Klöster im Hochmittelalter

110 | Steven Vanderputten
an exemplary church leader, addressing pastoral discipline and liturgical practices,
and promoting Benedictine monasticism’s emphasis on seclusion from the outside
world as the ideal context for contemplation and divine service.
To what extent Adalbero’s vision of ecclesiastical office was adopted by disciples
of the Reims school is best made evident through the example of Gerard, the
future bishop of Cambrai (1012–1051) and a close friend of Richard’s. Following a
career as canon and later archdeacon at Reims cathedral, and a prestigious tenure
as chaplain at the imperial chapel, Gerard was appointed bishop of Cambrai/Arras
in 1012. ¹⁵ Having assumed his new episcopal function, Gerard famously instigated
the production of a rich body of historiographical, hagiographical, epistolary and
synodal texts, all of which focussed on the defense of episcopal authority and the
promotion of a discourse that presented the bishop as sole mediator between God
and humanity, communicating divine will to the faithful and redeeming sin through
the instruments of excommunication and penance. Throughout his career, he developed
a public discourse which broadcast these ideas, not just through preaching,
but also through action; like Adalbero, he aimed to embody the pastoral ideal he
was promoting. Gerard saw the legimitate distribution of the sacraments and teaching
of Christian belief as both grounded in the personal behavior of the clergy, and
several authors involved in the promotion of his ideas relied on Gregory’s text when
projecting Gerard’s vision of episcopal leadership. ¹⁶ His experience in suffering, and
his ability to embody Christian virtues, was thematized most explicitly in the Deeds
of the bishops of Cambrai, where a decades-long conflict with Walter of Lens, castellan
of Arras, is represented as a test of the bishop’s patience and steadfastness in
defending the prerogatives of his office. ¹⁷ His famous oration on the three orders
in society, preserved in the same text, is more or less contemporary to Adalbero of
Laon’s poem to King Robert, and constitutes a staunch defense of episcopal authority,
and of the significance or penance to the maintenance of public order. ¹⁸ Greg-
15 The bibliography on Gerard is vast; see the references in Steven Vanderputten/Diane Reilly, Reconciliation
and Recordkeeping: Heresy, Civic Dissent and the Exercise of Episcopal Authority in Eleventh-Century
Cambrai, in: Journal of Medieval History 37, 2011, pp. 343 –357.
16 See in first place Bruno Judic, La diffusion de la Regula Pastoralis de Grégoire le Grand dans l’Église de
Cambrai, une première enquête, in: Revue du Nord 76, 1994, pp. 207–230. Allusions to, and quotations
from, the Liber Pastoralis are woven through Gerard’s Acta Synodi Attrebatensis, ed. Lucas d’Achéry,
in: Spicilegium sive collectio veterum aliquot scriptorum qui in Galliae bibliothecis delituerant, vol. 1,
Paris 1723, for instance at p. 623; and especially the contemporary Vita Gaugerici or Life of Bishop Géry
of Cambrai, ed. Jean-Baptiste du Sollier/Joannes Pinius/Guilielmus Cuperus et al., in: Acta Sanctorum
Augusti, vol. 2, Antwerp 1735, col. 681.
17 See Vanderputten/Reilly, Reconciliation (note 15 above) with further references.
18 Theo Riches, Bishop Gerard I of Cambrai-Arras, the Three Orders, and the Problem of Human Weakness,
in: The Bishop Reformed. Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, ed.
John S. Ott/Anne Trumbore Jones, Aldershot 2007, pp. 127–145.