In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r 1 Prolegomenon on the Dating and Authorship of the Writings about Gerald of Aurillac Gerald of Aurillac is a familiar figure to scholars of the central Middle Ages, and his life has provided rare and intriguing glimpses into this era: its forms of individual piety, the relations between peasants and landowners, the methods of justice, and even the banality of violence. The traditional dating and attribution of the texts about Gerald of Aurillac are erroneous, however, and this error has had serious consequences for the conclusions that scholars have drawn from Gerald’s biography. Most have accepted the opinion, established in the late nineteenth century, that Odo of Cluny wrote a detailed vita for Gerald of Aurillac in about 930 and that another and unknown monk of Aurillac composed an uninteresting and greatly abbreviated version shortly thereafter. This assumption needs to be corrected and a more reliable authorship and dating for the Vita Geraldi and the other writings about Gerald of Aurillac need to be established. The Two Versions of the Vita Geraldi, One Real, One Forged Two versions of the Vita Geraldi exist, both of which identify Odo of Cluny as their author. The more detailed version, in two books known as the Vita Geraldi prolixior (hereafter Vita prolixior), is the one much better known to scholars.1 A much briefer version, the Vita Geraldi brevior (hereafter Vita brevior), is much less well known.2 The longer version includes accounts of Gerald’s death and of posthumous miracles, usually numbered as books 3 10 chapter 1 and 4 (as they are in the PL), although both are also titled in some early manuscripts, as will be explained below. In addition, an early sermon and a collection of additional miracle stories also survive. The most damning evidence against Odo of Cluny’s authorship of the longer version of the Vita Geraldi are the errors in it not found in the briefer version. Foremost among them is Gerald’s misidentification as a count, repeated three times in the Vita prolixior but never once claimed in the Vita brevior. There is no other evidence for there ever having been a count in Aurillac, nor is there likely to have been one in Gerald’s day, since there was a count already with jurisdiction over the area (he was William the Pious, count of Auvergne and duke of Aquitaine). The error was compounded through several episodes in which Gerald acted as a count, for example, hearing important judicial cases when he would not have had the authority to do so, which scholars have tried with some difficulty to explain.3 Most of the errors in the Vita prolixior are difficult to imagine as having been made by Odo of Cluny, writing at Aurillac within a generation of Gerald’s death. The Vita prolixior claims that Gerald had been born ‘‘in the fort or town of Aurillac [oppido vel villa Aureliaco]’’ (1.1), something the Vita brevior does not, but there was no Aurillac in Gerald’s day: the archeological record confirms that the town sprang up around the monastery that Gerald founded only after Gerald’s death.4 (The Vita brevior [1] says instead that Gerald was born on the border of Auvergne near Cahors and Albi; the Vita prolixior [1.1] oddly repeats this information, too, even though these towns are each over a hundred kilometers distant from Aurillac .) The church that Gerald is said to have erected at Aurillac, moreover, is described in the Vita prolixior (2.5) as having been ‘‘built in a round design [arcuato schemate fabricare]’’ and erected next to a church dedicated to Saint Clement that his father had built. The Vita brevior gives neither of these details. Yet the archeological evidence has revealed neither a rounded shape to the original church, nor foundations sufficient for a vaulted roof, as some have suggested the phrase should be understood, nor any evidence for a second nearby church structure, and scholars have struggled to reconcile this evidence with the claims made in the Vita prolixior. This first church would have been the one still standing when Odo was at Aurillac, so it is difficult to understand him as having made this mistake, although it is easy enough to imagine a later forger as having mistaken the second church there—a larger structure built later in the tenth century with a rounded apse—for the original.5...

Share