Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France.

"May they be cursed in town and cursed in the fields. May their barns be cursed and may their bones be cursed. May the fruit of their loins be cursed as well as the fruit of their lands". French monks of the Middle Ages hurled curses like these at their enemies, seeking supernatural assistance when no secular judge could help them. In a long-awaited book written with elegance and erudition, Lester Little undertakes the first full-length study of these maledictions.

The title is something of a pun, a deliberate play on the contrast between "well-said" and "evilly-said," between blessing and cursing, a play on words medieval writers would have appreciated. The book's focus is the way that religious communities--especially the monks who followed Benedict's Rule and hence were known by his name--used liturgical cursing to safeguard their integrity and their possessions, against both laymen and other ecclesiastics. The "Romanesque France" of the title refers to the ninth through twelfth centuries; defining the period as "Romanesque" is a graceful alternative to the more common "central Middle Ages" or "post-Carolingian period" (or the deplorable term "feudal age").

For a long time western scholars viewed monasteries as centers of ignorance and superstition. When the reaction to this attitude came, it was to make monasteries on the contrary into romantic and mystical places for pure spiritual contemplation. In the last generation, however, this equally simplistic view has been replaced by an appreciation of the monasteries as institutions trying their best to follow their ideals in a dangerous and highly complicated world. Little's work thus fits into the newly-emerging understanding of the complex relationship between monks, saints, and secular society and of the changing views of gift and property ownership, as studied by such scholars as Barbara Rosenwein (who received her own early training under Little), Stephen White, Sharon Farmer, Thomas Head, and Geoffrey Koziol.

Curses of course have very long roots, but Little finds the two principal sources of liturgical malediction to be the clamor of Roman law, in which someone appealed to a judge for justice--if necessary, by quite literally and quite loudly clamoring to be heard--and the excommunication ritual developed by the early church to deal with those who refused to be corrected and were therefore cut off from the body of the faithful. These came together at the beginning of the tenth century in formulae in which God was petitioned as a judge, the monks humbly lying on the floor by the altar to do so. In these formulae the monks spelled out, often graphically, what they wanted God to do to malefactors who did not respond. They understood the conflict between on the one hand calling down destruction, usually phrased in terms taken from the Old Testament (especially Psalms and Deuteronomy), and on the other hand forgiving one's enemies as commanded in the New Testament. Their answer was to make cursing a collective, rather than individual activity, one for which the monks themselves often had to prepare spiritually through fasting and penance. In addition, many monasteries had specious authorizations from Rome allowing them to curse as long as they followed prescribed methods.

Professor Little has been collecting and studying such curses for some twenty years. His appendixes list the many archives and libraries where he found manuscripts of these formulae, as well as categorizing them by type and discussing the challenge of finding them. The book is illustrated by a number of handsome plates from medieval manuscripts. Virtually all the examples he found, both manuscript formulae and accounts in narrative sources of the use of such curses, come from northern France, the area roughly between the Rhine and the Charente. Most of the rest come from Ireland and Wales. With few exceptions--many of them explicable by direct contact between a French monastery such as Cluny and a distant daughter-house--these curses were not found in England, Germany, or the Mediterranean region. Little suggests that the reason may lie in this region's early contact with Irish missionary-monks who had attacked their enemies with devastating curses in the sixth and seventh centuries, on a much more individual basis than did the monks of later centuries.

Connected with the clamor, the request to God to bring justice, was the humiliation of saints, another method medieval monks used to overcome their opponents. Here they turned in anger not directly against their enemies but rather against their own patron saints. Surrounding the saints' relics with thorns, sometimes placing these relics on the ground, even hammering on the saints' altars with their fists, the monks tried to goad into action the supernatural powers who should have been protecting them. Such humiliation, first discussed by Patrick Geary some years ago, may seem even more foreign to the modern reader than ritual malediction. Little's discussion of the relation between malediction and humiliation is not always clearly organized, and he spends a great deal of space on the latter even while saying the former is his focus, but an understanding of both is certainly needed to appreciate the options available to monks whose only power lay in their moral rightness, expressed as a lack of physical power.

Much of the originality of this book lies in Little's appreciation of the way that liturgy for French monks of the tenth through twelfth centuries had replaced law as a form of defense. He draws parallels between maledictions and the Peace of God movement, where the bishops felt compelled to take justice into their own hands. When first royal and then even comital courts stopped meeting, when a "court" was more a place where negotiations were held rather than where an enforceable judgment would be handed down, the monks needed to enlist the supernatural. Indeed, although Little does not make this argument, the concentration of clamor and malediction in central and northern France makes excellent sense as this was precisely the area in which strong, central government was weakest and the memory of Roman law dimmest in his period. In his Conclusion (really more of an epilogue), he does suggest that the dying out of ritual cursing in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries should be linked with the growing authority of the French monarchy and the increased role legal experts played in dispute settlement.

One misses a bibliography of printed primary sources and of secondary sources, and a true conclusion that tied all of Little's themes together would have been useful. But this book should provide fascinating reading to medieval historians, whether approaching the Middle Ages from the viewpoint of social history, the Church, or intellectual history.

Constance B. Bouchard University of Akron