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APPENDIX 3 Vestigia deosculari: St. Efrem, Bavaria, and the Vita Mathildis posterior One of the most striking moments in the VMP occurs during its emotionally -charged account of Mathilda’s final farewell to Otto I at Nordhausen. After promising his mother that he would remain the convent’s protector and patron , Otto tearfully embraced her and prepared to depart. Mathilda, we are told, then “went into the church, rushed to where the emperor had stood during mass, and knelt down tearfully to kiss the footprints of her departing son” (ecclesiam ingressa propere ad locum tetendit, in quo imperator, dum missa cantabatur, steterat et flectens genua abeuntis filii lacrimando deosculabatur vestigia). Upon hearing of this from one of his retinue, Otto rushed back to his mother, fell prostrate before her, and “exchanged a few sorrowful words” before leaving, never to see her again.1 Apart from its dramatic impact, this episode is notable for Mathilda’s unusual gesture after Otto’s initial departure. In general terms, of course, her actions can be understood within the broader symbolic field of supplication and (self-) humiliation described by Geoffrey Koziol, where hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups were embodied through performances which emphasized relative “highness” and “lowness.” Lying at another’s feet, tending to them, or baring one’s own epitomized this distinction in ancient and medieval societies, and was incorporated into a variety of ritual vocabularies in the form of (among others) proskynesis (supplication at the feet of the ruler as an acknowledgment of his or her power, authority, and proximity to the divine) and deditio (self-abasement by wrongdoers, particularly rebels, before the ruler (including the baring of feet), and thus acknowledgment of their proper relationship of subordination).2 Within Christian discourse, moreover, “lowness” took on positive connotations as part of the NewTestament’s binary opposition between this world and the next, between St. Paul’s “old man” and “new man in Christ,” where salvation was identified with the inversion of  existing social distinctions.3 This reevaluation could be seen throughout Late Antique and medieval social ideology, from the recasting of Greco-Roman charity (euergetism) as self-denial rather than self-assertion, to the monastic tradition ’s insistence on self-abnegation as the key to eternal happiness, to the popes’ epithet “servant of the servants of God.” Mathilda’s devotion to Otto, at one level indexing his exalted position as ruler, thus also emphasized the paradoxical “exaltation of humiliation” discussed earlier, an inversion emphasized by Otto’s subsequent prostration at his mother’s feet.4 Yet while the symbolic significance of Mathilda’s gesture is relatively clear, its particular form—the kissing of footprints—was far less common.5 A similar turn of phrase appears in the Vulgate text of the Book of Esther, as Mordecai declares that “verily, I would have been ready to kiss his [Haman’s] footprints” in order to save Israel (etiam vestigia pedum eius deosculari paratus essem), a passage which could have inspired the author. Likewise, there is some resonance between our episode and the words of Psalm :: “We shall enter his tabernacle; we shall worship in the place where his feet once stood” (Introibimus in tabernaculum eius; Adorabimus in loco ubi steterunt pedes eius). It is notable, however, that this image also appears in a text of sacred biography—namely, the Vita Abrahae, the Latin translation of a fifth- or sixth-century Life of the Syrian holy man Abraham of Kiduna, apocryphally attributed to the Syrian ascetic St. Efrem († c. ).6 The second section of the Vita (which also appears to have circulated separately under the title Vita sanctae Mariae meretricis) relates how Abraham’s niece Mary, who had been living with him in monastic solitude, flees his care and becomes a prostitute. Abraham, disguised as a soldier, confronts her in the brothel, and at length persuades her to reform her ways and return to the desert. Upon accepting Abraham’s offer, the repentant Mary humbly tells him, “.l.l. command me and lo, I will do it. Go first, and I will follow and I will kiss your footprints as I go .l.l.” (.l.l. ecce et iubes, veniam: praecede, et ego sequar sanctitatem tuam, et exosculor vestigia tua .l.l.).7 There is very little information about the transmission of the Latin recension of the Vita Abrahae, the earliest exemplar of which is a seventh-century manuscript written in southern France and used around  for end leaves at the northern monastic scriptorium of...

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