A mother finds her unborn son’s name spelled out in ceramic tile buried underneath a centuries-old church graveyard. A greedy count chokes to death on his juicy steak because he chose dinner over a saint’s request to return a cow to its impoverished owner. The holy vision of a bishop’s shining white vestments turn the knives of would-be assassins.
As I worked through these texts, I expected to find memory building at the center of both the vitae and the gesta. In fact, memory, memoria, or the act of remembering, memoro, are neither extraordinarily common or explicitly tied in linguistic terms to audience action in either genre. In this visualization of how word placement works in this corpus, memoro is pushed to the outer right hand corner, the small pea-green offshoot that’s somewhat distant in linguistic terms from the rest of the word cluster. In other words, audiences aren’t explicitly being exhorted to “do this in memory of me”,3 an important note given the idea of a gesta episcoporum or gesta abbatum as a prescriptive behavioral text meant to bring the ghosts of bishops past into the day-to-day lives of actual bishops present and future.3 Instead, the language of gesta and vitae are dominated by individuals and institutions. Memory is implicit in the language of these stories, and in their introductions and conclusions, but we are not reminded regularly that memory is at the center of these texts.
The two genres share their focus on implicit, rather than explicit, memory building, but the affective focus of the memories built in each genre are very different. Gesta authors build an affective emotional connection for their audiences with an individual and bring that connection to bear on a positive outbound message they are crafting about their community and its role in a larger world. Vitae, on the other hand are inward facing, linguistically dominated by a specific community and only then by individual lives lived in the service of (and the walls of) their community.
In both cases, the memory formation happens at the moment when individual translates to communal.4 The audience’s affection is directed toward the community that accepts a saint’s holiness, rather than the saint. It’s no surprise that vitae focus inward in order to, in vulgar terms, market outward. What I was surprised by is the role community building has in the palatability of each saint. Vitae build up the reputation of a community by showing the outside world how the community’s saints blossomed only once the saint was united with that community.5 Gesta authors on the other hand build up the individual bishop prior to his entry into the community. Given that thie historiographic read on gesta is that they construct internal lineages to make the history of the institution stronger so individuals in the present can benefit, I was actually surprised. Instead, gesta bring individual authority to bear in support of the institution to which those individuals contribute. To make an oversimplified modern analogy, vitae are 1940s vacuum cleaner ads–“you won’t be happy until you’re one of us”–while gesta are WWII Uncle Sam recruitment posters in the vein of individual responsibility: “fight on our behalf to make ‘us’ better”.
Let’s take a look at how this works by starting with an overview of the documents and what I’ve done to them. For the early middle ages, between the seventh century and the ninth century, I’m working with 7 sources. Three gesta contribute 62,000 words and 4 vitae contribute 45,000 words. For the central Middle Ages, between the tenth and the twelfth century, you’re looking at information from 9 sources, with 2 gesta contributing 173,000 words and 7 vitae contributing 105,000 words.
The first piece of valuable information these basic numbers provide is that gesta are slightly more diverse in their vocabulary. Over all, the gesta contribute about 235,000 total words to the corpus consisting of 10,000 unique words in the text with the vitae contributing 150,000 words total and 8,500 unique words. If the two corpora are processed together, there are about 11500 unique words, suggesting that the variety of language in the two corpora–the number of unique words in gesta vs vitae–is about even. NB: This kind of word analysis can work on corpora as small as 5000 words, but it’s best to have more and clearly we’re well above the minimum 5000 word threshold.
One of the persistent claims about medieval hagiography is that that vitae share so many tropes across lives that they’re overly repetitive.6 The comparative variety of language across these two corpora, particularly given that when the two corpora are added together, there’s an additional jump in unique words, suggests that’s not an accurate claim. From a historian’s perspective, that means our vitae authors aren’t dependent on remembered tropes of saintly behavior to communicate the value of an individual saint to their audience, or at least not on the repetitive language that scholars tend to ascribe to the repetition of saintly tropes.
It’s no shock that “ecclesia” or church is high in both periods’ topic lists. That’s the equivalent of doing a text mining exercise on the bible and finding out it’s about Jesus. From there, though, we find topics that contain words describing individual roles and their various characteristics in relationship to the community at large. The yoking of emperor to early medieval church, but as one called voco to be part of the church pars tells us how our early medieval gesta authors want us to remember the church’s authority in these early years. The church is still high in the central medieval topic list at number two–here is the church, hic ecclesia, which is above everything, super quoque.
The next few topics in each list, though, are dominated by individuals. The first topic in the central medieval gesta is oriented toward seeing the most divine, tantus divinus, bodies of individual saints, beatus corpus. It’s similarly revealing that the bishop, episcopus in the early medieval topic 2, is possessed of, habeo, great truth, magnus verus. Existing analysis of gesta episcoporum support the focus we see here on the individual by noting a heavy dependence on specific people whose protection shores up the community.7 In topic 4 in the early medieval gesta, we see a bishop named John, whose body is the of the city itself. In the central medieval gesta we see Remigius in topic 4, who is protected by, praesul, (or maybe protecting) the king, rex.
The traditions of the cult of saints also build up the bishop’s environment in the language of a gesta. Saintly corpses buried for years are treated with language that also describes the length of a bishop’s tenure, tying the authority of these individual bishops to a lineage of miracle workers. These miracle workers benefit the church at large, rather than smaller institutions inside the church (like episcopatus or the episcopacy). And at long last, monasterium finally crops up to demonstrate the degree to which individual reputation is leveraged to personify the community to which that individual belongs.
The expression of this public role, plays itself out in larger patterns of episcopal relations with landowners and local clergy. in other words, bishops were intent on navigating the boundaries of conflict with other authority figures, and with the local urban population, who themselves had a stake in local and regional administrative duties in the wake of now-absent Roman power.
Missing? Memory and commemoration. These memorializing words, though they feel frequent in a read of vitae and gesta, actually appear both less frequently, and less consistently with other frequently appearing words, that from a linguistic vocabulary standpoint they become almost meaningless. In other words, memory isn’t highly associated with a single overarching concept: not vir, not beatus, not sanctus, not ecclesiae. Consider that in the context of the fact that episcopal names show up on this topic list (Iohannes), and you can see both the strength and weakness of an analysis like this: you can readily get at topics that show up frequently, but an overarching concept that plays heavily in an introduction or conclusion may not dominate the body of a text enough to be readily apparent in a topic model. We’ll get to that in a minute.
For the vitae in the project, the story changes. It’s immediately apparent that the issue of community can be bad–as in topic 1 for the early medieval vitae, In that building was the hand of death–or good, in topic 6, divine grace grants happiness to the church. References that tie an individual to a specific role in the institution, like bishop or pope or king or emperor, are missing in favor of the fairly generic sanctus–holy man–and the very humble vir, the medieval equivalent of “that guy”, though in this case our humble vir are marked by their service to pater deus, our father in heaven. Only 5 topics down down do we see our first mention of a specific institutional role, episcopus.
As with the gesta there are some changes that reflect (and in many cases are designed to affect) the contextual changes that mark the multitude of changes in monastic life between the 10th and 12th centuries. We see an individual name, Romuald, placed highly in the central list in topic 3 but his role as an individual figure of holiness is made possible by his integration into the institution: Romuald can finally be a venerable figure venerabilis for others alius only within the walls of monasteries monasterium. Keep in mind, though, that Romuald appearing here as an individual means the other words hew closely together in saints lives other than Romuald’s, it’s just that Peter Damian associated Romuald’s name more closely with these words than other authors associated their saints’ names.
These topic-model word buckets and the overview of word usage that goes with them, are very handy analytical tools, but they need context. Here, a look at corpus linguistics and network analysis is helpful. If you iterate through a document, word by word, and grab the words around it in pairs, rather than word by word, you get a more precise set of relationships between words. With each of those word pairs represented in a network diagram, our early medieval corpus, both gesta and vitae, looks like this.
This particular layout uses the strength of the relationship, or edge in network terminology, between words or nodes, to adjust spacing and placement in the diagram. Words that show up a lot and are connected to other words that show up a lot are in the center, and we can filter a bit to get a better look at the concepts we’re interested in.
Next, I filtered the original blob for some of the words that have come up here: bishop, episcopacy, church, monastery, abbot, memory. The filtered set of words aren’t distributed randomly throughout this big blog. Instead, they’re closely related, a blobby cluster in the center of the original big blob.
The "ego" filter here looks for words that appeared in the topic model (somewhat narrowed by my analytical choices), and then displays 1 level of direct node-to-node connections so we can see how the words in the topic model are connected and to what other words they are connected.
The filtered set of words aren’t distributed randomly throughout this big blog. Instead, they’re closely related, a blobby cluster in the center of the original big blob.
Episcopus, sanctus and vir all sit in the same large “community” of related nodes, the blue on the left, while ecclesia, monasterium and construo (build) all sit in the green community that dominates the right of the network, along with other words like relinquo that suggest sanctified episcopal control of the monastic community on the right. In a corpus-linguistics analysis of the texts, sanctus and episcopus or sanctus and a bishop’s name are linked (sanctus appearing either directly to the right or the left of the other term) more than 40 times. Abbas, abbot, is only linked to sanctus 4 times, with beatus at similarly skewed ratios. Consider that this part of the corpus includes a gesta abbatum, or deeds of abbots, and the idea of the outward facing emphasis in gesta, whether for secular or regular clergy, begins to dominate.
It’s similarly in this integration of network analysis, corpus linguistics and topic modeling that we begin to understand memory and its distribution. Memoria the noun is in the brown cluster of words related to veneration, venero, and recollection, recordatio. It’s node is fairly small, which means it doesn’t appear very often or have many connections other than to the words in this small cluster, but there are two that are important: contrado and causa, or “delivered together” and “purpose”. Neither are directly connected to memoria, but they are clustered near it, which means the connections between contrado, causa, and memoria to other words are similar. The delivery of memory with a purpose–and here we’ll look at memoriale closely connected to sempiterno in the lower right corner of the visualization, everlasting memorial–is to deliver an everlasting memorial. Distribution is exactly the key. The implicit movement of memoria as a concept throughout these texts, never overwhelming the institutions or the individuals who need to be memorialized, and the close connection between memory and wide distribution throughout all time is quite nicely represented as a gap, as its absence from the topic models.
The secular outward facing nature of a gesta and its insistence on the individuals constituting the whole and defending the community against outside depradation supports some of the more recent historiography on gesta, which suggest that attempts at royal control of monastic and episcopal holdings created serious economic issues for religious institutions.9 This emphasis was fomented by the expansion of Merovingian and Visigothic power and cemented by the Carolingians, rather than being purely a Carolingian phenomenon. Vitae, on the other hand, focused on attracting visitors and donations, rather than on defending historical precedent for ownership and authority. While the two genres are often treated together because miracle content and biography ties them together, the divergent purposes, highlighted here by considerable linguistic difference, suggests both the value of an approach like this and the importance of including serial biography in order to understand the memorialization of saintly authority.