Klöster im Hochmittelalter

The Mind as Cell and the Body as Cloister | 111
ory’s influence in these and other discourses is self-evident, as his works crucially
determined the vocabulary and conceptual toolset of tenth- and eleventh-century
attempts to describe and analyze society, especially among clerical authors with
conservative views. ¹⁹
What we know about Richard suggests that, he too, regarded Gregory’s ideas
on ecclesiastical office and the dialectic between action and contemplation as constituants
of his identity. In a sense this is hardly surprising. After becoming a priest
at Reims, he was promoted to the function of (according to Hugh of Flavigny)
archdeacon or (according to the Vita Richardi) deacon and procantor, ²⁰ and according
to the testimony of the Miracles of St Gengoul was assigned to care for the
cathedral’s relics. ²¹ This career path, which probably took him into his early thirties,
reveals that Richard was originally destined for a life in secular ecclesiastical office,
and thus is likely to have regarded his education of the Rule of the Pastor to be as
relevant to himself as to fellow students Adalbero of Laon and Gerard of Cambrai.
If Hugh of Flavigny’s claim that Richard had been a magister at the cathedral school
is correct, it is even likely that he relied upon Gregory’s text during his teaching,
and that his knowledge of that text was very intimate. ²² What his biographers also
confirm – even though it is easy to see a hagiographic subtext in this argument – is
that his religious identity had been established prior to his conversion to the monastic
life, which took place at Saint-Vanne, in July 1004. Already as a cleric Richard
had excelled through his devotion to prayer, reciting the entire psalter daily, fifty
bent over with his hands to the ground, fifty in an upright position, and fifty in a
prostrate one. ²³ Neither did the focus of his religious experience change: prior to
his conversion, he had developed a particular devotion to the suffering Christ – a
subject treated further in this paper – and according to Hugh of Flavigny this went
19 Bruno Judic, La tradition de Grégoire le Grand dans l’idéologie politique carolingienne, in: La royauté et
les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne (début IX ᵉ siècle aux environs de 920), ed. Régine Le Jan (Collection
“Histoire et littérature régionales” 17), Villeneuve d’Ascq 1998, pp. 17–57; and Id., Décrire la société
féodale à l’aide de Grégoire le Grand?, in: Regards croisés sur l’oeuvre de Georges Duby. Femmes et
féodalité, ed. Annie Bleton-Ruget/Marcel Pacaut/Marcel Rubellin et al., Lyon 2000, pp. 169 –178.
20 Respectively Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon (note 9 above), p. 369 and Vita Richardi (note 3 above), p. 519.
21 Gozo of Florennes (attributed), Miracula Gangolfi Florinensis, ed. Godefridus Henschenius/Daniel
van Papenbroeck, in: Acta Sanctorum Maii, vol. 2, Antwerp 1680, col. 649.
22 Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon (note 9 above), p. 369. See John R. Williams, The Cathedral School of
Rheims in the Eleventh Century, in: Speculum 29, 1954, pp. 661– 677, here p. 662, who argues that the
sources for Richard’s role as magister at Reims are unreliable. On the decline of the Reims school in the
final years of the tenth century, see Ibid., p. 663.
23 Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon (note 9 above), p. 369. The complete recitation of the psalter was not
uncommon for the spiritually ambitious, like John of Gorze and the hermits of Fontanevallae; see the
discussion in Dauphin, Le Bienheureux Richard (note 8 above), pp. 55 f. and Diane Reilly, The Art of
Reform in Eleventh-Century Flanders. Gerard of Cambrai, Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Saint-Vaast
Bible (Studies in the history of Christian traditions 128), Leiden/Boston 2006, pp. 94 f.