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44 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

THE MONK WHO CRUCIFIED

HIMSELF 1

KAT H RY N A . SM I T H

E ven those familiar with the range and rhetoric of Christian religious
imagery will find disconcerting the schematic drawing of a hapless
monk, bleeding feet and one bleeding hand nailed to a wooden step and beam;
the other hand limply holding the hammer with which he accomplished
this act; head inclined in a pathetic echo of Jesus’ in countless later medieval
images of the Crucifixion (Plate 3, bottom). The story that this drawing
illustrates—possibly the only depiction in the medieval visual corpus of
the act of auto-crucifixion—is one component of a fragmentary miscellany
of religious, devotional, and didactic works written almost entirely in
Provençal, now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 25415

1
I first encountered the drawings of the monk who crucified himself in 1993, shortly after I met
Pam Sheingorn. I have benefited immeasurably over the years from Pam’s intellectual and
personal generosity as well as from conversations with her about the images that are the subject
of this paper, and it is a supreme pleasure to contribute this essay in her honor. My great thanks
go to Wendy Pfeffer of the University of Louisville for the expert translation of the Provençal
exemplum published here. Earlier versions of this research were presented at the conference
Border Zones: Art History in the Age of Visual Culture, New York University (6 October 2006);
the Humanities Centre of the University of Toronto (27 April 2007); Liminal Spaces: A
Symposium in Honor of Pamela Sheingorn, held at Princeton University’s Index of Christian Art
(30 October 2009); and the Medieval Forum of the Department of English, New York University
(31 March 2011). For their kind invitations to speak and astute comments and questions, I am
grateful the following colleagues, friends, and former students: Pepe Karmel, Lucy Freeman
Sandler, Barry Flood, Malcolm St Clair, Christine Kralik, Robert Gibbs, Adam Cohen, Jill
Caskey, Alexander Nagel, Linda Safran, Sarah Guérin, Laura Weigert, Cynthia Hahn, Angela
Bennett Segler, Marlene Villalobos-Hennessy, Domenic Leo, Christopher Swift, Suzanne Yeager,
Jonathan Alexander, Nancy Regalado, Elizabeth Monti, and Shannon Wearing. For useful
bibliography, I thank Jeffrey Hamburger, C. Matthew Phillips, and Richard Marks. Elina
Gertsman and Jill Stevenson deserve special thanks for their felicitous organization of the
symposium Liminal Spaces, for their editorial expertise, and for shepherding this volume to
publication.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 45

FIG 2.1
THE
ILLUSTRATED
EXEMPLUM OF
THE MONK
WHO
CRUCIFIED
HIMSELF. 
In a Provençal
religious
miscellany made
in or near Béziers
c. 1373. Paris,
Bibliothèque
nationale de
France MS fr.
25415, fol. 41v. 

(Fig. 2.1).2 Written in two columns by what appears to be a single scribe and
illustrated by one artist, the texts in the volume include, in addition to the
tale of the monk (on fols 41r–42r), a prose version of the Siege of Jerusalem

2
Paul Meyer, ‘Notice du Manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds fr. 25415, contenant divers
ouvrages en Provençal’, Bulletin de la Société des anciens textes français (1875), 50–82 (hereafter
Meyer, ‘Notice’); and see also Léopold Delisle, Inventaire général et méthodique des Manuscrits
Français de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 2 vols (Paris, 1876–8), 1:113; and Henri Omont, Catalogue
général des Manuscrits Français. Anciens Petits Fonds Français, 3 vols (Paris, 1897–1902), 2:585.
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46 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

(fols 1r–23v); the Complaint of Our Lady in octosyllabic couplets (fols

24r–32v); the Seven Joys of the Virgin, also in verse (fols 32v–35v); the
Enfant Sage, a dialogue on catechetical, doctrinal, moral, and practical topics
between the emperor Hadrian and a three-year-old wise child, a work related
to the tradition of the Joca Monachorum, or Monks’ Riddles (fols 35v–41r);
a poem on the Ave Maria (fol. 42r); and a portion of the Evangile de
l’Enfance, an apocryphal Infancy text based on the Latin Gospel of Pseudo-
Matthew (fols 44r–50r). Fol. 43 is an added leaf containing the alphabet, the
letters introduced by a cross (+) prompting to the reader to cross him-
/herself and to say a short prayer before reciting the ABC.3
The manuscript provides a kernel of information concerning the
circumstances of its production. It can be dated to shortly before 1373 and
localized to the town of Béziers or its environs, in Languedoc, because an
inscription on fol. 42v records an earthquake in the region in March of that
year.4 As to the volume’s function and audience: based on the size of its folios,
which measure about 10 ¼” X 7”, and the nature of its contents, it could be
a compilation or sourcebook for monastic, clerical, or mendicant use,
whether small-group instruction or individual study.
The miscellany was first described and its textual contents analyzed in
1875 by the great philologist, Paul Meyer, who deemed the manuscript of
considerable interest for the history of French language and literature.
Several of the texts in BnF fr. 25415 have been studied by scholars of
literature, but art historians have ignored the manuscript’s plentiful
illustrations, no doubt on account of their unpolished execution.5 The
pictures accompanying the Evangile de l’Enfance are painted in simple

3
Meyer, ‘Notice’, p. 50. For the cross and alphabet in late medieval manuscripts (the ‘Christ-cross
row’), see Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT and London, 2001; reprinted
2002), pp. 246–61.
4
‘L’an mill .ccc.lxxiij., a.ij. de mars, un dimecres a nueg, fonc. la terratremoll a Bezes et en totz
autres locz de Bezes:’ (fol. 42v); transcribed in Meyer, ‘Notice’, p. 51.
5
Significant studies or citations of the texts in BnF fr. 25415 include the following: for the Siege of
Jerusalem, Walther Suchier, ‘Uber der Altfranzösische Gedicht von der Zerstörung Jerusalems (La
Venjance nostre seigneur)’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 25, no. 112 (1901), 94–109; A.
Restori, A. Martel and A. Roque-Ferrier, Histoire de la literature provençal depuis les temps les plus
reculés jusqu’a nos jours (Montpellier, 1894), p. 43; and Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and
Religious History of the Jews, 2nd edn (New York, 1957), pp. 357–8. For the Evangile de l’Enfance,
see Edmund Suchier, ‘Uber Provenzalische Bearbeitungen der Kindheit Jesu’, Zeitschrift für
romanische philologie 8 (1884), 522–69; Giorgio Rossi, L’Infanzia di Gesù. Poemetto provenzale del
Secolo XIV (Bologna, 1899), p. 50; Paul Meyer, ‘L’Evangile de l’Enfance en provençal’, Romania 35
(1906), 337–64; Giovanni Caravaggi, Vangeli provenzali dell’infanzia (Modena, 1963); idem,
‘Remarques sur la tradition des Evangiles de l’Enfance en provençal et sur la version inedite du MS
de Paris, BN fr. 25415’, Melanges de linguistique romane et de philologie médiévale offerts à Maurice
Delbouille, ed. Jean Renson, 2 vols (Gembloux, France, 1964), 2:71–90; and Peter T. Rickerts, ‘An
Evangelium Infantiae in Medieval Occitan (MS Paris, BnF nouv. acq. fr. 10453)’, Romance
Philology 58, no. 1 (2004), 1–49. For the Seven Joys of the Virgin in BnF fr. 25415 see Paul Meyer,
Daurel et Beton: Chanson de este provençale (Paris, 1880), p. xci, n.1. For the Enfant Sage, see
Amédée Pagès, ‘La Version Catalane de L’Enfant Sage’, Etudes romanes dédiées à Gaston Paris
(Paris, 1891), pp. 181–94, at 181; L’Enfant Sage. Das Gespräch des Kaisers Hadrian mit den klugen
Kinde Epitus, ed. Walter Suchier (Dresden and Halle, Germany, 1910); and Das Mittellateinische
Gespräche ‘Adrian et Epictitus’ nebst verwandten Texten (Joca Monachorum), ed. Walter Suchier
(Tübingen, Germany, 1955).
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 47

blocks of color, including green, red, mustard, brown, and occasionally

mauve. The images in the rest of the manuscript, including the illustrations
for the story of the monk who crucified himself, are line drawings in brown
ink highlighted occasionally with flecks or strokes of red (see Plate 3). Partly
on account of this difference in painting technique, Meyer suggested that
the gathering containing the Infancy text was not part of the original
manuscript,6 although if this quire was an addition, it probably was
produced nearly contemporarily with the rest of the volume, and by the
same scribe and artist. The figures and most of the other elements in the
drawings of the monk are rudimentary in execution, yet the beam to which
the monk affixes himself clearly was rendered with considerable care, the
grain of and knots in the wood depicted with an almost obsessive attention
to detail (Plate 3, bottom).
The Provençal drawings are anything but crude, unsophisticated
responses to the text they accompany, however. Through their purposeful
references to traditional, symbolically laden depictions of the Crucifixion
and other widely circulating devotional formulae, as well as their pointed
manipulation of disparate stylistic modes, the images register contemporary
concerns about the consequences of human despair, as well as the physical,
literal, and private—as opposed to the imaginative, metaphorical, and
communal—in respect to the religious ideal of the imitation of Christ. As
this study argues, the pictures of the monk who crucified himself are
eloquent meditations on the uses, meanings, and potential perils of
literalism, whether this literalism governed the interpretation of Scripture,
the empathetic imitation of Jesus’ Passion, or the making of images.

TEXT, IMAGE, AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXTS

The rubric introducing the story of the monk who crucified himself
describes this portion of the miscellany as a ‘book of the exempla’—that is,
a collection of moral tales in the plural—but the tale of the monk is the only
exemplum that it contains (for a transcription of the relevant portions of the
text and an English translation, see the Appendix). The exemplum is prefaced
by an account of the Creation and Fall of Man and the Passion, Death, and
Resurrection of Jesus. The text states that because of the coming of Jesus and
his death on the Cross, ‘Today the devil has no power over man more than
man wants to give him.’ The monk is an example of someone who did give
the devil this power.
The exemplum describes the monk as ‘a man of good life and a good
cleric’ who ‘held in great reverence and in great compassion the death of
Jesus Christ’. One evening, the monk was saying vespers alone in his cell.
When he came to Psalm 115:12, ‘Quid retribuam Domino?,’ ‘What shall I

6
Meyer, ‘Notice’, pp. 50–1.
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48 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

render to the Lord, for all the things that he hath rendered to me?’7—or as
the exemplum loosely translates this scriptural passage, ‘What could repay
our Lord who has done so much for us?’—the devil, ‘who is clever and full
of deceit, put it in the monk’s heart that he could not give thanks to our Lord
for His death’ unless he ‘himself put himself on the cross’ (emphasis added).
In the top picture, the monk is shown seated, a psalter or breviary open
before him on a lectern, the words ‘Quid retribuam domino’ inscribed on
its pages (Plate 3, top). The devil’s wings and shaggy head are visible at the
monk’s shoulder, horns and muzzle picked out in red.
As the text relates, the monk then ‘rose to his feet, saw a hammer and
two big nails, and approached a beam’. The monk is shown a second time in
the composition, standing and reaching for the instruments of his
crucifixion (Plate 3, top). The convenient availability of hammer and two
nails, rather than the three nails with which Jesus usually was held to have
been crucified by this point in the medieval period, was surely the work of
the devil, who clearly understood the principal logistical problem of auto-
crucifixion: the difficulty of nailing the second hand to the wood without
assistance. The fact that the action in the image moves from right to left
rather than the usual left to right of Gothic pictorial narrative would have
enhanced the viewer’s sense that the monk’s deed should be read in a
negative light.
No sooner had the monk affixed his feet and hand to his makeshift cross
than he died, ‘and the devil’, the tale relates, did ‘take his soul’. In the bottom
image, the artist has deftly portrayed the most liminal state of all—the
moment of death. The monk hangs from the beam at center. Although his
eyes are closed, the hammer of his attempted auto-crucifixion has not yet
slipped from his grasp. The devil, at right, gazes out at the viewer and carries
off the monk’s child-sized, nude, tonsured soul. The moral of the exemplum
is that man must not ‘empower the devil or abandon himself to sin’. Rather,
as soon as one has sinned, one should ‘confess with a penitent heart and do
penance which will be assigned by the confessor’. In addition, one should
‘persevere for the good’ and keep devoutly the ‘days of fast and feasting’ of
the Christian year.
The exemplum text offers a clue to understanding the nature of the
devout monk’s error. The text characterizes the monk as holding ‘in great
reverence and in great compassion the death of Jesus Christ’ (emphasis
added). By this point in the medieval period, the term ‘compassion’ denoted
an intense identification with, devotion to, and even an imaginative
participation in the principal aspects and events of Jesus’ humanity,
especially his Passion, and by extension, a compassionate identification with
the situation of one’s fellow man. Closely connected to and overlapping with
compassion was the ‘imitation of Christ’, which by the fourteenth century

7
All biblical translations taken from The Holy Bible (Douay Rheims Version), trans. from the
Latin Vulgate (Douay 1607; Rheims 1582) (Rockford, IL, 2000).
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 49

was focused not only on conforming to or adopting Jesus’ patience and

humility, but also on a personalized imitation of his physical, bodily
sufferings. Compassion was ‘essentially an inner response [and] . . . imitation
was an outer one’.8 The mutual goal of these interrelated practices and their
shared ideals was assimilation with Jesus, or, as Richard Kieckefer has put
it, a ‘clos[ing] [of] the distance between oneself ’ and one’s savior by
‘partak[ing] of his sufferings’.9
On one level, the exemplum of the monk who crucified himself can be
related to the idea encountered frequently in monastic writings that the
rigors of an enclosed life constituted a metaphorical crucifixion. For
example, in the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach’s (fl. c. 1180–1240)
didactic compilation for novices, Dialogus miraculorum, an extended
allegory describes the good monk as ‘crucified inwardly’ by compassion and
‘outwardly’ by imitation:
The crucifixion of monks is twofold: that of the interior man
through compassion for others, and of the exterior man through
the mortification of his own flesh. The word ‘cross’ is derived from
‘torture’. The cross of the monk is the rigour of the life in the order,
with respect to vigils and prayers, fasting and castigation, silence
and manual labor, the continence of the flesh, and the roughness
of his clothing and bed. But those who are Christ’s, who can say
with the apostle: ‘With Christ I am nailed to the cross’ (Galatians
2: 19), have crucified their flesh, that is, affixed it to the cross,
fighting the vices in their deeds and the lust in their desires . . .
The three nails by which the body of the monk ought to be affixed
to the cross are the three virtues through which, according to
Jerome, martyrs are made: obedience, patience and humility . . .10

8
Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu
(Chicago, IL and London, 1984), p. 105. On compassion, imitation, and other concepts, see also
Richard Kieckhefer, ‘Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion’, in Christian Spirituality: High
Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt (New York, 1987), pp. 75–108; Giles Constable, ‘The
Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought
(Cambridge, England and New York, 1995), pp. 145–248; and R. N. Swanson, ‘Passion and
Practice: The Social and Ecclesiastical Implications of Passion Devotion in the Late Middle Ages’,
in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. A. A. MacDonald, H. N. B.
Ridderbos, and R. M. Schlusemann, Mediaevalia Groningana 21 (Groningen, The Netherlands,
1998), pp. 1–29.
9
Kieckhefer, Unquite Souls, p. 105.
10
‘Duplex est religiosorum crucifixio, hominis interioris per alienam compassionem, et hominis
exterioris per propriam carnis mortificationem. Crux dicitur a cruciatu. Crux monachorum rigor
ordinis est, tum propter vigilias et orationes, tum propter ieiunia et castigationes, tum propter
silentium et opera manuum, tum propter carnis continentiam et vestimentorum stratique
duritiam. Qui autem sunt Christi, qui cum Apostolo dicere possunt: ‘‘Christo confixi sumus
cruci’’; carnem suam crucifixerunt, id est cruci affixerunt, cum vitiis operum, et concupiscentiis
desideriorum pugnantes . . . Tres clavi quibus corpus monachi cruci debet esse affixum, tres sunt
virtutes, per quas teste Hieronimo martyres efficiuntur, scilicet obedientia, patientia, humilitas’;
Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols (Cologne, Germany,
1851), 2:96–7. This transcription and translation taken from Almuth Seebohm, ‘The Crucified
Monk’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996), 61–102, at pp. 69–70; and see
also Constable, ‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, p. 212.
By the late Middle Ages, this monastic allegory had been reformulated for inclusion in works
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50 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

Caesarius built his allegory around one of three passages found in Paul’s
Letter to the Galatians that were fundamental to late medieval imitatio
Christi: ‘With Christ I am nailed to the Cross’ (Galatians 2: 19), ‘They that
are Christ’s have crucified their flesh’ (Galatians 5: 24), and ‘I bear the marks
of the Lord Jesus in my body’ (Galatians 6: 17).11 Paul was speaking
figuratively—about the wounds he endured in the course of his own
persecutions, about the necessity of suffering with Christ in order to ‘be also
glorified with him’ (Romans 8: 17), and about the death of his old self, his
abandonment of his original identity and his assumption of a new one as a
follower of Jesus. Indeed, as Giles Constable noted in his magisterial study,
throughout the early Middle Ages the imitation of Christ operated firmly at
the level of metaphor: individuals connected their own particular
experiences, struggles, and sufferings to those of Jesus by analogy.12
During the twelfth century, however, ‘the distinction between allegory
and reality’ in the compassionate imitation of Christ ‘became less clear’, and
as Constable, Kieckhefer, Caroline Walker Bynum, and other scholars have
richly demonstrated, imitatio Christi became increasingly literal in its
mechanisms and goals.13 As Constable put it, ‘If Christ was a real man who
suffered real wounds, and if the object of Christians was to imitate Him
literally’, one could even ‘bear his precise wounds’ and ‘be crucified as He
was’.14 It is in the context of this trend toward an ever more direct and
somatically focused imitation of the body and Passion of Christ that one may
view the forms of self-imposed suffering practiced by medieval religious and
some lay individuals and groups, including more common practices such as
flagellation, as well as others that resonate more suggestively with the actions
of the monk who crucified himself.15 For example, daily at the canonical
hours, the Belgian Beguine Elizabeth of Spaalbeek (fl. c. 1275) performed on
and through her body the events of the Passion, buffeting and scourging

intended for lay audiences. The second, 1355 redaction of the French Cistercian Guillaume de
Deguileville’s popular allegorical work, Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, translated into Middle
English in the early fifteenth century, details the encounter between the Pilgrim and Mortification
of the Body, who informs the Pilgrim that he (Mortification of the Body) nailed his straying body
to a cross and that it was ‘subdued’ by Spirit with the aid Lady Penance. For this, see John Lydgate,
The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, intro. by Katharine B. Locock, Early English
Text Society 77, 83, 92 (London, 1899–1904), vol. 77, part 1, pp. 326–8, ll. 11956–12056. Michael
Camille, in ‘The Illustrated Manuscripts of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinages, 1330–1426’
(PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1985), lists only one illustration of this scene, an
illuminated woodcut in the printer/publisher Antoine Vérard’s 1511 edition of the text (Camille’s
fig. 159).
For a fifteenth-century Middle English poem in which penance is figured as an allegorical
auto-crucifixion, see R. H. Bowers, ed., Three Middle English Religious Poems, University of
Florida Monographs, no. 12 (Gainesville, FL, 1963), pp. 32–3. My thanks to Marlene Villalobos-
Hennessy for this reference.
11
Constable, ‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, pp. 194–5.
12
Ibid., passim.
13
Ibid., p. 213.
14
Ibid.
15
For a wide-ranging overview of these religious phenomena and their implications, see Jeffrey F.
Hamburger, ‘Overkill, or History that Hurts’, Common Knowledge 13, no. 2–3 (2007), 404–28.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 51

herself and then extending her arms in the form of a cross and holding them
there for hours while she prayed.16 The regime of the Italian saint Robert of
Salentino (d. 1341) entailed reciting the Pater Noster while suspended from
a cross-shaped tree that he had cut down and installed in his cell, while the
Prussian mystic Dorothy of Montau (1347–94) extended the time that she
could maintain the pose of Christ Crucified by standing against a wall and
either holding onto nails or inserting her fingers into holes in the wall.17
Well-established, too, by the time the Provençal miscellany was made was
the phenomenon of stigmatization—the appearance on or in the body of
another, whether ‘visibly or invisibly, some or all of the wounds’ of Jesus.18
The most revered stigmatic was Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), the alter Christus,
the authenticity of whose wounds was promulgated through texts and images
like the well-known panel now in the Louvre assigned to Giotto or his shop.19
It is worth noting that the monk of the Provençal miscellany has a sparse
beard, a detail that associates him visually with Francis (see Plate 3, top and
bottom).20 Not all stigmata were held to be of supernatural origin as were
Francis’s, and Francis’s wounds had their doubters.21 Yet even the self-inflicted
marks of some holy men and women, such as the Cistercian nun Beatrice of
Ornacieux (d. 1309), who drove a nail into her own hand, were regarded by
many as miraculous, and as signs of an authentic imitatio Christi.22
In view of these traditions and developments in medieval spirituality,
what was the error of the monk who crucified himself? It appears to lie, in
part, in the nature of his understanding, or misunderstanding, of imitatio
Christi. No matter how literal it might be, the imitation of Christ still had to
operate at some level as analogy. Certainly, monastics and mystics like

16
For Elisabeth of Spaalbeek, see Walter Simons and Joanna E. Ziegler, ‘Phenomenal Religion in
the Thirteenth Century and Its Image: Elisabeth of Spaalbeck and the Passion Cult’, in Women
and the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford, 1990), pp. 117–27; and more recently
Carolyn Muessig, ‘Performance of the Passion: The Enactment of Devotion in the Later Middle
Ages’, in Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. Elina Gertsman
(Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT, 2008), pp. 129–42, with additional bibliography.
17
For Robert of Salentino, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA, 1987), p. 256. For Dorothy of Montau, see
Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, p. 117.
18
Constable, ‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, p. 215.
19
For the stigmatization of Francis, see Arnold Davidson, ‘Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or,
How St. Francis Received the Stigmata’, in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones
and Peter Galison (New York and London, 1998), pp. 101–24; and Jacques Dalarun, Michael F.
Cusato, and Carla Salvati, The Stigmata of Francis of Assisi: New Studies, New Perspectives (St
Bonaventure, NY, 2006). For the Louvre Stigmatization panel, see Julian Gardner, ‘The Louvre
Stigmatization and the Problem of the Narrative Altarpiece’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 45
(1982), 217–47.
20
As Thomas of Celano described Francis in his Vita Prima (c. 1228–9), ‘His teeth were white,
well set and even; his lips were small and thin; his beard was black and sparse; his neck was
slender, his shoulders straight . . .’; from The Life of Saint Francis by Thomas of Celano I, 29, ‘The
love that he had toward all creatures for the sake of the Creator and a description of both aspects
of his person’, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regins J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne
Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York, 1999), 1:253.
21
For suspicions concerning the fraudulence of stigmata, see Constable, ‘The Ideal of the
Imitation of Christ’, pp. 218–19.
22
For Beatrice of Ornacieux, see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 212.
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52 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

Robert of Salentino and Dorothy of Montau might imitate Jesus’ sufferings

in a highly literal way and even pray for death—which they did—but they
could not literally copy that death.23 Moreover, as monastic and clerical
authors such as Caesarius of Heisterbach maintained, imitatio Christi
entailed not only an imitation of Jesus’ sufferings but also a conformity with
his virtues, and therefore correctness of intention was essential to the
spiritual efficacy of its practice. In the Provençal exemplum, the devil
convinces the monk that devotion to Jesus’ sacrificial death on the Cross
requires not a humble ‘render[ing] to the Lord’, in the words of Psalm 115,
but a one-for-one ‘repay[ment]’ of Christ’s death, as the text of the exemplum
puts it; and that the perfect imitation of Christ entails a literal aping or
replication of the Crucifixion. A key facet of the devil’s victory, then, is the
perversion of the ideal of imitatio Christi.
That the monk’s error stemmed in part from an excess of literalism is
supported by further analysis of text, image, and religious context. The monk
is described as a ‘man of good life and a good cleric’, yet the devil has banished
from the monk’s memory the Eucharistic allegory at the heart of Psalm 115,
an allegory that was well-established in Christian liturgy and interpretation.
From the twelfth century, the celebrant’s recitation of Psalm 115 was an
important element of the fore-Mass or preparatory rites, the opening section
of the Mass, and it was the Eucharist itself that allowed Christians to imitate
Christ through the incorporation of his flesh and blood.24
Likewise, the monk seemingly has forgotten the long exegetical tradition
of this psalm, which for Augustine represented ‘the voice of the martyr’,
those adherents of orthodoxy who held to their faith even in the face of
death.25 Martyrdom was another form of imitatio Christi, although as R. N.
Swanson wryly noted, there was less opportunity to experience it in the later
fourteenth century than in earlier periods.26 The illustration for Psalm 115
in the ninth-century Utrecht Psalter emphasizes these lines of interpretation
(Fig. 2.2). Here the repentant psalmist answers the question posed at Psalm
115: 12, ‘Quid retribuam domino?’, by ‘tak[ing] the chalice of salvation’ of
verse 13 and filling it with the blood from Jesus’ side. As he does so, a spear-
bearer points his weapon not at Jesus’ side but at the psalmist’s. While the
psalmist offers the Lord ‘the sacrifice of praise’ (Psalm 115: 17) or expiatory
prayer, the martyrs —the ‘saints’ of verse 15, ‘precious in the sight of the
Lord’ and Christ’s perfect imitators—die by the swords of their persecutors.27

23
Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 256; Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, esp. pp. 116–17.
24
Josef A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missarum
sollemnia), 2 vols (New York, 1959), 2:273. For the Eucharist as an imitation of Christ, see Bynum,
Holy Feast, Holy Fast, pp. 256–7.
25
Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 115, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 40, ed. D. E.
Dekkers and J. Fraipont (Turnhout, Belgium, 1956); cited in Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in
the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge, England and New York,
2001), p. 249.
26
Swanson, ‘Passion and Practice’, p. 15.
27
For analysis of the image, see Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era, pp. 247–53.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 53

By contrast, the monk in the exemplum reads Psalm 115: 12 ‘by the book’, FIG 2.2
or according to the ‘letter’ rather than the ‘spirit’, to put it in Pauline terms.28 ILLUSTRATION
Through the devices of the devil, he reads the words in the volume on his FOR PSALM 115.
lectern not through the lens of Eucharistic allegory or Christological Utrecht Psalter.
metaphor, but instead as a literal directive to self-annihilation by auto- Made at the
crucifixion. monastery of
Indeed, a key aspect of the devil’s victory is his taking of a Christian soul Hautvillers, near
through suicide. On this point, the monk’s story resonates with that of Reims, ninth
Christianity’s most infamous suicide, Judas. For later medieval theologians century. Utrecht,
and homilists, Judas exemplified the sin of Despair. As had Judas, the University
despairing sinner killed himself out of weakness of faith, and in the belief Library, MS 32,
that his sins put him beyond redemption. Because this sinner doubted the fol. 67r (detail). 
boundless nature of God’s mercy and the Church’s ‘powers of intercession’,
his actions, like Judas’s, were regarded as the work of the devil and thus were
considered the antithesis of ‘the joyful death of the martyr’ and of Hope.29
In addition, because Judas’s attempts to repent and return the thirty pieces
of silver were rebuffed by the Jewish priests (Matthew 27: 3–6), many

28
‘Who also hath made us fit ministers of the new testament, not in the letter, but in the spirit.
For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth’ (2 Corinthians 3: 6).
29
For suicide in the Middle Ages and for Judas as a type of Despair, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Le
Suicide au Moyen Age’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 31 (1976), 3–28; Alexander
Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998); and particularly vol. 2: The Curse on
Self-Murder, Chapter 10: ‘Judas’, pp. 323–68, and Chapter 11: ‘The Sin of Despair’, 369–95;
Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
(Baltimore, MD, 1999), here quoting p. 30; and the succinct discussion in Jody Enders, Death By
Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago, IL and London, 2002), Chapter 13: ‘The
Suicide of Despair’, pp. 169–81.
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54 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

homilists used Judas’s suicide to illustrate the spiritual perils of a faulty or

an incomplete penance.30
Consequently, it is worth noting that beginning in the twelfth century,
Judas was sometimes portrayed as having hanged himself not from a tree
but from a wooden gallows or beam—the vehicle of the hapless monk’s self-
annihilation (see Plate 3, bottom).31 A well-known depiction of Judas’s death
that resonates with the image of the monk who crucified himself occurs in
the early fourteenth-century Passion cycle by Pietro Lorenzetti and his
workshop in the south transept of the lower church at Assisi, where the
Betrayer is portrayed as having hanged himself from a wooden beam set in
an arched passageway.32 As Janet Robson observes, Pietro may have had
access to drawings based on Giotto’s striking depiction of Desperatio in the
Scrovegni Chapel (c. 1305), where the (female) figure of Despair has hanged
herself from a beam within an architectural niche.33 The manner in which
the monk’s body appears to dangle from the beam by his left arm and hand
as if strung up by a rope compares suggestively with the portrayal of Judas’s
suicide on one of the leaves of the Hungarian Anjou Legendary, illuminated
c. 1325–35, possibly in Bologna (compare Plate 3, bottom, and Fig. 2.3).34
On some Gothic ivories, although the traditional tree serves as his gallows,
Judas grasps the rope of his self-murder with a raised left hand, a detail that
may confirm both his lack of faith and his authorship of his own damnation
and that is echoed in the image of the hapless monk.35 Intriguing in
connection with these visual parallels is a sermon preached by Pope John
XXII in the 1320s in which the pontiff cautioned his audience that they
ought not interpret St Paul’s desire to ‘depart and be with Christ’
(Philippians 1: 23) as a directive to commit suicide according to the
example of Judas and others.36 If the monk of the Provençal miscellany
sought assimilation with his savior through the ‘imitation of Christ’, he
achieved, instead, an ‘imitation of Judas’.
The medieval tradition preserves another, related tale of misguided auto-
crucifixion in a thirteenth-century collection of sermons by the prolific

30
Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, 2:358–68; and see also Janet Robson, ‘Judas and the
Franciscans: Perfidy Pictured in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Passion Cycle at Assisi’, The Art Bulletin 86,
no. 1 (2005), 31–57, here citing p. 32.
31
Norbert Schnitzler, ‘Judas’ Death: Some Remarks Concerning the Iconography of Suicide’,
Medieval History Journal 3, no. 1 (2000), 103–18, with additional bibliography; Robson, ‘Judas
and the Franciscans’, pp. 37–9.
32
For a recent discussion of the Assisi Passion cycle and earlier bibliography, see Robson, ‘Judas
and the Franciscans’, Fig. 1 and pp. 37–9.
33
Ibid., p. 38, Fig. 10.
34
New York, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum MS M.360.8, upper left compartment. For
the manuscript and bibliography, see the Morgan Library’s CORSAIR website, at
http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/msdescr/BBM0360.htm.
35
See for instance the late thirteenth-century diptych with scenes of the Passion, Death,
Resurrection, and post-Resurrection appearances of Christ in the Saint Louis Art Museum (183:
1928) and the diptych of c. 1375–1400 with Infancy, Passion, and post-Passion scenes in the
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, both reproduced in Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic
Age, ed. Peter Barnet (Princeton, NJ, 1997), p. 135, no. 12 and pp. 177–9, no. 33.
36
Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, 1:366.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 55

FIG 2.3
JUDAS
HANGED.
Detail of a leaf
from the
Hungarian Anjou
Legendary.
Bologna (?),
c. 1325–1335.
New York,
The Pierpont
Morgan Library,
MS M.360.8,
upper left
compartment.

author, theologian, and bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), and it is
fruitful to compare this version of the exemplum with the one in the
Provençal manuscript.37 In an episode purported to have occurred in 1229
at Huy in the diocese of Liège, an intensely devout but ignorant layman
crucified himself on a hill on Good Friday at the urging of an evil spirit,
which appeared to him in angelic form, and which convinced the man that

37
Jacques de Vitry, Exemplum 44, ‘De homine illo qui seipsum cruci affixit’, in Die Exempla aus
den Sermones feriales et communes des Jakob von Vitry, ed. Joseph Greven, Sammlung
mittellateinischer Texte 9 (Heidelberg, Germany, 1914), pp. 31–2; and see the brief discussion in
Constable, ‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, p. 216.
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56 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

‘he ought to suffer for Christ those things that Christ suffered for him’—
sentiments that, like the devil’s exhortation of the monk in the Provençal
exemplum, constitute a distortion of Psalm 115: 12. The layman affixed
himself to the cross with four nails, a detail that recalls depictions of the
Crucifixion common through the early thirteenth century (and beyond; see
Fig. 2.9) in which each of Jesus’ feet is nailed to the Cross with a separate
nail, side by side, rather than one foot over the other with a single nail as in
the three-nail Crucifixions that became standard in the late Middle Ages.38
Although ignorant, the layman clearly anticipated the logistical problems
associated with auto-crucifixion: as Jacques de Vitry’s tale explains, the
layman perforated his hands in advance in order to be able to attach his right
hand after nailing his feet and affixing his left hand to the cross.39 Unlike the
exemplum in the Provençal miscellany, however, Jacques de Vitry’s tale has
a happy ending of sorts. At the point of death, the crucified layman was
found by some shepherds and taken home. Within a few days his wounds
were virtually undetectable, a plot element that may signify the inauthentic
nature of his stigmata and his imitation of Christ. That the monk in the
Provençal exemplum dies immediately after he nails himself to the beam,
rather than lingering for hours in agony as Jesus did, is a detail perhaps
intended to convey the twofold nature of his spiritual error: his intended
self-annihilation and the utter failure of his attempted imitatio Christi. The
monk’s soul is taken by the devil before he can share Jesus’ sufferings in any
meaningful way.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE IMAGE

Thus far, this study has analyzed the pictures of the monk who crucified
himself principally in relation to religious texts and practices. Yet the images
repay further examination in relation to the pictorial tradition. Indeed,
medieval images never exist in a literal, one-to-one relationship with the texts
with which they are allied, but they communicate, instead, in subtle and
complex ways through their own conventions. Significantly, the text of the
Provençal exemplum does not state explicitly the nature of the monk’s spiritual
error: the reader is informed only that the monk ‘gave the devil power over
himself ’. Without benefit of further explication and glossing, the reader might
fail to understand why the monk’s attempted imitatio Christi constitutes such

38
For developments in the depiction of the Crucifixion, see Paul Thoby, Le Crucifix (Nantes,
France, 1959); and Manuela Beer, Triumphkreuze des Mittelalters (Regensburg, Germany, 2005).
Regarding the crucifix and its viewers in the high medieval period, see Sara Lipton, ‘The Sweet
Lean of His Head: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages’, Speculum 80,
no. 4 (2005), 1172–208.
39
‘Et cum crucem sibi aptasset, tenens malleum in manu duos pedes cum clauis cruci affixit; et
duabus manibus sibi perforatis manu dextera sinistram manum affixit cruci, et postmodum cum
digitis manus nondum affixe clauum tenens ipsum in manum eandem foramine preparato
introduxit’; Jacques de Vitry, Exemplum 44, in Die Exempla aus den Sermones feriales et
communes des Jakob von Vitry, ed. Greven, p. 31, ll. 13–18.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 57

a grave sin. The medieval sermon exemplum is, by its nature, illustrative and
didactic. Yet in the case of the tale of the monk who crucified himself, the
exemplum’s fuller, deeper meanings are comprehensible only with recourse to
the illustrations. Through their visual associations across a broad spectrum
of medieval representation, and by mediating the text for the reader/viewer
and thereby shaping, inflecting, and enhancing the audience’s comprehension
of the tale’s wider ramifications, the images of the monk’s folly provide the
threshold between text and audience.40 The formal and iconographic
connections between the drawing of the hapless monk dangling from the
beam, still grasping the hammer of his attempted auto-crucifixion, and images
of both Christ’s Crucifixion and the hanged Judas desperatus clutching his
moneybag, encourage the reader/viewer to read the monk’s perverse, failed
imitatio Christi against well-established interpretations of Jesus’ sacrificial
death, and to transfer to the figure of the errant monk ideas and judgments
concerning Judas and his crimes and sins. Instead of performing an act of
humble devotion and perfectly imitating Christ, the despairing monk has
betrayed his savior and ensured his own soul’s damnation.
The style of the drawings of the monk who crucified himself, and
particularly the selective, purposeful use of a naturalistic mode for the
representation of the beam, is also critical to the images’ mediating function.
Indeed, one might see the importance of analogy—as against literalism—in
the imitation of Christ as finding a parallel in the conventional medieval
attitude toward verisimilitude in art. Pictorial verisimilitude was regarded
negatively, because it implied a literal, uncomprehending, ‘outward’
simulation or replication of visual, material detail rather than a striving to
give form to a thing by thoroughly understanding and encompassing its
essentials. Certainly, attitudes toward verisimilitude were changing in the
later fourteenth century, when the Provençal miscellany was made, and
naturalistic styles were employed with increasing frequency alongside (or
even in preference to) traditional medieval modes of art-making grounded
in abstraction. Nonetheless, mimesis in art was still regarded to some degree
as producing what Stephen Perkinson has characterized as a ‘contingent,
limited’ resemblance to, rather than a profound understanding of, the truth
of the thing depicted.41
The conventional attitude toward verisimilitude in the Middle Ages may
be glimpsed in a variety of artistic, literary, and performance contexts. In

40
In my use of the term ‘threshold’, I draw on some of the ideas of anthropologist Victor Turner
as expressed in his various writings, including The Ritual Process (Chicago, IL, 1969); ‘Variations
on a Theme of Liminality’, in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally Moore (Leiden, The Netherlands, 1978),
pp. 27–41; and Victor Turner and Edith L. B. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture:
Anthropological Perspectives (New York, 1978).
41
Stephen Perkinson, ‘Portraits and Counterfeits: Villard de Honnecourt and Thirteenth-Century
Theories of Representation’, in Excavating the Medieval Image. Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences:
Essays in Honor of Sandra Hindman, ed. David S. Areford and Nina A. Rowe (Aldershot, England
and Burlington, VT, 2004), pp. 13–35, here quoting p. 19; and idem, The Likeness of the King: A
Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago, IL and London, 2009).
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58 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

the sphere of architecture, as Richard Krautheimer demonstrated long ago,

when medieval patrons and builders produced ‘copies’ of the Anastasis
Rotunda in Jerusalem, they strove not to reproduce exactly all of the features
of that venerable structure, but rather to selectively and meaningfully
‘transfer’ and reformulate a few important elements of the model. The new
edifice was not a literal replica of the original building, yet it nonetheless
was regarded as fully partaking of and embodying the original’s power,
authority, and significance.42
But if literalism in the architectural copy was considered superfluous, in
the reenactment of Jesus’ Crucifixion, it could be fraught with peril. Jody
Enders is the most recent writer to discuss the fascinating account of the
unfortunate Father Nicholas de Neuchâtel-en-Lorraine, a parish priest who,
while playing the part of Jesus during the 1437 performance in Metz of the
Play of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, ‘thought that he would die upon
the wooden cross, for his heart failed him’—perhaps because he was bound
too tightly to the cross, as many scholars have supposed, or perhaps because
he was so affected by the experience of assuming the role of his savior and
reenacting his death.43 The priest was taken down from the cross and saved
by sharp-eyed members of the audience, who correctly perceived that Father
Nicholas’s distress signaled a dangerous collision of ‘realism and reality’, as
Enders has put it.44 In the realm of ribald farce, in the fabliau known as Du
Prestre crucifié, a sculptor returned home to find his wife with her lover—a
priest.45 The panicked priest ran into the sculptor’s workroom and stripped
and mounted a cross in an attempt to hide among the many carved crosses
stored there. The sculptor entered the room, and, ‘astonished at [the]
sloppiness’ of some of his recent work, trimmed from the ‘image’ of Jesus
crucified a bit of ‘excess material’. The priest’s castration by the cuckolded
sculptor graphically illustrates the story’s moral: a priest should never love
the wife of another.46 In addition, however, it serves as a warning of the
danger inherent in literally imitating even an image of Christ crucified.
The unpolished, schematic rendering of the illustrations in the Provençal
miscellany warrants deeper consideration in connection with the images’
spiritual messages and semantic power. For their medieval viewer, the artless,
prosaic picture of the monk who crucified himself must have been startling,
not only on account of its resemblance to images of Jesus crucified and Judas
hanged, but also because the body of Christ and the Cross itself were the loci
of some of the most lyrical allegories and metaphors of medieval culture. Like

42
Richard Krautheimer, ‘Introduction to an ‘‘Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture’’’, Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 1–33, here quoting p. 20.
43
Enders, Death by Drama, pp. 55–66.
44
Ibid, here quoting p. 58.
45
R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago, IL and London, 1986), pp. 61–2. The
tale is reprinted in Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Anatole de
Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, 5 vols (Paris, 1872–90; reprinted New York, 1964), 1:194–7. My
great thanks to Laura Weigert for this reference.
46
Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, here quoting pp. 61–2.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 59

Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Crucifixion allegory, most of these metaphors FIG 2.4

originated in a monastic or clerical milieu, but by the later Middle Ages they THE DEVOTEE
circulated more widely, mediated not only through sermons and religious AT PRAYER
literature but also through art. For example, the body of Christ was a book— BEFORE THE
the book of life, the book of the heart, and the book with which the individual BOOK OF
measured her conscience, as portrayed in a miniature in an early fourteenth- CHRIST.
century French devotional anthology (Fig. 2.4).47 Christ’s body was the Miniature in a
Charter of Redemption by which he granted humankind life-everlasting: French devotional
his skin was the parchment, his blood the ink, his wounds the letters, his anthology, early
heart the wax seal, and the pens the instruments of his torture, metaphors fourteenth
strikingly visualized in the English Carthusian miscellany of c. 1460–70
century. Paris,
Bibliothèque
nationale de
47
Paris, BnF nouv. acq. MS fr. 4338, fol. 143v; for this image and the manuscript, see Sylvia
Huot, ‘The Writer’s Mirror: Watriquet de Couvin and the Development of the Author-Centered France MS nouv.
Book’, in Across Boundaries: The Book In Culture and Commerce, ed. Bill Bell, Philip Benet, and acq. fr. 4338,
Jonquil Bevan (Winchester, England and New Castle, DE, 2000), pp. 29–46, esp. pp. 30–4; and
idem, ‘Polytextual Reading: The Meditative Reading of Real and Metaphorical Books’, in Orality fol. 143v.
and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences in Honour of D.
H. Green, ed. Mark Chinca and Christopher Young (Turnhout, Belgium, 2005), pp. 203–22, esp.
pp. 206–09.
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60 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

FIG 2.5 CHRIST AS THE CHARTER OF REDEMPTION. Drawing in the Carthusian Miscellany.

England, c. 1460-70. London, British Library Add. MS 37049, fol. 23r.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 61

(Fig. 2.5).48 The wounds of Christ were also flowers or fountains, allegories
that find expression in a picture of the heraldic arma Christi in an early
fourteenth-century book of hours made for use in a diocese of eastern
France, an image that relies on both metaphor and metonymy to represent
the Passion of Jesus and his crucified body (Fig. 2.6).49 The Cross was the
Tree of Life, as in the early thirteenth-century psalter made for Robert de
Lindesey, abbot of Peterborough (Fig. 2.7).50 Christ’s tortured body was
referred to as a dovecote, or a honeycomb dripping with sweet honey,
imagery evoked in the perforated Jesus of the English Holkham Bible
Picture Book of c. 1330.51 Christ’s side-wound was the portal through
which the devotee could reach Jesus’ heart, ‘the locus of mystical union’,
as in the Prayerbook of Bonne of Luxembourg of before 1349, and in a
full-page devotional picture in a late fourteenth-century psalter-hours
made for a member of the Bohun family of England (Fig. 2.8).52 And, the

48
London, BL Add. MS 37049, fol. 23r. For the Charters of Christ as a theme in literature and
preaching see John Edwin Wells, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1400 (New
Haven, CT, 1926), pp. 369–70; Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Middle English Religious
Lyric (London, 1972); Margaret Aston, ‘Devotional Literacy’, in Aston, Lollards and Reformers:
Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), pp. 101–33, esp. pp. 103–104; Vincent
Gillespie, ‘Strange Images of Death: The Passion in Later Medieval English Devotional and Mystical
Writing’, in Zeit, Tod and Ewigkeit in der Renaissance Literatur 3, Analecta Carthusiana 117
(Salzburg, 1986), 111–59; H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford,
England and New York, 1993), pp. 139–44. For the Carthusian Miscellany and this image, see most
recently Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late
Medieval England (Chicago, IL and London, 2007); and Marlene Villalobos-Hennessy, ‘The Social
Life of a Manuscript Metaphor: Christ’s Blood as Ink’, in The Social life of Illumination: Manuscripts,
Images, and Communities in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Joyce Coleman, Markus Cruse, and Kathryn
A. Smith, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe (Turnhout, Belgium, forthcoming).
49
For Christ’s wounds as flowers, see Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, p. 104; and Martha Easton, ‘The
Wound of Christ, the Mouth of Hell: Appropriations and Inversions of Female Anatomy in the Later
Middle Ages’, in Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illuminated
Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture (Turnhout, Belgium and London,
2006), pp. 395–414, here citing pp. 405–06. For the heraldic arma Christi picture (Paris,
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 288, fol. 15r), see Henry Martin, Catalogue des manuscrits de la
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 9 vols (Paris, 1885–94), 1:173–4. For devotional images that rely on
metonymy in Passion meditation, see David S. Areford, ‘The Passion Measured: A Late-Medieval
Diagram of the Body of Christ’, in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late Medieval Culture, ed.
A. A. MacDonald, H. N. B. Ridderbos, and R. M. Schlusemann (Groningen, The Netherlands,
1998), pp. 211–38; and Villalobos-Hennessy, ‘The Social Life of a Manuscript Metaphor’.
50
For the Psalter of Robert de Lindesey (London, Society of Antiquaries MS 59) of shortly after
c. 1220, see Nigel J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1190–1250, A Survey of Manuscripts
Illuminated in the British Isles 4, part I, gen. ed. J. J. G. Alexander (Oxford, England and London,
1982), pp. 94–5, no. 47. For the Tree of Life in English Gothic art, see most recently Paul Binski,
Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300 (New Haven, CT and London,
2004), Chapter 9: ‘The Tree of Life’, pp. 209–30.
51
London, British Library Add. MS 47682, fol. 32r. For Christ’s body as a dovecote or honeycomb,
see Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, p. 104. For the Holkham Bible Picture Book, see W. O. Hassall, The
Holkham Bible Picture Book (London, 1954); Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts
1285–1385, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 5, gen. ed. J. J. G. Alexander
(London, 1986), 2:286–7, no. 221; and The Anglo-Norman Text of the ‘Holkham Bible Picture
Book’, ed. F. P. Pickering, Anglo-Norman Text Society 23 (Oxford, England, 1971).
52
New York, The Cloisters 1969 (69.86), fols 329r and 331r (the Prayer Book of Bonne of
Luxembourg), for which see Florens Deuchler, ‘Looking at Bonne of Luxembourg’s Prayer Book’,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 29, no. 6 (1971), 267–78; Flora Lewis, ‘The Wound in
Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response’, in Women
and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (London and
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62 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

side-wound was the orifice

through which Christ gave
birth to the Church during
the labor of his Crucifixion, as
in the early thirteenth-century
Vienna Moralized Bible.53
Indeed, it is likely that for
the audience of the Provençal
miscellany, the ostensible
artlessness of the illustrations
actually enhanced the message
of the tale of the monk who
crucified himself. Virtually
devoid of color, setting, and
the symbolic or historicizing
accoutrements of these and
so many other medieval
images of the Crucifixion, the
drawing stands as an esthetic
confirmation of the gravity of
the monk’s error, his false
equation of literal, uncom-
prehending, self-annihilating
replication with spiritual
perfection in the imitation of
Christ; and of his failure to
grasp that the central reality
of Christianity—the crucified
body of Jesus—was also the
site of its profoundest
metaphors.54 The artist of the
FIG 2.6 HERALDIC ‘ARMA CHRISTI.’ Miniature in a book of hours. Provençal miscellany faced a
Eastern France, early fourteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal considerable challenge: how
MS 288, fol. 15r.   to make an image that

Toronto, Canada, 1996), pp. 205–29, esp. pp. 210–12; and now Annette Lermack, ‘The Pivotal Role
of the Two Fools Miniature in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg’, Gesta 72, no. 2 (2008), 79–98.
For the Bohun psalter-hours (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Auct. D. 4. 4) of c. 1380, see Sandler,
Gothic Manuscripts 2:157–9, no. 138. For the meanings of the side-wound, see Jeffrey Hamburger,
The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300 (New Haven,
CT and London, 1990), pp. 72–85, here quoting p. 77; Lewis, ‘The Wound in Christ’s Side’; and
Easton, ‘The Wound of Christ, the Mouth of Hell’.
53
Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek Codex Vindobonensis 2554, fol. 1v; for the
manuscript, see Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée (London, 1995); and for the theme see also
Easton, ‘The Wound of Christ, the Mouth of Hell’.
54
Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London
and New York, 1993).
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 63

FIG 2.7
CRUCIFIXION.
Miniature in the
Psalter of Robert
de Lindesey.
England, shortly
after c. 1220.
London, Society
of Antiquaries
MS 59, fol. 35v.

resembled one of Christ Crucified, but that nonetheless resisted the key
symbolic and theological meanings and associations that accrue to such an
image. In the Psalter of Robert de Lindesey, the cross of the Crucifixion, as
the Tree of Life, sprouts tender green leaves and flowers of red and white,
the colors of martyrdom (Fig. 2.7). By contrast, the beam to which the monk
affixes himself in the Provençal drawing is dry, dead wood, and the viewer’s
impression of its lifelessness is enhanced by the care with which the artist
depicted the grain—by the meticulousness with which he employed a
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64 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

FIG 2.8 WOUND OF CHRIST AND INSTRUMENTS OF THE PASSION. Miniature in a psalter-
hours made for a member of the Bohun family. England, c. 1380. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS
Auct. D. 4. 4, fol. 236v.  
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 65

naturalistic mode of representation (Plate 3, bottom). The spiritual

bankruptcy of the monk’s imitation is signaled dramatically by the
incompleteness of his auto-crucifixion and by the fact that his makeshift cross
has no vertical bar:55 thus, the fundamental sign of Christian redemption is
conspicuously broken. Moreover, the top picture in the Provençal miscellany
is faithful to the exemplum text in its inclusion of only two nails rather than
the three typically arrayed for contemplation in late medieval devotional
images like the compartmented Bohun psalter-hours miniature (compare
Plate 3, top, and Fig. 2.8), where the nails might stand for Christ’s ‘obedience,
patience and humility’, as in Caesarius’s formulation (see above, p. 49).
The picture of the monk dangling limply from the beam even resists a
connection with Bernard of Clairvaux’s (1090–1153) striking allegory of the
‘punishing’ ‘cross of the devil’, elaborated in his Sententiae (Sentences).56 As
St Bernard conceived it, the devil’s cross is not a broken or incomplete cross,
like that of the monk in the Provençal miscellany, but rather a diabolical
inversion of the Cross of Christ: its height, depth, width, and length embody
pride, despair, desire of the flesh, and obstinacy respectively. These sins are
destroyed by the opposing aspects of Christ’s Cross— ‘fear of the Lord’, hope,
charity, and perseverance. The images of the hapless monk may be
unpolished in execution, but clearly they were created with a keen awareness
of the pictorial and religious traditions within which they were produced
and in relation to which they were viewed.
But one need not compare the images of the monk who crucified
himself to lavishly painted, gilded miniatures of Christ’s Crucifixion like
the one in Robert de Lindesey’s psalter or the Bohun psalter-hours (see Figs
2.7 and 2.8) to appreciate how profoundly the pictures express the monk’s
spiritual error. A drawing in a fifteenth-century German-Latin monastic
miscellany shows a monk crucified in imitation of Christ not by misguided
literalism, but metaphorically, through self-mortification and adherence to
virtue (Fig. 2.9).57 As Almuth Seebohm has shown, the picture gives visual
form to the textual allegories discussed earlier in this essay. The monk’s
blindfold and his padlocked mouth signify his mortification of his senses,
also symbolized in the biting serpent near his side-wound, a motif
originating in a sermon of Bernard of Clairvaux on the consecration to the
monastic life that draws, in turn, on imagery from Gregory the Great’s
Moralia in Job (late sixth century). Two cross-haloed children strike the
monk ‘with the message from God’, as Seebohm suggests, or they may
suppress the monk’s evil thoughts.58 The inscriptions in the arc above the

55
My great thanks to Malcolm St Clair for emphasizing the importance of this detail.
56
Bernard of Clairvaux, Sentences, ser. 3, no. 74, ‘On the Cross of Christ and that of the devil’, in
Bernard of Clairvaux, The ‘Parables’ & the ‘Sentences’, trans. Michael Casey and Francis R.
Swietek, ed. Maureen M. O’Brien, Cistercian Fathers Series 55 (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000), pp. 254–7.
I am indebted to C. Matthew Phillips for this reference.
57
For this image and for earlier bibliography, see Seebohm, ‘The Crucified Monk’.
58
Ibid., pp. 77–8.
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66 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

FIG 2.9
THE CRUCIFIED
MONK.
Drawing in a
German-Latin
monastic
miscellany. Early
fifteenth century.
London,
Wellcome
Institute MS 49,
fol. 63v.

Cross relate to the goals and practice of imitatio Christi: they include
Galatians 5: 24, ‘They that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh’, as well as
excerpts from the writings of St Bernard. Moreover, the glowing wood of
the Cross echoes the golden hue of the halos of the children. This visual
detail, as well as the inscription of the virtues on its length, transforms the
Cross into something far more than the lifeless wood of the beam in the
Provençal picture (Plate 3, bottom). In the German miscellany, the golden
cross of the monk’s humble self-mortification expresses both the spiritual
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 67

correctness of his imitation of Christ and its salvific outcome. In the

Provençal manuscript, the conspicuous grain and knots of the beam convey
the wood’s inadequacy as a vehicle of salvation: material desiccation equals
spiritual desiccation. The artist’s concerted employment of a naturalistic
mode of representation in the rendering of the beam signals both the failure
of the monk’s imitatio Christi and the fate of his soul.

THE MESSAGES OF TEXT AND IMAGERY

What were the messages of the illustrated exemplum of the monk who
crucified himself? That the tale registers anxiety concerning or even
condemnation of the extremely literal, radically somatic bent of late
medieval imitatio Christi as well as the dangers of its incorrect practice—
outward imitation without inner conformity and correct intention—seems
clear. As Jeffrey Hamburger put it in a recent essay on late medieval imagery,
Passion piety, and the cultural construction of pain and its meanings:
At stake [in some of the texts associated with late medieval spirituality]
is the nature of imitation: what did it mean to invoke the injunction
to ‘follow the naked Christ naked’ (nudus nudum Christi sequi)? Did
it mean . . . beating oneself to a bloody pulp? Or . . . did it mean
something more like the renunciation of will exemplified by Christ’s
submission to the Father in the Garden at Gethsemane?59
Other aspects of the Provençal manuscript suggest further paths of
inquiry. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Béziers was a flashpoint
in the Church’s conflicts with the Spiritual Franciscans and their mostly lay
followers and defenders, the Beguins of southern France, as well as with the
dualist Cathars or Albigensians. The Spirituals’ dispute with the Papacy over
the issue of apostolic poverty is the best-known aspect of the history of that
movement.60 Yet as David Burr has observed, the Spiritual Franciscans,
Beguins, and other contemporary groups can be seen as ‘connected’ by their
interest in ‘themes of . . . imitatio Christi’, and the Church vigorously
persecuted both the Spirituals and their followers on the grounds that their
disobedience on these and other issues constituted heresy.61 The Cathars saw
themselves as the true heirs of the early Church in its apostolic purity.62
Through the consolamentum, the principal rite of the Cathar church,
followers achieved liberation from the corruption of the material world and
the status of perfecti, the ascetic elite; while by means of the endura, or fasting

59
Hamburger, ‘Overkill’, p. 416.
60
The definitive account is now David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution
in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, PA, 2001).
61
Ibid., here quoting p. 313.
62
For these movements, see Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and
the Battle for Christendom (Oxford, England and New York, 2008); Malcolm D. Lambert, The
Cathars (Oxford, England and Malden, MA, 1998); and Malcolm Barber, The Cathars (Harlow,
England, 2000).
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68 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

to death, ill, old, and dying believers who could not otherwise sustain the
rigors of the Perfect’s existence could ‘hold’ the consolamentum.63 The Church
regarded the endura as suicide, as some records of the Languedoc inquisition
show.64 Perhaps the illustrated exemplum of the misguided monk—preserved
in a manuscript produced in or near Béziers—registers in some way, however
distorted, the impact or memory of these controversial movements and their
beliefs and practices.
The tale of the monk seems to comment on the dangers of individual
access to Scripture—and books—without appropriate mediation: left alone
with his psalter, the good monk commits a spiritual error so grave that he
damns his soul. As Caesarius of Heisterbach put it in another of his exempla,
one that he composed with the educated Cathar perfecti in mind, ‘When
literati begin to err at the instigation of the devil, they exhibit greater and
more profound stupidity than even the illiterate.’65 The story of the monk
who crucified himself also may be situated profitably within a small sub-
genre of the medieval literature of suicide, perceptively analyzed by
Alexander Murray: the tale of ‘suicide from religious melancholy’, in which
a learned individual, usually a member of a religious order, attempts or
commits suicide because he (or she) despairs of God’s love or even God’s
existence or otherwise waivers in his faith.66 Frequently, these individuals
attempt suicide after a visit from the devil; often, too, the chosen method is
hanging from a beam of the monastery roof or in the bell tower. And, in a
few instances, the cause of the individual’s despair or melancholy is excessive
religious fervor, which ‘invite[s] the Devil to confuse people’s minds’.67 The
illustrated exemplum of the monk who crucified himself, an ingenious
hybrid of the religious suicide tale and the literature of late medieval Passion
piety, offers a call for spiritual moderation that finds echoes in other later
medieval literary contexts.68
The Provençal exemplum also appears to be concerned with the
consequences of solitary, ‘private’ devotion or spirituality. Unlike the holy
persons mentioned earlier in this study, whose spiritual practices and
performances were, like the Crucifixion of Jesus itself, disseminated by
biographers and witnessed by many, the monk’s perverse imitatio Christi is
witnessed by no one, and he dies alone in his cell. Indeed, the ‘compassionate’
identification with Christ that was central to medieval spirituality was held
to have an explicitly social purpose and dimension. The Augustinian mystic
Walter Hilton (d. 1396) was one of several contemporary writers who
condemned meditative devotion on the Passion and related practices if they
were self-centered—that is, if they were pursued to the exclusion of fulfilling
one’s obligations to others—and he utilized the long-established metaphor of

63
Lambert, The Cathars, pp. 239–44.
64
Ibid., p. 244; Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages 1: 187–91.
65
Quoted in Barber, The Cathars, p. 83.
66
Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, 1:331–47, here quoting p. 332.
67
Ibid., 1:345.
68
Ibid.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 69

FIG 2.10
THE
DEPOSITION;
MARY
EMBRACES THE
DEAD CHRIST.
Miniature and
bas-de-page image
in the Taymouth
Hours. England, c.
1331. London,
British Library
Yates Thompson
MS 13, fol. 123v.

Christ’s body as the Christian community in order to make his point.69 The
picture of the monk hanging lifelessly from the beam, his attempted imitatio
Christi having benefited neither himself nor anyone else, his body mourned

69
Swanson, ‘Passion and Practice’, pp. 14–15.
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70 PA RT I : B E T W E E N WO R D A N D I M AG E

and attended by no one, and his soul carried off by the devil, suggestively
echoes standard depictions of Christ’s Deposition, in which Jesus’ grieving
companions lovingly remove his body from the Cross in order to prepare it
for burial, as in the early fourteenth-century English Taymouth Hours (see
Fig. 2.10). Emotionally and spiritually, however, the image of the hapless
monk is the Deposition’s antithesis.
The reader of the Provençal miscellany had the benefit of images to
mediate the exemplum of the monk who crucified himself. Cued by the
pictures’ pointed references to representations of the Crucifixion, the
Deposition, and other religious and devotional images as well as to
depictions of Judas hanged—and guided by the artist’s selective, purposeful
use of a naturalistic mode of representation—the reader/viewer was
encouraged to contemplate the many dimensions of the monk’s spiritual
error, and to understand his attempted auto-crucifixion as a grave damnatio
animae rather than a salvific imitatio Christi. And the devil himself plays a
crucial mediating role in the illustrations. Unlike so many of the gangly, pot-
bellied demons of later medieval art, who scurry about frenetically as they
attempt to thwart humankind’s salvation, the devil in the Provençal
miscellany pauses at the front of the picture—at the very threshold between
the time and space of the drawing and that of the reader/viewer. The devil
faces the viewer confrontationally as he hoists the dead monk’s soul onto his
back, as if warning the audience to examine their own beliefs and intentions
or sternly teaching his audience a lesson, and thereby mediating the message
of the illustrated exemplum with chilling effectiveness (Plate 3, bottom).70
Jacques de Vitry’s tale about the layman who crucified himself ends with
the admonition that visions ought not to be believed too readily, and with a
quote from John’s First Epistle, ‘Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if
they be of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world’ (1
John 4: 1).71 The Provençal exemplum cites, instead, John’s Gospel, ‘. . .
whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin’ (John 8: 34), and it reminds
the reader that the remedy for sin is neither a radical form of imitatio Christi
nor despair and self-annihilation but perseverance and participation in the
sacraments and institutions of the Church. The sinner must ‘confess with a
penitent heart and do penance which will be assigned by the confessor’ and
keep the ‘days of fast and feasting’ of the Christian year. In its frank
simplicity, the image of the monk who crucified himself stands at the
intersection of some of the most urgent concerns of religion and
representation in the fourteenth century.

70
For devils and demons in later medieval art, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and
Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ, 2003), esp. Chapter 2, ‘Demons, Darkness,
and Ethiopians’, pp. 61–94.
71
‘Non igitur facile credendum est visionibus, sed probandi sunt spiritus, virum ex Deo sint’;
Exemplum 44, in Jacques de Vitry, Die Exempla aus den Sermones feriales et communes des Jakob
von Vitry, ed. Greven, p. 32, ll. 2–3.
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KAT H RY N A . SM I T H 71

APPENDIX
‘ T H E MON K W HO C RU C I F I E D H I M SE L F ’ ; PA R I S , B N F M S
F R . 2 5 4 1 5 , F O L S 4 1 R– 4 2 R
[this transcription of portions of the Provençal text taken from Paul Meyer,
‘Notice du Manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds fr. 25415,
contenant divers ouvrages en Provençal’, Bulletin de la Société des anciens
textes français (1875), pp. 74–5]

F O L . 4 1 R , C O L S A– B — F O L . 4 1 V, C O L . A
Aquest libre es dels yssamples, e qui be lo enten nil met en obra nil vol
perseverar, la sieua arma pot salvar. El comessamen creet Dieus lo cel e la
terra; so es que enans que Dieus crezes lo cel ni la terra, no era cel ni terra,
may tenebras, so es escurtat, sobre la fassia d’abis. Ayso fo lo premier jorn.
E per abreujar vos diray enans que Dieus fezes home ac fachas totas cauzas
a servizi d’ome, e Dieus après fes home . . . [Creation of Adam and Eve/Fall
of Man/Expulsion from Paradise; humanity is redeemed by birth to Mary
of Jesus, who suffered and died on the Cross; Harrowing of Hell].

. . . Per que huey lo diable non a poder en home mays aytant cant home lin
vol donar.

F O L . 4 1 V, C O L . B — F O L . 4 2 R , C O L . A
Donx ausiretz cossi pres ad .j. morgue, cal poder donet al diable contra si. -
?-. I. morgue era en ja badia, et era home de bona vida e bos clergues, lo cal
avia en gran reverentia et en gran compassio la mort de Jhesu Crist. Et .j.
digous vespre, can lo morgue estava en sa cambra, el dizia vespras; e can fo
ad .j. ves que dis: ‘Quid retribuam Domino?’ (aquest vers vol dir: ‘que
guazardonaria a nostre senhor que tant a fag per nos’) e lo diables, que es
prims e ples de bauzia, mes en cor al morgue qu’el non podia redre guazardo
a nostre senhor de la sua mort, s’il morgue el meteys nos mezes en crotz. El
morgue levet se en pes, e vi .j. martel e .ij. grans clavels, et azinet se ad .ja.
trauc [trau], et tenc los pes sobre .ja. archa, e pres la .j. clavel e mes lo per
amdos los pes, et aco meteys fes de la .ja. ma sobre la trauc. Et aqui mezeys
el mori, e diables porter one la sua arma. E vec vos lo poder quel morgue
donet al diable de si meteys. Per que luns homs nossi deu layssar apoderar
al diable ni abandonar si a pecat. Sabetz que dis .j. doctor: Qui facit peccatum
servus est peccati, qui fa pecat sertz es de pecat, del diable; per que tota
persona, tantost co a pecat, se deu anar cofessar am cor penenden e far
penedentia, la cal li sera donada per lo cofessor, e deu persevrar en be. Et en
ayssi lo diable non aura poder en home, e totz homs se deu gardar de far
pecat al mays que pot, de carema, de carnal et en las vigilas de nostra Dona
e de Nadal e de Pascas e de Pantacosta e de san Johan e de totz los sans de
Paradis. Aquest romans so aternitz, nostre Senhor ne sia grazitz. Amen
amen.
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* * *

F O L . 4 1 R , C O L S A– B — F O L . 4 1 V, C O L . A
This book is of the exempla, and he who understands it well puts nothing in
works; he wants to persevere, he can save his soul.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth; so it is that before
God created the heaven and the earth, there was no heaven nor earth, but
shadows, and it was dark, over the face of the abyss. And it was the first day.
And to make it brief, I will tell you next that before God made man, He made
all things for the use of man, and afterwards, God made man . . . [Creation
of Adam and Eve/Fall of Man/Expulsion from Paradise; humanity is
redeemed by birth to Mary of Jesus, who suffered and died on the Cross;
Harrowing of Hell].

. . . So that today the devil has no power over man more than man wants to
give him.

F O L . 4 1 V, C O L . B — F O L . 4 2 R , C O L . A
So you will hear how he took a monk, what power the monk gave the devil
against himself -?-. A monk was in an abbey, and he was a man of good life
and a good cleric, who held in great reverence and in great compassion the
death of Jesus Christ. And one Thursday evening, when the monk was in
his cell, he was saying vespers; and when he came to the moment when one
says, ‘Quid retribuam Domino?’ (this verse means, ‘What could repay our
Lord who has done so much for us?’), the devil, who is clever and full of
deceit, put in the heart of the monk that he could not give thanks to our
Lord for His death, unless the monk himself put himself on the cross. The
monk rose to his feet, saw a hammer and two big nails, and approached a
beam; he held his feet above an arch and took one nail and put it through
both his feet, and then did the same with one hand on the beam. And right
there, he died, and the devil to take his soul. And see the power that the
monk gave the devil over him. Because a man must not thus empower the
devil nor abandon himself to sin.  Know what a doctor said, ‘Qui facit
peccatum servus est peccati’, he who sins surely is of sin, of the devil, because
anyone as soon as he has sinned, he must confess with a penitent heart and
do penance which will be assigned by the confessor, and [the sinner] must
persevere for good. And thus the devil will not have power over man and
everyone must take care not to sin insofar as he can, [paying attention to]
days of fast [=or Lent] and days of feasting, the vigils of our Lady and of
Christmas and Easter and Pentecost and St John and all the saints of
Paradise. This story is ended, may our Lord be blessed for it. Amen, amen.  

[English translation prepared by Professor Wendy Pfeffer, University of

Louisville]