Monastic Imagination and Historical Preservation

Relics and the legends surrounding them are often deeply connected to a monastic community’s commemoration of its foundations, patrons, and sacred objects within a framework that deepened their meaning in the present. This article addresses the depiction of Geoffrey Martel, eleventh-century founder of the Benedictine abbey of La Trinité, in the sculptural program of a thirteenth-century stone shrine erected to house the abbey’s relics. Despite Geoffrey’s historically less-than-virtuous character, the monks commemorated him as a loyal Capetian vassal and valiant crusader who transported from Constantinople to Vendôme a tear shed by Christ at the tomb of Lazarus, known as the Holy Tear, and donated it to La Trinité. Unfurling across the shrine’s arch and spandrels, the sculptural program augmented Geoffrey’s role in the Holy Tear legend. Comparing the shrine’s translatio narrative to a later vernacular poem recounting the legend of the Holy Tear, I contend that shrine and poem were part of a visual and textual culture that grew out of established crusader legends celebrating men who transported relics from the Holy Land and Constantinople to Europe and donated them to monastic foundations. The shrine itself is no longer extant, but a drawing of it remains in one of the portfolios of medieval patrimony commissioned by the seventeenth-century antiquarian François-Roger de Gaignières. While Geoffrey’s presence on the shrine has not garnered much scholarly attention, the drawing may be seen as evidence of the monks’ success in transforming him from a midlevel member of the French nobility into a great crusader and vassal of the king of France

Art · Art history · Literature · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Medieval History and Crusades · Medieval Literature and History

• Agnes of Burgundy

  Penelope D Johnson•Journal of Medieval History•1989

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• The Oxford Collection of the Drawings of Roger de Gaignieres and the Royal Tombs of Saint-Denis

  Elizabeth A R Brown•Transactions of the American…•1988

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