Like the divine circle whose center is everywhere, the Virgin Mary pervades medieval culture. But how did the majestic Theotokos of the early Middle Ages, patron of emperors and role model for nuns, evolve into the late medieval smiling Madonna and indulgent friend to sinners? Part of the answer must lie in the work of Gautier de Coinci and those like him. Gautier (ca. 1177–1236), prior of a Benedictine monastery near Soissons, took up his harp as Our Lady's troubadour at the same time his Italian contemporary, St. Francis, was establishing himself as Christ's. In his brilliantly successful collection of Miracles de Nostre Dame, Gautier did far more than translate Latin miracle stories into French. He also drew extensively on secular literary genres, interwove his artful verse narratives with songs, and inspired a lavishly illustrated manuscript tradition. This handsomely produced volume from Brepols, with its sixteen essays and six appendices, marshals an impressive crew of philologists, paleographers, art historians, musicologists, and literary critics to produce the first thoroughgoing, interdisciplinary study of Gautier's masterpiece.
Ardis Butterfield presents an overview of the manuscript tradition: of the 115 extant manuscripts, twenty-nine are illustrated, at least twelve transmit music, and seventeen preserve Gautier's full collection of eighty-nine miracle tales, together with songs and prayers. In more detailed manuscript studies, Olivier Collet examines a cycle of five longer Marian narratives linked to Gautier's miracles; Kathryn Duys studies his poetic identity, illustrated in author portraits of a composite monk-minstrel figure; and Alison Stones surveys the diffusion, copying, and ownership of the manuscripts. A second section on “Words and Music” includes essays by Pierre Kunstmann on Gautier's vocabulary and syntax, Robert Clark on his wordplay as a way of evoking “devotional ecstasy,” Frédéric Billiet on his musical techniques as a poet-singer, Claire Chamiyé Couderc on the melodies of his “Saint Léocade” cycle, and Barbara Haggh on his role in popularizing the responsory Gaude, Maria Virgo. This ninth-century chant, denouncing a “wretched Jew” who disbelieves in the Virgin Birth, would become a staple in the tradition linking Marian devotion with anti-Semitism, up to and including Chaucer's “Prioress's Tale.”
The third section on “Figures and Types” examines particular motifs. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski's essay situates one of Gautier's most famous tales in the tradition of medieval childbirth miracles. In this tale the Virgin delivers a pregnant abbess, spirits her child away, and restores her body to pristine virginity. Yasmina Foehr-Janssens looks at more of Gautier's sinners—licentious nuns, felonious knights, clerics who sell their souls to the Devil—in order to represent the Virgin's troubadour as an early example of the “bad-boy poet.” Like Mary herself, his Miracles “sing the praise of sweetness, the soothing pleasures of honey and milk and the fragrance of flowers, despite the rigorous condemnations of a rigid superego, which Gautier, maliciously, takes pleasure in demonizing” (226; translation mine). Kathy Krause follows the male gaze in its “rhetorical violation” of sinful women, who are punished by the public exposure of their bodies even when the Virgin frees them from harsher consequences. Nancy Black considers iconographic types of Mary herself in the illuminated Soissons manuscript.
Finally, a section on “Contexts” compares Gautier's Miracles with other story collections. In her essay on incarnational piety, Laurel Broughton asks why a selection of Gautier's miracles replaces Mary's traditional lily with the rose, observing rightly that roses link the Incarnation to the Passion, although the influence of secular love lyric should also be mentioned. Adrian Tudor compares some of Gautier's tales with their parallels in the earliest version of the Vie des Peres. That collection, though based on Desert Father stories, ironically takes a more sympathetic view of lay life and especially of peasants. Finally, the late Brian Levy's article on miracle stories and fabliaux is, to my mind, the most delightful in the volume. In the récit or short vernacular narrative, Levy notes, we often find a “metaphorical fork in the road”: kindred tales may “take the high pious road” to become miracle stories or sermon exempla, or else follow the low, profane path into the realm of the fabliau (334). Gautier's drunken monks, illiterate priests, tavern scenes, incestuous mothers, and bawdy wedding nights, given punch lines instead of long moralizing codas, could easily find a place in a very different narrative world. It was doubtless this generic fluidity, this nod toward the road not taken, that accounted for much of the Miracles' popularity.
As a collaboration of French, Swiss, British, and North American scholars, the present volume is meant for specialists. Five of the essays are in French and, regrettably, none of the quotations from Gautier's Old French are translated, though some dazzle with their elaborate wordplay. But an inspired popularizer like Gautier deserves himself to be popularized, so this reviewer devoutly hopes that the availability of such fine scholarship will bring these Miracles into fresh circulation in classes on medieval church history, literature, and popular culture.
