Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West

Epilogue

Epilogue In a homily written for the dedication of a church, Hrabanus Maurus makes a direct connection between bodies and buildings. He exhorts his fellow monks (fratres charissimi) to transform the interior spaces of their bodies into temples of God complete with all the trappings and rituals associated with Carolingian sacred space: wall paintings, candelabra, voices stirred by the power of chant, and holy readings. Hrabanus reasons that the internal nature of a monk should be an eternal liturgy as enduring as mortar and stone, yet composed of blood and sinew.1 The body of a monk chanting ‘‘Amen’’ or ‘‘Alleluia’’ in a basilica like the one depicted on the Plan of Saint Gall (Figure 6.18) shatters the division between the carnal and the spiritual and lifts the body of the chanter into the abode of the angels. No lay body could so transcend the physical. Externally and internally, sacred architecture and liturgical practice frame the religious experience of monks and cultivate the singularity of the monastic body. The authority of that monastic body outside of the safe realm of religious discourse was quite another matter. Hrabanus Maurus lived in an era when abbots served at the whim of secular potentates and when relations between the two groups could go sour even after decades of mutual accord. Hrabanus ’s life underscores this point. Like a number of his colleagues, Hrabanus lost his post as abbot of the premier monastery in the eastern half of the Carolingian Empire when the political tide turned against him. Before his expulsion from office, Hrabanus had experienced anxiety at the impending visit of a Carolingian monarch and had worried that a royal entourage would disrupt the rhythms of Fulda’s cloister. Hrabanus’s tenure as abbot also draws attention to the fact that kinship networks, such as the relationship between Abbot Hrabanus and his brother Count Guntram, extended into the monastery and forced holy men into the profane world outside. On the brink of political disaster, Hrabanus and Guntram negotiated a desparate land ex- 248 epilogue change in the hope of saving their family’s properties from seizure by Louis the German.2 Monarchs and aristocrats like Louis the German or Guntram left their mark on monastic space. Although architectural historians no longer interpret the westwork of a monastery as a Kaiserkirche, a ceremonial space set apart for kings, the makers of the Plan of Saint Gall did create lodgings for the traveling nobility, their horsemen, and their servants. In response to the presence of the military aristocracy in the monastery, the Plan’s architects embellish the secular authority of the abbot by outfitting his house with classicizing loggias. Chapter 6 describes the abbot’s house as possessing a ‘‘masking façade,’’ that is, a façade that conceals and dissimulates as much as it displays (Plate 7). The residence dissimulates in that it communicates the worldly authority of the abbot to the viewer of the Plan while concealing the degree to which he as an individual is immersed in the body. The Plan’s designers wanted to have it both ways. The abbot on the Plan is a potentate operating in an opulent secular context as evidenced by the Roman-style porticus, a space reserved for the exercise of power, and a solarium, a lofty symbol of royal authority.3 Simultaneously, he is an ascetic grafted on to the corporate body of the monastery, which protects him from the perils of luxuria . Hrabanus Maurus’s figural poem achieves much the same thing. As an author Hrabanus downplays his role in the creation of the text by scattering his name at every eighth word of every eighth line (Figure 1.1). He is there, yet not there, named and not named, central and peripheral. Hrabanus’s individuality as an artist is suppressed, but the method he uses to subsume himself in his work underscores his genius. Monastic constructions of gender also can be characterized as ‘‘masking façades.’’ Like the abbot’s loggia on the Plan, monastic gender expresses the imperial ambitions of the religious leadership of the Carolingian Empire. Commentators on the Rule Hildemar of Civate and Smaragdus of SaintMihiel explain how the art of classical oratory is transferred to the Christian monastery, where classical speech is perfected through the agency of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The early medieval monastery is a citadel of oratory, and monks use their status as heirs to the political prowess of Roman orators to carve...