Étienne
de Bourbon, a Dominican friar, was born towards the end of the
twelfth century and died about 1261. In his youth be passed some years in the
schools of the church of Saint-Vincent at Macon
and later studied at the University
of Paris before entering
the “Order of Preachers” (Dominicans) around 1220. (In his writings
there are a number of interesting anecdotes concerning student-life in his
days.) From 1230 he was very active for
as a preacher and inquisitor in the districts of Lyonnais,
Burgundy, Franche-Comté,
Savoy, Champagne,
Lorraine, Auvergne,
Languedoc, and Roussillon.
As
an inquisitor he acquired much information about,the
heretics, which he incorporated in his writings. Although he was zealous in his
work he was prudent, and rejected many fables current about the heretics. He
wrote sermons which were popular and widely used. The title shows his purpose, Tractatus
de diversis materiis praedicabilibus.
The
reader of Étienne de Bourbon’s narrative of St. Guinefort needs to aware
of of the conflict between the two
cultures represented by the text and its subject. The text and its Dominican
author represents the elite literate, Latinate, urban, clerical culture of the
thirteenth century, which saw itself as responsible for defending Christian
orthodoxy and did so by exercising powers of temporal and spiritual coercion;
the narrative, on the other hand, represents a “popular,” oral,
vernacular, peasant, lay culture, the Christianity of which was infused with
surviving pagan and folk customs. The
reader observes folk culture through the lens of an elite culture that regarded
it as illegitimate. Étienne’s purpose was not
anthropological but didactic: he described the cult of St. Guinefort in order
to condemn it and to distinguish between true religion and “insulting
superstitions, some of which are insulting to God, others to man.”
(Abels)
370. The sixth thing to say is about
insulting superstitions, some of which are insulting to God, others to man. The
superstitions which attribute divine honors to demons or any other creature
insult God. Idolatry is one example, or when wretched women sorcerers seek
salvation through the adoration of saddles (sambuca) to which they make offerings,
through the condemnation of churches and relics of the saints, through carrying
their children to ant-hills or other places in search of healing.
This is what they did recently in the diocese of Lyons. When preaching there against sorcery
and hearing confessions, I heard many women confess that they had carried their
children to St. Guinefort. I thought he was some saint. I made inquiries and at
last heard that he was a certain greyhound killed in the following way. In the
diocese of Lyons,
close to the vill of the nuns called Villeneuve, on the land belonging to the
lord of Villars-en-Dombe, there was a certain castle whose lord had a baby son
from his wife. But when the lord and lady and the nurse too had left the house,
leaving the child alone in his cradle, a very large snake entered the house and
made for the child's cradle. The greyhound, who had remained there, saw this,
dashed swiftly under the cradle in pursuit, knocking it over, and attacked the
snake with its fangs and answering bite with bite. In the end the dog killed it
and threw it far away from the child's cradle which he left all bloodied as was
his mouth and head, with the snake's blood, and stood there by the cradle all
beaten about by the snake. When the nurse came back and saw this, she thought
the child had been killed and eaten by the dog and so gave out an almighty
scream. The child's mother heard this, rushed in, saw and thought the same and
she too screamed. Then the knight similarly once he got there believed the
same, and drawing his sword killed the dog. Only then did they approach the
child and find him unharmed, sleeping sweetly in fact. On further
investigation, they discovered the snake torn up by the dog's bites and dead.
Now that they had learned the truth of the matter, they were embarrassed
(dolentes) that they had so unjustly killed a dog so useful to them and threw
his body into a well in front of the castle gate, and placing over it a very
large heap of stones they planted trees nearby as a memorial of the deed.
But the castle was in due course destroyed by divine will, and the land
reduced to a desert abandoned by its inhabitants. The local peasants hearing of
the dog's noble deed and innocent death, began to visit the place and honor the
dog as a martyr in quest of help for their sicknesses and other needs. They
were seduced and often cheated by the Devil so that he might in this way lead
men into error. Women especially, with sick or poorly children, carried them to
the place, and went off a league to another nearby castle where an old woman
could teach them a ritual for making offerings and invocations to the demons
and lead them to the right spot. When they got there, they offered salt and
certain other things, hung the child's little clothes (diapers?) on the bramble
bushes around, fixing them on the thorns. They then put the naked baby through
the opening between the trunks of two trees, the mother standing on one side
and throwing her child nine times to the old woman on the other side, while
invoking the demons to adjure the fauns in the wood of "Rimite" to
take the sick and failing child which they said belonged to them (the fauns)
and return to them their own child big, plump, live and healthy. Once this was
done, the killer mothers took the baby and placed it naked at the foot of the
tree on the straws of a cradle, lit at both ends two candles a thumbsbreadth
thick with fire they had brought with them and fastened them on the trunk
above. Then, while the candles were consumed, they went far enough away that they
could neither hear nor see the child. In this way the burning candles burned up
and killed a number of babies, as we have heard from others in the same place.
On the other hand, if when they returned they found the child alive, they
picked it up and carried it to a swiftly flowing river nearby, called the
Chalaronne [tributary of the Saône], and immersed it nine times, to the point
where if it escaped dying on the spot or soon after, it must have had very
tough innards.
We went to the place and assembled the people and preached against the
practice. We then had the dead dog dug up and the grove of trees cut down and
burned along with the dog's bones. Then we had an edict enacted by the lords of
the land threatening the spoliation and fining of any people who gathered there
for such a purpose in future.
[This above text forms the basis for the movie Le Moine et la sorcière,
aka The Sorceress France (1987):
Historical/Drama, 97 minutes. Director: Suzanne Schiffman; Cast includes Tchéky
Karyo and Christine Boisson. Although The
Sorceress was written by a professional medieval art historian, Pamela
Berger of Boston College, the movie’s tone and sympathies are, as with
many “medieval movies,”
thoroughly modern and rationalistic.
As a result, the movie is more of a subversive modernist (and feminist)
commentary upon Stephen de Bourbon’s text than an accurate reflection of
its world view. The review by Walter Goodman in the New York Times (April 1, 1988) captures why this is a problematic
“classroom” film:
Like
Bertrand Tavernier's recent ''Beatrice,'' Suzanne Schiffman's ''Sorceress'' is
set in France
in the Middle Ages, but its spirit is in the Enlightenment. It is a parable
about the clash between a dedicated healer and a dedicated pursuer of heretics,
over whether God prefers to tend man's body or scourge his soul. …
Into an isolated town, photographed with rough beauty
by Patrick Blossier, strides Etienne de Bourbon, a well-born monk (Tcheky
Karyo): ''My task is to persuade the guilty to repent - or else be burned.''
It does not take him long to discover Elda,
the ''forest woman'' (Christine Boisson), who wanders the glades collecting
herbs for the treatment of everything from malarial fever to difficult
childbirths to warts. ''Her practices sound irregular,'' Etienne observes most
ominously. He is outraged to learn that Elda
leads the peasants in rites at a ''sacred grove'' in which the intercession of
''St. Guinefort,'' a legendary dog, is sought to save their babies.
This illiterate woman represents the spirit of scientific inquiry and
Christian love. Etienne represents clerical obscurantism, ''fierce, unblinking
and blind,'' as the local priest (Jean Carmet) describes him. The priest stands
for a Christianity with compassion for human weakness
and ignorance, which Etienne only comes to appreciate the hard way.]