Susanna and English Communities

SUSANNA AND ENGLISH COMMUNITIES By LYNN STALEY The story of Susanna and the Elders, found in the apocryphal thirteenth chapter of Daniel, part of the Greek version of the Book of Daniel, is richly suggestive of its likely appeal to poets and artists. It is set during the Babylonian Captivity and recounts events concerning the Jewish community within Babylon. Susanna is the beautiful and chaste wife of a wealthy man, Joachim, whose home serves as a seat of justice for his fellow Jews. While bathing in their garden, Susanna is spied upon and accosted by two judges of Israel who frequent her husband's house. They invite her to satisfy both of them or suffer the penalty for a charge of adultery, which they will bring against her. She refuses, saying that she would rather fall into their hands than sin in the sight of God. She is tried unveiled before the people. Led off to execution, Susanna calls out to God, who stirs up the spirit of the young Daniel. Daniel's skill in separating the elders before asking for details of their evidence against Susanna reveals their perjury, and they are put to death by the crowd. The tale is certainly courtroom drama, but it is also a narrative of transgressions — of female chastity and modesty, of the household and property, of justice itself. Throughout the Middle Ages, the narrative was used to illustrate many types of lessons. The very early church put Susanna in the Commendatio animae, where she is invoked in a petition asking salvation from false witnesses . She was also used "as a locus around which exegetes formulated positions regarding marital chastity." Images of Susanna circulated among upper class Romans.1 Tertullian, Ambrose, Augustine, and Abelard, who addresses his treatment of Susanna to the nuns of the Paraclete, all use her as an example of chastity, and sometimes her story can be found in manuscripts associated with nuns.2 Daniel 13 is the epistle for the Saturday before 1 Kathryn A. Smith, "Inventing Marital Chastity: Iconography of Susanna," Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993): 3-24, at 3. My thanks to audiences at Fordham University and the University of Illinois for their comments about earlier versions of this essay. I also thank David LyIe Jeffrey for his astute reading for Traditio, Ralph Hanna for his comments regarding manuscripts and provenance, and Martin Chase for his encouragement. See Tertullian, "De corona," ed. A. Kroymann, in Tertulliani opera, vol. 2, CL 2 (Turnholt , 1954; repr., 1996); Ambrose, "De Joseph," ed. Carolus Schenkl, in Abrosii opera, CSEL 32, 2 (Prague, 1897), 73-112; "De Tobia," ibid., 519-73; "De uiduis," Verginitd e vedovanza, ed. Frank Gori, Biblioteca Ambrosiana 14, 1 (Milan, 1989), 244-318; Augustine, "Sermo CCCXLIII: De Susanna et Joseph," Revue bénédictine, 66 (1956): 28-38; Abelard, 26TRADITIO the third Sunday in Lent, where Susanna is linked with the woman taken in adultery, both illustrations of God's just and humane judgment. These same two examples are also linked to the Annunciation and questions about Mary's virginity.3 Following Saint Ambrose (see n. 2), some commentators associate her with Joseph, also falsely accused of and unjustly persecuted for sexual crimes. Ambrose and others praise Susanna for her silence and thus her faith and trust in heavenly justice (here, she can become a type of Christ), and some praise her for calling out in a loud voice, first in horror at the elders' demands, then, later in court, to God. Susanna also appears as the subject of several Latin poems and in poems to the Virgin.4 One of these Latin poems, a narrative account by the early thirteenthcentury Cistercian Alan of Melsa, is particularly arresting.0 Alan of Melsa is clearly aware of traditional ways of using the story of Susanna, but he focuses his account, first, through a conversion narrative that serves as a preface, which can be linked to the Cistercian language of conversion during the order's early period, and, second, through a profound emphasis upon law that seems germane to conditions in England during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Alan's urgent focus upon law, as well as his...