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The Vision of St Fursa in Thirteenth-Century Didactic Literature*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Chris Wilson
Chris Wilson*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

The vision of the otherworld seen by St Fursa (c. 590 — c. 649) and recorded in a Vita and in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History achieved a high level of popularity in England and France during the thirteenth century, especially through its inclusion in preaching aids for the friars and the pastoralia (the various guides and manuals for priests on the care and confession of their congregation) produced before and after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. This essay will discuss how compilers of this material altered, rearranged and summarized Fursa’s vision, and what these changes reveal about shifting attitudes towards sanctity in the thirteenth century. In some of these redactions, Fursa’s sainthood was sidelined or ignored completely. In others, the point at which Fursa is described as a saint varies and the emphasis of the vision shifts from a reward for a saintly life to the purgation of a sinful priest. It will be suggested that these modifications to Fursa’s role in the vision were linked to the genre and audience of the redactions and to other thirteenth-century theological preoccupations, including debates over the sinfulness of usury and the emergence of the doctrine of purgatory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 47: Saints and Sanctity , 2011 , pp. 159 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2011

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References

1 Fursa is also known as Fursey, Fursy, Forseus, Fursis and Furseus. Nine manuscripts of Fursa’s Vita survive. It is edited, omitting Fursa’s first two visions (Fursa’s second vision is the focus of this communication), in Vita virtutesque Fursei abbatis Latinacensis passiones (MGH SRM 4, 423—40). The first two visions which originally formed part of the Vita are included in ‘Le visioni di S. Fursa’, ed. Ciccarese, M. P., Romanobarbarica 8 (1984-5), 231–303 Google Scholar. The earliest surviving manuscript of this work is London, BL, MS Harley 5041, fols 79–98, which was probably copied in northern France in the eighth century. This manuscript has formed the basis of a recent transcription and translation: Rackman, Oliver, Transistus Beati Fursei (Norwich, 2007)Google Scholar. This is a helpful addition to the scholarly literature on the saint, although Rackman some what misleadingly introduces his own subtitles into the account. The vision appears in Bede, Historia ecclesiastica 3.19; ed. and trans. Colgrave, Bertram and Mynors, R. A. B., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), 268–77 Google Scholar [hereafter: HE].

2 For a discussion of the relationship between purgatory and visions, see Watkins, Carl, ‘Doctrine, Politics and Purgation: The Vision of Tnuthgal and the Vision of Owein at St Patrick’s Purgatory’, JMedH 22 (1996), 225–36.Google Scholar

3 For a list of saints involved in these visions as inhabitants, see Morgan, Alison, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge, 2002), 75–6.Google Scholar

4 For an overview of the genre of otherworldly visions, see Dinzelbacher, Peter, Vision and Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1981)Google Scholar; Carozzi, Claude, Le Voyage de l’âme dans l’au-delà d’après la littérature latine (Rome, 1994).Google Scholar

5 This debate was prompted by Le Goff, Jacques, La Naissance du purgatoire (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar; trans. Goldhammer, Arthur as The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago, IL, 1983)Google Scholar. See, most recently, Dunn, Marilyn, ‘Gregory the Great, the Vision of Fursey and the Origins of Purgatory’, Peritia 14 (2000), 238–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 238; eadem, The Vision of Saint Fursey and the Development of Purgatory, Fursey Occasional Papers 2 (Norwich, 2007)Google Scholar; Foot, Sarah, ‘Anglo-Saxon “Purgatory”’, in Clarke, Peter and Claydon, Tony, eds, The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul, SCH 45 (Woodbridge, 2009), 87–96.Google Scholar

6 The Fursey Pilgrims, a nondenominational society devoted to maintaining the memory of Fursa’s mission to East Anglia and fostering new scholarship about the saint, was founded in 1997 to mark the 1400th anniversary of his birth.

7 This compilation is appended to the earlier Vita in MGH SRM 4, 440–9.

8 ActaSS Ian. 2, 44–54.

9 Bede, HE 3.19 (ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 270–1, 276–7).

10 Ibid. Bede altered the order of the visions from the Vita to emphasize Fursa’s monastic vocation and the parts of his story that took place in England. The four visions from the Vita can be found as follows (note that the MGH edition of the Vita does not include the first two visions and the Ciccarese edition does not include the third and fourth visions): first vision, ‘Le visioni’, ed. Ciccarese, 280; second vision, ibid. 283; third vision, MGH SRM 4, 436; fourth vision, ibid. 437. Bede started with the Vita’s fourth vision before redacting the first and second accounts, and he omitted the third vision.

11 Bede, HE 3.19 (ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 272–3).

12 Ibid.

13 D’Avray, David L., The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1983), esp. 64–70Google Scholar; see also Bremond, Claude, Le Goff, Jacques and Schmitt, Jean-Claude, oL’Exemption, Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental 40 (Turnhout, 1982)Google Scholar. For the older Cistercian exempla collections, see McGuire, Brian Patrick, ‘The Cistercians and the Rise of the Exemplum in early Thirteenth Century France: a Reevaluation of Paris, BN Ms. Lat. 15,912’, Classica et Medievalia 34 (1983), 211–67 Google Scholar; Collectaneum exemplorum et visionum Clarevallense e codice Trecensi 946, ed. Legendre, Olivier (CChr.CM 208).Google Scholar

14 London, BL, MS Harley 268, fols 30r, 34’, 114’.

15 See, e.g., BL, Add. MS 11284, fol. 3r-

16 Bede, HE 3.19 (ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 274–5); Vita 16 (‘Le visioni’, ed. Ciccarese, 301).

17 The theme of correct clerical behaviour is even more clearly drawn out in the Vita, in which the Irish saints Beoan and Meldan lectured Fursa on the issue: Vita 13 (‘Le visioni’, ed. Ciccarese, 294).

18 Bede HE, 3.19 (ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 272–3).

19 Pitra, J.-B., ed., Analecta novissima spicilegii Solesmensis: Altera continuatici, 2 vols (Paris, 1888), 2: 189–93 Google Scholar (Prologue), 344–6 (list of sermons), 443–61 (list of exempla).

20 ‘Sermo XL. Sermo ad hospitalarios et custodes infirmorum’, in Pitra, ed., Analecta novissima, 2: 345, 450. The sermon is based on Prov. 16: 6: ‘By mercy and truth iniquity is purged.’ By the mid-thirteenth century exempla were circulating in individual collections, separate from sermons. One such early fourteenth-century English collection of Jacques de Vitry’s exempla is BL, MS Harley 463; the vision of Fursa is at fol. 6V. References below are taken from Jacques deVitry, Exempla ex sermonibus, ed. Thomas Crane (New York, 1890). Crane extracts the exempla from Paris, BN, MS Lat. 17509. All translations are my own.

21 De Vitry, Exempla, 46 (no. 99).

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 In Odo of Cheriton’s ‘Parabolae’ it appears after the story of St Laumer and the usurer: BL, MS Arundel 231, fol. 105r. Fursa’s vision does not appear in all of the versions of the ‘Parabolae’ and is missing from the only published edition of the text: Fabulistes Latins: Depuis le siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Age. 4: Études de Cheriton et ses dérivés, ed. L. Hervieux (Paris, 1896), 177–255. In the anonymous ‘Speculum laicorum’, it appears as the first exemplum in ch. 2, entitled ‘De acquisitis injuste et eorum periculo’. It is followed by six usury stories, including one about incorrect trading practices in Greece and the account of St Laumer and the usurer: BL, Add. MS 11284, fol. 3V. In the anonymous Fasciculus mortim it appears at the end of a sermon devoted to avarice: Fasciculus momm:A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. S. Wenzel (University Park, PA, 1989), 22–3. It is given a slightly different stress in Arnold of Liege’s ‘Alphabetum narrationum’, in which it is placed in a chapter entitled ‘elemosina’: BL, MS Harley 268, fol. 114r. In both the French Manuel des Peches and the Middle English Handlyng Synne it is paired with a story about how usurers should be detested. They are edited side by side in William de Wadington and Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, with those Parts of the Anglo-French Treatise on which it was Founded, Manuel des pechiez, ed. F J. Furnival, EETS os 119, 123 (1901, 1903; repr. as one vol. 1973; repr. 2006), 88.

25 Gilchrist, John, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London, 1969), 67.Google Scholar

26 Helmholz, R. H., ‘Usury and the Medieval English Church Courts’, Speculum 61 (1986), 364–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Le Goff, Jacques, ‘The Usurer and Purgatory’, in Chiappelli, Fredi, ed., The Dawn of Modem Banking (New Haven, CT, 1979), 25–52 Google Scholar; idem, La Bourse et la vie: Economic et religion au Moyen Age (Paris, 1986)Google Scholar, trans. Ranum, Patricia as Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York, 1988), esp. 65–84 Google Scholar. Despite the general propensity to place the vision in hell, I have found one example in which the vision takes place in purgatory: BL, MS Royal 12.E.i, fol. 160v. In the fourteenth century Dante infamously placed usurers in the lowest sub-circle of the seventh circle of hell.

28 BL, MS Harley 268, fol. 30’.

29 Ibid.

30 Robert of Greatham, Miroir des Evangiles, ed. Saverio Panunzio (Bari, 1974.), 232. Ali translations are my own.

31 Leonard E. Boyle discusses the impetus for the increase in the production of these manuals in ‘The Inter-Conciliar Period 1179—1215 and the Beginning of Pastoral Manuals’, in Tofanini, Roberto, ed., Miscellanea Rolando Bandinelli, Papa Alessandro III. Studi raccolti da Filippo Liotta (Siena, 1986), 43–56.Google Scholar

32 For the English context of this literature, see Legge, M. Dominica, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford, 1963), 212–13 Google Scholar; Gibbs, Marion and Lang, Jane, Bishops and Reform 1215–1272 (Oxford, 1934; repr. 1962)Google Scholar, esp. 106–31.

33 The following thirteenth-century manuscripts are extant: Nottingham, UL, MSS WLC/LM/3; WLC/LM/4; Cambridge, UL, MS Gg.I.i; Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS B.14.39 (323);York, Chapter Library, MS 16.K.14.

34 The Middle English ‘Mirror’: An Edition based on Bodleian Library, MS Holkham misc. 40, ed. Kathleen Marie Blumreich, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 182 (Tempe, AZ, 2002). See also Duncan, Thomas, ‘The Middle English Mirror and its Manuscripts’, in Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis, ed. Gray, D. and Stanley, E. G. (Oxford, 1983), 115–26.Google Scholar

35 As such it can be seen as one of the forerunners of the ‘second wave’ of vernacular penitential pastoralia identified in Boyle, Leonard E., ‘The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’, in Heffernan, Thomas J., ed., The Popular Literature of Medieval England (Knoxville, TN, 1985), 30–43 Google Scholar, at 35.

36 Kemmler, Fritz, ‘Exempla’ in Context: A Historical and Critical Study of Robert Mannyng of Brume’s ‘Handlyng Synne’, Studies and Texts in English 6 (Tübingen, 1984), 127–29.Google Scholar

37 Robert of Greatham, Miroir, 232.

38 Ibid. 243 (line 326), 244 (line 351), 245 (lines 378, 383), 246 (lines 407, 414), 247 (lines 426, 438).

39 Vita 16 (‘Le visioni’, ed. Ciccarese, 301); Bede HE, 3.19 (ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 274–5).

40 Robert of Greatham, Miroir, 246.

41 Ibid. 247.

42 Ibid.

43 Bede, HE 3.19 (ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 270–1); MGH SRM 4, 434; Vita 1 (‘Le visioni’, ed. Ciccarese, 279).

44 Helinand of Froidmont, whose work is the focus of some of my research, includes all of these visions in his thirteenth-century Chronicon: PL 212, 791C-793C (Vision of Dryhthelm), 1038D-1055D (Vision of Tundale), 1060C-1063D (Vision of Gunthelm).

45 de France, Marie, l’Espurgatone Seint Patrice, ed. Yolande de Pontfarcy (Louvain, 1995).Google Scholar

46 Although it is by no means certain that Robert was one, the Augustinian Canons were regarded as some of the greatest promoters of the doctrine of purgatory. In the twelfth century they were responsible for the promotion of Lough Derg and St Nicholas of Tolentine (d. 1305), the first member of the order to be canonized and the patron saint of souls suffering in purgatory.

47 Robert of Greatham, Miroir, 24.4.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid. 243.

50 Ibid. This particular alteration could also be influenced by the spread of romance literature. A possible parallel may be seen in Robert Easting, ‘The South English Legendary “St Patrick” as Translation’, Leeds Studies in English 21 (1990), 119–40.

51 Robert of Greatham, Miroir, 246.

52 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia 3.103, in Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. Banks, S. E. and Binns, S.W., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 2002), 764, 768.Google Scholar