Talk:Adémar de Chabannes

Forgery in monastic scriptoria

I am a little bit surprised about a heated tone in which the article is written.

In my experience many monastic scribes or librarians all over Europe had been very active as chroniclers and it is quite common that they invent bizarre stories about their monastery, usually with the intention to emphasise the importance of their Abbey and its good relations with powerful families in the secular department (and not rarely they were just related to them which easily explains it), often by inventing longstanding relationships throughout decades or even centuries which had never existed. The problem are less forgers than readers of such chronicles who do not understand the genre and feel offended, when they realise how much is made up. The same is true concerning hagiography. Fact is Adémar did forge another forgery, Petrus Diaconus at Montecassino Abbey was later than him but at least as active as Adémar, they both just changed the same tale according to local needs and even Notker Balbulus had part in it.

One should also take into account that James Grier as a musicologist has a certain sense of humour. Nobody would know about Adémar de Chabannes without his deep engagement. Guillaume de Machault had a similar education like Adémar at the Notre-Dame school in Paris (which was something like the école polytechnique today, where noble sons were educated to make a career at the Vatikan) and he went into Adémar's footsteps, but many manuscripts are just dedicated to him as a composer and he composed at the Courts of Kings! Adémar would never have dared to write his name in a liturgical manuscript, even in those cases he was the composer.

Grier discovered him and many musicological experts of the Saint Martial school argued even against the term and mumbled something about periphery and centrum, but they did wrong. I fear scribes at Limoges had too many legacies, they spoke Occitan (langue d'Oc), they did not just write about saints, but also about Occitan poets as troubadours (trobadors in Occitan) and definitely many things we do know about Middle Ages was simply written by them.

I would also like to make a remark about literacy of monks. Literacy in itself was always regarded in an ambiguous way in the context of Latin monasteries, their métier was the art of memory which made them much less dependent on media than we are today. On the other hand, a scribe and a notator was an extremely well educated monk, a cantor had almost the same social prestige like an abbot, and in the Cluniac context often well-educated cantors became abbots or even founding abbots who had a fulltime job just with the construction and organisation of new monasteries like Adémar's contemporary (he was more the age of his uncle) Guglielmo di Volpiano. We know from Adémar that he had exactly those ambitions, but they never worked out!

And finally one remark about the state of a saint as an apostle. I fear it is not very realistic (to say the least, because I fear it is about the late decanonisation of Martial during the 19th century!) to assume that medieval people at Limoges believed that their former bishop Martial was part of Jesus' sect known as the twelve apostles (with archaeological evidence that 500 of them had existed, even if this evidence was hardly known in medieval times). Also Cyril and Methodius have the apostle state, simply because they were officially asked by dukes, princes and kings to translate the bible and later liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic, and Cyril is even buried in the krypta of San Clemente in Rome, because he also translated Western liturgy from Latin! Also Prince Boris was soon venerated as a saint as "Saint Boris the Baptist", but it did not mean that some confused him with Saint John the Baptist, it simply meant under his rule the subjects of his Empire were forced into Christianisation. The apostle state of Martial has to do with some local patriotism, it is pride for the local language. Occitan was an important language during the Middle Ages, since they were also imitated everywhere, they invented poetry and they established poetic forms, not just by the trouvères in French (which developed out of the langue d'Oeil), but all over Europe in many other languages, including Middle German and Middle Dutch dialects. Of course, many did support Adémar's campaign and not necessarily always for religious motives and it simply meant that Bishop Martial had christianed (baptised) the local population of Aquitaine. Platonykiss (talk) 17:51, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Afaik, forgeries and the like were often relatively harmless, but specifically Adémar's insistence that St. Martial was an apostle was a rather extraordinary. Although the myth had been building up for a century before Adémar, there was a massive influx of pilgrims and there seemed to a widespread belief in the area (at least among the common people) that St. Martial was indeed an apostle. This all feels like an exceptionally forgery-related incident and less routine than others of the period. Aza24 (talk) 19:18, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh I did not say that he was innocent, but it does not help to understand if we judge him! His ambitious dreams were very unhappy ones and it very likely drove him to monasteries where he could never become happy. When he was a teenager, the Greek monk Saint Neilos the Younger was an old man. He as a radical anochorete would have disciplined a novice like him with a very firm hand. While others were greedy for political power and sometimes so decadent that they expected nothing less than the end of the world about 1000, Saint Neilos did found Grottaferrata! But Neilos was already too old and too weak to become its first abbot. And he was a fine psaltis and hymnographer, too!

I believe Adémar must have dreamt or even be obsessed to be as successful like William of Volpiano who was a generation older than his uncle. But with those dreams becoming true, it would not have mad him happier than he was! If we believe the legend (which is as usual completely unreliable), Emperor Otto I became his godfather, because he attacked the island of the Lake Orta in Piedmont, while his mother gave birth to him. He was definitely driven to powerful men like abbot Mayeul at Cluny and as a reforming abbot at Dijon, he headed the most ambitious monastic project of his time. It made him famous and he should continue with even more ambitious projects like Mont Saint Michel (a Monte Gargano at the Norman coast!), but they did not make him happy. His first monastery in Italy haunted him like Adémar was haunted by his.

Adémar was not less gifted than William (and they had the Occitan language in common), but the only place where he could be happy was Limoges and his manuscripts were true miracles. And as such they ought to be appreciated as local heritage, because they are unique in the world. Adémar with his talents had so many to offer to Cluny (and if one wants an answer to Arlt's discussion of periphery and centrum, one must be up to face the hard facts of political history, but he as a musicologist was too lunatic to face such hard facts!). The whole truth is, Cluny did not always make history, although they were crazy about Saint Martial and people like Adémar, but in fact, they completely neglected his works out of the same greedyness. They did still need some time to fall for later polyphony which Adémar's followers created all over Aquitaine. And that is no position, from where one could ever judge him!

The Ottonic dynasties had a too violent and too dull approach to power, they could never be as successful as the Normans who were much less conventional. They could not face the cultural diversity of Sicily, it was this violent approach which killed Otto II! And very few in France (even experts) do understand the cultural context of the Norman floor mosaics in the church of the Abbey of Ganagobie, a beautiful monastery at the East end of the Lubéron massif! Platonykiss (talk) 05:49, 25 August 2023 (UTC)