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i
Faces of Charisma
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363809_001

ii
Explorations in Medieval Culture
General Editor
Larissa Tracy (Longwood University)
Editorial Board
Tina Boyer (Wake Forest University)

Kelly DeVries (Loyola University Maryland)
David F. Johnson (Florida State University)
Asa Simon Mittman (CSU, Chico)
Thea Tomaini (USC, Los Angeles)
Wendy J. Turner (Augusta University)
David Wacks (University of Oregon)
Renée Ward (University of Lincoln)
VOLUME 9
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/emc

iii
Faces of Charisma
Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the
Medieval West
Edited by
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak

Martha Dana Rust
LEIDEN | BOSTON
iv
Cover illustration: Saint Francis and the Wolf. Pienza, Church of San Francesco. © 2017. Photo Scala,
Florence.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte Miriam, editor. | Rust, Martha Dana, editor.

Title: Faces of charisma : image, text, object in Byzantium and the medieval
West / edited by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, Martha Dana Rust.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2018. | Series: Explorations in
medieval culture, ISSN 2352-0299 ; volume 9 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008869 (print) | LCCN 2018009597 (ebook) | ISBN
9789004363809 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004288690 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Arts--Psychological aspects. | Arts audiences.
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Contents
Contents v
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Illustrations viii
List of Abbreviations xi
List of Contributors xii xiv
Faces and Surfaces of Charisma. An Introductory Essay 1

Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Martha D. Rust
Part 1
Medieval and Modern: The Hermeneutics of Charisma
1 The Mask of Grace. On Body and Beauty of Soul between Late

Antiquity and the Middle Ages 47
Martino Rossi Monti
2 Compassion as Moral Virtue: Another Look at the Wise and Foolish

Virgins in Gothic Sculpture 76
Jacqueline E. Jung
3 Charisma and Material Culture 128

Paul Binski
Part 2
Charismatic Art
4 Charismatic Art and Biography in the Carolingian World 157

Andrew Romig
5 The Saint’s Life as a Charismatic Form: Bernard of Clairvaux and

Francis of Assisi 181
Stephen Jaeger
6 Charismatic Rulers in Civic Guise: Images of the Nine Worthies in

Northern European Town Halls of the 14th to 16th Centuries 205
Andrey Egorov
vi Contents
Part 3
Dazzling Reflections: Charismatic Art and Its Audience
7 Charisma and the Ideal Viewer in Nicetas Choniates’s De signis 243

Paroma Chatterjee
8 Disenchantment: Hoccleve’s Tale of Jonathas and Male Revenge

Fantasy 267
Gavin Richardson
9 The Emperorship of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1410-37): Charisma and

Government in the Later Medieval Holy Roman Empire 288
Duncan Hardy
Part 4
Mediation: The Intermediary Spaces of Charisma
10 Medieval Franciscan Architecture as Charismatic Space 323

Erik Gustafson
11 Precious-Metal Figural Sculpture, Medium, and Mimesis in the Late

Middle Ages 348
Joseph Salvatore Ackley
12 “I’ll make the statue move indeed”: Charismatic Motion and the
Disenchanted Image in Early Modern Drama 386
Lynsey McCulloch
Index 411
422
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments vii
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the Medieval and Renaissance Center at New York University
as well as to the University’s Center for the Humanities for their assistance
with various production costs of this book. Our gratitude goes as well to Brill’s
Assistant Editor Marcella Mulder. Thanks to her expertise, generosity, and
attentiveness, we felt our book was in the very best of hands throughout the
several stages of its development. We thank the anonymous readers for their
useful comments on the manuscript in its earliest stage; our copyeditor and
indexer Tim Barnwell for the abundance of care he gave to the finished manu-
script; and Debbie de Wit, Brill’s production editor, who shepherded the book
to press. We also thank all of the contributors to the volume, both for their
innovative scholarship and for their dedication to the project. As the director
of NYU’s Medieval and Renaissance Center in 2012, Martha Rust is grateful to
Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, whose idea it was to put on a conference on the topic of
charisma. In turn, Brigitte is grateful to Martha for transforming her idea into
the successful event from which this volume grew.
Brigitte Bedos-Rezak and Martha Rust

List
viii of Illustrations List Of Illustrations
List of Illustrations
0.1 Google Ngram for “charisma” 4

2.1 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, complete view of portals 81
2.2 Strasbourg, Cathedral (Münster) of Notre-Dame. West facade, south (right-
hand) portal, with Last Judgment tympanum and Wise and Foolish Virgins in
jambs and adjacent wall-niches, c.1280-90 82
2.3 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, south portal, left-hand jamb: Prince of the
World with three Foolish Virgins 84
2.4 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, south portal, right-hand jamb: Christ the
Bridegroom with three Wise Virgins 85
2.5 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, south portal, (a) left-hand wall-niche with
two Foolish Virgins, (b) right-hand wall-niche with two Wise Virgins 86
2.6 Abbey church of St-Denis. West facade, detail of center portal with Last
Judgment tympanum and reliefs of Wise and Foolish Virgins on imposts,
c.1135-40 87
2.7 Basel Cathedral (Münster). North transept, portal of St. Gall (Galluspforte),
c.1185-1200 92
2.8 Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, Eguisheim. Lintel of portal with Wise and Foolish
Virgins, c.1210-15 94
2.9 Magdeburg, Cathedral of St. Maurice. Apse with column figures and reliefs
from an unfinished portal inserted at gallery level, c.1210-20 95
2.10 Magdeburg Cathedral. Apse, gallery level. Reliefs of a Wise Virgin (a) and a
Foolish Virgin (b) from earlier campaign, c.1210-20 96
2.11 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, figures of a Wise Virgin (a) and a
Foolish Virgin (b) from later campaign, c.1240-50 97
2.12 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal with the Dormition of the Virgin
in tympanum and Wise and Foolish Virgins in jambs, c.1240-50,
post-restoration 99
2.13 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, left-hand jambs, Wise Virgins, en
face 100
2.14 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, right-hand jambs, Foolish Virgins,
en face 101
2.15 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, faces of Wise (top) and Foolish
Virgins (bottom), arranged as a sequence of progressive emotional
responses 102
2.16 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, with viewer exploring sightlines
linking her to different Wise and Foolish Virgins and confirming that “Da ist
keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht” 104
List of Illustrations ix
2.17 Naumburg, Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul. Detail of St. John Evangelist from
the Crucifixion portal on the west choir screen, c.1245-50 109
2.18 Erfurt, Cathedral of St. Mary. Triangular porch on north transept, northwestern
face, right-hand jambs with Foolish Virgins, c.1320-30 110
2.19 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, south portal, left-hand jambs: Prince of the
World and laughing Foolish Virgin 114
2.20 Abbey church of St-Saveur in Charroux. Reliefs with smiling Foolish Virgins
from a dismantled portal, c.1250 115
2.21 Bamberg, Cathedral of Sts. Peter and George. Northern flank, “Princes’ Portal”
(Fürstenportal), tympanum with uncommonly exuberant Last Judgment,
c.1225 117
2.22 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, north (left-hand) portal, left-hand jambs
with Virtues conquering Vices, c.1280-90 118
2.23 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, north (left-hand) portal, right-hand jambs
with Virtues conquering Vices 119
3.1 Ely Cathedral, Lady Chapel, wall arcading with ogee arches and Life of Virgin
Mary above, begun 1321 134
3.2 Écouis, Normandy, collegiate church, Mary Magdalen, after 1311 136
3.3 Erfurt cathedral, portal, c.1330, Foolish Virgins 138
4.1 Obverse of a Charlemagne denier, coined in Frankfurt circa 813, now at the
Cabinet des Médailles, Paris 159
4.2 Bronze equestrian statue of Charlemagne outside the entrance to Notre Dame
Cathedral in Paris, Brothers Louis and Charles Rochet in 1878 176
6.1 Cologne town hall, Hansasaal, south wall after the air strike. 1943 206
6.2 The Nine Worthies. C.1330. Limestone, originally polychromed. Cologne town
hall, south wall of the Hansasaal 208
6.3 Master of the Cité des Dames. The Nine Worthies in Tommaso di Saluzzo, Le
Chevalier Errant. Paris, c.1403-05 212
6.4 King of Bohemia as One of the Prince-electors. C.1398. Mural fragment from the
north wall of the Hansasaal, Cologne town hall 218
6.5 Jan van Mansdale (Keldermans). Julius Caesar. 1384-85. Carved stone corbel,
originally polychromed 223
6.6 Jan van Mansdale (Keldermans). The Sacrifice of Abraham. 1384-85. Carved stone
corbel, originally polychromed 225
6.7 Joshua, Godfrey of Bouillon, Charlemagne, King Arthur, and Julius Caesar. c.1410.
Central stained-glass window of the south wall of the Gerichtslaube, Lüneburg
town hall 227
6.8 Cord Lange, Burgomaster of Lüneburg. C.1491. One of the four figures depicted
on the stained-glass window of the Bürgermeister-Körkammer, Lüneburg town
hall 231
x List Of Illustrations
6.9 Albert von Soest. King Darius flanked by Temperance and Patience. 1564-84.
Right pillar of the main portal, Grosse Ratsstube, Lüneburg town hall 234
6.10 Georg Osterwald. The Hansasaal of the Cologne town hall. 1846. Oil on
canvas 236
9.1 Sigismund, in full imperial regalia, enfeoffs the dukes of Bavaria-Munich in 1417,
as depicted in a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript of Ulrich von Richental’s
chronicle (c.1420) 301
9.2 Sigismund’s imperial seal, appended to a 1436 document issued by his
chancery 305
9.3 Sigismund’s judicial seal, appended to a 1436 document issued by his aulic
court 305
9.4 Privilege-charter issued by Sigismund’s chancery to the imperial city of
Haguenau in 1433, displaying a ‘golden bull’ 306
9.5 Albrecht Dürer’s oil paintings of Charlemagne and Sigismund, which adorned
the holder of the imperial insignia in Nuremberg 312
10.1 San Francesco, Arezzo, c.1314, Plan with Spatial Layers 327
10.2 Santa Croce, Florence, Plan with Spatial Layers 327
10.3 San Francesco, Pienza 328
10.4 Santa Croce, Florence, Nave 328
10.5 San Francesco, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, Tramezzo Mockup 329
10.6 San Francesco, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, Choir Screen Mockup 329
10.7 Santa Croce, Florence, Transepts and Chapels 330
10.8 San Francesco, Pisa, Transepts and Chapels 330
11.1 Reliquary Bust of St. Barbara, Circle of Nikolaus Gerhaert von Leiden, Franco-
Netherlandish, c.1465-67. Walnut, polychromed and gilt, H: 50.5 cm 350
11.2 Virgin and Child with Donor, Rhineland (Cologne, Lower Rhine, or Aachen?),
c.1350-60. Silver, partial gilding, sapphire, H: 62 cm 351
11.3 Icon of Christ Pantocrator, Constantinople (?), 500s. Encaustic on panel, 84 ×
45.5 cm 354
11.4 Book-Box for an Evangeliary from Kloster Harvestehude, Hamburg Workshop,
c.1510 367
11.5 Goldene Tafel (Antependium) from St. Ursula, Cologne 369
11.6 Reliquary Bust of St. Ida of Herzfeld, Cologne, c.1480 370
11.7 Canonization of St. Bridget of Sweden, Ulrich Richenthal, Chronicle of the
Council of Constance, 1414-1418. Constance, c.1464 373
11.8 Marienstatt High-Altar Retable, Cologne, c.1350 376
11.9 Altarpiece, so-called Kleiner Dom (closed), Cologne, c.1360 378
11.10 Altarpiece, so-called Kleiner Dom (open), Cologne, c.1360 379
List of Abbreviations
List of Abbreviations xi
List of Abbreviations
CCCM Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis. Turnhout,

1966-
CCSL Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina. Turnhout, 1953-
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1864-
2012)
DC District of Columbia
MA Massachusetts
MGH Monumenta Germaniae historica
MGH Auct. Ant. Auctores antiquissimi
MGH Conc. Concilia, eds. Friedrich Maassen et al. 8 vols. Hanover, 1893-
MGH Fontes iuris Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum separa-
tim editi, eds. Mario Krammer et al., 16 vols. Hanover, 1909-
MGH Lib. Lit. Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum saeculis XI. et XII.
conscripti, ed. ed. Ernst Dümmler, 3 vols, Hanover, 1891-
1897
MGH Poetae Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, ed. Ernst Dümmler. 4 vols.
Berlin, 1881-1923
MGH SS Scriptores
MGH SS rer. Lang. Scriptores rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum, eds.
Georg Waitz et al. Hanover, 1878
MGH SS rer. Germ. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum sepa-
ratim editi, eds. Georg Pertz et al. 80 vols. Hanover, 1871-
Mich. Michigan
NC North Carolina
NY New York
PG Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Graeca. Paris, 1857-1866
PL Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina. Paris, 1844-1855
SC Sources chrétiennes. Institut des sources chrétiennes. Les
éditions du Cerfs, Paris, 1942-
VT Vermont
xii List of Contributors List Of Contributors
List of Contributors

Ph.D. (2014), is Term Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College. He
researches and publishes on medieval metalwork, late medieval sculpture, the
medieval church treasury, and broader questions of material, medium, and
medieval strategies of accessing the divine.
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak

is a Professor of History at New York University (NYU). Her most recent research
on seals, signing practices, and imagistic scripts has appeared in a mono-
graph When Ego was Imago. Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2011) and
a co-edited volume (with Jefrey Hamburger), Sign and Design. Script as Image
in a Cross-Cultural Perspective (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard, 2016).
Paul Binski
is Professor of the History of Medieval Art at Cambridge University, a Fellow of
the British Academy and a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of
America.
Paroma Chatterjee
is associate professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor. Her research interests include the art of Byzantium, cultural relations
between Byzantium and the Latin West, and medieval image theory, among
others. Her current book project investigates the role of sculpture in the
Byzantine literary and artistic imagination.
Andrey Egorov
Ph.D. (1984), Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts, is Head
of Research Department and exhibition curator at the Moscow Museum of
Modern Art (MMOMA). His interests range from Late Medieval visual culture
to contemporary artistic practices, with a focus on political iconography, icon-
oclasm and image theory.
Erik Gustafson
Ph.D. (2012) is an Adjunct Professor of Art History at George Mason University.
He has published many articles on medieval architectural culture, and is com-
pleting a monograph entitled Building Franciscanism: Space, Tradition, and
Devotion in Medieval Tuscany.
List of Contributors xiii
Duncan Hardy
D.Phil. (2015), is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the
University of Central Florida and a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Uni
versity of Cambridge. His research focuses on the political and cultural history
of late medieval and early modern Central Europe. His first monograph, Asso
ciative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346–1521, is
forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
C. Stephen Jaeger
is professor emeritus of German, Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies,
University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign. He is the author of Enchantment: On
Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia, 2012).
Jacqueline E. Jung
Ph.D. (2002) is Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Her
book The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of
France and Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2013) received the John
Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. She has pub-
lished widely on the kinetic and emotive aspects of Gothic sculpture, and is
exploring these issues further in a new book, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Ex
pression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, forthcoming from Yale
University Press.
Lynsey McCulloch
Ph.D. (2010), is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Coventry University. She
has published widely on the relationship between literature and other arts,
and is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (forth-
coming from Oxford University Press).
Gavin T. Richardson
Ph.D. (1998), is Professor of English at Union University. He has published
widely on classical and medieval subjects, with current work treating male
revenge fantasy and Lollard antipapal polemic.
Andrew J. Romig
is Associate Professor of Medieval Studies at New York University’s Gallatin
School of Individualized Study. He has published several articles on Carolingian
cultural history along with his monograph, Be a Perfect Man: Christian Mas
culinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy (University of Pennsylvania Press,
2017).
xiv List Of Contributors
Martino Rossi Monti

Ph.D. (2007) is research associate at the Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb (Croa
tia). He has published a book entitled Il cielo in terra. La grazia fra teologia ed
estetica (Torino: Utet, 2008), and essays on the Platonic tradition, the problem
of evil and violence, and the physiognomical tradition.
Martha D. Rust
is an Associate professor of English at New York University, specializing in late-
medieval English literature and manuscript culture. The author of Imaginary
Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (Palgrave, 2007), her
current book project, Item: Lists and the Poetics of Reckoning in Late-Medieval
England theorizes the list as a device that enables thinking in a variety of
modes.
Faces and Surfaces of Charisma: An Introductory Essay 1
Faces and Surfaces of Charisma: An Introductory

Essay
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Martha D. Rust Bedos-Rezak and Rust
The idea for a volume entitled Faces of Charisma emerged from a conference
that took place at New York University’s Medieval and Renaissance Center in
April 2013. The impetus for the conference was provided by C. Stephen Jaeger’s
recently published book, Enchantment: Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of
the West.1 A measure of the excitement the conference generated was the early
emergence – already during the afternoon coffee break – of a conviction that
the exploration of charisma that had begun that day in the form of 20-minute
papers merited enlargement and dissemination in the form of a book. The
present volume includes most of the papers presented at the conference,
which have been subsequently expanded into chapters, as well as a number of
essays written specifically for inclusion herein.
Midway through his introduction to Enchantment, Jaeger makes an arrest-
ing claim: “The terms ‘charisma,’ ‘aura,’ and ‘enchantment’ can be profitably
rehabilitated as critical concepts to analyze art, literature, and films, their aes-
thetics, their impact on the audience, and the psychology of both star and
fan.”2 On its face this assertion might seem illogical given these terms’ usual
referents: charisma, a quality of exceptional people; aura, a quality of unique
things and places; enchantment, a state of mind. As Jaeger himself brilliantly
demonstrates, however, a recognition of the symptoms of these phenomena
together with the conditions that give rise to them affords a critic the means to
study certain effects of art that otherwise elude analysis, remaining in the
realms of faith, illusion, or subjectivity. Using the concept of charisma in par-
ticular, the critic is able to delineate that aspect of a life, a text, or an artifact
that seems at once the most real and most ineffable to its viewers. Thus, Jaeger
conceives of charisma as a quality that may apply to art as well as to person.
His conception of charismatic art springs from the category-expanding insight
that charisma of person is itself a work of art since, as with a work of art, it
1 C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West
(Philadelphia, 2012).
2 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 9.

2 Bedos-rezak And Rust
entails representation.3 To study charisma is therefore to study representation,

and to study charismatic art, as Jaeger’s work has shown, is to experiment with
a theory of representation that is hospitable to the possibility of nothing less
than a breakdown between art and viewer and between art and lived experi-
ence. The essays in this volume take up Jaeger’s invitation to experiment,
exploring the relationship between artifact and person and between art and
charisma from the perspectives of premodern history, art, and literature. Some
contributions substantiate the concept of charismatic art, others test its pos-
sibilities, still others challenge its premises; all found inspiration in Jaeger’s
gripping exposition.
We begin our introduction with a historiographic survey that situates
Jaeger’s notion of charismatic art within the several intellectual traditions
from which it draws: histories of the concepts of personal charisma, of the
sublime, and of aura. Having considered the theoretical foundations for
Jaeger’s charisma of art, we proceed to an analytical discussion of the three
dimensions that underlie our contributors’ own approaches to charismatic art:
audiences, effects, and operative modalities. In this triadic formation, the vec-
tors of charisma point in many directions: not only to and from the human
faces that most works of charismatic art feature but also from and to a work of
art’s materials, the play of light, for instance, on the surface of a gilded sculp-
ture. In this way, these analyses raise two related questions pertaining to
Jaeger’s insistence on an anthropocentric source in charismatic art: can the
humanness of charisma as it is traditionally understood be imputed to things,
and should the exclusivity of an anthropocentric origin in matters charismatic
be challenged? Parsing this latter point, further queries emerge: Is representa-
tion of a human being a prerequisite for art to act charismatically? And if so,
how mimetic does such representation need to be? Does cultural contingency
play a part in determining whether or not a work of art will be perceived by
viewers as charismatic, or are such responses a matter of our species’s neuro-
biological wiring, our tendency to see sentient life in things, or as Stewart
Guthrie famously put it, to see faces in clouds?4 What is the role of artistic
medium and technology in creating charismatic effects? These and other con-
cerns animate the essays gathered in this volume.
3 As Jaeger puts it, “personal charisma, whether natural or cultivated or a mixture of both in
whatever degree, is itself a form of representation and its bearer a kind of living work of art.”
Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 11.
4 Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford, 1993), p. viii.
From Charisma of Person to Charisma of Art, Via the Sublime and

the Aura
Max Weber to C. Stephen Jaeger: From Charisma of Person to

Charisma of Art
In contemporary English usage, the word charisma is the one to reach for when
we want to describe an attractive yet ineffable quality of a person, whether a
movie star, a politician, a TV newscaster, a religious figure, or even an attractive
someone, spotted across a crowded room. An elusive charm, an enigmatic
magnetism, an indefinable sparkle, charisma is sometimes described as the
“X-factor,” a term that captures well the essence of this quality as a personal
“something” that defies precise description.5 Anthropologist Charles Lindholm
observes that in this popular notion of it, charisma is a quality that certain
individuals are perceived “to have”; that is, this X-factor is thought to “exist” in
an individual in the same way “height or eye color exist,” Frank Sinatra’s blue
eyes or Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s seven-foot-two-inch stature, for instance.6 As
prevalent as it has become as a term for such a winning trait, the word cha-
risma is barely attested in English before the 1940s. Tellingly, the abrupt
upswing in its appearance in print in that decade (see fig. 0.1) corresponds with
the publication of the first English translations of the work of Max Weber.
Indeed, a spike in the use of the term charisma in 1947 coincides precisely with
the publication of A.M. Henderson and T. Parsons’s English translation of
Weber’s Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922), which con-
tains his most extensive discussion of the concept.7 Economy and Society also
contains what is generally considered Weber’s most explicit definition of cha-
risma, which appears in the course of his explication of three kinds of
leadership:
The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual

personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and
treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifi-
cally exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible
to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exem-
5 On charisma as the “X-factor,” see John Potts, A History of Charisma (New York, 2009), pp. 3, 5.
6 Charles Lindholm, Charisma (Oxford, 1990), p. 7.
7 Henderson and Parsons published their translation under the title The Theory of Social and
Economic Organization.
4
Figure. 0.1 Google Ngram for “charisma,” August 20, 2017.

Bedos-rezak And Rust
plary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a

leader.8
Within a few paragraphs of this definition, Weber expands upon it by describ-

ing the role of those by whom the charismatic leader “is treated” as such: “the
recognition on the part of those subject to authority is decisive for the validity
of charisma.” This all-important recognition, Weber further stipulates, “is a
matter of complete personal devotion to the possessor of the quality, arising
out of enthusiasm, or of despair and hope.”9
Two aspects of Weber’s definition of charisma are worth noting as starting
points for establishing the theoretical basis for a charisma of art as Jaeger
defines it: that is, as “a quality of works of art” that causes a range of inspiring,
transformative, and elevating effects in viewers.10 First, we can discern that
since its debut as a sociological term in the 1940s, the word charisma has
acquired a sense in popular culture that deviates significantly from Weber’s
definition, for it is clear that the “certain quality” indicated in Weber’s formula-
tion is of a different order from such genetically determined features as height
or eye color. Moreover, even though Weber ascribes that inner quality – be it
supernatural, superhuman, or otherwise exceptional – to an individual person,
he locates the crucial power of determining its meaning in the eye of the
beholder. Whatever mysterious quality it is that sets a person apart from the
crowd, the term charisma may be applied to it only insofar as it causes others
to consider him or her extraordinary. In other words, in its essence, Weber’s
charisma of person is less personal than interpersonal, less about an individual
than about a relationship.11 Given that this charismatic relationship is brought
into being by devotees’ assigning meaning to a personal quality, it follows that
charisma of person may be understood to spring from processes of significa-
tion, if only on the relatively unconscious level of stimulus and response, and
to exist not solely within the charismatic individual but rather as a kind of
8 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A.M. Henderson and
Talbott Parsons (New York, 1947), pp. 358-359. A slightly different rendering appears in the
more recent translation of the work, Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of
Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et
al. (New York, 1968), p. 241.
9 Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. Henderson and Parsons, p. 359.
11 On the essentially relational aspect of charisma, see also Lindholm, Charisma, p. 7; Robert
C. Tucker, “The Theory of Charismatic Leadership,” Daedalus 97 (1968), 731-56, at 738; and
Roy Wallis, “The Social Construction of Charisma,” in Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce,
Sociological Theory, Religion and Collective Action (Belfast, 1986), pp. 129-54, at 130.
magnetic field that operates between him and the followers he attracts. In this
way, Weber’s definition of charisma – the very locus classicus of the modern
idea of charisma of person – already admits of its possible application to art,
for interaction with a work of art is also a matter of stimulus and response, and
the sensory stimuli a work presents to a viewer may also arouse a sense of
devotion that may be experienced as an effect of a special quality of the work.
Broaching the possibility of such an alternative use of the term charisma brings
us to the second noteworthy aspect of Weber’s definition: its self-consciously
ad hoc nature. Opening with the declaration “the term ‘charisma’ will be
applied,” Weber clearly signals his act of appropriating for the purposes of soci-
ological analysis a term with a broader range of senses than the specific
phenomenon that he goes on, ever so influentially, to define as charisma.
With Weber’s deed of disciplinary term-setting in mind, we may quickly rec-
ognize Jaeger’s parallel act when, in the opening pages of Enchantment, he
declares that his study will deal with a subcategory of the sublime “which I will
call ‘charismatic art.’”12 Just as Jaeger implicitly acknowledges his debt to Weber
in this echoing phrase (and explicitly elsewhere in the book), Weber also
acknowledges the source from which he drew in turning the word charisma to
his own use. In Economy and Society he notes, “[t]he concept of ‘charisma’ (‘the
gift of grace’) is taken from the vocabulary of early Christianity. For the
Christian hierocracy Rudolf Sohm, in his Kirchenrecht, was the first to clarify
the substance of the concept.”13 A look at Sohm’s writing on charisma will
allow us to situate both Weber’s and Jaeger’s concepts of charisma in the con-
text of its usage in the New Testament, where we will discover the origins of
Weber’s interpersonal charisma as well as key features of Jaeger’s charisma of
art: in particular, its experiential and medial aspects. Following our discussion
of the legacy of Sohm in both Weber and Jaeger, we will turn to more recent
writing on charisma in order to provide a context for another major factor in
Jaeger’s concept of the charisma of art: that is, its precondition in the needs
and aspirations of a work of art’s audience and its stimulation of an audience’s
imagination.
While Weber’s definitive statements on charisma make their first appear-
ances in Economy and Society, his first use of the word appears in The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des
Kapitalismus, 1904-05). Speaking of the Zinzendorf branch of Pietism, he
remarks that it “glorified the loyal worker who did not seek acquisition, but
12 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 2 (emphasis added).

13 Weber, Economy and Society, eds. Roth and Wittich, p. 216. See also p. 1112. Rudolph Sohm
(1841-1917) was a legal scholar and Protestant church historian.
lived according to the apostolic model, and was thus endowed with the
charisma of the disciples.”14 Reading this remark with our post-Weberian
understanding of charisma in mind, it may strike us as odd that a lowly “loyal
worker” would have even a hint of it, accustomed as we are to thinking of cha-
risma as a quality that sets a person above and apart from such anonymous
and subservient figures. As John Potts explains, Weber’s evocation of the
Christian disciples’ charisma in this remark reflects his study of Sohm’s Outlines
of Church History (Kirchengeschichte im Grundriss, 1894) and, in particular, its
portrayal of the government of the early Christian community.15 In Sohm’s
account, the primitive church was understood to be governed by Christ alone,
his followers knit together “solely through the gifts of grace (χαρίσµατα, charis-
mata,) given by Him.” For this reason, the Greek word ecclesia was well suited
to the early church, for it was an assembly of people “ruled, not by man’s word,
but by the Word of God.”16 As Paul stresses in his first letter to the Corinthians,
each member of the ecclesia has his own gift, and though these gifts are vari-
ous, the same spirit works in them all, for the good of all: “Now there are a
variety of gifts (χαρισµάτων), but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of ser-
vice, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same
God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of
the Spirit for the common good.”17 In the light of Paul’s use of the word
charisma (χαρίσµα), we can see that Weber’s “loyal worker” does not “seek
acquisition” because he is already “endowed.” He sees his work as an expres-
sion of his charisma: that is to say, his God-given gift, or, as Weber puts it
elsewhere, his “life purpose willed by God.”18
In addition, we can see in Paul’s writing that the charismata – the gifts
of grace – constitute the medium through which the Spirit works. Like so
many nodes in a charged network, the gifts establish the ecclesia as a gathering
14 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, 1930
(New York, 1958), p. 178. The first publication of the work was in two issues of the journal
Archiv (1904-05). For an overview of pietism, a Lutheran reform movement, see Hartmut
Lehmann, “Pietism,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, ed. Peter N. Stearns
(Oxford, 2008).
15 Potts, History of Charisma, p. 119. Potts notes that Weber was also influenced by Sohm’s
Kirchenrecht I (1892).
16 Rudolf Sohm, Outlines of Church History, trans. May Sinclair (London, 1904), p. 33. Ecclesia
in Greek means “an assembly of the citizens regularly summoned.” See The Online Liddell-
Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, in Thesaurus Linguae Graecae <http://stephanus.tlg.
uci.edu>, s.v. ἐκκλησία.
17 1 Cor. 12:4-7. See also 1 Cor. 7:7 and Rom. 12:6-8.
18 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 177.
capable of holding and transmitting the beneficial charge of the Spirit, a gath-
ering in which the difference between human and divine is thus at least
partially dissolved. Writing at quite a different time and on a rather different
topic, Jaeger describes the charisma of art in similar terms: that is, as a
“medium” in which “opposites coalesce.” He writes, “[t]he dichotomies of real
and illusion, life and art, so fundamental to the cultic experience of art in the
West, are resolved in the medium of charisma.”19 And just as the gifts of grace
sustain an elevating current in the early Christian community, a work of art,
according to Jaeger, may “operate on the viewer” in such a way that “you live
briefly in its field of forces.”20 Beyond touching on the medial aspect of cha-
risma, Jaeger’s use of the second-person in “you live” serves to bring out the
experiential quality of charisma, a quality that is also implicit in Weber’s
description above of the loyal worker who “lived according to the [charismatic]
apostolic model,” which was so rewarding in itself as to preclude acquisitive
seeking.
Weber clearly understands the Pauline sense of charisma as a divinely given
aptitude that contributes to group cohesion and well-being; how does he arrive
at an idea of it as a specific aptitude for leadership and one, moreover, that sets
a person above his community? A prompt for this shift may also be detected in
the writings of Sohm. While stressing how egalitarian the early church was,
Sohm also speaks of the “divinely gifted teacher,” an individual who would
appear to rank just below the apostles and prophets, according to 1 Corinthians
12:28: “And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets,
third teachers.” The ecclesia “obeys” the words of the gifted teacher, Sohm
asserts, “only if, and so far as, it recognizes therein the Word of God.”21 In this
description of the divinely gifted teacher, we can see a prototype of Weber’s
charismatic leader. Just as Sohm’s “gifted” – that is, charismatic – teacher elicits
obedience to the extent that church members recognize his giftedness – in this
case, his capacity to convey the Word of God – so Weber’s charismatic leader is
only manifest as such to the extent that he attracts followers who recognize
something in him that is extraordinary, which makes him worthy of their devo-
tion. But where for Weber, charisma stems from “a quality of an individual
personality”, for Sohm, it is a function of a person’s ability to convey God’s
Word. On this aspect of Pauline charisma, New Testament scholar James D.G.
Dunn affirms Sohm resoundingly: charisma, he writes, “is not to be confused
with human talent and natural ability”; instead, it is “typically an experience, an

21 Sohm, Outlines of Church History, p. 33.
experience of something being accomplished through me.”22 Putting it in

terms of our metaphor of energy transmission above, Sohm’s charismatic
teacher has the “capacity” to be a conductor – or mediator – of a current that
the community shares.23 By contrast, in the case of Weber’s charismatic leader,
the current of energy flows to him, in the form of his followers’ adulation.
Weber’s charismatic leader is less a conductor than a magnet, as the popular
notion of the “magnetism” of a charismatic person attests.
If Sohm and Weber part ways on the issue of where, exactly, charisma is
located – whether in the charismatic person or in the charismatic community
– Weber’s inheritors part ways with him on the issue of which comes first – or
warrants the closest study – the charismatic individual or his followers, the
magnet or the filings. Especially in work on charisma since the late 1960s,
researchers in the fields of political science, sociology, anthropology, and psy-
chology all tend to focus on followers while characterizing the charismatic
leader as an expression of those followers’ needs and aspirations, thus antici-
pating Jaeger’s assertion that charisma of person is a matter of representation.24
In the vanguard of this new emphasis in the study of charisma were historian
Robert C. Tucker and social anthropologist Peter Worsley, whose independent
publications in 1968 may be seen, in retrospect, as having set the research
agenda for much of the study of charisma of person that has followed. In his
publication, which appeared in a special issue of Daedalus devoted to the topic
of leadership, Tucker argued that in order to understand the sway of charis-
matic leaders, “we must focus attention first upon the followers and their
needs.”25 Worsley struck the same chord in his The Trumpet Shall Sound, add-
ing that looking solely at the “personality” of a charismatic leader “distracts us”
from [his] “social significance as a symbol, a catalyst, a message-bearer.”26 In
this triadic description of the charismatic leader’s significance, Worsley cap-
tures well the complex dynamics of representation, stimulus and response,
and energy transmission that we have already seen at work in the New
Testament notion of charisma and, at least with respect to the stimulus and
response mechanism, in Weber’s concept of it as well. As we shall see, these
22 James D.G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience
of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI, 1975),
p. 255 (emphasis in original).
23 OED, s.v. “capacity.” sense 1.c.
24 For a sketch of the reception of Weber’s writing on charisma before the 1960s, see Potts,
A History of Charisma, p. 131.
25 Tucker, “The Theory of Charismatic Leadership,” p. 742 (emphasis added).
26 Worsley, Peter. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia, Second,
Augmented Edition (New York, 1968), p. xvii.
processes of mediation are also central to the workings of Jaeger’s charisma of

art.
In the latter decades of the 20th century, research on charisma took the idea
of the charismatic person as a symbol and message-bearer further, in effect
reversing its terms by arguing that both symbol and message are creations of
the charismatic’s followers. Writing in 1973, psychologist Irvine Schiffer is
already explaining that act of “creation” in terms of artistic production. The
charismatic leader, Schiffer argues, is a product of a group’s “creative process of
charismatic imaging,” a process that culminates in the group’s “projecting [the
charismatic image] outwards onto a suitable chosen object.”27 Even though
Schiffer sees the group as the prime mover in the making of a charismatic fig-
ure, he still envisions a part for the charismatic himself to play: leader and
follower alike, he contends, are “artists of sorts” participating “in an aesthetic
illusion.”28
While Schiffer’s description of the charismatic phenomenon – with its ref-
erences to imaging, artists, and aesthetic illusion – suggests a kinship between
the creation of a charismatic person and the creation of a work of visual art,
Pierre Bourdieu’s 1987 study of the charisma of prophets implies a likeness
between charisma and the production of literary art. Akin to Sohm’s gifted
teacher, Bourdieu’s prophet is charismatic by virtue of his “prophetic word.”29
But while the gifted teacher mediated the word of God, the prophet, as
Bourdieu sees it, mediates the already present but inarticulate distress or long-
ing of the people, people who become the prophet’s ardent followers precisely
because of his ability to represent their feelings. Bourdieu describes this inter-
action as a semiotic process: the prophet “brings about, in both his discourse
and his person, the meeting of a signifier and a pre-existing signified.”30
Expanding on Bourdieu, we might say that in signifying unspoken feelings and
dreams, thereby arousing a devoted following, the charismatic prophet is like a
poet, who, by presenting readers with a recognizable but previously unarticu-
lated complex of sorrow or joy or desire, may leave them feeling not only
27 Irvine Schiffer, Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (New York, 1973), pp. 17, 19.
28 Schiffer, Charisma, p. 148. Schiffer’s use of the terms “imaging” and “imagery” may be
misleading to readers outside of the field of psychology, where “imagery” may refer to a
range of mental representations. See Andrew M. Colman, “Imagery,” in A Dictionary of
Psychology (Oxford, 2015).
29 Pierre Bourdieu, “Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion,”
trans. by Chris Turner, in Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, eds. Scott Lash and Sam
Whimster (London, 1987), pp. 119-36, at 127.
30 Bourdieu, “Legitimation,” p. 130.
“entranced,” as Shelley described the nightingale poet’s auditors, but also mys-
tically allied with and grateful to the poet him or herself.31
What are the preconditions of the creative acts Schiffer and Bourdieu
describe? They, along with Tucker, Worsley, and other members of the “social
construction of charisma school,” uphold Weber’s view, quoted above, that
followers cleave to a charismatic leader “out of enthusiasm, or of despair and
hope.”32 In this way, Tucker notes that a group’s “acute malaise” predisposes it
to follow a “salvationist character,” and Bryan R. Wilson argues that the “growth
of anxieties and the disruption of normal life” create a “demand” that is met by
a person of “supposed extraordinary supernatural power.”33 These and other
late 20th-century scholars also follow Weber in appreciating that a group’s
distress may take many forms; Weber lists “psychic, physical, economic, ethi-
cal, religious, [and] political.”34 Tucker’s more concrete list runs from such
threats to bodily integrity as “persecution, catastrophes (for example, famine,
drought)” to threats to cultural identity such as “the feelings of oppression in
peoples ruled by foreigners.”35 On the topic of identity, developmental psy-
chologist Erik H. Erikson counts living in an “identity vacuum” as a contributor
to the condition of being “charisma hungry.”36 In speaking of such a range of
preconditions, these writers also support Weber’s contention that charisma is
a phenomenon related to “[a]ll extraordinary needs, i.e. those which transcend
the sphere of everyday economic routines.”37 Such “extraordinary needs” lead
to Wilson’s “demand” for the charismatic leader, to Erikson’s “charisma hun-
ger,” and to Schiffer’s “creative process of charismatic imaging”: all activities
that also uphold Weber’s view that charisma is “the specifically creative revolu-
tionary force of history.”38
31 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” qtd. in Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem
and Fall in Love with Poetry (New York, 1999), p. 14. The title of Hirsch’s book also speaks to
the devotion a poem may inspire.
32 The term “social construction of charisma school” is Potts’s in A History of Charisma, p.
135. See his excellent overview of work in the field as well as a discussion of its detractors,
in particular, Len Oakes, in the same work, pp. 130-36.
33 Tucker, “The Theory of Charismatic Leadership,” p. 743; Bryan R. Wilson, The Noble
Savages: The Primitive Origins of Charisma and Its Contemporary Survival (Berkeley, 1975),
p. 94.
34 Weber, Economy and Society, eds. Roth and Wittich, p. 1112.
35 Tucker, “The Theory of Charismatic Leadership,” p. 744-45.
36 Erik H. Erikson, oral remarks, qtd. in Tucker, “The Theory of Charismatic Leadership,”
p. 745.
37 Weber, Economy and Society, eds. Roth and Wittich, p. 1111 (emphasis in original).
38 Weber, Economy and Society, eds. Roth and Wittich, p. 1117 (emphasis added).
To the extent that charisma is a creative force, it is arguably also a force that
draws upon our faculty of imagination, and here our survey of the reception of
Weber meets up with Jaeger, who writes that one of the effects of charisma of
person is that it stimulates the imagination.39 His conception of the charisma
of art also entails the activation of viewers’ imaginations as it may not only
respond to a viewer’s enthusiasm, despair, or hope but also create visions of an
extraordinary, heightened level of existence. Reference to such elevating and
transporting visions, however, does not appear in the history of the concept of
charisma; to place that aspect of Jaeger’s charisma of art in its larger context,
we must turn to the history of the sublime, for Weber’s writings, however influ-
ential, do not exhaust the sources upon which Jaeger has built his own
approach to charisma. In fact, he may be the first scholar to integrate the phe-
nomena of the sublime, charisma, and the aura.40
The Sublime, Charisma, Aura

Jaeger understands charisma to be a subcategory of the sublime, but embed-
ding medieval charisma within the sublime is an interpretative move that is
beset with challenges. The sublime, a high rhetorical and literary style culti-
vated in antiquity, was specifically examined in a 1st- or 3rd-century CE unfin
ished treatise, On Sublimity (Περί ὕψους, Peri Hupsous).41 Written in Greek and
attributed to the rhetorician Longinus, this treatise was unknown in western
Europe until the 16th century. During the 18th century, modern interpretations
of Longinus transformed his sublime (hupsos) into an influential critical con-
cept in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy.42 Perhaps paralleling the

40 See, however, Joseph W.H. Lough, Weber and the Persistence of Religion: Social Theory,
Capitalism and the Sublime (New York, 2006), who argues that Weber’s adoption of a Neo-
Kantian theory of the sublime prevented him from recognizing the sublime character of
capitalism.
41 Bibliography on the sublime is huge and can only be selective here. In addition to the
studies cited below, we have consulted Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from
Longinus to Kant (Cambridge, 2015); Doran seeks “to provide a detailed and analytical
treatment of the key theories of sublimity” and does so from the perspective “that the
sublime possesses an intrinsic critical function,” pp. 2-3.
42 James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2015), p. 18; Doran, Theory of the
Sublime, p. 8. Caroline van Eck, Stijn Bussels, and Maarten Delbeke, “Introduction,” in
Translations of the Sublime. The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus’
Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre, eds. Van Eck,
Bussels, Delbeke, and Jürgen Pieters (Leiden, 2012), pp. 1-10, argue at pp. 1-2 for a
15th-century revival of the sublime and contend that its impact extended beyond rhetoric
and literature to embrace the arts, architecture, and the theater.
historical diffusion of Longinus’s disquisition, modern scholarship on the

Middle Ages has tended to be equivocal about the question of the sublime,
often concluding that its apparent absence in medieval culture is in character
with the alleged mediocrity of the period.43 The revivification of a medieval
sublime by Jaeger is integral to his conception of charismatic art.44
Jaeger’s approach to the sublime claims roots in Longinus, but a Longinus
interpreted by a historiography that tends to downplay the Peri Hupsous’s sta-
tus as a technical treatise for teaching the sublime style, rather considering the
work to be an investigation of the sublime as a transcendent quality present in
writing.45 This shift of emphasis, from the technical brilliance of a sublime text
to the sublimity encountered in written discourse originated with Nicolas
Boileau’s French translation, Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le dis-
cours, traduit du grec de Longin (1674). Boileau transformed Longinus’s sublime
style, which belonged to language as an objective quality of discourse, into the
sublime, conceived as an independent transcendent essence, expressed in and
through language to be sure, but expressible by other arts as well.46 Boileau’s
redefinition of the sublime was immensely influential and, relayed by the cod-
ifications of Edmund Burke and Kant, still carries much weight in current
scholarship as an aesthetic concept associated with a particular experience of
43 Paul Binski, “Reflections on the ‘Wonderful Height and Size’ of Gothic Great Churches
and the Medieval Sublime,” in Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art,
Architecture, Literature, Music, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger (New York, 2010), pp. 129-56, at
pp. 129-30.
44 In his edited volume, Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics, Jaeger seeks to
show that the Middle Ages knew a sublime that had no reference to Longinus. The project
has been welcomed by Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, pp. 18-19 but has also provoked
disagreement, Mary Carruthers, “Terror, Horror and the Fear of God, or, Why There Is No
Medieval Sublime,” in ‘Truthe is the beste’: A Festschrift in Honour of A.V.C. Schmidt, eds.
Nicolas Jacobs and Gerald Morgan (Oxford, 2014), pp. 17-36, and below at note 68.
45 Timothy M. Costelloe, “The Sublime: A Short Introduction to a Long History,” in The
Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Costelloe (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 1-7, at p. 4. By
contrast, Doran, Theory of the Sublime, pp. 6, 103, sees in Boileau “the first interpreter to
truly understand Longinus’s theory of sublimity,” and advocates a philosophical reading
of Longinus while denouncing the limits of a rhetorical interpretation of Peri Hupsous.
46 Costelloe, “The Sublime,” pp. 4, 7. Éva Madeleine Martin, “The ‘Prehistory’ of the Sublime
in Early Modern France: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,” in Costelloe, The Sublime, pp.
77-101. The essays gathered in van Eck et al., Translations of the Sublime investigate pre-
Boileau early editions and translations of Longinus in England, Italy, and the
“Introduction,” pp. 3-4 notes that neither Boileau’s French translation nor Burke’s Inquiry
superseded older versions of Longinus’s treatise, which continued to be consulted.
art, nature, and the self.47 Boileau’s neologism, however hermeneutically fruit-
ful, nevertheless rests upon a reading of Longinus that remains controversial to
this day.48 Interpretation of the Peri Hupsous is complicated: the surviving trea-
tise is fragmentary, and the attribution to Longinus, though widely accepted, is
still debated. Furthermore, the treatise does not fit neatly within the frame-
work of didactic technical writing on rhetoric,49 while Longinus propounded
no straightforward definitions of the sublime, offering only oblique descrip-
tions.50
Scholars who resist the transformation of the ancient sublime into an
essence, argue that for Longinus sublimity pertained to an elevated style of
rhetorical expression and did not extend to the visual arts, which were to be
judged by other criteria.51 They contend that Longinus situated his work within
the tradition of didactic and technographic exposition of rhetoric; that he was
primarily providing practical advice for achieving greatness in discourse so as
to produce a specific type of literary effect.52 They emphasize his characteriza-
tion of language as a light for thoughts and arguments.53 They quote his
statements on the effectiveness of purely stylistic devices,54 his examples of
sentences that achieved sublimity purely through sentence-construction,55
and his allusions to the sublime as a discursive excellence that secured the
everlasting fame of great writers while provoking an astonished and over-
whelming ecstasy in the souls of experienced literary readers. Longinus’s
47 Van Eck, Bussels, and Delbeke, “Introduction,” pp. 2-3. Doran, Theory of the Sublime, p. 6
argues for Boileau’s significant contribution to the concept of the sublime but against the
notion that he invented Longinus’s sublime. Doran considers rather that Boileau truly
understood Longinus; see above at notes 41 and 45 for Doran’s position that interpretations
of Longinus cannot rest upon a rhetorical reading of the Peri Hupsous. Studies opposing
this view are cited at notes 46, 48-49, 52-53.
48 Van Eck, Bussels, Delbeke, “Introduction,” p. 3, discusses the ways that 18th-century
aesthetics shaped the interpretation of the sublime as described by Longinus and his
early modern translations. Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, describes the “current biases” that
affect present-day understanding of the sublime in antiquity, pp. 7-18.
49 Malcolm Heath, “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime,” in Costelloe, The Sublime, pp. 11-23,
at pp. 15-16.
50 Heath, “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime,” in Costelloe, The Sublime, p. 12.
51 Heath, “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime,” p. 14.
52 Heath, “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime,” p. 17; Heath, “Longinus on Sublimity,”
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 45 (1999), 43-74, at p. 59.
53 Heath, “Longinus on Sublimity,” p. 60: “such language is as it were a light for the thoughts
and arguments.”
54 Heath, “Longinus on Sublimity,” p. 62.
55 Heath, “Longinus on Sublimity,” p. 62; Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, pp. 132, 133-34.
sublime is more than convincing: it is compelling and irresistible.56 However it

seems to require education, moral stature, and expertise on the part of all
involved for its grandeur to have full effect. Yet Longinus did also posit the uni-
versal impact of genuine sublimity, universal consent being for him the
ultimate marker of truth.57
Scholars maintaining that the sublime in Peri Hupsous is rhetorical are
aware that Longinus identified five sources for the magnification of style:
“thought, emotion, figures of thought and speech, diction [...], and composi-
tion [...].”58 Particularly with reference to thought as the first-mentioned factor
for elevating speech, they stress that the great thought at work in Longinus’s
literary sublime consists primarily in the ability to balance in discourse the
selection, combination, representation, and amplification of components so
that the resultant phrases will grip and transport their readers.59 For Longinus,
“thought in discourse and its expression are for the most part mutually
implicated.”60 He even questioned whether expression devoid of great thought
could achieve sublimity and concluded his consideration of Demosthenes’s
Marathon Oath with an assertion that in this text no thought could have
achieved sublimity independently of expression.61
It is from Longinus’s list of the five sources of sublimity that many interpret-
ers, in the wake of Boileau, have come to consider that his Peri Hupsous was not
about a category of style but concerned with transcendence instead.62 Since
Peri Hupsous shows Neoplatonist tendencies and discusses the sublime as a
human desire to reach “near to the greatness of the mind of God,”63 they raise
this aspiration for greatest things to the status of a sine qua non condition for

57 Heath, “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime,” p. 13; Paul Binski in this volume locates the
possibility of artistic charisma in the in-between between patterns of elite education and
models of artifactual style.
59 Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, p. 69.
60 Cited by Heath, “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime,” p. 19, and see Heath’s further analysis
at p. 22.
62 For a pithy and articulate presentation of the position that the currency of the modern
concept of sublimity cannot rest upon an understanding of the Peri Hupsous as a
rhetorical disquisition of the grand style, and therefore depends upon an interpretation
of the Peri Hupsous as the source for featuring the sublime as an aesthetic and philo
sophical concept, see Doran, Theory of the Sublime, pp. 27-47, 58-81, 97-99, 110-14. As
discussed earlier in this essay, a strong scholarly trend attributes to Boileau’s reading of
Longinus the conceptualization of the sublime in aesthetic and philosophical terms.
63 Cited in Heath, “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime,” p. 23.
sublimity,64 thus situating both the modes (high-mindedness, great thought,

noble passions) and the effects (ecstasy, self-transcendence) of the sublime in
the subject. This notion of the sublime thus originates in the subjectivity of the
great, and affects the subjectivity of its audience directly. No longer a dynamic
logic of expression that sets forces into motion,65 the sublime here becomes an
essential component of style, a revelation of a transcendental thought or being
which, animating representation, produces rapturous emotion. Art discloses,
in a flash of epiphany, that grandeur that imprints its sublime quality.66 From
having been understood as a powerful capacity of expression,67 the sublime
comes to be judged primarily by its effects within texts and on readers, as if its
own reality were an ideal, not of this world.
Interpretations of the Peri Hupsous’s legacy, thus, have been divided about
the very nature of hupsos – whether it is a feature of rhetoric, or an un-locat-
able force – and about the degree to which subjectivity or craft, nature or art,
may spark a sublime experience. Such interpretations are nevertheless unani-
mous in agreeing that the sublime produces elation, inspiration, transportation,
and self-transcendence in beholders.
The philosophical and Neoplatonic Longinus has appeal for medievalists.
His sublime condones religious transcendence as well as a belief in human-
kind’s natural vocation to transcend sensible limits. It also implied the reality
of the lofty powers (both divine and human) operating through representa-
tional media capable of generating transformative experiences of the grand,
the marvelous, and the supernatural.68 Such a sublime rendered sublime; it
64 A summary of the debate can be found in Heath, “Longinus on Sublimity,” pp. 60-62.
66 Costelloe, “The Sublime,” p. 5. We follow here Samuel Holt Monk’s reading of Boileau in
his The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1935), pp.
29-32: “Boileau’s terms … indubitably tell us that the sublime, apart from sublime style,
must be a great thought and that it must awaken strong emotions in the reader or the
audience. This is the new, the eighteenth-century, sublime for which Boileau is
responsible.” See a criticism of Monk’s reading in Doran, Theory of the Sublime, p. 2 and
pp. 99-100. C. Stephen Jaeger, “Richard of St. Victor and the Medieval Sublime,” in
Magnificence and the Sublime, pp. 157-78, at pp. 158-62, stresses agreement between
Longinus, Augustine, and Richard of St. Victor, presenting a Longinus for whom “the
sources of the Sublime are, first, grand conceptions, then forceful and enthusiastic
passions … Matters of formulation are secondary … dignified and elevated word-
arrangement derive from art.”
68 Carruthers, “Terror, Horror and the Fear of God,” contends that the Middle Ages did not
know the sublime beyond its obvious meaning as a rhetorical device. She argues however
for the existence of emotional effects that are associated with experiences of sublimity,
was an intersubjective dynamic that communicated high-mindedness and was

therefore also didactic.69
In surveying this theoretical history of the sublime within which Jaeger has
developed his reading of Longinus’s hupsos, it becomes apparent that Boileau’s
realist and philosophical reading readily accommodates medieval understand-
ings and experiences of grandeur, wonder, reality, pedagogy, subjectivity, and
religious rapture. One may indeed wonder if Boileau’s reading of the sublime
might not in fact have been informed by an understanding of such medieval
experiences, which were not confined to texts alone but occurred in the natu-
ral and artifactual world.70 This possibility, which would argue in favor of a
medieval contribution to a post-Longinian understanding of the sublime,71
becomes more convincing if the Peri Hupsous is read as a late antique rhetori-
cal treatise. In that case, it is possible to trace, through 15th-century (and later)
translations and interpretations of the Peri Hupsous, accretions that were gen-
erated by a medieval search for “the greatness of wonder,”72 which lifted
experience beyond the sensible world.73
Our interest in Jaeger’s treatment of the medieval sublime centers on his
conflation of charisma with sublimity. Whereas the sublime has fairly recently
entered the orbit of Jaeger’s scholarship, charisma has long been a focus of his
such as terror, but shows that such effects were unaesthetic, senseless, transporting
beyond the senses. From this perspective, there was no medieval sublime. Beth
Williamson, in her judicious analysis of the limited ways that the concept of the sublime
pertains to medieval art, concludes that art was sublime when it elicited “transcendent
experience of the divine”: “How Magnificent Was Medieval Art?,” in Magnificence and the
Sublime, ed. Jaeger, pp. 243-62, especially at pp. 252-62.
69 Jaeger, “Richard of St. Victor,” p. 166; Dolan, Theory of the Sublime, p. 81.
70 See the essays gathered in Jaeger, ed., Magnificence and the Sublime.
71 One must certainly conceive that whatever sublime the Middle Ages might have
contributed, it was a sublime without Longinus, Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, pp. 18-25.
72 Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Major [The Mystical Ark], cited by Porter, Sublime in
Antiquity, p. 22.
73 See the essays gathered in Translations of the Sublime and in Magnificence and the Sublime.
Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, pp. 21-23, attributes the appearance of a Longinian sublime in
Augustine’s writings to contemporary traditions of the sublime that existed and survived
independently of Longinus. He also notes that such an explanation cannot easily account
for later Christian writers whose expressions of the soul’s ravishment through yearning
for higher things are very similar to Longinus’s, although Longinus was unavailable to
them. Porter concludes that both the experience and the conception of the sublime could
occur without reference to Longinus, who should be seen as a witness and contributor to
an ongoing flow of sublime traditions. At any rate, our point here is that medieval authors
did develop a distinct, Christian sublime in thought and writing, which may well have
influenced both modern interest in and interpretations of Longinus.
attention. In his Envy of Angels (1994), he presented an 11th-century culture of

charisma centered on the cultured body as a work of art capable of inspiring
emulation and of didactically forming disciplined bodies. Both personal and
exemplary, such charisma was communicable and transformative of raw mate-
rial into talented human beings.74 Jaeger observed, however, that by the 12th
century the charisma of human presence had become susceptible to textual
representation, so that individuals were primed to realize that texts, and other
lifeless forms of representation could, if skillfully crafted, both embody heroic
and exceptional characters and compel admiration and imitation.75 In
Enchantment, Jaeger further investigates the themes he developed in The Envy
of Angels, but on a wider cultural scale extending from the world of Homer to
that of Woody Allen. His essay in the present volume compares a charismatic
personality (St. Francis) capable of being textually represented, to charismatic
texts that had been authored by a charismatic figure (St. Bernard) whose per-
sonal charisma failed to come through in stories written about him by others.
Bernard’s own writings, however, are charismatic because, though not bio-
graphical, they present an unmediated encounter with his personality infused
within his sublime style.76 It is in such circumstances that the overlap of
Longinus’s sublimity with Jaeger’s charisma would be expected, since
Longinus’s sublime can affect audiences through such techniques as style.
Jaeger, however, sees charisma as rooted in physical presence and character,
and his concept of charisma encapsulates a sublime intrinsic to its effects,
namely the ecstasy and alteration of the self. There might perhaps have been
here an opportunity to consider how Longinus’s technical approach to sublim-
ity of style would have helped to produce a theoretical underpinning for
analyzing the effective expression of charisma by art.
Jaeger’s charismatic art is necessarily representational, rendered hyper-
mimetic by the appeal of that which it represents, typically a charismatic
person.77 One is reminded of a late medieval conception of the term sublime
74 Jaeger, The Envy of Angels. Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe 950-1200
(Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 7-8, 39-40, 77-78.
75 Jaeger, Envy of Angels, pp. 191-92, where the author gives a definition of charismatic art.
76 Jaeger’s essay in this volume expands his remarks on Bernard’s ‘autography,’ that is, his
ability to charge narratives with his own charisma without describing himself, Enchant
ment, pp. 145-46.
77 Jaeger asks of the Christ Pantocrator at St. Catherine Monastery, Mount Sinai: “What need
do the realism and verisimilitude in this portrait satisfy? … What is important here is that
it is not mere verisimilitude that is at work …, but the magnetism of an extraordinary
personality present in an extraordinary physiognomy.” Enchantment, p. 110 and fig. 8, and
p. 122 for similar conclusions about the hyper-mimesis of icons.
as an alchemical operation that transformed a solid thing into a higher natural

form.78 As with alchemy, the operation of reciprocal mimesis – between living
characters and their inanimate representations further capable of prompting
imitation by entranced beholders – tends to remain mysterious in Jaeger’s
Enchantment. The primary title of his book, Enchantment, indeed suggests an
exploration of charismatic art by consideration of the magical fascination it
exerts upon viewers. The actual transfer of charisma from person to object is
explained (away) by hyper-mimesis, while the artifactual embodiment of the
living reality of a person is inferred from the fact that charismatic art blurs the
line between empirical reality and fiction, producing the enchanting illusion
of a higher yet attainable reality. Because of its primary situation in emotional
reactions, charisma seems principally to be a matter of subjectivity, that of the
charismatic persons whose self-presentation and performance aesthetically
display their extraordinary characters, as well as that of their enchanted fol-
lowers. Jaeger’s charisma of art seems fundamentally affective, measured by
the beholder’s stirred perception and imagination. The ability of art to be char-
ismatic, remains rooted in the subject’s acts of perception, and as such many
additional factors that may contribute to the phenomenon remain to be
explored.
Jaeger’s concept of the aura reinforces the primacy of a beholder’s subjectiv-
ity still further. Well aware of the decades of analysis devoted to Walter
Benjamin’s celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Re
production,” Jaeger follows another lead, Benjamin’s essay on Charles Baude
laire, to articulate his own definition of aura as a diaphanous halo of imaginative
and commemorative associations an object triggers in the mind of a viewer.79
As Jaeger has it, aura truly exists only in the mind of the beholder, who never-
theless projects back the aura onto the object of its activation, which is then
perceived as auratic in and of itself.80 Aura thus overlaps with charisma, both
being rooted in a subjective perception or collective consciousness, though
without aura, there is no charisma.81 Aura therefore is the catalyst of charisma,
78 Costelloe, “The Sublime,” p. 3.

80 Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” Narrating Charisma,
special issue of New German Critique, 114 (2011), 17-34, at pp. 21-22; Jaeger, Enchantment,
pp. 130-31, on the auratic character of relics and its reliance upon the visible aura of
reliquaries, and pp. 132-33: concluding remarks in which Jaeger compares the mimetic
icon, which transmits sanctity by charisma, to the memento relic, which does so by aura.
81 Eva Horn, “Introduction,” Narrating Charisma, special issue of New German Critique 114
(2011), 1-16, at p. 16; Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma,” p. 17, points out that the two categories of
charisma and aura have never been jointly considered despite their relatedness.
a property held by a person, a style, or any medium and its entrancing recogni-
tion by an individual or group’s reception.82 A product of a viewer’s imagina-
tion, aura forms around all sorts of things; charisma, on the other hand,
requires a person, who radiates toward an auratically susceptible beholder.
Human bodies and subjectivity are critical to Jaeger’s conception of the inte-
grated operation of aura, charisma, and enchantment.
Enchantment. Charismatic Art, Agency, Materiality

In Enchantment, Jaeger considers the role of literary plots and artifacts for the
construction and transmission of charisma, as well as the representational
qualities of works of art which, magnifying the persons or worlds they repre-
sent, are capable of lifting their viewers beyond the natural human scope of
their daily lives.83 Jaeger’s commitment to reveal charisma’s aesthetic pro-
cesses supports an argument about the power of art to aggrandize, to shape a
hyper-reality, to impact human thought and behavior.84 As such, Enchantment
engages developing trends in art history that consider works of art as possess-
ing qualities and capacities of living beings.85 As we have seen, however, Jaeger
eschews a systematic tracking of the means by which art produces charismatic
effects, preferring to infer charisma from a work’s reception.86 Our volume
seeks to counterbalance Jaeger’s primary focus on reaction by considering the
performance of charismatic art via its artifactual modes. We do not posit quali-
ties inherent in the artwork, but we do complicate its representational strategy
by drawing attention to a network of interactions particularly among its physi-
cal components, such as technicity, composition, dazzling arrangement of
materials, inner dynamics of form and matter, tendencies for particular situa-
tional locations, any active combination of which may enthrall.87 Artifacts
create settings that trigger cognitive and emotional reactions to be sure, but
they also generate direct physical engagement and stimulate practices that
play an important role in transformative experiences. By examining both
action and reaction as actions, we emphasize the multi-faceted agency of char-
ismatic occurrences, querying the relationship between art and beholder so as
to identify the multidirectional intermediary axes of relations between them.
82 Eva Horn, “Introduction,” pp. 7, 9, 11, 16.

83 Jaeger, Enchantment, passim; see also his “Aura and Charisma,” p. 18.
84 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 5 of the introduction, where he acknowledges the influence of
W.J.T Mitchell, Alfred Gell, and David Freedberg. The power of images is further analyzed
by David Morgan, Images at Work. The Material Culture of Enchantment (Oxford, 2018).
85 See also Binski’s essay in this volume.
87 As famously argued by Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment
of Technology,” Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics (1992), 40-63.
Charisma, in this volume, transports and translates both artifacts and behold
ers;88 both reciprocally exercise agency and endure metamorphosis. Agency is
traditionally considered an attribute of persons, and is controversially extended
to the inanimate world.89 Yet when agency, defined as the capacity to cause, is
distinguished from intentionality, a psychological human trait, it becomes pos-
sible to conceive that, in its extraordinary effect, charismatic art has agency,
and not only as a mimetic mediator of personal charisma or a crystallizer of
aura.90 It is to the study of the modalities of this particular agency that the
present volume is devoted.
Charismatic Art
Audiences
Jaeger, as we have seen, argues that evidence of a work’s widespread appeal
validates its charisma. For this reason, his study of charisma of art entails first
and foremost a study of viewers and of reception, and the authors of all the
essays in this volume highlight the popular renown of their objects of study.
Indeed, taken together, these objects make a hit parade of some of the most
well-known works of medieval art, not to mention the human figures they rep-
resent: from Andrew Romig’s study of the biography of Charlemagne (d. 814)
by Einhard (d. 840), to Jacqueline Jung’s study of the Wise and Foolish Virgins
of Magdeburg Cathedral, to Andrey Egorov’s study of statues of the Nine
Worthies, to name only three. What was it about these audiences that made
them respond to these works in such numbers and what did they find in them
that was so attractive? With respect to their characteristics and sensibilities,
the audiences discussed in this volume vary widely: from Joseph Ackley’s
church-goers dazzled by the sight of a winged altarpiece opened to reveal its
gilded reliquaries to Lynsey McCulloch’s savvy theater audiences enjoying the
enchantment of seeing through the enchantment of automata. Similarly, in
examining such audience responses, our authors vary widely with respect to
88 The concept of translation is loosely borrowed here from Bruno Latour, Reassembling the
Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005); We Have Never Been
Modern (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
89 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998), pp. 16-21, 66; Daniel
Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, 2005), p. 11; Carl Knappet, Thinking through Material
Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia, 2005), p. 22.
90 Knappet, Thinking through Material Culture, pp. 22-24.
their views regarding where exactly, between art object and art viewer, the cha-
risma of a work of art lies.
In Jaeger’s view, a state of need coupled with aspiration makes readers and
viewers especially receptive to the spell of a work of art.91 In the essays col-
lected here, this all-important mixture of psychological need and aspiration
often pertains to matters of identity and recognition within a context of some
form of redemption a work of art seems to proffer. The charisma of Eric
Gustafson’s Franciscan space, for instance, is grounded in the laity’s yearning
for a liturgical space that fostered intimacy with the praying friars and pro-
moted a sense of spiritual ascent toward God. Paroma Chatterjee’s spellbind-
ing classical statues served to differentiate the educated elites of Constantinople,
who perceived their wondrous sway, from the brutish Latin crusaders, who
could not. In Gavin Richardson’s psychoanalytical analysis, Thomas Hoccleve’s
Tale of Jonathas redeems Hoccleve (c.1368-1426) himself. The charismatic force
here was self-reflexive: the poet responded to the tale’s allure in translating it
and that very process transformed him into the recipient of the redemptive
effect of what Jaeger calls “life writing.”92 In the examples of Andrew Romig’s
Carolingian biography and Jaeger’s Franciscan hagiography, the projection of
valor, beauty, virtue, and humility exerts a magnetic pull on beholders, per-
suading them to imitate the greater model. The brief openings of winged altar-
pieces described by Ackley offered tantalizing glimpses of elevated dimensions,
thus fulfilling a desire both for extra-ordinary experience and a heightened
sense of corporate identity.
To the extent that audiences respond to charismatic art on the basis of their
hopes and dreams, hopes and dreams that may flame all the more brightly for
having been awakened from states of privation, charismatic art entails certain
forms of audience engagement and suppresses others. Audiences who respond
to the charisma of a work of art tend to engage with its surface rather than its
depth since they are drawn to imitate rather than to interpret it. In Enchantment,
Jaeger writes that the question viewers put to this kind of art is not ‘What does
it mean?’ but rather, ‘How must I act to be like Gawain, Tristan, or Lancelot, Jesus
or Buddha?’ He insists that meaning, interpretation, and hermeneutics – the
apparatus of commentary inherited from Western exegetical tradition – are
minor in the face of charismatic force; they are an intellectual charade played
behind or above the surface drama of authority and influence.93 Many authors
in this volume have this kind of audience engagement in mind in discerning
91 Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 15-22.

92 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 149. See also his essay in this volume.
the aspects of a work of art that may be subject to charismatological analysis.94

In this way, Ackley suggests that the symbolic meanings of silver and gold not-
withstanding, his audiences were likely moved primarily by these precious
metals’ physical brightness. Similarly, Jung focuses on the facial expressions of
the Wise and Foolish Virgins of Magdeburg as the sculptural innovation that
would have made these Virgins charismatic compared to other instances of the
motif that were only didactic. Again, Egorov argues that the gazes of viewers
encountering the Nine Worthies of Mechelen would have been drawn less to
their coats of arms, which register their historical significance, than to the
gazes these figures seem to return.
Given an understanding of the charisma of art as an art of surfaces, one
might conclude that an educated, interpretive approach to it would miss the
point entirely, would break the spell. According to other authors in this vol-
ume, however, charisma of art is not so fragile. In Binski’s view, audiences did
not respond to the crafted surfaces of Gothic art with either emotion or with a
desire to emulate. From the reactions such art caused, such as the awakening
of charitable impulses, Binski concludes that Gothic statuary operated at the
intersection of pleasurable experience and meaning. Whereas for Jaeger, criti-
cal judgment kills enchantment,95 for Binski, the experience of wonder and
the apprehension of significance are inseparable aspects of viewers’ engage-
ments with works of Gothic art such as the Lady Chapel at Ely. Perceptions of
the significance of a work of Gothic art would spring from its viewers’ educa-
tion. Education is also a key factor in Chatterjee’s study of the projected
audiences of De signis by Byzantine chronicler Nicetas Choniates (d. 1217),
according to whom only those viewers endowed with rhetorical and historical
sophistication were susceptible to the living, spellbinding quality of the classi-
cal statuary that adorned the city of Constantinople. Yet to be susceptible to
charisma did not mean, for this audience, to be swept away by overwhelming
emotion; instead, it meant willingly acquiescing to the emotions of admiration
and awe while also retaining the critical distance necessary for recognizing an
artwork’s historical significance, thereby investing it with meaning as well as
wonder. It is this level of emotional and cognitive refinement that Choniates
deploys as a shibboleth to distinguish the people of Constantinople as ideal
94 Jaeger created a neologism that receives two spellings in this volume. Whereas he coined
the word charismatalogy, in keeping with the word charismata, to designate the study of
charisma, the editors and contributors adopted the term charismatology, following the
Oxford English Dictionary which has -ology as a suffix for an academic discipline.
95 Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma,” p. 34.
viewers of its statuary from the Latin crusaders, whose gross ignorance ren-
dered them impervious to its aesthetic and historical emanations. Blinded by
their lack of education, the Latin conquerors of Constantinople had no com-
punction about sacking the city and purloining its art, turning a timeless
historical fabric into booty.
Certain characteristics of audiences thus acted as filters, screening them
from charisma’s power. In Byzantium, an inadequate education was a bar to
experiencing charisma; in the Carolingian world studied by Romig, the oppo-
site situation prevailed: there, the desire to resist charisma – to throw up one’s
own screen against it – was a mark of wisdom. In this way, in his De imagine
Tetrici (829, On the Statue of Tetricus), Walahfrid Strabo (808/809-49) mused
over a statuary group centered on Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths
(454-526), which had enthralled Charlemagne to the point of having it installed
in Aachen. Romig’s reading of the poem points to the charismatic effect the
statue had on Charlemagne but also draws attention to Strabo’s denunciation
of Charlemagne’s enchantment as a form of idolatry. As the poem continues,
Strabo attempts to shield Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, against the influ-
ence of such art, asserting that it provided a false model of kingship.
Thus, some of the audiences analyzed in this volume’s essays, though
acknowledging the impact of charisma, proved insensitive or resistant to it.
That audiences’ reactions can fall short of enchantment raises a crucial ques-
tion concerning the locus and operations of charismatic force, a point to which
we shall return.96
Effects
We began our discussion of the audiences of charismatic art by noting that
their large size is their single shared characteristic and also the single best vali-
dation of a work’s charisma. As we turn to the effects of charismatic art, we
return to this statement to note its logical implication: the same widespread
response that validates the charisma of a work of art also constitutes the pri-
mary effect of charismatic art, for it is only in the hearts and minds and bodies
of those large audiences that charismatic effects are felt. Further differentia-
tion of charismatic effects is a matter of identifying the varieties of response
that a work induces. In Jaeger’s view, charismatic art registers its effects in
readers’ or viewers’ sense of intoxication and enchantment, in their urge
toward devotion or imitation, in their coalescing around a cause or group iden-
tity, in their flights of imagination, and in their rapt participation in a
heightened life, a life that seems to proceed in a realm between life and art, one
96 See below in this introduction, Charisma: A Face-Lift.

whose real brilliance is a function of its admixture of illusion.97 In all of these

ways – again, in Jaeger’s view – charisma of art is like romantic love: though in
most cases its beguiling force is for the good, it may also render a person vul-
nerable to such negative effects as seduction, obsession, disillusionment, and
even hatred.98
The focused and historically contextualized studies in this volume contrib-
ute new examples of the beneficent effects of charismatic art but also present
several cases of its provoking negative attitudes or behaviors. Jaeger’s and
Hardy’s essays both deal with works that expand the field of energy surround-
ing a charismatic individual – be it Francis of Assisi or the king-emperor
Sigismund of Luxemburg (reigned 1411-37) – thus inspiring devoted, loyal, and
enduring followings. A trio of essays examines aspects of church architecture,
sculpture, and furnishings that have the effect of intensifying lay devotion. In
Ackley’s, recurrent opening of winged altar-pieces to reveal tiers of gilded fig-
ural reliquaries draws the laity to an experience of a higher plane, inspiring
them both to worship and to give. In Gustafson’s, the order of architectural
space in Franciscan churches shepherds both the faithful and the friars into a
single praying body, thus also granting the laity the experience of a realm apart
from their ordinary lives. In Binski’s, the wondrous surfaces of Gothic art also
impel viewers to strengthen the church with gifts. In another group of essays,
charismatic art elevates its viewers by nurturing virtue or refined habits of
mind: Jung’s Wise and Foolish Virgins positioned at a portal to the Magdeburg
Cathedral inspire repentance as churchgoers enter and empathy as they
depart. Egorov’s figures of the Nine Worthies model virtuous civic leadership
among burgomasters. McCulloch’s automata reward curiosity among theater-
goers. Choniates’s statuary, discussed in Chatterjee’s essay, at once calls forth
and ennobles the educated sensibilities of the citizens of Constantinople. To
the extent that Choniates arouses disgust in readers toward the Latins, he also
demonstrates that the purported charisma of art may be used for divisive pur-
poses. While in Chatterjee’s essay this dark side of charisma is implicit, other
essays address negative charismatic effects explicitly, all of which have to do
with improprieties of gazing that a charismatic work of art may compel,
whether it be a work of statuary, as in Romig’s essay, or a spectacle of misogy-
nistic revenge, as in Richardson’s.
While it is possible to document that all of the works of art examined in
these essays had the primary charismatic effect of generating a robust audi-
ence response, the particular nuances of that response must, in most cases be
97 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 22 and passim.

inferred. Our authors could not avail themselves of any collections of inter-
views with medieval viewers and readers to match a volume like Starlust: The
Secret Life of Fans, which was so useful to Jaeger in Enchantment for describing
a range of charismatic effects beyond the sheer fact of a work’s striking a chord
among a large group of people.99 Lacking first-person testimonials to these
works’ effects, our authors take what documentation they have of a work’s
appeal as a starting point and infer a more nuanced understanding of its char-
ismatic effects by examining the needs, aspirations, or filters its audience
would have brought to an encounter with the work. Such considerations of
audiences and charismatic effects lay the groundwork for the research that is
ultimately of most interest to our contributors: the task of identifying the par-
ticular ways that a work of art achieved its charismatic impact.
Modalities
Once the charismatic effect of a work is attested, charismatological analysis
necessarily turns to the work of art itself to elucidate the mechanisms by which
it produces that effect.100 Recurrently in Jaeger’s work and in the essays col-
lected here, such operative devices effectively redraw and even blur the
boundaries between life and art, between presence and representation. The
representational mode of charismatic art focuses on reality by way of mimesis
and then casts a glow on it – makes it more real than real – through its use of
hyper-mimesis. Even while positing that the charisma of texts and objects orig-
inates in the living bodies they represent in this mimetic-hyper-mimetic mode,
our contributors also advance the idea that the charismatic flow may at times
run in the opposite direction: that is, the force of enchantment may spring
from a work of art and flow toward the living person it represents.101 For
instance, texts and images referring to Sigismund, discussed in Hardy’s essay,
enlivened his persona, the personal image he projected. Hardy’s essay as well
as Romig’s and Egorov’s thus demonstrate that a central task of charismatology
is to apprehend the circulation of charismatic forces among individuals, texts,
and objects. As for the channeling of that force, the studies gathered here dem-
onstrate the ways that narrative, ekphrasis, commensurability, sculptural
technique, non-figural materials (gold, silver, gems), technological expertise,
and audience participation may all be modes that mediate the flow of cha-
risma, thus also serving as conduits of charismatic power.

101 Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 134-36, 160-61 discussing the ways that charismatic art can
compete with its models and with nature.
Given the importance of mimesis for charismatic art, one might assume
that cleverly mechanized statuary would be its highest form. McCulloch’s essay
on automata argues otherwise, though. As crafted entities that parodied life
rather than actually being lifelike, automata tended to arouse beholders’ curi-
osity. In McCulloch’s argument, the mystique surrounding wondrous animation
produced a fascination with the technological substructure of this phenome-
non. Mystique alone would produce unintelligibility, which in turn would
disenchant. Disenchantment, in McCulloch’s analysis, was not a matter of
demystification but of an obfuscating esotericism that prevented appreciation
of technological wonder. Similarly, Egorov’s study of the statues of the Worthies,
and Binski’s exegesis of Alfred Gell’s enchantment of technology102 suggest
that viewers’ apprehension of the mechanical achievements responsible for
amazing phenomena actually contributed to the force of their impact rather
than detracting from it. It was not their eerie identity with life that made mov-
ing statues fascinating, but rather an appeal based upon the audience’s
complicity in acknowledging the mechanical expertise capable of transform-
ing inertia into movement. In such cases, art is rendered charismatic by a
particular type of reception that derived from a critical appreciation of facture.
As Binski argues, and as Jaeger shows in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux
(d. 1153), technology (or rhetoric) can mediate artistic effects to produce
responses that range from overriding emotions to critical judgments. At the
same time, to the extent that they provoke excitement, curiosity, and a thirst to
know and to understand the nature of the prodigy, works of technological vir-
tuosity stand as cases that prove by contrast that what sets charismatic art
apart from fascinating art is its projection of lifelikeness, whether veristic or
idealized – mimetic or hyper-mimetic – inspiring audiences’ veneration and
dreams of self-improvement through imitation. However, for Binski, who chal-
lenges the notion of charismatic art, the attractive beauty of the sinuous and
insinuating forms of Gothic statues is a technique deployed to engineer think-
ing. Their gestural bodies are rhetorical, not mimetic; they persuade but they
do not represent. This is a point also made by McCulloch. Binski and McCulloch
thus complicate both Jaeger’s concept of charismatic art as essentially mimetic
and his notion that the characteristic response to it is emotional and
imitative.
While most of the volume’s essays touch in some way on mimesis, Ackley’s
and Jung’s essays deal most directly with issues of mimesis and hyper-mimesis.
102 Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment,” pp. 40-63.

Jung comments upon the trajectory of mimesis in medieval sculpture, from its
absence in the early Middle Ages when statues were associated with real bod-
ies (reliquaries, tomb effigies) to the emergence of a statuary art no longer
affiliated with dead bodies that endeavored to simulate the movements and
beauty of the living. Ackley’s analysis of late medieval, German figural reli-
quary statuettes in polychrome wood and precious metal shows that mimesis
of the living could occur in the context of relics. Jung is sensitive to the context
of mimetic representation, while Ackley points out that mimesis operates
along a spectrum, with its processes modulated by the very mediation of the
materials a statue might contain (relics), and by those used (metal, wood) in
their making.
Both Jung and Ackley thus introduce variables within the concept and prac-
tice of mimesis, and explore their implications for charismatic art. The over
arching question motivating Ackley’s piece stems from Jaeger’s argument that
the power of Christian icons is seated in their simultaneous representation of
a saint’s human and divine qualities: the human in individualistic portraiture,
the divine in hyper-mimetic focal points, such as large, dark eyes that seem to
gaze directly at the viewer.103 Given an icon’s two targets of mimesis, Ackley
asks, what is the role of medium in representing relatively more of either a
saint’s human or divine qualities? And what are the effects of this balance on
the image’s charisma? To answer these questions, Ackley presents two late
medieval figural reliquaries: one in polychrome wood, the other in hammered
silver and gilded except for the figure’s skin. He argues that the materials of
these reliquaries regulated their mimetic and hyper-mimetic display, thereby
heightening the humanity of one and humanizing the divinity of the other. In
her comparative study of Gothic statues of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, Jung
finds two forms of mimesis. In most instances of this statuary motif, mimetic
renderings of the Foolish Virgins’ courtly attire and ungraceful or flirtatious
gesticulations make a strong visual contrast with the serene body language and
demure accouterments of the Wise, thus prompting viewers to make moral
judgments about the contrasting behavior of the two groups. The Wise and
Foolish Virgins at the Cathedral of Magdeburg, however, display a sartorial
consistency, all modeling a seductive elegance; they are distinguished only by
facial expressions of inner emotions: the faces of the Wise evoke progressive
contentment while the foolish visages crumble by degrees into despair. By
eschewing the representation of proper and foolish behavior by means of a
figural mimesis internal to their group and instead focusing on facial expres-
sions, these statues create empathy in viewers for those virgins denied entry

into heaven. It is through identification with the pain of damnation that

beholders may form a desire to avoid it by reforming their own lives. The effect
of such charismatic art rests upon a two-tiered mimesis, which first stresses
similarity among all the Virgins, leading onlookers to ponder the causes of joy
and sorrow, and then steers them toward a personal mimetic experience, an
identification with the suffering women and an imitation of their penitential
mode. Jung concludes that the mimesis at work in Magdeburg’s statues of the
Wise and Foolish Virgins imparted their charismatic message less with didacti-
cism than with the inspiration to cultivate empathy, an important aspect of
13th-century spirituality.
While both Jung and Ackley thus explore the variations of sculptural mime-
sis in the production of charismatic art, Romig, Jaeger, and Hardy undertake
analogous investigations with respect to narrative mimesis. Jaeger argues in
this volume that the sensational rhetoric and fabulous episodes of biographies,
which make the subject come alive for readers, work charismatically because
of their commensurability with that person’s actions and attitudes toward the
world, as related by his contemporaries. In the case of St. Francis, humility,
charity, courage, mildness in overpowering violence, are all attested, and thus
authentic. When the same qualities are depicted in tales of Francis that would
seem inauthentic because they strain credulity – such as the fable of the Wolf
of Gubio – they come across instead as hyper-authentic, or hyper-mimetic. In
the case of Charlemagne, as Romig shows, the qualities of leadership, patron-
age, and effective imperial authority that are conveyed in his biography are all
congruent with the testimony of multiple sources and thus have the ring of
authenticity. Similarly, Hardy demonstrates that the noble guise, extravagant
generosity, and golden tongue attributed to Sigismund in texts and images
originating at his court are consistent, though idealized, with the writings of
contemporary chroniclers. In these essays, a charismatological reading of texts
has epistemological consequences since it provides a solution for the difficult
task of separating the legendary from the historical in hagiographic and bio-
graphical writing. Moreover, these charismatological analyses reveal that
charismatic biographies do not so much infuse words with the power of their
referents, replacing presence with representation, but rather render moot the
impossible ideal of real presence since, as these analyses show, charismatic
individuals are actually fictions both in their own lives and in their constructed
legends. In life as in legend they are representations, actors of their own attrib-
uted virtues and status.104 Perhaps therein lies the source of their charisma: an
alluring capacity for self-fashioning. It becomes problematic, then, to return to

the received wisdom, which holds that hagiographers and biographers devised
stories in order to revivify their protagonists since in fact these writers were
expanding upon what was already a representation, sustaining its reality by a
hyper-mimetic representational process. So it appears that two modes of rep-
resentation are at work in charismatic biographies. Charismatic art mediates a
fictional subject, replicating its representational performance.105
If biographies may transmit charisma of person, what about a charismatic
person’s own writing? May it also transmit charisma, or act as a charismatic
text? Jaeger remarks in his essay for this volume that Bernard’s recorded vita
radiated little if any charisma. His life as represented did not fire up the imagi-
nation because, as in a comparison with George H.W. Bush made by Jaeger, the
stories told about him, however impressive, were just history, not the stuff of
myth-making that instigates emulation. Yet, there were two ways in which
Bernard was charismatic: he preached, and he wrote, thereby igniting the de-
votional ardor of his audiences and propelling multitudes onto the path of cru-
saders. Bernard’s theological writings have been inspirational to a large
audience over the longue durée. Bernard’s charisma, it seems, was only pro-
jected when personally presented by him. Only he, not his biographers’ repre-
sentations, could infuse words with his personality.106 The ongoing impact of
Bernard’s writings thus raises interesting questions about their discursive na-
ture. Have these texts worked charismatically, by indexing Bernard’s very
being, so that readers perceived them as seamless emanations of his vital, au-
thorial, self? If so, unlike those of his biographer, Bernard’s writings do not
represent him; rather, they stand for him. The force of Bernard’s personality is
present in the force of his rhetoric. Bernard’s ideas and religious sentiments
inserted themselves vitally into his writing, offering captivating models of be-
havior, by virtue of his style and technique. Thus Jaeger’s argument that
Bernard’s charismatic writings, though rooted in the individual living body,
were significantly mediated by technique, shares the perspectives Binski and
McCulloch advance in this volume about the ways art acts upon its viewers.
To the role of technique in mediating the agency and, or, the charisma of art,
Binski, Chatterjee, Romig, and Hardy add that of contextual knowledge. Binski
105 Parenthetically, the constructed aspect of charismatic persons is nowhere more evident
than in the Franciscan notion of such persons as recipients of a spiritual gift that enabled
them to reach spiritual unification with God, See Gustafson’s essay and the section
Charisma: A Face-Lift in this introduction.
106 Jaeger develops this point in Enchantment, pp. 144-46, and in his “Bernhard von Clairvaux:
Charisma und Exemplarität,” in Exemplaris imago: Ideale in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit,
ed. Nicholaus Staubach (Frankfurt, 2012), pp. 119-35.
brings up the tomb effigy (c.1290) of King Henry III of England and a 14th-
century statue of Charlemagne (at Aachen), both strikingly beautiful. He
doubts, however, that viewers would see beauty – let alone charisma – in both
given their knowledge, mediated by independent texts, that Charlemagne was
a model emperor while Henry III was a failure. Chatterjee makes a similar
argument in her analysis of ekphrastic descriptions by the Byzantine poet
Choniates. The ancient statues of Byzantium come to life by the means of such
ekphrasis, but they lent themselves to ekphrastic treatment because they were
already alive with the aura of their accumulated history, of which their edu-
cated viewers were well aware. Choniates’s reference to Helen of Troy, for
instance, blurs the differences between the statue and the historical character
as known by beholders. Romig and Hardy both consider iconographic repre-
sentations of rulers whose charisma was generally acknowledged, focusing in
particular on Dürer’s portraits of Charlemagne and Sigismund commissioned
by the city of Nuremberg. It is noteworthy that, although both figures in this
diptych stand for archetypical emperors, Charlemagne’s image is idealized
(hyper-mimetic) whereas Sigismund’s is based on a physiognomic portrait
(mimetic). Sigismund remains a historical figure but Charlemagne seems
larger than history. Yet as bearers of imperial insignia, both compel the gaze,
illustrating what Binski in his essay calls the contextual and insufficient nature
of medieval art.107
While Weber asserted the role of charisma in buttressing authoritative rul-
ership, he opposed the idea of charisma as a feature of governmental
institutions, locating charisma in the ruler’s personality.108 In conveying the
personalities of Charlemagne and Sigismund, however, Dürer makes use of
material and official symbols: that is, the trappings of these rulers’ governmen-
tal institutions. Picking up on the implications of Dürer’s painterly choices,
Hardy develops an appreciation of the charisma of authoritative institutions,
seeing its output – in the form of documents, seals, livery badges – as capable
of animating the idea of empire among independent local power centers of
the late medieval Holy Roman Empire. Sigismund’s subjects responded both to
his living personality, and to the texts and objects that, diffused by his admin-
istration, bore his name or image. Charismatic art, in this way, extends active
107 The inscriptions continuing even around and in the back of the portraits refer to the
annual public display of the imperial insignia, which were kept in Nuremberg, in a cabinet
for which these portraits may possibly have served as covers, Christopher S. Wood,
Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 2008), pp. 149-
51.
108 Weber, Economy and Society, eds. Roth and Wittich, p. 244. For Weber’s discussion of the
“routinization of charisma,” see pp. 246-54.
rule throughout an extensive and diffuse political space, and does so by conjur-
ing the enthusiastic support of local elites and governments, keen to secure
imperial privileges sealed in gold with the imperial image, with the effect that
they acknowledged the legitimate hegemony of imperial rule.
One may well wonder if the golden seals so eagerly commissioned and then
preserved by German corporate bodies were seen as invested with some pro-
tective, talismanic powers. In the Tale of Jonathas written by Hoccleve and here
analyzed by Richardson, three such objects inherited by the titular Jonathas
set his tale’s charismatic power in motion: a ring that will get the wearer every-
one’s love, a brooch that will bring the wearer everything he wants, and a carpet
that will take whoever sits on it wherever he wants to go. With the powers of
the ring and brooch in particular, one might imagine Jonathas as being pos-
sessed of such charismatic traits as the magnetism of Charlemagne, the
imperial authority of Sigismund, the generosity of St. Francis, or the good looks
and appealing voice that were signs of charis among the ancient Greeks. As it
turns out, Jonathas’s gifts are only magical objects – not charis at all – and only
isolate Jonathas from the world of actual human relations, triggering a narra-
tive that ultimately leads to a horrific act of revenge. In Richardson’s analysis,
however, this same narrative presents perhaps the most complex operation of
hyper-mimesis examined in this volume, for as he argues, Jonathas’s story
works as a hyper-mimetic reflection of the famously troubled Hoccleve him-
self and thus – in the act of his translating it from the Latin – relieves him of his
personal demons and offers him a redemptive path to “translating” himself
back into society.
While Richardson sees Hoccleve as both the author and audience for the
charisma of his Tale of Jonathas, Gustufson finds the lay worshipers in 13th-
century central Italian Franciscan churches playing a similar role, also
reminiscent of audience participation in Sigismund’s administrative output,
this time in the production of charismatic space. With the very idea of charis-
matic space, we would seem to be a long way from Ackley’s and Jung’s sculptural
works, whose charisma flowed so directly from their imitation of human forms.
However, recalling that the charisma of those works was also a function of
their locations – the winged altarpieces of Ackley’s figural reliquaries, the
cathedral portal of Jung’s Virgins – we may recognize that those locations
became zones of charisma themselves, the charged places of viewers’ worship-
ful transport or moral transformation. In the same way, we may recognize that
Choniates’s descriptions of Constantinople’s statuary define the city and its
appreciative dwellers before its invasion by the barbaric Latins as a charis-
matic space. The only iconographic representation in Gustafson’s Franciscan
space is a crucifix, but the more living works of art it houses are the members
of the Franciscan Order themselves, who model their lives after the example of
the charismatic St. Francis. By choreographing the movements of the faithful
in the church, first through the nave, then through a narrow door in the tra-
mezzo screen into a space just adjacent to the intimate space of the friars’
choir, the design of Italian Franciscan churches responded to the laity’s desire
to participate in the mystic process of ascent to intimacy with God as envi-
sioned and practiced by the Franciscans, thereby partaking of the gifts of
holiness – the charismata as Bonaventure called them. In this way, the cha-
risma both of Franciscan churches and of Sigismund’s seals and documents
had a living fabric, one infused less with mimetic or hyper-mimetic representa-
tions of leaders – whether Francis or Sigismund – than with the participation
of living audiences whose physical role in the staging of liturgical events or the
creation of documents was both constitutive of their charisma and essential
for the higher status the same audience-creators derived from them.
Charisma. A Face-Lift
The charismatological analyses of audience and reception, effects, and opera-
tional modes advanced in this volume often identify the human visage as a
radiant locus of charisma, emitting magnetism or a secretive ambiguity that
keeps viewers at some distance. Our title for the present volume advertises the
special relationship between charisma and visages, while also indicating our
hope to contribute to Jaeger’s extraordinary project of giving charisma a face-
lift, in multiple senses. In applying the concept to art, Jaeger gives charisma a
face-lift in the sense of a makeover, one that entails its own methodology –
charismatology – just as there is an art and science to cosmetic surgery. Jaeger’s
project also gives charisma a face-lift in that it lifts the charismatic face – be it
the compelling face of an icon or the sur-face of an inspiring biography – to
investigate the anatomy and physiology of its glow.
In our authors’ furtherance of this investigation, historical contexts emerge
as a significant component of charisma. In his essay, Binski emphasizes that
backstories count. Martino Rossi Monti’s essay makes clear that the notion,
understanding, and terminology of charisma all have a history. In classical
times and Late Antiquity, the concept of charisma was deployed to designate
exceptional individuals and to note their endowment with special qualities. A
charismatic person had a beautiful soul, which was reflected in his body.
Physical beauty could thus be seen as a sign of divine favor and so, instrumen-
tal in winning the favor of others. Charisma implied mutuality between body
and soul, between beauty and virtue or, at least recognition of the body’s role
as a medium for the expression of grace and consequent powers that rendered
individuals thus endowed magnetic to their audiences. In the growing Christian
context, charisma became identified as a gift of divine grace, often but not
exclusively associated with prophecy, a connection, as we have seen, that
underlies the Weberian and Jaegerian understanding of charisma as a rela-
tional phenomenon between person, art, and audience. Gustafson’s reading of
the Breviloquium by the Franciscan Bonaventure, however, exposes aspects of
medieval charisma that insisted on the individual and inner-oriented charac-
ter of grace. For Bonaventure, charisma as a gift of grace works from within,
directing the ascension of the Christian soul toward God. According to this
understanding, a charismatic person results from the blessing of charismatic
grace combined with his or her own personal effort to achieve spiritual unity
with the divine. Thus, charismatic individuals are works of art themselves in
Jaeger’s felicitous formulation,109 but their art-self has become an end in itself,
a part of the universal being. This scenario, however, leaves space for an inter-
mediary type of charisma, animated by Francis’s notion of exemplarity, and
articulated through the architectural design of Franciscan churches. The
Franciscan ideal of providing models and methods for approaching intimacy
with God permits us to understand that even though charisma of person has
outward-facing effects, it may spring from a person’s inner-oriented, gift-
assisted growth. Such an understanding of charisma emerges from a careful
reading of medieval sources on the topic and stands as just one demonstration
of the importance of using modern definitions of charismatic force with care
so as not to obscure the medieval experience.
Relatively absent from this volume are reflections on gender and charisma.
Franciscans did not prohibit women from moving through charismatic space,
but Hoccleve and his character Jonathas relate to women as negative charis-
matic figures. The walls of town halls featured the figures of the Nine Worthies
but not of their female companions, the Nine Female Worthies. Charismatic
representations of historical and secular personages tend to be males, while
compelling images of biblical and religious individuals such as those exam-
ined by Jung tend to represent women. How might a study of gender and
charisma help us deepen our understanding of their roles in medieval society?
Other arguments presented in this volume consider the negative aspects of
charisma of art and thus challenge Jaeger’s tendency to speak of charisma of
art as positive by definition. If the effects of a work of art are not ennobling
then its allure ought to be given another term, such as seductive or fascinating.
Certainly such a boundary has not been drawn for charisma of person – Hitler
being a primary example of negative charisma – should art also be considered
109 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 26 and passim.

capable of having a force for ill?110 Several essays find medieval authors consid-
ering this question. Romig’s Strabo, in his De imagine Tetrici, staged a charisma
whose attractiveness he derided and resisted on the grounds that the material
stuff of images cannot convey special power. To this deceptive charisma, Strabo
contrasted the properly charismatic art of writing, exemplified by Einhard’s
biography of Charlemagne. Carolingian intellectuals trusted the charisma of
words, but not of images. Conversely, Chatterjee’s Choniates, writing in the
aftermath of the destruction of Constantinople by Latin crusaders, warned
against words, encouraging viewers to let themselves be seduced by images,
though not all images. Choniates’s ekphrasis praised ancient statuary, but not
Christian icons. Richardson’s Hoccleve worried about the hate-mongering
misogyny of the tale he was about to translate. All of these authors implicitly
raise further questions: could charisma be controlled, directed? And what
would it mean for a medieval writer to try to do so?
Perhaps the question that is most often raised in this volume has to do with
the locus of charisma. The arc described by Weberian and Jaegerian scholar-
ship enlarges that locus to include art and literature as well as human beings.
Several authors in this volume contribute to this expansive project by identify-
ing cases in which the medieval record itself explicitly locates charisma in
works of art. Ackley notes, for instance, that Bernard of Clairvaux’s biographer,
wishing to convey the living image of Bernard’s radiant body produced a de-
scription that calls to mind a figural reliquary executed in precious metal. The
indwelling charisma of a work of art would also be indicated by its inspiring its
own following in the form of similar works of art, which is what Egorov finds in
the case of the Nine Worthies sculptural motif. As we have already mentioned,
an effect of these figures was to inspire city councilors to lead a civic life of high
ideals, but that was not the only impact the images of the Worthies had: they
also inspired the making of other images, modeling artistic formulae of
grandeur and dignity. Moreover, when the burgomasters of Lüneburg decided
to commission their portraits, the resulting stained-glass depictions were
couched in the iconographic vocabulary of the Nine Worthies. An instance of
the flow of charisma moving from art to person, here living persons sought to
infuse their own being with the charisma of the Worthies’ images. The charis-
ma of the burgomasters was derived from the particular material presence of
the Worthies, mediated by a mimesis linking the portraits of the Worthies and
those of the burgomasters. Charismatic art had itself become a model, less a
representation than a persuasive formula for a communal audience eager to be
110 On these questions, see also the opening of our discussion of charismatic effects above,
p. 24 and notes 97-98.
governed by a charismatic leadership. Similarly, as Jung shows, the figural art

of late Gothic sculpture offered to the living, “in a kind of feedback loop,”111
models of spiritual excellence, worth imitating to achieve moral distinction.
For their part, Hardy and Gustafson suggest that the locus of charisma might
be further extended, from human leaders through art to the viewers them-
selves, for audiences too may generate charisma, not only by adhering to per-
suasive leaders (the traditional argument) but also by their own participation
in the production of charismatic art.
In its consideration of the locus of charisma, our volume hosts a ghost that
challenges our very project. The ghost of a question that acquires a shadowy
presence in Binski’s essay, where the author contends that for art to have the
effects of a living charismatic person, it needs an injection of aura, of an inde-
pendent critical judgement and appreciation. Art must needs have charisma
bestowed upon it. Binski insists on an unbridgeable ontological gap between
life and art: artifacts cannot see, behave, or have intentions. Such a statement
seems self-evident, yet challenging voices have arisen from the fields of anthro-
pology, archaeology, and material culture studies.112 That intentionality is a
human trait is not in question, but it is a trait that is pre-disciplined by and
executed within the cultural and material environment in which human beings
are situated. Charisma, as a particular form of agency, invites a reconsideration
of the traditionally unassailable distinction, so dear to western thought,
between things and people. In many instances of the relationships between
charisma and art presented in this volume, the charisma of art cannot simply
be reduced to being an effect of its mimetic connection with human life. Nor
does the critical role played by artifacts in the circulation of charisma appear
to have been unilaterally conferred by particular human protagonists. For were
that the case, how would we explain unwelcome surpluses of charismatic art,
the impact of its materials and techniques, or the unsettling hybridity of
automata?
111 Jung, “Compassion as Moral Virtue: Another Look at the Wise and Foolish Virgins in
Gothic Sculpture,” p. 78.
112 See above at notes 84, 87-90. Among a vast and growing literature, the two following
surveys are useful: Gell, Art and Agency; Jean-Pierre Warnier, Construire la culture
matérielle (Paris, 1999), and Carl Knappett, Thinking through Material Culture; C. Knappet
and Lambros Malafouris, eds., Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
(New York, 2008).
The Volume
In the first section of the present volume, “Medieval and Modern: The Herme
neutics of Charisma,” contributors embed their interpretation of terminology
(charis), cathedral statuary (Magdeburg), and English Gothic within historical,
theoretical, and methodological perspectives on the study of charisma and art.
In his essay, “The Mask of Grace: On Body and Beauty of Soul between Late
Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Martino Rossi Monti traces the development
of the concept of charis (grace) from its attestations in Homeric poetry to its
manifestations in ancient Roman culture under the term gratia to its adoption
by Christian hagiographers. As Rossi Monti shows, this history is one of a grad-
ual evaporation of charis from the body. Though always understood to be
god-given, charis was first considered a wholly embodied quality, recognizable
in such traits as a beautiful physique and an appealing voice. Beginning with
Plato, however, a parallel tradition held charis to be a function of the beautiful
soul instead, a quality that radiated through the body even as it was a force
unto itself. Early Christian hagiographers took this dualistic understanding of
charis further: for them the radiance of charis originated in neither the body
nor the gifted soul but rather in the soul’s surrender to Christ. In a paradoxical
last stage of this rarefication of charis, hagiographers see only the brilliance of
divine charis in their saintly subjects, and their physical characteristics disap-
pear behind what Rossi Monti calls “the mask of grace.”
In “Compassion as Moral Virtue: Another Look at the Wise and Foolish
Virgins in Gothic Sculpture,” Jacqueline E. Jung glosses Jaeger’s analysis of the
statues of the Wise and Foolish Virgins on the west facade of Strasbourg
Cathedral (end of 13th century)113 by considering the slightly earlier rendering
of the Wise and Foolish Virgins at Magdeburg Cathedral (c.1250). Jung argues
that in the Magdeburg group interior emotional states were, for the first time,
externalized in the Virgins’ bodies which, dazzlingly carved, expressed joy and
sadness even as they masked the moral conditions that had inspired the
Virgins’ attitudes. Whether foolish or wise, the Virgins resemble each other,
compelling viewers to bask in their youth and loveliness, and also to consider
self-reform channeled by empathy with the sad beauties who had preferred
human praise to a good conscience.
In his “Charisma and Material Culture,” Paul Binski considers the concept of
charismatic art in the course of critically engaging with Alfred Gell’s notion of
the enchanting power of technology. Binski attributes to the curvilinear bodies
and wondrous, insinuating surfaces of 14th-century British art, exemplified by
113 Jaeger, Envy of Angels, pp. 331-48; and Enchantment, pp. 150-59.

the Lady Chapel at Ely (c.1320), a persuasive capacity and especially the power
to convince beholders to practice charitable gift-giving. Rendered effective by
virtuoso facture, this art, without expressing psychological states, seeks to
guide its audience along a thinking, utilitarian path. For Binski, the agency of
art is “causal and social,”114 and highly contingent upon an enabling contextual
network of ethics, aesthetics, meaning, and experience. Extending beyond the
specific case of English Gothic art, Binski probes the extent to which charisma,
as a form of agency, inherently animates artifacts. He concludes that charisma
is a quality bestowed upon art by human consciousness.
The second section of the volume, “Charismatic Art,” considers instances of
charisma as a function of representation. Andrew Roming’s “Charismatic Art
and Biography in the Carolingian World” analyzes a reflection in Walahfrid
Strabo’s poem De imagine Tetrici (829) upon what constitutes good and bad
charismatic art. The poem warns against the statue of the Ostrogoth Theodoric
the Great (d. 526), which Charlemagne had brought from Ravenna and installed
in Aachen, denouncing its idolatrous quality and its power to lead viewers
astray, and reproaching Charlemagne for being seduced by its false charms.
Romig stresses that few images of Charlemagne himself circulated in his life-
time (a situation that dramatically reversed after his death), which paralleled
his court’s iconophobia evident in the Opus Caroli Regis (Libri Carolini). Romig
submits that such distrust of images may account for the revival of secular
biography at that time (exemplified by Einhard), based on the Augustinian
notion that words provided a truthful medium for conveying charismatic rep-
resentations of rulership.
In his essay “The Saint’s Life as a Charismatic Form: Bernard of Clairvaux
and Francis of Assisi,” Jaeger asserts that the publication history of Francis’s
biographies together with the novels and films they have inspired evince the
charisma of his life story. Acknowledging that some episodes in Francis’s biog-
raphies appear patently untrue, Jaeger argues that they comprise the essence
of his enduring legacy nevertheless. Moreover, he finds a kind of truth in the
fables of Francis in the form of their commensurability with the narrative arc
they share: the story of a humble, gentle, and courageous person who succeeds
in not only overcoming dangerous and powerful foes but also in winning them
over. This is the “real” Francis, Jaeger argues: the character whose story is con-
veyed in plausible and implausible episodes alike. By contrast, the sole major
biography of Bernard of Clairvaux portrays him as unapproachable in his holi-
ness, lacking, in other words, a basic element of charisma, that it inspires
114 Binski, “Charisma and Material Culture,” p. 131.

imitation. And yet, as Jaeger points out, Bernard is posthumously charismatic,

thanks to his own writing, rather than to writing about him by others.
In this section’s final essay, “Charismatic Rulers in Civic Guise: Images of the
Nine Worthies in Northern European Town Halls of the 14th to 16th Centuries,”
Andrey Egorov traces the power these effigies had to create spaces of exhorta-
tion where civic leaders were inspired to live according to the highest ideals of
good government in Cologne, Mechelen, and Lüneburg. The topos of the Nine
Worthies had originated in aristocratic culture, and Egorov argues that its sur-
prising appeal for urban magistrates, who typically attained their dominance
by challenging claims of local lords, lay in the charisma of the Nine Worthies’
material presence ensconced in town halls. Highly individualized figures posi-
tioned within broader iconographic programs that exemplified ancient and
biblical justice, The Nine Worthies portrayed a history of good governance and
materialized an imaginary genealogy of forefathers. Corporeal and mimetic as
sculpture, numinous as stain glass, the Worthies enveloped the council mem-
bers in the aura of their representational idiom. The Worthies and the magis-
trates formed a single auratic body of exemplary individuals.
The third section of the volume, “Dazzling Reflections: Charismatic Art and
Its Audience,” features essays that explore the charisma of art that offers view-
ers inspiring or redemptive reflections of themselves or that transmit ennobling
reflections of themselves to others. Paroma Chatterjee’s essay, “Charisma and
the Ideal Viewer in Nicetas Choniates’s De signis,” studies the contrast Chon
iates (d. 1217) makes between Constantinople as a zone of historical and
aesthetic consciousness owing to the beauty of its statuary and its appreciative
Byzantine viewers, and the Constantinople that was brutally sacked in 1204 by
marauding Latins unmoved by the charismatic power of those same public
sculptures. Her close reading of Choniates’s descriptions of Constantinople’s
life-like statues in the De signis elicits the Byzantine author’s view that works
of art function according to a principle of reciprocity, whereby individuals and
cultures receive a measure of grace for their appropriate response to them.
Chatterjee further examines the ways in which Choniates’s reflections shaped
viewers’ ability to perceive and respond to this grace as an index of cultural
characteristics and as a critical tool for investigating aesthetic and political
trends.
Gavin Richardson’s “Disenchantment: Hoccleve’s Tale of Jonathas and Male
Revenge Fantasy,” focuses on the Middle English translation of the extremely
popular story of Jonathas by Thomas Hoccleve (c.1368-1426), which Richardson
classifies as a male revenge fantasy: that is, a tale in which a male lover wreaks
usually violent and sexualized revenge on a woman by whom he feels himself
to have been shamed. As Richardson shows, Hoccleve’s example of the genre
makes for an elegant case study of disenchantment – what happens when a

charismatic object is withdrawn – and of the virulent misogyny that emerges
when the object is (or was) a female lover. The essay concludes with a sugges-
tion that in the light of his bouts of madness, Hoccleve may have found a
reflection of himself in the dark charisma of Jonathas’s life story, a reflection
that may have served as a “writing cure.”
The final essay in this section, “The Emperorship of Sigismund of Luxemburg
(1368-1437): Charisma and Government in the Later Medieval Holy Roman
Empire,” by Duncan Hardy, centers on the eventful career of the emperor by
considering the narrative and visual evidence of his energetic personality’s
broad and transformative impact on the European political landscape. As
Hardy shows, Sigismund’s energy was effectively relayed and transmitted by
such various institutional media as seals, documents, livery badges, and por-
traits. To explain the scope of the emperor’s influential outreach, Duncan
deploys the notion of charisma as an integrative force. Personally and institu-
tionally projected by the monarch, promoted and perpetuated by admiration
for and memory of a respected ruler, such charisma durably constructed and
united an imaginary political community. Hardy therefore contends that char-
ismatic leadership was a prominent operator in late medieval politics,
challenging Weber’s notion that European governmental structures were anti-
thetical to the exercise of charismatic rulership.
The fourth and final section of the volume, “Mediation: The Intermediary
Spaces of Charisma,” includes essays that provide a perspective on realms
intermediate between art and life that the charisma of art may call into being.
Together these essays contribute to our understanding of charismatic art as
capable of generating an enhanced environment, either secular or sacred.
In his essay “Medieval Franciscan Architecture as Charismatic Space,” Eric
Gustafson explores the agency of architecture in 13th-century central Italian
Franciscan churches in leading lay people – both men and women – into a
realm that inspires, feeds, and confirms a desire to draw nearer to God both
within the church and in their daily lives. The partitioning of the church inte-
rior into three spaces is key to the creation of this charismatic space: in
particular, the division between the nave and the lay choir, by means of the
tramezzo screen. Upon entering the church, a worshiper would be drawn for-
ward by the sight of the door in the middle of this screen and by the crucifix
above it. In passing through the door, a layperson would find him or herself in
an intermediary space that corresponds, Gustafson argues, to the second of
three levels of ascent to the divine articulated by Franciscan theologian
Bonaventure (1221-74) in his Breviloquium. At this stage, the Christian’s ascent
is supported by the gifts of the Holy Spirit – the charismata, as Bonaventure
terms them – and inspired by the life of Christ. Considered in relation to this
second stage of Christian practice, the unique space of the Franciscan lay choir
may be considered in itself a gift of grace.
Joseph Ackley’s essay, “Precious-Metal Figural Sculpture, Medium, and
Mimesis in the Late Middle Ages,” examines two northern-European figural
reliquaries that together define a polarity between mimesis and hyper-mime-
sis. The first is a bust of a radiant and rosy-cheeked Catherine of Alexandria in
polychrome wood (produced in Germany around 1465-67). The second is a
mid-14th century German Virgin and Child statuette in hammered silver,
gilded except for the figures’ skin. This second object would seem to be much
less mimetic than the first; however, Ackley suggests that of the two, the pre-
cious-metal Virgin and Child figure might provide the stronger likeness of
divinity, for it accurately pictures the radiance of saintly bodies, which Bernard
of Clairvaux had compared to the luminosity of sunlight shining on silver or
gold. Ackley’s further discussion of the winged altar piece, the site in which the
gilt of both polychrome wood and precious-metal figural reliquaries would
have been viewed by medieval Christians, situates both objects as a part a
drama of technological brilliance, which functioned both to fill viewers with
reverential awe and to inspire them to participate in the church’s financial
support.
In the final essay in this section, “‘I’ll make the statue move indeed:’ Char
ismatic Motion and the Disenchanted Image in Early Modern Drama,”115
Lynsey McCulloch traces the material presence and literary motif of animated
statues in early modern culture, arguing that their auratic appeal was informed
less by their esoteric than by their exoteric features, in particular their intelligi-
bility. As McCulloch points out, early modern audiences were quite familiar
with automata. They were featured in the theater as both devices and charac-
ters (Hermione in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Robert Greene’s Brazen Head);
they adorned pageants and urban buildings; they were incorporated into
Catholic church services – and exposed as tricks by Protestant Reformers – and
they loomed large in contemporary scientific and philosophical treatises.
While the latter provided explanations of self-moving devices that ranged
from the natural to the supernatural, the other media did not elucidate the
origins of sculptural motion. Spectators and readers were thus presented with
the choice of being enchanted by the supernatural, by the technological, or by
both since, as McCulloch shows, an understanding of technical ingenuity did
not necessarily limit the sense of wonder inspired by mysteriously moving
objects.
115 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, V.iii.88, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford, 1996).
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Part 1
Medieval and Modern: The Hermeneutics of
Charisma
∵
The Mask of Grace: On Body and Beauty of Soul 47
Chapter 1
The Mask of Grace: On Body and Beauty of Soul

between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Martino Rossi Monti
1 The Gift of Grace
‘Charisma’ is a word with a peculiar history. Risen to prominence as a theologi-

cal term in the 1st century AD thanks to the apostle Paul and gradually fallen in
disuse in the West (at least as a word), it was reinvented as a sociological con-
cept by Max Weber. In Weber, charisma denoted a form of authority, and was
defined as a (real or imagined) extraordinary quality, thought to be supernatu-
ral or superhuman in nature, by virtue of which its possessor is treated – on the
basis of faith rather than reason – as a leader.1 After Weber, the word has
enjoyed an increasing popularity and has been studied as a phenomenon or
adopted as a guiding idea by a variety of disciplines stretching from anthropol-
ogy to neuroscience. In popular usage, charisma has come to denote a
mysterious quality or set of qualities that make an individual unique and irre-
sistibly magnetic.
In Paul, however, the term was not specifically connected to authority or
leadership, but could indicate the gift of redemption or, more particularly, a
number of miraculous and ecstatic gifts (charismata), such as prophecy, heal-
ing, speaking in tongues, or miracle-working, assigned by God’s grace (charis)
* The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7 2007-2013) under grant agreement n. 291823 Marie Curie FP7-
PEOPLE-2011-COFUND (The new International Fellowship Mobility Programme for
Experienced Researchers in Croatia – NEWFELPRO). This article has been written as a part of
a project “Grace, Charisma, and Ease of Movement. A History of Three Ideas From the 18th
Century to the Present (grace1978)” which has received funding through NEWFELPRO project
under grant agreement n. 42.
1 Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building, trans. S.N. Eisenstadt (Chicago, 1968), p. 48.
For the influence of church historian Rudolph Sohm’s analysis of theological charisma on
Weber see David N. Smith, “Faith, Reason, and Charisma: Rudolf Sohm, Max Weber, and the
Theology of Grace,” Sociological Inquiry 68 (1998), 32-60. On the reception of Weber’s concept
of charisma in Germany and in the United States, see Joshua Derman, Max Weber in Politics
and Social Thought (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 176-215.

48 Rossi Monti
to individual Christians for the benefit of the community.2 In the Greco-Roman

world, supernatural talents of this kind were considered the privilege of excep-
tional individuals, and Paul, by adopting a new word for them, tried to
disentangle them from their association with the realm of magic or with com-
peting religious practices. He also did his best to domesticate them into a
communal framework: some gifts, admittedly, were higher than others, but
each member of the community was entitled to receive one. It is no mystery,
however, that by stressing the superiority of the spirit over the law and of the
“spiritual” man over the “psychic” one (1 Cor. 2), Paul also nurtured and person-
ally cultivated, to a certain extent, the same aristocratic elitism that, elsewhere,
he tried to contain. Even with the institutionalization of the church, the pro-
gressive decline of Pauline charismata and the replacement of prophets with
bishops, this tension never disappeared. In fact, the cult of saints as superhu-
man individuals whose powers elevated them well above the community soon
began to flourish: whether as martyrs, solitary ascetics, pastoral administrators
or monks, these men and women were venerated as God’s special friends and
were thought to possess supernatural powers. Gradually, their status was
almost equated to that of Jesus as described in the Epistle to the Hebrews (7:26):
“blameless, unstained, separated from sinners, exalted above the heavens.”3
It is precisely with the late antique and medieval representations of these
‘holy’ men that this essay will be concerned. Rather than attempting to trace
back a Weberian conception of charisma in the texts of the past, I will focus on
the Greek word from which the term charisma derives, namely charis (“grace”),
and on its Latin counterpart, gratia. In particular, I will explore the role of cha-
ris and gratia in a number of literary portraits drawn from late antique and
medieval biographies, panegyrics, and hagiographic texts. Out of the large
amount of late antique and medieval physical descriptions available, I will
focus on those in which the individual portrayed – whether a philosopher, a
bishop, a monk, an abbot, a pope, or an emperor – is presented as utterly supe-
rior to the average human being. In all such descriptions, despite their different
2 1 Cor. 12:7-12; Rom. 12:6-8. A useful history of the idea of charisma from Paul to Weber and
beyond is provided by John Potts, A History of Charisma (New York, 2009), who, however,
overlooks the importance of charisma in medieval culture: on this, see Ayelet Even-Ezra, “The
Conceptualization of Charisma in the Early Thirteenth Century,” Viator 44 (2013), 151-68, and
the essay by Erik Gustafson in this volume. See also the texts collected in Giancarlo Andenna
et al., eds., Charisma und religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter (Münster, 2005) and Il carisma
nel secolo XI. Genesi, forme e dinamiche istituzionali (Negarine di S. Pietro in Cariano, 2006).
On the etymology and history of the word see Claude Moussy, Gratia et sa famille (Paris, 1966),
pp. 456-59, and the entry in A Patristic Greek Lexicon, ed. G.W.H. Lampe (Oxford, 1961), pp.
1518-19.
3 Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions (Philadelphia, 1997), pp. 1-5.
epochs, styles and content, a privileged relationship between the individual

and the deity is implied or explicitly stated, often also on the basis of the gran-
diose claims made by the individuals themselves. Exceptional beauty and
grace are often (but by no means always) presented as evidence of this special
relationship, and are understood as a special gift (charisma, or donum) from
God and, depending on the context, as a sign of moral virtue, or nobility of
birth or as an overflowing of spiritual beauty.
First of all, however, something must be said about the diversified meanings
of grace (charis, gratia) in the ancient world, since this will help us to under-
stand the late antique transformation undergone by this idea (or group of
ideas). In Greek, charis4 could designate: 1) the outward grace and charm of
objects, human beings, or gods; 2) a favor or gift done or returned; 3) the kind-
ness of the doer/giver or the gratitude of the receiver; 4) a sense of gratification,
delight, or pleasure.5 It is widely thought that this last meaning connected and
explained all the others: in this sense, charis was something that brought joy or
pleasure. I will focus on the aesthetic sense of the word, but it is important not
to forget its connection with the others: the encounter with beauty was a
source of pleasure (visual, psychological, or sexual), but physical beauty was
also commonly seen as the mark of divine favor and as a key factor in winning
the favor of the others.
In the Greeks’ aristocratic, male-centered, and ethically-charged concep-
tion of human beauty,6 charis was often associated with youthfulness, warlike
strength, imposing size, and flourishing health. It was mostly a quality of the
body, from which it emanated like a sort of splendor. It was very often the gods
(the Graces, Athena, Aphrodite) who temporarily bestowed such special qual-
ity on humans, making them irresistible. This gift, however, did not come at
random: Odysseus was no ordinary mortal and, after Athena’s shedding of
grace over him, appeared to Nausicaa as “radiant” with beauty and grace and
god-like.7 Likewise, Pindar’s prize-winning athletes stood out and glowed with
divine charis. In the case of gods, heroes or kings, charis was often combined
with a kind of awe-inspiring fearsomeness (aidos, deinotes), an association
4 On charis in the ancient world see Moussy, Gratia, pp. 409-73; Bonnie MacLachlan, The Age
of Grace (Princeton, 1993). On the Greco-Roman benefaction context of charis and its influ-
ence on Paul’s understanding of human and divine grace see James H. Harrison, Paul’s
Language of Grace in its Graeco-Roman Context (Tübingen, 2003).
5 A Greek-English Lexicon, eds. Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott (1843; rev. ed. Oxford, 1996),
pp. 1978-79. Cf. Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étimologique de la langue grecque. Histoire des
mots (Paris, 1968-80; repr. Paris, 1999), pp. 1247-48.
6 Glenn W. Most, “Schöne (das),” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 vols., eds.
Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel, 1971-2007), 8:1343-51.
7 Homer, Odyssey 6.232-43. Cf. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 3.919-26, 443-44; Virgil, Aeneid
1.586-93; 4.150.
50 Rossi Monti
that, especially when referred to the gaze, was to enjoy great fortune in later
encomiastic descriptions of emperors, holy philosophers, and saints.8 In the
context of both hetero- and homosexual love, charis could also denote the
beauty radiating from the body or the eyes of the beloved (with the eyes liter-
ally emitting rays of light, according to the emissive theory of vision that
dominated until modern times). Charis’s erotic and spellbinding charm could
prove extremely dangerous, especially when feminine beauty was involved (as
in the case of Pandora).9 However, charis was also a property of speech, denot-
ing its charm and pleasantness, and it is no wonder that, in the rhetorical
tradition, charis came to denote the middle style, whose aim was to “delight.”
The fine line dividing these ideas from the world of magic and ‘fascinations’ is
hard to miss. Since grace of body and speech was thought to be so irresistible,
it can be hardly coincidental that charis, by Greco-Roman times, had acquired
the status of vox magica in the magical papyri and that charitesion had become
a technical term designating “spells or devices that make the user beautiful or
charismatic.”10
It was only during the early Roman imperial period that the Latin gratia
(and its cognates gratus and gratiosus) began to acquire an aesthetic sense and
to compete with the word venustas as a synonym for charis. The word quickly
gained terrain also among Christian writers, who regularly used gratia to trans-
late both theological and aesthetic charis.11 It is also important to remember
that the Greeks and the Romans used the word grace to denote feminine as
well as masculine beauty.12 In the overall, grace as a property often stood for
something elusive and non-measurable, a ‘plus’ capable of rendering beauty
irresistible. In a sense, grace could be seen not so much as a quality of the
8 For Odysseus, cf. Homer, Odyssey 8.22; for the goddess Demetra and the “eyes of kings,” cf.
Homeric Hymn to Demeter 214-15. For a late antique example, cf. Ammianus Marcellinus
on Emperor Julian’s eyes and face in Res Gestae 15.8.12: “oculos cum venustate terribiles
vultumque excitatius gratum.”
9 Hesiod, Theogony 585; cf. Works and Days 60-82.
10 Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 25, 96-110. For
the role of charis in the magical papyri see also Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace, pp.
90-95.
11 See Moussy, Gratia, pp. 417-35. On the Hebrew word for “grace” and its Greek rendering
see James A. Montgomery, “Hebrew Hesed and Greek Charis,” The Harvard Theological
Review 32 (1939), 97-102. On the patristic meaning and use of charis see A Patristic Greek
Lexicon, 1514-18.
12 Cf. the contrast between gratia virilis and femineum decus in Statius, Silvae 2.6.41, or the
“manly grace” of the emperor Aurelianus in Historia Augusta: Aurelianus 6.1: “Fuit decorus
ac gratia viriliter speciosus.”
object but rather as a projection on the object of the emotions it aroused in the
viewer13 (a similar point could be made about the modern notions of
charisma).
As we shall see, roughly in the age of Plotinus, the idea of grace as beauty
underwent, especially among Platonists and in some Christian circles, a pro-
cess of spiritualization, and came to denote not so much bodily beauty, but the
outward reflection of inward beauty and of the divine power inhabiting it. This
kind of luminous beautification from the inside was described by Plotinus and
later developed by his followers in their biographic descriptions of the
Neoplatonic philosophers. Adopting and adapting Platonic ideas, Christian
theologians – in Alexandria and especially in Cappadocia – argued that
through God’s charis the soul could regain its godlike, luminous beauty, which
had been obfuscated by the Fall: salvation was understood as a beautification
of the soul.14 The body could partially reflect this inner beauty already in this
life, but was to radiate it fully only in the resurrected state. In this sense, the
glow of charis on a saint’s face was often seen as the outward reflection of the
inner workings of God’s grace.15 These ideas seem to have reached the Latin
West through multiple channels (one of them possibly being Ambrose and the
Neoplatonic circle of Milan); in this process, as we will see, they gradually
intertwined with ideas and traditions quite distant from the Platonic frame-
work.
13 MacLachlan, The Age of Grace, p. 149; Valerio Neri, La bellezza del corpo nella società
tardoantica (Bologna, 2004), pp. 63, 76.
14 Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, ed. Richard A. Norris Jr. (Atlanta, 2012),
pp. 52-53 (PG 44:792): “When we were sinners and dark, God made us full of light and
lovely by shining upon us with his grace (charin) … so when the soul has been transposed
from error to truth, the dark form of her life is transformed into radiant beauty (charin).”
Cf. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, PG 32:109. This imagery is echoed in Thomas
Aquinas, Super sententiis 4 d. 18 q. 1 a. 2 qc. 1-2 and also in the Catechismus ex decreto
Concilii Tridentini ad parochos (Lyon, 1567), pp. 180-81.
15 For the grace shining from Moses’s face see Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, PG 44:325; for
the God-given grace shining from the dead body of Macrina (Gregory’s sister) see Life of
Macrina, PG 46:992. See Patricia Cox Miller, “Dreaming the Body: An Aesthetics of
Asceticism,” in Asceticism, eds. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (Oxford,
1998), pp. 281-300, and cf. Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York, 1988), pp. 293-94.
52 Rossi Monti
2 The Holy Philosophers
The religious and aristocratic turn of late antique philosophy has been often
pointed out: by the 3rd century AD, philosophy was generally identified with a
spiritual search for the supreme deity, and the philosopher was often seen as
an all-wise and godlike figure, if not even as a god. The Platonic philosophers,
especially after Plotinus, had done much to encourage their own divinization,
since they regarded themselves as the one and only pure and “holy succession”
of interpreters of Plato’s teachings. This attitude was part of a more general
trend, which found expression particularly in the biographical literature dedi-
cated to the so-called “holy men.”16 In Porphyry’s and Iamblichus’s ‘sacred’
biographies of Pythagoras, or in the Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists of
Eunapius (c.345-c.420), rigorous asceticism, magical knowledge, prophetic
insight, and superior philosophical contemplation were seen as the distinctive
marks of the divine philosopher and had formed an often confused but power-
ful mixture.17 These texts had a clear propagandistic and proselytizing aim and
must be put in the context of the rivalry between paganism and Christianity.
No wonder that, in this tradition, the physical description of Platonic phi-
losophers took on a fully hagiographical tone. However serene in its classicism,
Porphyry’s description of Plotinus in class already provides an example of an
‘illumination from within’ which draws from the same vocabulary that Plotinus
had used to describe the supreme deity.18 In Marinus’s description of Proclus
(c.410-85), not only Proclus’s beautiful bodily symmetry corresponded to the
harmony of his soul, but “the force of his soul, blooming in his body like a living
light, produced an astonishing radiance which is scarcely possible to convey in
words.” This radiance was particularly evident in Proclus’s face and eyes: “For
his eyes seemed to be filled with a sort of brilliance, and the rest of his visage
had a share of divine illumination (ellampseos theias).” We should be careful
taking these statements simply as metaphors: during one of Proclus’s lectures,
Marinus promptly reports, a certain Rufinus saw a “light” playing around the
16 On this, see Garth Fowden, “The Pagan Holy Man in Late Antique Society,” The Journal of
Hellenic Studies 102 (1982), 33-59; Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1983).
On ancient biography’s ambiguous position between reality and fiction see Arnaldo
Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography (1971; expanded ed. Cambridge, 1993),
pp. 46-47, 99-104. On the interaction and coalescence between biography and panegyric
in Late Antiquity see Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, eds. Tomas Hägg
and Philip Rousseau (Berkeley, 2000).
17 Fowden, “The Pagan Holy Man,” pp. 36-37.
18 Porphyry, The Life of Plotinus 13. Cf. Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.5; 5.5.12, ed. Arthur H. Armstrong,
7 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1966-88).
head of Proclus. Like Plotinus, Proclus was also kindly, but, unlike Plotinus, his
gentleness was combined with a touch of fearsomeness. Marinus also specifies
that when Proclus spoke he was “under divine inspiration (theias epipnoias)”
and his words “fell like snow” from his mouth.19
Even more interestingly, Damascius (480-c.550) presented Isidore’s eyes as
imbued with divine charis and wisdom, pointing once again to the outward
appearance as a gateway to the inside. Isidore’s description, even if slightly
more individualized than that of Proclus, appears vague: the style is encomi-
astic, and only Isidore’s old age and the divine shape of his face are alluded to.
Arguably the most important aspect of this description is the fact that Isidore’s
sparkling, grace-filled eyes were the “true images (agalmata) of his soul, and
not of the soul alone, but of the divine emanation (theias aporroes) dwelling in
it,” making him a sort of living manifestation of God.20 In all these portraits,
the ‘visibility’ of the soul also emphasizes the philosopher’s domination of and
detachment from his body, from which his soul would have been fully freed
only at the moment of death.
These ideas were deeply rooted in the Platonic tradition. At some point,
Plato’s notion of the beauty of the soul21 had been combined with the idea of
an ‘irradiation’ of the soul’s beauty to the outside, a beauty that was described
as luminous and divine in origin and, at the same time, as the result of a pro-
cess of moral self-purification. When a “beautiful soul is embedded in a
beautiful [male] body,” Maximus of Tyre wrote, it “shines out through what
encloses it.”22 This way, a form of mutual correspondence between the inside
and the outside was established; this, however, was problematic, since the con-
text was one of – Platonically speaking – ontological disparity, if not opposition,
between body and soul. In any case, the trend continued with Plotinus, who
argued that inward beauty could become outwardly visible – although by
no means entirely visible – through the “splendor” of “grace” (charis).23 For
19 Marinus, The Life of Proclus 3, 16, 23, trans. Mark Edwards, Neoplatonic Saints (Liverpool
2000), pp. 62, 81-82, 94 (modified). For the Greek text see Vita Procli, ed. Jean F. Boissonade
(Paris, 1850). On the passage see H.J. Blumenthal, “Marinus’ Life of Proclus: Neoplatonist
Biography,” Byzantium 54 (1984), 483-84. For the simile of the snow cf. Homer, Iliad, 3.222;
on Proclus’s fearsomeness cf. also Suda, alphaiota 89=Damascius frg. 248 Zintzen.
20 Damascius, The Life of Isidore 13, ed. Polimnia Athanassiadi, Damascius. The Philosophical
History (Athens, 1999), pp. 89-90, modified. Cf. p. 195 (=frg. 75F.3-5).
21 Plato, Republic 444d-e; Symposium 209b; Phaedrus 279b-c.
22 Oration 19, no. 2 (cf. 21.7) ed. M.B. Trapp, The Philosophical Orations (Oxford, 1997), pp.
170-71.
23 Plotinus, Enneads 6.7.22; cf. 2.9.17. Cf. Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision,
trans. Michael Chase (Chicago, 1998), pp. 49-52; Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus (London, 1994),
54 Rossi Monti
Plotinus, the grace of a human face was not a material property, such as color
or symmetry, but the spiritual light illuminating them. It was not, as in Homer
or Pindar, the splendor of the body: it had become the splendor of the soul. This
means that in order to ‘see’ true beauty one had to abandon normal vision and
open one’s “inner eye.” Yet – and this tension is typical of the whole Platonic
tradition – it was still sensible beauty that, however imperfectly, disclosed the
reality of its divine source: it was the Good that “bestowed graces” (charitas) on
each intelligible form, making it desirable, and a “trace” of such grace was still
visible in the material instantiation of that form.24 It was not a long step from
here to see in the face of one’s revered master the luminous epiphany of the
highest form of divinity. It seems difficult, in such descriptions, to keep the
codified rhetorical strategy of the propagandist entirely distinct from the psy-
chological experience – hardly confined to the ancient world – of the zealous
follower.
3 The Christian Holy Men
Between the 4th and 7th centuries, new figures emerged across the – quite
diversified – Christian world: the wandering ascetic, the solitary or coenobitic
monk, and the holy bishop. They inspired a multiform devotional literature
which, often competing with its pagan counterpart, typically exalted and ide-
alized its protagonists and aimed at promoting their example and turning
readers and listeners into disciples.25 Unlike that of the pagan holy men, how-
ever, the divinity of the Christian holy man was (or at least was supposed to be)
derivative: the powers he possessed and the miracles he performed were evi-
dence of the power of God.26 In both cases, however, their beauty and “grace”
was exalted as evidence of their special relationship with the divine sphere.
During the first centuries of our era, the attitude of the church fathers
toward physical beauty was mostly one of suspicion and contempt: in this con-
text, the deliberate humiliation of one’s body (or beauty) through asceticism
p. 184. The transparency of the beauty of soul through bodily charis appears to have been
also a Stoic idea (see Plutarch, Dialogue on love 766e-f, who approves it).
24 Plotinus, Enneads 6.7.22; 1.6.2, 8.
25 On the ‘charismatic’ effects of this kind of literature see Stephen Jaeger’s essay in this
volume.
26 Cf. Fowden, “The Pagan Holy Man,” p. 50. On the Christian holy men see Peter Brown,
“The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,” Representations 2 (1983), 1-25; Claudia Rapp,
“Saints and Holy Men,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, eds. Augustine Casiday
and Frederick W. Norris, 9 vols. (Cambridge, 2006-09), 2:548-52.
functioned as a way to emphasize inner purity. This trend never disappeared,

but between the 5th and 6th centuries the mood changed considerably: liter-
ary portraits exalting the luminous beauty and grace of abbots, monks, and
bishops became quite common, both in the East and the West. This was a
beauty completely deprived of erotic allure and made transparent by its own
purity; it was an anticipation of the perfection of the resurrected body, which
was thought to display a full correspondence between inner and outer beau-
ty.27 In these descriptions, the attribute of grace (charis, gratia) was very often
used to underline such correspondence. However, as pointed out by Ludwig
Bieler in a classic study, already during Late Antiquity the word “grace” was a
synonym for divine or angelic beauty (of personal appearance or speech) and
in this sense was commonplace in biographical pagan sources; in Christian
texts, however, the theological and aesthetic sense of the word had merged.28
A good example of this trend is the Life of Antony, written by Athanasius,
bishop of Alexandria, shortly after the hermit’s death in 356 AD. This very influ-
ential work, a great literary success both in the East and the West,29 is often
seen as the starting point of Christian hagiography. Here, Athanasius provided
a physical description of Antony:
His face had a great and wonderful grace (charis). This gift (charisma)
also he had from the Savior. For if he were present in a great company of
monks, and any one who did not know him previously, wished to see him,
immediately coming forward he passed by the rest, and hurried to
Antony, as though attracted by his appearance. Yet neither in height nor
breadth was he conspicuous above others, but in the serenity of his man-
ner and the purity of his soul. For as his soul was free from disturbances,
his outward appearance was calm; so from the joy of his soul he pos-
sessed a cheerful countenance, and from his bodily movements could be
perceived the condition of his soul. [...] Thus Antony was recognized, for
27 Neri, La bellezza, pp. 181-86.

28 Ludwig Bieler, ΘΕΙΟΣ ΑΝΗΡ (1935-36; repr. Darmstadt, 1967), 1:52-56; for more references
see Hans P. L’Orange, Apotheosis in Ancient Portraiture (1947; repr. New Rochelle, 1982),
pp. 29-30, 95-97. For a detailed 2nd-century physical description of Paul in which his
unattractive features are beautified by the angelic “grace” of his face see Acts of Paul and
Thecla 3 and see now Heike Omerzu, “The Portrayal of Paul’s Outer Appearance in the
Acts of Paul and Thecla,” Religion & Theology 15 (2008), 252-79. For the fullness of grace of
the martyr Stephen and his angelic face see Acts of the Apostles 6:8, 15.
29 Cf. Augustine, Confessions 8.6.14-29.
56 Rossi Monti
he was never disturbed, for his soul was at peace; he was never downcast,
for his mind was joyous.30
In his Life of Pythagoras (18) Porphyry had also insisted on the psychagogic
effect of Pythagoras’s charis of speech and manners. The harmony between the
body and the soul of Antony, however, was clearly an anticipation of their
awaited compenetration in the resurrected body, something that was utterly
unacceptable for the average pagan philosopher.31 The immutability of
Antony’s inner and outer condition must also be emphasized: the expression
of his face is undisturbed by passions and appears locked in a mask of blessed-
ness.32 It is interesting to note that, in the Greek text, the magnetic charis
appearing on the face of Antony is said to be a gift (charisma) of God. This
provides further evidence of the intertwining between the two senses of the
word charis typical of this age: in texts like this, the visible grace and beauty of
some exceptional individuals are seen as a reflection of the invisible gift of
God’s grace. Antony’s description was to exert an influence on the subsequent
(Latin and Greek) developments of the literary portraits of saints and bishops
that would be difficult to overestimate. The Latin version of the Life of Antony
most widespread in the West was completed by Evagrius of Antioch, who took
some significant liberties in the translation: to the grace of Antony’s face he
added that of his “holy mind,” made visible “through the mirror of the body”
(per speculum corporis).33 This, however, was hardly stretching the text beyond
its original meaning. In other texts, the quality of grace was associated with the
presence of light: in the 3rd-century Life of Cyprian, for example, the onlookers
30 Athanasius, Life of Antony 67, trans. Philip Schaff, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: Second Series, 14 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI, 1982-83),
4:214. For the Greek text: SC 400:312-14. On the passage, see David Brakke, Athanasius and
the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford, 1995), pp. 243-44; Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes
(Berkeley, 2000), pp. 143-44. Cf. chapter 14 of the Life for Antony’s “grace” of speech,
another gift from God.
31 However, on the resistance, by many western and eastern early Christians, to accept the
notion of the carnality of the resurrected body see Neri, La bellezza, pp. 269-81.
32 Cf. Athanasius, Life of Antony 14 for the correspondence between the stability and purity
of Antony’s soul (due to his being “guided by the Word”) and the partial incorruptibility of
his body (an anticipation of the resurrected condition).
33 For Evagrius’s version see PG 26:940. There had been also an anonymous, more literal, but
less widespread Latin translation (see the text ed. by G.J.M. Bartelink in Vita di Antonio,
trans. Pietro Citati, Salvatore Villa, 7th ed., Rome, 2003 – here p. 132).
were overwhelmed by the “sanctity” and “grace” that “shone out” of Cyprian.34
In 6th-century France, all these themes and imageries had already merged: in
a letter addressed to the bishop of Metz, for example, a Provençal nobleman
exalted the “grace” that “glowed” on the bishop’s face, this being the “mirror” of
his heart, namely of the “splendor of charity” that shone within the recesses of
his breast with a clarity of immense brilliance.35
In other cases, these ideas appeared in the context of much more detailed
physical descriptions, whose authors often resorted to the style and language
of ancient physiognomics. In a head-to-toe description of Epiphanius, bishop
of Pavia, his successor Ennodius (474-521) insisted on the splendor of the bish-
op’s physical beauty as a sign (index) of the beauty of his soul.36 The same
connection between outer and inner beauty can be found in Ennodius’s pan-
egyrical description of Theodoricus. Given his role, the emperor appears
stronger and more imposing than the bishop, but the parallel shows how
indebted the representation of religious (particularly episcopal) power and
authority were to the model of secular power: in both cases, physical beauty, as
a sign of moral nobility or purity, seemed to work both as demonstration and a
justification of their political and social role.37
Early medieval Italy provides further examples of this peculiar mixture of
physiognomic language and spiritualization of physical beauty, a mixture in
which the polysemy of the word gratia continued to play a fundamental role.
In the terse literary portraits of the bishops of Ravenna sketched in his Liber
pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis between 830 and 846, Agnellus of Ravenna
focuses on the somatic traits that emphasize the venerability of old age and
the effects of penitence; very often, also, he records the beauty and the
34 Vita Cypriani 6: “Tantum sanctitatis et gratiae ex eo relucebat, ut confunderet intuentium

mentes.”
35 Dynamius, Epistola 2, CCSL 117:435-36 (PL 80:25-26).
36 Ennodius, Vita Epifani 13-17, MGH Auct. ant. 7:86. On this, see Hilde Vogt, Die Literarische
Personenschilderung des Frühen Mittelalters (Leipzig, 1934), pp. 31-32; Raffaele Passarella,
“Fisiognomica ennodiana,” in Debita dona, eds. Paola F. Moretti et al. (Naples, 2009), pp.
401-10.
37 Passarella, “Fisiognomica,” pp. 402, 405. Ennodius’s detailed portrait of Epiphanius has an
interesting eastern parallel in the 6th-century description of patriarch Eutychius of
Constantinople by his disciple, the presbyter Eustratius, who appears to draw extensively
from Athanasius’s description of Anthony. See Nicholas Maridines, “The Beautiful Bishop.
Physiognomy and Holiness in the Life of St. Eutychius of Constantinople,” in The Concept
of Beauty in Patristic and Byzantine Theology, ed. John A. McGuckin (New York, 2012),
pp. 210-26. For the charis of Sisinnius, bishop of Constantinople (5th century) see Socrates
Scholasticus, Historia ecclesiastica 6.22.
58 Rossi Monti
harmonious proportions of the bishops and the “celestial grace” which “suf-
fused” or “adorned” their body or face.38
4 The Middle Ages
The texts quoted so far show the persistence of certain schemes and ideas that
appear to have been transmitted – sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly,
and with significant variations depending on the historical and social context
– from late antique to medieval authors. The idea that a graceful appearance
was evidence of a soul in grace became widespread in the Middle Ages, espe-
cially in hagiographic and biographic literature.39 As it has been repeatedly
observed, the biographers of medieval saints and the biographers of late
antique holy men often described and celebrated their heroes in very similar
terms. Many medieval texts could be recalled to illustrate this point. I will limit
myself to a few, starting with a description taken from an 11th-century monas-
tic biography. The author is the monk Jotsaldus and the protagonist is Odilo,
the fifth abbot of Cluny (962-1048), certainly one of the most influential and
respected figures of his time. According to his biographer, there was “some-
thing great and divine” about Odilo, which, however, seemed to be accessible
primarily through a kind of spiritual gaze. Something shone forth from Odilo’s
manners and appearance that turned him into a revered object of imitation.
His inner virtues became visible through what Jotsaldus defines as gratia, a
quality that seemed very much connected – according to a model of sainthood
typical of north-western Europe – to his aristocratic background. As in the case
of Antony, this grace seemed to guarantee a perfect correspondence between
the inward and the outward: “his inner nature was revealed on the outside by
the grace that shone from him” (qualis esset interius, relucens in eo gratia
declarabat exterius). Jotsaldus also provides a conventional and strongly ideal-
ized portrait of Odilo’s physical appearance:
He was of medium (mediocris) height. His face was full of authority and
grace (plenus auctoritatis et gratiae). To gentle people he was cheerful
38 Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, MGH SS rer. Lang., 287: “Probus XIII, pinguis divina
gratia et speciosus forma, decrepitus aetate, gravis corpore, ylaris vultu, caeleste perfusus
gratia, roboratus Deum senper quaesivit”; cf. p. 325. On these portraits see Vogt, Die
Literarische Personenschilderung, pp. 63-67; Paolo Squatriti, “Personal Appearance and
Physiognomics in Early Medieval Italy,” Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988), 191-202.
39 On medieval biography see Walter Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen
Mittelalter, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1986-2004).
and good-natured, but to the proud so terrible that they could hardly
bear his presence. In his emaciation he was strong, in his pallor ornate, in
his greyness, beautiful. His eyes, radiating as it were some sort of splen-
dor (splendore fulgentes) were for the beholder both a source of terror
(terrori) and admiration; they were also accustomed to tears due to his
frequent exercise of the virtue of repentance. From his movements, ges-
tures and gait shone forth the beauty of authority, the weight of gravity
and the mark of serenity … His voice was virile, and at the same time full
of beauty (plena decoris) … His speech was full of sweetness and grace
(plenus suavitatis et gratiae) … There was nothing artificial or affected
about him, and nature had made him admirably harmonious both in the
structure of his body and in the conduct of his life. And even though,
according to the blessed Ambrose, we do not consider the beauty of the
body as the locus of virtue, we do not exclude gracefulness (gratiam)
from it.40
According to C. Stephen Jaeger, the Cluniacs had appropriated the language

and educational ideals of the cathedral schools (which had largely followed
Cicero and Ambrose in their insistence on the cultivation of manners as an
expression of inner virtue) and had “filled them with a specifically monastic-
ascetic content.”41 Indeed, Jotsaldus’s explicitly recalled source is Ambrose,
who in his De officiis ministrorum had chosen to indicate with the word gratia
precisely the outward expression of moral beauty (honestum) which for Cicero
represented the essence of decorum.42 Cicero’s ethical system, cut out for the
Roman aristocrat and statesman, had been adapted by Ambrose to a different
context, that of the priest and the bishop. The influence of Cassiodorus, who
– in a kind of paradoxical harmonization with the classical ideals of serenity,
decorum and mediocritas – had transfigured the bodily signs of the monk’s
self-mortifications (emaciation, pallor) into an ideal of “monastic beauty,” is
also detectable in the passage.43 However, the connection between grace and
40 Jotsaldus, Vita Odilonis, MGH SS rer. Germ. 68:152-53 (PL 142:899-901). I relied in part on
Stephen Jaeger’s trans.: The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval
Europe 950-1200 (Philadelphia, 1994), p. 109.
41 Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, pp. 109-10.
42 Ambrose, De officiis ministrorum, CCSL 15:31 (PL 16:52). Cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.126-31.
43 Edgar De Bruyne, Études d’esthétique médiévale, 2 vols. (1946; repr. Paris, 1998), 1:73.
Cf. Cassiodorus, De anima 11-13, CCSL 96:556-65 (PL 70:1298-1301), where Cassiodorus also
insists on external appearance as a “mirror” (speculum) or “sign” (signum, indicium) of the
soul.
60 Rossi Monti
light, the overlapping between aesthetic and theological grace and the insis-
tence on the splendor radiating from Odilo’s eyes hardly point to Cicero as a
source; rather, these elements seem indebted to a complex of ideas (already
detectable in Ambrose)44 where the Christian-Neoplatonic imagery of light,
the theme of Christ’s transfiguration, and the representations of the dazzling
beauty and fearsomeness of the Roman emperors had formed a tangle that
seems almost impossible to unravel.45
This complex soon developed into the idea that the inward gift of divine
grace somehow overflowed on the outside, engulfing the face and the body of
the saint with light and beautifying his expressions, body language, and even
his flesh. In the biography of the Benedictine abbot, hermit, and wandering
preacher Bernard of Tiron, completed by the monk Geoffrey Grossus around
the middle of the 12th century, for example, it is written that such an “overflow-
ing of grace” (redundantia gratiae) had united his mind with that of God that
his face, “carrying an image (formam) of this union, manifested an angelic like-
ness”; as a result, his countenance “shone with a certain sweet brightness”
(cujusdam claritatis suavitate resplendebat).46 This theme became particularly
widespread in the works of the Cistercians.47 Bernard of Clairvaux had lyrically
described the luminous overflowing of the beauty of the soul (pulchritudo ani-
mae) into the body, the gait, and the expressions of the saint.48 One of his
biographers, Geoffrey of Auxerre, adopted this language in his description of
Bernard’s physical appearance, where inward grace becomes visible in his
flesh:
God had endowed this holy soul with an auxiliary (adiutorium) similar to
it, and had adapted to it a body formed by means of a special blessing. In
his flesh there was visible a certain grace (gratia), which was spiritual
44 Cf. for example Ambrose, De bono mortis 7.26-27 (CSEL 32:727-28).

45 This imagery had also a parallel in the literary portraits typical of medieval courtly
literature. See Henrik Specht, “The Beautiful, the Handsome, and the Ugly: Some Aspects
of the Art of Character Portrayal in Medieval Literature,” Studia Neophilologica 56 (1984),
131-32; Thomas Dale, “Romanesque Sculpted Portraits: Convention, Vision, and Real
Presence,” Gesta 46 (2007), 105-06.
46 Geoffrey Grossus, Vita beati Bernardi Tironiensis, PL 172:1427-28. On this passage see Ellert
Dahl, “Heavenly Images: The Statue of St. Foy of Conques and the Signification of the
Medieval ‘Cult-Image’ in the West,” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia
8 (1978), 175-91, at pp. 186-87 (I relied in part on his translation).
47 I have explored this tradition in my Il cielo in terra (Turin, 2008), pp. 25-94.
48 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 85.10-11, Sancti Bernardi opera,
8 vols. (Rome, 1957-77), 2:314 (PL 183:1193). Cf. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, pp. 269-72.
rather than carnal. His face radiated celestial rather than earthly bright-
ness (claritas praefulgebat): in his eyes shone (radiabat) angelic purity
and dove-like simplicity. So great was the beauty of the inner man (interi-
oris hominis pulchritudo), that it must needs break forth outwardly (foras
erumperet) with visible signs (indiciis), so that the outer man appeared
suffused with the overabundance of inward purity and copious grace (de
cumulo internae puritatis et gratiae copiosae perfusus).
This typically idealized portrait is followed by a description of Bernard’s body,

which, like that of Odilo, appears somewhat beautified by his penitential
practices:
His body was rather fragile (tenuissimum) and not plump, his extremely
thin skin turned moderately rosy on the cheeks. And whatever natural
warmth he possessed, he expended in his continuous meditation and
zeal for penance. The hair on his head was a mixture of white and blonde.
His beard somewhat reddish, but toward the end of his life it was covered
with a thin layer of greyness. His stature was a good average (mediocrita-
tis honestae) and appeared tall rather than short.49
This description appears much more detailed and individualized than that of
Odilo, but it is difficult to say how ‘naturalistic’ it really is: realistic traits are
juxtaposed with idealized ones and the overall purpose, as in many other cases,
seems to be to cast the individual as a type in accordance with his social role.50
Moreover, a great deal of stress is put on the transparency of the beauty of the
soul through the body, a body whose celestial radiance was also an anticipa-
tion of the glory of the resurrection. It has been persuasively argued that the
penetrating eyes and dazzling brilliance of the many golden reliquary figures
that continually appear from the late Carolingian period on were meant to
convey a similar message. Examples of this are the reliquary of St. Foy in
Conques (10th century) and that of St. Baudime in Saint-Nectaire (12th
49 Geoffrey of Auxerre, Vita prima 3.1, CCCM 89B:135 (PL 185:303). On this passage see Étienne
Gilson, “La mystique de la grace dans la Queste del Saint Graal,” Romania 51 (1925), 332-33;
Dahl, “Heavenly Images,” p. 187; Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, pp. 273-74; Adriaan H. Bredero,
Bernard de Clairvaux, trans. Joseph Longton (Turnhout, 1993), p. 94; James France,
Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Kalamazoo, 2007), pp. 1-11. On the Vita
prima, cf. Jaeger’s essay in this volume.
50 On this, see the excellent essay by Dale, “Romanesque Sculpted Portraits.”
62 Rossi Monti
century).51 Not surprisingly, the phenomenon described in the biography of

Bernard was thought to have characterized eminently the body of Christ and
the Virgin Mary, which received attention especially in the numerous Cistercian
allegorical commentaries on the Song of Songs.52
The encomiastic portraits of medieval popes were often constructed in
accordance with similar principles. In a propagandistic pamphlet completed
around 1133 and enthusiastically disseminated throughout Europe by (among
others) Bernard of Clairvaux, Arnulf, the future bishop of Lisieux, contrasted
the physical beauty and sanctity of Pope Innocent II with the ugliness and
depravity of his schismatic rivals, the papal legate Girard and Pope Anaclet II.
Innocent II – the author writes – is of medium height (staturae mediocris), and
the simplicity and shyness of his eyes and face are evidence of his soul’s chas-
tity; besides, his countenance “shines” (resplendet) with such dignity that it
generates reverence in the viewer. As Antony and many others after him,
Innocent is the recipient, among many other God-given “gifts” (dona), of a
“special grace” (specialem gratiam) that makes him lovable in virtue of his
appearance alone. Moreover, God’s generosity has inspired his eyes with
“something divine” (divinum quiddam) and “full of grace” (plenum gratiae) that
is worthy of veneration. His voice is sweet, but also authoritative. He attracts
onlookers all the more, Arnulf concludes, because his body appears to have
already received a taste of the future blessedness.53 More than a century later,
we read in the epitaph of Pope Nicholas III, who died in 1248, that his inner
nature “shone” (foris elucebat) on the outside and his physical appearance was
the image (imago) of his inner virtue.54
By the time of Thomas Aquinas, the idea of a luminous overflowing (redun-
dantia) of grace into the body of the saint had been incorporated into the
51 Dahl, “Heavenly Images”; Thomas E.A. Dale, “The Individual, the Resurrected Body, and
Romanesque Portraiture: The Tomb of Rudolf von Schwaben in Merseburg,” Speculum 77
(2002), 707-43.
52 Cf. Gilbert of Hoyland, Sermones in Canticum Salomonis 6.5 (PL 184:41).
53 Arnulf of Lisieux, Invectiva in Girardum Engolismensem Episcopum, MGH Lib. lit. 3:96. For
a discussion of this work see Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak, When Ego Was Imago (Leiden, 2011),
pp. 209-30. On medieval portrayals of ugliness see Jan Ziolkowski, “Avatars of Ugliness in
Medieval Literature,” The Modern Language Review 79 (1984), 1-20.
54 Gerhart B. Ladner, Die Papstbildnisse des Altertums und des Mittelalters, 3 vols. (Vatican
City, 1941-84), 2:216. On the medieval tradition of the physical beauty of the popes and the
combination of idealization and realism in their descriptions see Heinrich Schmidinger,
“Das Papstbild in der Geschichtsschreibung des späteren Mittelalters,” Römische Histo
rische Mitteilungen 1 (1956-57), 106-29; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Il corpo del papa
(Turin 1994), pp. 286-91.
scholastic theology of beatitude. For Thomas, the glory of the resurrection

coincided with the consummation of grace, and through grace the soul recov-
ered its original beauty lost because of original sin. The “brightness” of the
resurrected body was “caused by the overflowing of the glory of the soul into
the body”: the spiritual brightness of the soul was received as corporeal bright-
ness in the body. The glorious bodies are compared to gold for their brightness
and to glass for their translucence. Moreover, in the blessed condition, the
image of God, which resided first and foremost in the spirit, overflowed into
the body, which in turn, due to its proportionality with the soul, became in
itself a “representation” of the imago Dei. Thomas believed that a partial and
temporary anticipation of this state could be achieved on earth: as the soul
enjoyed the vision of God, its spiritual brightness was transmitted also to the
body.55
This valorization of the human body is certainly part of a more general
trend typical of the 13th century, and Thomas, following Aristotle, had insisted
on the unity and interdependence of body and soul. However, at least with
respect to the image of the overflowing of inner grace on the outside, I cannot
agree with Dominic Olariu’s emphatic remark that this valorization was
“unprecedented” in the medieval West: as should have become clear by now,
the idea of the body as an “external manifestation” of the soul’s “spiritual fulfill-
ment” had been developed by Christian authors well before Thomas Aquinas.56
Even the new phenomenon of the stigmata, which began to appear in the
1220s, seems to me a rather consequent development – a physiological one, so
to speak – of this tradition.57 With Francis’s stigmata, we are presented with an
even more tangible sign of God’s grace than the one shining through the flesh
of Bernard of Clairvaux, and it is no wonder that Thomas of Celano resorted to
a repertoire of images similar to those employed by Bernard’s biographer to
describe Francis’s stigmata.58
55 See, respectively, Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1 q. 95 a. 1 arg. 6; Super sententiis 4

d. 18 q. 1 a. 2 qc. 1-2; d. 44 q. 2 a. 4 qc. 1; d. 49 q. 4 a. 5 qc. 2 co; Contra Gentiles 4 cap. 86 n. 2.
56 Dominic Olariu, “Thomas Aquinas’ Definition of the imago Dei and the Development of
Lifelike Portraiture,” Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre 17, no. 2 (2013),
<http://cem.revues.org/13251>.
57 André Vauchez, La santità nel Medioevo, trans. Alfonso Prandi (Bologna, 1989), pp. 441-45.
58 As the dead body of Francis is uncovered at his funeral, the crowd can admire the radiant
beauty of his flesh, his angelic face, and the “beauty” and “grace” of his wounds (Thomas
of Celano, Vita prima 112-13; for a detailed physical description of Francis see ibid. 83).
64 Rossi Monti
5 The Mask of Grace
Qualities such as grace, comeliness, splendor, majesty, and inward beauty were
also commonly attributed – with different meanings depending on the epoch
and the context – to the Roman emperors both in encomiastic and biographi-
cal literature. Even after the Christian turn, when it became clear (especially by
the 5th century) that the Christian emperor could be a saint, but not a god,59
these qualities were often still seen as the visible manifestation of the emper-
or’s special relationship with the deity.60 The different developments of this
theme in Byzantium and in the West cannot be explored here. A literary por-
trait of a Byzantine emperor, however, will suffice to give the sense of the
persistence of certain schemes and ideas and of their ramifications outside the
context of saints and holy men:
Alexius indeed was not especially tall but rather broad, and yet his
breadth was well proportioned to his height. When standing he did not
strike the onlookers with such admiration, but if when sitting on the
imperial throne, he shot forth the fierce splendor of his eyes, he seemed
to be a blaze of lightning, such irresistible radiance shone from his face,
nay from his whole person. He had black arched eyebrows, from beneath
which his eyes darted a glance at once terrible and tender, so that from
the gleam of his eyes, the radiance of his face, the dignified curve of his
cheeks and the ruddy colour that suffused them, both awe and confi-
dence were awakened. His broad shoulders, muscular arms, mighty chest,
in fact his generally heroic appearance, evoked in the multitude the
greatest admiration and pleasure. From his whole person emanated
beauty (oran) and grace (charin) and dignity, and an unapproachable
majesty. And if he entered into conversation and let loose his tongue, you
would have realized from his first words that fiery eloquence dwelt on his
lips. For with a flood of argument he would carry the opinions of his hear-
ers with him, for truly he could not be surpassed in discussion or action,
59 Arnaldo Momigliano, “How Roman Emperors Became Gods,” The American Scholar 55
(1986), 181-93, at p. 193.
60 Cf. Elizabeth C. Evans, “Physiognomics in the Ancient World,” Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society 59 (1969), 1-101 at pp. 44, 46-58; Neri, La bellezza, pp. 109-51.
One of the best examples can be found in the encomium of Constantine’s beauty by the
310 AD anonymous orator in Panegyrici Latini 6(7).17.
being as ready with his tongue as with his hand, the one for hurling the
spear, the other for casting fresh spells.61
These words were written by the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena – a con-
temporary of St. Bernard – about the Emperor Alexius, her father. In this
portrait, the majesty of the Roman emperor seems to have merged with the
terrifying appearance of the Christ Pantocrator.
In the West, as is well known, an aura of sacredness surrounded kings and
emperors, who were not seen as ordinary mortals and were thought to possess
supernatural powers. The rituals of consecration and unction, which paral-
leled those in use for the bishops, mystically transfigured and elevated them by
far above the crowd: for some, the kings, while remaining by nature individual
men, became through such rituals ‘deified’ by the grace of God.62 This tradition
obviously had many roots and took different forms, but it is hardly surprising
to find our familiar imagery of grace applied to the encomiastic descriptions of
kings. In a messianic panegyric of Frederich II written by a certain Nicholas of
Bari after 1235, for example, the face of the emperor is described as “angelic”
and “full of graces” (plena gratiarum), and reference is made both to the beauty
of king David and the episode of Christ’s transfiguration.63 In a 14th-century
encomiastic portrait, Edward III of England is said to have had an elegant body
and a face similar to that of God, in which shone an extraordinary (and propi-
tious) grace.64
Another important point should be stressed. Some scholars have presented
the idea of the reflection of inner beauty on the body or countenance of the
saint as somehow indirectly indebted to, or at least compatible with, the tenets
of the ancient physiognomic tradition, whose founding texts were unknown in
61 Anna Comnena, Alexiad 3.3, ed. Elizabeth A. Dawes, The Alexiad of the Princess Anna
Comnena (1928; repr. London, 2009), p. 76 (PG 131:268). For a discussion, see Hans Belting,
Likeness and Presence, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1994), pp. 214-15. For the grace
(charis) shining on the face of emperor Manuel I Comnenus see Niketas Choniates,
Historia, PG 139:380-81.
62 Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges (1924; Paris, 1961); Herwig Wolfram, Splendor imperii
(Graz, 1963); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (1957; repr. Princeton, 1997),
pp. 42-86; Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (University Park, 2001).
63 For the Latin text of the panegyric and a discussion see now Fulvio Delle Donne, Il potere
e la sua legittimazione (Arce, 2005), pp. 104, 118.
64 Adam of Murimuth, Continuatio chronicarum, ed. Thomas Hog (London, 1846), p. 226:
“Corpore elegans, vultum habens Deo similem, quia tanta gratia in eo mirifice relucebat,
ut si quis in eius faciem palam respexisset, vel nocte de illo somniasset, illo die indubie
speravit sibi iucunda solatia et prospera evenire.”
66 Rossi Monti
the Western Middle Ages until their rediscovery between the 12th and 13th cen-
turies.65 In part, this is certainly true, but I believe this view fails to understand
the intricacy of the historical process that led to the development of the tradi-
tion I have focused on.66 This intricacy owes much to the intertwining and
mutual exchange – typical of Late Antiquity – between the tradition of the
physiognomic handbooks proper and the many other forms of “physiognomic
consciousness” to be found in ancient literature. More particularly, this view
neglects the fortune and the influence of the Platonic doctrine of the outward
irradiation of the beauty of the soul and its Christian development. In fact,
what emerges from the personal descriptions quoted so far is a peculiar conver-
gence: the attention to the morphological, somatic, and behavioral details,
typical of the physiognomic tradition and its heirs, combines with the celebra-
tion – typically Platonic and Christian – of much more elusive properties, such
as inward beauty, grace, splendor, or purity, which take on metaphysical and
spiritual meanings fundamentally alien to that tradition. Besides, the insis-
tence on the outward manifestation of the beauty of the soul through grace
points to a kind of nexus or ‘correspondence’ between body and soul that
appears very different – because hierarchical and dualistic to a certain extent
– from the psychosomatic “sympathy” presupposed by the ancient physiog-
nomic manuals. No exalted celebration of the spiritual over the material is to
be encountered in those manuals, and the idea of the transparency or over-
flowing of the beauty of the soul through the body is equally absent. In fact,
rather than of a correspondence, we should speak of a triumph of the soul over
the body, which appears engulfed from an inward splendor. Nonetheless, these
traditions seem to have formed a somewhat inextricable tangle.67 Yet, however
65 Squatriti, “Personal Appearance”; Dale, “Romanesque Sculpted Portraits.” On the medieval

rediscovery of physiognomics (and on the problems it generated) see the essays repr. in
Jole Agrimi, Ingeniosa scientia nature (Tavarnuzze-Impruneta, 2002). On the circulation,
in north-western France around 1100, of the Latin Anonymous physiognomic handbook
see Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, pp. 115-16. “Phisionimia” as an art of reading character from
the face is also attributed to the archbishop of Trier Albero in the 12th-century Gesta
Alberonis by Balderic of Florennes (MGH SS 8:257).
66 Much more aware of this intricacy (although no mention is made of the Platonic-
Christian tradition of the beauty of the soul) is Joseph Ziegler, “The Biology of the Virtues
in Medieval and Early Renaissance Theology and Physiognomy,” in Im Korsett der
Tugenden, eds. Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio and Andrea Bettels (Hildesheim, 2013),
pp. 12-13.
67 I have dwelled more extensively on this issue in “Fisiognomica e grazia da Bernardo di
Chiaravalle a Giovan Battista Della Porta,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 21 (2015), 331-45. On
the different forms of physiognomic consciousness, see Evans, “Physiognomics,” p. 6;
‘prevailing’ the soul might be over the body, it is still in and through the body
that the grace and purity of the saint became visible. The contradiction could
not be solved, and it is no wonder that in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
the human body became the object of both a humiliation and a glorification.
To deal with this kind of texts is to face that ambiguity and duplicity of the
body and its “signs” which Marie-Christine Pouchelle has described in her
essay on the Golden Legend.68
The protagonists of the texts discussed above were portrayed by their biog-
raphers and followers as endowed with exceptional qualities and special,
divine powers. Often they were literally divinized. Sometimes they were said to
inspire both love and fear with their (fatherly) combination of grace and fear-
someness, sometimes only love and admiration with their supposedly angelic
(and motherly) meekness. In all these cases, however, their magnetic power of
attraction was skillfully described by their biographers. Such power was
thought to manifest itself through, among other things, oratorical skills, physi-
cal presence, and miraculous powers. However, it is easy to realize that in these
portraits, not only the body, but also the personal identity of the individual
described often tends to rarify, if not almost to vanish. I think this is only par-
tially due to the fact that these descriptions employed specific rhetorical
devices and formulas which had formed part of the education of both pagan
and Christian men for centuries.69
David Rohrbacher, “Physiognomics in Imperial Latin Biography,” Classical Antiquity 29

(2010), 92-93.
68 Marie-Christine Pouchelle, “Représentations du corps dans la Légende dorée,” Ethnologie
française 6 (1976), 293-308. Cf. Michel Sot, “Mépris du monde et résistance des corps au
XIe et XIIe siècles,” Médiévales 8 (1985), 6-17; Jérôme Baschet, “Âme et corps dans l’Occident
médiéval: une dualité dynamique, entre pluralité et dualism,” Archives de sciences sociales
des religions 112 (2000), 5-30; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Über di Körperlichkeit der mittel
alterlichen Frömmigkeit,” in Dinzelbacher, Körper und Frömmigkeit in der mittelalterlichen
Mentalitätsgeschichte (Paderborn, 2007), pp. 10-49. On the ambivalence toward the body
in the Platonic tradition see John M. Dillon, “Rejecting the Body, Refining the Body. Some
Remarks on the Development of Platonist Asceticism,” in Asceticism, eds. Vincent L.
Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (Oxford, 1998), pp. 80-87.
69 On the development of personal descriptions from antiquity to the Middle Ages see
Geneva Misener, “Iconistic Portraits,” Classical Philology, 19 (1924), 97-123; Vogt, Die
Literarische Personenschilderung; Alice M. Colby, The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French
Literature (Geneva, 1965); Evans, “Physiognomics”; Gilbert Dagron, “Holy Images and
Likeness,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991), 23-33; Jakov N. Ljubarskij, “Man in Byzantine
Historiography from John Malalas to Michael Psellos,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 46 (1992),
177-86.
68 Rossi Monti
The medieval mind – André Vauchez has argued – was inclined to connote
as sensible what we would rather describe as spiritual realities. The saints ap-
peared to the medieval men and women as “luminous beings”: the source and
nature of this light was spiritual, but its manifestations and miraculous effects
were no doubt conceived as material.70 This, as we have seen, was not just a
medieval phenomenon: ancient men lived their spiritual life visually, to a de-
gree scarcely imaginable for us.71 The material world was often proclaimed in-
essential, but, at the same time, invested with spiritual meaning. The physical
appearance of the holy man deserved physiognomical attention, but tended to
disappear, swallowed by an inward splendor. Hans P. L’Orange has argued that
in the literary and artistic portraits of the rulers, the saints and the philoso-
phers of Late Antiquity the “pneumatic idealization” of man resulted in an ero-
sion of individual traits. Their “holy countenance” and visionary gaze indicated
a complete detachment from this world and eventually crystallized into a “ste-
reotyped mask of majesty.”72 Similarly, the glowing faces of the desert fathers
studied by Georgia Frank tended to become indistinguishable as they were as-
similated to those of the biblical heroes: theirs was a “biblicized physiognomy.”73
Despite L’Orange’s perhaps too uniform account of the development of late
antique art, it remains true that the influence of this “spiritualizing trend” on
the literary and artistic portraiture of both the Latin and Byzantine Middle
Ages was remarkable.74
There is certainly a relationship between the near-complete disappearance
of individual facial likeness in medieval art between the age of Charlemagne
and the time of Dante75 and the idea, typical of 12th-century religious texts, but
70 Vauchez, La santità nel Medioevo, p. 437; see pp. 434-41 on beauty (or ugliness) as a “sign”
of sanctity (though no mention is made of physiognomics).
71 L’Orange, Apotheosis, p. 98.
72 Ibid., pp. 95-126. Cf. R.R.R. Smith, “Late Roman Philosopher Portraits from Aphrodisias,”
The Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990), 127-55; Neri, La bellezza, pp. 13-14, 147-51.
73 Frank, The Memory of the Eyes, pp. 160-65.
74 Cf. Willibald Sauerländer, “The Fate of the Face in Medieval Art,” in Set in Stone, ed.
Charles T. Little (New Haven, 2006), pp. 3-17.
75 Ibid., pp. 3-4; the author links the rediscovery of physiognomical texts with the growing
naturalism of medieval art. On bodily and facial expressivity of late medieval imagery and
its metaphysical character see Paul Binski, “The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of
the Gothic Smile,” Art History 20 (1997), 350-74, and cf. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, pp. 331-
48. On the much debated problem of the 12th-century “discovery of the individual” see at
least Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” (1980),
repr. and revised in Bynum, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 82-109; Dale, “Romanesque
Sculpted Portraits.” Bedos-Rezak (When Ego Was Imago, pp. 109-59) stresses the
relationship between the technology and metaphors of sealing (with their logic of
in fact much older, that the true self does not coincide with one’s unique per-
sonality, but with a human nature made in the image of God – “an imago Dei
that is the same for all human beings.”76 To conform to such image – despite the
deformation it had undergone due to the Fall – was therefore the highest and
the most desirable goal. This desire for sameness, so unfamiliar to us, is prob-
ably one of the reasons (together with didacticism and the tendency to meld
individuals with their social roles) behind the conventionality, the repetitive-
ness, and the abstraction of so many medieval literary and artistic representa-
tions of holy men: reality was aestheticized in order to match unchanging
ideals.77 Nonetheless, the very attempts, in late antique and medieval sacred
biographies, at rendering the physical appearance of individuals remind us
that a complete absorption of the individual into the type was probably never
fully achieved or desired, and that some tension always remained.78 It remains
true, however, that, like the souls of the blessed in Dante’s Paradiso, the faces
of late antique and medieval holy men tended to blur under the everlasting
splendor of God-given grace. This perhaps explains why, to most of us, the
grace-less and tragically expressive figures of the damned, whether depicted in
Dante’s Comedy or on the walls of medieval churches, appear much more hu-
man.
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76 Jung
Chapter 2 Compassion as Moral Virtue: Virgins in Gothic Sculpture
Compassion as Moral Virtue: Another Look at the

Wise and Foolish Virgins in Gothic Sculpture
Jacqueline E. Jung
Introduction
[Charismatic art] creates a magnified, exalted semblance of life. Its basic

impulse is to create a world grander than the one in which the reader or
viewer lives, a world of beauty, sublime emotions, heroic motives and
deeds, godlike bodies and actions, and superhuman abilities, a world of
wonders, miracles, and magic – in order to dazzle and astonish the hum-
bled viewer and lift him, by emulation or envy, up to the level of the world
or the hero represented.1
For this art historian, who long ago relinquished any resistance to the enchant-
ments of Gothic sculpture, the question of the relationship between the fictive
bodies inhabiting the walls, piers, and portals of churches and their embodied
models, makers, and beholders has always been fundamental.2 My interest
was, if not sparked, then certainly heightened and encouraged by Stephen
* I will be forever indebted to Heiko Brandl and Andreas Waschbüsch for allowing me to exam-
ine and photograph the Virgins of Magdeburg Cathedral during their cleaning in 2009, provid-
ing access to the cathedral’s gallery level, and sharing their knowledge of the figures’ origins
and technical aspects with me. The photos in figures 2.10 and 2.11 were made at that time.
Support from the Griswold fund at Yale University enabled the travels that yielded the photos
of Strasbourg Cathedral and the newly restored portal at Magdeburg. This paper took shape
at a week-long interdisciplinary Mellon seminar held at Northwestern University on “The
Middle Ages in Translation” in July 2013. I am grateful to Barbara Newman, who organized that
event, and the many esteemed participants – especially Stephen Jaeger – whose comments
helped me clarify and refine my ideas. Barbara Rosenwein has likewise offered generous and
helpful insights on the material presented here. Thanks, finally, go to the perceptive anony-
mous readers who steered me away from some important infelicities, and to Brigitte Miriam
Bedos-Rezak and Martha Rust for including me in this volume.
(Philadelphia, 2012), p. 41.
2 This topic is explored, particularly with respect to the 13th-century programs at Naumburg
and Strasbourg, in my book in progress, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the

Compassion as Moral Virtue: Virgins in Gothic Sculpture 77
Jaeger’s writings on the conveyance of medieval social ideals through the elo-
quent bodies of clerical schoolmen, highly trained in the performance of
charisma, and eventually through their stone surrogates, the elegant bodies
that graced the facades of church buildings.3 The notion that the sculptural
arts of the High Middle Ages, with their idealized naturalism, suppleness of
presentation, and psychological suggestiveness, sought to harness and irradi-
ate something of the charisma once ascribed to living persons was and remains
a galvanizing idea in my own research. Being rooted in social practices and
conceptions, it offers a way of thinking about the mimetic achievements of
Gothic artists that has more historical nuance than the now-familiar invoca-
tion of the 13th century’s sudden twin “discoveries” of nature and of the
individual4 or, at the opposite extreme of historiography, the romanticizing
mode of interpretation that elided present and past forms of response, often in
the service of nationalist agendas.5 With several notable exceptions – Paul
Binski, Thomas Dale, Matthew Reeve6 – art historians have been slow to
explore the implications of Jaeger’s work, but the renewed interest in ques-
tions of mimesis, presence, and psychological expressivity in Gothic sculpture
in recent years should open the door to fresh engagements with the ideas put
forward there.7
Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, forthcoming from Yale University Press. The present essay
emerges from that project.
3 Especially Jaeger, The Envy of Angels. Cathedral School and Social Ideals, 950-1200 (Philadelphia,
1994), which appeared the year I began graduate study.
4 The question of nature and the individual has preoccupied interpreters of Gothic since the
early 20th century; see Wilhelm Vöge, “Die Bahnbrecher des Naturstudiums um 1200” (1914),
repr. in Bildhauer des Mittelalters: Gesammelte Studien (Berlin, 1958), pp. 63-97, and most re-
cently the catalog Der Naumburger Meister: Bildhauer und Architekt im Europa der Kathedralen,
eds. Hartmut Krohm and Holger Kunde, 3 vols. (Petersberg, 2009, 2011). For a sensitive account
of the question, see Jean A. Givens, Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art (Cambridge,
2005).
5 See Jacqueline E. Jung, “France, Germany, and the Historiography of Gothic Sculpture,” in A
Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd expanded edi-
tion, ed. Conrad Rudolph (forthcoming, Malden, MA, 2018).
6 Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (London, 2005),
pp. 257-59; Thomas E.A. Dale, “The Individual, the Resurrected Body, and Romanesque
Portraiture: The Tomb of Rudolf von Schwaben in Merseburg,” Speculum 77 (2002), 707-43;
Matthew M. Reeve, “Gothic Architecture and the Civilizing Process: The Great Hall in
Thirteenth-Century England,” in New Approaches to Gothic Architecture, eds. Robert Bork,
William W. Clark, and Abby McGehee (Farnham, Surrey, 2011), pp. 93-109.
7 See, for example, Martin Büchsel, “Monströse Gefühle – die Gefühle von Monstern:
Überlegungen zu emotionalen Strukturen in der marginalen Skulptur der Romanik und Gotik
78 Jung
As work in this vein progresses, it will be above all important to consider the
interactions and interrelationships that persisted between the charismatic
bodies of living people and those created by artists in various media well after
the rise of strongly mimetic representation in the later 12th century. Jaeger’s
early writings in particular were quite insistent about visual or literary art’s
“usurpation” of charisma from the living, whose embodied potency seems to
have faded as the closed world of cathedral schools opened up.8 But a view
into the broader terrain of medieval culture suggests a more complex situa-
tion: the existence of beautiful bodies in sculpture and poetry seems not to
have stripped the aura from the animate bodies of special people, even if these
were more often found outside the exclusive domains of cathedral schools and
monasteries than had been the case in the past. To judge from chronicles, hagi-
ography, and even inquisitorial reports, men and women of the 13th and 14th
centuries were no less apt to scrutinize the bodies and behaviors of living char-
ismatics for features to imitate, admire, or condemn than those who studied
their teachers in the 10th and 11th centuries, even if they did so in different
ways.9 Rather than taking over charismatic power from the living, art of this
later period was constantly paying homage to the beautiful bodies, controlled
movements, and heroic emotions of the living (specifically, the living elite) –
who, in a kind of feedback loop, were also learning from such representations
Frankreichs,” IMAGO. Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse und Ästhetik 1 (2012), 75-103;
Assaf Pinkus, Sculpting Simulacra in Medieval Germany, 1250-1380 (Farnham, Surrey, 2014).
Work on expressivity is being immensely facilitated by the writings of Barbara H. Rosenwein,
most recently Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700 (Cambridge, 2016).
8 This point emerges with special force in Jaeger, “Charismatic Body – Charismatic Text,”
Exemplaria 9 (1997), 117-37.
9 See, among many others, Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987); Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits:
Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Dyan Elliott, “The
Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body,
eds. Peter Biller and Alastair Minnis (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1997), pp. 141-73; Gábor Klaniczay,
“On the Stigmatization of Saint Margaret of Hungary,” in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed.
Miri Rubin (Princeton, 2009), pp. 274-84; Walter Simons, “Reading a Saint’s Body: Rapture and
Bodily Movement in the Vitae of Thirteenth-Century Beguines,” in Framing Medieval Bodies,
eds. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester, 1994), pp. 10-23; Mitchell B. Merback, “The Living
Image of Pity: Mimetic Violence, Peace-Making, and Salvific Spectacle in the Flagellant
Processions of the Later Middle Ages,” in Images of Medieval Sanctity: Essays in Honour of Gary
Dickson, ed. Debra Higgs Strickland (Leiden, 2007), pp. 135-80. This is leaving aside the ex-
amples of the 13th-century saints Francis of Assisi and Elizabeth of Thuringia, who were the
subjects of both admiration and imitation well before their lives were translated into text and
image; see the contribution by Jaeger in this volume.
how best to behave – and then broadcasting them to a mass audience with
precisely the ennobling intentions and effects that Jaeger describes.
Gothic sculpture functioned as a vital device of translation in this process,
not only of biblical stories and theological precepts but also of moral virtues
and behavior – and thus of spiritual formation.10 The former kinds of content
(biblical and theological) relied on shared conventions of formal positions and
iconographic motifs. The latter spoke the language of the body. Without the
existence of beautiful living bodies to provide inspiration, or to be refined and
further ennobled by the effects of art, the splendid men and women of Gothic
statuary would have had no reason for being; schematic reliefs, wall paintings,
or even textual inscriptions could have conveyed theological, narrative, or
didactic subject matter just as well.
This paper originally set out to chart the path medieval sculpture took from
its origins as an auratic medium intimately bound to real bodies and dismis-
sive of mimetic effects (as with the reliquary statue of St. Foy at Conques and
early tomb effigies at Merseburg and Quedlinburg) to a charismatic medium
that was at once increasingly detached from once-living bodies (corpses and
relics) and increasingly devoted to simulating the appearance and presence of
beautiful, mobile bodies in real space (beginning with the Royal Portals at
Chartres).11 This proved to be an overblown ambition, and for the sake of
decorum I have chosen to focus instead on the sculptural theme that looms so
large in Jaeger’s oeuvre: that of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. In my exploration
of this subject as one that encouraged at least some artists to grapple, in novel
ways, with the relation between interior and exterior person, I have found that
the kind of bodily eloquence Jaeger praises in the program at Strasbourg
Cathedral had earlier origins, and was realized even more forcefully in the mid-
13th-century sculpture group at Magdeburg Cathedral. Placing the Strasbourg
maidens into a broader trajectory of representations – as well as into their own
context in a more expansive program of imagery on the cathedral’s three west-
ern portals – allows us also to recognize that they are not as straightforward in
their evocation of virtue and vice as they seemed to be. They invite us to
expand our understanding of charismatic representation’s effects to encom-
pass not only the impulse to emulate but also the desire to empathize. The
cultivation of empathy – or, to put it in medieval terms, compassio, the ability
10 My view is in line with that of Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle
Ages (Oxford, 2013), a book I read only after this paper was complete.
11 The use of these terms to chart this development was motivated by Jaeger’s “Aura and
Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New German Critique 114, vol. 38 (2011),
17-34.
80 Jung
to feel along with a suffering other – was no less a part of the program of spiri-
tual formation in the 13th century than was the cultivation of decorum through
the emulation of gracious models. Art, particularly large-scale sculptures that
confronted beholders in highly charged threshold spaces, played an important
role in each domain.
“Virtue made visible”: The Wise and Foolish Virgins at Strasbourg

Cathedral
Readers of Stephen Jaeger’s books, from The Envy of Angels to Enchantment,

will be well familiar with the Wise and Foolish Virgins of Strasbourg Cathedral
of c.1280-90, for they appear there as the very epitomes of charismatic figural
arts despite their temporal distance from the decline of charismatic culture in
the 12th century.12 The building’s dizzying Rayonnant facade, funded by the
Strasbourg citizenry in the last decade of the 13th century, thrums with visual
excitement (fig. 2.1).13 At the lowest level, a sculpture program of unusual
ambition links the three portals: a tympanum with the Passion of Christ and
jamb figures of prophets forms the program’s center, while Virtues conquer
Vices beneath an Infancy tympanum in the northern (left-hand) doorway and
Wise and Foolish Virgins perform their drama beneath a Last Judgment tym-
panum on the right (fig. 2.2).14 The doorways are spaced relatively far apart,
leaving room for two additional sculptures to occupy each of the narrow wall
surfaces between the outer jambs and the projecting frontal buttresses.
Extending approximately 3.5 meters from the facade wall at ground level, these
buttresses create intimate pockets of space – like miniature porches – for view-
ers approaching each threshold.15
In Jaeger’s writings, the status and impact of the Wise and Foolish Virgins as
a group within a larger architectural and pictorial context is of less importance
than the bodily habitus the figures display as individuals (figs. 2.3-2.5). The
Virgins, he argues, “dramatize and enact virtue or vice,” “carrying their emblems
in the contours of their bodies” alone.16 The Wise in particular demonstrate
12 Jaeger, Envy of Angels, pp. 331-48; idem, Enchantment, pp. 134-61.

13 For the social and financial situation, see Henry Kraus, Gold Was the Mortar: The Economics
of Cathedral Building (London, 1979), pp. 109-30.
14 Benoît Van den Bossche, La cathédrale de Strasbourg: Sculpture des portails occidentaux
(Paris, 2006); Bruno Boerner, Bildwirkungen: Die kommunikative Funktion mittelalterlicher
Skulpturen (Berlin, 2008), pp. 146-82.
15 Van den Bossche, La cathédrale, p. 23.
16 Jaeger, Envy of Angels, p. 339.
Compassion as Moral Virtue: Virgins in Gothic Sculpture
81
Figure 2.1 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, complete view of portals (Photo: author).
82
Jung
Figure 2.2 Strasbourg, Cathedral (Münster) of Notre-Dame. West facade, south (right-hand) portal, with Last Judgment tympanum and Wise and
Foolish Virgins in jambs and adjacent wall-niches, c.1280-90 (several figures are replicas of originals now located in Musée de l’Oeuvre
Notre-Dame) (Photo: author).
the kind of “serenity and moderation” that makes them legible as “realizations
of virtue made visible” (fig. 2.4).17 The Wise Virgin on the wall niche (known in
the older sources as La Parisienne for her easy elegance),18 her face framed by a
softly billowing veil and her fingers tugging lightly on her mantle-strap, “exudes
both wisdom and fortitude,” yielding an impression of “strength coupled with
restraint and of a mean struck between opposing tensions” (fig. 2.5b, left). The
face that forms the frontispiece to The Envy of Angels belongs to her neighbor
on the portal’s outermost jamb (fig. 2.4, right). Whether or not we share Jaeger’s
discernment in its features of “the sexual promise and erotic potential of vir-
ginity,” this solemn visage holds up beautifully alongside Bernard of Clairvaux’s
description of the virgin Sophia, whose perfectly composed body even the
angels envied, and Hugh of St. Victor’s exemplary teachers, whose “excellent
and sublime qualities” at once radiated outward and drew attentive disciples
to him, prompting them to “recreate those qualities” in themselves.19
The Foolish, for Jaeger, likewise convey their inner conditions through their
bodies, but their message is not as pretty (figs. 2.3, 2.5a). Their status as nega-
tive exemplars is not only evident in the giddy behavior of one of the women,
who giggles as she drops her lamp and pulls back the bodice of her outer dress
as if to give the handsome, apple-brandishing man next to her a glimpse of her
loosely clad chest. This is a case of overt didacticism, with the moral message
hammered home by a whole cluster of conventional signs, from the Virgin’s
visible teeth (indicating a lack of restraint) to the vermin, invisible to her,
seething across the back of her male love interest.20 The sculptors had more
subtle means for revealing the moral flaws of the other women. With their
“grim glances,” as Jaeger describes them (invoking a description of Odo of
17 This and the following quotations come from ibid., pp. 340-41.

18 See Van den Bossche, La cathédrale, p. 194.
19 Jaeger, Envy of Angels, p. 340 and frontispiece. It is worth noting that the black-and-white
photographs of the figures’ heads that illustrate Jaeger’s writings, first published in Otto
Schmitt’s monograph Die gotischen Skulpturen des Strassburger Münsters (Frankfurt am
Main, 1924), present the Virgins in a highly artificial way, using an elevated standpoint,
soft lighting, and the conventional angles of celebrity head-shots to create a sense of
intimacy between viewers and subjects and to bring out the women’s glamour and poise.
Standing quite high above ground level, and forming a small part of a much larger
sculptural and architectural tableau, the figures do not lend themselves well to such close
scrutiny when encountered in situ. It is possible to read Jaeger’s sumptuous writings on
the Virgins as part of a chain of charismatic representations: they are charismatic texts on
charismatic photographs of charismatic sculptures of charismatic bodies. Each level
presents the other in new ways.
20 On the immoderate laughter of this figure, see Jaeger, Envy of Angels, pp. 342-44.
84 Jung
Figure 2.3 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, south portal, left-hand jamb: Prince of the World
with three Foolish Virgins (Photo: author).
Orléans), these figures demonstrate the “anger and spoiled petulance” that
must be a reason for their downfall; in their “oddly cocked and awkwardly
tensed” poses, they demonstrate a lack of control that was, for medieval
churchmen a sure sign of “inconstancy of mind.”21
What we see in these expressive bodies, in other words, are not, or not only,
the results of the judgment that has been cast upon the Virgins; they are also
the causes of that judgment. The bodies and faces of the Wise reveal, through
their composure, the wisdom and grace that earned them a place at the wed-
ding feast, while the Foolish – both the laughing maiden and her sulky
counterparts – demonstrate the lack of decorum and self-control that had
ensured their rejection.22 In both cases, the figures stand as exemplars of
behavior for their viewers – a broad and variegated audience of women and
21 Ibid., p. 344.
Figure 2.4 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, south portal, right-hand jamb: Christ the
Bridegroom with three Wise Virgins (Photo: author).
men, laity and clergy,23 who were expected to scrutinize and interpret their
bodies with a sensitivity once associated solely with the rarefied worlds of
cathedral schools and monasteries.
The Hidden Oil of Conscience: Making Sense of the Virgins in the

Exegetical Tradition
The idea that the two groups should illustrate not only contrasting reactions to
the Judgment playing out in the tympanum but also moral oppositions – that
they should represent a “homiletic contrast of moral absolutes,” in Paul Binski’s
formulation24 – accords well with many representations of the Virgins in
23 For the social context (and conflicts) under which the Strasbourg facade rose, see Boerner,
Bildwirkungen, pp. 139-46.
24 Paul Binski, “The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile,” Art History
20 (1997), 350-74 at p. 355.
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Figure 2.5 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, south portal, (a) left-hand wall-niche with two
Foolish Virgins, (b) right-hand wall-niche with two Wise Virgins (Photos: author).
diverse media up to and well beyond the 13th century. Their positioning alone
might do the trick. On the central portal of the west facade of St-Denis, from
1140-44, which first introduced the theme to monumental sculpture, the Virgins
occupy the imposts directly adjacent to the door (fig. 2.6).25 In keeping with
their status as fictional characters, they appear as pictorial footnotes to the
theme of Last Judgment rendered in the tympanum and archivolts above. The
banderole that unfurls from Christ’s right hand extends the invitation to “come
ye blessed of my Father,” while that in his left admonishes “Depart from me, ye
cursed” – lines from Jesus’s prediction of the words of Judgment that comes
soon after his parable about the Virgins (Matt. 25:32-41). Within this composi-
tion, the two rows of five nearly identical Virgins, who obligingly balance their
oil lamps upright or upside-down, literally underscore the larger message
25 See Paula Lieber Gerson, “Suger as Iconographer: The Central Portal of the West Façade of
Saint-Denis,” in Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium, ed. Paula Lieber Gerson (New
York, 1986), pp. 183-98 at pp. 187-88.
Figure 2.6 Abbey church of St-Denis. West facade, detail of center portal with Last Judgment
tympanum and reliefs of Wise and Foolish Virgins on imposts, c.1135-40 (Photo:
author).
about the finality of Judgment and the need for timely preparation. Charisma
is neither needed nor desired in this didactic scheme. The little reliefs, like
those that embellished smaller-scale objects such as sarcophagi and shrines,
stand for ideas of spiritual formation, suggesting the distinction between suf-
ficient and inadequate moral virtue without needing to render such qualities
visible.26
26 See, for example, the Spanish tomb studied by Elizabeth Váldez del Álamo, “Lament for a
Lost Queen: The Sarcophagus of Doña Blanca in Nájera,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996), 311-33; and
the early 12th-century Epiphanius Shrine in Hildesheim, discussed in Walter Lehmann,
88 Jung
But the parable itself is ambiguous, and the notion that one cluster of
women was superior in morals or actions, and that the other was flawed to the
point of deserving consignment to hell, was hardly self-evident. The narrative
splits the group of “ten virgins” – all, strangely, defined as members of the
“Kingdom of Heaven” – into opposing camps of wise and foolish from the out-
set (Matt. 25:1-2), but then proceeds to describe their shared actions and
motivations.27 All were chaste; all took their lamps to greet the wedding party;
all fell asleep; all awoke at the call of the bridegroom. What made the Foolish
foolish was only the fact that they had not brought enough oil to keep their
lamps burning during the evidently unanticipated delay, and thus had to rely
first on their companions and then, barring their help, on the oil vendors, who
clearly kept late hours but plied their trade at some distance from the main
road.28
The virtue of the Wise was that they had lots of oil. Reading against the
grain, a skeptical reader might note that they did not display, through their
works, the Christian virtues of generosity, compassion, or even fortitude.
Indeed, one can easily imagine the moral of the story being inverted, with one
group of women lauded for their perseverance and active efforts to ensure that
there would be sufficient light for the procession, and the other group chas-
tened for their refusal to share and their complacency in merely kicking back
and waiting for the festivities to begin.29 We might think here of the parable of
the Rich Man (Dives) and the beggar Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), such an important
theme in Romanesque sculpture.30 In that story the greedy Dives, having with-
held food from the dying pauper at his doorstep, went to hell upon his own
death while Lazarus reposed in the bosom of Abraham. This tale, too, ended
with a radical separation: as Dives implored Lazarus for a drop of water to cool
Die Parabel von den klugen und törichten Jungfrauen (Ph.D. diss., Freiburg im Breisgau,
1916), p. 32.
27 For an analysis of this text from a biblical historian’s perspective, see Klyne R. Snodgrass,
Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI,
2008), pp. 505-19.
28 Ruben Zimmermann, “Das Hochzeitsritual im Jungfrauengleichnis. Sozialgeschichtliche
Hintergründe zu Mt. 1-13,” New Testament Studies 48 (2002), 48-70. For some of the more
perplexing aspects of the parable – especially the bridegroom’s breach of decorum by
shutting out any members of the wedding party – see Vicky Balabanski, “Opening the
Closed Door: A Feminist Rereading of the ‘Wise and Foolish Virgins’ (Mt. 25.1-13),” in The
Lost Coin: Parables of Women, Work and Wisdom, ed. Mary Ann Beavis (London, 2002),
pp. 71-97.
29 As per Balabanski, “Opening the Closed Door.”
30 Ilene H. Forsyth, “Narrative at Moissac: Schapiro’s Legacy,” Gesta 41 (2002), 71-94.
his thirst, Abraham replied that “between us and you there is fixed a great
chaos: so that they who would pass from hence to you, cannot, nor from thence
come hither.” The door between zones in the afterlife is no less firmly closed
than the one dividing Dives’s house from the harsh outside world – or, for that
matter, the one that seals off the wedding feast in Matthew 25. (Also worth not-
ing is that, of the two guardians of the gate, Abraham exercised far more
courtesy than the Bridegroom, being willing to converse with the anguished
Dives rather than claiming not to know him.)
Medieval artists often pictured the Foolish Virgins’ exclusion through the
motif of the closed door. We see this in widely varied representations in diverse
media, from the scene in the Rossano Codex, a luxurious Syrian manuscript
from the 6th century, where a solitary door intrudes upon the women’s proces-
sion through a landscape, to one in the Rothschild Canticles, a 14th-century
Flemish florilegium, where the Wise Virgins enjoy a fabulous party in the upper
stories of a castle while the Foolish clamor vainly up the ramparts toward the
door, risking falling into a moat below.31 But the parable gives no indication
that the Foolish women were guilty of the kind of active wrongdoing that
prompted Dives’s banishment; theirs was a victimless crime. The church
fathers were quick to recognize this as they mulled over the narrative, which
they, no less than modern critics, found inconsistent and confusing. It was easy
enough to understand that the women’s sleep represented death, their arousal
by the Bridegroom the resurrection, and their ultimate separation the effects
of the Last Judgment.32 But what was the oil upon whose absence or presence
the women’s fates hinged?
Some early commentators, including Jerome, contended that it must be the
good works accumulated during a person’s lifetime; without having displayed
generosity to others, above all through the distribution of alms, one could not
31 Guglielmo Cavallo, Codex Purpureus Rossanensis (Rome, 1993); Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The
Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New
Haven, 1990), pp. 47-52. For earlier representations in various media, see Hildegard Heyne,
Das Gleichnis von den klugen und törichten Jungfrauen: Eine literarisch-ikonographische
Studie zur altchristlichen Zeit (Leipzig, 1922), pp. 79-98; for later ones, Lehmann, Parabel;
and Regine Körkel-Hinkfoth, Die Parabel von den klugen und törichten Jungfrauen (Mt. 25,
1-13) in der bildenden Kunst und im geistlichen Schauspiel (Frankfurt am Main, 1994).
32 This would be the interpretation given in the Glossa Ordinaria in the 12th century; see
Walafridus Strabo (attr.), Glossa Ordinaria: Evangelium secundum Matthaeum, cap. XXV, in
PL 114, cols. 164A-65A, closely followed by Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The
Thirteenth Century, ed. Harry Bober, trans. Marthiel Mathews (Princeton, 1984), pp. 202-
03.
90 Jung
hope to join the Elect.33 Augustine took the opposite point of view.34 With
Jerome, he stressed the fundamental parity of the ten maidens, who, despite
their gender, were intended to “relate to us all, that is, to the whole Church
together.” Their virginity was their purity of the five senses, and the lamps they
all possessed were good works. What the Foolish did not possess, he reasoned,
was caritas, the sincere and selfless love that must fill benevolent actions if
they are to carry weight in the afterlife.35 Along with this virtue, which moti-
vated good works, the Foolish lacked joy, which emerged from them. At least,
whatever joy they might feel about their “continence” and their pious behavior
came from the praise that others – the vendors of oil – lavished on them. Joy,
in Augustine’s vision, must arise solely from the good person’s sense that “he is
inwardly pleasing to God.”
The potential discrepancy between the inner person and her outward deeds
was also central to the interpretation expounded by Gregory the Great.36 For
him the oil signified the “brightness of glory” – something akin to Augustine’s
joy – that flickers forth in the “small containers [of] our hearts, in which we
carry all that we think.” These lamps are what Gregory calls “consciences,”
which either glow from within, stoked by the individual person, or are sus-
tained by the praise of others. The latter form of fuel runs out easily; as the
Psalmist put it, “all the glory of the king’s daughter is within” (Ps. 44.14). Gregory
went further than his forebears in thematizing the relation between inside and
outside, seen and unseen. The Wise Virgins’ virtues, being motivated by the
self alone, may not be apparent to other people. It is not just that they are
“attracted to interior things,” but even when they perform good deeds in the
world they “decline to receive human praise,” and “conceal [their glory] within
their own consciences.” The Foolish may outwardly do everything right – they
may “afflict their bodies through abstinence … [be] devoted to teaching, …
bestow much on the needy” – but they “seek only the recompense of human
praise.” At the time of the Bridegroom’s arrival, these works, so dependent on
33 St. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, Fathers of the Church 117, trans. Thomas P. Scheck
(Washington, DC, 2010), ch. 25, 282. See also St. John Chrysostom, “Homilies on the Gospel
of St. Matthew,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ser. 1, vol. 10, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand
Rapids, MI, 1888), hom. 78, pp. 451-53; Origen, “Commentaria in Matthaeum,” in PG 13, cols.
1699-1703 at 1699.
34 St. Augustine, Sermon 43 on the New Testament, par. 2, in from Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, ser. 1, vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, 1888), pp. 401-05 at pp. 401-02, par. 2.
35 Ibid., p. 402, par. 5.
36 Gregory the Great, XL Homiliarum in Evangelia, Book I, Homily 12, in PL 76: cols. 1118-23;
trans. by Dom David Hurst in Forty Gospel Homilies (Kalamazoo, MI, 1990), homily 10, pp.
68-75.
outside approval, will be “hidden within”; with no one able to testify to them, it
will be as if they never existed at all. The judge himself, Gregory avers, will be
“a witness not only of works but also of hearts.”
The idea that the good deeds of individuals had to be fueled by sincere
intentions, not by the desire to impress others, had an enduring impact on
later generations of commentators. By the 12th century, it was taken as the self-
evident message of the Virgins’ story by Hugh of St. Victor, a man who had
spent much time, in other contexts, reflecting on the connections between the
inner person and the body that gives it expression.37 “The ten virgins are all
believers, displaying good works; the lamps are the works; the oil is grace or
good conscience (bona conscientia). The five foolish virgins signify those who,
by the good deeds they do, seek to obtain not good conscience but human
praise. The wise virgins are those who, by the good deeds they do, seek to
obtain not human praise but good conscience.”38 Nothing, in this line of rea-
soning, could visibly distinguish the Wise from the Foolish – neither actions
nor attributes nor the “contours of the body.” The oil of grace was hidden deep
in the recesses of the individual heart.
Casting Judgment: The Virgins as Emblems of Virtue and Vice
Until the mid-13th century (and long thereafter), there was a significant cleft
between theological and visual interpretations of the biblical narrative. Many
artists could not resist imposing moral judgments on the characters, using cos-
tume, comportment, and gesture to show viewers that it was something
concrete and visible that had landed the Foolish in trouble. In one of the first
narrative renditions of the tale a large-scale format, found on the lower register
of the tympanum of the St. Gall Portal (Galluspforte) at Basel Cathedral (c.1185-
1200, fig. 2.7), the cause of the women’s separation is mapped clearly onto their
bodies.39 On the proper right side of the door, which stands like a barricade in
the center of the lintel, the Wise Virgins approach the Bridegroom wearing
baggy frocks and the wimples of married women, their uplifted hands and
37 Hugh looms large in Jaeger, Envy of Angels, particularly in his instructions to novices on
bodily self-fashioning as a means of controlling spiritual impulses. See also Jean-Claude
Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident medieval (Paris, 1990), pp. 173-206.
38 Hugh of St. Victor, Allegoriae in Novum Testamentum, Liber II: In Matthaeum, cap. XXXIV,
in PL 175, cols. 799-800.
39 Hans-Rudolf Meyer and Dorothea Schwinn Schürmann, Schwelle zum Paradies: Die
Galluspforte des Basler Münsters (Basel, 2000), esp. pp. 157-58.
92 Jung
b
Figure 2.7 Basel Cathedral (Münster). North transept, portal of St. Gall (Galluspforte),
c.1185-1200. Full view of portal with Christ in Majesty and saints in tympanum and
reliefs of the Works of Mercy on flanking walls (b); detail of lintel with Wise and
Foolish Virgins (a) (Photos: author).
wide eyes registering a kind of pious awe (fig. 2.7a). They strike a dramatic con-
trast with the row of Foolish Virgins on the opposite side, with their free-flowing
hair and body-skimming gowns that emphasize their slim physiques, while
also resembling the good matrons who are shown practicing the Seven Works
of Mercy in reliefs adjacent to the door. Thus, through a process of visual anal-
ogy and contrast playing out across the parts of the portal, the bodies of the
Wise at Basel cement their moral status: their virtue is simultaneously transi-
tive (i.e. outwardly directed, as suggested by the correspondence with the
Works of Mercy) and intransitive, having to do with their own modest
self-display.40
Sartorial distinctions marked the Virgins’ moral difference in many other
cases, for example in the early 13th-century lintel of the church of Sts. Peter
and Paul in Eguisheim (Alsace), where the Wise Virgins form a line of identical
stolid matrons who approach Christ with veiled heads and hands, while the
Foolish, with heavy collared cloaks draped casually over their shoulders, turn
toward each other pairwise in a suggestion of both mental and physical disar-
ray (fig. 2.8).41 This is a somewhat more restrained version of the group of
Foolish we find painted in the small central apse of the castle chapel in
Hocheppan (Tyrol).42 Here the cloaks splay open to reveal the women’s form-
fitting, rouched bodices, floor-length sleeves, and braided tresses – fine court
clothing that envelops bodies twisting and cringing in distress.43 The pattern
of aligning a courtly habitus with moral failings continued farther north, for
example in the series of reliefs made for the imposts of a French-style portal at
the newly rebuilt metropolitan cathedral in Magdeburg during the second or
third decade of the 13th century.44 The portal project was never completed, but
its figures received new life at the gallery level of the church’s apse, where they
40 For the useful distinction between transitive and intransitive modes of expression,
introduced by Richard Wollheim, see Binski, “Angel Choir,” p. 353.
41 Willibald Sauerländer, Von Sens bis Strassburg: Ein Beitrag zur kunstgeschichtlichen
Stellung der Strassburger Querhausskulpturen (Berlin, 1966), pp. 133-35. I am grateful to Dr.
Stephanie Luther for sharing her photos of this portal with me.
42 Helmut Stampfer and Thomas Steppan, Affreschi romanici in Tirolo e Trentino (Milan,
2008), pp. 128-31, 218-21.
43 This is a version of the attire worn by the elegant, gently smiling queens who occupy the
jambs of the 12th-century Royal Portal at Chartres Cathedral, a seminal monument in the
development of charismatic sculpture. See Janet E. Snyder, Early Gothic Column-Figure
Sculpture in France: Appearance, Materials, and Significance (Farnham, Surrey, 2011).
44 Heiko Brandl, Die Skulpturen des 13. Jahrhunderts im Magdeburger Dom: Zu den Bildwerken
der älteren und jüngeren Werkstatt (Halle an der Saale, 2009), pp. 22, 28, posits 1232, when
the middle level of the choir (where the figures were ultimately installed) was complete,
94
Figure 2.8 Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, Eguisheim. Lintel of portal with Wise and Foolish Virgins, c.1210-15 (Photo: Stephanie Luther).
Jung
Figure 2.9 Magdeburg, Cathedral of St. Maurice. Apse with column figures and reliefs from an
unfinished portal inserted at gallery level, c.1210-20; this installation was completed
by 1232. The Wise and Foolish Virgins stand within small arched niches near the
capitals of the colored columns (Photo: author).
96 Jung
a b
Figure 2.10 Magdeburg Cathedral. Apse, gallery level. Reliefs of a Wise Virgin (a) and a Foolish
Virgin (b) from earlier campaign, c.1210-20 (Photos: author).
came to surround the high altar (fig. 2.9). In keeping with established conven-
tions, the Wise Virgins wear bulky garments and headdresses (fig. 2.10a), while
the Foolish show off their slim bodies enveloped in sleek dresses. One, who
smiles softly out at viewers, wears a crown of flowers and hooks a finger in the
strap of her mantle in a display of courtly elegance and delight in worldly plea-
sures (fig. 2.10b).
as the terminus ante quem for the group. In ibid., pp. 29-33 he presents the various
attempts to reconstruct that portal going back to Adolph Goldschmitt’s first effort in 1899.
a b
Figure 2.11 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, figures of a Wise Virgin (a) and a
Foolish Virgin (b) from later campaign, c.1240-50. In these photos, the figures had
been removed from the portal for restoration (Photos: author, 2009).
About two decades later (c.1240-50), at the same cathedral, something

extraordinary happened. Sculptors from a workshop associated with Bamberg
Cathedral (and thus, at least indirectly, with the cathedral at Reims) were hired
to create a new group of Wise and Foolish Virgins to occupy the jambs of the
north transept portal, which formed the main entryway to the building (see fig.
98 Jung
2.12).45 The choice to dedicate an entire portal to female figures – who were,
moreover, characters in a parable, not patrons, donors, or saints – was ground-
breaking. We know these sculptors looked carefully at the existing representa-
tion of the theme in the cathedral. One of the figures they made in fact
replicates, in attire, pose, and good-humored mood, the most winsome of the
earlier Foolish Virgins, but now expanded into larger (if not quite life-size)
scale and carved in the round (fig. 2.11a).46 The only difference in the represen-
tation of the women is that the younger figure holds her lamp upright. Although
bearing all the traditional attributes of the Foolish cohort, she is, in fact, one of
the Wise.
Charisma, Compassion, and the Eloquence of Bodies at Magdeburg

Cathedral
This charming mid-century Wise Virgin occupies the central position among
her cohort on the left-hand splay of the north transept portal jambs (figs. 2.12,
2.13). (Today the entire portal area is sheltered within a small porch added to
the building around 1310-20. The outermost statues on each side have under-
gone some slight rearrangement to fit the space; originally they would have
been swiveled to face the marketplace adjacent to the cathedral’s north side.
The positioning of the three innermost figures seems to be that intended by
the initial designers.)47 Unlike some of her companions, who turn toward
viewers entering from either the porch doors or the door of the cathedral, she
looks straight toward her counterpart on the opposite jamb – a woman who is,
in all physical respects, her clone (figs. 2.11b, 2.14). The only differences lie in
costume details: their belts, head-circlets, the brooches are distinctly embel-
45 Martin Gosebruch, “Das oberrheinisch-bambergische Element im Magdeburger Dom,” in

Der Magdeburger Dom: Ottonische Gründung und staufischer Neubau. Bericht über ein
wissenschaftliches Symposion in Magdeburg vom 7.10. bis 11.10.1986, ed. Ernst Ullmann
(Leipzig, 1989), pp. 132-40; Klaus Niehr, “Die Skulpturen des Magdeburger Domes: Tradi
tionsvergewisserung und Modernität,” in Aufbruch in die Gotik: Der Magdeburger Dom
und die späte Stauferzeit, ed. Matthias Puhle, 2 vols. (Mainz, 2009), I:98-113 at pp. 106-07.
46 The figures average 125.4 cm (4.11 inches) in height, according to the measurements of
Brandl, Skulpturen, pp. 217-22. But their placement within the starkly angled splays of the
jambs, and, since the early 14th century, their containment within the small space of the
porch, gives them an illusory sense of monumentality.
47 Reconstructing the figures’ original arrangement was a central preoccupation of the
earlier literature. For various proposals, see Brandl, Skulpturen des Magdeburger Doms,
pp. 100-15.
99
Figure 2.12 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal with the Dormition of the Virgin in tympanum and Wise and Foolish Virgins in jambs, c.1240-50,
post-restoration (Photo: author, 2013).
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Figure 2.13 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, left-hand jambs, Wise Virgins, en
face (Photo: author).
lished, with the Foolish Virgin’s ornaments being smaller and plainer. The two
figures’ resemblance is not just superficial; they seem to have been conceived
as an organic whole. It takes only minute adjustments of the bodies to imagine
the Wise Virgin transformed into the Foolish in a quasi-cinematic process: the
left hand must loosen its clasp on the mantle strap and rise to the face; the
head must tilt gently to meet it; the right elbow must pull back just a little and
the right wrist slacken; the weight of the legs must shift from the figure’s left to
the right side. In the graceful simplicity of their design, which lets the full con-
tours of the bodies be traced from head to elegantly shod toes, in their refined
gestural language, and in their placid demeanors, the two figures present
themselves as a common baseline – a theme on which their companions will
provide variations.
The physiognomic sameness of the two central figures on each side extends
to the rest of the group of ten, despite slight changes in the design of their hair
Figure 2.14 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, right-hand jambs, Foolish Virgins,
en face (Photo: author).
and ornaments (figs. 2.12-2.14).48 All have oval faces with round cheeks and
slightly tapered chins; long, narrow eyes with fleshy upper and lower lids; thin,
smoothly arched eyebrows; straight noses; and moderately full lips with pro-
nounced cupid’s bows. This is the matrix that the sculptors manipulated as,
48 The principle of “variation on a theme” has been pointed out by many scholars, but
without further discussion of the conceptual implications. For diverse outlooks on this
aspect of the program, compare Hans Jantzen, Deutsche Bildhauer des dreizehnten
Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1925), p. 186 with Ernst Schubert, Der Dom in Magdeburg (Leipzig,
1994), p. 202. For the importance of sameness in male programs, see Wilhelm Schlink, “‘…
In cuius facie deitatis imago splendet’: Die Prägung des Physiognomischen in der gotischen
Skulptur Frankreichs,” Perspektiven der Philosophie, Neues Jahrbuch 23 (1997), 425-47. The
paint traces still visible on the figures reveals spectacularly bright color and ornamen
tation, but even here there is no pattern distinguishing the two groups; see the recent
conservation report by Thomas Groll and Claudia Böttcher in Die Paradiesvorhalle am
Magdeburger Dom: Baugeschichte und Restaurierung, Kleine Hefte zur Denkmalpflege 6
(Halle an der Saale, 2014), pp. 27-74.
102
Figure 2.15 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, faces of Wise (top) and Foolish Virgins (bottom), arranged as a sequence of progressive emotional
responses. The figures do not appear in this order on the jambs – but, remarkably, the figures composing each vertical pair in this grid occupy
matching positions on opposite sides of the doors. They seem to have been conceived as pairs sharing a similar “pitch” of expressivity (Photos
and montage: author).
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from one figure to another, they demonstrated the face’s slow progress from
quiet contentment to exuberant joy on the one side, and from reflective mel-
ancholy to abject despair on the other. (Figure 2.15 brings together frontal
views of all the faces, and arranges them from lowest to highest pitch of expres-
sivity. Although the figures do not appear in this order on the jambs, it is
noteworthy that each Wise-Foolish pair that emerges vertically on the grid in
fact corresponds to the groupings across the two splays: the two mildest figures
both occupy the central position on each side, the two most exuberant stand
in the fourth position from the door, etc.)
The women’s bodies are also identical to one another, marked by svelte phy-
siques with small breasts, tapering waists, and relatively full hips accentuated
by low-slung belts and long skirts. The contours of the bodies are readily appar-
ent in both clusters of figures, as they all are garbed in identical courtly cos-
tumes, and they wear them the same way, allowing the cloaks to fall in such a
way as to reveal their slinky dresses. This is a remarkable break from pictorial
conventions, as we have seen, where the women’s identities were encoded in
their contrasting costumes. Nor do any of the figures appear to either move
toward or away from the doors, or do anything else to cast them into the action
of a didactic narrative.
In the Magdeburg porch, a viewer does not scan the jambs in order to under-
stand and then render judgment on morally predetermined figures. Nor is the
act of judgment suggested in the tympanum, which now, in its early 14th-cen-
tury iteration, shows the Assumption of the Virgin but originally featured an
enthroned, frontally positioned Sponsus and Sponsa – the bridal couple toward
whom the Virgins in the story strove.49 Instead of having the judgment pre-
dicted for her, the viewer, encompassed by a crowd of equally elegant and
beautiful clones, is made to examine them closely and flesh out their moral
significance through their relations with each other and with herself. This sig-
nificance emerges strictly from the expressive behavior of the women’s bodies
and faces. They are arrayed in such a way that, no matter where a viewer stands
within the porch, at least one figure on each splay is looking straight at her –
Rilke’s line “da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht” applies here quite literally
(fig. 2.16).50 Here the plasticity of the body’s design, mastered by sculptors in
49 See Brandl, Skulpturen, pp. 124-36 for the enthroned couple; and, for the dynamics of
movement suggested by the Assumption tympanum, Jacqueline E. Jung, “Dynamic Bodies
and the Beholder’s Share: The Wise and Foolish Virgins of Magdeburg Cathedral,” in Bild
und Körper im Mittelalter, eds. Kristin Marek, Raphaèle Preisinger, Marius Rimmele, and
Katrin Kärcher (Munich, 2006), pp. 135-60 at pp. 156-58.
50 From Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archäischer Torso Apollos,” discussed in Jaeger, Enchantment,
pp. 267-87.
104 Jung
Figure 2.16 Magdeburg Cathedral. North transept portal, with viewer exploring sightlines
linking her to different Wise and Foolish Virgins and confirming that “Da ist keine
Stelle, die dich nicht sieht” (Photos: author, 2013).
France during the first quarter of the 13th century, indeed contributes to a
plasticity of perception and response, as Jaeger suggested.51 The multiple ori-
entations of bodies, accomplished by subtle inflections of torsion and
contrapposto as well as the directionality of heads, enables viewers to register
diverse compositions from any given standpoint.52 She can choose which
figures to focus on, and feel addressed by them variously. The only major dis-
tinction among the figures lies in the emotional variations of their faces and
bodies – variations that ripple among the figures on each jamb, and that clash
across the space of the portal, as one looks from one side to the other.
Confronting – and, more important, confronted by – the figures within a single
confined space, a viewer unavoidably becomes the living center and focal
point of the scene. Whether she “must change her life” remains for her own
conscience to decide.
By being all cast from the same mold, with no material accessories or fea-
tures to distinguish them in moral terms, the Wise and Foolish Virgins collec-
tively form a kind of charismatic “every(wo)man” – a character of high social
status, youth, and beauty, and one whom, at least in her baseline form, viewers
could admire, desire, and seek to emulate. In that respect the sculptures resem-
ble their counterparts in the vernacular dramas that were being performed in
central Germany by the early 14th century (and almost certainly earlier).53 In
her analysis of characters in the two extant versions of the Play of the Ten
Virgins (Zehnjungfrauenspiel) from Eisenach, Linda Senne concluded that
each set of characters, prudentes and fatuae alike, comprised “constituents of
one individual’s psyche,” their voices combining to produce representations of
hope, on the one hand, and, on the other, “foolish presumption” leading to
despair.54 But a major difference persists between the version of the story
enacted over time by living performers and that set, quite literally, in stone: the
drama of the Virgins shows the behaviors and intentions that led to the wom-

52 For further discussion of these tendencies, see Wilhelm Vöge, “Vom gotischen Schwung
und den plastischen Schulen des 13. Jahrhunderts” (1904), in Bildhauer des Mittelalters,
pp. 98-109; Roland Recht, “Torsion und hanchement dans la sculpture gothique,” Gesta 15
(1976), 179-84; Robert Suckale, “Die Bamberger Domskulpturen: Technik, Blockbehandlung,
Ansichtigkeit und die Einbeziehung des Betrachters,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden
Kunst 38 (1987), 27-82.
53 Karin Schneider, ed., Das Eisenacher Zehnjungfrauenspiel (Berlin, 1964); Karl Young, The
Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford, 1933), vol. 2, pp. 361-96.
54 Linda P. Senne, “The Dramatic Figure in Das Spiel von den Zehn Jungfrauen,” The Germanic
Review 5 (1976), 161-71 at p. 170.
106 Jung
en’s ultimate outcomes, whereas the sculpture program leaves that background
to the viewer’s imagination. It gives us only the final scene.
Now the conventional wisdom on the Magdeburg figures, at least in the
scanty Anglophone literature, holds that what we are seeing is a display of des-
erts: the elegant comportment and joyful expressions of the Wise are both
cause and effect of their salvation, whereas the tearful faces and self-chastising
actions of the Foolish – their lack of restraint and decorum – reveal both that
and why they have been condemned.55 But this assessment needs to be con-
sidered more closely. These Wise Virgins in fact flout conventions of decorum
in church, grinning openly at passers-by and manipulating their draperies in
ways that openly call attention to their breasts and hips.56 They model the
rules of gracious conduct of noble ladies in court scenarios, not those govern-
ing behavior of women in solemn liturgical settings. Their behavior makes
sense, in this context, insofar as it demonstrates to viewers familiar with the
bodily performances of courtliness the happiness and self-possession that
would attend entry into heaven, where, in the symbolic topography of the
church, they were about to move.
If the Wise Virgins’ actions, so out of line with liturgical decorum in a literal
sense, could thus be construed as appropriate to their situations, so could
those of the Foolish. Especially in light of the relatively expressionless faces of
French and earlier German representations of the characters, it is easy now to
regard their demeanors, with their crinkled eyes and stretched-out mouths, as
indeed “twisted in grotesque exaggerations of suffering.”57 But two things are
important to keep in mind. First is the issue of these figures as sculptural rep-
resentations. In the 1240s, the display of grief as the externalization of an inner
emotion, as opposed to pain caused by the application of a force to the body
from the outside, was quite new in large-scale arts, and the troupe at Magdeburg
55 On the concept of deserts in ancient and late antique ethics, see David Konstan, Pity
Transformed (London, 2004).
56 See James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality
(Chicago, 2006), pp. 29-44; Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the
High Middle Ages, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Woodstock, NY, 2000), pp. 140-45. For clerical
anxieties about women’s clothing and comportment in church, see Katherine L. French,
The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia,
2008), esp. pp. 91-93 and pp. 201-03.
57 Jaeger, Envy of Angels, p. 343 see also Binski, “Angel Choir,” p. 355; and Elina Gertsman,
“The Facial Gesture: (Mis)Reading Emotion in Gothic Art,” Journal of Medieval Religious
Cultures 36 (2010), 28-46. I am grateful to my colleague Robert Bork, who has helped me
refine this point.
were operating in an experimental mode.58 They were testing the possibilities

of expressive displays on a large scale, and they clearly wanted the results to be
legible. As we have seen with regard to the central Foolish Virgin, not every
member of this group displays the opened lips and swollen eyes of the most
extreme representatives (see figs. 2.14, 2.15). It is no accident that the two
Foolish Virgins who display the most contorted expressions – and the only two
who let viewers get a glimpse of their teeth – also do the most to hide their
faces; one beats her forehead with the palm of her clenched hand, and the
other dabs her eye with the edge of her mantle. The faces of both are lowered,
and their heads are turned in the direction of their uplifted hands, obscuring
any frontal view except from an awkward standpoint directly below the figure.
Here, as with the two figures at either end of the line who turn their heads
inward toward their companions, the heavy carving of the swollen eyelids and
the deep creases around the lips help render the expressions visible despite the
diverse orientations and obfuscations of the faces. This form of carving, so dif-
ferent from that used for the frontally positioned faces, is analogous to the
sharp-edged makeup application of opera singers and ballet dancers, whose
features and expressions need to be legible from a distance.
By etching the Foolish Virgins’ faces with signs of grief and designing their
bodies in the conventional poses of sorrow, the sculptors ensured that their
sadness would be missed by no one. But as undesirable as this emotion is for
those who feel it, it is crucial to remember that being sad is not the same thing
as being bad, and these Virgins show no evidence of moral deficiencies in their
display of emotion.59 This is the second important consideration. As noted
above, the two figures that show their teeth mask this partial loss of control by
lowering their heads and obscuring their faces with their hands. Their com-
58 Thomas Raff, “Heulen und Zähneklappern: Gedanken zur Mimik in der mittelalterlichen
Kunst,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 56, no. 105 (2002), 375-88; see also
Büchsel, “Monströse Gefühle”; Kirk Ambrose, “Attunement to the Damned of the Conques
Tympanum,” Gesta 50 (2011), 1-17. The smile, as a muscular response to an inner sentiment
as opposed to a sign tacked onto a human face, was likewise in an experimental mode at
this time; see Binski, “Angel Choir”; and Seliges Lächeln und höllisches Gelächter: Das
Lachen in Kunst und Kultur des Mittelalters, ed. Winfried Wilhelmy (Regensburg, 2012).
59 Quite apart from the Virgin Mary, John, and the Magdalene, whose grief at the foot of the
cross was a central model of Christian piety in the 13th century, secular literature is full of
charismatic characters whose sadness was regarded as noble and edifying. See, for
example, Elke Koch, “Inszenierungen von Trauer, Körper und Geschlecht im Parzival
Wolframs von Eschenbach,” in Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter/ Emotions and
Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten (Berlin, 2003),
pp. 143-58.
108 Jung
panions at either end of the row manage to clamp their lips together, if with
evident difficulty. The effect is not unlike what we find in contemporary repre-
sentations of John the Evangelist at the foot of the cross, such as that in nearby
Naumburg Cathedral, where the apostle strains to hold his lips together even
as his eyebrows flex upward in a surge of emotion (fig. 2.17).60 The central
Foolish Virgin, as we have seen, exemplifies less inner turmoil than a kind of
stoic regret (fig. 2.11b). In her, as in all her companions, the hand gestures are
highly conventional, running the gamut of motions associated in 13th-century
art and literature with proper expressions of grief.61 No tearing of hair, rending
of clothes, or scratching at bared flesh – all equally familiar forms of immoder-
ate grief in medieval romance literature and in pictorial depictions of the
Damned in hell – is even hinted at here.62 Nor does any of the figures drop her
lamp, let her headgear slip off, or allow her knees to buckle, as will happen in
slightly later Virgins programs at the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Erfurt (fig.
2.18).63 Despite their evident distress, the Magdeburg women hold it together.
And even if they didn’t – even if they lost control of their bodies while in the
throes of anguish and remorse – would that be so condemnable? These are,
after all, persons who have just lost all chance of entering heaven. What is
proper behavior under such circumstances? We do not need to concoct voices
to answer this question, for the contemporary dramas of the Ten Virgins allow
the women themselves to describe their woe and its manifestations. “Now
60 Krohm and Kunde, eds., Naumburger Meister, vol. 2, pp. 904-08.

61 See Erhard Lommatzsch, “Darstellung von Trauer und Schmerz in der altfranzösischen
Literatur,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 43 (1923), 20-67; Wilhelm Frenzen, Klage
bilder und Klagegebärden in der deutschen Dichtung des höfischen Mittelalters (Würzburg,
1936); Heinz Gerd Weinand, Tränen: Untersuchungen über das Weinen in der deutschen
Sprachen und Literatur des Mittelalters (Bonn, 1958). For a veritable catalog of 13th-century
grief acts, see Heinrich von dem Türlin, Diu Crône: Mittelhochdeutsche Leseausgabe mit
Erläuterungen, ed. Gudrun Felder (Berlin, 2012), pp. 190-91.
62 Loosening and tearing of the hair figured as an expression of deep grief since antiquity –
see Mosche Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York,
1976) – but was seldom performed by elevated characters in medieval representations. In
Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius, lines 3308-12, a fisherman who discovers the dark secret of
the hero’s identity claws at and tears his hair, gestures mocked by the narrator. Here
excessive emotive displays are directly associated with socially low characters, a tendency
discussed by D.A. Wells, “Gesture in Hartmann’s Gregorius,” in Hartmann von Aue:
Changing Perspectives, ed. Timothy McFarland and Silvia Ranawake (Göppingen, 1988),
pp. 159-86 at pp. 179-81.
63 Frank Matthias Kammel, Kunst in Erfurt, 1300-1360: Studien zu Skulptur und Tafelmalerei
(Berlin, 2000), pp. 74-80; Helga Sciurie, “Die Erfurter Jungfrauen und ihr Publikum,”
Bildende Kunst 5 (1989), 50-51.
Figure 2.17
Naumburg, Cathedral of
Sts. Peter and Paul. Detail
of St. John Evangelist from
the Crucifixion portal on
the west choir screen,
c.1245-50, showing facial
features distorted by the
difficulty of controlling
extreme anguish (Photo:
author).
wring your hands,” they implore the audience after all their tearful entreaties
to Christ for clemency have gone unheeded, “and cry out in misery!”64 “Now
shout and tear out your hair!”65 These are strong and radical displays of grief,
evidently deemed appropriate for both characters and their empathetic
onlookers. Again and again, viewers were made to oscillate between compas-
sion (feeling along with the characters, as in the lines above) and outright pity
(feeling for the characters from a detached standpoint).66 “Now lament, all you
64 Schneider, ed., Eisenacher Zehnjungfrauenspiel, 41, text A (mid-14th century ms.), lines
414-15: “Nů wyndit alle vwer hende/ vnd clagit dez enelende!”
65 Ibid., 42, A: l. 428: “Nu schrigit, roůfit uz dy har!”
66 See David Konstan, “From Classical Pity to Christian Sympathy: The Evolution of a Moral
Sentiment,” paper presented at the New England Medieval Conference, Rhode Island
School of Design, Nov. 9, 2013; Anthony Keaty, “The Christian Virtue of Mercy: Aquinas’
Transformation of Aristotelian Pity,” Heythrop Journal 46 (2005), 181-98.
110
Jung
Figure 2.18 Erfurt, Cathedral of St. Mary. Triangular porch on north transept, northwestern face, right-hand jambs with Foolish Virgins, c.1320-30
(Photo: author).
poor folks, that we were ever even conceived of!”67 “Weep for our misfortune,
you dear people, and guard yourselves well!”68 Sometimes the Virgins under-
score the mimetic connection between the audience and themselves: “Now
weep, you poor ones, greatly! … For we weep as much as there is water in the
sea.”69 And at one point they even make explicit what the mirroring structure
of such exhortations had only implied: “Now listen, good people, who are now
alive: we are given to you as a mirror so that you take us as an example (daz ie
bilde by vns nemet, literally, that you take us as an image), and wait busily while
you still live.”70
These dramatic representations are charismatic in the extreme. They invite
identification and then use that sense of likeness to spark the desire for self-
transformation in beholders. The effectiveness of the appeals these Virgins
made to spectators depended not only on their words but also on their bodily
presence; again and again they urge viewers to look at what they are doing, to
act along with them, and thereby to feel their pain – a practice of empathy
whose aim is to make people change their lives so as to avoid the unhappy
women’s fate at their own ends. This would not have worked if the characters
had not been rendered relatable, indeed appealing, early on. In keeping with
the parable itself, the women do not do anything overtly bad – they are not like
the piggish rich man in the corresponding dramas of Dives and Lazarus – but
their neglect of the oil is explained by their carefree Lebenslust, manifested in
a love of good food and wine, enjoyment of flowers, nature, and splendid
clothes, and wish to play instead of work.71 Who, in a predominantly lay audi-
ence, could not relate?
67 Schneider, ed., Eisenacher Zehnjungfrauenspiel, 47, A: l. 540: “Nů clagit, armen alle, daz
vnser ie wart gedacht!”
68 Ibid., 47, A: l. 543: “ie vrowen, weynit vnse vngevelle vnd hutit vch, so tůt ir wol”; text B:
l. 636: “weinet, ir lieben, dit vngefelle vnde hudet uch wol!”
69 Ibid., 42, A: 418-24: “Nů weynit, armen, sere!/ [io geschet nvmmermere/ trost noch gnade
me./ owe, wy sal iz vns erge!]/ wan wy geweynen also vel,/ also wazzers ist in dem mere;/
[so hebit sich vnse weynen alrest].”
70 Ibid., 44, A: lines 470-73: “Nů horet, selgen, dy nů leben:/ wy syn vch czů eyme spigele
gegebyn,/ daz ie bilde by vns nemet/ vnd wartet fliziclichen, wy ie lebit.”
71 Ibid., pp. 17-31 includes references to the Foolish Virgins’ lackadaisical attitude toward
spiritual preparation and their attachment to worldly fun. This attachment to pleasure
parallels that of six out of seven of the prospective brides in the early 14th-century “Little
Book of the Spiritual Wedding,” written for a lay audience by a certain Conrad (perhaps
Conrad Spitzer, confessor to the Hapsburg ducal family in Vienna). In this case, a series of
young women are presented as negative exemplars because they do not wish to marry an
eligible prince, citing everything from the hard work of marriage to contentment with
one’s own friends and family to the wish to continue partying. In each case, the young
112 Jung
If the play’s Virgins have no hope for themselves, their witnesses in the audi-
ence do. And the characters’ calls for compassion, pity, self-examination,
repentance, and preparation for the End through the cultivation of one’s per-
sonal spiritual treasury (Seelgeräte), it becomes clear, are there not only to
express the characters’ despair but also to soften the audience’s hearts, to spark
in them the charity and fellow-feeling that formed the oil of salvation.72 This,
in my view, was the aim of the Magdeburg sculptors when they eschewed the
usual didactic tools to distinguish their Foolish Virgins from the Wise. Rather
than using the figures’ bodies to justify their damnation (for example by show-
ing them gesticulating), the carvers created a permanent, embodied perfor-
mance of responses to that damnation. With no indications of why the Foolish
wound up on the wrong side, viewers had to fill in the gaps, to think for them-
selves about the internal flaws that could have led to their exclusion. The
answers could only come from the viewers’ own hearts, their own self-knowl-
edge. This makes the Magdeburg program accord more fully with theological
readings of the parable than almost any other visual representation, for it inge-
niously made palpable the invisibility of the Foolish Virgins’ faults behind their
elegant exteriors, and thus highlighted the issue of interiority so vital to the
story’s medieval meanings. To feel compassion with the Foolish Virgins in their
misery (even if that was ultimately caused by their own inner failings) is salu-
tary in that it makes viewers part of a benevolent community who can recog-
nize their connectedness with unfortunate others and who can take steps to
avoid falling into the same situation themselves.73
woman is admonished with another story illustrating why her excuse is a bad one; in each
of these internal tales, the protagonists are also women, with whom the maidens are
expected to identify. See Ulrich Schülke, Konrads Büchlein von der geistlichen Gemahel
schaft: Untersuchung und Text (Munich, 1970).
72 The play ends with the Foolish Virgins’ dark lament that viewers can no longer help them
with “spende vnde gabe” because “wy vordinet gotis czorn,” but that “eyn tot baz hulfe den
eyn selgerete.” Schneider, ed., Eisenacher Zehnjungfrauenspiel, 49-50, A: lines 572-77.
73 For charisma as a formative factor in early Christian communities, see John Potts, A
History of Charisma (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 46-51, a reference I owe to an anonymous
reader. For the constructive nature of compassion, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of
Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001). For the importance of empathy
to a hero’s progress in high medieval poetry, see Andreas Krass, “Die Mitleidfähigkeit des
Helden: Zum Motiv der compassio im höfischen Roman des 12. Jahrhunderts (‚Eneit‘ –
‚Eerec‘ – ‚Iwein‘),” in Wolfram-Studien XVI: Aspekte des 12. Jahrhunderts. Freisinger
Kolloquium 1998, eds. Wolfgang Haubrichs, Eckart C. Lutz, and Gisela Vollmann-Profe
(Berlin, 2000), pp. 282-304; Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch, “Compassio als Heldentugend am
Beispiel des ‚Willehalm‘-Fragments: Zur Darstellbarkeit von Gefühlen in der Epenillustra
tion,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 46/47 (1993-94): 629-40, 855-58.
Righteous Anger, Justified Sadness, and the Laughter of the

Damned: The Strasbourg Virgins Revisited
A similar dynamic was at work some decades later on the program of the
Strasbourg west facade (c.1280-90; figs. 2.1-5). But the interpretive challenges
posed to the viewer were mitigated here by the inclusion of Christ and the
Prince of the World, whose iconography and placement impose a layer of
heavy-handed didacticism onto the women’s nuanced expressivity.74 Through
their presence the women’s status becomes associated not just with their own
inner virtues but also with their affiliations with male authority figures, of
whom one beckons into the church and the other leads back to the empty
seductions of the world. Thus, even as the beauty and decorum of the Wise
gives them a charismatic dimension that can spiritually elevate and ennoble
beholders who prepare to enter the church, the addition of Christ suggests that
the program’s designer did not trust the women’s bodies to sufficiently bear the
message about moral virtue and just deserts.
A glance at the Virgins placed against the wall suggests that he had reason to
worry (fig. 2.5). For we see there that the sculptors were attuned to the kind of
interpretive flexibility their counterparts at Magdeburg had sparked when
they chose to modify a single figural type into a series of animated responses.
At Strasbourg, the Wise Virgin in the right-hand wall-niche slides a thumb
under the edge of her gown’s bodice in a movement only slightly more re
strained than that of her flirtatious cousin on the left jamb (fig. 2.5b, right). In
the outermost niche of the left wall, a Foolish Virgin, with head veiled and fea-
tures calm, rests her hand on her chest in a variation of the courtly clasp of the
mantle-strap that one of the Wise Virgin performs (fig. 2.5a, left). As we see in
figures 2.1 and 2.5, compositional echoes link these pairs across the chasm of
the portal, from the sweeps of heavy draperies across the legs and the parallel
positioning of hands to the tilting of the heads and gentle restraint of the faces.
If the figures on the jambs embody the distinctions in bodily appearance be-
tween those possessing virtue and those lacking it, those on the side walls
reveal the difficulty of discerning moral qualities on the basis of dress, com-
portment, and expression alone. None of the Wise Virgins, after all, looks
especially joyful, and the two Foolish on the side wall do not look especially
74 The original Prince of the World is now in the Musée de l’Oeuvre Notre-Dame. For these
figures see Reinardt, La cathédrale, pp. 126-27; Van den Bossche, La cathédrale, pp. 127-29,
191-93; also Rudolf Asmus, “Der ‘Fürst der Welt’ in der Vorhalle des Münsters von Freiburg
i. B.,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 35 (1912), 509-12.
114 Jung
Figure 2.19 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, south portal, left-hand jambs: Prince of the
World and laughing Foolish Virgin (Photo: author).
Figure 2.20 Abbey church of St-Saveur in Charroux. Reliefs with smiling Foolish Virgins from a
dismantled portal, c.1250 (Photo: after Willibald Sauerländer, Gothic
Sculpture in France 1140-1270, plate 300).
sad. It is left up to viewers to imagine the feelings and motives that their out-
ward demeanors mask.
By contrast, the simpering young woman on the jamb, so eager to attract the
attention of the Worldly Prince that she has dropped her lamp, leaves nothing
to the imagination (fig. 2.19). She is clearly an object of derision, an anti-model.
Her laughter, which exposes a row of tiny teeth, is unusual but not unique in
Virgins programs: the surviving Foolish maidens who once occupied the archi-
volts of a portal to the former abbey church of St-Saveur in Charroux (c.1250)
116 Jung
likewise smile merrily and preen as they brandish their empty vessels (fig.
2.20).75 More than their mirth per se – smiling and even light laughter could,
after all, be attributes of the Elect – it is the disparity between these figures’
expressions and their inverted lamps that is meant to cause frisson: the women
laugh in the face of their own perpetual damnation.76 Viewers of the Stras
bourg program would not have lost this point, as the tympanum over the
Virgins shows the Last Judgment in full swing. Like the nobleman at the far
right-hand side of the contemporary tympanum over the Fürstenportal at
Bamberg Cathedral (fig. 2.21), whose manic laughter is rendered horrifying by
its juxtaposition with the demon gleefully dragging him to hell, the Foolish
Virgin at Strasbourg demonstrates her inadequacy for heaven by her truly
careless behavior in the face of what viewers knew was the worst possible
scenario.77
In this light, the two Virgins who accompany her on the jamb – they of the
“grim glances,” sulky mouths, and graceless limbs78 – may not be as clear in
their moral expression as they seem. Their bodies are not as poised as those of
their Wise sisters, but should they be? Again, these are characters who have
just recognized that they are to be excluded forever from heaven. Laughter
would certainly not be appropriate under such circumstances, but neither
would elegant posing. As with the mournful maidens at Magdeburg, the
distress these pained demeanors and gestures convey – all rendered more
touching because of the women’s youthful beauty and elegant attire – was a
signal to every viewer: Du muβt dein Leben ändern. This would not have worked
if the figures were subject only to viewers’ moral judgment and not some modi-
cum of compassion and sympathy.
And so the two pouting women on the Strasbourg jamb open themselves to
various levels of interpretation. To be sure, as Jaeger shows, they throw the
placid beauty and exquisitely calibrated comportment of the Wise Virgins into
higher relief through their contrasting bearings. But this does not mean that
75 Jean-François Amelot and Marie-Thérèse Camus, Sculptures gothiques de Saint-Sauveur

de Charroux: Chefs-d’oeuvre du XIIIe siècle (La Crèche, 2006), pp. 28-32; Sauerländer,
Gothic Sculpture in France, pp. 508-509. The Wise, predictably, are stout matrons wrapped
in gigantic mantles.
76 For the varieties of laughter in medieval culture, see especially Binski, “Angel Choir”; Karl
Richard Kremer, Das Lachen in der deutschen Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters (Bonn,
1961); Anja Grebe and Nikolaus Staubach, eds., Komik und Sakralität: Aspekte einer ästhe
tischen Paradoxie in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 2005); Olga V.
Trokhimenko, Constructing Virtue and Vice: Femininity and Laughter in Courtly Society (ca.
1150-1300) (Göttingen, 2014); and Wilhelmy, ed., Seliges Lächeln.
77 See Suckale, “Bamberger Domskulpturen,” pp. 52-55; Raff, “Heulen und Zähneklappern.”
Figure 2.21 Bamberg, Cathedral of Sts. Peter and George. Northern flank, “Princes’ Portal” (Fürstenportal), tympanum with uncommonly exuberant Last
Judgment, c.1225 (Photo: author).
117
118 Jung
Figure 2.22 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, north (left-hand) portal, left-hand jambs with
Virtues conquering Vices, c.1280-90 (Photo: author).
the sinuous, asymmetrical movements of the Foolish have caused their dam-
nation, for their bodies, so expressive of inner turmoil, also contrast with that
of their companion who laughs and preens, oblivious to the anguish that
awaits her. If the mournful figures seem not to care about posing gracefully, it
may be because their attention is focused on their loss of heaven rather than
their appearance to onlookers. Their bodies express disarray, but this results
from their knowledge that no joy remains to them, and expresses regret for
their previous attachment to the world. Seen in this light the figures might, like
those at Magdeburg, be regarded as models of proper penitence.
The idea that, at the turn of the 14th century, the tumultuous body could be
understood in positive terms is affirmed in the contemporaneous portal at the
northern (left-hand) side of Strasbourg Cathedral’s west facade (fig. 2.2). Here
Figure 2.23 Strasbourg Cathedral. West facade, north (left-hand) portal, right-hand jambs with
Virtues conquering Vices (Photo: author).
were find the same jerky movements, asymmetrical draperies, and harsh facial
expressions – with furrowed brows, clenched jaws, and pursed lips – that char-
acterized the two innermost Foolish Virgins, but now on eight female figures
representing the Virtues (figs. 2.22-23).79 Of course, the Virtues’ movements are
motivated by outside forces: the rise and fall of their shoulders, the bend and
flex of their knees and hips, and the tilts of their heads are attributable to the
vigor with which they crush their enemies, crouching Vices bedecked (in a
startling inversion of conventional sartorial codes!) as matrons and nuns. And
perhaps what appears graceless to us would have impressed viewers who knew
79 Van den Bossche, Cathédrale de Strasbourg, pp. 62-68; Reinhardt, Cathédrale de Strasbourg,

p. 127.
120 Jung
the difficulty of wielding large weapons effectively while standing in a con-

fined space. But the poses are a clear representational choice; the sculptors
could have just as easily shown the conquest accomplished and the Virtues
resting easy over their victims.80 As they are, tilting their heads down toward
viewers as much as to their foes, these figures challenge onlookers to follow
their lead in defeating vice, even if this means summoning forth a kind of righ-
teous anger in the process. The composition reminds us that, at least by the
end of the 13th century, charismatic representations did not need to be beauti-
ful to be ennobling: provided they included some aspirational signs (in this
case, elegant court dress, vigorous bodies, youthful faces), sculpted figures
could offer models not only of cool restraint but also of hot emotion that could
be internalized and instrumentalized by viewers eager for spiritual re-forma-
tion.81 Here the body distorted by inner zeal becomes an aspirational goal.
Stamping out vice is hard, these women show us, but it is possible.
The struggle of the Foolish Virgins on the neighboring portal, by contrast, is
strictly internal: their foes are no one but themselves. And if their movements
signify the inner disarray that caused their exclusion from heaven, as Jaeger
suggests, they can be just as aptly interpreted as fitting – perhaps even under-
stated – responses to that state. The Wise, it is true, model the proper decorum
– the elegance, self-control, and gravitas – that was rightfully rewarded by their
admittance to the wedding feast and that, in the present, attended their
entrance to that celebration (even if they lacked the visible iocunditas that
would have also been appropriate under the joyful circumstances).82 But the
faces and bodies of the Foolish, apart from the giggling maiden, give a glimpse
the inner torment that accompanies the rejection from heaven, and that too is
important. Soliciting compassion, they remind all viewers of their need to
reflect and change their lives. Only through the process of recognition, empa-
thy, and self-reform can anyone hope to join the ranks of the Wise who stand,
80 For a catalog of such imagery, see Virtue and Vice: The Personifications in the Index of
Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2000). The modestly veiled female Virtues
in the quatrefoils at the dado level of the central portal of Amiens Cathedral, from c.1235,
rest comfortably on benches while little people enact the Vices in the zone below.
81 On anger as an instrument of expression and a catalyst for social action, see Gerd Althoff,
“Empörung, Tränen, Zerknirschung: ‘Emotionen’ in der öffentlichen Kommunikation
des Mittelalters,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 30 (1996), 60-79; Hildegard Elisabeth Keller,
“Zorn gegen Gorio: Zeichenfunktion von zorn im althochdeutschen Georgslied,” in
Codierungen von Emotionen, eds. Jaeger and Kasten; and the essays in Anger’s Past: The
Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY, 1998).
82 Jaeger, Origins of Courtliness, pp. 168-73.
already prepared, on the other side. If the Wise display the end result of the
process of inner reform, the Foolish show viewers how to get there.
Thus neither at Strasbourg nor in the earlier program at Magdeburg, where
all overdetermining elements were dispensed with and the message was really
borne by the bodies alone, can the Wise and Foolish Virgins be reduced to sim-
ple allegories of Virtue and Vice. Like the “goddesses” of medieval culture that
Barbara Newman has taught us to recognize, they are tools to think with.83 But
one does not read these figures on a page, or in conjunction with texts, to
explore erudite theological or natural philosophical concepts that are other-
wise difficult, or even dangerous, to articulate in words. One encounters them
in real space, quite literally looking up to them, as one prepares to cross a
threshold that one knows to be the driving force behind the figures’ responses.
And one uses them to feel a range of emotions – from outright joy through
shades of contentment into melancholic regret all the way to crippling despair
– that will prompt self-reflection and let one know that the passage from world
into church is a grand and mighty thing. Of course, in the later 13th and 14th
centuries, when Virgins portals enjoyed their heyday, what people found
beyond the doors really were the largest and most splendid architectural inte-
riors they would likely have ever seen: soaring vaulted spaces, brightly painted,
bedecked with textiles, and dazzlingly, if not always brightly, illuminated –
spaces of stunning magnificence and splendor.84 The Virgins prepared them to
encounter these with appropriate dignity, grace, and inner joy. So, too, they
prepared people to leave that zone and return to the world carrying “the bright-
ness of glory” they had experienced there in the vessels of their hearts, perhaps
even a bit more prepared than they would have been to share their caritas with
those outside with sincerely generous intent. Though fixed in stone them-
selves, the Virgins urge the living toward a continuous process of self-reforma-
tion: the sculpting of the virtuous heart.
83 Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages
(Philadelphia, 2003).
84 See Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature,
Music, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger (New York, 2010), particularly Paul Binski, “Reflections on the
‘Wonderful Height and Size’ of Gothic Great Churches and the Medieval Sublime,” pp.
129-56.
122 Jung
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128 Binski
Chapter 3
Charisma and Material Culture

Paul Binski
No one can doubt the extent of medieval thought about grace in medieval the-
ology and aesthetic speculation.1 The related notion of charisma also has a reli-
gious origin. While the versatile Greek word charis (meaning variously grace,
beauty, gift or charm) had been a term of rhetoric, charisma first entered wide-
spread use only in the Pauline Epistles where it is rendered in Greek as “gra-
cious gift” (χαρίσματα) and in the Vulgate as gratia or donum ex Deo (1 Cor. 1:7,
7:7 and 2 Cor. 1:2), and for a very long time its sense remained religious.2 The
charis of rhetoric was a value specifically of the middle or sweet style, rather
than the lofty grand style; equally charisma was a gift of Early Christian com-
munitarian grace. Loftiness had been spoken of by Longinus: hypsos was the
reply of “hot” Greek religion to “cold” Roman eloquence.3 Hypsos and megalo-
gos, sublime uplift and great-speech, are spoken of profoundly and accurately
* I am grateful to Stephen Jaeger and Alex Marr for their observations on a late draft of this
paper. Early drafts were read by Noel Sugimura and Mary Carruthers.
1 See Martino Rossi Monti, Il Cielo in Terra: la grazia fra teologia ed estetica (Turin, 2008), espe-
cially pp. 25-94; and his essay “The Mask of Grace. On Body and Beauty of Soul between Late
Antiquity and the Middle Ages” in the present volume.
2 John Potts, A History of Charisma (New York, 2009), pp. 12-50. Other valuable essays include
Stephen Turner, “Charisma Reconsidered,” Journal of Classical Sociology 3, no. 5 (2003): 5-26;
and Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma, Reflections on the Symbolics of Power.”
in Culture and Its Creators: Essays in Honor of E. Shils, eds. Joseph N. Ben David and Terry N.
Clark (Chicago, 1977), pp. 150-71. See also Ayelet Even-Ezra, “The Conceptualization of
Charisma,” Viator 44, no. 1 (2013): 151-68.
3 Longinus, so far as we know, was not known in the Middle Ages, however helpful he is to
medievalists. See Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (revised Donald A.
Russell), Loeb Classical Library 199 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), at pp. 162-65 (1.4); compare James
A. Arieti and John M. Crossett, trans., Longinus on the Sublime (New York, 1985); and for a
discussion, Donald A. Russell, Longinus on the Sublime (Oxford, 1964). For an investigation of
the idea of a medieval sublime, see the essays gathered in C. Stephen Jaeger, ed., Magnificence
and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics (New York, 2010); for skepticism about the idea see Ernst
R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask,Bollingen Ser.
vol. 36 (Princeton, 1990), pp. 399-400, discussed in turn by Jaeger, “Ernst Robert Curtius: A
Medievalist’s Contempt for the Middle Ages,” Viator 47, no. 2 (2016): 367-79; and for a critique
of the medieval sublime, Mary Carruthers, “Terror, Horror, and the Fear of God or Why There
Is No MedievalSublime,” in ‘Truthe is the Beste’: A Festschrift in Honour of A.V.C. Schmidt, ed.
Nicolas Jacobs and Gerald Morgan (Oxford, 2014), pp. 17-36.

Charisma and Material Culture 129
both by Longinus and Augustine. But charisma was at first a collective quality,
not a feature of striking individual personality. That idea is modern, formu-
lated in Max Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as the irresistible personality-
type of leadership in crisis.4
The purchase and occasions of all these words, charis, gratia, Pauline cha-
risma and Weberian charisma, are not exactly exchangeable. They all denote
extraordinary qualities given from “on high,” possessing that mysterious je ne
sais quoi, that “unknown quantity which is yet the vital one” that Ernst
Gombrich wrote of in regard to the grace of Raphael’s Madonnas.5 But while
they may all have mysterious aesthetic or psychological content, they are not
equally accounts of personality; their applicability to things rather than people
remains controversial (I admit a special class of problem here: images that rep-
resent people), nor do they enjoy the same moral valency. The radiant beauty
and virtue of grace as a gift of God does not sit comfortably with Max Weber’s
fundamentally amoral idea of singular and extraordinary power, not just per-
suasive or charming, but hypnotic. For Weber, questions of good and evil are
separable from fact and, as Reinhard Bendix says, “both very evil and very good
men have exercised domination through their extraordinary gifts of mind and
body.”6 Key to Weber’s extremely influential notion of charisma is the magical
power of surrender, of domination, of obedience, of enthusiasm that separates
this formulation of a superhuman personality type (and its outcome in the
actions of others) from the theological, moderate, and cooperative senses of
charisma in earlier centuries. Pre-Weberian charis is the quality of beauty.
Weberian charisma however is the Sublime of personality in which, for all we
know, the Devil has all the best tunes.
My question is whether Weber’s account can now be circumvented, and
whether, as a personality quality which is necessarily elusive and unstable,
charisma has purchase in any exact criticism of material culture more gener-
ally, of things, natural things particularly, not people. I admit immediately that
the history of animism and fetishism and the sheer power of human affect
can and have brought to images almost anything conceivable. One starting-
4 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1925), vol. II, chapters 9-10; Weber,
Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus
Wittich (New York, 1968); and Hans H. Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, eds., Max Weber, Essays
in Sociology (New York, 1946). A useful account of charismatic leadership is provided by
Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber, an Intellectual Portrait (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 298-328.
5 Ernst H. Gombrich, “Raphael’s ‘Madonna della Sedia,’” in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of
the Renaissance, 3rd ed. (London, 1978), pp. 64-80, at p. 79. For the expression, see Richard
Scholar, The Je-ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe Encounters with a Certain Something
(Oxford, 2005).
6 Bendix, Max Weber, p. 300.
130 Binski
point for all such discussion, Aby Warburg’s Denkraumverlust (identified by

Gombrich as the “tendency of the human mind to confuse the sign with the
thing signified”), is an aspect not simply of the “primitive” mentality but of the
richness of metaphor itself.7 And it seems to me reasonable to argue that im-
ages (as a special class of things) can produce charismatic effect, which
Mitchell describes as a secondary, reflexive image of images, or “metapicture.”8
This cannot be refuted: but the fact that it cannot be refuted raises a question
in my mind about critical method when it extends beyond images to material
culture more generally, my real concern. So, in a spirit of friendly critical en-
gagement with the topic of this collection of papers, I propose to examine,
first, some aspects of the work of Alfred Gell; second, the role of bodily repre-
sentation; and finally the general issue of material culture and the idea of
personality.
Making Magic? Surface and Experience, Gothic Voluptuaries
It matters, first, that the main pre-Weber formulations of charisma have theo-
logical roots (indeed this may even be true of Weber’s work). Whenever we
reflect on the quasi-sacral quality of the sublime and the charismatic we might
recall Paul Fisher’s “aesthetics of rare experiences,” wherein “the modern intel-
lectual [is allowed] to hold onto covert religious feelings under an aesthetic
disguise.”9 This warning is as useful to us as it is provocative. “Enchantment”
might be one way of holding onto such feelings. Only someone who led a very
sheltered life could deny that wonder, fascination, and enchantment played
any role, orthodox or otherwise, in medieval culture.10 But enchantment has
developed a new and more general valency as a word capturing a form of expe-
7 Ernst H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1972),
p. 125. For recent theorization of the idea of the image’s intrinsic life (Eigenleben) see
Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin, 2010).
8 My own position – that living effects are secondary properties of objects and that their
understanding must be historically mediated – is close to that of William J.T. Mitchell,
What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2005), pp. 5-27, at p. 10 for
“metapicture.”
9 Paul Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA,
1998), p. 2.
10 See the useful essays by Lea T. Olsan, “Enchantment in Medieval Literature,” and Carl
Watkins, “Fascination and Anxiety in Medieval Wonder Stories,” both in The Unorthodox
Imagination in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Sophie Page (Manchester, 2010), pp. 45-64 and
166-92 respectively.
rience of material culture.11 Alfred Gell energized the term in a consciously

secular way in order to think about the magical or quasi-magical power of
technology, of facture. His theory of the technology of enchantment is by its
own admission a form of “methodological atheism,” a virtuosic way of writing
about virtuoso magical effect while ridding it of the supernatural.12 In main-
taining this Gell finds some support in the new rhetorical and aesthetic turn in
the study of medieval aesthetics: it is perfectly possible to give an account of
the agency of the crafted and “thinking” artwork which entails no recourse to
theology or morality.13 Gell is no rhetorician, however: his understanding of
the impact of extraordinarily wrought surfaces does not involve the rational
faculty of persuasion, of softening and sweetening, but rather the harder,
unanswerable, power of a kind of wizardry invested in the hand of the artist: to
be fascinated is not to be persuaded.14 According to this view, what yields affect
from effect is an apprehension, imperfect but powerful, of the process which
might have made the perceived object as it appears, a sort of superior magic
creating an aura of difficulty in which a sense of value lies. The artist is there-
fore in effect an occult technician, using craft as sorcerers use craft. We might
recall that Old English senses of “craft” included “power” and “occult art.” In
Gell, as the Western artist is ushered out of the front door, his shamanic avatar
creeps back in through the tradesman’s entrance. Gell is not necessarily right
to separate agency and aesthesis, as if works of art could be exchanged willy-
nilly, regardless of their specific or particularized capacity to foster different
experiences precisely as rationally-intended artifacts.15 But his interest in the
psychological effect or agency of wondrous surface patterns, such as tattoos,
11 Above all in C. Stephen Jaeger’s magisterial Enchantment: on Charisma and the Sublime in
the Arts of the West (Philadelphia, 2012); see also Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of
Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, 2001).
12 I refer to Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Tech
nology,” in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, eds. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton
(Oxford, 1992), pp. 40-63; and Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, an Anthropological Theory
(Oxford, 1998).
13 As an instance, Mary Carruthers, Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013).
14 Caroline van Eck seems to regard Gell’s theory as rhetorical in nature: Caroline Van Eck,
“Living Statues: Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response and the Sublime,”
Art History 33, no. 4 (2010): 643-59; at p. 651, and Caroline Van Eck, “Groaning Paintings
and Weeping Viewers: A Gellian Perspective on Visual Persuasion,” in Speaking to the Eye:
Sight and Insight through Text and Image (1150-1650), eds. Thérèse De Hemptinne, Veerle
Fraeters, and Maria E. Góngora (Turnhout 2013), pp. 259-83.
15 See Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290-1350 (New Haven,
2014), p. 56; and Van Eck, “Living Statues,” pp. 649-50.
132 Binski
still echoes in Western religious consciousness in the harsh markings known as

stigmata, marvelous holes and excrescences to be kept secret such is their
theophanic power.16 How, after all, were they done? Religion too had (and has)
a way of crafting bodies.
Gell, though idiosyncratic in his assault on Western-style aestheticism, has
a point about the effect of crafted surfaces: amazement is tied to transaction,
since wonder at surface leads to greater gift-giving (i.e. it changes conduct).
I find this idea enriching for my own work on an era, the 13th and 14th centu-
ries in northern Europe, the “mendicant” centuries, when the notion of charity,
typically the charity of the living towards the dead, was of such profound and
general consequence for the visual arts.17 The movement of money, the eco-
nomic reality often tactfully sidestepped by medieval art historians in their
appraisal of cause and effect, should always be considered. Whatever Gell’s
theory may entail for “being,” it does therefore make a claim about outcome in
social and economic conduct.
Recent critical writing on aesthetics examines the apprehension of the
agency of surfaces to foster experience and action.18 Surface and significance
become one, primal, phenomenon: and it is within this primal character that
charismatic effect – as an effect of the beholding imagination – is enmeshed.
This phenomenon is a matter for experience as much as of discourse: it is
something which has to be “lived.” The primal phenomenon may be hard or
soft in its power. Charisma is a species of hard, not soft, power working force-
fully, overwhelmingly, out from bodies or, it is claimed, perceived surfaces. Like
love, it is beyond argument, and in this it is closer to the Longinian concept of
the sublime as that which is beyond rhetoric. Great Gothic buildings can
embody, I have argued, a form of Longinian hypsos. The aim was uplift, won-
der, magnificence. To these heirs to the traditions of the ancient Wonders
– man-man technological wonders – no one in the Middle Ages fell victim.19
Quite the contrary: the Aristotelian ethical dispensation of the time saw mag-
nificence as a high ideal of conduct in life as in art patronage, reinforcing that
link between human nature and idealized conduct so important in the saints’
Lives of the period.20
16 See Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge,
1995), pp. 194-217.
17 Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 81-117, p. 183.
18 Explored in different ways by Jaeger, Enchantment and Carruthers, Experience of Beauty.
19 See Paul Binski, “Reflections on the ‘Wonderful Height and Size’ of Gothic Great Churches,”
in Magnificence and the Sublime, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger (New York, 2010), pp. 129-56.
20 I have explored this ethical dispensation connecting magnificence to temperance in Paul
Binski, Becket’s Crown, Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (New Haven, 2004),
at pp. 41, 125-29, 142.
But, to repeat, the crafting of surfaces and bodies in the Middle Ages was in
general a form of persuasion whose highest flights might produce the wonder-
response, but which operated more usually by means of the insinuating
surface, not least the surface of colored (or colored-seeming) sculpture or
metalwork.21 Such effects did not exactly carry with them the grand illusions of
Weberian charisma. One typically ambivalent instance in its verbal formula-
tion is provided by Master Gregorius, a young clerk purporting to have visited
Rome probably in the early 13th century, who was “drawn back” three times to
a white marble statue of Venus made with such wonderful and unaccountable
skill (tam miro et inexplicabili perfecta est artificio) that it appeared suffused
with life and exerted some unknown magic persuasion (et nescio quam magi-
cam persuasionem) over him. Key words in this passage are miro artificio,
inexplicabili, nescio and the ambivalent and possibly periphrastic magica per-
suasio which, like the older senses of the word “craft,” test the boundaries
around human manufacture and art’s as-if magical secrets.22 That for Gregory
this image embodied the dangers, especially erotic dangers, of haunted pagan
statuary is important: that power of ancient marble statuary remained a trope
of fetishism into the modern era.23 The point however is that the purpose of
most medieval artists was not paralysis of the senses, the casting of spells and
the evacuation of reason – which would tend to place all such events beyond
sensory or verbal experience (this was a fundamental problem of medieval
transcendental or mystical experience, i.e. was it an “experience” at all?) – but
rather the use of technique and sensation precisely to articulate experience.24
In my recent work on the imaginative feats of Gothic art I have noted instances
of this kind of articulation, such object-agency, in the astounding insinuation,
undulation, and winding of English 14th-century curvilinear art, as in the Lady
Chapel at Ely designed around 1320 with its “nodding” ogees (double-curved
arches) and carvings of the Life of the Virgin Mary (fig. 3.1). Gell would under-
stand this intricate manufactured art of coral and color and its relation to
medieval giving, fund-raising. In the multivalent notion of insinuation I spot-
ted an opportunity for critical engagement. Within such sweetened and
21 For what follows see Binski, Gothic Wonder, pp. 161-229.

22 John Osborne, trans., Master Gregorius. The Marvels of Rome (Toronto, 1987), p. 26; see
inter alia Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol. Ideology and Image Making in Gothic Art
(Cambridge, 1989), pp. 81-87; and for a rhetorical reading, Carruthers, Experience of
Beauty, pp. 194-95. It is at least worth considering that magica persuasio is a clerical cir-
cumlocution for “sex appeal” indicating not puzzlement but ironic moral distancing.
23 Caroline Van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence. From the Animated Image to the Exces
sive Object (Leiden, 2015), pp. 11-12, 21-22.
24 For an account of the paradoxes involved in the notion of mystical “experience” (i.e. that
it is beyond sensory and rational experience and so discourse) see for instance Denys
Turner, The Darkness of God. Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge, 1995).
134 Binski
Figure 3.1 Ely Cathedral, Lady Chapel, wall arcading with ogee arches and Life of Virgin Mary
above, begun 1321 (Photo: author).
curving forms, about which the Renaissance and later aesthetics would have so
much to say, is (to use a suitably ambivalent word) secreted that most para-
doxical quality, voluptuousness, the fleshy vehicle of love and affection whose
counterpoise was the ascetic, itself exhibiting the most profound understand-
ing of the crafted body. A moment ago we encountered tattoos and stigmata:
St. Francis, the reformed rich kid, demonstrates the charismatic – and hence
bodily – power of asceticism. He became a walking Crucifix. The superbly
crafted, shimmering image of St. Mary Magdalen at Ecouis, made around 1310-
20, is precisely that of a voluptuary, her endless hair a continuous surface of
sheer insinuation and living ogee curves (fig. 3.2). Here, what’s pointed to is the
“winning wave” in the “tempestuous petticote” – in this case of hair.25 Like the
statue in Master Gregorius’s account, this figure is an essay in the limits of
moral-aesthetic wandering to the point of near error, from which Mary herself,
here, in eremitic exile, is retrieving herself: the sinner redeemed, error
“undone,” paradise regained, and all this despite the sculpted vortex of “drawn
desire.”26 The thought and reflection necessary to the understanding of this
statue as a representation specifically of Mary Magdalen, are inescapable: the
image speaks of its back story. This sculpture is a seductive masterpiece of
what John Foster Dulles, in the context of the Cold War, called “brinkmanship”:
it creates delight but also warns us by stirring complex (mixed) affects within
us.27
Bodywork and Conviction
Such sculptures remind us that the fundamental domain of charisma specula-

tion is the represented body. This brings us to “body talk” in Gothic figure
sculpture, the medieval body-in-art, and what Schmitt (usefully) called the
“rationale” of gestures.28 Its study has recently moved forwards by leaps and
bounds as the power of the body, actual or crafted, has penetrated discourse,
25 Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, et al., L’Art au temps des rois maudits: Philippe le Bel et ses fils
1285-1328, Exh. cat. (Paris, 1998), no. 54. I cite Robert Herrick, Delight in Disorder, ed. Tom
Cain and Ruth Connolly, The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick (Oxford, 2013), vol. 1, p. 28.
26 For “drawn desire,” see Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, pp. 59-60.
27 For a subtle account of this sort of transaction see Joseph L. Koerner, “The Mortification
of the Image: Death as a Hermeneutic in Hans Baldung Grien,” Representations 10 (1985):
52-101. For mixed affects, see the practical study by Elisabeth Reiners-Ernst, Das freudvolle
Vesperbild und die Anfänge der Pieta-Vorstellung (Munich, 1939); and Carruthers, Expe
rience of Beauty, pp. 80-107, 140-46.
28 Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’occident médiéval (Paris, 1990); C. Stephen
Jaeger, The Envy of Angels. Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200
(Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 331-48.
136 Binski
Figure 3.2 Écouis, Normandy, collegiate church, Mary Magdalen, after 1311
(Gilles Berizzi and Thierry le Mage).
but not always in ways free of the Idealist aesthetics that saw representation as
mimetic objectification or “expression.” Such theories of expression were con-
genial to a (still-prevalent) narrative of artistic change in the Gothic era which
saw it as the product or companion of a “new emotionalism,” an “affective
turn” within the history of spirituality inaugurated by theologians in the 11th
and 12th centuries but absorbed rapidly into lay piety. Yet, as those who resist
this narrative have indicated, this extraordinarily pervasive and basically
Romantic realist vision of a nuanced “psychological” later-medieval art sits ill
with much medieval artistic and textual practice which is social and disciplin-
ary (i.e. formulaic, artificial, and traditional) rather than individual or personal
(or “natural”), and in which outward physiological affects manifestly do not
necessarily correspond with (anyway mixed) inward emotional states – hence
the difficulty with the term “expression”: expression of what?29
Key to this issue, I think, is the understanding of purpose: like all special
effects of a rhetorical nature, the insinuatory power of the medieval crafted
body is not necessarily a means of emoting; rather, emoting is a means. As an
example I illustrate the fraught, but utterly calculated and conventional, body-
language of the Foolish Virgins on the cathedral portal at Erfurt in Thuringia,
of c.1330 (fig. 3.3). It remains to be shown that such bodies have “expression” as
their end: no less probably, their end or purpose is the attainment in the viewer
of conviction.30 Such agency is causal and social. It changes the audience’s
intentions and affects by using style to create sensation which leads to delight,
29 The observations of Carruthers, Experience of Beauty at pp. 99, 144 are important for any
rhetorical assessment of the “psychology” or “expressivity” of mimetic Gothic sculpture;
for “group textuality,” Mary Carruthers, “The Sociable Text of the ‘Troilus Frontispiece’:
A Mode of Textuality,” English Literary History 81, no. 2 (2014): 423-41, at pp. 427-29. For
body eloquence see also Paul Binski, “The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the poetics of the
Gothic Smile,” Art History 20, no. 3 (1997): 350-74 (for a metaphysical reading of Gothic
faciality) and Becket’s Crown, pp. 233-59. In the latter text, which places more emphasis on
the ambivalence or lack of moral and emotional transparency of Gothic images (for
instance, are smiles “nice” or “nasty”?), I state (p. 258) that these new forms of image “do
not fully or unambiguously embody in themselves virtues or dispositions.” This passage is
unfortunately overlooked by Gertsmann, “The facial gesture, which is however generally
justified in its cautious estimation of ‘expressivity.’” For moral transparency in Gothic art,
on the contrary, see the important pages of Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, pp. 331-48.
30 Jaeger (Enchantment, pp. 22-23) reminds us that charismatic reaction, however, “uncou-
ples the critical sense... [and] also overrides personal conviction.” This point is central to
the fundamental but neglected study of “realism” without reference to “sentiment” in
Frederick P. Pickering, Literature & Art in the Middle Ages (Coral Gables, 1970), pp. 223-307,
at p. 244. Pickering’s concept of conviction, though too separated from the aesthetic,
anticipates Carruther’s notion of “confident belief,” Experience of Beauty at pp. 14, 38, 42,
119. It is a fine antidote to a history of Gothic realism driven by an account of affect.
138
Binski
Figure 3.3 Erfurt cathedral, portal, c.1330, Foolish Virgins (Photo: author).
persuasion, confident belief, and willed (not unwilled – this is important)

action. Its methods may be mimetic – a complex question to which I want to
return in future studies of the culture of the Gothic sculpted portal – but in so
far as they are mimetic they are also fundamentally artificial, as artificial, argu-
ably, as the emotions and ethics they are purported to convey (contrary to
Romantic and post-Romantic “realist” models). So the end of this creation of
sensation is not calculated and cold-blooded “arousal” of feelings but the direc-
tion of the audience’s inclinations, beliefs, and judgments, not so much closing
off as guiding interpretative options, showing us “how.” As such they are a
means of indicating, of emphasizing and pointing. Such indication or guiding
is characteristic of both the figurative and the ornamental aspects of this art.31
That which is striking, attractive, or human-seeming is deployed as a technique
in order both to produce and guide a thinking response, a dynamic and far
from dispassionate form of agency: I mean specifically the thinking-through of
a problem according to a path, a narrative of understanding in the light of evi-
dentia. Many of the non-verbal arts, music especially, use (and generally have
used) aesthetic calculation (i.e. art) to indicate the way forward in this way,
particularly when they combine with and showcase the verbal.32 But sculpture
differs in its palpability: as Quintilian notes very helpfully, display oratory
precisely sets out its wares as if for their “handling” by the audience (his
chosen verb for this is pertracto).33 So I use the word “indicative” quite deliber-
ately: to indicate is to point to knowledge by causally directing desire in the
form of intentions, not representing psychological states. Mood can radically
affect, but cannot push aside, meaning, for experience, sensation, thought and
31 On the theoretical aspect of this see Mary Carruthers, “The Concept of ductus, or Journey
ing through a Work of Art,” in Mary Carruthers, ed., Rhetoric beyond Words. Delight and
Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 190-213. For ornament,
Jean-Claude Bonne, “De l’ornement dans l’art médiéval, VIIe–XIIe siècle; le modèle
insulaire,” in L’image: fonctions et usages des images dans l’Occident médiéval, eds. Jérôme
Baschet and Jean-Claude Schmitt, 6th International Workshop on Medieval Societies,
Centro Ettore Majorana (Paris, 1996), pp. 207-49.
32 Carruthers, “The Concept of ductus.” For a musicological instance see Peter Williams,
J.S. Bach, A Life in Music (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 373-74: “In maturer works of Bach, it seems
appropriate to find another verb than ‘express’: the music is not expressing a particular
word or idea but marking or underlining it, a kind of audible form of nota bene! An
example would be at sepultus est, ‘was buried’, in the B minor Mass: the change of mode
at this point draws attention to the words and what is to follow, but in no clear way does
it express grief, awe, subdued terror, despair or anything else … rather it creates an air of
expectancy by musical means …”
33 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII.iii.11-12, trans. H.E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA, 1921), vol. 126, pp. 216-17.
140 Binski
ultimately judgment are not readily separable.34 Rhetoric teaches us that

within the Christian moral dispensation, that which is dramatized in church
sculpture is not dazzling or enthralling experience (beyond choice or will, and
so responsibility) but precisely the issue of mindful choice and so intention
itself: for Cicero the audience may be hearers, but they are also arbitrators.35
This point may be pressed forward in order to underline the risks of charis-
matic analysis of form without regard to “occasion,” that is to say the context or
purpose of an image. An important reason for stressing the socio-aesthetic
character of such agency is that by doing so, we may ameliorate the disjunc-
tion, inherited from Idealist aesthetics, between experience and meaning,
between that which pleases and that which signifies: the interest of art as a
tercium quid lies precisely in its active negotiation between these polarities.36
Also, as I and others have suggested elsewhere, perhaps controversially (though
in line with Schmitt’s “rationale”), rational constraint is at least as important to
the intention of these artifacts as the long-familiar narrative of emotional
liberation, of the triumph of “romance” and its “imitation,” often associated
with Gothic art. Such arts were courtly, restrained, before they were emotive:
paradoxically perhaps, the history of this process was the history of a certain
sort of asceticism, of self-curtailment, identified with the “civilizing process.”
Constraint – a complex of social, ethical, and aesthetic factors – is the a priori
of aesthetic liberation and the realist embodiment of moralitas. 37
Faces matter here. The extremely tricky study of faces, actually a minefield,
has a particular importance for the assessment of charismatic power because
the face is that which seems most nearly to break down the barrier between
person and image. The face delivers, it helps: vultus adest.38 Stephen Jaeger
34 Models of “presence” are thus anti-hermeneutic in their outcome, see for instance Hans
U. Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, 2004);
also Jaeger, ed., Magnificence and the Sublime. For limitations to the concept of expres
sivity, and also for desire and intention, Carruthers, Experience of Beauty, pp. 35-41, 48, 51,
and 61.
35 Cicero, De partitione oratoria, III.10, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 349
(Cambridge, MA, 1942), at pp. 318-19.
36 I have made a practical case for this negotiation throughout Binski, Gothic Wonder, in
response to the theories of Belting, Freedberg, and Gell, who seem to me needlessly
skeptical about the role of “art” in the formation of the theories of function and response
which they themselves advance.
37 On which themes see Jaeger, Envy of Angels and C. Stephen Jaeger, “Charismatic Body –
Charismatic Text,” Exemplaria 9, no. 1 (1997): 117-37; and Binski, Becket’s Crown, pp. 233-59.
I am preparing a separate study of this point in relation to discipline of the self.
38 I cite Monika Otter, “Vultus adest (The Face Helps). Performance, Expressivity and Inte
riority,” in Rhetoric beyond Words. Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed.
Mary Carruthers (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 151-72.
reminds us that the Weberian notion of charisma requires a person, a psychol-

ogy or personality: it was part of the critique of Weber’s charisma, notably that
by Arthur Schlesinger, that the concept (like any concept) should not be weak-
ened by over-extension to the point where it loses its rationale, its strength.39
There is nothing to indicate that Weber believed that charisma was a property
of things (images included) rather than people or abstract institutions.40 We
might recuperate the notion of a “charm,” a gift, a glittering jewel, or a precious
marble magically exerting or underwriting power, from the Greek charis; but
we could not move forwards so easily from its derivative charisma, a specially-
given but specifically human attribute of personality. To be sure, the attribu-
tion of will or purpose to natural things is well known in the Middle Ages: “the
see desireth naturelly to folwen” the Moon, as Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale (lines
1052-53) puts it; materials such as iron could “honour” themselves in their con
tentious working and forging – an image drawn from the account of Lady
Dialectic’s metalworking in Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus.41 The notion of the
resistance, difficulty, and willfulness of materials in craft, writing included,
gets us some way towards a conception of life or the “character” (not, please
note, “personality”) of natural things: Michael Baxandall discusses the idea
of materials having “a character to be respected” in the act of wood-crafting
guided by chiromancy.42 But in the medieval dispensation only the stars in the
heavens truly possessed life or intelligence. Still, that things could auratically
frame charismatic power in the Middle Ages is indisputable, and is supported
by the host of objects made of precious metals, jewels, and high-status stones
possessing their own virtus and orchestrated in the service of power demon-
strated or instantiated in death ritual, coronations, or other inaugurations, or
the cult of relics.43 Stones associated with deaths and coronations, such as por-
39 Potts provides the reductio ad absurdam in the form of the “charismatic sandwich,” Potts,
A History of Charisma, pp. 188-91 and pp. 130, 136, 189 for Schlesinger; and for Bourdieu, a
doubter of a different type, see Potts, A History of Charisma, pp. 3, 5, 133, 136.
40 Potts, A History of Charisma, p. 121; Weber had a notion of impersonal charisma vested in
human groups or offices, see Bendix, Weber, pp. 308-28.
41 See the discussion in Clive S. Lewis, The Discarded Image. An Introduction to Medieval and
Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 92-94; for Alan of Lille, see Anticlaudianus,
book 3, lines 97-105, in Winthrop Wetherbee, ed. and trans., Alan of Lille, Literary Works
(Cambridge, MA, 2013).
42 Michael Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, 1990),
pp. 32-38.
43 On this theme see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: an Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis,
2015).
142 Binski
phyry, exemplify this truth. The word marble itself comes from the Greek mar-
màiro “to shine”; its association with nobility was common.44
Faces of course can shine too: in his Convivio, Dante writes of the smile as a
“flashing out” (corruscazione) of the soul’s delight.45 Power in particular may
have brightness, the brightness of a face that may be winningly pleasant, smil-
ing, apparently (and I stress “apparently”) genial in pointing up (not expressing)
noble courtliness – think of the founder-figures in the choir at Naumburg.46
Shine is an aspect of the splendor of aura.47 But the language of charismatic
effect in persons has a particular somatic focus. Though it is clearly an indivis-
ible Gestalt it tends to dwell on, or be captivated by, the face, especially on the
eyes, less so than the body. The Latin facies is related to the Indo-European
group of words, including facetus, concerning that which is well-made, fine,
apparent or shining. Very often the language of charismatic effect is the lan-
guage of faces, eyes, light, aura, sparkle, shine, starriness; and that perception
of shifting light, of Dante’s corruscazione entails a subjective sense of move-
ment, of change, of potentiality: the surface, the persona, should be illuminated
but it should also alter, be active. Jaeger rightly remarks of the icon that “It is
always the face that does the charisma work.”48 Quintilian speaks of orna-
ments as “the eyes of eloquence,” or “the face of the spoken word”: rhetorically
the eyes were agents of enargeia, vivid speech (Latin: illustratio, evidentia), and
energeia, “actuality,” and so of evidence and judgment.49
And how often in the literature of charisma and human captivation gener-
ally we read about the power of the eye. Here is Edgar Salin writing about
Stefan George, quoted by Stephen Jaeger:
And his eyes? Suddenly the observer realized: it had been a beam of those
eyes, sent to him with the speed of lightning, that had held him spell-
bound, had penetrated to the innermost region of his soul.
This is the sudden flashing-out of the Longinian sublime [1.4] experienced too
by the 11th-century theologian Michael Psellos in the face of an icon of the
44 Michael Greenhalgh, Marble Past, Monumental Present. Building with Antiquities in the
Mediaeval Mediterranean (Leiden, 2009), at p. 7. See also Binski, Becket’s Crown, pp. 56-57
and Gothic Wonder, pp. 22-30.
45 Dante, Convivio, II.viii, 11 ed. Giorgio Inglese (Milan, 1993): E che è ridere se non una corru
scazione de la dilettazione de l’anima, cioè uno lume apparente di fuori secondo sta dentro?
46 Jaqueline E. Jung, The Gothic Screen. Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of
France and Germany, ca. 1200-1400 (Cambridge, 2013) for this entire class of sculpture.
49 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VI.ii.32 and VIII.v.34, see vol. 125, pp. 434-35 and vol. 126,
pp. 298-99; see also IX.i.21, vol. 127, at pp. 20-21.
Virgin Mary, depriving him of strength and reason as by a bolt of lightning.50

These words should be noted. This flashing-out seems particularly Hellenic in
origin: the goddess Charis was also known as Aglaea, or splendor. And yet –
and this is a problem for our present exercise – it is also true of the modern,
post-Weber, terrain of the charismatic: the iconic faces of the powerful on the
silver screen and on TV, especially in close-up. Weber transformed the excep-
tional sublime of Longinian lightning into the daily banality of irresistible
leadership: but can Weber be escaped?
Was Christ charismatic? Before Max Weber’s work on economy and society,
unfinished at his death in 1920, charisma in medieval and post-medieval lan-
guage was specifically theological, its origins lying in the Pauline epistles, its
basis Hellenic. Potts shows that its domain was communitarian: charisma was
the giftedness of Christian communities, not leaders: it levelled, connected,
but did not single out. Only by the 2nd and 3rd centuries did charisma become
annexed to the power structure, the hierarchy, of the church and its leaders, its
bishops especially.51 There was no suggestion in the early church that Christ
himself was charismatic, that he possessed a certain personality. Nor was there
early agreement as to what Christ had looked like, what his hair length and
skin color were, though there was a theological agreement (and that is the
point) that he possessed beauty.52 Yet there was patristic authority for the idea
that Christ “sparkled.” It is found, for instance, in a commentary on St.
Matthew’s Gospel, 21:15 written in AD 398 by St. Jerome (AD 347-420). The pas-
sage is that in which Christ cleanses the Temple: 53
Igneum enim quiddam atque sidereum radiabat ex oculis ejus, et divini-

tatis majestas lucebat in facie. Cumque manum non audeant injicere
sacerdotes, tamen opera calumniantur …
Indeed a certain fiery starriness radiated from his eyes and the majesty of
divinity shone in his face, wherefore the priests would not dare to lay
their hands upon him, though they would condemn his works …
50 For these see Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 277, 119 respectively.

51 Potts, A History of Charisma, pp. 12-83.
52 Rossi Monti, Il Cielo in Terra, pp. 54-62. Discussed in relation to theology and identity
markers by Michele Bacci, The Many Faces of Christ. Portraying the Holy in the East and the
West 200 to 1300 (London, 2014).
53 Patrologia Latina, Cursus completus, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1844-64), vol. 26, col. 152; see
Thomas P. Scheck, trans., St Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, The Fathers of the Church
117 (Washington, 2008), pp. 237-38.
144 Binski
Any era influenced by theories of optical extramission will have a sense of the
power of the eye, and yet the biblical eye is an organ not of power but of under-
standing or, blinded, of ignorance, as well as a source of tears. God had shone
(coruscasti) upon Augustine, putting blindness to flight (Confessions, 10:27).
Jerome’s biblical language does not help us much, though Rev. 1.14 et oculis ejus
velut flamma ignis, “and his eyes were as a flame of fire” might have been in-
tended. At the Transfiguration, only one of the synoptic Gospels, Matthew 17:2,
mentions Christ’s face shining, not his eyes. It is rather Charon (supposedly
from the noun χάρων, a poetic form of χαρωπός (charopós, “of keen gaze”)) who
has fierce, flashing, or feverish eyes (Aeneid, 6:298-301); it is Athena whom
Homer refers to as the “goddess of the flashing eyes” (Glaukos Athene); and it is
Seneca, who in his De Ira (1.1.3-4) writes of rage that it makes the eyes “blaze
and sparkle”: flagrant ac micant oculi.54 Christ’s action in the Temple is one
motivated, of course, by anger. Jerome’s image of him is not Weberian, but
Senecan, Homeric: it is not the charisma of personality but of theology. We see
gentler embodiments of it less in the earliest surviving images of Christ than in
the astonishing painted mummy portraits from Roman Egypt in the first
centuries AD, such as those from Fayum, portraits whose steady gazes are
enlivened by the twinkle of light in the dark penetrating eyes, embers of a
God-seeking potentiality.55 It is in this flashing-out that lies the illusion of per
sonality. And yet in Jerome’s case this quality, obviously exaggerated, is mani-
festly theophanic. Jerome writes as if Christ “must have been” charismatic
because of his face and eyes, because this flashing-out of personality is really a
flashing-out of divinity, because this look induces men not to lay hands on him.
Jerome’s account of this “look” is individualistic, not communal. Charisma cre-
ates space, distance, secrecy; the ostentatious secrecy of the Transfiguration,
and the secrecy of the stigmatization of St. Francis, kept from men: Christ him-
self needed no gift, for he was God, or so Christians believe.
Faces, then, are difficult. But they help us better to understand important
points of method. Jerome’s account of Christ’s rage is an account of details sur-
face. The close reading of charismatic effect in persons or images, however
socially negotiated, must ultimately be a reading of objectively definable
qualities, such that we might come to say that an icon of Christ from Sinai has
54 See the discussion in Chad Hartsock, Sight and Blindness in Luke-Acts: The Use of Physical
Features in Characterization (Leiden, 2008), pp. 31, 58-60; for Jerome and Seneca, see
David S. Wiesen, St Jerome as a Satirist. A Study in Christian Latin thought and Letters
(Cornell, 1964).
55 See Susan Walker and Morris Bierbrier, Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt
(London, 1997), pp. 100-03. Some aspects of Christ’s appearance in the earliest Christian
centuries, though not his countenance, are considered in Thomas F. Matthews, The Clash
of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, 1993).
a “deeply moving personality” and also qualities which are “exhausted by a

careful study of the surface,” that “everything that this painted subject is, is
there [my italics],” in Stephen Jaeger’s words.56 Presumably one object cannot
be substituted for another: the facts about one object as opposed to another
matter not just incidentally, but fundamentally. To suppose that the experi-
ence of the charismatic, or indeed of any aesthetic effect, is not formed by the
ostensive appearance of an image is to undermine the very possibility of a
critical method. But because thought is internal to such experiences, to wit-
ness an icon indubitably of Christ is to summon a mode of imaginative looking
quite other than that entailed by the image of just anyone. The back-story mat-
ters: try substituting Judas Iscariot. There is no charismatic art without a
charismatic reality “behind” it: the art of charisma is an art of contingency. But
a question follows: if this is so, in what sense can charisma be said to lie in the
artifact?
Charisma and Material Culture
So my final questions concern technology, persons, and material culture. When

“charisma” replaced “prestige” as the personality-word for leadership, it also
entered the realm of technology at just the time, the 1930s, when Weber’s words
were translated into English and when Nazi Germany brought its power truly
to light. Vulgarized, it became an Anglo-Saxon word for stardom in Hollywood,
and for Kennedy’s Camelot during the Cold War and the start of the great age
of television.57 To what extent are modern notions of charisma and aura actu-
ally shaped by the moving image? Contrary to Walter Benjamin’s (early) view
that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of
the work of art,” it seems to me that some iconic images, uncanny if not char-
ismatic, precisely acquire their aura through mechanical reproduction, even
still photography.58 One instance would be one of the great desire-objects
of the 20th century, the Turin Shroud. I myself consider the shroud to be a me-
dieval artifact designed deliberately for styles of viewing unknown before the
Middle Ages, the character of which is not charismatic (it shows Christ’s eyes
as closed not open) so much as uncanny. But what produced the uncanny ef-

57 Potts, A History of Charisma, pp. 108-36, 159-221.
58 Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in
Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1968), p. 221. For
an admirable essay on this problem see Michael Camille, “The Très Riches Heures: An
Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Enquiry 17, no. 1
(1990): 72-107.
146 Binski
fect, what turned this image into something so powerful? The answer surely
was the moment in 1898 when the photographer Secondo Pia first saw the neg-
atives of the photographs he had taken of it for its then owner, King Umberto
I.59 Something in the process of rendering a negative of an image produces a
defamiliarization which intensifies effect, produces a haunting, at once un-
canny and epiphanic. But it is not “natural,” for auratic effects are illusions
which, as with the moving image, are intensified by mechanical reproduction.
I think it no coincidence that it was in the era of the moving image that cha-
risma first emerged as a widespread secular critical idea. Moving “talkie”
images are the typical agents of charismatic illusion. They permit the observa-
tion, scrutiny, of conduct; they allow us to hear the quaver, or confidence, of a
voice: hence the appalling vulnerability of non-media-savvy politicians on TV,
the sweaty Richard Nixons not the dazzling, smooth JFKs.
Talk of illusion might suggest that I am skeptical about the whole phenom-
enon of charisma, but this is not so. Schlesinger was perhaps aware, or overly
aware, of the risks of over-glamorizing the whole concept in the realm of the
political.60 No one denies the risks of overplaying dazzle and human personal-
ity in ordinary parlance. But it seems to me that in the fractured and cautious
culture of modern humanities, talk about great effects, of that which moves us
and which may even change us, restores vitality to our discussion in regard to
what it is that educates us.61 It is an act of affirmation of the possibility that
people may be great, that dazzle may be beneficial, and that (to use a Weberian
idea) “depersonalization” may be destructive. To encounter a great teacher is
not simply to encounter a mind moving over matter, but the working of a mind
through a living captivating personality. As a medievalist I certainly feel alert to
the ways in which agency cannot simply be returned to objects without regard
to their effects on audiences in the social domain.
But within this lies precisely a question about the relation of charisma and
personality which brings me to two concluding points. The first returns us to
the discussion of the hard and soft power, enchantment and persuasion, reli-
gion and rhetoric. Central to the doctrine of charisma as a form of sublime are
those key “Longinian” words of Psellos about an icon of the Virgin Mary noted
earlier, “depriving me of strength and reason”: in the “sublime” account of cha-
risma we do not engage, we succumb, are placed beyond reason and discourse.
Such is the overwhelming power of Weber’s doctrine of leadership personality.
Some might say that the danger here lies in hyperbole: that Longinus and
Psellos are creating an exaggerated topical fiction of response appropriate to
59 Thomas de Wesselow, The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection
(London, 2012), pp. 18-20.
60 Potts, A History of Charisma, pp. 130, 133 for Bourdieu; and see Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 371.
61 This case is made eloquently by Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 370-77.
the “rare experience.” But a further point, as modern aestheticians have noted,
arises from a distinction between fantasy and imagination.62 In this, the fan-
tasy object, the surrogate, is the unreal object of actual desires: mimesis,
literalism, are fundamental to the fantasist because the surrogate object of
emotion must be as real as possible. The freedoms of thought and imaginative
regard play no role in the fantasy relation because there, nothing is left to the
imagination, as in pornography or waxworks, the places of true simulacra.
Objects of fantasy in this regard are not representations but substitutions
because true representation entails thought about a subject which distances
the object and subject in a free imaginative process. Fantasy, in contrast, is lit-
eral and invasive, excludes thought, and entails the objectification of that
which is subject to fantasy. Imaginative regard does not necessarily produce
real emotion – for “real” emotion is the theme of fantasy and desire – but
“entertained” emotion. We may for instance say of an image that it looks arous-
ing, without actually being aroused: we may very well think about, or represent,
arousal to ourselves.63 In regard to the occasion and purpose of much medi-
eval representation, I suggest, the relation of subject to artwork is more like an
imaginative than a fantasy relation, because thought and judgment are abso-
lutely integral to it. Were they not, and were such art simply intended to dazzle
and so blind, the active conviction-purpose of medieval art founded in eviden-
tia and illustratio would be undermined and with it the generally-accepted
Gregorian concept of Christian art as that from which we may learn “more”
(addiscere).64
Here then lies a fruitful tension between the world of grand illusions of the
sort we might encounter, say, in cinema – surely the place where fantasy is
most readily awakened – and general aesthetic experience. My second issue is
the extension of the term charisma to the critique of “living” effects, height-
ened or vivid experience generally. In the context of the present volume we
hardly need to note that there is a longstanding tradition which maintains that
images or natural things can “live,” can embody liveliness. A well-known focus
of this in the Gothic era is the term “al vif,” used of the drawing of a lion in
Villard de Honnecourt’s portfolio, and as likely as not meaning something not
62 The idea is discussed at intervals in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Lon-
don, 1817), but is explored further by Roger Scruton, “Fantasy, Imagination and the Screen,”
Grazer Philosophische Studien 19 (1983): 35-46.
63 Arthur C. Danto addresses this issue by distinguishing between “transeunt” and “imma-
nent” representation, see Danto, review of Freedberg, The Power of Images, in Art Bulletin
72, no. 2 (1990): 341-42, at p. 342.
64 Celia M. Chazelle, “Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus
of Marseilles,” Word & Image 6, no. 1 (1990): 138-53, at p. 140: Aliud est enim picturam ado
rare, aliud per picturae historiam quid sit adorandum addiscere.
148 Binski
depicted from life, but brought to life.65 Presence, animacy, vividness, vitality,
quickness, are historically familiar critical terms, metaphors, which entail no
necessary beliefs about (though they may have unsettled) the ontological
standing of things. The use of the transferred epithet, shifting qualities of peo-
ple over to artifacts or natural things, is a widespread and sometimes helpful
maneuver in overcoming the art-life split. Not everyone found this fact of life
attractive: John Ruskin criticized the “pathetic fallacy”; extreme versions of the
“presentist” case are animism and fetishism; sophisticated versions are to be
found within the so-called Bildakt and the neo-vitalism of eco-criticism.66
But it is not my task here to argue against the “excessive image” and the entire
political economy of the post-humanist image. My point is simpler: of the var-
ious accounts of grace and giftedness familiar to us in Western thought, only
the Weberian version seems to entertain anything like a concept of personality.
Yet Weber, as already indicated, seems not to have extended this idea of per-
sonality beyond the analysis of persons and human institutions into the
domain of material culture more generally. The idea of personality should not,
to my mind, be conflated automatically with the idea of living presence in
material culture. Charisma in the Weberian sense is an emergent aspect of per-
sonhood. Ancient rhetorical tradition laid emphasis not just on words, or looks
(vultus) as sources of persuasive power, but on their combination with gesture
(actio): by word, look, and action, through enargeia, the orator gives a total idea
or image of a life lived. To perceive a charismatic totality, a Gestalt, we must
witness not the image of the orator, or hear the words of the orator, but also
behold the orator in action and witness the orator in context. Quintilian (per-
haps in a conscious deprecation of his art) saw in this totality of voice and
action an analogy to the power of motionless painting and an indication of the
limitation of speech, but some early writers, such as John the Grammarian,
65 Noa Turel, “Living Pictures: Rereading ‘au vif’, 1350-1550,” Gesta 50, no. 2 (2011): 163-82.
66 The literature on this topic is very substantial. For the Bildakt, see Bredekamp, Theorie
des Bildakts; for an eco-critical blurring of human and non-human agency, drawing on
Spinoza, and Deleuze and Guatari, see Bennett, Vibrant Matter. For the power of images
see most recently Van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence with copious bibliographical
support, and Van Eck, “Living Statues”; for different perspectives see Mitchell, What Do
Pictures Want?; Bill Brown, ed. “Things,” Special issue of Critical Enquiry, 28, no. 1 (2001);
Gumbrecht, Production of Presence; Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Meta-
phors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2006); and David Freedberg, The
Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989). For a pen-
etrating review of the latter stressing the limitations of images not their powers see Ernst
H. Gombrich, “The Edge of Delusion,” New York Review of Books 15 (1990): 6-9. For the
pathetic fallacy, see John Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy,” Modern Painters, 3, pt. 4 (Chap-
ter 12) (London, 1856).
thought that images were less effective than texts at conveying a whole person-
ality.67
Personality charisma is an elusive aspect of conduct, but it is more than an
effect. It is not simply vividness or expressiveness, or liveliness. Nor is it instan-
taneous, but changing and apprehended in time. It is a thing lived. We look at
images of people but do not observe them in the way we observe the behavior
of actual persons. Of course, we bring to images claims, desires, expectations
which have an interpersonal character: in this sense images, as Michael
Baxandall puts it, “admit” intimations of character and feeling rather than “ini-
tiate” them. It is for this reason that limits cannot readily be placed on “seeing
in” things, images included, certain qualities that may be psychological, as an
activity of imaginative beholding.68 But while the charismatic image may
indeed have eyes, it cannot gaze at us in the way we might gaze at it. While we
may treat objects as persons, gifting them with power, as a rule we do not treat
persons as objects, because persons are rational, embodied, and self-conscious,
not objects: this is why animacy and inanimacy cannot (and should not) be
split off from being alive or not alive.69 Sartre’s extraordinary discussion of the
gaze in Being and Nothingness explains why. If we meet a person’s glance it is
difficult to look them in the eye, or more specifically at the eye, because the eye
is absorbed into the person’s glance: “If I apprehend the look, I cease to per-
ceive the eyes … the Other’s look hides his eyes; he seems to go in front of
them.”70 So what we see is not an eye but a person looking back, a gaze: we
become the object of another’s intentions. In apprehending the gaze of a living
embodied person, I recognize an intention and a possibility for action towards
me – the person “intends” me. To look through the person’s glance, at the eye as
a material thing, is in contrast to insist that we are the subject, the person the
object. Looking and being looked at by another person are aspects of the for-
mation of self-consciousness: intentions in people are not separable from
67 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, XI.3.67, at vol. 494, pp. 118-19. Of the rhetorical theoreticians,
Quintilian is the most prone to relate painting and poetry (see variously Institutio oratoria
II.17-18, VIII.5, IX.3, XII.3-9 etc.). See also Verity Platt, “Agamemnon’s Grief. On the Limits
of Expression in Roman Rhetoric and Painting,” in Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture, eds.
J. Elsner and M. Meyer (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 211-31 at pp. 211-12, 231; Bacci, Many Faces of
Christ, p. 157.
68 Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, p. 152. On this complicated
matter see the fundamental reflections on “seeing as” and “seeing in” in Richard Wollheim,
Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 205-26, and the review of Wollheim’s
book by Michael Podro, The Burlington Magazine, 124, no. 947 (Feb., 1982), 100-02.
69 See however Gell, as discussed by Van Eck, “Living Statues,” p. 648.
70 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, 1957); see also
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London, 1989),
pp. 360-61.
150 Binski
human self-consciousness and action (being alive). This is not to deny a differ-
ent point: that works of art or texts embody intentions as artifacts which “move
towards” something (from the Latin intendere: to aim) yet which lack con-
sciousness.71 Here we may speak of agency, but not will. It is simply to persist
with the thought that in our critical language we should no more regard things
– and I mean especially natural things – as embodiments of personality than
we should regard them as embodiments of morality. With images, in contrast,
there is always a grey area to be savoured.
In arguing this, I want to retain the ontological specialness of human agency
while fully admitting the force, the agency of natural things and artifacts,
images included. Art is precisely where these agencies negotiate; and it is
above all the discursive agency of persons, not things, which brings this to light
in the first place. Contrary to some recent interpretative trends, the gap
between natural thing and person is not just significant but important: to allow
charisma to embrace general notions of the imaginative beholding of life in
things may be to weaken the concept to the point, not that we overemphasize
the living nature of objects, but that we risk objectifying persons possessed of
life and consciousness.72 Weber’s apparent caution on this point is hard to cir-
cumvent. If charisma is a quality of things, no matter how complex, it is
because it is we who have gifted them with that quality. To maintain this dis-
tinction between seeing and observing, stasis and time, person and thing is
above all to celebrate the power of charisma as a human possibility.
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Part 2
Charismatic Art
∵
156 Binski
Charismatic Art and Biography in the Carolingian World 157
Chapter 4
Charismatic Art and Biography in the Carolingian

World
Andrew Romig
As long as the charismatic figure is present, his reproduction in art is not

necessary. Copied semblances are substitutes; the living model is far
more efficacious than the spoken or written word, as Seneca had claimed.
Petrarch, in a letter in defense of learning by example, would reiterate the
priority of the lived presence precisely compared with the charismatic
force of sculpture: ‘If the statues of illustrious men can ignite noble minds
to the zeal of imitation … how much more does virtue itself exercise this
influence, being put forward not in shining marble, but in a living exam-
ple. It may be that the lineaments of bodies may be expressed more
forcefully in statues, but the awareness of deeds, of manners, and of the
attitudes of mind are undoubtedly expressed more completely and more
perfectly in words than in sculpture.’ (Petrarch, Epistolae familiares 6.4).
The death of the charismatic figure generates the need to recapture and
hold firm his image. It is passed along through those nearest the master,
who become, as it were, living contact relics. Then that force too fades.
Finally writing and effigies become the transmitters. Charismatic repre-
sentation emerges when the sensed force of living presence weakens.1
⸪
Inspired by Stephen Jaeger, who for more than three decades has been among
the most creative and provocative interpreters of high medieval intellectual
culture, I would like to ruminate here upon the charisma of the Frankish
emperor Charlemagne, both in life and, especially, in art. Charlemagne’s per-
sonal charisma in the Weberian sense of the term has been at the foundation
1 Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia,
2012), p. 160.

158 Romig
of his historical and his legendary reputation since soon after his death in 814.2
His capacity to command and to inspire the awe of those around him was cru-
cial, historians have argued, to the control that he was able to maintain over
the vast expanses of European territory that he conquered, centuries before
the development of the technologies of administrative government that we
associate with the modern state. And his charismatic reputation has only been
enhanced by the fact that his empire collapsed within a single generation after
his passing. For the next ten centuries, Charlemagne’s charisma would serve as
the counterexample for the charisma that his son and sole heir, Louis the Pious,
supposedly lacked. Louis, roi faible, historians would write, had no charisma;
he was unable to command and to cultivate the interpersonal loyalties on
which “premodern” government relied, and thus could not keep centrifugal
forces at bay. Only in recent decades have historians finally begun to challenge
and to rewrite this thousand-year-old narrative of Carolingian power.3
Charlemagne’s charismatic remembrance developed precisely as Jaeger
describes in the lines quoted above. While Charlemagne was living, there was
almost no reproduction of him in art. A handful of panegyric poems and annal-
istic histories written by courtiers conveyed highly-constructed portraits of
Charlemagne’s kingship. Yet the projection of his image beyond the court, par-
ticularly his pictorial image, appears to have been remarkably minimal during
his lifetime. Whereas the emperors of old Rome sought to bombard their sub-
jects with public displays of imperial cult imagery, the bounties of which we
now enjoy in the classical-era wings of our art museums, Charlemagne seems
to have produced no pictorial images while he was alive other than coinage
and royal bullae, and these very late in his reign. Only the coins remain truly
extant.4 They depict the emperor in profile, with round face, thick neck, and
prominent nose, wearing the Roman toga and laurel wreath, along with the
2 For Weberian concepts of charismatic leadership, see especially the collection, Max Weber,
On Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers, ed. S.N. Eisenstadt (Chicago, 1968).
3 See especially Courtney Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline
of the Carolingians (Philadelphia, 2009), for his detailed history and shrewd dismantling of
this traditional narrative.
4 Ildar H. Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language of Authority in the Carolingian World (c. 751–877)
(Leiden, 2008), pp. 208-23. Our main evidence for Charlemagne’s bullae comes from a late-
17th-century antiquarian’s sketch. Garipzanov argues against previous scholarly assessment,
most notably Percy Ernst Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser und Könige in Bilden ihrer Zeit, 751-
1190, ed. Florentine Mütherich (Munich, 1983), that images of Charlemagne began to appear
on imperial coins no earlier than 813. Louis the Pious followed this minting tradition for only
a short time, discontinuing the practice after 818.
Figure 4.1
Obverse of a Charlemagne denier, coined in Frankfurt
circa 813, now at the Cabinet des Médailles, Paris.
(<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Charlemagne_denier_Mayence_812_814.jpg>,
accessed 28 November 2017.) Photo: PHGCOM.
distinctive short hair and mustache of the Carolingian royal line.5 It is a styl-
ized portrait of old meeting new. Whether it enchanted its contemporary
viewers is impossible to know. Yet when compared to the exaggerated, even
cartoonish portrayals that emerged and became popular after Charlemagne’s
death, it is difficult to describe the contemporary image as anything more than
modest.
Perhaps, as Jaeger suggests for charismatic cultures, Charlemagne’s living
presence simply left no need for aggrandizement. After 814, however, as the
character and tenor of the Frankish world began to change dramatically, so too
did Charlemagne’s public image. Einhard wrote his famous biography of his
liege and friend during the late 820s.6 In the decades and centuries that fol-
lowed, artists working in every medium from language to pigment to wood to
stone would attempt to depict the aura of majesty that Charlemagne allegedly
radiated in life. European rulers would call upon these images in the dedica-
tion of their monastic houses and churches, in the patrimony and authentication
of their most precious relics, and most of all in their attempts to arrogate politi-
5 Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New
York, 2004), pp. 3-42, especially pp. 24-25. Garipzanov suggests that some viewers may even
have recognized in the laurel wreath an ancient symbol for pax – peace – and thus perhaps a
reference not only to the classical past but to Carolingian ideals of royal peacemaking; see
Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language of Authority, pp. 212-13; for Charlemagne as rex pacificus,
see also Paul Kershaw, Peaceful Kings: Peace, Power and the Early Medieval Political Imagination
(Oxford, 2011), pp. 158-73.
6 Einhard, Vita Karoli magni, MGH SS rer. Germ. 25, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger (Hanover, 1911),
pp. 69-130. For Einhard’s career and the history and dating of this text, see especially Paul
Edward Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (Toronto, 1998), pp. xi-xli.
160 Romig
cal and social authority by binding themselves to his ancient bloodline.7

Charlemagne’s legend waxed as his living memory waned.8
No image of Charlemagne represents this evolution more clearly than
Albrecht Dürer’s portrait, dated c.1512, now preserved at the Germanisches
Museum in Nuremberg. Commissioned by the Nuremberg city council in 1510,
it was originally part of a diptych that set Charlemagne in mirrored opposition
to the Emperor Sigismund (d. 1437). The two halves were ultimately exhibited
separately, however, a decision that seems to have been made quite early in the
history of their display; and when viewing the portraits in juxtaposition, it is
not difficult to guess the reason why. Charlemagne towers with regal ease over
the slouching, slinking, paunched, and scowling Sigismund (see figs 9.5a-b).
The inscriptions which frame the portraits explain that Charlemagne made
German the entirety of the Roman Empire in half the time of Sigismund’s
reign. Sigismund’s exploits, in comparison, were good patronage of Nuremberg
and the porting of the imperial relics from Prague (relics, predominantly, of
Charlemagne himself).9
Regardless of whether Dürer’s depiction was an honest representation or a
cruel artist’s joke played on his Nuremberg patrons, the image demonstrates
just how little resemblance Charlemagne’s later portrayals bore to the com-
paratively humble likeness that had been stamped onto his royal coinage. By
7 See especially Stephen G. Nichols, Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography
(New Haven, 1983); Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose
Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1993); Amy G. Remensnyder,
Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca,
NY, 1995); Matthew Gabriele, An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks,
and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford, 2011); Anne Latowsky, Emperor of the World:
Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800-1229 (Ithaca, NY, 2013).
8 For important surveys of the early components and development of this legendary remem-
brance, see Thomas F.X. Noble, “Greatness Contested and Confirmed: The Raw Materials of
the Charlemagne Legend,” in The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and
Crusade, eds. Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey (New York, 2008), pp. 3-22; Paul Edward
Dutton, “Karolus Magnus or Karolus Felix: The Making of Charlemagne’s Reputation and
Legend,” in the same volume, pp. 23-39.
9 See David Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith
(Ann Arbor, 2003), pp. 105-09. The panels read in German, “Charlemagne reigned [as Holy
Roman Emperor] for 14 years. He was the son of the Frankish King Pippin, and Roman
Emperor. He made the Roman Empire subject to German rule. His crown and garments are
put on public display every year in Nuremberg, together with other relics”; “Emperor Sigismund
ruled for 28 years. He always supported the city of Nuremberg, bestowing upon it many special
signs of his favor. In the year 1424, he brought here from Prague the relics that are shown every
year.” Price argues that Dürer may have composed these captions himself.
Dürer’s time Charlemagne had become, throughout Europe, not only a sign for
good rulership and imperial power, as the Nuremberg commissioners no doubt
thought of him, but a sign for charismatic authority itself.10 Since contempo-
rary images from the era of Charlemagne were scarce at best (and we should
doubt whether Dürer would have used them had he known about them), Dürer
had to construct a figurative depiction of his own from the building blocks of
stories and legend. Sigismund withers not in the shadow of a historical prede-
cessor, but instead in the mythic, blinding radiance of a fabled and transcendent
father of Europe.
The evolution of Charlemagne’s image as a sign for charisma reveals in stark
relief a deep historical irony upon which the remainder of this essay will focus.
Charlemagne himself, and early Carolingian culture in general, was in fact
quite anxious about charisma, and in particular, the dangerous power of char-
ismatic art. Charlemagne’s court produced the Opus Caroli Regis (formerly
known as the Libri Carolini), the most extensive statement in the history of the
Western Church, before or since, concerning the role of images and pictorial
art in Christian life.11 One of the Opus Caroli’s central claims is that images, no
matter how skillfully executed, can never convey anything beyond the material
world from which they are constructed. Any artist’s attempt to depict aspects
of the non-material world, such as the aura of the divine, or the charisma of
emperors, is ultimately an attempt to deceive. As the Opus Caroli argues repeat-
edly, only words had this unique power. We cannot know for certain whether
this was the reason that there is such a dearth of pictorial representation of
Charlemagne from during his reign. Yet as Thomas F.X. Noble has noted sug-
gestively, the absence of images is in perfect keeping with the theology of the
Opus Caroli. It is simply a historical fact that the early Carolingians seem to
have produced remarkably few pictorial images of their rulers.12
I would like to suggest a possible connection between this cultural distrust
of charismatic pictorial art and the innovative means by which the early
Carolingians did choose to represent their emperors: the revival of secular
biography. David Ganz has recently called Einhard’s decision to write biogra-
10 For “Charlemagne” as ideological discourse, see also Eugene Vance, “Semiotics and Power:
Relics, Icons, and the Voyage de Charlemagne à Jerusalem et à Constantinople,” Romantic
Review 79 (1988), 170-71.
11 Theodulf of Orléans et al., Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (Libri Carolini), MGH Conc.
2/1, eds. Ann Freeman and Paul Meyvaert (Hanover, 1998) (cited hereafter as Opus Caroli
Regis).
12 Thomas F.X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (Philadelphia, 2013), p. 229.
162 Romig
phy “utterly remarkable.”13 It most certainly was. No one in the West had com
posed the biography of a secular figure for centuries, and Einhard’s chief
model, famously discovered by the scholar Casaubon in the 16th century, was
Suetonius, a man who had written 700 years before the Carolingian rise to pow-
er.14 In contemplating the Carolingian revival of secular biography during the
second quarter of the 9th century (two more were written in prose and one in
verse about Louis the Pious), Ganz asks the crucial question: “What had hap-
pened to Carolingian history which meant that it was best recorded not as his-
tory, not as annals, but as biography?”15 Ganz’s answer is that the Carolingians
turned to the biographic genre because they believed it to exhibit a degree of
honesty and plain-spokenness that the genre of history lacked. Where history
was considered grandiose, Ganz argues, biography was, for the Carolingians,
“unpretentious.”16 It allowed Carolingian writers to focus on ideals of rulership
which annalistic forms simply could not address.
To this I wish only to add that the Carolingian revival of biography may also
have been informed by a deep cultural unease about the power of charismatic
pictorial art to confuse and to lead astray the viewer, particularly in the depic-
tion of emperors. For decades within the Carolingian intellectual world, there
had been widespread distrust of the material images and effigies by which
their ancient Roman predecessors and Byzantine Roman contemporaries cul-
tivated and projected the charismatic aura of their emperors.17 Thus when,
during the 820s and 830s, political turmoil led to debate and infighting within
the Carolingian imperial court over conceptions of right kingship, and writers
needed an art form that could convey the charismatic images of ideal rulership
13 David Ganz, “The Astronomer’s Life of Louis the Pious,” in Rome and Religion in the
Medieval World: Studies in Honor of Thomas F.X. Noble, ed. Valerie L. Garver and Owen M.
Phelan (London, 2014), p. 138.
14 It has also been suggested that Einhard drew on Tacitus’s Agricola and Cicero. See Thomas
F.X. Noble, Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan,
and the Astronomer, trans. Thomas F.X. Noble (University Park, 2009), pp. 15-16; Rosa-
mond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge,
2008), pp. 17-20. Cf. also the recent remarks by Gereon Becht-Jördens, “Einharts <Vita
Karoli> und die antike Tradition von Biographie und Historiographie. Von der Gattungs
geschichte zur Interpretation,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 46 (2011), 335-69.
15 Ganz, “The Astronomer’s Life,” p. 131.
16 Ganz, “The Astronomer’s Life,” p. 138.
17 For Carolingian depictions of their pagan Roman predecessors, see Lawrence Nees,
A Tainted Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court (Philadel-
phia, 1991), especially pp. 270-74.
for which they wished to argue, it may be no coincidence that they turned to
what was considered a much safer and more truthful medium: words.
…
Jaeger’s conception of charismatic art is very much dependent upon the
viewer, for as he himself notes, art that has a charismatic effect on one person
may not have the same effect on another.18 This makes the study of charismatic
art in the past a difficult task at best because it requires evidence of reception.
Luckily, we have a poem from the year 829 that offers us at least partial access
to how one Carolingian, Walahfrid Strabo, characterized his own experience of
a work of art’s charismatic effects: the De imagine Tetrici.19
In that year, the Emperor Louis the Pious summoned Strabo to his court to
oversee the education of his youngest son, Charles. Strabo would become argu-
ably the finest poet of his generation and a trusted advisor and court figure for
the next decade, retiring to become abbot of Reichenau in 838. Charles would
grow up, of course, to become King Charles “the Bald” of the Western Franks.
In 829, however, Charles was only five or six years of age, and remarkably,
Walahfrid was not much older: only 20 or 21. For an oblate such as Strabo, likely
of non-noble origins, a court appointment at such a young age was no small
honor. He had studied with the greatest minds of his day: Grimald at Reichenau
and then Hrabanus Maurus at Fulda; and he had been recommended to Louis
by the Archchaplain Hilduin, a trusted advisor. Yet we must wonder whether
the young phenom scholar knew what he was in for. 829 was among the most
tumultuous years of Louis’s tumultuous reign, perhaps second only to 833,
when Louis was forced for a short period of time to abdicate his throne. In 829,
there was a volatile political rift between Louis and his three elder sons, Lothar,
Louis “the German,” and Pippin, prompted in no small part by the favor that
Louis the Pious was now showing toward the young Charles, born of a different

19 Michael W. Herren, “The ‘De imagine Tetrici’ of Walahfrid Strabo: Edition and Transla-
tion,” The Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (1991), 118-39 (cited hereafter as De imagine Tetrici). It
should be noted here that I agree wholeheartedly with Lawrence Nees’s important discus-
sion of Carolingian ekphrasis and art description in the service of moral argumentation
(see especially Nees, A Tainted Mantle, pp. 21-46). As Nees argues, poems such as De imag-
ine Tetrici must have embellished the actual art described, if that art ever existed in the
first place. The poem’s focus on the power of art, real or otherwise, to affect the viewer is
my subject here.
164 Romig
and not universally popular mother, Judith.20 In agreeing to come to court spe-
cifically to train this youngest royal heir, Walahfrid Strabo was entering a pit of
vipers.
There is reason to believe, however, that Walahfrid knew exactly what he
was doing. For in that same year, perhaps as part of his tutelage of the young
Charles, Walahfrid wrote a poetic reflection on an equestrian statue that stood
on the palace grounds at Aachen. It was, we believe, a statue of Theoderic the
Great, king of the Ostrogoths (d. 526), cast in gilded bronze, according to the
poem, armed with shield and lance, and mounted on horseback atop a roughly
ten-foot base. Accompanying the statue, also according to the poem, was a
troop of statuary retainers that allegorically represented Rome and Ravenna.
Charlemagne brought the statue to Aachen from Ravenna in the year 801 and
installed it at his palace because, wrote Agnellus of Ravenna in the 830s or
early 840s, the emperor had marveled at its beauty and had never seen its
like.21
That Charlemagne had been captivated by the allure of the statue is central
to the meditation of the poem, for at its heart it is about the ways in which the
Theoderic statue conveys charisma of a wrong and dangerous sort. Strabo
labeled his verses “on the image of Tetricus,” a pun on the consonants of
Theoderic that meant in Latin “foul,” “harsh,” “gloomy,” “severe.” Michael W.
Herren, the most recent editor, translator, and interpreter of the poem, sug-
gests for tetricus the connotation, “cruel.”22 The poem, 262 hexameters in
length, is built loosely on the structure of a Virgilian eclogue; yet in true
Carolingian fashion Strabo repurposes the ancient genre for new use, replacing
bucolic shepherd’s speech with allusive and biting commentary on current
political affairs. He inserts himself into the poem as a character, “Strabus”
(a name which he actually prefers, he explains at the end of the poem, to
the more grammatically correct “Strabo”). As Strabus, he converses with his
muse, “Scintilla,” whom Dümmler has argued represents Strabo’s first teacher,
20 For a concise introduction to Carolingian political history during this period see espe-
cially Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World
(Cambridge, 2011), pp. 194-222. For further analysis, see especially Booker, Past Convic-
tions, and Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of
Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge, 2009).
21 Agnellus of Ravenna describes and recounts Charlemagne’s acquisition of the statue in
his Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis 94, MGH SS rer. Lang., ed. Oswald Holder-Egger
(Hanover, 1878), pp. 337-38.
22 Herren, “Edition and Translation,” p. 118.
Grimald of Reichenau.23 Together they contemplate the statuary group in the

courtyard and discuss the messages that it conveys.
Protracted exposition of the poem is unnecessary here, as it has received
several extended readings, most notably by Peter Godman and, again, Michael
Herren.24 In Herren’s reading, which seeks to correct Godman on a number of
key points, the poem’s central allusion is to the Old Testament Book of Exodus
and the story of the Golden Calf. “Tetricus” is an idolatrous representation of
good kingship that captivated Charlemagne and now threatens to push the
government of Louis toward a dark future. Louis is called Moses in the poem, a
strange Old Testament figure with which to allegorize a Carolingian Emperor.
Charlemagne had most often been likened in his court poetry to David, some-
times Solomon; in Admonitio generalis he is juxtaposed with Josiah, the law
giver.25 Yet in Strabo’s poem Louis is Moses, or rather, as Herren argues, should
remember to be like Moses, for he is in great danger of falling victim to the wor-
ship of a false idol – the Golden Calf that Tetricus represents.
In general I concur with Herren’s overall interpretation. The poem is in part
a subtle admonition to Louis that he should forge his own path, follow the
advice of his wise counselors, and not follow the examples of the greedy and
worldly emperors of old. His duty is to lead the Franks as the people of God. I
would only emphasize further that Strabo’s warning is not simply against the
idolatrous worship of bad kingship. He is specifically warning against the
power of charismatic art to lead emperors astray.
Roughly the first half of the poem records the conversation between Strabus
and Scintilla as they gaze upon and consider the sculpture group. Strabus,
23 For “Strabus,” De imagine Tetrici, colophon, lines 3-4 (Herren, “Edition and Translation,”
p. 139). For the identification of Scintilla, see Walahfrid Strabo, “De imagine Tetrici,” MGH
Poetae 2, ed. Ernst Dümmler (Berlin, 1884), pp. 302 and 370. Thomas F.X. Noble has
suggested that Scintilla is meant to refer to another aspect of Strabo’s own psyche:
“Images, a Daydream, and Heavenly Sounds in the Carolingian Era: Walahfrid Strabo and
Maura of Troyes,” in Envisioning Experience in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Dynamic
Patterns in Texts and Images, eds. Giselle de Nie and Thomas F.X. Noble (New York, 2012
[reprinted 2016]), p. 26.
24 Peter Godman, Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford,
1987), pp. 133-47; Michael W. Herren, “Walahfrid Strabo’s ‘De imagine Tetrici’; An Inter
pretation,” in Latin Culture and Medieval Germanic Europe; Proceedings of the First
Germania Latina Conference Held at the University of Groningen, 26 May 1989, eds. Richard
North and Tette Hofstra (Groningen, 1992), pp. 25-41.
25 For the commonplace of Charlemagne as David see, for example, Peter Godman, Poetry of
the Carolingian Renaissance (Norman, 1985), p. 5; for Charlemagne as Josiah, see Die
Admonitio generalis Karls des Großen, MGH Fontes iuris 16, ed. Klaus Zechiel-Eckes and
Michael Glatthaar (Hannover, 2012), p. 182, lines 30-31.
166 Romig
assuming the role of student, asks Scintilla first to explain to him why the
statue and its entourage of figures were made. Theoderic was once a ruler,
Scintilla responds, who now suffers in eternal flames for his greed and miserli-
ness. The conversation between Strabus and Scintilla thus teaches lessons on
good kingship. Importantly, however, Scintilla pays special attention to the role
of the craftsmen in the construction of the art and the messages that the art
conveys:
If perchance the craftsmen gave this statue to him while living,

Rest assured it was to soothe a raging lion through their art,
Or else – and I think it more likely – the dreadful man himself
Commissioned the likeness, which is often the prerogative of pride.
For no man will be unhappy unless he ceases to know himself
And dares to believe that he is what he is not.
If you know that the proud are wont to be placed in chariots and on horses,
you will scarcely be astonished that he is sitting on a horse.26
Theoderic likely commissioned the statuary himself, Scintilla suggests con-

temptuously. This is ill pride. But his criticism is also directed toward the
craftsmen of the piece. The artists had not only the power to appease the
emperor in his pride and tyranny, but to feed Theoderic’s hubris by making
him appear, and thus allowing him to believe, that he was greater than he actu-
ally was. Only the unhappy fail to know who they truly are.
During the course of their conversation, Strabus and Scintilla continue to
mock the charismatic delusions of the statue. Tetricus, far from an image of
glorious kingship, is an object of ridicule. “I suppose he’s nude just to get a good
suntan,” Strabus quips at one point.27 Yet in addition to these admonitions
against royal greed and tyranny, Strabo, again through the words of Scintilla,
emphasizes the particular power of the art itself to encourage bad behavior in
everyone:
Greed flashes all golden from his embellished parts,

It carries the darts with the power to stir lazy flanks
And kindle hearts to habitual plunder.
That this golden image reigns surrounded by a dark entourage
26 Strabo, De imagine Tetrici, lines 38-45. Trans. Herren, “Edition and Translation,” p. 132.
27 Strabo, De imagine Tetrici, line 53. I suggest a somewhat looser translation than Herren’s
in order to convey what I believe is indeed the tone of the Latin: “Nudus ob hoc solum,
puto, ut atra pelle fruatur.”
Means nothing else than this:

To the extent that wicked luxury swells some with a sense of greed,
Burning poverty brings destruction to others in the same degree.
That the waters flow away is because, as the poet says,
“The greedy man is always in need.” But the absence of bridles
And that he rides his horse over stones, lead, and hollow metal
Show that he rules his proud beast with a greedy spirit,
An insensitive heart and hollow feeling.
O bane injurious without cease, was it not enough
To fly through the whole world with war and the slaughter of the mighty,
Without also taking care to set your cursed face
Against illustrious palaces and Christian congregations?28
Theoderic used art to wicked ends, Scintilla teaches. He not only made war
against Rome and championed Arianism against the catholic faith; he circu-
lated his self-aggrandized image for public display in a manner that emboldened
others to enact the very sins that he himself committed.
And this, the poem suggests, was effectively the trap into which Charlemagne,
Louis’s father, had fallen. In being enchanted by the statue’s beauty and bring-
ing it to Aachen for display, Charlemagne had been worshipping a false idol of
kingship. On this point of interpretation, I break in part from Herren, for he
hangs his reading on his translation of a peculiar quintet of ultimately puz-
zling lines – the only lines of the poem to refer to Charlemagne directly. Herren
believes that the poem is equating Tetricus with Charlemagne, not a com-
pletely outlandish thought to attribute to the versifier of the highly critical
Visio Wettini.29 I believe, however, that the critique in De imagine Tetrici is
slightly less damning than Herren thinks, and oriented toward a slightly differ-
ent flaw.
In the passage in question, Strabo addresses Louis the Pious directly, remind-
ing him that like Moses his duty is, effectively, to build a tabernacle to God and
to lead his people to the promised land. In Latin the lines addressing Charle
magne read as follows:
Tu vero in populis paradysi ad amoena vocatis

Templa regis fundata sacris, rex magne, lapillis,
Quorum pensa pater quondam tibi magnus adauxit;
28 Strabo, De imagine Tetrici, lines 60-75. Trans. Herren, “Edition and Translation,” pp. 133-34.
29 Walahfrid Strabo, “Visio Wettini Walahfridi,” MGH Poetae 2, pp. 318-19, lines 446-61.
168 Romig
Aurea cui ludunt summis simulacra columnis,

Cuius ad ingenium non confero dogma Platonis.30
The “tu” refers to Louis, and thus his “magnus pater” is Charlemagne. Herren
translates this section to be saying that Charlemagne adorned his churches
with golden effigies of himself:
You rule among a people called to the beauties of paradise

Over temples built upon sacred stones, great king.
Your famous father at one time enhanced their importance.
His golden effigies sport at the tops of columns,
To his genius I do not apply the teaching of Plato.31
In this Herren sees a relation to Tetricus, and thus claims that the poem criti-
cizes Charlemagne for erecting self-aggrandizing images and failing to exhibit
the “teaching of Plato,” a cryptic reference to lines at the end of the poem,
where Strabo quotes Boethius’s Platonic maxim, “Only then does a prosperous
republic rise,/ When kings are sufficiently wise and wise men are kings.”32
The difficulty with Herren’s interpretation is that it requires the dative cui to
serve as a genitive, which is unlikely given Strabo’s learned facility with classi-
cal style. In my reading of the Latin, Herren’s English translation works only if
the reader understands line 110 to be referring to the statues of Theoderic and
his retinue, the subject under scrutiny in the poem. The “his” in the line is thus
referring to the fact that Charlemagne brought them to the palace in the first
place. They are “his” statues in the sense that they play for or to him (a more
accurate sense of the dative) and give him enjoyment; but they are not effigies
of him. Therefore, the critique of Charlemagne, while still a critique, is not
what Herren suggests. It is that Charlemagne had been enchanted by the art.
So enchanted, he had not acted as the kind of wise man and king that the
republic required according to Boethius and Plato. Louis, by extension, should
beware the false idol of kingship that Theoderic represents and the trap into
which his father had fallen.
30 Strabo, De imagine Tetrici, lines 107-11.

31 Herren, “Edition and Translation,” pp. 134-35, with exposition of his reading in Herren,
“Walafrid Strabo’s ‘De imagine Tetrici’; An Interpretation,” pp. 34-35.
The reference to Boethius is crucial, Herren argues correctly, because it was Theoderic
who condemned the beloved philosopher to death; Herren, “Edition and Translation,”
p. 120.
I elaborate on this grammatical quibble only because it is of crucial impor-

tance for understanding the historical significance of the poem and what it
says about charismatic art within Carolingian political culture. The notion of
Charlemagne constructing effigies of himself, as Herren would suggest, in fact
goes utterly against what we know about the image policy of Charlemagne’s
court. In his magisterial history of Byzantine and Western Christian doctrine
concerning icons during the first millennium, Thomas F.X. Noble shows how
deeply invested Charlemagne was in the doctrine that images, while not inher-
ently evil, had the power to deceive when used in devotional practices.
Furthermore, Charlemagne’s courtiers saw this as a crucial doctrinal difference
of opinion between themselves and their Byzantine counterparts, to such a
great degree that in the Opus Caroli Regis it serves as a means of asserting key
distinctions between Western and Eastern identity. The Carolingians, in other
words, built their claims to being the true inheritors of Rome, the righteous
leaders of the Faith, and the chosen people of God, precisely upon the argu-
ment they used images correctly, whereas the Byzantines did not.33 That
Charlemagne enjoyed a work of art fits his court’s policy. That he commis-
sioned golden effigies of himself and adorned churches with them does not.
This is important because it speaks to an increasing iconophobia among the
Carolingians in the final decades of Charlemagne’s reign, and in the decades
that followed his death. The Opus Caroli’s most stridently repeated argument is
that images cannot possibly convey anything beyond the physical world. To
believe that they could was to believe in a kind of dangerous idolatry. The
polemic of the Opus Caroli’s primary author, Theodulf of Orleans, is particu-
larly vitriolic and sarcastic on this matter. Reciting an argument that had been
made since the early centuries of the church, he wrote that images could never
accurately depict extra-human qualities. There are many different images of
St. Paul, he says. Which of them is the most true? How can humans determine
that truth? And if one image is less true than another, how can we know that
we are contemplating the true figure and not a false one?34 Theodulf then
attacks the hypothetical notion that an image can express hyper-mimetic
holiness:
But let us say that there is holiness in a painted image. Where was this
holiness before it was created? Could it be in the wood, which is obtained
from the forest for use, whose surplus is surrendered to the fires? Could it
be in the pigments, which are commonly made from unclean things?
33 Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, pp. 208-15.

34 Opus Caroli regis 1.2, p. 118.
170 Romig
Could it be in the wax, which contains both pigments and filth? If it is in

the wood, why, when holiness knows no death, would it be in something
that can be carried off to its execution, the hatchet blunting it, the car-
penter’s axe gnawing at it, the plane shaving it, consumed by the funeral
pyre and reduced into glowing ashes. Pigments die, too, broken down
into separate shades in the hands of an artist. And wax is rendered void
drop by drop, melted by the extreme heat of fire. Or if holiness is not to
be sought (and in fact it is not) in the things about which we have gone
on at such length, from where does the holiness get added after the image
is constructed out of these many materials? As long as holiness is not
discovered to be added to an image either through a blessing or through
some canonical consecration, it is not to be believed that it is within. If
holiness is within, can it be inquired whether it would crack when the
image cracks from old age? Would the holiness cross over into something
else constructed from the image’s parts? Indeed, if holiness is within the
image, it comes from a different source, and if it comes from a different
source, it can cross over to another. But holiness does not cross over to
another thing, therefore it is not to be believed that it is within.35
Theodulf’s argument is about the power of art to channel the divine. Yet part
of the reason that this issue was so important to him was that he believed the
Byzantines also attributed such power to images of their emperors.36 Theodulf
was particularly wary of imperial images that tricked not only the viewer but
the subject – that is, the emperor himself (or empress herself, in the particular
case of the Opus Caroli) – into believing in the emperor’s likeness to the divine.
God can never be one’s peer, Theodulf wrote derisively, and the emperor does
not co-reign with God, as he believed the Byzantine rulers had boasted at their
synod: “He reigns in us. He does not reign together with us.”37 Images of the
emperor, because they are images and made from the stuff of the material
world, could convey no aura of special power. Not only was it blasphemous to
believe that a human being could represent her or himself with a special power
that was more than real and true; to do so was to send the wrong message to
the people about their proper role models. Theodulf makes this argument
directly in two different chapters of Book III. Citing Saint Paul’s First Letter to
the Corinthians, Theodulf writes, “The teacher of the gentiles urged us not to
35 Opus Caroli regis 1.2, pp. 118-19. My translation.

36 For the different traditions of imperial image devotion in Byzantium and Francia, see
especially Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language of Authority, pp. 203-06.
37 Opus Caroli regis 1.1, p. 114. My translation and emphasis.
be imitators of emperors, but [God’s] own imitators.”38 In the margins of the

Opus Caroli manuscript considered to be the original working copy are notes in
a contemporary script, believed to record the responses of Charlemagne him-
self when the text was read to him. For this statement, Charlemagne exclaims,
“Prudent!”39
These arguments, stated and restated throughout the Opus Caroli, were
built upon the Augustinian doctrine that the only means by which human
beings could accurately convey ideas about the divine was through words.
Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, Book 2, had been particularly clear about
the inferiority of images to words.40 Words were the closest access that human
beings could have to the divine, and Christians were to revere the power and
depth and mystery of the verbum as the most efficient and accurate means of
contemplating God and his creation. Paintings were dangerous, said the Opus
Caroli, following this line of thought, because they were so much more poten-
tially false than the written word. In Noble’s words, concerning what the Opus
Caroli argues about the difference between images and Scripture: “… convey-
ing what the Lord has said is the work of writers, not painters: ‘painters can in
some way bring the stories of past events back to memory but things that are
only perceived by the senses and brought forth by words are comprehended
not by painters but by writers.’”41
Strabo’s concern in De imagine Tetrici thus becomes all the more clear.
Charlemagne had been enchanted by a false idol, and Louis needed to be care-
ful not to commit the same mistake. Just a few years before 829, Claudius of
Turin had made waves preaching the destruction of all images being brought
back by pilgrims from the Holy Land because of their danger. Claudius was
condemned for advocating too draconian and quasi-heretical a position.42 Yet
it shows how Carolingian culture during the 820s leaned far more toward
iconophobia than iconophilia. And it demonstrates the theological environ-
ment within which Strabo would have been trained, and which he thought
best to teach at court.
38 Opus Caroli regis 3.15, p. 400. My translation. Cf. Opus Caroli regis 3.29, pp. 475-79.
39 For commentary on the marginal notes, see Ann Freeman (with Paul Meyvaert), “Opus
Caroli regis contra synodum: An Introduction,” in Theodulf of Orleans: Charlemagne’s
Spokesman against the Second Council of Nicaea, ed. Paul Meyvaert (Burlington, VT, 2003),
pp. 70-74.
40 See Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, p. 36, 104.
41 Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, p. 200, citing and translating Opus Caroli
Regis 3.23, pp. 446-47.
42 Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, pp. 287-328.
172 Romig
Finally, it begs the question of whether it was no coincidence at all that

Einhard penned his Vita Caroli according to the same theological principles,
and in precisely the same political moment within which Strabo wrote his
verses. Einhard could have commissioned sculptors or painters to represent
the ideal image of Charlemagne that he wished to portray. Instead he chose
words. Not only could he persuade more clearly and more directly in words.
Words could also exalt without deceiving. Life writing in the form of hagiogra-
phy had for centuries been used for its hyper-mimetic capacity to convey
aspects of saintliness. The secular biography served the same function for non-
saintly figures, representing their own special qualities in the interest of
creating a community of correct and loyal devotion.
Einhard’s Vita Caroli has been well-studied as a work of biographic art. I
would only draw attention to the manner in which Einhard’s Vita Caroli proj-
ects a particular kind of imperial image, quite different from the statue that
Strabo mocks. It projects, in other words, an imperial aggrandizement that
within the culture of the 820s and 830s was considered to be aggrandizement
of the right kind. Einhard wrote in his preface that he feared the loss of
Charlemagne’s memory, and that this was one of the reasons for writing down
for posterity the story of his friend. Yet he makes clear to his reader also that
the purpose of his writing was to focus attention on what Charlemagne actu-
ally did – his deeds – not simply his greatness: “Thus [I present] to you this
book containing an account of the most splendid and greatest of all men.
There is nothing in it that you should admire but his accomplishments …”43
Einhard makes here a self-deprecating reference to the quality of his style, but
in this he also signals the fact that the biographic genre allows for his plain
style, just as Ganz has argued, and plain style is best for focusing the reader on
deeds in the right way.44
In the text, Charlemagne is a warlord, to be sure. Yet he is no Tetricus. The
discussion of his military exploits focuses not on the glory of his victories and
the prowess of his battle skills. It orients the reader more toward a sanitized
narrative of Frankish expansion and the spreading of Frankish Christianity
throughout the known world. In the second half of the Vita, Einhard famously
focuses on Charlemagne’s private world, his personality and his manner. We
can guess with relative certainty that Einhard crafted the well-known physical
description of the emperor with an eye toward achieving an enchanting effect
43 Einhard, Vita Karoli magni prologus, MGH SS rer. Germ. 25, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger
(Hanover, 1911), pp. 1-2. Trans. Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier, p. 16.
44 See above, note 13, 15, and 16.
on his reader. Yet Einhard does not make the emperor larger than life so much
as he renders him likeable for his extreme accessibility:
[Charles] had a large and powerful body. He was tall [at slightly over six
feet or 1.83 meters], but not disproportionately so, since it is known that
his height was seven times the length of his own foot. The crown of his
head was round, his eyes were noticeably large and full of life, his nose
was a little longer than average, his hair was grey and handsome, and his
face was attractive and cheerful. Hence, his physical presence was
[always] commanding and dignified, whether he was sitting or standing.
Although his neck seemed short and thick and his stomach seemed to
stick out, the symmetry of the other parts [of his body] hid these [flaws].
[When he walked] his pace was strong and the entire bearing of his body
powerful. Indeed, his voice was distinct, but not as [strong as might have
been] expected given his size.45
Once again, this is no Tetricus. Charlemagne is powerful, but he is hardly

gilded. He is attractive, but not exactly beautiful. As in the modern American
myths of Abraham Lincoln, Charlemagne speaks with a voice that seems weak
for a man of his size, yet he commands authority and loyalty through strength
of character and wise management of personalities. He weeps for his sons
when they die and he loves his daughters, ignoring the rumors of impropriety
that this causes.46 Unlike the biographies that would be written in the next
decade about Louis the Pious, Einhard’s text does not dwell on the inner
demons with which Charlemagne may or may not have wrestled.47 Interiority
is present in Einhard’s description, but the hyper-mimesis of the biography
suggests rather a distinct lack of personal conflict, a preternatural capacity for
avoiding strife and quelling adversity with calm and ease.48
45 Einhard, Vita Karoli II.22, pp. 26-27. Trans. Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier, p. 30.
46 Einhard, Vita Karoli II.19, pp. 23-25.
47 See especially Andrew J. Romig, “In Praise of the Too-Clement Emperor: The Problem of
Forgiveness in the Astronomer’s Vita Hludowici imperatoris,” Speculum 89, no. 2 (2014),
394-95.
48 An assessment that counters traditional interpretations of the last years of his reign. See
François-Louis Ganshof, “Charlemagne’s Failure (L’échec de Charlemagne),” in The Caro
lingians and the Frankish Monarchy: Studies in Carolingian History, trans. Janet Sondheimer
(London, 1971 [1947]), pp. 256-60; François-Louis Ganshof, “The Last Period of Charle
magne’s Reign: A Study in Decomposition (La fin du règne de Charlemagne, une
décomposition),” in the same volume, pp. 240-45; and the important reconsideration by
Janet L. Nelson, “The Voice of Charlemagne,” in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages:
174 Romig
It should come as no surprise that when Strabo edited and wrote a new pref-
ace to Einhard’s Vita Caroli soon after the death of Louis the Pious, for Strabo it
was Einhard’s quality that lent authority to Charlemagne, and not the other
way around. The attributes of character for which Einhard praised Charlemagne
– his humanity, his sense of duty, his shrewd political savvy – were precisely
the traits that Strabo praised in Einhard.49 And significantly, Strabo lauded
Einhard most of all for his capacity to understand what artists should and
should not do. The prologue to the Vita Caroli was not the first time that Strabo
had written admiringly about Einhard. Einhard appears in De imagine Tetrici as
well:
No less should be our reverence for this great father,

Beseleel, who skillfully and carefully grasps
Every task of craftsmen: thus in the end
God on high, who chooses the weak, spurns the strong;
For who of the great ever received greater gifts
Than those which, to much marveling, radiate from this tiny man?50
Throughout his career, Einhard had often been likened to Beseleel in court
poetry, a reference to the chief artisan of Moses’s tabernacle and the Ark of the
Covenant.51 Yet in Strabo’s poem the allusion obviously takes on special import.
As the Opus Caroli argues about Beseleel, Beseleel had been chosen by the Lord
to make a work of gold and silver, but filled with the spirit of wisdom and
understanding and knowledge to do so correctly.52 In Strabo’s description,
Einhard is above all the consummate craftsman – the artist who knows how to
construct a proper image of an emperor.
…
Carolingian concerns about the charismatic power of imperial images may
have been successful, ultimately, in making Charlemagne an avatar of right
Christian rulership. Yet his first charismatic depicters could not control the
Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, eds. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser
(Oxford, 2001), pp. 77-80.
49 Cf. Walahfrid Strabo, Vita Karoli prologus, MGH SS rer. Germ. 25, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger,
p. XXIX.
51 Exod. 31:1-6, and chapters 36-39.
52 Opus Caroli regis I.16, p. 176.
embellishments that he would receive nevertheless in the explosion of the ar-

tistic representations created after his death. One can only imagine Strabo
shaking his head, for example, at the remarkable resemblance between his de-
scription of Tetricus and the equestrian statue of Charlemagne that stands to-
day just outside the entrance to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (fig. 4.2). Cast
in bronze by the brothers Louis and Charles Rochet in 1878, this is the
Charlemagne of Dürer, not Einhard. Charlemagne stands resolute, armed,
forked-bearded, and mounted, accompanied by two rugged looking compan-
ions (thought perhaps to represent Roland and Oliver). They menace the view-
er in the “Germanic” style that was popular in 19th-century representations of
the romantic and heroic early medieval past. The throngs of tourists awaiting
their entry to Notre Dame cannot miss his presence, and while his size is
dwarfed by the massive structure of the cathedral behind him, his proportions
some 20 feet high convey charismatically an elevated and white-washed story
of a glorious and untainted medieval past, of the Christian Church as bringer
of light and civilization, with Charlemagne leading the way.
The tourists, and many professional historians alike, do not recognize
enough that the vast majority of what we know concerning Charlemagne’s
charismatic persona comes solely from his posthumous literary representation
and legendary remembrance.53 Perhaps he did have more charisma than his
son. In a sense, however, all we can truly say is that Charlemagne enjoys a leg-
acy of having had charisma. This is a distinction for which Stephen Jaeger’s
category of “charismatic art” is far more useful than Weberian concepts of
charismatic leadership and personality for our understanding of Charlemagne
and his remembrance. Beyond simply extending the study of Charlemagne’s
charisma from his person to the objects that represented him after his death,
the concept of charismatic art allows us to see Charlemagne’s legendary legacy
for what it truly is: a locus of artistic freeplay not upon his historical charisma,
but upon his historical reputation for charisma.
Of the artists who wrote about and depicted Charlemagne after his death,
only Einhard drew upon personal memory of Charlemagne the man. All
the rest were working from the constructed reputation of Charlemagne as
53 Janet Nelson has argued perceptively and provocatively that we can perhaps glean
something of Charlemagne’s personality and personal sense of urgency with regard to
reform from the flurry of capitularies drafted in the final decade of his reign (Nelson, “The
Voice of Charlemagne,” pp. 76-88). I certainly agree that there is something of the voice of
Charlemagne in these documents, but it does not preclude the fact that the voice we
“hear” is still inflected heavily by the expectations placed upon us by Charlemagne’s
charismatic remembrance after the 9th century.
176 Romig
Figure 4.2 Bronze equestrian statue of Charlemagne outside the entrance to Notre
Dame Cathedral in Paris. Brothers Louis and Charles Rochet in 1878
(Photo: author).
charismatic man – removed from the original, whom we can never truly know.
The history of Charlemagne’s legacy is therefore not simply the history of how
charismatic reputation is constructed, but how charismatic reputation is used
and re-used as a sign unto itself. It surely does not stretch the implications of
Professor Jaeger’s book too far to claim what is commonplace to scholars of
literature and performance theorists, but still quite radical for too many histo-
rians: namely that all human personas – particularly charismatic personas
– are in some form, works of constructed art. And perhaps it is not even hyper-
bolic to say that the historical study of charisma is always, necessarily, the
study of charismatic art, simply by virtue of the obvious fact that the artistic
representation of charismatic figures is all we ever have with which to work.
We can never study figures themselves in unmediated form, and perhaps there
is no such thing as the unmediated form.
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Fontes iuris Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum separatim editi, eds.
Mario Krammer et al. 16 vols. Hanover, 1909-.
Poetae Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, ed. Ernst Dümmler. 4 vols. Berlin, 1881-1923.
SS rer. Germ. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, eds.
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SS rer. Lang. Scriptores rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum, eds. Georg Waitz et al.
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Freeman and Paul Meyvaert. MGH Conc. 2/1. Hanover, 1998.
178 Romig
Walahfrid Strabo. “De imagine Tetrici.” Ed. and trans. Michael W. Herren. “The ‘De imag-
ine Tetrici’ of Walahfrid Strabo: Edition and Translation.” The Journal of Medieval
Latin 1 (1991): 118-39. Earlier edition with commentary: MGH Poetae 2, ed. Ernst
Dümmler. Berlin, 1884, pp. 259-66, 370-78.
Walahfrid Strabo. “Visio Wettini Walahfridi.” Ed. Oswald Holder-Egger. MGH Poetae 2.
Berlin, 1884, pp. 301-33.
Walahfrid Strabo. “Vita Karoli prologus.” Ed. Oswald Holder-Egger. MGH SS rer. Germ.
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The Saint’s Life as a Charismatic Form 181
Chapter 5
The Saint’s Life as a Charismatic Form: Bernard of

Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi
C. Stephen Jaeger
For Michael Curschmann
⸪
Life-Writing
The academic study of charisma has long been where Max Weber put it: in the
areas of religious experience, political leadership, and social interaction.
Looming behind these domains, where living people embody charisma and
influence admirers in a variety of ways, is a very broad realm in which neither
Weber nor the sociologists, historians, psychologists who followed him had
any interest: art and literature. These exercise charismatic effects no less than
human beings; in fact one of the reasons why art and literature exist is to give
fascinating people an earthly afterlife.1
One topic of many in this area of interest in medieval studies is charismatic
effects in the saint’s life. The literary/hagiographic form responds to and inter-
acts in a wide variety of ways with the actual effect of the personal presence of
the living saint. To see that interaction at its most critical, we must imagine the
crisis within a religious movement upon the death of a charismatic leader. If
the guidance of an ordered monastic life had been regulated by the charis-
matic force of a leader’s personal presence, then the bereaved community
faces a serious problem, a leadership vacuum. It had two options: it either
“went straight” by taking over a conventional rule of life and so abandoning
its charismatic phase (Gert Melville calls it “Entcharismatisierung”),2 or con
* This study is a lightly revised version of the keynote address at the NYU conference which led
to the publication of this volume. I omit discussion and bibliography on the Weberian tradi-
tion of scholarship on charisma, and refer the interested reader to my book, Enchantment: On
Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia, 2012).
1 See also “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New German Critique
114 (2011), 17-34.
2 See Gert Melville, “Stefan von Obazine: Begründung und Überwindung charismatischer
Führung,” in Charisma und Religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter, eds. Giancarlo Andenna,
Mirko Breitenstein, and Gert Melville, Vita Regularis: Ordnungen und Deutungen religiösen

182 Jaeger
tinued to live through the charisma of its founder. Or some combination of the
two. The impulse to maintain the charisma of the founder had to be strong.
Devotional forms, liturgy (Christ’s presence in the eucharist), relics, could help,
but the textualizing of charisma was stronger, more attractive, more portable;
writing gave it a form of permanence without the evanescent quality of a
performance.
But the impulse to charismatic representation is not always present in the
saint’s life. The kind of hagiography I have called “life-writing” tries to inject
into the text a vitality that transmits itself to the reader in something like the
force of the personal presence of the living saint. While there will be degrees of
charismatic presence in any vita, still the distinction between charismatic and
non-charismatic is useful, and it is that distinction on which this essay turns.
The term “life-writing” is meant to convey this intention of the charismatic
saint’s life. The “life” that is conveyed in sacred biography, insofar as it aims at
capturing charisma, is heightened life, narrated with intensity, either in the
voice of the narrator or in the structure of narrative (dynamics) or in the charm
or the passion of personalities and interactions. When those elements blend
with heightened stylistic elements (e.g. rhetorical ornament, the sublime), the
combination is especially powerful. Charisma in a text inspires not just admi-
ration but imitation. It lets the reader submerge in the character of the subject,
live in that model, makes the master come to life again in the disciple, fits the
vaguely defined contours of the reader’s character to the sharply formed lines
of the subject’s life. If the reader senses the living presence of the saint in the
text, we are one step on the way to life-writing; if the reader is moved, capti-
vated, charmed, converted, transformed by the writing; if the reader feels
herself enlivened and inspired by the text, then life-writing is working.
The gospels are life-writing. It would have been possible for the evangelists
to write systematic treatises on the teachings of Jesus; it would have been con-
ceivable for Jesus himself to write systematic treatises. But ideas by themselves
are desiccated. Like laws they are free of subjective elements; they pale before
the story of their embodiment in their first proponent, especially if he is tor-
tured and executed for adherence to the idea he embodies. The evangelists had
to resurrect the beloved teacher, keep him partly alive in words by reproducing
his speech, by narrating acts that astonished men and made the idea of a living
human god plausible, and by the sublime tragic drama of the crucifixion. His
life had to become a pattern and a rule of life for others.3
Lebens im Mittelalter 26 (Münster, 2005), pp. 85-101; and in the same volume, Ann Müller,
“Entcharismatisierung als Geltungsgrund? Gilbert von Sempringham und der frühe Gilberti
nerorden,” pp. 151-72.
3 As Christ was for Francis of Assisi. He understood Christ of the gospels as a living model that
governed his own life, and he understood it as a rule of life for his followers, one he clung to
The distinction between life-writing and non-charismatic biography is dra-

matically evident in the Lives of the two saints of my title, Bernard of Clairvaux
and Francis of Assisi. They represent two highly original types of Christian
sainthood, and two very different, indeed opposite types of charismatic leader-
ship. And a charismatalogical reading of their Lives opens to view interesting
aspects of the afterlife of saints in writing. It is proverbial that each book (like
each person) lives out its own destiny. Writing is central in determining the
posthumous destinies of the men they describe.
Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) was the subject of one significant biography.
The so-called Vita prima Bernardi (abbreviated here as VP) is something of a
jumble. Three different authors composed its five books. Each author wrote
from a different perspective: William of St. Thierry (d. 1148) wrote as a devoted
admirer and would-be friend of Bernard. But he died five years before Bernard.
Arnald of Bonneval (Bk. 2) focused on the political issues in which Bernard
engaged. Geoffrey of Clairvaux (d. 1188?) continued the biography to Bernard’s
death and included a dossier of miracles (Bks. 3, 4, & 5). His sections are discur-
sive and eulogistic rather than narrative; they show Bernard the miracle-worker,
loving abbot, public man, and saint. They talk about Bernard the charismatic
without bringing him back to life. The VP was complete by 1155, a revised ver-
sion by 1169.
Two other attempts at writing a consistent biography followed. They aimed
at harmonizing the three parts of the VP, but turned out to be insignificant
compilations.4 The efforts to produce a full record of Bernard’s life in the
Middle Ages ceased by the end of the 12th century. 5 The important Exordium
Magnum Cisterciense (c.1220) collected memorable tales of miracles around
the foundation and the first decades of the Cistercian order. Bernard was one
against the institutional pressure to adopt one of the standard monastic rules. The same logic
is at work when the biographers say that the person of Francis himself is a rule. Bernard could
not be a rule in his own person. He was too intimidating and set too high above his monks.
4 Among the many peculiarities of the destiny of this book we can mention: written in three
parts by three different authors. Later writers were not satisfied with the first life, tried to re-
write and improve but did not succeed. Two of the writers of the VP were never monks of
Clairvaux. Geoffrey of Clairvaux was, but his early efforts aimed at finding someone other than
himself to write the Life – collecting notes for that purpose. William and Ernald had close ties
to Clairvaux but did not live at Clairvaux under Bernard’s direct authority. References are to
Vita prima Sancti Bernardi Claraevallis Abbatis, ed. Paul Verdeyen, Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Mediaevalis 89B (Turnhout, 2011).
5 The VP was much-copied in the 13th century and beyond. There are also many early printed
copies, but with very few exceptions, it was added to collections of Bernard’s writings. Adriaan
Bredero, Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History (Grand Rapids, MI, 1996), p. 163.
184 Jaeger
subject among many. No personality emerges from this collection, just a

miracle-worker.
The memory of Bernard had little impact on popular culture, though there
are some significant works of art commemorating him.6 He is little noted by
12th-century historians.7
The early biographies of Francis are an ocean compared to the shallow lake
and troubled waters of the Bernard biographies. In the century following his
death, at least 20 major “legends” were written about him.8 Where the biogra-
phers of Bernard did not succeed, the memorializers of Francis did. The
writings are generally lively, very readable, certainly among the most memo-
rable biographical writings of the Middle Ages, and they culminate in a
significant work with the overt claim of biography but the feel of imaginative
literature, the Fioretti. Though a compilation, the Fioretti is the work of a fine
poet with a good sense of narrative. It is generally considered one of the earli-
est masterpieces of literature in the Italian language.9 An enthusiastic passage
from the Catholic Encyclopedia seems to me to have captured some qualities
relevant to the topic of charisma in the saint’s life: “That perhaps which gives
these legends such a peculiar charm, is what may be called their atmosphere;
they breathe all the delicious fragrance of the early Franciscan spirit … The
pages of the Fioretti … more than any other work transport us to the scenes
amid which St. Francis and his first followers live, and enable us to see them as
they saw themselves … These legends, moreover, bear precious witness to the
vitality and enthusiasm with which the memory of the life and teaching of
the Poverello was preserved.”10
My “ocean – lake” comparison fits also in terms of quantity and publication
history. There is a new collection of the complete early biographical materials
6 James France, Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies 210
(Kalamazoo, 2007). Thanks to Brian McGuire for this reference.
7 Paschal Phillips, “The Presence—and Absence—of Bernard of Clairvaux in the Twelfth-
Century Chronicles,” in Bernardus Magister, ed. John R. Sommerfeldt (Cistercian Publica-
tions, 1992), pp. 35-53.
8 Jacques Dalarun, The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi: Towards a Historical Use of the
Franciscan Legends, trans. Edward Hagman (Saint Bonaventure, NY, 2002; orig. 1996),
p. 22. “Legenda” in the accepted parlance of Franciscan studies means “things to be read,”
biographical works.
9 The Tuscan version of the Fioretti from mid-14th century is probably a translation/adapta-
tion of a Latin work. The earliest manuscript is dated 1390.
10 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06078b.htm>.
on Francis to the end of the Middle Ages.11 It fills four volumes (three plus an
index), currently about 2500 pages in total, and the forthcoming volume 5 will
push the page count well over 3000.12 The major Latin biographies and legends
fill 800 quarto pages of the Analecta Franciscana. Francis is perhaps the most
beloved saint of Christianity. Novels, plays, and movies maintain his image in
popular culture. So do statues with birds settled on the saint’s hands and shoul-
ders, available in many garden shops. Two books in English on Francis appeared
in 2012, one by André Vauchez (a study), the other by Augustine Thompson (a
biography with critical study of the sources and previous scholarship).13 They
were reviewed together in the New Yorker Magazine, a distinction that very few
in the field of medieval studies have enjoyed. Thompson has been approached
by a Hollywood studio for production rights, and the name, character, and poli-
cies of the new pope will be encouragement to Hollywood to actually make the
film.
Bernard: Grandiosity
Our comparison of the two saints’ Lives begins with a look at the Vita prima of
Bernard. He emerges from all five books as a powerful, daunting, but person-
ally not very appealing figure isolated in a state somewhere between man and
angel and willing to let his contemporaries feel the distance between himself
and them. William of St. Thierry (author of Bk. 1 of the VP) gives a consistent
picture of the impression Bernard made on his monks in his early days as abbot
at Clairvaux. Simply put, first he frightened them; then he accommodated
them. He welcomed novices with the announcement that they must leave
their flesh behind; only spirit is countenanced in Clairvaux. They are terrified.
When Bernard sees their fear, he spares the tender sensibilities of these simple
men by striking a gentler tone. He didn’t actually mean that they had to leave
their bodies behind; only their carnal desires (VP 1. 20. Lines 563-570, ed.
Verdeyen, p. 48).
William illustrates Bernard’s intimidating presence in many episodes; it is
clearly dominant in his image of the saint: though formidable, he learned the
11 Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, eds. Regis J. Armstrong, J.A. Wayne Hellmann, and
William J. Short (New York, 1999): vol. 1: The Saint; vol. 2: The Founder; vol. 3: The Prophet.
12 Vol. 5 will be largely devoted to Bartholomew of Pisa’s Book of Conformities.
13 André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael
F. Cusato (New Haven, 2012); Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography
(Ithaca, NY, 2012).
186 Jaeger
art of taking his edge off. One passage will have to stand for several.14 In his
early days as a teacher, William writes, Bernard descended on his monks like
Moses emerging, horned and terrifying, from his colloquy with God on Mt.
Sinai, frightening the sons of Israel. Bernard left contemplative ecstasy and
came to his monks bearing a divine gift, “a miracle of a purity more than
human.” He spoke to men with the tongues of angels – but angels speak a lan-
guage different from novices at Clairvaux. They did not understand what
Bernard said. Moreover he demanded of them in harsh sermons a perfection
like his own – those are William’s words. Bernard the abbot and pastor was no
softer. He hears the private confessions of his monks and reacts with shock.
Their sinful thoughts appall him (ed. Verdeyen, 1. 28-29. Pp. 54-56). William
comes to their defense: they are religious men. But Bernard was far above them
and not patient with human frailty. Bernard has, in William’s version, a much
clearer view of how things and creatures operate in heaven than on earth: he
thought he was speaking with angels, but they were only men. He drove away
nearly all of those whom he had come to rule over and to reside with (“pene
omnes a se absterruit” – 243B). The monks were aghast at his harsh intoler-
ance. It was a seedbed of despair (“seminarium quoddam desperationis” – 1.
29. l. 807, p. 55). Seeing their despair, Bernard softened. Clearly in the begin-
ning of his abbacy Bernard overdid it in wielding the divinity people saw in
him. But seeing the harm he causes, he changes, when, as William puts it, the
Holy Spirit takes over and speaks through him in moderation and understand-
ing for the needy and poor; he learns to act as a man among other men.15
14 Also, he treated William in the wake of a sickness, bossing him around, forbidding
virtually everything William asked. William disobeys, eats what Bernard forbids, and his
sickness returns. Bernard scolds and mocks him: “What do you plan to eat today?”
William, now chastened: “Whatever you command” (1. 60, 1531-33, p. 75). Bernard once
was about to send a monk of Foigny back to his monastery, but read certain secrets in his
soul. On parting, he “ordered” him to correct those things which called for correction, or
else he would soon suffer a just judgment of God. Struck dumb with amazement, the
monk asked, who told him this. Bernard in effect: never mind, just do what I tell you if
you want to avoid punishment (1. 63, 1615ff., p. 78). Bernard could call on this daunting
presence when necessary, and it certainly helped doing church business. He confronted a
count who had supported the anti-pope Anaclete, and demanded that he reinstate
bishops wrongly unseated. Arnold of Bonneval: “With fire in his face and flames in his
eyes, he approached the count, not to plead, but to threaten him with terrible words …
The count, seeing the abbot approaching in outrage, holding the most sacred body of the
Lord in his hands, stiffened in terror, all his members trembled uncontrollably in fear, he
fell over forward, as if he had lost his mind/consciousness” (1. 2., 1019ff., p. 116).
15 Bernard learns some measure of humanity from his early days at Clairvaux: VP 1. 38,
1067ff., p. 62. “Didicit aliquatenus et consuevit homo cum hominibus esse …”
Bernard shifts from the terrifying God of Sinai to the more merciful and loving
Holy Spirit. He still operates in the realms of the divine, just not the one he
descended from originally, but still a world above the monks in his charge.
The holiness of Bernard is grandiose, above the human.16 William of St.
Thierry and the other biographers assert his humility and gentleness, but ordi-
narily also explain that it is modified grandiosity. For the sake of balance, I
should cite one scene that bespeaks real tenderness and devotion on the part
of the disciple: One day William comes to visit Bernard at Clairvaux. He finds
him in a wretched little hut like the ones set for lepers at cross-roads. Seeing
him in that “royal cubicle,” lost in the delights of heaven, he was filled with
such a sense of reverence for Bernard and such a tender affection that he would
gladly have renounced his life and stayed with him forever in the poverty and
simplicity of that hut (1. 33, pp. 58-59). I think it is fair to say that in William’s
presentation, Bernard comes off better when alone than among other men.
Geoffrey of Clairvaux devotes a chapter of Bk. 3 to his “sweet manners and
preeminent virtues.” But what dominates in every case, practically in every
sentence, is the tension between grandeur or severity, and loving sweetness:
sweetness of manners tamed austerity, saintliness preserved authority. It is a
consistent picture: Bernard’s saintliness gave him a hard edge that needed soft-
ening either by the Holy Spirit or by Bernard’s own restraint.17
Francis: Humility
Francis was the opposite. In the Fioretti, once, Brother Masseo puts this ques-
tion to Francis, “Why does the whole world come after you, and everyone
seems to desire to see you and hear you? You aren’t a handsome man in body,
you aren’t someone of great learning, you’re not noble; so why does the whole
world come after you?” Francis is delighted with the question and answers that
God wanted it that way: “Since [God] could find no creature on earth more vile
than me, he chose me …”18
16 Closer to the angelic Bernard perceived as an angel: VP 1. 31. 911, p. 58: “ceteri [episcopi]
didicerunt suscipere eum et revereri tamquam angelum Dei …”; Peter Abelard sends
Bernard a flattering compliment just prior to refuting his reading of the Lord’s Prayer with
crushing argumentation, in his Epist. 10: receiving him on a recent visit, the nuns thought
he was an angel, not a man. Peter Abelard, Letters IX-XIV: An Edition with an introduction,
ed. E.R. Smits (Groningen, 1983), p. 239.
17 See Brian McGuire, The Difficult Saint: Bernard of Clairvaux and His Tradition (Kalamazoo
Michigan, 1991).
18 The Little Flowers of St. Francis ch. 10, Early Documents, vol. 3, p. 583.
188 Jaeger
Bernard’s image is greatness restrained; Francis’s is greatness rebuked.

Francis conquers by humility, not by authority or high-handedness. Bernard
was inimitable; his biographers conceive of him as an angel accommodated to
men; Francis’s make him the poorest and vilest of creatures charged by Christ
with the power to transform men.
It is not just the character of the men themselves, but the character of their
biographies that accounts for the differences in their popular reception. The
afterlife of the man is set in large part by the quality of the narratives that rep-
resent them. The biographies of Bernard and Francis are charged with different
levels of charisma. Bernard’s VP has, in style, narrative flow, and rhetorical
pitch, next to none. The lack shows in its reception. It is a historical source
document, not one with any level of magnetism. Once read with notes taken,
it offers little allure for a second reading.
The biographies of Francis maintain almost without exception a charm
rooted in the personality of Francis. Neither the cloying piety of Thomas of
Celano nor the institutional perspective of Bonaventure can reduce it to a col-
lection of formulaic praises. The narrative dynamics are dramatic and gripping:
the moment of metanoia when the young merchant’s son and aspiring knight
gives up his worldly ambitions and possessions, renounces his father with the
sensational gesture of stripping naked before an assembly of Assisi citizens
including his own father and the local bishop, and hands his fine clothes over
to his father with the news that he is no longer his son. But also many individ-
ual episodes in the biographies involve some reversal, or transformation, a
turning away from commonly accepted social values, however sensible and
rational these may be!19 Often his followers act in an ordinary human way, and
Francis has to correct them and inspire them to reverse their action. Many
episodes repeat the drama of worldly aspirations transcended by humility
and self-abasement, which then are transmuted into a form of Christian
heroism.20
“We cannot imagine Augustine, Anselm, or Bernard,” Lawrence Cunningham
writes in his book on Francis, Performing the Gospel. “But we can imagine
19 A story in the Assisi Compilation tells how once Francis’s pants caught on fire. The
brothers point it out and rush to extinguish it, but Francis stops them, refuses to allow
them to extinguish “brother fire.” Ch. 86, Early Documents, vol. 2, p. 191. They ignore his
prohibition.
20 Bonaventure, Vita major ch. 5, Early Documents 2, p. 560. Also, ch. 13, where Bonaventure
makes Francis, moving towards the stigmata, into a “valiant knight of Christ,” and develops
the metaphor of combat (wounds are armor etc.), Early Documents 2, p. 637.
Francis.”21 This is partly due to the “huge artistic reservoir at our disposal,” says
Cunningham. But it’s also partly because of the narrative quality of the writ-
ings on Francis, the fables.
Also there is a rock-solid consistency in the representation of Francis; wide
variation in details of the stories, but none in the fundamental reading of his
character and influence, stringently linked to the poor Christ of the gospels.
His actions, no matter how miraculous, fabulous, foolish, or mundane, are con-
sistent with that model.
It’s very different with Bernard, of whom Jean Leclercq said, “There are now,
as there always have been, several Bernards.”22 That is part of his problem. By
comparison with Francis of Assisi, the damage done by being several persons
is apparent. There was a good Bernard (the theologian, the doctor of divine
love), and a mixed character, the one observed by his contemporaries.
Francis was only one person. Opposed to the eloquent, formidable, and pro-
lific Bernard, was the unlearned Francis, unencumbered by education, learning,
or knowledge, the Francis who shed whatever ties he had to the social order.
He is Christ-like without theology and reverent without the doctrinal piety
that Thomas of Celano injects into his biography. He often plays the fool, and
revels in the role; he casts himself as a knight and troubadour. Johan Huizinga
saw in Francis an embodiment of the play-principle. 23 In the center of all the
legends we find a character of divine humility, who beams a powerful attrac-
tion, both in his humanity and his spirituality.
Now we turn to the difficult “Franciscan question.”24 In their wide variety
the sources of the life of Francis pose complex questions of “Quellenkritik.”
Often positions taken seem determined by confessional loyalties, which place
an objective judgment of the sources in limbo. The “Franciscan question” is the
hard task of sifting out a “historical Francis” from the layers of fable which sur-
round him. In the generally accepted terms of this problem “historical” means
“genuine.” Augustine Thompson explained the intention of his new biography
in these terms: legendary elements are part of the discussion, but are to be
separated from historical elements. Thompson makes finer distinctions than
21 Lawrence Cunningham, Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel of Life (Grand Rapids MI,
2004), p. 133.
22 Jean Leclercq, “Toward a Sociological Interpretation of the Various Saint Bernards,” in
Bernardus Magister, ed. John R. Sommerfeldt (Spencer MA, 1992), pp. 19-33. The effective-
ness of the “historical Bernard,” Leclercq claims, is accounted for by his charisma, an
innate quality, not given by position in society or the church hierarchy. Not conferred, we
can add, by his biographies.
23 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, 1955), p. 139.
24 See Thompson, New Biography, pp. 153-70.
190 Jaeger
others,25 but his book remains in the tradition of searching for the historical
Francis with emphasis on naturalistic elements and psychological complexity.
Thompson’s Francis is more rugged, more troubled, less saintly than the model
of holiness of the traditional biography.
The “Franciscan Question”
Jacques Dalarun sees the fabulous elements of the legends as a means of pen-
etrating to the historical elements, but, like Thompson, still keeps that distinc-
tion in force. The English translation of his 1996 book, The Misadventure of
Francis of Assisi, has as its subtitle, Towards a Historical Use of the Franciscan
Legends. Dalarun summarizes a century of historical research since Paul
Sabatier: “One must never lose sight of the layers of legend, but one must never
give up the ascent back to the historical Francis of Assisi.”26
The problem of sifting the fictional from the historical sources is especially
acute for the Catholic scholar. Thompson concedes his personal belief in the
reality of miracles in general, but at the same time puts aside the fabulous and
miraculous in the legends as unhistorical. This dilemma was brought home to
me in a comment by Karen Scott, Professor of Catholic Theology at Depaul
University, Chicago, and a well-regarded scholar on hagiography and expert on
Catherine of Siena. In a discussion at a colloquium on St. Francis at the
University of Chicago, Scott confessed that it is necessary to exclude fabulous
elements in the legends from the historical dossier. But she is reluctant to give
up her belief in the historical reality of the stigmata. Thompson agreed. (He
and Lawrence Cunningham were the other participants in the session.) To be
fair, Thompson recognizes a certain “truth” in the legendary elements, but he
distinguishes “historical” from “legendary” truth, without pursuing the latter.
My argument is that a critical reading of the legends as “life-writing” distin-
guishes authentic from inauthentic legends and so rehabilitates the fabulous
as revelations of the historical character of Francis. As answer to Brother
Masseo’s question, “why does everyone follow you?” Franciscan fable can be as
useful as Franciscan fact. To reduce Francis to “the historical” person, is to
25 Thompson, A New Biography, Intro, p. 8: “The Francis I have come to know has proved a
more complex and personally conflicted man than the saint of the legends … I would also
emphasize that my ‘Historical Francis’ is no more the ‘real Francis’ than the Francis of the
legends and popular biographies. He is ‘historical’ in that the picture I have painted is the
result of historical method, not theological reflection or pious edification.”
26 Dalarun, The Misadventure, p. 59.
separate out one strong force that made him the man he was, that made so
many people “run after him,” to use Brother Masseo’s words. If the historical
figure is to be understood as the man separated from his magical shell of cha-
risma and confined to the man of the conventionally verifiable historical
sources, then his influence on followers and modern readers will be inexpli-
cable. Brother Masseo saw in Francis only a small, unattractive, inarticulate
man, unlearned and plebeian. But he knew that “all the world” ran after him.
The large gap between those two perceptions gets filled by stories of Francis’s
deeds, both real and invented. But the invented ones cannot be false. They
have to be commensurable with the real force that he exerted; they have to be
true stories, however fabulous.
The Wolf of Gubbio and His Relatives
“The Wolf of Gubbio” is my first test cast of a fable whose “commensurability”27

is the test of its authenticity. It is one of the best-known stories of Francis.28
Augustine Thompson excludes this story from those with historical value: it is
too fabulous and too far away in time from Francis’s life (the Fioretti date to
second half of the 14th century); it is for him a “hearsay story” (New Biography,
p. viii).
The story has indirect analogues which precede the fully developed version
told by Ugolino Boniscambi of Montegiorgio in The Deeds of Blessed Francis
and his Companions (second quarter of the 14th century) and adapted in the
Fioretti. The author of the latter version shortens his source and eliminates
bombast. The story runs as follows: Francis is staying in the town of Gubbio. He
learns from the terrified townspeople of a wolf which is ravaging the country-
side, eating animals and people. Francis goes out of the city gates to find the
wolf, defying all warnings. The townspeople accompany him at first but the
thought of the wolf’s fierceness frightens them and they return to the safety of
27 Rosalind Brooke, following a similar line of thought, used the term “characteristic.” The
Image of Saint Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge,
2006).
28 For commentary see Edward A. Armstrong, Saint Francis: Nature Mystic (Berkeley, 1973),
pp. 199-217; Roger M Payne, “The Wolf in the Forest: St. Francis and the Italian Eremitical
Tradition,” in Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art, eds. Cynthia Ho et al. (New York,
2009), pp. 63-77. Payne gives examples of wolf taming by Francis and others that precede
the story as fully developed in the Fioretti. The story of the Wolves of Greccio is especially
relevant. Henry of Avranches, Versified Life of Saint Francis Bk. 9, parag. 42, Early Works 3,
p. 104.
192 Jaeger
the town. Francis calls to the wolf, orders him not to hurt him. The wolf appears.
When Francis makes the sign of the cross, the wolf lies down at his feet. Francis
bawls him out for the harm he has done: he deserves to be put to death like the
worst robber or murderer. But instead Francis wants to make peace with him.
He forgives him, expresses understanding (the wolf was hungry, therefore he
ate what was available), and he makes a pact with the wolf: that if the people
of the town will provide food for him, he will never again harm man or animal.
The wolf agrees. They shake on it, and they walk back to town together, to the
amazement of the townsfolk. He tells them the arrangement salting it with a
moral clause: they must repent, give up sinning, and they must put out food for
the wolf every day. They keep to their word and the wolf to his. Townsfolk and
beast lived in peace until the wolf grew old and died.29
Unquestionably what we have here is a folk tale and fable. But also a genu-
ine charismatic text and authentic source in a charismatalogical study of
Franciscan biography. One note before I argue this case: we should recognize
at the outset the comparative naturalism of the tale. There are no miracles. The
wolf tamed by the sign of the cross goes in that direction, but any reader
inclined to see a religious miracle at work here would get an argument from
connoisseurs of canine behavior, who know well that dogs and wolves have a
strong sense of the aura of humans. The ability to tame an angry dog is not
miraculous; it is a sign of a gifted dog whisperer. And gestures do it along with
some mystery of personal presence.30 Francis recognized in the wolf’s ferocity
a sign that he was starving – also not a supernatural insight. A passerby lacking
this insight and unprotected by the aura of the wolf tamer would not have
fared well with this or any starving wolf. Also the taming and partial domesti-
cation of the wolf is not miraculous, but rather simply a sign that another form
of food than live children and animals was preferable to him, and made him
reluctant to eat his provider. Both versions, however, have the wolf confirm the
contract made in the forest in the presence of the townfolk. He kneels down
(no easy trick for a quadruped), bows his head, and wags his tail in confirma-
tion of his agreement, and miracle trumps wolfish nature in this point.
What we have is a fable based on a not implausible sequence of events,
based also on a character with courage – a form of charisma sensed by animals
– an understanding of animals, and an idea that generosity and forgiveness are
more powerful than weapons and fear.
29 Fioretti ch. 21, Early Works 3, p. 601-03.

30 I have experience (not my own) on this point, but would rather not push further into the
anecdotal.
The two sources in which the story occurs are not stingy with miraculous
elements: healings of mortally ill brothers, hosts of angels, consultations of the
saint with the holy family in the forest solitude, chariots of fire, and stigmata.
But the “Wolf of Gubbio” is a story of charismatic effects aided minimally by
supernatural forces.
The mechanism that moves this story is a genuine Franciscan experience: a
weak, mild, unarmed man confronts a powerful, dangerous, and murderous
being, conquers, tames it, and wins it over by gentleness, courage, and cha-
risma. The same dynamics and narrative structure are at work in the various
stories of Francis’s conversion of bands of robbers. Three sources record such
stories.31 The version in the Mirror of Perfection is paradigmatic and can spare
us rehearsing the other two. It runs as follows: near the hermitage of Borgo San
Sepolcro there is a lair of robbers. They come to the brothers to beg food and
alms. There is a debate among the brothers whether they should give alms to
criminals who rob travellers. Francis gives them instructions how to win their
souls. They are to take a supply of bread and wine to the edge of the forest and
call out, “Come, brother robbers, come to us, because we are brothers, and we
are bringing you some good bread and good wine!” They are to spread a table
cloth on the ground, place the bread and wine on it, preaching to them while
they eat; make them promise not to strike or harm anyone. Return a second
time with more food and drink, and encourage them to give up their criminal
ways, convert, and trust in the lord to provide for them. The robbers are per-
suaded by the brothers’ humility and charity. They give up their previous life.
Some come to the hermitage and serve the brothers, carrying wood. Others
join the order. Others yet confess their sins, do penance for their offences, live
by working, and promise never to steal again.
The parallels to the wolf of Gubbio are clear; it needs only the transforma-
tion of robbers into wolf,32 and the plot elements and dynamics work for the
one as for the other.
31 “The Assisi Compilation” (1244/1260), ch. 115, Early Documents 2. P. 221-22; “The Mirror of
Perfection” (1318), ch. 66, ed. Sabatier, Early Documents 3, p. 310; and in the Fioretti (after
1337, before 1390), ch. 26, Early Documents 3, p. 609-11.
32 The equation of wolf and robber or thief is explicit in the Deeds, 3, p. 483: [Francis
speaking to the wolf] “you deserve … death like a robber or vile murderer,” and in the
Fioretti, p. 602: “… you are worthy of the gallows as a thief and the worst of murderers.” The
comparison of robbers to wolves is consistent in the Franciscan writings, and it was an
easy step from savage, hungry man to savage, hungry wolf in the progress of increasing
congruence with the saint’s charisma. Francis assaulted by the sultan’s soldiers: [the
army] “fell on them like wolves on sheep” (Early Documents 2, p. 602) shortly after Francis
had cautioned his travelling companion with the words of Christ: “I send you forth like
194 Jaeger
Finally, there is the story of Francis’s trip to Egypt to convert the sultan and
the muslim world to Christianity. It is closely related to these tales in structure,
basic intent, and charismatic effect. The difference is that the (failed) conver-
sion of the sultan is a historical event, observed and reported on by contempo-
raries.33 I will refer to the version of Bonaventure in his Major Legend (c.1263).34
Francis travels to the Egyptian city Damietta with one companion. On the way
they encounter great dangers. The sultan had announced that he would reward
with a gold piece anyone who would bring him the head of a Christian. When
the sultan’s army confronts them, the muslim soldiers fall upon them “like
wolves upon sheep.” They put Francis and his companion in chains and drag
them before the sultan, postponing their beheading for reasons not addressed
in the report. Francis proclaims his purpose to the sultan: he has come in order
to convert him. God has sent him, he claims, in order to show the pagans the
way to salvation. The sultan is impressed by the courage and passion of the
saint. He listens to Francis with interest, and invites him to remain with him.
Francis insists on their conversion, and promises to walk barefoot on glowing
coals, if they agree to it. Impossible, replies the sultan. If he converted, he
would have to fear that his own people would kill him – implying that he would
convert if he could. The version in the Fioretti has the sultan secretly accept
Christianity, but on condition that Francis tell no one, lest the news reach his
people and cause a revolt.
The common feature of these stories of wolves, robbers, and sultan is: Fran
cis faces dangers and savage creatures, which no normal person would face,
actively seeks them out, and tames or converts or wins their admiration with
courage, meekness, generosity, and forgiveness. The victory of gentleness and
mercy over strength and power is a fundamental Franciscan experience, per-
haps the fundamental Franciscan experience. It does not matter that the wolf
of Gubbio isn’t human or that wolves, though tameable, aren’t susceptible to
sheep among wolves” (Matt. 10:16); Bartholomew of Pisa (late 14th cent.): a bandit in the
forest near the monastery of San Verecondo was nicknamed “the wolf” (“Lupo”) because
of his ferocious nature, was converted by Francis, and became a friar. (Payne, “Wolf in the
Forest,” p. 69.) Paul Sabatier suggested a link in the progression from the tales of converted
robbers to the wolf of Gubbio.
33 On the sources see Galm K. Johnson, “Saint Francis and the Sultan: An Historical and
Critical Assessment,” Mission Studies 18 (2001), 146-64; Mahmood Ibrahim, “Francis
Preaching to the Sultan: Art and Literature in the Hagiography of the Saint,” in Finding
Saint Francis in Literature and Art, pp. 47-61. Paul Moses’s book, The Saint and the Sultan:
The Crusades Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace (New York, 2009), is written for
a general audience but treats the sources with care.
34 Major Legend Ch. 9, parag. 7-9, Early Documents 2, pp. 601-03.
human religious symbols – any more than it matters that the robbers of Borgo
San Sepulcro and the sultan’s soldiers behave like wolves. The experience of
mildness overcoming power and violence is a viable strategy of behavior in
conflict, not some fabulous invention. It links Francis to other reformers like
Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr.: non-violence is an instru-
ment against forces held in power by violence or by the threat of it.
The force of the Franciscan model continued in fiction, drama, film, and
opera. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables turns on what we can legitimately call a
Franciscan incident: the bishop of Digne, known as Monseigneur Bienvenu,
who lives rather like the new pope Francis, welcomes into his house, one night,
a desperado named Jean Valjean, escaped, it is said, from the prison at Toulouse
and kicked out with scorn and violence from every other place where he seeks
refuge. The bishop’s housemates, the housekeeper, and his sister are terrified at
this house guest, whose appearance is “hideous” and “sinister.” They imagine
him cutting their throats in the middle of the night. Instead, the desperado
commits a lesser crime: he steals the bishop’s silver plate and runs away. Caught
and brought back by the police, Jean Valjean is welcomed by the bishop, who
tells the gendarmes that the convict is his guest, guilty of no crime, that he had
given him the silver as a gift. He chides Jean Valjean for leaving without saying
goodbye and for not taking also the silver candelabra, which he then adds to
the prisoner’s loot. The police release him. The bishop admonishes Jean Valjean
that with this gift of silver he has bought his soul. He is to give his soul to God
and use the silver to make himself an honest man. The convict, who had lost all
sense of humanity and goodness, is a changed man and lives from that time on
according to the bishop’s rule.
In Roberto Rossellini’s film, The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), a scrawny,
weak-minded brother, beat up and reviled by soldiers holding a town under
siege, faces down a huge, monstrous warrior with metal spikes on his armor,
leader of the besieging troops. Armed with nothing other than a foolish smile
and a fixed gaze, Fra Ginepro wins a long staring contest with Nikolaio, the
brute. The brother in fact produces some kind of conversion in Nikolaio. Fra
Ginepro does nothing to single-handedly bring him out of countenance. It is
just the working of some unexplained charismatic force, some supernatural
innocence that the warrior sees in the monk’s eyes. Nikolai, with fear and won-
der in his face, rushes away from Ginepro and declares the siege over. The
soldiers turn tail and bolt. The scene obeys the law whereby beatific meekness
prevails against brutishness and violence.
The main script writer on the Rossellini film was Federico Fellini. Fellini was
sensitive to the meaning and power of the scene. Four years later, he made a
film in which a brutish circus strongman travels and performs with a gentle,
196 Jaeger
saintly woman, borderline retarded, an angelic innocent and secular holy fool
named Gelsomina. She becomes a model of gentleness and goodness that the
strong man can hold up in contrast to himself, a despised bully, carnival fake
and beast, and that model can produce, if not a conversion, at least a moment
of illumination and repentance (La Strada 1954) – also a Franciscan moment
without Francis, though he is not far in the background. Jean Valjean, Rossel-
lini’s brutal knight, and Fellini’s Zampano, are wolves of Gubbio. At least the
force that tames this string of brutes is the same, and the tamed ones, beast or
man, are led from recognition to reversal, to a new life or a new disposition, by
charismatic, not miraculous force.
False Fables: Incommensurability
That force is where the “authenticity” of the stories is located. The string of fa-
bles and fictions that I have just assembled are authentic sources on Francis
because they are commensurable with his character and experience as ob-
served by companions, contemporaries, and near-contemporaries. This com-
mensurability constitutes the “truth” of the fables, legitimates their use in
understanding the effect of Francis on his world and ours.
While the discipline of charismatalogy is young (not to say, non-existent), it
might not be premature to refer to the critical comparison of narrated events
spanning history and legend, as a methodology, a means of verifying insights
into the character of a historical figure. As one expects of a methodology, it
must also be possible to determine incommensurability. Can a critical reader
claim that a given story conveys the effect of the once living subject whereas
another is ungenuine? Can one determine whether the legends are commen-
surable with the character of the person as observed and experienced? Here is
a test case: the saints’ love for animals. Bernard of Clairvaux had compassion
for both humans and animals, Geoffrey of Clairvaux says. If Bernard saw a rab-
bit chased by a dog, or a bird pursued by hawks, he freed it marvelously by the
sign of the cross.35 Contrast this exemplum with Thomas of Celano’s story of
Francis rescuing a rabbit from a trap that one of the brothers had set. Francis
calls the rabbit to him and scolds him: “Brother rabbit … come to me. Why did
you let yourself get caught?” The rabbit hops into Francis’s arms and settles in.
Francis “caresses it with motherly affection,” then lets it go.36 While that “moth-
35 Geoffrey, VP 1. 3. 28, pp. 153-54.

36 Celano, First Life, 1, ch. 21, Early Documents 1, p. 235 Any number of stories bear out the
image of Francis relating to animals by “motherly affection,” by a combination of charis-
matic and miraculous power.
erly affection” for animals, and all creatures, echoes in myriad other stories of
Francis, nothing else in Bernard’s memorials answers to Geoffrey’s anecdote, to
my knowledge. A real love of animals is inferable from the stories of Francis,
not of Bernard. The comparison also shows up the narrative blandness of
Geoffrey of Clairvaux over against the vividness and charm of the biographers
of Francis. The passage highlights Bernard more as miracle-worker than lover
of animals. Animals are fetched onto the stage to create admiration for Bernard;
then they exit and play no further role. Francis accorded them the status of his
human followers.
The Truth of the Stigmata
Francis’s experience of the stigmata is not omitted in any major source on his
life. It has to cause some uneasiness to the critical historian.37 The historian
who says, “I reject the other miracle stories but hold onto the stigmata as
theophany” – does so at the cost of compromised historical method. The
appearance of Christ’s wounds on Francis’s body, the role of the crucified
seraph in producing them, the bleeding wound in his side, are legend more
than history. In his Francis of Assisi (p. 117), Augustine Thompson holds to the
appearance of the wounds as reality and says most historians accept them as
such (p. 117), but doesn’t mention Richard Trexler’s trenchant dismantling of
the sources. “The reality of the stigmata of Francis cannot be proven on the
historical plane,” writes Vauchez in his Francis of Assisi (p. 227).
And yet the appearance of the wounds of Christ on Francis’s body has a
stringent logic to it, related to the whole cast of Francis’s life. The idea of this
event, however miraculous or supernatural, strengthens a conception of
Francis congruent with his life, his thought, his imitation of the poor Christ of
the gospels. It has the truth of extravagant poetry and is commensurable with
the character and charisma of the saint.
37 Richard Trexler, “The Stigmatized Body of Francis of Assisi: Conceived, Processed, and
Disappeared,” in Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter: Politisch-Soziale Kontexte, Visuelle Praxis,
Körperliche Ausdrucksformen, ed. Klaus Schreiner (Munich, 2002), pp. 463-97. See also
Carolyn Muessig, “Signs of Salvation: The Evolution of Stigmatic Spirituality before
Francis of Assisi,” Church History 82 (2013), 40-62; Jacques Dalarun, “Renovata sunt per
eum antiqua miracula: les stigmates de Francois d’Assise entre remploi et novitas,” in
Remploi, citation, plagiat: Conduites et pratiques médiévales (Xe-XIIe siècle), eds. Pierre
Toubert and Pierre Moret (Madrid, 2009), pp. 53-72.
198 Jaeger
Charisma and the “Historical” Person
The critical act of judging stories for their commensurability with the charac-
ter and actions of the religious or political leader, is a basic methodology of
charismatalogy, and the historicity or fictionality of the material is an insignifi-
cant distinction. Ronald Reagan was a charismatic leader. He liked the story of
a WW II bomber pilot whose plane was shot down and who went down with
the ship rather than abandon his wounded navigator. Reagan told it as histori-
cal fact. The story stuck and seemed to characterize Reagan himself, who had
never been a pilot or served in WW II. It was not historical fact, but the story of
a movie he had played in. But it fit, was congruent with whatever charismatic
force determined the popular image of Reagan. George H.W. Bush was a WW II
fighter pilot; he was shot down, survived, and was rescued. But that story made
no particular impact, because it didn’t stick. He did not project the charisma
that would have “validated” the story. For Bush, it was just history. It wasn’t
“true” in the sense that Reagan’s heroics were true, because Bush senior was
not a heroic personality, however brave, devoted, patriotic his character in fact.
Reagan seemed heroic, however slim his track record of heroism. Bush was
heroic without a heroic aura; Reagan had and projected a heroic aura. He was
in his life a fictional character, as are many actors and politicians. Fact is not
what the life-writing of charismatic figures is about, though it helps solidify the
image when it is in the mix.
Life-writing wants and needs fantasy to bring the real, factual activities of a
charismatic into congruence with his charismatic influence, just as the hagiog-
rapher needs stories that bring the saint’s life in line with Christian doctrine
and Christian mythology. If history doesn’t supply them, the imagination must
invent them, or form them from what the “knowledge” of the saint’s presence
means and inspires. That opens a flood of sources and documents to relevance
in the case of Francis.
This approach to the historian’s vexed problem of fiction in history can
bring some clarity into what is a deeply problematic concept, “the historical
person,” “the historical Jesus,” or “Francis,” or “Ronald Reagan.” If “the historical
person” is to be understood as the man as which sober, factual historical evi-
dence, emptied of subjective elements, fables, miracles, party-political claims,
reveal him, then the very concept, “historical person,” will remain undefinable,
mystical, and unapproachable. The quest for a historical figure, a composting
of verifiable facts and recorded observations, will always, given our empirical
mind-set, run into the confusing overlay of the supernatural or legendary or
hyped anecdotal. The removal of myth and miracle is a potential distortion of
the character. I recently had an exchange of letters, to put it nostalgically
– actually, e-mails, with a colleague, who invited me to imagine Louis XIV in his
underwear and sent along a 19th-century caricature of the sun king to help out
my imagination. The idea was that I would see the real person of the monarch
by stripping him of his trappings of state, mere silly excess. But to reduce the
king in this way is to grossly distort the historical figure. The real effect he had
on his subjects, on French society and law, on European history, depended on
his personality, glory-bound with royal authority, inflated by the silly, excessive
trappings of kingship and brightly lit-up by myth (“sun king,” center of the uni-
verse, enthroned in the utopian “city of the sun”). If someone should observe
the king in his underwear, then that scene itself had to be mythically inflated,
the king in his naked state vested with appropriate mythical power, the use of
the toilet transformed into solemn ceremony.38 From this point of view (his-
torical impact), the king in his underwear is a falsehood, a distortion of the
historical figure. And the same is true of St. Francis stripped of stigmata and
miracles natural or supernatural. Only an anatomist could warm to the wis-
dom that says the naked living presence is the person, and only an empirical-
scientific historian could demand reduction to “the bare facts” in the pursuit of
historical reality.
The genius of Shakespeare’s King Lear as a contribution to the psychology of
charisma is in gradually removing from the old king his kingship and all its
trappings and posing the question, what is the man without them? Once
reduced to “the thing itself, unaccommodated man,” the king’s person dis-
solves into insanity, or rather, he loses “personhood.” Persona is the Latin word
for “mask,” a significant joining of personhood with the person’s outer surface.
The “person” unmasked, the individual without the accretion of gifts, talents,
without rank and authority, means the reduction to less than human. Take
away a king’s regalia, throne, retinue, and you take away those things that con-
stitute his “person.” Having given up his throne and lost “the large effects that
troop with majesty,” Lear discovers that without them he is nothing, that
“the thing itself” is an absence. Lear’s insanity is the loss of “persona” in both
senses.39
I’ll just add a few reflections on the psychology of charisma and the myth-
making impulse in the disciple. Charisma awakens in the devotee the urge
to be like the charismatic. A chain of charismatic influence links Christ,
Francis, his followers, and presumably most members of the Franciscan order,
38 See the description of the Levée in Saint-Simon’s memoirs and the chapter of Erich
Auerbach’s Mimesis devoted to Saint-Simon’s narrative.
39 I develop these ideas further in an article “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in
Critical Theory. And Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime, n. 1 above.
200 Jaeger
transforming the disciple at each stage, whether weakly or strongly, into a sem-
blance of the higher model. The awareness of that linkage is awakened,
renewed, and strengthened by reading or hearing the gospel, the stories and
legends of Francis, the actions of others, real or fictional, like Francis. The fol-
lowers are drawn into his world by an impulse that imitates if it does not
reproduce the linkage of Francis to Christ. They want to live in that world
where they can submerge their own identities into those of the master. They
want to live according to the laws and the values, the moral and spiritual cli-
mate of that world. The presence of the charismatic – real, remembered, or
imagined – stimulates the imagination, makes the disciple into an artist or
novelist writing the world of Francis in his imagination. He injects himself into
that world, like the audience in a drama, sees with the vision of the master,
experiences with the master’s sensorium, and dreams his dreams. The records
of the growth of the collective imagining of the charismatic and his disciples
tend towards literary modelling. Hence the progression from Celano and
Bonaventure to the Fioretti, and from the Fioretti to Roberto Rossellini, Nikos
Kazantzakis, and many others. A progress from fact to fable is innate in any
charismatic relationship.
Living in a model is a mode of being that is both real and fictional at the
same time. In imitating Christ, or Francis, the disciple is engaged in make-
believe based on a faith in the gospels, biographical stories, and legends.
Imitation of a charismatic is a performance with the scenario written into the
performer’s perception of the model. Mimesis is representation, not only in
narrative, but also when a living person imitates a once living person.40
Imitation of a model is lived and experienced representation. Or should we say
that imitation of Christ – or Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King
Jr. – is artificial? Disingenuous play-acting? But we know as a fact of western, in
fact, world history, that such imitation can be charged with power to change
society and to influence history, as the case of the four charismatics I just men-
tioned demonstrates. The devotee in the spell of the charismatic figure – even
generations after his death – needs that store of anecdote, story, and fable to
reawaken the memory and restore the inspiring power of the model so as to
continually reactivate the impulse to imitate, to live like he did. The biographer
as life-writer will tell his stories, not just in order to artificially pump up the
saint’s qualifications for sainthood, but to revivify the quasi-living presence of
the saint. That presence must be revived as an experience, sensed and lived.
Stories like the stigmata or Francis’s face to face consultation with God on the
40 Imitation of a model, living or fictional – not narrative representation – is the context of

mimesis in Greek philosophy – Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics.
Franciscan rule, or Francis appearing to his followers in a chariot of fire, dra-

matic, sensual, and immediate in the extreme, are aids to mental resurrection
of the saint. We find the answer to Masseo’s question in stories like those that
convey the effect of Francis’s presence.
…
A comparison of the biographies of Bernard and Francis will inevitably make
Francis appear as a far more appealing character than Bernard, engaged to the
tip of his tonsure, and at risk to his life, in human affairs and created nature.
Bernard was also deeply engaged in human and ecclesiastical affairs, but not
happily. They often involved the difficult saint and others in difficulties.
And yet, though the stories of his miraculous working were dull and stan-
dardized according to the prerequisites of sainthood and stories of his
personality did not make him appealing, but rather off-putting, Bernard of
Clairvaux was a charismatic figure – not because of his biographies, which
gave him no life or dynamism. The dynamics of Francis’s story, however, were
powerful enough that Dante could rehearse its major points in nearly a full
canto of the Divine Comedy.41 Dante felt clearly what charismatic force there
was in the events of Francis’s life and expressed it in the outcry, “His wonder-
working life were better sung by Heaven’s highest angels” (Paradise 11. 96-97).
And yet, Bernard stood higher in Dante’s view of the afterlife. In Paradise
Canto 31, Dante turns from the realm of the blest back to his guide, Beatrice,
only to find her gone and replaced by “an elder in the robes of Heaven’s saints.
His eyes, his cheeks, were filled with the divine joy of the blest, his attitude
with love that every tender-hearted father knows.” (Paradise 31. 60-65). Bernard
of Clairvaux, not Beatrice leads the pilgrim Dante to the highest realms of
heaven and the vision of God. Having seen heaven through contemplation
while alive he is the proper guide (Paradise 32. 111).
Dante derived this image of Bernard not from the writings about Bernard,
but from Bernard’s own writings. We have been measuring Bernard by works of
little imaginative power and contrasting him to Francis, conveyed in works of
great charm and charisma. Francis had all the charismatic texts; Bernard had
only the ones that he himself wrote.42 His posthumous charisma was self-acti-
41 Paradise, 11. 40-117.

42 Bernard the charismatic is far more present and alive in his own theological writings than
in his biography. And that claim is practically a quotation of Geoffrey of Clairvaux, who
admitted how little able his own biography was to capture the character of Bernard, and
referred the reader instead to Bernard’s works: “The saintly manners and character of our
202 Jaeger
vated, called into effect in his sermons on the Song of Songs and his other
sermons and tracts. These works radiate life, energy, and passion, in a way his
biographies do not.
There is a curious witness to Bernard himself at work administering his
fame through his writings – posthumously. In 1423 the abbot of Saint Albans,
John Whetamstede, fell mortally ill on a trip to Rome. He had a dream in which
none other than Bernard of Clairvaux, nearly 200 years dead, appeared to him
and cured his sickness. But the ghostly healer had set conditions on his doctor-
ing: he stipulated that from that time on Abbot John should read and distribute
only the writings of – Bernard of Clairvaux.43 Post-mortem self promotion is a
good trick if you can do it, I suppose, and a useful skill for scholars, whose
works are generally either absorbed or forgotten or both, in one generation.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Abelard, Peter. Letters IX-XIV: An Edition with an Introduction, ed. E.R. Smits. Groningen,
1983.
Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, eds. Regis J. Armstrong, J.A. Wayne Hellmann, and
William J. Short. New York, 1999: vol. 1: The Saint; vol. 2: The Founder; vol. 3: The
Prophet.
Vita prima Sancti Bernardi Claraevallis Abbatis, ed. Paul Verdeyen, Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Mediaevalis 89B. Turnhout, 2011.
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Armstrong, Edward A. Saint Francis: Nature Mystic. Berkeley, 1973.
Bredero, Adriaan. Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History. Grand Rapids, MI,
1996.
Brooke, Rosalind. The Image of Saint Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth
Century. Cambridge, 2006.
Cunningham, Lawrence. Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel of Life. Grand Rapids
MI, 2004.
father … emerge so clearly in his own writings, that it seems he had created an effigy and
a mirror of himself in them.” See my article, “Bernhard von Clairvaux: Charisma und
Exemplarität,” in Exemplaris imago: Ideale in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Nicholaus
Staubach (Frankfurt, 2012), pp. 119-35.
43 Bredero, Cult and History, p. 161.
Dalarun, Jacques. The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi: Towards a Historical Use of the
Franciscan Legends, trans. Edward Hagman. Saint Bonaventure, NY, 2002; orig. 1996.
Dalarun, Jacques. “Renovata sunt per eum antiqua miracula: les stigmates de Francois
d’Assise entre remploi et novitas.” In Remploi, citation, plagiat: Conduites et pratiques
médiévales (Xe-XIIe siècle), eds. Pierre Toubert and Pierre Moret. Madrid, 2009,
pp. 53-72.
France, James. Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies 210.
Kalamazoo, 2007.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston, 1955.
Johnson, Galm K. “Saint Francis and the Sultan: An Historical and Critical Assessment,”
Mission Studies 18 (2001): 146-64.
Ibrahim, Mahmood. “Francis Preaching to the Sultan: Art and Literature in the Hagiog
raphy of the Saint.” In Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art, eds. Cynthia O. Ho,
Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey. New York, 2009, pp. 47-61.
Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New
German Critique 114 (2011): 17-34.
Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Bernhard von Clairvaux: Charisma und Exemplarität.” In Exemplaris
imago: Ideale in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Nicholaus Staubach. Frankfurt,
2012, pp. 119-35.
Philadelphia, 2012.
Leclercq, Jean, “Toward a Sociological Interpretation of the Various Saint Bernards.” In
Bernardus Magister, ed. John R. Sommerfeldt. Spencer, MA, 1992, pp. 19-33.
McGuire, Brian. The Difficult Saint: Bernard of Clairvaux and His Tradition. Kalamazoo,
MI, 1991.
Melville, Gert. “Stefan von Obazine: Begründung und Überwindung charismatischer
Führung.” In Charisma und Religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter, eds. Giancarlo
Andenna, Mirko Breitenstein, and Gert Melville, Vita Regularis: Ordnungen und
Deutungen religiösen Lebens im Mittelalter 26. Münster, 2005, pp. 85-101.
Moses, Paul. The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission
of Peace. New York, 2009.
Muessig, Carolyn. “Signs of Salvation: The Evolution of Stigmatic Spirituality before
Francis of Assisi,” Church History 82 (2013): 40-62.
Müller, Ann. “Entcharismatisierung als Geltungsgrund? Gilbert von Sempringham und
der frühe Gilbertinerorden.” In Charisma und religiöse Gemeinschaften, pp. 151-72.
Payne, Roger M. “The Wolf in the Forest: St. Francis and the Italian Eremitical Tradition.”
In Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art. New York, 2009.
Phillips, Paschal. “The Presence—and Absence—of Bernard of Clairvaux in the Twelfth-
Century Chronicles.” In Bernardus Magister, ed. John R. Sommerfeldt. Cistercian
Publications, 1992, pp. 35-53.
204 Jaeger
Thompson, Augustine. Francis of Assisi: A New Biography. Ithaca, NY, 2012.

Trexler, Richard. “The Stigmatized Body of Francis of Assisi: Conceived, Processed, and
Disappeared.” In Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter: Politisch-Soziale Kontexte, Visuelle Praxis,
Körperliche Ausdrucksformen, ed. Klaus Schreiner. Munich, 2002, pp. 463-97.
Vauchez, André. Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael
F. Cusato. New Haven, 2012.
Charismatic Rulers in Civic Guise: Images of the Nine Worthies 205
Chapter 6
Charismatic Rulers in Civic Guise: Images of the

Nine Worthies in Northern European Town Halls
of the 14th-16th Centuries
Andrey Egorov
A stark black-and-white photograph from the holdings of the Rheinisches Bild

archiv Köln displays a wall of a ruined building (fig. 6.1). The roof of the former
structure is missing, its floor covered in dust and small debris, the plaster
almost completely vanished, exposing the dense fabric of darkened brickwork.
Yet the elaborately carved Gothic screen of gable-ornamented piers, balda-
chins, and finials – heavily covered in soot from a fire – is still largely preserved.
Conspicuously absent, however, are the sculptural figures that once occupied
the nine niches in its central register. As it happens, their original presence is
paradoxically and traumatically emphasized in the traces of their very disap-
pearance – the clearly legible whitish anthropomorphic outlines. Contemplat-
ing this lonely wall, left standing in the exposed interior, we become aware that
in a sense this entire space once belonged – and still belongs – to the missing
figures.
The picture under consideration shows the southern wall of the 14th-cen-
tury Hansasaal, the oldest part of the historic town hall of Cologne. It was
taken in the aftermath of the heavy bombardment of the city by the Royal Air
Force on 29 June 1943.1 The nine limestone sculptures – the most important
and recognizable pictorial feature of the Hansasaal – had actually been
removed shortly beforehand, and stowed in the vaulted cellar of the town hall
(where they would still be seized by fire and seriously damaged).2 The postwar
* I would like to thank Brigitte Bedos-Rezak and Martha Rust for their dedication and patience,
Anna Arutyunyan for her advice and support, Ingeborg Arians for her excellent tour of the
town hall of Cologne, Crystal Parsons for her assistance in the course of the “Charisma” confer-
ence at NYU, Andrew Romig and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and
suggestions.
1 Lucia Hagendorf-Nußbaum and Norbert Nußbaum, Der Hansasaal, Köln: Das gotische Rathaus
und seine historische Umgebung, eds. Walter Geis and Ulrich Krings, Stadtspuren – Denkmäler
in Köln 26 (Cologne, 2000), p. 376.
2 Ibid.; Walter Geis, “Die Neun Guten Helden, der Kaiser und die Privilegien,” in Köln: Das go-
tische Rathaus (see above, note 1), pp. 387-413.

206 Egorov
Figure 6.1 Cologne town hall, Hansasaal, south wall after the air strike. 1943
(Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, RBA 56 237).
decades saw the virtually destroyed town hall slowly rebuilt, and the figures
restored. In the early 1970s, they were back in the new Hansasaal, at last filling
the empty niches captured on that haunting war-time photograph.3 Nowadays,
they can rightfully be designated as a collective symbol of the Rhine city’s well-
being. But what are these figures, and why was their absence so threatening
– not only in view of the historic integrity of the Rathaus, but of Cologne’s very
identity?
With the exception of three decades, this sculptural group has for centuries
occupied the southern wall of the Hansasaal (fig. 6.2). Dated to c.1330, it repre-
sents a popular medieval subject known as the Nine Worthies. Rooted in the
literary tradition of courtly romance, it has thus likely originated in the sophis-
ticated milieu of chivalric aristocracy.4 The tightly-knit group is comprised of
nine exemplary heroes of the past – noble warriors and victorious rulers, the
glorious possessors of the whole gamut of manly virtues, “the best that ever
were,” in the words of William Caxton.5 Their respective French, German, and
Dutch appellations (les neuf preux, die Neun Guten Helden, de negen besten)
ascertain their valiancy, magnanimity, and superiority to common people.
Shown here anachronistically as 14th-century knights, dressed in full armor
and duly equipped with offensive weapons, the permanent membership of the
Nine Worthies actually stands for the three consecutive ages of world history,
characterized by religious allegiance. Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, and
Julius Caesar belong to the pagan era, Joshua, King David, and Judas Macca
beus to the Jewish (Old Testament) era, while King Arthur, Charlemagne, and
Godfrey of Bouillon personify the Christian era. Their primary identifying
attributes are fanciful coats of arms (usually on shields and banners), often
independently included in armorials.6
3 Ibid., pp. 409-10.

4 Two comprehensive monographic studies of the theme are Horst Schroeder, Der Topos der
Nine Worthies in Literatur und bildender Kunst (Göttingen, 1971), and Wim van Anrooij, Helden
van weleer. De Negen Besten in de Nederlanden (1300-1700) (Amsterdam, 1997). An examination
of its occurrence in pictorial arts is provided in Robert L. Wyss, “Die neun Helden: eine iko-
nographische Studie,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 17 (1957),
73-106.
5 “Caxton’s Preface,” in Le Mort Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory: The Original Edition of William
Caxton, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, Vol. 1 (London, 1889), leaf 1r.
6 For the description of the Nine Worthies’ coats of arms, see Horst Schroeder, Der Topos der
Nine Worthies, pp. 225-50, and pp. 261-302 for a series of comparative charts of the armorials
given to the Nine Worthies (as well as their female counterparts) in different regional and
cultural settings.
208
Egorov
Figure 6.2 The Nine Worthies. C.1330. Limestone, originally polychromed. Cologne town hall, south wall of the Hansasaal (Photo: author).
Self-evidently, however, the sculptures of the Nine Worthies in the Hansasaal

were not produced for the noble domain of princely castles, but placed in an
imposing civic hall amid the hustle and bustle of a late medieval metropolis.7
What is more, they might actually be the first known and surviving visual man-
ifestation of the Nine Worthies anywhere – the initial step in their documented
pictorial career.8
The Nine Worthies were familiar to the townsmen, being mentioned in the
writings of city clerks, and represented in open-air processions and pageants.9
But why were these mythic knights, revered in aristocratic circles, pictured in
town halls – the most important public buildings of Northern European civic
communes, which for centuries have been engaged in political maneuvering
and military struggle to attain independence from their territorial lords?10 Was
7 A discussion of the sculptures, their stylistic features, dating, and iconography, as well as
the vicissitudes of their modern reception and post-World War II treatment, can be found
in Walter Geis, Die Neun Guten Helden, pp. 387-413. For the Hansasaal and its iconographic
program, see Fried Mühlberg, “Der Hansasaal des Kölner Rathauses,” Wallraf-Richartz-
Jahrbuch 36 (1974), 65-98; for architectural and restoration/reconstruction history of the
hall, see Lucia Hagendorf-Nußbaum and Norbert Nußbaum, Der Hansasaal, pp. 337-86.
The name Hansasaal was first applied to the hall only in the later 18th century; its earliest
known appellation is “groissen Sal,” or the great hall (Ibid., p. 337). An outline of the
Cologne town hall’s architectural makeup is given in Stefan Albrecht, Mittelalterliche
Rathäuser in Deutschland. Architektur und Funktion (Darmstadt, 2004), pp. 150-54.
8 On the sculptures’ dating, see Walter Geis, Die Neun Guten Helden, pp. 400-03.
9 Van Anrooij, Helden van weleer, p. 41, pp. 167-71. The first documented civic pageant that
featured the Nine Worthies took place in Arras in 1336. Among other known instances,
cited by Van Anrooij, were public spectacles in Oudenaarde (where the Worthies became
a staple of the annual Sacrament processions, 1411-1530s), Kortrijk (1417/18), Aalst (1447),
Dendermonde (1470), and Dordrecht (1485).
10 At least since the early 14th century, the town halls in the geographic and cultural area
that encompasses the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries, built mainly for the
purpose of the urban governments’ self-representation on behalf of the communes, have
been richly furnished with imagery in a broad range of media. The distinctive tradition of
late medieval civic iconography, encompassing a variety of secular and Christian themes,
differs in important ways from the humanism-driven urban visual culture in the 16th-18th
centuries. See Stephan Albrecht, “Rathaus,” in Handbuch der Politischen Ikonographie,
eds. Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke, and Hendrik Ziegler (Munich, 2011), 2, pp. 273-79;
Hartmut Boockmann, “Rathaüser,” in Die Stadt im späten Mittelalter (Munich, 1986), pp.
125-49; Susan Tipton, Res publica bene ordinata: Regentenspiegel und Bilder vom guten
Regiment. Rathausdekorationen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Hildesheim, 1996); Ulrich Meier,
“Vom Mythos der Republik: Formen und Funktionen spätmittelalterlicher Rathausikono
graphie in Deutschland und Italien,” in Mundus in imagine: Bildersprache und Lebenswelten
im Mittelalter. Festgabe für Klaus Schreiner, eds. Andrea Löther et al. (Munich, 1996), pp.
210 Egorov
it a case of pragmatic appropriation of the iconic templates of sovereignty, or

perhaps a matter of the Nine Worthies’ overpowering charisma – a set of
unique qualities that cannot be encompassed when reduced to fixed mean-
ings, yet which the late medieval magistrates desired to make their own? Are
these options mutually contradictory at all? In this essay, we shall focus on
three case-studies which demonstrate how the iconographic theme of the
Nine Worthies has been embedded in the pictorial system of the town hall, and
what kind of interpretations this has occasioned.
The chosen examples are not the only known depictions of the Nine
Worthies in town halls, or civic space more broadly, and our goal is not to pro-
vide a detailed overview. Rather, it consists in focusing on the workings of
those visually arresting and representative monuments – different in scale,
medium, and dating – which amount to the telling moments of the Nine
Worthies’ appearance in town halls.11
It is held that the literary topos of the Nine Worthies made its first appear-
ance in several verses of the widely-disseminated vernacular Alexander
345-87; Ursula Lederle, Gerechtigkeitsdarstellungen in deutschen und niederländischen

Rathäusern (Philippsburg, 1937); Juliaan H.A. de Ridder, Gerechtigheidstaferelen voor
schepenhuizen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden in de 14de, 15de en 16de eeuw (Brussels, 1989).
11 Among other town hall representations of the subject, we should mention the sandstone
sculptures from the facade of the Oude Raadhuis of Kampen. From this series, figures of
Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, dated to c. mid-15th century, survive, albeit in a
weathered state. They are conserved at the Stedelijk Museum Kampen (Koornmarktspoort).
See Harry A. Tummers, “De oude stadhuisbeelden in Veere, verslag van het onderzoek
naar de historische en kunsthistorische waarde van de zeven stadhuisbeelden in de
Schotse Huizen te Veere,” Praktijkboek Instandhouding Monumenten, II-11, 27 (The Hague,
2006), pp. 6-8. In Lübeck, painted depictions of the Nine Worthies on metal-plated oak-
wood panels were also placed on the town hall facade. See Susan Tipton, Res publica bene
ordinata, p. 343. Notably, the Nine Worthies were incorporated in the iconographic
programs of two important civic fountains. They are among the 40 carved-stone figures of
the Schöne Brunnen on Nuremberg’s market square (c.1385-96), and their coats of arms
are displayed in the heraldic register of the lead-cast Altstadtbrunnen in Braunschweig
(1408). Both monuments exist today as modern replicas and assorted original fragments.
See Ludwig Zintl, Der Schöne Brunnen in Nürnberg und seine Figuren. Geschichte und
Bedeutung eines Kunstwerkes (Nuremberg, 1993); Erhard Metz and Gerd Spies, eds., Der
Braunschweiger Brunnen auf dem Altstadtmarkt (Braunschweig, 1988). The popularity of
the topos in urban communes is likewise attested by a monument commissioned by guild
authorities (rather than the magistrates): the extensive painted softwood wainscoting of
the assembly hall of the Augsburg weaver’s guild house, executed in 1456-57 by Peter
Kaltenofer, now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich (inv. MA 856-MA 860). See
Jörg Rogge, “Die Bildzyklen in der Amtsstube des Weberzunfthauses in Augsburg von
1456/57,” in Mundus in imagine (see above, note 10). pp. 319-23.
romance Les Voeux du Paon, written in 1312-13 by the Lotharingian poet Jacques
du Longuyon for his patron – the prince-bishop of Liege, Theobald of Bar.12 In
spite of this, the scholar Wim Van Anrooij has argued that Longuyon, who
introduced the Worthies as a colorful aside while describing the siege of
Ephesus by the Indian army of the brave King Porus, had in fact based his
description of the nine characters on the Middle Dutch poem Van neghen den
besten, which devotes its 700 lines exclusively to the Worthies. This text might
have originated in the 1280s, and can even be ascribed to the famous Flemish
erudite Jacob Van Maerlant.13
Speaking of the semantic structure of the topos, and specifically of the his-
torical-religious divisions among the Nine Worthies, it must be said that they
are commonly seen as referencing St. Augustine’s concept of the spiritual prog-
ress of mankind in three consequent stages that resolve in the fourth stage:
ante legem (before the law), sub lege (under the law), sub gratia (under grace),
and ultimately, sub pace (under peace). This process is mirrored in the devel-
opment of an individual human soul.14 Echoing this pattern, the Nine Worthies
can be envisioned as the key actors in the grand narrative of the linear unfold-
ing of the history of Salvation – as the secular, mortal leaders of this seminal
quest.15 Noticeably, this also endows the three triads with an eschatological
dimension. Prefiguring one another as types and antitypes, the Nine Worthies
are meant to embody the most prominent and glorious worldly recipients of
the gifts of grace in each successive period – as such, of course, they are char-
ismatic figures in a literal sense.16
12 For a critical overview of the origins and early dissemination of the motif, see Horst
Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies, pp. 41-61, and Van Anrooij, Helden van weleer, pp.
33-54.
13 Van Anrooij, Helden van weleer, pp. 55-73.
14 St. Augustine, Commentary on Statements in the Letter of Paul to the Romans (394/395). For
the concept’s elucidation, see Paula Frederiksen, “Expositio quarundam propositionum
ex epistola apostoli ad Romanos,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed.
Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI, 2009), pp. 345-46. It is noteworthy that this
principle explicitly underlies the typological-exegetical program of the famous Verdun
Altar (Ambo) in the abbey of Klosterneuburg. See Arwed Arnulf, “Studien zum Kloster
neuburger Ambo und den theologischen Quellen bildlicher Typologien von der Spät
antike bis 1200,” Wiener Jahrbuch der Kunstgeschichte 48 (1995), 9-41.
15 The canonical sequence of the Nine Worthies was given a (misinformed, but characteristic)
chronological attestation in the verses accompanying their woodcut depictions pasted in
the armorial of Gilles le Bouvier (Paris, BnF, Ms. Fr. 4985, dated c.1450-70). Horst Schroeder,
Der Topos der Nine Worthies, p. 49.
16 On charisma as a gift of grace, see Martino Rossi Monti, “The Mask of Grace. On Body and
Beauty of Soul between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages” in this volume.
212 Egorov
Figure 6.3 Master of the Cité des Dames. The Nine Worthies in Tommaso di Saluzzo, Le
Chevalier Errant. Paris, c.1403-05. Tempera, gold and ink on parchment. Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. fr. 12559, fol. 125r (Photo: BnF).
In the later 14th century, writers like Jean Le Fèvre (Livre de Leesce, 1373-87),
Eustache Deschamps (the ballads Il est temps de faire la paix, 1387, and Si les
héros revenaient sur la terre, ils seraient étonnés, 1396), and marquis Tommaso
di Saluzzo (Le Chevalier Errant, c.1394) (fig. 6.3) continued to develop the sub-
ject and supplemented the Nine Worthies with female counterparts, striving
for balance, symmetry, and intellectual excitement. Not least of all, the sophis-
ticated codes of gender relations and hierarchies of the aristocratic audiences
demanded inclusive sets of male and female characters to identify with.17
One of the most sumptuous testimonies to the preoccupation with the Nine
Worthies within the top echelons of European aristocracy at the turn of the
14th century is the incompletely surviving set of monumental tapestries that
belonged to Jean, the powerful Duke of Berry, now in the Cloisters Museum.18
In another telling example, the two miniatures of the lavishly executed Le
Chevalier Errant manuscript in Paris, the male and female Worthies are shown
standing in castle-hall interiors, which evoke the fabled “palace of the elected”
(palais aux élus), a location where the romance’s wandering protagonist
encounters them.19 In the 1420s, the neuf preux and neuf preuses found their
way to a real noble abode when they were depicted in the remarkable frescoes
adorning the grand hall (Sala Baronale) of Tommaso’s Piedmontese familial
castle, La Manta. The tall, elegant figures comprise a stunning frieze, as if stroll-
ing through idyllic pastoral settings one after another and encouraging the
viewer to join them. The accompanying versed inscriptions, in French, are
meant to be read (perhaps aloud) as the personal utterances of the legendary
17 Jean Le Fèvre’s neuf preuses were Semiramis, Sinope, Hippolyta, Melanippe, Lampedo,
Penthesilea, Tomyris, Teuta, and Deipyle. The female Worthies, however, would neither
attain their male counterparts’ fixed membership, or the neat division into three historical
triads (first introduced only in Hans Burgkmair the Elder’s series of prints of 1516-18). See
Ingrid Sedlacek, Die Neuf Preuses: Heldinnen des Spätmittelalters (Marburg, 1997); Ann
McMillan, “Men’s Weapons, Women’s War: The Nine Female Worthies, 1400-1640,”
Mediaevalia 5 (1979), 113-39; Horst Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies, pp. 168-73; Van
Anrooij, Helden van weleer, pp. 89-97; Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, “Penthésilée, reine des
Amazones et Preuse, une image de la femme guerrière à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Clio.
Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés 20 (2004), 169-79.
18 James J. Rorimer, Margaret B. Freeman, “The Nine Heroes Tapestries at the Cloisters,” The
Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 7, no. 9 (May, 1949), 243-60.
19 BnF, Ms fr. 12559, fol. 125r (the male Worthies), fol. 125v (the female Worthies). The
manuscript was likely commissioned by Tommaso di Saluzzo himself in 1403-05 and
richly illuminated by the Master of the Cité des Dames. See Florence Bouchet, L’icono
graphie du Chevalier errant de Thomas de Saluces (Turnhout, 2014).
214 Egorov
heroes and heroines.20 The three mentioned examples offer distinctive models
of the audience’s engagement with the exalted subject, imposed by the relative
scale, conventions, and affective properties of the artistic medium: from the
delicate stylization of the illuminated page to the rich festive textures of tapes-
tries and the precise linear rhythms of the frescoes, relatable to the human
body.
It should be said that no representations of the Nine Female Worthies are
known to have existed in town halls, which seems understandable, given the
civic councils’ exclusively male lineup, a fact that in many ways determined
the character of their political and legal routine. There is, however, an impor-
tant documented instance of the female Worthies’ appearance in the public
space of urban streets and squares – as part of the ceremonial proceedings of
Joanna of Castile’s royal entry into Brussels, which took place in December
1496. The allegoric tableaux vivants staged for the duchess featured the female
Nine Worthies as the true paragons of womanly virtue, and they figure among
the 63 watercolor miniatures of the manuscript commissioned by the city
authorities to commemorate the event.21 Still, the visual field of the town hall
per se belonged exclusively to the aldermen, and catered to their own ambi-
tions and ideals of social comparison.
20 The murals, executed by the eponymous Master of the Castello della Manta, were com
missioned by Tommaso’s illegitimate son, Valerano di Saluzzo, who likely had himself
portrayed as Hector, and his wife Clemenza di Provana as Penthesilea. Apart from the 18
Worthies, the iconographic program of the hall includes a busy scene of the Fountain of
Youth, heraldic imagery, as well as Christ’s Crucifixion, the figures of Saint John the Baptist
and Saint Quentin. See Daniel Arasse, “Portrait, mémoire familiale et liturgie dynastique:
Valerano-Hector au château de Manta,” in Il ritratto e la memoria, 1, ed. Augusto Gentili
(Rome, 1989), pp. 93-112; Anne Dunlop, Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early
Renaissance Italy (University Park, 2009), pp. 148-53; Lorenz Enderlein, “The Wandering
Mind: Concepts of Late Medieval Allegory in the Painted Chamber of the La Manta
Castle,” Meaning in Motion. The Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art, eds. Nino
Zchomelidse and Giovanni Freni (Princeton, 2011), pp. 233-65. The Nine Worthies also
feature in an extensive fresco cycle adorning the Summer House of the Runkelstein castle
in South Tyrol amidst other fabled triads of the best and noblest knights, love pairs,
swordsmen, giants, and dwarves. See Haug Walter, “Das Bildprogramm im Sommerhaus
von Runkelstein,” in Runkelstein: die Wandmalereien des Sommerhauses (Wiesbaden,
1982), pp. 15-62.
21 Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, MS 78.D.5.
Anne-Marie Legaré, “Joanna of Castile’s Entry into Brussels: Viragos, Wise and Virtuous
Women,” in Virtue Ethics for Women, 1250-1500, eds. Karen Green and Constant J. Mews
(Dordrecht, 2011), pp. 177-86.
Bearing in mind these preliminary considerations, let us now return to the

town hall of Cologne, which still serves its original function. The central,
instantly striking feature of the Nine Worthies sculptures when one faces them
in the Hansasaal is their ability to provoke a strong sensation of lifelikeness
and bodily presence (phenomenological effects associated with the inherent
mimetic potential of sculpture in the round, but which still required to be pur-
posefully attained). The characters we are examining were by all counts
extraordinary individuals – “superheroes” that once actually existed, but long
ago acquired purely legendary status. We can assume, therefore, that to
“enliven” them was the pressing challenge of the unknown master carvers. The
substitution of the Worthies’ transitory bodies with congenial iconic portray-
als, which referenced the prototypes, but were self-sufficient in their artistry
and plastic vivacity, would naturally contribute to the effect of what Stephen
Jaeger designates as “charismatic art.”22
At least three factors are at work here.23 Firstly, our attention is drawn by the
impressive microarchitectural framework of the group. Arranged in a rhythmi-
cal horizontal row, the figures of the Nine Worthies are integrated into a
screen-wall of Late Gothic morphology: they stand on tall cornered piers,
crowned with intricate baldachins with finials. Of course, such a layout in
stantly reminds one of the arrays of saintly figures on the jambs of church
portals, and this analogy seems to have been consciously pursued. After all, a
richly articulated sculptural portal was instituted by this period as a time-hon-
ored, recognizable structure proven to generate auratic and symbolically rich
experience.
Secondly, the allure of the almost life-sized figures is enforced by the skillful
manipulation of the medium’s expressive qualities. One instantly takes notice
of the Worthies’ lively, yet balanced poses, obtained through a slight contra-
posto, and the soft modeling of the surface, especially of the hefty folds at the
gathering parts of their long tunics. Importantly, the now unpainted limestone
sculptures were originally polychromed. In the course of the extensive restora-
tion of the Hansasaal, undertaken in the 1860s, the Cologne Nine Worthies
22 The relationship between artistic practice and charisma is explored in detail in C. Stephen
Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia,
2012), pp. 11-57, 63-66.
23 For a discussion of the rising critical awareness of the material presence of artifacts and
the existential status of images in art historical practice, see Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies
and the Iconic Turn,” in Visual Time. The Image in History (Durham, NC, 2013), pp. 53-75.
The most comprehensive overview of the central theoretical and social issues of the
interplay between depiction and presence, analyzed in the cultic domain, is given in Hans
Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, 1994).
216 Egorov
acquired a thick light-reflecting oil-based coating, which could not be as seam-

less and natural as the original tempera color scheme (light-toned and opaque)
would have been. This modern paint, which obviously reflected the tastes of
the 19th-century romantic medievalism, was melted away by fire during the
1943 bombardment of the city.24
Finally, the application of an essentially dramatic body language, through
gestures and postures, attains crucial significance for the enlivening effect of
the whole group – endowing it, as it were, with a sense of vivid theatricality.
While some of the Worthies stand militant (Godfrey of Bouillon), others are
tense (Judas Maccabeus), or shown, by way of contrast, in an absorbed, pen-
sive state (King Arthur).25
So, are there any iconographic peculiarities that might hint on the purpose
of this emotionally charged image? First of all, the “correct” left-to-right
sequence of the triads making up the Nine Worthies (the pagans-the Jews-the
Christians), known to have been reshuffled in various representations,26 has
been laterally changed in this case too. The progression is initiated by the
Christians and closed by the pagans, with the Jewish Worthies, wearing the
characteristic pointed hats, the Jüdenhütte, acting as the central group. The
focal point, therefore, belongs to King David, captured in a belligerent pose,
ambivalently sheathing or unsheathing his sword. We do not know if this com-
positional and affective emphasis has anything to do with the fact that for as
much as two centuries before the period under our consideration the Cologne
town hall had been standing in the midst of the town’s Jewish quarter (as early
as 1149 it was called the domus civium inter iudeos sita).27 According to the most
recent dating of the Nine Worthies sculptures, they had been put into place
more than a decade before the violent pogrom of August 1349, which broke out
in the wake of the bubonic plague and even caused a fire in the town hall.28
24 Walter Geis, Die Neun Guten Helden, pp. 406-10.

25 Parts of the figures’ faces, hand-gestures, and clothing, damaged in the 1943 fire, had to be
supplemented by the restorers in the 1950s-60s, based on historical photographs. Ibid.,
pp. 409-10. It should be said that the affective aspects of the sculptures that we are
describing were not critically altered or amplified; though, as Geis mentions, a commit
ment to the post-War modernist aesthetic is clearly discernible in the attention to the
figures’ bare material surface.
26 For example, cf. below our observations on the Nine Worthies group pictured in the
stained-glass windows of the town hall of Lüneburg.
27 Stephan Albrecht, Mittelalterliche Rathäuser, p. 150.
28 After the official eviction of the Jewish community from Cologne in 1424, the council
decreed to convert the synagogue-religious school opposite the town hall into the
magistrate’s chapel, the Ratskapelle, which survived, in a reconstructed and restored state,
More specifically, however, the upward-oriented central vector of the sculp-

tural group provides further clues. At the apex of the framing structure, in the
stark counter-light from the windows behind, and right beneath the crown of
the pointed tunnel vault of the Hansasaal, a more diminutive group of three
figures is situated.29 Right above King David – who was, of course, the royal
ancestor of Christ and His important Old Testament prefiguration – stands a
crowned monarch clad in a swirling mantle, holding a scepter and a charter
with pendent seal. This could be a conventional representation of the Holy
Roman Emperor, or a more specific reference to Louis the Bavarian (r. 1314/1328-
47), who reigned at the time of the presumable production of the Hansasaal
sculptures. Meanwhile, the characters on his sides – the one with the stream of
water running from a jar and the one with a model of a town gate – personify
the two important privileges that Louis affirmed for the citizens of Cologne,
respectively, the right to store and sell transit goods (Stapelrecht), and the right
to erect military fortifications (Befestigungsrecht).30 In this larger scheme, the
Nine Worthies might have been given the role of symbolic intermediaries
between the royal power and the oligarchic magistrate, as well as defenders, in
a somewhat apotropaic sense, against any territorial encroachments on the
part of the city’s nominal lord, the archbishop of Cologne – exiled after the
battle of Worringen in 1288. Placed within the thickness of the screen-wall, the
Worthies support the sovereign and – perhaps more importantly for the alder-
men – the lucrative privileges of the commune.31
Another explanation of the Worthies’ surprising appearance in the Hansa
saal is also context-bound, but this time the key to their meaning could be
until World War II. For a historical overview of Cologne’s Jewish quarter, see Marianne
Gechter, Sven Schütte, “Ursprung und Voraussetzungen des mittelalterlichen Rathaus
und seiner Umgebung,” in Köln: Das gotische Rathaus (see above, note 1), pp. 107-44.
29 The configuration, which belongs to the original solution of the southern wall of the
Hansasaal, is an example of a triad group, “a form of composition that presents frontally
an elevated, or larger, central figure and two lower or smaller flanking figures.” See Rebecca
Zorach, The Passionate Triangle (Chicago, 2011), p. 13. The corresponding sense of order
and hierarchy, enforced by the Nine Worthies appearing at the base of the even larger
triangular arrangement encompassing all of the 12 figures, is important for the visual
rhetoric of this entire sculptural-architectural screen.
30 Walter Geis, Die Neun Guten Helden, pp. 399-400, Fried Mühlberg, “Der Hansasaal des
Kölner Rathauses,” p. 72, 88.
31 Three painted two-headed imperial eagles once adorned the vault of the hall, intensifying
the symbolic statement of imperial allegiance. Their dating is contestable. See Walter
Geis, Die Neun Guten Helden, p. 399; Fried Mühlberg, “Der Hansasaal des Kölner Rat
hauses,” p. 80 and note 69.
218 Egorov
Figure 6.4 King of Bohemia as One of the Prince-electors. C.1398. Mural

fragment from the north wall of the Hansasaal, Cologne town
hall. Tempera on plaster. Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum
& Fondation Corboud, Nr.: Dep. 268 (Photo: author).
offered by the murals, which once existed on the neighboring three walls (fig.
6.4). They survive only in fragments, datable on stylistic grounds to the latter
third of the 14th century.32 Thankfully, important details of the original icono-
graphic content of the program have come down in archival sources.33 On the
opposite, northern, wall from the Worthies the murals displayed a group of
prophet-like figures in long robes and eye-catching headgear – identified more
broadly as historic men of wisdom, or auctoritates. With all likelihood, eight
shorter figures, inscribed into the niches of the painted altar-like structure
(constituting the college of the imperial prince-electors and the Holy Roman
Emperor) accompanied them. Each character originally held a sweeping ban-
derole with a titulus devoted to the fair dispensation of justice and loyalty to
the ideal of the empire’s well-being.34 Furthermore, the longitudinal walls of
32 Five fragments of the murals – four heads of the “prophets” and a shorter figure of the
king of Bohemia, one of the prince-electors – have been preserved. The fragments were
detached from the wall during restoration works in 1859, and are housed in the Wallraf-
Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne (Inv. Nr.: Dep. 264-268). They are
executed in a tempera technique, containing oil and animal glue in the binding medium,
allowing for multilayered and nuanced bodily modeling. For a close examination of the
Hansasaal murals, possible sources of their numerous inscriptions, dating issues, and
proposed reconstruction, see Stephan Altensleben, “Politische Ethik im späten Mittelalter:
Kurfürstenreime, Autoritätenspruche und Stadtregimentslehren im Kölner Rathaus,”
Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 64 (2003), 125-85; Nicole Buchmann, “Die Malereifragmente
aus dem Hansasaal,” in Köln: Das gotische Rathaus (see above, note 1), pp. 415-38; and a
foundational study in two parts: Eduard Trier, “Die Prophetenfiguren des Kölner Rat
hauses,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 15 (1953), 79-102; Idem, “Die Prophetenfiguren des
Kölner Rathauses (II). Ein Beitrag zur Profan-Ikonographie des Mittelalters,” Wallraf-
Richartz-Jahrbuch 19 (1957), 193-224. Trier’s primary focus is on the important group
of eight oak-wood figures of “prophets,” or master scholars of the early days, created
c.1414 and likewise originating from the Cologne town hall, now on loan to the Museum
Schnütgen in the same city.
33 The group of sources is comprised of: Cronica van der hilliger stat van Coellen (Koelhoffsche
Chronik, 1499), Auctoritates infrascripte sunt scripte in domo consulatus civitatis Coloniensis
(from the miscellanea of legal and theological texts that belonged to the canon Franz
Sluyn von Rheinbach, c.1500), a manuscript from the St. Pantaleon abbey in Cologne
(c.1616), and a manuscript introduced to the discussion of the murals by Altensleben in
2003 (BnF, Cod. Lat. 5237, 294 v., first half of the 15th century). For the archival references
and comments, see Stephan Altensleben, Politische Ethik im späten Mittelalter, pp. 132-36,
notes 22, 23, 26, 31.
34 Among the surviving fragments, only the king of Bohemia’s inscription can still be seen
(others are preserved in documentary sources; see above, note 33): “You must consider
the Empire’s needs, both what is lost and what is gained” (“Ir suelt des ryches noet
besinnen, wael up verlies ind up gewinnen”). Stephan Altensleben, Politische Ethik im
220 Egorov
the hall were also adorned with murals representing a plentitude of esteemed
teachers of the vita activa of the classical, biblical and Christian eras: prophets,
philosophers, writers, poets, and rulers, all praising justice, good government,
and civic unity with their Latin epigrams.35
The inclusion of the Worthies in the semantic field saturated with moral
and legal rhetoric, prompted scholars such as Robert L. Wyss to assign them
the status of “court assistants,” or ideal judges, offering examples of correct
behavior to the councilmen, and advocating the moral good on behalf of the
town population.36 The aldermen thus wished to approximate the elevated,
noble stature of the Worthies through imitation and performative identifica-
tion. They might have looked up to these charismatic “role models” much in
the same way as to the image of Christ the Judge, prominently displayed in
council chambers throughout the German territories and the Low Countries.37
Despite the fact that the painted auctoritates accordingly frame the reading
of the limestone Nine Worthies (reinforcing the “hybridity” of media and
meanings in the town hall’s visual field), the murals most probably appeared in
the hall decades after the sculptures had been in place there. Nevertheless,
justice was indeed the greatest of knightly virtues, and its dispensation a cen-
tral social event occurring in the town hall.38 In his detailed study of the
murals, Stephan Altensleben proposed that they could have been painted
c.1398, that is to say, shortly after a political coup of 1396 ended the long rule of
the old patrician families in Cologne, bringing to power the representatives of
the craft guilds (Gaffeln). The number of the painted historic authorities com-
bined with the older sculptures of the Nine Worthies (51 in total) corresponded,
as Altensleben notes, to the 49 aldermen plus the two burgomasters of the
recently reformed council.39
späten Mittelalter, p. 131. Here and below the English translations are mine, unless
otherwise indicated.
35 For instance, amid the 23 figures whose names and inscriptions have come down to us,
were Moses, Isaiah, King Salomon, Aristotle, Cato, Horace, Emperor Trajan, and, curiously,
the “reduplicated” Worthies – Alexander the Great, King David, and Charlemagne.
Stephan Altensleben, Politische Ethik im späten Mittelalter, pp. 142-43.
36 Robert L. Wyss, Die Neun Helden, pp. 86-87.
37 On representations of the Last Judgment in town halls, see Georg Tröscher, “Welt
gerichtsbilder in Rathäusern und Gerichtsstätten,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 11 (1939),
139-214; Kristin Eldyss Sorensen Zapalac, In His Image and Likeness. Political Iconography
and Religious Change in Regensburg (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 26-54.
38 The judicial function of town halls is discussed in Stephan Albrecht, Mittelalterliche
Rathäuser (see above, note 7), pp. 13-16.
39 Stephan Altensleben, Politische Ethik im späten Mittelalter, pp. 149-57, esp. pp. 152-54.
Accordingly, the sculptures of the Nine Worthies would have been appropri-
ated and incorporated in a new iconographic collage that mainly consisted of
a multitude of the revered men of the past professing the virtues of good gov-
ernment with inscriptions – an emphatic visual-rhetorical statement against
the tyranny of the old regime and a celebration of the reinstated peace and
prosperity.40 Taking his seat under a given figure, a member of the council
would have, or should have, personally identified with it and would be expected
to emulate the righteous example.41 In a way, he would be set to act as a double,
a disciple or a distant (spiritual) descendant of the portrayed authority. We
may add that regardless of the murals’ precise dating this general “substitutive”
logic would be essentially valid.42
This hypothesis, however, leaves behind the “original” function of the Nine
Worthies sculptures in the Hansasaal, which, in fact, could have dealt even
more directly with the concept of kinship. Before the transition of power in
1396, the town hall and the institution of the council belonged to an elite caste
of the 15 wealthiest patrician families (Geschlechter) of Cologne, whose politi-
cal authority, according to legend, had been established in Roman times by
none other than the Emperor Trajan.43 Hardly republican or democratic in the
modern sense, the patricians strived to follow recognizable aristocratic ideals
and forms of behavior to legitimate and cement their rule. According to Walter
40 Ibid., p. 171.
41 An analogous device of a direct correspondence between the number of the actual
magistrates and the number of depicted historic authorities was employed in the carved
oak-wood aldermen benches, formerly in the Obere halle of the Bremen town hall (1405-
10). Originally forming a square, they respectively depicted prophets, philosophers, poets,
and church teachers on their long sides, all named and holding banderoles with
inscriptions. Unfortunately, the benches were almost completely destroyed in the Napo
leonic wars, only their four short-side panels have been preserved (Focke Museum,
Bremen, inv., 00294, 00295, 00296, 00297; they depict Charlemagne (sic), Saint Paul, Saint
Peter, and Saint Willehad), as have all of the former figures’ tituli. Ibid., pp. 149-50; Stephan
Albrecht, Das Bremer Rathaus im Zeichen städtischer Selbstdarstellung vor dem 30-jährigen
Krieg (Marburg, 1993), pp. 49-50.
42 The program of the Hansasaal murals also included diminutive scenes and figures located
in the trefoils and quatrefoils above each of the auctoritates. A number of these upper
register scenes are known from pencil drawings executed in the mid-1860s and watercolor
reconstructions from 1878. They could be interpreted as examples of negative behavior,
contrasting with the righteous sayings of the wise men. Some of them are associated with
the topos of the power of women: Aristotle and Phyllis, Virgil in a Basket, and episodes
from the story of Samson. See Nicole Buchmann, Die Malereifragmente aus dem Hansa
saal, pp. 416, 430-32.
43 Walter Geis, Die Neun Guten Helden, pp. 388-89. See also, pp. 146-52.
222 Egorov
Geis, the old magistrates actually wished to incorporate the Nine Worthies
(who stood at the pinnacle of a shared model of social hierarchy) into their
own private genealogies, thus providing for the continuity and the smooth
transmission of sovereignty.44 The sculptures of the Hansasaal could thus be
seen as a monument to the ambitions of the ruling elite to lay hold of a glorious
past – in order to ensure a prosperous future. To cite a later example, this inher-
ently aristocratic principle of constructing a spectacular, even if largely fictive,
ancestral pedigree has seldom been exemplified with more splendor and bra-
vura than in the cenotaph of the emperor Maximilian I in the Innsbruck
Hofkirche (started in 1502, the work on the monument famously took many
decades to complete). Incidentally, two of the Nine Worthies – King Arthur
and Godfrey of Bouillon – stand here among the imposing bronze figures that
represent the extended kinship of the Habsburgs.45
As we can see, there are quite a number of approaches to justify the Worthies’
occurrence in the town hall. Ideas of imperial loyalty and flattery, of court
assistantship and judicial rhetoric, of invoking the accepted notions of good
governance, of serving as identification models, or even imaginary forefathers,
to the councilors of different social affiliations and commitments, come into
play. All these interpretations, convincing in their own way, presuppose that a
form of personal mimesis, a certain phenomenological and imaginative
endeavor on the part of the town hall proprietors, was a strong motivation for
welcoming the fabled Nine Worthies into the building. In the case of the
Cologne sculptures, which – taking into account the aesthetic horizon of the
period and the regional sculptural tradition – could be considered expressly
lifelike, this procedure acquires an immediate, palpable sense. Put another
way, the purported aim of their collective image was not only to signify or illus-
trate external entities and meanings for practical ends, but also to embody,
receive, and reflect intentionality through charismatic presence, multiplied
ninefold – to become the reference point, or the focus, of human expectations,
wishes, anxieties, and hopes.46
44 Ibid., pp. 400-03. Geis notes that the chronicler Gottfried Hagen, siding with the patricians
in their struggle against the archbishops and guilds in his Reimchronik of Cologne (1270-
80), has explicitly evoked Judas Maccabeus, one of the Nine Worthies, as a model for the
patricians’ own heroic exploits.
45 The likeness of Charlemagne, which would have completed the Christian triad of the
Nine Worthies, was planned but never executed. Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The
Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, 2008), p. 72.
46 This reading follows the broad theoretical agenda of such studies of the phenomenological,
historical, and ideological issues governing human fascination with imagery as David
Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago,
Figure 6.5 Jan van Mansdale (Keldermans). Julius Caesar. 1384-85. Carved stone corbel,
originally polychromed. Mechelen, Museum Schepenhuis, Stedelijke Musea
Mechelen (Photo: Jean-Luc Elias, © KIK-IRPA, Brussels).
Keeping all this in mind, let us now turn to a rather different solution of
employing images of the Nine Worthies in a town hall (fig. 6.5). The medium is
once again sculptural, but in this case we will not encounter a spectacular
stage-like framing screen with monumental figures. In fact, it might take some
time to even notice the characters in question in the great hall of the 13th-
century Schepenhuis (“House of the Councilmen,” the former town hall) of the
Brabant city of Mechelen, an austere edifice standing on the edge of the medi-
eval Grote Markt, close to the stately Saint Rumbold’s Cathedral. It is a series of
11 sculpted corbel stones, produced in 1384-85 by master carver Jan Van
Mansdale, nicknamed Keldermans, from nearby Brussels.47 Nine of the corbels
1989), W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2005), and Horst Bredekamp,
Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin, 2010).
47 Jean Squilbeck, “Les sculptures de l’ancienne Maison Echévinale de Malines,” Revue belge
d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 5 (1935), 329-33; Domien Roggen, “Het beeldhouwwerk
224 Egorov
represent the full membership of the Worthies, clad in heavy armor and bran-
dishing heraldic shields, whereby the two remaining corbels are adorned with
biblical scenes: the Drunkenness of Noah and the Sacrifice of Abraham.
Appropriately for this type of sculptural furnishing, offering very limited
space, the individual Worthies are depicted in perceptibly uncomfortable,
odd-looking poses – squeezed, crouching, or half-lying. As with the Hansasaal
sculptures, they project different emotions, though with a tenser expressive-
ness. The combative thrust of King David or Joshua, for example, is met with
the confident watchfulness of Judas Maccabeus, the halted head-on look of
Godfrey, and Caesar’s dynamically reclining posture, with torso and head half-
turned, his enfolding cape forming a cavernous hideaway – a portrayal that
simultaneously suggests circumspection and introspection. The Worthies are
quite literally marginal figures in this hall, distributed as they are over its
perimeter, lurking on the fringes in the somber light. Still, the corbels are posi-
tioned at mid-height of the wall, and in purely plastic terms (even if we take
into account the many playful distortions in the armored knights’ bodily pro-
portions), the bas-reliefs are vigorous and muscular, executed in the vein of the
Sluter-influenced Brabant sculpture.
As in the Cologne Hansasaal, the mighty Nine Worthies are made to look as
if fulfilling a structural mission – carrying the bases of the ceiling beams. The
predetermined spatial configuration of the beams prompted Keldermans to
interpret the corbels as favorable vantage points for his characters, so that – as
a group – they not only become objects of visual interest for the spectator, but
also seem to project an encompassing reciprocal gaze – top down from every
side of the hall.
Because the Mechelen corbel-stones have for a long time remained in rela-
tive obscurity in the art historical discourse, there have been no scholarly
polemics as to the particular meaning and function in their given settings (fig.
6.6). Can we claim that those remarks which were brought forward in connec-
tion with the Cologne sculptures are likewise relevant in this case? The two
Old Testament corbels shed an interesting light on this matter. It is worth tak-
ing note that from the typological-exegetical perspective, both are related to
van het Mechelsche Schepenhuis,” Gentse bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis 3 (1936),

86-103; Marie van der Vennet, “L’Ancienne maison échevinale de Malines,” Revue belge
d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 23 (1953), 3-32; Juliaan H.A. De Ridder, Gerechtigheids
taferelen (see above, note 10), pp. 14-19. Jan Van Mansdale, who gets his nickname from a
brewery he owned in Brussels, is the founder of the Keldermans dynasty of architects, and
his numerous descendants have received prestigious civic, church, and court commissions
throughout the 15th and early 16th centuries. See J.H. Van Mosselveld, Keldermans: een
architectonisch netwerk in de Nederlanden (The Hague, 1987).
Figure 6.6 Jan van Mansdale (Keldermans). The Sacrifice of Abraham. 1384-85. Carved stone
corbel, originally polychromed. Mechelen, Museum Schepenhuis, Stedelijke Musea
Mechelen (Photo: Jean-Luc Elias, © KIK-IRPA, Brussels).
the Passion cycle – the Drunkenness of Noah prefigures the Mocking of Christ,
and the Sacrifice of Abraham His Crucifixion (fig. 6.6), pairings that have been
often depicted in the biblia pauperum tradition.48 Considering the judicial pur-
pose of this space, the choice of biblical episodes does not look arbitrary at all:
they afforded the Mechelen officials two memorable and provoking moral
exempla, which represented a travesty of justice on the one hand, and a righ-
teous fulfillment of God’s will on the other, thematizing the responsibility of
making the right choice when facing a complex dilemma.
Nevertheless, we can point to another aspect, which we may call temporal
or chronological. The particular scenes from the Book of Genesis chosen for
the corbels are foundational for the Christian understanding of history, mark-
ing pivotal events after the Deluge. Interestingly enough, the Old Testament
corbels are located exactly between the pagan (ante legem) and Jewish (sub
lege) triads of the Nine Worthies, so that the patriarchs Noah and Abraham –
the protagonists of the biblical scenes – are logically followed by the Jewish
48 Cf. Engelbert Kirschbaum, ed., Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie (Rome, 1972; offprint,
Rome, 2004), 4, p. 619; Idem., 1, pp. 29-30.
226 Egorov
heroes Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus. The canonical tripartite sequence
and temporal consistency of the Nine Worthies topos here remain intact,
despite the apparent intervention of the biblical scenes – but now, the linear
narrative dynamic comes to the fore.
In the Mechelen Schepenhuis, we again witness how the Nine Worthies
affirm their fabled reputations, not only as defenders of justice, but as tempo-
ral “signposts,” or relays, in the historical imaginary of the late Middle Ages
– providentially drawing a common trajectory through the vastness of time,
collapsing the past into the present, and welcoming fantasies of lineage. Work
ing in a sculptural idiom that strived for the singularity of forms and the
incitement of emotional participation, Keldermans succeeded in ingeniously
imparting to his Nine Worthies not only a sense of presence, but historic au-
thenticity, so that in spite of their size and limited visibility, they would still
convincingly epitomize charismatic leadership.
Evidently, the magistrates of Mechelen wished to have the Nine Worthies
close by for the same reasons as their associates in Cologne (situated less than
200 km away), putting to good use their seemingly restrained budget for the
project. These reasons, in our opinion, were not exclusively defined by any
given function of the figured corbel stones, judicial or political, but would have
had more to do with the interplay of various meanings, reflecting the alder-
men’s own conflicting thoughts. Hermeneutic impulses could be challenged
by the sheer fascination with the Nine Worthies – mythic heroes, though no
less real for that matter.
Our third case study takes us to the Hanseatic town of Lüneburg in Northern
Germany – a commune formally dependent on territorial lords, the Welf dukes
of Saxony, but in the later Middle Ages effectively autonomous in its policies
and trade. The ducal castle on a prominent hill with a gypsum quarry, the
Kalkberg, which overlooks the town from the west, was destroyed in 1371 dur-
ing the so-called Wars of the Lüneburg succession, never to be rebuilt.49 The
city enjoyed prosperous times thanks to its extensive natural repositories of
salt, and for this reason, its council chiefly consisted of wealthy merchants
involved in the salt industry.50
The Lüneburg town hall complex is one of the best preserved monuments
of medieval and early modern civic architecture in Germany, with a good share
49 Eckhard Michael, “Die Blütezeit Lüneburgs und ihre Grundlagen,” in Das Lüneburger
Ratssilber, Bestandskatalog des Kunstgewerbemuseums 16, ed. Stefan Bursche (Berlin,
1990), pp. 49-57.
50 Klaus Alpers, Patriziat in Lüneburg, ibid., pp. 58-63.
Figure 6.7 Joshua, Godfrey of Bouillon, Charlemagne, King Arthur, and Julius Caesar. C.1410.
Central stained-glass window of the south wall of the Gerichtslaube, Lüneburg town
hall (Photo: Rüdiger Becksmann, Corpus Vitrearum Deutschland,
Freiburg im Breisgau).
228 Egorov
of its original furnishings and imagery intact.51 In contrast to the unostenta-

tious series of corbel-stone reliefs in the Mechelen Schepenhuis, we are faced
here with a magnificent showpiece featuring the Nine Worthies.52 Three large
pointed-shaped stained-glass windows – with five figures on the wider central
one, and the others paired on the sides – adorn the southern wall of the oldest
hall of the Rathaus, the so-called Gerichtslaube, originally novum consistorium
(fig. 6.7). A record of payment in the sum of 10 marks made in 1434 to an anony-
mous glass painter for unspecified work on the windows – conveniently, and
tellingly, designates the space as unser heren sale, “our lords’ hall.”53 Created
c.1410, these windows are indeed remarkable: they represent the only known
treatment of the Nine Worthies theme in the medium, and the only monu-
mental secular stained-glass cycle of the medieval period still in situ.54
As with our previous examples, the persuasive intent of the Nine Worthies
images in the Gerichtslaube lies in generating a feeling of presence; though,
given the specific possibilities provided by stained glass, this time it is a pres-
ence of a distanced, elevated, even numinous nature. The corporeal and
mimetic qualities of limestone statuary are substituted here for ethereal semi-
transparency of the surface, clearly bringing to mind an association with a
prestigious class of church imagery. The flash of brilliant colored light in the
focal area of the hall produces a sensation of a quasi-sacred epiphany, a power-
ful apparitio regis. The skillful technique of combining colored and grisaille
glass pieces, as well as the subtle and differentiated application of contours
and modeling,55 prompt the effect of partial dematerialization and enhance
the images’ aura of magnificence.56
51 For a concise architectural history of the town hall, a large conglomerate of buildings
dating from the 14th to the 18th centuries, see Stephan Albrecht, Mittelalterliche Rathäuser
(see above, note 7), pp. 100-03.
52 Rüdiger Becksmann, “Lüneburg, Rathaus,” in Die mittelalterlichen Glasmalereien in Lüne
burg und den Heideklöstern, Corpus vitrearum medii aevi Deutschland VII, 2, eds. Rüdiger
Becksmann and Ulf-Dietrich Korn (Berlin, 1992), pp. 80-130; Madeline H. Caviness, “The
Law (En)acted: Performative Space in the Town Hall of Lüneburg,” in Glas. Malerei.
Forschung. Internationale Studien zu Ehren von Rüdiger Becksmann, eds. Hartmut Scholz,
Ivo Rauch, and Daniel Hess (Berlin, 2004), pp. 181-90.
53 Rüdiger Becksmann, Lüneburg, Rathaus, p. 82.
54 Ibid., p. 89.
55 Ibid., pp. 95-96.
56 That the concept of magnificence, usually associated with princely milieux, was indeed
of central concern to the magistrates is borne out by the tradition of the ceremonial
display of the city councils’ collections of silverware. Remarkably, it is the Ratssilber of
Lüneburg that is the best preserved group of such objects with more than 30 pieces dating
to the 15th-early 17th centuries, conserved at the Kunstgewerbe Museum in Berlin. Stefan
Incidentally, the benches of the 24 council members were located right next
to these windows (the corresponding segment of the floor, which largely pre-
serves its original tiling, was actually equipped with a warm-air-heating system
– pipenoven).57 Bearing in mind that one arrived in the hall from the opposite,
northern end, the city fathers clearly sought to appear enshrouded by the
luminescent, shimmering vision of the nine heroes.
Apart from the customary heraldic shields, the Worthies can be identified
by means of inscriptions in two languages. Their names conveyed in German
vernacular above their heads, while Latin distychs on pictorial plinths at the
feet of the figures adduce brief descriptions of their deeds and victories.
Whereas three of the distychs have been fully or partially lost, or ended up
jumbled up after the windows’ restoration in 1853, others remain more or less
readable. Textual messages in Latin likewise appear in the banderoles of the
diminutive figures of the prophets, or historic authorities, accompanying the
main group of the Nine Worthies in the manner of the auctoritates that we
have mentioned in our discussion of the Hansasaal of the Cologne town hall.58
Positioned above the Nine Worthies (in the two sections of the crowning rose
of the central window, and the quatrefoils of the side windows), clad in schol-
arly robes and caps, their half-figures are supplemented by the coats of arms of
the town and the dukedom. Moreover, these exemplary teachers and the armo-
rials multiply in the stained-glass windows of the adjacent eastern wall of the
hall. Providing the Nine Worthies with a rhetorical framework of moral admon-
ishment, the wise dictums (credited in some cases to named figures like Cicero
and Seneca, and quoting in others from the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah)
emphasize the judicial and civic virtues of the heroes.59
Bursche, ed., Das Lüneburger Ratssilber (see above, note 49; reworked new edition, Berlin,
2008). On magnificence as a princely virtue, see Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the
Renaissance. Burgundian Arts across Europe (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 48-58.
57 Stephan Albrecht, Mittelalterliche Rathäuser, p. 101.
58 All inscriptions are cited, with modern German translations, by Rüdiger Becksmann,
Lüneburg, Rathaus, pp. 99-117.
59 To give an idea of the language and content of the wise men’s sayings, it is worthwhile to
quote a number of them (with loose translations based on Becksmann’s citations):
“Isaiah. Wisdom and knowledge are treasures of Salvation.” (Isaias · consilium · et ·
sapiencia · diviciae · sunt · salutis ·). Ibid., p. 99, 2a; “We’re not born for ourselves only, but
for the others too [Cato or Plato]” (non · nob(is) · solu(m) · nati · sumus · sed · …ie · eciam · et
· a(lteris) · …o). Ibid., p. 100, 2c. “Those who take the office of a judge must give up on
friendship. Tullius” (Deponat · p(er)sona(m) · amici · q(ui) · induit · p(er)sona(m) · iudicis ·
Tullius ·). Ibid., p. 104, 2a.
230 Egorov
Reinforcing the situation of a personal engagement with pictorial reality,

the distychs below the Nine Worthies make each protagonist address the
viewer directly in the first person singular.60 Godfrey of Bouillon, for example,
proclaims about his feats as the leader of the First Crusade: “I defended the
sepulcher of the Lord of Heavens across the sea, so that the faith would attain
lasting strength.”61 King Arthur adds his own lines: “My royal court glistens
with eulogies, now it is the honor and adornment of women,”62 and so comple-
ments the triumphs on the exotic battlefield with the celebration of courtly
sexuality. In contrast to other inscriptions, an immediate reference to the local
memoria and civic identity is provided by Julius Caesar: “I have erected the
town of the moon, an imposing fortress, and single-handedly slashed Pompey
with a sword.”63 The first part of the phrase is an invocation of the founding
myth of Lüneburg: it was believed that Caesar had a statue of the goddess Luna
put on the Kalkberg, and the town would grow around the shrine.64 In this way,
the widely held reverence for the Nine Worthies had a very particular local
resonance for the civic government of Lüneburg.
Noticeably, the respective positions of the three triads of the Nine Worthies
pictured in the Gerichtslaube were subject to simple yet effective manipula-
tion, so that the Christian emperor Charlemagne, here beardless, was given
“center stage,” with Godfrey and Arthur flanking him. We could read this com-
positional gesture as an expression of allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor;
after all, at the time Charlemagne was considered a mythic, saintly hero, a
Christian potentate par excellence.65 While the presence of the coats of arms of
the Saxon dukes – the intermediaries between the commune and the Kaiser –
assures the necessary hierarchical decorum, the shifting of the Frankish leader
60 As noted above, this mode of address was also used in the Worthies’ inscriptions in the La
Manta frescoes.
61 Ibid., p. 109, 1-4b: trans · mare celoru(m) regis arceo (?) · sepulcru(m) · / Ut · robur · sumat ·
iugitur · ego · fides ·
62 Ibid., p. 112, 1-4d: Curia ·regalis · mea · fulget laudib(us) · illa · / nu(n)c · decus · est · femi
neusque · decor ·
63 Ibid., pp. 112-14, 1-4e: urbis · co(n)struxi · lune · spectabile · castru(m) / Et · mea · pompeium ·
sincopat · ense · manus
64 Ibid., pp. 112-14, and note 100. For a study of the legend, and the marble column (preserved
in the Museum Lüneburg) that allegedly belonged to the Luna shrine, see Klaus Alpers,
“Die Luna-Säule auf dem Kalkberge. Alter, Herkunft und Wirkung einer Lüneburger
Tradition,” Lüneburger Blätter 25/26 (1982), 87-121.
65 On Charlemagne’s posthumous reputation, see Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey, eds.,
The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages. Power, Faith, and Crusade (New York,
2008).
Figure 6.8
Cord Lange, Burgomaster of
Lüneburg. C.1491. One of the
four figures depicted on the
stained-glass window of the
Bürgermeister-Körkammer,
Lüneburg town hall (Photo:
Corpus Vitrearum
Deutschland, Freiburg im
Breisgau).
232 Egorov
to the dominant position in the Nine Worthies group could be an allusive affir-
mation of the town’s de facto direct subordination to the German king and
emperor, and the eschewal of the expelled dukes’ political proxy.
However, the strong psychological motivation for picturing the Nine
Worthies in the Lüneburg town hall (just as in town halls elsewhere) manifests
itself in another image, found in the room immediately adjoining the Gerichts
laube to the west: the so-called Bürgermeister-Körkammer. The chamber, se
questered from the main hall not with one door, but with three of them,
warranted security because it was reserved for the election of burgomasters
and private council, as well as for custody of municipal accounts and contracts.
About 80 years after the Nine Worthies windows had been installed in the
Gerichtslaube, the four-sectioned window of the southern wall of the burgo-
masters’ chamber was also adorned with stained glass (fig. 6.8).66
Its subject is a group of four figures standing upright beside each other, with
heraldic shields underneath, and hovering banderoles with inscriptions pro-
fessing ethical maxims. These men, appropriately dressed in long fur-lined
mantels and leather shoes in clogs, are the four burgomasters of Lüneburg who
were in office in the 1490-91 term. Personal armorials serve to identify their
names: Dietmar Sanckenstede (Ratsherr, or councilman, since 1482, burgomas-
ter since 1487), Cord Lange (councilman since 1474, burgomaster since 1486)
(fig. 6.8), Nikolaus Sanckenstede (councilman since 1458, burgomaster since
1467), and Jakob Schomaker (councilman since 1479, burgomaster since 1491).67
The robes of all except Lange are red, while the latter is donned in black
66 For the description of the Bürgermeister-Körkammer, as well as technical and iconographic

analysis of its stained-glass window, see Rüdiger Becksmann, Lüneburg, Rathaus, pp. 119-
23. Becksmann dates the stained glass to 1491 and connects it with the workshop of the
glazier Gerd Wulff (Ibid., p. 121).
67 Ibid., p. 120, and note 117. The inscriptions are as follows: Dietmar Sanckenstede: “Your
responsibility is to think wisely, not try to envision; God, however, is able to look and
foresee the things to come.” (Istud · est · sapere · non est · videre · sed de(u)s · [non] modo ·
[pot]est · videre · sed · eciam · futu[rum praescire]). Ibid., p. 122, 1a; – Cord Lange: “Every
wrong-doing can easily be eradicated at the outset, but it mostly grows strong when pun-
ished.” (Omne · malum enascens · facile · opprimitur · mulctatu(m) · pleru(m) · que fit ·
robustius). Ibid., pp. 122-23, 1b; – Nickolaus Sanckenstede: “The foundation of an endur-
ing community and a good name is always justice, without it nothing can be praisewor-
thy.” (Fundame(n)tum · enim · est · perpetue com(un)ionis et · fame iusticia sine · qua ·nichel
potest · esse · laudabile). Ibid., pp. 123, 1c; – Jakob Schomaker: Sui · adipisci · vera(m) ·
iusticie · gloriam … officiis. Ibid, p. 123, 1d. Becksmann points out that due to a preservation
flaw, the inscription has not been satisfactorily translated yet, though he quotes an
attempt made by W. Reinecke, finding it “little convincing.” Ibid, p. 123, note 129.
and holds a scroll: attributes distinguishing him as the ruling burgomaster of

1490.68
Notwithstanding the losses (among the faces of the four figures, for instance,
only that of Lange is original, and interestingly, it betrays individualized por-
trait features), these stained-glass likenesses must be considered important
precursors of the tradition of civic group portraiture, as well as individual
burgomaster portraits hung in town hall galleries in later periods. What is
interesting in our context is that the burgomasters’ depictions in the Körkammer
directly evoke the neighboring Nine Worthies: in the choice of expensive, opu-
lent medium, in the full-figure composition and hieratic postures, in the
authority-exuding accompanying inscriptions, and key iconographic attri-
butes such as their coats of arms. Both the Nine Worthies and the burgomasters’
windows are positioned at the south side of the town hall in sheer spatial prox-
imity, a fact that accentuates their symbolic symmetry. Furthermore, seen
from the street at the time when the interiors would be candlelit, these stained-
glass windows must have produced a spectacular unified vision.
That being said, the window of the Körkammer commemorated, celebrated,
and, as it were, eternalized real individuals who had the power and financial
resources to produce the prestigious work. In this “staff only” room, kept under
lock and key for most visitors to the town hall, the idea of personal mimesis is
foregrounded in a bold visual stratagem. It bears witness to the transformative
power of the Nine Worthies and their compelling, optically exciting represen-
tation. In an ambitious drive for imitation, the four city leaders went as far as
to acquire a pictorial – and aesthetic – dimension themselves. “Charisma stim-
ulates imitation,” as Jaeger reminds us, “the greater model remakes the lesser
in its own image; the devotee’s desire activates the chemistry of higher re-
formation.”69
In conclusion, it should be noted that the 16th century has not lost interest
in the Nine Worthies – as attested, for instance, by the impressive and influen-
tial series of prints by Hans Burgkmair of Augsburg (1516-19), Lucas van Leyden
(1518-22), and later Virgil Solis of Nuremberg (1530-62).70 But with the advent of
68 The words Omisse…est (“… to be left out …”) can be seen on the scroll. Becksmann
indicates that the officials are placed on the heraldic right and left relative to the ruling
burgomaster in accordance with the seniority principle, based on the length of each one’s
continuous service. Ibid., p. 120.
69 C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 137.
70 Complete sets are preserved, respectively, at the Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden (Inv. A
2027-2032, series includes the Nine Female Worthies); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Inv.
RP-P-BI-6236M, J, O); The British Museum, London (Inv. 1868, 0822.283-291, the museum
also holds assorted sheets by Solis forming the complete series of the Female Worthies).
234 Egorov
Figure 6.9 Albert von Soest. King Darius flanked by Temperance and Patience. 1564-84. Right
pillar of the main portal, Grosse Ratsstube, Lüneburg town hall (Photo: Nieder-
sächsisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Fotosammlung).
both the Northern humanism and Protestantism, the overall system of com-
munal iconography has experienced a perceptible shift – learned motifs and
subjects were multiplied, but, as Stephan Albrecht argues, quite often they
were in fact transferred from didactic handbooks on princely government and
grouped without apparent reference to the specifically civic, or “republican,”
and local concerns.71 By contrast, precisely such concerns and individual aspi-
rations were central to the magistrates in search of legitimate identity who
commissioned and looked at the 14th- to 15th-century images that we have
discussed.
One of the most ingenious examples of civic artwork commissioned by
magistrates in the 16th century also features the Nine Worthies, and we do not
need to leave the town hall of Lüneburg to find it. The familiar characters can
be seen on the two rotating figural pillars of oak-wood forming part of the
main portal of the Large Council Chamber of the Rathaus (fig. 6.9). The mas-
terly carved wooden decoration of this entire room, including these pillars,
was carried out by the local sculptor Albert von Soest in the 1560s-1580s.72 The
Worthies are positioned in niches, surrounded by the female personifications
of the virtues and dense grotesque ornamentation. On closer inspection, how-
ever, one notices that Joshua and Charlemagne happened to be replaced by the
Persian kings Cyrus and Darius (named by inscriptions) – historic figures of
rather notorious standing in the classical tradition (fig. 6.9). Meanwhile, their
coats of arms seem to belong to the original proprietors. Could it be that this
confusion signals a gradual disenchantment with the singularity of the Nine
Worthies, the “dissipation” of their charisma – a different, or more accurately,
indifferent, attitude?
This was certainly the case in early modern Cologne, where the names of
the heroes depicted in the Hansasaal would be forgotten for generations (fig.
6.10).73 Until the middle of the 19th century, the only concerned opinion was
that the warrior figures stood for the representatives of the member-cities of
the Hanseatic League. A sentimental scene painted by the artist Georg
Osterwald in 1846 – set in the sunny Gothic hall with nine colorful sculptures,
sometime in a distant medieval past – finally signals a renewed appeal of this
space and its adornments, albeit a nostalgic one.74
71 Stephan Albrecht, “Rathaus” (see above, note 10), pp. 277-78.

72 Hans Wentzel, Die Lüneburger Ratsstube von Albert von Soest (Hamburg, 1947); Maike G.
Haupt, Die Große Ratsstube im Lüneburger Rathaus (1564-1584). Selbstdarstellung einer
protestantischen Obrigkeit (Marburg, 2000).
73 Walter Geis, Die Neun Guten Helden, pp. 404, 406. The figures were correctly identified as
representing the Nine Worthies in 1858, on the eve of the Hansasaal’s extensive restoration.
74 Ibid., p. 404.
236 Egorov
Figure 6.10 Georg Osterwald. The Hansasaal of the Cologne town hall. 1846. Oil on canvas.
Potsdam, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Inv. Nr. GK
I 7782 (Photo: Roland Handrick, Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und
Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg).
Returning to our initial question: why were the Nine Worthies so beloved by
the Northern European town authorities in the later Middle Ages? After all, we
should take into account that the allegedly perfect knights were not regarded
as blameless by everyone: their reputations invited skepticism or even irony.
Already in the 1320s, Jan Van Boendale – a town clerk in Antwerp – complained
that it would have been more appropriate if Octavian had taken place among
the three best pagans, as he was obviously “better” than his uncle Julius
Caesar.75 Moreover, powerful heroes and rulers have commonly been associ-
ated with vainglory, as well as the transitory nature of earthly sovereignty.
Apparently, these controversies only helped to enroot the concept of the Nine
Worthies deeper in the collective imagination of the Late Middle Ages – made
their aristocratic gloss even more fascinating, and so more susceptible to
exploitation in political propaganda.
If we think which of Max Weber’s three forms of legitimate rule were avail-
able to the German and Netherlandish civic governments of the age, we would
undoubtedly detect features of both the legal and the traditional authority in
their oligarchic regimes.76 What it seems the communal officials consciously
lacked was personal charismatic authority – and they wished to attain it with
the help of pictorial rhetoric and agency, not least of all by appealing to the
cultural ideal of the nine exemplary heroes of times past, a hauntingly sublime
image borrowed from a higher social milieu. They strived towards it, however
intricately this had to be rationalized and morally justified along the way.
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240 Egorov
Part 3
Dazzling Reflections: Charismatic Art and
Its Audience
∵
242 Egorov
Charisma and the Ideal Viewer in Nicetas Choniates’s De signis 243
Chapter 7
Charisma and the Ideal Viewer in Nicetas

Choniates’s De signis
Paroma Chatterjee
Some time after the momentous events of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, a
Byzantine historian set himself to write an account of his land.1 The Historia is
the most important eyewitness report in Greek of the mayhem wreaked by the
Crusaders on Constantinople. Nicetas Choniates – courtier, rhetorician, and
chronicler – was outraged that the Latins had sacked his city and the Byzantine
empire instead of directing their ire toward the Saracens occupying the Holy
Land as they should have done. The attack on Byzantium was as unexpected as
it was violent, and the ensuing bitterness on the part of the Orthodox Greeks
against the Latins is well captured in the Historia. Although parts of the chron-
icle serve as a devastating critique of the state of Byzantium itself, particularly
under some of the more colorful characters of the ruling house of Komnenos,2
the work culminates in a savage denunciation of the Crusaders, made all the
more damning by Choniates’s brilliant rhetoric. Indeed, the entire Historia, as
Anthony Kaldellis has shown, is a virtuoso piece of writing, strewn with gram-
matical reversals and rhetorical paradoxes.3 This is utterly appropriate on the
part of an author who was profoundly disturbed by the unnatural reversals of
recent history in which Christians (Catholics) could turn on their fellow
(Orthodox) Christians for mercenary gain. Rhetorical form, in this case, rein-
forces content with a dramatic force.
1 Nicetas Choniates, Historia, trans. Harry J. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas
Choniates (Detroit, 1984). All passages discussed in this essay are drawn from Magoulias’s
translation and referred to as Historia followed by the appropriate number marking the pas-
sage and the page on which it occurs. These numbers correspond to the definitive edition
of the Historia by J.A. Van Dieten (Berlin, 1975). For an analysis of the manuscript tradition of
the Historia, see Alicia J. Simpson, “Before and after 1204: The Versions of Niketas Choniates’s
Historia,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006), 189-221.
2 Anthony Kaldellis, “Paradox, Reversal and the Meaning of History,” Niketas Choniates.
A Historian and a Writer, eds. Alicia Simpson and Stephanos Efthymiadis (Geneva, 2009),
pp. 77-101.
3 Kaldellis, “Paradox, Reversal and the Meaning of History,” pp. 77-101.

244 Chatterjee
But it is in the coda to the Historia, known to scholars as the De signis,4 that
Choniates deploys the trope of reversal to particularly interesting effects,
thereby disclosing his conception of the city of Constantinople as a charged,
charismatic space undone by the marauding Latins. If the medieval concep-
tion of charisma comprises the sense of “authority granted by remarkable
moral and spiritual gifts,”5 then Constantinople was certainly deserving of that
epithet. For one, it was a veritable treasure-trove of some of the most precious
relics of Christendom such as the pieces of the True Cross, the nails with which
Christ was pinned, the lance with which he was pierced, and even drops of the
Holy Blood, among others, which were housed in the imperial chapel of the
Pharos and in numerous other churches and shrines throughout the city.6 This
cache of relics alone bestowed a tremendous charisma on the spaces within
which they resided. But no less significant were the icons – some of them of
miraculous manufacture and/or capable of working miracles of their own –
that invested Constantinople, and Byzantium, with the aura of an enviable
prestige and grace. Hans Belting went so far as to argue that Byzantine icons
were regarded as relics in medieval Italy; hence the well-remarked similarities
between Italian duecento painting and Byzantine art.7 Furthermore, the
accounts of pilgrims, diplomats, and tourists to the city over centuries describe
it as a wondrous, surpassingly beautiful, and awe-inspiring place, redolent
with charisma. Indeed, a leitmotif of the crusading chronicles themselves is
that of wonder at the rich and mighty city the soldiers had successfully laid
4 For studies on the De signis, see Anthony Cutler, “The De signis of Nicetas Choniates.
A Reappraisal,” American Journal of Archaeology (April, 1968), 113-18; E. Mathiopoulou-
Tornaritou, “Klassiches und Klassizistiches Statuenfragment von Niketas Choniates,” Byzan
tinische Zeitschrift 73 (1980), 25-40; Titos Papamastorakis, “Interpreting the De signis of Niketas
Choniates,” in Niketas Choniates. A Historian and a Writer, eds. Alicia Simpson and Stephanos
Efthymiadis (Geneva, 2009), pp. 209-24; and Paroma Chatterjee, “Sculpted Eloquence and
Niketas Choniates’s De signis,” Word & Image 27, no. 4 (2011), 396-406.
5 Paul Binski, “Reflections on the ‘Wonderful Height and Size’ of Gothic Great Churches and
the Medieval Sublime,” in Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics, ed. C. Stephen
Jaeger (New York, 2010), p. 130.
6 See Holger A. Klein, “Sacred Relics and Imperial Ceremonies at the Great Palace of Con
stantinople,” Visualisierungen von Herrschaft, ed. F.A. Bauer, BYZAS 5 (2006), 79-99; and George
Majeska, “Russian Pilgrims in Constantinople,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002), 93-108.
7 Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings
of the Passion, trans. M. Bartusis and R. Meyer (New Rochelle, 1990), p. 216. A compelling cri-
tique of Belting’s argument may be found in Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late
Medieval Italy. Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (New York, 1996).
siege to, so much so that “brave as they might be, every man shivered at the
sight.”8
The quality of charisma features no less prominently in Choniates’s De sig-
nis where it is deployed, interestingly, as an essential component not of
Byzantine relics and icons, but of pagan and pre-Christian statues. The account
is almost exclusively devoted to the descriptions of these images which graced
the public spaces of Constantinople, and which were brutally destroyed or
mutilated by the Crusaders. Herakles, Helen of Troy, and various birds and
beasts appear in all their glory, only to be razed to the ground by the invaders.
The descriptions are breathtakingly evocative, framed as they are in the rhe-
torical mode of ekphrasis. Ancient rhetorical handbooks such as the Pro
gymnasmata define an ekphrasis as the description of an event, a place, a
period, an image, or a person which brings the subject (the event, place, image,
and so forth) vividly before the eyes of the listener or reader.9 A successful
ekphrasis engaged the recipient not simply as one receiving a text (whether in
oral or written form), but also as a participant in the unfolding narrative. The
peculiar power of ekphrasis to render verbal descriptions graphically alive
often led to the deliberate overstepping of the boundaries separating art and
nature, such that a statue or an object was presented as being the ‘real’ thing.
This sort of reversal is entirely natural to an ekphrastic description – and as we
shall see, Herakles, Helen, and others are invested with similarly uncanny life-
like qualities in the De signis. In such a capacity, then, ekphrasis assumed the
mantle of a verbal competitor of reality and of the visual arts, striving to cap-
ture the vividness of the latter through words. Ekphrasis was a staple of
Byzantine rhetorical training and amply evident in various other literary
genres as well. Hence, it is no surprise that one as skilled in the art of rhetoric
as Choniates should wield it in a work so heavily dominated by the theme of
reversals.
8 Geoffroy de Villehardouin, “The Conquest of Constantinople,” in Joinville and Villehardouin:

Chronicles of the Crusades (New York, repr., 1985), p. 128. See also the essays by Ruth Macrides,
“Constantinople: The Crusaders’ Gaze,” pp. 193-212, and Albrecht Berger, “Sightseeing in
Constantinople: Arab Travelers, c. 900-1300,” pp. 179-91; Travel in the Byzantine World. Papers
from the Thirty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. Ruth Macrides (Aldershot,
2002).
9 The literature on ekphrasis is vast. A few recent works on Byzantine ekphrasis are Ruth Webb,
Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Burlington,
VT, 2009); Webb, “Accomplishing the Picture: Ekphrasis, Mimesis, and Martyrdom in Asterios
of Amaseia,” Art and Text in Byzantine Culture, ed. Liz James (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 13-32; and
Paroma Chatterjee, “Viewing and Description in Hysmine and Hysminias: The Fresco of the
Virtues,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 67 (2013), 209-25.
246 Chatterjee
And in doing so, he imputes a specific charisma to the statues he mentions.

For if the quality of charisma resides in the weakening of distinctions between
life and art, as C. Stephen Jaeger has argued, then Choniates’s ekphrastic effu-
sions endow the statues with precisely that quality. No mere confections of
bronze or stone, they seem at times to depict Herakles himself, cloaked in his
lion skin, and Helen herself, lips invitingly parted, “anointed with the moist-
ness of erotic love.”10 In discussing this dimension of charisma, Jaeger cites
Charles Sanders Peirce who observed that, “In contemplating a painting, there
is a moment when we lose consciousness that it is not the real thing; the
distinction of the real and the copy vanishes …”11 Choniates’s ekphrases serve
– or at least attempt – to blur the distinctions between the real and the repre-
sented.
But even more than their seeming life-likeness, some of the statues actively
strive to cast a protective aura over the city. Just so does the magnificent sculp-
ture of an eagle triumphing over a snake ward off poisonous reptiles and snake
bites from Constantinople. Beguiling forms and apotropaic functions, thus,
work together in some of these statues to make their effects felt in tangible
ways as powerfully charismatic objects in the cityscape. Furthermore, as we
shall see, Choniates takes care to outline the ancient lineage of these images,
mentioning their manufacturers (Apollonios of Tyana, in one case) or their
depictions of events from antiquity. Their great age is construed as part of their
intrinsic charisma; the Latins’ assault on them, as the unfortunate stemming of
their centuries-long existence.
This essay argues that by investing Constantinople’s ancient statues with a
charismatic aura and a historical resonance, Choniates frames his text as a
polemic in which the Latins are posited as being unsusceptible to charisma
and, therefore, deprived of historical consciousness. The inability, or refusal, to
submit to the demands of charisma results in the disruption of historical con-
tinuity, as the Latins did by invading Byzantium. (Sometimes, though, one
wonders whether Choniates protests too much; in at least one instance, as will
be shown later in this essay, he seems to credit the Latins with an awareness
– even if a dim one – of a particular statue’s charismatic potential, and their
destruction of the piece seems to be calculated to neutralize its dangerous
power.) The appreciation of charisma here is tightly interwoven with an ideal
model of viewership which, in turn, is construed as having its foundations in a
classical education (paideia). Choniates implicitly prescribes a model of
10 Choniates, Historia, 652. p. 360.

viewing which entails knowledge of ancient rhetoric and history; without this
training, the full force of charisma upon the viewer is lost. The Latins are con-
tinually presented as a people devoid of such knowledge. Their ignorance of
the traditions of the Romans allows them to desecrate Romania with no com-
punction. In addition, their absolute imperviousness to the charisma of images
spurs them on to acts of total destruction. Choniates laments that while
in olden times, the victors in battle were motivated by fellow feeling and
chose not to nurse hatreds forever; hence, they erected trophies of wood
and small stones that would stand but a short while and then crumble,
for they were memorials … Nowadays, as evidence of their victories, the
barbarians … have invented the razing of cities and total ruin.12
The creation of images, it is implied, is an important step toward cultivating an

appreciation of them and of nurturing a sense of humanity, one that does not
“nurse hatreds forever.”13 Viewing these small trophies while they stand, fur-
ther leads to the cultivation of memory, a sense of the past, and knowledge of
the contingency of victory. But instead of engaging in the creative act of erect-
ing victory memorials (and all that it entails in terms of memory, historical
consciousness, and the cultivation of fellow feeling for one’s enemies), the
Latins instead rampage over the city and reduce it to rubble.
Yet another reason why the Latins remain unmoved by charisma is their
love of money.14 Choniates misses no opportunity of castigating them as a peo-
ple fatally attracted by base currency, willing to sell off their own wives for the
sake of it. Coin is pitted against charisma as its very opposite. Where the latter
is rooted in the Greek term charis, or grace, a quantity without measure and
difficult to obtain, believed to animate sacred relics, icons, and even human
beings such that they manifest the presence of the divine, coin is measurable,
easily copied, and capable of being circulated in inferior imitations. More
importantly, where charis has the additional meaning of “gratitude” and “a
favor bestowed,”15 thus entailing a reciprocal relationship between the giver of
charisma and its recipient who is thus favored in exchange for a vow or a prayer,
coin, in Choniates’s chronicle, never enters into an honorable exchange. The
Latins duly pilfer all the gold and silver they can lay their hands on, “consider-
12 Choniates, Historia, 635, pp. 347-48.

13 Choniates, Historia, 635, p. 347.
14 See the observations in Chatterjee, “Sculpted Eloquence,” pp. 397-99.
15 See the entry for charis and charisma in Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English
Lexicon (Oxford, imp. 2003), pp. 882-83.
248 Chatterjee
ing themselves to be guiltless … since they were only receiving what was owed
them …”16 Indeed, coin is not exchanged for a quantity that is equal (or even
inferior) to it in value at all; rather, it is brutally wrested from the city’s treasur-
ies and statuary by the marauders who give nothing back in return, not even
the victory memorials of wood and stone mentioned above. Furthermore, coin
is obtained in these circumstances through the very acts of complete destruc-
tion that mark the Latins out as barbarians for it is through the dissolution of
bronze statuary that currency is minted. By melting the statues, the Latins
transform the mighty, the unique, and the whole into the small, the frag-
mented, and the reproducible. Their love of gold, along with their ignorance of
the classical tradition, cuts them off from the effects of charisma and causes
them to staunch the course of an ancient civilization.
In what follows, I shall perform a close reading of the De signis in order to
disclose the ways in which Choniates weaves his polemic around the pivotal
subject of charisma. Apart from examining the specific components of charis-
matic images as presented in the text, I will focus on two extended passages
describing, in the first instance, the statue of an eagle battling a snake and in
the second, an image of Helen of Troy. A comparative study of these descrip-
tions reveals the tight nexus spun between rhetorical excellence, historical
consciousness, and the appreciation of charisma. Moreover, the descriptions
also reveal that charisma, for Choniates, is not a uniform quality but one that
differs in degree and kind from image to image. Correspondingly, he prescribes
subtle but important differences in the process of viewing them. While the
sculpture of the eagle and the snake promises to captivate the viewer to the
point of transfixing him or her with amazement, Helen’s statue invites a rather
more calibrated response in which full-fledged surrender is not the ideal to
aspire toward. Instead, Helen’s statue encapsulates an inherent struggle
between the charisma of images and that of words in which the latter, specifi-
cally, are posited as bearing a dangerous edge. Finally, I consider the reasons
why statues are so prominently favored as the bearers of charisma in the De
signis, and not Christian relics and icons.
Charisma in Public Spaces
Choniates begins the De signis with an invocation of the religious authority of

the newly-arrived Venetian patriarch, Tommaso Morosini.17 Declaring con-

temptuously that he was “fatter than a hog,”18 Choniates describes his

clean-shaven face, his hairless chest, and some of his accoutrements, thus dis-
playing an eye for detail and close viewing where human beings are concerned.
This serves as a prelude to the notes on the statues to come, in which Choniates
exhibits his descriptive powers to the full. Next on the list is the sacking of the
Heroon by the Latins, who broke open the tombs of the Byzantine emperors
and looted the jewels buried therein.19 Even though they looked upon the per-
fectly preserved corpse of Emperor Justinian as a miracle, it did not prevent
them from plundering his sepulcher. The refusal to be moved by miracles and
the concomitant disdain of wonder on the part of the Latins is a constant leit-
motif of the epilogue. ‘Wonder’ is posited as an essential component of
charisma, and the willingness to yield to it an integral aspect of the ideal
viewer. The Latins fail to achieve this ideal, even when they are capable of
appreciating a miracle.
The account goes on to describe the desecration of the Great Church but,
interestingly, not in any detail. Choniates contents himself with mentioning
the gold and silver-encrusted ciborium of the church, weighing tens of thou-
sands of pounds, which was pulled down by the Latins.20 It is surely significant
that this event is dispensed with in a couple of sentences, and without a word
regarding the fate of the holy icons and relics that might have been similarly
defiled in the church. This maneuver serves to underscore the sheer material
wealth of Constantinople, but it also highlights the narrative weight reserved
for statues in the space that follows. Having thus begun with a genuflection to
the religious and imperial authorities of Byzantium, Choniates swiftly moves
to the subject that occupies the rest of the epilogue and displays the full force
of his rhetorical expertise.
The statues are described in prose that both celebrates their magnificence
and laments their loss. Part of their charisma lies in their tremendous size or
height. Equestrian statues of “heroic form and admirable size,”21 mechanical
devices placed at heights that nearly reached those of the tallest columns, a
head of Hera that “could barely be carted off by four yokes of oxen,”22 so enor-
mous was it, and a statue of Herakles “mighty in his mightiness,”23 so large that
a cord the size of a man’s belt was required merely to encircle its thumb, fea-

250 Chatterjee
ture among the sights presented to the reader. The trope of size was common
enough and particularly fitting to Constantinople. Visitors’ accounts of the city
attest to the grandeur of its monuments and the sky-scraping extremities of its
columns. So impressive was this last feature to al-Harawi in the 12th century,
that he expressed a wish for Constantinople to become the capital of Islam.24
As Fabio Barry has tellingly pointed out, the skyline of the city was a source of
continual marvel to Western travelers as well and it was, ironically, just below
the Diplokionion, or the “twin columns” on the harbor of the western shore of
the Bosporus that the Latin fleet moored before they attacked the city, the col-
umns being well-known landmarks.25
But quite apart from size and height, it is the intimation of life in the city’s
public statuary that evokes their ancient origins and grants them a unique
appeal. This holds not just for the figurative statues depicting the heroes and
goddesses of yore, but also for purely mechanical contraptions such as the
Anemodoulion.26 This was a complicated weather-vane, a four-sided pyrami-
dal monument carved with images of melodious birds, bleating sheep,
bounding lambs, a lavish marinescape complete with swimming fish, and
Erotes pelting each other with apples as they shook with laughter, as Choniates
has it. Even grotesque characters such as the Sphinxes (“comely women in the
front and horrible beasts in their hind parts”), and Scylla, depicted as leaning
forward and on the brink of leaping into Odysseus’s ship and devouring his
companions, are thrilling to look at because of their intensely life-like qualities
as figured by our historian’s prose.27
The Voices of Statues
One of the most eloquent testimonies to the moving, living element evident
in the statues is the description of the eagle vanquishing the snake mentioned
above. This ensemble was placed atop a column in the Hippodrome. It is
worth quoting Choniates at some length in order to appreciate the descriptive
24 See the comments of Marc D. Lauxtermann, “Constantine’s City: Constantine the Rhodian
and the Beauty of Constantinople,” in Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art. Papers
from the Forty-Second Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, eds. Antony Eastmond and
Liz James (Aldershot, 2013), p. 126.
25 Fabio Barry, “Disiecta membra: Ranieri Zeno, the Imitation of Constantinople, the Spolia
Style, and Justice at San Marco,” in San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice, eds.
Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson (Washington, DC, 2010), pp. 10-11.
nuances of the passage and its encapsulation of a specific mode of viewership

which apparently eluded the Latins. Choniates claims that the eagle was
depicted with
wings [were] aflap as though attempting flight, while a coiled snake

clutched in his claws prevented its being carried aloft by striking out at
the winged extremities of his body. But the venomous creature accom-
plished nothing, for, transfixed by the sharp claws, its attack was smoth-
ered, and it appeared to be drowsy rather than ready to give battle to the
bird by clinging to its wings. While the snake breathed its last and expired
with its venom unspent, the eagle exulted and, all but screeching out his
victory song, hastened to lift up the serpent and bore it aloft to leave no
doubt as to the outcome by the flashing of his eyes and the serpent’s mor-
tification. It was said that the very sight of the snake uncoiled and inca-
pable of delivering a deadly bite frightened away, by its example, the
remaining serpents in Byzantion, convincing them to curl up and fill
their holes. This eagle’s likeness was remarkable …28
The passage unfolds a dynamic narrative through the medium of the sculp-
tures under view. Beginning with the account of an incipient battle between
reptile and bird in which the former, enmeshed in the claws of the latter, resists
being carried off, the description switches to a victory song on behalf of the
eagle. The snake, even as it attacks, “accomplishes nothing,”29 appearing to
sink into an eternal sleep under the strength of its winged foe while the eagle,
now on the brink of triumph, apparently manages to “lift up the serpent”30 and
bear it aloft. Notice how the passage encompasses a series of dizzying reversals
following swiftly one upon the other: the snake is said to be “coiled” and strik-
ing out at the wings of the eagle, while a few lines later the sight of the snake
“uncoiled,” drowsy, and “incapable of delivering a deadly bite” is supposed to
have been responsible for frightening away serpents.31 Abrupt changes in the
sequence of events are not the only contradictions played out here; they are
also evident in the vivid tension imparted to the actions of the protagonists.
The eagle strains to rise up in flight but is chained to the ground by the snake;
however, at the end, the eagle does succeed in lifting itself, bearing its heavy
burden in its claws. The snake, for all its hapless state, embraces the eagle in a

252 Chatterjee
near-deadly clasp (it strikes out at the very extremities of the eagle’s form), but
it finally, and fatally, uncoils itself, presumably leaving the eagle free to take
wing. Upward, downward, coiled, uncoiled, belligerent, drowsy; these para-
doxes are deliberately deployed to impart a taut energy to the sculpture,
transforming it into a breathing, flexing entity.
The oppositions fall within the rhetorical category of antithesis, in which
striking juxtapositions serve to reinforce contradictions and to evoke a spec-
trum of emotions in the reader or listener, ranging from one extreme to the
other. As Henry Maguire has persuasively shown, antithesis was an integral
part of church decoration in Byzantium, usually designed to underline the dis-
parate moments in the life of Christ and to bring to the fore the central
paradoxes of the Christian faith.32 However, as a figure of speech and a “habit
of thought”33 for the Byzantines, it was also used in non-religious contexts. In
the passage above, it serves as a lens for ideal viewership just as much as it
functions as a descriptive mode for the sculpture in question. The viewer (fig-
ured by, and as, Choniates) is one whose eyes probe and rove all around the
sculpture, even though his body might be held “spellbound” by its grandeur. In
this sense, the viewer embodies the figure of antithesis itself, exhibiting physi-
cal stasis on the one hand and an all-seeing, moving gaze on the other. In
addition, this viewer is sensitive not only to visual, but also to rhetorical, stim-
uli; the one mobilizes the other such that viewing transcends the act of looking
to become an emotionally affective experience expressed in eloquent prose, as
Choniates himself does.
The use of antithesis figures in the passage as part of the larger category of
ekphrasis, which was also a vehicle for prescribing a mode of engaged, immer-
sive viewership. The greatest ekphrasists of the classical and post-classical
tradition spin elaborate narratives out of the images they describe and in doing
so, negate the status of those images as inanimate objects, investing them with
the very essence of life, or life-likeness.34 It is this ‘living’ quality that renders
the statues of the De signis so magnetic – but only to certain viewers: those
endowed with a level of rhetorical sophistication (ekphrasists) and historical
consciousness. Choniates underscores the latter when he traces the history of
the manufacture of the eagle and snake ensemble, ascribing it to the hand of
Apollonios of Tyana, famed in Late Antiquity for his proficiency in magic.35
According to Choniates, Apollonios was once beseeched by the Byzantines to
32 Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (New Jersey, 1981), pp. 53-83.
33 Maguire, Art and Eloquence, p. 53.
34 See note 9 above.
free them of snake bites, and he duly did so by erecting the eagle statue on a
column. The sculpture is, in the anthropologist Alfred Gell’s words (concerning
a quite different object and cultural context), “a physical token of the magical
prowess on the part of the owner,” and “the fact that he has access to the ser-
vices of a carver whose artistic prowess is also the result of his access to superior
carving magic.”36 Where Gell explores the technological feats that can enchant
a viewer, leading him/her to credit the object and its maker with magical pow-
ers, in the case of the eagle and the snake ensemble, both the object and its
maker were indeed associated with magic. Interestingly, Choniates derides the
process whereby the statue came into being, declaring it to be the product of
“those lewd rituals whose celebrants are the demons and all those who pay
special honor to their secret rites.”37 But he immediately – paradoxically and
typically – goes on to heap praise on the beauty of the sculpture, claiming that
its sight “gave pleasure to onlookers and persuaded any who delighted in its
aspect to stay on like those held spellbound by the sound of the Sirens’ song.”38
Through his disparagement of the statue’s origins in late antique magic and
his praise of its final, spellbinding form, Choniates accomplishes several aims
key to the agenda of the De signis. He makes a resounding claim for Orthodoxy
(which was staunchly opposed to pagan magic of any kind) while simultane-
ously reinforcing the necessity of acknowledging Byzantium’s ancient, pagan
heritage. Integral to this acknowledgement is the historical context of the
sculpture being viewed. Historical context is a recurrent theme of the text; the
Latins’ appalling ignorance of history marks them out as the savages they prove
to be. So, in describing the statue of an ass with its driver following behind,
Choniates emphasizes the fact that
these figures had been set up by Caesar Augustus at Actium … because

when going out at night to reconnoiter Antony’s troops, he met up with a
man driving an ass, and on inquiring who he was and where he was going,
he was told, ‘I am Nikon and my ass is Nikandros, and I am proceeding to
the camp of Caesar.’39
In striking contrast to Choniates’s scrupulousness in gathering the historical

background of the statues he describes, is the utter disinterest of the Latins in
36 Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in

The Art of Anthropology. Essays and Diagrams, ed. Eric Hirsch (London, 1999), p. 166.
254 Chatterjee
the same. For instance, an equestrian statue was rumored by an enduring oral
tradition to have an image of a man buried under its left hoof, according to
Choniates.40 This statue was broken into pieces and cast into the fire by the
Latins who, in the process, found the statue, dressed in a cloak woven of sheep’s
wool, under the horse’s hoof. But where Choniates and other Constantino
politans debated (usefully and knowledgeably) on the precise identity of this
cloak-clad figure, the Latins “show[ed] little concern over what was said about
it”41 and fed it to the flames. The Latins are blind to the beauty of the statues
and deaf to the stories they have to tell.
Deafness is a wholly undesirable stance in the De signis, for the text posits
the statues’ charisma as residing not just in their form but also, critically, in
their ‘voices.’ Certainly, every single sculptural ensemble that Choniates elabo-
rates upon in any detail is invested with an aural force. The statues are potent
vehicles of multisensory engagement with compelling sonic abilities integral
to their charismatic aura, just as much as size, height, and lifelikeness. So, for
instance, the birds on the Anemodoulion are expressly identified as “melodi-
ous” ones, “warbling … springtime tunes,” just as the husbandsmen carved on
the same instrument carry pipes, the sheep bleat, and the Erotes shake with
“sweet laughter.”42 Herakles’s lion skin is said to “look terrifying even in bronze,
almost as though it might give out a roar and frighten the helpless populace
standing nearby.”43 Here it isn’t even an animate figure that has the potential to
roar – not a lion as one might expect – but a skin made from the beast’s pelt
that adorns the mighty hero. The cloak acquires the intimidating vocal abilities
of the animal from whose flesh it is fashioned (even though the cloak is actu-
ally crafted from bronze); herein lies the wonder of the statue, quite apart from
its gigantic stature.44 Yet another statue of a man mounted on a horse is said to
have “fiercely breathed out war,” as a consequence of which the horse “pricked
up its ears as though in response to the war trumpet.”45 This ensemble is said
to be positioned on the hand of another, larger statue of a youthful woman; an
interesting indicator of the fact that sonar capability is not necessarily con-
nected to the size of the statue. Even a miniature confection enfolded within a
more imposing structure can possess a ferociously commanding voice.

44 For further observations on the cloak, see Chatterjee, “Sculpted Eloquence,” p. 398.
Sound in the eagle and snake sculpture is significant in its own right (as
compared to sound in the other sculptural ensembles mentioned). It operates
on (at least) two levels. First, the general view of the sculpture atop the column
works to hold the (ideal) viewer in its thrall; according to Choniates, it func-
tions much like the Sirens’ song which captivated its listeners.46 The simile of
the Sirens is filled with a baleful resonance, implying a fatal attraction to sound
which results in the listener’s death. In the De signis, however, ‘death’ is con-
strued as a receptive stillness on the part of the viewer to the statue in question.
The latter is described as “persuading” such viewers to linger in the wake of its
spell. The theme of persuasion is important here, entailing the dimension of
reciprocity that is so fundamental to the operation of charisma. Only a viewer
willing to respond to the call of the statues can unleash their visual and sonar
powers. Attentive eyes and ears, in return, are rewarded by the most stunning
optical and aural effects of the images on display. The resulting experience is
that of a mutual give and take, whereby the statues garner due praise for their
charisma and the viewer is gifted with a thrillingly multisensory experience in
exchange for his or her attention.
The second level at which sound permeates the eagle and snake sculpture is
as a coda to the process of viewing. Only by apprehending the eagle’s screech,
is its “victory song” made audible to the viewer, who can then complete the
narrative which began as a battle between equally matched rivals. No less
important is the sight of the snake breathing its last. Sound is conjured through
the visual depiction of the serpent expiring, its “venom unspent.”47 Inter
spersed with the cries of the creatures are the sounds of flapping wings and the
gradual smothering of the snake, not as explicitly evoked as the eagle’s screech,
to be sure, but unmistakably woven into the description. Even as the viewer
gazes at every detail of the sculpture, he or she hears the sound effects accom-
panying each stage of the narrative the sculpture depicts.
The longest – and most convoluted – paean to sound as an integral compo-
nent of charismatic images occurs in Choniates’s description of the statue of
Helen of Troy. “What of the white-armed, beautiful-ankled, and long-necked
Helen,” he asks,
who mustered the entire host of the Hellenes and overthrew Troy, whence
she sailed to the Nile and, after a long absence, returned to the abodes of

256 Chatterjee
the Laconians? Was she able to placate the implacable? Was she able to
soften those men whose hearts were made of iron?48
The crescendo of queries is no mere rhetorical posturing; it conveys this view-

er’s detailed knowledge of the intricate history of Helen herself – her role in
the Trojan war and its aftermath – and not just of the image that resembles her.
The description of this statue, in particular, confounds the delicate line
between image and subject for it is often impossible to tell which is being
referred to – again, a classic ekphrastic maneuver. This statue also serves to
compound the barrier separating the Byzantines (the ideal viewers) and the
Latins, for the latter are unnatural in not being softened by the maiden (and
her statue) who was responsible for launching a thousand ships. The reference
to the “iron hearts” of the Latins takes on a specific resonance later in the pas-
sage, which I shall discuss in due course.
Suffice it to say that “she who had enslaved every onlooker with her beauty”
failed to do so with the obdurate Latins,
even though she was appareled ornately; though fashioned of bronze, she
appeared as fresh as morning dew, anointed with the moistness of erotic
love on her garment, veil, diadem, and braid of hair. Her vesture was finer
than spider webs, and the veil was cunningly wrought in its place … The
lips were like flower cups, slightly parted as though she were about to
speak; the graceful smile, at once greeting the spectator, filled him with
delight; her flashing eyes, her arched eyebrows, and the shapeliness of
the rest of her body were such that they cannot be described in words
and depicted for future generations.49
The account of Helen’s beauteous form and her adornments culminates in the
reference to her lips that appear to be on the brink of speech. The trajectory
leading from close, detailed description to intimations of sound is also evident
in the accounts of the other statues in the De signis, but what sets Helen apart
from her peers, as it were, is the fact that her voice is not immediately regis-
tered. Indeed, one never actually hears what Helen has to say, unlike the eagle’s
screech that signals its triumph in no uncertain terms (at least as Choniates
describes it, whether the screech is actually heard by the viewer or not). In
Helen’s case, the viewer/reader must extrapolate the contents of her never-
spoken speech from the narrative context of the great epics in which she

features. Choniates underscores his familiarity with those epics in the very
form of his address to Helen (or her statue, as you will). Tellingly, this is the sole
instance in the De signis in which the historian directly poses a question to the
statue he describes. Sound is the medium connecting viewer and viewed in a
dialogic intimacy in which the statue speaks through her form. Crucially, her
interlocutor must interpret her speech by means of his prior knowledge of her
history.
“O Helen, Tyndareus’s daughter, the very essence of loveliness, off-shoot of
Erotes, ward of Aphrodite, nature’s most perfect gift,” Choniates declares,
… where is your drug granted you by Thon’s wife which banishes pain and
sorrow and brings forgetfulness of every ill? Where are your irresistible
love charms? Why did you not make one of these now as you did long
ago? But I suspect that the Fates had foreordained that you should suc-
cumb to the flame’s fervor so that your image should no longer enflame
spectators with sexual passions. It was said that these Aeneadae con-
demned you to the flames as retribution for Troy’s having been laid waste
by the firebrand because of your scandalous amours.50
Choniates weaves a series of implied narratives from his persistent interroga-

tion of Helen, each of which glorifies the power of rhetorical brilliance and
simultaneously discloses its deceptive dimensions. This maneuver also paves
the way for an interrogation of the seductive potential of the statue, which is
figured as an intrinsic component of its narrative complexity. Let us begin by
examining one of those implied narratives, the “drug” given to Helen by Thon’s
wife which refers to a specific episode in the Odyssey, Book 4, when Telemachus
and Peisistratus arrive in Sparta in time to attend a celebration for the mar-
riage between Menelaus’s son by a slave-woman and his daughter by Helen.51
Initially disguised, the identities of Telemachus and Peisistratus are gradually
uncovered, and the joyous feast dissolves into a dirge as those present recall
the tragic losses of the Trojan War and weep. In order to calm the situation
(and perhaps for other, more sinister motives), Helen throws a drug into the
wine. Sorrow and pain – Choniates’s very words – are then banished from the
banqueters’ hearts such that “no tear would [have rolled] down [their] face,
not if [their] mother died and [their] father died, not if men murdered a
brother or a beloved son in [their] presence … and [they] with [their] own eyes

51 Homer, The Odyssey, Book 4, trans. Edward McCrorie (Baltimore, 2004), ll. 1-305.
258 Chatterjee
saw it.”52 Having thus ridden the feast of sorrow, and thereby of historical and
personal memory, indeed, having rendered the banqueters well-nigh impervi-
ous to any sort of natural emotion, Helen proceeds to spin a tale of her own.
This is the point where Choniates’s description of Helen’s half-open lips
acquires an ominous significance. As Matthew Gumpert has remarked in a dif-
ferent but entirely relevant context, the virtues of Helen’s drug are highly
ambiguous, for “to forget all sorrows, as the frightening image of familial
slaughter played out before our eyes suggests, is also to lose all sense of ethical
distinctions.”53 Oddly enough, it would seem that Choniates wishes Helen’s
drug had made the Latins even more obdurately insensitive to history and its
personal consequences than they already are. By invoking the multiple roles of
Helen as the means to historical oblivion, femme fatale, and a would-be narra-
tor (albeit, one whose narrative remains unheard in the De signis), Choniates
endows her statue with the simultaneous potential for seduction and speech.
In other words, the charisma of Helen’s statue resides not just in her alluring
form, but also in her status as a narrator. But since her drug failed to prepare
the Latins for her charms (as a woman and a narrator), the tale she is on the
point of telling is silenced even before it begins.
What might Helen have said were she permitted to speak? This is a critical
point in the passage, since the oblique mention of her unspoken speech
encompasses a wealth of detail significant to Choniates’s polemic, and to his
conception of the ideal viewer. According to scholars, the tale Helen spun to
her audience in the Odyssey was a curious one. In her famous reading of the
scene, Anne T. Bergren contends that Helen’s narrative presents an image of
herself designed to impress and delight her listeners.54 The statue of Helen, as
figured by Choniates’s prose, strives toward the same effects; it has the ability
to banish the pain of historical conflict in order to concentrate the viewer’s
(and listener’s) focus purely on its own delectable being and the words it/she
speaks. But by underscoring the narrative potential of Helen’s statue, Choniates
also implicitly exposes the dangers of historical narration by cunning narra-
tors. In doing so, he highlights the potentially menacing charisma of words as
opposed to images. The entire passage endorses a viewer’s absorption in
Helen’s image, but it warns that viewer not to listen to Helen’s words. Or put
52 Matthew Gumpert, Grafting Helen. The Abduction of the Classical Past (Madison, WI,
2001), p. 41.
53 Gumpert, Grafting Helen, p. 41.
54 Anne T. Bergren, “Helen’s ‘Good Drug’ Odyssey IV 1-305,” in Contemporary Literary
Hermeneutics and Interpretation of Classical Texts, ed. Stephen Kresic (Ottawa, 1981),
pp. 201-14.
another way, the ideal viewer is well enough versed in the epics and the arts of
eloquence to be wary of a narrator of the likes of Helen. The ideal response to
this statue is not construed as complete surrender to its charisma, but as a stra-
tegic, calibrated approach whereby its beauty should be acknowledged as the
overpowering thing it is, but its voice must be scrupulously resisted.
Choniates goes on to elaborate on the motif of Helen’s love potion that
failed to have its effect. In the process, he doesn’t merely describe a failed
exchange, in which the Latins reveal themselves as woefully inadequate view-
ers; he also takes apart the kind of exchange that does occur, and which is a
travesty of what should have occurred. Helen’s spell rebounds on herself. This
is also the case in the episode from the Odyssey mentioned earlier, for follow-
ing Helen’s tale is the one told by her husband, Menelaus, which contradicts
and casts doubt on his wife’s preceding narrative. In Bergren’s words, “By per-
mitting Menelaus to recall without pain, what pain might have kept beyond
recall, Helen’s ‘good drug’ and her ‘good tale’ have reminded Menelaus of
another … one that violates her claim to kleos.”55 Helen’s drug works against
her own credibility as a narrator.
Just as Helen’s pacifying drug recoils on its practitioner by weakening the
strength of her tale, so too Helen’s statue, drug-like in its capacity for inducing
passion, boomerangs on itself. Choniates claims that “… these Aeneadae con-
demned you to the flames as retribution for Troy’s having been laid waste by
the firebrand because of your scandalous amours.”56 The essential lack of sym-
pathy between the Latins and the statues on display in Constantinople
– particularly that of Helen – is partly due to the “iron hearts” of the invaders.
An epigram from the Anthologia Graeca, although dated to the early centuries
of Byzantium, is appropriate in this context. Issuing from the mouth of a cer-
tain Callirhoe, a courtesan, it claims that an admirer by the name of Thomas
who had set up a portrait of her, “show[ed] all the ardor in his breast; for like
wax is his heart melting.”57 It has been argued convincingly that the portrait in
question must have been in the medium of encaustic, or melted wax. Thus
Thomas, the admiring viewer, emulates the very medium of the image he looks
at, his heart melting like the wax of which Callirhoe’s portrait is composed.
Unlike Thomas, however, the Latins are burdened with hearts of iron that do
not respond to the majestic malleability of bronze. Even when Helen’s statue
is consumed by the flames, the invaders remain unmoved. This is hardly sur-
55 Bergren, “Helen’s ‘Good Drug,’” p. 210.

57 See the translation and excerpt in Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453,
Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching (Toronto, 1986), p. 119.
260 Chatterjee
prising for these men are as impervious to the charms of living women as they
are to statues. In the course of the passages dedicated to Helen, Choniates
mentions “the frequent selling and sending away of their women for a few
coins while they attended the gaming tables and were engrossed in draughts
all day long …”58 Empathy, even desire, for another human being are posited
here as natural impulses which the Latins shockingly violate. How much fur-
ther are they, then, from fashioning themselves as the ideal viewers and
recipients of the charisma of images which, we recall, requires a rather more
sophisticated training?
But for all their crudeness, the Latins successfully dodge the flames of erotic
enchantment and turn them back upon their source. They combat their own
potential for sexual passion by drowning Helen’s image in fire, thus positioning
themselves as characters on a par with the cunning Odysseus himself. In this
instance, at least, Choniates betrays his own characterization of the Latins as
being unsusceptible to charisma; indeed, it may be argued that where Helen’s
statue is concerned, the Latins destroyed it partly because of their appreciation
and wariness of its powers. The frenzied destruction of the Constantinopolitan
statues seems to hint at some deeper motive other than the naked greed that
Choniates attributes to the enemy.
But, as our historian reveals in the lines that follow, this is too generous an
interpretation of Latin behavior. The ability to circumvent a love-spell requires
not only the subtlety of recognizing its verbal and visual components, a skill
the Latins signally lack.59 More importantly, the power of this particular spell
resides in the knowledge of its impressive past; in Helen’s role in having mus-
tered the host of Hellenes and overthrowing Troy, as Choniates reminds the
reader when he opens his description. The Latins, however, are said to be
“wholly ignorant of their ABCs, the ability to read and knowledge of those epic
verses sung of you.”60
The epic voice alluded to here is emphatically historical. Choniates’s refer-
ence to Homer is part of a series of Homeric formulae that are strewn
throughout his narrative, including his characterization of historical figures as
Homeric heroes or villains.61 The incorporation of such epic elements in his

59 On love spells specifically, see Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic
(Cambridge, MA, 2001). For love spells more generally, see Henry Maguire, ed., Byzantine
Magic (Washington, DC, 1995).
61 Roderick Saxey, “The Homeric Metamorphoses of Andronikos I Komnenos,” in Niketas
Choniates, pp. 120-43.
chronicle allows Choniates to frame historical episodes as tragic or comic. The

Latins’ neglect of the epic past, then, amounts to their lack of knowledge
regarding the historical past. This, in turn, leads directly to their inability to
sustain human civilization, despite their territorial conquests. The destruction
of the public statuary of Constantinople attests to this. Constantinople belongs
to the Latins, but it is a sorry victory on their part, bereft of images, of ideal
viewers, and of the gift of charisma.
Epilogue
Why does Choniates locate charisma almost exclusively in pagan statues,

neglecting Christian icons and relics altogether? For a stridently polemical text
which consistently posits Orthodox Christianity and Byzantium as far superior
to the Latins (even though the Byzantines often fall short of their natural lofti-
ness, much to Choniates’s dismay), the Historia astonishingly fails to elaborate
on that mainstay of Orthodoxy: the holy icon. Images of Christ, the Virgin, and
the saints make purely perfunctory appearances in it and are not granted the
lavish, even loving, attention our historian bestows on the statues in the epi-
logue. When religious monuments such as the Great Church (Hagia Sophia)
are mentioned, they are described as being duly beautiful and inimitable, but
the descriptions have none of the ekphrastic ingenuity reserved for the statues.
As Titos Papamastorakis points out, “His [Choniates’s] Constantinople was an
ancient city whose beauty resided more in the classical monuments which
embellished it and less in the splendor of its Christian churches as all the other
Byzantine authors of the Middle and Late Byzantine periods seemed to think.
In fact, Choniates views the Christian buildings as if they had merely slipped
in.”62 Consequently, icons and relics are presented as being bereft of the kind
of charisma the statues appear to be so rich in.
This omission is startling, not least when we consider the fact that it was
precisely the holy image that was upheld as an integral part of Orthodoxy, and
which was one of the most powerful identifiers of Byzantine culture in the
medieval world. The Latins demolished just as many churches, religious
images, and liturgical furnishings as they did statues – Choniates does mention
some of these in the earlier sections of the Historia – and some of the former
were renowned as being formidably charismatic. The icon of the Virgin
Hodegetria, for instance, drew large numbers of spectators from within and
without Constantinople on the occasion of the famous Tuesday miracle when,
62 Papamastorakis, “Interpreting the De signis of Niketas Choniates,” p. 223.

262 Chatterjee
after refusing to be lifted by various confraternity members, the image sud-

denly allowed itself to be carried aloft with ease, belying its own tremendous
weight.63 The equally famous Friday miracle, in which a veil covering an icon
of the Virgin and Christ lifted itself and stayed put until the following day, was
yet another attraction avidly awaited by citizens and tourists alike.64 In addi-
tion to these icons, the city possessed an enormous and enviable cache of holy
relics as mentioned above, stored in churches and chapels and which were no
less potent in bringing hordes of pilgrims to the city. In short, the powers of
holy icons and relics are well attested to in various sources, and were even
spectacularized, as the Tuesday and Friday miracles mentioned above suggest.
Yet Choniates’s chronicle marginalizes this entire category of images and
objects, even as it makes a searing case for some of the most cherished ideals
of Byzantium and Orthodoxy in general.
Why are statues the favored bearers of charisma for Choniates? In order to
answer this question, it is important to address the status of the De signis as an
epilogue. In signaling the end of the historical narrative it delineates, it also
equates the end of a glorious empire with the destruction of its wealth of statu-
ary, not its holy images. Statues are thus explicitly yoked to imperial power;
their destruction to imperial dissolution. By constantly alluding to their
ancient pedigree, Choniates advances the statues as the critical markers of the
heritage of Byzantium and the empire’s identity as Romanía, the continuation
of the ancient Roman empire. In their very status as ‘old’ artifacts, they are
imagined to connect to a remote point of origin. As Christopher S. Wood
remarks in a different but related context, “The early history of Europe was not
forgotten … The historical imagination was a kaleidoscope of shifting, overlap-
ping, animated shadows, crowded by a fabulous pagan and prehistoric past
that seemed to have left the most tangible of traces …”65
The above scenario applies well to the purposes of the De signis. In it, the
statues stand as symbols of historical continuity, having adorned Constan
tinople since the time of its foundation. Indeed, as mentioned above, some of
them existed long before the city ever came into being, having been trans-
63 See Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power. The Mother of God in Byzantium (University
Park, PA, 2006), pp. 129-43; and Alexei Lidov, “The Flying Hodegetria. The Miraculous Icon
as Bearer of Sacred Space,” in The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, eds. Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf (Rome, 2004), pp. 291-321.
64 See Charles Barber, “Living Painting or the Limits of Painting?: Glancing at Icons with
Michael Psellos,” in Reading Michael Psellos, eds. Charles Barber and David Jenkins
(Leiden, 2006); and Pentcheva, Icons and Power, pp. 145-64.
65 Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction. Temporalities of German Renaissance Art
(Chicago, 2008), p. 34.
ported from various parts of the Roman empire to the new capital.66 Their
continued existence and display despite the Christianization of the empire
serve as constant reminders of the origins of Byzantium, and is as critical a
dimension of the cityscape as the numerous churches and monasteries dotting
it (as construed by the De signis). Indeed, several of the statues were perceived
to be invested with prophetic powers and the ability to foretell the fortunes of
the city and, by extension, of the empire itself. The statues, therefore, plotted
out an alternative topography for the Constantinopolitans; one that was paral-
lel to the eschatological dimension encapsulated by the religious structures of
the city and which was no less valued in this capacity. Their termination, for
Choniates, is the material manifestation of an abrupt break in the history of
the Romans which, until 1204, had apparently continued uninterrupted since
antiquity.
Although in 1261 the Crusaders were ousted, Constantinople was recon-
quered by Michael VIII Palaiologos, and a flurry of building and restoration
projects ensued,67 the capital never managed to recapture the glory embodied
by its wealth of ancient statuary. The remarks in a letter by Manuel Chrysoloras
in 1411 are telling in this regard. Chrysoloras mentions the magnificence of the
ancient ruins of Constantinople (New Rome) as he compares them to the
antique fragments that dot the landscape of Rome (‘Old’ Rome, as Chrysoloras
puts it).68 But the charismatic aura of the statues is gone, a thing of the past to
be remembered and lamented over, but never to be seen – or heard – again.
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66 See Beat Brenk, “Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus Ideology,”
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67 Alice-Mary Talbot, “The Restoration of Constantinople under Michael VIII,” Dumbarton
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68 Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and
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Hoccleve’s Tale of Jonathas and Male Revenge Fantasy 267
Chapter 8
Disenchantment: Hoccleve’s Tale of Jonathas and

Male Revenge Fantasy
Gavin T. Richardson
In contrast to most forms of authority, charisma is always seen as benevo-

lent and life-affirming, at least until disenchantment sets in.1
⸪
If we are to believe what Thomas Hoccleve says about his own writing, around
1420 a friend asked him to translate a tale from the Gesta Romanorum with the
ostensible purpose of teaching his 15-year-old son to avoid the wiles of women.
The concerned father wants his son to learn that women can be “deere and
ouer deere boght,” leaving a young man’s purse empty and hastening him to his
“confusioun” (15-21).2 Hoccleve at first hesitated on the project, fearing that he
would be regarded as a misogynist if he translated such a tale. He had already
engendered some ill will by translating Christine de Pisan’s Letter of Cupid in
1402. This “defense” of women was poorly received, perhaps because it
rehearsed a number of antifeminist commonplaces, or because it was believed
to have parodied the original Letter.3 Indeed, Hoccleve’s words against women
2 Thomas Hoccleve, Tale of Jonathas, in Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, eds. Frederick J.
Furnivall and Israel Gollancz (Oxford, 1970), pp. 215-42, at p. 216. The Tale of Jonathas is edited
from Durham University Library Cosin V.iii.9, which survives in holograph. See Thomas
Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts: Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino (California), MSS HM III and HM 744; University Library, Durham (England), MS Cosin
V. III. 9, eds. J.A. Burrow and A.I. Doyle (Oxford, 2002), fols. 77r-95r. A more recent edition is
Thomas Hoccleve, ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter, 2001), pp. 234-55.
In this essay I have used Furnivall’s text but have followed Ellis in removing virgules that occur
within lines.
3 On the reception of Hoccleve’s translation then and now, see Karen A. Winstead, “‘I am al othir
to yow than yee weene’: Hoccleve, Women, and the Series,” Philological Quarterly 72 (1993),
143-55.

268 Richardson
were said to have been so plentiful as to “fille … a quarter sak.”4 However,

Hoccleve’s friend assured him that depicting the sins of evil women would do
no disservice to the good. Hoccleve consented, and the result is one of the
most violent male revenge fantasies in all of English literature, the Tale of
Jonathas.
In many ways, the Tale of Jonathas is a useful text for exploring the theories
on charisma C. Stephen Jaeger sets forth in Enchantment: “This book … is about
an aspect of the sublime style, which I will call ‘charismatic art.’ This mode also
‘conceals’ reality – or at least clothes it – in brilliance; it diminishes the reason-
ing faculty, speaks to the imagination, and exercises an ‘enthralling’ effect on
the reader or viewer.”5 Through the centuries, Hoccleve’s Tale of Jonathas has
exhibited many of these features, particularly the enthralling effect central to
Jaeger’s description. While assessing the reception of medieval works is often a
difficult or impossible task, manuscript evidence shows that this tale enjoyed
strong cultural currency. In his edition of Hoccleve’s Series – the collective
term for the Complaint, Dialogue with a Friend, the Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife, Learn
to Die, and the Tale of Jonathas – Roger Ellis references six manuscripts con-
taining a version of the tale in the Anglo-Latin Gesta Romanorum, two
manuscripts containing a prose version in the Middle English Gesta, seven
manuscripts containing a Latin or Anglo-Latin Gesta version, six manuscripts
containing the poem itself as part of the Series, and three manuscripts contain-
ing the poem along with Hoccleve’s other Gesta translation, The Tale of
Jereslaus’s Wife.6 William Browne would copy Hoccleve’s poem virtually word-
for-word as the First Eclogue of his Shephearde’s Pipe of 1614, and in this form it
would be republished in the 18th and 19th centuries, appearing in William
4 Thomas Hoccleve, Dialogue with a Friend, in Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, line 669,
p. 138.
6 For a generous discussion of the relevant manuscript traditions, see Hoccleve, “My Compleinte,”
pp. viii-ix and 10-41, esp. 23-26. The two prose versions (British Library Harley 7333 and
Additional 9066) appear in Sidney J.H. Herrtage, The Early English Versions of the Gesta
Romanorum (London, 1879). (Herrtage also consulted a prose version in Cambridge University
Library Kk. 1.6.) British Library Harley 7333 serves as the base text for Godfridus a Wise
Emperoure, in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, 2002), pp. 169-76.
In the Latin Gesta the tale appears as De mulierum subtili decepcione, ed. Hermann Oesterley
(1872; repr. New York, 1980), Cap. 120, pp. 466-70. The Anglo-Latin version that is likely
Hoccleve’s immediate source has been edited from British Library Harley 2270 as an appendix
to Jerome Mitchell’s unpublished dissertation: “Thomas Hoccleve: His Traditionalism and His
Individuality,” Ph.D. diss. (Durham, NC, 1965), pp. 315-28.
Hazlitt’s 1869 collection of Browne’s Works.7 More recently, Peter Jorgensen has
demonstrated the tale’s Scandinavian survival from the Middle Ages through
the 19th century in folk retellings.8 While popularity alone does not define
charismatic art, it does suggest that the Tale of Jonathas had a peculiar imagi-
native appeal that extended over half a millennium in a variety of forms.
Much of this essay, however, is about disenchantment, or the way in which
charismatic elements often give way to disillusion, particularly in medieval
male revenge fantasy. This genre is discussed at greater length below, but for
now, male revenge fantasy might be defined as a tale in which a woman shames
and discards a naïve would-be lover, only to suffer violently in the end. This
plotline describes texts from the medieval East and West, such as Boccaccio’s
“Tale of Elene and Rinieri” (Decameron 8.7), Robert Henryson’s Testament of
Cresseid, and Farīd Al-Dīn Aṭṭār’s narrative of Sheikh Sam’an from the 12th-
century Persian Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr). It is even possible to
consider Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale as a thwarted male revenge fantasy in which
the menace of sexual violence is transmuted into slapstick comedy by
Nicholas’s windy intervention. Using Thomas Hoccleve’s Tale of Jonathas as a
representative example, I hope to show that the force of such narratives largely
depends on key elements of Jaeger’s charismatology: a structure that makes
use of the abject-to-exalted heroic movement,9 a kind of dark imitation as a
weak protagonist achieves mastery over his formerly dominant shamer, and a
violent conclusion that mirrors the kinds of violence visited upon persons and
even works of art that had formerly enthralled the perpetrators. My reading of
Hoccleve’s Tale of Jonathas seeks to demonstrate how male revenge fantasy
operates at the intersection of enchantment, disenchantment, and misogyny,
and it concludes by suggesting what this poem might have meant for Hoccleve
and his readers through the ages.
Hoccleve’s poem begins with a dying Emperor parceling out his patrimony
to his three sons; the eldest receives land while the second son receives his
movable wealth. To his youngest son, Jonathas, the Emperor bequeaths a ring
that compels people to love the wearer, a brooch that will grant any material
possession, and a magic carpet that will bear anyone anywhere. Jonathas goes
7 William Browne, The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock, ed. Gordon Goodwin (London,
1894), Eclogue 1.137-724, pp. 91-116; William Browne, The Whole Works of William Browne, ed.
William Hazlitt, 2 (London, 1869), pp. 178-96. The text has also been edited by James Doelman
in Early Stuart Pastoral (Toronto, 1999), pp. 27-54. Doelman questions Browne’s sole author-
ship of the First Eclogue, p. 10.
8 The Story of Jonatas in Iceland (Reykjavík, 1997).
9 On this movement, see Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 83.
270 Richardson
to university and quickly falls in love with a prostitute named Fellicula, who is
amazed at the lifestyle Jonathas enjoys thanks to his magical talismans. In a
series of seductions, Fellicula acquires these talismans one after the other,
each time sending Jonathas back to his mother to beg the next and endure a
humiliating maternal “I told you so.” Once Fellicula has all the talismans, she
discards Jonathas and then falls gravely ill. After a long sojourn in a dangerous
and enchanted land, Jonathas returns to Fellicula with the power to heal her.
Instead, however, he gives her marvelous fruit and water that result in her
graphic death: “Hir wombe opned and out fil eche entraille” (664).10 Jonathas
returns home to his mother, with whom, we are assured, he lives happily ever
after.
Hoccleve’s Jonathas bears affinities with Marie de France’s Lanval as a disen-
franchised young man whose meager inheritance is compensated for by
supernatural elements, romance, and adventure. His story might be read as a
simple wonder tale about the power of magical talismans – ring, brooch, car-
pet. It is tempting to regard these as “charismatic objects” because of their
power, but theirs really is a false charisma, if charisma is to be understood as
“an effect of physical presence,”11 a property inseparable from the person who
wields them. Although the ring has the supernatural power to make people
love Jonathas, this gift is different from the kind of transformative and indi-
vidualized charis the gods bestow upon Odysseus among the Phaeacians.12
Jonathas is hardly made godlike, and Fellicula remains capable of exposing his
youthful gullibility and naiveté. Indeed, the magical talismans principally
serve to enable a false socialization. Because his ring compels others to love
him (“who-so þat the ryng vsith for to were, / Of alle folke the loue he shal con-
quere” (104-05)),13 the objects keep Jonathas in a state of arrested development.
His acquisition of friendship is every bit as artificial as his procured relation-
ship with the prostitute-paramour Fellicula. Thus the poem opens with a kind
of misdirection; we are made to think that the poem is about magical talis-
mans, but these objects only point to the figure who dominates the tale: the
prostitute Fellicula. Indeed, Hoccleve’s transition from the contextualizing
prologue to the story itself reveals an emphasis not on talismans, or the “wise
10 Hoccleve, Tale of Jonathas, p. 239.

12 Cf. Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 78-79.
emperor,” or even the protagonist Jonathas himself, but on “a certain evil

woman”: “incipit / fabula de quadam muliere mala.”14
The power that this mala mulier exerts over Jonathas is so profound that
Fellicula, not his magical talismans, better qualifies as a charismatic entity
within the world of the text. Discussing Fellicula as a charismatic character is
deeply problematic; she embodies many of the features of Jaeger’s charisma-
tology, but her effects upon Jonathas are so destructive that she fails to fulfill its
most vital aspect: affirming life. Indeed, in this regard, she could even be
described as anti-charismatic. Perhaps, then, it is more accurate to say that
Fellicula exhibits some of the working parts of charisma that characterize her
and catalyze the narrative processes of revenge, beginning with the enthralling
power she has over Jonathas. Jaeger considers the association between cha-
risma and influence by cataloguing six effects of charisma, which I have
redacted below:
1. It compels people to follow by the force that I’ve called “body magic.”
2. It inspires a sense of affirmation in the viewer or follower …
3. It uncouples the critical sense, overrides judgment, as it lessens individ-
ual will.
4. It enlarges the person who possesses it, or some simulation of the person
constructed either in the mind of the charismatic person or in the minds
of the devotees …
5. It inspires imitation, awakens the urge to be like the charismatic person
…
6. It stimulates the imagination, makes the spellbound fan or disciple
dream the dreams of the leader …15
These categories are developed more generously in Enchantment, but this

excerpted summary will help describe the power Fellicula holds over Jonathas,
particularly by demonstrating effects 1, 2, and 3. Most obviously, Fellicula com-
pels Jonathas to do her bidding not so much by the sheer force of her educative
presence (a dimension of Jaeger’s “body magic”), but through a body magic of
a more literal sort – the power of sex. Hoccleve says that she was “gay, fresh and
pykid … to the sale,” and that Jonathas met her “[b]y the streetes of the univer-
sitee” (164, 160), clearly defining her status as prostitute. Fellicula is simply
called a concubina in the Latin, but Hoccleve’s name for her is etymologically
14 These lines are unnumbered in Furnivall’s text but occur just before line 85. Ellis uses this
Latin phrase as the title of the poem in his edition.
272 Richardson
associated with Latin, Middle English, and Old French words for poison,
treachery, and deceit.16 She solicits the secret of Jonathas’s first magical talis-
man when they are in bed together, arguing that he should trust his lover
because she has given him her virginity – a highly dubious assertion coming
from a prostitute, but a calculating one that recognizes both the market
demand for sex and the premium placed on virginity. Jonathas is aware of the
risks of confession (“‘If y telle it,’ quod he ‘par auenture / Thow wilt deskeuere
it & out it publisshe: / Swich is wommannes inconstant nature’” (190-93)).17 He
even appeals to a bit of proverbial wisdom by noting that garrulous women
“can nat keepe conseil worth a risshe.”18 But Jonathas is firmly under Fellicula’s
spell, and while the tale characterizes this spell in clearly erotic terms, Fellicula’s
command extends beyond the enervating power of sex. Her rhetorical skill is a
vital dimension of her control as she “uncouples the critical sense” of Jonathas,
even when sex is not in play. A survey of the poem’s plotline demonstrates how
she continually overrides Jonathas’s judgment:
When he tells her the secret power of his ring. (ll. 204-12)
When he gives her the ring for safekeeping, “[y]euynge un-to hir wordes
ful credence,–.” (ll. 225-31)
When he comforts her after she “loses” the ring. (ll. 246-52)
When he returns with the brooch and takes her back again. (ll. 274-80)
When he gives her the brooch and asks her advice on how to keep it safe.
(ll. 309-24)
When he uncritically forgives her for her “loss” of the brooch. (ll. 336-43)
When he abandons his plans to leave her at the end of the world.
(ll. 400-06)
When he divulges the magic carpet’s power. (ll. 414-18)
Readers may not receive enough detail about Fellicula to fully understand her
extraordinary hold on Jonathas; indeed, she may not seem particularly charis-
matic to the reader. Nevertheless, it is clear that Hoccleve wants readers to
understand that Jonathas perceives Fellicula to possess significant working
parts of charisma. For much of the poem he is powerless against her, even
when he is prepared for her verbal seduction. After losing the ring to her,
16 E.g. Latin fel, “gall”; Middle English and Old French fel, “treacherous, deceitful, false;
guileful, crafty; villainous, base; wicked, evil”; Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “fel (adj.).”
Hoccleve alludes to this etymology in the Tale of Jonathas, lines 634-36, p. 238.
Jonathas promises himself that he will guard the secret of the magic brooch,
but after Fellicula solicits his trust once again, “Ionathas thought hir wordes so
sweete, / Þat he was dronke of the plesant swetnesse / Of hem …” (ll. 304-06).
This intoxication is quite literally a “surrender of the will.” Her sweet talk is
conventional but no less efficacious for that. When a weeping Fellicula says
that she is afraid of Jonathas losing his magic brooch, he abdicates his own
judgment, asking, “[N]ow, what … woldist thow in this cas consaille?” (313-04),
signaling his “sense of affirmation in the viewer or follower,” and rhetorically
reversing his earlier proverbial pronouncement that women cannot keep
secrets. Her will has now become his.
After losing both ring and brooch, Jonathas finally prepares to punish
Fellicula by abandoning her at the end of the world via his magic carpet, but he
ultimately forgives Fellicula a third time. In a remarkably accelerated passage,
Jonathas then falls asleep, Samson-like, in the lap of his paramour, but not
before divulging the secret of the magic carpet:
“Swich vertu hath this clooth on which we sitte,”

Seide he “þat where in this world us be list,
Sodeynly with the thought shuln thidir flitte,
And how thidir come un-to us unwist,
As thyng fro fer unknowen in the mist.”
And ther-with to this womman fraudulent,
“To sleepe,” he seide, “have I good talent;” (ll. 414-20)
This shift from explanation to sleep is so abrupt as to be almost comic, like

Nick Bottom’s enchanted slumber with Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“I have an exposition of sleep come upon me” (4.1.39). But perhaps this artless
narcolepsy illustrates the depths of Jonathas’s enchantment. He loses con-
sciousness only to wake up abandoned at the end of the world. His inexplicable
slumber is a metaphor for the power Fellicula wields over him – a power that
defies rational explanation.
The working parts of charisma that characterize Fellicula set the stage for
the revenge that is to follow, contributing to a second dimension of charisma
in the tale: the power of revenge narrative itself. When Fellicula betrays
Jonathas at the end of the world, she prompts the foolish protagonist to become
a powerful avenger by first plunging him into Jaeger’s abject state, a state in
which he is “as low as he can go”19:

274 Richardson
Whan he awook and neithir he ne fond

Womman ne clooth he wepte bittirly,
And seide, “allas now is ther in no lond
Man werse, I trowe, begoon than am y!”
On euery syde his looke he caste, and sy
Nothyng but briddes in the eir fleynge,
And wylde beestes aboute him rennynge. (442-48)20
Hoccleve takes this opportunity to stress Jonathas’s humiliation here, with the
narrator shaming Jonathas directly: “thy paramour maad hath thy berd” (433).21
Such derision marks his nadir. He has been repeatedly duped by his lover,
chided by this mother, abandoned through his own naiveté, and even dispar-
aged by the poem’s narrator. His abandonment provides a powerful geographical
correlative to his psychological state: he is at wit’s end at world’s end. Here it is
helpful to compare Jonathas’s situation to Homer’s description of Odysseus
arriving shipwrecked among the Phaeacians, which Jaeger uses to detail the
hero’s movement from abject to exalted states: “Homer needed Odysseus to
enter this happy land of beauty and excellence barely clinging to life, stripped
of every possession and every physical quality. His starting point had to be set
low so that the rise would be all the more dramatic.”22 A few paragraphs later
we learn that a formal charisma is inherent in this structure: “The dynamics of
the narrative work are measured by the changes in the trajectory of the hero’s
development. If the dynamics move from falling low to rising high, the effect,
in epic certainly, is charismatic.”23 Thus two principal types of charisma are at
play in the Odyssey: a charisma that relates to character, and a charisma that
relates to form. In the Odyssey, these two types of charisma mutually reinforce
one another, as the charis of the hero is enhanced by the narrative movement
that exalts him.
Compared to that of Odysseus, one might even say that Jonathas’s Aufstieg
höhe – Jaeger’s term for the distance a protagonist must climb from low to high
20 Hoccleve, Tale of Jonathas, pp. 231-32.

21 Hoccleve’s narration – with its talk of beards – invokes medieval language of social
embarrassment and ridicule, like Nicholas’s cry, “A berd! A berd!” when Absolom is
sexually and scatologically shamed in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. In his recent edition of
Hoccleve’s Series, Roger Ellis writes of this narratorial intrusion, “An apostrophe without
parallel in the analogues, which reinforces Hoccleve’s bending of the allegory in the
direction of a moral lesson relevant to the first fictional reader”; see Hoccleve, “My
Compleinte,” p. 259, note to lines 432-41.
– is even greater.24 Jonathas’s profoundly abject state, so necessary in tales of

revenge, sets up the considerable force of revenge narrative’s dynamics, par-
tially accounting for the genre’s lasting appeal. In enabling the rising movement
of Jonathas, vengeance functions as a psychic opportunity, a means by which
he can forge a heroic masculine identity by engaging a world of risk. The
Jonathas who emerges after his abandonment is very different from the
Jonathas at the beginning of the tale. No longer manipulated by his paramour,
he is methodical, purposeful, and self-controlled. Stranded at the end of the
world, he suffers terribly after consuming poisonous fruit and water, but he
heals himself when he discovers equally miraculous fruit and water as anti-
dotes. He comes across a magnificent castle and learns that its King suffers
from a mysterious malady. Although he sees the severed heads of previously
unsuccessful doctors spitted upon pikes, Jonathas accepts the challenge of
healing the King, sounding more like a venturesome knight in the world of
romance than a fainthearted university student: “fful wel dar I me putte in
auenture” (525).25 Although Jonathas’s risk is mitigated by his newfound heal-
ing objects, his challenge at the castle is no mere university game, for it involves
potentially fatal consequences. It is significant that Jonathas’s recovery begins
in an enchanted land of adventure, for adventure is the “medium in which the
moral and martial education of the knight takes place.”26 Here the tone and
purpose of the poem shift; the poem becomes less about dissuasion (e.g. “Do
not let this happen to you”) and more about imitation (e.g. “Overcome your
shame and weakness like Jonathas”). While Jonathas’s discovery of the leprosy-
inducing fruit and corrosive water is a painful accident, there is nothing
accidental in the way he uses them in his pursuit of revenge. His success as a
healer wins him safe passage back home – and back to Fellicula.
With this narrative return to Fellicula, it is appropriate to return to the ques-
tion of charisma and her character. According to Jaeger’s effects 4 and 5,
charisma “enlarges the person who possesses it, or some simulation of the per-
son constructed either in the mind of the charismatic person or in the minds
of the devotees … [and] inspires imitation, awakens the urge to be like the
charismatic person …”27 Given Fellicula’s cruelty, it may be difficult to see how
these particular effects are witnessed in the Tale of Jonathas. However, some
form of imitation is essential to many prominent revenge narratives, structur-
24 Cf. Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 85.

276 Richardson
ing the very transference of power that turns victims into avengers. Consider,
for example, Shylock’s most famous speech in the Merchant of Venice. After
Shylock’s daughter Jessica elopes with the Christian Lorenzo, Shylock resolves
to carve his pound of flesh from Antonio’s chest. When asked what a pound of
a man’s flesh is good for, Shylock responds:
To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He
hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled
my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew … If
you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you
poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we
are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a
Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what
should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The vil-
lainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the
instruction. (3.1.53-73)
This speech illustrates that, for Shylock, imitation is an essential element of his
revenge, perhaps even its most vibrant dimension. In the play, imitation moves
from the hypothetical plane of a written contract into an actual physical
attempt upon Antonio in a court of law. The loss of Shylock’s own figurative
flesh – Jessica – will be compensated for by a literal forfeit as Shylock intends
to “better the instruction” of a hostile Christian society that took his daughter
away.
Retaliatory imitation is central to the processes of disenchantment in
Hoccleve’s poem, serving as a kind of mirror image of charismatic imitation,
and it occurs in multiple male revenge fantasies referenced at the outset of this
essay (e.g. Boccaccio, Henryson, Chaucer). The structures of these works are
similar enough to facilitate a taxonomy of this genre’s recurring features:
1. A sexual experience gap between an experienced female and an inexpe-

rienced male.
2. The shaming of the male protagonist.
3. Peripeteia or reversal of fortune for the female character, creating a need
for the male character.
4. The male protagonist’s retaliatory imitation of her abuse of him.
5. The female’s recognition and confession of abuse (anagnōrisis).28

6. Violent (and often sexualized) punishment of the female character.29
While these features vary from work to work, the role of peripeteia – defined by
Aristotle in his Poetics as a “surprising reversal” – typically catalyzes the pro-
tagonist’s movement from abject to exalted positions, as well as occasions the
imitation that transforms him into an avenger. The kind of peripety that
obtains here is something richer than simple role reversal, hinging as it does on
fantasies of control and leading to sexualized conclusions. The male protago-
nist suddenly gains a position of power and control over his shamer and over
his former emotional and sexual weakness, and the abusing female’s newly
abased position seems serendipitously designed to require the male’s unique
gifts. In Hoccleve’s poem, for instance, Jonathas gains his healing abilities just
before Fellicula falls conveniently ill:
Now shoop it thus þat this Fellicula–

The welle of deceyuable doublenesse,
ffolwere of the steppes of dalida–
Was thanne exaltat vn-to hy richesse,
But shee was fallen in-to greet seeknesse,
And herde seyn for nat mighte it been hid,
How maistreful a leche he had him kid; (589-95)30
With her newfound weakness, it is as if Fellicula has absorbed all the negative
qualities of the formerly weak Jonathas, beginning with his lack of discern-
ment. At the beginning of the narrative, Jonathas was unable to recognize
what should have been apparent: that Fellicula was a prostitute intent on
manipulating him. By the end of the tale it is Fellicula who is unable to see that
the man standing before her is the man whom she had abused long ago: “But
28 Peripeteia and anagnōrisis are derived from Aristotle’s Poetics and form part of John
Kerrigan’s structural analysis of revenge in Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
(Oxford, 1996), p. 6.
29 Even the figure Jaeger holds up as the charismatic hero par excellence, Odysseus, orders
Telemachus to mutilate and then hang 12 faithless servant women in Book 22 of the
Odyssey for sleeping with the suitors and thereby shaming his house. Although Odysseus
himself has not been shamed directly by these women, a psychoanalytic reading may
view the hanged women as ciphers for other female characters such as Calypso and Circe
who had exercised control over him during his journey home.
278 Richardson
what þat he was shee ne wiste nat” (603).31 And whereas Jonathas had craved
sex, Fellicula’s physical desire is more essential: she needs her health restored.
In her abject state she becomes foolishly credulous, like the formerly naïve
Jonathas, and she believes him when he says that he will heal her if she only
trusts him and confesses. The power that “uncouples the critical sense [and]
overrides judgment” now belongs to Jonathas; a perverse form of imitation has
occurred.
Poised with an opportunity to show mercy and heal Fellicula, or to take ven-
geance upon her with his fatal fruit and water, Jonathas chooses the latter:
Of the fruyt of the tree he yaf hire ete,

Which þat him made in-to the leepre sterte;
And as blyue in hir wombe gan they frete
And gnawe so þat change gan hire herte.
Now herkneth how it hire made smerte:
Hir wombe opned and out fil eche entraille
That in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill. (659-65)32
The first line of the stanza offers a reversal of woman’s primal seduction, a
punishment for the sexual power Fellicula had exercised over Jonathas as a
daughter of Eve. The ensuing violence of the passage is shocking, abruptly nar-
rated, and perhaps even marked by some gallows humor, as the idiomatic
“change of heart” here does not refer to Fellicula’s newfound sense of remorse,
but to her physical dissolution.33 Just as the audience was previously asked to
consider Jonathas’s disgrace, we are now rhetorically invited to behold his ven-
geance: “Now herkneth how it hire made smerte …” Perhaps only the phrase
“thus seith the booke sanz faill” signals some authorial discomfort with these
gruesome details. But it is precisely in these gruesome details that we witness
the working parts of charisma that lead to disenchantment in male revenge
fantasy. In his first chapter, “Charisma and Art,” Jaeger details instances of
extreme fan worship of pop and rock stars such as David Bowie, drawing upon
the research of Fred and Judy Vermorel in Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans. These
obsessive fans seek to escape into fantasy worlds in which existence is richer,
more vibrant, and sexually alive. Such pleasure-seeking illusions might be
anticipated. But intense fandom also has its dark side:

33 The idiom “change of heart” is attested as early as c.1325; Middle English Dictionary, s.v.
“chaunǧen 2a.”
Starlust records not just hyperreal exaltation, but also a fair amount of
ugly aggression directed at the star. The authors/compilers confess their
shock at the vehemence. It is often generated by the bursting of the illu-
sion, the realization that the inspirer of blissful dreams is all tinny show,
not a god at all. It also takes the form of the fan imagining that the luster
of the idol will become his if he kills him. The shooting of John Lennon is
one spectacular case. The impulse to destroy, slash, throw acid on, or
pound to bits famous works of art can have a similar motive, and this too
connects charisma of person and of art.34
This “bursting of the illusion” finds an apt metaphor in the bursting of Fellicula’s
womb, just as the violence of the disillusioned fan parallels the violence
Jonathas perpetrates against the woman who had once enthralled him and
held him in thrall. Although Jaeger’s last sentence describes acts of violence
done to art objects, it could just as easily be applied to persons, and especially
to women. In our own time, acid attacks have victimized women who have
“repelled unwanted offers of marriage or sexual advances.”35 The corrosive
water Jonathas uses to rend Fellicula’s womb is a grisly literary precursor to
such vitriolage, and with the bursting of Fellicula’s womb, the poem forces us
to witness a kind of “gynoclasm” that parallels the iconoclasm described by
Jaeger above. The poem’s contemptuous emphasis upon feminine bodiliness is
broadened by a strained allegorical moralization common to nearly all Gesta
Romanorum tales, in which Fellicula is said to symbolize the recalcitrant
flesh that must be mortified with the water of contrition and the fruit of
penance.36
Though such misogyny is thoroughly conventional in the literature of the
Middle Ages, compared to source and analogue materials, Hoccleve’s account
of Fellicula’s punishment is uniquely sexualized. Oesterley’s edition of the
Gesta Romanorum reads, “[E]t cum gustasset et bibisset, statim est arefacta et
dolores interiores senciens lacrimabiliter clamavit et spiritum emisit.”37 [“And
when she tasted and drank, she was immediately burned and, feeling interior
pains, tearfully cried out and sent forth her spirit.”] The Anglo-Latin text edited
by Jerome Mitchell is closer to Hoccleve’s description: “Cum autem de fructu
commedisset et de aqua bibisset statim corpus eius aperuit et omnia viscera

35 Kate Wesson, “A Situational Assessment Study of Acid Violence in Bangladesh,” Develop
ment in Practice 12, no. 1 (2002), 96-100, at p. 97.
37 Gesta Romanorum, p. 469.
280 Richardson
eius exibant et sic cum angustia magna spiritum traditit.”38 [“And when she ate
the fruit and drank the water, immediately her body opened and all her intes-
tines gushed out, and so with great distress she surrendered her spirit.”] The
prose version in Harleian 7333 describes the scene as a kind of perverse com-
munion: “[W]henne she hadde resseyvid [the water and fruit], she was in
swiche a likenesse, that no man wolde no lenger abide with hir, and in that
grete angr she yede up the sprite …”39 British Library Additional 9066 reads,
“And whan she had eten of the frute, and dronken of the watir, anon her bely
opened, and all her guttes went out; and so with grete payne she died.”40 Thus
Hoccleve’s near contemporaries render the Latin interiores dolores slightly dif-
ferently. The Harleian writer stresses the paramour’s loss of physical beauty
with the result that no man could stand to be around her – a particular indig-
nity for a woman who traded upon her looks. The other vernacular prose writer
is more brutal, suggesting a kind of spontaneous evisceration: “[A]non her bely
opened, and all her guttes went out.”41
Only Hoccleve uses the term womb to gloss dolor interior or viscera. In
Middle English the word womb had a wide semantic range, often simply mean-
ing “the visceral cavity of the human body.”42 Today the word has undergone
semantic narrowing to the point that it is almost exclusively used in the con-
text of female sexuality and childbirth, and the Middle English Dictionary
shows that this meaning was certainly available to Hoccleve: “The human
uterus, womb; also fig.; specif. the womb of the Virgin Mary; also, the vaginal
canal, vagina …”43 It is this narrower definition that suits the Tale of Jonathas
best. I do not think it is farfetched to perceive in Fellicula’s destruction a kind
38 Mitchell, “Thomas Hoccleve,” p. 325.

39 Herrtage, The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, p. 193.
40 Herrtage, The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, pp. 192-93.
41 Thomas D. Hill has demonstrated that evisceration in medieval literature is associated
with “the punishment of heretics, apostates, and traitors.” Hill cites, inter alia, the
disembowelment of Bróðir in Brennu-Njáls Saga, the similar grisly death of the heretic
Arius, Dante’s representation of Mohammed in Inferno 28.21-63, the bursting bowels of
Error’s children in Spenser’s Fairie Queene 1.26, and of course, the death of Judas in Acts
1:18. See Thomas D. Hill, “The Evisceration of Bróðir in Brennu-Njáls Saga,” Traditio 37
(1981), 437-44, at p. 443. Fellicula’s death also resembles the fate of what Robert Mills has
termed “abject anti-bodies” in hagiographical narratives – bodies marked by “corporeal
destructibility and distance from the sublime.” See Robert Mills, “Violence, Community
and the Materialisation of Belief,” in A Companion to Middle English Hagiography, ed.
Sarah Salih (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 87-103, at p. 94.
42 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “womb 2a.”
43 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “womb 5a.”
of symbolic rape, a form of penetration and internal destruction. In Fellicula’s

demise we view a savage punishment reciprocal to her manipulative eroticism,
and one may even detect a kind of Dantesque contrapasso in the bursting of
her womb. This misogynistic violence is a function of Jonathas’s disenchant-
ment with Fellicula, illustrating how “charismatic experience gives way to
disillusion … While charisma raises up the viewer, it also creates the greater
space to fall: that is the grounding of the disillusioned fan’s aggression toward
the idol …”44 The poem violently nullifies Fellicula’s power over Jonathas, ren-
dering the once alluring and mysterious to be simply revolting. Fellicula’s
exposed womb corresponds to Camille Paglia’s comments on sex crimes as a
means to disclose the “unbearable hiddenness” of the female body – perhaps
what captivated a sexually inexperienced Jonathas in the first place:
If sexual physiology provides the pattern for our experience of the world,
what is woman’s basic metaphor? It is mystery, the hidden … the anxiety-
inducing invisibility of the womb … Woman is veiled. Violent tearing of
this veil may be a motive in gang-rapes and rape-murders, particularly
ritualistic disemboweling of the Jack the Ripper kind. The Ripper’s public
nailing up of his victim’s uterus is exactly paralleled in tribal ritual of
South African Bushmen. Sex crimes are always male, never female, be-
cause such crimes are conceptualizing assaults on the unreachable om-
nipotence of woman and nature. Every woman’s body contains a cell of
archaic night, where all knowing must stop.45
Paglia’s biological essentialism here may be overstated, and Jonathas does not
nail up Fellicula’s womb for all to see. But Paglia’s comments do get at the way
in which the Tale of Jonathas offers up the literary equivalent of such bloody
spectacle – one that seems unnecessarily grisly if its ostensible purpose is sim-
ply to warn a 15-year-old boy to avoid loose women.
To this point I have examined aspects of Jaeger’s charismatology operative
within the Tale of Jonathas, looking at how working parts of charisma structure
relationships among characters and account for recurring features of revenge
narratives themselves, such as disenchantment and misogynistic violence.
I would like to conclude this essay by stepping outside the world of the text to
consider how aspects of Jaeger’s charismatology might help explain Hoccleve’s
particular interest in this tale and account for its popular longevity.

45 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New
York, 1991), pp. 22-23.
282 Richardson
I opened this paper with a caveat: if we are to believe what Thomas Hoccleve
says about his own writing, because Hoccleve is simultaneously one of the most
solipsistic and confessional of all medieval writers. In the Series, Hoccleve ref-
erences his own psychology to a degree unprecedented among medieval
English poets. The confessional nature of his work invites inevitable specula-
tion about the man himself, and for our purposes, speculation about why he
chose to English the Tale of Jonathas. Readers of Hoccleve should approach his
autobiographical writing with a healthy degree of skepticism. James Simpson,
for example, argues that Hoccleve’s exchanges with his “friend” constitute vari-
ations on consolation literature tropes as a means to “convince his public,
in the person of the friend, that his voice is, in the most essential respects,
stable.”46 D.C. Greetham similarly recognizes literary constructs behind
Hoccleve’s representation of madness, but he affirms the validity of looking at
authorial psychology in Hoccleve’s Series, even in texts that are not obviously
autobiographical:
[S]ince Hoccleve’s oeuvre is so much concerned with the problems of

melancholy (under that term or another), his narrator is faced with, and
advances the same cure for, the disease which engendered Burton’s
Anatomy (i.e. to write about madness in order to avoid going mad)
…
In the Series poems, this “thoghtful disease” becomes a primary subject
for narrative as well as psychological analysis. Here, Hoccleve’s exploita-
tion of a previously created persona is given full license to dominate the
work. The self-contained poems … become in fact really digressions in
the portrayal of the poet’s psyche. They react to, and are the product of,
emotional and psychological disturbances to a far greater degree than are
the individual stories in The Canterbury Tales …47
A consideration of the Tale of Jonathas as a reflex of the “emotional and psy-

chological disturbances” of the author is problematized by the fact that many
aspects of character are determined by Hoccleve’s Latin source. Nevertheless,
we may at least speculate about why Hoccleve was drawn to translate this
work, aside from a commissioning frame narrative that may or may not be
true.
46 James Simpson, “Madness and Texts: Hoccleve’s Series,” in Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century
Poetry, eds. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London, 1991), pp. 15-29, at p. 21.
47 D.C. Greetham, “Self-Referential Artifacts: Hoccleve’s Persona as a Literary Device,” Mod
ern Philology 86, no. 3 (1989), 242-51, at pp. 246-47.
This frame narrative positions the poem as a negative exemplum, a warning

to young men to avoid women such as Fellicula. Such a purpose would seem-
ingly set the poem at odds with the kinds of charismatic literature Jaeger
discusses in Enchantment, works that inspire and enlarge existence, and exem-
plary “life writing” that stands in for the “longed-for physical presence” of the
subject.48 In other words, the Tale of Jonathas is ostensibly focused on dissua-
sion, whereas charismatic works typically inspire imitation. Yet as we have
seen, the didactic elements of the poem become overwhelmed by the working
parts of charisma that animate it; e.g. the alluring abject-to-exalted transfor-
mation of Jonathas in a romance world of adventure, as well as Jonathas’s
disenchanted vengeance. Readers may come for the moral, but they stay for
the violence.
Perhaps what Hoccleve saw in this tale was the potential for “life writing” of
a different sort – a Gesta Romanorum narrative that related more to his own
anxieties than to any altruistic desire to mentor youth. Perhaps Hoccleve was
(consciously or unconsciously) compelled to write Jonathas’s life in an effort to
restore some internal sense of self. Of literature’s role in facilitating such a pur-
pose, Jaeger writes:
Recent theories of cognitive and developmental psychology have claimed

the importance of the “narrative construction of the self.” Identity gets
fashioned via narratives. The process of writing a life narrative is by now
entrenched in the practice of therapy in cognitive psychology. Individuals
construct their identity by “writing” their own narratives, and they derive
a sense of who they are from fictional narrative, their own and others.49
With this approach, it is possible to read Hoccleve’s writing of Jonathas simul-

taneously as a “digression in the portrayal of the poet’s psyche” as well as an
attempt to enlarge his existence through an appeal to a narrative he finds char-
ismatic. Others have probed Hoccleve’s psychology more thoroughly than can
be attempted in the remaining pages of this essay.50 However, a brief look at
two Hocclevian works will illustrate some commonalities between Hoccleve’s
48 Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 352, 64.

50 In addition to Simpson and Greetham, see Jennifer Bryan, “Hoccleve’s Glasses,” in Looking
Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia,
2008), pp. 176-203; and Ethan Knapp, “Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the
Self in Hoccleve’s Formulary and La male regle,” Speculum 74, no. 2 (1999), 357-76. Knapp
expands upon his Hoccleve research in The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the
Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, PA, 2001).
284 Richardson
autobiographical obsessions and the preoccupations of Jonathas, suggesting

that Jonathas represented for the poet a means to mediate anxieties about
feminine power and control, and eradicate them by portraying the violent
demise of Fellicula.
Hoccleve writes frankly about his own self-destructive behavior in La Male
Regle (c.1406), in which he admits to wasting his health and Privy Seal pay-
check on tavern revels and Thames water taxis. At the Paul’s Head Tavern he
frequently caroused with women, treating them to “sweet wyn … / And wafres
thikke” (145-46).51 Yet even at the Paul’s Head there is a Jonathas-like naiveté
about his dealings with women, for Hoccleve maintains that a kind of coward-
ice – not moral compunction – restrained him from pursuing sexual relation-
ships:
Of loues aart yit touchid I no deel;

I cowde nat, & eek it was no neede:
Had I a kus I was content ful weel,
Bettre than I wolde han be with the deede:
Ther-on can I but small; it is no dreede:
Whan þat men speke of it in my presence,
For shame I wexe as reed as is the gleede. (153-59)52
This portrait of a sexually inexperienced young man squandering his resources

on wine, women, and song is not unlike the description of Jonathas at univer-
sity. Of course, Hoccleve’s moralizing self-characterization is cliché, and lest
we invest too much in it, we should be mindful that La Male Regle is ultimately
a begging poem that concludes with a request for Lord Fourneval to pay his
annual salary of ten pounds.
Less clichéd and formulaic, however, are Hoccleve’s comments in his
Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend, in which Hoccleve candidly describes
his bouts with madness, his “wylde infirmitee” (40), likening his sanity to a
pilgrim who goes away for a while and later returns home.53 In this poem,
Hoccleve veritably obsesses about what others have said about him during his
“braynseek” period, and he is angry and resentful of friends who are skeptical
of the long-term prospects of his sanity. Hoccleve even rehearses an imagined
dialogue of those speculating on when he would go mad again: “‘Whan
51 Thomas Hoccleve, La Male Regle, in Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, pp. 25-39, at p. 29.
52 Hoccleve, La Male Regle, p. 30.
53 Thomas Hoccleve, Complaint, in Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. J.A.
Burrow (Oxford, 1999), pp. 5, 19.
passynge hete is,’ quod they ‘trustith this, / Assaile him wole ageyn þat mala-
die’” (92-93).54 In one remarkable passage from the Complaint, Hoccleve says
that he was so overcome with melancholy that he had to write in order to feel
human:
The greef aboute myn herte so swal

And bolned euere to and to so sore
Þat nedes oute I muste therwithal.
I thoghte I nolde keepe it cloos no more
Ne lette it in me for to eelde and hore;
And for to preeue I cam of a womman
I brast oute on the morwe and thus began. (29-35)55
Hoccleve’s description of writing as a way “to preeue [he] cam of a womman”

depicts poetry as a means of affirming the integrity of the self, and it comple-
ments the famous scene of Hoccleve standing in front of a mirror, examining
his image for any residual signs of madness, trying desperately to correct them:
And in my chamber at hoom whan þat I was

Myself allone I in this wyse wroghte:
I streighte vnto my mirour and my glas
To looke how þat me of my cheere thoghte,
If any othir were it than it oghte;
For fayn wolde I if it had nat been right,
Amendid it to my konnynge and might. (155-61)56
This passage reveals Thomas Hoccleve to be a 15th-century man deeply curious

about the workings of his own mind and suffering from a fragmentation of the
self that he seeks to ameliorate, in part, through writing. He is a man keenly
aware of appearances, trying intently to avoid being laughed at, or gossiped
about, or regarded as foolish and unstable. Poetry affords him the opportunity
to tell his story and reassure himself of his own integrity. Jaeger’s comment
about individuals therapeutically constructing a sense of self through writing
constitutes a slight variation on Greetham’s suggestion of revelation in
Hoccleve’s non-autobiographical writing – that these “digressions in the por-
trayal of the poet’s psyche” most meaningfully betray unconscious authorial
54 Hoccleve, Complaint, p. 9.
55 Hoccleve, Complaint, p. 5.
56 Hoccleve, Complaint, pp. 14-15.
286 Richardson
interests and obsessions. It is an overstatement to say that Hoccleve is Jonathas.

But Hoccleve’s obsessions map well to those of his character, and Hoccleve
himself invites us to examine the ways in which his writing works out his battle
for sanity with fear and trembling.
The popularity of the Tale of Jonathas – its Latin, prose vernacular, and
poetic versions, its Renaissance pastoral appropriations and Scandinavian folk
retellings – demonstrates that Hoccleve was not alone in responding to this
narrative’s allure. Indeed, some six centuries of continuous transmission tes-
tify to a profound emotional response from readers through the ages. Just as
the poem may have done some therapeutic work for the author, it may also
have done some work for the people who kept reading it. In male revenge fan-
tasy, villains such as Fellicula perform the vital work of affirming readers’ faith
in a moral universe, as long as such women suffer terribly in the end. To para-
phrase Voltaire, if Fellicula did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her. Of
this communal desire for revenge John Carey has written, “We need to feel the
sweetness of revenge so constantly that life cannot satisfy our requirements.
We have to keep inventing villains, and inventing stories in which vengeance
catches up with them, because otherwise we should be starved of a vital part
of our moral diet.”57 With the Tale of Jonathas, Hoccleve serves us that prover-
bial dish best served cold. He feeds us a male revenge fantasy that exhibits
many of the working parts of charisma, but one whose female villain is ulti-
mately destroyed by the effects of disenchantment. Yet the continuing readerly
fascination with the narrative of Fellicula’s bursting womb suggests that, for
Hoccleve and his readers, this may have been the most charismatic object
of all.
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Bryan, Jennifer. Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval
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288 Hardy
Chapter 9
The Emperorship of Sigismund of Luxemburg

(1410-37): Charisma and Government in the Later
Medieval Holy Roman Empire
Duncan Hardy
Introduction: Later Medieval Politics and Culture through the Lens

of Charisma
As a concept that relates to the qualities of individuals, in representation or

reality, and to their effects on wider groups, “charisma” is potentially a very use-
ful term for late medievalists. Although the word “charisma” itself has rarely
been used explicitly in studies of politics and culture in later medieval Europe,
recent scholarship in this field has focused increasingly on the roles of key fig-
ures in 14th- and 15th-century societies, and the constructions and perceptions
of these figures. It is widely accepted amongst later medievalists that success-
ful government depended in many respects on the competence and character-
istics, real or imagined, of rulers and political actors. There are many prominent
examples of kings whose reigns are considered to have been disruptive phases
of crisis because of the personalities of the monarchs themselves. We might
think of Henry VI (1421-71), for example, a king of England who was decidedly
uncharismatic by any conventional definition of the word, and whose govern-
ment disintegrated in the face of his inertia;1 or Charles VI (1368-1422), king of
France, whose bouts of insanity created a power vacuum filled by warring
princes.2 What historians of these familiar examples have highlighted is that
the political cultures and structures of these later medieval kingdoms required
at least a modicum of vigor and skill on the part of the king in order for the
1 For the argument that the conflicts traditionally called the “Wars of the Roses” arose because
the political culture and governmental structure of the English polity could not cope with a
weak and inactive personality like Henry VI, see John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of
Kingship (Cambridge, 1996).
2 See Françoise Autrand, Charles VI: la folie du roi (Paris, 1986); Bertrand Schnerb, Les Armagnacs
et les Bourguignons: la maudite guerre (Paris, 1988); Richard Vaughan, John the Fearless: The
Growth of Burgundian Power, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, 2002).

The Emperorship of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1410-37) 289
government to be perceived to be exercising power effectively, impartially, and

in the interests of the common good.
Equally, later medieval scholarship of recent decades has emphasized the
importance of the image of rulers, as depicted in a growing variety of ever
more widely diffused media, and as represented in increasingly sophisticated
debates about authority and political organization. The 13th to 16th centuries
saw an explosion in the reading and writing of texts about the roles and attri-
butes of ideal rulers.3 The genre often categorized as “mirrors for princes”
constitutes the most intellectually developed manifestation of this literature,
but it is now clear that the participants in discussions about the nature and
attributes of authority in a given polity were numerous and varied in this
period, and that these discussions took place at many levels.4 At the same time,
the image projected by rulers and apprehended or constructed by their sub-
jects has long been recognized as integral to their power and legitimacy,
especially in the case of those who occupied positions associated with sacral
traditions, like kings and emperors.5 The mechanisms by which power was
mediated within European societies in this period have been studied exten-
sively, and we are now aware of the complex interactions of oral, written,
material, and performative means of communication which enabled multilay-
ered dialogue between elites and between rulers and subjects.6
3 This is now a commonplace of the textbook literature: see for example Charles F. Briggs, The
Body Broken: Medieval Europe 1300-1520 (London, 2011), pp. 91-95, 102-03.
4 On the political thought of jurists and canonists in general, see Joseph Canning, A History of
Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450, 2nd ed. (London, 2005), chapters 3-4. On mirrors for
princes, see Albert Rigaudière, “The Theory and Practice of Government in Western Europe
in the Fourteenth Century,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History. Volume VI c.1300-c.1415, ed.
Michael Jones (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 17-41. For the rise of participation in political discussions
(and political processes more generally), see, amongst many others, John Watts, The Making
of Polities. Europe, 1300-1500 (Cambridge, 2009), esp. pp. 9, 416.
5 On the construction and representation of sacral monarchy in France, where this scholarship
is most developed, see Jacques Krynen, L’empire du roi: idées et croyances politiques en France,
XIIIe-XVe siècle (Paris, 1993); Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Joël
Blanchard (Paris, 1995). The foundational work on the dualistic conception of a monarch’s
person and office remains Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval
Political Theology (Princeton, 1957).
6 The enormous and diverse literatures on these media and modes of communication cannot
be summarized here. However, of particular note is work on “pragmatic literacy” in the UK
and Germany, which has investigated the intersection of written, oral, and performative prac-
tices, often in political contexts. See Pragmatic Literacy, East and West, 1200-1330, ed. R.H.
Britnell (Woodbridge, 1997); Pragmatische Dimensionen mittelalterlicher Schriftkultur, ed.
Christel Meier (Munich, 2002); Zwischen Pragmatik und Performanz: Dimensionen Mittelal-
290 Hardy
Clearly, then, there is now a rich scholarship of politics and culture in later
medieval Europe, in which the personalities and traits of political actors have
been shown to be important, as have the conventions and rhetorical and mate-
rial constructions of rulership. This article aims to consider these structural
and representational factors in later medieval political culture through the
prism of “charisma.” While recent historiography has paid close attention to
rulership in the ways outlined above, the term “charisma” itself has rarely been
interrogated or deployed in the field of later medieval history.7 Yet in both its
Weberian formulation and in the recent theoretical work of Stephen Jaeger,
this concept brings into focus some of the key mechanisms of political author-
ity in the 14th and 15th centuries. These mechanisms include the performance
of power by an individual ruler and his entourage; the dissemination of ideas
about a king or emperor’s high status and virtuous characteristics through nar-
ratives and material artifacts; and the construction of an imaginary political
community united by a shared admiration for and memory of an influential
monarchy.
Max Weber understood charisma as a force that created and buttressed the
authority (Herrschaft) of a ruling figure.8 For Weber, charisma equated to an
unusual, even magical aura which attracted a following to those individuals
perceived to possess it. The Weberian theory of charisma therefore offers a vo-
cabulary for articulating the authority-building effects of sacral kingship and
emperorship, particularly as this role was performed in person to audiences of
elites and subjects. However, in Weber’s own view the “pure” manifestations of
charisma capable of having this effect only existed in “primitive” and ancient
societies. Weber considered more sophisticated and institutionalized political
structures, such as those present in later medieval Europe, to be antithetical to
the elemental functioning of the ideal-typical Herrschaftsverband of a charis-
matic leader.9
terlicher Schriftkultur, eds. Christoph Dartmann et al. (Turnhout, 2011). Also noteworthy is the
extensive German-speaking scholarship of “symbolic communication.” See especially Gerd
Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 2003); Spek
takel der Macht: Rituale im Alten Europa 800-1800, eds. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger et al. (Darm-
stadt, 2008).
7 An exception is the work of Gert Melville, focusing primarily on the charisma of religious
leaders. See the recent Festschrift dedicated to him: Institution und Charisma. Festschrift für
Gert Melville zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. Franz Felten et al. (Cologne, 2009).
8 See Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 1922), chapter III, part 4: “Charismatische
Herrschaft” (pp. 140-42).
9 Ibid., pp. 141-25.
By contrast, Stephen Jaeger has offered a theorization of charisma that

allows the concept to be deployed across time and space in even the most com-
plex social and cultural contexts.10 For Jaeger, charisma can be understood as
an aesthetic phenomenon that can manifest itself through any number of
artistic and literary media. Any representation of an individual that endows
him or her with the illusion of “an extraordinary personal presence” can be
said to have charismatic force. The effect of this charisma is that onlookers
become “enchanted,” and therefore willing to be persuaded or entranced by
the individual in question, to the point of obedience and even worship.11 The
“enchantment” effect articulated by Jaeger is similar to the process by which
later medieval rulers are thought to have influenced their subjects and other
elites through stagings and depictions of their authoritative status.12 In Jaeger’s
framework, skillful artifice and performance are central to conjuring this
enchanting charismatic force into being. The key technique for this purpose is
the achievement of “hypermimesis,” a quality of representation that conveys
the impression of an extraordinary personal presence that transcends the real-
istic and the mundane.13 Departing from Weber’s strictly personal definition of
charisma, Jaeger argues that artistic or material artifacts can convey hypermi-
metic representations of people. He also acknowledges that individuals can
cultivate a charismatic presence in their personal interactions (through dress,
manners and behaviors, and so on) – a notion that has a long history in the
scholarship of court cultures in premodern Europe.14
In the theories of charisma developed by Weber and Jaeger, the late medie-
valist has a useful analytical tool for considering the importance of rulers’
personalities within the wider operation of political cultures and social struc-
tures. The idea of “charisma” as an enchanting influential force strikes at the
heart of what later medieval political actors sought to cultivate and achieve in
their day-to-day activities, particularly through performative and representa-
tional modes of political communication. Understanding charisma as a force
experienced both in individual encounters and in a variety of media also chal-
lenges the presumed dichotomy between highly personalized, oral and
face-to-face styles of rulership and sophisticated and institutionalized political
10 Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Phila
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 7.
11 Ibid., p. 9.
14 Ibid., pp. 7-9, 24-26; see for example Wayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking
and Festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Detroit, 1978).
292 Hardy
systems that encompassed large spaces. In much of the later medieval scholar-
ship noted so far, the Weberian opposition of these two repertoires of power
– the personal and the institutional – has been implicitly abandoned or over-
turned. To assert that a king or emperor’s persona had an authoritative or
integrative effect on his realm is to accept that networks of influential people
living within that realm held shared ideas about the benefits of charismatic
rulership, including the importance of obeying and sustaining the rule of effec-
tive monarchs (often to their own advantage, of course).15 Such ideas, as we
have seen, have been detected in texts, artworks, and rituals, and often these
cultural artifacts emanated from political centers, monarchical courts fore-
most amongst them. In other words, far from being limited to small groups in
“primitive” societies, charismatic rulership can be observed in operation within
complex socio-cultural and ideological structures and institutions in later
medieval Europe.
This article proposes to engage with charisma as a category of analysis by
using it as a lens to examine government and political culture in Europe’s larg-
est polity, the Holy Roman Empire, under one of its most energetic monarchs,
Sigismund of Luxemburg. Following the emphases of the scholarship noted so
far, “charisma” is understood here to take into account both the personal char-
acteristics of the central actors in a polity and the ways in which their peers
and subjects interacted with them and, more abstractly, with the ideals of
authority, hierarchy, and community which these central actors represented
and embodied. We shall consider whether Sigismund was able to perform a
“charismatic” role in the Weberian and Jaegerian sense, that is, whether he was
able to persuade and “enchant” contemporaries to accept and assist his gov-
ernment of the Holy Roman Empire. Gauging the success of Sigismund’s
charismatic rulership therefore entails a focus on how other elites and subjects
responded to him and his administration as much as on the man himself. It
also requires an investigation of Sigismund’s legacy after his death. Attempts
by different groups within German-speaking Europe to draw on the memory of
Sigismund (whether as a “real individual” or as an idealized representation in
various media) provide insight into the enduring characteristics of charismatic
government in the 15th and 16th centuries.
In the later medieval Holy Roman Empire, the role of the monarch was
simultaneously more and less important than elsewhere in Europe. It was
more important because the Empire was much larger and more disparate than
15 On the “conceptual framework” which emphasized a ruler’s character and behavior,

shared by many elites and subjects in later medieval Europe, see in particular Watts,
Politics of Kingship, chapter 2.
realms like England or even France. The German-speaking lands within its bor-
ders were ruled by an array of competing powers, including princes, various
strata of noblemen and women, episcopal and monastic lords, free and impe-
rial cities, and even minor communes.16 The Empire therefore consisted of a
shifting kaleidoscope of intertwined jurisdictions and networks. The most
powerful political actors and entities in the Empire, and many of the smaller
and weaker ones, were formally independent of one another, being “immedi-
ate to the Empire” (reichsunmittelbar). These powers technically recognized no
overlord except the Empire’s supreme ruler – the king of the Romans (rex
Romanorum, römischer König; known as the Roman emperor – imperator,
Kaiser – if he had been crowned by a pope in Italy). In a sense, therefore, the
only thing that made the Holy Roman Empire something more than just a vast
zone filled with notionally autonomous political entities in the 14th and 15th
centuries was the monarchy. It is true that the Empire was also conceived as a
community of elites, which met at developing institutions like the imperial
diet and was tacitly headed by the six German prince-electors.17 However, the
roles and legitimacy of all the elites in the Empire, individually and collec-
tively, were underpinned by the king or emperor, whose notional position at
the pinnacle of the imperial polity was never challenged in the 14th and 15th
centuries.18
16 Traditionally, the power-bases of these actors have been characterized as “territories” or

“territorial states.” See, for example, Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der
territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter, 5th ed. (Vienna, 1965); Der
deutsche Territorialstaat im 14. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Patze, 2 vols. (Sigmaringen, 1970-71);
Karl Siegfried Bader, Der deutsche Südwesten in seiner territorialstaatlichen Entwicklung,
2nd ed. (Ostfildern, 1995). For a nuanced view of these power bases, including a critique
of the overly neat territorial categories that have shaped German scholarship, see Ernst
Schubert, Fürstliche Herrschaft und Territorium im späten Mittelalter, 2nd ed. (Munich,
2006).
17 On the imperial diet and its development in this period, see Gabriele Annas, Hoftag –
Gemeiner Tag – Reichstag: Studien zur strukturellen Entwicklung deutscher Reichsversamm
lungen des späten Mittelalters (1349-1471), 2 vols. (Göttingen, 2004). Susan Reynolds, King-
doms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1997), remains an
important overview of the communitarian dynamics in medieval “regnal polities.”
18 On the importance of the crown as the theoretical, and sometimes practical, apex of the
Holy Roman Empire’s socio-political hierarchy, see Peter Moraw, “Die Verwaltung des
Königtums und des Reiches und ihre Rahmenbedingungen,” in Deutsche Verwaltungsge-
schichte. Band I. Vom Spätmittelalter bis zum Ende des Reiches, ed. Kurt G.A. Jeserich et al.
(Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 22-65; Idem, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: das
Reich im späten Mittelalter, 1250 bis 1490 (Berlin, 1985); Karl Friedrich Krieger, König, Reich
und Reichsreform im Spätmittelalter, 2nd ed. (Munich, 2005). Note that in the 20th- and
294 Hardy
Fulfilling the functions of monarchical government in the enormous area of

Central Europe encompassed by the Empire was no easy task. The crown of the
Romans had relatively few administrative and financial resources. It was also
an elective office, and it therefore passed regularly between dynasties and
power bases.19 Nonetheless, if they hoped to give any substance to the idea of
the Holy Roman Empire as a polity, kings and emperors had to make as much
use as they could of the tools at their disposal in order to engage with the mul-
titude of powers in the Empire. It is often asserted that the idea of a Christian
Romano-German imperium was dead by this period, and that the under-
resourced kings and emperors of the Romans were incapable of reanimating it.
In his famous survey of 14th- and 15th-century Europe, Bernard Guenée put it
rhetorically: “How can one deny, in these circumstances, that at the end of the
Middle Ages, even in Germany, the Empire is nothing but a ghost?”20 We shall
see by reference to Sigismund of Luxemburg’s reign that monarchs capable of
performing the charismatic persona of a Roman king or emperor, both in per-
son and in a variety of media, could “enchant” peers and subjects, sustaining
the idea of the Empire amongst them with minimal resources.
At the same time, the monarchy was in some respects less important to
political life in the Holy Roman Empire than in other European realms. Many
of the constituent parts of the Empire were so remote from the lands of the
holder of the crown that the monarch had little effect on their practical func-
tioning. The reichsunmittelbar princes, bishops, abbots, margraves, counts,
knights, and cities were all endowed with at least a degree of governmental
self-sufficiency. These fragmented powers were often in conflict with one
another, but they also co-operated in order to carry out some basic tasks of
government in their localities. For instance, they collaborated within leagues
and associations for peace-keeping, mutual defense, arbitration, the mainte-
nance of coinage quality, or the streamlining of jurisdictions.21 The size and
early 21st-century German historiography of the Empire, its organization/political frame-

work is referred to as an “imperial constitution” (Reichsverfassung).
19 A useful summary of the situation of the king/emperor’s government in the 13th to 16th
centuries is Moraw, “Die Verwaltung des Königtums.” See also Len Scales, The Shaping of
German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245-1414 (Cambridge, 2012), chapter 2.
20 “Comment nier dans ces conditions qu’à la fin du Moyen Age, même en Allemagne,
l’Empire n’est plus qu’un fantôme?” Bernard Guenée, L’Occident aux XIVe et XVe siècles: Les
Etats (Paris, 1971; repr. 1993), p. 74.
21 Heinz Angermeier, Königtum und Landfriede im deutschen Spätmittelalter (Munich, 1966);
Duncan Hardy, “Reichsstädtische Bündnisse als Beweise für eine ‘verbündende’ politische
Kultur am Oberrhein (c.1350-1500),” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 142 (2014),
95-128.
fragmentation of the Empire forced its elites to act on their own initiative and
work out regional solutions geared towards everyday political needs, and
therefore to acquire substantial autonomy vis-à-vis the monarchy. In this sense
the monarch was potentially less important than in a more consolidated polity.
Kings and emperors who lacked suitably charismatic and energetic personali-
ties risked being cast aside or reduced to irrelevance. Indeed, Sigismund of
Luxemburg’s half-brother, the remote and inactive King Wenceslas of the
Romans and Bohemia, who remained in Prague for most of his reign in the
Empire (1376-1400), was ultimately deposed by an alliance of the four Rhenish
prince-electors on the grounds that he had failed to fulfil the characteristics
and requirements of a Roman king.22 Declaring Wenceslas to be “an unprofit-
able, neglectful, disreputable dismemberer and unworthy governor of the Holy
Roman Empire” in their articles of deposition,23 the electors replaced him with
one of their own, Rupert of the Palatinate (r. 1400-10).
Thus, the monarch had to be charismatic in two important respects. Char
isma enabled him to function as a focal point for the political elite, ensuring
their loyalty and participation through his exalted and “enchanting” persona,
and thereby sustaining a vision of a Holy Roman Empire which was more than
the sum of its parts. Persuasive charismatic force was also needed to prevent
that same elite from governing on its own terms and running the localities
without reference to the crown. It is in the context of the relationship between
the crown and other elites in the Empire that “charisma” worked as a force for
political attraction and the reinforcement of power. The remainder of this arti-
cle will analyze the facets and mechanisms of the charisma of Sigismund of
Luxemburg, and the way in which it shaped his government in the Empire dur-
ing his reign. It will also examine his charismatic image, and the idea of the
Romano-German imperium manifested by that charisma, after his death. First
we will analyze charisma as a personal, direct force, which subjects of the
Empire experienced when they encountered Sigismund face to face. We will
then consider charisma as a projected, indirect phenomenon, whereby its per-
suasive power was mediated through objects and instruments like documents,
seals, and portraits, and expressed in ideologies and discourses within which
Sigismund, and the office he held, took on particular meanings.
22 See the alliance and the articles of deposition in Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Ältere Reihe,
eds. Julius Weizsäcker et al., 22 vols. (Munich, Gotha, and Göttingen, 1876-2013), 3:245-66.
23 “eynen unnueczen versuemelichen unachtbaren entgleder und unwerdigen hanthaber
des heiligen Romischen richs.” Ibid., 3:258.
296 Hardy
Sigismund of Luxemburg: The Charismatic Ruler in His Lifetime
Sigismund was born in 1368 into the Central European house of Luxemburg.24
He died in 1437 as the final male member of that dynasty, having borne six
royal titles: Sigismund acceded as king of Hungary, Croatia, and Dalmatia in
1387; he was elected king of the Romans in 1411; he acquired the crown of
Bohemia, nominally, in 1420; and he was crowned Roman emperor by Pope
Eugenius IV in Rome in 1433. As such, Sigismund formed the central node in
several sprawling elite networks extending from the Low Countries to the
Balkans. He was therefore uniquely reliant on the attractive and persuasive
force of monarchical charisma. The challenges presented by the imperative to
govern such vast and disparate political spaces were compounded by several
interrelated crises which affected many of Sigismund’s realms between the late
14th and the mid-15th century. The Holy Roman Empire and Europe more gen-
erally were divided by competing religious allegiances during the papal
schisms of 1378 to 1417 and 1438 to 1449. Hungary and Upper Germany were
wracked by wars and factional conflicts in the 1380s, ’90s, and 1400s. More acute
still was the upheaval faced by Bohemia, which was plunged into an exception-
ally violent series of conflicts between the Hussites and their enemies from the
1410s onwards.25 Five crusades launched by Sigismund, the electors, and papal
legates between 1420 and 1431 failed to defeat the Hussites, and Sigismund’s
claim to the crown of Bohemia was not widely recognized within the kingdom
itself until 1436. Against this troubled backdrop, Sigismund seems to have had
an impressively large reach and influence, notwithstanding numerous set-
backs. He managed more or less to maintain the cohesion of the Empire and at
times took a leading role in navigating it through myriad crises, not least by
overseeing the resolution of the Western Schism at the Council of Constance
(1414-18), despite acceding in dire circumstances and with limited financial
resources.26
Perhaps because the events and configurations of Sigismund’s lifetime are
so complex, and his varied career does not fit neatly within the confines of
nationalistic historiographies, scholarly engagement with his life and govern-
ment was minimal until recently, especially outside of Hungary. After the pub-
24 See Jörg K. Hoensch, Die Luxemburger. Eine spätmittelalterliche Dynastie gesamteuro

päischer Bedeutung 1308-1437 (Stuttgart, 2000).
25 On the Hussites see Howard Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1967); František Šmahel, Die Hussitische Revolution, 3 vols. (Hannover, 2002).
26 See esp. Walter Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Konstanz, 1414-1418, 2 vols. (Paderborn, 1991-
97).
lication of Joseph von Aschbach’s four-volume biography of Sigismund in

1838-45,27 few substantial studies of the Luxemburg monarch were produced
until a century and a half later.28 The last three decades have seen a rapid in-
crease in research on Sigismund, with particular focus on his political and dip-
lomatic modus operandi.29 In investigating Sigismund’s “practice of authority”
(Herrschaftspraxis), recent scholarship has drawn on many of the approaches
highlighted at the start of this article: a close attention to the roles and compe-
tences of the monarch as an individual, an interest in material culture, perfor-
mativity, and gender alongside more traditional themes in political history,
and an emphasis on the ways in which power was mediated through culturally
specific codes of behavior and meaning.30
One clear finding of this research is that Sigismund cultivated the idea of
what might be called the charismatic role of the king or emperor of the Romans
with all the ritual, emotional, and material modes and means at his disposal. In
large part this powerful role was performed at a distance, and received indi-
rectly by remote elites who bought into the idea of the Empire through an ar-
ray of representative media. First, however, it should be noted that Sigismund
seems to have made a profound personal impression on those who encoun-
tered him and recorded their experiences. Even allowing for the tendentious
nature of most of the accounts of him which survive, he appears to have striv-
en to meet the expectations of a successful charismatic monarch, performing
the kind of persona that might “enchant” interlocutors and onlookers in the
27 Joseph von Aschbach, Geschichte Kaiser Sigmunds, 4 vols. (Hamburg, 1838-45).

28 An overview of this literature, as well as all subsequent work up to 2012 (encompassing
German, Austrian, Czech, and Hungarian scholarship), is provided in Karel Hruza,
“Einleitung,” in Kaiser Sigismund. Zur Herrschaftspraxis eines europäischen Monarchen
(1368-1437), eds. Karel Hruza and Alexandra Kaar (Cologne, 2012), pp. 13-20.
29 This article has relied in particular on Sabine Wefers, Das politische System Kaiser Sigis-
munds (Stuttgart, 1989); Sigismund von Luxemburg. Kaiser und König in Mitteleuropa 1387-
1437. Beiträge zur Herrschaft Kaiser Sigismund und der europäischen Geschichte um 1400,
eds. Josef Macek, Ernő Marosi, and Ferdinand Seibt (Warendorf, 1994); Jörg K. Hoensch,
Kaiser Sigismund: Herrscher an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit, 1368-1437 (Munich, 1996); Sigis-
mund von Luxemburg. Ein Kaiser in Europa, eds. Michel Pauly and François Reinert
(Mainz, 2006); Sigismundus rex et imperator. Kunst und Kultur zur Zeit Sigismunds von
Luxemburg 1387-1437, ed. Imre Takács (Mainz, 2006) (museum catalogue for an exhibition
about the age of Sigismund in Budapest and Luxembourg); Kaiser Sigismund, eds. Hruza
and Kaar; Mark Whelan, “Sigismund of Luxemburg and the Imperial Response to the
Ottoman Turkish Threat, c. 1410-1437” (doctoral thesis, Royal Holloway, University of
London, 2014).
30 See the essays in Kaiser Sigismund, eds. Hruza and Kaar. See also notes 44-48 below.
298 Hardy
manner theorized by Stephen Jaeger.31 In the view of Jörg Hoensch, the author
of Sigismund’s most complete biography in recent years, “[t]he king/emperor
conformed to the medieval ideal-type of a monarch, otherwise his likeness
would not have been worked into so many biblical and secular historical
paintings.”32 Contemporary verdicts appear to confirm this. As one chronicler
from what is now Switzerland, who saw the king at Constance in the 1410s, put
it, “he [Sigismund] has a noble, kingly, lordly guise … wherever he walked,
there the poor and the rich alike were in his thrall.”33 Despite his chronic short-
ness of money, Sigismund always appeared in the most expensive and splendid
clothing available, and took every opportunity to perform his elevated socio-
political rank – a trait which attracted criticism from those who experienced
his spending habits, like the humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini.34 Thomas
Ebendorfer, a Viennese academic who came to know Sigismund in Basel dur-
ing the 1430s, portrayed him as a model of monarchical generosity and magna-
nimity, but, like Aeneas Silvius, noted that this came at the price of wasteful
extravagance, and resulted in many unfulfilled financial engagements.35
Several commentators remarked favorably upon Sigismund’s competence as
an orator and negotiator at the imperial diets and the ecclesiastical councils at
Constance and Basel.36 There is little doubt that Sigismund had a gift for per-
suasive speech – surely an essential aspect of personal charisma – even if his
enemies were quick to point out his propensity for forgetting the grand prom-
ises he made. This was certainly the impression of the chronicler of the noble
Klingenberg dynasty, who was poorly disposed towards the king of the Romans
because his patrons were partisans of Duke Friedrich IV of Austria-Tyrol, whom
Sigismund placed under the imperial ban and dispossessed in 1415:
[T]his king was a lord of good words, he could say what everyone wanted
to hear; he bade, gave, counselled, and promised much to which he did
32 “Der König/Kaiser hat dem mittelalterlichen Idealtypus eines Monarchen entsprochen,
sonst wäre sein Abbild nicht so häufig in biblische und weltliche Historiengemälde
eingearbeitet worden.” Hoensch, Kaiser Sigismund, p. 482.
33 “er hatt ain adeliche küngliche herliche gestalt … wo er wandlet, da warent jm arm und
rich hold.” Klingenberger Chronik, ed. Anton Henne (Gotha, 1861), pp. 208-09.
34 Hoensch, Kaiser Sigismund, pp. 482-87; see Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomineus, qui postea Pius
II. P. M., De viris illustribus (Stuttgart, 1842), p. 65.
35 Hoensch, Kaiser Sigismund, p. 488.
36 Ibid., p. 484.
not hold, and he was not ashamed of this … His words were sweet, lenient,
and good, and his works were short, meagre, and small.37
It seems that Sigismund stopped at nothing to maintain the image expected of

the ruler of the Empire and (theoretically) of the Christian world, however lim-
ited his practical resources. Even where this risked causing diplomatic
incidents, Sigismund sought to act out his position of exalted authority in his
encounters with others. When he visited Paris in 1416, for example, he insisted
on being seated on a throne as the foremost lord in attendance. Sigismund
even took the unprecedented step of chairing a session of the parlement of
Paris and rendering judgments in the disputes brought before it that day.38
Eberhard Windeck, a merchant from Mainz who spent over two decades in
Sigismund’s service and wrote an account of his career, claimed – probably
with some exaggeration – that the monarch’s performance of his lofty status
earned him the sobriquet “lux mundi, that is, a light of the world.”39
Of course, care must be taken when trying to reconstruct Sigismund’s per-
sonality and behavior from these varied accounts, all of which were shaped by
different literary styles, intended audiences, and agendas. Even those illus-
trated chronicles covering Sigismund’s reign which were once held to be
faithful eyewitness accounts, such as the work of Eberhard Windeck and the
“Chronicle of the Council of Constance” of Ulrich von Richental,40 have been
reassessed. Through critical and comparative readings of these texts, it has
been shown that the authors of such narratives were attuned to their audi-
ences’ preconceptions about what constituted an ideal ruler, and exaggerated
the traits of Sigismund to match these expectations.41 The “real” Sigismund, as
an individual, cannot be accessed straightforwardly through these portrayals.
37 “diser küng was ain her von guoten worten, er kond redden was jederman gern hort; er
gehiess, er gab, er rett und versprach vil und menges der er kains hielt, und schampt sich
des nüt … Sine wort warent suess, milt und guot, die werk kurz, schmal und klain.”
Klingenberger Chronik, ed. Henne, pp. 208-09.
38 Sigismundus, ed. Takács, pp. 491-93.
39 “lux mundi, das ist ein liecht der werlt.” Eberhart Windeckes Denkwürdigkeiten zur
Geschichte des Zeitalters Kaiser Sigmunds, ed. Wilhelm Altmann (Berlin, 1893), pp. 1-2.
40 Ibid.; Chronik des Konstanzer Konzils 1414-1418 von Ulrich Richental, ed. Thomas Martin
Buck (Stuttgart, 2010).
41 See Joachim Schneider, “Herrschererinnerung und symbolische Kommunikation am Hof
König Sigismunds. Das Zeugnis der Chronik des Eberhard Windeck,” in Kaiser Sigismund,
eds. Hruza and Kaar, pp. 429-48; Martin Roland, “Was die Illustrationen zu Eberhard
Windecks Sigismundbuch präsentieren, was man dahinter lesen kann und was verborgen
bleibt,” in ibid., pp. 449-66.
300 Hardy
However, both Richental and Windeck devoted many passages to the public
ceremonies which they, and many others, had witnessed, in order to focus
attention on the monarch as a performatively constructed “ruler who stands at
the centre of the Empire and personifies it.”42 While we must be cautious about
assuming that we can learn much about Sigismund’s personality, these ritual
occasions, which are corroborated by external evidence like the records of the
towns in which they took place, tell us much about the staging (Inszenierung,
as scholars of symbolic communication call it) of charismatic kingship and
emperorship.43
Sigismund was an adept metteur en scène, and a variety of sources attest to
the impressive displays that he orchestrated of his association with the idea of
supreme imperial monarchy and its archetypical attributes. In taking every
opportunity to act out his office – royal entries, ceremonies of liege-homage
and privilege-granting, tournaments, and orations – Sigismund “reactivated
the old charisma of Roman kingship,” as Joachim Schneider recently put it.44
By arranging for the well-attended ecclesiastical councils of 1414-18 and 1431-49
to be held in imperial cities (Constance and Basel) at crucial junctures in his
reign, Sigismund guaranteed a broad audience for these performances of char-
ismatic power, ranging from German noblemen and merchants to cardinals
and ambassadors from all the major polities in Europe.45 A representative
example, illustrated in Richental’s chronicle, is the enfeoffment of the dukes of
Bavaria-Munich by Sigismund before a large audience at Constance in 1417 (fig.
9.1).46 As Gerrit Jasper Schenk has argued, the Council of Constance can be
understood as a kind of imperial diet or assembly when Sigismund was pres-
ent, so, as at other diets, the king sought to display and bring into being the
idea of the Holy Roman Empire, with him at its pinnacle, through ritual occa-
42 “der als Herrscher im Zentrum des Reichs steht und dieses personifiziert.” Schneider,
“Windeck,” p. 447.
43 On the predominantly German scholarship of ritual and symbolic communication, see
note 6 above.
44 “das alte Charisma des römischen Königtums reaktiviert[e].” Joachim Schneider, “Sigis
mund. Römisch-deutscher König auf dem Konstanzer Konzil,” in 1414-1418. Weltereignis
des Mittelalters. Das Konstanzer Konzil. Essays, eds. Karl-Heinz Braun et al. (Stuttgart,
2013), pp. 41-46 (at p. 46).
45 On international encounters at the councils, see Jürgen Miethke, “Die Konzilien im 15.
Jahrhundert als Drehscheibe internationaler Beziehungen,” in Zwischen Habsburg und
Burgund. Der Oberrhein als europäische Landschaft im 15. Jahrhundert, eds. Konrad Krimm
and Rainer Brüning (Ostfildern, 2003), pp. 257-74.
46 On this and other rituals at Constance see Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Zeremonielle und
Rituale auf dem Konstanzer Konzil,” in 1414-1418, eds. Braun et al., pp. 22-27.
Figure 9.1 Sigismund, in full imperial regalia, enfeoffs the dukes of Bavaria-Munich in 1417, as
depicted in a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript of Ulrich von Richental’s chronicle
(c.1420). Rosgartenmuseum Konstanz, Ulrich Richental; Chronik des Konstanzer
Konzils Hs 1, fol. 77. Used with permission.
302 Hardy
sions.47 The imperial insignia – the crown, supposedly of Charlemagne, and

the orb and scepter of office – were displayed prominently so as to emphasize
the supreme authority and control of the monarch. To these were added an
innovation which is thought to be Sigismund’s own invention.48 The sword,
the symbol of secular justice, was not merely held alongside the other insignia,
but was borne above his head, resting in his crown. Through this hypermimetic
mise en scène, in which the imperial sword of office literally pointed at the
monarch’s head, Sigismund emphasized himself as the bearer of the ancient
charisma of the Holy Roman Empire, in whose person Romano-Christian tra-
dition and present authority in the world were fused. These enfeoffments, like
many other rituals at Constance, took place in the “upper market” of the city, a
public space which maximized the potential size of the audience; Richental
noted that even “the houses which offered a view onto it … were full of
people.”49 This symbolic staging of the Holy Roman Empire, embodied by its
charismatic monarch and a supporting cast of German princes, evidently
exerted an attractive influence on those present in Constance at the time. The
“enchanting” effect such rituals had on their audiences must have increased
the willingness of the imperial elites to participate in the scenes staged by
Sigismund, even though these scenes emphasized his charismatic pre-emi-
nence and authority above that of all other participants. Furthermore, there is
reason to believe that these performances had meaningful outcomes. There is
a general consensus that the 1410s were a time of success for Sigismund, espe-
cially as his imposing presence in Constance, the Empire, and Western Europe
forced the divided political actors around him to reach an agreement on the
papal succession and bring an end to four decades of schism in the Roman
Church.50
Another means by which “charisma” took effect as an integrative force in the
Empire, in connection with Sigismund’s constructed persona, was through the
diffusion of texts and objects which bore his name or image. Coins and seals,
for instance, could be used to convey messages about the centrality of
Sigismund to the imperial polity in much the same way as staged rituals, and to
much broader and more distant audiences.51 Sigismund seems to have taken a
47 Ibid., p. 23.
48 Werner Paravicini, “Das Schwert in der Krone,” in Institution und Charisma, eds. Felten et
al., pp. 279-304.
49 “an dem obern markt” “die hüser, so da hin gesehen mochten … waren vollen lüt.” Chronik
des Konstanzer Konzils, ed. Buck, p. 91.
50 Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Konstanz, 1414-1418, passim.
51 On the iconographic program of Sigismund see Bertalan Kéry, Kaiser Sigismund. Ikono
graphie (Vienna, 1972).
personal interest in the production of artifacts which projected these mes-

sages. His imperial seal (fig. 9.1), developed around 1417, was based on the
familiar figure of the monarch seated in majesty popularized by his father
Charles IV, which had reached the far corners of Central Europe appended to
documents from his prolific chancery. Sigismund’s chancery was more prolific
still – indeed, proportionate to the length of his reign, he issued more charters
and privileges than any other later medieval Roman monarch.52 This widely-
travelled seal also displayed some innovations. The double-headed eagle
(Doppeladler) on the reverse, for instance, was a symbol of universal imperial
authority that Sigismund specifically fostered, and thereafter the motif gained
popularity and ubiquity in the course of the 15th century.53 The image of
Sigismund on the obverse was not only surrounded by the heraldry of five of
the monarch’s kingdoms and lordships (the Empire, Bohemia, Hungary, and
Luxembourg), but also featured the insignia of the Order of the Dragon, a
transnational chivalric network founded by Sigismund in 1408. The Registra
turbücher of Constance note the commissioning of the mold for this seal from
a Netherlandish jeweler, one “Arnoldus de Bomel,” with a detailed specifica-
tion, apparently produced by Sigismund himself.54 The charisma-projecting
technique of hypermimesis was at work in all the elements of this imperial
seal. The eagle and majestic throne imbued the figure of Sigismund with the
almost otherworldly charisma of universal power, passed down from Roman
antiquity and sanctioned by God – a point reinforced by the standard intitula-
tio in imperial documents, “Sigismund, by the grace of God king of the Romans,
eternal augmenter of the Empire …”55 The five coats of arms surrounding
Sigismund’s throne highlighted the unusual extent to which this particular
monarch’s authority was based on vast pan-European domains, anchoring the
ethereal aspirations of universal government in a specific dynast. All in all,
Sigismund’s chancery staff drew on the central techniques of charismatic art,
playing on what Jaeger calls “the particular relationship of a perceived author-
ity of the image or text and its successful assertion of influence on the viewer,”
to project an unambiguous statement of supreme rulership.56
52 See “II. Urkunden und Briefsproduktion Sigismunds,” in Kaiser Sigismund, ed. Hruza and
Kaar, pp. 215-364.
53 Claus D. Bleisteiner, “Der Doppeladler von Kaiser und Reich im Mittelalter,” in Mitteilungen
des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 109 (2001), 4-52.
55 E.g. “Sygimund von gots gnaden Romischer konig zue allen ziten merer des richs.” Deutsche
Reichstagsakten, eds. Weizsäcker et al., 7:53.
56 See Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 5, 38-42.
304 Hardy
Similar attention to charismatic imagery seems to have been paid to Sigis

mund’s judicial seal (fig. 9.3), which also displayed an idealized vision of the
ruler – with his characteristic forked beard – bearing the imperial crown and
scepter and the sword of secular justice. As in the rituals in which Sigismund
and his entourage deployed this imperial accoutrement in person, the sword
and scepter served a hypermimetic purpose. They enhanced the charisma of
Sigismund’s persona by symbolically elevating him from the status of a mere
temporal lord who happened to rule certain lands to that of the highest secular
authority in Christendom, whose jurisdiction theoretically transcended all
other powers. As this seal was used by Sigismund’s Hofgericht (aulic court),
which operated in his absence via networks of local actors such as the counts
of Montfort-Tettnang,57 it enjoyed wide circulation. Even more impressive are
the “golden bulls” – gold-plated seals with images of Sigismund seated in maj-
esty – which adorn some of the privileges issued by the Luxemburg monarch’s
chancery (fig. 9.4).58 Few objects so clearly transmitted, visually and materially,
the ideals of charismatic imperial monarchy, especially given that they came
attached to texts which legitimized the position of local actors by reference to
the traditional authority of the Empire and its sovereign. Sigismund seems to
have deployed these prestigious adornments to encourage the loyalty of his
key supporters – especially the imperial cities – and for documents which
might increase his influence in the localities, such as a 1432 privilege for a
league of knightly societies in Upper Germany under the aegis of his Upper
Rhenish and Swabian agents in the middling and lower nobility.59
These representations of Sigismund and the symbols of the Empire are es-
pecially significant since the diverse elites of Central Europe were keen con-
sumers and collectors of these visual and material artifacts. Although a number
of factors probably motivated Sigismund’s subjects to obtain products from
the imperial chancery – not least the need to legitimize their own local author-
ity – their keenness does suggest that the use of charismatic imagery could
make a concrete difference to day-to-day imperial government, especially con-
sidering the acceleration of document production during Sigismund’s reign.60
The charismatic media produced by the chancery were invariably funded by
other actors, who then voluntarily disseminated these media in their localities.
This was a crucial dynamic for a monarch like Sigismund, who lacked the re-
sources to make his presence felt directly within the vast areas under his no-
57 Archives Municipales de Haguenau AA53.

58 Sigismundus, ed. Takács, pp. 185-88, 3.17, 3.19a-b.
59 Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 46/1689.
Figure 9.2
Sigismund’s imperial
seal, appended to a
1436 document issued
by his chancery
(Archives Municipales
de Haguenau, AA 54)
(Photo: author).
Figure 9.3
Sigismund’s judicial
seal, appended to a
1436 document issued
by his aulic court
(Archives Municipales
de Haguenau, AA 53)
(Photo: author).
306
Hardy
Figure 9.4 Privilege-charter issued by Sigismund’s chancery to the imperial city of Haguenau in 1433, displaying a ‘golden bull’ (Archives Municipales de
Haguenau, AA 50) (Photo: author).
tional authority. For instance, it was local powers (towns, nobles, and so on)
which paid for messengers to travel to wherever Sigismund’s peripatetic chan-
cery was located, and they paid large sums for all of the materials involved in
making the charters of privileges they received there. Nuremberg’s records in-
dicate that in 1433 the municipal government sent two councilors to Rome,
where Sigismund was located, and that they paid 200 ducats for 14 privilege-
charters and eight golden bulls, 40 ducats in order to have these bulls manufac-
tured by a goldsmith, “and 50 ducats as a tip for the scribes in the chancery.”61
A document preserved in the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe shows that half
of the cost of the golden bull for the 1432 royal endorsement of the league of
Upper German knights was provided by the members of the knightly Society
of St. George’s Shield.62 This dynamic is crucial for conceptualizing Sigismund’s
rule in the Empire. While he himself was frequently occupied in Hungary, the
Balkans, and elsewhere – times when his personal qualities and staged rituals
had little impact on his government in Central Europe – the integrative power
of the idea of his imperial authority, i.e. his charisma in this context, remained
active through the intermediary of an array of charismatic texts and objects
which were enthusiastically circulated throughout the Holy Roman Empire.63
Sigismund’s Charismatic Afterlife: The Idealized Emperor in the

15th- and 16th-Century Holy Roman Empire
Before concluding this investigation of the place of charisma in our under-

standing of Sigismund’s government, it is worth considering the significance of
the many texts and objects which commemorated or invoked his rule in the
decades after his death. More than any other later medieval king or emperor of
the Romans, Sigismund – as a memory and as an archetype – became a byword
for the charismatic authority of the imperial monarchs. His name and his fa-
miliar traits (a tall figure, often in the imperial regalia, with a long, sometimes
forked beard) encapsulated and embodied the justice and order which the
Holy Roman Empire represented, at least in the rhetoric of some 15th- and
61 “und 50 ducaten den schreibern in der cantzley zu trinkgelt.” Die Chroniken der fränkischen
Städte. Nürnberg. Erster Band, ed. Karl Hegel (Leipzig, 1862), pp. 451-52.
62 Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 46/1689.
63 On the “bottom-up” desire to engage with artifacts which evoked the Empire, see Len
Scales, “The Illuminated Reich: Memory, Crisis and the Visibility of Monarchy in Late
Medieval Germany,” in The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered, eds. Jason Coy et al. (New
York and Oxford, 2010), pp. 73-92.
308 Hardy
16th-century elites. This is clear, for example, in the decision of an anonymous

conciliarist cleric writing around 1439 at the Council of Basel to name his ver-
nacular manifesto for the reform of the church and the Empire “Reformacion
keyser Sigmunds” (“the Reformation of Emperor Sigismund,” or Reformatio
Sigismundi). The text broadly calls for an end to regional autonomy and disor-
der and the (re-)creation of an impartial, centralized government under the
aegis of the Roman emperor. It begins with the claim that its proposals came to
Sigismund (who had been dead for two years at this point) in a spiritual vision,
and that he then fashioned these into an ordinance (“ein ordenunge”) in col-
laboration with the Council of Basel.64 Modified manuscripts of the “Refor
macion,” which took at face value the attribution to Sigismund, enjoyed a wide
circulation from the 1440s, and many printed editions were in existence by the
end of the 15th century. The text was often grouped with legal ordinances (the
1356 “Golden Bull” of Charles IV and the 1442 “Reformation” of Frederick III),
which suggests that it was regarded as an authentic and desirable set of regula-
tions.65 That the Baslean author thought that Sigismund’s name would lend
weight to his ideas, and that his text did indeed enjoy enormous success, is a
testament to the enduring appeal of the figure of Sigismund, whose name
alone evoked the charismatic ideal of a rejuvenated, effective imperial govern-
ment presided over by a powerful and just monarch.
Equally notable is the large number of chronicle accounts written in the
15th and 16th centuries which recall the years of Sigismund’s rule as a time of
good monarchical government, despite the political and ecclesiastical crises of
the years between 1410 and 1437. We have already encountered the adulatory
narratives of Windeck and Richental, in which Sigismund incarnated the char-
ismatic ideal of imperial rulership in descriptive passages that portrayed him
with hypermimetic characteristics. To these could be added numerous shorter
references which present similar depictions, to less self-serving ends. Such ref-
erences are particularly common in town chronicles, from the compiled
chronicle of Bern (c.1422-84)66 in the south-west to the Rathsannalen of Görlitz
(c.1509-42)67 in the north-east. The latter were written over several decades by
Johannes Haß, councilor and mayor of Görlitz, who still noted with approval
the activities of “the great and mighty unconquerable prince and lord, lord
64 Monumenta Germaniae historica 500–1500. Staatsschriften des späteren Mittelalters. VI.

Band. Reformation Kaiser Siegmunds, ed. Heinrich Koller (Stuttgart, 1964), p. 51.
65 See the editor’s introduction in ibid., pp. 1-49.
66 Die Berner-Chronik des Conrad Justinger, ed. G. Studer (Bern, 1871), p. II.
67 Scriptores rerum Lusaticarum. Sammlung ober- und niederlausitzischer Geschichtschreiber,
Neue Folge, 4 vols. (Görlitz, 1839-70), 2, 3.1, and 3.2.
Sigismund, Roman emperor and king of Hungary, Bohemia, etc.” a century

after his death, particularly because he had declared the city’s privileges “effec-
tive and powerful now and for all time.”68 Sigismund’s reputation in the region
as an ideal ruler, whose charismatic figure was worthy of commemoration, pre-
dated Haß: around 1450 the municipal council of Görlitz commissioned a
portrait of the late emperor which hung in the council chambers as a symbol
of gratitude for his magnanimous rule (according to Haß).69 The inscription
below the portrait, which is still extant, memorialized the late monarch as
“pious and just” and “at one time the greatest king in the whole world.”70
Portraiture, indeed, was the final medium through which Sigismund’s char-
ismatic image lived on. As Len Scales has noted,
Sigismund’s reign coincided with a significant moment in European cul-

tural history, when the multiplication of recognisable likenesses of the
ruler came, as never before, to seem both possible and desirable. No
monarch of the time was the subject of more intense and specific visual
reproduction than Sigismund.71
Visual depictions of Sigismund dating from the 15th and 16th centuries abound,
filling town halls, illuminated manuscripts, and (as crypto-portraits of the sov-
ereign as a saint or biblical character) church frescoes throughout the lands of
the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdom of Hungary.72 Even the chronicler
Enguerrand de Monstrelet, whose masters, the dukes of Burgundy, were gener-
ally on bad terms with the kings of the Romans, seems to have been impressed
by the appearance and manner of “lempereur Sagimont,” and a later 15th-cen-
tury manuscript of his Chroniques depicts the king enthroned in majesty.73 It
may seem paradoxical that most of these images were produced on local initia-
tive, sometimes long after the monarch’s death, but this points to the greater
importance of the durable charismatic ideal that he came to represent, over
and above the context-specific possibilities and limitations of his personal rule
as an individual political actor in the early 15th century. To borrow Jaeger’s
68 “dem gossmechtigen unobirwintlichen fursten und hern, hern Sigmund Rohmischen

keysser unnd zu hungern Behmen etc. konig” “unser privilegien … nw unnd zu ewigen
tzeiten krefftig unnd mechtig gesprachen.” Ibid., 2:137; see also ibid., 3.2:131.
70 “fromm und gerecht” “einstmals größter König des Erdkreises.” Ibid., p. 159.
71 Len Scales, “Book Review: Sigismundus, Rex et Imperator: Kunst und Kultur zur Zeit
Sigismunds von Luxemburg, 1387-1437,” English Historical Review 124 (2009), 944-46.
72 See examples in Sigismundus ed. Takács, Part II.
73 Ibid., p. 492.
310 Hardy
conceptual categories, Sigismund’s persona – when represented with suffi-

cient skill – had an “enchanting” effect which weakened the distinction
between life and art, such that the dead emperor continued to incarnate the
ideal of a well-governed Holy Roman Empire.74
This is demonstrated most clearly by perhaps the most famous surviving
portrait of Sigismund, Albrecht Dürer’s depiction of the emperor side-by-side
with Charlemagne, which was commissioned by the municipal council of
Nuremberg and completed around 1510-13 (Fig. 9.5). These two oil paintings
originally decorated the doors of a large container for the Reichskleinodien
(imperial insignia) – visually and materially impressive symbols of the Empire,
which were displayed in a public ceremony every year in Nuremberg, whether
or not the king or emperor of the Romans was present.75 The resonance of
Nuremberg as a home for the insignia was enhanced by the fact that the major-
ity of the imperial diets of the 15th century were held in this imperial city.76
The presence in Dürer’s painting of Charlemagne – the charismatic resuscita-
tor of the line of Western Roman emperors, who was credited with the transla-
tio imperii to the Germanic peoples, was widely considered a saint, and
belonged to the foremost figures of royal and chivalric legend throughout
Europe – is highly significant for our understanding of the intersection of cha-
risma and imperial government within the Holy Roman Empire. Even as the
Empire’s inner structures and dynamics were evolving in the 15th and early
16th centuries, concretizing around multiple centers, institutions, and associa-
tions, the figure of the monarch – the king and emperor of the Romans –
remained the keystone of its imaginary system, if not always of its practical
day-to-day functioning. Charlemagne, the re-founder of the Roman Empire
and the ideal-typical peace- and justice-enforcing monarch in medieval tradi-
tion, was the quintessential symbol of this charismatic office in its idealized
form. By the early 16th century Charlemagne had also been appropriated by
polemicists who were developing narratives about a “German nation” (a term
which must be understood in the politicized context of ecclesiastical and
humanist discourses).77 That Sigismund was selected to accompany this highly

75 Ibid., pp. 480-86.
76 See Annas, Reichsversammlungen, passim.
77 See amongst others Karl der Große und das Erbe der Kulturen, ed. Franz-Reiner Erkens
(Berlin, 2001); Karl der Große in Renaissance und Moderne: zur Rezeptionsgeschichte und
Instrumentalisierung eines Herrscherbildes, ed. Franz-Reiner Erkens (Berlin, 1999); Caspar
Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der
Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2005). On Charlemagne in Dürer’s painting,
see Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch, “Karl der Große als vielberufener Vorfahr,” in Karl der
charged character, in the city most closely associated with the ideology and
performance of the Holy Roman Empire, indicates that he, too, had become
the focus of a cult-like devotion at imperial sites like Nuremberg. As Jaeger
notes, cult-like loyalty to a particular figure, even a long-dead individual medi-
ated solely through an image, is one of the defining effects of charismatic art.78
In Sigismund’s case, this loyalty was surely related to the way in which the
Luxemburg monarch had come to embody the ideals of imperial government
which the patricians of Nuremberg and other German elites wished to cele-
brate and promote.
There were historically contingent reasons for choosing Sigismund over the
dozens of other kings and emperors who had held the imperial office since
Charlemagne. Of all the monarchs in recent centuries, Sigismund had been the
most generous benefactor of Nuremberg, granting a total of 75 privileges to the
city in the course of his 26-year reign.79 We have already seen evidence of the
close relationship that Nuremberg’s elites maintained with Sigismund’s admin-
istration. Furthermore, Nuremberg’s government had orchestrated the perma-
nent storage of the imperial insignia in their city with the approval and
collaboration of Sigismund’s administration in 1423. However, the municipal
council of Nuremberg’s request that Dürer paint Sigismund may well have
been justified by more than just the close relationship between the monarch
and the city some 80 to 100 years earlier. Sigismund himself, it will be remem-
bered, had been exceptionally adept at using the insignia as part of his public
performances of his imperial role wherever he went in the Empire, and espe-
cially before large audiences at the Councils of Constance and Basel. These
performances were preserved in a multitude of narratives and images which
predate Dürer’s painting. After Charlemagne, therefore, it was Sigismund who
was most closely linked to the imagery of the Reichskleinodien and the per-
fected notion of imperial rulership that they connoted. More generally, as we
have seen, Sigismund’s name and features were embedded in the collective
memory of many different communities in the Holy Roman Empire as symbols
of the imperial monarchy at its most energetic and impressive. If he was
sometimes noted for his vengeful and deceitful manner and his perpetual
impecuniousness, Sigismund nonetheless achieved a kind of posthumous
immortalization as the epitome of a charismatic Roman king and emperor. His
charismatic reputation was unparalleled amongst later medieval monarchs, at
Große als vielberufener Vorfahr. Sein Bild in der Kunst der Fürsten, Kirchen und Städte, ed.
Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch (Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 9-21.
78 Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 6-7, cf. chapter 4.
312 Hardy
a
Figure 9.5 Albrecht Dürer’s oil paintings of Charlemagne (a) and Sigismund (b),
which adorned the holder of the imperial insignia in Nuremberg. →
b
Catalogue numbers Gm167 and Gm168 in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum,
Nuremberg. Used with permission.
314 Hardy
least before Maximilian I and the explosion of new media which facilitated
that ruler’s propagandistic program of self-representation.80
Conclusion
This attempt to consider Sigismund of Luxemburg’s government through the

lens of charisma has shown that the concept has the capacity to enhance our
understanding of the Holy Roman Empire in the period of Sigismund’s reign
and its aftermath. This in turn has implications for the value of the concept of
“charisma” as an analytical category for making sense of politics, society, and
culture in later medieval Europe. Clearly, the widespread engagement with
Sigismund as a staged persona and as an idealized archetype shows the cen-
trality of the idea of a charismatic monarch, whether real or imagined, to
contemporary understandings of how the Holy Roman Empire should be ruled
and ordered. In a sense this finding reinforces the consensus in Germanophone
scholarship, established under the influence of Peter Moraw in the 1980s and
’90s, that the monarchy still framed and undergirded the political configura-
tion of the Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries, regardless of the other
changes in conception and structure that it underwent.81 However, the mecha-
nisms of government that the concept of charisma invites us to consider do
not fit neatly within the categories which are still used in the normative inter-
pretation of the Empire – the “state,” the “territory,” and the “constitution”
(Verfassung). Rather, the Empire as governed by Sigismund can be understood
as a world of personal relationships framed and maintained by symbolic com-
munication and conventional and negotiatory institutions and associations. In
this sense, the later medieval Empire was similar in many respects to the
Empire of the early modern period, which, as Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger has
demonstrated, relied heavily on symbolic communication to maintain its
coherence.82 The impression given by the later medieval sources, not least the
charters, seals, and chronicles produced or purchased on local initiative, is of a
political system held together as much by the enthusiasm of varied local elites
for a particular “enchanting” construction of charismatic imperial rulership as
80 On Maximilian’s propaganda see Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology
of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, 2008).
82 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the
Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York, 2015).
by any “constitutional” authority notionally bestowed on the ruler himself, or

by any set of incipient “state” institutions.
“Charisma,” then, is a possible vantage point from which the plausible as-
pects of the existing models of the Holy Roman Empire can be confirmed, and
the less helpful abstractions which still pervade the historiography can be im-
proved by insights from the scholarship of imaginary and behavioral frame-
works, particularly as manifested in chronicle accounts and visual and
material culture. This perspective also underlines the relative success of Sigis-
mund himself in operating within the system identified here. Little of what
Sigismund did was truly new or different, but he maximized the benefit that
could be extracted from the repertoire of rituals and media available to later
medieval rulers – even the under-resourced Romano-German monarchs – in
order to cultivate, project, and exploit the charismatic ideal of Roman kingship
and emperorship. Sigismund seems to have functioned as a kind of central
node, symbolically and sometimes practically, within a nexus of reciprocal po-
litical relationships between governing elites, all of whom justified their power
in relation to the Holy Roman Empire – an edifice that was imbued with (sup-
posedly) age-old sacral traditions, and which was viewed as the supreme guar-
antor of the common good of all of its inhabitants. There could not be an
Empire without a king or emperor of the Romans, hence the captivation and
enchantment of contemporaries by a monarch like Sigismund, who could per-
form and incarnate the ideal-typical role in a manner that resonated through-
out German-speaking Europe and beyond.
Thus, the modalities of power emphasized by the investigation of charisma
in the later medieval Empire fuse two elements. On the one hand, charisma in
this context clearly relied upon the behavioral and psychological effects noted
by Weber and Jaeger – the ability to evoke awe and loyalty vis-à-vis an authori-
tative and persuasive figure, or a hypermimetic staging or representation of
that figure. At the same time, the “enchantment” provoked by charismatic per-
formances, descriptions, or artifacts took effect within sophisticated structures
(the monarchical court, imperial cities, church councils, regional leagues and
alliances) and long-standing conventions (enfeoffments, ceremonial proces-
sions, commemorative writings). The persuasive and integrative force of cha-
risma was therefore anchored within a historically, socially, and culturally
contingent context. The case of Sigismund in the Empire highlights the impor-
tance of certain exalted individuals and positions in the socio-political con-
figuration of later medieval Europe. It underlines the intertwined relationship
between, on the one hand, developing institutions, offices, and administrative
technologies and, on the other, personal, dynastic, and network-based rela-
tions of power. Evidently, these two sets of political modes and formats were
316 Hardy
not, as medieval and early modern historians have sometimes assumed, anti-
thetical to one another. “Charisma” – and the focus on the construction of the
roles of powerful figures within wider systems that it entails – could certainly
form part of a much-needed new conceptual toolkit to help us to rethink later
medieval Europe beyond the confines of the restrictive categories and assump-
tions which have shaped traditional approaches to the politics of this period.
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Part 4
Mediation: The Intermediary Spaces of Charisma
∵
322 Hardy
Medieval Franciscan Architecture as Charismatic Space 323
Chapter 10
Medieval Franciscan Architecture as Charismatic

Space
Erik Gustafson
In a volume on the idea of charisma in history and aesthetics beyond Weber,

I would like to step back and look at charisma before Weber but after Saint
Paul. More specifically, this essay will examine the role charisma played in the
habitus of medieval religious thought and how that thought structured the
experience of medieval religious space. While Paul coined the concept of char
isma as spiritual gifts from the Holy Spirit, he included within the idea a wide
variety of gifts made possible through divine grace. How did the concept of
charisma as spiritual gifts then translate into the Middle Ages, if we separate
the simple idea of spiritual gifts from the Weberian-influenced focus on seem-
ingly supernatural power and authority? In fact, the gifts of the Holy Spirit as a
trope have a significant history and theological significance, amongst which
the thought of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio stands out both for his use of the
term charismata and for the spatial underpinnings of his theology. The test
case under analysis is the historical experience of Franciscan churches in cen-
tral Italy, the cradle of Franciscanism.
In both its medieval theological and modern critical theory senses, the idea
of habitus will form the conceptual framework connecting architecture and
historical experience. Most associated in medieval intellectual history with the
12th- and 13th-century recovery of Aristotle’s works, the doctrine of habitus
held a central role in the increasingly technical moral philosophy of the era
leading to Scholasticism.1 The habitus is the mechanism by which an individu-
al’s education and experiences become accustomed sensory memories, predis-
posing similar responses in the future. As a predisposition and not an impera-
tive, the individual can exercise free will in choosing to act with or against their
accustomed tendencies; with each repeated act, the disposition becomes in-
creasingly routine and internalized, forming part of the individual’s identity. It
1 Marcia Colish, “Habitus Revisited: A Reply to Cary Nederman,” Traditio (1993), 77-92; Cary
Nederman, “Nature, Ethics, and the Doctrine of ‘Habitus’: Aristotelian Moral Psychology in
the Twelfth Century,” Traditio 45 (1989-90), 87-100; David Wagner, “Peirce, Panofsky, and the
Gothic,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48, no. 4 (2012), 436-55.

324 Gustafson
is important to note that this definition of habitus was hardly new to Christian
theology, as it was rooted in Augustine’s writings.2 In chapter 73 of the De diver-
sis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, the first definition Augustine offers is the
Aristotelian one,3 using wisdom as an example that can be learned and which
then strengthens and consolidates one from foolish to wise.4 This doctrine was
amplified by Augustine’s extensive quotation from Cicero’s De inventione rhe-
torica in Chapter 31 of De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, as well as De
libero arbitrio 2:18-19 extolling the virtues as habits of the soul. Although fre-
quently treated in relation to an individual’s actions defining their moral char-
acter, the habitus was a general mechanism underlying a variety of cognitive
practices. Key among these was recollection, the art of memory in which the
intellect is trained to organize memories, making a vast amount of data im-
mediately available to the mind.5 As Mary Carruthers has demonstrated, this
habitus of recollection was the requisite beginning point for monastic prayer
and writing.6 The capacity to recollect the layers of biblical passages, their ex-
egetical texts, and the spiritual treatises advocating methods for the their ap-
plication, was fundamental to medieval Christian practice at an advanced
level. The varieties of medieval habitus were predicated on education, training,
and experience, building predispositions to actions in daily life. Likewise, the
modern adaptation of habitus theory by Pierre Bourdieu has built on this defi-
nition, although Bourdieu’s usage has a Marxist inflection emphasizing the
social world and childhood conditions such as education, neighborhood, class,
and family.7 Whereas the medieval habitus comprised predispositions that one
could consciously hone and perfect, Bourdieu’s habitus is entirely precon-
2 George Lavere, “Habit (habitus),” in Augustine through the Ages, ed. Allan Fitzgerald (Grand
Rapids, MI, 1999), p. 411.
3 The chapter contains Augustine’s careful parsing into four possible understandings of the
term habitus in Paul’s letter to the Philippians 2:7. The passage ultimately distinguishes be-
tween hexis and schema as the two Greek terms that could be translated as habitus in
Augustine’s short explanation of Christ’s human and divine natures. For Augustine, the
Aristotelian hexis is inappropriate to explain the Incarnation as Christ was not himself
changed by humanity (which hexis would imply), but changed humanity by clothing himself
in it (consonant with schema as a shape or kind of monastic clothing).
4 Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, LXXIII; translated by Boniface Ramsey
in Responses to Miscellaneous Questions (Hyde Park, 2008), pp. 135-37.
5 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 2nd ed (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 23-24, 75-89.
6 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 1-6, 69-72.
7 For Bourdieu’s definitions of habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
(Cambridge, 1977), pp. 82-83; idem., The Logic of Practice (Stanford, 1990), p. 53. For comments
on Bourdieu, habitus and historical inquiry, see Philip Gorski, ed., Bourdieu and Historical
Analysis (Durham, 2013), pp. 6-11, 347-51.
scious, largely developed during childhood socialization, and triggered by

one’s environment. As a social phenomenon, Bourdieu’s habitus can be ana-
lyzed by ethnographic observation, and thereby characterizes how groups or
individuals act in relation to broader cultural fields.8 When speaking of the
habitus of medieval religious thought and the experience of medieval religious
space in this essay, my emphasis will be on the overlapping aspects of the me-
dieval and Bourdieusian habitus. The solidly Augustinian medieval doctrine is
that the habitus entails learned dispositions that can affect the behavior and
character of an individual, whether for subconscious ethical virtue or for the
conscious composition of prayer. Bourdieu is useful insofar as the habitus
might be considered as a broader cultural practice, leaving aside elements
such as his Marxist emphasis on preconscious class socialization. The habitus
therefore becomes the operative mechanism for the embodied action of cha-
risma as a theological concept, while church architecture serves as the arena in
which the Bonaventuran practice of charisma can unfold.
While scholars have long made much of the charisma of the Franciscans
and the Weberian charisma of its leaders,9 the power of Franciscan architec-
ture as charismatic space has never been mooted. Well-documented preach-
ers, contentious proceedings over doctrine, and the patronage of famous
artworks often characterize the medieval Franciscans. Moreover, the inescap-
able legacy of Francis’s founding charisma has overshadowed the development
of the Order’s own distinct identity. Franciscan houses are rarely mentioned
other than as the location of artworks or General Chapter meetings. However,
Franciscan architecture can more usefully be considered as the charismatic
articulation of a Franciscan identity developed post-Francis, an identity crafted
through mediated movement and ritual practices to inspire devotion among
the faithful.
This essay will examine how Franciscan architecture spatially attests to the
participative and performative aspects of Franciscanism. Franciscan architec-
ture was not merely a backdrop for preaching and painting, but was decisive in
establishing a compelling sense of place for enacting a Franciscan habitus of
religious experience. By means of embodied strategies of spatial distinction
created by architectural screens and nuanced through an innovative lack of
regulation for gendered access, the eastern halves of churches became spaces
where the laity could devotionally seek their spiritual perfection in the com
8 For secondary analysis of Bourdieu’s system, see David Swartz, “Metaprinciples for Sociological
Research in a Bourdieusian Perspective,” in Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, pp. 19-35.
9 For example, see Stephen Jaeger’s discussion in this volume of charisma in the vita of Francis.
326 Gustafson
pany of the Franciscan friars. At the core of this spatial habitus were the gifts of
the Holy Spirit and grace, space made charismatic by Bonaventure’s distinct
use of the charismata within his theology of spiritual ascent.
Central Italian Franciscan Architecture and Space
What, then, is Franciscan space?10 It is useful to begin with a simple visual

analysis. Nearly all central Italian Franciscan churches are longitudinally
planned, whether they are single-naved churches such as the mother house of
San Francesco in Assisi or three-aisled basilicas such as Santa Croce in Florence
(figs 10.1-10.8). One of the defining traits of all these churches is their visual pull
down the length of the nave. In some churches, such as Santa Croce, this effect
is emphasized through the addition of continuous horizontal elements such as
the balcony, which provided further visual guides for the eye along the domi-
nant axis. The vaults of the nave of San Francesco in Assisi fulfill a similar
function, although vaulting was banned by the Constitutions of the order as
excessive. This dominant axis is generally only challenged or ruptured in visual
terms at the eastern, altar end of the churches, where transepts, chapels and
occasionally ambulatories complicated the visual simplicity of the main nave
(figs 10.5-10.6). While the visual pull of the main nave axis tends to draw the
visitor down the length of the church, the transepts and chapels stall that
movement, creating a variety of visual axes and spaces to physically inhabit,
explore, and engage. Each transept arm or chapel has its own axis, each with a
potential visual pull, prismatically splintering the visual clarity of the nave.
Today these churches have lost their medieval character, shorn of the divid-
ing walls and the monumental furniture that gave visual structure to the
interior spaces. Most Franciscan churches are now open boxes, the result of
15th- and 16th-century renovations. Further, Franciscan architecture took dif-
ferent forms around Europe, as the Franciscans didn’t repeat the same building
type across the continent.11 While the floor plans of Franciscan churches var-
ied, the progression of spaces within these buildings was generally consistent.
In nearly all of the Order’s churches, the overarching interior space was divided
by screen walls into three more discreet spaces (figs 10.1-10.2). As these spaces
10 The most recent consideration of Franciscan space is Donal Cooper, “Experiencing

Dominican and Franciscan Churches in Renaissance Italy,” in Sanctity Pictured, ed. Trinita
Kennedy (Nashville, 2014), pp. 47-61.
11 Wolfgang Schenkluhn, Architektur der Bettelorden: Die Baukunst der Dominikaner und
Franziskaner (Darmstadt, 2000).
Figure 10.1 San Francesco, Arezzo, c.1314, Plan with Spatial Layers (Plan by author).
Figure 10.2 Santa Croce, Florence, Plan with Spatial Layers (Plan by author).
were not reliably named in historical sources, I will refer to them as the lay
nave, the lay choir, and the friars’ choir. The overall space of the church was
ruptured by the main dividing screen, which usually stretched across the entire
width of the church. In the Florentine church of Santa Croce, this screen was
referred to as a tramezzo, a useful term in that it emphasizes the structure’s role
328 Gustafson
Figure 10.3 San Francesco, Pienza (Photo: author).
Figure 10.4 Santa Croce, Florence, Nave (Photo: author).

Figure 10.5 San Francesco, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, Tramezzo Mockup (Photo: author).
Figure 10.6 San Francesco, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, Choir Screen Mockup (Photo: author).
330 Gustafson
Figure 10.7 Santa Croce, Florence, Transepts and Chapels (Photo: author).
Figure 10.8 San Francesco, Pisa, Transepts and Chapels (Photo: author).
in bifurcating the church interior.12 Crucially, the tramezzo screen is distinct

from the choir screen, which defined the third area, the friars’ choir approach-
ing the sanctuary around the high altar.13 A second screen beyond the tramezzo
defined a U-shaped pocket of space, which was the friars’ choir proper con-
taining the brothers’ stalls. The choir screen and tramezzo together defined the
lay choir, which incorporated the space beyond the tramezzo except for the
friars’ choir. The lay choir space ended against or was surrounded by a series of
chapels.
The fundamental problem in trying to understand the medieval spatial hab-
itus of Franciscan churches lies in coming to terms with the role of the tramezzo
dividing screen. Did the Franciscans follow the precedent of most medieval
monastic orders, and sequester themselves behind the tramezzo in clausura,
the enclosed space meant to separate the religious from the secular world?14
Or was the tramezzo a more porous structure, allowing the laity to access the
chapels and altars beyond that screen? The prevailing consensus has been that
the Franciscans would have adopted an approach closer to clausura, possibly
allowing some members of the male laity through the tramezzo at certain
times but only extremely rarely allowing women into the space beyond.15
However, an examination of the Franciscan legislative Constitutions does
not support this scenario.16 Unlike the Dominican and Augustinian Hermit
12 Marcia Hall, “The Tramezzo in Santa Croce, Florence, Reconstructed,” The Art Bulletin LVI,
no. 3 (1974), 325-41; “The Ponte in S. Maria Novella,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institute 37 (1974), 157-73; and Renovation and Counter-Reformation (Oxford, 1979); and
Monika Schmelzer, Der mittelalterliche Lettner in deutschsprachigen Raum: Typologie und
Funktion (Petersberg, 2004).
13 On medieval European choirs screens, see Jacqueline Jung, “Beyond the Barrier: the
Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (2000), 622-57.
14 Jean Leclercq, “Clausura,” Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione (Rome, 1975), 2:1166-83.
15 Margaret Aston, “Segregation in Church,” in Women in the Church, eds. W.J. Sheils and
Diana Wood (Oxford, 1990), pp. 237-94; Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, “Gender, Celibacy and
Proscriptions of Sacred Space: Symbol and Practice,” in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place
and Gender in the Medieval Church, eds. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury
(Albany: 2005), pp. 185-206; Ena Giurescu Heller, “Access to Salvation: The Place and Space
of Women Patrons in Fourteenth-Century Florence,” in Women’s Space, pp. 161-84.
16 Erik Gustafson, “Tradition and Renewal in the Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Architec-
ture of Tuscany” (Ph.D. Thesis: New York University, 2012), pp. 251-314; Caesaris Cenci and
Romani Georgii Mailleux, eds., Constitutiones generales ordinis fratrum minorum I (saecu-
lum XIII) (Grottaferrata, 2007): Cenci and Mailleux, eds., Constitutiones generales ordinis
fratrum minorum II (Saeculum XIV/I) (Grottaferrata, 2010). For an English translation of
the 1260 Constitutions, see Dominic Monti, ed., St. Bonaventure’s Writings Concerning the
Franciscan Order (St. Bonaventure, 1994), pp. 71-135.
332 Gustafson
Constitutions, which both have very clear rubrics on allowing women into
church spaces, the Franciscans were completely silent on the issue.17 While the
Dominicans banned women from passing the dividing screen and the
Augustinian Hermits adopted a sometimes-yes-sometimes-no policy, the only
Franciscan stipulation regarding women was that a brother never be alone
with a woman.18 The only time something like clausura was invoked in the
Franciscan legislations was for novices, not for the friars themselves.19 Donal
Cooper has shown that mendicant choirs were often used in Tuscany as places
for witnessing and notarizing legal documents and contracts, highlighting
both that the daily reality of churches was highly varied and that the laity often
had access to the inner areas of the churches even if they might have been
excluded during services.20 This is not to say that the genders could not or
would not have been separated. Rather, there is no reason to treat the Fran
ciscan tramezzo as the device for that separation. Men and women were often
separated side to side rather than front to back, as is shown in two paintings by
Sano di Pietro of the Franciscan Saint Bernardino preaching (c.1448).21 It is
therefore entirely possible, and I would argue likely, that when a gendered sep-
aration might have been appropriate – such as during a High Mass or the Hours
– women could have gone to the left half of the lay choir and men would have
gone to the right half. At other times, they would have been able to mingle,
although while still observing the social mores such as chaperoning.22 A key
component of the experienced context for Franciscan space would therefore
17 For Dominicans and screens, see first Joanna Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art
in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New
Haven, 2013). For the Dominican Constitutions, Raymond Creytens, “Les constitutions
des frères prêcheurs dans la redaction de S. Raymond de Peñafort,” Archivum fratrum
praedicatorum XVIII (1948), 5-68; A.H. Thomas, De oudste constitutions van de Dominicanen
(Leuven, 1965). For the Augustininan Hermits, Ignacio Aramburu Cendoya, La primitivas
Constituciones de los Agostinos (Ratisbonenses del año 1290) (Valladolid, 1966).
18 Gustafson, “Tradition and Renewal,” pp. 277-86.
19 “Instructions for Novices,” in St. Bonaventure’s Writings Concerning the Franciscan Order,
ed. Monti, pp. 145-76.
20 Donal Cooper, “Access All Areas? Spatial Divides in the Mendicant Churches of Late
Medieval Tuscany,” in Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages, ed. Frances Andrews (Doning-
ton, 2011), pp. 90-107.
21 Corine Schleif, “Men on the Right – Women on the Left: (A)Symmetrical Spaces and
Gendered Places,” in Women’s Space, pp. 207-50.
22 Adrian Randolph, “Regarding Women in Sacred Space,” in Picturing Women in Renaissance
and Baroque Italy, eds. Geraldine Johnson and Sara Matthews Grieco (Cambridge, 1997),
pp. 17-41.
have been access for the laity of both genders through the tramezzo screen into
the lay choir.
What then was the purpose of the tramezzo screen? The three spaces inside
Franciscan churches were not static volumes within the architecture, but were
interlocked and entwined through both vision and movement.23 Both screens
acted to subdivide the unified space of the whole church, an aspect made most
clear when seen from the main doors of the church (figs 10.3-10.4). Here also
the visual pull of the axial building was at its most marked, providing a visual
impetus for physical movement towards the eastern end of the church. While
the tramezzo screen fragmented the nave into two distinct spaces when seen
from a distance, the act of passing through that screen in turn emphasized the
transition of the first space into the second, of the lay nave into the lay choir.
The tramezzo was generally pierced by at least one gate; in the exceptionally
large and complex church of Santa Croce in Florence, there were three gates.
These gates provided visual access of the lay choir space beyond as one
approached the screen, as Jacqueline Jung has recently demonstrated for choir
screens in French and German cathedrals.24 However, in the case of Franciscan
churches, it seems likely that the laity could have physically moved through
the tramezzo screen as well. Passing through the screen would therefore have
emphasized a qualitative differentiation of spaces, the lay choir being more
special for requiring an act of passage to gain access. Having identified such a
qualitative shift in the architectural experience of these churches, we turn now
to the spatial habitus of Bonaventuran thought for a corresponding tripartite
conceptual division of approaching the divine, grounded in the qualitative
uplifting and ascent of the soul towards union with God.
Bonaventure and Medieval Charismata
One of the commonplaces in the intellectual history of charisma is that Paul’s

usage, “was eclipsed as a religious concept within the church by the end of the
third century,” laying “submerged” for centuries until it was “reinvented” by
Max Weber.25 Ayelet Even-Ezra has recently demonstrated that the concept of
23 Jacqueline Jung, “Seeing through Screens: The Gothic Choir Enclosure as Frame,” in Thres
holds of the Sacred, ed. Sharon Gerstel (Dumbarton Oaks, 2006), pp. 185-214.
24 Jacqueline Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture and Community in the Cathedrals of
France and Germany, ca. 1200-1400 (Cambridge, 2013).
25 John Potts, A History of Charisma (New York, 2009), p. 1. For an analogous discussion of the
afterlives of alternate meanings for the Greek charis in late antique and medieval thought,
see Martino Rossi Monti in this volume.
334 Gustafson
charisma was indeed still afloat, if not crucial, in the Middle Ages.26 That study
examined early 13th-century Scholastic debates on prophecy, linking them to
new theological distinctions of grace as a gift of the Holy Spirit. However, in
focusing her study specifically on prophecy, Even-Ezra has to some degree per-
petuated the Weberian association of medieval charisma with superhuman
powers. For medieval theologians, the gifts of the Holy Spirit were necessary
for salvation, playing a crucial role in the dispensation of grace making possi-
ble eternal redemption. Such a conception was rooted in the Pauline epistles
and their development of gifts and grace.27
As mentioned previously, the second commonplace in considerations of
charisma is that the charismatic gifts were defined by the supernatural abili-
ties listed in 1 Corinthians 12:1-31. Six of the nine spiritual gifts listed by Paul are
indeed superhuman abilities (healing, miracles, prophecy, discerning spirits,
speaking in tongues, interpreting tongues), and the other three are very human
abilities (wisdom, knowledge, faith). Tongues and prophecy have drawn the
most attention, and the fading of these phenomena across the early centuries
of Christianity has been taken as evidence of the disappearance of charisma.
However, this was not the only biblical group of traits associated with the Holy
Spirit. In Isaiah 11:2-3, the Spirit comes to rest upon the shoot of Jesse, bringing
seven spirits (wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, piety, and
fear of the Lord). That these traits informed Paul’s gifts of the Spirit has been
noted, but their significance as the medieval Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit has
not figured in the intellectual history of charisma. Moreover, all seven are fun-
damental to the theology of grace and redemption, far more useful to practical
early Christian and medieval theologians working out the moral ramifications
of Christian life than the supernatural and exceptional gifts in Paul. Further, all
are relevant in considering the proper role of charisma as the spiritual gifts of
grace from the Holy Spirit.
The Pauline passage introducing the charismata begins, “Now concerning
spiritual things, my brethren, I would not have you ignorant” (De spiritualibus
autem nolo vos ignorare, fratres).28 These spiritual things are given as manifes-
tations of the Holy Spirit (datur manifestatio Spiritus in 12:7), leading to the
culmination of the chapter at 12:31 when Paul exhorts the Corinthians to “be
26 Ayelet Even-Ezra, “The Conceptualization of Charisma in the Early Thirteenth Century,”

Viator 44, no. 1 (2013), 151-68.
27 Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed.
(Cambridge, 2005), pp. 21-32.
28 Latin and translation taken from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library The Latin Vulgate:
Volume VI The New Testament 1 Cor. 12:1, ed. Angela Kinney (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 910-11.
zealous for the better gifts,” (aemulamini autem charismata meliora).29 Drawing
from the Vulgate, medieval theologians consistently used the Latin words for
gift rather than the Greek charisma. The charismatic gifts in the Pauline epis-
tles were translated in the Vulgate with terms such as donum, donatio, or
datum, or were alluded to through references to grace (gratia). The term gift
was not used in the Vulgate Isaiah, but the term spiritualia used in 1 Corinthians
12:1 provided medieval interpreters with a clear link to the lists of spirits in
Isaiah 11:2-3. In De Spiritu Sancto, Ambrose referred to the seven gifts (spiritua-
lia) of the Holy Spirit in Isaiah, as well as describing them as gifts (dona), while
referring to the charismatic gifts of Corinthians also as dona.30 Augustine
linked these spiritualia to gifts (dona) of the Spirit from Isaiah 11 in De gratia et
libero arbitrio, and discusses the Holy Spirit as gift (donum and donatio) in De
Trinitate.31 Following the model of Augustine, most theological writers in the
Western Church preferred Latin terms for gift. Gregory the Great discussed the
gifts of the Holy Spirit in Moralia in Job, relating the dona sancti Spiritus to the
virtues.32 Aquinas would cite both authors in his discussion of the Gifts in his
Summa theologiae.33 The medieval textual record for spiritual gifts is primarily
grounded in the terminology of gift (dona), the Spirit (spiritualia), and grace
(gratia). The shared vocabulary between references to the gifts in Isaiah and 1
Corinthians in the textual tradition only emphasized the fluidity between the
lists, with the Old Testament list eventually replacing the Pauline as the stan-
dard spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit.34
However, one use of the Latinized term charismata did survive in the Vulgate
Bible: 1 Corinthians 12:31 reads, “But be zealous for the better gifts [charismata
meliora]. And I show unto you yet a more excellent way.”35 Further, at least one
medieval theologian made use of the term charismata in addition to the com-
mon donum when discussing the spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit. Bonaventure
used the term in his short theological summa, the Breviloquium, as well as in
other writings such as the Legenda maior of Francis and the unfinished
Collationes in Hexaemeron, giving charismata a specifically Franciscan inflec-
29 The Latin Vulgate 1 Cor. 12:7, pp. 910-11; 1 Cor. 12:31, pp. 914-15.
30 Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto, 1.0.4, 1.16.159 for Isaiah, 2.13.150-52 for Corinthians.
31 For Augustine, Potts, Charisma, pp. 87-90, as well as throughout De gratia et libero arbitrio
and De Trinitate 5.12-15.
32 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, 2.LVI.89-92.
33 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II, Q. 68: Of the Gifts.
34 This is hardly a comprehensive overview of spiritual gifts in the early theology of the
church. As far as the author is aware, no such study exists, although it would be invaluable.
35 The Latin Vulgate 1 Cor. 12:31, pp. 914-15.
336 Gustafson
tion in 13th-century theology.36 As the Breviloquium was Bonaventure’s most

popular text, providing a concise compendium of his Franciscan vision for
Christian life, it will be the first point of reference for the present study. How
did Bonaventure then use the term charismata, or distinguish charismata gifts
from dona gifts? His first use of the term is suggestive, coming in the prologue
of the Breviloquium amidst a discussion of the dimensions of Holy Scripture.
Using the breadth, length, height, and depth of Scripture, Bonaventure begins
his text with spatial metaphors, laying out for his readers how to search out the
unfolding depths of sacred doctrine.37 In describing the height of scripture,
Bonaventure equates the beauty of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to the splendor
of the gifts (charismata) of holiness, which “possess a lofty subject matter,
which engages our mind and raises aloft its vision.”38 These traits of uplifting
and engaging the subject distinguish Bonaventuran charismatic gifts from gen-
eral gifts of the Holy Spirit, although he was not consistent in his usage.39 They
are consistent, however, with the role the spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit play
in Bonaventure’s theology of grace and salvation.
Bonaventure’s theology has been characterized as a mystical ascent towards
union with God.40 Grace and salvation (or justification in the technical theo-
36 Bonaventure used the term charismata sparingly: 12 times in the Breviloquium, twice in
the Legenda maior Sancti Francisci (7.1 and 8.1 of the Miracles), eight times in the
Collationes in Hexaemeron, but interestingly not once in the Collationes de Septem Donis
Spiritus Sancti.
37 Bonaventure had used the same device to structure his Commentaria in quatuor libros
Sententiarum; see Emmanuel Falque, “The Phenomenological Act of Perscrutatio in the
Proemium of St. Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences,” Medieval Philosophy and
Theology 10 (2001), 1-22.
38 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, Prologue 3.3, p. 12-13 of WSB IX (2005).
39 The 12 uses of the term charismata in the Breviloquium include the Prologue mentioned
in the previous note; 4.2.1 introducing the fullness of gifts (charismatum) as part of the
union of natures in the Incarnated Word; twice in 4.5.1 expanding on that theme
considered in the gifts (charismata) of Christ’s affections (affectu); 4.7.5 on the perfection
of merit in Christ’s deeds emphasizing the fullness of his great gifts (charismatum); 4.8.1
referring to the previous point (plenitude charismatum); three times in 4.10.8 introducing
the gifts of 1 Corinthians 11 as the effect of Christ’s suffering in the Passion, poured out to
the Apostles at Pentecost; 5.10.4 as the seven divine charisms (charismatum) corresponding
to the seven petitions and gifts of sevenfold grace; 6.9.2 on the integrity of the Eucharist
through Christ’s healing and gifts (charismata) of grace; and finally, 7.7.5 on the glory of
Paradise, and the varying amounts in which different members of Christ receive the gifts
(charismata), recalling the Pauline construction.
40 Ilia Delio, “Theology, Spirituality and Christ the Center: Bonaventure’s Synthesis,” in A
Companion to Bonaventure (Leiden, 2014), pp. 361-402; Gregory LaNave, Through Holiness
logical sense) are an early step within this system, providing the springing
point for deeper understanding and advancement towards the divine. To use a
rope climbing metaphor, two forms of grace function as the ascender for spiri-
tually raising oneself up. For Bonaventure, all mankind is endowed with grace
given gratuitously (gratia gratis data), referring to the “assistance God gives
human beings so that they might prepare themselves for receiving the gift
(donum) of the Holy Spirit.”41 This infusion of grace, when combined with the
expulsion of guilt, contrition, and an act of free choice, merits for the Christian
sanctifying grace (the grace that makes pleasing, gratia gratum faciens).42 This
is enough for justification, for salvation, which in the technical sense must be
merited congruously (de congruo) for Bonaventure rather than by right. That is
to say, merit accrued before justification depends on the condescension of
God, so it is considered fitting (congruo) that any value of such merit be depen-
dent on God’s benevolence. Once an individual has been justified by sanctifying
grace (gratia gratum faciens), any merit is accrued by right (de condigno) based
on the shared dignity of Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit in “the
grace that makes pleasing.”43 Between these two forms of grace, Bonaventure
considers all gifts of the Holy Spirit to be gratuitous grace, available to the sin-
ner and the justified alike.44
However, further merit can be acquired, greater proximity to union with
God broached, through what Bonaventure labels as the three branches of
Grace: the virtues, the gifts, and the beatitudes.45 These three habiti parallel
the state of the soul in a series of triadic hierarchies.46 The primary level cor-
responds to the seven virtues, and to the rectified soul in the active life who
believes. The intermediary level corresponds to the seven gifts of the Holy
Spirit, and to the advanced soul in the contemplative life who understands
what is believed. The final level corresponds to the seven Beatitudes, and to the
perfected soul with mastery of both the active and contemplative lives who is
to Wisdom: The Nature of Theology according to St. Bonaventure (Rome, 2005); Timothy
Johnson, The Soul in Ascent: Bonaventure on Poverty, Prayer and Union with God (Quincy,
2000); Charles Carpenter, Theology as the Road to Holiness in St. Bonaventure (New York,
1999); Zachary Hayes, The Hidden Center: Spirituality and Speculative Christology in St.
Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure, 1981, 2000).
41 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, V.2.2.
42 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, V.3.
43 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, V.2.3-4; McGrath, Iustitia Dei, pp. 139-42.
45 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, V.4-6.
46 On the virtues, gifts and beatitudes as habitus and their relation to one another, see
Bonaventure, Commentarius in quatuor libros Sententiarum III, 24,p.1,a.1.
338 Gustafson
capable of vision of the understood. Such grouping in threes is typical of

Bonaventure, reflecting the powerful mystical influence of Pseudo-Dionysius
and the monastic tradition in considering the ascent of the soul. The seven
gifts of the Holy Spirit are those from Isaiah, and while not referred to as cha-
rismata while being discussed in detail47 are termed charismata when their
effect is paired with the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer as effective modes
to honor God and be worthy of merit.48 In the Breviloquium, the seven gifts
help the Christian soul advance in seven corresponding ways: they help one
combat the seven vices, assist the natural powers, assist the virtues in discharg-
ing their tasks, help one suffer in the same spirit as Christ, help one act
effectively, help one advance in contemplation, and facilitate both the active
and contemplative lives.49 Here we encounter the place of the charismata in
Bonaventure’s theology, as the second of three tiers in ascending to God
through the grace of the Holy Spirit. The gifts engage the mind and raise aloft
its vision towards the perfection of the soul in union with God, to paraphrase
Bonaventure’s prologue.
To put the Franciscan aspect of Bonaventure’s theology in perspective, a
quick summary of the equivalent issues in the Summa theologiae of Thomas
Aquinas will be useful. In Aquinas, gratuitous grace allows “that a man may
help another to be led to God,” to which end the gifts of 1 Corinthians and
Isaiah 11 are all considered gratuitous graces as they facilitate the conversion of
souls to God and salvation.50 Such a formulation clearly reflects the Dominican
emphasis on teaching and preaching. The gifts are superior to the virtues in
their ability to perfect the soul’s powers in relation to the Holy Spirit, similar to
Bonaventure. For Aquinas, it is the Holy Spirit that controls movement rather
than the Franciscan mystical ascent of the soul.51 Sanctifying grace is a right
(de condigno) for Aquinas, conferred by the sacrament of confirmation, rather
than the de congruo merit advocated by Bonaventure.52 That is, merit is a state
of being dependent on the divine nature; therefore, once one has attained sal-
vation and takes one’s just place within the hierarchy of creation, God’s
absolute nature dictates that merit also be just and not conditional. Again, the
difference is one of movement; for Bonaventure, the soul must work and earn
47 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, V.5.

49 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, V.5.2-9.
50 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II Q. 111, A. 4, a.c. & respondeo on 1 Corinthians 11
as gratuitous graces, I-II Q. 68 on the gifts, I-II Q. 109-13 on grace.
51 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II Q. 68, A8.
52 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III Q. 72, A. 7.
merit to approach perfection, while in Aquinas the soul exists in relation to

God atop the hierarchy of the world.53 Unlike in Bonaventure’s writing, the
term charismata only appears four times in the Summa theologiae of Aquinas,
all as direct quotations from 1 Corinthians 12:31.54 For example, “The Apostle,
having enumerated the gratuitous graces adds: ‘And I show unto you yet a more
excellent way [charismata meliora]:’ and as the sequel proves he is speaking of
charity, which pertains to sanctifying grace. Hence sanctifying grace is more
noble than gratuitous grace.”55 Aquinas relates the term charismata to charity
and sanctifying grace rather than to the realm of the spiritual gifts as gratuitous
graces. For Bonaventure the charismata engage and lift the soul, while for
Aquinas the charismata indicate charity and the already sanctified soul.
The Historical Experience of Franciscan Charismata and

Charismatic Space
In the Bonaventuran interpretation of Christian souls ascending Jacob’s Lad-

der towards union with the divine, there is no distinction of who can or cannot
climb the branches of Grace. That is, no way is reserved for friars while another
is made open to laity. Because every human is endowed with gratuitous grace,
they have the ability to act on their free will, expel guilt, and be contrite, there
by meriting the sanctifying grace of salvation. Every human therefore also can
exert their free will and gain merit by internalizing and acting on the habiti as-
sociated with the three branches of Grace: the virtues, the gifts, and the beati-
tudes, climbing from a rectified soul to an advanced soul until perfection of the
soul is reached. Such a hierarchy has very clear parallels to the experience of
Franciscan space outlined above. If we translate this hierarchy to Franciscan
churches, we can read the lay nave as the spatial habitus of the rectified soul,
the active life of belief. The lay choir corresponds to the intermediary habitus
of the charismata, to the advanced soul in contemplation. Finally, the friars’
choir and sanctuary correspond to the habitus of the perfected soul, master of
both the active and contemplative lives. Perfection, and in particular the idea
of evangelical perfection, was for Bonaventure associated with the Franciscan
order and its apostolic mission of a life balanced between the vita attiva and
53 McGrath, Iustitia Dei, pp. 64-67, 143-44.

54 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II Q. 111, A. 5, s.c; II-II Q.43 A.7 ad 4; II-II Q. 161, A. 2,
prae. 2; II-II Q.182, A. 1, prae. 3.
55 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II Q. 111, A. 5, s.c.
340 Gustafson
vita contemplativa.56 In architectural terms then, the general laity would have
ready access to the charismatic space of the lay choir, while entrance to the
perfected zone of the friars’ choir (and chapels) would theoretically be re-
served for those whose devotion and spiritual accomplishments set them
alongside the friars. For the laity, movement into the church would be directed
towards passage into the charismatic space of the lay choir, through the door
in the center of the tramezzo screen above which hung a giant crucifix.57 The
crucifix was a reminder for the faithful that they passed into the advanced,
charismatic state of grace because of the Incarnation of Christ’s body, reiterat-
ing the Franciscan emphasis on the life of Christ as a spiritual model. While the
crucifix marked the role of the Son, passage through the screen marked the
charismatic role of the Holy Spirit, and only through both the Son and Holy
Spirit could the faithful approach the divine presence and spiritual union with
the Father.
While the Franciscans are best known as a preaching order, preaching was
not the basis of Franciscanism but merely a means to an end. The Franciscan
ideal was founded on the vita apostolica, on humbly submitting the self for the
good of the community, on providing an example of how anyone could
approach the divine. The classic models of behavior (habiti) by Francis himself
involved attending to lepers or similar extreme outcasts. Franciscanism as
it developed turned towards higher levels of society, but while the nobility
and the wealthy developed close ties to the Order, the poor and general laity
remained key to Franciscan practice. Franciscanism encouraged all levels of
the laity to humble themselves and join the apostolic movement, worshipping
the divine alongside the Franciscans themselves. By allowing the laity through
the tramezzo screen, normal men and women could surround the Franciscans
inside their friars’ choir, praying and worshipping alongside the brothers before
the chapels and altars of the churches’ east ends, joining the friars in their spir-
itual relationship with the divine as made possible by charismatic grace.
Rather than following the transgressive examples of Francis with the lepers,
the laity were encouraged towards more traditional forms of devotion such as
private prayer, and attendance of Masses and the Hours. In a way, the laity
became quasi-monasticized, engaging in forms of devotion and worship long
associated with monastic practice.  
56 In particular, see Bonaventure, Quaestio disputata de perfectione evangelica.

57 On the crucifix and the divine presence, see Donal Cooper, “Projecting Presence: The
Monumental Cross in the Italian Church Interior,” in Presence: The Inherence of the Proto-
type within Images and Other Objects, eds. Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd (Alder-
shot, 2006), pp. 47-70.
When seen through this contextual lens, the visual pull of the nave and the
transformative potential of passing through the tramezzo become the rhetori-
cal mechanisms to convey the charismatic compulsion and transformation of
the Franciscan message. Franciscan space was the charismatic conduit to
transmit the ideals of the order, experienced directly through either a learned
or observed habitus as one moved through the areas of the church towards the
sacred presence housed in the chapels and altars of the eastern end. Passing
through the tramezzo had the conceptual effect of endowing the faithful with
the divine gifts of grace appropriate to the vita apostolica, experienced by the
laity to a lesser degree than the friars themselves but nonetheless done along-
side the brothers. Such an endowment was possible through the laity’s knowl-
edge of Franciscan doctrine, practice, and habitus, and their belief made the
charismatic gifts active agents in their experience of the religious space.
Polemically, the charismatic space of medieval Franciscan architecture allowed
the laity closer regular access to the divine presence than other contemporary
architecture. The Order’s explosion of popularity and growth across Europe
can therefore come as no surprise.
The churches of other orders had similar visual effects, but the experience
of the space was vastly different. For example, Dominican churches were
generally identical to Franciscan churches within regional contexts, both in
terms of the larger architecture as well as the deployment of dividing screens.
However, the Dominican Constitutions were far more circumspect in allowing
the laity through the screens.58 While the Franciscan architectural aesthetic
and habitus drew the faithful towards and welcomed them into the east end of
the church, the antithetical experience of Dominican churches established a
clear hierarchy between laity and clergy. Such an experiential message was far
more appropriate for the mission of the Dominicans, defenders of orthodoxy
and the authority of the Roman Church. Unlike the experience of Franciscan
architecture that engaged and compelled the faithful to action, the Dominican
experience discouraged action while enforcing stasis. Further, the Dominican
context again demonstrates the exceptionality of Franciscan space, revealing
how profound was the novelty of the Franciscan use of space.
58 Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches, pp. 25-46, 227-50.

342 Gustafson
Epilogue: Post-Weberian Charisma and the Compulsion of

Architectural Space
While architectural space has a powerful visual component that can exert
potential influence on how a building might be seen or experienced, interpret-
ing that visuality is not so straightforward. Can the Weberian concept of cha-
risma as an embodied source of authority capable of compelling the viewer
towards certain behaviors or thoughts be brought to bear on architecture?
Gestalt psychologists such as Rudolf Arnheim have sought to identify the uni-
versal structures of visual forms, which were then understood to pre-cogni-
tively determine the experience of space.59 More recent work on neuroscience
and architecture has worked towards similar ends.60 While such approaches
treat architecture essentially as a source of authority capable of compulsion
and direction, the mechanisms for such responses are couched in psychologi-
cal or cognitive terms rather than in an embodied personality. More recent
phenomenological studies rooted in social theory would instead distinguish
visual reception from interpretation, therefore allowing the object of vision to
be mediated through the cognitive filter of a culturally specific context. The
extension of charismatic powers to objects, as in the work of Alfred Gell or
C. Stephen Jaeger, is dependent still on a concept of embodied personhood.61
Personhood may be appropriate for corporations, but not for the buildings that
house them. If we are to analyze the ability of architecture to compel a viewer
charismatically in a post-Weberian usage of the term, it cannot be on the
grounds of embodied personality. Literature, the plastic arts, and film all main-
tain mimetic references to the body, and although there are many bodily meta-
phors related to architecture, the lack of direct mimetic correspondence
precludes their relevance.
The anthropologist Thomas Csordas has suggested a useful refinement of
the modern, sociological idea of charisma, using rhetoric as an analog for how
charisma is mediated between the source of charismatic power and the
receiver/viewer. In contrast to older Weberian and Durkheimian definitions of
charisma in which selfhood was thought to be lost in the face of charismatic
authority, Csordas grounds charisma amongst the viewers rather than the
59 Rudolf Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (Berkeley, 1977).

60 John Eberhard, Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Architecture and Neuroscience
(Oxford, 2008).
61 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford, 1998); C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma
and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia, 2012). For a similar critique of
mimetic charisma for medieval studies, see Paul Binksi in this volume.
authority holders. For Csordas, the mental habitus of the receivers provides the
power of charisma. “Rhetoric moves and persuades, and tracing its phenome-
nological consequences allows us to perceive not gross abolition [of self] but a
shift in orientation … within cultural configuration.”62 Charisma then can be
considered as the potential to move and persuade people to action within a
specific cultural context. The mental outlook (habitus in the terms of this
essay) of the receivers must be already aligned or prepared for the rhetorical
force of charisma to have power. Returning to the built environment, architec-
ture can and does exert visual forces, and can encourage movement in particu-
lar directions. The analogy of rhetoric is useful here as well, suggesting that the
visual cues in combination with a historically grounded context can provide
insight into the subjectively compulsive potential of architectural space.
Turning back to medieval Franciscan architecture, this post-Weberian char-
ismatic power of Franciscan space must therefore be sought in how the
churches were seen and used in the 13th century. That the tramezzo screen
placed a physical and psychological barrier between the main portals and the
advanced level of contemplative space of the Bonaventuran habitus, provides
a powerful compulsive aspect to the medieval experience of Franciscan
churches. The viewer is compelled forward physically as well as spiritually, into
the lay choir and towards the chapels. Not only is the lay choir a charismatic
space in Bonaventure’s theological formulation, but it can also be considered
charismatic in Csordas’s post-Weberian sense. The spiritual ascent of the faith-
ful through Franciscan spirituality towards union with the divine was sanc-
tioned by the habitus of the laity, trained by their Franciscan spiritual fathers
and disseminated from Bonaventure’s theology in myriad devotional texts and
manuals such as the Meditaciones vitae Christi. Medieval Franciscan religious
space was driven by charisma, both through the charismata as a step towards
spiritual perfection as well as through the compelling power instantiated by
the Bonaventuran spiritual habitus. In either sense, the Franciscans estab-
lished a new paradigm for church architecture with their creation of a unique
charismatic spatial habitus.
62 Thomas Csordas, Language, Creativity and Charisma: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic
Renewal (New York, 2001), p. 151.
344 Gustafson
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348 Ackley
Chapter 11
Precious-Metal Figural Sculpture, Medium, and

Mimesis in the Late Middle Ages
Introduction: Metal vs. Paint
When imaged, the divine figure in medieval Christianity was typically designed
to attract the viewer’s gaze: these were images to be run towards, not run from.
Whether masochistic imitatio or delightful voyeurism, these images provoked
pleasure in their viewers, modeled a higher state of existence, and extended an
invitation to partake. They looked attainable even if they were not. They were,
in a word, charismatic. To figure the charismatic divine, be it as God, Christ, the
Virgin, the saints, or regular mortals momentarily touched by grace, the medi-
eval artist shaped a variety of media. Each medium could claim, enable, and
magnify a distinctive range of resonances and significances. Gold and silver
might signal the glorified, heavenly, immortal body; flesh- and rose-colored
paint could recall a shared humanity, as well as the earthly, humbling, and yet
graceful enfleshment of Christ’s own Incarnation.
Metal, wood, paint, stone, glass, bone, ivory, alabaster, and other materials
thus generated a spectrum of representational modes for the human figure,
several of which would have simultaneously occupied a single designated
space, be it an altar, a church choir, or the multimedia surfaces of a chalice.
Ivory statuettes stood adjacent to polychromed-wood sculpture, an altarpiece’s
painted panels were draped with figured textiles, and so on. Such clusterings of
figured media physically revolved around the Christian divine made present,
perhaps embodied or represented in a cult image, perhaps actualized in the
Eucharist, a presence both enticing and remote. While one might see a multi-
media unity in such decorative ensembles, another might see competition
and hierarchy, or at least varietas, multiple chains of symbolism (reinforcing,
contradictory, and superfluous alike) on simultaneous offer. Within these
* This essay has been enriched through the thoughtful feedback of Katherine Morris Boivin and
its two anonymous reviewers, as well as conversations with Greg Bryda, Jessamyn Conrad,
Andrew Griebeler, Julia Perratore, Adam Stead, Brendan Sullivan, and Shannon Wearing.
Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

Precious-Metal Figural Sculpture, Medium, and Mimesis 349
options, this essay attends to the charismatic potential of the precious-metal

medium.
A c.1465-67 reliquary bust of St. Barbara, attributed to the workshop of
Nikolaus Gerhaert von Leiden, encapsulates key trends of polychromed-wood
figural sculpture in the 15th-century North, a genre then developing towards an
ideal of mimetic verisimilitude and human presence (fig. 11.1).1 Instead of the
strictly symmetrical and stiffly frontal pose that had characterized reliquary
busts since their 9th-century origins, the Barbara sculptor animates the saint:
she has arms (hitherto rare among reliquary busts), her drapery and face are
modeled rather naturalistically, and she gazes – no, glances – not straight
ahead, but to the viewer’s right.2 Barbara’s is a courtly body, delicate and plump,
with a long nose, high forehead, pursed lips, severely white skin, and full, rosy
cheeks. Her hair cascades onto her shoulders, gloriously blond – that is, gilded,
as is her mantle. The gilding, importantly, quasi-transfigures and lifts Barbara
from her otherwise earthly existence into an otherworldly plane. A relic, prob-
ably mounted beneath a precious stone, originally occupied the oval cavity on
her chest. Barbara seems, in saintly fashion, impervious to her martyrdom: she
clutches her tower of imprisonment, the windows of which are filled with sil-
ver- or tin-leaf, and yet the thumb and forefinger of her other hand are pinched
together, the pinkie drawn back, as if to hold a flower.
Equally elegant is a c.1350-60 Rhenish statuette, now in Aachen, of the Virgin
and Child with a now anonymous male donor (fig. 11.2), which stands 62 cm
tall.3 The Virgin, whose drapery and pose derive from early 14th-century
Parisian figural styles, holds a lily scepter and thrusts a hip to counter the
weight of the Christ Child. Similar to Barbara, the Aachen statuette is a figural
reliquary: relics could have been housed both beneath the sapphire on the
Virgin’s chest and within the base. Unlike Barbara, however, the three figures
here are hammered of silver and then completely gilded, save for their skin. In
lieu of Barbara’s rosy cheeks, red lips, white skin, and blue eyes, the Virgin’s
1 Barbara’s polychromy is largely original; her tower, hands, and mantle exterior display later
repaintings. For literature see Stefan Roller, ed., Niclaus Gerhaert: Der Bildhauer des Späten
Mittelalters (Petersberg, 2011), pp. 248-54, cat. 9.
2 For the development of bust-length reliquaries see Birgitta Falk, “Bildnisreliquiare. Zur
Entstehung und Entwicklung der metallenen Kopf-, Büsten- und Halbfigurenreliquiare im
Mittelalter,” Aachener Kunstblätter 59 (1991-93), 99-104 and 110-25.
3 For literature see Gerd Althoff, ed., Goldene Pracht. Mittelalterliche Schatzkunst in Westfalen
(Munich, 2012), pp. 395-96, cat. 227, hereafter cited as Althoff; and Dietmar Lüdke, Die
Statuetten der gotischen Goldschmiede. Studien zu den ‘autonomen’ und vollrunden Bildwerken
der Goldschmiedeplastik und den Statuettenreliquiaren in Europa zwischen 1230 und 1530, 2 vols.,
Reihe Kunstgeschichte 4 (Munich, 1983), 2:299-302, cat. 2, hereafter cited as Lüdke.
350 Ackley
Figure 11.1 Reliquary Bust of St. Barbara, Circle of Nikolaus Gerhaert von Leiden, Franco-
Netherlandish, c.1465-67. Walnut with gilding and polychromy, H: 50.5 cm. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917
(17.190.1735). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
face is adamantly metallic, a highly lustrous and gloriously radiant silver. The
Virgin’s manner is balanced and restrained, and her face is finely modeled,
including the arches of the eyebrows. Her medium, however, traffics in differ-
ent traditions of figuring sanctity than those of the polychromed Barbara.
Barbara and the Aachen Virgin, both reliquaries, were also designed to be
displayed as liturgical ornamenta, to charm and exert a charismatic pull. As
peer liturgical objects, they would have shared the physical space of the late
medieval altar: Barbara was probably made for the winged high-altar retable at
Figure 11.2 Virgin and Child with Donor, Rhineland (Cologne, Lower Rhine, or Aachen?),
c.1350-60. Silver, partially gilt, sapphire, H: 62 cm. Aachen, Domschatzkam-
mer, G 62. Photo © Stephan Kube, Greven.
352 Ackley
the Benedictine abbey of Wissembourg, and the Aachen Virgin would have
occasionally been exposed for veneration on or near an altar of its host estab-
lishment.4 A similar adjacency attended the workshop origins of polychromed-
wood and precious-metal figural sculpture, as metalworkers frequently
hammered figural sculpture after wooden models supplied by wood-carvers.
From their conception to their eventual display, therefore, sacred images in
these two media remained in close dialogue.
The Aachen Virgin and Wissembourg Barbara can also summarize the long
history of medieval Christianity’s anxious acceptance and eventual promotion
of the sacred figural image in three dimensions. One representational approach
pulled the figural image into precious metal, the other into painted surfaces.
The second category was larger, encompassing wood, stone, and other fully
or partially polychromed media (e.g. ivory). While art history has tended to
argue that this latter category, in terms of mimetic verisimilitude, triumphed
over the former during the 15th century, it must be recalled that these two
approaches, the metallic and the hued, coexisted intimately through the end
of the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the metallic, be it metal sheet or gilt wood,
remained a primary vehicle for fostering the charismatic charm of the divine.
The Charismatic Image
Charisma, as formulated by Stephen Jaeger, begins with an “extraordinary per-

sonal presence.”5 A person’s charisma simply radiates; heroic deeds are not its
cause, although perhaps its effect. Its cause frequently resides in the inexpli-
cable and the ineffable; the Greek charis means “grace,” usually bestowed by
a god. Charisma intoxicates the non-charismatic, who is then prompted to
imitate and rise to the charismatic’s level to hopefully partake in his or her
charisma. The charismatic, though extraordinary (out of bounds, “hypermi-
metic”), may initially appear as mundane, as “hidden in the veil of the everyday,”
4 The Wissembourg provenance for Barbara cannot be firmly documented but is accepted. The
high-altar retable was destroyed in 1806/07. See Jörg Rosenfeld, “Niclaus Gerhaert von Leiden
in Straßburg. Bemerkungen zum Bürger, Künstler und Werk unter besonderer Berücksichtigung
der Weißenbürger Büsten,” Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen in Baden-Württemberg
32 (1995), 14-22.
5 For Jaeger’s definition of charisma see C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the
Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia, 2012), esp. chaps. 1, 4, 5, and 6, here p. 9; and
C. Stephen Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New German
Critique 114 (2011), 17-34.
which in turn simply intensifies the eventual reveal.6 The charismatic bridges
the real and the aesthetically artificial: “The dichotomies of real and illusion,
life and art, so fundamental to the cultic experience of art in the West, are
resolved in the medium of charisma. In this medium those opposites coalesce.”7
The charismatic image, as defined by Jaeger, is the representation of the
charismatic (the hypermimetic) via the mimetic, the “hyperreal” made to look
real. A representation of the charismatic him- or herself is prerequisite: for
example, Christ’s body and face, not the empty tomb, the cross, or other touch
relics. The viewer need only behold, and not contemplate or analyze, the char-
ismatic image to sense the charisma of the depicted individual:
The educating force of charismatic art generally is exercised by the au-

thority gathered on the narrative or visible surface. ‘What does it mean?’ is
an all but irrelevant question … Meaning, interpretation, hermeneutics,
the apparatus of commentary inherited from Western exegetical tradi-
tion are minor in the face of charismatic force.8
Jaeger, having defined charisma this generally and flexibly, notes the radical
contingency of its effect – that is, what one viewer finds charismatic another
may not.9 The historian negotiates such subjectivity by being tasked not with
asking whether Jesus of Nazareth (d. c.30 AD), Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), or
Diane Keaton (b. 1946) actually had or have charisma, but whether their his-
torical contexts treated them as if they did.10 The historian attends to the
artifacts of the charismatic presence, to the methods of its construction, main-
tenance, and promulgation. Many of these artifacts concern, necessarily, the
image of the charismatic.
The 6th-century Christ Pantocrator icon at Mt. Sinai (fig. 11.3), in Jaeger’s
formulation, exemplifies the charismatic image.11 The icon, by depicting a
divine figure, is made to:

7 Ibid., p. 24.
8 Ibid., pp. 183-84.
9 Jaeger’s description of John Singer Sargent’s 1892 portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw
demonstrates this contingency. Ibid., pp. 32-35.
10 See, for example, C. Stephen Jaeger’s essay in this volume on the “life-writing” of Francis
of Assisi.
11 For Jaeger on the Sinai Christ and the medieval icon see Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 98-123.
354 Ackley
Figure 11.3 Icon of Christ Pantocrator, Constantinople (?), 500s. Encaustic on

panel, 84 × 45.5 cm. Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine’s. Published
through the courtesy of the Michigan-Princeton-
Alexandria Expeditions to Mount Sinai.
… go to the boundaries of the human … It [the icon] works its paideic

effect by showing us how minor we are and how high we can rise. The
illusion powerful enough to dissolve its own illusory character and lift the
viewer into a “heightened” world, accepted as real, is the prerequisite of
imitation.12
The Sinai Christ and the Wissembourg Barbara function similarly. Although
traces of their narratives remain, such as Barbara’s tower and the generic yet
identifiably earthly setting and garb of Christ, attention is directed to their
flesh-colored faces.
Of such icons and icon-like images Jaeger writes, “… the religious force radi-
ates from the face, and it works because the zone of the face is freed from
semiotic function and given over entirely to an individual emotionality and
passion that is virtually hypnotic, at the minimum riveting …”13 Whether a leg-
ible image, or even simply a sensible one, can ever be “freed from semiotic
function,” evacuated of narrative, or rendered purely affective is debatable.14
For the purposes of this essay, however, Jaeger’s definition of “charisma” and
“charismatic image” may be narrowed to signal the iconic, relatively non-nar-
rative figure of the human being that, somehow, suggests a wondrous, hyper-
mimetically conceived charisma. While mimetic, therefore, the image must
still be distanced from the viewer.
Many objects and images fulfill these requirements; their underlying con-
ventions and patterns of appearance, however, may still be historicized into
coherent and critically alert examples that remain wary of anachronistic pro-
jection. Indeed, it must be emphasized that other Western traditions of
defining, picturing, and perceiving charisma existed. Bissera Pentcheva, for
example, discusses ancient Greek and Byzantine charis as a characteristic or
state signaled by the lustrous radiance of precious metals, above all gold:
For a work of art to have charis meant that it had, not pictorial or sculp-
tural naturalism, but the sparkle of gold, through whose glittering spec-
tacle divine presence became known. Charis was thus an expression of
12 Ibid., p. 122.
13 Ibid., p. 110.
14 On affect and its theorists consider Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical
Inquiry 37 (2011), 434-72.
356 Ackley
the phenomenal, the presence effects, the simulation rather than the imi-
tation of presence [my emphases].15
Homer likens Athena showering Odysseus with charis to a metalworker cover-

ing silver with gold. Per Pentcheva, radiant metal engenders “… a scintillating
tremble that conveys in its fugitive state of attraction the fleeting fragile
moment of divine presence.”16 Pentcheva’s larger reevaluation of the Middle
Byzantine icon casts simulation and performance, not reflection or imitation
(not mimesis), as its goal, a goal better realized by the medium of precious-
metal figural sculpture than two-dimensional painting.17
Two quite opposite definitions of the charismatic image are therefore on
offer: the precious-metal image that prioritizes simulated presence over mime-
sis and whose medium signals divine grace (Pentcheva), and the mimetic
image that usually idealizes the form, color, and texture of the observable
world (Jaeger). The mimetic claims of late medieval figural sculpture in the
West situate it within the latter category. Figural sculpture in precious-metal,
however, continues to pull in aspects of the former. Jaeger argues that different
media are differently capable of mimetic verisimilitude; that some media,
such as paint, are thus better suited to picturing charisma than others; and that
a hierarchy of charismatic images obtains.18 He acknowledges, however, that
some precious-metal figural images, if appropriately mimetic, may achieve
and emit a charisma similar to that exuded by the Sinai Christ.19 This essay
expands this observation. A spectrum of charismatic images arises across late
medieval sculpture, its poles occupied, heuristically, by the Aachen Virgin and
the Wissembourg Barbara.
15 Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (Univer-
sity Park, 2010), esp. pp. 156-60, here p. 157.
16 Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, p. 193.
17 On this question see also Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Aesthetics of Landscape and Icon at
Sinai,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65/66 (2014/15), esp. pp. 201-07.
18 Jaeger, Enchantment, esp. pp. 98-133.
19 See specifically Jaeger’s appraisal of Cynthia Hahn’s scholarship on figural reliquaries in
Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 98, n. 1, and pp. 128-31, n. 41 and n. 44. For Hahn see Cynthia Hahn,
“The Spectacle of the Charismatic Body: Patrons, Artists, and Body-Part Reliquaries,” in
Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, eds. Martina Bagnoli
et al. (New Haven, 2010), pp. 163-72.
The Charismatic Image in Text
Since Late Antiquity precious metal and gemstones had been accruing an
abundance of symbolisms, identities, and allegorical traditions, including that
of the charis-rich substance.20 Such precious media dazzlingly signaled the
irruption and appearance of heavenly grace within the earthly sphere. The
greater the luster and preciousness, the greater the potency. Jerome (d. 420),
turning to Psalm 11:7, likens the purity and truth of the Word to silver that has
been mined and then purified by fire.21 Both Gregory the Great (d. 604) and
Rupert of Deutz (d. 1130) see the tarnish of silver as the darkness of the Old
Testament, which is then polished by the Incarnation of Christ, its formerly
hidden luster now released and shining forth.22
When precious metal was shaped into the image of a saint, it allegorized the
saint’s body infused with and transfigured by heavenly virtus.23 Biblical exege-
sis and hagiography alike provided abundant material for likening the saintly
body to a glorified, incorruptible, and radiant body, a substance repeatedly pic-
tured by precious metals and gemstones, including rock crystal.24 Paul writes
in 1 Corinthians 15:40-53 that corpora caelestia are differently glorious than
20 Introductions to this sprawling topic include Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the
Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400-circa 1204 (University Park, 2012), pp. 31-44;
Martina Bagnoli, “The Stuff of Heaven: Materials and Craftsmanship in Medieval Reli-
quaries,” in Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, eds.
Martina Bagnoli et al. (New Haven, 2010), pp. 137-47; Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der Materi-
alien. Anleitung zu einer Ikonologie der Werkstoffe, 2nd ed., Münchner Beiträge zur Volks
kunde 37 (Münster, 2008), pp. 49-104; Bruno Reudenbach, “‘Gold ist Schlamm’: Anmerkun-
gen zur Materialbewertung im Mittelalter,” in Material in Kunst und Alltag, eds. Monika
Wagner and Dietmar Rübel, Hamburger Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte 1 (Berlin,
2002), pp. 1-12; Dominic Janes, God and Gold in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 61-
152; and Hans-Jörg Spitz, Die Metaphorik des geistigen Schriftsinns. Ein Beitrag zur alle-
gorischen Bibelauslegung des ersten christlichen Jahrtausends, Münstersche Mittelalter-
Schriften 12 (Munich, 1972), pp. 191-200.
21 See Spitz, Die Metaphorik, p. 199.
22 Spitz, Die Metaphorik, pp. 196-97.
23 For the symbolism of precious-metal figural reliquaries see especially Bagnoli, “The Stuff
of Heaven,” pp. 137-47; Hahn, Strange Beauty, pp. 117-41; Hahn, “The Spectacle of the
Charismatic Body,” pp. 163-72; and Bruno Reudenbach, “Visualizing Holy Bodies:
Observations on Body-Part Reliquaries,” in Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth
Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. Colum Hourihane, Index of Christian Art
Occasional Papers 10 (University Park, 2008), pp. 95-106.
24 For saintly bodies being compared to rock crystal and glass see especially Arnold
Angenendt, “‘Der Leib ist klar, klar wie Kristall,’” in Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-
358 Ackley
corpora terrestria: heavenly bodies are radiant, lustrous, and bright.25 In Poly
carp’s 2nd-century martyrdom, the burning body of the saint is likened to sil-
ver and gold being purified in the fire (and also bread baking in the oven).26
Less remote is the flesh of Aelred of Rievaulx’s corpse (d. 1167), which was
observed to be clearer than glass, whiter than snow, and without blemish, sim-
ilar to that of a child. Aelred himself had likened the body of Edward the Con
fessor (d. 1066), at Edward’s 1163 exhumation and translation, to glass and
snow, a picture of transfigured glory that also helped confirm the king’s vir-
ginity.27
Beyond symbolism and evocation, precious metals and gemstones could
reflect and radiate heavenly light. They thus served as devotional tools, step-
ping stones to a higher plane lodged somewhere between the earthly and
heavenly spheres. Suger of Saint-Denis (d. 1151), writing in the 1140s, famously
describes this anagogical process, whereby the deserving mind, gazing at gold
and gemstones, was permitted to momentarily dwell in a realm between those
of “earthly slime” (terrarum faece) and “heavenly purity” (coeli puritate).28
Importantly, Suger’s anagogic ascendance, in this example, is not prompted by
a figural image; instead, he is discussing the monumental gemmed cross made
by St. Eligius, bishop of Noyon (d. 660).29 The Eligius cross, a crux gemmata,
represented the glorified, charis-infused True Cross. And precious media need
not be shaped specifically into a cross to emit heavenly radiance: any object
covered by or assumed up into such a precious substance, especially those
adorning an altar, such as chalices, patens, antependia, and candelabra, could
function similarly.30
The radiance seen in the deceased bodies of Polycarp and Aelred might
sometimes bleed over into the living. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) describes
soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksformen, ed. Klaus Schreiner (Mu
nich, 2002), pp. 387-98.
25 See Reudenbach, “Visualizing Holy Bodies,” p. 102.
26 Cited in Bagnoli, “The Stuff of Heaven,” p. 138.
27 See Angenendt, “‘Der Leib ist klar,’” pp. 394-95.
28 Suger of Saint-Denis, Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its
Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1979), pp. 62-65. Jaeger
discusses Suger in C. Stephen Jaeger, “Richard of St. Victor and the Medieval Sublime,” in
Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music,
ed. C. Stephen Jaeger (New York, 2010), pp. 171-73.
29 For the Eligius cross see Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, ed., Le Trésor de Saint-Denis (Paris,
1991), pp. 56-59, cat. 1.
30 In addition to Suger, Pentcheva’s discussion of a heavenly banquet recorded in the
10th-century vita of Basil the Younger nicely demonstrates the grace-giving power of non-
figural objects. Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, pp. 158-59.
the exceptional person whose inner spirit overflows, exceeds, and breaks forth
(erumpere) from its bodily limits. The radiance signals their charisma. As
Bernard writes:
When the luminosity of this beauty [moral beauty, honestum] fills the
inner depths of the heart, it overflows and surges outward, as a lamp hid-
den under a basket, or rather, as a light shining in the darkness, incapable
of being suffocated by darkness. Then the body, the very image of the
mind, catches up this light glowing and bursting forth [erumpentem] like
the rays of the sun. All its senses and its members are suffused with it,
until its glow is seen in every act, in speech, in appearance, in the way of
walking and laughing …31
Bernard’s description straddles the real and the metaphoric. His biographers,
however, grounded this description in the living image of Bernard himself.
Geoffrey of Clairvaux, who spent years in Bernard’s company, notes that in
Bernard’s flesh there was visible “a certain grace” [gratia, per Jaeger, the Latin
analog of “charisma”], that Bernard’s “face radiated celestial rather than earthly
brightness [claritas],” that Bernard’s “inner beauty [pulchritudo interioris] must
needs break forth [erumperet] outwardly with visible signs …”32 The picture of
normal flesh is made inadequate; instead, a graceful interiority breaks through,
and Bernard’s living image begins to approach the radiance materialized by
precious-metal figural sculpture.
Contrast the charismatic Bernard with a secular, courtly charismatic. The
male dreamer of Guillaume de Lorris’s c.1225-30 portion of The Romance of the
Rose, upon being admitted to Pleasure’s garden, is captivated by the sight of
Pleasure’s coterie dancing.33 The dreamer describes them, beginning with
Pleasure (Déduit, sometimes translated as “Diversion”):
Pleasure was handsome, straight, and tall: never in any company would
you find a better-looking man. His face was pale, with cheeks as rosy as an
apple, and he was elegant and well dressed; his eyes were bright, his
31 Discussed and translated in Martino Rossi Monti, “‘Opus es magnificum’: The Image of
God and the Aesthetics of Grace,” in Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics:
Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger (New York, 2010), pp. 24-25.
32 For Jaeger on Bernard of Clairvaux and these passages see Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 143-
46. I follow Rossi Monti’s translation of Geoffrey of Clairvaux in Rossi Monti, “‘Opus es
magnificum,’” p. 25.
33 For an art historical introduction to courtly love see Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of
Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York, 1998), pp. 27-49.
360 Ackley
mouth charming, and his nose very finely formed; his hair was blond and
curly, his shoulders rather broad, and his waist slender. He was so hand-
some and elegant and had such shapely limbs that he looked like a
painting [my emphasis].34
The dreamer continues on through the fine dress and graceful, elegant carriage
of Pleasure and the other dancers, both male and female. White, fair skin,
blond, shining hair, and sometimes rosy cheeks characterize the group that the
dreamer longs to, and is invited to, join.
Together, the Romance bodies and Geoffrey’s Bernard of Clairvaux appear to
recapitulate the polarity of the Wissembourg Barbara and the Aachen Virgin.
These two poles stake out a fertile, productive tension between apple-like,
rosy-cheeked flesh and radiant, lustrous flesh, between the incarnate body and
the transfigured body, between paint and metal. This tension is “fertile” pre-
cisely because these two figural modes frequently overlapped and interpene-
trated. The bodies of Aelred and Edward were already incorruptible and whiter
than snow while still on earth; such quasi-transfigured bodies blended the
immortal, spiritual body with earthly flesh, as did the radiance emitted by
Bernard’s living body.
Indeed, radiance and color, especially those of healthy human skin, were
repeatedly intertwined within natural philosophy and literature, and both
became prerequisite to the state of beauty.35 In Middle High German litera-
ture, beautiful bodies, as James Schultz notes, are most frequently described as
having “radiance.”36 These bodies are not metallic, but colored, usually with
the now familiar red lips, rosy cheeks, and white skin. Such color produces the
body’s schin or glanz, etc., a vocabulary Schultz translates as “radiance” specifi-
cally to emphasize the necessity of light and its reflection to beauty.37
Within texts, therefore, the boundary between the metallic and the hued
was delightfully permeable. The blond hair of Isold, in Gottfried von Straßburg’s
(d. c.1210) Trístan und Isold, so rivaled in radiance the gold circlet adorning her
34 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, ed. and trans. Frances
Horgan (1994; repr. Oxford, 2008), pp. 14-21.
35 Select discussions of medieval beauty, color, radiance, and skin include Paul Binski,
Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290-1350 (New Haven, 2014), pp. 22-30
and 179-85; Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013),
esp. pp. 175-87; and Sarah-Grace Heller, “Light as Glamour: The Luminescent Ideal of
Beauty in the Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 76 (2001), 934-59.
36 James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago,
2006), p. 10.
37 Schultz, Courtly Love, pp. 80-83.
head that each “… shone, trying to outdo the other.”38 Such competition recalls
the gilding of the Wissembourg Barbara’s hair and crown – but with caveats.
The gilding of Barbara’s crown is a polished water-gilding (Glanz- or Poliment
vergoldung), that of Barbara’s hair matte (Mattvergoldung). Varnishes, perhaps
of different shades, were applied to both crown and hair to modulate the luster
of the gilding.39 Indeed, the physical, real-world media of much sculpture and
painting do not typically blend or combine as easily, as fancifully, or as willfully
as the virtual media conjured by texts. Technical imperatives and stylistic con-
ventions alike placed constraints, both limiting and stimulating, on the painter,
sculptor, and metalworker.
The Precious-Metal Figural Image
The history of precious-metal figural sculpture is pivotal to that of monumen-

tal figural sculpture in the medieval West in general.40 While it remains debated
whether a monumental gold crucifix existed in Metz Cathedral in 636, by the
early 9th century at latest freestanding figural sculpture had irreversibly begun
to populate sacred spaces in the Latin West.41 Carolingian and Ottonian monu-
mental sculpture included full-, half-, and bust-length figural reliquaries,
Enthroned Virgin and Childs, and the Christ corpora of monumental crosses,
all of which coexisted with a robust tradition of relief figural sculpture in stone
and stucco. The dominant medium of pre-11th-century freestanding figural
sculpture, however, was precious metal, always covering a wooden core.
38 Discussed and translated in Schultz, Courtly Love, pp. 85-86.

39 Roller, Niclaus Gerhaert (see above, n. 1), p. 248, cat. 9.
40 Key studies of monumental figural sculpture in the West include Beate Fricke, Fallen
Idols, Risen Saints. Sainte Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in
Medieval Art, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages 7 (Turnhout, 2015); Anna
Pawlik, Das Bildwerk als Reliquiar? Funktionen früher Großplastik im 9. bis 11. Jahrhundert,
Studien zur internationalen Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte 98 (Petersberg, 2013);
Manuela Beer, Triumphkreuze des Mittelalters. Ein Beitrag zu Typus und Genese im 12. und
13. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 2005), pp. 167-205; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence:
A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1994), esp.
pp. 297-310; and Ilene H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna
in Romanesque France (Princeton, 1972), esp. pp. 1-15 and 67-91.
41 Fricke, critiquing the textual record, places the Metz crucifix in the early 11th century, a
re-dating accepted by Pawlik; Beer represents the older dating. See Fricke, Fallen Idols,
p. 105; Pawlik, Bildwerk, pp. 279-80, cat. 30; and Beer, Triumphkreuze, p. 170.
362 Ackley
Precious-metal figural images could channel the rich symbolism and alle-
gorical chains discussed above. Concurrently, and no less importantly, precious
metal, precisely because of its less mimetic, more otherworldly radiance, could
preempt charges of idolatry, always a larger concern with images in three
dimensions than those in two. In the Sinai Christ icon, gold and gemstones are
seen both in Christ’s halo and in the book-cover of his codex, while Christ’s
flesh is painted. Christ’s Incarnation – his graceful humiliation – remained
central to the Christian belief system. In manuscript and panel painting,
accordingly, the overwhelmingly preferred medium for the skin of holy figures
was paint; gold- and silver-leaf, conversely, could appear almost anywhere else
on the page or panel.42 Early monumental figural sculpture, however, flipped
the formula of the Sinai Christ and translated the precious metal of the book-
cover to the god’s human body.
In the Ottonian era, with earlier anxieties of idolatry contained, monumen-
tal freestanding figural sculpture in polychromed-wood began to flourish.43
This occasionally entailed a coexistence, even an interchangeability, of metal
and paint within a single sculpture, as is demonstrated by the c.1051-58 Imad
Madonna in Paderborn. The freestanding, monumental, carved-wood Virgin
and Child was originally polychromed: the Virgin’s mantle was white with red
highlights and patterned decorative motifs, the Child’s mantle blue. After
being damaged by fire in 1058, the Madonna was covered with hammered gilt-
copper plaques funded by a documented gift from Bishop Imad (d. 1076).44 It
seems, due to the nail holes, that the flesh areas of the Virgin and Child, as well
as the Child’s hair, were not covered with the gilt-copper plaques at this time
but instead remained polychromed.45 This is an intentional and significant
decision, given that peer monumental precious-metal figural sculpture did not
at all hesitate to cover areas of flesh with gold and silver, and an explanation
such as a scarcity of (non-precious) copper is implausible.
The desire for fully precious-metal figural sculpture, however, did not abate.
Such sculpture, in the form of cast figures, hammered figures in relief, or free-
standing figures hammered over a wood core, continued to be produced
through the Middle Ages (the corpus remains relatively understudied in An-
42 See, for example, Belting’s discussion of “living painting” and 11th-century Byzantine
icons in Belting, Likeness and Presence, pp. 261-65.
43 For the incunabular examples of this genre see Pawlik, Das Bildwerk, pp. 45-51.
44 The copper plaques were melted down in 1762; the wooden sculpture is preserved as
Paderborn, Erzbischöfliches Dom- und Diözesanmuseum, inv. 1. See Pawlik, Das Bildwerk,
pp. 290-96, cat. 35.
45 Hilde Claussen and Klaus Endemann, “Zur Restaurierung der Paderborner Imad-
Madonna,” Westfalen. Hefte für Geschichte, Kunst und Volkskunde 48 (1970), p. 124.
glophone scholarship).46 In the 13th century there arose a new genre of free-
standing, portably scaled, full-body figural statuettes, such as the Aachen
Virgin, which were hammered, not cast, and which did not require a wooden
core.47 Dietmar Lüdke designates such statuettes “autonomous.”48 The earliest
autonomous statuettes appear to be seated Virgin and Childs, for example the
c.1235-40 Minden and c.1260 Walcourt Enthroned Virgins, as well as c.1200 gilt-
copper-alloy examples from Limoges. Autonomous statuettes of standing fig-
ures appear at latest by c.1240.49 Such statuettes are technically indebted to the
hammered precious-metal relief figural sculpture that populated, in increas-
ingly plastic and independent manners, the exteriors of the large late 11th-
through 13th-century reliquary shrines, for example the c.1272-98 Shrine of
Gertrude of Nivelles.50
The creation of a precious-metal statuette involved both metalworker and
wood-carver.51 First, a two-dimensional design would be produced, either by a
metalworker, painter, or sculptor. The design would then be rendered three-
dimensionally, at full-scale, in carved wood (or clay or wax), probably by a
wood-carver. The degree of finish of the wood sculpture varied based on the
needs of the metalworker. The wood sculpture served neither as a core nor as a
positive model. Instead, the metalworker would have hammered and finished
the autonomous precious-metal figure “freely,” that is, solely by means of the
anvil, hammer, ciselet, chisel, burin, punch, and related tools. Smaller compo-
nents, such as hands, would be cast and attached separately. Multiple sheets of
metal, usually silver, could be used for a single statuette, sometimes obviously,
such as for the layering of drapery, but more often discretely, with joins and
soldering hidden or made otherwise insignificant.
46 Key studies of precious-metal figural sculpture include, in addition to Lüdke, cited above
in n. 3, Johann Michael Fritz, Goldschmiedekunst der Gotik in Mitteleuropa (Munich, 1982).
Important English-language contributions include Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Art of the
Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop (Fort
Worth, 2006); and Hugo van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive
Portraits of Charles the Bold (Turnhout, 2000).
47 See Lüdke, esp. 1:5-15 and 1:29-47.
48 Lüdke, 1:iii.
49 Lüdke, 1:5-15. The Minden Virgin was originally made for a now lost wood core. For the
Minden and Walcourt Madonnas respectively see Althoff, pp. 124-26, cat. 11, and 216, cat.
78.
50 Lüdke, 1:46-47. The Nivelles shrine was largely destroyed in 1940. For literature see Althoff,
pp. 219-21, cat. 80.
51 For the working methods of the figural metalworker see Lüdke, 1:118-42; and also Smith,
The Art of the Goldsmith, pp. 25-40.
364 Ackley
A newly designed carved-wood model was not always necessary: metal-

workers could also have used preexisting sculpture in stone, wood, ivory, and
other media as models. The necessity and utility of a three-dimensional model
for the metalworker varied.52 Lüdke asserts that skilled metalworkers could
have freely hammered figural statuettes from two-dimensional designs alone,
and the metalworker, if suitably skilled, could have designed and executed the
necessary two- and three-dimensional models himself. Repeatedly, however,
there seems to be a stylistic dependence of the metalworker on the model. A
single metalworker, for example Hans von Reutlingen (d. 1547), would have
commissioned models from multiple sculptors, whose individual styles would
then be reflected accordingly across Reutlingen’s output.
Only one identified pair of precious-metal sculpture and wood model sur-
vives: a silver-gilt Virgin and Child, made, according to its inscription, by
Heinrich Hufnagel of Augsburg in 1482 (nothing further is known of Hufnagel),
and its c.1480 carved-wood model, attributed to Michel Erhart (d. c.1522).53
Hufnagel would have commissioned Erhart to make the model.54 Following its
service in Hufnagel’s workshop the wood Virgin and Child was probably used
as a private Andachtsbild. Other wooden statuettes created as models for pre-
cious-metal statuettes may yet exist; however, their identification as such is
difficult: after serving as a model for the metalworker, the wood sculpture may
have been polychromed and entered into liturgical or devotional use.55 Small-
scale, freestanding, polychromed-wood figural sculpture produced as finished
sculpture (any service as a model being secondary) begins to arise, on a region-
by-region basis, only in the late 14th century.56
52 For the relationship between model and finished statuette see Lüdke, 1:126-36.
53 The Erhart sculpture’s polychromy is largely 20th-century. See Stefan Roller and Michael
Roth, eds., Michel Erhart und Jörg Syrlin d. Ä.: Spätgotik in Ulm (Stuttgart, 2002), pp. 284-87,
cat. 28 and 29; and also Lüdke, 1:122; and Smith, Art of the Goldsmith, pp. 32-34.
54 Anja Broschek, Michel Erhart. Ein Beitrag zur schwäbischen Plastik der Spätgotik, Beiträge
zur Kunstgeschichte 8 (Berlin, 1973), pp. 93-94.
55 Lüdke 1:124-26.
56 See Norbert Jopek, “Kleinbildwerke des Syrlin-Erhart-Kreises: Neue Perspektiven,” in
Michel Erhart und Jörg Syrlin d. Ä.: Spätgotik in Ulm, eds. Stefan Roller and Michael Roth
(Stuttgart, 2002), pp. 154-61; and Jörg Rasmussen, Deutsche Kleinplastik der Renaissance
und des Barock, Bilderhefte des Museums für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg 12 (Hamburg,
1975), pp. 5-13.
The Charismatic Potential of the Precious-Metal Figure
As the design and execution of precious-metal figural sculpture demonstrate,

the formal, stylistic, and mimetic interests of the wood-carver or painter trans-
lated, easily and intentionally, to the metalworker. The charismatic rendering
of the human figure should therefore follow as appropriate. And yet, the radi-
ant, lustrous medium of precious metal potentially inhibits mimetic imitation.
Precious metal symbolically distanced the figure from the viewer’s earthly
sphere, as did the gilding of polychromed-wood sculpture.57 Visually, the me-
tallic surface worked against mimetic verisimilitude. As Michael Baxandall
phrases it, gilt surfaces “… easily become incoherent through dazzle.”58
Baxandall’s judgment resonates with the fact that late medieval poly-
chromed-wood sculpture utilized a variety of gilding techniques to manipulate
the luster, hue, and overall appearance of the gilt surface. While technical con-
siderations may have primarily driven the decision to use water gilding
(Poliment- or Glanzvergoldung) or oil gilding (Matt- or Ölvergoldung), the deci-
sion to vary the color of an underlying bole or to cover a gilded surface with a
layer of paint was clearly one of optical effect. In addition, glazes were some-
times applied to gilded areas, especially drapery, to soften and decrease their
luster.59 This recalls, however circuitously, the famous episode recounted by
Pliny (d. 79 AD): Nero so admired a bronze sculpture by Lysippos of Alexander
the Great that he ordered it gilded, which, however, compromised the “artistic
charm” (gratia artis) of the sculpture, whereupon the gilding was eventually
removed. Lysippos, per Pliny, had identified only Nature herself as his instruc-
tor.60
Indeed, by the end of the Middle Ages the gilt surface had been cast deci-
sively as an opponent of mimesis. One of the most significant and studied
developments in 15th-century painting and sculpture is the gradual elimina-
tion, at different rates across different media and geographies, of the gilded
57 For a concise discussion of the dynamic between polychromy and gilding in late medieval
sculpture see Lynn Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380-1550: Medieval
Tastes and Mass Marketing (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 81-96.
58 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, 1980),
p. 170.
59 For a succinct introduction to the gilding techniques of polychromed-wood sculpture see
Eike Oellermann, “Die spätgotische Skulptur und ihre Bemalung,” in Tilman Riemen
schneider, frühe Werke, ed. Bodo Buczynski (Regensburg, 1981), pp. 275-83.
60 Discussed and translated in Raff, Die Sprache, p. 32. For text and translation see also Jacob
Isager, Pliny on Art and Society: The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, trans.
Henrik Rosenmeier, Odense University Classical Studies 17 (Odense, 1991), pp. 100-02.
366 Ackley
and the metallic from the otherwise hued image. The ars nova of Jan van Eyck
(d. 1441) and early Netherlandish oil painting in general, for example, is distin-
guished by the evacuation of gilding from the pictorial surface, a disappearance
championed south of the Alps by Alberti (d. 1472).61 Both the mid-15th-century
appearance of freestanding bronze statuettes in Italy and the c.1500 appear-
ance of monochromed-wood sculpture in the circle of Tilman Riemenschneider
(d. 1531) comprise two mimetic traditions that notably eschew gilding, although
bronze statuettes were sometimes fully or partially gilt.62
Certain trends in late medieval precious-metal figural sculpture itself might
confirm this equation of the metallic with the non-mimetic. The most pro-
nounced would be that of painting the flesh areas of the precious-metal figural
sculpture (Kaltbemalung), a technique that further likened such sculptures to
those in polychromed-wood and which is evidenced by the 13th century.63 The
14th-century development of enamel en ronde bosse also colored precious-
metal figural sculpture; however, its palette was more restricted and its use less
widespread than that of Kaltbemalung, and the coloring conventions of ronde-
bosse sculpture tended to contrast less sharply between areas of flesh and
areas of drapery.64
A silver book-box, made c.1510 in Hamburg and decorated with a high-relief
figure of the Apostle John, demonstrates the mimetic strategy of Kaltbemalung
(fig. 11.4).65 John’s scale, pose, and plasticity suggest his near independence
61 See, for example, Stephan Kemperdick and Friso Lammertse, eds., The Road to Van Eyck
(Rotterdam, 2012), pp. 11-19.
62 For the 15th-century development of the Italian bronze statuette see Volker Krahn, ed.,
Von allen Seiten schön. Bronzen der Renaissance und des Barock. Wilhelm von Bode zum 150.
Geburtstag (Berlin, 1995), pp. 128-229. For the surface treatment of bronze statuettes,
including gilding, see Edgar Lein, Ars Aeraria. Die Kunst des Bronzegießens und die Bedeu-
tung von Bronze in der florentinischen Renaissance (Mainz, 2004), pp. 51-71. For the surface
treatment of Riemenschneider sculpture, including the monochromes, see Michele
Marincola, “The Surfaces of Riemenschneider,” in Tilman Riemenschneider: Master Sculp-
tor of the Late Middle Ages, ed. Julien Chapuis (Washington, DC, 1999), pp. 99-116.
63 Lüdke, 1:139-40. A comprehensive study of medieval Kaltbemalung, no doubt hindered by
post-medieval restorations and interventions, remains outstanding.
64 Many ronde-bosse enameled figures use the white- or cream-colored enamel of the face
for areas of drapery, etc. For a review of ronde-bosse enamel see Renate Eikelmann,
“Goldemail um 1400,” in Das Goldene Roessl. Ein Meisterwerk der Pariser Hofkunst um 1400,
ed. Reinhold Baumstark (Munich, 1995), pp. 106-30.
65 See Uwe M. Schneede, ed., Goldgrund und Himmelslicht. Die Kunst des Mittelalters in
Hamburg (Hamburg, 1999), pp. 342-43, cat. 88. John’s body is stuffed with relic bundles,
irremovable and inaccessible; an inventory of the 36 relics, written in a 16th-century
hand, is pasted onto the verso of the book-box’s front cover.
Figure 11.4 Book-Box for an Evangeliary from Kloster Harvestehude, Hamburg

Workshop, c.1510. Silver, partial gilding, paint, 30 × 21.5 cm. Hamburg,
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, 1879.320. Photo © Museum für
Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg.
from the book-box support: his head and canted nimbus exceed the upper
frame, he gestures towards his chalice and looks to the viewer’s right (at what
the viewer does not know), and he stands not on the rectangular frame but on
his own polygonal base, over the edge of which his bare foot protrudes. He is
hammered silver, and the nimbus, chalice, and mantle edges have been gilded
– his face and hands, however, are painted flesh tones. When empty, the book-
box could have been stood as an independent image on or near an altar.
368 Ackley
The Hamburg John’s sculptor has endowed him with a dynamic lifelikeness.
Any “incoherent dazzle” of John’s silver drapery or the silver book-box itself is
countered and anchored by the matte stability of John’s painted flesh. This dra-
matic contrast of painted flesh and gilt surface had been a venerable staple of
book and panel painting, and in certain painting traditions, for example
German painting, it continued to flourish through the 15th century. The so-
called Goldene Tafel from St. Ursula, Cologne, exploits this convention (fig.
11.5). Divine figures – saints, angels, and the central Virgin and Child – are
painted in black outline on a tooled, gilt ground; however, their faces, hands,
and even their bare feet are carefully finished in full polychromy. The figures,
painted originally c.1430 and restored in 1844, inhabit a framework of c.1170
champlevé enamels, gilt-copper-alloy plaques, and gilt pastiglia (the latter two
of uncertain date).66 The figures’ flesh tones lay conspicuous amidst the metal-
lic radiance of the Tafel at large, and Anton Legner observes that the figures
intentionally evoke precious-metal statuettes.67
And yet, the overwhelming majority of silver statuettes do not employ
Kaltbemalung. The Aachen Virgin’s silver flesh and gold robes remained in
many ways a desired norm. A c.1480 reliquary bust of St. Ida of Herzfeld, how-
ever, presents an interesting case of late medieval precious-metal figural
sculpture echoing the “mono-media” mimetic strategies of bronze and mono-
chromed-wood (fig. 11.6).68 The bust is attributed to Cologne through stylistic
comparison with specific examples of polychromed-wood sculpture. The
bust’s lower section would have originally been surrounded and covered by a
base, thus mitigating the smooth, undefined form seen today. Ida intentionally
rests her gaze off-axis, her eyes heavy, her eyelids, irises, and pupils carefully
indicated. Her veil falls naturally and asymmetrically around her fleshy face,
her wimple bunched beneath her chin. Most notably, the entire copper-alloy
bust, including the skin and eyes, is gilded.
66 It is thought that the champlevé enamels originally framed repoussé figures in partially-
gilt silver. The ensemble was used as an antependium by the 1287 renovation of St. Ursula’s
choir. The silver repoussé figures were replaced with the painted figures c.1430, to which
the 1844 restoration has been judged reasonably faithful. The iconography seen today may
have duplicated that of the repoussé figures, as Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen argues,
or it may have replaced a central Maiestas Domini with the standing Apostles. See Hiltrud
Westermann-Angerhausen, “Die Goldene Tafel aus St. Ursula im Museum Schnütgen,”
Kölner Museums-Bulletin 3 (2008), 58-73; and Anton Legner, ed., Ornamenta Ecclesiae.
Kunst und Künstler der Romanik (Cologne, 1985), 2:348, cat. E113.
67 Anton Legner, Rheinische Kunst und das Kölner Schnütgen-Museum (Cologne, 1991), p. 188.
68 For literature see Althoff, p. 130, cat. 16; and Udo Grote and Reinhard Karrenbrock, eds.,
Kirchenschätze. 1200 Jahre Bistum Münster, 2 vols. (Münster, 2005), 2:92, cat. I.37.
Precious-Metal Figural Sculpture, Medium, and Mimesis
369
Figure 11.5 Goldene Tafel (Antependium) from St. Ursula, Cologne. Wood, stucco, gilt copper-alloy, champlevé enamel, paint. Champlevé enamel: Cologne,
c.1170; Painting: Cologne, c.1430, restored in 1844 by J.A. Ramboux. 114 × 218 cm. Cologne, Schnütgen-Museum, G 564. Photo © Rheinisches
Bildarchiv Köln.
370 Ackley
Figure 11.6 Reliquary Bust of St. Ida of Herzfeld, Cologne, c.1480. Gilt copper,
40 × 24 × 19 cm. Herzfeld, Katholische Pfarrkirche St. Ida.
Photo © Stephan Kube, Greven.
Between the Wissembourg Barbara, Aachen Virgin, Hamburg John, and

Herzfeld Ida, a paragone has emerged across paint, wood, and metal, a para-
gone this essay seeks to intensify, not settle.69 Indeed, this essay argues for a
spectrum of mimetic, and also charismatic, images across paint, wood, and
69 From the abundant scholarship on the Renaissance paragone see Elisabeth Dalucas’s
study of bronze and metalworking within the paragone tradition. Elisabeth Dalucas, “‘Ars
erit archetypus naturae’. Zur Ikonologie der Bronze in der Renaissance,” in Von allen Seiten
metal. A direct equation of the lustrous metallic with the non-mimetic seems
overly reductive of a sculptural genre whose art history is far from fully
written.70 Regarding charisma, the metallic figure in the Late Middle Ages re-
mained as instrumental to generating a charismatic presence as that in poly
chromed-wood. This is seen most clearly when considering the use and display
of these two sculptural genres.
Media Hierarchy and Interchangeability
The display of much precious-metal and polychromed-wood figural sculpture

alike was carefully controlled and staged as part of the Christian liturgy. The
Christian liturgy operated on a cyclical model of velatio and revelatio, a genera-
tion and temporary release, in a highly structured, anxiously protected manner,
of the divine here on earth. A moment of epiphany was produced, with which
the audience, if fortunate, could commune. The Christian liturgy, therefore,
feverishly repeated the cycle of desire, imitation, and elevation so similar to
that triggered by the charismatic image. In order to generate such a moment of
divine presence and channel it to deserving communicants, a sacred space,
typically anchored by an altar, had to be prepared. Such preparation entailed
an increase in proper decorum, most visibly in the form of precious objects,
textiles, and images. Throughout these conventions of decoration, the metallic
surface, be it a gilt panel, silver statuette, or gold chalice, maintained its crucial
instrumentality as a sign of divine grace and presence.
While the display of precious-metal figural sculpture was specific to its par-
ticular church, a few general observations can be offered.71 Precious-metal
figural sculpture would have been placed near or adjacent to an altar on tem-
porarily constructed steps, small tables, or other functional supports; within or
in front of a dossal or winged retable positioned at the rear of the altar; on
projections extending from the architectural superstructures (the Gesprenge)
schön. Bronzen der Renaissance und des Barock. Wilhelm von Bode zum 150. Geburtstag, ed.
Volker Krahn (Berlin, 1995), pp. 70-81.
70 Michael Cole’s remarks on Italian Renaissance attitudes towards the metalworker are
instructive on this point. See Michael W. Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture
(Cambridge, 2002), pp. 43-78.
71 For general remarks on the use and display of these statuettes see Lüdke 1:54-61; Fritz,
Goldschmiedekunst, pp. 69-79; and Klaus Krüger, “‘Aller zierde wunder trůgen die altaere’.
Zur Genese und Strukturentwicklung des Flügelaltarschreins im 14. Jahrhundert,” in Ent-
stehung und Frühgeschichte des Flügelaltarschreins, eds. Hartmut Krohm et al. (Wies-
baden, 2001), pp. 72-75.
372 Ackley
of especially large retables; or simply on the altar mensa itself as objects of

emphasis.72 Such figural sculpture could be made mobile by being carried in
processions with other reliquaries or treasury objects. It also could have been
displayed within other types of liturgical furniture beyond the altar, both mov-
able, such as armaria (large cupboards, often decorated), and immovable, such
as mural armaria and shrines. Such furnishings were frequently grated for
security, the precious objects obscured but visible within.
These display options applied to the other objects of the church thesaurus.
An image of the 1415 canonization of Bridget of Sweden from a c.1464 illus-
trated manuscript of Ulrich von Richenthal’s Chronicle of the Council of Con
stance (1414-1418), for example, shows an abundance of these display strategies
and the variety of objects thus disposed (fig. 11.7).73 Bridget’s precious-metal
reliquary bust is held by gloved hands, her face as alert as those of the human
participants; a winged retable inhabited with figural sculpture stands open at
the rear of the properly vested altar; reliquary chasses and busts stand imme-
diately in front of the retable, sharing the mensa with other precious-metal
liturgical objects; a grilled mural tabernacle niche adjacent to the altar is
flanked by polychromed-wood figures of the Virgin and John; and, to its left, a
tabernacle-like shrine, its wings decorated with figural images, opens to reveal
a plastic Virgin and Child standing within. A peaked cloth baldachin hangs
over the altar. The drawing, summarily colored, puts the Bridget bust, altar
retable, liturgical objects, the mural tabernacle’s Virgin and John, and the tab-
ernacle shrine’s Virgin and Child – in all, a range of precious objects in diverse
media – all in the same light ochre, grouping these decorative objects together
and distinguishing them from the greens and roses of the human partici-
pants.74
72 See, for example, a c.1465 panel by Colantonio in San Pietro Martire, Naples, cited and
reproduced in Lüdke, 1:50, n. 302, and pl. 263.
73 Constance, Rosgartenmuseum, Hs. 1, fol. 33r. For the larger Richenthal tradition see esp.
Ulrike Bodemann et al., eds., Katalog der deutschsprachigen illustrierten Handschriften des
Mittelalters. Bd. 3,5. Chroniken (Munich, 2011), pp. 450-85, cat. 26B.1; and Bernd Konrad,
“Die Buchmalerei in Konstanz, am westlichen und am nördlichen Bodensee von 1400 bis
zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Buchmalerei im Bodenseeraum vom 13. bis zum 16. Jahr-
hundert, ed. Eva Moser (Friedrichshafen, 1997), pp. 116-22 and 290-91. For the Constance
manuscript in particular see Bodemann, Katalog, pp. 462-66, cat. 26B.1.3; and Bernd
Konrad, ed., Rosgartenmuseum Konstanz. Die Kunstwerke des Mittelalters (Constance,
1993), pp. 96-103, cat. 2.07.
74 Despite the ochre coloring, the Virgin and John standing to the side of the grilled niche
can be taken to be polychromed-wood, not precious-metal; another Richenthal manu-
script, a lavishly colored c.1470 version in Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbiblio-
Figure 11.7 Canonization of St. Bridget of Sweden, Ulrich Richenthal, Chronicle of the
Council of Constance, 1414-1418, Constance, c.1464. Constance, Rosgartenmuseum,
Hs. 1, fol. 33r. Photo © Rosgartenmuseum Konstanz.
374 Ackley
Among these liturgical furnishings, it is the winged altarpiece that most

pointedly condenses and even mechanizes these broader liturgical strategies
of concealing and revealing the divine.75 Late medieval altarpieces developed
into a few standardized types; the winged altarpiece is almost exclusive to Ger-
man-speaking areas, Scandinavia, and the Lowlands.76 The winged altarpiece,
notably, served as one of the primary arenas for the display of polychromed-
wood and especially precious-metal figural sculpture. Already from its c.1300
origins, the monumental winged altarpiece arranged polychromed relief
sculpture, painted images, and individual objects within a purposefully hierar-
chical architectural framework. Figural sculpture and painted images became
increasingly dominant within winged retables through the 14th and 15th cen-
turies. Throughout the altarpiece ensemble, the gilt and the metallic were stra-
tegically contrasted with the painted.
Winged retables were governed by an aesthetic of crescendo and climax
predicated upon a hierarchy of medium, preciousness, and plasticity. This aes-
thetic is remarkably consistent across winged altarpieces large and small, early
thek, St. Georgen 63, fol. 27r), brightly colors their garments green and blue. For the Karls
ruhe manuscript see Bodemann, Katalog, pp. 459-62, cat. 26B.1.2.
75 Instructive discussions of the winged altarpiece in terms of liturgical velatio and revelatio
include Johannes Tripps, “Studien zur Wandlung von Retabeln südlich und nördlich der
Alpen,” in Zeremoniell und Raum in der frühen italienischen Malerei, ed. Stefan Weppel-
mann (Petersberg, 2007), pp. 116-27; Bruno Reudenbach, “Der Altar als Bildort. Das Flügel-
retabel und die liturgische Inszenierung des Kirchenjahres,” in Goldgrund und Himmels
licht. Die Kunst des Mittelalters in Hamburg, ed. Uwe W. Schneede (Hamburg, 1999),
pp. 26-33; and Annegret Laabs, “Das Retabel als ‘Schaufenster’ zum göttlichen Heil. Ein
Beitrag zur Stellung des Flügelretabels im sakralen Zeremoniell des Kirchenjahres,”
Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 24 (1997), 71-86.
76 Winged altarpieces found in England, France, Spain, and Italy were frequently imports.
The best summary of the development of the winged altarpiece is Krüger, “Zur Genese
und Strukturentwicklung,” pp. 69-85. For German winged altarpieces see especially
Rainer Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria,
and South Tirol, trans. Russell Stockman (Los Angeles, 2006), pp. 9-39; and Norbert Wolf,
Deutsche Schnitzretabel des 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2002), esp. pp. 11-19, 255-305, and 335-
76, hereafter cited as Wolf; and also Stephan Kemperdick, “Altar Panels in Northern Ger-
many, 1180-1350,” in The Altar and Its Environment, 1150-1400, eds. Justin E.A. Kroesen and
Victor M. Schmidt, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages 4 (Turnhout, 2009),
pp. 125-46; Hartmut Krohm et al., eds., Entstehung und Frühgeschichte des Flügelaltar
schreins (Wiesbaden, 2001); Belting, Likeness and Presence, pp. 443-53; and Bernhard
Decker, “Reform within the Cult Image: The German Winged Altarpiece before the Refor-
mation,” in The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, eds. Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp (Cam-
bridge, 1990), pp. 90-105. For the altarpiece more generally see Jacobs, Early Netherlandish
Carved Altarpieces, pp. 238-58.
and late. The two-dimensional was subordinate to the three-dimensional, the

painted subordinate to the gilded. A winged altarpiece might have one or two
sets of wings. When closed, the retable displayed its humblest media, usually
painted panels with minimal, if any, gilding. As it progressively opened, both
the amount of gilding and the possibility for plastic sculpture increased. The
first opening of a double-winged altarpiece, for example, might have presented
figures carved in relief, or panel paintings with large expanses of gilding. The
second and ultimate opening, which revealed the altarpiece’s central stage-like
shrine, or corpus, exposed the viewer to the greatest amount of gilding and the
highest degree of sculptural plasticity. Although altarpieces normally would
have been opened before the start of a liturgical performance as the custos was
decorating the church interior, there exists isolated evidence for altarpieces
being opened at climactic moments during the liturgy itself, such as at 15th-
century Xanten.77
A typical 14th-century winged altarpiece, the c.1350 high-altar retable at the
Cistercian abbey at Marienstatt, opens to reveal three rows of architecturally
elaborated niches (fig. 11.8): in the bottom arcade, protected behind tracery,
originally rested relics, in the middle arcade female reliquary busts with relic
cavities in their chests, and in the top arcade standing polychromed-wood
sculptures of the Apostles.78 The niches of the central vertical axis are slightly
wider and protrude slightly forward. The upper niche contains a Coronation of
the Virgin. The middle, grated niche probably contained a particularly vener-
ated c.1325 female reliquary bust, or a Eucharistic monstrance.79 The bottom
arcade has recently been occupied by relic skulls, wrapped in silk and linen
and placed upon pillows.80 In the altarpiece’s open state, therefore, from bot-
tom to top and side to center, one progresses through relics, reliquary busts,
iconic full-body statuettes, and finally, in the top center, narrative.
77 For public openings of the winged altarpiece see Tripps, “Studien zur Wandlung,” pp. 116-
19 and, on Xanten, 125-26; and Laabs, “Das Retabel als ‘Schaufenster,’” pp. 77-78.
78 Two of the 12 reliquary busts date to the 1330s; the remaining are coeval with the altar. For
the Marienstatt altar see Wolf, pp. 112-21; and Doris Fischer, ed., Holz und Steine lehren
Dich ... : Die Restaurierung der Klosterkirche Marienstatt, Denkmalpflege in Rheinland-
Pfalz, Forschungsberichte 9 (Worms, 2011), pp. 277-350.
79 See Fischer, Holz und Steine, pp. 280-83. Laabs argues for the Eucharist – see Laabs, “Das
Retabel als ‘Schaufenster,’” pp. 79-80.
80 While the original appearance of the bottom-arcade reliquaries cannot be conclusively
determined, there do exist 13th-century examples of wrapped skulls on silk pillows, such
as those at Marienfeld that were moved into the c.1430-40 high-altar retable – see Althoff,
pp. 420-21, cat. 247.
376
Ackley
Figure 11.8 Marienstatt High-Altar Retable, Cologne, c.1350. Wood, polychromy, 278 × 230 × 32 cm (open). Cistercian Abbey of Marienstatt. Photo © Foto
Marburg / Art Resource, NY.
The so-called Kleiner Dom, made c.1360 in Cologne, models the trends of
later winged altarpieces that explicitly prioritized the staging of the figural im-
age or scene.81 When closed (fig. 11.9), the door exteriors show an Annuncia-
tion painted against a green background punctuated with yellow rosette-like
stars. When opened (fig. 11.10), the Annunciation again appears, this time fully
plastic and inhabiting the actual space of the corpus, the Virgin and Gabriel,
now kneeling, joined above by God and two angels. The interior wings are
painted with standing saints, narrative scenes from the Nativity cycle, and, in
the upper register, music-making angels. Most dramatically, the drapery of the
corpus figures, the rear interior wall of the corpus, and the interior wings, in-
cluding their raised architectural moldings, have all been gilded. The gilding of
the rear interior wall is tooled similarly to contemporary Cologne panel-paint-
ing, while that of the interior wings remains un-tooled and smooth. The low-
relief cusped arches and architectural frames carved on the wing interiors
reappear, with additional decoration, as the suspended tracery (Schleierwerk)
hanging down from the top edge of the corpus. The tower-like Gesprenge of the
Kleiner Dom recalls that of both monumental winged retables, such as the
c.1300 high-altar retable at Doberan, and small-scale, precious-metal reliquar-
ies, such as the c.1360-80 Dreiturmreliquiar in Aachen.82
One could argue, however, that the most climactic points of the Kleiner Dom
corpus are not the gilded ground and draperies, but rather the areas of painted
flesh. At the core of this assemblage of tiered preciousness and plasticity,
therefore, resides mimetically rendered rosy cheeks. And yet, other conven-
tions of tiered preciousness existed. Lüdke, for example, speculates that, were
a retable to have incorporated polychromed-wood statuettes, such as those at
Marienstatt, precious-metal statuettes, such as the complete ensemble of 15
c.1350-90 silver-gilt statuettes preserved at Münster, could have been brought
out and substituted in for their less precious, polychromed-wood counterparts
on especially important occasions.83
For many (all?) winged altarpieces, the more silver statuettes clustered
around or, better yet, formally incorporated within the altarpiece, the better.
The c.1425 double-winged high-altar retable in the Lübeck Marienkirche, for
81 The upper 20 cm of the tracery is a modern replacement. See Cornelia Ringer, “Der ‘Kleine
Dom’ – ein kölnischer Schnitzaltar um 1360,” in Entstehung und Frühgeschichte des
Flügelaltarschreins, eds. Hartmut Krohm et al. (Wiesbaden, 2001), pp. 205-14; and also
Roland Krischel, “Mediensynthesen in der spätmittelalterlichen Sakralkunst,” Wallraf-
Richartz-Jahrbuch 69 (2008), 104-07.
82 Ringer, “Der ‘Kleine Dom,’” p. 210.
83 Lüdke, 1:122-24. For the Münster ensemble see Althoff, pp. 442-46, cat. 270.
378 Ackley
Figure 11.9
Altarpiece, so-called Kleiner Dom
(closed), Cologne, c.1360. Wood
with gilding and polychromy, 147.5
× 123.5 cm (open). Munich,
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum,
L MA 1968 a-d. On loan from the
Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds,
Munich. © Bayerisches
Nationalmuseum München
(Photo: Walter Haberland).
Figure 11.10 Altarpiece, so-called Kleiner Dom (open), Cologne, c.1360. Wood with gilding and
polychromy, 147.5 × 123.5 cm (open). Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum,
L MA 1968 a-d. On loan from the Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds, Munich.
© Bayerisches Nationalmuseum München (Photo: Walter Haberland).
380 Ackley
example, came to contain either 92 or 93 silver statuettes, the largest perhaps

30-40 cm tall (the statuettes were meticulously inventoried in 1530 and melted
down in 1533).84 The retable’s first opening revealed narrative polychromed-
wood reliefs beneath baldachins. The second opening revealed the precious-
metal statuettes standing within a many-niched microarchitectural framework,
most recently analyzed by Jan Friedrich Richter. The 90-plus silver statuettes,
however, were not all produced by the altarpiece’s completion; rather, they
would have been individually commissioned and donated over the next few
decades. Instead of empty spaces within the retable, less precious “placehold-
er” statuettes would have been displayed and replaced one by one by their
precious-metal peers as the latter were completed.85
Conclusion
In medieval Christianity, the efficacy and charisma of the divine, and thereby
the entire process of redemption, communion, and reunification with God,
rested upon a tantalizing fleetingness and beckoning inaccessibility. As
Johannes Tripps notes regarding the image of a saint:
… [what] is for us today difficult to comprehend—indeed, an apparent

paradox—is that the sure sense of the presence of the saint and the pro-
tection exuded lay in the staging of his invisibility, that is, the restricting
of the amount of time one exposed the saint to profane gazes.86
84 See Jan Friedrich Richter, Das mittelalterliche Hochaltarretabel der Lübecker Marienkirche,
Sonderdruck aus der Zeitschrift für Lübeckische Geschichte 94 (Lübeck, 2014), esp.
pp. 1-14; and Uwe Albrecht, “Auf den Spuren eines verlorenen Denkmalensembles: Die
spätgotische Chorausstattung der Lübecker Marienkirche,” in Kunst und Liturgie: Choran-
lagen des Spätmittelalters – ihre Architektur, Ausstattung und Nutzung, ed. Anna Moraht-
Fromm (Ostfildern, 2003), pp. 113-25. Richter speculates that the 90-plus silver statuettes
were cast, not hammered, due to their total weight of 109 kg in the 1530 inventory – see
Richter, Das mittelalterliche Hochaltarretabel, p. 8.
85 The “placeholders” could have included polychromed-wood sculpture, but also wood
sculpture covered in part with hammered metal plaques, still a less precious object than
cast precious-metal. Richter, Das mittelalterliche Hochaltarretabel, pp. 11-14.
86 Johannes Tripps, “Man hole einen Schmied. Funde zum Enthüllen und Verhüllen von
Heiligenschreinen zwischen Spätgotik und Säkularisation,” in ... das Heilige sichtbar
machen. Domschätze in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft, ed. Ulrike Wendland,
Arbeitsberichte des Landesamtes für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt 9
(Regensburg, 2010), p. 285.
The Christian divine usually exerted a charismatic force; the intentionally tran
sient stagings of decorated, image-rich altars and winged altarpieces amplified
this charisma. Throughout, the metallic, simultaneously as overt sign and fig-
ural medium, retained its magnificent potency.
The ideal viewer longed to be assumed into this charis-bathed realm. This
elevation was perhaps best achieved by the ability to insert into this graceful
environment an image or sign of oneself: coats of arms, donor and votive
figures, inscriptions, etc., realized virtually a partaking in the charisma of
the divine. The winged altarpiece rhythmically staged such opportunities of
charismatic communion. This template, however, is also pictured within the
Aachen Virgin itself. The statuette’s donor, through his piety and largesse, has
been sublimated into the Virgin’s space: her base has been extended to (mostly)
accommodate him, and his body partakes in her silver-gilt medium. He kneels,
nobly clad in mid-14th-century armor, but bare-headed. Properly diminutive,
he gazes up towards the gigantic goddess figure. While the Christ Child seems
to react to his presence, the Virgin cannot be concerned to visually acknowl-
edge him. The longing of the donor – and, by proxy, the viewer – can only be
heightened.
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386 Mcculloch
Chapter 12
“I’ll make the statue move indeed”: Charismatic

Motion and the Disenchanted Image in Early
Modern Drama
Lynsey McCulloch
Recognising idols for what they are does not break their enchantment1
…
exoteric, a. and n. A. adj 2. Of philosophical doctrines, treatises, modes of
speech, etc.: Designed for or suitable to the generality of disciples; com-
municated to outsiders, intelligible to the public.2
⸪
In his 1977 work of comparative literature, Disenchanted Images: A Literary
Iconology, Theodore Ziolkowski examines three literary tropes – the animated
statue, the haunted portrait, and the magic mirror – and charts their historical
movement from magically enchanted object to mechanized, and thereby dis-
enchanted, device:
It is perhaps nothing less than a modern miracle if these disenchanted

images still retain so much literary vigor that they can be conjured up
again and again to provide a fleeting touch of magic to our disenchanted
world.3
For Ziolkowski, Europe’s scientific revolution – and the ensuing Enlighten-

ment – rationalized the mysteriously moving object of earlier tradition. The
source of the object’s movement was no longer supernatural but manmade
and, crucially, knowable – a knowability that compromised the object’s capac-
1 W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (London, 1971).

2 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Exoteric.’ (accessed February 1, 2015).
3 Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology (Princeton, 1977), p. 257.

“I’ll make the statue move indeed” 387
ity for enchanting the onlooker. But Ziolkowski’s chronology of charismatic

motion, one clearly tied to processes of secularization, not only underesti-
mates the strength of modern spiritual belief and the continued use of the
‘marvelous’ as an artistic device but it simplifies the imaginative, even philo-
sophical, modes of earlier periods. Taking Ziolkowski’s animated statue as an
example, this chapter challenges the notion – still accepted by many – that a
belief in magic and an understanding of mechanics were mutually exclusive in
the early modern period and suggests that the charisma of vivified statuary, far
from being predicated on mystery, is actually based on comprehension.
William Shakespeare’s 1611 play The Winter’s Tale – with its celebrated Ovid-
ian finale depicting a statue brought to life – is by no means an isolated exam-
ple of animating statuary in English Renaissance literature, even if it remains
the most famous. Several of the period’s poets and dramatists exploited the
device and the literary presence of the motive statue was matched by its
appearance in real-life aristocratic spaces and religious contexts; the automa-
ton’s capacity for wonder appears, in fact, unrivalled in this era. Scholars often
look to esotericism, and the mystical, for an explanation of the animated stat-
ue’s charismatic aura. As Marina Warner rightly comments:
[I]t is still difficult to turn one’s back on the deep hinterland behind the
principle of animation: the difference between life and death depends on
an animus or anima imagined to lurk within embodied personality.4
While acknowledging the pull of esoteric practice in this period, I would sug-
gest that it is the exoteric aspects of the moving image – its accessibility and
intelligibility within early modern culture – that ensure its particular charm.
The statue’s availability as an object of open discourse may not be immediately
apparent, however. Animated statuary takes various forms within early mod-
ern drama and the origins of its movement are not always clear. Not only do
playwrights routinely neglect to inform spectators and readers of the cause of
sculptural motion – and whether it derives from a human or non-human
source – but the particulars of staging this theatrical device are regularly
absent from the text. This level of uncertainty is not only a feature of literary
examples; in documented accounts from the period of statues brought to life,
the debate over animation as a derivative of natural processes, supernatural
forces, or human interference is conspicuous. But, in spite of the apparent
reluctance of writers to elucidate the origins of sculptural movement, the pub-
4 Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria (Oxford, 2006), p. 9.

388 Mcculloch
lic was – I would suggest – not only prepared for the appearance of the ani-
mated statue but well-equipped to decipher its meaning.
In characterizing the Renaissance spectator not as the object of stage tricks
and deceptions but as a subject capable of recognizing theatrical contrivance
and interpreting it, I am not suggesting that the dramatists of the period pre-
sented audiences with a singular, or transparent, version of the animated
statue but rather that they offered theatergoers choice and credited them with
the ability to make that choice. By often equivocating over the source of the
statue’s newly acquired vitality, writers were participating in a culture-wide
discussion of miraculous effects and their derivation, a discussion that cru-
cially failed to reach a consensus. The publication of numerous treatises on the
subjects of magic and mechanics – in addition to the rediscovery and transla-
tion of several ancient esoteric and engineering texts – testifies to the interest
shown by readers in this area and confirms also the extent to which science
and the supernatural overlap in the Renaissance period. Early modern play-
texts demonstrate a similar slipperiness; although audiences were familiar
with the supernatural occurrence in drama, the plays’ otherwise rational bent
and the material reality of their staging frequently offset this magical atmo-
sphere. The Reformation’s condemnation of idolatry and its uncovering of the
fraudulent use by Catholics of mechanisms to enliven iconic statuary compli-
cate the era’s dialogue on faith and fakery but it is my contention that the
churchgoer, like the theatergoer, was well-acquainted with the employment of
automata and, as W.H. Auden put it much later, “[r]ecognising idols for what
they are does not break their enchantment.”5 The representation of divine
incarnation on the early modern stage, via the deus ex machina or god from the
machine, was, like the active idol of Catholic practice, simultaneously tran-
scendent and technological; a symbol of immanence within the text, this fig-
ure nonetheless depended on stage machinery or technically challenging
acting for its effect. Using Robert Greene’s c.1589 comic drama Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay and William Shakespeare’s 1611 romance The Winter’s Tale along-
side historical examples of animated statuary, this chapter will examine the
significance and materiality of moving objects and assess whether the fine bal-
ance between miracles and mechanisms sustained in the period at large is
maintained also in its drama.
5 Auden, A Certain World.

Moving Idols in Early Modern Culture
Although the early modern public theater has a reputation for minimalism,
the use of mechanisms, some of them elaborate, was well-established. Robert
Greene’s c.1589 theatrical comedy, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, contains the
creation and destruction of Roger Bacon’s talking brazen head.6 The popular-
ity of magic as a subject for drama in the period suggests that tricks and devices,
some involving stage machinery, were essential to theatrical practice. Although
this aspect of Renaissance staging may have benefited from advances in tech-
nology and the commissioning of purpose-built theaters, mechanisms and
automata were by no means novel in the dramatic output of the late 16th and
early 17th centuries. The mystery play tradition, perhaps not surprising given
Christianity’s investment in iconic statuary, had much earlier utilized proper-
ties capable of representing moving statues. Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby,
in their 1983 work The Staging of Religious Drama, quote from the stage prop-
erty list of a 15th-century performance in Turin of the play of St. George: “Item:
another idol in which is hidden a person who speaks.”7 While this example
may not suggest the most sophisticated of theatrical effects, it was a successful
method of creating sculptural movement and comparable techniques were
used at civic events and special court occasions, maximizing their exposure to
the wider public. Philip Butterworth has researched illusory effects on the
early English stage and offers examples of animated statuary from Queen
Mary’s progress into London before her coronation in 1553 and Queen Eliza-
beth’s entry into Kenilworth Castle in 1575. According to Holinshed’s Chroni-
cles, a Florentine pageant greeting Mary included angelic automata:
[V]erie high, on the top whereof there stood foure pictures, and in the
middest of them and most highest, there stood an angell all in greene,
with a trumpet in his hand: and when the trumpetter (who stood secret-
lie in the pageant) did sound his trumpet, the angell did put his trumpet
to his mouth, as though it had beene the same that had sounded, to the
great maruelling of manie ignorant persons.8
6 Greene’s later Alphonsus King of Aragon (c.1590) offered the playwright another opportunity
to employ a brazen head; as an extra attraction, this head is required on two separate occasions
to cast forth flames.
7 Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama in the Later Middle Ages
(Kalamazoo, 1983), p. 112.
8 Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles (Early English Books Online), Vol. IV.
390 Mcculloch
Elizabeth’s entry into Kenilworth Castle featured a similar effect, with eight-
feet-high modelled trumpeters sounding the welcome and obscuring the real
musicians hiding behind.9 Moving images of this kind were a staple feature of
civic pageants, lord mayors’ shows, and monarchical processions. Whether by
direct observance or reputation, the public were aware of their usage and of
the ingenuity that made them possible. Raphael Holinshed may deride the cre-
dulity of the ignorant majority but I would suggest that he underestimates the
level of engagement with such objects demonstrated by the wider populace.
Assessing the public’s awareness of automata, and their understanding of the
underlying technology, is problematic but recognition of the ubiquity of ani-
mated statuary should revise any notion of the moving image as a figure of
hidden parts and esoteric exclusivity. In other words, the moving statue should
not be used as a stick with which to beat a ‘gullible’ early modern public.
Even within Catholic ritual, I would suggest, the coexistence of faith and
technology remained, for long periods, untroubled. In the wake of the Refor-
mation, however, the employment of motive imagery within a Catholic con-
text was subject to heavy criticism and scaremongering from Protestant
propagandists. As Ziolkowski himself remarks, “Catholic legendry is filled with
tales of statues, images, and icons (of Jesus, Mary, and the various saints) that
wink, beckon, sweat, bleed, cry, sing, speak, and perform various other won
ders.”10 Reformers, conscious of the influence such movements and actions
had on onlookers, not to mention their infinite adaptability, were unstinting in
their efforts to demystify the tradition of the moving idol. John Bale, the 16th-
century English churchman and writer, offers an account of St. Dunstan, a
10th-century archbishop of Canterbury, in which Dunstan exploits the figure
of the animated statue to sway a council vote. He, and his supporters, first
“sought out a practyse of the olde Idolatrouse prestes, which were wont to
make their Idolles to speake, by the art of Necromancy, wherin the monkes
were in those dayes expert.” Dunstan encourages his detractors then to pray to
the rood – or crucifix – on the wall of the monastery:
In the myddes of their prayer, the roode spake these wordes, or els a
knaue monke behynde hym in a truncke through the wall, as Boniface
ded after for the papacye of Celestyne. God forbyd (sayth he) ye shuld
change this ordre taken. Ye shuld no do wele, now to alter it. Take Dun
9 Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 101-02.
10 Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images, p. 22.
stanes wayes vnto ye, for they are the best. All thys worke of the deuill at
al they were astayned, that knewe not therof the crafty conueyaunce.11
Bale’s explication of sculptural movement is one of many from the period. The
most famous of these is perhaps the exposure by Protestant reformers of the
Rood of Boxley – a Catholic crucifix and moving image of Christ – as a mechan-
ically-worked trick played on the innocent visitors to a Cistercian monastery in
Kent.12 The device was exposed in a 1538 sermon by John Hilsey, bishop of
Rochester, but it became infamous when included in the 1583 edition of John
Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Reginald Scot, in his Discouerie of witchcraft, said
of the Boxley rood that it was “not inferior to the idoll of Apollo”13 and the cru-
cifix was publicly destroyed as befitting an idolatrous and papist object. The
antiquarian William Lambarde describes the active Christ figure also in his
1596 A Perambulation of Kent. The wooden image, reportedly via the manipula-
tion of wires, is able to
[b]ow down and lifte up it selfe, to shake and stirre the hands and feete,
to nod the head, to rolle the eies, to wag the chaps, to bende the browes,
and finally to represent to the eie, both the proper motion of each mem-
ber of the body, and also a lively, expresse, and significant shew of a well
contented or displeased minde: byting the lippe, and gathering a frown-
ing, froward, and disdainful face, when it would pretend offence: and
shewing a most milde, amyable, and smyling cheere and countenance,
when it woulde seeme to be well pleased. So that now it needed not
Prometheus fire to make it a lively man, but onely the helpe of the covet-
ous Priestes … to deifie and make it passe for a verie God.14
11 John Bale, The first two partes of the actes or vnchast examples (Early English Books
Online).
12 For further discussions of the Rood of Boxley and its relation to early modern attitudes
towards idolatry and iconoclasm, see Marion O’Connor, “‘Imagine Me, Gentle Spectators’:
Iconomachy and The Winter’s Tale,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume IV:
The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard
(Oxford, 2003), pp. 366-67; Gareth Roberts, “‘An Art Lawful as Eating’? Magic in The
Tempest and The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds. Jennifer
Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 126-42; Peter Marshall, “Forgery and
Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII,” Past and Present 178 (February 2003), 39-73.
13 Reginald Scot, The Discouerie of witchcraft (Early English Books Online).
14 William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (Early English Books Online).
392 Mcculloch
Lambarde is in no doubt that the figure was used by avaricious monks to

exploit visitors and extort money from them. Thomas Goad is equally scathing,
and convinced, like Lambarde, that the public were deceived by such objects:
Are not yet men liuing, that can remember the knauerie of Priests to
make the Roodes and Images of the Churches in England in the dayes of
Queen Mary, to goggle with their eyes, and shake their hands: yea, with
Wiers to bend the whole body, and many times to speake as they doe in
Puppet playes, and all to get money, and deceiue the ignorant people?15
The identification by Goad of apparently idolatrous practice with the world of

the theater is unsurprising given Puritan discomfort with superstition and
stage illusion. In both cases, the spectator is vulnerable to the mimetic and
persuasive qualities of impersonation. However, I would argue that those
exposed to the goggle-eyed and hand-shaking idols of Catholic practice were
just as much aware of the implied illusion as the theatrical spectator and that,
far from being outraged at such devices, visitors were complicit in the practice.
The usefulness of mechanisms such as the Rood of Boxley to Protestant pro-
pagandists is self-evident. It is probable, in the schismatic and hysterical atmo-
sphere of the early Reformation, that accounts of Catholic devices were
fabricated in order to promote the new religious order or, alternately, distorted
in order to emphasize their fraudulent and exploitative function. The routine
usage of visible automata within Catholicism suggests that churchgoers were
far from deluded by animated statuary but rather colluded with churchmen in
the employment of moving images. Automatons, such as the jacks on clocks,
were a familiar feature of church architecture, and their interior design. Mer-
riam Sherwood describes the organ apes of the French medieval cathedrals of
Strasbourg and Orléans; these bearded automata “mechanically indulged in
the wildest antics that amused the pious even while they prayed.”16 Sherwood
attributes the popularity of these devices to the rediscovery of antique engi-
neering works and suggests that their technical aspects were generally under-
stood:
It is not surprising, therefore, that statues that moved, images that spoke
or sang and goblets from which the wine mysteriously vanished had their
15 Thomas Goad, The Friers Chronicle, or the true legend of priests and monkes lives (London,
1623) (Early English Books Online).
16 Merriam Sherwood, “Magic and Mechanics in Medieval Fiction,” Studies in Philology XLIV,
no. 4 (October 1947), 585-86.
counterpart in actual machines of the time. It is, further, but reasonable

to assume that the operation of such machines was familiar to a substan-
tial portion of the people.17
In England too, cathedral facades displayed complex automata. The clock at

Wells Cathedral, for example, had a mechanical jack called Jack Blandifer, with
an iron hammer in each hand for striking the time. Salisbury Cathedral, in the
pre-Reformation era, contained various carved figures animated by a system of
weights and demonstrating incidents from the Bible.18 The use of motive statu-
ary in Christian education was well-established. Mary Hillier, the toy historian,
describes the manufacture of automated nativity scenes in European Catholic
culture; the displays included “cribs in which the figures were worked by the
movement behind the scenes of sand, water, steam or quicksilver.”19 Hillier
also relays the employment of biblical automata during sermons, with the
priest using “a foot pedal to work such models.”20 Add to these examples the
use of stage machinery in the mystery cycles and miracle plays of Catholic tra-
dition and it seems feasible that several so-called miracles – labeled hoaxes by
Protestants – were actually neither marvels nor swindles but something in
between. Spectators were complicit in the spell cast upon them by these appar-
ently self-moving objects. This collusion need not indicate a lack of faith but
simply a more transparent communication between pew and pulpit. Likewise,
in the theater, there seems to be, in many cases, an understanding in place
between author and audience when such devices are brought into play.
The circumstances of animation do not necessarily detract from the enchant
ment of the effect. In fact, the circumstances of animation can constitute the
enchantment.
Explicating Sculptural Movement
Beyond explicitly religious rivalries, contemporary scientific and philosophical

texts also addressed esoteric practices and the self-moving device. Thomas
Hill’s Natural and Artificial Conclusions, Reginald Scot’s Discouerie of witch-
craft, William Bourne’s Inventions or Devises, John Wilkins’s Mathematical
Magic, Thomas Campanella’s Theologia, and John Dee’s Preface to Euclid’s
17 Sherwood, “Magic and Mechanics,” pp. 591-92.

18 Butterworth, Magic, pp. 119-20.
19 Mary Hillier, Pageant of Toys (London, 1965), p. 46.
20 Mary Hillier, Automata and Mechanical Toys: An Illustrated History (London, 1988), p. 18.
394 Mcculloch
Elementa all looked, in their different ways, to explicate magical occurrences,

whether by recourse to mechanical precepts or with reference to occult pro-
cesses. These authors take pains to elucidate the paranormal and communi-
cate their findings to a wider audience. In other words, they render the esoteric
exoteric and, in doing so, they look back to classical accounts of the automa-
ton, references to animated statuary within Hermetic writings, and the cre-
ation of artificial life attempted by the medieval and Renaissance alchemists
Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Paracelsus.21 These tracts and trea-
tises were not, of course, widely available. Publication, if attempted, was lim-
ited in its circulation and illiteracy prevented several sections of the population
from accessing such information. Nevertheless, the desire in these writers to
communicate knowledge and enlighten the reader is more than apparent. The
numbers of such works may also be attributable to a wider controversy, the
theological debate over the arts of alchemy and conjuring. John Donne, in his
“Of certain ingenious Arts, and rare Inventions of former Ages,” extols the work
of Albertus Magnus amongst other artists and scientists:
Albertus Magnus who once Tutor was

To that renown’d profound Pythagoras,
Made the Idea of a man in mould,
So vive to the Spectators to behold;
With active iron gimbals to’t so meet,
That it could move the head, eyes, hands, and feet:
And which was more to be admired at,
It some words plainly could articulate.22
Donne detects no occult aspect to Magnus’s artificial creation and celebrates

the production of various historical automata on the basis that “[t]hese shew
what rare things may be done by Art, / Whilst God doth guide the Artists hand
21 The early modern era saw the translation of several classical engineering works, by,
amongst others, the Greek authors Ctesibius, Philon, and Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria.
The apparent discovery of the works of Hermes Trismegistus in the 15th century gal
vanized interest in esotericism and the ancient Egyptian animation of statuary; for a
seminal account of Renaissance Hermetism, see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the
Hermetic Tradition (London, 1982). Albertus Magnus is credited, in several sources, with
the manufacture of a brazen head similar to Roger Bacon’s. Cornelius Agrippa believed
that artificial life could be grown from mandrake plants while Paracelsus, in his 1572 De
natura rerum, claimed to have used the principle of spontaneous generation to create a
homunculus, in the form of a miniature man, by incubating sperm in horse manure.
22 John Donne, Cabinet of Merry Conceits (London, 1662) (Early English Books Online).
and heart.”23 Francis Bacon, taking a slightly different approach, cites engi-
neering and machinery as the means by which restitution for humanity’s
expulsion from the Garden of Eden may be achieved. His New Atlantis, pub-
lished in the early 1620s, imagines an island utopia inhabited by motive devices:
We have divers curious clocks, and other like motions of return, and per-
petual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures, by images of
men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents. We have also a great number of
other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty.24
Bacon’s reading of automata as theological compensation is implicit also in his

recorded response to the sight of a delivery of antique statuary to the home of
Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel: “the resurrection!”25
But Donne’s apparently relaxed attitude towards the motive statue and
Bacon’s strong belief in the mechanical sciences are not shared by all. Silvio
Bedini wonders “how many among the countless number of mechanicians
who worked to produce automata for whatever purpose may have secretly nur-
tured an ambition to go a little beyond”26 and early modern observers were
wise to such dangers. John Dee, discussing thaumaturgy – or miracle-working
– in his Preface to the 1570 English translation of Euclid’s Elementa, quotes
from Cassiodorus, the 6th-century Roman statesman and writer, on the subject
of faith and the automatous arts. Addressing his Christian God, Cassiodorus
states that “[b]y the disposition of your Arte, Metals do low: Diomedes of
brasse, doth blow a Trumpet loude: a brasen Serpent hisseth: byrdes made,
sing swetely. Small thynges we rehearse of you, who can Imitate the heauen.”27
Cassiodorus interprets the imitation of life as an emulation and celebration of
God but Dee was conscious of the dangerous elision between white and black
magic in matters of artificial movement. Dee himself produced a theatrical
device – a mechanical flying dung beetle – for a Trinity College performance of
Aristophanes’s Pax in the mid-16th century and fielded much criticism for his
presumption, resulting in accusations of conjuration and passionate rebuttals
from Dee: “Shall that man, be (in hugger mugger) condemned, as a Companion
23 Donne, Cabinet of Merry Conceits.

24 Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in The Works, eds. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and
Douglas Denon Heath (London, 1857), p. 164.
25 Thomas Tenison, Baconiana (Early English Books Online).
26 Silvio A. Bedini, “The Role of Automata in the History of Technology,” Technology and
Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964), 40.
27 John Dee, introduction to Elementa, by Euclid (Early English Books Online).
396 Mcculloch
of the Helhoundes, and a Caller, and Conjuror of wicked and damned

Sprites?”28 But although Dee defended his work against accusations of black
magic, he was nonetheless a keen student of the occult and spent much of his
scholarly life researching magic and divination. His fellow thinkers were, many
of them, less sympathetic to magical pursuits despite its Neoplatonic legiti-
macy in some quarters. Reginald Scot’s 1584 Discouerie of witchcraft exposed
the illusions used by magicians to entertain, or trick, the public, and was sub-
jected to criticism by James I for denying the existence of witchcraft.
Scot was one of several writers in the period committed to demystifying
magical practice and superstition. John Wilkins, in his Mathematical Magic,
takes up the challenge of Daedalus’s self-moving figures: “Aristotle affirms that
Daedalus did this by putting quick-silver into them. But this would have been
too grosse a way for so excellent an artificer, it is more likely that he did it with
wheels & weights.”29 The automata of Daedalus are mythical figures and yet
Wilkins still feels it necessary to account scientifically for their movement. The
use of quicksilver – or mercury – is characteristic of alchemical practices;
wheels and weights are less mysterious but clearly more impressive to the
skeptical author. Wilkins, alongside William Bourne and John Dee, attempts
also to account for the brazen head, citing the use of wheels, plummets, springs,
clockwork, and pneumatics. In Italy, the Dominican philosopher, Tommaso
Campanella, was unstinting in his efforts to reclassify magical movements as
mechanical motion and retain as sacred the human spirit:
This art however cannot produce marvellous effects save by means of

local motions and weights and pulleys or by using a vacuum, as in pneu-
matic and hydraulic apparatuses, or by applying forces to the materials.
But such forces and materials can never be such as to capture a human
soul.30
Even within practical engineering texts or ‘machine books,’ under no illusion

as to the source of their subjects’ movement, the desire to expose the mechan-
28 Dee, introduction to Elementa.

29 John Wilkins, Mathematical Magic (Early English Books Online).
30 Quoted in Yates, Giordano Bruno, p. 148. Yates traces the mechanical enthusiasm of the
early moderns to the wonder-working of the ancient Egyptians and the technological
advances of the ancient Greeks. As Elaine Graham comments, “The rediscovery of
hermetism during the European Renaissance revived the ancient fascination in tales of
artificial hominoids, fuelled by the unique blend of rationalism and occultism that was
characteristic of early modern science.” See Elaine Graham, Representations of the Post/
Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester, 2002), pp. 96-97.
ical workings of motive devices is paramount. Jonathan Sawday, aligning his

work on Renaissance anatomy with his subsequent study of technology,
describes how these machine books – texts such as Georgius Agricola’s De re
metallica, Jacques Besson’s Livre des instruments mathematiques et mecha-
niques, and Agostino Ramelli’s Le diverse et artificiose machine – “opened up a
world of interior mechanical invention which was analogous to the interior
world which the magnificent Vesalian and post-Vesalian books of anatomy laid
before their wealthy readers.”31
The popularity of these revelatory works also suggests a shift in social mores
and the understanding of traditional crafts, even if the texts themselves were
mainly enjoyed by the affluent. As Martin Kemp remarks, the intellectualiza-
tion of technē guaranteed that “what had previously been taken as rudely
mechanical pursuits acquired a theoretical base.”32 The attractions of natural
philosophy, or magic, remained strong, however, and John Wilkins bemoaned
the difficulty in liberating automata from the esoteric tradition:
This whole Discourse I call Mathematicall Magick, because the art of

such Mechanicall inventions as are here chiefly insisted upon, hath been
formerly so styled; and in allusion to vulgar opinion, which doth com-
monly attribute all such strange operations unto the power of Magick.33
Wilkins’s reference to vulgar opinion might seem elitist and his published
work was certainly only available to the literate but the will to publish and the
text’s practical function – it works as a primer for the mechanical engineer –
demands that we read it as an outward-facing work. The interface between
magic and mechanics is notoriously blurred in this period and it is not my
intention to distinguish between the magical as esoteric and the mechanical as
exoteric. Old magic and the new science are both areas subject to mystique.
My argument is rather that efforts to explicate self-moving devices, whether
the explanation tends towards the natural or supernatural, hint at a desire to
communicate, and to an ever wider audience.
31 Jonathan Sawday, “‘Forms Such as Never Were in Nature’: The Renaissance Cyborg,” in At
the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern
Period, eds. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 178.
32 Martin Kemp, “‘Wrought by No Artist’s Hand’: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and
the Scientific in Some Artifacts from the Renaissance,” in Reframing the Renaissance:
Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven, 1995), p. 190.
33 Wilkins, Mathematical Magic.
398 Mcculloch
Historians of automata have often tracked the trajectory of the self-moving

device as a process of disenchantment or secularization; in other words, what
was once thought of as enchanted and fetishistic becomes subject to rational
explanation. Despite the untidy division between magic and mechanics in the
early modern period, commentators insist that such uncertainty was the first
step in the demystification process of an emergent mechanistic philosophy.
Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz conclude – following the French theologian
Jean Labadié – that there are “three quite separate stages in the history of
automata; the age of Gods, the age of men, the age of machines.”34 Theodore
Ziolkowski charts this development also in his 1977 work, Disenchanted Images.
The animated statues, haunted portraits, and magic mirrors of Ziolkowski’s
text – all popular literary devices – have been subject to a process of seculariza-
tion, robbing them of the enchantment that originally brought them to life.35
Ziolkowski’s representation of a disenchanted modern society not only under-
estimates the strength of the contemporary imagination but it grossly simpli-
fies earlier periods, suggesting that a belief in magic and an understanding of
mechanics were mutually exclusive. Preferable as a critical methodology for
understanding animated statuary is Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantas-
tic.36 Todorov too imagines differing responses to incredible events, creating a
trinity of the marvelous, the fantastic, and the uncanny. The marvelous has a
supernatural basis, the uncanny a natural one, and the fantastic owes some-
thing to both categories. Working theoretically rather than historically, Todo-
rov interprets these groupings synchronically. Ziolkowski, with his investment
in the historical sequence, offers a diachronic reading and, I would suggest, a
crude one. Todorov’s fantastic admits the possibility of a dual perspective.
Early modern playwrights, masters of equivocation, provide an equally com-
plex analysis of the miraculous occurrence.
In the final act of William Shakespeare’s 1611 tragicomedy The Winter’s Tale,
a statue animates. Hermione, long believed dead, returns to life and does so by
first imitating, and then animating, statuary. Hermione’s sculptural apotheosis
within Shakespeare’s text has generated a conspicuous level of hyperbole
within literary criticism, prompting G. Wilson Knight to describe it as “the
most strikingly conceived, and profoundly penetrating, moment in English
34 Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata: A Historical and Technological Study, trans.
Alec Reid (London, 1958), p. 387.
35 Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images.
36 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard
Howard (Ithaca, NY, 1975), pp. 24-40.
literature.”37 The enchantment at work in this transformative moment is not in

doubt. However, the basis of that enchantment is often misunderstood. The
audience understands that a statue of the dead queen has been produced by
an Italian master. Her husband Leontes and daughter Perdita – recently
reunited themselves – visit the statue and are amazed by its animation. At the
point of the statue’s animation, the source of its motion is apparently a mys-
tery to the audience. The suggestion is that this mystery ensures its charisma
and powerful affect on the theatrical spectator. However, I would argue that
the staging of the animation in a live theater modifies its reception and mean-
ing. The esoteric aspects of the motive statue are undercut by the performative
contingencies of its staging, producing an animated statue that is far more exo-
teric than esoteric. Esotericism is suggestive of the closed and specialized cir-
cle, a psychologically internalized world committed to strict initiation, secrecy,
exclusivity, and elitism; the circulation of knowledge in the Renaissance would
seem, in many ways, to conform to these undercurrents and not to the exoteric
principles of openness, externalization, and materiality. However, early mod-
ern drama’s engagement with such knowledge tends not towards the esoteric
but towards its opposite, rendering these often hidden subjects open, accessi-
ble, intelligible, and crucially adjustable – as evidenced by Hermione’s statue.
Traditionally, scholars discussing performances of the statue scene in The
Winter’s Tale have emphasized the surprise and wonder with which contempo-
rary spectators greet the animation. Leah Scragg’s description is typical:
Consequently, at the close of the play, when Leontes, Perdita, Florizel and
Polixenes visit Paulina’s house to view the ‘statue’ of Hermione suppos-
edly carved by Julio Romano, those outside the play world are as
unprepared as those within it for the revelation that the Queen is alive,
and they thus share in the responses of the dramatis personae, rather
than anticipating (as in Much Ado About Nothing or All’s Well That Ends
Well) the moment of their enlightenment. As the statue of Hermione
gradually comes to life, the members of the audience, like Leontes and
his household, are gripped with a sense of wonder, crossing with them
into a universe made radiant by an apprehension of the power and
benevolence of the gods.38
37 G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower (London, 1958), p. 240.

38 Leah Scragg, Shakespeare’s Mouldy Tales: Recurrent Plot Motifs in Shakespearian Drama
(Harlow, 1992), p. 186.
400 Mcculloch
Hermione is here an anomaly, or Shakespearean oddity, capable of surprising

and hypnotizing audiences. The ubiquity of the animated statue in English
Renaissance theater, well-established by the first recorded performance of
Shakespeare’s drama in 1611, goes unnoticed. As does the play’s wider interest
in the mimetic, and thereby fraudulent, qualities of art. The use of life-size
statuary as a stage property without an attendant animation is rare indeed and
the likelihood of an actor representing an image that then remains still almost
impossible. Scragg’s reading not only underestimates the play’s audience in
terms of its cultural awareness but it also downplays the effects of theatrical
embodiment on the spectator. Audiences typically fixate on the body of the
actor personating statuary, as they do on the figures of the apparently deceased
on stage. Props can be equally ‘distracting,’ especially when movement is
required from them. The animated statue, perhaps more than any other stage
device, raises questions about the immersion of an audience in the world of
the play.
Whether represented on stage by a player or a stage property, animated stat-
uary is accident-prone. Mechanisms fail, makeup runs, and actors breathe. The
statue’s propensity for theatrical chaos is, I would suggest, significant, both in
terms of its performativity – it cannot fail to draw attention to itself – and as a
reminder of its substantiality. It inevitably compromises the more closed and
mysterious aspects of animated statuary. Shakespeare also take pains to ‘reveal’
Hermione to an audience – both as art object and living, breathing woman. He
provides the statue with a genuine artist, the 16th-century Italian master Guilio
Romano, and there are extended discussions of the figure’s mimetic qualities:
“The fixture of her eye has motion in’t, / As we are mocked with art” (V.iii.67-
68).39 The statue’s materiality, and its construction as art object, are also
emphasized when Paulina – the statue’s custodian – prevents Leontes from
kissing the static figure:
The ruddiness upon her lip is wet;

You’ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own
With oily painting. (V.iii.81-83)
Paulina’s protestations are, of course, false; she knows that the statue is a real
woman. But her playful encouragement of Leontes’s wonder serves to heighten
the ambivalence of the scene, as do later explanations of Hermione’s simu-
lated death and subsequent disappearance. The statue and its animation are
39 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford, 1996). All subsequent
references to this play are to this edition.
interrogated by those present, not obscured by magic and mystification. Most

importantly, Shakespeare prolongs the period of Hermione’s immobility before
her sculptural animation. The actor is required to remain still for a significant
amount of time. Given this effort and indeed the very presence of the actor
who represented Hermione earlier in the play, any suggestion that the move-
ment of statuary would have surprised audiences seems dubious. Yet scholars
persist in claiming that spectators were caught unawares by moving statues,
implying that the animated statue’s most valuable attribute is the element of
surprise. David Bergeron, who has written at length on the subject of sculp-
tural art within Renaissance drama, insists that Leontes’s first address to the
statue in Shakespeare’s play – “Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed /
Thou art Hermione” (V.iii.24-25) – is taken at face value by audiences: “[T]he
dramatic irony is not felt either on stage or in the audience.”40 Irony of this
kind is surely redundant if unperceived by the spectator at the moment of its
utterance. Shakespeare would not have relied on the repeat visitor or subse-
quent reader of the play to effectively realize his final scene. For an audience
fully conscious of the underlying vitality of the static actor, the mechanics of
mimicking statuary – and the practical process of bringing that statuary to life
– are key elements of the theatrical experience and do nothing to lessen the
power, or enchantment, of that experience. Moreover, there is clearly an ele-
ment of enchantment that is compatible with a shared understanding of
stagecraft and a wider appreciation of moving objects within early modern
culture.
In instances where the actor’s body is replaced by a mechanism or device,
the audience’s interest in the statue’s movement – and the origins of its motion
– are just as pronounced, perhaps even greater. Robert Greene’s brazen head is
conceivably an example of this kind, its speech facilitated by a vocal instru-
ment or a simple act of ventriloquism. The mechanism behind its animation
remains unclear but it is my suggestion that contemporary audiences would
have been familiar with these theatrical logistics and conscious of the technol-
ogy that made them possible. Their engagement with the animated statue’s
theatrical materiality – as stage property or a human performer – may also
have informed their response to dramatic content and the issue of magic’s rela-
tionship with the mechanistic.
40 David Bergeron, “The Restoration of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare’s

Romances Reconsidered, eds. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs (Lincoln, 1978),
p. 130.
402 Mcculloch
Charisma, and the Brazen Head
The early modern theater, in staging charismatic motion, was influenced by

both antique precedent and medieval example. The regular employment of
prophetic statuary in the classical era anticipates the oracular abilities of man-
ufactured objects such as the brazen head in the medieval period.41 One of the
most famous of these disembodied heads, capable of answering any question
put to them, belonged – according to legend – to Roger Bacon, the 13th-century
friar and philosopher. While there is no historical proof of Bacon fashioning a
brazen head, the apocryphal tale was perpetuated by a mid-16th century prose
account and, more famously, by Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The
play follows the eminent Friar’s effort to create a talking head, one of diverse
capabilities:
I have framed out a monstrous head of brass,

That, by the enchanting forces of the devil,
Shall tell out strange and uncouth aphorisms,
And girt fair England with a wall of brass. (XI.17-20)42
The process of animation, however, is thwarted. Bacon’s attempt to animate

the brazen head is frustrated by exhaustion; while Bacon and his fellow friar,
Bungay, sleep, the head briefly stirs, makes three enigmatic pronouncements
(Time is, Time was, Time is past) and is summarily destroyed by a curious ham-
mer blow. Animated statuary, such as that demonstrated by Greene, is clearly
implicated in the esotericism of the Renaissance period. The source of its
motion is often mysterious, its workings arcane. A cursory glance at the drama
of Greene suggests that he has no intention of opening up the worlds of ancient
and medieval magic to the delectation of his audience.
Using the mid-16th century and anonymous prose life of Bacon as his source,
Greene chooses not to examine the means by which Bacon’s brazen head is
animated. The source is, in fact, far more loquacious on the subject, narrating
41 In classical Greek and Rome, belief in the divine oracle, such as that of Apollo at Delphi,
was accompanied by an acknowledgement of mechanical oracular devices, or neuro-
spasta. Capable of movement and speech, they were used to deliver prophecies and judg-
ments. See Susan Murphy, “Heron of Alexandria’s Automaton-Making,” in History of Tech-
nology, eds. Graham Hollister-Short and Frank A.J.L. James, Vol. 17 (London, 1996), p. 5.
42 Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton
Anthology, eds. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric
Rasmussen (New York, 2002). All subsequent references to this play are to this edition.
in detail the creation of the head and the circumstances of its animation.43
Greene, for example, omits any reference to the use of a continuous fume of
“simples” applied to the head during its gestation period. His source specifies
that “with a continuall fume of the six hotest Simples it should have motion,
and in one month space speake.”44 A simple is a substance of one constituent
ingredient. The purity of and heat from these simples would seem to aid the
development of the brazen head but Greene has no apparent interest in this
recipe for animation. Mention is made only of the hammering out of the brass
by Belcephon, one of Bacon’s indentured spirits, and of the rather vague and
“enchanting forces of the devil” (XI.18). The timing of the animation is integral
to its success in both accounts of Bacon’s brazen creation but it is only in the
prose source that this is explicated. The devil raised to assist Bacon and Bungay
with their manufacture warns the friars that the head will animate after a
month and that they must be present to hear its speech: “the Time of the
moneth or day hee knew not: also hee told them, that if they heard it not before
it had done speaking, all their labour should be lost.”45 Sources are, of course,
at an author’s disposal and it may have been neither desirable nor dramatically
necessary for Greene to replicate on stage the information available in print.
He was also under no obligation to advise his audience on the ancient methods
of enlivening art. But wouldn’t the stage spectacle of a statue brought to life,
without any explanation of its movement, have bewildered spectators?
Literary works may, as part of their remit, privilege fantasy over reality but I
would argue that the playwright’s reluctance to ‘tell’ fulfills an entirely different
function. His coyness is, paradoxically, propelled by a desire to communicate.
It is a critical commonplace that Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay cau-
tions the spectator against the hubris of magical practices – although, unlike
its close dramatic counterpart, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus – the play
offers its overreaching conjurer the hope of redemption. Greene’s Bacon – a far
less sympathetic character than his equivalent in the source material – craves
control, frustrates the romance of the central couple (Lacy and Margaret, the
fair maid of Fressingfield), and his meddling in the affairs of others, via the
magic mirror, results in the murders of four men. His brazen head is built to
pronounce aphorisms – or concise scientific statements – but also to protect
England with a wall of brass, a task that the text wastes no time in declaring
futile for a nation blessed with the natural defenses of the sea:
43 Anonymous, The famous historie of Fryer Bacon (Edinburgh, 1905).

44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
404 Mcculloch
Ringed with the walls of old Oceanus,

Whose lofty surge is like the battlements
That compassed high-built Babel in with towers,
Welcome, my lords, welcome, brave Western kings,
To England’s shore, whose promontory cliffs
Show Albion is another little world. (IV.2-7)
Such magical practices are obsolete: the dynastic marriage – of Edward, Prince
of Wales, and Elinor of Castile – at the end of the play heralds more for the
future of England than any prophetic instrument Bacon could manufacture:
“this royal marriage / Portends such bliss unto this matchless realm” (XVI.38-
39). Other magical practices are simply dangerous. Like Faustus, Bacon is dam-
aged by his art. But the potential blasphemy of conjuring is not the play’s main
concern. Margaret and Lacy’s romantic idolatry – “Love, like a wag, straight
dived into my heart, / And there did shrine the idea of yourself” (VI.79-80) – is
exonerated by the play’s happy ending and undermines any condemnation of
other blasphemies, despite the drama’s conventional close and Bacon’s whole-
sale rejection of “necromancy” (XIII.84). The focus of criticism is not Bacon’s
magic per se but the secrecy and suppression associated with several aspects
of it.
Greene, I would argue, targets more specifically the esoteric character of
Bacon’s practices. The brazen head’s inability to communicate is one example
of this; Bacon’s public performances at court are far more successful, protect-
ing the reputation of English philosophy against the incursion of Vandermast,
the German magician. The King, like the English theatergoers observing
Bacon’s triumph over the foreigner, is grateful for the Friar’s occult artistry:
Bacon, thou hast honored England with thy skill,

And made fair Oxford famous by thine art;
I will be English Henry to thyself. (IX.165-67)
But while conjuring in the diplomatic interests of the nation is celebrated,

Bacon’s creation of a “monstrous head” (XI.17) is critiqued. The brazen head
requires protection and constant surveillance. Ensconced in Bacon’s cell, a
secret kept from others, the audience join the hapless servant Miles in total
confusion at the head’s enigmatic phrases. The head’s first pronouncement,
“Time is” (XI.54), follows what the stage direction describes as a “great noise.”
Several moments later, another loud noise presages the head’s second state-
ment: “Time was” (XI.66). The head’s last comment, “Time is past” (XI.76),
comes after a final great noise and as a mysterious hammer blow destroys it.
The stage direction describes the order of events: “Here the Head speaks, and a
lightning flasheth forth, and a hand appears that breaketh down the Head with a
hammer.” Like stock phrases learnt by rote, the lines communicate nothing so
much as regret and inscrutability. The head’s failure to communicate becomes,
in fact, proverbial. In contemporary parlance, “brazen head” came to be under-
stood as a euphemism for a lack of contact and communication; in John
Dryden’s much later play, The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery, a prospective
lover indicts the object of his affection for playing the brazen head with him
when she refuses his advances.46 In Greene’s play, we might expect the mystery
associated with the brazen head to guarantee its charisma. It certainly remains
an enigmatic figure. But the sense of anti-climax associated with the head,
coupled with its inability to engage sufficiently with the play’s other charac-
ters, interferes with any attempt to enchant an audience.
Greene also cleverly redirects Bacon’s esoteric approach to conjuring, offer-
ing his audience privileged access into this necromantic environment. Bacon,
aiding Edward in his attempt to woo Margaret, invites the Prince to look in his
glass prospective, or magic mirror. Through it, Edward will be able to view the
activities of his deputy, Lacy, in Suffolk, where he has been charged with pre-
paring Margaret for Edward’s advances. Edward views Margaret, Lacy, and
Friar Bungay in the glass. He cannot hear them speaking but the audience is
privy to their conversation. In other words, the Prince watches a dumb show
while the audience is treated are treated to surround sound. The spectator is,
in fact, the better magician. Comparing himself to the Argonaut with such
keen eyesight he could see through the earth – “Edward hath an eye that looks
as far / As Lynceus” (VIII.3-4) – Edward fails to see his own limitations. When
Lacy and Margaret kiss and Edward tries to penetrate the mirror with his
sword, he is again refused access. In Greene’s play, the spectator is granted pri-
macy, suggesting not only that Bacon’s art is finite but also that the visual and
communicative qualities of the theater offer a better model for the exchange
of information, one that privileges the open over the closed.47
Greene’s treatment of the magic mirror celebrates the accessibility of the
theater as a center for entertainment and learning. His handling of the moving
46 John Dryden, The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery (London, 1673) (Early English Books
Online).
47 Francis Berry’s 1966 text, The Shakespeare Inset, proffers a useful means of interpreting
this dumb show. Berry discusses various inset performances within dramatic texts – plays
within plays, ekphrastic inserts, songs, narratives, and framing devices – arguing that
insets allow spectators to see further, offering a background, or hinterland, in addition to
the foregrounded material and the downstage action of the text. See The Shakespeare
Inset: Word and Picture (London, 1966), pp. 168-69.
406 Mcculloch
statue – the brazen head – is quite different but Greene does not obscure the
circumstances of animation in order to perplex his audience. This is not an
exercise in esotericism, although the dramatist’s reluctance to explain the
action of the play and the magic traditionally associated with the moving
statue might suggest so. If we accept that the early modern spectator was
familiar, even intimate, with the ‘self-moving’ object – both at the theater and
in wider society – the obscurity of the brazen head simply dissolves. Greene
does not need to educate his audience. They understand the choice – between
human and superhuman intervention – available to them. They are also able to
interpret Greene’s specific silence on the matter as a subtle critique of exclu-
sive practices, whether they be magical or mechanical. The mysteriousness of
Greene’s brazen head is commensurate with its prosaic lack of charisma. This
version of the animated statue is disenchanted, not by virtue of any explana-
tion of its workings (as Ziolkowski would argue), but as a direct result of its
esoteric opacity. The enjoyment of sculptural motion relies upon transparency
and mutual understanding, even in the context of supernatural occurrences.
Charisma need not be enigmatic to be enchanting.
Conclusion
Given the complex history of the self-moving device and its equally diverse
appearance on the early modern stage, it seems fair to question Theodore
Ziolkowski’s account of the image and its inexorable slide from a figure of mag-
ical enchantment to one of mechanical disenchantment. But critical discus-
sions of charisma and its relationship to transparency and technology continue.
Alfred Gell’s rejection of purely aesthetic readings of art in favor of a definition
of art as technology is germane here. Gell crucially acknowledges that the
“imaginative aspect of the art and the tool-wielding aspect of the art are one
and the same.”48 But he does not credit the audience with the same under-
standing. Instead, the tool-wielding aspects of art – its making processes –
remain a mystery to the spectator: “It is the way an art object is construed as
having come into the world which is the source of the power such objects have
over us – their becoming rather than their being.”49 Because the technical abil-
ities necessary to create a great work of art are beyond most viewers, they can
48 Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in

Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, eds. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford, 1992),
pp. 40-63.
49 Ibid., p. 46.
only imagine its manufacture to be magical. It is this error that guarantees the
enchantment of the art object and enables it to be used for political and pro-
pagandist means. It is, in Gell’s own terms, “the technology of enchantment …
founded on the enchantment of technology.”50 While I welcome Gell’s acknowl-
edgement of technology as an integral feature of art-making and its charis-
matic effects, rather than accept his version of technical prowess within art as
a means of distancing the spectator from the work and its mysterious design, I
suggest that maker and spectator collaborate in the creation of charisma.
Examples from religious history, civic history, scientific discourse and early
modern drama all suggest that the early modern public were more cognizant
of artistic technologies than Gell might concede.
Stephen Jaeger, in his 2012 Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the
Arts of the West, has responded to Gell’s position and, as I do, pays much more
attention to reception and the viewer of charismatic objects. He also chal-
lenges Gell’s identification of charisma with the mysteries of technical ingenu-
ity, present within Gell’s reading of the famous prow boards of Trobriand
islanders: “Technology enchants, but not as much as ghosts, whether they
appear in flesh or wood.”51 But, like Gell, Jaeger associates enchantment with a
disguised reality; charismatic art “‘conceals’ reality – or at least clothes it – in
brilliance; it diminishes the reasoning faculty, speaks to the imagination, and
exercises an ‘enthralling’ effect on the reader or viewer.”52 Charisma is neces-
sarily antithetical to reality and the objective viewpoint:
Charisma of art accordingly operates through grandiose illusions, which

will appear to those not in their spell as phony or outright deceptive.
Rational, critical thought mistrusts and resists charisma.53
This view is corroborated by early modern reformists; their refusal to accept

the miracles performed by animated statuary and efforts to expose these taw-
dry illusions to the public worked against the charismatic illusions of Catholi-
cism. But we need not position the public as victims within this propagandist
tussle. Neither should they be hardened cynics, alert to the illusions on show
and immune to their charms. As has been demonstrated, an audience can
apply critical thought and still remain under the spell of the object. Jaeger, in
50 Ibid., p. 44.
52 Ibid., p. 2.
53 Ibid., p. 39.
408 Mcculloch
describing the “indwelling forces”54 of charismatic art, comes close to a discus-

sion of animated statuary but these indwelling forces need not be gods or
ghosts to ensure charisma; they could equally be a priest, an actor, or a mechan-
ical device. And discovering the source of movement does not in any way
diminish the charismatic effect. There is still that sense of wonder in the appar-
ently magical movement, now coupled with the satisfaction of understanding
a work of human ingenuity, in an atmosphere of exoteric discourse.
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Index
1 Corinthians 8, 48, 128, 171, 334-337, 357 in Catholic tradition 389-393

Aachen Virgin and Child statuette (Rhenish, in theaters
c.1350-60) 349-352, 363, 381 brazen head in Robert Greene’s Friar
Admonitio generalis 165 Bacon and Friar Bungay
Aelred of Rievaulx 358-359 (c.1589) 400-406
Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini 298 Hermione in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s
agency 21, 36, 147-149 Tale 398-400
Agnellus of Ravenna (Liber pontificalis ubiquity 400
ecclesiae Ravennatis) 57, 164 in the mystery play tradition 389
Agricola, Georgius (De re metallica) 397 popularity 389-390
Albert von Soest 235 Protestant polemic against 390-393
Alberti 366 See also Rood of Boxley
Albertus Magnus 394 use in sermons 393
Alexander the Great 207
Alexius I Comnenus 70-71 Bacon, Roger 402-405
al-Harawi 249 See also Greene, Robert (Friar Bacon and
allegory 62, 121, 164-165, 214, 279 Friar Bungay, c.1589)
significance of precious metals and Bagnoregio 320
stones 357-359 Bale, John 390-391
Altensleben, Stephan 220 Bamberg Cathedral 97, 116-117
Ambrose of Milan 51, 59, 335 Barry, Fabio 249
Anaclet II (antipope) 62, 186 Battle of Worringen (1288) 217
Anemodoulion 250 Baxandall, Michael 140, 148, 363
Anna Comnena 65 beauty
Antony the Great 55-56 imago Dei 63, 69
See also Life of Antony physical beauty 49-51
See also Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria suspicion of 54-55
Apollonios of Tyana 246, 252-253 physiognomic tradition 57, 66, 68
Arianism 166 productive tension between different ideas
Aristotle 63, 132, 277, 323-324 of beauty 359-361
Arnald of Bonneval 186 spiritualization of physical beauty 51,
Arnheim, Rudolf 342 53-63, 68, 359-360
Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux 62 See also honestum
asceticism 52, 54, 59, 61, 132, 140 See also charis
Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria 55 Bedini, Silvio 395
Athena 49, 143, 336 Belting, Hans 244
auctoritates 219-220, 229 Bendix, Reinhard 129
Auden, W.H. 388 Benjamin, Walter 18, 144
Augustine 90, 128, 143, 171, 211, 324-325, 335 Bergeron, David 400
automata/animated statues 387-406 Bergren, Anne T. 258, 259
association with the occult 395-397, 400 Bernard of Clairvaux 60, 63, 83, 186, 183
as toys 393 medieval commemoration 183, 201-202,
attempts to demystify 396-397 358-359
based on credulity? 390 in Dante 201
brazen head 389, 396, 400-405 See also Vita prima Bernardi

412 Index
Bernard of Tiron 60 ideas in West compared to Byzantium 64,

Beseleel 172 65
See also Einhard interaction of pagan/Christian ideas 58,
Besson, Jacques (Livre des instruments 59, 63
mathematiques et mecha- fearsome aspect 49, 53, 60, 186-187
niques) 397 relation to the eyes/gaze 52-53, 58, 62, 68
Bieler, Ludwig 55 See also charisma
Binski, Paul 77 See also gratia
Boileau, Nicolas 13, 14, 16 See also Plotinus
Bonaventure 188, 194, 320, 335, 337 See also “luminous overflowing” of grace
on charismata 335-338 charisma passim
on gratia 335-339 age/antiquity as charismatic 246-247,
See also Francis of Assisi 262-263, 304-305
See also Major Legend and education 15, 59, 246-247, 252-254,
See also Breviloquium 259, 324-325, 353, 355
Bourdieu, Pierre 10, 11, 324-325 architecture as charismatic space 325,
See also habitus 342-343, 371
Bourne, William (Inventions or Devises) 393 See also Franciscan architecture
Bowie, David 278-279 as antithetical to greed 247-248, 254
Breviloquium 335-336, 338 as blurring the boundaries between life and
Browne, William (Shephearde’s Pipe, art 246, 254, 310, 353, 395-396
1614) 268-269 See also ekphrasis
Bush, George H.W. 30, 198 See also automata
Butterworth, Philip 389 as hypnotizing, intoxicating 24, 129, 146,
273, 353, 355, 400
Campanella, Thomas (Theologia) 393, 396 association of metallic with (divine)
Carey, John charisma 355, 356-358
Carolingians as transactional 131, 133
revival of secular biography as superhuman 3, 5, 129, 334
See Einhard as understood by Max Weber 3, 5-9, 11-12,
attitude to images 31, 47, 128, 142
See Opus Caroli Regis importance of personality for Weber 5,
Carruthers, Mary 324 129, 140, 146, 147, 292
Cassiodorus 59, 395 as understood by Irvine Schiffer 10, 11
Catholic Encyclopedia 184 as understood by C. Stephen Jaeger 1, 6, 8,
Chapuis, Alfred 398 12, 181-183, 271, 291
charis as understood by Peter Worsley 9, 11
as a (divine) gift 49, 55, 56, 247, 270, 274, as understood by Pierre Bourdieu 10, 11
320, 353 as understood by Rudolf Sohm 6-9
See also charismata as understood by Robert C. Tucker 9, 11
as property of speech 50 as understood by St. Paul 7-8, 47-48, 128,
as (physical) beauty 49-51, 53, 55 142, 320, 334-336, 357
definition of 47-50, 55, 128-129, 140, 247, audience 21-24, 163, 388-390, 406
335 biography/hagiography 22, 52-53, 58, 60,
development of idea in Late Antiquity 50- 62, 357-359
58 distinction between charismatic and
development of idea in Middle Ages 58- non-charismatic hagiography 182
69 “life-writing” 172, 182, 190, 196-198, 283
Index 413
See also Einhard in early Christianity 6-8, 47-48, 128,

See also Fioretti 142-143
See also Francis of Assisi inspiring imitation 200, 340, 352
See also The Wolf of Gubbio See also the Wise and Foolish Virgins of
See also Vita prima Bernardi Strasbourg Cathedral
charismatic art 5-6, 18, 20-23, 76, 129-130, lack of personal charisma 288
352-353, 356 magical aspect 50, 52, 130-133, 252-253
agency of charismatic art 21, 36, 129-130, of eyes 52-53, 59-62, 64, 141-143
137, 140-141, 145, 147-149 of faces 52, 56, 62, 69-70, 140-141, 143, 355
“liveliness” of charismatic art 146-148, of the Christian liturgy 371-372, 374-375
245, 395-396 of the human body 18, 136, 157, 297, 353,
mistrust of charismatic art 161-162, 350, 358-359
362, 390-92 of the voice 37, 59, 62, 145, 173, 254-257,
See also Opus Caroli Regis 298
charismatic leadership/rulership 8-10, 31, of Christ 142-143, 145, 182, 197, 353, 357
34, 142, 145, 288-292, 296, 303 Christ’s transfiguration as model 60, 65,
See also Charlemagne 143
See also Sigismund of Luxemburg personal charisma 3, 5, 31, 34, 146-148,
See also the Nine Worthies 157-159, 274, 290-292, 297-298
charismatic motion 386-387 See also Charlemagne
See also mechanical/magical charisma See also Francis of Assisi
See also automata/animated statues See also Sigismund of Luxemburg
cinema 145-146, 185, 195-196 photography 83n3, 144-145
psychological experience of 54, 131,
Cold War 136, 144
199-200, 342-343
Constantinople as a charismatic
quasi-sacral element 130
space 244-245, 263
relation of the mechanical and magi-
courage 192, 194
cal 253
definition of 1–6, 128-129
as compatible 392-394, 397-398,
use of the term 3-4
405-408
erotic aspect 49, 83, 132-133, 146, 246, 260,
as mutually exclusive 386-387, 398,
271-272
406-407
See also Nicetas Choniates’s De signis…
See also automata/animated statues
Helen of Troy
relation to aura 1, 12, 19-20
See also Fellicula relation to hyper-mimesis 26, 31-32, 173,
esotericism as uncharismatic 406 291, 302-303, 352-353
experiential aspect 8, 9, 132, 341 Carolingian critique of 169
failure to appreciate charisma (as sign of relation to mimesis 31, 200, 215, 355-356,
barbarism) 246-249, 253-254, 256, 365, 400
259-261 relation to the sublime 12-18, 129, 146
See also Nicetas Choniates’s De signis See also sublime
“false charisma” 270 “social constructionist school” of charis-
historiographical context 2-12, 129-130, ma 9-11
142, 144-145, 288-290 supernatural element 48, 65, 131, 192-193,
development of idea in modernity 142, 388
144-145, 387-390 secular/atheistic response to supernatu-
moral aspect of different traditions 129 ral element 130-131, 396-397
“indicative” charisma 137, 139, 146 See also automata/animated statues
414 Index
charisma (cont.) Council of Basel (1431-49) 298, 300, 308

television 3, 142, 144-145 Council of Constance (1414-18) 296, 298-300
See also charis courtliness 93, 96, 106, 126, 140, 142, 207, 230,
See also charismata 275, 291, 349
See also charismatology/charismatology association with charisma 126, 359-360
See also gratia association with moral failings 93, 96
charismata (gifts of grace) 7, 33, 40, 47-48, Csordas, Thomas 342-343
323, 326, 333-336 Cunningham, Lawrence 188-190
embodied in Franciscan architecture 339
See also Franciscan architecture Daedalus 396
See also charis Dalarun, Jacques 190
charismatology/charismatalogy 23n1, 26, 33, Dale, Thomas 77
196, 198, 269, 281 Damascius 53
charity (caritas, charitas) 54, 57, 90, 112, 121, Dante 69, 142, 1201
132, 339 David 65, 165, 207
Charlemagne 158-159, 164, 175 See also Nine Worthies
contemporary representation 158-159 Dee, John 393, 395-396
bullae 158 decorum 59, 79-80, 84, 106, 113, 120, 230, 371
coinage 158-160 See also honestum
comparisons with Old Testament See also paideia
figures 165 De officiis ministrorum 59
See also Opus Caroli Regis Denkraumverlust 130
personal charisma 158-159 Diplokionion 250
remembrance disenchantment (disillusion) 269, 276-278,
as charismatic figure 158-161, 175, 177, 281, 286, 386, 398, 406
302, 310 Donne, John (Of certain ingenious Arts, and
as one of the Nine Worthies 207 rare Inventions of former Ages) 394
bronze equestrian statue outside Notre Droz, Edmond 398
Dame Cathedral in Paris 175-176 Duke Friedrich IV of Austria-Tyrol 298
criticism of 167-168 Dümmler, Ernst 164-165
relics 160 Dürer, Albrecht, portraits of Charlemagne
See also Albrecht Dürer, portraits of and Sigismund (c.1512, Germanisches
Charlemagne and Sigismund Museum in Nuremberg) 160, 310
See also Einhard
See also Walahfrid Strabo early modern theater 388-389, 402, 406
Charles IV 203, 308 audience 388, 400, 407
Charles the Bald 163 See also automata/animated statues
Chaucer 269 See also Robert Greene
Christine de Pisan 267 See also Shakespeare
Christopher Marlowe (Dr Faustus) 403 Ebendorfer, Thomas 298
Cicero 59, 60, 140, 324 Eberhard Windeck 296-300
Clairvaux 185, 187 eco-criticism 148
Claudius of Turin 171 Edward III of England 65
Cologne 205-208, 215-229, 235-236 Edward the Confessor 358
coup of 1396 220-221 effigies 79, 157, 162, 168-169
foundation myth 221 Einhard 159, 161-162, 172-175
See also Hansasaal Vita Caroli 161-162, 172-174
Cooper, Donal 332 ekphrasis 26
Index 415
ancient definition 245, 252 See also Aachen Virgin and Child

See also Nicetas Choniates’s De signis… statuette (Rhenish, c.1350-60)
ekphrasis/charisma See also Imad Madonna in Paderborn
Eligius, bishop of Noyon 358 (c.1051-58)
Eligius Cross 358 See also Shrine of Gertrude of Nivelles
Ellis, Roger 268 (c.1272-98)
enchantment 1, 21, 23-24, 26-27, 130-131, 146, See also reliquary bust of St. Ida of
260, 269, 273, 291, 315, 386, 388, 393, Herzfeld (c.1480) 368, 370
398-399, 401, 406-407 significance of medium 350, 356, 361, 371,
See also disenchantment 377
Enchantment (Jaeger) 1, 6, 17-20, 22, 26, 80, See also reliquaries
145n56, 157n1, 163n1, 268, 271, 283, 407 See also winged altarpieces/retables
Enguerrand de Monstrelet 309 Fioretti 184, 187, 191, 194
Ennodius 57 See also Francis of Assisi, medieval writings
Envy of Angels (Jaeger) 17-18, 80, 83 on and commemoration of
Epiphanius 57 Fisher, Paul 130
Erikson, Erik H. 11 Fourth Crusade 243-245, 250, 263
Eunapius 52 See also Nicetas Choniates’s De signis
Evagrius of Antioch 56 Francis Bacon (New Atlantis) 395
Even-Ezra, Ayelet 333-334 Franciscan architecture (in medieval Italy)
Exordium Magnum Cisterciense 183 charismatic habitus of 325, 339-341, 343
compared to Dominican churches 341
Fall, the 51, 69 lay access 331-333, 341
fandom 278-279 overview of Italian Franciscan church
Fellicula 270-286 architecture 326
as a charismatic/anti-charismatic tramezzo (dividing screen) 327, 331-333,
character 271-273, 275, 286 340
etymology 272 women’s access 331-333
rhetorical skill 272 See also San Francesco, Assisi
See also Tale of Jonathas See also Santa Croce, Florence
Fellini, Federico (La Strada, 1954) 195-196 Franciscans 325
figural images Franciscan legislative Constitutions 331-
anxieties over idolatry 161-162, -362 332
See also Opus Caroli Regis See also Francis of Assisi
“autonomous” statuettes 363 See also Franciscan architecture
development 352, 363 See also Bonaventure
polychromed-wood 348-349, 352, 362, 364 Francis of Assisi 183
precious metal figural image 366-368 medieval writings on and commemoration
Book-Box for an Evangeliary from Kloster of 184, 187-195, 196, 325
Harvestehude (c.1510) 366-368 compared with Vita prima Bernardi 188-
equation with the non-mimetic 365- 189, 196-197
368 the problem of the “legendary” and the
Goldene Tafel from St. Ursula, Co- “historical” 190-191, 196, 198-199
logne 368, 369 in Dante 201
Kaltbemalung 366, 368 See also Franciscan architecture
methods for creating precious-metal See also Mirror of Perfection
statuette 363-364 See also Ugolino Boniscambi of Monte-
potential for (divine) charisma 349, giorgio
352, 356-358, 380-381 See also Wolf of Gubbio
416 Index
Francis of Assisi (cont.) Gottfried von Straßburg 360

modern publications on 185 grace
in film 195-196 See charis
See also stigmata See gratia
See also Bonaventure See charismata
Frank, Georgia 68 gratia 37, 48-50, 57-62, 128-129, 211, 335, 337,
Franks as the people of God 165, 167, 169 359
Frederick II 65 See also charis
Frederick III 308 gratuitous grace 337-339
Foxe, John (Acts and Monuments) 391 See also Thomas Aquinas
Greene, Robert (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,
Ganz, David 161-162, 172 c.1589) 389, 401-406
gaze 23, 144, 149, 252 Greetham, D.C. 282, 285
premodern, emissive understanding Gregory the Great 90-91, 335, 357
of 49-50, 52, 53, 58, 144 Grimald of Reichenau 163, 165
spiritual 58, 68 Grossus, Geoffrey 60
sculptural 23, 28, 103, 144, 149, 224, 252, Guenée, Bernard 294
349, 368 Guillaume de Lorris 359-360
Geis, Walter 221-222 Gumpert, Matthew 258
Gell, Alfred 130-131, 253, 342, 406-407
Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 307 habitus 80, 323-325
Geoffrey of Clairvaux 183, 187, 196, 358-359 spatial habitus 339, 343
See also Vita prima Bernardi (VP) See also Franciscan architecture
Geoffrey of Auxerre 60-61 See also courtliness
Gestalt 142, 148, 342 Hansasaal (the oldest part of Cologne town
Gesta Romanorum 267-268, 279, 283 hall) 205
See Tale of Jonathas damage in World War II 199, 205-206, 216
Gerichtslaube postwar restoration 207
See Nine Worthies sculptural group in See also Nine Worthies sculptural group in
Lüneburg town hall the Hansasaal (c.1330)
Goad, Thomas 392 Haß, Johannes 308-309
Godman, Peter 165 Hebrews (epistle to) 48
Gombrich, Ernst 129 Heinrich Hufnagel of Augsburg 364
Gothic sculpture Helen of Troy
ambiguity of voluptuous 133, 136 See also Nicetas Choniates’s De signis…
as rooted in social practices 77 Helen of Troy
damage during World War II 205, 216 Heroon 249
idealist aesthetics 137, 140 Herren, Michael W. 164-165, 167-168
“indicative” charisma 139 Hillier, Mary 393
importance of “occasion” 134, 147 Hilsey, John, bishop of Rochester 391
nationalist interpretations 77 Hoccleve, Thomas 267
relationship with living bodies 77-78, 105 Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend 268,
rise of mimesis in 12th century 77-78 284-285
romantic interpretations 137, 139, 216 La Male Regle (c.1406) 284
See also Franciscan architecture psyche in his writings 282-286
See also Magdeburg Cathedral See also Tale of Jonathas
See also Wise and Foolish Virgins of See also male revenge fantasy
Strasbourg Cathedral Hoccleve’s Series 268
Index 417
Hoensch, Jörg 298 Jan Van Mansdale 223-224, 225

holy men See also Nine Worthies sculptural group in
pagan holy men 52-54 the Schepenhuis in Mechelen
Christian holy men 54-60 James I 396
Holy Roman Empire Jan van Eyck 366
political configuration in the late Middle Jonathas
Ages 292-296, 310 See Tale of Jonathas
Homer 18, 54, 144, 260, 274, 356 Jerome 89-90, 143-144, 357
honestum (moral beauty) 59, 359 Jews 216, 276
house of Komnenos 243 JFK
See also Anna Comnena See Kennedy, John F.
Hugh of St. Victor 83, 91 John the Grammarian 148
Hugo, Victor (Les Misérables) 195 Jotsaldus 58, 59
Huizinga, Johan 189 Judith, empress 164
hupsos/hypsos Jung, Jacqueline 333
See sublime
Hussites 296 Kaldellis, Anthony 243
“hyperreal” 279, 353 Keldermans
See also charisma, relation to hyper-mime- See Jan Van Mansdale
sis Kemp, Martin 397
Kenilworth Castle 390
Iamblichus 52 Kennedy, John F. 145
icons 28, 35, 169, 244, 261, 353-355 kingship 162, 199
as charismatic objects 244, 354-355 bad kingship 165
as relics 244 good kingship 165-166
icon of the Virgin Hodegetria 261 sacral kingship 290
Sinai Christ Pantocrator icon 353-355, 362 See also Charlemagne
See also Opus Caroli Regis See also Sigismund of Luxemburg
Imad, Bishop 362 See also Walahfrid Strabo
Imad Madonna in Paderborn (c.1051-58) 362 Körkammer
image of St. Mary Magdalen at Ecouis See Nine Worthies sculptural group in
(1310-20) 136 Lüneburg town hall
Innocent II 62
Innsbruck Hofkirche 222 L’Orange, Hans 68
irony 237, 401 Lady Chapel at Ely (1320) 133-134
Isaiah 11:2-3 334-335, 338 Lambarde, William 391-392
Isidore of Alexandria 53 La Parisienne 83-84
See also Wise and Foolish Virgins on west
Jaeger, C. Stephen passim facade of Strasbourg Cathedral
See charisma as understood by C. Stephen Last Judgment 80, 86, 89, 116-117
Jaeger Leclercq, Jean 189
See charisma … “life-writing” Legner, Anton 368
See Envy of Angels Life of Antony 55-56
See Enchantment Longinus 12-18, 128-129
See sublime as understood by C. Stephen See also On Sublimity (Peri Hupsous)
Jaeger Louis the Bavarian 217
See Wise and Foolish Virgins on west facade Louis the Pious 158, 162-163, 165, 168, 173
of Strasbourg Cathedral as under- lack of charisma vs. Charlemagne 152
stood by C. Stephen Jaeger as Moses 159, 161
418 Index
Louis XIV 199 Michael VIII Palaiologos 263

Lüdke, Dietmar 363, 377 miracles 47, 183-184, 190, 193, 249, 262
“luminous overflowing” of grace 59-63, 68, as an historical problem 189, 190, 196-199,
351-353 407
Lüneburg 226 as evidence of charisma 47, 249, 334
foundation myth 230 miraculous icons 244, 261, 262
perfectly preserved corpses 249, 358
Magdeburg Cathedral 93, 95-100 Mirror of Perfection 193
Wise and Foolish Virgins in the north misogyny 215n3, 267, 269, 272, 279-281,
transept portal (mid-13th centu- See also male revenge fantasy
ry) 97-112 See also Tale of Jonathas
conventional interpretation of 106 See also sexual violence
courtly demeanor of the Wise Vir- Mitchell, Jerome 279-280
gins 106 Moraw, Peter 293n3, 294n1, 314
Foolish Virgins as eliciting empathy and Moses 165, 167, 174, 186
introspection 79, 111-112, 121
moral challenge to the viewer 105-106 nationalist historiography 77, 290
poses and gestures of the Foolish Neoplatonism 15, 51, 60, 396
Virgins 107-108, 112 neo-vitalism 148
resemblance between the Wise and Newman, Barbara 121
Foolish Virgins 98, 100-101, 103 Nicetas Choniates 244
resemblance to counterparts in the Nicetas Choniates’s De signis 245
vernacular dramas 105, 108-109, 111 condemnation of crusaders 246-248, 253,
See also Wise and Foolish Virgins 256, 259, 260
See also Wise and Foolish Virgins of Choniates’s understanding of charis-
Strasbourg Cathedral ma 246-248
Maguire, Henry 252 ekphrasis/charisma of ancient stat-
Major Legend 194 ues 245, 246, 249-260, 263
male revenge fantasy, genre 267-269, Helen of Troy 245-246, 248, 255-260
275-279, 286 sculpture of the eagle and the snake in
See also Tale of Jonathas the Hippodrome 248, 250-253,
See also misogyny 255-256
Manuel Chrysoloras 263 sculptures as symbols of historical
Marinus 52-53 continuity 261-263
Mary 143, 146, 349, 390 statue of Herakles 245-246, 249, 254
Virgin and Childs 363-364, 368, 372 “voices” of the statues 254-257
other representations 262, 377, 390 trope of reversal 244-246, 251
coronation of the Virgin 375-377 Nicholas III 62
nativity scenes 377, 393 Nicholas of Bari 65
See also Aachen Virgin and Child statuette Nikolaus Gerhaert von Leiden 349
(Rhenish, c.1350-60) Nine Female Worthies 213-214
See also Imad Madonna in Paderborn Nine Worthies 207-217, 218-237
(c.1051-58) declining interest in 16th century 233, 235
See also Michael Psellos inclusion in town halls 207-217, 218-237
Maximilian I 222, 313 nostalgic revival 235
Maximus of Tyre 53 origins and development 211-214
Melville, Gert 181, 290n1 representation by Eustache Deschamps, Il
Meredith, Peter 389 est temps de faire la paix (1387) and Si
Index 419
les héros revenaient sur la terre, ils Odilo of Cluny 58- 61

seraient étonnés (1396) 213 Odo of Orléans 83-84
representation by Jacob Van Maerlant, Van Odysseus 49, 230, 250, 260, 270, 274, 277n2
neghen den besten (1280s) 211 Olariu, Dominic 63
representation by Jacques du Longuyon, On Sublimity (Peri Hupsous) 12-15
Les Voeux du Paon (1312-13) 211 See also Longinus
representation by Jean Le Fèvre, Livre de See also sublime
Leesce (1373-87) 213 Opus Caroli Regis (formerly known as the Libri
representation by Tommaso di Saluzzo, Le Carolini) 161, 169-171
Chevalier Errant (c.1394) 212-213 Osterwald, Georg 235, 236
representation in Le Chevalier Errant
MS 212-213 Paglia, Camille 281
wooden figures of Council Chamber of paideia 246
Lüneburg town hall 235 Papamastorakis, Titos 261
See also Nine Worthies sculptural group in parable of the Rich Man (Dives) and the
the Hansasaal beggar Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) 88-
See also Nine Worthies sculptural group in 89, 111
Lüneburg town hall Paragone 370
See also Nine Worthies sculptural group in paradox 243, 252, 253, 309, 380, 403
the Schepenhuis in Mechelen See also trope of reversal
See also Georg Osterwald See also peripeteia
Nine Worthies sculptural group in the Passion, the 80, 225, 336n4
Hansasaal (c.1330) 208-209, 215-222 Peirce, Charles Sanders 246
arrangement 215 Pentcheva, Bissera 355-356
context in Jewish quarter 216 peripeteia 267, 277
influence of craft guilds (Gaffeln) on their personhood (persona) 142, 147-149, 175, 177,
inclusion 220 192-194, 199, 294-95
motivation for inclusion in town hall 209- embodied personhood 342
210, 216-222 Petrarch 157
patrician influence on inclusion 221-222 Psellos, Michael 142, 146
restoration in the 1860s 215-216 pilgrims and tourists 171, 175, 169, 250, 262
Nine Worthies sculptural group in the Pindar 49, 54
Schepenhuis in Mechelen (13th Plato 37, 52-53, 168
century) 223-226 Platonism 51-53, 66, 67n1, 168
arrangement 224-226 pleasure 49, 111n5, 253, 278, 348
motivation for inclusion in town hall 226, personification of 359-360
237 Plotinus 51-54
Nine Worthies stained-glass windows in pogrom 216
Lüneburg town hall (c.1410) 221-227 Polycarp 358
accompanying inscriptions 229-230 Porphyry 52, 56
arrangement 224 Potts, John 7, 143
effect of the medium 228-229 Pouchelle, Marie-Christine 67
motivation for inclusion/creation 220, power
222, 226, 228, 230, 232 insignia 302-303, 310-311, 312
restoration in 1853 229 staging (Inszenierung) of power 299-300,
Nixon, Richard 146 302, 315
Noble, Thomas F.X. 161, 165n1, 169, 171 See also charisma as hypnotizing, intoxicat-
non-violence 195 ing
420 Index
power (cont.) representation according to social/literary

See also charismatic rulership/leadership ideal types 61, 67-68, 292, 299-300,
See also Sigismund of Luxemburg 311, 308
See also Holy Roman Empire influence on medieval depictions of
Proclus 52-53 faces 68-69
prophecy Reutlingen, Hans von 364
charismatic prophets 8, 10, 220, 334 Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln 206, 369
prophetic statuary 263, 402 Richter, Jan Friedrich 380
Pythagoras (life of) 52, 56 Rilke, Rainer Maria 103
Romance of the Rose 359-360
Queen Elizabeth I 389-390 Rome 133, 158, 164, 167, 169, 202, 263, 296,
Queen Mary 389, 392 307
Quellenkritik 189 Rood of Boxley 391, 392
Quintilian 139, 142, 148 Rossellini, Roberto (The Flowers of St.
Francis) 195
Ramelli, Agostino (Le diverse et artificiose Rupert of Deutz 357
machine) 397 Rupert of the Palatinate 295
Holinshed, Raphael 389-390 Ruskin, John 148
Reagan, Ronald 198
Reeve, Matthew 77 Sabatier, Paul 190
Reformacion keyser Sigmunds (Reformatio salvation history 51, 211, 336-338
Sigismundi) 308 See also Last Judgment
relics 28, 79, 141, 159-160, 182, 244, 247, San Francesco, Assisi 326-330
261-262, 349, 375 Sano di Pietro 332
as imparting charisma 244, 357-358 Santa Croce, Florence 326-328, 330, 333
icons as relics 19n80, 244 Sartre, Jean-Paul 149
of Constantinople 244, 243-249 Sawday, Jonathan 397
See also reliquaries Scales, Len 309
reliquaries 61, 160, 349, 375 Schenk, Gerrit Jasper 300
as charismatic objects 350, 371 Schiffer, Irvine 10, 11
See also figural images…potential for Schlesinger, Arthur 141, 146
(divine) charisma Schmitt, Jean-Claude 135
of Charlemagne 160 Schneider, Joachim 300
of polychromed-wood 348-349, 352, 362 Scholasticism 63, 323, 334
reliquary busts 349-350, 368-370, 372, 375 Scintilla 164-167
reliquary of St. Foy in Conques 61, 79 See also De imagine Tetrici
See also Aachen Virgin and Child statuette Scot, Reginald, Discouerie of witchcraft 391,
(Rhenish, c.1350-60) 393, 396
See also reliquary bust of St. Barbara Scott, Karen 190
(Wissembourg, c.1465-67) Scragg, Leah 399-400
See also reliquary bust of St. Ida of Herzfeld sculpture
(c.1480) See Gothic sculpture
See also shrine of Gertrude of Nivelles Senne, Linda 105
(c.1272-98) Seven Works of Mercy 93
reliquary bust of St. Barbara (Wissembourg, sexual violence 269, 278, 279-281
c.1465-67) 349-350 See also Tale of Jonathas
reliquary bust of St. Ida of Herzfeld See also misogyny
(c.1480) 368, 370 Shakespeare, William 199, 276, 387
Index 421
A Winter’s Tale 387, 388, 398-401 Tailby, John E. 389

Sherwood, Merriam 392 Tale of Jonathas 267-286
Shrine of Gertrude of Nivelles (c.1272- confessional, autobiographical ele-
98) 363 ment 282-283
Shylock 276 in British Library Harleian 7333 280
Sigismund of Luxemburg (1410-37) 292, in British Library Additional 9066 280
294-297 Jonathas’s abject state 273-275
as a charismatic ruler 294-295, 297, 300, Jonathas and Fellicula’s role reversal 277-
expressed through coinage 302 279
expressed through seals 302-304 origins 267-268
innovations 303 overview of plot 269-270, 272
contemporary views of 296-298, 314 reception 267-272, 286
memory of Sigismund as a charismatic See also male revenge fantasy
ruler 291-292, 294-295, 297, 300, See also misogyny
302, 304, 307-311, 314-315 Tetricus 164-168, 172-173, 175
relationship with Nuremberg 160, 305 See Walahfrid Strabo
the “real” Sigismund 299-300 theater
Simpson, James 282 See early modern theater
Sohm, Rudolf 6-9 Theoderic the Great 164, 166-168
Solomon 165 See Walahfrid Strabo
Song of Songs 62, 202 Theodulf of Orleans
Strabo, Walahfrid See Opus Caroli Regis
De imagine Tetrici 163, 165-168, 171, 174 Thomas Aquinas 62, 63
See also Louis the Pious on charismata 335, 338-339
See also Godman, Peter Summa theologiae 335, 338-339
On Einhard 174 See also gratuitous grace
St. Paul 7, 8, 47-48 Thomas of Celano 63, 188-189, 196, 200
See also charisma as understood by St. Paul See also Francis of Assisi
St. Dunstan 390 Thompson, Augustine 185, 189-191, 197
Stained-glass Todorov, Tzvetan 398
See Nine Worthies sculptural group in Tommaso Morosini 248
Lüneburg town hall tourists
Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara See pilgrims and tourists
Strasbourg Cathedral Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le
See Wise and Foolish Virgins of Strasbourg discours, traduit du grec de Longin
Cathedral (1674) 13
stigmata 63, 193, 197 Trexler, Richard 197
historical reality of 190, 193, 199 Trístan und Isold 360
See also Francis of Assisi Tucker, Robert C. 9, 11
sublime 12-19 Turin Shroud 145
ancient sublime 12, 14-15
as understood by C. Stephen Jaeger 13, 17 Ugolino Boniscambi of Montegiorgio 191
hupsos/hypsos 12, 16-17, 128, 132 Ulrich von Richental 299, 300-302, 308
See also Longinus uncanny 145, 245, 398
See also On Sublimity (Peri Hupsous)
medieval sublime 13, 17-19, 142 Van Anrooij, Wim 211
Weber’s sublime of personality 129 Vauchez, André 68, 185, 197
Suger of Saint-Denis 358 Vermorel, Fred 278
422 Index
Vermorel, Judy 278 in St-Saveur in Charroux (c.1250) 115

Visio Wettini 167 in the Basilica of Saint Denis 86-87
See also Walahfrid Strabo on the cathedral portal at Erfurt in
Vita prima Bernardi (VP) 183, 185, 187, Thuringia (c.1330) 108, 110, 137, 138
196n35, 359 in the church of Sts. Peter and Paul in
See also Francis of Assisi…compared with Eguisheim (Alsace) 93-94
Vita prima Bernardi in the Rossano Codex 89
Von Aschbach, Joseph 297 in the Rothschild Canticles 89
on the St. Gall Portal at Basel Cathedral 91-93
Warburg, Aby 130 See also Magdeburg Cathedral
Warner, Marina 387 See also Wise and Foolish Virgins of
Wars of the Lüneburg Succession 226 Strasbourg Cathedral
Weber, Max passim Wise and Foolish Virgins on west facade of
See also charisma as understood by Max Strasbourg Cathedral (c.1280-
Weber 90) 79-86
Wenceslas IV of Bohemia 295 ambiguity to elicit empathy and reflec-
Wilkins, John (Mathematical Magic) 393, tion 120-121
396-397 as dramatizing and enacting virtue or vice/
William of St. Thierry 183, 185, 187 didacticism 80, 83-84, 87
Wilson Knight, G. 398-399n37 as understood by C. Stephen Jaeger 80,
Wilson, Bryan R. 11 83-84
winged altarpieces/retables 368-369, 375, comparison with portal at the northern
377 side of Cathedral’s west facade 118-
Aachen Dreiturmreliquiar (c.1360-80) 377 119
Kleiner Dom 377-379 compositional effect of Prince of the World
Lübeck Marienkirche (c.1425) 377 on interpretation 113-114
Marienstatt retable 375-377 pairing of Wise and Foolish Virgins 113
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 129 role of laughter of Foolish Virgins 115-116
Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25:32- See also Magdeburg Cathedral
41) 86, 88-91 See also Wise and Foolish Virgins
ambiguity of the parable 88 Wolf of Gubbio 191-194
attempts to visually equate the Wise/ wonder 17, 23, 27, 41, 76, 130-132, 249, 270,
Foolish Virgins with virtues/ 387, 399, 400, 408
vices 91, 93, 96 Wood, Christopher S. 262
exegetical attempt to distinguish between Word, the 7-8, 56n3, 357
the Wise and Foolish 89-91 World War II 198
disparity between visual and exegetical Worsley, Peter 9, 11
renderings of the parable 91
in Hocheppan castle chapel (Tyrol) 93 Ziolkowski, Theodore 386-387, 390, 398, 406

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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363809_001

Explorations in Medieval Culture

Larissa Tracy (Longwood University)

Tina Boyer (Wake Forest University)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/emc

Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte Miriam, editor. | Rust, Martha Dana, editor.

Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Faces and Surfaces of Charisma. An Introductory Essay 1

1 The Mask of Grace. On Body and Beauty of Soul between Late

2 Compassion as Moral Virtue: Another Look at the Wise and Foolish

3 Charisma and Material Culture 128

4 Charismatic Art and Biography in the Carolingian World 157

5 The Saint’s Life as a Charismatic Form: Bernard of Clairvaux and

6 Charismatic Rulers in Civic Guise: Images of the Nine Worthies in

7 Charisma and the Ideal Viewer in Nicetas Choniates’s De signis 243

8 Disenchantment: Hoccleve’s Tale of Jonathas and Male Revenge

9 The Emperorship of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1410-37): Charisma and

10 Medieval Franciscan Architecture as Charismatic Space 323

11 Precious-Metal Figural Sculpture, Medium, and Mimesis in the Late

Brigitte Bedos-Rezak and Martha Rust

0.1 Google Ngram for “charisma” 4

CCCM Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis. Turnhout,

Joseph Salvatore Ackley

Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak

Martino Rossi Monti

Faces and Surfaces of Charisma: An Introductory

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363809_002

entails representation.3 To study charisma is therefore to study representation,

From Charisma of Person to Charisma of Art, Via the Sublime and

Max Weber to C. Stephen Jaeger: From Charisma of Person to

The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual

Figure. 0.1 Google Ngram for “charisma,” August 20, 2017.

plary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a

Within a few paragraphs of this definition, Weber expands upon it by describ-

12 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 2 (emphasis added).

19 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 24.

experience of something being accomplished through me.”22 Putting it in

processes of mediation are also central to the workings of Jaeger’s charisma of

The Sublime, Charisma, Aura

39 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 23.

historical diffusion of Longinus’s disquisition, modern scholarship on the

sublime is more than convincing: it is compelling and irresistible.56 However it

56 Heath, “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime,” p. 12.

sublimity,64 thus situating both the modes (high-mindedness, great thought,

was an intersubjective dynamic that communicated high-mindedness and was

attention. In his Envy of Angels (1994), he presented an 11th-century culture of

as an alchemical operation that transformed a solid thing into a higher natural

78 Costelloe, “The Sublime,” p. 3.

Enchantment. Charismatic Art, Agency, Materiality

82 Eva Horn, “Introduction,” pp. 7, 9, 11, 16.

91 Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 15-22.

the aspects of a work of art that may be subject to charismatological analysis.94

96 See below in this introduction, Charisma: A Face-Lift.

whose real brilliance is a function of its admixture of illusion.97 In all of these

97 Jaeger, Enchantment, p. 22 and passim.

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