In the year 1240, after six fruitless years, King Louis IX of France and his wife Margaret were at last expecting a child. But it so happened that the newborn was a girl. The king’s courtiers, unwilling to tell the king themselves, asked the bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, to deliver the news. William’s announcement to the king was a triumph of diplomatic address: “Rejoice, my Lord, for I bring you good news. Today, the crown of France has gained a kingdom, because you have a daughter. Through her marriage, you will acquire a kingdom, whereas if you’d had a son, you’d have had to give him part of your kingdom” (p. 151). The king, we are told, was cheered by the news, and perhaps amused by the mode of its delivery.
One might wonder whether the story happened exactly in this way. The source that tells it to us is a Dominican collection of exempla – not the kind of source that inspires confidence about getting the details right. Nonetheless, the story does conform enough with other evidence about William to warrant the assumption that we are glimpsing a real feature of his personality. As Lesley Smith puts it, in this beautifully written study, William was a psychologist who put his understanding of human character to good effect. Here and elsewhere, we see shrewdness, sympathy, and a sense of humor.
Insights such as this capture Smith’s approach throughout the book. She is not so much entering the slight scholarly conversation about William (although she often cites the classic study of Noël Valois) as reconstructing his world. Her overarching strategy appears in the title: reassembling “fragments of a world,” or as she puts it in the last chapter, offering glimpses of his world rather than a biography. She is also investigating an individual at a time when people saw themselves in the first place as part of a group. At the same time, the twelfth century saw an “explosion of new forms of knowledge and expressions of creativity” that contribute to our understanding of the period as one of “confidence and ambition” (p. 3), all themes that surface in William’s biography.
Smith readily acknowledges the limitations of our evidence, but she also exploits them skillfully. Those who go in quest of a personality in the writings of a medieval scholar face a daunting task. For every Abelard, there are dozens more Peter Lombards, men whose personalities lie inscrutable behind layers of dense scholastic prose. In William’s case, we have a large amount of academic writing, but the key source for Smith is a collection of around 600 sermons. Medieval sermons are often highly impersonal and rarely offer a window into the personality behind them. By contrast, William’s sermons consist of the notes that he wrote for himself, in Latin with some sprinkling of the French vernacular, as reminders for what he would say in oral delivery. Better still, William included jokes, though they may fail to impress a modern reader.
The book has 16 chapters. Its structure is dynamic – chronological at first, yielding to thematic in the later chapters. Following an introductory chapter on sources and methods (Chapter 1, “Seeing in a Smoky Mirror”), the next four chapters lay out the major scenes of William’s youth and adulthood. Chapter 2, “Home and Family,” explores the domestic structures of his upbringing, before describing the physical, cultural, political, and religious environment of the Midi, which Smith contrasts with Paris and the North. Chapter 3, “Teachers and Teaching,” sketches the educational path that William must have followed, from grammar schools in the south, to his study of the liberal arts, and at last to theology, now certainly at Paris. Chapter 4, “Paris,” paints a colorful portrait of the Capetian capital, including its physical topography, its people and their occupations and trades, its animals, and William’s attitudes to city life. Chapter 5, “Bishop,” is perhaps the most heavily biographical chapter. Here, Smith follows William through the challenges and controversies of his episcopal reign, in particular the strike of the university masters in 1229 and the arrival of the newly formed mendicant orders.
The remaining chapters move across a kaleidoscope of themes drawn mostly from William’s sermons: “Language,” “Knowing,” “Jews,” “Women,” “The Weak,” “Poverty,” “The Landed and the Monied,” “Animals,” “Food and Drink,” and “Death and Beyond.” The book concludes with a chapter (“Face to Face”) that returns to the problems raised by a study such as this, in particular recovering an individual who left no “personal writing.” Smith admits that she has come to like William, though she also acknowledges the distance between his world and ours, and thus the impossibility of ever coming to the kind of understanding that we might expect in the biography of a modern person. In the 1240s, Smith points out, William had dissuaded Louis from going on crusade. But decades earlier, he fully endorsed stamping out the Albigensian heresy. Yet William seems to have had a sympathetic temperament. Even as a bishop, he lived simply. His pragmatic character helped him to appreciate the plight of those on the margins of society, such as prostitutes; rather than simply condemn their behavior, he created a home for reformed prostitutes. Likewise, he saw Jews not simply as wicked but as “children” who needed help. Yet, contradicting this stance, he also played a role in the burning of Jewish books. “None of us is consistent,” Smith writes.
Smith admits that her treatment of William is highly personal, that “a different biographer would certainly have produced a different portrait” (p. 205). But few biographers have the scholarly and literary gifts to draw such a human portrait of a figure who seems at once so approachable, and at times even likable, yet so distant. The book should enter the larger conversation about the nature of the twelfth-century renaissance, but it is also accessible to American undergraduates and might be fruitfully paired with John Baldwin’s Paris, 1200.
