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

Introduction Dark Age Bodies An image of an early medieval monk dressed in humble attire and kneeling under a vibrant red cross appears in Plate 1 of this book. The hands of the monk, graceful and eloquent, are extended in a gesture of supplication, and his tonsure signifies his world-renouncing status. Subjugated by the weight of the cross, the monk’s body appears to lean on the words running left to right across the page. Within the contours of his body, bold red letters stand out and link him to the cross hovering over his head. The red letters form a separate poem within the longer series of verses moving across the manuscript in a horizontal line. That poem reads: ‘‘O Christ, in your clemency and your holiness, I beseech you to protect me, Hrabanus, on the Day of Judgment.’’ The stanzas on the horizontal and vertical arms of the cross are identical: ‘‘O Wood, I pray to you, you who are an altar, that I may be carried up and placed on your heights.’’ Poetry clarifies the meaning of the holy man’s gesture : he is offering his body as a sacrifice at the onslaught of the apocalypse.1 The folio is from an acrostic poem of the ninth century, Hrabanus Maurus’s In Honor of the Holy Cross, a masterpiece that gives viewers a rare portrait of the artist. Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856) was a leading figure in the intellectual and spiritual world of the Carolingian Empire. His acrostics were renowned for their visual and verbal intricacy, especially the author ’s unrivaled talent for hiding poems within poems to be deciphered by the learned eye.2 Figures, such as the cross or the kneeling monk, serve as visual cues prompting viewers to find more verses in and around images. Hrabanus’s figural poem also represents the Carolingian propensity for coupling classical forms and Christian themes. In this instance, the literary styles of the Romans, Horace, Lucan, Lucretius, and Virgil, glorify the crucifixion.3 Hrabanus himself participates in this union of the classical and 2 introduction the Christian. He is both seer (vates) trained in heroic hexameter and monk, whose life is dominated by the cross. In his verse, Hrabanus calls on Christ to temper his desires, to eliminate his vices, and to replace his rebellious tongue with a pure mouth.4 The depiction of Hrabanus Maurus in figure 28 of In Honor of the Holy Cross exemplifies the major theme of Dark Age Bodies: the conception of the body in the early medieval enterprise of salvation. The book’s chief task is to reconstruct the gender ideology of clerical masculinity through an investigation of early medieval readings of the body. It also considers the ritual, spatial, and liturgical performances of that body within the imaginative landscapes of same-sex ascetic communities in northern Europe, with a special emphasis on the Carolingian era (ca. 751–987). Investigation of the body compels the contemporary interpreter of early medieval Christianity to confront notions of gender created through ninth-century ascetic practice, especially the use of the liturgical voice in the making of monastic masculinity. Architecture is an essential component of this study because the ascetic body was mirrored in the sacred spaces constructed by monks. Finally, the monastic body expressed the imperial ambitions of the religious leadership of the Carolingian Empire. The ensuing discussion demonstrates how the body of a monk served as a bridge between classical Rome and an encroaching Dark Age. Ascetic intellectuals believed that one particularly potent body part, the tongue, had the power to divide humanity into two opposite camps: those possessing Latin eloquence and those condemned to barbarous prattle. Pure Latin and fluent speech were prophylactics against secular savagery and the dark allures of the devil. The major textbook of the Carolingian era, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies (ca. 636), epitomizes the idea of the ‘‘Dark Age’’: the barbarous peoples of the empire, who were ignorant of the purity of the Latin language, corrupted Roman civilization through grammatical errors and uncouth speech.5 Carolingian writers believed that the Holy Spirit itself purifies the mouths of the most potent chanters in the empire’s monasteries.6 Monastic tongues were objects of ritual blessings, and cutting off an abbot’s tongue was a way of visibly declaring his impotence.7 It is appropriate then that the empire’s abbots were ‘‘buried beneath the choir bells, recalling how their tongues, as dedicated cymbals of the Holy Spirit...

Share