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c h a p t e r 2 The First Saint Gerald The earliest remembrances of Gerald come from one of the most prominent monastic reformers of the central Middle Ages, Odo of Cluny. This is, once again, the Vita brevior (an English translation of which appears in Appendix 1 from my own critical edition) and not the better-known Vita prolixior. Why a man so devoted to the monastic ideal should have been willing to praise the saintliness of a layman is a difficult question. If we read with a modern (or, perhaps, a postmodern) sense of skepticism, however, we see revealed a hagiographer who did not so much craft a new model for noble holiness through his portrayal of Gerald as he wrestled with his own regrets and then resolved them by casting doubts on Gerald’s sanctity. Odo and Aurillac It seems likeliest that Odo wrote his version of the Vita Geraldi while or shortly after he was abbot of the monastery of Aurillac. Although it is not mentioned in Odo’s biography, he lived there probably in late 928 and/or early 929.1 Odo was in his early fifties then.2 He was already abbot of Cluny and remained so throughout his time at Aurillac; as he was also reforming other monasteries, he may not have spent more than a few months there. How long after Gerald’s death Odo arrived is impossible to know: we don’t know either the years of Gerald’s birth or of his death. The earliest mention comes from Ademar of Chabannes, who said that Gerald was born in 855 and died on October 13 in 906.3 Bernard Itier, who also noted Gerald’s birth and death dates in his late twelfth-century chronicle also written at Limoges, gave them as 836 and 887, respectively, though this is probably too The First Saint Gerald 45 early.4 The earliest manuscripts to record the year of Gerald’s death, both thirteenth-century ones, give it as 918.5 Since Gerald’s more detailed biography said that he died on a Friday, and since October 13 did not fall on a Friday in any of these three years, most scholars move that date to the nearest year in which it did (Gerald’s nineteenth-century biographer, for example, thought it should be 909, and Bultot-Verleysen prefers 920) yet it is easy to imagine why a hagiographer should want to place Gerald’s death on a Friday, that is, to recall Jesus’ death, so there is no need to make this change.6 Depending upon which, if any, of these dates is accurate—887, 906, or 918—it means that Gerald had been dead for perhaps as few as ten or as many as forty years when Odo wrote about him, but likelier between ten and twenty-three years. What brought Odo to Aurillac is difficult to say. Cluny was over three hundred kilometers distant from Aurillac. And even while Cluny would eventually become the heart of a monastic empire encompassing Aurillac as well as most other monasteries in this region, that day was still far off, so when Odo finished with his reform of Aurillac, he left it to its own fate. Insofar as we can tell, once Odo left he never visited Aurillac again.7 There was not much to Aurillac in Odo’s day. There is some material evidence of settlement in the district from the beginnings of the Common Era, and the name may be derived from Aurelius, perhaps a Roman nobleman who owned land there.8 It would not take long for a town to form around the monastery that Gerald founded along the Jordanne River, but it was not there yet. A castle on a nearby hill may have overlooked the monastery ; more likely, though, it did not yet exist. Odo mentioned no castle at Aurillac in his version of the Vita Geraldi, so it is one of the elements that Ademar added, and given that there were few castles at all in the mid-ninth century when Gerald was born, especially in Auvergne, Ademar may well have been mistaken.9 There were no natural geographical connections between Cluny and Aurillac. The upper Auvergne region where Aurillac lies is now extraordinarily picturesque, but in the central Middle Ages it probably seemed more foreboding than idyllic. The Jordanne still meanders through Aurillac before joining first the Cère and then the Dordogne, and...

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