Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa Author(s): Thomas E. A.

Dale Reviewed work(s): Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 402-436 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177236 . Accessed: 06/03/2012 15:55
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Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa

Thomas E.A. Dale
Saint Bernard's Cloister In his celebrated Apologia of 1125, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux questions the purpose of the most enigmatic genre of Romanesque art: the monstrous and ostensibly profane images that intrude upon the garden-paradise of the cloister. After a broader critique of religious art in cathedral and monastery, Bernard asks: ... in the cloisters, before the eyes of the brothers while they read-what is that ridiculous monstrosity doing, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What are the filthy apes doing there? The fierce lions? The monstrous centaurs? The creatures, part man and part beast? The striped tigers? The fighting soldiers? The hunters blowing horns? You may see many bodies under one head, and conversely many heads on one body. On one side the tail of a serpent is seen on a quadruped, on the other side, the head of a quadruped is on the body of a fish. Over there an animal has a horse for the front half and a goat for the back; here a creature which is horned in front is equine behind. In short, everywhere so plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books, and spend the whole day wondering at every single one of them than in meditating on the law of God.1 Although Bernard has no particular example in mind,2 he aptly characterizes the images of monstrous and hybrid beasts, wild animals, and worldly pursuits found so frequently in early twelfth-century Benedictine cloisters of southern France and northern Spain-including Moissac, Toulouse, Silos, Elne, Ripoll, Serrabonne, and St-Michel-de-Cuxa. The capitals from Cuxa, now divided between their original site in the French Pyrenees (Figs. 1, 2) and the Cloisters in New York (Fig. 3), were sculpted in the 1130s, only a short time after Bernard composed his Apologia, and illustrate his text particularly well. Here we find naked dancers interspersed with monstrous mouths either surmounting or devouring human torsos (Figs. 5-7), "filthy apes" seated side by side with naked men (Figs. 12-17), monstrous creatures from antiquity such as the Siren (Fig. 19), and heraldically repeated doublebodied lions and bears joined to a single head (Figs. 20-22). In other cloisters, such as Moissac, where sacred narratives predominate, it is easy to dismiss such fantastic subjects as decorative or marginal interludes.3 Since biblical or hagiographic narratives are entirely absent from Cuxa, however, the viewer is forced to confront the same question that troubled Bernard: Why should such "ridiculous monstrosities" be displayed so prominently in the heart of the monastery, where the monk spent most of his time reading and meditating on Scripture? Before attempting an answer, it is essential to recall that Bernard's attack on monstrous imagery in the cloister formed part of a broader polemic concerning monastic lifestyle, ritual, and the arts.4 The Cistercian order, of which Bernard was the most prominent spokesman, had been founded in 1098 by Robert of Molesme as a reform movement within Benedictine monasticism, dedicated to a more ascetic way of life and a stricter observance of the original spirit of the Benedictine rule. Seeking to flee worldly pursuits by locating their monasteries within remote valleys, the Cistercians emphasized simplified ritual and inner meditation rather than outward ostentation.5 In this regard they were particularly critical of the Cluniacs. The Burgundian abbey of Cluny, founded in 910, had developed by the end of the eleventh century into the head of a vast "congregation," or network of dependent abbeys. At the same time it cultivated an ever more elaborate liturgy, complemented by increasingly ostentatious vestments and liturgical furnishings and imposing architectural structures and sculptural programs. This fondness for the material setting of worship was manifested in the third abbey church of Cluny itself, completed under Abbot Hugh of Semur (1088-1130), and also at other like-minded Benedictine foundations, such as the royal abbey of St-Denis, which was partially rebuilt under Abbot Suger during the late 1130s and early 1140s. For the Benedictine traditionalists who were opposed to the ascetic extremes of the Cistercians, architecture and the figural arts were justified, most famously by Suger, as material aids to the contemplation of the divine and as outward expressions of devotion to God and the saints.6 Bernard composed his tract at the request of Abbot William of St-Thierry in order to put to rest Cluniac claims that they were being slandered by the Cistercian reformers, to denounce the excesses of the Cluniacs, and to foster further reform.7 With these purposes in mind, Bernard deploys the rhetoric of satire to paint a vivid, exaggerated, ofttimes humorous picture of the Cluniacs' overindulgence in food, luxurious personal attire, and ostentatious art and architecture.8 It is within the context of this debate that Bernard's condemnation of the cloister capitals is best understood. The contradictory forms of the monstrous hybrids, apes, and centaurs are decried not because they have no meaning but because they evoke the monk's curiosity and distract him from the higher calling of an interior meditation. Likewise, when we a seek a response to Bernard, we need to take into account the broader current of monastic thought that deployed both mental and material images of the monstrous and deformed as beneficial aids for the monk's meditation in the cloister. That the extensive literature on Cuxa9 never explicitly addresses the meaning and function of the historiated capitals is not surprising in light of the long-standing misapprehension of Saint Bernard's Apologia.10 Scholars of the nine-

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teenth and early twentieth centuries, including Eugene Viollet-le-Duc and Emile Male, assumed from Bernard's hostile attitude that images of the monstrous had no specific meaning but were purely decorative.11 Jurgis Baltrusaitis went so far as to propose that the monstrous forms on Romanesque capitals were generated by an inherent geometric formalism of the period.12 More recent assessments of Bernard's Apologia have attempted to recuperate a general meaning for the monstrous through recourse to psychology and anthropology. The most influential scholar of Romanesque sculpture in the twentieth century, Meyer Schapiro, classifies Bernard's hybrids as essentially profane, as an expression of the "secular" imagination and "projected emotions" of individual artists.13 Disregarding the specific monastic context in which the images appear, he argues that "the new art is condemned precisely because it is unreligious and an example of a pagan life-attitude which will ultimately compete with the Christian, an attitude of spontaneous enjoyment and curiosity about the world, expressed through images that stir the senses and the profane imagination."14 Similarly, Ernst Gombrich, in a broad-ranging study of ornament, argues that Bernard's cloister capitals exemplify a universal genre of the "grotesque," which, contrary to Bernard's protests, was deployed in Romanesque art as in that of other periods to master instinctual urges by "giving them an outlet of an acceptable shape."15 Taking marginalia in illuminated manuscripts as his point of departure, Michael Camille interprets the monstrous within the anthropological framework of liminality as deliberately ironic or even subversive glosses on the sacred. Camille counters Bernard's fear that "reading in the marble" was a distraction from the monk's reading of Scripture with the ensuggestion that one particular group of monsters-those the for in as a visual serve metaphor devouring-might gaged monk's exegetical process of ruminatio, or mastication.16 Ultimately, however, he returns to Schapiro's explanation of the monstrous as representing the imagination. The Romanesque artist, Camille believes, took "obvious delight ... in the space of the imagination" and deliberately transgressed the norms of religious iconography in order to establish its limits.17 Conrad Rudolph has probed more deeply into the conditions of monastic spirituality in a recent textual commentary on Saint Bernard's Apologia. Illustrating Bernard's cloister capitals with surviving examples from Cluniac monasteries such as Moissac, Rudolph rightly emphasizes that Bernard was particularly critical of those monstrous, "contradictory forms" that would cause the monk to be distracted from his meditation, thus raising a traditional monastic concern with curiosity, but he never explains why carved capitals with such subjects would have been acceptable to the Cluniacs.18 In a second, more recent book, Rudolph offers compelling explanations for historiated initials of the early twelfth-century Cistercian manuscript of the Moralia in Job (Dijon, Bibliotheque Municipale lat. 173). Here, at the very heart of the revered commentator's text, a wild array of monsters and hybrid creatures do battle in the historiated initials, raising comparable questions concerning the meaning of the monstrous. In this case, Rudolph uses Gregory the Great's text as a concrete basis for understanding the monsters and "semi-

homines" as pictorial commentaries that parallel the transformative struggle of reading itself as a spiritual exercise (see below; Figs. 18, 28).19 Whereas Schapiro and Gombrich's generalizing theories fail to account for the specific religious context in which Bernard's images appeared, Rudolph, like Camille, realizes the necessity of understanding the monstrous within the realm of monastic reading and meditation. As will be shown later in this paper, Rudolph's approach to the Moralia in Job is of particular relevance to the imagery in the cloister, given the fact that the monks would have been reading and viewing such texts there.2? My own response to Saint Bernard builds on the recent consensus that monstrous images in Romanesque art externalize some aspect of the imagination, but it rejects as anachronistic the assumption of Schapiro and others that the imagination is primarily the product of the artist's personal fantasy. Shifting the focus from the artist and the critic to the monastic audience, I propose to examine the underlying religious concepts of the body and phantasia (or imagination) that would have made it both permissible and appropriate to represent the monstrous and deformed in the context of the monastic claustrum. It will be shown here that the monstrous creatures in the Romanesque cloister capitals functioned as conventional examples of corporeal deformity, which manifest in visible form the spiritual deformities, inner desires, and phantasms that perturbed the collective imagination of the monastic community. The cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa offers no single, explanatory text of its own: sadly, its library has almost completely vanished.2' We do know, however, that its scriptorium produced a number of key secular and religious texts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and it may be assumed that it would have possessed or had access to as broad a range of biblical texts and commentaries as its sister house at Ripoll. That abbey's holdings included some two hundred and fifty volumes by the middle of the eleventh century. Apart from the standard service books and biblical texts, the library possessed numerous patristic texts by Augustine, Ambrose, Bede, Boethius, Cassian, and Pope Gregory the Great, as well as more recent local commentaries and chronicles, papal decretals, and model saints' lives.22 My interpretation of the monstrous and deformed is based primarily on late eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic writers, including Bernard of Clairvaux himself, William of StThierry (1085-ca. 1148), and Peter the Venerable of Cluny (ca. 1092-1156), who cast the physical body as a site for understanding the inner life of the spirit. By no means isolated from contemporaneous thought on cosmology and the behavior of the body propagated in the urban schools by such celebrated teachers as Hugh of St-Victor (d. 1141), monastic writers were also steeped in an ascetic tradition that was grounded in the Early Church Fathers such as Augustine (354-430), John Cassian (ca. 360-ca. 435), and Pope Gregory the Great (540-604), whose writings continued to be widely read and copied by the monastic communities in the twelfth century. In addition to these sources, I will consider the texts of the Benedictine rule and the liturgy of the divine office, which shaped so fundamentally the spirituality and art of the monks at Cuxa. Bernard's rhetorical antithesis-"deformed beauty" and

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1 Abbey of St-Michel-de-Cuxa, general view of cloister, ca. 1140, reconstructed in the 1950s (photo: Editions Zodiaque)

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2 Castelnau, abbey of St-Michel-deCuxa, plan, 1779. Paris, Archives Nationales de France

on particular importance in "beautiful deformity"-takes light of the more "somatic" spirituality of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this way he highlights the contradiction of the natural body posed by hybrid monsters and double-bodied beasts, as well as by the deformities inherent in the gesticulating figures of dancers and entertainers in the Cuxa cloister. These "contradictory forms" are the essence of the "ridiculous monstrosity" that simultaneously attracts and appalls Bernard. It will be argued here that the Cluniacs and the members of other traditional Benedictine monasteries such as that of Cuxa believed that these images could perform salutary didactic and purgative functions for the monk who deigned to "read in the marble rather than in books." Although I will focus on a single case study here, it must be emphasized from the outset that the broader interpretative framework might be applied to images of the monstrous and deformed both in other Romanesque cloisters and more generally in other settings in which the monks were the primary audience and patron. St-Michel-de-Cuxa as Case Study Nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southwestern France near Prades, the Benedictine abbey of St-Michel-deCuxa was founded early in the ninth century by monks from St. Andrew in Exalada.23 The abbey rose to preeminence in the region of Roussillon and Catalonia under Oliba (10081046), who served simultaneously as abbot of Cuxa and the Catalan abbey of S. Maria at Ripoll and began to develop a congregation of affiliated monasteries following the model of Cluny.24 In the last decades of the eleventh century, both abbeys in turn were absorbed into the larger congregation of Benedictine abbeys headed by St-Victor in Marseilles; standing apart from the Cluniac system, Marseilles nonetheless saw Cluny as a model and was joined in confraternity with it.25 Thus, while St-Michel-de-Cuxa was never a dependency of

Cluny, it was spiritually and culturally connected to the same conservative strain of Benedictine monasticism. The present abbey church is the product of two building campaigns in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries under Abbot Oliba and his predecessor, Garin (965-998). The cloister, which stands to the south of the church, was constructed under Abbot Gregory in the 1130s (Fig. 1).26 The precise disposition of the capitals will never be known because the cloister was gradually dismantled in the century after the French Revolution. A drawing made on the eve of the revolution in 1779 by the Seigneur Castelnau, the royal engineer, indicates that the cloister was trapezoidal in plan and comprised sixty-three capitals, including four mounted on paired columns of reduced diameter at the south end of the eastern gallery (Fig. 2).27 Incorporated into domestic buildings at Prades and elsewhere in the vicinity of Cuxa during the nineteenth century, about half of the original capitals and architectural fragments were reinstalled in situ in the 1950s. Most of the other capitals were acquired by the American sculptor George Grey Barnard in 1906 and 1907. After initially displaying the capitals in his own private museum in New York, Barnard sold them to John D. Rockefeller Jr., who purchased them for the Metropolitan Museum in 1925.28 These capitals were mounted in an ersatz cloister to form the centerpiece of the Cloisters, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was opened in Fort Tryon Park in 1938 (Fig. 3). Architecturally, Cuxa on the Hudson evokes the spirit of the original setting quite accurately, even including a free copy of one of the transept towers, but the plan has been shrunk to half the dimensions of the original, and certain capitals of smaller dimensions may originally have come from the tribune or portals of the abbey.29 The discussion that follows will draw upon the entire

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3 Cloister of St-Michelde-Cuxa as reconstructed in 1938 at the Cloisters in New York, view from the south (photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

repertoire of historiated capitals now divided among the two sites. From the outset it must be acknowledged that we will never know the precise disposition of individual capitals within the original cloister.30 This is not an insurmountable obstacle to programmatic interpretation, though, if we take into account how the monks would have seen and used the capitals. As Kathryn Horste has emphasized in her study of La Daurade, cloister capitals were not intended to be viewed as often attempted by art historians, in a continuous sequence, and the cloister garth-the stone plinth on which the open arcades rest-makes it virtually impossible to follow a sequence

of scenes even around a single capital.31 In her study of the Moissac cloister, Leah Rutchick goes even further to suggest that a sequential, continuous narrative was not necessarily an ideal desired by the planners of the program.32 Rather, the distinctive vignettes presented on clearly differentiated sides of the capitals allowed the monk to reconstitute larger narratives in an additive fashion as part of his "ruminations" in the cloister during his lifetime there. Much like contemporaneous secular literature and the oral traditions on which they were based, the artists of cloister capitals would assume a certain knowledge of the sacred narratives by the monastic audience, and could thus present their material in a disjunc-

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tive fashion, eschewing chronological order and repeating the same material from different points of view without a loss of coherence.33 The totality of any cloister program is thus comparable to a florilegium, the typical monastic anthology of sacred knowledge, drawing on diverse scriptural texts and commentaries.34 The cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa comprises a similar fiorilegium of disparate themes. To be sure, the range of sources utilized is much more restricted than that found at Moissac or La Daurade. In place of conventional biblical and hagiographic narratives, we find subjects based more loosely on the bestiary, the Psalms, moralizing treatises, and monastic accounts of dreams and hallucinations. There is also a tendency at Cuxa to repeat themes both within the same capital and on other capitals in the cloister. The capitals must have been viewed primarily one or two sides at a time when the monks were seated on the garth during their daily reading and meditation, or glimpsed fleetingly as they moved through the cloister on their way to the various structures it connected.35 Since capitals were intended to be viewed only in small clusters, the repetition of themes in different parts of the cloister would be considered a virtue. Likewise, we should not expect to find a discernible narrative sequence at Cuxa. The keys to understanding the imagery lie more in broader genres than in a precise sequence.36 Only two of the capitals belonging to the Cuxa group Christ, Apostles, depict explicitly sacred figures-including and angels-but they are usually attributed to the tribune from the interior of the abbey church.37 By contrast, the rest of the historiated capitals are carved in high relief with a or dancing riotous array of naked male figures-squatting with flailing arms-wild beasts, hybrids, and monstrous mouths devouring naked torsos (Figs. 5-7, 12-17, 19-25). Building on recent research on the body and gesture by historians of medieval religion, I start from the assumption that the physical body was scrutinized as a key to understanding the inner life of the spirit.38 On this basis, I hope to establish a general framework within which one can understand distinctive types of deformed bodies in the cloister. I will focus on three prominent themes in the capitals: jongleurs, or entertainers, as distortions of the human body; simian creatures as images of man's lower nature; and wild beasts and hybrids as potential threats to bodily integrity. Finally, I will suggest how these different examples of corporeal deformity might be related to the monk's interior battle with demonic phantasms in the imagination and dreams.

Thus, the body not only reflects the state of the soul but can also impose order on it. Bernard's moral understanding of the body and behavior is symptomatic of a broader current of twelfth-century thought, which has been studied most recently by Jean-Claude Schmitt and C. Stephen Jaeger. Both authors make clear the preoccupation in monastic and scholastic circles with the relationship between the physical, exterior body and the interior life of the soul. In his study of the "charismatic culture" of cathedral schools in western Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries,Jaeger affirms that physical appearance and bearing were identified with character and carefully scrutinized for signs of the state of the inner life. By the same token, just as Bernard had suggested, early Scholastic writers viewed the well-composed body as a visual model for behavior, or as Jaeger puts it, "a text-book of virtue."41 Painting a broader canvas, Schmitt sees medieval society from the Carolingian period to the fourteenth century as a "civilisation du geste" in which "gestures," encompassing all movements and attitudes of the body, were invested with great significance in social relations, and thus came to be interpreted in political, historical, ethical, and even theological terms.42 A key source for both Jaeger and Schmitt is De institutione novitiorum, a manual composed for the formation of novices by Hugh of St-Victor. Hugh argues here that the outward appearance and movements of the body both reflect and can condition the life of the inner man: Just as inconstancy of mind brings forth irregular motions of the body, so also the mind is strengthened and made constant when the body is restrained through the process of discipline. And little by little, the mind is composed inwardly to calm, when through the custody of discipline its bad motions are not allowed free play outwardly. The perfection of virtue is attained when the members of the body are governed and ordered through the inner custody of the mind.43 As Schmitt has shown, Hugh of St-Victor and his contemporaries drew on a long rhetorical tradition that was rooted ultimately in Cicero and Quintilian but filtered through Saint Paul and the Early Church Fathers.44 They established the essential framework for viewing the body as an integral, ethical whole, combining a physical exterior with a spiritual interior. Rather than seeing the flesh as wholly negative, they viewed the body in light of Genesis, as initially created in God's own image but deformed through original sin. The physical body provided external signs that variously reflected or imposed on the interior soul the state of its moral health.45 Blending this tradition with a renewed Platonism, twelfthcentury cosmologists such as Bernard Silvester (fl. 1136), William of Conches (1080-ca. 1150), William of St-Thierry (1085-ca. 1148), Alan of Lille (1128-1203), and Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) cast man as microcosm.46 For these writers, man was simultaneously viewed as image of the world and as image of God. Man, who exists in nature, is at once the embodiment of the four elements of all creation and a spiritual being, participating in the divine goodness of the soul. The man-as-microcosm theme is appropriately illustrated in manuscripts of the female mystic Hildegard of Bingen, for

Theories of the Ideal Body and the Monstrous In order to set the monstrous and deformed in context, it is essential to grasp the central roles that images of the idealized body and conventions of behavior played in the religious culture of the Romanesque.39 We can see why Bernard of Clairvaux felt so compelled to condemn the monstrous in religious art when we read his statement on corporeal behavior from the Sermon on the Song of Songs. He writes that to understand the beauty of the soul, "we must observe a man's outward bearing, not because morality originates from conduct, but because conduct mediates morality.... The beauty of actions is visible testimony to the state of conscience ....,40

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4 Man as Microcosm, from Hildegard of Bingen, Liberdivinorum operum,ca. 1200. Lucca, Biblioteca Comunale ms 1942 (photo: Scala/Art Resource)

whom pictorial images aided a more "somatic" approach to theology (Fig. 4).47 In an illustration of the second vision in Hildegard's Liber divinorum operum, now in Lucca, the abbess herself appears at lower left as witness to a Trinitarian universe set against a glimmering gold ground. The bearded Creator emerges from the head of the fiery Holy Spirit who embraces, in turn, the circular firmament surrounding the world. Anticipating by three hundred years Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the "Vitruvian Man," an idealized male nude, the image of God incarnate stands at the center of a circular universe that determines the proportions of his body.48 According to Hildegard, "the height of the human figure is equal to its width if arms and hands are evenly stretched out from the chest. This is so because the firmament, too, is as long as it is wide."49 The man's head, like the universe, is round in shape; intellectual faculties are linked directly by visible rays to the divine Creator and the celestial bodies above him. In this way man's body was seen to emanate the beauty of the God-given soul. In keeping with his prelapsarian innocence and his identity with Christ, this ideal male is shown without the potentially dangerous sign of his sexuality.

If the ordered body reflected the harmonious nature of the godly soul, corporeal deformations furnished metaphors for the soul's potential degeneracy. Pope Gregory the Great set the tone for later Christian thought on this matter in his Moralia in Job by drawing an essential contrast between upright men, governed by reason, and sinners, or "deformed" men who behave like beasts. Commenting on Job 33:27, Gregory affirms, "[Scripture] calls those 'men' whom reason distinguishes from the beasts, that is, who it shows to be unaffected by the bestial influence of passions.... For the Lord in truth feeds them, whom carnal pleasure does not affect as it does the beasts. But, on the other hand, they who yield to the desires of the flesh, are no longer called men, but beasts."50 Anticipating Bernard's rhetorical contrast of "deformed beauty" and "beautiful deformity," Gregory goes on to suggest that the rational man will correct his bestial behavior by observing the contrast between his own sinful character and that of holy men. "For if a person is desirous of most completely learning his real character, he ought no doubt to look at those who are different from himself: so that from the beauty of the good he may measure the extent of his own deformity.... For by those who possess every good quality in abundance, he rightly considers what he himself lacks. And he beholds in their beauty his own deformity .... ,,5l Perhaps the most highly developed theory of the relationship between man's rational and animal natures in the early twelfth century is outlined by William of St-Thierry, the Benedictine abbot to whom Bernard wrote his Apologia. In book 1 of The Nature of the Body and Soul,52 William argues that man is distinguished from beasts principally by the faculty of reason, which "stands in the middle [of the brain] as queen and lady, differentiating us from beasts." William associates "animal power" or sensation with the forward part of the brain, where imagination is also lodged.53 In book 2, which deals with the "Physics of the Soul," he emphasizes that because man is cast "in the image of him who created [the soul]," that man stands erect "reaching toward heaven and looking up [and this] signifies the imperial and regal dignity of the rational soul." By contrast, those who ignore the rational soul and "slavishly serve the lusts arising from the senses" are said to "have put off the image of the Creator and have put on another image, one that looks at the ground like an animal, one that is beastly."54 The theory of a lower animal nature within man's soul made it possible to conceive that malevolent forces could deform man's perfect corporeal image. At least within the realm of the imagination, a man's carnal impulses could result in the demonic transformation of his physical body into beast or monster. Such thinking could spawn, in turn, the images of monsters, the "deformed beauty" and "beautiful deformity" captured so vividly by Saint Bernard. Although many medieval monsters originated as marvels of natural history, transmitted by the ancient authors Pliny the Elder (23/24-79) and Solinus (ca. 401-450), by Bernard's time they had come to be intimately associated with the spiritual deformity of human beings.55 Monsters were viewed both as specific races, such as the progeny of the accursed Cain, that could be localized to the dark margins of the mappaemundi and more generally as metaphors for man's flawed character and his inappropriate behavior.56 The illus-

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trated bestiaries, which were widely diffused in monastic centers from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, not only gave tangible reality to monstrous creatures and races, placing them side by side with domestic species, but also reinforced their primary value as allegories of human morality.57 The ease with which a twelfth-century monk might associate corporeal monstrosity with spiritual or behavioral deformity is witnessed in a letter of Peter the Venerable, who served as abbot of Cluny (1122-56) during the period in which the Cuxa cloister was built. Peter describes as monstrous (monstruosus) the dishonest man who "unites to a human head a horse's neck and the feathers of a bird."58 Here, the degeneration of human character is graphically conveyed by the contradictory form of a hybrid. As Caroline Walker Bynum has recently shown, Bernard likewise used such paradoxical rhetorical structures in his writings to show the essential hybridity (mixtura) or duality of the human being and his contradictory natures and social roles.59 In a passage from his De consideratione,much quoted by later twelfth-century authors, Bernard decries secular rulers, calling monstruosa the coincidence of "the highest rank and the lowest soul, the first seat with the lowest life, a loquacious tongue with a hateful hand, grand talk with no fruit, a heavy countenance with light action, enormous authority and wavering stability."60 Addressed to Eugene III, Bernard's text was also an implicit warning to the pope himself and his need to overcome the duality of his own hybrid role as a professed monk and leader of the church in the world.61 Beyond this metaphorical usage, Peter the Venerable shows that "monstrous" might be used to describe any behavior of the physical body that could be considered immoderate or unseemly, a reflection of internal disorder and contradiction. Thus, in a letter to Saint Bernard concerning differences of practice between his own Cluniac Benedictines and the Cistercians, he applies the metaphor of the monstrous hybrid to what he considers to be the hypocritical response of traditional Benedictine (black-robed) monks to the sight of a Cistercian (white-robed) monk: "I have seen I know not how many black [monks], laughing at a white [monk] whom they meet, as if he were a monster, and showing by their voices and movements that they are amazed, as if a chimera or a centaur, or some traveling portent were carried to their eyes."62 Here, Peter, like Bernard, uses rhetorical contrastsblack versus white; the monstrous centaur or chimera coming upon religious men-to reinforce the impression of contradictory behavior in his monks. We can see the Benedictines roaring with laughter, twisting in their seats, their faces changing color like the chimera's skin was supposed to do. These immoderate gestures and movements of the body transform them into beasts such as the centaur, known for its unbridled passion. Peter's condemnation of the monks must be understood within the context of a religious culture that was increasingly preoccupied with the relationship between the movements of the corporeal movement-gestus-and soul. Both Scholastics and monastic writers, including Bernard himself, placed a high value on the notion of imposing spiritual order on the "inner man" through the harmonious, orderly movement of the physical body. In this context, the gesticulation of actors or monks convulsed with laughter

could appear as monstrous as the hybrid creatures combining human and animal features. So pervasive was the physical and metaphorical understanding of the monstrous that Bernard, who condemned hybrid monsters carved in stone, would describe his own conflicted personality as a hybrid monster: "My monstrous life cries out to you, my miserable conscience. For I am a kind of chimera of my time; I conduct myself neither as a cleric nor as a layman."63 Thus, when Bernard complains of "ridiculous monstrosity," of "deformed beauty" and "beautiful deformity" in the cloister capitals, he is concerned not so much with the issues of artistic freedom as with the disturbing propagation of images that make tangible the contradiction of the natural order in the ideal body of Christ, which is the measure and microcosm of the universe and matrix for the individual faithful.64 It was one thing to evoke such images of hybrid monsters as revelatory metaphors for human behavior; for Bernard, it was apparently unacceptable to represent the same in concrete, pictorial form. For here, deformity visually competes with the sacred models that the monk is expected to imitate and to impress upon the inner man. Deformed and Monstrous Bodies in the Cuxa Capitals Once the monstrous is understood as one aspect of a broader category of corporeal deformities, one begins to see how the cloister might provide an appropriate functional frame for monstrous imagery. The cloister is the distinctive architectural symbol of the common life of the monastic body.65 At the heart of the physical structure, it communicates between church, refectory, dormitory, and chapter (Figs. 1-3). All physical movement within the monastery is organized around it. At the same time its walkways shelter the symbolic monastic garden, which serves as a microcosm of the physical world and of the restored Paradise of Eden.66 The monk's individual body is inscribed within this microcosm at the center of the monastic plan, much as the man's ideal body is inscribed within the diagram of the world in Hildegard's Liber divinorum operum (Fig. 4). Architecturally, the rectangular geometry of plan and the rhythmic arcades of the galleries on four sides convey an image of order and concord, which mirrors the ideal life of the monk as regulated by the Benedictine rule. As much as the claustrum represents the ideal order of the monastic life, it is also a place of transition for the monk both in terms of his spiritual life and his physical movements around the monastery. Thus, Peter of Celle (1118-1182) writes in his School of the Cloisterthat "the cloister lies on the border of angelic purity and earthly contamination."67 Elsewhere in the same work, Peter emphasizes that the cloister, which stands for the entire monastic enclosure, is a place of spiritual struggle in which the monk works to cleanse himself from the sins of the fleshly body. He likens the monastic claustrum to a stadium, "where those who run the race ... ab." and stain from fornication, adultery and all uncleanness... where the monk "has begun to tread upon the world and his own body."68 Peter also calls upon the monk, through the discipline of the Benedictine rule, to make reparation for the Fall, which "has weakened the strength of his bodily health" and to "crucify his whole self with his vices and lusts."69 The ambivalent nature of the cloister extends to the di-

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5 Cloister capital from St-Michel-deCuxa with naked dancers and monstrous mouths, south face. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.635 (photo: author)

verse activities sheltered within its galleries. While it was the primary place for quiet reading, it was also used by the pueri (the young boys in training to be monks), who read aloud, and at other times of the day it served liturgical processions and more mundane tasks such as washing.70 It regularly functioned as a point of transition between the life of prayer in the oratory and the more routine actions of eating, sleeping, and administration organized around its perimeter. In certain Cluniac establishments, the cloister had even been invaded by the laity to the extent that Peter the Venerable felt the need to impose severe restrictions on lay access.71 The capitals themselves seem to echo these diverse functions of the cloister. The very form of the capitals highlights a visual process of transformation from the regular, classical harmony of the Corinthian order that serves as the template for all the capitals to the more abstract geometric forms or human figures, beasts, and monsters. It is this tension between the world and the cloister, the struggle to repress the natural inclinations of the body, that is underscored both in Bernard's description and in the subjects illustrated in the surviving capitals at St-Michel-de-Cuxa. One capital from Cuxa, now in the Cloisters (Figs. 5-7), is representative of a broader category of ludic themes that evoke most directly the concerns expressed in contemporaneous monastic literature on corporeal behavior.72 The capital displays on three of its faces a single naked male dancer, whose head is positioned on the central axis, midway between volutes, as if to form a console supporting the abacus. The

central of three figural faces (Fig. 5) depicts in profile a naked man with long, unruly locks of hair and a bulging belly. Holding a large blast horn in one hand, he rests the other on his hip as he dances with legs bent and feet lifted high. Moving clockwise, on the adjacent face (Fig. 6) appears a bald man, who stares out at the viewer with bulging eyes and twists his rubbery body as he dances across the face of the capital from right to left, one hand on hip, the other grasping at the left volute of the capital. The third figure (Fig. 7), like the first, is depicted in profile blowing a horn as he dances. Perhaps derived ultimately from Dionysian figures on late antique sarcophagi, these hedonistic characters find their closest contemporaneous analogues in figures of naked and half-naked Vices such as those illustrated in an eleventhcentury manuscript from Moissac (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France lat. 2077; Fig. 8), containing, among other texts, extensive excerpts from the Treatiseon the Eight Vicesby Halitgarius of Cambrai (d. 830) and Battle betweenthe Virtues and Vicesby Ambrose Autpertus (d. 784).73 In the illustration of the Battle between Lust and Chastity, the richly clad vice appears at left assaulted by a monstrous hybrid grasping her feet and a naked demonic figure with flaming hair who tugs at her clothes from behind. Meanwhile, Lust loosens her belt to disrobe as she casts her gaze at a man who lifts his tunic to reveal his private parts. Chastity appears at right as a more modestly clad woman carrying a palm of victory as she tramples on a second naked figure with flaming hair to indicate her triumph over Luxuria. In both cases, nakedness and

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6 Cloister capital with naked dancers and monstrous mouths, west face (photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

7 Cloister capital with naked dancers and monstrous mouths, east face (photo: author)

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Lust and Chastity,from Halitgarius, Treatiseon 8 Battle between the Eight Vices,Moissac, 11th century. Paris, BNF ms lat. 2077, fol. 173r

unruly locks of hair are used as attributes of evil and vice; perhaps in deference to the exclusively monastic audience, however, the male phallus is decorously omitted.74 While the Cuxa figures certainly evoke a general connection with the theme of luxuria, they do not literally illustrate the psychomachia. They convey, instead, the unrestrained movements of jongleurs. The large horns held by the dancers reinforce this identification. Similar instruments are depicted in the exterior corbels of Romanesque churches and in the sculptural decoration of cloisters.75 In the cloister of S. Domingo in Silos, for example, the upper zone of the Doubting Thomas relief (Fig. 9) features long-haired men and women in secular garb blowing horns and beating drums. Schapiro identifies these figures as the tromperosand tamboreros (horn blowers and tambourine players) mentioned in medieval Spanish documents.76 Associated by occupation with the broader class of jongleurs, or entertainers, such performers might appear in either sacred or secular settings-at paraliturgical celebrations of the church or banquets.77Jongleurs were the primary practitioners of instrumental music, and even though church officials consistently censured their behavior, they might still be called on to perform paraliturgical music within the church on major festivals.78 A second comparison demonstrates that the horn-blowing jongleurs of Cuxa would have evoked more explicitly a contrast between the sacred music practiced by the monks themselves and profane music brought in from outside. A page from the early twelfth-century psalter from St-Remigius in Reims (Fig. 10) illustrates how sacred music was equated with the harmony of psalmody, the staple of monastic life; this is embodied in the upper register by David playing the lyre in

the company of other instrumentalists. Chiara Frugoni has convincingly argued that David appears here not only as the author of the Psalms but also as the "Beatus vir" of the first psalm, which it prefaces, as the righteous man who prefigures Christ himself, and as a creator of sacred music.79 Around him we see other practitioners of sacred music for the liturgy, including a singer holding an open psalter and instrumentalists playing flutes, bells, and organ. Profane music appears below in the guise of a bear beating a drum. This demonic counterpart of David, as Frugoni suggests, may actually be a man transformed by the beast's costume to represent the animal power of profane music. Instead of the sweet-sounding lyre, he beats a drum, an instrument particularly associated with carnality and sin, because it is formed from the skin of dead animals.80 In this more chaotic composition, the protagonist is flanked by tumbling figures of acrobats or jongleurs, dancers, and two musicians producing a dissonant combination of sounds on a viol and a loud blast horn like the ones held by our figures at Cuxa. Here, then, we find an explicitly negative gloss on profane music and its accompanying spectacle of entertainer figures: dancers and acrobats, both figures of those who would deform the image of God by the "wantonness and obscenity of their bodies."81 Just as the corporeal contortions of actors and dancers were associated with prostitution, so profane music was frequently associated in monastic art with lust. An unusually direct example is illustrated here by a capital in the nave of the abbey of the Madeleine at Vezelay (Fig. 11).82 At left, a musician plays a loud horn, while a naked demon with wild, flaming hair twists around to fondle the breasts of a naked woman on the opposite side. The explicitly sexual content of this image is also revealing. The Vezelay capital is situated high up in the public space of the nave and would have been seen much less frequently by the monks themselves. By contrast, the Cuxa capital, evocative without being sexually explicit, lay immediately above the monk's head, where he was reading every day. The metaphor of the dancers was also more readily applicable to the twelfth-century monk's preoccupations with the comportment and carriage of the physical body. The connection between music, bodily movement, and the workings of the soul is spelled out in the Gloss on Timaeus by Bernard of Chartres (fl. 1114-19). Drawing in part on Augustine and Boethius, Bernard goes much further to argue that harmonious music, like the disciplined movement of the outer body, can fashion a harmonious soul within. "Upon hearing the harmonies of music, we ought to be reformed in our conduct according to the harmony of virtues. For although the soul is constructed according to consonances, yet those consonances turn dissonant when joined to the body, and they must be reformed outwardly through music. And this means: music as a whole is given to man, not for his delight, but for the composition of his manners."83 Besides this fundamental contrast of sacred and profane music, the naked dancers and horn blowers represented on the Cuxa capital also evoke more generically the broader histriones(ystriones),and mimi class of entertainers-jongleurs, (mimes)-as examples of inappropriate lifestyle and corporeal behavior. These men and women were condemned by

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9 S. Domingo, Silos, cloister, relief on northwest pier: Doubting Thomas with jongleurs (photo: Contancio del Alamo Martinez and Elizabeth Valdes del Alamo)

both monastic authorities and secular clergy first because they failed to fit within the orderly class structure of society.84 They performed no "useful" service, and whereas the monk's life was marked by stabilitas within the confines of the monastic garden, the entertainers were vagrants who traveled from one city to another in search of work and alms. The monk who engages in such activities is explicitly censured in the Benedictine rule. Chapter 1, which describes four different kinds of monks, refers in the last place to gyrovagi-those "who spend all their lives wandering about different provinces, staying in different cells for three or four days at a time, ever roaming, with no stability, given up to their own plea85 sures and to the snares of gluttony.... Already excluded from the body politic by their unstable employment, the jongleurs were made monstrous by the deformation and misuse of their bodies. Solo dancing, which is represented on the Cuxa capitals, had been condemned continuously by church officials from the fifth century up to the late Middle Ages.86 According to Pierre Riche, Church

officials saw in dance a pagan survival that needed to be uprooted in order to preserve Christian morals.87 The movements and gestures of the body in dance were considered incitements to lust to which priests themselves were susceptible.88 An even greater emphasis on corporeal deformation as an incitement to lust is found in great abundance in penitentials and sermon literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By the twelfth century, when pagan associations were no longer a serious cause for concern, dance came to be seen much more as a threatening sexual intrusion from within the church, because of its widespread acceptance in ecclesiastical space on the occasions of funerals and saints' festivals, as well as on the most hallowed feast of Easter itself.89 In contrast to this festival, which glorified the ideal body of the resurrected Christ, the celebratory dances were seen to deform man's body as image of God. The jongleurs' display of the naked body and reliance on shameful movements further led both monastic writers and

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10 St-Remigius Psalter, Beatus Vir-Sacred and ProfaneMusic, Reims, ca. 1125. Cambridge, SaintJohn's College ms B 180, fol. Ir (photo: By Permission of the Master and Fellows of Saint John's College, University of Cambridge)

11 Abbey of the Madeleine, Vezelay, capital in nave with profane music, Satan, and Lust, ca. 1125 (photo: Editions Zodiaque)

canonists to associate them with prostitution and lust. With typical irony, Bernard of Clairvaux used the corporeal deformation of acrobats and dancers as a contrast for the intellectual acrobatics of the mind performed by monks. A good sort of playing it is which is the object of men's ridicule, but offers a beautiful spectacle to the angels. ... In fact, what else do seculars think we are doing but playing when what they desire most on earth, we fly from; and what they fly from we desire? In the manner of acrobats [joculatorum] and dancers [saltatorum] who with their heads down and feet up, stand or walk on their hands, and thus draw all eyes to themselves. But this is not a game for children or the theater where lust is excited by the effeminate and indecent contortions of the actors, it is a joyous game, decent, grave and admirable, delighting the gaze of heavenly onlookers.'" Here, no less than in his Apologia, Bernard describes beautifully those things that he deems repugnant: the dancers and acrobats who excite lust in the spectator by deforming their bodies with indecent gestures. More direct condemnation of the jongleurs for corporeal deformity is found in later twelfth-century canonists. According to Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), the histriones "earn the necessaries of life through wantonness and obscenity of their

bodies, deforming the image of God."l1 Likewise, Rufinus (d. ca. 1192) defines ystriones as those storytellers "who exercise their bodies as objects of derision, and who represent stories of others through gesticulation and the movement of their body and by transforming their faces."'92Rufinus's choice of words is significant here: by referring to the gesticulatio of the actors, he makes clear the distinction between the inappropriate movements and gesticulations of their bodies and the harmonious movement (gestus) of the ordered body.93 A second kind of corporeal deformity is illustrated by the assimilation of man to ape on three capitals now in New York and another reinstalled at Cuxa.94 In two of the examples in New York (Figs. 12, 13), single apes and men squat in identical poses in alternation beneath the Corinthian volutes of the capital. Placed in such close proximity, the two creatures seem barely distinguishable. On one corner (Fig. 13), an ape squats with bent legs spread wide apart and arms resting squarely on its knees, while looking down at the viewer through large, bulging eyes. On an adjacent corner in each of two examples a naked man squats in the identical pose (Fig. 12), distinguishable from beast only by his humanoid facial features and feet. Both of these figures. are contrasted with erect, athletic-looking men marking the central axis of each capital, who appear to be attempting to raise their animal counterparts by the arms. These positive exemplars would seem to represent in concrete terms Peter of Celle's meta-

MO()NSTERS

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12 Cloister capital from St-Michel-deCuxa with squatting apes and men. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.617 (photo: author)

13 Cloister capital from St-Michel-deCuxa with squatting apes and men. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.634 (photo: author)

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phor for the monk as athlete struggling to win the race against vice in the monastic stadium.95 In a third example found in situ at Cuxa (Figs. 14, 15), the four corners are occupied by squatting lions with toothy grins, while a series of three squatting humanoids and one ape appear on the principal faces. In this case the series as a whole visually suggests the degeneration of man into beast. On one side (Fig. 14) we see a fully clothed bearded man who

stands upright like the athletic men on the previously discussed capitals in the Cloisters. Moving clockwise, we find on the next face a naked man in the same squatting pose found on the other two capitals, with hands on knees. On a third side, a squatting naked humanoid has been transformed by the addition of a long beard. Finally, on the fourth side (Fig. 15), the humanoid is replaced by a hairy-chested ape in identical pose.

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14 St-Michel-de-Cuxa, cloister capital with rampant lions, squatting men, and ape, detail: naked squatting man and clothed man with beard (photo: author)

15 Cloister capital with rampant lions, squatting men, and ape, detail: ape and squatting man (photo: Editions Zodiaque)

A fourth capital in the Cloisters (Figs. 16, 17) provides a further variation. An ape appears in one corner beneath the volutes, hemmed in by the hind legs of two lions (Fig. 16), while to its left, his human counterpart appears prostrate, his head beneath the front paws of one of the lions (Fig. 17). Viewed in the context of the other ape capitals, this example suggests a ftirther threat to the monk, which will be discussed

with the next category of capitals to be considered here: falling prey to monstrous, devouring beasts. The "filthy ape," which figures prominently among the cloister capitals of the Apologia and is found so frequently in actual Romanesque capitals, seems to have had particular resonance as the inferior order of beauty described by Bernard as "deformed beauty."96 As Schapiro has pointed out,

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16 Cloister capital from St-Michel-deCuxa with double-bodied lions, ape, and men, detail: ape. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.582

17 Cloister capital with double-bodied lions, ape, and men, detail: lions threatening prostrate man (photo: author)

Augustine anticipated Bernard's paradoxical phrase in his De natura boni when he affirmed: "there is a beauty of form in all creatures, but in comparison with the beauty of man, the beauty of the ape is called deformity."97 Horst W. Janson has recognized that the ape's almost exclusive appearance on capitals visually reinforces the creature's deformity through its apparent oppression under the heavy load of the archi-

trave.98 Noting that the apes are shown in poses commonly associated with human figures, especially for personifications of lust, he sees these caryatid beasts primarily as emblems of man's fallen nature.99 The Cuxa capitals suggest a more precise interpretation. By juxtaposing man and ape in identical squatting poses, these capitals explicitly evoke the simian trait of mimicry. AsJanson

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t, '.
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18 Historiated initial H, from Pope Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job,Citeaux, ca. 1111. Dijon, Bibl. Mun. ms 173, fol. 66r (photo: Bibliotheque municipale dle Dijon-France, clich6 F.
Perrodin)

has observed, it was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the ape's association with imitation came to the fore; indeed, the expressions "ars simia naturae" (art apes nature) and "simius humanae naturae simia" (the ape imitates human nature) were then common currency.'?) The ape had long been associated with the Devil's own attempt to imitate God, but in the twelfth century greater emphasis was placed on the ape's assimilation of human characteristics. The Cambridge Bestiary, for example, affirms that "they are called monkeys [Simia] in the latin language because people notice a great similitude to human reason in them."101 Likewise, Hildegard of Bingen calls the ape "a passionate creature, and since it resembles man somewhat, it always watches man in order to do what a man does."1(2 The ape's penchant for imitating man is beautifully illustrated in a historiated initial from an early twelfth-century Cistercian manuscript of Pope Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job (Fig. 18). Here, the initial H is formed by two performers sporting long tunics and distinctive pointed shoes. One stands in profile at right with hands outstretched in what Schmitt describes as a gesture of elocution, but which could also simply represent prayer. The other, shorter figure at left is surmounted by an ape and stretches his arms to the right to hold out a hare, which overlaps the gesturing figure at right.'11 The ape, standing in profile with arms outstretched in the same gesture as the figure in profile, turns his head to watch his human model at right. As Schmitt observes, the lively gestures and the exchange of glances transform the rigid framework of the letter into an animated scene of jongleurie. One could futirther argue that the twisted poses and animated glances and gestures represent the "gesticula-

tions," or inordinate movements that transform man into irrational beast. Indeed, the fact that the right-hand figure appears to look upward at the ape suggests a certain ambiguity as to who is following whom. In the case of Cuxa, it seems clear that man is imitating ape, both in pose and glance. Janson himself has shown that the prevailing view of the ape in both monastic and Scholastic circles of the twelfth century was as a debased man, similar in physical appearance but lacking man's moral powers of reason.104 In the present context, it is instructive that twelfthcentury writers also saw the ape as a prime example of corporeal and spiritual deformity. Bernard Silvester, for example, calls the ape "the deformed image of man; a man of degenerate nature." He warns that if we let our animal impulses get the better of us, "we sink to the level of the ape, human in form but laughable and contemptible in all our actions because we have cut ourselves off from the source of divine wisdom."105 The ape affords only the most prominent example of the more general conception of the way bodily form can degenerate through pose and behavior. In a passage already discussed above, William of St-Thierry contrasts the nobility of man's soul, cast in the image of God, with his carnal, animal nature. The "erect man, reaching toward heaven and looking up, signifies the imperial and regal dignity of the rational soul.... It shows that man has received from the Creator dominion over all the beings that look down, and that he has much in common with that which is above if he maintains the dignity of his inborn likeness .... ."1"( Once again, then, it is the deformation of the ideal image of the physical body that serves as a sign of the potential depravity of the human spirit within. The fear of succumbing to animal forces both within and without the body is visualized in the more monstrous forms of a third group of capitals. In these examples minute human figures are seemingly overwhelmed by enormous wild beasts, double-bodied beasts joined to single heads and hybrids combining animal and human elements (Figs. 19-25). Among this group we find one traditional hybrid from antiquity, the Siren (Fig. 19).107 Repeated on all four corners of a single capital, the Cuxa Siren displays a beautiful female head with almond-shaped eyes and long locks of braided hair falling over gently sloping shoulders. The grace of the face is greatly enhanced by the otherwise rare use of the drill for hair and eyes. Although breasts are articulated, the flesh gives way to a scaly skin and the lower body divides into a double serpentine tail. Homer, the Latin translations of Physiologus between the fourth and sixth centuries, and Isidore of Seville in the seventh century described the Siren as a hybrid of bird and woman, the equivalent of a Harpy.108 As Edmond Faral has shown, however, the Libermonstrorum,composed sometime in the seventh or eighth century, bequeathed to the later Middle Ages what would become the more common representation of the creature as half woman and half fish or sea serpent.'09 According to this text, the. Siren possessed the body of a virgin but had a scaly fishtail, always hidden in the sea. Sirens, the most common hybrids to be included in Romanesque sculpture, appear frequently in the context of the

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19 Cloister capital from St-Michel-de-Cuxa with four Sirens. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.130.837 (photo: David Simon)

monastic cloister. The Siren owes its prominence here to Jerome's translation of Isaiah 13:21-22 in the Vulgate: "But beasts reside there, and their places are filled with dragons, and ostriches live there, and satyrs also dance there; and they respond there with ululations in his places and sirens in the houses of pleasure.""" Jerome's own commentary on the passage, as well as those of other Early Christian Fathers, including Ambrose, Augustine, and Paulinus of Nola (353/ 54-431), popularized the idea of the Siren as courtesan, the ' In l symbol of carnal pleasure (volumptas) and lust (luxuria). " keeping with what was said above regarding monstrosity as an outward symbol of conflicting natures and behaviors, the Siren is also described in the moralized natural histories as a creature of deception because of her careful concealment of her monstrous tail beneath an attractive female upper 12 body. In monastic writings of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries the Siren appears frequently as a symbol of those vices that tempted the monks away from the virtuous life prescribed by the Benedictine rule. In his Liber deflorationum, Abbot Werner of St-Blaise (d. 1126) interprets the three Sirens who threaten Ulysses and his men with their seductive music as an allegory of avarice (avaritia), boasting (jactantia), and lust (luxuria). According to Werner, "they have faces of women, for nothing else alienates the mind of a man from

God more than the love of women."'13 For other monastic writers the Siren represented more specifically the dangers of reading pagan literature. Peter Damian (d. 1072) warned his monks that those lovers of the "sirens" of pagan literature had abandoned the faith that should be their legitimate spouse and had forsaken chastity for those actress-courtesans. 114 Even in texts addressed to nuns, it is women, not men, who are held to pose the greatest threat to their chastity and general well-being. The Cistercian Thomas of Froidmont, a contemporary of Saint Bernard, warns the audience of his De modo bene vivendi that secular women are the Sirens who tempt the religious away from their vocation. "A secular woman is an organ of Satan. This one sings to you alluring things by which she excites the secular and shows the path of the devil, as we have read. The siren of the sea is such that from the belly up she appears as an excellent and beautiful virgin, and from the belly to the feet as a fish .... Just as the siren deceives sailors with her sweet song, so the secular woman through her deceitful words deceives the servants of Christ.... and leads their souls into danger."' 15 This demonization of women as a threat to the monk's ascetic life and his pledge to virginity can be traced back to the desert Fathers of Egypt in the third and fourth centuries.11;"Thus, woman is among the many monstrous guises

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Satan takes in the series of temptations of Saint Anthony described by Athanasius; similarly, Gregory the Great narrates in his Dialogues how Saint Benedict of Nursia, the father of Western monasticism (ca. 480-543), rolled naked in a field of thorns and stinging nettles to resist the vision of a woman that the Devil had sent to his eyes."17 Ultimately, this reflected the notion of woman's primary responsibility for carnal knowledge and the sins of the flesh, promoted first by the narrative of the Fall in Genesis and then by its later exegesis, beginning with the Epistles of Saint Paul.118 The frequent representation of feminine temptation in the guise of Sirens in Romanesque cloister sculpture reflects the renewed enforcement of chastity for monks and secular clergy alike during the monastic revival and the Gregorian Reform of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.119 Like the Fathers of the Early Church, the reformers emphasized the propensity of women toward lust, based not only on their association with Eve but also on their physiology and symbolic identification with carnality.120 The Benedictine abbot Geoffrey of Vend6me (d. 1135), affirming the rule of chastity for his monks, saw in the female sex the root of all sin: The [female] sex poisoned our first ancestor... it strangled John the Baptist and delivered brave Samson to his death. In a manner of speaking it also killed Our Savior: for had [woman's] sin not required it, Our Savior would not have had to die. Woe unto this sex, which knows nothing of awe, goodness, or friendship and which is more to be feared when loved than when hated!121 Echoing Tertullian's attack on women as the "Devil's portal," Geoffrey warns elsewhere that the female sex "discharges its office in the manner of a guardian of the gate: those whom it seduces, it either excludes from life, like Christ's Peter, or admits unto death, like Adam of Eden."'22 It is hardly surprising, then, that both Cistercians and Benedictines greatly restricted contact between monks and women, either secular or conventual, and deployed lay brothers to conduct practical business both within and outside the monastery.123 The Siren was a useful means of visualizing lust in the sacred space of the cloister, because it showed simultaneously the attraction of women and their potentially monstrous behavior without resorting to more explicitly sexual images of the female nude often found on the exterior of churches as personifications of lust.124 While the breasts are rather understated as in most Romanesque images of the Siren, in the Cuxa capital, the uncovered, long locks of hair would be considered alluring enough in their own right. For this reason, twelfth-century churchmen such as Honorius Augustodunensis advocated that women always cover their heads.'25 The long, unencumbered locks of hair displayed by the Siren would thus have conveyed the sinful desires associated both with the naked figure of Eve and the personification of lust in Romanesque sculpture.126 The scaly, bifurcated fishtail, by contrast, was enough to reveal the true, monstrous nature disguised by the feminine beauty of the upper half.127 A second group of monstrous beasts is shown as posing a more direct physical threat to humanity. Bernard's double-

bodied creatures joined to a single head prepare to devour dwarflike human figures on two Cuxa capitals now in the Cloisters. On one capital (Fig. 20), double-bodied lions stand on hind legs with mouths and paws mauling diminutive male figures clad only in loincloths. On a second capital (Figs. 21, 22), double-bodied, rampant bears display a similar heraldic composition also repeated on four corners, with tiny male figures variously threatened and already disappearing into gaping jaws. More inventive are the monstrous heads mounted on human legs. The capital already considered for its dancers (Figs. 5-7) appears to represent in its corners a hybrid of man and beast. Below appear the naked legs and buttocks of a human figure, while above we find a monstrous, inflated feline head with pointed ears, large, almond-shaped eyes flanking a narrow nose with flared nostrils, and a gapingjaw, which, like the brow, is lined with warts. In this instance, there is a certain ambivalence in presentation that causes one to question whether the carver is depicting a true hybrid-a man with a beast-head mounted on his torso-or a naked human being shown in the process of being devoured. A second example in the Cloisters (Fig. 23) unambiguously shows a human body being devoured: in this case, a more precise leonine form is shown with human arms and hands emerging from a toothy jaw. This form of lion's head with arms emerging to support it appears on two further capitals at Cuxa. In the first of these capitals (Fig. 24), the monstrous heads are particularly deformed, with large swelling foreheads and balloonlike ears, while the human limbs, alternating legs and arms, are particularly smooth and slender. Here, as in the ape capitals, athletic figures stand erect on each of the central faces. In the second of the Cuxa examples (Fig. 25), more standard leonine heads clearly consume limbs that could be either human or animal. Although some of these creatures could be construed as hybrids, there is little doubt that they are primarily images of devouring mouths. As Michael Camille has argued in his consideration of the Souillac trumeau, such monstrous mouths could evoke a multiplicity of meanings for the monastic audience.128 They simultaneously suggest the monk's very real fear of wild animals in the countryside surrounding the monastery, or more metaphorically, the monk's active "digestion" of, or ruminatio on the sacred texts that were the focus of his meditation.129 For the monk who knew the psalter inside out, they might also evoke the enemies who "gaped upon me with their mouths as a ravening and a roaring lion" in Psalm 22:13. Ultimately, however, the most compelling visual resonance of the Cuxa creatures is that of the monstrous maw of Hell represented so frequently in contemporary scenes of the Last Judgment.130 In the Winchester Psalter, for example (Fig. 26), the Hell mouth is shown as a great scaly sea monster, which opens a lion's tooth-lined jaw to devour a host of naked bodies, including a number of tonsured monks, as well as princes and prelates.131 Similar images commonly appear within French Romanesque tympana of the Last Judgment. In the west portal of Ste-Foy in Conques, for example (Fig. 27), the disembodied mouth serves both as the devouring agent and as the portal of Hell within which Satan appears again to torment the bodies of the damned.132

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20 Cloister capital from St-Michel-deCuxa with double-bodied lions threatening men. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.855 (photo: author)

21 Cloister capital from St-Michel-deCuxa with bears and men, detail: double-bodied bear threatening to devour a man. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.843 (photo: author)

The Hell mouth itself is not so much a direct illustration of a single text as an evocation of any number of threatening, demonic forces associated with Hell and the fate of the bodies of the damned. The Hell mouth appears nowhere in the biblical accounts of the LastJudgment but emerges in the course of tenth-century exegesis. As Gary Schmidt and Joyce Galpern have shown, Hell was first represented in literature

and art as a great disembodied, monstrous mouth in AngloSaxon England.'33 At a time of reform, the image adapted a pre-Christian northern European tradition to envisage in concrete terms the place of Hell and the fearful punishment of the damned. The appropriation of monstrous maws from a pagan context was facilitated by certain key passages in the Old Testament. Isaiah 5:14 describes Sheol as "mouth

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22 Cloister capital with bears and men, detail: double-bodied bear devouring a man (photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

23 Cloister capital from St-Michel-deCuxa with monstrous heads mounted on human arms. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 25.120.849 (photo: author)

[opened] beyond measure," and similar images of open or swallowing mouths are used to describe Sheol in Numbers (16:30-32) and the Psalms (106:17) as well as the Leviathan in Job 41:14 and the Behemoth in Job 40:15-24. The leonine aspects of the Hell mouth shared by the Winchester Psalter and the Cuxa sculptures probably originate in the Psalms. 34 The monks would be familiar with the

oft-repeated petition of Psalm 22:21: "Save me from the mouth of the lion," and at Compline each day they sang of the Lord's triumphant trampling of the lion together with the asp, basilisk, and dragon in Psalm 91:13. As Jer6me Baschet points out, this imagery is already clearly associated with the judgment and punishment of the damned in the offertory of the Requiem Mass, whose text goes back to the

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24 St-Michel-de-Cuxa, cloister capital with monstrous heads mounted on or devouring human arms (photo:
author)

25 St-Michel-de-Cuxa, cloister capital with monstrous heads mounted on or devouring human arms (photo:
Editions Zodiaque)

eighth or ninth centuries: "Save the souls of all the faithful deceased from the infernal punishments and the deep pit, save them from the mouth of the lion . .. 3."5 Baschet sees the devouring Hell mouth more as metaphor than as description: the monstrous mouth signifies what cannot be described or represented, the horrors of damnation, "without revealing anything about the fate of the damned."136

Yet the Hell mouth does reveal the fundamental role of the physical body and its punishment at the LastJudgment. Here the devouring jaw is a symbol of corporeal disintegration; it reverses the process of reintegrating the perfected body and soul at the time of the Resurrection.137 As Caroline Bynum has demonstrated, twelfth-century writers drew on Saint Augustine to present Resurrection as a process in which the

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stands not only for unbridled sexual appetite but also for the other appetites of the flesh, gluttony and avarice. These vices that "consume" one's spirit in life anticipate the ravenous mouths of Hell that will ultimately devour the physical body at the end of time. Thus, Gregory the Great's commentary on Job 40:11 describes how both sexes, following in the footsteps of Adam and Eve, are overcome by the power of the Devil in the present world in terms that suggest the punishment of the damned in the Hell mouth: "This Behemoth, therefore, who rages insatiably and seeks to devour the whole man at once, simultaneously exalts his mind to pride and corrupts his flesh with the pleasure of lust.... His strength is in his own loins and his force is in the naval of his own belly; because those who are deceived by his blandishments and submit to him through the looseness of lust, they also doubtless become specially his body."'42 The sins of the flesh-lust and gluttony-thus "devour the whole man" like a monstrous mouth, so that the sinner's body is assimilated to that of the monstrous Behemoth. In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, these were precisely the sins that the reformers condemned, and not surprisingly these metaphors for vices took on tangible, corporeal form in the demonic creatures that invaded the monastic imagination. Phantasms and the Religious Imagination Up to this point I have interpreted three distinct groups of monstrosity and corporeal deformity as negative moral signs warning against the consequences of behavior and inner impulses that the monk had to learn to control. Rather than seeing these capitals simply as isolated didactic symbols, though, I would like to explore how their subjects might have been imprinted on the monastic imagination, and why it was deemed appropriate to represent these jarring images in the space of monastic meditation. Meyer Schapiro recognized in Bernard's monsters a general psychological significance tied to the irrational. In a passage worthy of the abbot himself, Schapiro speaks of "a world of projected emotions, psychologically significant images of force, play, aggressiveness, anxiety, self-torment and fear, embodied in the powerful forms of instinct-driven creatures, twisted, struggling, entangled, confronted, and superposed."'43 Because he was searching for a precursor of the modern secular artist, however, Schapiro dismissed any meaningful connection with the monastic culture that produced the cloister capitals. 144 Emile Male pointed the way to a more accurate understanding of the monstrous within the monastic imagination in his masterful survey L'art religieusedu XIIe siecle en France.145 Although he dismissed "monsters" such as Sirens and doublebodied beasts as purely decorative,1'4 when he came to discuss demons in a separate chapter entitled "The Monastic Imprint," he related their fantastic appearance to the monk's frequent experience of visions and dreams. In texts of Benedictines and Cistercians alike, including De miraculis by Peter the Venerable, the Liber miraculorum(ca. 1178) of Herbert of by Konrad of EberClairvaux, the Exordium magnum cisterciense bach, and the Dialogus miraculorum by Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180-1240), demons appear with great frequency in a series of human and monstrous guises.147 Whereas Male saw such texts principally as iconographic sources for images

26 Winchester Psalter, ArchangelMichael Lockingthe Hell Mouth, English, ca. 1145. London, British Library ms 1846, Cotton Nero C.IV, fol. 39r (photo: By Permission of the British Library) physical body, both flesh and bone, was reassembled in an ideal state, free of all physical deformity.138 Echoing certain scriptural accounts of the Resurrection in which the "fishes of the sea . . . cast up the bones which they have devoured" (Enoch 61:5), artists of the twelfth century depicted those who had been consumed by wild animals reemerging whole from the jaws of lions, dragons, and sea monsters.139 Rejoining its soul, the reconstituted body provided the essential identity of personhood. After the Last Judgment, the damned, by contrast, were to be eternally punished in their physical bodies, reversing the process of regurgitation and resurrection.'14? Amplifying the principal biblical accounts of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25 and Revelation, Augustine and Gregory the Great bequeathed to the later Middle Ages the concept of an eternal punishment of the damned.141 While these Early Church Fathers cited fire as the sole agent of punishment, the twelfth century saw the gradual diversification of the corporeal punishments expected, especially in visions of Hell, so that the punishment might suit the crime. The monstrous mouths at Cuxa represent the more general punishment of the body in Hell: naked bodies are devoured whole to suggest their continual pain in the realm of the damned. Juxtaposed with naked jongleurs (discussed earlier), they also suggest a dramatic warning against luxuria, the most dangerous of all sins in the monastic life. Luxuria

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27 Abbey of Ste-Foy, Conques, west detail: Hell portal, Last Ju(dgmnent, mouth, ca. 1140 (photo: Bildarchiv Foto Marbutrg/Art Resource)

of the demonic, I would like to explore how dreams, the imagination, and pictorial images functioned in tandem both as a distorting mirror of the monk's own body and a means of externalizing and purging the demons within. The foundations for medieval conceptions of dreams and the imagination were laid by Macrobius, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Already in late antiquity, Macrobius had argued that while man's mind was created in the likeness of God, his soul was susceptible to corporeal imagination-that is, images imprinted on the mind through the senses.148 In his influential Commentaryon the Dream of Scipio, Macrobius warns that during the drowsy state between wakefulness and slumber, "the dreamer . . . imagines he see specters rushing at him or wandering vaguely about, differing from the natural creatures in size and shape, and hosts of diverse things both delightful and disturbing."149 Similarly Augustine sees phantasia, or the imagination, as potentially distorting what has been communicated to the mind by sight. In book 11 of his treatise On the Trinity, Augustine observes that the mind has the capacity to form images of things that do not exist in reality by "enlarging, diminishing, changing, or arranging at its pleasutire those things" that do exist in another form, impressed utiponthe memory.1?50 Later, in the same book, he gives examples of the kind of "phantasms" that one might imagine through such manipulations of reality-black swans or four-footed birds. In these cases, Augustine argues, the mind must exercise its will properly in order to avoid being harmed by the potentially shameful "fantasies of the imagination [phantasmata]." l l By the twelfth century, such fantasies were most often ascribed to diabolical intervention in the imagination, particularly through the vehicle of dreams. The Cistercian Treatise on the Spirit and the Soul, once attributed to Augustine himself, explains a common belief that men can be turned into wolves and beasts by demons and return to their own selves without losing their human faculty of reason in the following way.

Since demons cannot create natures . . . they do something which makes certain things seem to be what they are not. The intellectual soul and the body could not possibly be truly turned into the form and shape of a beast by any art or power. But man's imaginative faculty [phantasticum] can take innumerable shapes through thought and through dreams, and although this faculty is not itself a body it can take on with amazing speed forms similar to bodies. When man's bodily senses are in a state of slumber or of suppression, the imagination can be diverted to the corporeal shapes of other perceptions. Thus the living body of a man can be lying somewhere, with its sense more intensely suppressed than occurs during sleep. In such a case that imaginative faculty, formed as if in the shape of some animal, may appear to the senses of others. The man will appear to himselfjust as he appears in dreams-in this case carrying burdens like a beast. If these burdens are true bodies it is the demons who carry them so that they can deceive the men who are seeing partly the true bodies of men and partly the false ones of beasts of burden.152 Speaking more specifically of the nature of dreams, Alan of Lille associates accompanying phantasms (phantasmata) with an ethical and rational laziness of the human mind. Thus, in his Summa on the Art of Preaching, Alan warns: he who dreams has closed the eyes of his mind and neither directs his intuition to good nor opens the eye of his mind in order to see necessary things. As long as he neglects himself ... allowing terrestrial pleasures to lull his mind to sleep, then he dreams of phantasmata.... for while the circumspection of reason is less watchful over the portal of the mind, the devil cleverly enters to slay the soul.1'3 Through such sloth, Alan goes on to argue, man deforms within himself the image of God.

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In addition to such theoretical discussions of "fantasies" within dreams and imagination, the very palpable threat posed by demonic apparitions was recorded in the lives of the founding fathers of monasticism. In his Life of Saint Anthony the Hermit, Athanasius records a host of metamorphoses by which the Devil tried to deceive the third-century monk, including naked women, serpents, scorpions, dragons, wild beasts, and even monks.154 Likewise, Pope Gregory the Great recounts in his Dialogues how the founder of Western monasticism, Saint Benedict, and his own monks were frequently confronted with demonic interference within the claustrum. In book 2, chapter 4, Gregory describes a monk who was unable to concentrate on prayer or meditation and was constantly wandering away from his brethren.155 Recognizing the source of trouble in a demon, Benedict is said to have struck the monk with a rod. As a result, the Devil, as if he had been struck himself by the whip, no longer disturbed the monk in the midst of his meditation. The tangible, monstrous form that the Devil could take in the imagination of the monks is revealed in chapter 24 of the same dialogue.156 A monk who constantly requested to abandon his vocation was finally released from his vow by Benedict. As soon as he had left the monastery grounds, he was frightened by a dragon with gaping jaws, blocking his way. Crying out for help, the monk was rescued by his brethren, but they could see no dragon. Once safely within the monastic precinct, the monk vowed never to leave again, and through the help of Benedict's prayers was able to recognize the "invisible dragon" that was leading him astray. Both Athanasius and Gregory's texts continued to be widely read in the twelfth century and served as models for a proliferation of demonic apparitions in contemporaneous monastic literature. One collection of diabolical visions that was widely circulated among Benedictine monasteries at the very time the Cuxa cloister was being built is the treatise on miracles, De miraculis, composed by Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny. Peter believed the monks of Cluny to be constantly under attack from demons, and these attacks of the spirit were visualized in physical terms. In the chapter "On the hostility that the Devil has always nourished against Cluny," Peter asks: Who could describe the hatred with which he constantly or at least frequently attacks this celestial citadel, [and] how hostile he has always been towards the soldiers of Christ who resist him, how he violently wages these frequent assaults, wanting to enter in by force? In effect, searching, as is his custom, to destroy the host within, that is the Holy Spirit, he put into use on the exterior the entire arsenal of temptations of which he was capable and, complaining that he was rejected from the interior, engaged with all his forces a combat on the exterior.157 Following the model of Athanasius's account of the temptations of Saint Anthony, Peter has the Devil exercise power on the monks in a wide range of different guises. The monks' anxieties over physical harm from demons is made tangible by menacing bears, vultures, and other creatures in dreams, parallels for which are found in the Cuxa cloister. The threatening leonine forms so prevalent in the Cuxa capitals (Figs.

5-7, 14-17, 20, 23-25) are evoked by Peter's account of a priest at Lusignan.158 After living a dissolute, ungodly life, the priest, who was nearing death, came to seek solace at a Cluniac priory. There he was besieged by a series of horrific visions, including one in which he found himself flanked by two lions with wide-open jaws ready to devour him. A Cuxa capital showing diminutive men flanked by paired bears on hind legs, now in the Cloisters (Figs. 21, 22), parallels another demonic dream found in De miraculis.159 Peter describes how a novice, having fallen into a light sleep, felt the ominous presence of a bear pressing upon him. After being awakened by this terror, he claimed to have seen himself threatened again while he was awake; this time, the bear was so close that he could see the inside of its abominable mouth and the paws ready to tear him to pieces. Hybrids such as the Siren or the monstrous heads surmounting human limbs are not specifically mentioned by Peter, but a contemporary Cistercian, Herbert of Clairvaux, speaks of a demon who appeared to a monk from Toulouse "in the form of a bellicose monster, part lion and part eagle."160 Elsewhere, Herbert describes demons as hybrids of unshapely human bodies and animal natures: Demons have the habit of appearing in different forms, but there is a form, or more accurately a deformity, under which guise one sees them most often. In terms of the general contour of their bodies, they resemble monstrous men, gigantic in stature, black like Ethiopians in skin color, agile like serpents, ferocious like lions. Marked by large heads and prominent inflated bellies . . . they have a very frail and long neck, and also arms and legs of disproportionate length.161 The allusions to lust in the Cuxa cloisters, both in the Siren capital (Fig. 19) and more directly in the capital with naked dancers (Figs. 5-7), may also be explained in reference to dreams. Saint Anthony the Hermit, we have already noted, was constantly afflicted with visions of naked women tempting him from chastity,162 and this preoccupation in later fourth- and fifth-century monastic communities of Egypt was transmitted to the west by John Cassian (ca. 360-ca. 435).163 His two guides to the monastic life, The Institutes and The Conferences,were already listed as required reading in the Benedictine rule and thus had acquired canonical status by the twelfth century. In book 6 of The Institutes, "The Spirit of Fornication," Cassian emphasizes that images or "fantasies" in the mind constitute the primary threat to the monk's purity: It will be a clear sign and a full proof of this purity if either no unlawful image occurs to us as we lie at rest and relaxed in slumber or at least, when one does surface, it does not arouse any movements of desire. For although a disturbance of this kind may not be accounted as fully evil and sinful, it is nonetheless the sign of an as yet imperfect mind and an indication of vice that has not been totally purified when this sort of delusion comes about by way of deceiving images.164 Cassian goes on to warn that the very sight of a woman is potentially dangerous because it will continue to work on the mind "by the devil's subtle and clever insinuation" through

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the remembrance of the woman's image (even of one's own mother or sister).165 Finally, he admonishes the monk that he will never perfect his chastity until the mind is no longer deluded by the sight of such images during sleep.166 The same concerns are manifest in more explicitly corporeal terms in twelfth-century accounts of sexual fantasies. To take but one example, the anonymous Cistercian treatise De spiritu et anima, already cited above in connection with the powers of the imagination, describes how dreamers see things and act on them as if they were awake: Against their intention and the norms of right behavior they take positions proper to sexual intercourse and the fluid which nature collects in their bodies is emitted through the genital passages. Waking persons who are chaste can control such movement of the flesh. Sleeping persons, however, cannot because they have no power over the expression of corporeal images, which are the natural source of the flesh's movements. The flesh's movement is followed for sleepers by what is to be expected, something which waking persons cannot engage in without sin.167 Other monastic writers of the twelfth century repeat Cassian's assertion that these involuntary breaches of the cherished virtue of chastity were caused by demons. Thus, Hildegard of Bingen warns: when a man falls asleep in delight of the flesh, diabolic illusion will produce this delight in him when he sleeps in such a way that it seems to show to him the bodies of the dead with whom he has sometimes had familiarity or (those) whom he truly never saw with corporeal eyes. This happens in such a way that it seems to him that he takes delight with them in sin and pollution, in such a way that foul things also occur to his semen.... 168 The palpable, corporeal experience of demonic visions is symptomatic of what Steven Kruger has observed is a more general tendency in the twelfth century to somatize dreams.169 Dreams were not only understood to have tangible effects on the physical body, they were also believed to have their origins in the very physiology of the body. According to Paschalis Romanus, When the heart is so clotted by blood and humors . . . the humors become heavy on the sleeper so that he thinks that he is holding up a whole house or some other mass. ... Sometimes ... phantasms occur from a perturbation of the brain. Indeed when one is supine, the memorial part of the brain is pressed upon by the intellectual part and thus the intellectual by the fantastic.'70 In this passage, then, we see how the presence of the fantastic and demonic in the imagination could be connected with a physical deformation of organs within the body. While the monastic literature on dreams helps explain the role of monstrous and deformed creatures in the collective imagination and provides direct parallels for specific subjects, it still does not answer Bernard's question directly. Returning to the functional context of the Cuxa capitals, we are

prompted to ask why such thoroughly negative images should appear in the heart of the monastic claustrum around the symbolic garden paradise. A partial answer is suggested in the passage already quoted from Peter the Venerable's treatise De miraculis. The monk's life of prayer and meditation, Peter asserts, was constantly under attack from the Devil and his legions. To visualize the monstrous and deformed bodies in the cloister thus served on the most basic level to remind the monk of the ongoing battle with the enemy. In this sense, the images in the cloister capitals performed a role parallel to that of the monastic liturgy. As Barbara Rosenwein has aptly described it, the particularly elaborate and expansive form of Benedictine liturgy developed at Cluny in the course of the eleventh century constituted "a kind of battle."171 It may have fulfilled, as Rosenwein argues, a historically defined need to channel the negative forces of military aggression on the battlefields of Europe into a ritualized battle against the supernatural forces within the imagination. Nonetheless, the battle waged in Cluniac ritual was primarily a psychological one, designed to externalize the monk's ongoing psychomachia-his battle for spiritual perfection. In many of Peter's miracula it is meditation and the chanting of psalms that help expel the demons. The psalms composed the monk from without, gave him the internal harmony to dispel the fear and doubt of phantasms from his imagination. At the same time the psalms, which are full of pleas for refuge from inimical forces, form the foundation of regular ritual prescribed in the Benedictine rule.'72 Chapter 18 mandates that the entire psalter be rehearsed during the week, but in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries the abbey of Cluny dramatically expanded ritual to the extent that 170 psalms were sung each day.'73 In addition, certain psalms were repeated on a daily basis for a particular hour or for a specific liturgical feast. Because psalms were so crucial to regular monastic ritual, each novice was required to memorize and fully digest the material of the psalter.174 Thus, particular forms in the cloister capitals such as the leonine Hell mouths, which we have already seen are related to images found in Psalm 22, would have readily evoked a host of associations for the monk, who was highly familiar with the scriptural text. Furthermore, the essential mechanism by which the monstrous imagery of the Cuxa capitals might be associated with the monastic imagination is suggested by the content of one of the psalms that was chanted at the end of each day during the office of Compline: Psalm 91 ("Qui habitat"). Psalm 91 takes as its theme that those who put their trust in the Lord need fear no peril. The Lord will deliver the faithful from the snare of the hunter, from the pestilence that stalks in darkness, and he will trample the threatening beasts: the asp and the basilisk, the lion and the dragon. Saint Bernard wrote no fewer than seventeen sermons on this psalm, emphasizing the connection between the beasts and the monstrous phantasms of the Devil. It was here that Bernard described the capacity of the Devil to enter into the imagination. Because demons have no corporeal existence, Bernard reasoned that "demons want to possess that which we have-and which they themselves cannot possess-they want to steal from us the essence of this world. .. the life of [our] bodies."1'75For Bernard, the asp, basilisk, lion, and dragon of

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verse 13 are "horribilia monstra" that represent the "works of evil, the servants of iniquity."'76 They show the different ways in which the Devil does harm to the soul through the senses-the asp through its bite (touch); the basilisk through its glance (sight); the lion by its growl (hearing); and the dragon by its poison breath (smell). Given such sentiments, it is appropriate that Psalm 91 was sung during the office that ended the day. Compline was designed to prepare the monks for sleep and thus protect them from the demonic forces that might assail their imagination with disturbing phantasms and seek to influence their behavior.'77 This is reflected in the choice of prayers, psalms, versicles, and antiphons. In addition to Psalm 91, the rule prescribes Psalms 4 and 134. Psalm 4 opens with a plea for God's mercy (line 2: "Have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer"), and then advocates self-examination and repentance (line 4: "Do not sin: speak within your hearts and have compunction upon your beds"). It concludes in the hope of a peaceful sleep: "In peace I lie down and at once fall asleep, for you alone, Lord, make me secure in hope." After the battles with monsters in Psalm 91, the last of the psalms, 134, calmly reaffirms God's protection during the night. Perhaps the most explicit reference to the dangers of the night comes in the hymn sung immediately after the psalms throughout Advent, the summer, and the weeks after Epiphany: "Te lucis ante terminum." While the first verse seeks again the protection of the Lord "before the end of the light," the second verse prays: "May the bad dreams [somnia] and phantasms [phantasmata] of the night subside; may the enemy be repulsed, and may our bodies not be polluted."178 It evokes a world of demonic forces that had to be purged before sleep to stave off the disturbing dreams by which demons might take possession of the animal part of the soul and overcome the monk's chastity with sexual dreams. The depiction of such phantasms in the space of the cloister was surely not accidental. It was here that the monk spent much of the day reading and meditating on Scripture and other edifying texts. As Mary Carruthers has recently emphasized, it was thus also a primary "rememorative" structure-a mnemonic architectural frame on which a series of allegorical images could be erected.179 The rectangular claustral garden with its surrounding colonnades on four sides might evoke for Honorius the "portico of Solomon, constructed next to the temple in Jerusalem as the cloister is joined to the monks' church" or the Edenic paradise with its flowering trees.180 If for Bernard the plain, unadorned surfaces of the uncarved capitals in a Cistercian cloister were necessary to allow the monk to form his own mental images, it seems that the Cluniacs and other traditional Benedictines such as those of Cuxa regarded sculptural decoration as beneficial visual stimuli to the memory. Leah Rutchick has convincingly argued that the carved capitals of Moissac and their inscriptions were not merely based on scriptural passages and commentaries with which the monk would be familiar, but were also expressly designed in their formal presentation to stimulate the monk's active Folexercise of memory during his regular meditations.18' lowing the mnemonic architecture described in the influential treatise Ad Herennium, Rutchick sees the four independent facets of the carved capitals at Moissac as "hooks" to

which the monk can attach a longer narrative, often juxtaposed with disparate episodes on adjacent sides of the same capital to aid him in his own exegesis during his active meditation. The cloister arcades, which are associated with distinctive ritual functions, further provide the "background" within which the monk can locate and interpret the individual images within his memory. Understood within such a framework, the apparent absence of a clear diachronic sequence for the narratives becomes a virtue. The cloister as a whole becomes a visual "florilegium" with a wide range of subjects allowing the monk to take his meditations in a different direction depending on where he was seated or moving within the larger cloister. Although the Cuxa cloister lacks the sophistication and complexity of references contained in the Moissac cloisterthere are no inscriptions and no explicit links to scriptural and hagiographic narratives-it must be assumed that on a general level, the Cuxa capitals functioned in a similar way as stimuli to the active process of meditation. Seated on one of the benches within the colonnades, the monk would certainly be aware of the chaotic imagery of the capitals just above his head. There, if he were distracted from reading in books, as Bernard feared, the monk would find a concrete visualization of the phantasms, which drew in part on the monstrous creatures described in the psalms, but also more generally evoked his ongoing struggle against the Devil both in communal, liturgical prayer and psalmody and in private meditations. The very texts that the monks were reading in the cloister were often decorated with a similar repertoire of disturbing creatures. The late eleventh-century Moissac manuscript already considered in conjunction with the naked dancers on one of the Cuxa capitals (Fig. 8) graphically illustrates the battle of Virtues and Vices described in the texts with naked humanoids and monstrous hybrids. A more inventive response to illustrating a text is found in the historiated initials of an early twelfth-century Cistercian manuscript of Pope Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job, already discussed above. Here the text itself cannot be read or "digested" fully without puzzling momentarily over the tangled compositions of human, semihuman, and monstrous creatures in the decorated initials that mark the major divisions of the text. The initial P, which heads the Commentary on Book 28 (Fig. 28), for example, depicts a mass of monstrous hybrids intertwined in violent struggle. In the upper portion of the letter, a satyrlike creature with a beast's head transfixes a goat-headed man with a lance, but even as the satyr holds out a shield in self-defense, another hybrid creature attacks its belly from below. In the midst of these creatures a bearded, man-headed pig is being devoured by a winged dragon. Beneath the satyr, on the upright of the letter, an eagle or vulture attacks two lions in combat, and at the very base, a dwarf harnesses and rides a naked man crawling on all fours. According to Conrad Rudolph, these beasts and part-human creatures narrate the struggle against irrationality and sin that is the overriding theme of Gregory's commentary.182 Throughout the Moralia, beasts represent for Gregory the "desires of the flesh that rise up against the spiritual person," while semihumanoid figures suggest a creature whose nature lies between good and evil, reason and irrationality. Set apart from the conflict above,

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the dwarf riding a naked man suggests a more positive message: the bridling of temptations referred to by Gregory in the text of the same chapter. Rudolph further shows that these "fantastic" narratives, set against a dark night sky, evoke the world of dreams. As disturbing as they might initially seem, these "corporeal fantasies [imaginationes corporeae],"as Gregory calls them, might ultimately serve a positive function for the monastic audience of the Moralia.'83 Commenting on Job 7:13-14 ("When I say my bed shall comfort me; You will frighten me with dreams and terrify me with visions"), Gregory writes initially that dreams are generally to be mistrusted because they so often derive from the suggestions of the Devil (the "Evil Spirit"). The Devil attacks holy men, who resist his "delusive phantasy" during the day, with particular vehemence while they sleep. Gregory goes on to affirm, however, that it is God alone who allows the Devil to tempt the holy man, and he permits it only insofar as it serves as a beneficial trial. This he permits in order that holy men may have a foretaste of the "last searching judgement" when the Judge "will bring back every sin before our eyes."184 That temptations were considered a salutary part of God's plan for the monk is made clear throughout the Moralia. In book 24 Gregory describes the monk's life as a journey in three stages: conversion, probation, and death (and Judgment). At each stage the monk is tested with temptations and delivered by God: He speedily succors us with the aid of consolation, assuages the rising pangs of temptations, and calms with inward peace the emotions of the thoughts which rise up against Him. And then the mind soon derives great delight from its hope of heaven, on beholding the evil, which she had endured, overpowered. So that of this man tempted and delivered it may be justly said, "he shall see His face with joy"; and, "He hath delivered his soul from going onward to destruction but that it should live and behold
the light."
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28 Historiated initial P from Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Dijon, Bibl. Mun. ms 173, fol. 103v (photo: Bibliotheque municipale de Dijon-France, clich6 F. Perrodin)

In the end, those who have passed successfully through these stages of temptation are granted "complete inward happiness." Because the mind of the elect "is purified and set free by this very suffering, it is appropriately added. . . 'That he may recall their souls from corruption and enlighten them with delight of the living' [Job 33:30]."18(; The idea that the temptations and battles within the imagination of the monk at night might serve as a form of purification is a basic tenet of monasticism that Gregory shares with the other great founding father of the monastic discipline in the west, John Cassian. In his Seventh Conference, "On the Soul and Evil Spirits," Cassian describes how demons cannot penetrate those bodies they wish to overcome without first possessing their minds and thoughts. "Even holy men," Cassian observes, "have been given over bodily to Satan or to great sufferings on account of some slight sins. For the divine clemency does not permit the least blemish or stain to be found in them on the day of judgement. According to the words of the prophet... he purges away all the dross of their uncleanness in the present so that he may bring them to eternity like fire-tried gold or silver, in need of no penal

cleansing."187 After citing the examples of holy men from Egypt who were gravely tempted, Cassian concludes that "not one of these persons is ever tried without the permission of God ... [and that] those who according to the Apostle have been delivered over for the present 'to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that the spirit may be saved in the day of our LordJesus Christ' may either be brought to the other life in a more purified condition or be struck with a lighter punishment."188 It must have been felt that the tangible visualization of such diabolical temptations or phantasms in sculpted capitals such as those of St-Michel-de-Cuxa served a similar function to both the recitation of the psalms at Compline and the meditation on images found in the texts the monks were reading. Clearly, even though these images distracted the monk, they also allowed him to purge over time the demonic spirits from his soul so that it could be restored by the harmony of his meditation. By externalizing the threats to the monk's spiritual life in this way, the capitals could further be seen as means of establishing the boundaries of, and coming to terms with his own behavior and imagination.189 The "demons" that

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possess the body and imagination of the monk are less threatening when they are thus exposed to light and allow the monk to reform his inner and outer self. It is this purgative function of art to which Ernst Gombrich has appealed in his explication of the "grotesque." Responding to Bernard's cloister capitals, Gombrich argues, "These inconsequential images would attract the eye but they would not hold it for long; they present a kind of 'side show' which refreshes the mind but does not stay in the memory because they do not cohere."'90 To lump the monsters of the Romanesque cloister together with marginalia in Gothic manuscripts as inconsequential or as a "sideshow" surely overstates the case: unlike Gothic marginalia these cloister capitals occupy a much more central visual field for the monk, and their subjects have a more serious content. But Gombrich's notion of the images refreshing the mind can be accepted if we return to the specific function of the cloister as a rememorative structure. As Mary Carruthers points out, monastic writers including Saint Anselm and Saint Bernard himself believed that one needed to call to mind one's vices and sins from the past in order to effect a true conversion toward a more spiritually enlightened future life.191 Since one could never really eradicate sins completely from the memory, it was necessary to seek God's forgiveness and then change one's "intention" or attitude toward them, transforming them from producers of guilt or fear into productive agents of conversion. This process of transforming memory parallels a broader monastic strategy of sublimation.192 Realizing that monks are only human and would naturally be prone to the same temptations of the flesh as men in the secular world, monastic writers sought for ways of controlling sexual desires and other proclivities by channeling those energies elsewhere. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux himself composed a series of sermons on the Song of Songs that dwell at great length on sensual aspects of human love. As Jean Leclercq has shown, however, Bernard introduced accessible, even erotic passages dwelling on the kiss and the breasts of the bride in order to engage the monk and help him to transcend human desire on the path to a completely spiritual love of God.193 In his first nine sermons, Bernard carries us from the kiss on human lips exchanged between two human lovers to the sublime, divine kiss exchanged between God the Father and the Son, and ultimately between the monk himself and his Creator. Carnal love necessarily plays a role because, for Bernard, it is only through the incarnate or fleshly image that love of God is at first accessible to his human creatures.194 As Leclercq explains, "there are symbols which can arouse sexual echoes but the readers he had in mind-can which an author-and use without any complexes."195 and sufficiently 'sublimate,' turns monk away from the images of carnal Step by step, the sensual imagination, literally in the love concretely grounded a to converted to be purely spiritual love of God. It may be argued that the sculpted images of the cloister effected a similar form of sublimation and conversion. These monstrous and deformed creatures carved in stone made tangible the malevolent spirits that caused the monk to misbehave and served as a starting point for the cleansing of the memory and for spiritual reform. Exposed to the light, the monk's inner demons and the phantasms of his dreams

would no longer seem quite as frightening or threatening. Viewed daily in the company of other monks, the sculpted capitals, much like the words and harmonious music of the liturgy, could help the individual renew his personal struggle with the support of the community.'96

Thomas E.A. Dale is associateprofessorof art historyat the University of Wisconsin-Madison.His publications include Relics, Prayer and Politics in Medieval Venetia (Princeton, 1997) and articles on S. Marco in Venice and Romanesque mural painting. He is of the bodyin Romanesqueart preparinga bookon the representation Art of History, Universityof Wisconsin-Madison,Mad[Department ison, Wis. 53706].

Frequently Cited Sources

Bynum, Caroline Walker, 1991, Fragmentation and Redemption:Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books). , 1995, The Resurrectionof the Body in WesternChristianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press). Camille, Michael, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Jaeger, C. Stephen, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Kruger, Steven, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Leclercq, Jean, and Henri Rochais, Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957-77). McGinn, Bernard, ed., Three Treatiseson Man: A CistercianAnthropology,Cistercian Fathers Series, 24 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1977). Male, Emile, L'art religieux du XIIe siecle en France: Etude sur les origines de l'iconographie du Moyen Age, 4th ed. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1940). Rudolph, Conrad, Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemics in the Citeaux Moralia in Job (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Rupprecht, Bernard, Romanische Skulptur in Frankreich (Munich: Hirmer, 1975). Rutchick, Leah, "Sculpture Programs in the Moissac Cloister: Benedictine Culture, Memory Systems, and Liturgical Practice," 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1991. Schapiro, Meyer, RomanesqueArt (New York: George Braziller, 1977). Schmitt, Jean-Claude, La raison des gestes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Simon, David, "Romanesque Sculpture in North American Collections, XXIV: The Metropolitan Museum of Art," pt. 4, "Pyrenees," Gesta25, no. 2 (1986): 245-76.

Notes
To William Dale on his eightieth birthday. My research was supported by membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 1997-98; I thank Professors Irving Lavin and Giles Constable and the other members of the institute for their instructive comments on my initial presentation of this material. Revisions were completed in 2000-2001 as Coleman Fellow in the Department of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Thanks are due to Peter Barnet and Mary Shepard for facilitating access to museum files, and to Christine Brennan for obtaining crucial photographs. The following scholars generously commented on earlier drafts of this article: Richard Brilliant, Susan Boynton, Elizabeth Brown, Caroline Walker Bynum, William Dale, Dorothy Glass, Henry Maguire, and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo. The final version was greatly improved by the suggestions of Perry Chapman and the two anonymous readers for the Art Bulletin. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. 1. Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem, trans. Conrad Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and Rudolph, The "Things of GreaterImportance": the Medieval Attitude towardArt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 282-83; in Leclercq and Rochais, vol. 3 (1963), 80-108: "Ceterum in claustris, coram legentibus fratribus, quid facit illa ridicula monstruositas, mira quaedam deformis formositas ac formosa deformitas? Quid ibi immundae simiae? Quid feri leones? Quid monstruosi centauri? Quid semihomines? Quid maculosae tigrides? Quid milites pugnantes? Quid venatores tubicinantes? Videas sub uno capite multa corpora, et rursus in uno corpore capita

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multa. Cernitur hinc in quadrupede cauda serpentis, illinc in pisce caput quadrupedis. Ibi bestia praefert equum, capram trahens retro dimidiam; hic cornutum animal equum gestat posterius. Tam multa denique, tamque mira diversarum formarum apparet ubique varietas, ut magis legere libeat in marmoribus, quam in codicibus, totumque diem occupare singula ista mirando, quam in lege Dei meditando." This passage became a locus classicus for the discussion of Romanesque sculpture following the publication of Meyer Schapiro's celebrated article "On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art,"in Art and Thought: Issuedin HonorofDr. AnadaK. Coomaraswamy ed. K. on the Occasion ofHis 70thBirthday, BharathaIyer (London: Luzac, 1947), 130-50, reprinted in Schapiro, 1-27. 2. Conrad Rudolph, "Bernardof Clairvaux'sApologiaas a Description of 27 (1988): 125-32. Cluny and the Controversyover MonasticArt," Gesta 3. On the cloister of Moissac,see Thorste Droste, Die Skulpturen von Moissac (Munich: Hirmer, 1996), 47-149; Rutchick; Meyer Schapiro, "The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac," pt. 1, Art Bulletin 13 (1931): 248-351, reprinted in Schapiro, 131-200. 4. For a useful summary, see Conrad Rudolph, ArtisticChangeat St-Denis: AbbotSuger's and theEarlyTwelfth-Century overArt (PrinceControversy Program ton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1990), 8-18. 5. An excellent, recent overview of early Cistercian principles and their application to monastic architecture is provided by Peter Fergusson and StuartHarrison, Rievaulx Architecture, (New Haven: Memory Abbey: Community, Yale UniversityPress, 1999). 6. For the complete text and commentary,see ErwinPanofsky,Abbot Suger: On theAbbey Church and Its Art Treasures, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeof St-Denis ton UniversityPress, 1979). 7. See Jean Leclercq and Michael Casey, Cistercians and Cluniacs:St. Bernard'sApologiato AbbotWilliam(Kalamazoo, Mich: Cistercian Publications, 1970), 3-30. 8. On Bernard's deployment of ancient rhetorical techniques, see Jean de CivilisaLeclercq, "Aspectslitterairesde l'oeuvre de saint Bernard,"Cahiers tion Mgdiivale1 (1958): 425-50, esp. 440ff.; and idem, "Nouveaux aspects 8 litteraires de l'oeuvre de saint Bernard," Cahiersde Civilisation Medievale (1968): 299-326, esp. 313-15. 9. On the sculpture of St-Michel-de-Cuxa, see Marcel Durliat, La sculpture en Roussillon, romane vol. 1 (Perpignan:La Tramontane, 1948), 91-92; idem, Roussillon roman,La Nuit des Temps, vol. 7 (Ste-Mariede la Pierre-qui-Vire: Zodiaque, 1958); Pierre Ponsich, "Chronologieet typologie des cloitres rousdeSaint-Michel deCuxa7 (1976): 77-82; Simon; Thomas sillonnais,"LesCahiers Lyman, "Les origines 6nigmatiques du cloitre de Saint-Michelde Cuixa,"in Etudes roussillonnaises a PierrePonsich, ed. Marie Grau and Olivier offertes Poisson (Perpignan:Etudes Roussillonnaises, 1987), 255-59; Geraldine Mallet, "Nouvellesreflexions sur l'atelier du cloitre de l'abbaye de Saint-Michel de Cuxa,"Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa24 (1993): 93-102. 10. For a useful historiographicaloverview,see Rudolph, 1997, 3-12. Ilene H. Forsythhas also pointed out the tendency to take Bernard's statement at face value and has asked whether "in some cases these fabulous figures represented ruminations, sometimes ribald,which were so fully charged with allusion to meaning that this was the very reason for their impugnation as dangerous distractionsto concentrated meditation?"See Forsyth,"The Monumental Arts of the Romanesque Period: Recent Research,"in The Cloisters: Studies in Honorof theFiftieth ed. Elizabeth C. Parkerwith MaryB. Anniversary, Shepard (New York:Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 15. 11. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonni de l'architecture francaisedu XIeau XVIesiecle, vols. 1, 2 (Paris:B. Bance, 1867-70), vol. 1, 127-28, vol. 2, 300, 387; and Male, 340-63. Criticizing 19th-centuryauthors who assumed that everydetail of medieval sculpture had meaning, Male concluded that the monsters of Romanesque capitals are essentially "decorative" motifs, derived ultimatelyfrom Eastern textiles: "Ce chapitre a montre ce que l'art decoratif du XIIe siecle devait a l'Orient.... Saint Bernard avait cent fois raison; il est devenu 6vident que les monstres des chapiteaux-a quelques exceptions pr&s-n'ont aucun sens. Ils n'etaient pas destin6s a instruire, mais a plaire. ..." 12.Jurgis Baltrusaitis,Le Moyen Agefantastique,Collection Henri Focillon, vol. 3 (Paris:LibrairieArmand Colin, 1955); and idem, La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane (Paris:LibrairieErnest Leroux, 1931). The latter is critically reviewed by Meyer Schapiro, "Uber den Schematismus in der romanischen Kunst,"Kritische Berichte zur Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur (193233): 1-21, translated as "On Geometric Schematism in Romanesque Art,"in Schapiro, 265-84. 13. Schapiro, 6-10. 14. Ibid., 6-7. 15. Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1979), 276. 16. Camille, esp. 61-65. 17. Ibid., 65. 18. Rudolph (as in n. 1). 19. Rudolph, 1997, 85: The artist "transformedwhat he had read into artisticexpression of his own spiritualstruggle and dailylife, recognizing both 'what is monstrous and what is beautiful,' what pertains to the animal and what pertains to the human, and what pertains to both as embodied in the figure of the semi-homo." 20. Jenny Thompson has recently taken a comparable approach to a series

of 12th-centurymanuscriptsof texts by Augustine and Ambrose made for the Benedictine monks of Durham in "Reading in the Painted Letter: Human Heads in Twelfth-Century English Initials,"Ph.D. diss., University of St. Andrews, 2000. See J. Thompson, "'To What Purpose Are Those Half-Men?' Hybrid Figures in Durham Manuscripts,"in the session "Fantasyand the 2001 (NewYork:College Art Religious Imaginationin MedievalArt,"Abstracts Association, 2001). A rare explanation of monsters in cloister sculpture is found in a forthcoming essay by Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, "The Saint's Capital, Talisman in the Cloister,"in Decorations for theHolyDead:Embellishmentson Tombs and Shrines of Saints,ed. Stephen Lamia and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, International Medieval Research, 8 (Turnhout: IMC/Brepols, in press). Focusing on a single capital marking the original grave site of Domingo at Silos, Valdez del Alamo shows that in this particularcase, the birds attacking vicious Harpies suggest an apotropaic function that parallels the protection the faithful sought in the holy site of the saint's burial. I thank ProfessorValdez del Alamo for generously giving me a typescriptof the article prior to publication. 21. Pierre Ponsich, "Saint-Michelde Cuxa du IXe au XIIe siecle: Apercu deSaint-Michel de Cuxa1 (1970): 19-26, documents the historique,"LesCahiers flourishing library and scriptorium under Abbot Oliba (1008-1046) of StMichel-de-Cuxaand Ripoll, and records that an evangelistarynow in Perpignan is the sole survivingwork known from the Cuxa library. 22. See M. Delcor, "Lescriptoriumde Ripoll et son rayonnement culturel: de Cuxa5 (1974): 45-64, esp. de Saint-Michel Etat de la question," Les Cahiers 46-52. The inventory is recorded in Jos6 MariaPellicer y Pages, Santa Maria de Ripoll (Matar6: Establecimento Topgrafico de Feliciano del Monasterio Horta, 1888), 105-7. see Ramon d'Abadal, "Com 23. For the foundation of St-Michel-de-Cuxa, neix i com creix un gran monestir Pirinens abans de l'any mil: EixaladaMonsterratensia 8 (1954-55): 125-337. Cuixa,"Analecta 24. For the development of the congregation of monasteriesunder Cuxa in the 11th century, see Dom Anscari Mundo, "Moissac,Cluny et les mouvements monastiques de l'Est de Pyrenees du Xe au XIIe siecle," in Moissacet l'Occident au Xle siecle(Moissac:Edouard Privat, 1964), 229-51, esp. 230-38; and Noreen Hunt, Cluny under Saint Hugh, 1049-1109 (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 127. RevueMabillon(Ar25. See P.-A.Amargier, "OrdoVictorinus Massiliensis," chivesde la FranceMonastique) 58, no. 246 (1971): 97-111, esp. 104-5. On St-Victor'sconfraternalarrangementswith Cluny, see Hunt (as in n. 24), 84; and Herbert EJ. Cowdrey,"Unionsand Confraternitieswith Cluny,"Journal of Ecclesiastical 16 (1975): 152-62. That St-Victormodeled itself at least in History part on Cluny is further suggested by Abbot Bernard of St-Victor'sletter of 1079 advising William of Hirsau that the soundest monastic observance in Gaul emanated from Cluny. See Hunt, 198. 26. On Abbot Gregoryand his associationwith the building of the cloister, see Annie de Pous, "Les marbres inscrits de Saint-Michelde Cuixa,"Etudes Roussillonnaises 2 (1952): 116-25, esp. 119-22; Daniel Cazes and Marcel Durliat, "Decouverte de l'effigie de l'abbe Gregoire createur du cloitre de Saint-Michelde Cuxa,"BulletinMonumental 145, no. 1 (1987): 7-14. 27. For the dismantling of the cloister, see Marcel Durliat, "La fin du cloistre de Saint-Michelde Cuxa,"Les Cahiers deSaint-Michel de Cuxa2 (1971): 9-16. 28. For the historyof the Cuxa capitalsin the United States,see Simon, 246; and Harold E. Dickson, "The Origin of 'The Cloisters,"'Art Quarterly 28 (1965): 235-74. For Barnard'smuseum and the building of the Cloisters,see Mahonri SharpYoung, "George Grey Barnard and the Cloisters,"Apollo106 (1977): 1-52;Jack L. Schrader, "GeorgeGrey Barnard:The Cloistersand the Museumof Art Bulletin 37, no. 1 (1979): 1-52; and Abbaye," Metropolitan William H. Forsyth,"FiveCrucial People in the Building of the Cloisters,"in Parkerand Shepard (as in n. 10), 51-62. 29. For the architecturaldesign of the Cloistersmuseum, see MaryRebecca Leuchak, "'The Old World for the New': Developing the Design for the Museumof ArtJournal23 (1988): 257-77. For attribuCloisters,"Metropolitan tions of some of the capitals to locations other than the cloister, see Simon, 246, 259-76; and Mallet (as in n. 9), 96-98. Of the thirty-sixcapitalsinstalled in the Cloisters, twenty-nineare attributed to the original cloister by Simon, thirty by Mallet. 30. Of the historiatedcapitalsconsidered here, only one can be placed with certainty, that depicting squatting monks and apes (Fig. 12). A photograph from about 1900 shows this capital, flanked by another now at the Cloisters (25.120.633) showing men emerging from acanthus, in the southwest corner of the original cloister on the south side. The series of nonhistoriated Corinthian capitals from the adjoining south side were also incorporated into the installation at the Cloisters. See Durliat (as in n. 27), esp.13, figs. 9, 10. 31. For problems of viewing in the cloister, see Kathryn Horste, Cloister TheRomanesque in Toulouse: Designof MonasticReform Sculpture of La Daurade (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992), 187-88. 32. Rutchick,vol. 1, 81-90, 157-72. Rutchicktakes as her point of departure Meyer Schapiro'sobservation that the apparent disorder of the iconographic program at Moissacwas part of the original design rather than the result of later scrambling during the Gothic rebuilding. In his Ph.D. dissertation, Schapiro rejects the modern assumption that "there must be some iconographic order in the Moissac caps" comparable to that of Gothic facades, manuscriptpainting, and mural painting; Schapiro, "TheRomanesque Sculp-

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ture of Moissac," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1935, vol. 1, 60-61, cited in Rutchick, 86-87. 33. For the recent emphasis on orality in monastic art, see in addition to Rutchick, Michael Camille, "Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art," in Iconography at the Crossroads,ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 43-58, esp. 53-54; and Forsyth (as in n. 10), 16-17. 34. The analogy is suggested by Schapiro (as in n. 32), vol. 1, 60-61. "What is more natural," Schapiro asks, "than that a cloister arcade have a profusion of ornament without a rigid narrative or theological sequence? ... The monks passed delightedly, as we do today, from the contemplation of David and Goliath to fine flowers and then to the Ascension of Alexander, to the story of Cain and Abel, to little monsters and birders, and to grotesques without any Even the sermonists united at liberty the most Scriptural foundation.... varied themes in single speeches." 35. There is no specific documentation of how and where the monks sat when they read in the cloister. The Cluniac customary compiled by Ulrich of Zell about 1080, however, records that masters were seated between the columns (in cancellis claustri) to keep watch over the pueri (the young boys in training to be monks), seated opposite them with their backs to the wall (pueri sedeant prope murum) when they were being shaved. Similarly, Ulrich records that when the pueri are practicing their reading, the armarius, or custodian of the books, should always be present, and each of the listening pueri should be separated from the others by a column ("Inter quos et liber quo legitur ita semper ponitur ut una de columnis claustri media sit inter audientem et audiendos"). See Uldarici Cluniacensis, Consuetudines Cluniacenses, III.9, 10, Pat. lat., vol. 149, 747D, 749D. I thank Susan Boynton for bringing this valuable source to my attention. 36. This is not to say that the original organization of the capitals was entirely random. The location of certain themes may have been dictated by the particular functional topography of the cloister. Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo (as in n. 20) has shown, for example, that the first burial place of Saint Domingo in the north gallery of the cloister at Silos was commemorated as a powerful presence with a series of funerary themes in the narrative reliefs from Christ's Passion and a historiated capital depicting Harpies attacked by birds marking the original grave. 37. Marcel Durliat, "La tribune de Saint-Michel de Cuxa," Etudes Roussillonnaises 1-2 (1952): 103-12; Pierre Ponsich, "Le probleme des tribunes de Cuxa et de Serrabona," Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 16 (1985): 9-19. 38. Jaeger; Schmitt; Bynum, 1991; Bynum, 1995; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds., Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Jaeger, 10, is most explicit when he affirms that "the body... is meant to be 'read.' The well composed body is itself a text-book of virtue." 39. I focus here on studies that deal with western Europe. A related set of issues concerning corporeality in Byzantine art is discussed by Henry Maguire, The Icons of Their Bodies: Saints and Their Images in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 40. Bernard of Clairvaux, Super Cantica Cantorum Sermo, 85.10-11, in Leclercq and Rochais, vol. 2 (1958), 314; trans. Jaeger, 111. 41.Jaeger, 10-11. 42. Schmitt, 14. 43. Hugh of St-Victor, De institutione novitiorum, chap. 10, Pat. lat., vol. 176, 935; trans. Jaeger, 260. 44. Schmitt, 47-92. 45. Cassian's Conferences,a guide to the monastic life much read in the 12th century, is particularly explicit about this connection, describing vices as akin to "bodily illnesses" and the soul, like the body, as comprising different members. See Collationes patrum XXIV, 24.15 ("On Mortification"), trans. Ancient Christian Writers, 57 Boniface Ramsey, John Cassian: The Conferences, (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 837-38. 46. On man as microcosm, see Fritz Saxl, "Macrocosm and Microcosm in Medieval Pictures," in Fritz Saxl: Lectures (London: Warburg Institute, 1957), vol. 1, 58-72; and Marie-Dominique Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 24-37. 47. "The Female Body and Religious Practice," in Bynum, 1991, 181-238. 48. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber divinorum operum, ed. Albert Derolez and Peter Dronke, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio mediaevalis, vol. 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996). For commentary on the miniatures, see Saxl (as in n. 46), vol. 1, 62-63; and Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetti and Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Sanctae Hildegardis Revelationes: Manoscritto 1942 (Lucca: Cassa di Risparmio, 1973), 16-17, 28-32, pls. II, III. Although this manuscript was produced some thirty years after her death, the illustrations are generally believed to be based on her own designs. See, for example, Madeline Caviness, "Hildegard as Designer of the Illustrations to Her Works," in Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art, Warburg Institute Colloquia, 4 (London: Warburg Institute, 1998), 29-62. 49. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber divinorum operum,I, Visio Secunda, cap. 1 (as in n. 48), lines 40-46, 60-61: "In medio quoque rotae istuius imago hominis apparebat, cuius vertex superius et plantae subterius ad prefatum circulum velut fortis et albi lucidique aeris pertingebant. A dextero autem latere summitas digitorum dextrae manus eius, a sinistro quoque summitas digito-

rum sinistrae manus ad ipsum circulum hinc et hinc in rotunditate designatum porrecta erat, quoniam eadem imago brachia extenderat." 50. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, 24.15, trans. Morals on the Book ofJob by Gregorythe Great, Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, 23 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1897), 59-60; ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL, vol. 143B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), 1198: "Nonnumquam tamen homines dicit eos quos a bestiis ratione distinguit, id est quos non atteri bestiali passionum motu demonstrat ... quia illos nimirum Dominus pascit quos voluptas carnis iumentorum more non afficit. At contra hi qui carnali affectioni succumbunt, non iam homines, sed iumenta nominatur; sicut de quibusdam in peccato suo morientibus . . ." 51. Ibid., trans. adapted from Morals on the Book of Job, 60; Adriaen, vol. 143B, 1198-99: "Qui enim plenissime intellegere appetit qualis est, tales nimirum debet conspicere qualis non est ut ex bonorum forma metiatur, quanto ipse deserto bono deformis est. Ex his quippe quibus plenissime bona adsunt, perpendit recte, quae sibi minus sunt, atque in illorum pulchritudine conspicit foeditatem suam, quam in seipso et potest perpeti et sentire non potest." 52. William of St-Thierry, De natura corporis et animae, Pat. lat., vol. 180, 695-726; trans. Benjamin Clark, On the Nature of the Body and the Soul, in McGinn, 103-52. 53. Ibid., McGinn, 114-15; Pat. lat., vol. 180, 702: "Et sciendum quia cerebrum per se quedam facit, quedam per officiales suos. Rationem in medio positam, sicut reginam et dominam, qua distamus a bestiis; phantasiam in prora, memoriam in puppe per se facit, animalem autem virtutem, id est sensum, in prora, motum autem in puppe, alterum per quinque sensus, alterum per nervos a puppe procedentes." 54. Ibid., McGinn, 132-33; Pat. lat., vol. 180, 714B: "Erecta hominis figura ad coelum extensa, et sursum aspiciens, imperialem regalemque dignitatem animae rationalis significat.... Hujusmodi enim homines imagine Creatoris exuta, aliam induerunt imaginem terram respicientem, pecudalem, bestialem. Non enim secundum furorem hominis ad Deum est similitudo.... Haec et his similia ab irrationali humana sibi contraxit natura." 55. Rudolph Wittkower, "Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters," in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1977), 48-65; and John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). For the terminology of the monstrous in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Friedman, 108-30. 56. I am confining my discussion here to French monastic writers, but the same sentiments are expressed in Scholastic circles. Peter Lombard, for example, speaks on the one hand in Augustinian terms of Resurrection as a literal perfection of corporeal deformities, deploying again the metaphor of the recast statue; on the other hand, he defines as monsters those beings who are marked by any deformities of human nature that will be recalled to perfection in the Resurrection. See Sententiarum libri quatuor, bk. 4, dist. 44, chap. 8, Pat. lat., vol. 192, 948: "Ita et caetera, quae nimia deformitate monstra dicuntur, ad humanae naturae figuram resurrectione revocabuntur." 57. Among the more recent studies of the bestiary tradition, see Nona C. Flores, ed., Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1996); and Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 58. Peter the Venerable, Epistulae, 111, in The Lettersof Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable, Harvard Historical Studies, 78 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 297, line 23: "Et ne ex toto inhonestus proderetur, studium elemosinarum, et quaedam opera misericordiae commendat, orationes collaudat, et sic undique monstuosus, ut ille ait, humano capiti equinam cervicem, et plumas avium copulat." 59. Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, in press), chapter 3. I am grateful to Professor Bynum for sharing the manuscript of this work prior to publication. 60. Bernard of Clairvaux, De considerationelibri v, bk. 2, pt. 14, in Leclercq and Rochais, vol. 3, 422, line 3: "Monstruosa res gradus summus et animus infimus, sedes prima et vita ima, lingua magniloqua et manus otiosa, sermo multus et fructus nullus, vultus gravis et actus levis, ingens auctoritas et nutans stabilitas." 61. Bynum (as in n. 59). 62. Peter the Venerable, Epistulae, 111, trans. based on Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 189; Constable (as in n. 58), 285, line 39: "Vidi plurimos nec recordor quotiens de nigrorum numero, occurentem quempiam album quasi monstrum ridentes, et velut si Chimaera vel Centaurus, vel potentum aliquod peregrinum oculis ingereretur, voce vel gestu corporis se stupere signantes." 63. Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistulae, 250, pt. 4, in Leclercq and Rochais, vol. 8 (1977), 147, line 1: "Clamat ad vos mea monstruosa vita, mea aerumnosa conscientia. Ego enim quedam Chimaera mei saeculi, nec clericum gero nec laicum." 64. As always with Bernard, there is a certain ambivalence suggested by his use of the monstrous metaphor. As Constable, 1996 (as in n. 62), 25, observes, the hybrid life Bernard refers to here could also be identified more positively with the desired combination of "intense inner life and outward concern" admired by the reformers. 65. On the functional aspects of the cloister and its symbolism, see Paul Meyvaert, "The Medieval Monastic Claustrum," Gesta 12 (1973): 53-59; Wayne

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Dynes, "The Cloister as Portico of Solomon," Gesta12 (1973): 61-69; and Forsyth (as in n. 10), 4, 8. 66. For the paradisiacalassociationsof the cloister, see Paul Meyvaert,"The ed. Elizabeth MacDougall Medieval Monastic Garden,"in MedievalGardens, (Washington,D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986), 23-54, esp. 51; Constable (as in n. 62), 138-40; and Fergusson and Harrison (as in n. 5), 65-66. V, trans. Hugh Feiss, Peterof Celle: claustrali, 67. Peter of Celle, De disciplina Cistercian Fathers Series, 100 (Kalamazoo,Mich.: Cistercian Selected Works, Chretiennes (Paris:EdiPublications, 1987), 79; ed. Gerard de Martel, Sources tions du Cerf, 1977), vol. 240, 152: "Estautem claustrumin confinio angelicae puritatis et mundane colluvionis."Cf. Camille, 56. 68. Peter of Celle (as in n. 67), XI, trans. Feiss, 89-90; ed. Martel, 188-93: "Huiusstadii lex est ut ab omnibus abstineatqui ad braviumfestinat ... Tollit fornicationem, adulterium et omnem immunditiam, ipsumque matrimo.... ." nium 69. Ibid., VI, trans. Feiss, 81; ed. Martel, 161: "sic claustralis qui vere claustralisdebet se totum crucifigere cum vitiis et concupiscentiis... ." 70. For a surveyof all the activitiesin the cloister, see Meyvaert(as in n. 65), 53-59. statutes 23 and 53, ed. Giles Constable, Corpus 71. StatutaPetriVenerabilis, vol. 6 (Siegburg: Franz Schmitt, 1975), 60, 83; monasticarum, consuetudinum Otto KarlWerckmeister,"The Emmaus and Thomas Pillar of the Cloister of en Silos(Silos:Abadia Benedictina, 1989), 160. I thank Silos,"in El Romanico ElizabethValdez del Alamo for this last reference. 72. Although the association of this capital with the original series at Cuxa has been questioned, Simon, 252 (cat. w), points out enough crucial details shared with the vocabularyof the majorityof the capitals to affirm that "its attribution to the Cuxa cloister, while not assured, is likely."In addition, the dimensions and the particulartheme of monstrous heads devouring humans coincide well with the main group of capitals from the cloister. 73. Schapiro, 70 n. 21, 77 n. 48; Chiara Frugoni, "L'iconographiede la 20 femme au cours des Xe-XIIe siecles," Cahiersde CivilisationMedievale (1977): 177-88, esp. 182; and Chantal Fraisse, "Un trait6 des vertus et des de vices illustr6 a Moissac dans la premibre moiti6 du XIe siecle," Cahiers 42 (1999): 221-42, esp. 234-35. Midievale Civilisation 74. By contrast, sexual imagery displayed on the exterior of buildings, and thus addressed to a more varied audience, including the laity, could be much more explicit. On this discrepancyin audience and imagerybetween interior France in Medieval and exterior, see Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, MarginalSculpture (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1995), 53-76. 75. One example of a horn blower appears among a series of acrobatsand instrumentalistsin corbels on the exterior of the parish church of St-Herieat Matha in western France. Ibid., 25, fig. 1.36. 76. Schapiro, 45. 77. Schapiro, 47, assumed that these figureswere deliberatelymarginalized from the sacred theophany to censure their profane music: "in this image the church introduces, as a spiritualisticemphasis, a figure whose significancelies in the fact that he was not present at all.... The marginal figures of entertainers, introduced presumablyby the artist or with the consent of an abbot responsive to these profane forms, reveal to us the force of secular interests which are beginning to place experience above or beside faith. ..." This is another instance of Schapiro's insistence on a subversive "secular"voice within the monastery.On this aspect of Schapiro'sscholarship,see Otto Karl 17 (1994): 60-64. in a Monastery," Oxford ArtJournal Werckmeister, '"Jugglers Werckmeister, by contrast, has argued (as in n. 71), 149-71, that in this particularrelief, the jongleurs actuallyallude to the religious celebrations in the portico of the temple, as described in the Old Testament narrativethat preceded that of the Doubting Thomas during the liturgyof the Easteroctave. This reinterpretation of the musicians is confirmed by ElizabethValdez del Alamo, "Ortodoxia y heterodoxia en el estudio de la escultura romanica deHistoriayTeoria Estadode la cuesti6n,"in AnuariodelDepartamento espafnola: 9-10 (1997-98): 9-33, esp. 21. de Madrid Aut6noma delArte,Universidad 78. For a discussion of jongleurs appearing at liturgical celebrations in the cathedralof Santiago,see SerafinMoralejo,"DaMariaetympanum:De Pedro medieval Nacionalde literatura Abedlardo, al claustro de Silos," in I Congreso (Santiago de Compostela, 1985), 221, cited in Werckmeister (as in n. 71), 156 n. 54. Even though the Silos relief appears to represent the Old Testament celebration, the musicians may also simultaneouslyallude to the contemporarymusic accompanyingliturgicaldrama, as suggested by Constancio de Silos (Madrid:Alianza, 1983), Romdnico del Alamo Martinez, El Claustro 34-35. 79. See Frugoni (as in n. 73), 119-21; Helmut Steger, DavidRexetPropheta to 38; DurantW. Robertson,A Preface (Nuremberg:Hans Carl, 1961), Denkmal in Medieval Studies (Princeton:Princeton UniversityPress, Chaucer: Perspectives 1962), 130, fig. 29; and Schmitt, 263-65. writercited by 80. Frugoni (as in n. 73), 116 nn. 18-20, 117. A 12th-century Frugoni, Bruno of Karthauser,specificallycondemns the tambourine as symbolizing the mortification of the flesh: this instrument, he argues, "estcamis mortificatioque per tympanummerito accipitur quod corio mortui animalis Ps. 80 Pat. lat., vol. 152, 1069. in Psalmos, Expositio supervestitur"; 81. As Schmitt, 264, has suggested, the alignment of David and the bear on the central axis and the similarityof the compositions in the two zones suggest a more disturbing message: the ease with which sacred harmonies could be transformed into the lascivious music of the monstrous jongleur and the

monk figurativelytransformedinto beast by following the example of David, who succumbed to the charms of Bathsheba. de Vezelay (Melun: Librairied'Argences, 82. See FrancisSalet, La Madeleine der 1948), 182;Rupprecht, 109, pl. 161;and Peter Diemer, StilundIkonographie von Ste.-Madeleine, inaugural dissertation,Ruprecht-Karl-UniVezelay, Kapitelle versitat,Heidelberg, 1975, 275-76. For the interpretationof this capital as the "lyrede Satan,"see Male, 374. ed. Paul Dutton (Toronto: 83. Bernard of Chartres, Glosae superPlatonem, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1991), 216-17; trans.Jaeger, 168. 84. On the image of thejongleur in 12th-and 13th-centuryart and thought, au Moyen en France see Edmond Faral, Lesjongleurs Age (Paris:H. Champion, The Princesand Merchants: 1910); Schapiro, 42-48; John W. Baldwin, Masters, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton and His Circle, SocialViewsof Peterthe Chanter UniversityPress, 1970), vol. 1, 198-204; Carla Casagrandeand SilvanaVecchio, "L'interdizionedel giullare nel vocabolario clericale del XII e del XIII secolo," 207-58, and ChiaraFrugoni, "Larappresentazionedei giullari nelle alla drammaturgia dei Giullari chiese fino al XII secolo," 113-34, in II Contributo 17-19 giugno 1977 di Studio,Viterbo, italiana delleorigini:Atti del II Convegno (Rome: Bulzoni, 1978); Jean Leclercq, "'loculator et saltator':S. Bernard et and studii:Manuscript l'image du jongleur dans les manuscrits,"in Translatio L. Kapsner, Oliver O.S.B.,ed.Julian G. Plante (CollegeStudies Honoring Library ville, Minn.: St. John University Press, 1973), 24-48; Camille, 56-60; and John W. Baldwin, "The Image of the Jongleur in Northern France around 72 (1997): 635-63. 1200," Speculum trans. Dom A Commentary, 85. Dom Paul Delatte, TheRuleof SaintBenedict: Justin McCann (London: Bums, Oates and Washbourne, 1920), 33-34; S. 1.20-25, ed. Benno Linderbauer (Bonn: Peter Benedicti RegulaMonasteriorum, Hanstein, 1928), 19-20: "Quantumvero genus est monachorum, quod nominatur gyrovagum,qui tota vita sua per diversasprovinciasternis aut quaternis diebus per diversorumcellas hospitantursemper vagi et numquam stabilieset propriis voluntatibus et gulae ilecebris servientes.... De quorum omnium horum miserrima conversatione melius est silere quam loqui." Cf. Leclercq (as in n. 84), 126. 86. For a useful overviewof the ideology of dance in later medieval art, see Art Gallery Journalof theWalters Jonathan Alexander, "Dancingin the Streets," 54 (1996): 147-62. Alexander distinguishesbetween solo or couple dancing, both of which were usuallyassociatedwith a threatening sexuality,and ring or circle dances, which served to metaphoricallyreincorporate the dancer into society through marriage. 87. Pierre Riche, "Dansesprofanes et religieuses dans le haut Moyen Age," Mandrou et mentalites: collectives in Histoiresociale,sensibilites MelangesRobert (Paris:Presses Universitairesde France, 1985), 159-67. For a broader overDancesin view of clerical opposition to dance, see E. Louis Backman,Religious trans. Ernest Classen (London: and in PopularMedicine, Church the Christian Allen and Unwin, 1952), 154-61. For the condemnation of dance in conjunction with pagan "theatrical"music in Early Christianity,see Johannes in Pagan and Christian Antiquity(Washington, Quasten, Music and Worship D.C.: National Association of PastoralMusicians, 1983), 120-47. 88. As early as the 7th century, a priest was condemned in Visigothic Spain for joining the people in lasciviousdance. "In the manner of the people, he danced in an obscene rotating movement, suitable for the voluptuariesof the theater, insofar as his arms went here and there, encircling his feet in a lascivious manner, dancing in a ridiculous way, jumping in the air with agitated feet, singing impious songs adapted to the dance and nefarious [pagan] funeraryincantations, he gave himself over to the lust of the diabolPat. lat., vol. 87, 443, cited in ical pest";Valerius de Bierzo, Ordoquerimoniae, Rich6 (as in n. 87), 162-63. 89. See Backman (as in n. 87), 50-57, 66-68; and Schapiro, 42, 82-83 n. 78. Pat. lat., vol. 182, ad Ogerium, 90. Bernard of Clairvaux,EpistolaLXXXVII 217B: "Bonusludus, qui hominibus quidem ridiculum, sed Angelis pulcherrimum spectaculum praebet. ... Nam revera quid aliud saecularibus quam ludere videmur, cum quod ipsi appetunt in hoc saeculo, nos per contrarium fugimus; et quod ipsi fugiunt, nos appetimus?More scilicet joculatorum et saltatorum, qui capite misso deorsum, pedibusque sursum erectis, praeter humanum usum stant manibus vel incedunt, et sic in se omnium oculos defigunt. Non est hic ludus puerilis, non est de theatro, qui femineis foedisque anfractibus provocet libidine, actus sordidos repraesentet: sed est ludus jucundus, honestus, gravis, spectabilis, qui coelestium spectatorum delectar possit aspectus."See esp. Leclercq (as in n. 84), 124-48; Schapiro, 86 n. 113; and Camille, 58-59. My translationis based on Camille's, but like more literallyas dancers, rather than Camille's Schapiro,I translatesaltatorum freer interpretation asjugglers. 91. Peter the Chanter, quoted in ChristopherPage, TheOwland theNightingale:MusicalLife and Ideasin France1100-1300 (London: J. M. Dent and 3.2a, in Pierrele ChantreSummade Sons, 1989), 21; Summade sacramentis et de animae consiliis,ed. Jean-Andre Dugauquier, 3 vols. in 5 sacramentis brio et turpitudine sui corporis acquiruntnecessaria,et deformantymaginem Dei." ed. Heinrich Singer (Paderborn, 1902; re92. Rufinus, Summadecretorum, print, Aalen: Scientia, 1963), 176: 'Ystrionesdicuntur qui ludibriasui corporis exercent et gesticulatione et motu corporis et transformationevultus gestus cited in Baldwin,1970 (as in n. 84), vol. 2, 139 n. 188. aliorum representant";
(Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1954-67), vol. 1 (1954), 177: "Quid enim cum ludi-

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93. For the contrastbetween appropriategesture or harmonious movement of the body and gesticulation or disorderlymovement, see Schmitt, 135-205; for a History idem, "The Ethics of Gesture,"in Fragments of theHumanBody,pt. 2, ed. Michel Feyer (NewYork:Zone Books, 1989), 129-47, esp. 136-43; and Jaeger, 9-13, 111-16. 94. The examples in New York are 25.120.582, squatting apes with doublebodied lions (Simon, fig. 7), 25.120.634, and 25.120.617, squatting apes alternating with squatting naked men and wrestler figures (Simon, figs. 10, 24). A fourth capital reinstalled at Cuxa (Mallet [as in n. 9], 016) shows a bearded man with monkey's feet on one of the main faces in alternationwith apes. A fifth capital now installed as part of the cloister in New York, 25.120.614 (Simon, fig. 65), may actuallyhave come from the tribune inside the church at Cuxa. It carries the corporeal deformation one step further by substituting a male Siren for one of the human figures in series with the squatting apes. 95. See nn. 67-69 above. 96. Horst W.Janson, Apesand ApeLorein theMiddle Agesand theRenaissance, Studies of the Warburg Institute, 20 (London: Warburg Institute, 1952), 45-46. A distinctivevariation is represented by a series of Tuscan capitals in which paired apes are shown chained. See Dorothy F. Glass,Portals, Pilgrimage, and Crusade in Western Tuscany(Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1997), 34-35; and FriedrichKobler, "DasPisanerAffenkapitellin Berlin-Glienicke," in MinusculaDiscipulorum: Kunsthistorische StudienHans Kauffmannzum 70. 1966, ed. Tilmann Buddensieg and Matthias Winner (Berlin: B. Geburtstag Hessling, 1968), 157-64. 97. Augustine, De natura boni,chap. 14, Pat. lat., vol. 42, 555; trans. Schapiro, 8. 98.Janson (as in n. 96), 46-47. 99. Other French examples of naked men squatting like apes are found in the historiated capitals of Notre-Dame at Cunault (Maine-et-Loire)and StPierre at Oloron Ste-Marie.See Rupprecht, pls. 208, 218. 100.Janson (as in n. 96), 19-20. By contrast, the early medieval authority Isidore of Seville derived the name of the ape from the Greek, meaning naribus),and explicitly rejected the Latin derivation "pressednostrils"(pressis from similitudo, or likeness. See his Etymologies XX),12.30, Pat. (EtymologiaeLibri lat., vol. 82, 439. 101. Bestiary,CambridgeUniversityLibraryms 11.4.26,Terrence H. White, ed. and trans., TheBookof Beasts(New York:Dover, 1984), 34-35. diversarum naturarum creaturarum libri 102. Hildegard of Bingen, Subtilitatum Pat. lat., vol. 197, 1329B-C: "Symeacalida est, et quia homini aliquannovem, tum assimilatur,hominem semper inspicit, ut faciat secundum quod homo facit. Et etiam mores bestiarumhabet, sed in ambobus naturisdeficit, ita quod nec secundum hominem nec secundum bestias ad perfectum facere potest, et ideo instabilis est." A comparable definition is given by the author of a libriquatuor, ad ed. as Appendicis et aliis rebus treatise,De bestiis mid-12th-century Pat. lat., continuatio: Auctorincertus (HugodeFolieto?), HugonisOperadogmatica vol. 177, 62D: "Simiae Latinae vocantur eo quod in eis similitudo rationis humanae sentitur." 103. Schmitt, 137. 104.Janson (as in n. 96), 29-30. 105. Bernard of Silvester,De mundiuniversitate, lines 227-28, in Bibliotheca mediaeaetatis,vol. 1, ed. Carl S. Barach and Johann Wrobel philosophorum 1876), 21; (Innsbruck:Verlag der Wagner'schen Universitats-Buchhandlung, trans. inJanson (as in n. 96), 29. 106. William of St-Thierry(as in n. 52), McGinn, 133. See n. 54 above. 107. The attributionof this capital to the Cuxa cloister has been questioned because its dimensions are considerably smaller than most of the other capitalsand it makes use of the drill, which is seen as a hallmarkof the tribune workshop (see Simon, 263 [capital1];and Ponsich [as in n. 37], 19). However, these writers assume that only one workshop was operating in the cloister. Against the argument of size, I would argue that the Siren capital might well have been mounted in the northeast corner of the cloister, where the Castelnau plan indicates two double columns. Indeed, two pairs of smaller capitals of only slightly larger dimensions than those of the Siren capital were placed in that position when the Cuxa cloister was reconstructed in the 1950s. 108. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, 12.3.30-31, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay, in Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, Scriptorum 1911): "Sirenastres fingunt fuisse ex parte virgines, ex parte volucres, habentes alas et ungulas. ..." 109. Liber monstrorum, 6, Pat. lat., vol. 41, 485-87. For the manuscript tradition, ranging in preserved copies from the 9th to the 11th centuries, see Edmond Faral, "Laqueue de poisson," Romania74 (1953): 441-46. 110. The Vulgate, in contrast to modern translations,mentions the Sirens: "Sed requiescent ibi bestiae, et replebuntur domus eorum draconibus, et habitabunt ibi struthiones, et pilosi saltabunt ibi; et respondebunt ibi ululae in aedibus ejus, et sirenes in delubris voluptatis." 111. Pierre Courcelle, "L'interpretation evhemeriste des Sirenes-courtisanes jusqu'au XIIe siecle," in Gesellschaft, Kultur, Literatur: Rezeption und Originalitit im Wachsen einer Europdischen Literatur und Geistigkeit,ed. Karl Bosl (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1975), 33-48. 112. See Hassig (as in n. 57), 104-15. 113. Werner of St-Blaise, Liber deflorationum, Pat. lat., vol. 157, 848A-849B, at 849B.

114. Peter Damian, De perfectionemonachi, 11, Pat. lat., vol. 145, 306C, cited in Courcelle (as in n. 111), 44-45. 115. Thomas of Froidmont, De modo bene vivendi, Pat. lat., vol. 184, 1285A86B, at 1285D-86A. 116. Peter Brown, The Body and Society:Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 241-58. 117. Athanasius, Vita Antonii, Pat. gr., vol. 26, 835-978; Gregory the Great, Dialogorum libri IV, 2.2, trans. Odo J. Zimmerman, Life and Miracles of Saint Benedict (Collegeville, Minn.: St. John's Abbey Press, 1949), 7-8. 118. See esp. 2 Cor. 11 and 1 Tim. 2:9-15. For the strengthening of the Pauline view in the patristic tradition, see Brown (as in n. 116); andJacqueline Murray, "Hiding Behind the Universal Man: Male Sexuality in the Middle Ages," in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vemn Bullough and James Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 123-52. 119. Sirens appear among the cloister capitals of S. Domingo in Silos, Elne in the Pyrenees, and in the monastic churches of D6ols, Cunault, La-SauveMajeure (Gironde), and St-Parize-le-Chatel. For illustrations, see del Alamo Martinez (as in n. 78), 43-45, figs. 11, 12; Pedro de Palol, Spanien: Kunst des friihen Mittelaltersvom Westgitenreichbis zum Ende derRomanik (Munich: Hirmer, 1991), pls. 92-96; Victor H. Debidour, Le bestiaire sculpte en France (Paris: Arthaud, 1961), pls. 55, 215, 321, 324-26, 329-32, figs. 1-9; and Rupprecht, pl. 109. For a general survey of Sirens in Romanesque sculpture, see Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London: R. T. Batsford, 1986), 48-57. 120. See Jean Saugnieux, "Culture religieuse et culture profane: Les representations de la luxure dans l'art francais du XIIe siecle," in Culturespopulaires et savantes en Espagne du Moyen-Age aux Lumieres (Paris: CNRS, 1982), 81-91; Jacques Dalarun, "The Clerical Gaze," 15-42, esp. 17-21, and Claude Thomasset, "The Nature of Woman," in Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, vol. 2 of A History of Women in the West, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). 121. Geoffrey of Vendome, Epistolae, 24, Pat. lat., vol. 157, 168; trans. Dalarun (as in n. 120), 19. 122. Ibid., 21, Pat. lat., vol. 157, 126B-C; Dalarun, 20-21. 123. Penny Shine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-CenturyFrance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 76-93; and Peter King, WesternMonasticism: A History of the Monastic Movement in the Western Church (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1999), 164, 181-82. For a rare counterexample, the case of Robert of Arbrissel, see ibid., 202-3. 124. See Weir and Jerman (as in n. 119); and Kenaan-Kedar (as in n. 74), 14-25. 125. Honorius Augustodunensis, Gemma Animae, 1.145, 146, Pat. lat., vol. 172, 589; cited in Marie-Therese d'Alverny, "Comment les theologiens et les philosophes voient la femme," in La Femme dans les civilisations des Xe-XIIIe siecles, special issue of Cahiers de Civilisation Midievale 20 (1977): 105-29, esp. 115-16. Honorius argues that women should always veil their heads for three reasons. First, women are the trap of the Devil, and one should avoid allowing the hearts of young men to be captured by the thread of women's disheveled hair; second, certain women would risk being too proud of the beauty of their own hair, or others of being ashamed of ugly hair; finally, the veiling of women reminds us of the crime of original sin, which has its origin in woman, and indicates both her culpability and her subjection. 126. For the famous Eve of Autun Cathedral and other examples, see 0. Karl Werckmeister, "The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from SaintLazare, Autun," Journal of the Warburgand Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 1-30. For the theme of luxuria in Romanesque sculpture, see Saugnieux (as in n. 120); and Weir andJerman (as in n. 119), 58-79. It should also be noted that the Siren and the personification of lust were often assimilated to one another pictorially, since both were often shown with snakes attacking their breasts, a Christian transformation of the same ancient pictorial model of Tellus-Mater. See Jacqueline Leclercq-Kadaner, "De la Terre-Mere a la Luxure: A propos de 'La migration des symboles,"' Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale 18 (1975): 37-43.

127. Ultimately, the scaly tail might allude to Satan's own appearance as serpent-tempterin Eden. On a comparable combination of serpent's tail with a woman's face to represent Satan in the Garden of Eden, see Nona C. Flores, "'Effigiesamicitiae ... veritasinimicitiae':Anti-Feminismin the Iconography of the Woman-HeadedSerpent in Medieval and RenaissanceArt and Literature,"in Flores (as in n. 57), 167-95. 128. Camille (as in n. 33), esp. 47-51. see Jean Leclercq, TheLoveof Learning 129. For the concept of ruminatio, and theDesire for God,trans.CatharineMisrahi (NewYork:Fordham University Press, 1961), 90. 130.Jerome Baschet, Lesjusticesde l'au-deld: Les representations de l'enferen et en Italie(XIIe-XVe France siecle)(Rome: Ecole Francaisede Rome, 1993), esp. 233-43. 131. For the Winchester Psalter Last Judgment, see Kristine Haney, The Winchester Psalter:An Iconographic Study (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1986), 128. 132. Rupprecht, 97-100, pls. 114-19. 133. Gary D. Schmidt, The Iconography of the Mouthof Hell: Eighth-Century Britain to the FifteenthCentury(Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press,

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1995); and Joyce Galpern, "The Shape of Hell in Anglo-Saxon England," Ph.D. diss., Universityof California-Berkeley, 1977. For a broader surveyof the motif in art, literature, and drama, see Pamela Sheingorn, "WhoCan Open the Doors of His Face? The Iconography of the Hell Mouth,"in TheIconogofHell, ed. CliffordDavidsonand Thomas H. Seiler (Kalamazoo,Mich.: raphy Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 1-19. 134. Schmidt (as in n. 133), 41-45. 135. Baschet (as in n. 130), 239. 136. Ibid., 243. 137. On this theme in art, see Bynum, 1995, 192-99; and Debidour (as in n. 119), pls. 204, 216, 217. 138. Bynum, 1995, 117-57; and idem, "MaterialContinuity,Personal Survivaland the Resurrectionof the Body:A ScholasticDiscussionin Its Medieval and Modern Contexts,"in Bynum, 1991, 239-97, esp. 280-91. For Augustine's key statements on the subject, see De Civitate dei,trans. David Knowles, the City of God against the Pagans (Harmondsworth: Augustine:Concerning Penguin Books, 1972), esp. 1060-61. In bk. 22, chap. 19, he argues that "anythingin nature that is deformed-and of course, the sole purpose of the deformityis to give yet another proof of the penal condition of mortalsin this life-anything of this kind will be restored in such a way as to remove the deformitywhile preservingthe substance intact." 139. Bynum, 1991, 284, 287. 140. See n. 137 above. 141. Baschet (as in n. 130), 17-83, 85-134. 142. Gregorythe Great, MoraliainJob,32.21, trans. adapted from Moralson the Bookof Job (as in n. 50), 526; Adriaen (as in n. 50), vol. 143B, 1645: "Behemoth itaque iste insatiabilitersaeviens, et devorare totum simul hominem quaerens, modo in superbiam mentem erigit, modo carnem luxuriae voluptate corrumpit.... Fortitudo eius in lumbis suis, et virtus illius in umbilico ventris sui, quia nimirum eius proprie corpus fiunt, qui, suggestionum turpium blandimentis decepti, ei per luxuriae fluxa succumbunt." 143. Schapiro, 10. 144. Ibid.: "Unlike the religious symbols, they are submitted to no fixed teaching or body of doctrine. We cannot imagine that they were commissioned by an abbot or bishop as part of a didactic program. They invite no systematic intellectual apprehension, but are grasped as individual, often irrational fantasies, as single thoughts and sensations. These grotesques and animal combats stand midway between ancient and modern art in their individualized,yet marginal character...." For an incisive analysisof Schapiro's associationof Romanesquewith modem art, see Michael Camille, "'How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art': Medieval, Modern and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro,"Oxford ArtJournal17 (1994): 65-75. 145. Male, 365-76. 146. Ibid., 340-63 ("Le monde et la nature"). 147. For analysisand overviewof Peter the Venerable's De miraculis libriduo as well as the Cistercian sources, see Jean-Pierre Torrell and Denise le Venerable et sa visiondu monde: Sa vie-Son oeuvre; Bouthillier, Pierre L'homme et le de'mon, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, Etudes et Documents, Fasc. 42 (Leuven:Spicilegium SacrumLovaniense, 1986), esp. 220-28. I thank Nurith Kenaan-Kedar for recommending this work to me. Focusing on the 13th and 14th centuries, ChristopherPage (as in n. 91), esp. 162-65, 183-85, explores Cistercianconcerns over the demons' continual harassmentof monks while they were singing in the choir. 148. See Kruger,20-34. 149. Trans. in ibid., 22. 150. Augustine, De Trinitate, 11.5.8, Pat. lat., vol. 42, 990-92; trans.Stephen TheTrinity, Fathersof the Church,45 (Washington, McKenna,SaintAugustine: D.C.: Catholic Universityof America Press, 1963), 326. 151. Ibid., 11.10.17, Pat. lat., vol. 42, 997; McKenna,338-39. 152. Cistercian Treatise on the Spiritand Soul, trans. McGinn, 222; Liberde spirituet anima,XXVI ("Spectrorumratio") Pat. lat., vol. 40, 798: "quoniam daemones naturas creant, sed aliquid tale facere possunt ut videantur esse quod non sunt. Nulla enim arte vel potestate animus, sed nec corpus quidem aliqua ratione in membraet lineamenta bestialiaveraciterconvertipotest. Sed phantasticum hominis (quod etiam cogitando sive somniando per rerum innumerrabilium genera variatur,et cum corpus non sit, corporum similes formas mira celeritate capit) sopitis aut oppressis corporeis hominis sensibus, ad aliorum sensuum figuras corporeas perduci potest. ... phantasticum autem illud veluti formatum in alicujus animalis imaginem, alienis sensibus appareat, talisque homo sibi videatur, qualis sibi videri posset in somnis et portare onera. Quae onera si vera sunt corpora, portantur a daemonibus, ut illudatur hominibus. ..." 153. Alan of Lille, trans. in Kruger,78. 154. Athanasius, VitaAntonii,Pat. gr., vol. 26, 835-978. 155. Gregory the Great, Dialogorum libri IV,2.4, trans. Odo John Zimmerthe Great: man, Saint Gregory Fathers of the Church, 39 (New York: Dialogues, Fathers of the Church, 1959), 66-67. Leah Rutchick, vol. 1, 179-80, has identified this episode in one of the capitalsof the Moissaccloisterfrom about
1100.

156. Gregorythe Great,Dialogorum libriIV,2.25, Zimmerman(as in n. 155), 94-95. 157. Peter the Venerable, De miraculis libriduo,1.12, ed. Denise Bouthillier, Continuatio vol. 83 (Turnhout:Brepols, 1988), Christianorum, Corpus medievalis, 43; trans.Jean-PierreTorrell and Denise Bouthillier, Livredesmerveilles deDieu

(Fribourg:Editions Universitaires,1992): "Quanta semper invidia diabolus adversusCluniacumfremuerit");Bouthillier, 43: "Quisenim explicare valeat, quanta improbitatecelestia illa castrasemper vel sepe invaserit,quam infestus semper Christismilitibus sibi repugnantibusfuerit, quam frequentes impetus violenter inrumpere volens dederit?More quippe suo interiorem civem id est Spiritumextinguere querens, quas poterat temptamentorum machinas exterius admovebat,et ab intimis se repulsum dolens, quanta valebat extra prelia commovebat." 158. Ibid., 1.25; Bouthillier, 75-79. 159. Ibid., 1.18; Bouthillier, 55-57. 160. Herbert of Clairvaux, Tres libri de miraculis,1.3, Pat. lat., vol. 185, 1278D: "in figura belluae monstruosae, partim saevo leoni, partim rapaci aquilae similis";cited in Torrell and Bouthillier (as in n. 147), 281 n. 63. 161. Ibid., Pat. lat.,vol. 185, 1294C-D: "Qui (daemones) cum multiformiter soleant apparere,una est tamen forma vel potius informitas,in qua frequentius eadem conspicatur. Igitur, secundum corporum lineamenta monstruosi homines esse videntur, statura gigantes, colore Aethiopes, agilitate angues, leones feritate. Capitibus vero grossis, ac turgidis ventribus prominentes, corporibus curti atque gibbosi sunt. Colla quoque producta habentes, atque exilia, brachia nihilominus et crura longissima proferunt"; Torrell and Bouthillier (as in n. 147), 288-89. 162. Athanasius (as in n. 117). 163. On Cassian'spreoccupation with the preservationof chastityand the monk's constant battle against lust and nocturnal pollutions, see Michel 35 (1982): 15-25, trans. Foucault, "Lecombat de la chastet6,"Communications in Western Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times,ed. Philippe Sexuality: Aries and Andre B6jin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1985), 14-25; and Brown (as in n. 116), 420-23. et de octoprincipalium vitiorum 164.John Cassian, De institutiscoenobiorum remediis libri XII, 6.10, trans. Boniface Ramsey,John Cassian:The Institutes, Ancient ChristianWriters,58 (New York:Newman Press, 2000), 157-58; Pat. lat., vol. 49, 278-79: "Cujuspuritatis hoc erit evidens indicium, ac plena probatio, si vel nulla imago decipiens quiescentibus nobis, et in soporem laxatis occurrat, vel certe interpellans nullos concupiscentiae motus valeat excitare. Licet enim ad plenam peccati noxam talis commotio minime reputetur; tamen necdum perfectae mentis indicium est, nec ad purum excocti vitii manifestatio, cum per fallaces imagines hujusmodi operatur illusio." 165. Ibid, 6.12-13; Ramsey, 158-59. 166. Ibid., 6.22; Ramsey, 162. 167. Liberde spiritu et anima, XXIII ("Percipiendi in anima quot vires. Somnia lasciva"),trans. adapted from McGinn, 216; Pat. lat., vol. 40, 796: "contrapropositum suum vel contra licitos mores concumbere videantur, et quod naturalitercollectum est, per genitales viasemittatur.Hunc motum casti vigilantescohibent et refrenant: dormientes autem ideo non possunt, quia in potestate non habent imaginis corporalisexpressionem, qua caro naturaliter movetur; et sequitur quod eum motum sequi solet, et quod sine peccato a vigilantibusfieri non potest." 168. Hildegard of Bingen, trans. in Kruger, 77. 169. Kruger,70-78. 170. PaschalisRomanus, quoted in ibid., 70. 171. Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Feudal War and Monastic Peace: Cluniac 2 (1971): 129-57, esp. 145; and RosenLiturgyas Ritual Aggression,"Viator wein and Lester K. Little, "SocialMeaning in the Monastic and Mendicant Past and Present 63 (1974): 4-63, esp. 7-10. ChristopherPage Spiritualities," (as in n. 91), 162-65, has made a comparableargument for the Cisterciansin the 13th and 14th centuries, drawing particularlyon Caesarius of Heisterbach: "Itwas clear to all Cisterciansthat when they approached the choir they came out of their camp, as it were, and challenged Satan in the open field" (162). 172. S. Benedicti Regula(as in n. 85), XVIII("Quoordine ipsi psalmi dicendi sunt") and XIX ("De disciplina psallendi").On the place of the psalms in the monastic liturgy, see also Joseph Dyer, "The Singing of the Psalms in the 64 (1989): 535-78. For their fundamental Office," Speculum Early-Medieval role in monastic education, see Paul Gehl, "MysticalLanguage Models in Monastic Educational Psychology," and Renaissance Studies Journalof Medieval 14 (1984): 219-43, esp. 220-26. 173. See Rosenwein and Little (as in n. 171), 7. At least one Cluniac customaryadvocated that the complete sequence of 150 psalms be sung on Cluniacensium Fridayof Easterweek in the cloister itself; Consuetudines antiquiorescumredactionibus ed. KassiusHallinger, in Corpus derivatis, consuetudinum vol. altera Franz 7, monasticarum, pars Schmitt, 1983), 88. See also (Siegburg: Rutchick, vol. 2, 207, where the importance of the psalms is stressed as a source of inspiration for the viewers of the Moissac cloister capitals. 174. Pierre Riche, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West,trans.John Contreni (Columbia,S.C.:South CarolinaPress, 1976), 115-17, 463-66; and Gehl (as in n. 172). 175. Bernard of Clairvaux,Sermones in Psalmum"Quihabitat," sermo 7.13, Leclerq and Rochais, vol. 4 (1966), 421-22: "Hi [daemones] nimirum nobis non nisi ob temporalia quaelibet adversantur et transitoria bona, quae quidem aut nos habere invidiosa malignitate suspirent, aut cupiditate iniusta sese potius doleant non habere. Forte enim mundi huius conantur auferre substantiam,forte favorem hominum, forte ipsam corporum vitam." 176. Ibid., sermo 13.2, Leclerq and Rochais, 464-68, at 465. 177. The following discussion of Compline is based on the rule of Saint

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Benedict (as in n. 85), chaps. 17, 18; Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscriptsfor Mass and Office:A Guide to Their Organization and Terminology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), esp. 74-75; and Aime Georges Martimort, The Church at Prayer:An Introduction to the Liturgy, 3 vols. in 1 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), vol. 3, 173, 245, 271-72. The most accessible outline of all components of the service is found in John Harper, The Formsand Orders of WesternLiturgyfrom the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century:A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 102-5. The complete texts both said and sung appear with only minor postmedieval accretions in Antiphonale monasticum pro diurnis horisjuxta vota RR. DD. Abbatum congregationum confoederatarumordinis Sancti Benedicti a SolesmensibusMonachis Restitutum (Tournai: Desclee, 1934), 167-80. This can be checked against the compilation of medieval manuscript sources found in Rene J. Hesbert, Manuscrits de Cursus Monastique, vol. 2 of Corpus Antiphonalium officii (Rome: Herder, 1965), 325. 178. See Jacques LeGoff, "Christianity and Dreams," in The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 255. The full text, which can be traced back in monastic sources as early as the 9th century, appears in A. S. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922): "Procul recedant somnia; Et noxia phantasmata; Hostemque nostrum comprime; Ne polluantur corpora." See also Clement Blume, ed., Die Hymnen des Thesaurus Hymnologicus H. A. Daniels, in Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi (Leipzig, 1908; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprints, 1961), vol. 51, 41. 179. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 272-76. 180. Ibid., 274-75. 181. Rutchick, vol. 2, 173-263. 182. Rudolph, 1997, 56-61. 183. Ibid., 36. For the following discussion of the theme of temptations and their conception by God as a means of trial and purgation in the Moralia, I draw on Robert Gillet's introduction to Gregoirele grand: Morales surJob, livres 1 et 2, Sources Chretiennes, 32 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1950), 54-64. 184. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, 8.41-43, ed. Adriaen (as in n. 50), vol. 143, 411-15; trans. Morals on the Book ofJob (as in n. 50), vol. 18, 447-48.

185. Ibid., 24.25-34, esp. 26, trans. Morals on the Book ofJob (as in n. 50), vol. 23, 67-76, esp. 73; ed. Adriaen, vol. 143B, 1205-13, at 1206: "Sed quia divina gratia diu nos istis difficultatibus affici non permittit, ruptis peccatorum nostrorum vinculis citius nos ad libertatem novae conversationis consolando perducit, et praecedentem tristitiam subsequens laetitia refouet; ita ut conversi uniuscuiusque animus eo magis ad votum suum perveniendo gaudeat, quo magis se pro illo meminit laborando doluisse. Fit cordi immensa laetitia, quia ei quem desiderat, iam per spem securitatis propinquat, ut recte de hoc dici debeat: DeprecabiturDeum, et placabilis ei erit; et videbitfaciem eius in iubilo. Vel certe: Liberavit animam suam, ne pergeretin interitum, sed vivens lucem videret." 186. Ibid., 24.34, Adraien, vol. 143B, 1213; Morals on the Book of Job 76-77. 187. Cassian, Collationespatrum XXIV, 7.24-26, trans. Ramsey (as in n. 45), 264-65. 188. Ibid., 7.28, Ramsey, 267. 189. In a passing remark, Michael T. Clanchy has already suggested such a function for Bernard's cloister capitals: "Representing these images threedimensionally in sculpture was one way of coming to terms with them"; Clanchy, Abelard:A Medieval Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 58. 190. Gombrich (as in n. 15), 276. 191. Carruthers (as in n. 179), 94-107. 192. I am grateful to Professor Michael Clanchy for suggesting to me this line of inquiry. 193. Jean Leclercq, A SecondLook at Bernard of Clairvaux (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 103-27. 194. John R. Sommerfeldt, The Spiritual Teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 95-101; Lode van Hecke, Le desir dans l'experiencereligieuse: L'homme reunifie; Relecture de saint Bernard (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1990), esp. 119-200; Pierre-Andre Burton, "'Le Verbe est meme descendujusqu'a notre imagination' (De acquaeductu, 10)," Collectanea Cisterciensia 59 (1997): 132-51. I thank Father John of Taize via Luisa Saffiotti for the last two references here. 195. Leclercq (as in n. 193), 111. 196. On the power of music itself to combat demons, especially in the Cistercian context, see Page (as in n. 91), 165-69.