The Manly Priest. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux
and king lauded him for his behavior, the latter saying that the archdeacon “withstood him [the bishop] manfully and defended your Church right well.”27 The archdeacon himself was not above reproaching others who had failed in their duties to correct clerical behavior in their dioceses. He told a council of Irish clergy that “if the prelates from the days of Patrick, through so many rolling years had manfully, as their office demands, given themselves to preaching and instruction and likewise to rebuke and chiding, then would they have rooted out some of the great enormities of the nation.”28 Eadmer’s Historia Novorum in Anglia makes comparatively few uses of virile language, but, when he does, it is very suggestive.29 For instance, when describing how the archbishop Lanfranc defended monks in his realm, he portrayed the archbishop as a manly adversary. Lanfranc first defended the monks of Winchester against the designs of Bishop Walkelin, who desired to expel the monastic clergy from the cathedral chapter and install secular clerics in their place. Then, according to Eadmer, the secular bishops of England conspired to remove the monks at Canterbury. Lanfranc would not permit this, and he “opposed it with all his might and stood out manfully (viriliter) against the pressure and enmity of them all.”30
The defense of monastic leadership required the use of virile language. When Bernard of Tiron was preaching in Coutances, he was confronted by an archdeacon, his wife, and his children. The question, however, was not about clerical concubinage but about the right of monks to preach when they are supposed to be “dead to the world.” Clearly, many priests and secular clerics saw a vast difference between the clerical vocation and the monastic life. Bernard’s response was lengthy, drawing on biblical sources to defend his right to preach. In a thinly veiled criticism of Norman priests, Bernard drew on an analogy of hardness and softness. He admonished the archdeacon: “The preacher must have the strength of bone, because he must manfully (viriliter) resist sin and vice and bear hardship bravely in the defense of justice and holiness. The preacher must be harder than the soft flesh (mollitie carnis), because through harder abstinence he must remove carnal delight in pleasure from his existence and way of life and must not weakly allow his mind to be enslaved by softening vices.”31
Virile language appears frequently in descriptions of competition between monastic and secular clerics. Hugh the Chanter, a York chronicler, utilized such terminology in his discussions of the primacy dispute between Canterbury and York. Hugh, a secular cleric and York member, pointed out that the monks of Canterbury nefariously planned to have the newly installed archbishop of York make a profession to Canterbury. Hugh said, “the monks of Canterbury do not cease to aim at and shamelessly demand what is unjust; they think on it while awake and dream of it in their sleep.”32 Hugh’s portrayal of this event suggested that leadership was an issue of manliness. About the archbishop of Canterbury, he said, “let him be a man (viriliter), let him [the archbishop of Canterbury] call our archbishop elect [of York] to Canterbury to be consecrated, and refuse to consecrate him till he has made his profession.”33 Hugh’s chronicle also shows how the York clerics supported their archbishop, Thomas II, who was being pressured to make a profession of submission to Canterbury. The chapter reminded Thomas of how his predecessor refused to be cowed by the Canterbury contingent: “Look at Archbishop Gerard! How honest, how manly (viriliter), how excellent this action of his! He refused to sit in the council at London because Archbishop Anselm had been given a higher seat than himself, until a seat of equal dignity was made ready for him.”34
To define manliness, religious writers used a gendered language, one emphasizing virile action. By underscoring the masculine nature of the religious life, Christian writers of the reform era presented the virility of ascetic values and the manliness of struggle. Feminized language, such as the maternal imagery of a mothering abbot/Jesus was not used in a more “public” discourse.
Becoming a “New Man”: The Hegemony of Ascetic Manliness
What did Christian writers mean when they called on celibate men to act “manfully”? Manly action was part of a process to adopt ascetic/monastic manliness; writers presented this often in the motif of the “new man,” derived from the New Testament letter to the Ephesians (“that he might create in himself one new man”).35 In this manner, monastic writers particularly were able to highlight the superiority of the monastic life over the worldly; such assertions implied the superiority of monastic masculinity over clerical and aristocratic masculinity. In the context of eleventh and twelfth century Anglo-Norman religious writings, to become a “new man” was to abandon all worldly ambitions and the secular life and to adopt monastic manliness. For many, this meant the assumption of a new masculine identity, one based on self-control and chastity. In fact, writers presented entrance into the monastic life as the adoption of a new bodily comportment, one that profoundly marked the male body as impenetrable, disciplined, and orderly. This narrative is most apparent in texts written by monastic writers. While it is true that many of these texts were intended for monastic audiences, others, like Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History, were written for a literate audience of lay and religious. These texts conveyed a particular ideology of manliness that was defined by the ascetic male body.
At a time when many warriors entered monastic life, the theme of becoming a “new man” appeared frequently in monastic texts. From the eleventh century on, large numbers of knights entered monastic communities; as Katherine Smith has shown, their connection to their experiences of war was directly tied to the presentation of martial imagery in monastic texts.36 Anselm, while abbot of Bec, wrote a letter to a young man, William, to advise him regarding his desire to follow his brother to Jerusalem. Anselm instead admonished him to join the service of Christ at Bec and become a “soldier of such a king,” abandoning worldly desires and embracing the “heavenly Jerusalem.”37 Roger of Warenne, a knight, was persuaded by the preaching of Gerold of Avranches to become a monk and enter St. Evroul with his fellow knights; Orderic called his profession to monasticism “like one escaping from the flames of Sodom.”38
While scholars are very familiar with the motif of the warrior-turned-monk in medieval hagiography and other texts, I would suggest that this construct forms a larger narrative regarding the adoption of a superior form of manliness, a kind of persuasive rhetoric to reinforce this gender paradigm. Orderic Vitalis contributed to the “new man” model by presenting numerous illustrations of knights who renounced the world for monastic life, thereby asserting that monastic life was superior to the secular world. Orderic continued this motif by retelling the life of St. Guthlac, a seventh-century warrior, and, in doing so, set up a historical precedent for his readers; even in the distant past, manly warriors were conquered by the monastic life and took up a different, spiritual struggle. As a youth, Guthlac had given himself over to war and a warrior life, pillaging and destroying towns. One day he left his fellow warriors and entered a monastery, but finding this life to be lacking in the austerity he desired, Guthlac became a hermit, “where a man may wrestle with the enemy face-to-face.”39 Other warriors saw the value in transferring military virtu to the spiritual battlefield. Richard de Heudicourt, a knight from the Vexin, was wounded in battle, and, and on the advice of his lord, he decided “from that time forward to fight under the monastic rule by the practice of virtue (virtutum).”40
Orderic was not the only writer to illustrate the knightly conversion to monasticism. Gilbert Crispin’s vita of Herluin exemplifies the hegemony of monastic manliness and stresses how Herluin indeed became a “new man.” Herluin, a Norman knight of the highest caliber, answered the call to monastic life around age thirty-seven.41 Praised for his fighting ability and his use of arms, Herluin was a model of warrior masculinity, a man that any knight of his day would admire. Gilbert’s praise of Herluin as an ideal warrior enhanced his abandonment of the worldly life and his entrance into the contemplative one. In fact, Gilbert points out at the very beginning of Herluin’s vita that in Normandy “it was considered a monstrosity for a healthy soldier to put aside his arms and become a monk,”42 clearly alluding to the cultural perception of Norman manliness. Gilbert presented Herluin’s transition from a knight to a monk-in-training as his evolution into a “new man.” Like his training for war, Herluin devoted himself to learning the life of a monk: he ate little during the day despite