Reading the Juggler of Notre Dame E-Book

Jan M. Ziolkowski

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In this two-part anthology, Jan M. Ziolkowski builds on themes uncovered in his earlier The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Here he focuses particularly on the performing arts.

Part one contextualises Our Lady’s Tumbler, a French poem of the late 1230s, by comparing it with episodes in the Bible and miracles in a wide variety of medieval European sources. It relates this material to analogues and folklore across the ages from, among others, Persian, Jewish and Hungarian cultures. Part two scrutinizes the reception and impact of the poem with reference to modern European and American literature, including works by the Nobel prize-winner Anatole France, professor-poet Katharine Lee Bates, philosopher-historian Henry Adams and poet W.H. Auden.

This innovative collection of sources introduces readers to many previously untranslated texts, and invites them to explore the journey of Our Lady’s Tumbler across both sides of the Atlantic.

Reading the Juggler of Notre Dame: Medieval Miracles and Modern Remakings will benefit scholars and students alike. The short introductions and numerous annotations shed light on unusual beliefs and practices of the past, making the readings accessible to anyone with an interest in the arts and an openness to the Middle Ages.

Leseprobe

Reading the Juggler of Notre Dame

Reading the Juggler of Notre Dame

Medieval Miracles and Modern Remakings

Jan M. Ziolkowski

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2022 Jan M. Ziolkowski

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes, providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Jan M. Ziolkowski, Reading the Juggler of Notre Dame: Medieval Miracles and Modern Remakings. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0284

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ISBN Paperback: 9781800643680

ISBN Hardback: 9781800643697

ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800643703

ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 9781800643710

ISBN Digital ebook (AZW3): 9781800643727

ISBN XML: 9781800643734

ISBN HTML: 9781800646698

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0284

Cover image: Leon Guipon, ‘Lightly down from the dark descends the Lady of Beauty’ (1907), published in Edwin Markham, ‘The Juggler of Touraine’, Century Magazine (December 1907), p. 231.

Cover design by Anna Gatti.

To Nola and Tullia,

Cayden and Brennan,

your Boppa’s mime-playing

on the Capitoline Hill

Contents

Overview

xi

Part 1: “Our Lady’s Tumbler”: Sources and Analogues, Medieval to Modern

1

Introduction

3

1. The Medieval Story

9

A. “Our Lady’s Tumbler”

13

B. The Table of Exempla, in Alphabetical Order: “Joy”

29

2. The Bible and Apocrypha

33

A. “The Dancing of David before the Ark”

33

B. “The Dancing of Mary before the Altar”

35

C. “The Widow’s Mite”

37

3. The Life of the Fathers

39

A. “Miserere”

42

B. “Goliard”

45

4. The Pious Sweat of Monks

49

A. Cistercian Miracles of Monks Working

49

B. Gautier de Coinci, The Miracles of Our Lady: “A Monk of Chartreuse”

63

5. The Jongleur and the Black Virgin of Rocamadour

69

A. The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: “On the Wax Form That Came Down upon a Viol”

74

B. Gautier de Coinci, The Miracles of Our Lady: “Of the Candle that Came Down to the Jongleur”

74

C. Alfonso X the Wise, Songs of Holy Mary: “The Jongleur of Rocamadour”

83

6. The Jongleurs and the Holy Candle of Arras

87

A. “The Foundation of the Jongleur Confraternity in Arras” (in Latin)

90

B. “The Foundation of the Jongleur Confraternity in Arras” (in French)

97

C. “The Arrival of the Holy Candle”

104

D. Alfonso X the Wise, Songs of Holy Mary: “The Two Jongleurs of Arras”

123

7. The Fiddler and the Holy Face of Lucca

127

A. “The Report of Deacon Leobinus”

131

B. “The Silver Shoe of the Holy Face, Offered Miraculously to a Pauper”

136

8. The Fiddler and the Bearded Lady

139

A. Hans Burgkmair the Elder, “Saint Kümernus”

141

B. Brothers Grimm, “The Saintly Woman Kummernis”

143

C. Justinus Kerner, “The Fiddler at Gmünd”

145

9. The Dancer Musa

147

A. Gottfried Keller, “A Little Legend of Dance”

147

B. Ludwig Theoboul Kosegarten, “The Legend of the Virgin Mary”

153

C. Gregory the Great, “The Passing Away of Young Musa”

154

D. Jacques de Vitry, Sermons to the People

155

10. The Roman Report of “The Old Mime-Player”

157

11. The Persian Tale of “The Old Harper”

159

A. Moḥammad ebn Monawwar, The Mysteries of Unification

160

B. Farid al-Din ‘Aṭṭār, Saints’ Lives and The Book of Afflictions

161

C. Rumi, “The Old Harper”

164

D. Khvāju-ye Kermāni, The Garden of Lights

168

E. Moḥammad Amin, The Sea of Chronicles

171

F. Jalāl Āl-Aḥmad, “The Setār”

172

12. The Hasidic Tale of “The Little Whistle”

177

Martin Buber, “The Little Whistle”

178

13. The Western Reality of Religious Performers

181

A. Saint Paschal Baylon

181

B. Saint John Bosco

182

C. Ruth St. Denis

183

D. Mireille Nègre

184

E. Nick Weber

186

F. Sister Anna Nobili

187

14. The Hungarian Tale of “The Fool”

189

Dezsö Malonyay, “The Fool”

191

15. Henri Pourrat, “Péquelé”

195

Part 2: “The Juggler of Notre Dame”: Reception from Fin-De-Siècle France to Late Twentieth-Century America

203

Introduction

205

1. The Romance Philologists

211

Wendelin Foerster, Introduction to “Our Lady’s Tumbler”

215

2. The Medievalizer Félix Brun

219

3. The Poetaster Raymond de Borrelli

225

4. The Writer Anatole France

233

5. The Composer Jules Massenet

243

6. The Professor-Poet Katharine Lee Bates

275

7. The Philosopher-Historian Henry Adams

279

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: “Les Miracles de Notre Dame”

282

8. The Poet Edwin Markham

287

9. The Children’s Book Writer Violet Moore Higgins

299

10. The Radio Narrator John Booth Nesbitt

309

11. The Mid to Late Twentieth-Century Poets

317

A. Patrick Kavanagh

317

B. W. H. Auden

319

C. Virginia Nyhart

324

D. Turner Cassity

327

E. Virginia Hamilton Adair

328

Further Resources

333

Editions (and French Translations)

333

English Translations

334

Manuscript and Print Versions of the Medieval Poem and of Anatole France’s Story

334

Old-Time Radio: Printed Scripts

335

Television and Film

335

Illustrated Children’s Books Devoted to the Story

336

Story Books and Activity Books That Include the Story

336

Graphic Novels

337

Miniature Book (“Little”)

337

Music

337

Bible Quotations and Citations

339

Acknowledgments

Notes

341

Part 1

343

Part 2

401

List of Illustrations

443

Index

447

Overview

© 2022 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0284.29

How does the tale about the juggler of Notre Dame go? The story just about always runs something like this: a medieval performer grows weary of wayfaring and sick of sideshows. Instead, he longs for the opportunity to settle down and express his faith. Alienated from the secular milieu, he joins a monastery. Unfortunately, this about-face leaves him not a bit happier. Once cloistered, he soon recognizes how hopelessly unqualified he is for monasticism. The erstwhile entertainer does not know the liturgy, the Latin language, or such rudiments of monkish etiquette as when to keep silent and when to speak. The realization of his utter unsuitability leads him to despair of his present monastic life, as much as he had done recently of his prior worldly one. But eventually he finds a way out by devising a ritual thoroughly his own that makes him feel less useless: whenever his fellow monks chant the divine office together in the choir of the church, he slips down by himself to the crypt and tumbles or juggles before an image of Mary there.

The brethren, once aware of this unconventional conduct, denounce their comrade. When they bring the head of their community to spy on his routine, the little gang is at first outraged. What arrant blasphemy! The newcomer’s dancing not only violates the decorum of their worship through its irreverence but, still worse, conflicts in its individualism with the strict conformity that monastic obedience requires. Yet shortly thereafter, they behold a miracle that forces them to rethink. First their colleague collapses, bathed in sweat from the rigors of his performance. Then the Mother of God reveals herself and comforts him. The abbot, in his wisdom, perceives and explains the significance of the Virgin’s apparition and intercession. Under his guidance, the other monks concede how misguided their assumptions have been. No longer condemning the tumbler as sacrilegious, they go on to extol and emulate him as saintly.

This narrative secured a modest toehold in the written records of France from the early thirteenth century up through the late Middle Ages, first as a poem and later as a preaching exemplum, only to vanish from view from then until 1873. After its rediscovery, the tale scaled the cultural ladder. Early on, it escaped from the confines of scholarship by being paraphrased, translated, and transformed into short stories and versifications. Rung by rung, it made the transition from opera to radio, television, and film. Simultaneously, poets, both major and minor, laid claim to it.

At first blush, the story may look too straightforward to allow much scope for creativity. Nonetheless, for a hundred years after its recovery in 1873, it evidenced remarkable malleability and multiplicity. Not a single retelling or reenactment of it in any medium failed to introduce unexpected elements and angles. Nowadays, however, the juggler’s miracle has not demonstrated much of a capacity to survive and even thrive through adaptation. On the contrary, it has slipped far down from the privileged post in cultural literacy it once occupied. A few charming specimens of it linger in children’s literature, but otherwise it shows faint signs of life.

Why did the tale exercise such intense appeal seven hundred years ago, only afterward to be relegated to obscurity? Why did it regain or even intensify its magnetic hold over audiences in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and maintain it through the close of the twentieth, but then lose its magic touch in our own twenty-first? In sum, why did it twice emerge from a void to prosper, when countless other stories were ignored and even perished?

This collection is envisaged as a treasure chest partitioned into two well-stocked halves. If you throw open the lid of this stout coffer (and it is meant never to be locked but instead always to stand open to all prospective admirers), the first item to greet your eyes will be a gem of verse from early thirteenth-century France, not record-breakingly huge but brilliantly multifaceted. The precious stone in question has been commonly called “Our Lady’s Tumbler” (after Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame, the medieval French name for the poem that the first editor appropriated) and “The Juggler of Notre Dame” (after Le Jongleur de Notre Dame, the present-day French title that rapidly displaced the original one).

However we designate the story, it looks at first glance to be short but sweet and simple as can be. For all that, more minute inspection proves that the seeming simplicity is illusory. In modern metamorphoses of the tale, both the earthly and heavenly protagonists have varied. The principal male part has been not merely a juggler, jongleur, and tumbler, as the titles previously quoted would imply, but also an acrobat, clown, dancer, and jester. He has dedicated his craft to another heavenly power such as God or an angel, not to the Virgin Mary. The variability is reflected in titles of children’s literature such as The Clown of God, The Acrobat & the Angel, and The Little Jester, where the modification of both roles obscures the relationship of new treatments to the old story. Adults who have never heard of “Our Lady’s Tumbler” or “The Juggler of Notre Dame” may carry within them hazy childhood memories of one or more of these other books, but the very elasticity of the tale, so long one of its strengths, has interfered with its recognizability. Nor does the heterogeneity stop there with the hero and the object of his veneration. The image for which he gives his all may be a painting, statue, or some other artwork. The miracle bestowed on him may take the form of a flower, a gesture of the hand, a smile, or the swipe of a towel to wipe away sweat. So much for simple.

A moment ago, this volume was likened to a jumbo-sized jewelry box. The top tray within it has three bays. The first offers, as already mentioned, a translation of the thirteenth-century poem. But that is not all: next come possible sources of inspiration from the Bible and from a medieval work known as “The Life of the Fathers.” Another space in the tray can assist readers who are curious to compare the tale of the minstrel with other miracles, mostly relating to Mary, from medieval western Europe that show strong similarities to the tale of the minstrel. Lastly, a third area of this first level makes accessible, for the purposes of comparison, parallels to the basic components of this tale that can be identified in texts and traditions from very different places and times. These artifacts, mostly literary but from time to time biographical, are generally far removed in miles from Europe and in centuries from the Middle Ages; a few even lie distant both geographically and chronologically. Did they share any of our story’s ancestry, influence it, or arise altogether autonomously?

Beneath the top tray in this compilation resides a second compartment that encourages readers to explore how audiences and artists have reacted to the thirteenth-century French narrative poem since the excitement that greeted its recovery in the late nineteenth century. Within a few decades, the original was eclipsed by modern re-creations. They had one heyday after another as the tale seeped from one medium into the next, until its final glory days in the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, the leading man and the miracle in which he participated have persisted worldwide mainly in the subculture of children’s books.

Put together, the two parts of this compendium bring home the benefits and delights that the study of cultural and literary history can deliver through the reading and analysis of premodern texts in tandem with their subsequent recasting. Culture, counting literature, operates according to its own elaborate, unpredictable, and not seldom mystifying principles. For much of the twentieth century, the appearances and reappearances of a given story were regarded as conforming to laws of cause and effect, termed “source and influence” by literary critics of those days. Later, beginning fifty years ago or so, the newer models of reader-response criticism and especially of reception theory instead sought to emphasize the fresh contributions and innovations that each perusal produces. The thinking became that every individual who interprets a text generates novel meanings.

Among other main functions that this book has been designed to fulfill, one of the most fundamental relates to the intrinsic nature of literature. The materials contained here sprawl across an impressive spectrum. Fast and furious, we have hurtled ever deeper into an era in which communication depends predominantly on pixels glimmering on screens along with sounds rumbling forth from speakers. The subject matter enclosed within these covers can empower us to gaze back and probe the problems and promises presented by earlier phases of culture, with their radically dissimilar media. Our forebears relied more heavily than we do on ink, first written on parchment and later pressed on paper, to record words in writing. Each mode, quills from birds plied across hides from animals (supplemented by styluses scratched into beeswax on wooden tablets), movable type imprinted on sheets of dried pulp, and dots glowing on flat panels, has had its own characteristic fragility, durability, and dynamism. The medium may not be all the message, but the two are indisputably interconnected.

The question of why the literary materials pertaining to the tumbler or juggler warrant our attention can also elicit other responses. For one, these gleanings grant insights into the depth and diversity that characterize the cultures of western Europe in the Middle Ages. They also give glimpses into the manifold and sometimes mistaken understandings that those from later epochs have evolved with respect to that period. Like any other phase of human development, the medieval European one entailed its share of breathtaking good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and conservation and innovation. Such olden times should not be viewed solely through rose-tinted glasses. Then again, they should not be damned as nothing more than a dry run for the ills and wrongs perpetrated by successive civilizations, of course not excluding our own. Rather, they ought to be judged on their own terms. For obvious reasons, they lacked the benefit of hindsight: how could they have foreseen that they would commit injuries and injustices by not operating in alignment with our values? If misty-eyed nostalgia can have its pitfalls, so too can its inverse of sitting in judgment on bygone days and pinpointing in them telltale signs of what we now have the wisdom to censure as moral shortcomings.

A second justification for the subject matter selected and assembled here is that it enables its users to confront the age-old interactions and frictions between individuality and community. In this interplay, collective concerns within cultures stir craftsmen of words and other artforms to compose and recompose stories. A perennial chicken-or-the-egg asks how much of history is prescribed by the force of specific personalities, once labeled “great men,” as opposed to overarching trends within economics, politics, culture, and nature that sweep along nations and now and then even the whole of humanity. What owes to larger dynamics within societies, and what to the temperaments, talents, and wills of individuals? How much freedom do we really have to affect others, or even just to determine ourselves?

Third, the readings bring us up against the eternal mystery of body and soul. Under many circumstances worship hinges on prayer that adheres to fixed verbal formulas, while at other times it centers on rituals that fulfill prescribed bodily movements. Where does the athleticism of the tumbler’s dance fit? Are his motions the physical equivalents of words, are they his idiosyncratic expression of liturgical movements, or are they something totally separate?

The paramount objectives behind the book are comparative, impelled by a humanistic conviction that, as fellow human beings, we may learn from one another. By pinpointing and meditating upon similarities and dissimilarities among persons, objects, and actions, we may gain sensitivity to gradations and nuances. In this case, the points of departure for comparison happen to be literary—multiple versions of a single tale, along with analogues to it.

Thanks to mass culture and especially to the animation of the Walt Disney Company, many have heard of The Hunchback of Notre Dame or seen it adapted on the screen, even if they have little or no awareness that the hefty novel behind it was written in 1829 by a French man of letters. In contradistinction, the narrative behind “The Juggler of Notre Dame,” composed six hundred years earlier by an anonymous countryman of Victor Hugo’s (or is it anachronistic to retroject the concept of the nation-state onto the Middle Ages?), has fallen into oblivion. Why should anyone bother with a quaint text from so long ago? Life is devastatingly short, while books are dauntingly plentiful. What renders this tale noteworthy in its own right, as well as important in cultural history for the sway that it has held over later authors, composers, and other artists and their audiences? How can the story, and the story of the story, enlighten us about the essence and operation of literature and culture? Last but not least, what light can the narrative shed on the human condition—on human beings, human behaviors, and human values—in the Middle Ages, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and right now?

The full title Reading the Juggler of Notre Dame: Medieval Miracles and Modern Remakings signals that the book will comprise two sections. The first half is devoted, for a start, to a thirteenth-century poem. From this one focal point, the camera pans back to situate this masterpiece in the setting of other miracle tales from western Europe contemporary with it. Then the aperture widens further, to permit comparisons with other traditions. The second half of the book zeroes in on how the medieval piece was received from 1873 on through the twentieth century, initially in France and later in America and elsewhere.

The Middle Ages, late nineteenth century, and twentieth century all look far removed, even beyond repair, from the perspective of the present. We have types (and hypes) of media, communication, and entertainment that precious few in earlier times could have anticipated even vaguely in their wildest dreams or nightmares. Yet certain puzzles recur constantly among people across time and space. What is art? What is faith? How do we express them? What is giving? What value should we place on gifts that carry no monetary value and may even be anti-materialist, rule-breaking, and authority-questioning?

By the same token, some topics of acute urgency in this century of ours are not without precedent but in fact were formerly anything but unknown. The questioning and rejecting of gender binaries, practicing of cross-dressing, and undergoing of sex changes: these considerations crop up again and again in versions of “Our Lady’s Tumbler” and in other stories connected with them. The same texts depict disabilities, both short- and long-term. They touch upon issues concerning classism and elitism, poverty and homelessness, ethnic identity and color, the perseverance of racial and religious minorities in the face of prejudice, and the disputed social status of artists.

At the same time, the literature of bygone times should not find its solitary raison d’être in serving as a mirror to our own preoccupations now. Our predecessors are already extinct. The past created by them is a threatened species, easily harmed, in acute need of respect, examination, and preservation. Its protectors, while endeavoring to keep it alive, will be rewarded by the delights that accrue from grappling with similarity and difference. Each age through which humanity has transited has witnessed unprecedented change as well as unacknowledged continuity. The here and now has never been exactly identical with the bygone, nor entirely distinct from it. It behooves us to profit by learning from what has preceded us. Failing that, we can at least take pleasure from the days of yore, without leaving them damaged by misrepresentation.

The bundles offered in parts 1 and 2 position those using the book to reach their own opinions about the earliest extant form of the story and the world that engendered it as well as about more than a dozen ways in which the tale was revamped when reimagined by successive writers, from the late nineteenth century on. In the process, those who so desire can interrogate the selections while assessing them as imaginative reconceptions. The medieval era in Europe has been reinvisioned in this fashion ceaselessly in the popular culture of ensuing periods, down to ours at this very moment. Umbrellas tend to be at once cumbersome and indispensable. The word medievalism, marked by both of those qualities, has become a convenient shelter under which to collect and protect outlooks and art objects from this or that later time that were inspired by the European Middle Ages.

The body of evidence accumulated here equips readers to make their own case studies, by charting the trajectory that the story of “Our Lady’s Tumbler” has traced from the thirteenth century to today. Those who want or need further details, in analysis, images, or bibliography, relating to the medieval poem and its reception may refer to the six open-access volumes of The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity that were published in 2018 or to the freely downloadable booklet forthe exhibition Juggling the Middle Ages that came on its heels in 2019 at Dumbarton Oaks. All the information and images have a higher end: great story is never-ending, and my hope is that this one will endure deep into this millennium.

Translation can furnish the first line of commentary. In that spirit, the prose of most selections presented here sticks deliberately close to the originals. Square brackets indicate that the words or citations encased within them are not part of the base text that has been put into English. For ease of reference, poems have been provided with numbering every five lines.

A further note on nomenclature is in order. The medieval French poem is here designated “Our Lady’s Tumbler,” a literal translation of the title that became commonplace from the late nineteenth century. To avoid confusion and repetition, the modern French short story is called “The Juggler of Notre Dame,” likewise in quotation marks, while the opera is The Juggler of Notre Dame, italicized but otherwise identical. The character is the juggler of Notre Dame, plain and simple—or not.

PART 1: “OUR LADY’S TUMBLER”: SOURCES AND ANALOGUES, MEDIEVAL TO MODERN

Introduction

© 2022 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0284.30

Part 1 of this collection enables readers to immerse themselves in a generous cross section of weird and wonderful written materials. All these constituents relate to the thirteenth-century French tour de force typically called “Our Lady’s Tumbler.” To set the stage, the opening subsection offers a brand-new, heavily annotated translation of the poem and the exemplum related to it. Afterward follows a concise chapter with episodes from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and apocrypha that could well have informed the poet and other storytellers contemporary with him in their thinking about the dancing of the tumbler. This first cluster is capped by selections from a medieval work known as The Life of the Fathers. All of these extracts show tantalizing similarities to the piece about the tumbler.

The next cluster of texts brings together miracles that have been culled from across medieval Latin Christendom. This medley has been put into English from Latin, French, Galician-Portuguese, and German. Its contents depict monks, minstrels, or maidens who merit miracles from Mary or other powerful intercessors.

Complementing the reports of miracles from western Europe in the Middle Ages is a third cluster with parallels from other cultures, including Roman, Persian, Hungarian, and French, in which entertainers persist in performing for God or the Virgin, despite the opposition of traditionalists. These analogues extend in their chronological range all the way from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and early modernity to the second half of the twentieth century. If religious context is of interest, these materials were the products of pagans, Muslims (both Sunni and Shiite), Jews (both Hasidic and not), and Catholics.

Close engagement with this panoply of narratives lays the groundwork for exploration of many puzzles. What, if anything, that could have inspired these accounts is likely to have transpired in reality? In other words, are we discussing a swatch of actual history, a good yarn, or an interweaving of both? What may have been contrived for rhetorical or literary purposes, rather than supposedly experienced? Finally, whether fact or fiction, reality or legend, truth or lie, what did readers and listeners make of the poem and exemplum? Whether or not anything resembling the events recounted ever happened, did anyone seriously believe that they had? To arrive at our own determinations and verdicts, we will do well not to ignore the wealth of other texts from the late Middle Ages in which lay monks and minstrels apprehend miracles that the Mother of God (to call her as they would often have done) effectuates through her apparitions and interventions.

What seems to have been transmitted by word of mouth, rather than as conventional literature in written form? What is owed to the laity, and what to the Church? To rephrase these questions slightly, which of the themes in the poem may we reasonably conjecture stemmed from oral tellings among everyday people and can accordingly be interpreted within the framework of folklore and folktales, and which were instead composed by literate, educated, Latinate, and ecclesiastic authors whose writings cry out for literary analysis?

In most of the pieces in the first part, the key events are miracles. In the ones from Latin Europe of the Middle Ages and modernity, these wonders often involve visions of the Virgin. As time passed, the Catholic faith developed to shield the Mother of God ever more from any impurity of earthliness. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception freed her from original sin from the moment of her conception. At the other end of her existence, the doctrine of the Assumption taught that at the end of her earthly life Mary was taken bodily into heaven. Because of the last belief, the relics of the Virgin’s physical presence on earth were, make no bones about it, less immediate than for most saints. In compensation, she rendered herself visible and even tangible constantly in visions.

Tales in which Mary intervenes and sometimes even materializes miraculously made themselves evident first in the East. After modest success there, they sometimes received much louder fanfare in the West. One case in point that comes up now and again in versions of the juggler story is Saint Mary of Egypt. The essentials of her legend are that she was an Egyptian who as a young girl turned prostitute and as a woman was moved to take up an existence of extreme asceticism in the desert. The stimulus for her transformation is an icon of the Virgin that mesmerizes her, at which point she receives instruction to cross the Jordan and commence her new life.

In later apparitions, such people as musicians and monks received signs of celestial grace via Mary. From time to time she bestowed her favor upon devotees as lowly as lay brothers, despite opposition from others loftier than them in the social hierarchy. In many cases the wonders take place in or are otherwise connected with cathedrals and monasteries in France, such as Rocamadour and Arras, and in Italy, such as Lucca.

In the complex of miracles to which Our Lady’s Tumbler belongs, white monks are salient. So called owing to the color of their clothing, these brothers were Cistercians. Their order took its name from Cîteaux, the location in Burgundy where their first monastery was located. Not far from it was Clairvaux, the most significant site in the story of the jongleur. A favorable disposition to the white monks stands out in many tales related to ours. The main runner-ups to them are the Carthusians, monks whose head monastery was (and remains) the Grande Chartreuse, in an isolated French mountain valley twenty miles from Grenoble. Both orders arose during the period of experimentation in monasticism that stretched across the long twelfth century, from the final quarter of the eleventh century through the first of the thirteenth.

The translations with which the first part begins bring home ways in which Jesus, saints, and, first and foremost, Mary materialize from heaven to aid and comfort those, including jongleurs, lay brothers, and women, who proclaim devotion to them. The focus of these reports often rests on folk who have little or no power within either the Church or nobility. The tumbler was doubly powerless, first as a professional entertainer and later as a lay brother.

A lay brother was a man who operated at the boundary between the world and religion as well as between physical toil and prayer. He was known now and again by the Latin term conversus or its medieval French derivative convers, to betoken that he had converted or (to break down the verb etymologically) turned around from secular life. Yet his turn did not take him all the way to religion as full monks, often called choir monks, were bound to practice it. If such a convert had a stability, it came from being stuck at the midpoint between the two statuses of lay and monastic.

Lay brethren were obliged to cultivate a distinct appearance from choir monks. Even in grooming, these converts stood apart. Whereas regular monks were clean-shaven and had the crowns of their heads especially shorn, their lay counterparts wore beards (giving them the name barbati or “bearded ones”) and had no such tonsure. The lay monks wore a kind of uniform, but it amounted to work clothes rather than a monastic habit.

In sum, the lay brothers were neither fish nor fowl or, to transpose the proverb into more monastic terms, neither fully physical nor completely cowl. On the one hand, they undertook a commitment not to fulfill their potential worldliness by marrying. On the other, they agreed not to exceed their humble perch in the religious pecking order by aspiring to become full monks or clerics. In their daily round, they were tasked with executing heavy labor that choir monks could not have accomplished while also carrying out the many hours of chanting that The Rule of Saint Benedict prescribed. In return, the lay brothers were expected to adhere to a drastically reduced set of prayers.

The linguistic situation in medieval monasteries was unlike what most of the world’s population experiences today in daily life. A working command of Latin was essential since it was the language of worship and Holy Writ. In it, the monks performed the liturgy of the hours, which consisted of psalms, hymns, readings, and other prayers. The canonical hours obliged the brethren to fulfill these duties in seven (or eight) stretches spread across the day and night. At many other hours, the brothers were supposed to uphold silence. The strict wordlessness was broken, when necessary, by limited exchanges in sign language. Sometimes the monks would have had to converse in Latin or in the vernacular. What has just been described does not map well onto bilingualism, in which two living languages live alongside each other. Instead, it qualifies as diglossia, in which one or more mother tongues coexist with a father tongue—a language that no one knows from the cradle but that everyone must learn who engages with Scripture and achieves any sort of formal education.

In the Middle Ages, being lay, ignorant of Latin, and illiterate were frequently overlapping categories. Individuals who could communicate only in their own tongue and not in the learned one were idiotae, from which derives the modern “idiot.” Latin, only half-dead, possessed great prestige and its grammar was held in such awe that it gave us, by way of Scottish English, the word glamour. By not knowing the learned language, those in monastic communities who were not choir monks risked being second-class citizens who could be disrespected, exploited, and mistreated. In fact, sporadic uprisings bore out how real those risks were. Yet a sunnier case could be made for mutual respect. The work and worship enjoined upon the lay members of the monastic communities were restricted but rigorous. The combination contained a capacity for holiness, so long as the untonsured brethren held true to their simplicity and sincerity.

But where does the tumbler fit? He is a lay brother but, to all appearances, he does not wish to be consigned to the grange as a purely manual laborer. On the contrary, he likes his liminality at the edges of the cloister and in the crypt beneath the church, much as he once relished his marginality while busking outside. He redefines work on his own terms. En route to saintliness, he comes to prize his peculiar outlet for physical asceticism. Likewise, his command of the most demanding dance steps and of the terminology to describe them endows him with a language of his own for prayer and empowers him to transcend his illiteracy and Latin-lessness in a unique fashion.

The medieval materials in Part 1 offer profound perspectives upon the means at the disposal of believers from long-ago times to manifest their religion and seek redemption. In addition, they pose conundrums about the very definition of sanctity. The tumbler in the medieval poem remains unnamed, and nothing suggests that any effort was ever mounted to have him beatified or sanctified. He is far from the elite, and practically at the bottom of the social hierarchy, at least within the Church. All the same, he is portrayed without question as being saintly.

The sources in the first part encompass a broad sweep of materials. Some are biblical and apocryphal, but many others comprehend Marian miracles. These other accounts relate wonders that Mary is reputed to have instigated after her death. The story came into its own as the cult of the Virgin was reaching its apogee in the European Middle Ages, with a multiplication of churches consecrated to her, pilgrimages undertaken in her honor, and tales of miracles set in motion by her, particularly in conjunction with apparitions of her. Among various features that distinguish the medieval poem and some of its closest comparanda is the representation to which the performer offers his distinctive devotion to the Mother of God. Carvings in wood of Mary with the infant Jesus were the first statues in the round that many viewers in western Europe had encountered in centuries. The story has much to say about the power of images and in its bigger context so-called Black Virgins loom particularly large.

The analogues from within medieval western Christendom mostly deal with entertainers who merit special acknowledgment from the Mother of God. Alongside the Christian depictions of such low-ranking figures may be considered those in other religious traditions, from Roman paganism through Islam and Judaism, who achieve commensurately privileged relations with God through some sort of program, often musical. Incidentally, many of these selections show the astounding range of mysticism across human experience.

The original, or at least the oldest extant, embodiment of the narrative comes in a poem in French dating from the first half of the thirteenth century that was brought to light in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and printed first in 1873. In the English language, popularizing translations of the medieval French, more often by enthusiastic amateurs than by trained professionals, were published repeatedly from the last decade of the nineteenth century on, in affordable but charming palm-sized hardbacks. This volume offers my own fresh rendering into English from the original.

Capping the first part is a French story published by Henri Pourrat after World War II. This iteration rehearses substantially the same sequence of incidents as do preceding versions, but it gives the principal character a new name. More important, it packages the narrative as a folktale from the Auvergne region. For want of any information about the teller, telling context, or date, the possibility remains that it is a faketale—the reshaping, either directly or indirectly, of Anatole France’s story, with trappings to coordinate it more tightly with the telling of an oral traditional tale.

One trait of culture in western Europe and maybe everywhere on earth is the constant give-and-take between folklore and literature. Perhaps related, debate has raged intermittently since the early nineteenth century over whether components of culture such as stories originate in the fervid imaginations of an educated elite and percolate from there down to mass audiences, or whether credit is owed to nameless tellers from lower classes whose creations are commandeered by individuals from the upper ones. The two viewpoints are summed up in the German phrases gesunkenes and gehobenes Kulturgut, which mean “sunken” and “elevated cultural material,” respectively. Is it shirking to speculate that both motions, sinking and elevation, take place, and that we need to assess each story on a case-by-case basis?

The susceptibility of human beings to binary oppositions in their thinking is no secret. One such dichotomy, reaching back to the nineteenth century, posits that folktales and other folklore which are attested in different places and times originated in two ways. At one extreme is diffusionism. This theoretical framework assumes, applying the concept of monogenesis, that a given item of narrative or lore is born in one location. From there spreads to other locales from one individual to another, as from one group to another. When sufficient information survives, the transmission from the place of origin may even be mapped by applying the techniques of the historic-geographic method. At the other end of the gamut, the theory of polygenesis avows that similar tales may arise in different places because of shared human nature. In other words, people who are subject to similar wants, needs, and phenomena may cope with them by inventing narratives that are similar or even identical to those produced by others from the species of Homo sapiens. Let’s keep our minds open to both hypotheses … and to everything between them. Gray areas can turn out to be very colorful.

1. The Medieval Story

© 2022 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0284.01

“Our Lady’s Tumbler” here refers to a piece of French poetry from the Middle Ages. Probably a product of the late 1230s, the poem survives in five manuscripts. It was written in a northern form of the medieval language or cluster of dialects that is conventionally called Old French, with features that point to influence from the region of Picardy. The text comprises 342 rhyming couplets, for a total of 684 octosyllabic lines.

Though generally considered anonymous, the verse narrative has often been wrongly ascribed to the thirteenth-century Benedictine monk Gautier de Coinci, who composed in medieval French verse the vast Miracles of Our Lady. Likewise, the story contained in it has sometimes been credited mistakenly to Jacobus de Voragine, also from the thirteenth century but Italian and a Dominican friar, who wrote the Legenda Aurea or “The Golden Legend,” an enormously popular collection of saints’ lives in prose. Neither attribution is correct. The author, still unidentified and likely to remain so till doomsday, is put under the rubric of that most prolific of medieval authors, Anonymous (anon., for short).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the work of this unidentified poet was generally called Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame, with the del (meaning “of”) often omitted. This title is one of a few that have been transmitted in manuscripts, none of them likely to be authorial but instead all scribal. Early on, the words were translated as “Of Our Lady’s Tumbler,” with the order of the nouns in the original flipflopped. “Our Lady” refers to the personage known in Catholicism as the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. Though not as common as some synonyms, tumbler is a sufficiently normal word for an acrobat or gymnast who performs somersaults.

The name of the story raised greater challenges in French than in English. For a start, in modern speech the noun tombeur, corresponding roughly to tumbeor, means lady-killer. Consequently, the title was modified to avoid the less-than-saintly associations of tombeur by substituting the synonym jongleur. The old-fashioned spelling of Nostre was modernized by deletion of the s. Finally, grammar now demands adding the word de to fulfill the role of of in English. By putting these little adjustments together, the poem is now routinely entitled Le Jongleur de Notre Dame.

Confusingly, that expression can refer equally to a short story from the fin de siècle by the Nobel prizewinning French writer Anatole France and to an opera from the early twentieth century by the once well-known but now neglected French composer Jules Massenet. Even more misleadingly, none of the three works has the slightest connection with The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo or even with the famous cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The epithet Notre Dame, meaning “Our Lady,” designates the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, venerated in the Christian church. The name is attached to many cathedrals, churches, and chapels in France, so often that it can stand for one of them by itself. In this usage, the two words are in French properly hyphenated as Notre-Dame.

Enough fussing and fretting about the title: more major issues await in the contents. The tale tells of an all-round professional entertainer who is what the Middle Ages labeled indiscriminately a minstrel, mime-player, and the like. His versatility is borne out in the sole illustration of the poem to survive in a medieval manuscript, which shows him performing as a gymnast but includes a depiction of his violin-like musical instrument.

Fig. 1: The jongleur before the Virgin and Child. An angelic hand delivers a towel from the heavens while a protoviolin lies at the Virgin’s feet. Miniature, thirteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Arsenal 3516, fol. 127r. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. All rights reserved.

Such professionals belonged to an immensely varied class of itinerant performers who could specialize in verbal, physical, or musical skills. They could overlap with jesters and clowns; they could be storytellers or singers, acrobats or contortionists, or even animal trainers. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, the names by which they were called were evolving, along with the laws by which they were governed and the social norms by which they were judged.

This protagonist travels about, giving performances that in his case blur the boundaries between what we differentiate as dance and gymnastics. In doing so, he achieves ever more success but ever less satisfaction. Weary of his métier, he is eventually stirred to quit the secular world. After forsaking his money, horse, and clothes, he embarks upon a religious life by entering an abbey as a lay brother.

The anonymous medieval poem is all the more exemplary for having no named characters, excepting Mary herself. The nameless minstrel joins the monastery of Clairvaux. In the French region of Burgundy, this abbey had been founded by the man now called Saint Bernard. He and his followers were Cistercians, often styled “white monks,” from the color of their habits. Cistercianism has special relevance to the background of “Our Lady’s Tumbler” because the adherents of this monastic order made a speciality of collecting and communicating, often from oral tradition, short narratives relating to their founders and to the heavenly blessings bestowed upon the brethren, above all by the Virgin Mary. Between 1140 and 1200 the white monks devoted intense efforts to documenting the men and miracles from the especially heroic and saintly early days of their order. In tracing their history, they paid attention not only to the full monks, so-called choir monks, but also to the lay brothers. A word of explanation is called for about this latter group.

By being a lay monk, the lead character was disadvantaged in many ways vis-à-vis the choir monks. Like jongleurs, the lay brothers occupied a social space brimming over with ambiguity. Medieval society comprised the so-called three orders: knights who by warring delivered defense, clerics who by praying saw to salvation, and peasants who by tilling the land furnished food. But class systems are rarely as neat as they first appear. In fact, they are usually approximative. In this case, the lay brothers presented a particular quandary by straddling the last two categories.

The conversion of the tumbler to lay brother requires a thoroughgoing transformation. A man who was previously footloose and fancy-free embeds himself in the fixity of place that has been a regular essential of monasticism in western Christianity. Of his own accord, he dislodges himself from a position in which he was a professional who commanded his trade. Instead, he lands in a new environment with an utterly unfamiliar etiquette. He is illiterate and knows no Latin, he has no grasp of the liturgy that the choir monks must carry out eight times daily, and in fact he fails even to comprehend when he should speak and when he should keep quiet.

The inadequacy of the erstwhile tumbler in singing, reading, and even staying silent induces him after a while to despair. After the world degraded into a dystopia for him, he expected the monastery to be a utopia in contrast. Having the cloister become equally dissatisfying and disappointing knocked his legs out from under him. Yet he perseveres and maps out an escape from what a psychiatrist might diagnose as his clinical depression.

In due course the onetime entertainer devises a solution all his own for expressing his devotion. Whenever the monks gather in the choir of the church to perform the liturgical office, he descends to the crypt to do acrobatics before a statue of the Virgin. Yet even now, his troubles have not ended. Eventually he is caught in the act by one of the others, who reports his unusual antics to the abbot. When this informant and his superior spy upon the lay brother, they see that his performance prompts Mary to appear. By fanning him and wiping away his sweat, she shows the favor he has won in the eyes of God. Soon afterward he dies, redeemed and vindicated.

The narrator makes clear that the tumbler achieves results not by worshipping a Madonna, which would violate basic Church doctrine, but by venerating Mary through the image of her, in the hope that she will intercede for him with Jesus. He speaks to the representation, but as a conduit to the Mother of God. The likeness does not come to life. Rather, the woman materializes to comfort him. In turn, God is swayed by her to grant the miracle and with it salvation.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the cult of the Virgin grew breathtakingly throughout western Europe. She became the last refuge of sinners, a miracle worker, shielding them from diabolic dangers and interceding in their favor with her son. Her garments offered special protection and solace, as here. Monks, not the least the Cistercians (who dedicated all their churches to Mary), practiced ever greater devotion to her in prayer and poetry, and lay people, to the best of their ability, imitated them. Both churchmen and the laity craved the immediacy of contact that Marian apparitions procured them. Writings proliferated, Mariological ones that examined her theologically and that refined the doctrines associated with her, sermons that preached her, poems and hymns that praised her, and miracles that celebrated her feats.

This tale belongs to a large grouping of Marian miracles in which the beneficiaries are individuals whose piety compensates for their ignorance. The outcomes of these accounts bring home that the Mother of God can and does reward the faithful for their saintly simplicity. For example, one such story tells of an ignorant but devout monk who can recite none of the obligatory prayers. Instead, to honor the Virgin he recites five psalms whose first letters spell out her name. After his death, five roses are found in his mouth in miraculous compensation for his devotion.

“Our Lady’s Tumbler” establishes a direct equation between the formal liturgy of chanting the office and the improvised and idiosyncratic one of dancing it. The moves of the gymnastic lay brother are enumerated at length. Each is even assigned its own name, almost as if the French technical terms correlate to the Latin liturgical words that are incomprehensible to the lay brother: he has his own jargon. The description of the acrobat’s routine demonstrates that the beauty and discipline of physical acts may stand on par with those of formal verbal reverence. At the same time, the detailed representation of the dance leaves the reader to suspect that the author’s knowledge could not have been acquired casually. Being so conversant with the tumbler’s trade must have required living within it or at least in intimate proximity to it: he was an insider or at a minimum rubbed elbows with one.

Simultaneously, the poet evidences a remarkable openness to what could have been treated by a lesser mind as the rigid hierarchy within the monastery. He shows compassion for the lay brother, who owing to his ignorance of Latin and the liturgy occupied the bottommost point on the social scale of the convent. By the same token, he evinces sympathy for the choir monks above the convert and finally for the abbot at the apex of the community.

As a craftsman of words, the writer knows that his verbal contribution is required to give the tumbler a voice. In the end, it is the acrobat alone, not his fellow monks, who through his humble physicality stirs Mary into action. Then again, no historical document names the gymnast or even attests to his existence. For such awareness as we have of the spiritual exaltation and exultation of his performance and miracle, we depend on the verse.

The abbot displays his wisdom in not subscribing to the harsh verdict of the monk who brings him to watch the lay brother perform. Yet shortly afterward, the same knowledge of people and human nature fails him, since by summoning the anxious newcomer to his quarters for a private interview, he precipitates the emotional turmoil that kills the tired tumbler.

The translation of the poem here holds close to the French, but not, it is hoped, at the cost of being idiomatic. Often the English follows the original in frequent changes of tense, but it does not attempt to retain many uses of the subjunctive when that verbal mood would be out of place today. The presentation here maintains the large initial letters and corresponding textual divisions of the earliest and best manuscript.

The Old French was not put fully into modern French until first Pierre Kunstmann in 1981 and then Paul Bretel in 2003. In contrast, a translation into English prose by Philip Henry Wicksteed was published first in 1894, by Isabel Butler in 1898, by Alice Kemp-Welch in 1908, and by Eugene Mason in 1910. The poem was translated into English verse in 1897 by William Showell Rogers, albeit in a form that attained only extremely limited circulation, and in 1907 by George Cormack. Among later versions, special mention should be made of the one prepared in 1979 by Everett C. Wilkie Jr.

A. “Our Lady’s Tumbler”

In the Lives of the Ancient Fathers,

the contents of which are good,

we are told a little exemplum.

I do not say that people have not heard

5

equally nice ones many times,

but this one is not so flawed

that retelling it does not serve well.

Now, I want to speak to you and to tell

of a minstrel, what happened to him.

10

He came and went

in so many places, and spent,

until he committed himself to a holy order,

because earthly concerns wearied him.

Horses, clothing, and money,

15

and everything he had, he gave to it;

and thus, he withdrew from the world,

for he wished never after to reengage there.

For this reason, he put himself in that holy order,

so they say, at Clairvaux.

20

When this young man committed himself

who was so elegant,

handsome, gracious, and well formed,

he knew no profession

of which they had need there.

25

For he had not lived except by tumbling,

vaulting, and dancing:

to leap and bound, this he knew,

but he knew nothing else,

because he did not know the wording of any other prayer,

30

not the Our Father or the canticle,

not the creed or the Hail Mary,

not anything that worked to his salvation.

When he committed himself to this order,

he saw men with a very high tonsure

35

who expressed themselves by signs

and did not utter a word from their mouths.

He believed most surely

that otherwise they did not speak.

But soon he was beyond doubt about it,

40

because he knew well that as penance they abstained from speech.

For this reason, they kept silent sometimes,

so that it happened often

to be expedient for him to keep silent.

45

He kept silent so patiently,

and for such a long time,

that he would not speak the whole day through,

unless someone directed him to speak,

so that they had much laughter about this.

50

In their midst, he was entirely confounded,

for he did not know how to say or do

what one was supposed to do inside there.

Because of this, he was very sad and ashamed;

he saw the monks and lay brothers:

55

each one served God here and there

in such an office as he held.

He saw the priests at the altars,

for such was their office,

the deacons at the Gospels,

60

the subdeacons at vigils;

and in turn the acolytes stand ready

for the epistles, when it is the set time for them:

one pronounces versicles, the other the lesson.

And the young clerics are at the psalters

65

and the lay brothers at the Miserere–

in this way they present their laments–

and the most ignorant of them at Our Fathers.

He looked everywhere, up and down,

in the workspaces and main buildings,

70

and he saw hidden in corners

here five, there three, here two, there one.

He observed well, as he could, each one:

he hears one groan, another weep,

yet another moan and sigh,

75

and so he wonders by what they have been touched.

“Blessed Mary,” he then says,

“by what have these people been touched, that they behave in this way

and display grief of such a kind?

They are very distressed, it seems to me,

80

when they make such great mourning all together.”

“Blessed Mary,” he then said,

“alas, what have I, wretch, said?

I believe that they pray to God for mercy.

But what am I, base as I am, doing here?

85

Here there is not anyone so wretched

that he does not endeavor entirely

to serve God in his occupation.

But I would not have any occupation here,

for I neither do nor say anything.

90

I was most wretched when I joined,

for I know neither to do well nor to pray.

I go about aimlessly,

I manage here only to waste time

and to consume food for nothing.

95

If noticed for this,

I would be badly mistreated.

They will put me out in the fields,

for here I am a sturdy peasant,

and here I do nothing but eat.

100

I am indeed wretched to a high degree.”

Then he cries to assuage his grief.

If he had had his wish, he would have wished very much to be dead.

“Blessed Mary,” he said, “oh, mother,

entreat the father on high

105

to hold me in his good will,

and to send me such good counsel,

that I may be able to serve him and you,

so that I may be able to merit

the food that I consume here,

110

for I know well that I am committing a wrong.”

After he had lamented so,

he went wandering through the monastery

until he found his way into a crypt.

So he crouched near an altar

115

and as much as he could, he took a place there.

Above the altar was the likeness

of my lady, Blessed Mary.

He had not at all lost his way

120

when he headed there.

God who knows well to guide his people.

When he heard the Mass sound,

he leaped up, altogether confounded.

“Ah!” he said, “how I am betrayed!”

125

Now each one will say his verses,

and I am here an ox on a tether

who does nothing here but browse

and squander food for nothing.

And I will say nothing or do nothing?

130

By the Mother of God, I will do it so.

I will not be reproached now,

I will do what I have learned,

I will serve the Mother of God

in her monastery with my office.

135

The others serve by singing,

and I will serve by tumbling.”

He takes off his cloak, undresses,

and puts his clothes beside the altar,

but so that his flesh would not be naked,

140

he kept a short tunic,

which was very fine and delicate.

It counts for little more than an undershirt—

so his body remained dressed only in it.

He is well belted and outfitted;

145

he belts his robe and arrays himself.