ABSTRACT
In the early Middle Ages conflicts over ownership and rights were fought out with an arsenal of weapons: the mobilization of protectors and allies, negotiations, litigation, procrastination, the use of small-scale violence. Religious communities also had religious levers, such as excommunication, cursing and the humiliation ritual. The secular and the religious defence methods together formed a rich repertoire, which was tapped by the monastic communities in ever-changing combinations and sequences.
In the years 1065–1071 the monks of Stavelot 1071 several times employed a religious ritual against their adversaries. At stake in the conflict was the monks of Stavelot’s unabated claim to the undivided abbacy of Stavelot and nearby Malmedy, which position was preferably to be held by a monk from Stavelot. The monks of Malmedy, however, wished to appoint their own abbot. The latter were supported by the powerful Archbishop Anno of Cologne, and at first unhampered by the youthful Henry iv. During the conflict the monks of Stavelot repeatedly enacted the ritual of the ‘humiliation of a saint’, removing the relics of their patron St. Remaclus from their honorific receptacle in the monastery church and placing them in a humiliating position on the ground. The conflict reached its peak at a meeting of the highest-ranking noblemen in Liège in 1071, offering a glimpse of all the stakeholders, their motives and emotional responses.
The monks believed in their cause. With their rituals they were enacting the reversal of the just relationship between the saint and the faithful, between heaven and earth, a reversal effectuated by the injustice towards their patron saint, which might ignite the saint’s wrath. They urged him to rid himself of this humiliation. Bishop Anno, King Henry and their entourage initially responded with disdain and indignation over what they felt was an affront on the part of monks. Their rejection of the monastic rituals might also spring from religious and intellectual considerations and a complementary critical view of the use of cultic objects. At a later stage in the conflict, when the residents of Liège gathered in large numbers, the joint actions of the monks and townspeople filled them with fear. It is quite possible that they were consequently moved to make concessions.
The conflict described here allows us to gain insight into the substantial differences in the emotional experiences and motives of various groups involved in the same course of events: in the case of the monks aggression towards their attackers, but also anger towards their saint and therefore essentially towards themselves; for the crowd of laymen, fear of the saint’s wrath and aggression towards him, a more open aggression than in the case of the monks; for the members of the royal court, indignation and disdain, perhaps disgust, and later on fear – instilled by the agitation of numerous clerics and laymen, whose indignation led them to form a temporary alliance, and a dangerous one at that.
