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Article Excerpt
In his contribution to the Chronicon Anglicanum, the Cistercian chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall interrupts his account of the preparations made for the Fourth Crusade in 1199 to recount six anecdotes of local marvels and recent miracles. The focus in the first four "wonder tales"--the stories of the Wildman dragged from the sea, the feral children, the discoveries of giants' remains in Essex and Wales, and the changeling Malekin--is on corporeality and alterity. The fifth and sixth stories--about the witch of Rheims and the saintly Alpais of Cudot--address heresy and orthodoxy. Once dismissed as non sequitors, such "prodigious" narratives now suggest themselves as imaginative exercises in distinguishing the self from other. My interest in Coggeshall's Chronicon falls on a curious account of two French women heretics and known to scholars of witchcraft as "The Witch of Rheims." This tale begs certain questions of formal unity, if not textual coherence, both in terms of the wonder tales that precede it and the larger crusade narrative that frames these digressions. How are doctrinal issues raised by heresy an extension of the other wonder tales' interest in corporeality and difference? How are readers expected to parse this seemingly interpolated text in relation to the Chronicle's historicist agenda? One way to approach these questions is to focus on the thematic undertow of this section of the chronicle, a rationalization of the institutional project of defending what Elizabeth Freeman terms "the integrity of the Christian body" by justifying the crusades as an act of God. (1) I would like to propose that this concern for the integrity of the Christian body, both literally and figuratively, does not begin with the Cistercian order's involvement in the Fourth Crusade, and that Ralph's account of "The Witch of Rheims" registers a crisis of identity and authority much closer to home.
In this article I want to consider another possible textual link between "The Witch of Rheims" and the larger mission of shoring up the boundaries of the Church Militant. When Ralph writes his section of the Chronicon at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cistercians have been fighting heresy on the Continent for almost eighty years. (2) English Cistercians in particular eagerly accepted the responsibility for the prosecution of heretics that Innocent III placed on the shoulders of the Abbot of Citeaux (and, by extension, on the Cistercian order as whole) in 1204. It should hardly surprise us, then, that the fifth anecdotal digression in Ralph's story concerns the heretical body, while the sixth, presumably by contrast, gives an account of the saintly body of Alpais of Cudot. What is perplexing, however, is that the narrative trajectory from alterity to orthodoxy, which would serve the overall ideological agenda of a crusade narrative, falters precisely when Ralph reaches the more conventional terrain of heresy and orthodoxy. The Cistercian's accounts of the unredeemable bodies of two heretics and the redeemed body of a saint communicate a curious ambiguity that disrupts and potentially questions the foundations upon which ecclesiastical authority itself is built.
By many historical accounts, as Western European society shifted from a warrior to a clerical culture in the twelfth century, literacy and celibacy became the defining attributes from which the clerical class derived its spiritual and administrative authority and through which it established a social hierarchy distinguishing between cleric and layperson, free and servile, male and female, orthodoxy and heresy. (3) Yet in the context of twelfth-century ecclesiastical reforms, the hermeneutic occupations and ideology of bodily purity that supposedly consolidated clerical authority in the high Middle Ages were also the bedeviled terms of the church's internecine struggles. In an age where monastic reform and lay evangelicalism proclaimed similar apostolic attitudes towards the institutionalized church as an administrative and educational body, lines between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy not only blurred but sometimes officially shifted.
The drama of institutional efforts to control the reprobate bodies of heretics or women can obscure the degree to which this nexus of textuality and sexuality fragmented the ecclesiastical establishment itself, particularly as the rise of early scholasticism alienated the cloister from the cathedral. In the following, I want to explore how "The Witch of Rheims" reveals the ideological link between the integrity of the texts and the integrity or deceptiveness of the body. I propose that Coggeshall's narrative presents an important moment in anti-heretical discourse that means to police the boundaries of the authentic church practices through the symbolics of the female body. In an atmosphere where monastic and scholastic scholars are searching for mechanisms to authenticate their own textual practices, the figure of the heretic registers an ambivalence haunting the emerging discourse of textual/sexual authority in the church. Rather than simply functioning as an other who dialectically reinforces the epistemological hubris one might associate with the period's ecclesiastical establishment, the elusiveness of the heretics' bodies registers for Coggeshall the textual ambiguities haunting his own hermeneutical practices.
Although only a brief tale, "The Witch of Rheims" is remarkable in ways that invite further scrutiny. It is one of the few narrative elements that draws attention to the otherwise unremarkable work of Ralph, the sixth abbot (1207-18) of the Coggeshall monastery in Essex. Responsible for documenting the years 1187-1224 in the abbey's Chronicon, Ralph reproduces his sources faithfully, save for his unchronological inclusion of six wonder tales, which must have captured his imagination, just as they do ours. Ralph's account of the trial of an unnamed Publican female heretic at Rheims has received some scholarly attention because the witch who appears in this narrative anticipates by several centuries the conventional witch figure that later comes to haunt the European imagination. (4) Without this reference to witchcraft the heretical sect called the Publicani might not be easily differentiated from the other dualist heretical sects of France and Germany. Ralph of Coggeshall's catalog of Publican beliefs recalls numerous beliefs attributed to the more famous Cathars during the same period:
These heretics allege that children should not be baptized until they reach the age of understanding; they add that prayers should not be offered for the dead, nor intercession asked of the saints. They condemn marriage; they preach virginity.... They abhor milk and anything made thereof, and all food which is the product of coition. They do not believe that purgatorial fire awaits one after death but that once the soul is released it goes immediately to rest of damnation. They accept no scriptures as holy except for the Gospels and the canonical letters.... Those who have delved into their secrets declare also that these persons do not believe that God administers human affairs of exercises any direction of control over earthly creatures. Instead, an apostate angel whom they call Luzabel, presides over all the material creation, and all things on earth are done by his will. The body is shaped by the devil, the soul created by God and infused into the body; whence it comes about that a persistent struggle is always being waged between body and soul. (5)
Despite the commonalities between the Publicani's purported beliefs and other contemporary religious dissidents, the sect is noteworthy for several reasons. First, the Publicani present an interesting narrative nexus relating heresy to witchcraft and magic. In addition to Ralph's identification of one of the heretics as a witch, Waher Map's reference to the Publicani in De Nugis Curialium (1181-92) conflates the conventional sex orgies attributed to organized religious dissidents--beginning with the accusations leveled at the Early Church itself with the acts of devil worship that would eventually become the standard topoi of the early modern accounts of the witches' Sabbath. Along with being uniquely associated with the discourse of magic by English authors, the Publicans are also the only heretical sect known to have briefly breached the insular shield that seemed to protect England from the Continent and its religious tumult in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One might well ask if the localized threat posed by the Publicani inspires the exaggerated supernatural features with which this sect is identified by English authors.
This disconcerting combination of intimate first-hand experience of the sect and fantastical accounts of diabolical presence in the world also informs Ralph's own account of the Publican heretics. Ralph's source for this account of the marvelous incident at Rheims is not just an eye witness, but the actual instigator of the events. Gervaise of Tilbury, a fellow native of Essex, local canon, author of Otiis Imperialibus (a section of which also appears in the Chronicon Anglicanum), is, to his own discredit, both literally and figuratively the source of Ralph's story. Ralph tells us that when Master...
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