter in ihren Beziehungen erläutert an den Schriften

Ottos von Freising (+1158), Heinrichs Livlandchronik (1227), und den anderen

Missionsgeschichten des Bremischen Erzsprengels: Rimberts, Adams von Bremen,

Helmolds (Bonn: L. Röhrscheid, 1951), pp. 41–42 and 86–87.

Before its professionalization in the late nineteenth century,
“historiography” was a dramatist’s art, a branch of poesy and rhetoric. We
must, first of all, in approaching the narrative output of the ninth through
the eleventh centuries, dispense with any neo-positivist prejudices, and
renounce any project to distinguish genres along scientistic lines. Scientistic
understandings do not work even for the early part of the nineteenth
century, when Henry Adams (soon to become the first professional
American medievalist) took second place in the 1858 competition for the
Bowdoin prize for Harvard undergraduates in historical writing for an essay,
on St. Paul and Seneca, written “in the vein of Plutarch,” that is, as a guide to
morals.32 Still less do scientistic understandings work for the twelfth
century, when Robert of Torigny began his Chronicle by explaining that he,
as a historian, has the following moralistic aims: to praise virtue, censure
vice, and thus admonish his readers to love and fear God.33 And scientistic
understandings certainly do not work for the period before 1100.

32 Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 21.

33 PL 160.421; see also Robert of Torigny, Chronique, ed. Léopold Delisle, 2 vols. (Rouen: A.
Le Brument, 1872–1873).
Genre: a ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-
century anachronism
Simply to reject the scientistic, empiricist yardstick as anachronistic, which
we must do for twelfth- and nineteenth-century narratives alike, does not go
far enough when it comes to the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. In this
case, we must move beyond positivism and genre. Nor is it enough to say
that, for centuries on end, there was much “cross-over” or “bleeding” or
“blurring” among genres; at a certain point, constant “cross-over” must be
taken as an indication that the categories themselves are hopelessly
inadequate. To retain the generic categories of “hagiography” and
“historiography” for the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries would do more
harm than good.
How does it help us even to pose the question of which generic label
ought to be affixed to the monastic and episcopal gesta composed by some
of the most active scriptoria in Francia in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh
centuries, such as the Actus pontificum Cenomannis in urbe degentium,34
the Gesta episcoporum Autissiodorensium,35 the Gesta episcoporum
36
Cameracensium, and the Gesta abbatum Fontenellensium?37 These
narratives are at once serial biographies and chronological histories of local
institutions; they contain a heavy supernatural content while being loaded
with citations to and verbatim recapitulations of documentary sources, and
have sometimes been broken down and assigned individual numbers in the
38
Bibliotheca hagiographica latina (BHL). Indeed, the insoluble complexities
involved in the enterprise of applying generic categories to the late
Carolingian and early Capetian periods help us to understand the variable
treatment accorded to the various gesta by the compilers of the BHL. The
gesta of the bishops of Le Mans have all been given BHL numbers. On the
other hand, the BHL lists the sections of the gesta of the bishops of Auxerre
that were published in the Acta Sanctorum but does not assign them
numbers. Finally, the gesta of the bishops of Arras-Cambrai are completely
ignored by the BHL. Meanwhile, there have been extended expert
discussions aiming to disentangle the properly “historiographical” and the
properly “hagiographical” strands in the narratives, since they had somehow
been mixed together by the authors of the texts.39 And what can the modern
notion of genres make of what Bautier has called “historical cartularies” or
“chronicle-cartularies:” collections of charters attesting to the property rights
of a monastery, embedded within a chronological narrative of local history
and accompanied by collections of miracles?40

34 Actus pontificum Cenomannis in urbe degentium, eds. Georges Busson and Ambroise
Ledru (Le Mans: Société des Archives Historiques du Maine, 1901).

35 Gesta episcoporum Autissiodorensium, ed. L.M. Duru (Auxerre: Bibliothèque historique

de l’Yonne, 1850), pp. 309–509.

36 Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, ed. Ludwig Konrad Bethmann (MGH SS 7; Hanover:

Hahn, 1846), pp. 402–489.

37 Gesta abbatum Fontenellensium, eds. Fernand Lohier and Jean Laporte (Rouen and Paris:
Société de l’histoire de Normandie, 1936). For other examples of such gesta see Robert-
Henri Bautier, “L’historiographie en France de l’ouest aux Xe et XIe siècles,” Settimane

17 (1970): 793–850; for similar narratives composed on the northern Italian peninsula
during the same period, see Picard, Le souvenir des évêques, pp. 442–459 and 480–498.

38 Bibliotheca hagiographica latina, eds. Société des Bollandistes, 2 vols. and supplements
(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1898–1911 and 1987).

39 Michel Sot, “Arguments hagiographiques et historiographiques dans les ‘Gesta

episcoporum’,” in Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés, IVe-XIIe siècles, eds. Pierre Riché
and Évelyne Patlagean (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1981), pp. 95–104; Michel Sot,
Gesta episcoporum, gesta abbatum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981).

40 Bauthier, “L’historiographie en France,” pp. 816–821.

In the course of the 1980s, medievalists increasingly learned from cultural

anthropologists to treat their texts in a culturally specific manner.41 White’s
1988 study of the laudatio parentum is an example of how long-vexed
questions can find plausible solutions only if we stop asking them in
anachronistic forms.42 White argues that the major downfall of earlier
studies lays precisely in a projection backward of the very concept of clear-
cut bodies of laws and rules, and in treating the laudatio as part of a
standardized system of land conveyance procedures. By the thirteenth
century, it seems there was a system in place that was more analogous to
our modern assumptions about real property law, but that does not help us
understand the eleventh century, and, in fact, for a long time prevented us
from understanding the eleventh century.

41 Vansina has argued against the possibility of any “universal cross-cultural classification”
of narrative genres, noting how the categories never work even when “convoluted to
excess” (Jan Vansina, History as Oral Tradition [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985], p. 82).

42 Stephen D. White, Custom, Kinship and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio Parentum in

Western France, 1050–1150 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), esp.
pp. 9–15, his discussion of issues concerning accidents of source survival and the
fragmentary nature of the sources.

The twelfth century

Static definitions of and decontextualized criteria for “hagiography” and
historiography cannot function adequately both for the late Carolingian and
early Capetian periods and for more recent times. Some attempts to define
the boundaries between historiography and “hagiography” have focused on
the relative balance between natural and supernatural phenomena in the
narratives, such that the “historical” quality of the text was thought to have
decreased in proportion to any increase in its miraculous content.43 Once we
recognize how very anachronistic are such secularizing arguments for the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, we will begin to see how the effects of a
whole series of twelfth-century transformations render the generic category
“hagiography” useless for the earlier period.

43 Stancliffe relies heavily on this criterion to argue that Sulpicius Severus wrote
“hagiography” in his vita Martini and “history” in his Chronicle (Clare Stancliffe, Saint

Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983], pp. 88–102 and 182), although for a contemporary such
as Paulinus of Nola, Sulpicius’ vita Martini was simply “historia” (Letters of Saint

Paulinus of Nola 11.11, ed. Patrick B. Walsh [Westminster, MD: Newmann Press, 1966]).
For Voss, despite the formal continuity in themes, literary devices, etc., between ancient
“historical biography” and medieval “hagiography,” the latter is a genre unto itself,
unconnected with historiography, because to his mind the miraculous is, in and of itself,
incompatible with historiographical description (“Berührungen,” p. 65). Lotter also
wished to make an author’s attitude toward “the miraculous” the main criterion for
formal distinction between genres, since only those biographies without a significant
miraculous content depict “real” (namely, true, historically accurate) lives; the rest are, at
best, encomia (Friedrich Lotter, Severinus von Noricum: Legende und historische

Wirklichkeit [Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1976], pp. 17 and 50–58). Such criteria would not
work even if they were not anachronistic; such a scheme cannot accommodate
biographies of saints that do not include any significant miraculous or supernatural
content, for instance because the holy individual in question did not perform many
miracles (one example is Norbert of Iburg, Vita Bennonis II, episcopi Osnabrugensis, ed.
Harry Bresslau [MGH SRG 56; Hanover: Hahn, 1902], p. 1, which the author declares to
be practically devoid of miracles).

Before the twelfth-century schoolmen began to examine “the miraculous,”

the genuineness of the possibility of such occurrences was very much taken
for granted by all levels of society.44 From the patristic to the scholastic
period, the conviction reigned among Christian authors that the doings of
earth and heaven formed a single seamless garment; certainly it was useless
to consider events in the former outside the context of the latter. The
ecclesiastical elites of the twelfth century and after turned ever more hostile
eyes upon mystical, miraculous occur-rences, a reversal of the policies of
ninth-, tenth- and eleventh-century clerics who had actively promoted many
forms of “magic.”45 Certainly, many in the late Roman world had rejected
“magic,” but it had then been rescued and preserved by many prominent
leaders of the Merovingian- and Carolingian-era churches, and it flourished
outright by the tenth century.46

44 Ward, Miracles, p. 3.

45 Valerie I.J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991).

46 Flint, Rise of Magic, pp. 128–145 and esp. 142–143.

However, the twelfth-century scholastic philosophers increasingly carved

out a sphere of inquiry in which proto-scientistic modes of analysis were
used to narrow the concept of the “miraculous,” until it became quite a rare
and unnatural thing indeed, enlarging instead an ever-growing category
called the “superstitious.”47 By the sixteenth century “witches” were burned
for engaging in the very same practices which had been prescribed by tenth-
century clerics.48 Twelfth-century scholastic philosophers also elaborated a
new theory of memory, one which applied contemporary rationalizing
epistemology to the remembrance of things past.49 How can a single
definition of “hagiography” (or historiography) serve for two eras with such
clearly divergent visions of the world?

47 Ward, Miracles, pp. 19–24.

48 Flint, Rise of Magic, p. 83.

49 Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the

Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 229–324, esp. 274–324.

The epistemological reorientation of scholasticism formed an integral part

of the political and social transformation in twelfth- and thirteenth-century
Latin Europe, as evidenced by a new emphasis on the separation of the
secular and the ecclesiastical.50 At the same time, the new administrative
monarchs put forward a laicized conception of the foundation and nature of
royal power, couched in secular rhetoric. The strength of the new
secularizing tendency is nowhere more evident than in the rationalistic basis
of even papal authority, which appealed to canon law. The concomitant
mental transformation of the administrative monarchies of Latin Europe in
the twelfth century and after, so much connected with the provision and
manipulation of documentary evidence, signed, sealed, delivered, and dated,
in and of itself accelerated the making of a new series of distinctions
between public and private, royal and ecclesiastical, legal and customary,
historical and literary.51 Without abrogating all their sacral character, the
new-style princes based their claims to authority more on profane
considerations than on the grace of God, whose role in the description of
high-level political doings was, accordingly, increasingly irrelevant. The
“miraculous” (or “superstitious”) content was accordingly and progressively
drained from most forms of narrative, whether about a saint, a warrior, or
some other hero, and the self-conscious genre of androcentric and “realistic”
historiography was born.52

50 It is no accident that Bautier located the source of “proto-modern” historiography in

western Fran-cia at Fleury, one of the most important centers of reform ideals
(“L’historiographie en France,” pp. 826–827 and 833–837). He went so far as to call
Aimoin of Fleury’s early twelfth-century Gesta Francorum “the first modern history” (p.
850).

51 Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970), pp. 1–56, esp. 22–26; M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written

Record: England, 1066–1307 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Susan
Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), p. 16 and chapter 2, “Legal Change, 1140–1300,” pp. 39–66. Such a
development would slowly but surely also serve to make the lack of temporal precision

in earlier “hagiographical” narratives look like generalized ahistoricity. Thus, the typical
 absence of precise temporal coordinates in saints’ biographies is hardly a solid criterion
by which to distinguish them from “historical” narratives, as Lotter (“Methodisches,” p.
335) would like to claim; we will look in vain for precise temporal coordinates in the
narrative texts of a society that barely “dated” its documents concerning real property
transfers and juridical pronouncements, when indeed it felt the need to produce
documentary records at all! For the general lack of what to us is crucial chronological
precision in the period, see Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Time Past: Pre-Newtonian
Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), esp. p. 137, and Donald J. Wilcox, “The Sense of Time in Western Historical
Narratives from Eusebius to Machiavelli,” in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval

Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985),

pp. 167–237.

52 “N’imprégnant plus comme dans le passé l’ensemble de la vie sociale, le surnaturel

devient une catégorie à part, l’objet de la réflexion critique des théologiens et des
canonistes…. Enfin, la relation traditionelle des miracula est peu à peu éliminée des
ouvrages d’histoire (historiae) pour se réfugier dans le genre specifique de
l’hagiographie” (Jean-Claude Schmitt, “La fabrique des saints,” Annales: E.S.C. 39 [1984]:
286–300, at 296).
The above-mentioned trends were connected with and reinforced by a
concurrent series of changes in the conception of sanctity and in the modes
of saintly veneration in the Latin world. Vauchez has shown how, in stark
contrast with Carolingian and early Capetian cultic promoters, who had
looked to the long dead as intercessors, the saint-makers after 1150
increasingly favored the recently deceased.53 This shift in patterns of
veneration caused biographers of saints to focus their narratives increasingly
on the present or immediate past. We must also consider the impact of the
advent and elaboration of canonization procedures emanating from the
papal curia.54 Juridical canonization procedures also profoundly altered the
nature of writings about saints, past or present. For one thing, the type of
written instrument into which an interested promoter would have to pour
his energies became increasingly “documentary,” the type of archival
evidence that would pass muster with the lawyers of the Roman curia.
Sanctification in the twelfth century ceases to be a matter of narrative and
becomes a matter of law and science; narrative texts such as biographies
form but a fraction of the assembled legal dossier. Put another way, writing
about saints becomes less “historiographical” and more “journalistic.”55

53 André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age d’après les

procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome: École franç aise de

Rome, 1981). The rise in “recent” saints holds true across the board, both in the category
of officially canonized saints and in the category of popular/local saints that do not
attain universal status. Also see the chart in Pierre Delooz, Sociologie et canonisations

(Liège: Faculté de droit, 1969), p. 230: the vast majority of successful canonization
processes under the new papal order involved recent saints.

54 For a detailed description of the canonization process, see Delooz, Sociologie, pp. 44–97.

55 From the late ninth century to the mid-eleventh century, miracle collections composed
at Fleury were sophisticated narratives, synthesizing the history of the community with
the marvelous stories of its patron saints, yet from the middle of the eleventh century
miracle collections become less and less shaped narrative tales and more and more
simply loose collections of anecdotes, lists of miracles (Head, Hagiography, pp. 137–138).

In the course of the twelfth century, there was developed not only a new
way of writing about saints, but also a new way of speaking about saints. In
the new discursive strategy of exempla, used by sermonizers, the hero or
heroine ceases to be the center of interest, to be replaced by a more abstract,
objectified, depersonalized center: the moral.56 Just as the saint was
displaced by the moral as the true subject of “hagiography,” the saint was
also displaced by another abstraction, the state, as the true subject of
historiography. For it is more than the intellectual context, and more than
the nature of saints’ cults, that changes in the twelfth century. It is true that
scholastic rationalism began a process which culminated in post-
Enlightenment positivism. But the point is to place the intellectual and
religious developments in the context of the political and thus the
ideological changes, first of the twelfth century, then of the nineteenth, all of
which determined the nature of historiography in those periods. History
cannot be written or even conceived of outside the political and social
context in which the historian lives.

56 Jacques Le Goff, “‘Vita’ et ‘pre-exemplum’ dans le deuxième livre des ‘Dialogues’ de

Grégoire le Grand,” in Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés, eds. Riché and Patlagean, pp.
105–120.

It may not even have been possible in any serious way to conceive, in the
post- Roman West (unlike in the post-Roman East, or Byzantium), of a
subject for “secular” historiography that would be distinct from the
individual activities of holy men and women. In the post-Roman Latin West,
by way of contrast with the Byzantine East, there was no evident earthly
political embodiment of the Divine Plan to be found; thus, in the words of
Claudio Leonardi, “i santi, monaci o vescovi – a differenza di quelli orientali
– entrano nella storia e vogliono regolarla, se ne sentono responsabili”
(“saints, both monks and bishops – unlike those of the East – enter into
history and wish to control it, they feel themselves responsible for it’’).57
Although Leonardi developed his ideas in reference to the fifth century, they
are easily applicable to the Frankish territories in the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh centuries, for there are few places that were more lacking in an
obvious earthly embodiment of Providence.

57 Claudio Leonardi, “Modelli di santità tra secolo V e VII,” Settimane 36 (1988): 261–283, at
265.

Leonardi argues that, because of the political situation, Western ideals of

sanctity included an active dimension, keyed around conversio and
58
prophetia, in a way that Eastern ideals did not. But we cannot forget the
connection between writing about the active saints in question and the
political situation, for it is precisely those narratives that stand between us
and the activities and comprise our source of information about them. The
description of the saints’ activities was primarily the task of those whom we
now call “hagiographers.” Over seventy examples of such narratives were
brought to light by Tilliette, though they have not yet been read for their
historiographic content, not even by Tilliette himself. The late Carolingian
and early Capetian saints’ biographers of Francia set their narratives within
a metahistorical and sacral framework because they were, in effect,
describing the earthly realization of the Divine Plan, a realization which was
unconnected with any contemporary political units. These narratives have
tended to be unrecognizable to modern eyes as historiography because, from
the twelfth century onward, the definition of historiography has been, in
contrast, increasingly connected with secular powers and political units.

58 Leonardi, “Modelli,” p. 266.

Very specific political changes in the twelfth century transformed the

metahistorical framework within which historians wrote, shifting it away
from the one described by Leonardi toward the teleological secular-national
historiography that would eventually dominate the historical profession. The
twelfth century marked the beginnings of a historiographical revolution
concerning the proper subject of historical narrative, a revolution which
began in the abbey of St. Denis during the abbacy of Suger (1122–1151),
when the first example of what could legitimately be called a history of
“France” was initiated with the Gesta gentis Francorum.59 History-writing
inhabitants of the abbey began to set a new style, creating the first examples
of the type of royally centered “national” historiography that would become,
by definition, the prototype of “grosse Geschichtsschreibung,” of Hegelian
“world-historical” history.

59 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey (Brookline, MA:

Classical Folia Editions, 1987), p. 11.

The key revolution in Dionysian historiographic production was the

identification of “France” and its history with the Capetian kings. As Spiegel
writes:
 By inserting the history of the troisième race within the history of France as a whole,
the chroniclers could describe French history as a coherent evolution and use the past to
legitimize contemporary political life. In this sense, royal history as written at St.-Denis
functioned as a legitimizing myth…. [Suger’s] Life of Louis VI presents the Capetian
monarch as the… focal point of French history…. it provided a new model for historical
writing…. Suger initiates the intensive study of the history of France, reign by reign,
with a clear focus on the person of the king.60

60 Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition, pp. 45–46.

In order to pinpoint the way in which the twelfth-century historiographic

production of St. Denis is “modern,” Spiegel contrasts it with that pre-
modern form of historiographical production which we now call
“hagiography:”
The focus on the king is no longer restricted to a biographical study, as in Helgaud’s
quasi-hagiographical study of Robert the Pious, but takes a more official perspective, in
which the king figures as the representative of the realm.61

61 Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition, p. 47.

With the twelfth-century productions of St. Denis, part and parcel of the
creation of the administrative monarchy of the Capetians, we begin to see
the creation of a “historiography” measured against which pre-twelfth-
century narratives will seem to pertain to a distinct genre, one which, in the
nineteenth century, would be labeled “hagiography.” Helgaud’s biography of
Robert was “quasi-hagiographical” compared with Suger’s biography of
Louis precisely because the true subject of Helgaud’s narrative was not the
realm, the kingdom, the “state.” The exemplary, moralizing, providential
aspects of Helgaud’s narrative did not render it “hagiography” in Spiegel’s
eyes, but the absence of a focus on the kingdom of France did, for that has
been a sine qua non for the definition of historiography.62
62 The works of Helgaud and Suger did not differ at all when it came to the types of criteria
that are most frequently invoked to distinguish “hagiography” from historiography, for
Suger’s biography too remains “a panegyric written to reflect the virtue and piety of the
king as an exemplar to later generations” (Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition, p. 48). So too for
the contribution of Odo of Deuil, Suger’s successor as abbot and historian at St. Denis.
Odo’s narrative, De profectione Ludovici Vll in orientem (ca. 1148), is filled with
“unwavering praise of Louis’ actions, ideas and virtues, in which he sees the disguised
hand of God at work” (Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition, p. 54).

Because ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-century Francia had no modern-style

secular kingdoms or states, it was not possible to write history in the
modern style. It was, however, possible to write history, as Tilliette’s
seventy-plus narratives, numerous extant monastic and episcopal gesta,
“chronicle-cartularies,” and a host of other texts amply demonstrate.

The nineteenth century

All the factors mentioned above, intellectual-epistemological, religious, and
political, worked together from the twelfth century to create a new
paradigm within whose framework “historiography” became a type of
narrative ostensibly concerned exclusively with the realm of sensible reality
divorced from the realm of the sacred, the realm of the “saints.” However, it
was not until the nineteenth century that the category, the genre, of
“hagiography” was invented. For then, historiography stood ready to be
purged of those who dared write of saints or miracles in history at all, rather
than within the confines of “hagiography,” “superstition,” “folklore,” or
“popular devotion.”
The definition of “hagiography” that was current in approximately 1100
has already been cited in the opening lines of this essay; it bears repeating
here. In the words of Honorius of Autun:
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Title: The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 5,

February 1923)

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YALE

LITERARY MAGAZINE (VOL. LXXXVIII, NO. 5, FEBRUARY 1923)
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Vol. LXXXVIII No. 5

The
Yale Literary Magazine
Conducted by the
Students of Yale University.

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February, 1923.
 New Haven: Published by the Editors.
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THE YALE CO-OP.

A Story of Progress
At the close of the fiscal year, July, 1921, the total membership
was 1187.
For the same period ending July, 1922, the membership was
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 On January 18th, 1923, the membership was 1905, and men
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Why stay out when a membership will save you manifold times
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 THE YALE LITERARY
MAGAZINE

Contents
FEBRUARY, 1923

Leader Winfield Shiras 137

Five Sonnets Maxwell E. Foster 140
Girl Friends Norman R. Jaffray 145
Under the Arch I Passed Morris Tyler 146
A Benediction Walter Edwards Houghton, Jr. 147
Sonnet J. Crosby Brown, Jr. 148
Georgiana Russell W. Davenport 149
The Artistry of Art Maxwell E. Foster 164
Gossip W. T. Bissell 170
Book Reviews 174
Editor’s Table 180
 The Yale Literary Magazine

Vol. LXXXVIII FEBRUARY, 1923 No. 5

EDITORS

MAXWELL EVARTS FOSTER

RUSSELL WHEELER DAVENPORT WINFIELD SHIRAS
ROBERT CHAPMAN BATES FRANCIS OTTO MATTHIESSEN

BUSINESS MANAGERS

CHARLES EVANDER SCHLEY HORACE JEREMIAH VOORHIS

 Leader
We appear to have been surrounded in these weeks by a polemic
atmosphere. Tremendous controversies have proved and disproved
the validity of Christianity, the inability of the Faculty and Corporation
to make great men from Yale undergraduates, and whether we
should be made to go to Chapel on Sundays and to recitations on
other days. Editorials, communications, and private discussions
continue to feed the maw of this wholesale argumentative
machinery, and to the casual observer, a spirit of radicalism hovers
above the campus, clouding or illuminating it as the individual
chooses to suppose.
There is no place here to discuss the beneficial effect of
controversy upon thought. Nor is there any need for pointing out the
possibility of reform arising from the conviction which thought brings.
It is the controversy itself which is interesting, especially in an
institution where experience and tradition form the basis of the laws
and customs. Controversy at Yale must mean an offensive begun by
young minds upon what time has taught their controlling elders. And
consequently, as is being seen, it takes a ton of controversy to
germinate a pound of “reform”.
But young minds are impulsively active. They are impatient, and
the distant hope of a change in a present state of affairs holds in
itself a vast attraction. The philosophy of “all things must change”,
applied to conditions as well as to matter, extends a sweet and
optimistic prospect to youth. And it is to this natural tendency, as well
as to any deep-rooted sincerity concerning evils, that much of our
controversy may be attributed. And when a beginning has been
made, a flaming question raised, there are the additional attractions
of being given an opportunity to turn clever phrases, to appear in the
public eye, to champion or rend in a spirit of battle. The
argumentative machinery clanks frantically, and the sound and
rhythm of it beats a false sincerity into the minds of the
controversialists, a kind of belief founded more upon emotional than
mental activity; more upon desire than knowledge.
A controversy may be said to be worth while to us only when it
involves more thought than impulse. A questionaire has recently
been sent broadcast through the University which is quite definite in
its spirit of controversy, but which falls for no definiteness of thought.
Rather, it requires the impulsive reply, the mere “yes” or “no” form.
Do we (yes or no) think Sunday Chapel should be abolished? Are we
(yes or no) in favor of unlimited cuts from recitations for those whose
stand is above 70 per cent.? Although there is certainly no chance to
turn phrases here, the philosophy of change readily asserts itself. It
is so easy and delightful to change things with a slight swift
affirmation or negation. Those who write “yes” to the suggestion of
unlimited cuts may be the identical persons who have been
complaining that certain professors require all cuts, even within the
present limited range, to be made up. Nor do those hasty souls
pause to consider that continuous attendance would be inevitably
required under the new system through a more severe grading and a
greater emphasis upon examinations. But it is so easy and delightful
to write “yes”, whereas to reply in the negative would indicate a
desire for the boring continuation of existing conditions!
Then, says the non-University man, what is the advantage of a
system of education which stimulates emotional rather than rational
opinion? The answer is simply we learn through disappointments,
and through a later realization of our childlike wistfulness for new
things. This latter begins often as early as our Senior year, in which
we realize other things as well, including our transience as
undergraduates and our lack of time for conducting many of the new
states of affairs which we advocate so heartily, such as complete
student government. There is too much extra-curriculum activity
already in our lives here to allow us to be administrators as well.
Also, in Senior year, we tend to acquire more or less veneration for
the force of experience and for the opinions of older minds than our
own. The greatest lesson of life is dawning upon us,—that the truest
form of living is one which is built upon simplicity, fundamentals, and
a direction of our actions by old example.
 University life, operating upon our intelligent spirit, is the emerging
from the sensationalism of thought and action craved by youth, into
the more simple contemplative nature of maturity. In our Freshman
and Sophomore years we seek diversion almost wholly in gaudy
forms. Then,—too soon, it seems—we find that we were wrong, that
it is the life of the Quadrangle, the relationship of friends, the contact
with the internal rather than with the external shows, which are the
vital and permanent attractions. The fire-brand element is prone to
vanish.
Whether all this may be considered too conservative in the present
day and place; whether, in itself, it is a turning of phrases, or invites
controversy by attacking controversy, is extraneous. Whether it may
be thought to neglect too much the good influence of controversy
upon right thinking, is another and fairer question. One thing it seeks
to inculcate: a realization of the component parts of undergraduate
controversy, a useful knowledge of the natural emotional forces
involved which veil clarity; so that truth may be found more fully than
in the replies to questionaires and in the disputes revolving about
destructive editorials.
WINFIELD SHIRAS.
 Five Sonnets
1

Now lift the burden of your pagan hair,

And shame the sun; now stretch your eager hands,
And with your lily-fingers fasten bands
About me. I am Prometheus, and so dare.
Your eyes are vultures and my heart their fare,
But you are something no one understands,
You are the spirit of the falling sands,
You are the color that is lost in prayer.

I am Prometheus, but your dreams conceive

New subtle desolations for desire,
Holding aloft the gold unbroken bowl.
What wisdom of black art can so deceive?
For though it is the guerdon of my soul,
I cannot reach to steal that Titan fire.

Let the Hippolytuses make their prayers

To altars of cold death, and let them take
The dead results their clear libations make,
Or with bowed head climb up the golden stairs.
The glory of their dying is all theirs
Who have found fire only about the stake,—
It is a pity we should try to break
The perfect symmetry of their despairs.

But we who are the children of our birth

Loving the clay we are, and are to be,
Find more sufficient life wherein we spawn,
And eat and drink, mere creatures of the earth,
And so endure with less fragility
The sun and starlight of the lonely dawn.

I cannot watch this dawn with humble eyes,

Feel the wind on my forehead, and not feel
My genius and my destiny reveal
Themselves unto the surge of that surmise,
Nor with a humdrum and dust-worn surprise
Can I unveil the λόγος you conceal,
Or praise the Potter or the Potter’s wheel
For having made the beautiful that dies.

It is with a new light I find my way,

But you have given that; it is your light.
And if I walked in darkness as of old,
I should not blame the Gods, nor shall I say
That they have changed into this day the night,
Or fashioned of my crown of thorns this gold.

Could I foresee the Truth gleaming ahead

Out of our common reach, but in my own,
I should not go unto that perilous throne
To lose myself among the famous dead.
For in the glory where a martyr’s bled
Lurks a renunciation of the known,—
His wine is salty, and his bread a stone....
Mine is a sparkling wine, mine sweetened bread.

I care not for a deathless imagery

With you a living image by my side,
Nor for a visioned truth with you the true.
I need no Godhood save the gift of pride
To make my idol my idolatry,
And me insatiate of only you.

A moment hold that pose for my applause:

My heart’s an artist; it would paint its fill.
Let you the model be the test of skill
Whether or not your eye or mine’s the cause.
No need this moment for artistic laws;
Lost in the poem is the prosaic will—,
My art is lost in you. And do you kill
The picture moving so?—A moment pause.

So goes the brush on canvas, so the rhyme,

And so mortality. What do we fear
If there be only a moment, so that lives?
The aeon passes, and no dream regives
Its passion repetition in our time.
Pause for a moment. There is beauty here.
MAXWELL E. FOSTER.
 Girl Friends

On the bench at the piano, playing

Very close together,
Fingers touching one another lightly—
Light as any feather—
Sat they, smiling to each other brightly
What their hearts were saying.

One would turn the sheets of music over

Gently, for the other,
As a kind and sympathetic sister
Helps a younger brother;
Till at last she bent and swiftly kissed her
As one would a lover.

NORMAN R. JAFFRAY.
 Under the Arch I Passed

Under the arch I passed

Out of a blasphemous world
Into the quiet of years
And of old lives departed.

Under the arch I passed

Out of life’s traffic and din
Into the playground of youth
And of ghostly tradition.

Under the arch I passed

Out of a turmoil of gain
Into the light of the truth
And of days past recalling.
MORRIS TYLER.
 A Benediction

What if the storm to-night

Drive us on unknown shore?
What if the morning light
Never shall bless us more?

Need we to fear or care

What is our given share?

Dawn will bring skies of blue,

And calm will the waters be—
Long as I live for you,
And long as you live for me.

WALTER EDWARDS HOUGHTON, JR.