HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

370 MICHAEL GOODICHa different set of values, which might include devotion to the idealof poverty and the common life, the apostolic life, pilgrimage, hospitality,chastity, imitation of Christ, penance, preaching, and actsof charity. The Church faced a series of intellectual and militaryrivals, including Jews, Muslims, schismatics, heretics, religious skeptics,and pagans. The hagiographer thus often included an obligatorychapter dealing with his subject’s successful defeat of the enemy,usually through eloquent persuasion, personal example, deeds, ormiracles (verbum et exemplum). In the eleventh century, the struggleagainst lay investiture engendered a moral crusade against simony,clerical marriage, and concubinage in which the saints’ involvementwas stressed. In the thirteenth century, this moral crusade was directedagainst such lay vices as gambling, usury, prostitution, and the prohibiteddegrees of marriage. In order to enhance the pious potentialof marriage, the saintly spouse (usually female) was characterizedby devotion to the ideal of chaste matrimony, i.e., procreation withoutlust. Among the saints, devotion to the papacy included mobilizationin support of the crusades, the Inquisition, and the advancementof learning in monastic or cathedral schools and universities. Manyof the revelations they experienced reflected divine confirmation ofthe new eucharistic theology, the penitential code, or the concept ofPurgatory.The eleventh to thirteenth centuries witnessed the unprecedentedcreation of new religious orders, each with its own particular constituency,rule, and goals. The struggle for legitimacy in the face ofcompeting orders, the demand for proper authorization by the clericalhierarchy, the desire to establish new cults devoted to the leadingfigures of the order, and the need to recall the early days of theorder’s history engendered considerable diplomatic and literary material.The establishment of such orders as the Cistercians, Franciscans,Dominicans, and Augustinian hermits called forth the compositionof an official hagiography recounting the lives and accomplishmentsof the order’s founders. In his account of the origins of the Cistercianorder, Conrad of Eberbach († after 1226) stressed two aims: 1) toinform future generations, especially members of the order dwellingin remote regions, about the order’s history, in particular about theexemplary life of Bernard of Clairvaux; and, 2) to counter a calumnyspread by the black monks in the presence of uninformed secularpersons to the effect that the earliest Cistercians had withdrawn fromthe monastery of Molesmes disobediently and scandalously without