Hermeneutical Perversions: Ralph of Coggeshall's "Witch of Rheims" (2006)

In his contribution to Chronicon Anglicanum, Cistercian chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall interrupts his account of preparations made for Fourth Crusade in 1199 to recount six anecdotes of local marvels and recent miracles. focus in first four tales--the stories of Wildman dragged from sea, feral children, discoveries of giants' remains in Essex and Wales, and changeling Malekin--is on corporeality and alterity. fifth and sixth stories--about witch of and saintly Alpais of Cudot--address heresy and orthodoxy. Once dismissed as non sequitors, such prodigious narratives now suggest themselves as imaginative exercises in distinguishing self from other. My interest in Coggeshall's Chronicon falls on a curious account of two French women heretics and known to scholars of witchcraft as The Witch of Rheims. This tale begs certain questions of formal unity, if not textual coherence, both in terms of wonder tales that precede it and larger crusade narrative that frames these digressions. How are doctrinal issues raised by heresy an extension of other wonder tales' interest in corporeality and difference? How are readers expected to parse this seemingly interpolated text in relation to Chronicle's historicist agenda? One way to approach these questions is to focus on thematic undertow of this section of chronicle, a rationalization of institutional project of defending what Elizabeth Freeman terms the integrity of Christian by justifying crusades as an act of God. (1) I would like to propose that this concern for integrity of Christian body, both literally and figuratively, does not begin with Cistercian order's involvement in Fourth Crusade, and that Ralph's account of The Witch of Rheims registers a crisis of identity and authority much closer to home. In this article I want to consider another possible textual link between The Witch of Rheims and larger mission of shoring up boundaries of Church Militant. When Ralph writes his section of Chronicon at beginning of thirteenth century, Cistercians have been fighting heresy on Continent for almost eighty years. (2) English Cistercians in particular eagerly accepted responsibility for prosecution of heretics that Innocent III placed on shoulders of Abbot of Citeaux (and, by extension, on Cistercian order as whole) in 1204. It should hardly surprise us, then, that fifth anecdotal digression in Ralph's story concerns heretical body, while sixth, presumably by contrast, gives an account of saintly body of Alpais of Cudot. What is perplexing, however, is that narrative trajectory from alterity to orthodoxy, which would serve overall ideological agenda of a crusade narrative, falters precisely when Ralph reaches more conventional terrain of heresy and orthodoxy. Cistercian's accounts of unredeemable bodies of two heretics and redeemed body of a saint communicate a curious ambiguity that disrupts and potentially questions foundations upon which ecclesiastical authority itself is built. By many historical accounts, as Western European society shifted from a warrior to a clerical culture in twelfth century, literacy and celibacy became defining attributes from which clerical class derived its spiritual and administrative authority and through which it established a social hierarchy distinguishing between cleric and layperson, free and servile, male and female, orthodoxy and heresy. (3) Yet in context of twelfth-century ecclesiastical reforms, hermeneutic occupations and ideology of bodily purity that supposedly consolidated clerical authority in high Middle Ages were also bedeviled terms of church's internecine struggles. In an age where monastic reform and lay evangelicalism proclaimed similar apostolic attitudes towards institutionalized church as an administrative and educational body, lines between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy not only blurred but sometimes officially shifted. …