One of the most fascinating aspects of the ecclesiastical reform movement that reshaped Latin Christian society in the late eleventh century is the number of elite laywomen who rose to prominence thanks to their participation in reformist affairs.Footnote 1 Clerical reformers had an aggressive agenda, including but not limited to banning clerical marriage, establishing free elections for ecclesiastical offices, enforcing papal supremacy, and “correcting” the behaviors and customs of the secular elite to align more closely with Christian ideals. Royal and noblewomen across western Europe acted as allies or opponents of clerical reformers, as intercessors between their recalcitrant husbands and sons and furious reformers, and as rulers concerned over their own high stakes in the face of widespread religious and social upheaval. Indeed, some of the most effective and prominent of clerical reformers’ supporters were elite laywomen, including the famous Matilda of Tuscany, who led armies in defense of three popes—Gregory VII, Victor III, and Urban II—against her own liege lord, Henry IV of Germany. The dependence of male clerics and monks on secular women incited much commentary both within and without reformist circles. While women had always played important roles in the development of the medieval Latin Christian Church, reformers at the end of the eleventh century were calling on women to act in remarkable and radical ways in support of their cause.
Clerical reformers were well aware that they were blatantly flouting traditional expectations of good Christian women. In 1067, the cardinal bishop of Ostia, Peter Damian (d. 1072/73), an early and influential reformer, instructed Guilla, the countess of Monte Santa Maria, to little less than overthrowing her husband’s corrupt rule. Peter wrote, “The weaker sex generally needs manly authority. But when a wife’s judgment is more correct, it is right that her husband not oppose her laws by using his authority.”Footnote 2 Peter turned to scriptural history to justify his unusual stance, arguing that if husbands were not meant to listen to their wives, the Lord would never have told Abraham, “Pay heed to all that Sarah has to say to you.”Footnote 3 One of the great paradoxes of the reform movement was that reformers clung tenaciously to the idea that they were merely returning to a way of life described in scripture despite the fact that so much of what they fought for were novel practices and ideas—including Peter’s request for a woman to overthrow her husband’s administration. Thanks to this emphasis on the scriptural past, the reform period coincided with a surge of biblical exegesis and allegory. One of the leading Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, Henri de Lubac, identified key reformers, including Peter Damian, the archbishops Lanfranc and Anselm of Canterbury, the theologian Manegold of Lautenbach, and Bishop Ivo of Chartres, as important voices in shaping the biblical theology that would develop over the long twelfth century.Footnote 4 Exegesis had an immediate political use as well, as Beryl Smalley and I.S. Robinson have argued, for defending the Church against external rivals—whether they be rival powers, non-Christians, or heretics. This was especially true for those in the circle of Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–1085), who armed their polemical arsenals with biblical commentary.Footnote 5 In a similar vein, exegetes could also use their commentaries as gifts and shows of support for the lay rulers they deemed to be legitimate, comparing their worldly allies favorably with biblical examples.Footnote 6
Biblical exegesis and salvation history were powerful tools in the hands of reformist writers, particularly when writing to or about women. This essay will focus on the exegetical writings produced in German-Italian circles in the last quarter of the eleventh century which promoted the authority and roles of some of the most powerful women in the region: the German empress Agnes of Poitou (c. 1025–1077), Countess Adelaide of Turin (1014/20–1090), and Countess Matilda of Tuscany (c. 1046–1115). While clerical reformers had a wide gamut of biblical and historical female exemplars at their disposal, I argue that the reform period witnessed a new surge of interest in the models provided by Old Testament women, and especially the figure of Deborah from the Book of Judges. Exegetical commentaries on Deborah, written for the real women who were fighting on behalf of the reform, showcase the remarkable creativity and flexibility of reformist polemics and highlight the challenges women faced as they participated in male-dominated political and religious arenas.
Late eleventh-century reformers relied on models provided by Old Testament women to a much greater extent than did earlier authors. There are a few key exceptions from the early medieval period, including Hrabanus Maurus’s ninth-century expositions on Judith and Esther, dedicated to two Carolingian queens, and Aelfric of Eynsham’s tenth-century homilies on the same two biblical women, who only grew in popularity as exegetical subjects in later centuries. However, early medieval monks and priests did not rely as extensively on biblical stories or models when writing to or about laywomen as did their later counterparts.Footnote 7 Instead, they were more likely to draw on early medieval saints’ lives, such as Venantius Fortunatus’s sixth-century Life of Radegund. Footnote 8 During the eleventh-century reform movement, however, the opposite was true: reformers were far more likely to turn to biblical history than to early medieval saintly queens for models and justification when reaching out to their own contemporary women. The relatively small selection of saintly women brought to bear in reformist arguments may point to reformers’ own awareness of the limits to their claims of returning to older traditions and practices. There was no readily available historical or hagiographical model from the late antique or early medieval Church that was perfectly suited for the arguments they were making about powerful laywomen, so they had to turn to an even deeper sacred past.
The use of exegesis encompassed more than mere politics. Scripture provided the blueprint for salvation history, a history that had not and could not end within the pages of the Old and New Testaments. As Erich Auerbach, a key founder of modern comparative literary studies, showed in his discussion of medieval figura and allegory, Christian time was teleological but not linear: real historical events connected vertically by divine purpose as the events and figures of the past prophesied or prefigured events or figures in the present. These present figures were, in turn, merely prefigurements or prophecies that would not be fulfilled until the future end time of the Last Revelation.Footnote 9 This salvific view of the connections between biblical, historical, and contemporary events greatly influenced the arguments of clerical reformers at the turn of the twelfth century, who constructed images of themselves and their lay allies as a new generation of biblical-like warriors for the Latin Christian faith.
I. New Women in an Old History: In You, They Are Returned to Us
Medieval exegetes believed that holy scripture had four meanings: history, or the literal sense of the past; allegory, the ways in which real events prophesize or prefigure later religious developments; tropology, the moral and ethical guidance for individuals; and anagogy, the fulfillment of the promises of the scripture through the Last Judgement.Footnote 10 These four meanings, being the word of God, encompassed everything in existence, but often lay hidden within holy texts and past events, which in themselves prefigured what would happen in the future.Footnote 11 Scripture could therefore help to explain historical and current events, as well as prophesy about the future; scripture also naturally provided the necessary lessons and moral guidelines for achieving the reality of a Christian world, or to prepare the world for the final Revelation.Footnote 12 All that was needed was the crucial step of interpretation.Footnote 13 Such concepts of exegesis and sacred history were paramount to the ways in which clerical reformers envisaged the events and goals of the reform movement unfurling into the future. During the reform era, clerical and monastic authors dwelt at length on the links between scripture, history, and spiritual mysteries, all with an eye to why religious reform was necessary at the turn of the twelfth century. Anselm of Canterbury (1033/34–1109) argued that all possible truths already existed in the scriptural texts; they just had to be sought out.Footnote 14 The twelfth-century monastic chronicler Orderic Vitalis commented, “I find many things in the pages of Scripture which, if they are subtly interpreted, seem to resemble the happenings of our own time.”Footnote 15 Orderic’s close contemporary, the historian Henry of Huntingdon, said about the mysteries contained within the past, “Truly, it is quite common for the path of history to lead us straight back to moral purity.”Footnote 16 Exegesis thus provided a natural tool for men and women who wanted to improve social mores, purify their world, and liberate the Church, itself seen as the factual, allegorical, and anagogical fulfillment of Christ’s promise of redemption.Footnote 17
The reformers of the late eleventh and early twelfth century thought of themselves as merely the latest iteration of scriptural refigurations, a sacred vertical line of events and people in the pursuit of all the hidden truths in the Word of God.Footnote 18 Justification for the reform movement rested largely on manufacturing spiritual and ideological links between a sacred past and contemporary efforts to effect radical changes throughout the Latin Christian world. According to reformers, the Church, and Latin Christendom with it, was languishing in a period of darkness that could be lightened only by a return to, or a refiguring of, an ancient faith. This fundamental idea of a rebirth of a better and brighter Christian past percolated throughout the reform’s many arms and objectives and at all levels of authority. It helped to define the papacy’s claim to superiority over all princes of the world through its descent from St. Peter. It lay at the heart of defeating the practice of simony, an act named after the biblical villain Simon Magus.Footnote 19 It was embodied in the cries for priests to be as pure of body as Christ had been and in the ritual purity emphasized in the Old Testament.Footnote 20 And it shaped ideas about how lay men and women ought to act in their positions as secular rulers during the reform period.
Discussing contemporary men and women as new manifestations of sacred biblical and historical figures was a popular activity amongst clerical reformers. These figurations could cover both heroes and villains. It was a simple matter to present the enemies of reform as the past arch villains of the ancient Church. Donizo of Canossa and Paul of Bernried, two enthusiastic supporters of the reform movement, called Henry IV of Germany the new Nero, who was once again crucifying St. Peter, now refigured as the Church itself.Footnote 21 Matilda of Tuscany herself called the imperialist anti-pope Wibert of Ravenna “Barabbas the thief.”Footnote 22
Alluding to the sacred past also served the obverse objective, to create a “holy lineage” for contemporary figures.Footnote 23 Peter Damian frequently touted the concept of holy lineages as a way of bringing together two historical realities through a specific figure.Footnote 24 In a rare allusion to a saintly woman, Peter urged the German empress Agnes of Poitou to abjure her noble birth and instead focus on her “descent” from St. Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, who found the True Cross.Footnote 25 In a similar manner, Peter presented Agnes’s husband, Henry III of Germany (r. 1046–1056), as the new David slaying Goliath, and the new Constantine destroying the Arian sect, thanks to his actions at Sutri in 1046, when he resolved a contested papal election by rejecting all three rival claimants and naming his own candidate as pope.Footnote 26 Unlike later reformers, Peter approved of the decision to give Henry III the right to oversee future papal elections, perhaps seeing in the German emperor a way to break the power of Roman factions. If David and Constantine were both justified in their rule by slaying the enemies of God, Peter could likewise justify Henry III’s new powers over the papal throne. Henry had “slain” the three anti-popes and restored peace to Rome; as David was given a king’s daughter as his reward, so Henry received the Church, the daughter of “the highest king” as his. St. Helena was the natural analogue for Agnes. Through Helena, Peter was able to emphasize Agnes’s own imperial power and the importance of her influence over her husband and future children. God had given Helena the privilege of finding the True Cross; although Agnes had not as yet received any such momentous reward, the implication is clear that surely she just needs to wait for it.
Clerical reformers wanted nothing less than a return, as Peter Damian put it, to the golden age of the apostles.Footnote 27 Their efforts to purify society, the intellectual and physical battles they waged in pursuit of those goals, and perhaps more than anything else, the persecutions they suffered in defense of their ideas became the latest manifestation of an ancient, historical, and atemporal battle to establish the Word of God in the real world. Paul of Bernried fully developed this refiguration elsewhere in his biography of Gregory VII, the most infamous of the reformer popes who died in exile in 1085. Paul himself was an exile, expelled from his priesthood in Regensburg by Henry V of Germany, most likely in 1121, thanks to his continued support of the reform faction.Footnote 28 Paul described an episode (most likely apocryphal) during Gregory’s exile, in which the pope, freezing to death on a cold winter’s night, stumbled into the care of an unidentified noble couple. While the husband wrapped Gregory in furs and warmed the pope’s frozen feet with his own garments, his noble wife wept and tended to Gregory’s wounds, exclaiming against his enemies. Paul of Bernried describes this unknown woman as another Mary of Bethany from the Gospels:
For just as the latter, grieving her failures, bathed the Lord’s feet with her tears, so this woman washed the great pastor with her tears, as she told of the crimes of all those men. [Mary of Bethany] kissed the feet of the Lord and Savior and afterward she was able even to wash his head; but this woman—the maidservant of God and the Lord, at first purified by baptism, at last kindled by the ardor of her heart—kissed [Gregory’s] head and breast and wet them with her tears.Footnote 29
The power and immediate presence of Christ’s redemption run throughout the scene. Gregory VII himself becomes a Christological figure, suffering as Christ suffered at the hands of God’s enemies.Footnote 30 In the Gospel accounts, Mary of Bethany anointed Christ’s feet or head with her tears (or perfume in the Gospel of John), foretelling Christ’s death in a matter of days; likewise, the noblewoman of Paul’s story seems to foretell in her grief Gregory’s own imminent death.Footnote 31 But Gregory’s suffering, like Christ’s, paves the way for the salvation of others. Here, it is the mysterious noblewoman who is saved, her salvation figuring in the two separate but connected events of her baptism and her spiritual epiphany—the kindling of her love—as she weeps over Gregory’s/Christ’s wounding.
The hagiographer’s choice of a noblewoman to refigure Mary of Bethany reveals the significance of Gregory VII’s relationships with noblewomen in general, both in the vita and in historical reality. This scene also exposes the important role lay noblewomen were playing in these new exegetical allegories and interpretations. The changes instituted by Gregory and other clerical reformers were meant to act in a fashion similar to the original teachings of Christ and the apostles: to create a foundation for Christ’s Church and for the Christian world as a whole. Many reform goals specifically targeted traditional sources of secular authority and influence as harmful to a Christianized society, and these changes would have affected elite laywomen and their families directly, making their support and cooperation all that more important. Women in Jerusalem had already played a crucial role in the history of that salvation story, preparing the way for Christ himself. Now, or so Paul tries to assert, noblewomen in the empire were doing so again.
Gregory VII himself pulled predominantly on New Testament figures when writing to elite laywomen. Like Peter Damian before him, Gregory spoke of a return of Christ’s closest disciples. In a 1074 letter to Matilda of Tuscany, Gregory wrote, “You are willing to show the same fervent love to the prince of the apostles, the most blessed Peter, that the vessel of election St. Paul, his fellow apostle, was ready to maintain until death to Jesus Christ our Lord.”Footnote 32 He turned again to the apostolic age in a separate letter to Agnes of Poitou, also sent early in his pontificate. After praising Empress Agnes for her efforts to bring her son Henry IV into better concord with the papacy, Gregory claimed that Agnes and her “disciples,” the mother-daughter duo of Beatrice and Matilda of Tuscany, were the new women at Christ’s tomb: “Therefore through you a new example of an ancient joy—through you, I say, the women who once sought the Lord in the tomb often return to us in memory.”Footnote 33 Gregory went on to explain that just as the women at the tomb preceded and prepared the way for the other disciples, Agnes, Beatrice, and Matilda were visiting Christ’s Church in its “sepulcher of affliction”—and they were doing so before any other worldly prince. Gregory assured Agnes that, by helping the struggling Church, she and her fellow female rulers would eventually share in the self-same reward as the women at Christ’s tomb.Footnote 34
Gregory’s choice of disciples to connect to the empress and the countesses must have been carefully calculated. In saying that Matilda, his most powerful ally, acted in the same way as St Paul, and highlighting Paul’s role as Christ’s “vessel of election,” Gregory was able to imply that Matilda had also been chosen by the divine power to be God’s vessel. If, as Gregory frequently argued, the papal see and St. Peter were one and the same, in her defense of the reform papacy, Matilda was, like Paul, carrying forth the name of Christ to all the peoples of the earth.Footnote 35 The allusion of the women at the tomb carries with it similar associations of Gregory’s female contemporaries sharing in and spreading the word of Christ. As the first to receive the news of Christ’s resurrection, the women at the tomb became, however briefly, the instructors of the male apostles, telling them where to find Christ for themselves. If the Church represented Christ on earth, by opening the “sepulcher of affliction” which was currently entombing it, Agnes, Beatrice, and Matilda would be able to lead all of the other worldly princes, the new apostles, to the resurrected Christ/Church. Gregory could claim that he was not, as the imperialist faction accused him, introducing a novel and unwelcome female element into Christian practices and politics. In the 1070s, the Church’s resurrection was being made known, once again, first to women, and through their efforts for religious reform, they in turn would become leaders of the other rulers of Latin Christendom.
II. The Flexibility of Exegetical Models: The Many New Faces of Deborah
Exegetical commentary was a common tool in the reform movement, but there was not a single papally enforced program of exegetical propaganda.Footnote 36 Gregory VII was actually unusual in his reliance on women from the New Testament, but this is not surprising considering the all-important argument for St. Peter’s primacy—and his own sovereignty in the empire and beyond—that he constantly tried to promote in his letters. Other clerical reformers drew far more frequently on Old Testament heroines than on the women of the New Testament.Footnote 37 While Gregory’s women at the tomb evoked powerful images of resurrection and privilege, the Old Testament offered a much wider variety of female figures. In his tract on defending women, the popular poet and hagiographer Marbod of Rennes (1035–1123) commented, “Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Esther, Judith, Anna, and Naomi, like seven stars which ancient times produced, equaled or surpassed men.”Footnote 38 To this roster, clerics could add Ruth, Deborah, Jael, Abigail, Hannah, and even more, as and when they proved useful.Footnote 39 The women of the Old Testament provided clerical reformers with a wide variety of examples of female participation in social and religious crises, and they pulled liberally on biblical female exemplars when writing to or discussing contemporary elite women.Footnote 40 For example, two vitae written around the turn of the twelfth century compared Countess Ida of Boulogne (c. 1040–1113) and the saintly queen Margaret of Scotland (c. 1045–1093) to the Hebrew queen Esther, emphasizing their roles as intercessors on behalf of their subjects.Footnote 41
However, the favorite model in German-Italian circles was the Old Testament woman Deborah, who enjoyed a popularity in reformist exegetical writings not seen in earlier periods.Footnote 42 According to the Book of Judges, Deborah served as the only female judge of Israel and incited the successful rebellion against Jabin of Canaan and his general Sisera, resulting in a long period of peace for the Israelites. During this rebellion, Deborah collaborated with Barak, a man whose exact position in the Israelite tribes was hotly debated in later exegesis. She also foretold Sisera’s death at the hands of a woman, Jael.Footnote 43 Deborah was more than just a convenient model for authoritative women. Deborah was also the hidden mystery of the Old Testament, which foresaw the Revelation of Christ. Exegetical authors interpreted Deborah’s act of sending Sisera to die at the hands of Jael, stabbed in the head with a tent peg, as prophesying Christ’s death on the Cross, the sacrifice that saved mankind from sin. In other words, Deborah’s story existed on multiple levels of Christian understanding. Like their biblical counterpart, the women who acted as new Deborahs in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries became the latest manifestations in a constant and constantly changing salvation story through the writings and interpretations of the Roman reformers.
Deborah’s example covered a wide range of actions, ranging from the traditional female role of adviser and counselor to her far more unusual position as the military commander defending against Sisera. It was this latter, more masculine, activity that seemed to have made her a popular archetype among reform writers. As historian Katherine Allen Smith has pointed out, the language and symbolism of war were “intimately woven” into the late eleventh- and twelfth-century ecclesiastical texts, both in terms of fighting lay enemies and private vices.Footnote 44 For reformers, the biblical Deborah’s fights for the righteous and oppressed tied neatly into the language of war they employed throughout their polemical writings. In her roles as both judge and commander, Deborah encouraged and justified the inclusion of women in the ecclesiastical arena, which reformers frequently construed as an overtly and exclusively masculine space.
Unlike other Old Testament women, including the intercessory queen Esther or Judith, who beheaded Holofernes, Deborah does not seem to have been a popular subject among medieval biblical commentators before the late eleventh century.Footnote 45 Indeed, early Christian theologians struggled with defining Deborah’s place in a Christological and patriarchal worldview.Footnote 46 As church historian Joy Schroeder has said, Deborah “created a problem for countless readers…Because of her extraordinarily authoritative behavior and speech, the biblical Deborah was especially prone to re-interpretation.”Footnote 47 This reinterpretation often took the form of recasting Deborah into more acceptably feminine roles, such as wife, widow, or mother, despite a glaring lack of scriptural evidence. Ambrose’s fourth-century De uiduis (On Widows), is a rare example of extensive exegetical writing on Deborah that pre-dates the eleventh-century reform period. Ambrose’s early interpretation of Deborah as a widow and mother, which was one of the few prominent commentaries available to authors of the later reform period, reveals how different were reformers’ visions of the same woman.
Ambrose, an influential theologian and bishop of Milan (c. 339–397) wrote his tract on Deborah to encourage widows to avoid serial monogamy, making the argument that widowhood was closely related to virginity and thus an honorable state, certainly more honorable than a second or third marriage.Footnote 48 Ambrose interpreted Deborah primarily through a familial lens, as a widow and mother to Barak, neither of which role is denoted in the Old Testament. According to the De uiduis, Deborah proved that widows “have no need of the help of a man…And I think that her administration of justice has been chosen, and her deeds described, lest women be recalled from virtuous duties by the weakness of their sex. Widowed, she rules the people; widowed, she leads the army; widowed, she chooses generals; widowed, she orders wars and commands victories.”Footnote 49 Ambrose continues by recalling Deborah’s prophecy that victory would belong to a woman. This woman proved to be Jael, who defeats the fleeing enemy Sisera by stabbing him in the head with a wooden tent peg.Footnote 50 Ambrose interprets Deborah’s prophecy and Jael’s victory as a holy mystery revealing the rise of the Church from among the Gentiles: “For us, then, the oracles of the prophets fought, for us those judgements and arms of the prophets won the victory.”Footnote 51 Ambrose concluded his commentary on Deborah with the following warning to widows of his own age:
And so according to this history, so that the spirits of women might be stirred up, a woman judged, a woman administered, a woman prophesied, a woman triumphed, and joining in the battle taught men to make war for a woman. According to the mystery it is a battle of faith and the victory of the Church. You, then, have no excuse because of your nature, women. You, widowed, have no excuse based on the weakness of your sex, nor can you tender your inconstancy to the loss of the support of a husband.Footnote 52
Ambrose’s Deborah is thus an example of female strength, a prophet of the Lord, and the presaging of the fourth-century Church and the future Last Revelation all at once. More than anything else, however, she was an icon of widowhood and a lesson that widows could—and needed to—take care of themselves rather than drain the early Church’s resources or risk sinning by engaging in multiple marriages.Footnote 53
The refiguring of Deborah as a wife or widow was picked up again in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a period which proved important for the formation of an established medieval exegetical tradition concerning the Old Testament woman. Rupert of Deutz, a Benedictine theologian writing in the first decades of the twelfth century, was one of the first medieval exegetes to work on the story of Deborah. Rupert completely reimagined the story, turning Barak into both Deborah’s husband and the true leader of Israel. Deborah herself became confined to the role of prophetess.Footnote 54 Rupert’s recasting of Deborah as Barak’s wife, and as a source of prophecy rather than of judgement, became common in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Christian exegesis. Indeed, over the course of the twelfth century, clerical authors continued to reference Deborah as an exemplar for contemporary women, but mainly for monastic figures like Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen, and Elisabeth of Schönau. When drawing connections between these holy nuns and the Old Testament judge, clerical authors emphasized Deborah’s influence as a prophetess rather than as a ruler or military commander, presumably to match the monastic vocations of their female subjects.Footnote 55
The later twelfth-century clerical and monastic attentions spent on Deborah must have been inspired in part by clerical reformers’ promotion of her as a biblical model in the preceding decades, but the use of Deborah in the reform movement differed radically from her later interpretation as a prophetess. Outside of writings to or about women, reformers rarely mentioned Deborah. Peter Damian’s sermons include some of these infrequent mentions and begin to illustrate how flexible the figure of Deborah could be as an interpretive and didactic subject. In a sermon celebrating the martyr Cassian, for example, Peter argued that Deborah represented the “womanish,” carnal interpretation of scriptural prophecy, the interpretation that could not foresee the spiritual meanings of the Old Testament in light of the New Testament. In another sermon, Peter instead used Deborah to emphasize the power of God to achieve great deeds even through weak women.Footnote 56
In writings targeting or featuring elite laywomen, however, Deborah transformed from a passive prophetess or weak woman into a true firebrand. Despite his pessimistic rendering of Deborah in his sermons, Peter Damian spent a great deal of attention dissecting and promoting Deborah’s role in his letters to contemporary women. In 1064, for example, Peter Damian told the countess Adelaide of Turin to look to Deborah for inspiration, for, like Deborah, Adelaide ruled her land “without the help of manly rule.”Footnote 57 Adelaide (d. 1091) was thrice-widowed and had been ruling the March of Turin alongside her sons since the death of her third husband, Otto of Savoy, around the year 1060. At first glance, it may seem that Peter is echoing Ambrose’s stance on the preference of widowhood over serial monogamy by referencing Deborah. But Peter makes no mention of Deborah’s potential status as a widow, instead focusing on her relationship with Barak, her male counterpart within the tribes of Israel. Peter used the specific example of Deborah and Barak going into battle together to encourage Adelaide to work with Cunibert, the bishop of Turin, to eradicate clerical marriage in her territory:
As a woman you are as strong as a man, and more richly endowed with good will than with earthly power. Therefore, because in the words of the pagan poet, ‘My champion has need of a man to fight for him,’ I beg you and encourage you to join with the lord bishop, so that through your mutual efforts of defense you may take on the fight against the forces of impurity that are attacking Christ…Therefore, like this man and woman, namely, Barak and Deborah, who by assisting one another, entered the battle against Sisera and destroyed him and his forces armed with nine hundred chariots equipped with scythes, so should you and the bishop of Turin take up arms against Sisera, the leader of impurity, and slay him with the sword of chastity for having oppressed the Israelites, that is, the clerics of the church. Thus the bishop, in fact, all the bishops who live in the lands that you administer, should enforce episcopal discipline on the clerics, and you should apply the vigor of your worldly power to the women.Footnote 58
Peter’s emphasis is on the importance of cooperation and alliance between clerics and female lords. Together, the two have the power to reform an entire region, freeing the Israelites/clerical hierarchy from the oppression of Sisera/clerical marriage. At the same time, Peter uses the example of Deborah to distance Adelaide’s own activities from the ecclesiastical sphere. Barak and Deborah are two parallel, cooperative, but separate forces in Peter’s exegesis. Likewise, while the bishop of Turin watches over his fellow clergymen, Adelaide finds herself relegated to a circle of women, former priests’ wives. In this way Peter brings Adelaide into the sphere of a masculinized defense of the Church while still keeping her femininity safely contained. Like Deborah in the wars of the Old Testament, she commands and strengthens but she does not fight.
Peter’s long commentary on Adelaide and Cunibert as the new Deborah and Barak is accompanied by further allusions to other Old Testament women, including the war-like Jael and Judith, but also the more peaceable Esther and Abigail.Footnote 59 The combination of Old Testament figures which the author brings into his letter is particularly interesting. In biblical history, Deborah, Jael, and Judith appear in a context of physical violence—participation in war and the killing of men. Esther and Abigail, in contrast, draw upon the more traditionally “female” acts of interceding with the dominant male authorities, but there is no sense in the letter of these latter two being more appropriate for a woman to emulate or more feminine in nature. The presence and participation of Deborah, Jael, and Judith in arenas of violence were necessitated by the threats to their immediate circumstances, threats which, in the later interpretations by eleventh-century reformers, reflected the contemporary oppression and destruction of Christian morality and order. Each biblical woman appears in scripture in a context of war and danger, the same context into which Peter places Adelaide: “Act therefore, be a virago of the Lord…For such victory makes God very happy who triumphs sometimes through women with quite glorious praise…You also can avert divine fury from your home and from those in the regions you rule.”Footnote 60 Adelaide of Turin, according to the reformist ideals of Peter Damian, possessed the necessary attributes to become another champion of God in this new period of religious and social crisis: she carried the swords both “of piety and of justice.”Footnote 61 Peter was able to capture adroitly the intertwined nature of these two virtues through his new Deborah and Barak.
Adelaide’s contemporary and cousin, Matilda of Tuscany, more than any other woman involved in the reform movement, became a nexus for Deborah’s return. The link between Matilda and Deborah may have seemed obvious to clerical reformers: both were women in the unusual position of commanding armies. Certainly, several authors used the figure of Deborah to reflect on Matilda’s warlord role, but these Deborah/Matilda models had a deeper significance beyond the unusual image of an Amazonian warrior woman. The author of the earliest vita for Bishop Anselm II of Lucca, who was a leading reformer in Italian circles, wrote shortly after Anselm’s death in 1086 and was one of the first reformers to describe Matilda as being “like another Deborah, she judged the people, defeated the army, and resisted heretics and schismatics.”Footnote 62 The author was most likely part of Anselm’s inner circle and would have known of the bishop’s close working relationship with Matilda. The vita describes Matilda as Anselm’s special helper (adiutrix), handmaiden (ancilla), and spiritual daughter. While all other princes rebelled against the Roman see, so the author says, the “duke [dux] and marchioness Matilda alone and uniquely stayed loyal.”Footnote 63 She expressed her loyalty in the form of obedience to Pope Gregory VII and to Anselm of Lucca, who appears as her main adviser in the vita. In fact, the author describes Matilda and Anselm as mutually complementary in their roles: “She was incited by the piety of her mother, he driven by contemplation of the arts; she exercised power, he directed; she accepted and he gave counsel…In addition I say that she indeed was noble and magnificent, unaccustomed to the habits of women, who ruled manfully, fearing no fierce danger.”Footnote 64
Matilda’s figuration “like another Deborah,” established early in the text, helped the author to emphasize her secular—and especially military—powers as an outgrowth of Church authority. The Vita Anselmi constantly reiterates the image of Matilda as a warrior, defeating armies and fighting the enemies of the Church; missing from this portrayal is any real discussion of Matilda’s comital administrative duties. It was not enough that Matilda was a woman with an army. As the new Deborah, Matilda was, effectively, Anselm of Lucca’s temporal sword, exercising her military might at his direction against those people the reformist faction deemed traitors to the Church. Thus, through her military actions, she became a source of justice, judging her fellow secular princes just as Deborah had judged the Israelites’ enemies.
The Vita Anselmi’s depiction of Matilda as a new Deborah may have provided inspiration for other authors in the countess’s reforming circle. Matilda of Tuscany’s earliest biographer and contemporary, Donizo of Canossa, also found Deborah to be a useful model.Footnote 65 While Donizo used scriptural allusions liberally throughout his work (including a brief commentary on Genesis), he rarely compared Matilda to other women.Footnote 66 There is, however, one notable exception, when Donizo describes the Empress Eupraxia’s flight from her husband, Henry IV of Germany, citing his sexual abuse against her. According to Donizo, Eupraxia fled to Matilda’s protection in 1093. “Matilda, the new Deborah,” led a small force to rescue the empress, which was a strike against Henry’s tyranny, with the same success as Jael piercing Sisera’s temple.Footnote 67 That Donizo should choose to equate Matilda with Deborah in this context—as the protector of another woman—is particularly interesting. Moreover, he conflates Matilda with both Deborah and Jael. As a new Deborah, the countess commanded troops, but as a new Jael, she herself struck directly against Henry, Donizo’s Sisera.
Bonizo (c. 1045–1095), the erstwhile bishop of Sutri and Piacenza, likewise placed Matilda within the realm of Deborah and Jael in his Liber ad amicum. Bonizo spent several years living under Matilda’s protection after Henry IV exiled him from his see in Sutri in 1082. The Liber, most likely written during his time at Matilda’s court, chronicles the long history of rivalries between popes and emperors, from Constantine the Great to the pontificate of Gregory VII. In the final conclusion to the text, Bonizo condemned the actions of Henry IV and praised his protector, Matilda. “For we believe,” he writes, “that it is into her hand that Sisera is sold, and like Jabin, he will be destroyed at the river of Kishon. Because he has ravaged God’s vine and fed on it like the wild boar, he has become dung for the ground.”Footnote 68 Bonizo’s text, like Donizo’s, thus portrays Matilda in the role of both Deborah and Jael, the latter for taking Sisera in hand and the former for destroying Jabin at the river. As a result, Matilda becomes doubly the fulfillment of Deborah’s prophecy that victory over the enemies of God would be given into the hands of a woman.
Donizo of Canossa and Bonizo of Sutri were not alone in focusing on Deborah’s role as a model of divine justice or revenge, rather than trying to extrapolate her ambiguous relationship with Barak. Paul of Bernried, writing in 1128, used the model of Deborah to defend the agency and power of good Christian female rulers, even over men, rather than working alongside them. In his vita of Gregory VII, Paul emphasizes the crucial combination of secular authority and religious feeling by identifying three elite laywomen as particularly important to Gregory’s pontificate. This was the common powerful trinity of the empress Agnes of Poitou, Beatrice of Tuscany, and Beatrice’s daughter Matilda. Paul discusses Agnes primarily in terms of her religious vow and retirement to Fruttuaria.Footnote 69 Agnes thus appears as an exemplar for abdicating her secular authority, a common laudation for the empress. The countesses of Tuscany, on the other hand, are far more forceful in their characterization: “[A]lthough they carried out the worldly duties of dukes and governed Italy, they were made like Deborah, who, when she judged Israel, scattered Jabin with all his men in the torrent Kishon, that is, they often confounded the wicked and ground them down.”Footnote 70 Paul here uses Deborah in her role as both warrior and judge, and it is noteworthy that she appears again without her male counterpart, Barak. This combination encourages the interpretation of Beatrice and Matilda as powerful Christian lords in their positions as administrators of justice.
The placement of Paul’s use of the Deborah allegory in the vita is particularly interesting. It appears as part of a short passage addressing Gregory’s alliance with the three women. As discussed above, Paul was careful to link Gregory to lay noblewomen as a way of showing proper relationships between the pope and his lay adherents. In this passage, Paul provides a blunt defense of Gregory’s interactions with the women, stating that he has brought their involvement in Gregory’s affairs to the reader’s attention in order to prove false the accusations against Gregory for having had immoral relations with his female allies. In other words, Paul offers here, through the Deborah example, a rationalization for Gregory’s reliance on female agents, which act had cast the pope’s own sexual purity in doubt. While Peter Damian focused on the alliance between the countess and the bishop of Turin through the comparison to Deborah and Barak, Paul instead highlights Deborah’s status as an autonomous ruler. She scatters Jabin’s army, and she judges Israel, from which nation Christ and the Revelation would eventually rise. In Christian interpretations of the Old Testament, these were heroic and necessary deeds to prepare for the coming of Christ in the New Testament. As the new Deborahs of the age of reform, Beatrice and Matilda had every right both to scatter the enemies of Christ and to pass judgment on their fellow Christians. In fact, Paul portrays the countesses, like Deborah, as strengthening “the state of the kingdom” through war-like actions by grinding down the wicked. Their very deeds provided the necessary justification for their alliance with Paul’s true subject, Gregory VII.
As these examples illustrate, Deborah resembled something of a shapeshifter in her different exegetical iterations during the reform era. It may have been Deborah’s very strangeness that made her the choice biblical heroine to impose upon women such as Adelaide of Turin and Matilda of Tuscany. Unlike Ambrose and later twelfth-century exegetes who tried to force Deborah into the ill-fitting mold of mother and widow, clerical reformers working closely with elite laywomen chose instead to emphasize the very traits that made Deborah so troubling to clerical and monastic authors. She ruled alone, without needing any (secular male) help. She led men into war, showing, according to some authors, more courage than her male generals and emphasizing the importance of lay support for reform goals. She prophesied and presaged the destruction of the enemy through another woman, hinting toward the growing network of elite laywomen becoming involved in the reform. And she was, in theory, uncontestable proof that a woman could act in male-dominated spheres as a champion of the true faith. This was the Deborah brought to life again through Adelaide, Beatrice, and especially Matilda.
III. Conclusion: A New Deborah or a New Cassandra?
Reformers’ reliance on exegetical arguments to mask their radical stances did not go unchallenged. The imperialist bishop Benzo of Alba (d. c. 1089) clearly recognized some of the tactics the reformist faction took in its polemical writings and recruitment of powerful lay allies, especially elite laywomen. It was his idea to try to restore Henry IV’s reputation by recruiting Adelaide of Turin, one of the great Italian lords and Henry’s mother-in-law, to the king’s side, to offset the influence of the papacy’s ally Matilda of Tuscany. Throughout his letters, Benzo tried to directly counter the reformist exegetical arguments. Like the Roman reformers, Benzo played with the idea of the past returning in his own time, but for him, it was the pagan past rearing its ugly head. In a letter to Henry IV, in which he complained about the reform faction in Rome, Benzo wrote, “Monks and women force prelates into flight, as if pursued by Hercules. Monks, I say, and what monks? Defamed with perjury, and dirty intercourse with nuns. And these are the creators of popes, bringing shame to those who are the rulers of the Church.”Footnote 71
In his multiple attempts to recruit Adelaide of Turin to the imperialist cause in 1080, Benzo deftly and blatantly refuted clerical reformers’ claims to scriptural truth and salvation history. Benzo warned the countess against the reform faction’s ideas by calling them a madness that could not understand the mysteries of scripture: “Those mysteries seek a healthy mind, not what Cassandra and the Sybil were driven by, whose breasts Pythius filled when he wished to delude heathens with obscurities.” Here, then, Benzo offers a sharp contrast to reformers’ visions of new Deborahs, replacing them instead with the mad oracles of the ancient pagan world. But he continues with a reassurance: “But when the Lord was incarnated, the holy Spirit illumined the hearts of the faithful, ejecting the possessed women and the Delian from the Church. Indeed, it opened up the secrets of divine scripture; it would reveal to the infidels what the figures of the earlier Testament hid.”Footnote 72 In other words, Adelaide should not be fooled by reformers’ promises of scriptural fulfillment; they were, in fact, regressing to an ancient, superstitious, bedeviled pagan past rather than returning to their apostolic golden age.
Benzo’s letter is more than an example of an opponent adroitly turning the weapons of the reform movement against itself. It also serves as an important recognition of the effectiveness of the exegetical figuration that reformers were placing on their own actions and goals. Reformers needed their female allies to become the new Old Testament heroines. They had introduced an era of political and socioreligious chaos that was closely reminiscent of the tribulations and violence of the Old Testament, the scriptural history shaped so prominently by female actors. Reformers’ use of figures such as Deborah reveals a core element to reformist conceptions of lay female authority: Elite laywomen were not being instructed to remember their innately inferior status as women. Rather, they were being taught that women had a place in Christian salvation history, past, present, and future—and an important one at that. The new Deborahs of the reform movement would prepare the way so that Christ’s women could one day reach the tomb.
Acknowledgments
I owe special thanks to the founding members of the University of Chicago’s Lexicon Project Working Group for their comments on early drafts of this project, especially Jonathan Lyon, Lucy Pick, Daisy Delogu, and Julie Orlemanski. I am also grateful to Church History’s reviewers and editors for their helpful feedback.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
