I probe the effect of contemporary medieval theory on this sign's agency, ..... the production of written documents.13 School and chancery shared not only the.
Agreement to share revenues between Hugh, abbot of St. Denis, and Matthew, cou.nt of Beaumont. Se~led with Matthew's seal (the equestrian figure) and the seal of the abbey (St. De,ms enthroned). Archives Nationales, J 168 no.6-AD 1189 (Latin, Ile-de-France, immediately north of Pans).
Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept BRIGITTE MIRIAM BEDOS-REZAK
IN THE TWO CENTURIES following the turn of the first millennium, literate individuals in Western Europe rarely if ever resorted to mediated expression, to indirect communication by means of the written word, without expressing some sense of the absence of immediacy, that is, of personal presence. When Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux (d. 1181) could not attend a council in London, he sent a letter "so that the page might take the place of his person and the letter might faithfully bring his voice to life."l Slightly earlier, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) sought to reassure his correspondents about thc authenticity and representativeness of two letters to which he was unable to affix his seal. In one letter, he wrote: "I do not have my seal handy, but the reader will recognize the style because I myself have dictated the letter."2 The other letter states: "May the discursive structure stand for the seal, which I do not have handy."3 Bernard expects readers to notice his personal presence, however immaterial, within the fabric of the text, through its style and diction. His secretary and biographer, Geoffrey of Clairvaux (or of Auxerre, d. after 1188), emphasized this conflation of person and text by entitling Chapter 8 of his biography: "On St. Bernard's writings and the image of his soul expressed in them."4 Bernard's and Arnulf's letters reveal two closely related assumptions, that there Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (December 1996), at Princeton University (March 1997), at Johns Hopkins University (December 1997), and at the Stanford Meeting of the Medieval Academy (March 1998). I wish to thank these institutions' audiences for their informative comments and challenging queries. All who rcad thc manuscript at differcnt stages of its elaborations, Professors Caroline Walker Bynum and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, my colleague at the University of Maryland Jeannie Rutenburg, Dr. Ira Rezak, Robert and Dimitri Milch, and the reviewers of the AHR, generously offered critical comments and rich suggestions that were crucial in helping this essay reach its mature version. Without the timely and generous assistance of Dr. Harry Fritts, this essay would have lacked the medium that enabled its appearance. Finally, it gives me pleasure to acknowledge my debt to the Institute for Advanced Study for the opportunity to carry forward my research for a year (1996-1997) under favorable circumstances, during which, benefiting from the learned guidance of Professor Giles Constable, I was able to advance my work on the medieval practice and theory of signs. 1 Quoted and translated in John Van Engen, "Letters, Schools, and Written Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries," Dialektik und Rhetoric im friiheren und hohen Mittelalter, Johannes Fried, ed. (Munich, 1997), 114. The London council was gathered following the schism of 1160, to judge betwecn the claims of rival popcs. 2 Ep. 330; Bernard's letters are quoted and discussed in Auguste Dumas, "La diplomatique et la forme des actes," Le moyen age 42 (1932): 21 n. 1. 3 Ep. 339, Dumas, "La diplomatique et la forme des actes," 21 n. 1. My admittedly free translation of materies locutionis as "discursive structure" privileges the meaning of locutio as style or manner of speech, and of materies as constituent substance. 4 On Bernard's relationship to writing and his ability to function through personal charisma, see C.
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is a symbiotic relationship between human presence and representation, one in which representation matches real presence, and second that the written text is an embodiment of its author and articulates a notion of authenticity revolving around authority and identity. Additionally, Bernard indicates that there was equivalence between his discourse and his seal, in that both had the capacity to signify his personality. Written texts, to be sure, were major instruments of the literate elite's effectiveness as personalities and public figures,5 but so too was the aura of their physical presence. Bernard and Arnulf lived at a time when it was still possible for them to deploy both media-body and text-equally in matters of authority, even though an irreversible movement had already commenced during the eleventh century that was to shift preeminence from personal to textual presence. Bernard, being literate, could both compose and write in Latin; his authorial identity might thus be vested just as well in his discursive style as in his seal. However, what became of such a form of personal identity if it had to be projected through texts that, produced by others in the names of non-literate individuals, necessarily lacked the authoritative imprint of authorial style and presence? The phenomenon I wish to consider in this essay involves the novel recourse to the written and sealed word by the lay aristocracy of northern France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. At this time, French nobles were not yet literate; they lacked Latin beyond the modest requirements of liturgy, and as yet neither participated in modes of textual and iconic representation nor controlled the spheres of scribal and iconographic practice. I believe that the process of the French nobility'S acculturation to such modes of representation as the sealed charter commenced in writing bureaus staffed by prescholastic clerics, who were actively involved in discussion on semiotics even as they wrestled with questions in sacramental theology. Eleventh and twelfth-century lay elites came to be the subjects of representation in the explicit sense that, in situations requiring authority and commitment, they evolved from immediately present agents to represented actors. Persons absent in time or place were substituted by seals, which operated as alternates for those who were absent, acting in their place. It is intriguing that personal identity came to be signified just as people began to project their authority and accountability beyond their own actual, empirical presence. It is as if absence were required for the question of identity even to become conceivable. 6 Since seals are evidence, in my opinion, of a more general and unprecedented shift toward mediation, representation, and the formulation of personal identity in the medieval West, questions arise about the conceptual origin, form, signifying modes, and agency of this new medium, the sealed charter. My own method in exploring this matter has been to follow not the principles but the analytical agenda of Peirceian semiotic anthropology, which is critically Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (Philadelphia, 1994), 272-77. 5 Van Engen, "Letters, Schools, and Written Culture," 107-09, 113-14, discusses as the key characteristic of letters the intention to represent one self to another, to write as if two personae were speaking face to face. 6 For a complex analysis of the circumstances that permit the conceptualization of identity as a political agent, see Pierre Legendre, Le desir politique de Dieu: Etudes sur Ie montage de l'Etat et du droit (Paris, 1988), 88 and following.
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presented below. 7 By focusing on seals and on the institutions that produced them, I probe the effect of contemporary medieval theory on this sign's agency, assuming that seals' semiotic codes were dependent on a theology and an ontology that fostered their diffusion and interpretation. In this analysis, I do not seek to establish an absolute symmetry between semiotic theory and seal praxis. Rather, I examine how the seal was enabled by and how it encoded a specific set of ideas about signs and semiosis, and show how seal usage and metaphor contributed to contemporary reflection on and development of semiotic thinking.8 I ask what idea of semiosis must have been operative and what the place of ideas within semiosis was that enabled ideas about sign efficacy to create and shape material signs. Lastly, wishing to elucidate the social effects of seals as agents that performed and produced cultural works, I examine the action of seals as an innovative semiotic trope that, both in theory and in social practice, re-figured the categories of person, presence, identity, and authority. I will argue that, in projecting personal distinction, seals acted through a system of identification, designation, and recognition in which representational identity rested on an ontological principle of likeness. The medieval seal was a serial object: seal iconography utilized a limited range of distinctive types, themselves established on the basis of a limited range of stereotyped personae, and the engraved seal-die (matrix) itself repeatedly projected its owner's identity by reproducing identical impressions. This technology of replication appears to have served as a model for the formation of medieval identity. Seal users thus came to develop an awareness of themselves in relation to an object whose operational principles as a sign were categorization, replication, and verification. As the elites who used seals came to depend on representation by signs, the concepts of both social and personal identity eame also to be formulated in relation to such signs. This is not to say that such representation and such concepts were completely congruous with any definition of the self-as-an-individual as might then have existed, or that the notions of individuality and subjectivity were primarily generated by, or a construct subject to, cultural codes. 9 I am not addressing here the entire postmillennial experience of 7 Charles Sanders Peirce's (1839-1914) philosophical analysis oflanguage and cognition constitutes the theoretical foundation of semiotic anthropology, an interpretive methodology developed at the University of Chicago in thc mid-1970s. Sce bclow pp. 1516-32 for a full discussion of Peirce's semiotics and its applicability to the analysis of cultural processes. 8 In his recent article, "John Duns Scotus, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Chaucer's Portrayal of the Canterbury Pilgrims," Speculum 71 (1996): 633-45, James I. Wimsatt argues that Chaucer's rendering of his pilgrims both as types and as individuals implies that Chaucer's art conformed to Scholastic realism. My own mcthod is to look not for conformity but for interaction between semiotic systems and semiotic processes. 9 The term "individual" is used throughout this essay in the neutral sense of a "single entity which is the subject of cognition in various modes"; Catherine McCall, Concepts of Person: An Analysis of Concepts of Person, Self and Human Being (Aldershot, 1990), 12. My argument concerning notions of individuality reopens, on a minor key, a topic eloquently discussed by Colin M. Morris in his classic The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 (London, 1972), and ably pursued by John Benton, "Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality," in Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982),263-95. For a challenge to some of Morris's claims, see Caroline Walker Bynum, "Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual," in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 82-109, who also gives a full review of the qucstion and of its bibliography; and Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 86-89. See John Martin, "Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe," AHR 102 (December 1997):
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selfhood or personhood, but I am exploring a new experiment in signing and signifying both person and personal identity within northern French culture and society. In modern Western societies, while the term "identity" refers generally to those characteristics used to identify, define, and distinguish persons so that they can be individually recognized, it is also acknowledged that these characteristics as well as the very notions of identity and individuality may vary with time, place, and culture. In the medieval lexicon, the concept of identity did not address individual personality. Rather, identity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries centered on a logic of sameness and operated by assuming a model of similarity, referring to human beings as members of an identical species, or to the person as a psychosomatic whole, a social agent identical to itself with respect to number, essence, or properties. Since that particular sign, the seal, which accompanied, indeed articulated, the assertion of personal identity, participated in this same logic, conceptions of the sign and the human subject appear to be closely related. Indeed, they both operated on the basis of a newly elaborated premise of a dialogic connection between semiotics, theology, ontology, and anthropology.
CONCERN ABOUT MEDIATION, SIGNIFICATION, AND REPRESENTATION pervaded the eleventh century. The whole of Western Europe was then agitated by the Investiture Controversy, a dramatic conflict between church and statc in which the pope struggled with the German emperor to establish absolute ecclesiastical control over the appointment of church officials. Less emphasized in traditional historiography but central to this conflict were questions surrounding the effectiveness of certain signs, particularly material objects. The papal party believed that the symbols of ecclesiastical office, the ring and the crozier, possessed no intrinsic capacity to cause any effect but that the valid possession and application of them effectively and irrevocably established an ecclesiastic's right to both office and its associated power. The underlying sign theory thus held that material symbols were ordinary objects whose significance derived from a value ascribed to them by common agreement, by their recognized use in a particular ceremony. At stake here was the very nature of the operation of signs, the belief that their efficacy might be based on a contract or covenant and need not depend on any value inhering in the sign-object used. After a century of heated discussions about this semiotic issue, Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) was to propose a reversal of this position, arguing that signs were effective on the basis of inherent or infused virtue.lO In eleventh-century northern France, however, the semiotic debate extended 1309-42, for a new reading of Renaissance individualism. Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, Lawrence A. Pervin, ed. (New York, 1990), 143-45, gives anthropological and psychological approaches to the formation of social and personal identity that are intriguing even if not directly relevant for medieval society. 10 See a lucid discussion of this controversy in William J. Courtenay, "Sacrament, Symbol, and Causality in Bernard of Clairvaux," Bernard of Clairvaux: Studies Presented to Dom Jean Leclercq (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1973), 111-22; and "The King and the Leaden Coin: The Economic Background of 'Sine qua non' Causality," Traditio 28 (1972): 185-209; both rpt. in Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought: Studies in Philosophy, Theology, and Economic Practice (London, 1984).
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beyond a consideration of the efficacy of the signs of ecclesiastical investiture. The signifying modes at work in language, in writing, and in such fundamental signs of divine revelation as the sacraments, the Incarnation, and the Trinity came under intense scrutiny.1 1 The literate elites involved in this inquiry were pre scholastic 11 The shift from transcendence toward immanence that charactcrizcd thc understanding of sign operation between the Investiture Controversy and Thomas Aquinas seems also to have animated a broader semiotic reflection, which, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, focused particularly on linguistics, sacramental theology, and authority and authenticity in scriptural and documcntary writings. The bibliography on each of these areas is abundant and is here cited only selectively; see below at n. 42 for references on image and representation in prescholastic thought. On medieval signs in gencral, scc Maric-Dominiquc Chcnu, O.P., "Thc Symbolist Mentality," in Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago, 1968), 99-161; Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, Ind., 1984); Alfonso Maieru, "'Signum' dans la culture medievale," Miscellanea Mediaevalia 13 (1981): 51-72; Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln, Neb., 1986). On theories of verbal signification between Augustine and Dante, see Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (Lincoln, 1983). On medieval semiotics, sec On the Medieval Theory of Signs, Umberto Eco and Costantino Marmo, eds. (Amsterdam, 1989). On the postmillennial questioning of intellectual attitudes forged in Late Antiquity, see Constant J. Mews, "Philosophy and Theology 1100-115U: The Search for Harmony," in Le XIr siecle: Mutations et renouveau en France dans la premiere moitie du XII e siecie, Fran
