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Angels and Anchoritic Culture

in Late Medieval England
OXFORD STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL

LITERATURE AND CULTURE
General Editors
Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon
The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture

showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and
actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects
medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social,
political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the
history of science—but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers
innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript
and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and
the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music;
medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of
devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the
environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism.
Angels and Anchoritic

Culture in Late Medieval
England
JOSHUA S. EASTERLING
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Joshua S. Easterling 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942466
ISBN 978–0–19–886541–4
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for you. si tu rêves d’un ange, c’est moi

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi
List of Illustrations xiii
Introduction: Anchoritic Communities 1

1. The Arrival of Angels 22
2. Charismatic Anchorites and the Making of Truth 49
3. Lay Preaching and Living Saints 78
4. The Angel, the Confessor, and the Anchoress 105
5. The Transformation of Perfection 137
6. A Mirror of Clerical Authority 165
Conclusion 197
Bibliography 201
Index 221
Acknowledgments
I am so very delighted to give thanks for the generous support I have received
while completing this book. Thinking and writing about the charismatic figures in
its pages has reminded me on several occasions that, in major and minor
endeavors, the sources of assistance often prove to be both unexpected and
wonderfully abundant. This book owes a tremendous amount to the support of
a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt founda-
tion, and of the colleagues at two institutions who helped with many of the
practical details in connection with the fellowship—Staci Stone and Sue Sroda.
I am especially and unspeakably grateful to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance
Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, Andrew James Johnston, whose gener-
osity reaches to the heavens, or seems to.
Many friends and colleagues in Germany, the United States, and Britain have
offered much encouragement, in word and deed, at various points in this project.
A special thanks goes to several colleagues, including Bella Millett, Roxane Riegler,
Fiona Somerset, Eddie Jones, Sara Cooper, Michael Sargent, Andrew James
Johnston, and Kevin Binfield, who have all read, and generously commented on,
portions of this book at various stages of its development. In a different but equally
important way, many friends living and working well beyond the boundaries of
academic culture have been immensely supportive. It is a truth perhaps too
seldom practiced that to field many questions from non-specialists about a chosen
subject of inquiry is to cultivate a special capacity for rethinking what had grown
too familiar and, as a consequence, requires fresh ideas and re-examination. I have
been fortunate to have friends who were willing to listen, with superhuman patience
and generosity, to descriptions of this book and its subject. Their questions, attention,
and genuine interest in the lives of medieval anchorites—a fantastically arcane
subject to those with sense enough to avoid having further acquaintance with it—
have alone accomplished much to shape and refine my understanding of the
literature and culture of voluntary reclusion in the later Middle Ages.
And yet my debts run deeper still. I am very grateful indeed for the assistance of
several librarians at different institutions, who have in various ways helped with
securing rare materials. It is also a delight to have worked with my colleague and
friend Juyoung Song during the early stages of their project; she offered many and
invaluable encouragements for which I will remain ever grateful. I would also like
to thank the anonymous readers for the series in Medieval Literature and Culture
at Oxford University Press, as well as the editors of that series. Their astute reading
allowed me to correct several errors and absurdities that I would have otherwise
x 
missed. For all of those imperfections in argument, etc. that remain in the book
I am of course solely responsible. Moreover, I am fortunate that friends and
colleagues at the University of Maryland, including Theresa Coletti and Charles
E. Wright, have remained so supportive and encouraging over the years. Their
advice, perspective, and humor have been true blessings offered in great abun-
dance. I hope only to have given at least as much as I have received, though I feel
certain that this has not been so.
I am every bit as grateful for many other friendships and family members who
have in one way or another carried me for years. They are the sine qua non of this
work and, it seems, of everything I have accomplished. At some level, as this book
emerged, it did so in response to numerous interactions and conversations with
friends and family, often on subjects that had on their face nothing to do with its
subject. I have learned so much from these interactions and the love that inspired
them. I am grateful to my brother, Paul H. L. Easterling, who surely doesn’t realize
how much our talks have changed and taught me. And in many ways—I cannot
even begin to count them—Roxane Riegler has been and remains a guiding light.
Her heart is generous and kind beyond measure.
Finally, I thank my parents, June Crandall and Billy Easterling, whose love and
support have in a very real sense authored this book. For them I have more love
and gratitude than words can express; and the beautiful words that Ælred of
Rievaulx composed for his sister—wait there for the arrival of the angel.
List of Abbreviations
AASS Acta Sanctorum, ed. J. Bollandus et al. (Antwerp, 1643–).

AKDM Die Akten des Kanonisationsprozesses Dorotheas von Montau von 1394 bis
1521, ed. Richard Stachnik with Anneliese Triller and Hans Westpfahl
(Cologne: Böhlau, 1978).
CCCM Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout: Brepols, 1966–).
CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols: 1953–).
CF Cistercian Fathers Series
CSQ Cistercian Studies Quarterly
DM/CH Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and
C. C. Swinton Bland (London: George Routledge, 1929); Caesarius von
Heisterbach: Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Marc-Aeilko Aris et al. (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2009).
DSB Doctoris Seraphici S. Bonaventurae, S .R. E. Episcopi Cardinalis Opera Omnia,
10 vols. (Florence: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902).
EETS Early English Text Society
GCO Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, 7 vols., ed. J. S. Brewer et al. (London: Longman,
1861–77).
JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
JMH Journal of Medieval History
JMRC Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures
JRH Journal of Religious History
MGH SS Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores rerum germanicarum
(Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1826–).
MED Middle English Dictionary
MMT Medieval Mystical Theology
MMTE The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium
PL Patrologiae cursus completes: series Latina, 221 vols., ed. J. P. Migne (Paris:
Migne, 1861–4).
SBO S. Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and N. M. Rochais, 8 vols.
(Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77).
SCH Studies in Church History
Spec. incl. E. A. Jones, ed., Speculum Inclusorum, A Mirror for Recluses: A Late-Medieval
Guide for Anchorites and Its Middle English Translation (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2013), now the standard edition in place of P. Livarius Oliger,
Speculum Inclusorum, Auctore Anonymo Anglico Saeculi XIV, Lateranum 4.1
(1937), 1–148.
ST Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Latin-
English, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 9 vols. (Scots
Valley, CA: NovAntiqua, 2008–18).
xii   
VCM Vita Christinae Mirabilis, AASS, July 24, 637–60.

VCS Vita Catharina Senensis, AASS, April 30, 863–967.
VDM Vita Dorotheae Montoviensis Magistri Johannis Marienwerder, ed. Hans
Westpfahl (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1964).
VHV Vita B. Herlucae Virginis, AASS, April 2, 549–54.
VJMC Vita Julianae Montis-Cornelii, AASS, April 5, 435–76.
VLA Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis, AASS, June 16, 187–209.
VMC John of Magdeburg, Die Vita der Margareta Contracta, einer Magdeburger
Rekluse des 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. Paul Gerhard Schmidt (Leipzig: Benno,
1992).
VNM Vita Sancti Norberti Archiepiscopi Magdeburgi, AASS, June 6, 791–845.
VSW Vitae Sancae Wiboradae: Die ältesten Lebenbeschreibungen der heiligen
Wiborada, ed. Walter Berschin (St. Gallen: Historischer Verein des Kntons
St. Gallen, 1983).
VVIV Vita Venerabilis Idea Virginis, AASS, April 2, 156–89.
VW/LW John of Ford, Wulfric of Haselbury, by John, Abbot of Ford, ed. Maurice Bell
(Somerset Record Society, 47, 1933); John of Forde, The Life of Wulfric of
Haselbury, Anchorite, trans. Pauline Matarasso, Cistercian Fathers Series 79
(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011).
VYH Vita Juettae Reclusae (Yvette of Huy), AASS, January 1, 145–69.
List of Illustrations
1 Dutch manuscript of the Apostle Peter freed from prison by the angel.
The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 78 D 38 II, fol. 213v. 19
2 The penitent, her confessor, and the angel. British Library, Yates Thompson
11, fol. 29r © The British Library Board. 111
3 Angel playing musical instrument. British Library, Arundel 83, fol. 134v
© The British Library Board. 159
4 Angels assisting at mass. The Hague, KB, 76 G 9, fol. 134r. 162
5 Mary Magdalene as a desert-dwelling and angel-attended solitary.
British Library, Yates Thompson 3, fol. 280r © The British Library Board. 188
Introduction
Anchoritic Communities
And Peter returned to himself and said, “Now I know that the Lord
has sent his angel.”
(Acts 12:11)
In his first letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul identifies several gifts,
or charismata (χαρίσματα), that Christians receive from the Holy Spirit, including
wisdom, faith, knowledge, healing, miraculous and prophetic powers, spiritual
discernment, and speaking or interpreting different languages (1 Cor. 12:8–11).
His letter nowhere suggests precisely whom the Spirit might so grace with
charismatic power, or how it might do so; divine generosity is here at once
inscrutable and potentially boundless. Paul does, however, provide an image to
elucidate the relation between such diverse charisms; he notes that, as the body has
“many parts” (1 Cor. 12:12), so too is the “body of Christ” (1 Cor. 12:27) a
collective of many members whose gifts will vary from one member to another
in kind as well as in function. The image implies both a contrast and a joining of
unity with diversity, the one with the many, and the individual with the wider
community of believers. While Paul hereby suggests an understanding of spiritual
gifts in relation to embodiment, the task of articulating or even imagining that
intersection ranks among the many challenges that his metaphor would later
present to a medieval religious culture that drew liberally on his spiritual
authority.¹
This book examines the relationship between embodiment—both in direct
experience and metaphorical representations—and the spiritual gifts as these
were figured across religious works composed in England (c.1100–1400) and in
connection with the life of reclusion.² The many writings that emerged within the
¹ For discussion of Paul’s metaphor and its philosophical intertexts, see Michelle V. Lee, Paul, the
Stoics, and the Body of Christ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 105–97; and Dale
B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 87–138. The now flour-
ishing scholarship on embodiment and spiritual authority in early Christian society owes much to the
study by Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
² On medieval discourses of embodiment, see The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in
Medieval Culture, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2013); Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University
Angels and Anchoritic Culture in Late Medieval England. Joshua S. Easterling, Oxford University Press.
© Joshua S. Easterling 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198865414.003.0001
2        
highly fluid textual communities to which late medieval anchorites belonged are
intensely preoccupied with the charismatic spirituality that marked this period,
and which has much to teach us (far more, in fact, than we realize) about
contemporary representations of the body and its relation to spiritual power.³
Committed to a spiritual vocation within the narrow confines of their cells,
anchorites lie at the heart of this study not least because they inhabited various
cultural boundaries, for example between solitude and community, as well as
those spaces of transition and transformation that are inextricably connected with
charismatic experience. Many anchoritic texts in fact owe their origins to the
transformations that took place within the cultures of religious reform, which
flourished during the second half of the eleventh century and beyond, and which
fundamentally altered the wider spiritual landscape of Western Europe. That is to
say, the corpus of anchoritic writings produced in late medieval England was
powerfully shaped by, and responded to, the reformist developments within
western Christendom at large.⁴ These texts are central to the argument of this
book because they serve as highly eloquent witnesses to divergent notions of
charisma and holy embodiment, and as a record of persistent tensions within
medieval religious culture between charismatic power and that of the church,
between inspired individuals and ecclesiastical authority. The story that this study
tells about recurrent crises of spiritual legitimacy and their place in the formation
of anchoritic writings requires of course that we first know who wrote (and read)
these works, what purpose they served for intended readers, and finally how these
texts participated in the religious storms that swept across late medieval Europe
and England.
Press, 1996); and Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings
(London: Routledge, 1993), 22–30.
³ The term “textual communities” derives from Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written
Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983), 88–240. On anchoritic textual communities, see Medieval Anchorites in Their
Communities, ed. Cate Gunn and Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 167–220; and
Joshua Easterling, “Anchorites and Orthodox Culture: Spiritual Instruction in the Twelfth Century,”
Viator 49.1 (2018): 77–98 et passim.
⁴ Scholarship on anchoritic culture in medieval England has flourished since Ann K. Warren’s study
Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). See
esp. Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages, ed. Liz
Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005); Rhetoric of the
Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2008); Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200–1550, ed.
E. A. Jones (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019); Mari Hughes-Edwards, Reading
Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012);
Anchoritism in the Middle Ages: Texts and Traditions, ed. Catherine Innes-Parker and Naoë Kukita
Yoshikawa (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013); and Gunn and McAvoy, Medieval Anchorites in
Their Communities.
:   3
Charismatics in a Reforming Culture
Religious elites, including monks, friars, and others, occupied a central place
within anchoritic culture, which flourished as a set of complex spiritual and
textual networks throughout medieval Europe.⁵ From an institutional and inter-
personal perspective, there were good reasons for anchorites’ close affiliations
with clerics and religious orders. Although reclusion was in several ways pro-
foundly monastic in its expression and origins, and while many formal religious
(nuns, mendicants, and others) opted for reclusion, anchorites within and beyond
England often had little or no prior monastic training, and hailed either from lay
society or, like Wulfric of Haselbury (d. 1154), from the ranks of the priesthood.⁶
Overall, the life of voluntary reclusion was far less tightly governed by the
regulatory strictures at home within European monasteries, and no anchoritic
“rule” or admonitory text ever attained anything like the cultural and spiritual
authority of the Benedictine Rule. Described as “bees without a king,” anchorites
also found themselves at times without direct and sustained clerical, mendicant, or
monastic oversight and thus became living sermons on the need for regular
guidance from religious authorities.⁷ Direct interventions often took the form of
visitations to the anchorhold by local spiritual affiliates, while others, including
Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), Ælred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), and Peter the
Venerable (d. 1156), turned to composing works of guidance and encouragement
for both individual anchorites and wider networks.
Another established feature of this culture was its fascination with what might
be called the angelic image, which was elaborated in various ways and across a
range of texts. These repeatedly attest that anchorites were not only visited by
spiritual elites, nor only provided with works of spiritual instruction (among other
⁵ While the influence of women, including those who were not themselves enclosed, is more difficult
to trace, it was potentially far stronger. For example, anchoresses wrote, copied, and read texts often as a
consequence of their ties with other women; evidence of this is found in Ælred of Rievaulx’s De
institutione inclusarum (see Chapter 2), the Life of the twelfth-century anchoress Jutta of
Disibodenberg (d. 1136), and other sources. For Jutta’s Life, see Anna Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard:
The Biographical Sources (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 65–84, esp. 77–80.
⁶ On the diversity in class and vocation among those who were enclosed, see Chapter 1, n. 84. For
general studies of European anchoritism, see esp. Anneke Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The
Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010).
⁷ See Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 1–23. On anchoritic guidance or admonitory texts,
see esp. Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism, 15–31; and Bella Millett, “Can There Be Such
a Thing as an ‘Anchoritic Rule,’ ” in Anchoritism in the Middle Ages, 11–30. Anchorites also received
material assistance from higher prelates, the lower clergy, and local monastic and mendicant sup-
porters, who often personally visited the enclosure; see Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, 127–279.
For discussion of visitations by religious supervisors, see Joshua S. Easterling, “Cistercians, Recluses and
Salvation Networks in the Thirteenth Century,” Quaderni di storia religiosa medievale 24.1 (2021):
153–80.
4        
texts), but were also graced by the presence of angels.⁸ Anchoritic writings are also
in places marked by a vital “angelism,” which is exemplified in the literature of
early monasticism and thus connected with the historical emergence of eremitism
and voluntary reclusion. The notion gained currency among early desert fathers
and mothers who aspired to liberation from the flesh (including freedom from the
constraints of sex and gender) by adopting an “angelic life” through various
ascetic renunciations.⁹ What orthodox Christianity would eventually confront as
a troubling association of angels with various forms of spiritual freedom informs
many late medieval anchoritic works. Moreover, persistent across this period was
the belief that angels often frequented holy enclosures, whether monastic or
anchoritic. These in a sense became angelic spaces: Gabriel’s greeting of the
Virgin Mary in her enclosure at the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38); the angel
who visited the Apostle Peter, imprisoned by civil authorities (see epigraph); as
well as the radiant figures who appeared to the women near the tomb at Christ’s
Resurrection (John 20:12) gave no few anchorites the reassurance that their own
angel would attend them in like fashion. In powerful ways, angelic visitations were
a cultural sine qua non; on the rare occasion that anchoritic writings do not refer
to angels their presence is nonetheless assumed. The same was often true of
eremitic life. The English hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349) opens his Meditation B
by commending himself to the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, other saints, and to “my
holy aungel.”¹⁰
This aspect of solitary reclusion and its textual culture belongs within a
constellation of ideals and images that related to the perennial and contested
issue of authority and its institutional localities. Across late medieval writings
angelic visitations frequently served many interrelated functions and afforded a
stage for both the renegotiation of personal spiritual power and the cultural
imperatives of imitatio. In a letter (c.1102) addressed to two anchoresses, Edith
and Seitha, Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury encouraged the women to invite
their angels (angelos vestros) into the enclosure and even to imitate them by living
“as if you were gazing upon [the angels] visibly.”¹¹ An authority cited often in
⁸ On the writings that anchorites accessed beyond guidance texts, see Chapter 1, n. 95.
⁹ For discussion, see Jean Leclercq, “Monasticism and Angelism,” Downside Review 85 (1967):
127–37 at 128ff. On this idea’s development within late medieval contexts, see also Barbara Newman,
From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 4 et passim.
¹⁰ Richard Rolle, Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, Ed. from MS Longleat 29 and Related Manuscripts,
S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), VII.1–4.
¹¹ Anselm of Canterbury, Sancti Anselmi Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmidt, vol. 4 (Edinburgh:
Thomas Nelson, 1949), Letter 230, 134–5: “[A]ngelicam in omnibus considerate et imitamini conversa-
tionem. Haec contemplatio sit magistra vestra, haec consideratio sit regula vestra. Quae vitae angelicae
concordant sectamini, quae ab illa discordant exsecramini. Angelos vestros—sicut dixit dominus: ‘angeli
eorum semper vident faciem patris mei’—semper vobis praesentes et actus et cogitatus vestros consider-
antes cogitate, et ita, velut si eos visibiliter inspiceretis, semper vivere curate” (22–8). On this letter, which
suggests that the women in question may have had need of a regulatory text (regula vestra), see also
Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 83.
:   5
anchoritic texts, Saint Jerome (d. 420) had in similar terms upheld as an ascetic
model the continual watchfulness of angels and their preparedness to “obey God’s
commands.” He writes, “we must imitate by our frequent vigils the service of the
angels.”¹² Drawing on the scriptural witness that angels gaze continually upon the
divine countenance (Matt. 18:10 [cf. 1 Pet. 1.12]), Anselm for his part instructs
Edith and Seitha to follow suit and even to undertake any practice that accorded
with the angelic life (vitae angelicae). His discussion of contemplation (literally, a
gazing upon) as the anchoresses’ teacher (magistra) lends a double meaning to a
practice that occupied a central place within anchoritic culture: the women were
to gaze upon their angels but also imitate them in contemplating the Creator. Yet
imitatio angeli embraced far more than engaging in vigils or contemplatively
beholding God, as we shall see, even as the angelic presence was further associated
in medieval religious culture with an array of spiritual gifts beyond the list
provided in Paul’s epistle. As the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Bernard of
Clairvaux (d. 1153) observed, the bestowal of divine gifts was often delegated to
angels, whose visitations became occasions for this purpose. The German mystic
Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. c.1282) agreed. She was shown the angels who were
charged with her care, one of whom was “a keeper of the gifts [who] orders
wisdom in the loving soul.”¹³ Indeed, unless they are themselves prophesying or
healing, angels in biblical texts (e.g. 2 Kings 1:3–4; John 5:4; Num. 22:35) often
turn an unsuspecting listener into a prophet of God; much the same was true for
medieval visionaries like Mechthild and, of course, anchorites.
These were known for possessing various charisms, which were described by
the Latin donum or a conventional synonym (gratia, charisma, munus), and
which ranged from prophecy to miracle-working and spiritual discernment.
Within the Latin and vernacular religious writings brought together in this
book, including theological texts, works of spiritual guidance, mystical treatises,
papal decrees, vitae, and letters, several of the Pauline charismata are of marginal
importance, or at least figure less prominently than do later accretions that have
little or no scriptural witness. Thus, xenoglossia, the ability to speak an otherwise
unfamiliar tongue and arguably one of the gifts identified by Paul, was reported of
many holy men and women but did not enjoy the cultural prominence attained by
what was referred to as the “gift of tears” (gratia lacrymarum).¹⁴ Likewise, the
¹² Quoted in Leclercq, “Monasticism and Angelism,” 129.

¹³ Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York:
Paulist Press, 1997), 140. For Bernard’s point about angelic gifts, see Chapter 1, n. 53.
¹⁴ On xenoglossia, see in particular Christine F. Coopoer-Rompato, The Gift of Tongues: Women’s
Xenoglossia in the Later Middle Ages (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010), 6–10 et
passim. In general, the “gift of tears” was far more strongly promoted than many other gifts, and was
assumed to be more spiritually salubrious, and hence more desirable. See Kimberley Joy Knight,
“Si puose calcine a’ propi occhi: The Importance of the Gift of Tears for Thirteenth-Century
Religious Women and Their Hagiographers,” in Crying in the Middle Ages, ed. Elina Gertsman
(New York: Routledge, 2012), 136–55. Peter Damian (d. 1072) instructed his own congregation on
“how the gift of tears might be acquired” [quomodo lacrymarum gratia possit acquiri]; De institutis,
6        
English hermit Christina of Markyate (d. c.1160) and the prioress-turned-

anchoress Juliana of Cornillon (d. 1258) were celebrated as much for their
clairvoyance or foreknowledge as for their prophecies or discernment.¹⁵ These and
similar graces, for example the strongly somatic gift of sweetness popularized within
Cistercian spirituality, in fact often outstripped healing and miracle-working in their
cultural significance even as they implicated the body to an equal or greater extent.¹⁶
The charismatic spirituality witnessed among many late medieval anchorites
and which represented a form of divine grace communicated by the Spirit, or by
angels, figures in the writings discussed throughout this book as highly dynamic
and experiential rather than fixed and conceptual. Moreover, as the gifts that
medieval Christians claimed to possess, or to which they aspired, extended well
beyond their scriptural range, and while their links with embodiment was a
mainstay throughout the Middle Ages, charismatic experience resists assimilation
to any single organizing principle or set of texts. Here “charisma” has little to do
with the aura that surrounded bishops and kings as a consequence of their station,
or with what C. Stephen Jaeger has referred to as “charismatic culture” (or
“charismatic texts,” etc.).¹⁷ On the other hand, we speak even today of a “gifted
speaker” without wishing to suggest the exercise of a power on the order of a
spiritual gratia. The public magnetism or particular ability of some “to inspire
devotion or enthusiasm” emerges through many writings in close collaboration
with other specifically embodied experiences.¹⁸ That is, my use of the term retains
a multitude of resonances, and the teaching, preaching, or prophesying figures
I explore throughout were above all gifted in several ways, whether or not they
were possessed of the more extraordinary abilities of the spirit.
As they were expressed within and beyond anchoritic textual culture, those
abilities formed part of a broader discourse about the sources of religious author-
ity. Decisive in the formation of medieval religious communities, that discourse
26 (PL 145: 358B–359B). On this gift, see also André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages,
trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 438–9.
¹⁵ The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Recluse, trans. C. H. Talbot, reprint
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 140–4; and, for Juliana, Living Saints of the Thirteenth
Century: The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy; Juliana of Cornillon, Author of the Corpus Christi Feast;
and Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, trans. Jo Ann
McNamara et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 160; and Vauchez, Sainthood, 474. For an example roughly
contemporary with Juliana, see Thomas of Cantimpré, The Collected Saints’ Lives: Abbot John of
Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres, and Lutgard of Aywières, ed. Barbara
Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 267–8; and VLA, 40.192.
¹⁶ For discussion of late medieval accretions to the Pauline charismata, as well as the very many
figures who possessed such graces, see Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen: Schicksale auffälliger
Frauen in Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit (Zürich: Artemis und Winkler, 1995), 104 et passim; and
Vauchez, Sainthood, 499–526.
¹⁷ C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe,
950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 4 et passim. On the charisma of
bishops and kings, see Vauchez, Sainthood, 418 and 421. Nor does my reading frame spiritual gifts as in
any sense a “syndrome.” See Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen, 104.
¹⁸ See Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com), s.v. “charisma” (sense 2).
:   7
owes much to the fact that the capacity to inspire devotion and embody spiritual
power was contested, at times fiercely, during the first centuries of Christianity in
the West, and later during the eleventh- and twelfth-century waves of religious
reform. In such contexts, the notion of accessing divine truth through individual
experience worked at crosscurrents with an emergent and ultimately dominant
view of that authority as transmitted through hierarchy and apostolic succession.
In Katherine Ludwig Jansen’s succinct formulation, “the dilemma was whether
leadership in the Church, following the Gnostics, would be charismatic, personal,
visionary, and prophetic, or . . . operate through tradition and apostolic authority
handed down from generation to generation, from bishop to bishop.”¹⁹ This
tension between charismatic and personal channels of divine inspiration and
what would eventually form the institutional church and its leadership did not
vanish with the latter’s marginalization of Gnostic Christianity.²⁰ In a kind of
return of the Gnostic repressed, an eleventh-century culture in the process of
reforming monastic and ecclesiastical institutions came to a reckoning with the
spirit as a host of figures, including anchorites, gained popular admiration and
support in ways that challenged the discourse of spiritual legitimacy that was
promulgated by spiritual elites. Further, emergent forms of spiritual power among
the laity during and prior to this period often worked at crosscurrents with an
ecclesiastical politics that emphasized orthodox devotion and clerical purity.
It was also at this historical juncture that several of the images at the heart of
this book were appropriated by mainstream reformers and pressed into the service
of a specific articulation of church unity. Of central importance here were once
again the writings of Paul, which mention prophecy alongside both the charismata
and the work of “doctors” and “apostles” (Ep. 4:11), whose official power would
eventually be authorized by the church. This association of charisma with eccle-
siastical authority extended recurrent efforts within orthodox religious culture to
marginalize particular spiritual formations in favor of their institutionally legit-
imized alternatives. One text that vividly captures this contest is the Elucidarium
by Honorius Augustodunensis. An otherwise elusive figure (though likely a
monk), Honorius flourished during the first half of the twelfth century. Like
many contemporaries, he wrote within the orbit of wide-ranging reforms, which
began at the midpoint of the eleventh century as religious and cultural boundaries
¹⁹ Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the
Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27; for a general treatment of this
tension, see Hans von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the
First Three Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969). On Gnosticism, itself a troubled
category, see esp. Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003), 5–19 et passim.
²⁰ For brief discussion of this tension, see for example, Mary Harvey Doyno, The Lay Saint: Charity
and Charismatic Authority in Medieval Italy, 1150–1350 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019); see
also John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 22–4 and n. 16.
8        
were reordered and, as throughout the later Middle Ages, the collective “body of
Christ” was broken and reconstituted.²¹ Honorius’s image of the body of Christ
vividly recalls its Pauline source but differs in critical ways.
As the body is attached to the head and governed by it, so is the Church joined
together to it through the sacrament of the body of Christ; indeed, it is made one
with it, by which all of the righteous in its order are governed as members by the
head. The eyes of this head are prophets (prophetae), who foresee the future; as
are the apostles, who guide others back from the path of error to the light of
righteousness. The ears are the obedient, the nostrils the discerning (discreti).
The snot that is expelled from the nostrils are heretics, who are wiped from
Christ’s head by the judgment of those with discernment. The mouth are doctors;
the teeth, expositors of sacred scripture; the hands defenders of the Church.²²
Similar images would follow over the coming decades and centuries; for example,
the Expositio in Cantica Canticorum by the Cistercian Geoffrey of Auxerre
(d. 1194) compared the monastery “to the body of the bride [in the Song of
Songs]” and made analogies between that body and offices in the church.²³ While,
Honorius underscores unity and order, he also re-forms the Pauline charisms (e.g.
discernment) by matching them with different parts of the church. The move is in
fact consistent with a largescale reworking of spiritual ideals in accordance with
the priorities formulated by a reforming church that emphasized unity and
subordination to clerical authority. Though Paul underscored the multiplicity
and diversity of gifts, which were not restricted to particular Christians or set in
an ideological frame of subordination, the gift of wisdom or knowledge was
presupposed in teaching, judging, or correcting others—tasks that are the focal
²¹ See Charles F. Briggs, The Body Broken: Medieval Europe, 1300–1520 (London: Routledge, 2011).
²² Honorius Augustodunensis, L’Elucidarium et les lucidaires: contribution, par l’histoire d’un texte,
à l’histoire des croyances religieuses en France au moyen âge, ed. Yves Lefevre (Paris: E. de Boccard,
1954), Book 1.179, 394: “Ut corpus capiti inhaeret et ab eo regitur, ita Ecclesia per sacramentum corporis
Christi ei coniungitur; immo unum cum eo efficitur, a quo omnes iusti in suo ordine, ut membra a capite,
gubernantur. Cujus capitis oculi sunt prophetae, qui futuram praeviderunt; sunt et apostoli, qui alios de
via erroris ad lumen iustitiae deduxerunt. Aures sunt obedientes. Nares, discreti. Phlegma, quod per
nares ejicitur, haeretici, qui iudicio discretorum de capite Christo emunguntur. Os sunt doctores. Dentes,
sacrae scripturae expositores. Manus, Ecclesiae defensores.” On this passage, see Caroline Walker
Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 148. The hierarchy implied by Honorius and others markedly contrasts with
the Pauline text, which takes precisely the opposite view; see Lee, Paul, the Stoics, 16. For the now
standard studies of Honorius’s works and his ties with reform culture, see Valerie Flint, Ideas in the
Medieval West: Texts and Their Contexts (London: Variorum, 1988), 63–238, esp. 178–98.
²³ Geoffrey of Auxerre, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, ed. Ferruccio Gastaldelli (Rome, Temi e
testi, 1974), 2.449–55; see also Martha G. Newman, The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and
Ecclesiastical Reform 1098–1180 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 103 and 107. The image of
Christ’s body in theological writings and biblical exegesis long antedates the twelfth century. On the
subject, see the series of articles on Saint Augustine’s works by Stanislaus J. Grabowski, “The Mystical
Body of Christ According to Saint Augustine,” Theological Studies 5–9 (1944–8): 453–83, 62–84,
72–125, 614–67, and 48–84 (with slightly varying titles).
:   9
point of this passage, and that were performed by religious elites, who were little
inclined to extend their institutional privileges to those outside of their ranks.²⁴
Yet not all medieval Christians were by any means in agreement about what
Christ’s body was—a fact that renders the rather narrow and confining boundaries
established by this image still more striking. Was that body a strictly ordered
hierarchy governed by prelates and the imperatives of obedience, or a collective
shaped by the inscrutable stirrings of the spirit and the charismatic power to
which that spirit gave rise?
Still more is at work in Honorius’s troubled image. As even the most fleeting
reflection on human experience demonstrates, bodies are anything but stable;
whether individual or communal, they conform to the transfiguring powers of
time and circumstance. Medieval religious writings repeatedly acknowledged that
the healing, wounded, aging, and growing body was nothing if not unstable,
despite the tendency to present the bodies of saints as incorruptible and unchan-
ging.²⁵ By contrast, Honorius’s image remains firmly invested in corporeal stabil-
ity. Admittedly, no eye should or can perform the function of a mouth. Yet that is
not his point: Honorius’s alignment of particular spiritual activities and functions
with certain members of Christ’s body is unsettled by any suggestion that corpor-
ate collectivities might change. In short, Honorius’s thought and that of many of
his orthodox counterparts registers a strong ambivalence toward the body, one
that had direct implications for late medieval religious discourses of spiritual
authority. This ambivalence was also expressed through the language of spiritual
charisms, and relatedly, in defending the church’s monopoly on the mediation of
divine grace.
Guided in part by a suspicion of spiritual charisma and those who demon-
strated it, early reformers embraced few metaphors as deeply and readily as
“unity” (almost always a shorthand for affirming hierarchical authority), which
often worked at crosscurrents with local, charismatic spiritualities and thereby
restated the challenge inherent in the apostolic image of Christ’s body. Unity
represented inter alia a response to perceptions that spiritual power might be
arrogated by those whose aspirations in this respect did not always accord with
mainstream ideals. While anchorites were often charismatic in precisely this sense
and elicited such perceptions, their local supporters and the authors of the various
texts composed for or about them were often strongly guided by reformist ideals.
That is, this book examines reformist efforts to elaborate a notion of religious
authority by marginalizing the forms of charismatic power that emerged from
within that same spiritual landscape and that came fundamentally to shape late
²⁴ On the balance of unity with diversity within Paul’s image of Christ’s body, see Lee, Paul, 125–50.
²⁵ For a general study of saints’ cults in the Christian west, see Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do
Such Great Things?: Saints and Worshipers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2013).
10        
medieval writings for the many public visionaries, including anchorites, who
flourished within and beyond England and whose demonstration of extraordinary
personal qualities could profoundly misalign them with orthodox priorities.
Belonging to a complex social, textual, and cultural matrix, anchorites also
represented a point of intersection between a collective spiritual body, as concep-
tualized within orthodox culture, and a lay society that reformers perceived to be
corrupt. As we will see, the frequent use of the angelic image to describe priests
and monks assisted in reconfiguring the association of anchorites with angels,
often to weaken anchorites’ otherwise close affiliations with lay communities. In
arguing for an inextricable connection between lay culture and late medieval
charismatic spiritualities, this book assumes further that all forms of charisma
were “public” in the sense that they always had the potential to inspire devotion
among the laity and to exert pressure upon long-established religious and cultural
boundaries.²⁶ Spiritual charisma operated as a power that invited the laity into the
religious arena and, far from simply conforming to dominant and traditional
forms of spiritual life, often exceeded and emerged beyond them. Fostered far less
by anchorites than by religious elites themselves, this tension was an inextricable
part of widespread assumption that late medieval spiritualities stood in urgent
need of reform. The result was often suspicion and distrust, not to say jealousy, on
the part of those who defended the unity of religious institutions and the ideo-
logical structures by which they were underwritten.
From Transformation to Transfiguration:

Reform and the Angelic Image
This book’s foremost thematic concern, the place of charismatic anchorites within
cultures of reform, constellates around the question of embodiment and the
related ambivalence within orthodox culture toward those transformations in
spiritual life that operate as both cause and consequence of religious reforms.
Among that culture’s central images was the status and function of religious elites
as angelic mediators to the lay public as well as to enclosed holy men and women.
It was on the stage of angelic identity that spiritual rivalries converged. In one way,
the reformist ideals that aggrandized clerical and monastic authorities as “angels”
also sent them to the cells of anchorites to provide spiritual support and super-
vision, often as a complement to the written guidance of an admonitory or
regulatory text. As the thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Thomas
Aquinas (d. 1274) noted, “The purpose of the angelic offices is to lead men to
salvation,” a purpose shared by religious elites, who were specially charged with
²⁶ For related arguments, see also Doyno, The Lay Saint, 1–19.
:   11
that very task.²⁷ For anchorites, angelic visitation came in both forms, celestial and
human. Thus, when Rolle, in his Form of Living, observed that his anchoritic
reader should dwell “among angels and holy men,” his hope was both thoroughly
conventional and nearly redundant: holy men were angelic, even as angels visited
humans to provide spiritual guidance and thus to “lead men to salvation.”²⁸ At the
same time, and with the support of their lay clients, enclosed men and women
routinely occupied this space as intermediaries, not only adopting the angelic
function of assisting in the salvation of others but displaying through their various
charisms a form of spiritual power that at times obviated and displaced clerical
authority.
What might be called an “angelic” imaginary encoded a host of ideals and
anxieties that extended from mainstream elaborations of a unified model of
spiritual authority. These tensions centered on the ideals of reform, or re-form,
and transformation, its inescapable twin. Late medieval religious culture offered
several models for representing the forming and re-forming of structures and
matter, including, as Sara Ritchey has shown, “remaking” or re-creation. Like
recreatio, or elsewhere transformatio, the terms reformatio and reformare were at
home within the culture of the high and later Middle Ages, where they served as a
shorthand for the reality of individual, institutional, and cultural change.²⁹ For
orthodox elites, however, the world was “remade into holy matter” only once that
world met particular ideological demands, including the alignment of charismat-
ics with clerical and monastic hopes for corporate unity, which were inextricably
bound with their claims to spiritual power.³⁰
But across religious culture there was considerable uncertainty about the status
of reform and holy matter—and bodies—in their relation to the angelic image.
The elusive nature of angels, a biblical reluctance to consistently distinguish them
from humans, and their tendency to take on human appearance made it a
challenge to articulate and delimit the angelic nature in strict theological terms.
For early Christian theologians, while angelic bodies were distinct from the bodies
of humans, the condition of demons and humans as in some sense “fallen” further
underscored the resemblances between them.³¹ Humans were like angels, as
²⁷ Thomas Aquinas, ST, I. Q. 108, art. 7.3: “patet quod officia angelorum ordinantur ad hoc, quod
homines ad salutem adducantur.”
²⁸ Rolle, Prose and Verse, I.12.
²⁹ Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval
Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 24–90. On the cultures of religious reform during
the twelfth century, see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996); on the term “reform,” see ibid., 3ff.
³⁰ Ritchey, Holy Matter, 3. See also Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology
in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 14–34.
³¹ See, for example, Aurelii Augustini Opera, Part 14, De civitate dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb,
CCSL 47 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), 8.16 and 9.9; see also Elliott, Fallen Bodies, 128–35.
12        
Anselm argued, and their resurrected and transformed bodies still more so.³² For
although theologians understood humans and angels as distinct creations, they
also explored the metaphorical and imaginative implications of thinking humans
in angelic terms, yet without necessarily investing the idea with theological
solidity. Bernard of Clairvaux confidently, if daringly (audeamus), asserted that
human souls, in their reason and capacity for blessedness, are “born of angelic
nature.”³³ Here Bernard was not speaking with theological determinism but with
an insight into what he found to be meaningful, although elusive, resemblances
between God’s rational creatures.³⁴ To adopt Barbara Newman’s exceedingly
helpful category of “imaginative theology,” eleventh- and twelfth-century writers
acknowledged the differences between angels and humans even as they imagina-
tively explored the implications of their association.³⁵
Precise distinctions between angels and humans would eventually become a
theological desideratum, though the contests over spiritual power that were in part
sustained by these close resemblances, as well as by the involvement of angels in
human affairs, continued throughout the later Middle Ages. Whereas the twelfth-
century Cistercian abbot John of Ford could describe the English anchorite
Wulfric of Haselbury as “angelic,” the transformations of which angels, humans,
and demons were equally capable (albeit in different ways) unsettled a religious
culture wherein spiritual truth was closely associated with the stability of (bodily)
forms. The ways in which angels within and beyond biblical texts interacted with
humans through changes in physical appearance troublingly suggested deception
and concealment. These latter qualities, as this book argues at various points, often
attached to those who were viewed as spiritual frauds, including hypocrites and
heretics. In the context of religious reform, angels thus became an important
metaphorical and “imaginative” resource for addressing the problems of charisma,
embodiment, and spiritual authority, all of which proved to be loci of disturbing
shifts and transformations.
Moreover, while religious elites policed the boundary between genuine sanctity
and other more suspect forms of charisma, the slippery identities of humans and
³² According to the Proslogion, resurrected bodies are like the angels of God (similes angeliis Dei)
because a natural body (corpus animale) will have been made a spiritual body (corpus spirituale); see
Anselm, Opera Omnia, vol. 1, 25.21–3, 118. On the “propinquity of the human and demonic realms,”
see Elliott, Fallen Bodies, 2 et passim; and Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and
Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2012), 9–29.
³³ Bernard of Clairvaux, SBO, Sermones 2, In commemoratione sancti Michaelis, 1.4.13–14: “Constat
sine dubio, rationis participes et capaces beatitudinis humanas animas angelicae, si dicere id audeamus,
cognatas esse naturae.”
³⁴ For treatment of these resemblances in his writings, see esp. Gilbert C. Stockson, “Contemplation
and Action in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s Angelology,” CSQ 53.4 (2018): 363–89; and Maria L. Ruby
Wagner, “The Impact of the Second Crusade on the Angelology and Eschatology of St. Bernard of
Clairvaux,” JRH 37.3 (2013): 322–40.
³⁵ Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 292–304.
:   13
angels provided the metaphors for the church’s confrontation with its charismatic
rivals. During the later part of the eleventh century, as emergent pieties refused to
fall in line, churchmen saw demonic agencies at work. Here the New Testament
text that charged Satan with transfiguring into an “angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14)
made its appearance within a wide range of texts, including anchoritic writings,
and often in the context of visionary experience. The Pauline text was used
frequently by authorities in the wake of upheavals across the eleventh and twelfth
centuries and beyond, in which contexts demons functioned both as a warning
against deceptive visions and as a kind of alibi: as it was so affirmed, charismatics
only seemed credible just as demons transfigured with astonishing virtuosity. That
is, the Holy Spirit’s inspirations could be imitated by demons to deceive the
unwary, and the influence of (fallen) angels on human actions and affairs gener-
ated uncertainty and repeated calls for discernment, itself one of the gifts of the
spirit.³⁶ That is, visionary experience, angels, and spiritual gifts often functioned as
a kind of metric for the (mis)alignment of holy men and women with the church
establishment more broadly. As the legitimacy of charismatic spiritualities became
contested, so too did the status and identity of angels begin to shift. Visions
accordingly functioned as a means of reimagining spiritual experiences from the
perspective of orthodox culture, and thus not only as a rival form of charismatic
power but as potentially dangerous to oneself and others. This reorientation came
about as, already in the eleventh century, holy men and women, including
anchorites, who were associated with angels and the gifts that they communicated
were seen as challenging that culture.
These developments proceeded alongside orthodox appropriations and re-
appropriations of the angelic image, often with great care to manage the negative,
that is demonic, resonances of transfiguration. Not by chance is Francis of Assisi
(d. 1226) said in Thomas of Celano’s thirteenth-century Legenda maior to have
been “transformed,” not transfigured: “After true love of Christ transformed the
lover into his image, when the forty days were over that he spent in solitude . . . the
angelic man Francis came down from the mountain bearing with him the likeness
of the Crucified.”³⁷ In a theological treatise on the Eucharist composed in 1180,
the Cistercian abbot and later archbishop of Canterbury Baldwin of Ford likewise
underscored the distinction between transformation and transfiguration.³⁸
³⁶ On the discernment of spirits in the context of medieval religious women, see esp. Nancy Caciola,
Discerning Sprits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2003); Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of
Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 1999); and Wendy Love
Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).
³⁷ Francis of Assisi, Early Documents, Vol. 2: The Founder, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne
Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 2002), 543; see also Ritchey, Holy Matter,
132–3.
³⁸ For Baldwin and his treatise on the sacrament, see Chapter 2, n. 1.
14        
Elsewhere, when that distinction is not noted explicitly, or underscored with

theological rigor as in Baldwin’s work, it is often present as a kind of cultural
and textual unconscious. Thus, within and beyond anchoritic writings, 2 Cor.
11:14 transmitted orthodox culture’s suspicion of local pieties and of the (vision-
ary) charismatics who were often visited by angels. Not simply a consequence of
the theological and functional boundary between angels and demons, these
developments expressed once again an ambivalence that saw in angels both
spiritual power and its troublingly unmanageable expression. That angels did
not inspire only (or even primarily) those who occupied a position within, or
showed obedience to, the church hierarchy both fostered and troubled the other-
wise widespread view of male religious elites as possessing an angelic purity. It was
a function of this ambivalence that already by the close of the twelfth century the
angelic image was thoroughly contested.
Branded as the corrupt and demonic falsifications of religious “truth” and of the
saints who embodied it, charismatics and the visionary signs of divine favor that
so frequently attended them served a number of ideological priorities at the heart
of late medieval religious culture, including the making of heresy.³⁹ Among its
broader contentions, this study argues that the spaces between orthodoxy and
religious dissidence were often deliberately occluded in the church’s response to
spiritual and cultural transition, and in its equally troubled effort to draw rigid and
solid distinctions between saints and heretics. The gifts of the spirit, in particular
the working of miracles, were after all inextricably related to sainthood and
adorned many of those whom the church condemned as heretics. In observing
that “the categories of saint and heretic have too often been treated . . . opposi-
tionally,” Dyan Elliott has followed other historians of late medieval religion to
explore the spaces wherein the two become more or less indistinguishable.⁴⁰
Meanwhile, each re-appearance of European heresy brought a concomitant
surge in the use of Paul’s text on demonic transfiguration, for example in the
wake of the Council of Vienne (1311–12) and its condemnation of so-called Free
Spirit heretics and other allegedly false Christians.⁴¹ As visions and charismatics
became the expression of rival notions of embodiment that resisted the ossified
and stabilized categories of heresy and orthodoxy and disrupted the efforts by
churchmen to close off this space and to re-establish those boundaries that were
³⁹ On the resemblances between saints and heretics, see esp. Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female
Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2004), 1–8 with notes; and more recently, with specific reference to medieval Italy, Janine Larmon
Peterson, Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics: Disputed Sanctity and Communal Identity in Late Medieval
Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).
⁴⁰ Elliott, Proving Woman, 4. For more recent discussion, see also Peterson, Suspect Saints, 1–16.
⁴¹ Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500), The Presence of
God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 4 (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 77.
:   15
integral to the making of orthodox culture.⁴² As André Vauchez has remarked, the
Roman curia would grow suspicious of “the visionary and prophetic current” and
of “the charismas whose anarchic proliferation” challenged institutional
interests.⁴³
While this suspicion extended to include anchorites, whose charismatic pres-
ence drew laypeople in particular, the proliferation of such graces was “anarchic”
only from the perspective of a religious establishment that insisted on both
maintaining the boundaries between “true” and “false” expressions of the spirit
and managing what were perceived as disruptive spiritualities. As Mary Doyno
has recently shown, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italy boasted a wide range of
lay saints, and elsewhere, as we will see, much lay devotion to local saints
converged upon the anchoritic cell.⁴⁴ Moreover, charismatics show from another
perspective how and why orthodox culture, on the one hand, and a notion of
popular heresy, on the other, operated as linked and mutually reinforcing con-
structions of a church that remained intent on sustaining its spiritual hegemony.
By inhabiting spaces between the polarities of orthodoxy and heresy, charismatics
made visible forms of spiritual authority that lie outside of mainstream figurations
of a unified body of Christ. In one sense, the oppositional logic through which
heresy and orthodoxy were manifested was largely the fiction of a perceived need
to defend the priestly and Eucharistic body, and by extension their ecclesial
counterpart, from demonic corruptions. That fiction and those defenses nonethe-
less gave concrete shape to the writings I examine throughout this book. As each
chapter in one way or another emphasizes, angels and anchorites were in a critical
sense “at the boundary,” not within or outside of a particular space, but between
spaces. The assiduous efforts within orthodox culture to eliminate such indeter-
minacies were frequently motivated by its need to re-establish traditional bound-
aries involving the individual and collective body.
Partly in response to these troubles within ecclesiastical paradise, scholastic
theologians sought to manage the unruly effects of embodiment. Twelfth- and
thirteenth-century arguments for the incorruptible and unchangeable nature of
sacred bodies attended to the elusiveness of the angelic nature.⁴⁵ In one important
contribution, the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas determined, against
earlier writers, that angels do not have bodies: “Not all intellectual substances
are united to bodies; but some are quite separate from bodies, and these we call
⁴² See Elliott, Proving Woman, esp. 1–8 and 119–230. On late medieval sainthood, see esp.
Chapter 3.
⁴³ Vauchez, Sainthood, 523–4.
⁴⁴ Doyno, The Lay Saint, passim. Doyno’s excellent study builds on the landmark work by André
Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, trans. Daniel Ethan
Bornstein and Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).
⁴⁵ See Elliott, Fallen Bodies, 127–56; and Leclercq, “Monasticism and Angelism,” 127.
16        
angels.”⁴⁶ But what was it about the body that inspired writers to marginalize its
role in charismatic experience? And what was the status of the fixed and fiercely
defended bodies of orthodox culture—the sexually disciplined priest, the
Eucharist, and the collective “body of Christ”—in relation to their charismatic
counterpart? The difference, I argue, is one between a reified notion of the body
and an embodied experience that exceeds the solidity of intellectual structures that
were repeatedly made to serve institutional, including theological, imperatives.⁴⁷
As the relation between angels and embodiment was being adjusted, so too were
the Pauline charismata being quietly displaced by virtues that were thoroughly
spiritual and rather less embodied.⁴⁸ With recourse to Isaiah 11:1–3, a set of moral
qualities (fear, piety, knowledge, fortitude, counsel, understanding, wisdom) came
to serve as the seven “gifts” of the Holy Spirit. These figure centrally in the highly
popular Liber de similitudinibus, for example, and in Bonaventure’s De septem
donis Spiritus Sancti and in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux.⁴⁹
Chapter 1 examines the images of angels and sacred embodiment as these
emerge within the culture of eleventh- and twelfth-century reforms and under-
write its suspicion, and ultimate rejection, of popular charismatics. There was no
single and determinate relation between the forms of embodied experience and an
individual’s spiritual gifts, and one of the most salient hallmarks of late medieval
orthodoxy was its anxious defense against such indeterminacy. In a curious irony,
the status of a sexually purified and angelic priesthood was supported by the
unholy specter of demonic transfiguration (2 Cor. 11:14) as the countervailing
threat to clerical authority and its narratives of spiritual power. The anxieties
informing the transitions within this culture were accordingly projected onto a
spirituality that was prominent among anchorites and that was often assumed to
be in competition with that authority and potentially out of alignment with
orthodox culture generally. The following chapter turns to twelfth-century
Cistercian writings and their unease with both popular spiritual currents and
the putative corruptions of lay society in its influence on anchoritic life. In this
context, John of Ford’s Life of the English anchorite Wulfric of Haselbury
⁴⁶ Aquinas, ST, qu. 51, art. 1: “Non igitur omnes substantiae intellectuales sunt unitae corporibus; sed
aliquae sunt a corporibus separatae. Et has dicimus angelos.”
⁴⁷ For quite a different notion of the “charismatic body” than the one presented here, see Jaeger,
Envy of Angels, 7–8.
⁴⁸ Along with other theologians, Aquinas holds that angels at times assume bodies when appearing
to (and for the benefit of) humans. See Aquinas, ST, 1a pars, qu. 51, art. 2. For related questions on the
“somatomorphic” soul in the afterlife, see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 291–303; and Carol Zaleski,
Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 174–86.
⁴⁹ Bonaventure, DSB, De septem donis Spiritus Sancti, 5:455–503. On the Liber and its popularity in
the thirteenth century, see C. M. Kauffmann, “New Images for Anselm’s Table Talk: An Illustrated
Manuscript of the ‘Liber de Similitudinibus,’ ” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 74
(2011): 87–119. On this emergent understanding of the spiritual gifts, see also Vauchez, Sainthood,
521–6.
:   17
(d. 1154) articulates clerical and monastic emphases on virtue over charismatic
graces, as well as ecclesiastical hostility to apostolic movements and their poten-
tially heterodox outgrowth. Like many other writings, moreover, John’s Life
assumes a strong affinity between vision and visitation, which depended in turn
on the various forms of angelic visitation (clerical, monastic, and celestial) and on
elites’ interest in the specific content of visionary experiences. My readings here as
throughout deliberately refuse to rigidly distinguish angels from clerics, angels
from anchorites, and the charismatics of whom orthodox elites approved from
those of whom they did not.
Chapter 3 addresses new forms of sainthood, as these emerged at the close of
the twelfth century and into the thirteenth, and situates them in relation to
contemporary debates about the authorization to preach. Anchorites at times
summoned the demonic nightmare of orthodox culture by replicating and thereby
obviating this form of clerical work, as well as by encouraging lay preaching.
I attend in particular to an Anglo-Latin rule for anchorites, the Regula reclusorum
(c.1280), and a persistent discourse that was directed against allegedly “false”
prophets and preachers. As I argue, this discourse owes much to the collaboration
between the charismatic voices that emerged through lay-anchoritic communities
and the forms of sanctity that were quickly gaining ascendancy in the thirteenth
century. Chapter 4 examines several thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writings,
including The Form of Living, an anchoritic guidance text written in the 1340s by
the English mystical writer and hermit Richard Rolle. Here the Annunciation and
its principle actors—the Virgin and the Archangel Gabriel—again serve as
remarkable and versatile textual resources that, with a dazzling array of meta-
phors, came to represent the routinely conflict-ridden relationship between
angels, female penitents, and confessors. Here an angelic capacity among vision-
ary anchoresses to resemble their confessors and to appropriate their spiritual
knowledge and discernment undermined insistent calls for subordination.
As Chapter 5 argues, the experiences of late medieval holy women, in particular
their doubts about the Eucharist and their own salvation, were often responses to
orthodox figurations of sacred embodiment and the pollution fears that were
repeatedly projected onto women. I examine Walter Hilton’s (d. 1396) Scale of
Perfection, which reflects ongoing contests over rival notions of perfection
wherein the spiritual legitimacy of charismatic women was at stake. Moreover,
the intersecting ideas of perfection and securely orthodox notions of embodiment
were inextricably connected to angelic charisms, which stood in marked contrast
to a discourse of the virtues that held a prominent place within late medieval
religious writings. The final chapter extends this analysis of spiritual perfection
with attention to devotional and theological rivalries in the Life of Dorothea of
Montau (d. 1394), the fourteenth-century Speculum Inclusorum, and Marguerite
Porete’s (d. 1310) Mirror of Simple Souls. In these and other texts, discourses of
perfection become a means of securing charismatics more firmly to sacramental
18        
devotion and a spiritual economy of suffering. Several of the texts that I examine
place increasing pressure on the angelic image that for centuries served orthodox
priorities and which remained closely associated with charismatic experiences.
Methodologically my readings of these texts move between different levels of
analysis as I seek to determine how and why particular developments emerged,
and to place specific texts (both literary and non-literary) within broader cultural
patterns. Throughout I assume that historical developments became a stage
whereon to explore textual culture and vice versa. My analyses therefore do not
rest on strict and firm distinctions between “historical reality” and textual repre-
sentation. For better or worse, I am guided throughout by the assumption that
historical currents and developments are always discursive and representational
just as they give shape to, and are shaped by, written texts.
The Contributions of This Book
This book’s larger contributions to the study of late medieval religious experience
and writings, while implied in much of this introduction, deserve more explicit
treatment. I endeavor to situate anchoritic textual culture, in a manner more
intricate and extensive than have studies heretofore, securely within late medieval
debates about spiritual authority, and to elucidate how that culture was shaped by
mainstream attitudes about religious reform and embodiment. Alongside its
major contentions, including the relationship it seeks to elucidate between
anchoritic textual communities and reformist thought, this book responds to the
tendency, witnessed in literary and historical analyses alike, to confine the analysis
of anchoritic spirituality and its textual environments within a relatively limited
set of discourses and models of affective and mystical experience. Even if these
held a prominent and vital place within late medieval religious life, this book
redresses a long neglect within medieval studies by placing anchorites front and
center within the cultural constructions of more widely disseminated works and
the historical developments to which they responded. These relationships are
often not addressed in anchoritic scholarship, or only in ways that tend to occlude
the participation of anchoritic writings within a wide network of religious and
cultural debates about genuine spiritual authority as distinct from its allegedly
false counterpart. Thus, I read these works alongside and within, not apart from,
the myriad tensions that, far from being an inherent feature of spiritual charisma,
were actively nurtured within an ecclesiastical culture of reform in its defense of
orthodoxy.
In this connection, a number of religious writings that were not formally about
anchorites or intended for enclosed men and women nonetheless have close
affiliations with the culture of reclusion, and these deserve to be designated
accordingly. Thus, this book submits a new class of medieval spiritual discourse,
:   19
Figure 1 Dutch manuscript of the Apostle Peter freed from prison by the angel. The
Hague, KB, 78 D 38 II, fol. 213v.
under the heading of “para-anchoritic” texts, to describe precisely these intellec-

tual and thematic linkages across works. Several images from the writings of the
French beguine Marguerite Porete and the English Carthusian prior Nicholas
Love, for example, have a para-anchoritic cast and powerfully resonate with more
strictly anchoritic writings through a shared constellation of metaphors and
20        
spiritual concerns (e.g. interiority and solitude). A further suggestively anchoritic

representation appears in a fifteenth-century Dutch manuscript of the Apostle
Peter who is freed from prison by the angel (see Figure 1). One doubts that any
anchorite could fail to experience this representation, or Nicholas Love’s descrip-
tion of Mary Magdalene at Christ’s tomb, as a kind of mirror of the reclusive life.
Yet it is not my argument that such images were directly accessed by anchorites,
although Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c.1410) certainly was.
Rather, the term “para-anchoritic” is a way of contending that the visual and
discursive imaginary that was securely at home within anchoritic writings was by
no means confined to them. After all, it is quite possible that the readers and
writers of a wide range of religious works also thought about anchorites and,
whether consciously or not, constructed their texts in meaningful ways. That is,
para-anchoritic writings deploy a discourse and images that show a metaphorical
contiguity between writings that were and those that were not directly intended
for anchorites. Accordingly, my use of the term argues that such writings occupied
a space that was culturally and functionally adjacent to anchoritic texts.
So too, scholars have at times placed anchoritic culture within an inadequate,
because oppositional, matrix that largely reiterates the priorities of the reformist
culture I examine and normalize its hopes of establishing secure boundaries
between orthodox culture and heretical “corruptions.”⁵⁰ The orthodoxy of
English anchorites, far from being a historical given, existed as an oft-asserted
feature of the ideological framework that I examine.⁵¹ Much also remains to be
said of the institutional alignments of the authors of anchoritic texts, who were
never neutral in their ideological and vocational commitments. The Dominican
and Carthusian affiliations of anchoritic writings (Chapters 4 and 6) are one
example among many. Examining those commitments offers valuable material
for, and greater interpretive purchase on, anchoritic texts and culture. My read-
ings of these texts also depart somewhat from a widespread emphasis on anchor-
itic culture as strongly gendered in its expression. Though critical attention to
female over male recluses in current scholarship is thoroughly justified by the
prominent regulatory and hagiographical texts written for and about anchoresses,
as well as by the fact that anchoritism increasingly became a feminine institution
as the Middle Ages progressed, I seek to foreground charismatic experience across
the spectrum of gender. This book also advances fresh readings of the dynamic
bonds shared among saints (especially Mary Magdalene and the Virgin), anchor-
ites, and angels, which came about through the operations of imitatio. To be sure,
some of these texts were composed by hermits, or former hermits. However, this
book largely excludes eremitic texts and culture, despite their close affiliations
⁵⁰ See Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, 79, who asserts that a “secure orthodoxy . . . charac-
terizes the anchorite movement” in England (my emphasis).
⁵¹ For an overview of this pattern, see esp. Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism, 1–11.
:   21
with their anchoritic counterparts, largely because the inclusion of texts written
for hermits would unduly expand an already long study.
While this book revises much about what we know, or think we know, about
anchoritic texts and culture, at another level it also invites a reorientation in our
understanding of embodied experience and the potentials of spiritual agency. I am
guided throughout by a strong sense that our attempts to understand extraordin-
ary experiences run afoul of our attachment to conventional explanatory models
of agency (both human and non-human), embodiment, and their relation—
models that occlude the very interactions that they seek to elucidate. Rather
than providing a rival conceptualization of embodiment, these texts demonstrate
their capacity to challenge the assumptions behind that model, including and
especially assumptions about corporeal purity that stood at the heart of orthodox
culture. That culture often left little room for incorporating certain forms of
charisma into mainstream spiritualities. As individuals and communities were
powerfully altered by such experiences, charismatics wielded the transformative
talents possessed by angels themselves. But what transformed? What changed for
these individuals at the level of the body? Religious elites often sought to displace
such questions, relegating them to a “demonic” unconscious that returned again
and again to trouble elite hopes for fashioning secure and approved pieties. It is to
the figures who disrupted those pieties that I now turn.
A final note on my quotation of texts. Throughout I have regularized the spelling

of Latin j/i and u/v, and I have at times altered the punctuation of edited texts.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Middle English and Latin texts are
my own.
1
The Arrival of Angels
And angels, when they reveal themselves to human sight, always have
the brightest faces, as when the wife of Manue said, “A man of God
came to me, with the face of an angel.” Demons, on the other hand,
who are kept under shadows until the day of last judgment . . . usually
appear with the blackest of faces, unless they deceitfully disguise
themselves as angels of light.
(Guibert of Nogent, Monodies, c.1115)¹
The Pauline notion of a single and unified body of Christ with a diversity of parts
brought with it the potential for the considerable differences among that body’s
many members to transform into a contest between rival notions of spiritual
power. Expressed in the early church through the formation of a culturally
dominant male clergy and its institutional prerogatives, this potential was
revisited upon religious communities during the major reforms of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries.² Like a traumatic wound relegated to the cultural uncon-
scious of mainstream Christianity, the rivalry returned with a vengeance during,
and as an expression of, the massive reorganization of religious and secular life
throughout this period. In tracing the historical and textual contours of this
development, I begin with an account of the reformist program advanced by
those who, when they were not high-ranking churchmen, belonged to monastic
communities that were rapidly spreading across medieval Europe. Under pressure
of a perceived struggle for their own spiritual legitimacy, reforming elites sought
to “reify boundaries” between their own authority and lay society, largely as a
means of delineating the specific forms and institutional contexts through which
divine grace could be authoritatively channeled.³ This initiative to affirm the
borderline between clerical and lay culture was inextricably bound together with
¹ Guibert of Nogent, Monodies and On the Relics of the Saints: The Autobiography and a Manifesto
of a French Monk from the Time of the Crusades, ed. Jay Rubenstein and trans. Joseph McAlhany
(London: Penguin, 2011), 7.
² On the negotiations surrounding inspired speech (including prophecy), gender, and authority
within early Christian communities, see James L. Ash, “The Decline of Ecstatic Prophecy in the Early
Church,” Theological Studies 37.2 (1976): 227–52; and Mary Ann Rossi, “Priesthood, Precedent, and
Prejudice: On Recovering the Women Priests of Early Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in
Religion 7.1 (1991): 73–94, at 78ff. See also Antoinette C. Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets:
A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric (Augsburg: Fortress, 1990), esp. 72–115 and 135–58. As all of
these studies observe, at issue is nearly always the Pauline organization of spiritual gifts.
³ Elliott, Fallen Bodies, 82.
Angels and Anchoritic Culture in Late Medieval England. Joshua S. Easterling, Oxford University Press.
© Joshua S. Easterling 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198865414.003.0002
    23
the assimilation of Paul’s image of Christ’s body to a wide-reaching program to

secure the ritual and sexual purity of the clergy. In a familiar act of repression, the
images of embodiment that aggrandized the priesthood also came to serve a
campaign to marginalize holy men and women whose special and charismatic
expressions of spiritual power challenged reformers’ institutional and intellectual
priorities.
As these developments within the collective body of Christ unfolded over many
decades, various charisms were assimilated to distinct notions of spiritual power
even as they inhabited an indeterminate space between opposing and supporting a
clerical monopoly on the mediation of divine grace. I elucidate the ways in which
cultural, and angelic, transformations challenged widely held assumptions about
spiritual power and its embodied expression. My reading of reformist texts by the
cardinal-bishop Peter Damian (d. 1072), Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), and
others explores clerical and monastic resistance to the rise of visionary, preaching,
or miracle-working charismatics, many of whom arose from well outside the
clerical ranks. Presented through the frequent and even persecutory citation of
the Pauline text on the “angel of light” (2 Cor. 11: 14), these pressures and contests
gave shape to writings by or about enclosed holy men and women, who were often
charismatically inspired in ways that recalled only too vividly the church’s
troubles with its rivals: heterodox (or outright heretical) preachers and visionaries.
At this chapter’s conclusion, I discuss the writings of the visionary and prophetic
nun Elisabeth of Schönau (d. 1164) and representations of anchoritic culture, for
example in the Casus Monasterii Petrishusensis, a twelfth-century work shaped by
monastic reforms, and in the Autobiography of Gerald of Wales (d. 1223). The
several and intersecting contests I address witness to institutional crises that faced
contemporaries with at times widely varying expressions of embodiment, divine
graces, and the relation between them. A clerical culture desperate to manage
individual and collective pieties was, in the end, confronted by these extraordinary
transformations under way across medieval religious culture.
Bodies in Crisis: Monastic and Clerical Reforms
What André Vauchez has aptly called “the emergence of the laity within the
church” attended a series of intellectual transitions that, with the rise and pro-
gression of religious reforms, first took shape around the midpoint of the eleventh
century.⁴ Church authorities, who responded to perceived abuses or forms of
corruption, including simony and lay investiture, which purportedly threatened
the dignity of the church and its clergy, advanced a program of ecclesiastical
⁴ Vauchez, The Laity, 3–82.

24        
reforms, or as it is still called, the “Great Reform.”⁵ Themselves shaped by earlier

reforms within Benedictine monasticism, church authorities also identified cler-
ical marriage or concubinage as a major source of moral and spiritual impurity.
Although widely tolerated prior to this period, clerical marriage was assiduously
opposed by religious authorities during and beyond the late eleventh century.⁶
The prominent Roman archdeacon Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII
(1073–85), underscored the unity of the church body with this ideal of “pure
religion” in mind. Gregory wrote in a letter of 1073 that, just as the physical body
has two eyes, “so in its spiritual sight is the body of the church proven to be
governed . . . by these two harmonizing dignities (priesthood and imperial power)
in pure religion.”⁷ That is, together with several other reforming pontiffs, Gregory
emphasized a unified church and the ritual (and sexual) purity of its clerics as
foremost, and mutually reinforcing, priorities.⁸
The reforms also sought to sustain existing institutional boundaries and struc-
tures that for centuries had largely relegated lay culture to the margins of Christian
spirituality, and to manage heretical attacks, which had emerged repeatedly over
the course of the first part of the century, against the institutional church, its
sacraments, and priests.⁹ Clerical marriage ranked among reformers’ chief targets
largely as a way of reinforcing the porous boundaries between lay and clerical
cultures; a fundamental assumption of reform politics held that Christendom’s
spiritual leadership could purge its alleged impurities by severing ties with lay
⁵ For an account of these reforms, the scholarly histories of which are now hopelessly legion, I have
been guided by the following studies: Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from
1050 to 1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 79–108; Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture
Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Jehangir Yezdi Malegam, “Pro-Papacy Polemic and the Purity of the
Church: The Gregorian Reform,” in A Companion to the Medieval Papacy: Growth of an Ideology
and Institution, ed. Keith Sisson and Atria A. Larson (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 37–65. See also Jeffrey
Burton Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (Stanford: University of California Press,
1965), 44–53; and Karl F. Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church, 300–1140
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 265–317. See also the following nn. 7 and 13.
⁶ On the concerns of churchmen for the sexual purity of priests, see Elliott, Fallen Bodies, 14–34 and
81–106; and Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), 31–2 et passim; Maureen C. Miller, “Masculinity, Reform, and Clerical Culture:
Narratives of Episcopal Holiness in the Gregorian Era,” Church History 71.1 (2003): 25–52. In
connection with the monasticization of clerical life, see Jacqueline Murray, “Masculinizing Religious
Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and Monastic Identity,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the
Middle Ages, ed. Katherine J. Lewis and P. H. Cullum (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 24–42.
For these developments in Anglo-Norman culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Jennifer
D. Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and
Normandy, 1066–1300 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), esp. 15–111.
⁷ Pope Gregory VII, Registri, Book 1, Letter 19 (PL 148, col. 302C): “Nam sicut duobus oculis
humanum corpus temporali lumine regitur, ita his duabus dignitatibus in pura religione concordantibus
corpus Ecclesiae spirituali lumine regi et illuminari probatur.”
⁸ Despite the obscurity of Gregory’s early life, scholars have argued for the validity of contemporary
reports of the pope having been a monk earlier in his career; see for example, H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope
Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 28–30.
⁹ R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 23–45.
    25
society. In their intentions to curtail and direct an emergent lay piety, as well as its
potential anticlerical and heretical outgrowth, reformers also fostered lay depend-
ence on clerical authorities by duly aggrandizing the priest in his presence at the
altar and work of mediating divine grace.¹⁰ The participation of laypeople in
religious life and the reformation of a clerical image exposed to heretical attacks
were mutually reinforcing developments. The control that the church sought over
clerical sexuality in fact extended a profound concern for the purity of its sacred
and sacramental, and not simply its human, bodies. The Eucharist was both
fiercely defended and attacked over the course of these reforms. It was in fact an
omen of things to come that, in 1049, with Leo IX’s (d. 1054) ascension to the
papal throne, Berengar of Tours (d. 1088) first and famously began to present
heretical teachings on the Eucharist.¹¹ Thus reforming efforts came about in large
part because, for eleventh-century religious elites, sacred bodies were in crisis.
It is here that religious elites discovered in angels an image which both suited
the clergy in its aspiration to spiritual and sexual purity, and which closely aligned
with the monastic histories of certain papal reformers.¹² For the sexual abstinence
that was advanced and codified within monastic tradition bore telling resemblance
with the celestial purity of angels and reflected Gregory’s ideal of pure religion.
The sexual and ritual purity to which he referred and which structured eleventh-
century religious politics generally was for monastic and ecclesiastical reformers
analogous to the purity of angels. The recasting and defense of clerical power
associated priests not with the supposed corruptions of lay culture but with angels,
who were, after all, widely assumed to have some sort of body, albeit one
exceedingly pure and uncorrupted by the limitations and unruliness of human
corporeality.¹³ Already by the tenth century monastic houses had become “centers
of angelic purity” as, in Martha Newman’s observation, reforming monks
endeavored “to separate the clergy from the imperfections of the secular world
so that priests would become worthy of their sacramental functions.”¹⁴ Support
for such ideals presented itself forthwith; there was no more felicitous scriptural
witness to the angelic aspirations of ecclesiastical and monastic reformers than
¹⁰ For an overview of popular heresy in the eleventh century, see R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular
Heresy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975); and Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in
Medieval Europe: Documents in Translation (London: Scholar Press, 1980).
¹¹ See John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 135. On the
Eucharistic controversy, see also Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 273–315.
¹² On these monk-popes, see Morris, Papal Monarchy, 221 et passim; and n. 7 above.
¹³ For discussion of this view of the clergy, see Kathleen G. Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the
Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); and
R. N. Swanson, “Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to the
Reformation,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. Dawn M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999),
160–77. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle
Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 11–19.
¹⁴ Newman, Boundaries of Charity, 155. On monastic reform generally, see esp. Giles Constable,
Reformation of the Twelfth Century.
26        
Christ’s pronouncement, concerning the resurrection of the dead, that those who
do not marry are “like the angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25). For example, Hildebert
of Lavardin (d. 1133), bishop of Le Mans, deployed this text in a letter to an
anchoress named Athalisa to argue that nothing less than sexual purity rendered
the Christian angelic.¹⁵ Indeed, the bishop’s claim for virginity as redolent of the
angelic life (angelicam conversationem) was by the early decades of the twelfth
century a more or less standard slogan of reform politics.¹⁶
The architects of orthodox religious culture discovered in the celestial hier-
archy, as in the angelic body, a mirror of its earthly equivalent within the church.
While similar uses of this image appeared as early as the writings of Gregory the
Great (d. 604), Pope Urban II would later make a point-by-point comparison of
preaching monks and clerics with angels, who after all literally proclaim the word
of God whenever they appear in scripture: “Monks and canons, as priests who
announce God’s precepts, are called angels.” Here the wings of the Cherubim
become an image of monastic vestments: “Two [wings] as the hood of their
vestment, by which the head is covered, are shown in their true affections. And
what extends as their arms we say are two wings; and that [habit] by which the
body is covered [represents] the other two.”¹⁷ Such comparisons owed much to
ongoing tensions between spiritual ideals and realities, and figured prominently
among twelfth-century Cistercians and mystical writers. In one of his biblical
commentaries, the canon Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) wrote, “placed highest
in the heaven of divine and incomprehensible majesty are the holy angels, perfect
doctors, and prelates by divine providence seated and ordained in holy
church.”¹⁸ Not to be outdone, Cistercians too fostered an especially flattering
self-image as angels, as we will see in Chapter 2. A prominent exponent of
twelfth-century reformed monasticism, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to Pope
Eugenius III an extended analogy between celestial with ecclesiastical hierarchies:
“just as there [i.e. in heaven] the Seraphim and Cherubim, and all the others
including the angels and archangels are ordered under a single head, namely God,
so here also are primates or patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, priests or abbots,
¹⁵ Hildebert of Lavardin, Venerabilis Hildeberti Epistolae, Epist. xxi (PL 171, col. 194B): “An nescis
quia ii qui neque nubunt neque nubentur, juxta Evangelium, similes sunt angelis Dei?”
¹⁶ Ibid., col. 195B: “Virginitas angelicam redolens conversationem.”
¹⁷ Pope Urban II, Council of Nîmes, in Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, vol. 20
(Venice, 1775), col. 934: “Sacerdotes igitur monachi atque canonici, qui Dei praecepta annuntiant,
Angeli vocantur . . . . Duae in capitio, quo caput tegitur, veris demonstrantur affectionibus. Illud vero
quod brachiis extenditur, alas duas esse dicimus: et illud quo corpus tegitur, alas duas.” The punctuation
has been modified. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book 34.7 [Rec. 7] 14 (PL 76, col. 725A): “holy
preachers are called angels [sancti praedicatores angeli dicuntur].” See also Bynum, Jesus as Mother,
30–1.
¹⁸ Richard of St. Victor, In Apocalypsim, Book 2.1 (PL 196, col. 746A): “Sedes summae et incom-
prehensibilis ac divinae majestatis in coelo posita, sunt sancti angeli, perfecti doctores et praelati per
divinam providentiam positi et ordinati in sancta Ecclesia.” On the Victorines, see Jaeger, Envy of
Angels, 244–68. On Cistercians, see Chapter 2.
    27
and the rest in this way under a single highest pontiff.”¹⁹ The Franciscan theolo-
gian St. Bonaventure (d. 1274) would be similarly inspired to align celestial
identities and structures with their earthly counterparts, so much so that he
devoted an entire work to the subject of the six wings of the seraphim and made
abundant use of the angelic image in his De ecclesiastica hierarchia.²⁰
These resemblances were also very much a matter of the preacher’s embodied
power and authority in mediating divine truth. Bernard and Hugh of St. Victor (d.
1141) noted that the priest’s very lips (labia) are the “messenger” (angelus) of God
(Malachi 2:7).²¹ The Benedictine monk Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129) glosses biblical
trumpets (tubae) as “holy preachers,” implying the trumpet-wielding angels of the
Book of Revelation, who summon the faithful “to the assembly of many thousands
of angels.”²² In a letter of 1067 Peter Damian (d. 1072), prior of Monte Avellani,
cardinal-bishop of Ostia and one of the most powerful voices of the ecclesiastical
reforms underscored this point. For this “most radical reformer,” priests are as
pure as the sky since they are the very heavens themselves.²³ True to their function
of angelically guarding and mediating knowledge and spiritual nourishment, they
“glow with radiance.”
Therefore, since the Church’s priests are “the heavens that tell out the glory of
God” (Ps. 18:2), it is required that the priest who functions in the office of
preacher shower his audience with the rains of spiritual doctrine, and glow
with the radiance of a virtuous life, like the angel announcing the birth of the
Lord to the shepherds, who appeared in brilliant splendor and expressed in
words the good news he came to announce. And to this point Malachi said,
“The lips of the priest guard knowledge and they seek the law from his mouth,
because he is the angel of the Lord of Hosts.” (Malachi 2:7)²⁴
¹⁹ Bernard of Clairvaux, SBO, Tractatus et Opuscula, De consideratione, 3.18.13–17: “[S]icut illic

Seraphim et Cherubim, ac ceteri quique usque ad angelos et archangelos, ordinatur sub uno capite Deo,
ita hic quoque sub uno summo Pontifice primates vel patriarchae, archiepiscopi, episcopi, presbyteri vel
abbates, et reliqui in hunc modum.” See also Newman, Boundaries of Charity, 159. On Bernard’s
thought and work, see Michaela Diers, Bernard von Clairvaux: Elitäre Frömmigkeit und Begnadetes
Wirken (Münster: Aschendorff, 1991); and more recently, G. R. Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000); and Alice Chapman, Sacred Authority and Temporal Power in the
Writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
²⁰ Bonaventure, DSB, De sex alis seraphim, 8:131–51; and De ecclesiastica hierarchia, 7:437–97.
²¹ Hugh of St. Victor, Commentaria in hierarchiam coelestem, Book 9.12 (PL 175, col. 1107B); and
Bernard of Clairvaux, SBO, Tractatus et Opuscula, Liber de praecepto et dispensatione, 9.21.29–30.
²² Rupert of Deutz, De divinis officiis, Book 1.16 (PL 170, col. 19B): “Haec igitur Ecclesiae signa atque
illae legales tubae, unum atque idem significant scilicet sanctos Ecclesiae praedicatores, qui ad Sion
montem et civitatem sanctam, coelestem Hierusalem, et multorum millium angelorum frequentiam et ad
futurum Dei judicium populum invitant.”
²³ Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the
Reformation (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977), 37.
²⁴ Peter Damian, The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation, trans. Owen J. Blum, Letters
121–50 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), Letter 145, 152; Die Briefe des
Petrus Damiani, ed. Kurt Reindel, Briefe d. dt. Kaiserzeit, Teil 3 (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae
Historica, 1989), 530: “Quia ergo sacerdotes aecclesiae sunt ‘caeli qui enarrant gloriam Dei’, necesse est
28        
Here we see once again the discursive intersection of the office of clerics with that
of angels. In the “splendor” of sexual purity, reformed priests were indispensable
both for mediating divine grace and, more centrally, for solidifying the clerical
monopoly on spiritual power. By the time Alan of Lille (d. 1203) compared
preachers with their “authoritative bodies” to angels the image had come to
serve arguments that those who occupied an official status within the institutional
church were alone authorized to preach.²⁵
Such aggrandizements of clerical identities by early reformers emerged from
what appears as a persistent state of crisis, which was perceived as a set of
diabolical and heretical threats to the church broadly. As part of this development,
the growing spiritual investments of laypeople lent uneven support to the insti-
tutional concerns of reform culture; for the laity, clerics remained important
spiritual, not to say angelic, messengers of divine truth, though by no means
were all lay communities as passionately devoted to clerical celibacy as were
religious elites.²⁶ Moreover, for Peter Damian and others, lay society was essen-
tially sinful.²⁷ On the other hand, many lay Christians, in ideological league with
reformers, looked to their angelic mediators for moral and spiritual nourishment
even as the defenders of the church, embroiled in a spiritual crisis, required no
small measure of defense. For this reason, too, the angelic image remained a key
part of orthodox culture, even as challenges to that image would continue to
emerge from a heretical quarter. Even so, that image could not entirely secure the
clergy from real or perceived corruptions. Angels fell en masse from celestial glory,
and nothing prevented even reform-minded clerics from suffering a similar fate.
There was in fact no shortage of priests who failed to live up to these ideals. At
work in this monasticization of the clergy was therefore a persistent enhancement
rather than diminishment of the “pollution fears” that underwrote the cultural
work that had inspired reformers in the first instance.²⁸ Thus, the rhetorical and
ideological force behind the angelic image voiced a set of orthodox anxieties, and
ut sacerdos qui praedicatoris officio fungitur, et doctrinae spiritis imbribus pluat, et religiosae vitae radiis
splendeat, instar illius angeli, qui natum Dominum pastoribus nuncians, et splendore claritatis emicuit,
et quod evangelizare venerat verbis expressit. Hinc est quod per Malchiam dicitur: ‘Labia sacerdotis
custodiunt scientiam, et legem requirunt ex ore eius, quia angelus Domini exercituum est’.”
²⁵ See Claire M. Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the
Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), ix. On extra-clerical preach-
ing, see Chapter 3.
²⁶ See Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 101. For example, the widespread support for clerical marriage
within Anglo-Norman England witnesses to a lay social contingent that was out of alignment with
reform culture; see Thibodeaux, Manly Priest, 90–8.
²⁷ Bernard of Clairvaux was of a similar mind. On Peter’s attitudes toward secular society, see Robert
Bultot, Christianisme et valeurs humaines. A. La doctrine du mépris du monde, en Occident, de
S. Ambroise à Innocent III, vol. 4, Le XIe siècle, vol. 1, Pierre Damien (Louvain and Paris: Béatrice-
Nauwelaerts, 1963); and Michel Grandjean, Laïcs dans L’église regards de Pierre Damien, Anselme de
Cantorbéry, Yves de Chartres (Paris: Beauchesne, 1994), 67–114. See also, Elliott, Spiritual
Marriage, 100.
²⁸ Elliott, Fallen Bodies, 30 et passim.
    29
these continued well beyond the eleventh and twelfth centuries, though often
through attempts to control those developments that challenged and rivaled that
same image.
As the ideal of angelic priests and monks directed the course of twelfth-century
reform culture and reinforced the borders between the clergy and a lay society
firmly subordinated to its authority, that ideal also summoned a host of related
difficulties. Even if they were not directly posed, several questions pursued a
deeply uncertain religious establishment: how could a priesthood, whatever insti-
tutional dignity it retained, both remain uncertain of its purity and aspire to
imitate the angels, let alone serve as “necessary intermediary between the soul and
God”?²⁹ As I suggest below, the angelic image also represented a reactive effort to
displace and manage emergent spiritualities, which contemporary religious cul-
ture, in its pangs of birth and transition, threatened to uncover. That these
spiritual currents were intensely charismatic is shown both in their precise
expression and in the specific discursive resonances of orthodox defense.
Meanwhile, the conceptualization of a sacred clerical body ossified in angelic
purity was intended to promote allegiance to the broader ideological investments
of ecclesiastical and monastic reformers, who were nonetheless hostile to the
realities of reform as a reorganization—an unmaking and remaking—of the
individual and collective body.
Challenges to the Angelic Priesthood
The calls by ecclesiastical and monastic reformers for a sexually continent clergy
relied heavily on the angelic image to articulate the imperatives of hierarchical
order and authority, on the one hand, and a sexually purified priesthood, on the
other. Integral though they were to the formation of orthodox culture, these
mutually informing ideals were also attended by a host of difficulties, among
them sexually incontinent clerics who troubled the cherished insistence on their
genuine rather than merely apparent resemblance with angels. Priests who seemed
to be angelic by virtue of their office within the church also bore the burden of
sustaining that ideal alongside more complicated social and spiritual realities, and
the angelic façade did little to eliminate the church’s multitude of unreformed
clerics. In a letter (1064) to Cunibert, bishop of Turin, Peter Damian wrote of this
“obscene” state of affairs.
God forbid that in your great prudence you should be unaware that such a
practice is obscene and opposed to ecclesiastical purity, contrary to the
²⁹ Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 19. On the related question of the clergy’s “usefulness” in the face of
emergent charismatics, see also Doyno, The Lay Saint, passim.
30        
commands of the canons, and certainly offensive to all the norms promulgated
by the holy Fathers. This is especially true, since these very clerics of yours are
otherwise decent people and properly educated in the study of the arts. Indeed,
when they met me, they appeared to shine like a choir of angels and like a
distinguished senate of the Church.³⁰
In seeking to rescue the dignity of both the clerics and their office, the cardinal-
bishop refers to them, with no little condescension, as otherwise “decent people . . .
educated in the study of the arts.” His forced reference to the clerics as a “choir
of angels” was an automated piece of reformist propaganda that resisted contem-
porary realities as much as it sought to shape them.³¹ Likewise, according to Bernard
of Clairvaux’s first biographer, William of Saint-Thierry, the abbot suffered his
own share of disappointment. When his monks in confession accused “themselves
of the various fantasies to which human thought is prone,” Bernard “discovered
that those he had taken for angels were in this respect ordinary men.”³²
As calls for purity heightened rather than eased displeasure with human
realities, the use of the angelic image to “reify boundaries” between the clergy
and laity both remained a symptom of orthodox culture’s anxieties regarding
bodily corruption and reinforced those same anxieties. The Pauline body of Christ
foregrounds unity, as did reformers, yet that ideal was at variance with an
increasing emphasis on the boundary, distance, and discontinuity between the
relative status of the clergy and laity. Although Paul did not exclude particular
Christians from this corporate structure, medieval elites sought to accomplish
precisely that. In one letter, Bernard “grieves” for his monastic son Geoffrey of
Lisieux, who “with the angels rejoicing” gave himself to God, only later “to be
treaded down by demons” by returning to the world.³³ In examining the discourse
of clerical continence in eleventh- through thirteenth-century Norman culture,
³⁰ Peter Damian, Letter 112, 259; Reindel, Briefe, 3:260: “Quod sane quam aecclesiasticae munditiae
videatur obscoenum, quam canonicae sit auctoritati contrarium, quam certe cunctis sanctorum patrum
sanctionibus odiosum, absit ut tanta, quae in te est, possit ignorare prudentia. Praesertim cum et ipsi
clerici tui alias quidem satis honesti et litterarum studiis sint decenter instructi. Qui dum ad me
confluerent, tanquam chorus angelicus et velut conspicuus aecclesiae videbatur enitere senatus.”
³¹ On these realities in eleventh- through thirteenth-century Norman society, see Thibodeaux,
Manly Priest.
³² William of Saint-Thierry, Arnold of Bonneval, and Geoffrey of Auxerre, The First Life of Bernard
of Clairvaux, trans. Hilary Costello, Cistercian Fathers Series 76 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,
2015), 32. The abbot also admonished his monks to flee pride as the vice that “darkened Lucifer,
shining more brilliantly than all the stars . . . and changed the first of the angels into a devil.” Bernard of
Clairvaux, SBO, Sermones 1, In adventu domini, 1.3.3–6: “Fugite superbiam, fratres mei, quaeso;
multum fugite. Initium omnis peccati superbia, quae . . . ipsum quoque sideribus cunctis clarius mican-
tem aeterna caligine obtenebravit Luciferum, quae non modo angelum, sed Angelorum primum in
diabolum commutavit.”
³³ Bernard of Clairvaux, SBO, Epistolae, Letter 112.4–7: “Doleo super te, fili mi Gaufrede, doleo super
te. Et merito. Quis enim non doleat florem iuventutis tuae, quem, laetantibus angelis, Deo illibatum
obtuleras in odorem suavitatis, nunc a daemonibus conculcari, vitiorum supricitiis, et saeculi sordibus
inquinari?”
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character. Their fatal misjudgment marks the fundamental divergence
in ethical thought and feeling between the “culture” of Teutonism and
the old-world civilization represented by Great Britain. They lack the
ethical sense with which to perceive the motives which inspired the
attitude of this country. They are able to understand and appreciate a
war of revenge or a war of conquest, but they are incapable of
conceiving the workings of a national mind which can undertake a
costly and bloody war merely to uphold the sacredness of a treaty—a
war for a mere scrap of paper.
In engineering this war of wanton aggression Germany committed
one capital mistake—a result of the atrophy of her moral sense: she
failed to gauge the ethical soul of the British people. She neither
anticipated nor adequately prepared for the adhesion of Great Britain
to France and Russia. And to ward off this peril when it became visible
she was ready to make heavy sacrifices—for the moment. One of
these was embodied in the promise not to annex any portion of French
territory. But here, again, this undertaking would not have hindered her
from encouraging Italy to incorporate Nice and Savoy, as an
inducement to lend a hand in the campaign. Her assumption that
England would not budge was based largely on the impending civil war
in Ireland, the trouble caused by the suffragettes, the spread of
disaffection in India and Egypt, and above all on the paramountcy of a
Radical peace party in Great Britain which was firmly opposed to war,
loathed Russian autocracy, and contemplated with dismay the
prospect of Russian victories. These favourable influences were then
reinforced by the vague promise to conclude a convention of neutrality
with Great Britain at some future time on lines to be worked out later,
by the undertaking to abstain from annexing French territory in Europe,
and at last by the German Ambassador’s suggestion that the British
Government should itself name the price at which Britain’s neutrality
during the present war and her connivance at a deliberate breach of
treaty could be purchased.
That all these promises and promises of promises should have
proved abortive, and that Austria and Germany should have to take on
France, Russia, and Great Britain when they hoped to be able to
confine their attentions to little Servia, was gall and wormwood to the
Kaiser’s shifty advisers. For it constituted a superlatively bad start for
the vaster campaign, of which the Servian Expedition was meant to be
but the early overture. A new start already seems desirable, and
overtures for the purpose of obtaining it were made by the German
Ambassador at Washington, who suggested that the war should be
called a draw and terms of peace suggested by Great Britain. But the
allies had already bound themselves to make no separate peace, and
their own interests oblige them to continue the campaign until Prussian
militarism and all that it stands for have been annihilated. None the
less, it is nowise improbable that as soon as the allies have scored
such successes as may seem to bar Germany’s way to final and
decisive victory, she may endeavour, through the good offices of the
United States, to obtain peace on such terms as would allow her to
recommence her preparations on a vaster scale than ever before,
amend her schemes, correct her mistakes, and make a fresh start
when her resources become adequate to the magnitude of her
undertaking. And if the allies were ill-advised or sluggish enough to
close with any such offers, they would be endeavouring to overtake
their Fate and to deserve it. What would a peace treaty be worth, one
may ask, as an instrument of moral obligation if the nation which is
expected to abide by it treats it on principle as a scrap of paper? There
can be no peace except a permanent peace, and that can be bought
only by demolishing the organization which compelled all Europe to
live in a state of latent warfare. As Mr. Lloyd George tersely put it: “If
there are nations that say they will only respect treaties when it is to
their interests to do so, we must make it to their interests to do so.”
And until we have accomplished this there can be no thought of
slackening our military and naval activity.
One word more about German methods. Intelligent co-ordination of
all endeavours and their concentration on one and the same object is
the essence of their method and the secret of their success. German
diplomacy is cleverly and continuously aided by German journalism,
finance, industry, commerce, literature, art, and—religion. Thus, when
the Government think it necessary, and therefore right, to break an
international convention, violate the laws of war, or declare a treaty a
mere scrap of paper, they charge the State on whose rights they are
preparing to trespass with some offence which would explain and
palliate, if not justify, their illegality. It was thus that the German
Secretary of State, when asked by our Ambassador whether the
neutrality of Belgium would be respected, said evasively that certain
hostile acts had already been committed by Belgium—i.e. before the
end of July! In the same way, tales of Belgian cruelty towards German
soldiers and German women—as though these, too, had invaded King
Albert’s dominions—were disseminated to palliate the crimes against
Louvain, Malines, and Termonde. And now Great Britain is accused of
employing dum-dum bullets by the Kaiser, whose soldiers take
hostages and execute them, put Belgian women and children in the
first firing line, whose sailors are laying mines in the high seas, and
whose most honest statesmen are industriously disseminating
deliberate forgeries among neutral peoples. Prince Bülow, the ex-
Chancellor, in an appeal to civilized peoples for their sympathy with
Germany in this iniquitous war, operates with the forged speech
mendaciously attributed to Mr. John Burns, in which England is
accused of having assailed Germany from behind out of brutal
jealousy and perpetrated the crime of high treason against the white
races!
The present Imperial Chancellor, von Bethmann Hollweg, reputed
to be the most veracious public man in Germany, has quite recently
issued a memorial for the purpose of substantiating the charges of
atrocity levelled against Belgians as a set-off to German savagery in
Louvain, Malines, and elsewhere. The Chancellor relies upon the
evidence of one Hermann Consten, a Swiss subject and a member of
the Swiss Red Cross Society, a gentleman, therefore, whose political
disinterestedness entitles him to be heard, and whose presence at
Liége during the siege is an adequate voucher for his excellent source
of information.
But inquiry has elicited the facts that the description of this witness
given by the honest Chancellor is wholly untrue. The Chief of Police at
Basle, in Switzerland, has since testified that Consten is a German,
that he conducted a German agency in Basle which is believed to have
been an espionage concern, that he was charged with fraud, and after
a judicial inquiry expelled from Switzerland on September 10th, that he
was under police surveillance for two years, that he is not a Swiss
subject, nor a member of the Red Cross Society, and that, as he
resided in Switzerland during all the time that the siege of Liége was
39
going on, he could not have seen any of the atrocities he alleges.
When the Chief of a Government descends to slippery expedients
like these to find extenuating circumstances for acts of fiendish
savagery that have staggered the world, he is unwittingly endorsing
the judgment against which he would fain appeal. And if Germany’s
most veracious statesman has no scruple to palm off barefaced lies on
American and European neutrals, what is one to think of the less truth-
loving apostles of Prussian culture?
What we in Great Britain have to expect from Germany, if now or at
any future time the anti-Christian cultural religion and inhuman maxims
on which her military creed rests get the upper hand, has been
depicted in vivid colours by Germans of all professions and political
parties. Delenda est Carthago. But the very mildest and fairest of all
these writers may be quoted to put us on our guard. Professor
Ostwald, the well-known German chemist, is a pacifist, a man opposed
on principle to war. In a document addressed to American pacifists for
their enlightenment as to the aims and scope of the present contest,
this bitter adversary of all militarism makes an exception in favour of
that of his own country. An enthusiast for civilization, he would gladly
see that of the British Empire destroyed. He writes:
According to the course of the war up to the present time,

European peace seems to me nearer than ever before. We
pacifists must only understand that, unhappily, the time was not
yet sufficiently developed to establish peace by the peaceful way.
If Germany, as everything now seems to make probable, is
victorious in the struggle not only with Russia and France, but
attains the further end of destroying the source from which for two
or three centuries all European strifes have been nourished and
intensified, namely, the English policy of World Dominion, then will
Germany, fortified on one side by its military superiority, on the
other side by the eminently peaceful sentiment of the greatest part
of its people, and especially of the German Emperor, dictate peace
to the rest of Europe. I hope especially that the future treaty of
peace will in the first place provide effectually that a European war
such as the present can never again break out.
I hope, moreover, that the Russian people, after the conquest
of their armies, will free themselves from Tsarism through an
internal movement by which the present political Russia will be
resolved into its natural units, namely, Great Russia, the
Caucasus, Little Russia, Poland, Siberia, and Finland, to which
probably the Baltic Provinces would join themselves. These, I
trust, would unite themselves with Finland and Sweden, and
perhaps with Norway and Denmark, into a Baltic Federation, which
in close connection with Germany would ensure European peace
and especially form a bulwark against any disposition to war which
might remain in Great Russia.
For the other side of the earth I predict a similar development
under the leadership of the United States. I assume that the
English Dominion will suffer a downfall similar to that which I have
predicted for Russia, and that under these circumstances Canada
would join the United States, the expanded republic assuming a
certain leadership with reference to the South American
Republics.
The principle of the absolute sovereignty of the individual
nations, which in the present European tumult has proved itself so
inadequate and baneful, must be given up and replaced by a
system conforming to the world’s actual conditions, and especially
to those political and economic relations which determine
40
industrial and cultural progress and the common welfare.
The peace which this distinguished pacifist is so eager to establish

on a stable basis can only be attained by the “mailed fist,” fortified on
one side by its military superiority, and on the other by the eminently
peaceful sentiment of the German Emperor. And the means to be
employed are the utter destruction of the British Empire and the break-
up of Russia into small States under German suzerainty. This is a
powerful wrench, but it is not all. The “absolute sovereignty of the
individual nations is to be made subordinate to Germany in Europe,
and, lest Americans should find fault with the arrangements, to the
41
United States on the new Continent.”
No peace treaty with a nation which openly avows and cynically
pursues such aims as these by methods, too, which have been
universally branded as infamous, would be of any avail. It is essential
to the well being of Europe and the continuity of human progress that
the political Antichrist, who is waging war against both, shall be
vanquished, and that peace shall be concluded only when
Prussianized Germany has been reduced to a state of political,
military, and naval impotency.
APPENDIX
DIPLOMACY AND THE WAR
THE RUSSIAN ORANGE BOOK

(From “The Morning Post,” September 21st,
1914)
Under the title of “Recueil de Documents Diplomatiques.
Négociations ayant précédé la guerre,” the Russian Ministry for
Foreign Affairs has published at St. Petersburg an important Orange
Book giving full details of the diplomatic negociations which
preceded the war. Although dated August 6th (July 24th Old Style), it
only reached London last evening. The first document is a telegram
from M. Strandtman, the Russian Chargé d’Affaires at Belgrade,
under date July 23rd, in which he informs the Minister for Foreign
Affairs in St. Petersburg that the Austrian Minister has just sent to M.
Patchou, who is representing M. Pasitch, the Servian Minister of
Finance, at six o’clock in the evening, an ultimatum from his
Government, fixing a delay of forty-eight hours for the acceptance of
the demands contained in it. M. Pasitch and the other Ministers, who
were away on an electioneering tour, had been communicated with,
and were expected to return to Belgrade on Friday morning. M.
Patchou added that he asked the aid of Russia, and declared that no
Servian Government would be able to accept the demands of
Austria. The same day M. Strandtman telegraphed to his
Government, stating what were the alleged grievances of the Austro-
Hungarian Government against Servia. The Servian Government
was to suppress the “criminal and terrorist” propaganda directed
against Austria with a view to detaching from the Dual Monarchy the
territories composing part of it. Servia was called upon to publish on
the first page of the Servian “Official Journal” of July 13th a notice to
this effect, while expressing regret for the fatal consequences of
these “criminal proceedings.”
Austria’s Impossible Demands.

Moreover, the Servian Government was to undertake (1) to
suppress all publications designed to excite people to hatred and
contempt of the Austrian Monarchy; (2) to dissolve at once the
“Narodna Odbrana” Society; (3) to eliminate from the curriculum of
the public schools anything tending to foment an anti-Austrian
propaganda; (4) to dismiss military and civil officers guilty of similar
propaganda; (5) to accept the collaboration of Austria in the
suppression of the said “subversive movement”; (6) to open a judicial
inquiry against the partisans of the conspiracy of June 28th still in
Servia; (7) to arrest Commandant Voija Tankositch and Milan
Ciganovitch, a Servian official; (8) to prevent illicit traffic in arms and
explosives across the frontier, and dismiss and punish severely the
Servian officials at the Schabatz-Loznica frontier guilty of having
helped the authors of the crime of Sarajevo by facilitating their
passage across the frontier; (9) to give the Austrian Government
explanations as to the declarations hostile to Austria made by high
Servian officials in interviews after the crime of June 28th; (10) to
advise the Austrian Government without delay that the above
demands have been complied with. To these demands a satisfactory
reply must be given at latest by Saturday, July 25th, at six o’clock in
the evening. On the following day, July 24th, the Minister for Foreign
Affairs at St. Petersburg sent a telegram to the Russian Chargé
d’Affaires at Belgrade, in which he pointed out that the
communication of the Austrian Government gave a wholly
insufficient length of time to the Powers for dealing with the
complications which had arisen. In order to guard against the
incalculable consequences, which were equally serious for all the
Powers, that might follow from the action of the Austrian
Government, it was indispensable first of all that the delay accorded
to Servia should be extended. At the same time M. Sazonoff
despatched an identical message to the Russian Ambassadors in
England, France, Germany, and Italy, in which he said he hoped that
the Governments to which they were accredited would support the
Russian Government in the view that it took.
Servia’s Position.
The Prince Regent of Servia, on the same date, July 24th, wrote
to the Emperor of Russia a letter, in which, after referring to the
Austrian Note, he said that Servia, recognizing its international
duties, at the very first opportunity after the horrible crime, declared
that it condemned that crime and was ready to open an inquiry if the
complicity of certain Servian subjects should be proved in the course
of the investigations made by the Austrian authorities. “However,” he
continued, “the demands contained in the Austrian Note are
unnecessarily humiliating to Servia and incompatible with her dignity
as an independent State. We are ready to accept those Austrian
conditions which are compatible with the position of a sovereign
State as well as any which your Majesty may advise us to accept,
and all the persons whose participation in the crime shall be
demonstrated will be severely punished by us. Among the demands
made by Austria are some which could not be satisfied without
certain changes in our legislation, which would require time.”
On July 25th the Russian Chargé d’Affaires at Belgrade, in a
telegram to his Government, which did not reach Petrograd till July
27th, sent a copy of the Servian reply to the Austrian demands, in
which it was stated that Servia had many times given proofs of a
pacific and moderate policy during the Balkan crisis. The Servian
Government could not accept responsibility for manifestations of a
private character such as were contained in newspaper articles and
the peaceful work of societies, manifestations which take place in
nearly all countries in the ordinary way, and which are not subject to
official control. The Servian Government had been painfully
surprised at the allegations to the effect that certain persons in
Servia had taken part in preparing the crime at Sarajevo.
Assurances and Concessions.

The Servian Government proceeded to repeat its assurance that
it was willing to make all efforts to find out the guilty without regard to
rank or station, and to punish them for any complicity in that crime;
further, the Servian Government transmitted a long announcement,
which it undertook to publish on the front page of the Journal Officiel
of July 26th. It was largely based upon the Austrian demands, and
undertook, while formally repudiating all idea of interfering in
Austrian affairs, to warn its civil and military authorities, as well as
the entire population of the Kingdom, that it would proceed with the
utmost severity against all persons who should be guilty of such
acts. The Government undertook besides to introduce at the first
sitting of the Skupschtina a Press Law enacting severe penalties for
any attempt to excite the people to hatred and contempt of the
Austrian Monarchy, and it promised that at the forthcoming revision
of the Constitution Article 22 should be amended in such a way that
such publications could be confiscated, which under the existing law
was impossible. The Government did not possess any proof, and the
Note of the Austrian Government did not furnish any proof, that the
Narodna Odbrana Society and other similar associations had
committed any criminal act. Nevertheless, the Servian Government
would accept the demand of the Austrian Government, and would
dissolve the Narodna Odbrana Society and any other society which
might act in a manner hostile to Austria. Other points on which the
Servian Government offered to meet the Austrian demands were the
elimination from the curriculum of the Servian public elementary
schools of any propaganda against Austria which could be shown to
exist, and to dismiss from the Servian service any officers who might
be shown to have been guilty of acts directed against the integrity of
Austrian territory.
The Servian Government, while protesting that it did not clearly
understand the sense and the tendency of the demand of the
Austrian Government that it should accept upon its territory the
collaboration of the Austrian Government, declared that it was ready
to admit any collaboration consistent with the principles of
international law and criminal procedure, as well as with neighbourly
relations. The Government considered it its duty to open a judicial
inquiry with regard to the conspiracy of June 28th, but could not
accept the participation of Austrian delegates, as this would involve
the violation of the Servian Constitution. On the very evening,
however, of the receipt of the Austrian Note the Government
proceeded to arrest Commandant Voija Tankositch. With regard to
Milan Ciganovitch, who was an Austrian subject, they had not been
able to find him. The Government would undertake to extend the
measures taken to prevent the illicit traffic in arms and explosives
across the frontier, and would at once order an inquiry and punish
severely the frontier officials on the line Schabatz-Loznica who
neglected their duty by permitting the passage of the authors of the
crime of Sarajevo. The Government would willingly give explanations
as to the opinions expressed by its agents after the crime, as soon
as the Austrian Government would communicate the statements in
question and show that they had really been made. “In case,” it was
added, “the Austrian Government should not be satisfied with this
reply, the Servian Government, considering that it is to the common
interest not to precipitate a solution of this question, is ready, as at all
times, to accept a pacific understanding, while remitting this question
to the decision either of the International Tribunal of The Hague or to
the Great Powers which took part in the elaboration of the
declaration which the Servian Government made on March 31st,
1909.”
Germany’s Duties.
On July 23rd the Russian Chargé d’Affaires in Paris telegraphed
to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg: “To-day a morning
newspaper publishes in a form not entirely accurate the declarations
made yesterday by the German Ambassador, following them up with
commentaries representing them in the light of a threat. The German
Ambassador, much impressed by these revelations, paid a visit to-
day to the Acting Director of the Political Department, and informed
him that his words did not bear the construction put upon them. He
declared that Austria had presented its Note to Servia without any
precise understanding with Berlin, but that nevertheless Germany
approved the point of view of Austria, and that certainly ‘the arrow
once shot’ (these were his exact words) Germany could only be
guided by its duties as an ally.”
M. Sazonoff on July 26th telegraphed to the Russian
Ambassador at Rome the following significant words: “Italy could
play a rôle of the first importance in favour of the maintenance of
peace by exercising the necessary influence on Austria and adopting
an unfavourable attitude towards the conflict, for that conflict could
not be localized. It is desirable that you should express the
conviction that it is impossible for Russia not to come to the
assistance of Servia.”
On the same day that this was written the Acting Russian Consul
at Prague telegraphed to St. Petersburg the news that the
mobilization in Austria-Hungary had been decreed.
A number of documents follow which do not deal with matters
that are not more or less public property, although incidentally they
show how strenuously Sir Edward Grey was working for peace.
Austria’s Last Word.

Even so late as July 28th the Russian Ambassador at Vienna
was still seeking a modus vivendi. In a telegram of that date to his
Minister for Foreign Affairs he related how he had seen Count
Berchtold, and told him in the most friendly terms how desirable it
was to find a solution which, while consolidating the good relations
between Austria and Russia, would give the Austrian Monarchy
serious guarantees with regard to its future relations with Servia.
Count Berchtold replied that he was perfectly aware of the gravity of
the situation and of the advantages of a frank explanation with the
Cabinet of St. Petersburg. On the other hand, he declared that the
Austrian Government, which had taken energetic measures against
Servia much against the grain, could no longer back out or submit to
discussion any of the terms of the Austrian Note. Count Berchtold
added that the crisis had become so acute, and public opinion had
become so excited, that the Government could not consent to do this
even if it would, the more so as the Servian reply afforded proof of a
want of sincerity in its promises for the future.
Deceptive Representations.
On July 29th the Russian Ambassador in France sent to his
Government a telegram saying: “Germany declares that it is
necessary to exercise a moderating influence at St. Petersburg. This
sophistry has been refuted at Paris, as at London. At Paris Baron de
Schoen has in vain tried to get France to join with Germany in
pressing on Russia the necessity of maintaining peace. The same
attempts have been made at London. In both capitals the reply was
that such action ought to be taken at Vienna, because the excessive
demands of Austria, her refusal to discuss the slight reserves made
by Servia, and her declaration of war against that country threatened
to provoke a general war.”
On July 30th the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs made to the
German Ambassador in St. Petersburg the following declaration,
urging that it should be transmitted without delay to Berlin: “If Austria,
recognizing that the Austro-Servian question has assumed the
character of a European question, declares itself ready to eliminate
from its ultimatum the points directed against the sovereign rights of
Servia, Russia undertakes to cease her military preparations.”
Summing up the Position.
Communiqué from the Minister of Foreign Affairs concerning the
events of the last few days.
August 2nd, 1914.
A statement distorting the events of recent days having
appeared in the foreign Press, the Minister of Foreign Affairs holds it
to be his duty to publish the following aperçu respecting the
diplomatic negociations that have taken place during the period
above mentioned.
On July 23rd the Austro-Hungarian Minister at Belgrade
presented to the Servian Minister-President a Note in which the
Servian Government was accused of having favoured the pan-
Servian movement which had resulted in the assassination of the
Heir to the Austro-Hungarian Throne. Consequently Austria-Hungary
demanded of the Servian Government that it should not alone
formally (sous une forme solennelle) condemn the aforementioned
propaganda, but further, under the control of Austria-Hungary, should
take sundry measures with the object of bringing to light the plot,
punishing those Servian subjects who had taken part in it, and
ensuring in the future the prevention of any such outrage within the
Kingdom. The Servian Government was allowed a period of forty-
eight hours in which to reply to this Note.
The Imperial Government, to whom the Austro-Hungarian
Ambassador at St. Petersburg had communicated the text of the
Note seventeen hours after it had been sent to Belgrade, having
taken cognizance of the demands therein contained, was forced to
recognize that some of them were fundamentally impossible of
execution, while others were presented in a form incompatible with
the dignity of an independent State. Holding as inadmissible the
lowering of Servia’s dignity involved in these demands, also the
inclination of Austria-Hungary to ensure its preponderance in the
Balkans displayed in these same requirements, the Russian
Government pointed out in the most friendly manner to Austria-
Hungary the desirability of submitting the points contained in the
Austro-Hungarian Note to fresh examination. The Austro-Hungarian
Government did not think it possible to consent to any discussion
respecting the Note. The pacific action of the other Powers at Vienna
met with a like non-success.
Servia’s Readiness to Give Satisfaction.

Despite the fact that Servia had denounced the crime and had
shown herself ready to give satisfaction to Austria to an extent
exceeding that foreseen not only by Russia but also by the other
Powers, the Austro-Hungarian Minister at Belgrade considered the
Servian reply insufficient and left that city.
Recognizing the exaggerated nature of the demands presented
by Austria, Russia had already declared that it would be impossible
for her to remain indifferent, but at the same time without refusing to
use all her efforts to discover a peaceful issue which should be
acceptable to Austria and should spare its amour propre as a Great
Power. At the same time Russia firmly declared that a peaceful
solution of the question could only be admitted on a basis which
should imply no diminution of the dignity of Servia as an independent
State. Unfortunately all the efforts of the Imperial Government in this
direction remained without effect.
Austria’s Refusal of Mediation.

The Austro-Hungarian Government, after having rejected all
conciliatory intervention on the part of the Powers in its dispute with
Servia, proceeded to mobilize; war was officially declared against
Servia, and on the following day Belgrade was bombarded. The
manifesto which accompanied the declaration of war openly accuses
Servia of having prepared and carried out the crime of Sarajevo.
This accusation, involving as it does an entire people and a whole
State in a crime against the common law, by its evident inanity
served to enlist on behalf of Servia the broad sympathies of Europe.
Russia’s Mobilization.
In consequence of this method of action by the Austro-
Hungarian Government, despite Russia’s declaration that she would
not remain indifferent to Servia’s fate, the Imperial Government
deemed it necessary to order the mobilization of the military
circumscriptions of Kieff, Odessa, Moscow, and Kazan. This decision
was necessary because since the date of the sending of the Austro-
Hungarian Note to the Servian Government and Russia’s first
intervention five days had elapsed; nevertheless, the Viennese
Cabinet had taken no steps to meet our pacific efforts. On the
contrary, the mobilization of half the Austro-Hungarian Army had
been decreed.
The German Government was informed of the measures taken
by Russia; it was at the same time explained that these measures
were simply the consequence of Austria’s arming and were in no
way directed against Germany. The Imperial Government declared
that Russia was ready to continue the pourparlers with a view to a
pacific solution of the dispute, either by means of direct negociations
with the Viennese Cabinet, or, in accordance with the proposals of
Great Britain, by a conference of the four Great Powers not directly
interested, namely, England, France, Germany, and Italy.
This effort on the part of Russia also failed. Austria-Hungary
declined a further exchange of views with us, and the Viennese
Cabinet renounced participation in the projected conference of the
Powers.
Russia’s Efforts for Peace.

Russia nevertheless did not cease her efforts in favour of peace.
Replying to the German Ambassador’s question, on what conditions
we would suspend our warlike preparations, the Minister of Foreign
Affairs said the conditions were that Austria-Hungary should
recognize that the dispute with Servia had become a European
question, and that Austria-Hungary should not insist on demands
incompatible with the sovereign rights of Servia. Russia’s proposition
was judged by Germany to be unacceptable on the part of Austria-
Hungary, and simultaneously St. Petersburg received news of the
proclamation of a general mobilization in Austria-Hungary.
Meanwhile hostilities on Servian territory continued, and there was a
renewed bombardment of Belgrade.
The non-success of our pacific proposals obliged us to increase
our military precautions. The Cabinet of Berlin having addressed to
us a question on the subject, the reply was made that Russia was
forced to begin arming in order to be prepared against all
eventualities. While taking these precautions Russia continued to
seek to the utmost of her ability for an issue out of the situation, and
declared herself ready to accept any solution consistent with the
conditions she had already laid down.
In spite of this conciliatory communication the German
Government, on July 31st, addressed to the Russian Government, a
demand that they should suspend their military measures by midday
on August 1st. At the same time the German Government
threatened that if Russia did not comply they would order a general
mobilization. On August 1st the German Ambassador, in the name of
his Government, transmitted a declaration of war to the Minister for
Foreign Affairs.
Telegram to Russian Ambassadors.

On August 2nd the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs sent the
following telegram to the representatives of his country abroad:
“It is quite clear that Germany is trying to throw upon us the
responsibility for the rupture. Our mobilization is due to the
enormous responsibility that we should have assumed if we had not
taken all precautions at a time when Austria, confining her
negociations to dilatory pourparlers, was bombarding Belgrade and
carrying out a general mobilization. His Majesty the Emperor had
given his word to the German Emperor not to undertake any
aggressive act as long as the discussions with Austria should last.
After such a guarantee and all the proofs which Russia had given of
her love of peace, Germany had no right to doubt our declaration
that we would accept with joy any peaceful issue compatible with the
dignity and independence of Servia. Any other course, while
completely incompatible with our own dignity, would have shaken the
European equilibrium and assured the hegemony of Germany. The
European, even world-wide, character of the conflict is infinitely more
important than the pretext on which it has been commenced. By her
declaration of war against us while negociations were going on
between the Powers, Germany has assumed a heavy responsibility.”
Austria’s Declaration of War.

The Austro-Hungarian Ambassador at St. Petersburg remitted to
the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs the subjoined note at six
o’clock on the evening of August 6th:
“By order of his Government, the undersigned Ambassador of
Austria-Hungary has the honour to notify to his Excellency as
follows: Considering the menacing attitude of Russia in relation to
the conflict between the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Servia,
and in view of the fact that as a result of this conflict Russia, after a
communication from the Cabinet of Berlin, has thought right to begin
hostilities against Germany, which consequently finds itself in a state
of war with Russia, Austria-Hungary, from the present moment
considers herself equally in a state of war with Russia.”
Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld.
London and Aylesbury.—1414759
FOOTNOTES
1
Cf. Westminster Gazette, September 9th, 1914.
2
Cf. Sir M. de Bunsen’s supplementary despatch, which is
reproduced in full on pp. 129–140.
3
“The Price of a German-English Entente.” By Professor Hans
Delbrück. (February, 1911.)
4
“Solange es Herrn Dillon erlaubt sein wird, in der
Contemporary Review über deutsche Politik seine aus Hass
und Argwohn erzeugten Phantasien vorzutragen, solange
arbeiten umsonst, die da glauben, dass durch Schiedsverträge
der Frieden zwischen unsern Nationen gesichert werden
könne.”—Preussische Jahrbücher, Mai, 1911.
5
Cf. Westminster Gazette, September 14th.
6
There is prima facie evidence for the statement that labour
strikes were being actually engineered in Russia during the
crisis which culminated in the present war by agents supplied
with money from Germany. I cannot fairly say that this has
been proven.
7
I understand that this was one of the modifications which the
Kaiser himself made in the Austrian ultimatum. I know that he
also altered something in that document, and made it sharper
than was at first intended.
8
I endeavoured to draw the friendly attention of the French
Government to these striking defects in an unsigned article

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Angels and Anchoritic Culture in Late

Medieval England Joshua S. Easterling

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern

The Theology of Debt in Late Medieval English

Women and Parliament in Later Medieval England 1st ed.

Franciscan Books and Their Readers: Friars and

Artistic and Cultural Dialogues in the Late Medieval

Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy:

Justification in Late Medieval Preaching: A Study of

Angels and Anchoritic Culture

OXFORD STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture

Angels and Anchoritic

for you. si tu rêves d’un ange, c’est moi

Introduction: Anchoritic Communities 1

AASS Acta Sanctorum, ed. J. Bollandus et al. (Antwerp, 1643–).

xii   

VCM Vita Christinae Mirabilis, AASS, July 24, 637–60.

2        

:   3

Charismatics in a Reforming Culture

4        

:   5

¹² Quoted in Leclercq, “Monasticism and Angelism,” 129.

6        

English hermit Christina of Markyate (d. c.1160) and the prioress-turned-

:   7

8        

:   9

10        

From Transformation to Transﬁguration:

:   11

12        

:   13

14        

Elsewhere, when that distinction is not noted explicitly, or underscored with

:   15

16        

:   17

18        

The Contributions of This Book

:   19

under the heading of “para-anchoritic” texts, to describe precisely these intellec-

20        

spiritual concerns (e.g. interiority and solitude). A further suggestively anchoritic

:   21

A ﬁnal note on my quotation of texts. Throughout I have regularized the spelling

    23

the assimilation of Paul’s image of Christ’s body to a wide-reaching program to

Bodies in Crisis: Monastic and Clerical Reforms

⁴ Vauchez, The Laity, 3–82.

24        

reforms, or as it is still called, the “Great Reform.”⁵ Themselves shaped by earlier

    25

26        

    27

¹⁹ Bernard of Clairvaux, SBO, Tractatus et Opuscula, De consideratione, 3.18.13–17: “[S]icut illic

28        

    29

Challenges to the Angelic Priesthood

30        

According to the course of the war up to the present time,