The Anxiety of Sanctity: St Gerald of Aurillac and his Maker

Author:

Airlie Stuart

Abstract

Count Gerald of Aurillac (855–909) might seem rather out of place in a gallery of medieval saints: an aristocratic warrior, a great lord, Gerald seemed very much a man of this world rather than a saint in ascetic withdrawal from it. This was also the initial opinion of his biographer, who is, as far as this article is concerned, effectively his maker since we shall be dealing only with the ‘textual’ Gerald and not the historical one. This biographer, no less a figure than Abbot Odo of Cluny (879–942), began hisVitaof Gerald (c. 930) by saying that many people doubted that Gerald was a saint. The opening words of Odo'sPraefatioare quite explicit and perhaps rather surprising: ‘many people tend to doubt whether what is said about the blessed Gerald is true. And quite a lot of these people say that these stories are not only not true but fantastic.’ Originally Odo himself had not been too certain of Gerald's saintliness, though by the time he came to write the Vita he was convinced enough.2 The problem lay in convincing others.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Religious studies,History

Reference140 articles.

1. Rosenwein B. and Little L. K. , ‘Social meaning in the monastic and mendicant spiritualities’, Past and Present lxiii (1974), 4–32, at p. 14.

2. ‘St Odo's St Martin: the uses of a model’;B.;Journal of Medieval History,1978

3. reprinted in his Von Cassiodor zu Dante, Berlin-New York 1973, 180–205, here at pp. 198-9. Another victory pleasing to Christians, that of Count Gerard of Vienne over some Vikings in the Rhone valley was celebrated in 860 by Loup de Ferrières, Correspondance, ii, no. 110.

4. Thegan, Vita Hludowici, 19 (military skill), 230–2; 26 (wife), 232; 1, 3 and 53 (importance of family), 216, 246.

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