The Anxiety of Clerical Celibacy: From Guibert of Nogent's "De quodam Galiciae peregrino a diabolo decepto" to Gonzalo De Berceo's "El romero engañado por el diablo"

Clerical chastity, or rather its absence, forms a central preoccupation in many of the twenty-five exempla collected in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora by the Riojan cleric Gonzalo de Berceo. As Antonio Sánchez Jiménez has pointed out, the majority of the characters in these stories are members of the clergy.¹ Continence, when not enforced through self-restraint, is imposed upon these wayward clerics by catastrophic punishment. Yet, miraculously, the Virgin redeems the perpetrators, reintegrating each of them into the ecclesiastical community where he serves as an example of chastity.

Nowhere is this cause and effect more dramatically traced than in miracle VI, "El romero engañado por el Diablo". Writing a century before Berceo, the northern French Benedictine abbot Guibert of Nogent (1053-1124) relates the same account in his autobiography, the Monodiae (1115). Both versions of the miracle share the same narrative core. In the story, a hapless pilgrim on his way to Santiago de Compostela suffers a fatal emasculation that, ironically, leads to his resurrection. Through his embrace of monastic orders and his repentance, the pilgrim ends his life in Christ-like chastity and obedience. The miracle's transformation through the span of more than a century reveals that St. Ambrose's views on the "scar of sexuality", as Peter Brown terms it (350), continued to preoccupy twelfth- and thirteenth-century religious institutions as they struggled to impose continence amongst their ranks.

To place Berceo's miracle VIII within this religious context, I trace its evolution through the twelfth-century sources known to date. As Brian Dutton has established, Berceo's miracle VII belongs to a storied European tradition of collections of Marian Miracles (2: 37). E. Michael Gerli adds that the "extra-textual life" of the miracles suggests that they derive from a long oral tradition (143). Although Berceo's exact source remains unknown to us, critics agree that Berceo's miracles bear a resemblance to those contained in the works of Jacobus Voragine, Vincent de Beauvais, and Gautier de Coincy (Sánchez Jiménez 541). In addition, Avelina and Fátima Carrera de la Red have noted that the miracle also appears in the works William of Malmesbury, Caesar of Heisterbach, Juan of Gobi, Jean Mielot, Hermann of Laon, Hugh Farsit, and Alfonso X (30). To these sources I would add that miracle VI is included in the Dicta Anselmi by St. Anselm (Southern, "The English Origins" 208) and in the autobiographical "confession" of Guibert of Nogent. I pay particular attention to the French abbot of Nogent's lesser-known version of the miracle, collected in his Monodiae, because it seems to be one of the earliest recorded versions. Completed in 1115, the Monodiae combines the confession of his monastic calling and a historical account of events, including miracles, that occurred in his diocese of Laon. As a comparison to Berceo's cuaderna via adaptation of the miracle, Guibert of Nogent's Latin prose account of the miracle and the narrative context in which it is embedded offer a twelfth-century historical framework within which to contextualize the Riojan's preoccupation with clerical laxity. The question of obedience and chastity in both accounts relates directly to the growth of the church as a political institution, and in Berceo's case it relates particularly to Cluniac and papal political ascendance and influence over northern Spain. Therefore, this cautionary exemplum hints at a higher purpose than merely attracting pilgrims to Berceo's monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla and entertaining them there for economic purposes, as Brian Dutton initially suggested (2: 12-13).² In addition, Guibert of Nogent's account offers a means of understanding the draconian punishment of emasculation that appears in both accounts, which, to our twenty-first-century sensibilities, seems disproportionate to the disobedience of the hapless pilgrim. I examine the motif of emasculation as an emblem of the narration of fall and redemption that comprises the pilgrim's physical...