The Pastoral Image: Guillaume de Deguileville’s Spiritual Pedagogy in the Pèlerinage Allegories

This thesis examines the Cistercian monk Guillaume de Deguileville’s three allegories: the Pèlerinage de vie humaine (1330 and 1355), the Pèlerinage de l’âme (1355), and the Pèlerinage de Jesus-Christ (1358). The thesis analyses each of these allegories as dream visions filled with ethical and moral instruction, designed to guide both the reader and the pilgrim-narrator from the terrestrial life to the next life. Designed as Christian pedagogy for laypeople, the Pèlerinages form part of a tradition of memorial art and personification allegory. Nevertheless, as readers have noted, these allegories also portray their pilgrim-narrator as strangely incapable of learning from the teaching he is offered. This thesis proposes that a deep vein of sacramental iconography and thought underlies the poems’ pedagogy – it is this sacramentalism that, for Deguileville, counters the endemic human tendency towards sin. The thesis also explores Deguileville’s tendency to describe, counterintuitively, spiritual processes in material terms. What I call Deguileville’s allegorical ‘pastoral image’ refers to his complex and poetic notion of how the soul as imago dei is to be moulded, both materially and spiritually. The pastoral mission is summarised in the twenty-seventh Canon of the Fourth Lateran Council: ‘To guide souls is the art of arts’ (ars artium regimen animarum). Deguileville depicts the soul as a malformed, misshapen thing when it is captured by sin, increasingly conceiving of the soul as dependent on the mechanics of grace. I argue that this shift, especially apparent in the second recension of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine and his later allegories, derives from the author’s Augustinian pessimism about the compromised state of the human soul after the Fall. It is well known that Deguileville draws on the Roman de la rose. In Chapter One, I discuss his pastoral reworking of a number of narratives and images from the earlier poem. In the second chapter, I examine Frère Laurent’s Somme le roi as an example of vernacular pastoral care, to demonstrate how Deguileville draws on this didactic tradition – particularly the Somme’s reliance on instructive imaginative images. Identifying pastoral ideas common to both authors, the chapter discusses Deguileville’s broadly Augustinian theology. The third chapter explores his novel use of what I term ‘sacramental craft’: these are images of the soul reformulated and remade to supplement the pedagogy offered to the ineffectual pilgrim. They include traditionally Cistercian images such as the sacramental Christ-in-the- winepress and the ‘Mystic Mill’ – images of Christ torn apart. The pilgrim is taught that by grace channelled through material signs (sacramenta) he can be redeemed. The fourth chapter argues that Deguileville’s pastoral enterprise can also be seen from another angle, proposing that the Pèlerinage trilogy is a novel kind of ars moriendi. Deguileville makes the case for living a life of virtue in preparation for the soul’s final reworking through death. I show this process to be another kind of sacramental craft in imitatio Christi, the full ramifications of which are ultimately expressed in the Pèlerinage de Jesus-Christ.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Statz, Alexis Francesca

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Zeeman, Nicolette

• ars moriendi
• Augustine
• Guillaume de Deguileville
• Middle French
• pastoral care
• Roman de la rose
• sacramental craft
• Somme le roi

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/3c7c7a47-e0aa-4472-8842-f403b5198390/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.115715

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/379746