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c o n c l u s i o n Memory, Sanctity, Violence Saint Gerald is virtually unknown today except to scholars of the Middle Ages. He no longer functions convincingly as a saint. Vestiges of Gerald’s saintly memory still linger at Aurillac and also in the towns and villages where his churches still stand, although many of the residents with whom I spoke during my travels were hard pressed to come up with any details of his life. It is also true that in a few locations Gerald’s holy reputation has been revived: the modern hostel for pilgrims in O Cebreiro, Galicia, is now named after Saint Gerald, thanks to a historically minded priest.1 Still, it is a fractured memory at best. Let us return to the pretty chapel at Auris-en-Oisans with which I began. It may have been built as early as the eleventh or twelfth century, in the greatest fullness of Gerald’s fortunes. By 1454, when the bishop of Grenoble passed through his visit to the district, it lay half-ruined, an apt symbol of Gerald’s own dimming renown.2 Bouange briefly mentioned the tiny chapel in his nineteenth-century biography of Saint Gerald, a work that struggled mightily to hold onto the saint’s fading memory; he claimed that this chapel’s patron had preserved the local folk from the cholera epidemic of 1854.3 But most of its history, like so much about Saint Gerald, is utterly lost. A grainy and undated photograph in the local archives shows a mass being conducted in front of the chapel in what seems, to judge from the clothing styles, to have been the 1940s or 1950s.4 But nothing happens there anymore. The memory of Saint Gerald has always been at risk of ruin, as I have argued throughout this book, placed too close to the edge of oblivion. Odo of Cluny first composed a vita for Saint Gerald in about 930 only a decade or two after Gerald’s death. Perhaps Aimon and Turpin pressured him into doing it, hoping to glorify a relation, probably recommending the fashioning 188 conclusion of a saintly founder as the best way to ensure the success of the monastery Odo was reforming. It was brief and straightforward, filled as much with reminders to the monks of Aurillac about the principles of the monastic life as with real incidents from Gerald’s life. As he wrote the vita, he infused it with random thoughts drawn from his own life, having lived a childhood and adolescence much like those of Gerald before his own determined break with this life’s path. Forced into imagining the life he himself might have led, Odo might have resisted any regrets by offering misgivings about the real holiness of a life led outside the cloister. Maybe he even went so far as to invent Gerald’s semipacifism and semimonasticism as a means of excusing Gerald’s refusal to abandon the world. Odo’s Saint Gerald was but halfformed . Almost a full century later in the 1020s, Ademar of Chabannes decided to bolster the cause of Gerald’s sanctity: to finish the making of the saint, as it were. He might have done it to honor or flatter the powerful men of Limoges, who may have been related to Gerald, or perhaps he did it for his own aggrandizement or that of his family. He began simply enough, adding short accounts of Gerald’s death and his posthumous miracles to Odo’s vita so as to end it properly. But he couldn’t quite stop thinking about Saint Gerald, adding a sermon and additional miracle stories before deciding to rewrite Odo’s vita in his own words. Within this forgery he gave himself free rein, taking the episodes from the existing vita and mixing in new elements apparently borrowed from other saints or from contemporary discussions of violence and peace, and even granting Gerald the false title of count. Throughout it all he castigated and threatened with holy retribution those who doubted or ignored Gerald’s worthiness. For a few centuries, this recast Saint Gerald flourished. Popular devotion configured Saint Gerald in diverse ways: as patron and benefactor to the poor and the peasant, as model and mirror to the military man and the monk. An enlarged church and sculpted likeness further enhanced Gerald’s saintly standing, together offering an appealing focal point for devotion to him. The...

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