As a child, she tells us, Teresa of Avila used to read the Lives of the Saints with her brother. Together they would discuss how they might become martyrs: ‘‘We settled to go together to the country of the Moors, begging our way for the love of God, that we might be there beheaded.’’ When the improbability of this scheme dawned on them, they developed an alternative: ‘‘My brother and I set about becoming hermits and in an orchard belonging to the house we contrived, as well as we could, to build hermitages, by piling up small stones one on the other, which fell down immediately; and so it came to pass that we found no means of accomplishing our wish.’’ So Teresa had to settle for life as a nun - but she continued, so she says, to model her life on early Christian texts. In her novitiate, suffering from physical and nervous collapse, Teresa recalls, ‘‘It was a great help to my patience that I had read the story of Job in the Morals of St Gregory, which the Lord seems to have used to prepare me for this suffering’’ (Cohen 1957: 43).
In the Life of Teresa of Avila by Herself, we see the strange shape and formidable power of Late Antiquity across the west in the medieval period. Our task is to explain how a woman in sixteenth-century Spain could have taken texts written a millennium previously as a direct template for her life (Weber 1990). That the world of the Later Roman Empire should have come to mean ‘‘monasticism, the cult of the saints, the texts of the Fathers,’’ has been for some a cause of grief. For Edward Gibbon, notoriously, the sight of bare-footed friars in the Capitol at Rome was the inspiration for his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or so he later claimed (Gibbon 1907: 160; see Ando, ch. 5). The modern study of Late Antiquity has tended to react against Gibbon’s claim that it was Christian ‘‘superstition’’ that sapped imperial vigor and opened the way to the barbarian invasions. Peter Brown’s The Rise ofWestern Christendom, in particular, argues for Christianity as part of the
1 My thanks to Richard Corradini, Maximilian Diesenberger, Henrietta Leyser, and in particular to Kate Cooper, Helmut Reimitz, and Mark Vessey.
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
Solution to late Roman problems, not their cause (Brown 2003). In a further twist, some scholars have recently made the case that, as a field, Late Antiquity airbrushes out the catastrophe of collapse as seen by Gibbon (Liebeschuetz 2001a; Heather 2005; Ward-Perkins 2005). Here, I would simply point out that scholars on all sides of this debate must acknowledge (more than hitherto) that our access to Late Antiquity is hugely mediated by the medieval west, and specifically the institutional structures of the medieval church. This mediation cannot simply be bypassed: it needs to be understood if we are to move forward. A study of the cultural memory of Late Antiquity as a subject in its own right has much to offer both medievalists and late antiquarians.
A word of caution, however. No one in the period ad 200-1500 thought of themselves as living in either ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ or ‘‘the medieval west.’’ These labels are the creations of what we regard as the modern era (Delogu 2002: 13-57). To ask about the reception of Late Antiquity in the medieval west is therefore to risk posing an entirely artificial question - one anachronism compounding another. The challenge, then, is to approach the question of the uses of the past across at least a millennium of western European history without imposing a conventional periodization on segments of that past.
If we adopt contemporary periodization, we find that ‘‘modernity’’ dawns in the sixth century (Cassiodorus is the first Latin writer to use the term modernus), but does not begin in earnest until the ninth (Freund 1957; Vessey and Halporn 2004: 6). In the self-consciously revived Roman Empire of Charlemagne and his successors, we may recognize a decisive phase in the commodification of the past. The more the Carolingians sought to preserve and define ‘‘things Roman,’’ the greater the transformation they wrought, turning their ancient inheritance into a modern fetish. Scholars will continue to debate to what extent Carolingian intervention made a lasting difference to the infrastructure of the Latin west: here, more perhaps than elsewhere, ambitions and rhetoric exceeded what was possible (e. g., Sullivan 1989; Fouracre 1995; Nelson 2002). But in the history of cultural memory, the ninth century represents a clear break. In what follows, I shall consider how the Carolingians inaugurated the era of ‘‘mechanical reproduction’’ in the history of the Latin book. I shall then consider the three building blocks of Teresa of Avila’s subjectivity as a child and a young woman: the cult of the saints, the institution of monasticism, and the texts of the Fathers, in particular of Gregory the Great.
World History
