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Symbolic Cartography in a Medieval Parish: From Spatialized Body to Painted Church at Saint-Aignan-sur-CherAuthor(s): Marcia KupferSource: Speculum, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Jul., 2000), pp. 615-667Published by: Medieval Academy of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903398 .

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Symbolic Cartography in a Medieval Parish: From Spatialized Body to Painted Church

at Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

By Marcia Kupfer

Founded on an ideal of aesthetic transcendence, academic art history has until recently relied on "great works" to generate its disciplinary narratives about cultural production. This is especially the case in the medieval field with its strong tradition of scholarly focus on powerful abbeys and cathedrals, renowned patrons and theologians, sumptuously illuminated manuscripts, and precious ornaments. A canon constituted by and revolving around articulate elites still tends to drive our inquiry.

The artistic record of parishes, passed over in silence by contemporaries and down to us in degraded condition, is caught in a double bind. Previous generations of art historians routinely judged the sanctuaries of smaller corporate bodies, village churches, and rural chapels to be second-rate, and thus unworthy of serious study. When considered at all, the surviving material was typically granted limited reflective value, acquiring visibility insofar as it fleshed out developments at major centers or bore on prestigious monuments. Consequently, little in the way of basic documentation, let alone more probing research, is available to historians who today seek to understand how ordinary people of the past approached everyday issues. Yet we cannot tease out what artistic activity at the parish level may reveal about medieval society without first inventorying dispersed archaeological remains-not an especially rewarding project in our postpositivist era. Once re- garded as the province of antiquarians and now left to conservators in charge of national patrimonies, the medieval parish continues to elude the historian's gaze. I hope to show that this arena of cultural production merits another look.

My research on the painted crypt at Saint-Aignan has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Program. This article in particular owes its existence to a conversation I had some years ago with Kathleen Biddick, whose keen insights into the cartographic relationship between the Saint-Aignan paintings and the local hospital network stim- ulated my thinking on the topic. Earlier versions were given as lectures at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Memphis and, in necessarily much reduced form, at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, in the session "Shaping Sacred Space and Institutional Identity" chaired by Thomas Dale in 1997. I would like to thank Professors Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Thomas Dale, Carol Purtle, Alison Stones, Franklin Toker, and John Williams for encouraging me to develop a publication based on my presentations. I am especially grateful to Professors Jean-Claude Schmitt and Jean-Claude Bonne for inviting me to participate in their seminars at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where I was able to review my research in great depth.

This article complements another, "Images, Pilgrims, and the Dead: Spatial Practices of Penance and Burial at Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher," in Shaping Sacred Space and Institutional Identity in Romanesque Mural Painting: Essays in Honour of Otto Demus, ed. Thomas Dale and John Mitchell (Leeds, forthcoming). In order that each could be read independently, however, some overlap of the material has proved unavoidable.

Speculum 75 (2000) 615



Symbolic Cartography

At an unremarkable site in central France a little-known work of Romanesque art played a key role in a remarkable story that can be pieced together from scattered elements of the built environment. An ensemble of frescoes painted around 1200 in the crypt of the collegiate and parish church at Saint-Aignan-sur- Cher can be correlated with the contemporary operation of several hospitals scattered on the perimeter of the town.1 The connection, highly unusual to say the least, is puzzling indeed. Why link a decorative scheme inside a church to outlying charitable institutions? Pondering this question led me to investigate the painted crypt in relation to the urban development of the site, provisions for poor relief, and the local topography of healing. Just what might be at stake in the spatial organization of the parish that the concomitant organization of pictorial images in architectural space addressed? Both systems, I propose, participated in the representation, inchoate and unverbalized, of competing therapeutic regimes.

My attempt to retrieve a dimension of vernacular culture from a singular evi- dentiary trace draws inspiration from the goals and techniques of microhistory. The now classic studies, among others, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie on the Occitan village of Montaillou, Carlo Ginzburg on the cosmogony of a Friulian miller, and Jean-Claude Schmitt on the cult of a dog-saint in the Dombes have demonstrated the value of training attention on localized formations and anom- alous instances: the reduced scale of observation permits insight into tensions and possibilities, tactics and accommodations that belie normative accounts of social (and-in the case at hand-artistic) order.2 Instead of taking an isolated text as a starting point for the recovery of mentalities, I shall try to decipher spatial practices from a cluster of uniquely connected buildings and images. This configuration, of which only discontinuous fragments survive, must first be painstakingly reconstituted through intensive analysis of archaeological, iconographic, archival, and ethnographic material. Seemingly inconsequential, banal details provide clues to meaningful patterns articulated in and through space: one set of coordinates maps relations between corps and terroir; another, giving priority to spiritual health, returns the ailing body to the church.

I can best delineate the two cartographic networks by moving from a global view of the medieval site (Part 1 below) into the space of the painted church (Part 2). This rhetorical strategy brings into focus the way in which the pictorial program, commissioned by the social group with the most access to artistic resources,

1 For previous art historical literature on the Saint-Aignan paintings, see Marcia Kupfer, Roman- esque Wall Painting in Central France: The Politics of Narrative (New Haven, Conn., 1993), pp. 181- 85.

2 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1979); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1993); and Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge, Eng., 1983). In the notes that follow, I shall refer to the French edition of the last work, Le saint levrier: Guinefort, guerisseur d'enfants depuis le XIIIe siecle (Paris, 1979), hereafter cited as Schmitt. For critical reflections on microhistory as a historiographical practice, see in particular Carlo Ginzburg, "Microhistory, Two or Three Things That I Know about It," Critical Inquiry 20/1 (1993), 10-35; and Giovanni Levi, "On Microhistory," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Uni- versity Park, Pa., 1992), pp. 93-113.

616




negotiated alternative readings of the physical world. The restricted scope of my investigation means that the exemplary status of its results remains uncertain. All the same, the experiment suggests that "lesser" works formerly thought to lack visual and intellectual interest may indeed yield to new questions.

1. MAPPING IN THE LANDSCAPE

The small town of Saint-Aignan rises in tiers around the slopes of a rocky promontory overlooking the Cher River some forty kilometers south of Blois (Figs. 1, 2). The place-name derives from the dedication of a chapel that had occupied the plateau before the count of Blois, Odo I (976-96), built a fortress there at the end of the tenth century.3 The naturally defended site, carved out of the valley by the sinuous course of the river, is located at the conjunction of three regions. To the north, between the Cher and the Loire, lie the vast, marshy tracts of the So- logne. To the south and east, a mix of small wood- and pastureland (bocage) covers the hills of that part of Berry called the Boischaut. The Cher valley at the level of Saint-Aignan, however, already presents the limestone plateaus character- istic of the area around Tours sixty kilometers to the west. Geographically an extension of Touraine but politically a satellite of Blois, the town was identified throughout the Middle Ages in relation to Berry because it belonged, as a parish, to the diocese of Bourges.4 The development of the fortified town at Saint-Aignan was shaped by the double role its strategic location conferred. Controlling a gate- way to Touraine, the castrum established a stronghold along the embattled frontier between the domains of Blois and Anjou. But what began as a military outpost also provided a link between vital arteries of the surrounding agrarian world. Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher was both buffer and bridge, a critical position in a chain of defense and point of passage along a well-traveled corridor.

Pictorial, cartographic, and archival documents capture the physical layout of the medieval town at the end of its development.5 An architectural portrait of Saint-Aignan, painted in 1631 as an ex-voto after an epidemic of plague (Fig. 3), epitomizes the town by individuating a few salient elements: the castle, the collegiate church, the ramparts with their fortified gates, and the bridge. This otherwise conventionalized view can be corrected and supplemented by further con- sulting a detailed description of the town in an inventory, dated 1646, of the feudal

3 Odo II (1004-37) subsequently enfeoffed the oppidum to a loyal man of his entourage, Geoffrey the Young of Donzy: Gesta Ambaziensium dominorum (Cbroniques des comtes d'Anjou et des sei-

gneurs d'Amboise), ed. Louis Halphen and Rene Poupardin (Paris, 1913), pp. 79-80. The house of

Donzy, based in the Nivernais, retained possession of the seigneury of Saint-Aignan through the first

quarter of the thirteenth century. 4 Guy Devailly, Le Berry du Xe siecle au milieu du XIIIe: Etude politique, religieuse, sociale et

economique (Paris, 1973), pp. 62-65, 69-77, 133, 166-67, 180. 5 Blois, Archives d6partementales du Loir-et-Cher, the unpublished report of Annie Cosperec, "Etude

du bati du centre ancien de Saint-Aignan" (July 1982), prepared the ground for this description of the medieval town.

617



618 Symbolic Cartography rights of Franqois de Beauvillier, count of Saint-Aignan;6 a plan made c. 1780 to complete a larger map of regional roads, which records the town's narrow, windy streets (Fig. 4);7 and the nineteenth-century cadastre, which reflects the transition of the site to its modern state.8

Midway between the castle keep at the summit of the plateau and the borough around the base lies the Romanesque church, subordinated to the one and domi- nating the other. The present edifice, supplanting earlier structures, was built between the end of the eleventh and late twelfth centuries (Fig. 5).9 A belt of ramparts, punctuated by six gates, pressed the urban amphitheater against the river (Fig. 6). Following the contours of the promontory, the main road through the town paralleled the river bank and then cut south ninety degrees. The thorough- fare virtually bisected the walled enclave, separating the castle with its fosses and the church from quarters devoted to food production, the market, the administration of justice, penal exhibition, and tanneries. Outside the southwest gate lay the principal cemetery (suppressed in 1812),10 an offshoot of a much smaller burial ground that originally abutted the church. The bridge off the main gate is documented in 1287, when a wealthy burgher, Colin Tavernier (or Peageur), innkeeper and toll collector, bequeathed funds for its upkeep from his estate;11 its existence, however, probably dates from the twelfth century, as does the toll imposed by the lords of Saint-Aignan.12 A continuation of a north-south route from Blois through the Sologne, the bridge at Saint-Aignan tied into a network of minor roads traversing Berry below the Cher.13

6 Private Collection, Chateau de Saint-Aignan, Archives des Beauvillier, Terrier Sommier of August 25, 1646; a published transcription is available in Ren6 Guyonnet, Saint-Aignan: Mille ans d'histoire, 5 vols. (Blois, 1978-80), 5:125-76. I am grateful to the Marquis de la Roche-Aymon for kindly allowing me access to the Beauvillier archives. The Beauvillier family inherited Saint-Aignan in 1496; the seigneurial title was elevated to count in 1538 (Guyonnet, Saint-Aignan, 4:113, 127).

7 Blois, Archives d6partementales, 41, no. 243, "Route de Blois du Blanc en Berry," part 2: "de Saint-Aignan a la fin de la generalit6 [d'Orleans]."

8 Blois, Archives d6partementales, 3 P2/157A, Section A, ville. 9 Maylis Bayl6, "Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher," Congres archeologique de France 139 (1981), 310-33. 10 Jean-Jacques Delorme, Histoire de la ville de Saint-Aignan, 2 vols. (Paris, 1846; repr. in 1 vol.,

Marseilles, 1979), p. 10. 1 Blois, Archives d6partementales, G 801, no. 1. For a transcription, see Inventaire sommaire des

Archives departementales anterieures a 1790: Loir-et-Cher, archives ecclesiastiques, clerge seculier, Serie G, ed. Fernand Bournon, Ernest Roussel, and Alfred Bourgeois, 1 (Blois, 1894), pp. 265-66, esp. p. 266.

12 Revenues from the toll at Saint-Aignan were donated to the local chapter of secular canons by Herveus III of Donzy (d. 1187), a gift nearly quadrupled in 1193 by his second son, Philippe, and greatly increased again in 1200 by his third son, Herveus IV. The original acts of donation no longer exist, but their contents are summarized in an inventory, compiled in 1692, of the titles or diplomas of the Beauvillier family: Private Collection, Chateau de Saint-Aignan, Archives des Beauvillier, liasse 1, fols. 43r-44r, also mentioned by Guyonnet, Saint-Aignan, 2:147, 211-12. For comparanda, see Jean-Marc Bienvenu, "Recherches sur les p6ages angevins aux XIe et XIIe siecles," Le moyen age 63 (1957), 210-40, 437-67.

13 Medieval roads through the Sologne are discussed by Isabelle Gu6rin, "Peages terrestres et fluviaux de la Sologne medievale," Bulletin philologique et historique du Comite des travaux historiques et

scientifiques 1 (1960), 235-70. Medieval roads linking Saint-Aignan to points in Berry (e.g., Valencay and Le Blanc) can be deduced to some extent from Charles Estienne, Guide des chemins de France (1533), ed. Jean Bonnerot, 2 vols. (Paris, 1936), esp. 1:34-35, 150, 155; on this source, see Jean



Symbolic Cartography 619

1. Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher and region.

A chapter of secular canons dominated local religious life not only through the collegiate church, which housed the parish of Saint-Aignan, but also through satellite institutions in and around the borough (Fig. 7).14 During the second half of the twelfth century, dependent chapels and hospitals nested into local pilgrimage

Hubert, "Les routes du moyen age," in Arts et vie sociale de la fin du monde antique au moyen age (Geneva, 1977), pp. 43-78.

14 Saint-Aignan is grouped along with other collegiate churches in a papal bull of 1145 that inventories the possessions of the archbishop of Bourges (Bourges, Archives departementales du Cher, G 28, no. 12); see the Inventaire sommaire des Archives departementales anterieures a 1790: Cher, archives ecclesiastiques, Serie G, ed. Alfred Gandilhon, 1, Archeveche de Bourges, 1 (Bourges, 1931), pp. 142-43. The chapter consisted of secular canons whose record of properties, revenues, and delib- erations dates from the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries: Blois, Archives departementales, G 446-G 875, Inventaire sommaire, ed. Bournon et al., 1:155-287. Saint-Aignan is also named in a thirteenth-century pouille of omnes ecclesiae parrochiales Bituricensis diocesis: Pouilles de la province de Bourges, ed. Maurice Prou, Charles-Edmond Perrin, and Jacques de Font-Reaulx, Recueil des His- toriens des Gaules et de la France, Pouilles, 9, 2 vols. (Paris, 1961-62), text vol., p. 151. The fact that two ecclesiastical entities, chapter and parish, inhabited a single building very likely explains the spo- radic designation of the church by either one or the other of two titular saints, Anianus and John, in eleventh- and twelfth-century sources.



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ti 2. Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher (Loir-et-Cher). Aerial view. (Photograph: R. Malnoury, Inventaire General Centre, S.P.A.D.E.M. All illustrations reproduced by permission.)

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5. Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, collegiate church (left) and chateau (right). (Photograph: author.)

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circuits began to support and supplement, if not also compete with, the principal sanctuary. The only oratory intra muros, Saint-Laurent, was built before 1170 on the main street (rue du Pont) near the bridge.15 Two Marian chapels, Notre-Dame- du-Pont and Notre-Dame de Pitie, could be found at opposite ends of the town, above the main gate and in the cemetery respectively.16 The Chapel of Saint-Andre was located about 1.5 kilometers outside the northwest gate on a road along the left bank of the Cher; an engraving, published in 1851 before the chapel's destruc- tion, shows a twelfth-century structure (Fig. 8).17 A chapel dedicated to St. Gui- nefort spawned a tiny suburb across the sluggish creek (the Trainefeuille) that marks the boundary between the parishes of Saint-Aignan and Seigy.18

Three hospitals completed the ring of paraparochial institutions serving the town of Saint-Aignan and its immediate vicinity. By the time Colin Tavernier set aside monies for these charities in his testament of 1287 (the earliest preserved document to mention them), they had long been in operation. Precise dates of foundation may remain a matter of conjecture, but the combination of physical remains and indirect evidence gleaned from the written record confirms that the local eleemosynary system evolved along lines well attested throughout twelfth- century France.19 Indeed, as will later become clear, the iconographic program

15 The existence of Saint-Laurent is documented in an act of c. 1170 to which the chaplain was a witness: Chateauroux, Archives departementales de l'Indre, H 705; see Inventaire sommaire, Indre: Archives ecclesiastiques, clerge regulier, Serie H, ed. Theodore Hubert (Paris, 1876), p. 226, col. b; and Guyonnet, Saint-Aignan, 2:133, 135. The chapel also received a gift from Colin Tavernier in his 1287 testament (see above, n. 11). Its location on the rue du Pont is noted in 1581 (Blois, Archives departementales, G 2540, no. 13; Inventaire sommaire, ed. Bournon et al., 1:387), in several eighteenth-century sources, and by Delorme, Histoire de la ville de Saint-Aignan, p. 9; it was destroyed in 1705.

16 The Capella Beatae Mariae de Cimiterio (called Notre-Dame de Piti6 from the fourteenth century) is listed in the testament of Colin Tavernier.

17 Delorme, Histoire de la ville de Saint-Aignan, p. 9; and Georges Touchard-Lafosse, La Loire historique, 5 vols. (Paris, 1851), 3:820. The chapel left its trace only in the form of a lieu-dit.

18 Berry presents one of the oldest and most vital theaters in France for the diffusion of Guinefort's cult. In contrast to the peculiar assimilation of the saint to a greyhound in the Dombes (diocese of Lyons), the hagiographic construction of Guinefort as "abbot" in the diocese of Bourges was promoted via official ecclesiastical channels. His remains, enshrined in the collegiate church of Saint-Ursin, are first attested between 1073 and 1078, and again in the mid-seventeenth century. A breviary of the usage of Bourges, dated 1493 (Chateauroux, Bibliotheque municipale, MS 254), includes Guinefort's name in its litanies: Schmitt, pp. 152-54. At Saint-Aignan/Seigy (not listed in Schmitt's inventory of cult sites), the chapel and lieu-dit Saint-Guyneffon, Sainct-Guinefon, Sanctus Ginnefortus, St.-Genefort appear as points de repere in property transactions archived by the chapter of Saint-Aignan from 1468. Unlike the other chapels circumscribing the borough, that of Saint-Guinefort is not included among the numerous vicariates controlled by the chapter. The parish church of Seigy, Saint-Martin (about 1.75 kilometers further east toward Selles-sur-Cher), depended on the Benedictine house of Pontlevoy; the Chapel of Saint-Guinefort, however, does not appear in the archives pertaining to the abbey. Might it have functioned autonomously, as did many other chapels dedicated to this healing saint? The profile of the site-a rural chapel in close proximity to a brook and a hospital (the maison-dieu)-conforms typologically to an intermediate strain of the cult between its official and folkloric extremes (Schmitt, pp. 162-63,168-71).

19 The literature on poor relief and hospitality in medieval France is vast. For an up-to-date bibliography that also includes the classic studies, see Francois-Olivier Touati, Archives de la lepre: Atlas des leproseries entre Loire et Marne au moyen age, Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, Memoires et Documents d'Histoire Medievale et de Philologie 7 (Paris, 1996), pp. 167-75, 182-87.



Symbolic Cartography introduced into the crypt of the collegiate church at the end of the twelfth century or turn of the thirteenth presupposes a functioning network of poor relief. Each of the houses exemplifies a particular type of establishment characterized by a different statutory personality and mission.

The Domus Sancti Lazari accommodated a stable community of lepers, as of- ficially sanctioned by the Third Lateran Council in 1179.20 Besides domestic quarters, garden, and pasture, the leprosery had its own cemetery and chapel, the only element of the complex to survive intact (Fig. 9). The south door of the Roman- esque chapel, built in the middle of the twelfth century, opened onto the old Gallo- Roman road between Tours and Bourges.21 Saint-Lazare occupied a kind of frontier zone between Saint-Aignan and, on the opposite bank of the Cher, the village of Noyers. But at 1.5 kilometers northeast of the borough, the leper house was no farther from the bridge gate than the more or less contemporary structure of Saint-Andre from the northwestern gate. Although the ecclesiastical status of the leprosery is impossible to ascertain from twelfth- or thirteenth-century sources, it should be noted that the parish of Noyers was itself also a possession of the chapter.22 Because clergy installed in leproseries were by and large subject to the tutelage of the monastic or canonical body to which the parish also belonged, the dependency of Saint-Lazare on the chapter of Saint-Aignan can reasonably be assumed.23 In 1366 the Parlement of Paris adjudicated a dispute between the chapter and the town over the administration of Saint-Lazare (referred to as Leprosaria Sancti Aniani Bituricensis diocesis); the court decided in favor of the canons, up- holding their claim to exclusive rights, spiritual and temporal.24 In the early seventeenth century, long after lepers had ceased to be interned there, the chapter maintained its customary annual procession to Saint-Lazare on the Monday of the Rogation Days and enjoyed a meal duly provided by the tenant.25

The Domus Dei de Sancto Aniano, or maison-dieu, was located between the Cher and the brook Trainefeuille at a site very close to, if not exactly at, that of

20 The practice of granting relative spiritual autonomy to leper communities-widespread yet still resisted-received official sanction at Lateran III in canon 23: Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London, 1990), 1:222-23. The canon, which defined the institutional nature of leprosaria and insisted on their subordination to parish churches, is best discussed by Joseph Avril, "Le IIIe concile de Latran et les communaut6s de lepreux," Revue Mabillon 60 (1981), 21-76. For recent, exhaustive studies of leprosy in medieval France, see Francois-Olivier Touati, Maladie et societe au moyen age: La lepre, les lepreux et les leproseries dans la province ecclesiastique de Sens jusqu'au milieu du XIVe siecle (Paris, 1998); and Francoise Beriac, Des lepreux aux cagots: Recherches sur les societes marginales en Aquitaine medievale (Bordeaux, 1990).

21 Francois Deshoulieres, "Noyers," Congres archeologique de France 88 (1925), 369-77, esp. pp. 373-77; Frederic Lesueur, Les eglises de Loir-et-Cher (Paris, 1969), p. 275; Jean-Marie Berland, "Saint- Aignan-sur-Cher," in Val de Loire roman, 3rd ed. (La Pierre-qui-Vire, 1980), p. 38; Touati, Maladie et societe au moyen ige, pp. 437-41 and passim; and idem, Archives de la lepre, pp. 54, 298-99. On the Gallo-Roman road from Tours to Bourges through Vierzon, see Emile Chenon, Les voies romaines du Berry (Paris, 1922), pp. 16-18; and Jacques Soyer, "Les voies antiques de l'Orleannais," Memoires de la Societe archeologique et historique de l'Orleannais 37 (1950), 5-108, esp. pp. 14-15, 89-91.

22 Pouilles de la province de Sens, ed. Auguste Longon, Recueil des Historiens de la France, Pouilles, 4 (Paris, 1904), p. 344A.

23 Avril, "Le IIIe concile de Latran et les communaut6s de lepreux," pp. 31-32, 45. 24 Paris, Archives Nationales, Xla 19, fols. 142-43. 25 Paris, Archives Nationales, S 4864, dossier 5: the processions are mentioned in a lease from 1636.

626



7. Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher and neighboring parishes.

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the new h6tel-dieu built between 1698 and 1700 (see Fig. 4).26 The medieval hospital still existed in July 1673, when officials from the orders of Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel and Saint-Lazare de Jerusalem inspected the grounds.27 The chapel was placed under the double invocation of Leu or Loup (Lupus) and Giles (Aegidius), the patron saints also recorded in an administrator's account of 1577.28 One room sheltered pilgrims admitted only for brief stays, while another was reserved for townsfolk who required longer-term residence.29 This arrangement, though documented for the early modern period, is entirely consistent with the picture extrapolated from medieval sources elsewhere.30 Maisons-dieu provided

26 The new ho6tel-dieu, a Beauvillier foundation, supplanted the medieval hospital and ultimately became the core of a modern hospital complex. The approximate location of the medieval maison- dieu can be deduced from many transactions in which it served as a landmark delimiting properties on the border of the parishes of Saint-Aignan and Seigy. A dependency or annex of the maison-dieu, a farm called the Grange-Dieu, is mentioned in a contract of 1319 (Blois, Archives d6partementales, G 603, Inventaire sommaire, ed. Bournon et al., 1:211-12) and still appears on Cassini's map (Cesar Francois Cassini de Thury, Carte de France, Paris, c. 1755-89, section no. 30). According to an entry in a journal written between 1690 and 1737 by an echevin of Saint-Aignan, ground was broken for the new ho6tel-dieu in June 1698, "au lieu oui il y avait des tanneries et autres maisons," and the first mass was celebrated in November 1700 (Alexandre de la Borde, "Livre de raison," Mer, Private Collection; the journal remains unpublished, but an anonymous transcription of selected extracts, including the entry cited here, is available at Blois, Archives d6partementales, photocopy no. 116. On this source, see Gallerand, "Journal d'un Bourgeois de Saint-Aignan sous Louis XIV," Memoires de la Societe des sciences et lettres de Loir-et-Cher 26 [1926], 32-34).

27 Paris, Archives Nationales, S 4833, dossier 45ter. The royal edict of 1672 attaching leproseries and hospitals of the realm to the orders of Mont-Carmel and Saint-Lazare was revoked in 1693. In 1695 the properties and revenues of the hospital at Lucay-le-Male (Indre), the maladrerie of Noyers (i.e., Saint-Lazare), and the almonry or "Porche de Noyers" (discussed below) were attached to the hospital at Saint-Aignan (Paris, Archives Nationales, V6 1166, no. 10, dated September 10). See Etat general des unions faites des biens et revenus des maladeries, leproseries, aum6neries et autres lieux

pieux aux ho6pitaux des pauvres malades (Paris, 1705), pp. 50, 123. These events paved the way for the new Beauvillier foundation.

28 Paris, Archives Nationales, S 4833, dossier 45ter (the 1673 report), and Chateau de Saint-Aignan, Archives des Beauvillier, liasse 1833, dossier no. 1 (the 1577 inventory); and Ren6 Guyonnet, Saint- Aignan: L'h6tel-dieu et le couvent des dames bernardines (Blois, 1984), p. 113. In Berry and the Ile- de-France the cult of St. Giles was closely tied to that of St. Loup, archbishop of Sens, whose feast day also fell on the first of September; indeed, Loup appears to have been accorded greater importance, eventually overshadowing Giles altogether: Patrick Corbet, "La diffusion du culte de Saint Gilles au moyen age (Champagne, Lorraine, Nord de la Bourgogne)," Annales de PEst 32 (1980), 3-42, esp. p. 9; Christian Roth, "Notes sur le culte de St. Gilles dans l'ancien diocese de Bourges," Cahiers d'archeologie et d'histoire du Berry 45-46 (1976), 19-37, esp. pp. 20,22; and Charles Vulliez, "Orleans, S. Gilles, et la 1egende du pardon de Charlemagne," in Haut moyen-age: Culture, education et societe. Etudes offertes a Pierre Riche, ed. Michel Sot (Nanterre, 1990), pp. 575-89, esp. pp. 583-84.

29 According to an inventory drawn up in 1674 (Chateau de Saint-Aignan, Archives des Beauvillier, liasse 1834, dossier no. 7; Guyonnet, Saint-Aignan: L'h6tel-dieu, pp. 134-35), the medieval maison- dieu comprised a chapel, a "chambre des malades" then occupied primarily by elderly persons, often widowed, from the town, and a separate "salle oui logent les pauvres passants." Care for these two categories of persons, the sick from the town and itinerants, was emphasized during a suit litigated in 1481, when the rector stated that the purpose of the maison-dieu was to undertake "oeuvres pit6ables et de charite" and to receive "pellerins qui y affluent en grande habondance" (Archives des Beauvillier, liasse 1830, dossier no. 1, cited after Guyonnet, p. 104).

30 See, e.g., Jean Imbert, Les ho6pitaux en droit canonique (Paris, 1947), pp. 118, 124; Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster, The English Hospital, 1070-1570 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), pp. 56-64;



Symbolic Cartography care for the sick poor but catered especially to the wayfarer and stranger, trans- euntes or pauvres passants whose journeys had uprooted them from family and community; pilgrims, in a state of voluntary exile, were identified as pauperes Christi par excellence. While maisons-dieu brought together the itinerant and the sick in a single edifice, the need to maximize delivery of service could nonetheless lead to the separation of the ambulant and the bedridden.31 In contrast to itinerants who preserved their mobility, the sick were often characterized as weak or prostrate (egrotantes, languentes, jacentes) because of their inability to move about. Because limited resources were expended only on those who could benefit from care, maisons-dieu as a rule excluded the chronically ill and the permanently invalid and handicapped and would also turn away victims of epidemics who might otherwise flood the establishment. Not only lepers but also ardentes (those suffering from what is today known as ergotism), amputees (demembrati), the paralyzed or crippled (contracti), and the blind would have had to find other venues of assistance.32

As in the case of Saint-Lazare, archival sources specifying the patronage of the maison-dieu during its earliest period of operation are lacking. However, litiga- tion, leases, and inventories of the late fifteenth through seventeenth centuries reveal the broad rights of tutelage exercised by the chapter of Saint-Aignan.33 Until 1497 the post of rector was almost always held by a canon, and in any case the rector's lease of hospital properties had to be confirmed by the chapter.34 Annually on Pentecost the chapter processed to the maison-dieu, where the canons ban- queted at hospital expense.35

Jacqueline Caille, H6pitaux et charite publique a Narbonne au moyen age de la fin du XIe a la fin du XVe siecle (Toulouse, 1978), p. 101; Alain Saint-Denis, L'hotel-dieu de Laon, 1150-1300: Institution

hospitaliere et societe aux XIIe et XIIIe siecles (Nancy, 1983), p. 75; and Annie Saunier, "Le pauvre malade" dans le cadre hospitalier medieval, France du nord, vers 1300-1500 (Paris, 1993), pp. 5-22.

31 In the small maison-dieu of Saint-Aignan, the two groups occupied different rooms; in the twelfth- century hotel-dieu of Laon, a major cathedral hospital, they were each assigned to different floors: Saint-Denis, L'hotel-dieu de Laon, p. 53; and idem, "Soins du corps et m6decine contre la souffrance a l'h6tel-dieu de Laon au XIIIe siecle," Medievales 8 (1985), 32-42, esp. p. 35.

32 Leon Le Grand, "Les maisons-Dieu, leur r6gime interieur au moyen age," Revue des questions historiques 60 (1898), 98-146, esp. p. 133; Imbert, Les hopitaux en droit canonique, p. 126; Saunier, "Le pauvre malade," pp. 51-58, 204-35; Miri Rubin, "Development and Change in English Hospi- tals, 1100-1500," in The Hospital in History, ed. Lindsay Granshaw and Roy Porter (London, 1989), pp. 41-59, esp. p. 49; and Martha Carlin, "Medieval English Hospitals," in The Hospital in History, pp. 21-40, esp. p. 25. Statutes of some medieval hospitals list categories of persons denied admission. I have extrapolated in particular from the statutes of the hotel-dieu of Angers, redacted in the early thirteenth century (Leon Le Grand, Statuts d'hotels-dieu et de leproseries [Paris, 1901], p. 25, no. 13), and those of the hotel-dieu-le-Comte at Troyes compiled in 1263 (ibid., p. 115 no. 90).

33 Guyonnet, Saint-Aignan: L'hotel-dieu, pp. 98-116, 120, 135-37. For a general picture of the subordination of maisons-dieu to the ecclesiastical patrons of the parishes in which they were found, see Joseph Avril, "Le statut des maisons-dieu dans l'organisation eccl6siastique medievale," in Actes du 11 Oe Congres national des societes savantes, Montpellier, 1985, Section d'histoire medievale et de

philologie, 1: Sante, medecine et assistance au moyen age (Paris, 1987), pp. 285-97. 34 Chateau de Saint-Aignan, Archives des Beauvillier, liasse 1834, dossier 14, no. 3 ("extrait des

titres qui concernent l'administration de l'hostel-dieu en faveur du chapitre," compiled in 1698), 1-3

(contents of charters from 1448 to c. 1500). 35 The procession is mentioned in the account of 1577 (cited above in n. 28) and in several seven-

teenth-century documents (Guyonnet, Saint-Aignan: L'hotel-dieu, pp. 113, 120, 136, 137).

630




The maison-dieu and leprosery of Saint-Aignan conform to well-known patterns governing the siting of medieval hospitals at the confines of towns or villages.36 Outside the gates, the two houses were strategically positioned in ways that appropriated the ambivalent power of the infirm and poor on behalf of the community from which they were socially displaced. To paraphrase Roberta Gilchrist, the display of stigmatized bodies defined and guarded parish boundaries, while prime roadside property on main thoroughfares enabled donors and trav- elers to exhibit charity. Fear of pollution demarcated and protected; pious gifts redeemed.37 The equivocal location of hospitals-removed to the periphery yet close enough to remain an integral part of everyday life-cultivated as much as it reflected the ambiguous status of their inmates. The maison-dieu just outside the eastern gate at Saint-Aignan provided pilgrims a means of transition into town even as it may have relegated itinerants to the fringes of the community.38

Lepers, of course, were enjoined to a special symbolic state of separation from the world (as were monks), but it would be a mistake to exaggerate their physical or economic isolation. Leproseries reorganized tracts of land in the interstices between town and village into productive domains and so participated in the domestication of suburban space; inserted into major regional systems of communication and exchange along river and overland routes, they helped tie desolate outlying areas to centers of population never more than two or three kilometers away in any case.39 The proliferation of leproseries in the twelfth century created a fixed space for those whose visible mark of sin-disease-initiated a life com- mitment to penance that in many ways emulated the monastic profession. Para- doxically, it may seem, the houses of what constituted a lay penitential order became a conspicuous feature of the developing paysage d'agglomeration during

36 See, e.g., Michel Mollat, "L'h6pital dans la ville au moyen age en France," Bulletin de la Societe francaise d'histoire d'ho6pitaux 47 (1983), 6-17, esp. p. 8; Pierre De Spiegeler, Les ho6pitaux et l'assistance a Liege (Xe-XVe siecles): Aspects institutionnels et sociaux (Paris, 1987), p. 59; Noel Coulet, "H6pitaux et oeuvres d'assistance dans le diocese et la ville d'Aix-en-Provence, XIIIe-mi. XIVe siecle," Cahiers de Fanjeaux 13 (1978), 213-38, esp. p. 223; Michel Mollat, in Histoire des ho6pitaux en France, ed. Jean Imbert (Toulouse, 1981), pp. 13-133, esp. pp. 99-102; Jacques Chiffoleau, D. le Blevec, and Monique Zerner, "Aspects de l'institution hospitaliere dans la region comtadine au moyen age," in Actes du 110e Congres national des societes savantes, pp. 299-315, esp. p. 305; Florence Collette and Denise Mea, "Les etablissements charitables dans l'ancien diocese de Bourges a la fin du moyen age," in Actes du 11llle Congres national des societes savantes, Poitiers, 1986, Section d'histoire medievale et de philologie, 2 (Paris, 1988), pp. 79-110, esp. pp. 79-82, 93; and Orme and Webster, The English Hospital, pp. 41-48.

37 Roberta Gilchrist, "Medieval Bodies in the Material World: Gender, Stigma and the Body," in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester, Eng., 1994), pp. 43-61, esp. pp. 46-49; and eadem, "Christian Bodies and Souls: The Archaeology of Life and Death in Later Medieval Hospitals," in Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100-1600, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, 1993), pp. 101-18, esp. pp. 113-16.

38 Chiffoleau, le Blevec, and Zerner, "Aspects de l'institution hospitaliere," p. 309. 39 Touati, Archives de la lepre (see above, n. 19), pp. 48-76, and Maladie et societe au moyen age

(see above, n. 20), pp. 267-80, 288-94. Albert Bourgeois, Lepreux et maladreries du Pas-de-Calais du Xe au XIIIe siecle: Psychologie collective et institutions charitables, Memoires de la Commission departementale des Monuments Historiques du Pas-de-Calais 16 (Arras, 1972), p. 39, likewise ob- serves that the distance of leproseries from centers of population ranges from six hundred to two or three thousand meters.

631



632 Symbolic Cartography a period in which the private, individual act of confession took priority over public, collective rituals of expiation and reconciliation.40 But in fact the two phenom- ena are mutually reinforcing: a heightened awareness of personal guilt produced a new class of penitents required for the health of the social body.

Unlike the leprosery and maison-dieu of Saint-Aignan, the third hospital was situated in the center of the village of Noyers. The Porticus (literally "porch") de Noeriis can be identified as an appendage of the parish church of Saint-Silvain and, like the latter, ultimately depended on the chapter of Saint-Aignan. Silvanus, a legendary saint of obscure origins, had his primary sanctuary in Berry at Le- vroux.41 There, abutting the southwest flank of the collegiate church, a separate structure called a porticus served as a hospital since the eleventh century (Fig. 10). It had become the goal of pilgrimage for those stricken with a disease, or "fire," named after the saint; documents copied into the thirteenth-century cartulary of Levroux refer variously to the ignis or infirmitas Sancti Silvani, an affliction defined in the same source and others as synonymous with ignis gehennalis or sacer ignis.42 Between 1071 and 1090 Raoul, lord of Deols, granted the secular canons of Levroux possession of all the afflicted from his domains who remained in the

40 For new insights into the history of penance, especially with respect to the survival of public forms of penance, see Mary C. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995).

41 Bibliotheca hagiographica Latina, Subsidia Hagiographica 6, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1898-1901), 2:1118, nos. 7722-24 (hereafter cited as BHL); Acta sanctorum, 3rd ed. (Paris and Rome, 1863-70), September 6:404-7 (September 22; hereafter cited as AASS). The oldest extant version of the saint's life is a Latin vita (BHL no. 7722) preserved in a manuscript dating c. 1220-30 (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS lat. 5317, fols. lr-3v); the Bollandist editors of the text in Catalogus codicum

hagiographicorum Latinorum antiquiorum saeculo XVI qui asservantur in Bibliotheca Nationali Pari- siensi, 2/2 (Brussels, 1890), pp. 122-28, mistakenly report a fourteenth-century date for the manuscript. I would like to thank Patrick Gautier Dalche and Patricia Stirnemann for ascertaining the correct date of MS lat. 5317. Philippe Labbe, Novae bibliothecae manuscriptorum librorum tomus primus [-secundus] (Paris, 1657), 2:445-46, published an abridged vita (BHL no. 7723) from a "very old" breviary of the usage of Bourges (now lost). Legend eventually assigned Silvanus an illustrious apostolic career by assimilating him to the Gospel personage Zacchaeus the publican, whom St. Peter sent to evangelize Gaul. This identification is not explicit in the oldest vitae (BHL nos. 7722 and 7723), but it does appear in lessons in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century breviaries (Labbe, Novae bibliothecae, 2:446). See also Louis Raynal, Histoire du Berry depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu'en 1789, 4 vols. (Bourges, 1844-47; repr. Paris, 1972), 1:137-40, 429-31, 476-78, and 2:570-72; J. Veillat, Pieuses legendes du Berry (Chateauroux, 1864), pp. 55-92 with pieces justificatives, nos. ix-xv; Hip- polyte Delehaye, "Sanctus Silvanus," Analecta Bollandiana 25 (1906), 158-62; Maurice de Laugar- diere, L'eglise de Bourges avant Charlemagne (Bourges, 1951), pp. 204-6; and Jean-Paul Saint-Aubin, "Le culte de Saint-Silvain, son origine," Revue de l'Academie du Centre 97 (1971), 47-52.

42 The most exhaustive study of St. Silvanus's cult at Levroux unfortunately remains unpublished: Jacques Greslier, "Le cartulaire de Levroux (XIIIe siecle): Edition et commentaire," 3 vols., third-cycle thesis (University of Paris, 1975, hereafter cited as Greslier), as does the cartulary of the collegiate church itself (Chateauroux, Archives departementales de l'Indre, G 110). I am greatly indebted to M. Greslier for making his thesis available to me. The prologue to the cartulary and the prior's oath of office (Greslier, 1:43, 54 and 2:63-64) note the interchangeability of terms ("infirmitatem illam habere, que dicitur ignis gehennalis" and "infirmitatem beati silvani que vulgaliter appellatur ignis gehennalis"). A bull promulgated by Alexander IV in 1256 and granting indulgences to those who give alms to the porticus of Levroux refers to the disease as "morbo qui Gehennalis ignis dicitur" (Charles Bourel de la Ronciere, Les registres d'Alexandre IV, 1 [Paris, 1902], p. 469, no. 1500).



.. ..

I ,

.. -. " i ,

I 1. --.- -

.- 'T . .1

(K,, '.. 1

I I ,

I1. PORTICUS, I11th Century (destroyed, 19th century) 2. COLLEGIATE CHURCH OF ST.-SILVAIN, 12thi & 13th century

;~ 3. TRIBUNE PORCH, 16th century (destroyed, 19th century)

10. Levroux, collegiate church and porticus (based on a cadastral plan of 1844).




porch and, what is more, of any offspring whom they might bear thereafter.43 The privilege was confirmed in 1214, at which time the lord of Deols, Guillaume de Chauvigny, added new clauses requiring the canons to diagnose the disease ac- curately or forfeit their rights.44 The porticus of Levroux proved so crucial to the institutional identity of the chapter that the canons treated its original architectural fabric like a sacred relic. When the collegiate church was rebuilt at the turn of the thirteenth century, the eleventh-century apparatus was preserved despite the fact that it constrained the ground plan of the new building and prevented the sym- metry of the western narthex. Ultimately used as a chapter and charter house, the porticus survived into the mid-nineteenth century, when it was demolished without a trace.45 The irregularly shaped corps, visible in plan on a cadastre of 1844, comprised a long rectangular nave (with projecting arms on the north and west flanks) and a square chancel at the east. The scheme is compatible with the range of building types adopted for medieval hospitals.46

After variable lengths of stay in the porch at Levroux, those cured of St. Silvan's fire became dependents of the chapter, their new ties symbolically sealed through a ceremonial payment of coins. The cured most often returned to their parishes in the seigneury of Deols, where having escaped the lord's jurisdiction, they were henceforth obligated to the chapter for various customary dues. To help keep track of dependents, lists of the sick were entered into the chapter's cartulary.47 Evidently an unknown number of such homines capituli had settled in the castellany of Saint- Aignan by the early thirteenth century, for, according to an act copied into the cartulary, the lord, Herveus IV of Donzy, then count of Nevers (c. 1199-1222), pledged himself to Levroux on their account.48 The involvement of the lord of Saint-Aignan in Silvanus's cult also emerges from a text noting the participation of the count of Nevers-that is, Herveus of Donzy-in the second translation of the saint's relics at Levroux, undertaken around the same time by William, archbishop of Bourges (1199-1209).49

The porticus at Noyers could well be linked to the presence in the castellany of dependents of Levroux and to the lord's devotion to St. Silvanus. This connection would help date the origins of the porticus at Noyers sometime between the foundation of the nearby leprosery and the appearance by the mid-thirteenth century of yet another regional shrine and hospital complex dedicated to St. Silvanus at

43 For the text of the act, see Raynal, Histoire du Berry, 1:477-78; and Greslier, 1:65-66. 44 The prior and canons had to swear that they would receive into the porch only those whom they

believed in good faith to be stricken with the infirmitas Beati Silvani; if it later turned out that individuals whom the canons had thus admitted did not indeed have this particular disease, but that the church had been deceived, the lord would regain dominium over his former dependents. The text of the 1214 grant is published in Raynal, Histoire du Berry, 2:570-72 (transcribed also by Greslier, 1:62-

64). 45 Jean-Paul Saint-Aubin, "La collegiale Saint-Silvain de Levroux," Congres archeologique de France

142 (1984), 147-61, esp. p. 154 and figs. 2, 3a, 7. 46 Gilchrist, "Christian Bodies and Souls," pp. 102-7. 47 Greslier, 2:88-96, 105-7, 277-81. 48 Chateauroux, Archives departementales de l'Indre, G 110, fol. 18r; transcribed and briefly dis-

cussed by Greslier, 1:172-73, 2:280. 49 The only preserved account of the translation is copied in a breviary of Bourges bearing a date of

1493 (Chateauroux, Bibliotheque municipale, MS 254, fols. 6v-7r).

634



Symbolic Cartography Genouilly (see Fig. 1).50 If the porticus at Noyers assisted victims afflicted with the "holy/hell fire" of St. Silvanus, then perhaps it received those called ardentes, a category excluded from admission to some contemporary hotels-dieu, such as those at Angers and Troyes.51 Thus, while it is premature to speak of medical specialization, it appears that at least complementary functions had been distrib- uted among the three hospitals around Saint-Aignan.

The churches of Saint-Aignan, Noyers, and Levroux enjoyed a close relationship. A canon of Saint-Aignan received permission in 1444 to remove a bone from the reliquary chest of Saint-Silvanus at Levroux in order to carry it round the province for veneration.52 As it turned out, the parish church of Noyers happened subsequently to acquire one of the saint's bones enshrined in a silver reliquary statue, last seen in the eighteenth century in the chapel of the hotel-dieu of Saint- Aignan.53 The Church of Saint-Silvain at Noyers especially attracted pilgrimage from villages in the Sologne.s4 Outside collective forms of devotion, such as annual processions on the feast of St. Silvanus (September 22), the patron of Noyers also drew individual pilgrims throughout the year. According to a parish priest who recorded folk traditions at the end of the nineteenth century, pilgrims appealed to St. Silvanus for assistance against all sorts of diseases but especially "pour une affection charbonneuse, une sorte d'erysipele qu'on appelle le mal de Saint-Silvain ou le mal de Noyers."55 Local veneration of Silvanus may also explain the appearance outside Saint-Aignan of the peculiar cult of St. Guinefort, invoked at Levroux for the healing of St. Silvan's fire.56 Of the many conceivable pilgrimage circuits through Saint-Aignan during the Middle Ages, one between Noyers and Levroux (about forty-five kilometers) would have passed the maison-dieu and the Chapel of Saint-Guinefort close by.57

The patron saints of the hospitals and subsidiary chapels in and around Saint- Aignan exercised power over numerous ailments that, for all their diversity, fall into well-defined nosological fields. Silvanus was linked to certain categories of symptoms associated with other local saints. The multiple dimensions of the fire/ infirmity of St. Silvanus can be extrapolated both from thirteenth-century sources

so Greslier, 2:110; Alphonse Buhot de Kersers, Histoire et statistique monumental du departement du Cher, 8 vols. (Bourges, 1878-98), 1:244, 246.

51 See above, n. 32. 52 AASS September 6:407, col. 2. 53 (L'abbe) Naudet, Le pelerinage de Saint Silvain a Noyers (Saint-Amand, 1893), pp. 10-12. It is

not possible to determine whether the relic arrived around 1444 through the agency of Guillaume

Vaquelin, canon of Saint-Aignan, or somewhat later, c. 1500, when all the saint's relics except the head found their way to La Celle-Bruere (see E. Duroisel, St.-Silvain: Sa chapelle, son tombeau, son cult a La Celle-Bruere [Bourges, 1893]). Hospital archives for the year 1711 confirm the display of the reliquary in the chapel: Saint-Aignan, Archives de l'hotel-dieu, registre 1, 1688-1722, fol. 50v.

54 Bernard Edeine, La Sologne: Contribution aux etudes d'ethnologie metropolitaine, 3 vols. (Paris, 1974), 2:711.

ss Naudet, Le pelerinage de Saint Silvain a Noyers, p. 31. 56 Schmitt, p. 154. 57 In their report on the maison-dieu of Saint-Aignan in 1673 (see above, n. 27), officials from the

order of Mont-Carmel noted its location on the road to Valencay, which leads to Levroux.

635



636 Symbolic Cartography

produced at Levroux58 and from the ethnographic archive of Solognot villages going back to the seventeenth century.59 The combined documentation suggests, on the one hand, a tormenting inner fire, pain in the lower extremities, and purplish discoloration or burning up of the skin60 and, on the other, a range of neu- rologic disorders-from tremors and withered or contracted limbs to violent muscular spasms and convulsions.61 Significantly, the porch at Noyers that accommodated pilgrims to the parish church of Saint-Silvain was placed under the invocation of St. Anthony.62 The holy/hell fire that had become one of An- thony's attributes, today identified as gangrenous ergotism, usually begins in the toes and then appears literally to consume the lower extremities. The flesh, some- times at first covered with red or violet vesicles, eventually blackens like charcoal, and bloodless limbs shrivel up, detaching from the body.63 Like St. Anthony, among numerous others, St. Lawrence (patron of the chapel near the bridge within the borough of Saint-Aignan) had lent his name to the fire of gangrenous ergotism, and eventually to skin diseases more generally, perhaps because of his martyrdom on the grill.64 The mutilating fires of Anthony and Lawrence shared with leprosy- represented by Lazarus-the putrefaction of the flesh and amputation of members. Meanwhile, Andrew (venerated extra muros on the left bank of the Cher) had become the patron of those crippled by twisted and contracted limbs; the medieval term infirmitas Beati Andrei designated what we now know as the convulsive form of ergotism, which can result in tremors, extreme muscular contor- tions, and epileptiform seizures.65 While St. Giles, one of the patrons of the mai-

58 The cartulary of the collegiate church (see above, n. 42) contains lists of 439 individuals admitted into the porticus between 1231 and 1326 (Greslier, 2:35-39, 63-65, 76-87); thirteen records include minimal notes pertaining to the presentation of St. Silvanus's ignis/infirmitas (ibid., 2:63-70). Another source, heretofore overlooked in considering the medical aspects of the disease, can be used to supplement the laconic registry of the sick in the cartulary: seven posthumous miracles appended to the saint's Vita in a manuscript dating 1220-30 (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS lat. 5317, fols. 3v-5v) include graphic descriptions of three afflicted individuals (for an edition of the text, see

Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum Latinorum, as in n. 41 above, pp. 131-32, nos. 5-7). 59 I1 have here relied on the three volumes of Edeine, La Sologne. 60 Where medical observation is forthcoming in the cartulary, affected sites include the foot, leg,

hand, and forearm; Edeine, La Sologne, 2:709, 720-22, 730, 756, 759. 61 All three subjects of the medical miracles collected in BnF lat. 5317 suffered severe neurological

disorders. In the modern period the cult of St. Silvanus at Mur was directed against "la tremblotte"; according to an anonymous observer in 1788, St. Silvanus at Noyers was invoked against "des maladies convulsives" (Edeine, La Sologne, 2:767-78 and 770 n. 165).

62 Naudet, Le pelerinage de Saint Silvain a Noyers, pp. 25-31. 63 George Barger, Ergot and Ergotism (Edinburgh, 1931), p. 30. 64 Henri de Mondeville, a fourteenth-century surgeon, reports that in Normandy the disease went

by the name "feu St.-Laurent" (Henri de Mondeville, La chirurgie de maitre Henri de Mondeville, ed. Alphonse Bos, 2 vols. [Paris, 1897-98], 2:68, nos. 1572-74). The deacon was the focus of a cult

against the "mal des ardents" in Poitou and Charentes that was either still practiced or revived at the end of the nineteenth century when the term was applied to different dermatoses; Henri Chaumartin, Le mal des ardents et le feu Saint-Antoine (Paris, 1946), pp. 150, 155, interpreted this modern usage as a relic of the collective ergotism that had ravaged populations in medieval times.

65 Barger, Ergot and Ergotism, pp. 31-39; Chaumartin, Le mal des ardents, pp. 96, 150, 199-203; and more recently Adalbert Mischlewski, "Das Antoniusfeuer in Mittelalter und friiher Neuzeit in Westeuropa," in Maladies et societe (XIIe-XVIIIe siecles): Actes du colloque de Bielefeld (novembre 1986), ed. Neithard Bulst and Robert Delort (Paris, 1989), pp. 249-68, esp. pp. 252-53.




son-dieu, was affiliated with lepers and the lame, his partner Loup covered convulsive disorders.66 Guinefort, as already mentioned, was tied at Levroux to St. Silvan's fire.

The striking redundancy and convergence of nosological groupings suggest that local healing cults may possibly be correlated with the polymorphous symptom- atology of ergotism, more or less endemic in the Sologne from the eleventh century through the ancien regime.67 This disease is caused by the ingestion of grain con- taminated with a highly toxic fungus to which rye is especially susceptible. Because of its poor soil, the Sologne was so dominated in the Middle Ages by the culti- vation of rye that the region derived its name from the grain; the medieval Latin sigalis, derived from the classical Latin secale, produced the Latin toponym La Sigalonia, in Old French La Salloigne.68 In the eighteenth century the disease went by the labels "gangrene des Solognots" and "convulsio Soloniensis."69 Long be-

66 Of twenty-four or twenty-five medieval hospitals dedicated to Giles in England, ten were reserved for lepers: Frederick Brittain, Saint Giles (Cambridge, Eng., 1928), pp. 38-48; and Rotha Mary Clay, The Mediaeval Hospitals of England (London, 1909), pp. 262, 280, 290, 294, 304, 310, 311, 328, 331. Leproseries in Normandy seem commonly to have been placed under the invocation of St. Giles: J. Aubert, "Maladreries et leproseries dans l'Orne," Societe historique et archeologique de l'Orne: Bulletin principal 104/4 (1985), 21-37, esp. pp. 26-27; Simone Mesmin, "Waleran, Count of Meulan and the Leper Hospital of S. Gilles de Pont-Audemer," Annales de Normandie 32 (1982), 3-19, and eadem, "Du comte a la commune: La leproserie de Saint-Gilles de Pont-Audemer," Annales de Nor- mandie 37 (1987), 235-67. In Anjou the confraternity Saint-Gilles of La Fleche (active 1145) may have been responsible for placing a chapel near the castle at the service of lepers (Jean-Marc Bienvenue, "Pauvrete, miseres et charite en Anjou au XIe et XIIe siecle," Le moyen age 73 [1967], 5-33 and 189-216, esp. pp. 203-4). Although the diffusion of Giles's cult in northeastern France is less strongly related to the proliferation of hospital foundations, the saint nevertheless appears as patron of lepers in the diocese of Langres, notably at the leproseries of Tonnerre (1147) and Saint-Gilles de la Maladiere (1150): Corbet, "La diffusion du culte de Saint Gilles" (see above, n. 28), pp. 8-9, esp. n. 14. Because Giles became associated with the cure of fevers, it has been suggested that his cult took root in marshy lands: Ernest Rembry, Saint Gilles, 2 vols. (Bruges, 1881), 2:206; and E.-C. Jones, St.-Gilles: Essai d'histoire litteraire (Paris, 1914), pp. 49-50. Not surprisingly, therefore, the saint was venerated at several sites in the Sologne (Blois, Faverolles, Monthou-sur-Cher, Monterieux-en-Gault, Montrieux- en-Sologne, Mur): see Edeine, La Sologne, 2:760; and Vulliez, "Orleans, St. Gilles et la legende du pardon de Charlemagne" (see above, n. 28), p. 583. A recent study correlates the dissemination of Giles's cult in the diocese of Bourges with parishes occupying densely wooded, marshy, or unhealthy land: Christian E. Roth, "Aspect du culte et de l'iconographie de Saint Gilles, abbe en Brivadois et en

Velay," Bulletin historique, scientifique, litteraire de la Societe d'agriculture, sciences, arts et commerce du Puy 56 (1980), 173-78, and idem, "Notes sur le culte de St. Gilles" (see above, n. 28), pp. 36-37. The cult's association with the lame is discussed later. On the association of convulsive disorders with St. Loup, see E. Gresy, "Iconographie de Saint-Loup emprunt6e principalement aux monuments de l'art local," Bulletin de la Societe d'archeologie, sciences, lettres et arts du departement de Seine-et- Marne 4 (1866), 65-71; and William Hinkle, "The Iconography of the Four Panels by the Master of Saint Giles," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965), 110-44, esp. pp. 130-36.

67 Chaumartin, Le mal des ardents, p. 124; Barger, Ergot and Ergotism, pp. 45 (map), 49, 52, 69- 71; and for the eighteenth century, Christian Poitou, "Ergotisme, ergot de seigle et epid6mies en So- logne au XVIIIe siecle," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 23 (1976), 354-68, and idem, "La mortalit6 en Sologne orleanaise de 1670 a 1870," Annales de demographie historique (1978), 235-64, esp. pp. 247-48.

68 Isabelle Guerin, La vie rurale en Sologne aux XIVe et XVe siecles (Paris, 1960), p. 27; Devailly, Le Berry (see above, n. 4), pp. 564, 567; and Edeine, La Sologne, 1:59.

69 Poitou, "Ergotisme," p. 354; Barger, Ergot and Ergotism, p. 30; Henri Chaumartin, Brieve et curieuse chronique du mal des ardents (Paris, 1961), pp. 21-22; Francois Quesnay, Traite de la gan-



638 Symbolic Cartography fore, Solognot peasants had coined the word ergot to refer to spurred rye.70 An echevin of Saint-Aignan who kept a diary in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries described ergotized grain and the bad bread produced from it.71

Whether or not an identifiable epidemiologic profile supported the veneration of particular saints, the configuration of hospital and chapel dedications tran- scends the relationship between local cults and specific diseases. Together the saints governed internal affliction and its external manifestations under the three broad fields of cutaneous eruptions, impairment of motor functions, and convulsions or seizures (Table 1). Flesh, mobility, and psyche-a dispersed representation of the human organism-was thus externalized and, through the cult of saints, situated in the habitat. This tripartite representational scheme articulates the body at a maximum level of generality in order to reconfigure it locally.

Insight into this kind of symbolic system and its topographic projection may be obtained from Alban Bensa's ethnographic study of healing saints in the neighboring region of Perche-Gouet (between Beauce and Normandy).72 Using nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources, Bensa analyzed the ritual appropriation of the landscape in rural society during a period when the spatial order it had produced was being gradually effaced. Through traditional practices such as divina- tion, seasonal pilgrimages, and accompanying quasi-magical rites of immersion and contact, saints' cults referred particular afflictions to specific sites and thus localized therapeutic powers. Mapping "each organ, member, ailment" onto the land and traversing space to recover the fragmented, sick body functioned as reciprocal processes.73

grene (Paris, 1749), pp. 406-7; Saillant, "Recherches sur la maladie convulsive epid6mique, attribu6e par quelques observateurs a l'Ergot, et confondue avec la gangrene seche des Solognots," Histoire et memoires de la Societe royale de mgdecine (1776), "Memoires," pp. 303-11; and Denis Diderot, "Ergot," in Encyclopgdie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers (Geneva, 1777), 12:921 col. a, 926 col. b, 928 col. b.

70 D. Dodart, "Lettre de M. Dodart, de l'Acad6mie royale des sciences a l'auteur du journal, con- tenant des choses fort remarquables touchant quelques grains," Mgmoires de l'Acadgmie royale des sciences 10 (1676), 561-66, esp. pp. 561-62: "Nous observames quelques grains de ce seigle qui avoit ainsi degenre; ils sont noirs en dehors, assez blancs en dedans, & quand ils sont sec, ils sont plus durs, & d'une substance plus seree que les grains naturels.... On appelle ces grains des Ergots en Sologne, & du Bled-cornu en Gastinois."

71 Alexandre de la Borde, entry for 1725, "A l'egard des bleds [ils] furent serez[,] fort mal condi- tionnes et presque tous noirs et germez, de facon que le pain en estoit fort noir et mauvais": cited after a transcription of selected excerpts by Rene Guyonnet in "Journal d'un Bourgeois de Saint-Aignan," Revue de Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher (1981), p. 16.

72 Alban Bensa, Les saints gugrisseurs du Perche-Gouet: Espace symbolique du bocage (Paris, 1978). 73 Ibid., pp. 171-72: "... la carte du Perche-Gouet peut etre consideree comme le support topo-

graphique et toponymique du savoir medicale populaire; la totalite des lieux de culte est comparable a un dictionnaire medical deploye dans l'espace.... Ces correspondances entre les affections et les points de l'espace spatialisent l'image du corps malade. Ce dernier se trouve projete, par le discours

populaire medical et par la pratique des pelerinages qui l'accompagnent et l'actualisent, sur l'ensemble du terroir. La reconnaissance et l'utilisation de l'espace mediatise les rapports du paysan percheron a son propre corps.... Le corps paysan, eparpille dans l'espace, est un corps meurtri, souffrant. Les cultes populaires viennent soigner chaque organe, chaque membre, chaque affection, de sorte que l'unit6 du corps n'est saisissable qu'a travers l'unite de l'espace pratique. Le pelerin, en visitant les lieux saints de sa r6gion, reconnait son propre corps: le langage spatio-mythique du discours m6dical tend a identifier le corps du malade au terroir a la fois support et agent de la guerison."




TABLE 1. Saints and Ailments

Representational Fields

Motor Saint Associated Symptoms/Ailments for Which Invoked Flesh Function Psyche

Andrew his "infirmity," muscle spasms, contractions, X ergotism (convulsive)

Anthony his "fire," dermatoses, ergotism (gangrenous) X Giles patron of lepers and the lame X X Guinefort at Levroux, St. Silvan's fire X Lawrence his "fire," dermatoses, ergotism (gangrenous) X Lazarus leprosy, dermatoses X Loup "fright," convulsive disorders, seizures X Silvanus saint's "fire" or "infirmity"

Levroux, cartulary, dermatological erup- X thirteenth century tion

Noyers, priest, 1893 "affection charbonneuse," "sorte d'erysipele

Sologne, ethno- purplish discolora- graphic archive tion of skin, "maux

des jambes" Levroux, miracula, tremors, contrac- X

before 1220 tions, violent muscle spasms

Noyers, anonymous "maladies convul- X source, 1788 sives"

Bensa catalogued several coexisting patterns according to which cult sites across an entire region were incorporated into a comprehensive therapeutic system. Saints' cults, in other words, constituted a langue through which different mapping strategies, like so many paroles, could be actualized. Applied to the micro- topography surrounding the medieval borough of Saint-Aignan, this concept allows local cults also to be read as a set of relations that, working together, governed the body's struggle with disease and death. Thaumaturgic saints, like Silvanus, were petitioned to heal particular infirmities. In contrast, Lazarus provided a model for those forced to grapple with the permanent liminality of an incurable disease that divided them from the living. The person whom Christ raised from the dead at Bethany had become the archetypal leper through conflation with his homonym, the beggar covered with sores in the Gospel parable of Lazarus and the evil rich man.74 As seals carved for French Lazar houses so elo- quently express (Figs. 11, 12), the patronage of this composite character validated the ambiguous condition of the leper who, sealed unto the grave, redefined con- tinued existence as an opportunity for perpetual penance; the leper died to this

74 Touati, Maladie et societe au moyen age (see above, n. 20), pp. 381-88.

639



11 (left). Seal of the Leprosery of Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1264. Christ raises Lazarus in the presence of Mary and Martha; a boat is depicted below. 12 (above). Seal of the Leprosery of Saint-Lazare, Corbeil, 1263. A leper (Lazarus) climbs out of his tomb. (Photographs: Paris, Archives Nationales, Sceaux Douet d'Arcq D/9989 and D/9984.)



Symbolic Cartography world but found new life in a lay penitential community.75 Whereas Lazarus personified the passage from death to rebirth, Guinefort was invoked to decide the fate of those suspended between life and death.76 St. Giles, famous for his ability to absolve unconfessed sins, protected against the dangers of sudden death, that is, without benefit of last rites.

Whether they localized curative powers or created sites for negotiating disease and death, saints' cults here linked to form a coherent defense around the community and, what is more, to inscribe it on the land. Ritual veneration in the paraparochial structures encircling the borough and often positioned in relation to its orifices, the gates, activated an invisible, supernatural wall separating the rocky plateau from the marshy lowlands of the plat pays. At the same time, thaumaturgic cults at Noyers (St. Silvanus) and Seigy (St. Guinefort) established an itinerary through Saint-Aignan to Levroux. Buffer and bridge, the network of saints refigured on another plane the idea of the town itself.

Still, the outlying chapels and hospitals that began to multiply in the later twelfth century could only undermine the spiritual investment and concentration of resources in the older sanctuary at the borough's core. Oversight of the leprosery, maison-dieu, and porticus allowed the chapter at least to claim a key role in the disbursement of material assistance to the poor and spiritual recompense to the charitable. The secular canons could broker the exchange between a resident population and itinerants, between donors and recipients of alms, between saints and suppliants. Peripheral cult sites nevertheless provided the nodal points for a symbolic cartography, multivalent and unstable, whereby the splayed body could be tactically diffused across space beyond ecclesiastical control.

In dialogic opposition, another mapping system installed c. 1200 inside the collegiate church recapitulated the topography of healing and, at the same time, transposed its purposes. Romanesque paintings featuring hospital and allied saints "remapped" the local network of charitable institutions into the radial chapels of the crypt (Fig. 13). The converse of annual liturgical processions through which the chapter literally circumscribed its satellite possessions, the artistic commission virtually inscribed the chapter's dependencies within the collegiate church. The pictorial program not merely "advertised" venues of poor relief subordinate to capitular patronage. It reclaimed the mortal body for the canons and thereby submitted it to their priestly authority.

2. COUNTERMAPPING IN THE CHURCH

Hagiographic images in the south apsidiole relate the life of Giles of Provence, patron saint of the maison-dieu. This duplication of saintly patronage verifies the

75 Ibid., pp. 383, 476-79. 76 Despite the learned construction of the saint's persona in the diocese of Bourges (see above, n.

18), Guinefort was called on here as elsewhere to determine the fate of the sickly whose condition left them languishing painfully between life and death: Nicolas Catherinot, Le sanctuaire de Berry (Bourges, 1680), repr. in Les opuscules de Nicolas Catherinot (Bourges, 1877), no. 10, p. 20. The saint's invocation, frequently undertaken outside the confines of normative ecclesiastical structures or clerical supervision, might be accompanied by rites of contact or immersion through which the patient's life or death would be revealed (decided). Even where attached to a chapel, the cult might be practiced throughout the year rather than celebrated on a particular date (in Berry, February 25, 26, or 27), although pilgrimage could be more intense at that time (see Schmitt, pp. 152-54).

641




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13. Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, collegiate church, plan of crypt.

early date of the hospital's tie to the chapter, whose prerogatives are taken for granted in the much later archival material already discussed. As Michel Mollat has observed: "Certain signs permit recognition of canonical influence on hospital institutions: for example, identical patronage in numerous places of certain specialized saints, Christopher, Giles, James, John, Julian, Mary Magdalen, Nicholas. ..."77 The cycle at Saint-Aignan comprised eight scenes arranged in two tiers across the base of the conch vault and around the hemicycle wall (Fig. 14). Of these, only the first two and part of the third are well preserved; the four subsequent scenes, barely legible today, can be identified on the basis of fragmentary elements now visible with raking light or in old photographs; the closing scene has been entirely effaced. The particular choice and formal arrangement of episodes visually coordinate the demonstration of Giles's thaumaturgic powers with that of the efficacy of divine medicine available through the church.

From the Abbey of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, profitably located on roads to Rome and Compostela, the legend and cult of its founder had spread throughout Eu-

77 Michel Mollat, Les pauvres au moyen age: Etude sociale (Paris, 1978), p. 115.

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644 Symbolic Cartography

rope.78 If Giles's posthumous miracles and the consequent renown of his abbey assured the cult's dissemination,79 the saint's popularity in turn fueled a literary production of extraordinary magnitude. Versions of his life circulated in Latin and several vernacular languages, in prose as well as verse.80 The legend, variously adapted for recitation in the liturgy, also intersected with the epic repertory pertaining to Charlemagne.81 Verbal performances surely were instrumental in pub- licizing the deeds of St. Giles. Pictorial images, by embellishing and modifying the narrative record, likewise shaped the cult's development.82

78 For an overview of the cult and its history, see Jacques Pycke, "Gilles (Saint)," in Dictionnaire d'histoire et de geographie ecclesiastiques 20 (Paris, 1984), cols. 1352-56. On the cult outside France, see, as in n. 66 above, e.g., Rembry, Saint Gilles; Brittain, Saint Giles; and Jones, St.-Gilles, pp. 63- 69. The role of the legend in constructing the institutional identity of the Abbey of Saint-Gilles is best discussed by Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Me- dieval Southern France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), esp. pp. 57, 63-65, 71-72, 83, 113-14, 182-87, 219- 43.

79 A collection of posthumous miracles was compiled by the abbey's librarian between 1120 and 1124 and expanded in the the second half of the twelfth century: MGH SS 12:316-23; and "Liber miraculorum sancti Aegidii," Analecta Bollandiana 9 (1890), 392-422.

80 On the Vita S. Aegidii, see BHL 1:17-18 and BHL, suppl. ed. (Brussels, 1911), p. 6; for editions and additional bibliography, see Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past, pp. 322-24. On the literary production inspired by the Vita, see Jones, St.-Gilles, pp. 1-9, 62-67.

81 Fulbert of Chartres used the Vita s. Aegidii as the basis for the office he composed in honor of the saint before 1029 (PL 141:343-44 and Jones, St.-Gilles, p. 33). Hymns sung on the feast recapitulated the narrative thread of the Vita in verses that referred to, if they did not fully relate, key episodes (Franz Joseph Mone, Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters, 3 vols. [Freiburg im Breisgau, 1855], 3:165-68, nos. 759-61; D. S. Wrangham, ed., The Liturgical Poetry of Adam of St. Victor, 2 vols. [London, 1881], 2:204-17, nos. 71-72). On St. Giles and Charlemagne, see, e.g., Gaston Paris and Alphonse Bos, La vie de Saint Gilles par Guillaume de Berneville (Paris, 1881; repr. New York, 1966), pp. xliv-xlv, Iv, lxiv-lxxxii; Jones, St.-Gilles, pp. 39-45; Baudouin de Gaiffier, "La legende de Char- lemagne: Le peche de l'empereur et sa pardon," in Memoires et documents publies par la Societe de l'Ecole des Chartes 12 (Recueil de travaux offert a M. Clovis Brunel), 2 vols. (Paris, 1955), 1:490- 503; Rita Lejeune, "Le peche de Charlemagne et la Chanson de Roland," in Homenaje ofrecido a Damaso Alonso, 2 (Madrid, 1961), pp. 339-71; Michel Rouche, "Charlemagne, polygame et inces- tueux," L'histoire 64 (1984), 18-24; Vulliez, "Orleans, St. Gilles et la legende du pardon de Charle- magne" (see above, n. 28), pp. 575-89; and most recently Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past, esp. pp. 182-87.

82 The oldest known image of St. Giles, a single figure posed in a frontal stance, occurs in the lower church of S. Clemente in Rome, where it forms part of a border of saints framing the scene of the translation of St. Clement's relics (Joseph Wilpert, Die romischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirch- lichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert, 4 vols. [Freiburg, 1916-17], 4, pl. 239, no. 1). The saint's legend is most frequently epitomized by the representation of two episodes, the Pursuit of the Hind and the Mass of St. Giles (or the Pardon of Charlemagne), encapsulated in single scenes or broken down into pairs of scenes (the hunt of the doe and wounding of the saint; the miraculous mass and Charlemagne kneeling before the saint). These two favorite episodes recur in a sizable group of French wall paintings from the late twelfth through the fourteenth centuries (see Paul Deschamps and Marc Thibout, La peinture murale en France au debut de l'epoque gothique [Paris, 1963], pp. 21, 68-70, 131-32). Both events were painted on the north wall of the Chapel of Saint-Laurent at Le Loroux- Bottereau (Loire-Atlantique; see now Christian Davy, La peinture murale romane dans les Pays de la Loire: L'indicible et le ruban plisse [Laval, 1999], pp. 150-53) and on the south wall of the south transept arm of Saint-Nicolas, Civray (Vienne). In the churches at Landes and Largny-sur-Automne, in the parish church at Thoire-sur-Dinan (Sarthe; Davy, pp. 354-55), in the rupestral chapel of Saint- Gervais at Roches-l'Eveque (Loir-et-Cher; Christian Davy, Vincent Juhel, and Gilbert Paoletti, Les peintures murales romanes de la vallee du Loir [Vend6me, 1997], pp. 119-23), and in the north apse




In the opening scene of the Saint-Aignan cycle, a youthful Giles (identified by the inscription "EGIDIUS") divests himself of a richly embroidered tunic in order to clothe a half-naked beggar leaning on a tau-shaped crutch; by donning the saint's garment, the lame pauper is healed (Fig. 15). The importance accorded the tunic, displayed in its entirety, makes it a locus of meaning-indeed almost another protagonist-in the scene. Its joint presentation by the saint and the pauper, each of whom holds up one side, emphasizes the double nature of the transaction. For Giles, scion of a wealthy family, the garment freely given up betokens the virtue of charity. For the beggar, the robe in which he will be (re)dressed symbolizes spiritual rebirth or renewal. Healing depends on inner conversion. The pauper, turning from sin, sheds his defective body like his ragged loincloth; he must "put on Christ" (Gal. 3.27), the saint's robe, in order to be restored to wholeness.83

Benefactors and inmates of the maison-dieu at Saint-Aignan would have ritually reenacted this episode in the life of the hospital's patron saint. Donors imitated the saint's charity through gifts, alms, and bequests that sustained the hospital. On admission the sick poor would have been bathed and clothed in a clean garment (typically a white shirt) as preparation for mandatory confession; like baptism, this purificatory rite of the body instantiated the spiritual ablution of the

of Saint-Gilles, Montoire (Loir-et-Cher; ibid., pp. 134-47) the Pursuit of the Hind alone appears. In the abbey at Aiguevive (Loir-et-Cher) it is the Mass of St. Giles (Germaine Demaux, "Une fresque in6dite du XIIIe siecle en l'abbaye d'Aiguevive [Loir-et-Cher]: Saint Gilles remettant a Charlemagne la 'chartre' apport6e par un ange," in La chanson de geste et le mythe carolingien: Melanges Rene Louis, 2 vols. [St.-Pere-sous-Vezelay, 1982], 1:279-92). On the south transept facade at Chartres cathedral (right portal, bottom set of voussoirs, 1220-35), the Pursuit of the Hind and the Mass of St. Giles are prefaced by a depiction of the saint bestowing his garment on a pauper (Willibald Sauer- lander, Gothic Sculpture in France, 1140-1270, trans. Janet Sondheimer [New York, 1972], p. 114 and figs. 118, 124). A similar selection of scenes (Giles cures the beggar, shields the doe, celebrates mass) occurs in a fourteenth-century hymnal (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS II. I. 212, fols. 50v, 51v). At Notre-Dame, Paris, a relief shows Charlemagne receiving the charter of pardon from St. Giles (Jacques Dubois, "Trois bas-reliefs du portail du couronnement de Notre-Dame a Notre- Dame de Paris," Cahiers de la Rotonde 11 [1988], 19-28). The best-known Charlemagne cycles to include the depiction of the Mass of St. Giles are the silver-gilt reliefs on the roof of the Charlemagne reliquary at Aachen (beginning of the thirteenth century) and the stained glass panels of the Charle- magne window in the ambulatory of Chartres cathedral (second decade): see Hermann Schnitzler, Rheinische Schatzkammer, 2: Die Romanik (Diisseldorf, 1959), pp. 19-21 and fig. 41; Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon, The Legend of Roland in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (London, 1971), 1:145-52, 169-77, 192-98; Clark Maines, "The Charlemagne Window at Chartres Cathedral: New Consider- ations on Text and Image," Speculum 52 (1977), 801-23; Isabelle Rolland, "Le mythe carolingien et l'art du vitrail," in La chanson de geste et le mythe carolingien, 1:255-77; and Colette Manhes- Deremble, Les vitraux narratifs de la cathedrale de Chartres: Etude iconographique (Paris, 1993), esp. pp. 256-68, 308-9. A wall painting of 1194-99 in the Saint-Clement chapel in the crypt of Chartres cathedral also includes an image of the Mass of St. Giles in the context of an extended Charlemagne narrative; I am most grateful to Professor Clark Maines for providing me with photographs of the Chartres paintings and a copy of his unpublished master's thesis on the fresco.

83 On the symbolic importance of the garment, see Nancy Caciola, "Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual in Medieval Culture," Past and Present 152 (1996), 3-45, esp. p. 12; and Pierre Bureau, "Le sym- bolisme vestimentaire du d6pouillement chez St. Martin de Tours a travers l'image et l'imaginaire medi6vaux," in Le vetement: Histoire, archeologie et symbolique vestimentaires au moyen age, Cahiers du Leopard d'Or 1 (Paris, 1989), pp. 35-71.



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Symbolic Cartography soul.84 St. Giles is the agent through which God's power operates, the splendorous garment the sign of divine transformation. The tunic's intense color and decorative elaboration-the antithesis of the beggar's tatters (and of actual hospital garb)- map the miraculous onto the social: noble apparel stands for the integral recovery of the impoverished self. The act of sacrifice transforms what is an attribute of secular power and physical beauty into an instrument of redemption. Gift giving converts material into spiritual wealth.

In a second curative intervention Giles drives out poisonous venom from a man bitten (in the leg?) by a serpent (Fig. 15). What could better follow this twofold demonstration of healing powers than a display of total mastery over the forces of nature? Thus the saint's prayer from a rocky beach rescues a ship battered by storm-tossed seas (Fig. 16). Having departed from his native land with the grateful mariners, Giles eventually arrives at Arles, where, in the much-damaged fourth scene, he kneels before the nimbed and mitered bishop, St. Caesarius. Episcopal recognition of the holy man confirms Giles's induction into the ecclesiastical hierarchy. As if to suggest that divine inspiration guided their meeting, the curtain draped around the framing column billows like the wind-filled sail of the boat in the previous scene.

Thus far, the sequence of scenes in the upper register establishes St. Giles, at the viewer's left in each composition, as the subject of miraculous action, his inter- locutor(s) at right the direct object. This narrative structure changes in the lower register, which is divided by windows into discrete pictorial fields. Continuing the progression of the story, two men on horseback ride from left to right. But the figure of the saint, identifiable by his aureole, appears only in the second field, where he is shrouded by foliage (Figs. 14, 17, 18). The two scenes, portraying a single incident from Giles's eremitic career, reverse subject-object positions. The saint is now the victim of the hunters, who, in their pursuit of a hind, accidently wound the holy man. Giles, however, seizes this infliction of pain as an opportunity to "increase" (that is, manifest) his sanctity. Refusing the king's offer of medical treatment, he prays never to recover his former well-being because virtue is per- fected in infirmity.

The Vita S. Aegidii does not say what part of the saint's body took the hunters' arrow, but visual images, unlike verbal narratives, had to show where the arrow struck. Admittedly, the poor condition of the mural surface makes it impossible to ascertain the specific iconographic formulation of the scene at Saint-Aignan. Yet an image of Giles wounded in the leg-hence resonant with figures of the lame in the upper register and, most unusually, in the great theophany above the crypt's main altar (Figs. 20-22, discussed below)-is a tantalizing possibility. Al- though depictions are known of the arrow piercing Giles's hand or chest, or even the doe, the saint's leg was selected as the affected site in thirteenth-century wall painting and monumental sculpture in this region and elsewhere in France.85 Con-

84 Saunier, "Le pauvre malade" (see above, n. 30), pp. 91-117; and Saint-Denis, L'h6tel-dieu de Laon (see above, n. 30), pp. 106-14, and "Soins du corps et m6decine" (see above, n. 31), pp. 39- 42.

85 The wounding of the saint in the leg appears in fresco at Montoire (preserved only in the form of a watercolor copy made in 1850) and Civray and in portal sculpture at Chartres (see above, n. 82).

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temporary texts, in line with iconographic developments, also incorporated accounts of the laming of St. Giles.86 The process of translating the Vita into pictorial form seems therefore to have collaborated with, if it did not inspire, the invention of the lame Giles and the cult's association with the crippled.87

Loss of detail aside, the organization of the cycle delivers a double message by bringing into vertical alignment episodes that show relief from affliction on the one hand and its acceptance on the other. This juxtaposition both validates miraculous cures and spiritualizes the endurance of physical suffering. One aspect of sainthood, the power to heal, encourages appeals to the thaumaturge even as its inversion, the will to bear pain as an act of martyrdom, gives positive meaning to, and so allows for, their failure.

The seventh scene (too damaged to illustrate here) depicts the now elderly Giles rapt in trance while celebrating mass for Charlemagne. The crowned, mustached, and bearded figure at right holds his fist to his chest as if beating his breast in self- accusation. The emperor feels remorse for a secret sin so awful that he cannot bring himself to confess it. On top of an altar at left sit a cloth-covered chalice, a disk that may be identified as a paten, and an open book. Suspended above the chalice, the tail end of an unfurled scroll can be made out. The scedula, divinely inscribed and delivered, discloses Charlemagne's offense to the officiating saint and promises God's pardon. Between the royal personage and the right edge of the composition, a partial figure of a youth-arguably Roland-is crowded into the scene.88 The dead hero's anachronistic interpolation into the Mass of St. Giles would relate the Saint-Aignan painting to a well-known group of more or less contemporary images that variously responded to or commented on the legend of Charlemagne's forbidden relations with his sister and their incestuous conception of Roland.89 The youthful presence could be interpreted as Charlemagne's ago-

86 The version of the legend that Philippe Mouskes incorporated into his Chronique rimee (c. 1260) and the life attributed to Jean Beleth (c. 1285) note that the saint was wounded in the thigh (Frederic- Auguste de Reiffenberg, ed., Chronique rimee de Philippe Mouskes, 2 vols., Collection des Chroniques Belges Inedites [Brussels, 1836-38], 1:160-61, vv. 3960-65; and Jones, St.-Gilles, p. 144). The much- abridged Italian version of the fourteenth century indicates the leg (Wilhelm Friedmann, Altitalienische Heiligenlegenden, Gesellschaft fur romanische Literatur 14 [Dresden, 1908], pp. 11-14, esp. p. 13); the version attributed to Robert of Gloucester reports that the arrow struck Giles's knee (Jones, pp. 69-70). In her study of the Vita and its literary offshoots, Jones (pp. 64-69) proposed that the tradition making Giles lame originated in England: after a church dedicated to St. Giles was founded in the last decade of the eleventh century in the Cripplegate quarter of London, the saint's cult became bound up with the semantic connotations acquired by the Anglo-Saxon toponym (these are made clear in a late-twelfth-century Latin document: "ante ecclesiam sancti Egidii ad portam civitatis quae lingua Anglorum Crepelesgate, latine vero porta contractoram [sic] vocatur").

87 Jones, St.-Gilles, pp. 69-70, already surmised that pictorial representation played a key role in the broader transmission of the embellished narrative.

88 Lejeune and Stiennon, The Legend of Roland in the Middle Ages, 1:148, mention the existence of the Giles cycle in the crypt at Saint-Aignan, including the scene of the miraculous mass, but offer no further commentary.

89 Examples include (see above, n. 82, for bibliographic references) a carved capital of c. 1150 from the Church of San Gil at Luna near Saragosa, the Charlemagne reliquary at Aachen, the Charlemagne window at Chartres, frescoes at Loroux-Bottereau and Aiguevive, and a miniature in a Flemish psalter of the mid-thirteenth century (Liege, Bibliotheque de l'Universite, MS 431, fol. 96v). How these images differed in the way they engaged the tradition of Charlemagne's sin and pardon will be more fully discussed in my forthcoming book on the Saint-Aignan paintings.

649




17-18. Schematic line drawings of damaged scenes in the lower register of the south chapel. Hunters pursue a hind (top); St. Giles is wounded by hunters (bottom).

nizing memory, a kind of flashback device that enables an already familiar story to be retold in the mind of the viewer. Together the emperor's mental image and breast-beating gesture give visual form to his psychological distress.

The recollection of sexual transgression and the inner affliction it causes makes a crucial point: the saint's remedies go beyond the cure of the body to erase sins that cripple the soul. Confession, miraculously accomplished in Charlemagne's case, restores the raiment of baptismal purity. It is the antidote administered by priests against the poison of sin,90 here injected by the serpent, humanity's primeval enemy. Just as sin entered the world through a bite, so must it be purged through words spoken by the mouth. Confession delivers the soul from the shipwreck of

90 Nicole Beriou, "Autour de Latran IV (1215): La naissance de la confession moderne et sa diffusion," in Pratiques de la confession: Des peres du desert 2 Vatican II. Quinze etudes d'histoire (Paris, 1983), pp. 73-92, esp. p. 87.

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Symbolic Cartography sin after baptism.91 Narrative action depicted in the upper register at once recounts the saint's legend and rephrases conventional metaphors for penance.

The Vita S. Aegidii concludes the episode of the miraculous mass by claiming that God would remit the sin of anyone who invoked St. Giles-provided only that the fault not be repeated. By the end of the twelfth century, however, this interpretation of the Pardon of Charlemagne had been discredited. Instead, theologians explained that Giles's prayers changed the emperor's heart, thereby paving the way for confession and subsequent absolution.92 Through a programmatic insistence on contrition and confession, themes further elaborated in the crypt's axial and apsidal chapels, the Saint-Aignan paintings bring old hagiographic tradition into line with current penitential practice.

The painter of the Giles cycle ensured the legibility of his work by coupling clarity of composition with a high degree of iconographic elaboration. He isolated moments of encounter and exchange or used gesture to help convey the particular action at the core of each scene. Such economy of narrative representation recalls mnemonic or cuing techniques found in liturgical compositions, or the paratactic sequence of captionlike phrases that, in the mid-twelfth century Pilgrim's Guide, reduces the saint's life to a list of episodes.93 At the same time landscape elements like the rocky shore, agitated sea, and wild vegetation serve not only to stage the storm and hunt scenes but also to reveal the saint's domination of nature. Con- versely, the interior settings in which Giles meets Caesarius of Arles and celebrates mass for Charlemagne underscore the saint's authority within ecclesiastical and secular realms.

Another factor would also have contributed to a rudimentary visual compre- hension of the cycle. Recurrent episodes in lives of confessor saints had by the late twelfth century received more or less standardized iconographies. The cycle at Saint-Aignan conforms to this hagiographic pattern, which included acts of charity (the bestowal of a garment), healing, control over nature (for example, quelling tempests at sea), entry into the ecclesiastical hierarchy, self-mortification as a sub- stitute for martyrdom, and the power of divine invocation through the liturgy (the miraculous mass).94 Viewers unfamiliar with the specifics of the Vita S. Aegidii,

91 Paul Anciaux, La theologie du sacrement de penitence au XIIe siecle (Louvain, 1949), pp. 140- 41; Nicole Beriou, "La representation de la confession dans quelques ecrits theologiques et pastoraux du XIIe siecle: Medication de l'ame ou demarche judiciare?" in L'aveu: Antiquite et moyen age. Actes de la table ronde de l'Ecole francaise de Rome, 28-30 mars 1984, Collection de l'Ecole Francaise de Rome 88 (Rome, 1986), pp. 261-82, esp. p. 266.

92 De Gaiffier, "La legende de Charlemagne" (see above, n. 81), p. 497 n. 4; Jean-Charles Payen, Le motif du repentir dans la litterature francaise medievale (des origines a 1230) (Geneva, 1967), pp. 132-33; and Anciaux, La theologie du sacrement de penitence, pp. 425, 436-37.

93 The Pilgrim's Guide to Compostela: A Gazetteer, ed. Annie Shaver-Crandell and Paula Gerson (London, 1995), pp. 75-76.

94 Barbara Abou-El-Haj, The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), esp. pp. 33-60. For a probing discussion of hagiographic typology, see Cynthia Hahn, "Picturing the Text: Narrative in the Life of the Saints," Art History 13/1 (1990), 1-33, esp. pp. 1- 10, 23-24; and eadem, "Speaking without Tongues: The Martyr Romanus and Augustine's Theory of Language in Illustrations of Bern Burgerbibliothek Codex 264," in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 161-80, esp. pp. 161-62. Paris and Bos, La vie de Saint Gilles par Guillaume de Berneville, pp. lvi-lvii and lx-lxi, compare episodes in the legend of St. Giles to those in other legends.

651



Symbolic Cartography albeit widely diffused, would have been able to follow the unfolding story and grasp the priority accorded to spiritual health, on which physical health depends. The concluding scene, now lost, may have shown a miracle that Giles performed at the end of his life-for example, his revival of the dead son of the ruler of Nlmes-or the saint's death and the translation of his soul.

The relationship between the defeat of mortality and the renunciation of sin is made explicit in the decoration of the axial apsidiole, which culminates in an expanded representation of the Raising of Lazarus (Fig. 19). The episode, depicted in two continuous phases, fills the right half of the conch vault. Responding to Christ's command, Lazarus sits up in his sarcophagus. Then, freed of his winding cloth and standing in orans pose, Lazarus again appears with two women, his sisters Mary and Martha, in the front row of a crowd. The rest of the cycle consisted of Gospel scenes from the life of Mary Magdalen after whom this crypt chapel was named.95 Despite its fragmentary condition, the scene at left can be identified as the Supper at Bethany. Traces are visible of the figures of Christ (cross- nimbed), a disciple (nimbed male), and Simon (name inscribed) seated behind a table spread with a diamond-patterned cloth and vessels. Martha (wearing a ma- fora), accompanied by a male servant, waits at table. With raking light it is possible to detect the silhouette of a figure prostrate below the table, no doubt the Mag- dalen in the act of anointing Christ's feet.96

The design of the cycle gives special dignity and weight to the resurrection of Lazarus as pendant to the Magdalen's own conversion. Beyond their internal narrative connection, the pair of scenes on the concha equates (Mary's) spiritual transformation with (Lazarus's) awakening from death to life. Archetypal sinner and penitent, the Magdalen, like Lazarus, figured prominently in the spirituality of leproseries, which were frequently dedicated to her.97 The series of images on the hemicycle wall below, more difficult to reconstitute, included the Noli me tangere and a portrait of Lazarus's two sisters. Although the cycle privileges the Magdalen, who, on account of her great love, was the first to see the risen Christ, it also accommodates the patron's interest in elevating the role of Martha as model for

95 The chapel dedication can be inferred by correlating the iconography of the paintings with chapter records concerning the vicariate of Marie-Madeleine-des-Grottes or Ste.-Marie-Madeleine in criptis: Blois, Archives departementales, G 825 (dated 1437), G 824 (1625), and G 446, pp. 3-4 (1761), Inventaire sommaire, ed. Bournon et al., 1:156, 275-76.

96 On the conflation of the Magdalen with Mary of Bethany and the medieval characterization of the sisters' roles, see Giles Constable, "The Interpretation of Mary and Martha," in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), pp. 3-141.

97 Orme and Webster, The English Hospital (see above, n. 30), p. 50; Gilchrist, "Christian Bodies and Souls" (see above, n. 37), pp. 114-15; Touati, Maladie et societe au moyen age (see above, n. 20), pp. 381-88; idem, "Une approche de la maladie et du phenomene hospitalier aux XIIe et XIIIe siecles: La leproserie du Grand-Beaulieu a Chartres," Histoire des sciences medicales 14 (1980), 419-24, esp. p. 423; Walter De Keyzer, "Lepreux et leproseries dans le comt6 de Hainaut au moyen age," in Recueil d'etudes d'histoire hainuyere offertes a Maurice A. Arnould, ed. Jean Marie Cauchies and Jean Marie Duvosquel (Mons, 1983), 1:521-44, esp. pp. 525-26; Aubert, "Maladreries et leproseries dans l'Orne" (see above, n. 66), p. 26; J. H. Bayliss, "Domus leprosae-Community Care in Medieval

England," Nursing Times (London) 75/2 (1979), 62-67, esp. p. 64; Nicolas-N. Huyghebaert, "L'origine ecclesiastique des leproseries en Flandre et dans le Nord de la France," Revue d'histoire

ecclesiastique 58 (1963), 848-57, esp. p. 852.

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Symbolic Cartography those busy about the world. Attention to the sister who personified the active life seems especially appropriate in the context of an overarching decorative scheme that promoted the canons' hospital mission.

In the north apsidiole faint traces of painting indicate that the decoration consisted of a hagiographic narrative contemporary with and similar in format to the cycles in the south and axial chapels. Unfortunately, without either sufficient pictorial evidence to allow for iconographic reconstruction or archival records re- vealing the chapel dedication, the identity of the saint in question remains a matter of speculation. Yet I am tempted to hypothesize that images pertaining to St. Silvanus-and therefore to the porticus at Noyers-appeared here, just as did images of the titular saints of the maison-dieu and leprosery in the other two radial chapels. Although the extant iconographic tradition pertaining to Silvanus of Levroux is quite limited, the ad hoc composition of a pictorial narrative of the saint's life lies within the realm of possibility. The choir of the church of Beaumont- Village, a rural parish in Touraine, was decorated in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century with an ensemble of wall paintings based on the corpus of hagiographic lore from Levroux. The program, only partially salvaged when the church was demolished in 1949, included a series of single standing figures and narrative scenes from the lives of Silvanus and his saintly companions.98 Surely the Beaumont paintings can have been neither the earliest nor the only pictorial cycle to treat this material.

Visual ties between the frescoes that do survive in the radial chapels and local hospitals take on particular meaning in light of the image painted in the semidome of the apse, the crypt's central space (Fig. 20). Here, scriptural instructions on the care of the sick are embedded in a theophany that couples the intercession of saints with the sacrament of penance administered by priests. With outstretched arms, a gigantic figure of Christ enthroned in majesty triggers a dynamic chain of giving and receiving that links the entire group of figures. To Peter at his right, Christ issues the keys of heaven (Fig. 21). To James the Less at his left (Fig. 22), he conveys a long scroll on which is inscribed the epistle verse "Confitemini [ergo] alterutrum peccata [vestra]" ("Confess therefore your sins to one another," James 5.16).99 James the Less, to whom the altar below was dedicated, substitutes for Paul in a compositional formula typically associated with the traditio legis, an early Christian theme revived in the twelfth century.100 The mandate to confession

98 Deschamps and Thibout, La peinture murale en France (see above, n. 82), pp. 124-25, fig. 38; 174, pl. LIX fig. 2; and Greslier, 2:59-61.

99 Francois Deshoulieres, "Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher," Congres archeologique de France 88 (1925), 378-415, esp. p. 392, first reconstructed the inscription. Today, only a portion of the last two words is legible: [alt]ERUTRUM PEC[c]A[ta]. The last two letters are elided as the end of the scroll is represented as folding over itself.

100 This altar must correspond to the altari Sancti lacobi in crotis mentioned in the 1287 testament of Colin Tavernier (see above, n. 11). On the twelfth-century revival of the traditio legis at Berze-la- Ville and Coombes, see Eric Palazzo, "Iconographie des fresques de Berze-la-Ville dans le contexte de la reforme gregorienne et de la liturgie clunisienne," Les cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 19 (1988), 169-82, esp. pp. 170-74; and Helene Toubert, "Peinture murale romane: Les decouvertes des dix dernieres annees. Fresques nouvelles, vieux problemes, nouvelles questions," Arte medievale, ser. 2, 1 (1987), 127-62, esp. pp. 148, 158.

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20. Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, collegiate church, crypt, apse. Semidome painting c. 1200 of Christ in Majesty with saints and supplicants. (Photograph: author.)



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thereby acquires the status of divine law. Christ himself is shown to institute the sacrament of penance through the apostolic church: God's remission of sin is fulfilled through Peter's (that is, the priest's) power to bind and loose. The apsidal theophany explicates the hagiographic cycles whose lessons it recapitulates. Christ's forgiveness of the penitent Magdalen, a precedent for the divine pardon of Charlemagne, valorizes contrition through which God remits sins; nevertheless the figure of Christ Majesty proclaims the necessity of confession, for which the Raising of Lazarus is the allegorical prefiguration.101

The superelongated apostles flanking Christ in turn bestow their blessings on three much smaller figures engaged in ritual self-offering and supplication. Equipped with the signa peregrinationis, walking stick and pouch slung over the shoulder, one man deposits a coin at Peter's feet (Fig. 21). A second drags his lame body along the ground with the help of walking irons, devices frequently used by paralytics or amputees (Fig. 21). A third man genuflects before James; on his knees and about to bow with lowered head, he gazes at the saint's feet toward which he extends folded hands (Fig. 22). Given the inscription on the scroll above, the supplicant would appear to be making his confession to the saint from whom he receives absolution.102 The penitent is the only one of the three pilgrims not to rely on his crutch, which balances "miraculously" between him and St. James. Has he been cured? Indeed, an explicit connection between infirmity and sin, confession and healing is established by the verses of James's epistle to which the inscribed phrase provides the conclusion: "Is there anyone among you sick? Let him bring in the presbyters of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he be in sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess therefore your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be saved" (James 5.14-16). In contrast to the heavenly bodies of the saints, glorious in their perfect rectitude, the bent and broken bodies of the pilgrims manifest the fallen condition of humanity, debased by sin and consequently by morbidity and death. Hunched, crawling, and kneeling postures, however, do not identify the sick poor only in negative terms. The suppliant poses of submission also portray the pauperes Christi "positively" in the act of humbly begging forgiveness and favor that calls forth the Lord's mercy.103

The three supplicants assume positions with respect to the enthroned Christ and the saints that echo the prostrate figure of the Magdalen, peccatrix redeemed, just as the coin offered at Peter's feet parallels her unction of Christ's. At the moment of her conversion depicted in the axial apsidiole (the Supper at Bethany), the Magdalen embodies both perfect penance (total submission) and perfect charity

101 On the raising of Lazarus as an allegory of confession, see Kupfer, Romanesque Wall Painting (n. 1 above), pp. 88-89, and for bibliography, p. 220 n. 56.

102 Traces of letters above the figure's head indicate an accompanying inscription, of which only the last two letters VS can now be deciphered. Unfortunately, the inscription was not recorded in earlier documentation. It is possible therefore that the figure represented a specific individual identified by proper name (perhaps the donor of the painting?); alternatively, a generic label (e.g., peregrinus) may have indicated the status or action of the figure.

103 Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France

(Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), pp. 77-103.

658




(the anointing). Her sublime gesture synthesizes the attitudes of the pilgrims, and, conversely, they each reiterate an aspect of hers. The penitent before James re- nounces sin through confession while his counterparts, the cul-de-jatte and coin giver, anoint the Lord with prayers and the apostolic Church (in the person of St. Peter) with offerings. The visual resonance between the two scenes, axially aligned on oriented vaults, assimilates gifts to the saints/the Church into the metaphorical equation between unguent and alms, a literary commonplace.04 While the anointing of Christ and the Church identifies the spiritual bodies that are the genuine focus of caritative zeal, the opening scene of the Giles cycle in the south radial chapel shows that the Magdalen's gesture is properly displaced and reenacted in works of mercy toward the poor.

Broadly interpreted, the single coin held out to St. Peter epitomizes the offerings with which pilgrims supplicated the saints and, following a miracle, expressed gratitude for their intervention. The oblatio and ex-voto entered at different moments into the process of ritual propitiation but were fashioned out of the same diverse materials, from wax to precious metals, and could take the same array of forms: candles, agricultural produce, land, serfs, one's own labor, valuables, trin- kets, significant sums of money, or a few coins, and so on.105 The cured might leave behind representations of body parts or the paraphernalia that had been the attributes of their infirmity. Indeed the crutch of the penitent kneeling before James may refer, like the coin, to articles that littered the shrines of saints.

If one or two coins might entice the saint to answer prayers, remuneration after a miracle reflected the resources at the beneficiary's disposal.106 Pilgrims without other means of repaying their spiritual debt might enter into the service of the saint, or rather the saint's church-an offering of self usually sealed with the deposit of one to four coins on the saint's tomb, on the altar containing his or her relics, or in a coffer kept nearby.107 More narrowly, then, the figure of the coin giver would seem to be performing the rite of the sainteur, a votive practice that evoked-indeed constituted an extension of-chevage.108 Through the ritual payment of tribute in the form of a head tax (virtually recalling a life ransomed from execution or captivity), a lord's dependents acknowledged their servile status.109 Pierre-Andre Sigal believes that the sainteurs most often mentioned in miracle tales

104 On unguent as a metaphor for alms see, for example, James H. Morey, "Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible," Speculum 68 (1993), 6-35, esp. p. 19 n. 40; Jean Longere, "Pauvrete et richesse chez quelques predicateurs durant la seconde moitie du XIIe siecle," in Etudes sur l'histoire de la pauvrete, moyen dge-XVIe siecle, ed. Michel Mollat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1974), 1:255-73, esp. pp. 260-61; and Nicole Beriou, "Les lepreux sous le regard des predicateurs d'apres les collections de sermons ad status du XIIIe siecle," in Nicole Beriou and Francois-Olivier Touati, Voluntate Dei leprosus: Les lepreux entre conversion et exclusion aux XIIeme et XIIIeme siecles (Spoleto, 1991), p. 73 n. 123.

105 The medieval terminology for offerings and ex-votos, as well as modern definitions and classifi- cation systems, are discussed in Pierre-Andre Sigal, L'homme et le miracle dans la France medievale (XIe-XIIe siecle) (Paris, 1985), pp. 86-107.

106 Ibid., pp. 82, 90. 107 Ibid., pp. 104, 107-16. 108 Ibid., pp. 108-9. 109 Dominique Barthelemy, La mutation de l'an mil, a-t-elle eu lieu? Servage et chevalerie dans la

France des Xe et XIe siecles (Paris, 1997), pp. 57-171, esp. pp. 134-41.

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Symbolic Cartography (as opposed to juridical texts) were free men and women who recognized their dependence on the saint, typically via a chevage in coin, but did not thereby necessarily alienate their liberty. Rather, they committed to repeat their pilgrimage annually on the saint's feast, at which time they again offered token remittance: not an especially constraining or humiliating charge and, for those outside the "saint's" own domains, difficult to enforce.110 In Dominique Barthelemy's view, however, all chevage, including that of the altar, confirmed the principle of servitude."l

The Saint-Aignan theophany projects this principle into an eschatological arena. The pyramidal composition establishes a symmetrical and complementary relation between the actions depicted at its base angles; it thereby visually equates entrance into the saint's service with absolution. Ritual self-offering is isomorphic with redemption from bondage to sin, a bondage manifested by the suffering, mortal body. Just as the penitent at Christ's left confesses in exchange for salvation (and finds his body healed as well), so the pilgrim at Christ's right becomes St. Peter's servant in exchange for the blessing of heaven's gatekeeper. "Bonne affaire que d'aliener un statut temporel contre un passeport pour l'eternite," to quote Bar- thelemy, who further emphasizes the formal similarity, ritually imposed, between captivity to disease on the one hand and to sin on the other: "les rites de l'action de grace sont proches de ceux de la penitence. En outre, un penitent est quelqu'un qui s'avoue vaincu, qui se rend, en adoptant l'une des postures paradigmatiques de la servitude."112 Submission and expiation are two sides of the same metaphorical coin. In hagiographic material a miraculously enlarged coin can reveal a delinquent serf, forcing him to return to his saint's service;113 in other literary contexts it symbolizes the satisfactory dimension of penance.1l4

In forging the associative triad of disease, sin, and servitude, the church en- couraged not only gifts that subjects made of themselves but also gifts of subjects made by others. Curative miracles could inspire, or pressure, lords to transfer ownership of their dependents to ecclesiastical communities. As mentioned above, Raoul of Deols granted the chapter of Saint-Silvain dominium over all those from his lands who were healed in the porticus at Levroux and over their future offspring. Raoul's heirs confirmed the original grant through the twelfth century; only when the seigneury devolved through marriage to a male outside the ancestral line did the new lord attach qualifying provisions to its renewal (1214). Silvanus, for his part, had vanquished the "fire" named after him and secured custody of the cured via the rite of chevage. Individuals belonging to the saint had settled in the castellany of Saint-Aignan, whose lord, Herveus IV of Donzy, acknowledged their dependency on Levroux and where at Noyers a porticus received pilgrims to the parish church of Saint-Silvain. The apsidal theophany in the crypt of the col-

110 Sigal, L'homme et le miracle, pp. 107-15. 111 Barthelemy, La mutation de l'an mil, pp. 65, 124-27, 165-70. 112 Ibid., pp. 166, 170, with additional pertinent remarks pp. 88, 143-44. 113 Thomas Head, "Andrew of Fleury and the Peace League of Bourges," Historical Reflections/

Reflexions historiques 14 (1987), 513-29, esp. pp. 521-22. 114 Leo Charles Yedlica, Expression of the Linguistic Area of Repentance and Remorse in Old French

Studies, Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures 27 (Washington, D.C., 1945), pp. 406, 415.

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legiate church at Saint-Aignan addressed everyone, including members of the seigneurial family, in terms of local cult practices that consolidated ecclesiastical patronage. The promise of a blessed hereafter, certified by the church in the person of Peter, obtained for the most noble avoue who renewed previous commitments to a saint's church as it did for the lowliest sainteur who pronounced or fulfilled a vow of personal service.

Taken as a whole, the apsidal painting diagrams the relationship between God, the saints, and the faithful. Peter and James stand between God whose will they execute and the faithful on behalf of whom they intervene. Their mediating role could not be made clearer. Whereas Christ remains isolated within his mandorla, saints and petitioners inhabit the same plane and communicate with each other. Of course, the process of intercession as envisioned here rests on a calculus of patronage. God filters his grace through saints who-if properly beseeched and remunerated-respond to the needs of the faithful. Prayer and offerings (the coin) on the part of pilgrims motivate and compensate action (remission of sin and disease) on the part of the saints. The release of divine grace remains contingent on personal ties, which, secured through reciprocal gift giving, obligate saints and supplicants to discharge their respective duties.l5 No contemporary image I know better grounds the curative powers of the saints in the economy of gift exchange.

What the painting shows, however, does not exhaust what it does. Even as the pictorial scheme denies the possibility of direct contact with the deity, the image nevertheless opens a conduit for the spectator into the circulation of gifts and grace. It organizes a system of mediation and exchange realized through the very act of looking whereby the work is consumed. The painted figure of God, frontal and compelling, addresses, not the pilgrims represented outside the mandorla, but rather the viewing subject before him. The enthroned Christ initiates supernatural transactions in which the figures of the paupers enable viewers to participate. Surrogates for actual pilgrims, the painted supplicants connect their live counterparts to the depicted spiritual world. The handicapped and the itinerant, recog- nizing themselves in the work, might thus position themselves as penitents at the feet of Christ and the saints whom they beseech for aid. The crawl of the cul-de- jatte toward the all-seeing Majesty balances the centrifugal force of divine action with the centripetal movement of his return to God. Christ, source of all grace, is simultaneously the goal of all prayers. Contemplation of the image therefore becomes itself a means to petition the divine.

The pilgrim figures serve a second purpose, however, for they elicit not only identification but also objectification. In effect, the three paupers add one more link to the cosmic chain of gift exchange painted on the vault. More fortunate viewers-who, after all, might also be kneeling or prostrate at the apsidal altar- can approach God and the saints through them. Instrumental to the redemption of others, the poor pray for those whose wealth they convert into alms. The same image that exhorts the infirm to confession simultaneously invites the well-off to achieve the health (salvation) of the soul through charity. Pauperes Christi, reified

115 For an especially probing discussion of the bonds between saints and supplicants, see Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orleans, 800-1200 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), esp. pp. 12, 114, 135-201; and Sigal, L'homme et le miracle, pp. 79-116.

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pictorially in an order of intercession, ameliorate God's view of their benefactors. What better way to petition potential donors than to place them, as here, under divine scrutiny? The exchange between Peter and the coin giver shows that, yes, saints accept the self-offering of the poor. It equally assures the less poor and the

powerful that the church turns earthly resources into spiritual capital. The lesson was not lost on Colin, the innkeeper and toll collector mentioned earlier. His testament of 1287 opens with instructions for founding a chaplaincy here at this very altar, which he must therefore have known, and then goes on to list gifts to charitable institutions in the immediate vicinity and throughout the region. Could the local lord contemporary with the commission, or his heirs, have failed to grasp the message?

The linkage between the crypt paintings and sites of relief identified the colle-

giate and parish church at the nucleus of the walled borough with scattered ther-

apeutic functions outside. In effect, the principal sanctuary recuperated the sacred

space controlled by dependencies and thereby demonstrated their subordination. The ensemble of late Romanesque frescoes implemented a politics of ecclesiastical

patronage comparable to that which Alban Bensa encountered for the much later

period of his study: effigies of saints venerated at pilgrimage sites in outlying hamlets of Perche-Gouet were displayed in the naves of parish churches; the "clocher du village" thus recalled its priority.116 Through the visual recollection of local hospitals within the lower church of Saint-Aignan, the chapter similarly asserted its primacy over affiliated and competing cults.

At Saint-Aignan, however, pictorial reference to local hospitals had an added dimension. It channeled recourse to thaumaturgic powers into ecclesiastically sanctioned, clerically supervised institutions. Moreover, the ensemble of images showed healing to be contingent on penance and therefore on sacerdotal mediation. The canons not only recontained the hospital network within the crypt of their church but also positioned themselves at the center of the healing process. Christ's injunction to confession appoints priests, who dispense the medicine of

penance, physicians of the soul;117 through prayer and unction they prepare the

body's receptivity to divine grace.118 The canons' pastoral vocation, insofar as it

116 Bensa, Les saints guerisseurs (see above, n. 72), p. 182. 117 On the elaboration of the comparison between confession and medicine, priests and physicians

see Jean Longere, ed., Alain de Lille, Liber poenitentialis, 2 vols. (Louvain, 1965), 1:161, 163, 166, 168,189; and Beriou, "La representation de la confession" (see above, n. 91), pp. 261-82.

118 On the relationship between healing the body and healing the soul, see Jole Agrimi and Chiara

Crisciani, Medicina del corpo e medicina dell'anima: Note sul sapere del medico fino all'inizio del secolo XIII (Milan, 1978). Developments in the rites accorded the sick are discussed by Frederick S. Paxton, "Liturgy and Healing in an Early Medieval Saint's Cult: The Mass In Honore Sancti Sigismundi for the Cure of Fevers," Traditio 49 (1994), 23-43, esp. pp. 39-43; and idem, "Anointing the Sick and the Dying in Christian Antiquity and the Early Medieval West," in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila D. Campbell, Bert S. Hall, and David Klausner (New York, 1992), pp. 93-102. For the high Middle Ages, see Joseph Avril, "La pastorale des malades et des mourants aux XIIe et XIIIe siecles," in Death in the Middle Ages, ed. H. Braet and W. Verbeke (Louvain, 1983), pp. 88-106; and Aime Georges Martimort, "Prieres pour les malades et onction sacramentelle," in L'Eglise en priere: Introduction a la liturgie, ed. Aime Georges Martimort, new ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1984), 3:132- 53.

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combined the care of sick with the cure of souls, encompassed the solicitation of alms on behalf of local hospitals dependent on capitular patronage.

To appreciate the cartographic function of the crypt paintings, it is not enough to reintegrate them laterally into the therapeutic infrastructure of the rural landscape. They must also be reconnected vertically to the twelfth-century rebuilding of the church. Just as the pictorial decoration mapped sites of healing into the crypt, so also was it coordinated with the symbolic hierarchies of architectural space to delineate an itinerary from sin to grace. The artistic commission thereby reoriented the goal of pilgrimage from the healing of the body to the salvation of the soul.

Between ongoing medieval construction on the site and modern renovations, the archaeology of the church is fraught with problems that cannot be sorted out here. Suffice it to say that structural changes over the course of four successive campaigns from the 1080s through the 1190s ultimately transformed the original nature of the relationship between the crypt and the upper church (Fig. 23). The initial arrangement had allowed for visual and physical communication between the two levels. Summary excavations carried out in 1933 disclosed two tiny win- dowlike openings, or fenestellae, in the eleventh-century retaining wall at the end of the crypt's westernmost bay, blocked off in the later Middle Ages.119 Such fenestellae typically enabled the laity gathered in the nave to perceive relics deposited in the crypt below. In addition, stairs once led into the crypt from the side aisles of the fourth nave bay; descent began just west of the piers separating the nave collaterals from the transept arms.120 Already in the early twelfth century, however, the level of the new transept and nave rendered the fenestellae obsolete. Some decades later (probably in the 1160s) the lateral stairs, obstructed by thickened

piers between side aisles and transept arms, were suppressed altogether. A north portal (Figs. 24, 25), integral to the late-eleventh-century masonry of the crypt and eventually framed by a monumental porch, was left to provide the sole means of access.121 By the time the frescoes were commissioned at the close of the twelfth or turn of the thirteenth century, the crypt had been converted into a virtually independent lower church, which could be neither apprehended nor penetrated from above.

The radical disjunction between the two formerly connected levels of the church has significant ramifications for assessing how the architectural framework struc- tured the terms of participation in the economy of salvation made visible through

119 The findings are recorded only in a set of four drawings contained on a single leaf unaccompanied by any report: Paris, Hotel de la Croisille, Archives des Monuments Historiques, F II, 39666 (2).

120 The location of the north stairs was discovered in 1932, when plans were drawn up for the installation of a modern stairway into the crypt from the north arm of the transept: Paris, H6tel de la Croisille, Archives des Monuments Historiques, Loir-et-Cher, Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, eglise, carton 1215, dossier 3, 1925-47. The architect Maurice Lotte presented his design for the stairway in a report dated November 16, 1932 (rapport no. 6282), which was accompanied by three drawings, now F2, 39669 (plan of crypt) and 39678 projet 1 and 2 (showing the stairway of two flights). The edges of the medieval steps, worn from use, can still be seen from the landing between the two flights of modern stairs into the crypt.

121 These alterations are described in detail by Bayle, "Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher" (see above, n. 9), pp. 314-22.

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images. The reconception of the crypt as a wholly autonomous space, sealed off from the upper church and accessible only from the exterior, culminated in the introduction of wall paintings that at once programmatically depended on and validated the altered disposition. Equipped with its own porch through which it communicated directly with the outside world, the crypt acquired a new status as a discrete oratory similar to that of the auxiliary chapels encircling the borough. Pictorial references to local hospital saints completed the process of incorporating the lower church into the local pilgrimage circuit.

This interpretive realignment of the crypt was accompanied by an even more profound shift in the performative role of the building itself. The elimination of all entrances to the lower church but the north portal intensified the staging of pilgrimage as a penitential act. Passage into the subterranean space now occurred exclusively on the side of the church traditionally associated with cold and dark- ness, hell and the devil, and, by extension, the state of sin. The conventional symbolism of the cardinal directions entered into the medieval exegesis of religious architecture where it was made to serve allegories of redemption.122 Thus the sinister connotations of the north or left flank of the church building were trans- lated into topoi about aversion from evil, conversion to God, the work of repentance, and ultimately the possibility of divine forgiveness. At Saint-Aignan pictorial proofs of the efficacy of confession and penance activated the latent symbolic charge of the north portal.

What is more, the crypt paintings appear to have formed only part of a comprehensive decorative scheme that encompassed the upper church as well. Around 1850 Jean-Baptiste Lassus, architect of the Monuments Historiques, observed that nave paintings contemporary with those in the crypt lay hidden beneath a layer of whitewash applied earlier in the century. He detected on the vaults great scroll- bearing figures draped in long robes, which he interpreted as representations of "vertus chretiennes" and "intelligences angeliques."123 Unfortunately, the resto-

122 Joseph Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebiudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mit- telalters (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1902), pp. 87-98; and Barbara Maurmann, Die Himmelsrichtungen im Weltbild des Mittelalters (Munich, 1976), pp. 117-28,183-85. For discussion of specific examples, see Helen Dow, "The Rose Window," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 248-97, esp. pp. 280, 291; Otto-Karl Werckmeister, "The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from Saint-Lazare, Autun," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972), 1-30, esp. pp. 20- 23; Nouredine Mezoughi, "Saint-Gabriel en Provence: Reflexions sur l'iconographie de la faqade et sur la signification symbolique de l'oculus," Les cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 8 (1977), 105-36, esp. p. 132 n. 129; Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church ofSt.-Denis, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J., 1979), pp. 225-29; Elaine Beretz, "Fortune Denied: The Theology against Chance at St.-Etienne, Beauvais," Ph.D. thesis, Yale University (1989), pp. 153-54 n. 69; Jerome Baschet, "L'enfer en son lieu: Role fonctionnel des fresques et dynamisation de l'espace cultuel," in Luoghi sacri e spazi della santita, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucetta Scaraffia (Turin, 1990), pp. 551-63, esp. p. 554; and idem, Lieu sacre, lieu d'images: Les fresques de Bominaco (Abruzzes, 1263). ThBmes, parcours, fon- ctions (Rome, 1991), pp. 18-21, 162-65, 184-87.

123 Jean-Baptiste Lassus, "Eglise de Saint-Aignan (Loir-et-Cher)," in Archives de la Commission des Monuments Historiques, 1:1855-1872 (Paris, n.d.), "Architecture religieuse, lere partie, eglises," no. 17, 1-14, esp. p. 6: "La nef entiere telle que nous venons de l'esquisser etait couverte de peintures. De

grandes figures a longues et roides draperies, et probablement du meme temps que celles de la crypte que nous decrirons plus loin, ornaient la vofite. Des phylacteres s'enroulaient autour de ces representations de vertus chretiennes et d'intelligences angeliques. Toutes ces peintures ont disparu, il y a pres de quarante ans, sous une couche de badigeon; on croit possible neanmoins de les faire revivre."

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Symbolic Cartography ration of the building that followed Lassus's death in 1858 entailed, among other things, the thorough scraping of the mural surfaces in the upper church, thus destroying any trace of the images he described. Despite the loss of this iconographic material, its general import nevertheless remains clear. Whereas the lower church was dedicated to the exposition of a penitential theme, the nave vault received figures of a supernal character identified with the celestial realm. Pictorial decoration articulated the disjunction between upper and lower church by translating it into spiritual terms.

The transformation of the architectural fabric defined everyone who entered the lower church as a penitent. Insofar as the single portal leveled a diverse public to a common state of sin, the clergy asserted its authority over all the laity-including the powerful. Pilgrims, whatever their needs and backgrounds, had to submit themselves if they were to receive divine medicine. Beyond the threshold, however, images inscribed supplicants within the expiatory process according to their status in the economy of gift exchange. The sick poor whose redemption lay in patient suffering and in self-offering to saints and church were made the venue for others' charity. By virtue of the crypt's autonomy, the infirm seeking contact with relics there would have been effectively diverted from the upper church without necessarily being formally excluded. Pauperes Christi were admitted to the divine presence in the apsidal painting of Christ in Majesty but discouraged from circulating within the principal sanctuary. The decorated church, like the ambivalent em-

placement of contemporary hospitals of which it was a permutation, thus gave physical expression to the ambiguous position of the sick poor in Christian society. Of course, when burghers like Colin the innkeeper or members of the seigneurial family visited the lower church, they joined ranks, if only temporarily, with an underclass whose prayers (in return for alms) would unleash the grace of God and his saints. The canons, agents of spiritual relief, assimilated a model of the reciprocal roles of rich and poor to a transcendent therapeutic regime for the body of the faithful.

Marcia Kupfer is an independent scholar in Washington, D.C. (e-mail: makupfer@erols .com).

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