W40 through 43: Sainte Foy: The Benefits of Bling
Sainte Foy's day is October 6
My apologies for the late post-feast-day arrival of this essay, but I was delayed by a visit to a land of miracles…the geological miracles so beautifully in evidence in the middle Pyrenees. The ancient, and continuous, movement of rocks seem every bit as mysterious to me as the willingness to believe in a resurrected donkey, one of the hundred-plus miracles recounted in the book of Sainte Foy’s miracles created during the twelfth century, the Liber miraculorum sancta Fidis.
Onward to our saint! The first issue is her name, meaning “faith,” and difficult to pronounce in either of its French forms, Foy or Foi. If you think of the word foyer (also French but also English), that helps for Foy. Foi is like foie gras…try fwaah. Or you can turn to her original name in Latin, Fides, or to the name for so many Puritans, Faith. Fairly fuddled yet?
Sainte Foy was yet another young virgin defending her Christian faith in Late Antiquity, this time in the substantial Gallo-Roman settlement of Agen in southern France. Like them all, her short life was filled with good works and miracles, and when she was asked to worship the Roman goddess Diana and she refuses, she was grilled and beheaded. But she rises above the crowd of martyred virgins for several reasons. Her bones were the booty in one of the most documented relic thefts of the ninth century; her reliquary is achingly excessive and was controversial in its time; and, once stolen, her relics provided the monastery at Conques with sufficient resources to build a magnificent pilgrimage church and sponsored perhaps the first chanson de geste known to date. Lastly and posthumously, she was not without a sense of humor. She could be a trickster, a Christian version of Raven of the Northwest Amerindian tribes or of Coyote of the Plains tribes.
Her bones, her reliquary, the medieval books about her, and the church can all be found in Conques, a small village in the Rouergue region still visited by thousands of pilgrims and pilgrim wanna-bes. The Rouergue is a wild and wooly part of France, full of beautiful rivers and streams and deep valleys and populated in the early Middle Ages by seemingly inaccessible castles, lots of isolated farms, and the occasional village. The castles were owned by heavily armed “cowboys” who rode roughshod on everyone else, until the Peace of God Movement of the first millennium. This “movement” was a series of ecclesiastical councils held to hammer out some rules for controlling the castle bandits, and it resulted in an increasing number of wealthy monasteries that established protected settlements called sauvetés where the inhabitants received secure lodging and a little plot of land in return for their labor, and in an urbanization and concentration of markets in existing villages that resulted in a wider distribution of wealth; a new Middle Ages “middle-class” if you will.
Conques is situated in one of these narrow valleys. It’s a beautiful site but there’s very little room for the village, just enough for it to stretch out on a sun-filled shelf facing south. Gallo-Roman pottery shards have been found in the valley, and there are stories of hermit settlements here, but nothing seems to indicate that it was ever a prosperous settlement…until the bones of Sainte Foy arrived sometime in the later ninth century. The story of the monastery of Conques and Sainte Foy’s arrival there is found in the Translatio, or story of the translation (read “theft”) of her body from Agen to Conques, written in the eleventh century, at least two centuries after the event. Once martyred, Foy’s remains were carefully guarded in secret by the monks in Agen until Bishop Dulcidius (c. 525) built a basilica and a marble sarcophagus for her. 200 kilometers away to the NE, and 200 years later, give or take a few, the monastery of Conques is established by King Pepin (the father of Charlemagne) with a monk named Dado, given the name Conques because the site resembles a mussel shell, or concha, squeezed between the steep hillsides that frame the Ouche River below. The Translatio describes the monks of Conques longing for Sainte Foy’s remains, because this possession would bring “salvation and redemption” to their community and the region. In fact, in the mid-ninth century, when they plotted to infiltrate the monastery at Agen and steal Foy’s relics, the monks of Conques were pissed off and desperate, and Sainte Foy was not even their first choice for salvation. They were in this state of despair because Pepin I, the King of Aquitaine and Charlemagne’s grandson (797-838), had given Conques several gifts, one of which was something of a Trojan horse. That was his creation of a monastic foundation in the town of Figeac about 40 kilometers away, that he called the “New Conques.” Pepin thought himself magnanimous, giving the older monastery a new subordinate one, but the monks at the New Conques saw things otherwise. They quickly took advantage of the benefits of their more urban location in Figeac and claimed themselves as the alpha dogs, launching a bitter and long-lasting rivalry between the two monasteries.
The original Conques, hidden deep in the hills, began to perish on the economic vine. Her monks realized that possessing the relics of an important saint would help them attract pilgrims, and after studying the possibilities, they decided on Vincent of Saragossa, whose relics lived in Valencia, Spain. A monk named Hildebertus set out from Conques with his companion, and after many difficulties it was his companion who made off with the body of Vincent, but alas was caught and had to return the goods. When the thief-monk made it back to Conques he was refused re-entry for his failed mission, and he moved into the monastery at Castres, a few miles to the south. Through a series of lucky connections, Castres finally succeeded in stealing Vincent’s body to enhance the glory of their monastery. Conques fumed, but rallied to focus on another Vincent whose relics were much closer, in Agen, where our Sainte Foy rested as well (Patrick Geary tells this story beautifully). And, as the renown of Sainte Foy by this time surpassed that of Vincent No. 2, it was she that became the guarantee of success for the monastery at Conques.
The Translatio tells us that the monk Arinisdus was chosen for the heist, having the “perfect qualities,” and he was sent to Agen with a companion (as Patrick Geary points out, this is a typical plot line for relic heists: two monks make the journey to rescue the relics; often languishing in a state of disorder or chaos, the break-in occurs at night and miracles accompany the return). Arinisdus & Co. arrive in Agen, pose themselves as pilgrims, and worm their way into the confidence of the monastery, to such a degree that Arinisdus becomes the guardian of the treasury, including the relics of Foy. The length of time it takes to achieve this varies depending on the narrative; some describing it as a period of ten years. Our hero waits for a feast day when the monks are living it up, he enters the church, struggles with the sarcophagus a bit but finally succeeds in opening it and puts Foy’s bones in a “very clean sack.” That night he checks out of Dodge with his buddy, and they hightail it back to Conques. Not so fast! The posse from Agen sets off immediately hot in pursuit, but through various miracles they become lost or, once having actually found the thieves, don’t recognize them. In the end, the Agen posse returns defeated and Arinisdus & Co. return triumphant to Conques, where Foy immediately sets to work on racking up miracles.
Soon, she reveals her penchant for sartorial luxury. As pilgrims flood in to visit her, the monks decide to built a bigger church, but she refuses to budge until they build her a new reliquary. And what a reliquary! The monks create a seated statue almost a meter high. The body and its base are made of yew wood, but everything is sheathed in gold, and from God knows where they found the golden head (thought to be a fifth-century imperial funerary portrait) for which they made ground glass eyes. The funerary portrait is of a male and is outsized for the body, but no matter; because the skull of Foy was the most important of her body parts as she performed so many miracles associated with sight, it seems perfectly appropriate that she is immortalized in this eerie sculpture with its fixed gaze. I think she’s been dying for a blink all these centuries. Furthermore, it suits her to reside in the head of an emperor; unlike most female saints she clearly had a penchant for riches and a mean streak that she used to punish those who tried to steal from her or from her monks. Her golden crown was probably a gift from King Pepin I, and her jewels were added to the ensemble over the years as donors and pilgrims brought their offerings.
It was sometime after 850 when Sainte Foy was brought to Conques, and about the same time when Santiago de Compostela was first publicized as the ultimate pilgrimage destination in western Europe (the other two were Rome and Jerusalem). The promotion campaign was based in Metz, which is close to Luxembourg and about 800 kilometers from Conques, but word spread quickly, and soon, four main pilgrimage routes to Compostela emerged, enhanced by their attendant tourist services. Hotels and souvenir stands could be found roughly every 25 kilometers, or a day’s journey, along the way. Crowds moved in masse; in 951 Bishop Godescalc left from Le Puy with 200 monks in tow. I can’t tell you what the crowd sizes are today, but I do know that pilgrimage to Santiago is a popular sport, in which at least one of my readers has participated. Plus ça change...
The golden reliquary of Sainte Foy was controversial, especially for monastic scholars from the north. In the late eighth century Charlemagne and his think tank (see W 16 & 17, Riquier) produced a series of studies on imagery and its relation to idolatry (the Libri Carolini). Full-body statues, especially those sheathed in gold, were flying too close to the sun; too similar to biblical stories of idols to work for good Christians. When Bernard of Angers came to Conques in the early-eleventh century to learn more about the life of Sainte Foy and to write the book of her miracles, he realized that he had a problem to explain away—the splendor of the golden statue. But he found a way to spin his tale without compromising the reliquary, and in fact he was helped by the fact that it was a common practice in the south to honor saints with reliquaries that were also full body portraits.
I entered the world of Conques through my teaching about Romanesque architecture—through its place as one of the five major pilgrimage sites of the eleventh century, where churches were built to a similar, new blueprint to accommodate the crowds of pilgrims. An exciting hinge of time that resulted in spatial and structural innovations that would lead, a century later, to the development of what we call Gothic architecture. Of these five churches (Saint-Martin of Tours, Saint-Martial of Limoges, Sainte-Foy of Conques, Saint-Sernin of Toulouse, and Saint-James of Santiago de Compostela) only three remain: those at Conques, Toulouse, and Santiago de Compostela. These churches were designed to serve several functions at once, the most important being the accommodation of the hundreds of pilgrims who came to see the relics and tick off yet another stage on their route to the ultimate destination in Spain. With this new design, they could enter the church and circumambulate all the way around the perimeter, stopping to marvel at the treasures in the small chapels that project like barnacles from the main building, or descending into the subterranean crypt where other treasures could be seen, without disturbing the ceremonies required of the monks, which were held in the east; in the choir, the most sacred part of the church around the high altar. To support the increased width of the church, the side walls of the nave were raised to unprecedented heights, but the vaulting of the nave remained a Romanesque barrel form reinforced at regular intervals by transverse arches. Groin vaults were used for the aisles and ambulatory.
Conques stands out in the group of five as being much smaller; the other four share similar, grandiose dimensions appropriate for their urban sites. But Conques has a magic that I suspect the others lacked, thanks to its constrained site. One of its main features is the elaborately sculpted tympanum, which remains a secret until the last minute, as the approach to Conques is via a narrow street that shows you only the plain block of the southern tower. Suddenly you turn the corner to face the entry, and voila! The best action movie of the Middle Ages, a Last Judgement full of saints and sinners, souls being weighed on the scales of justice, stuffed into the mouth of hell to emerge head down at the other end, and the charming accent of the curious on-lookers peeking out from behind their stone ribbon above. This is not the only humor in stone at Conques; witness a cloister capital sandwich containing a crowd of pleasant-looking masons as the “meat” squeezed between their stone work below and the abacus above.
The interior of the church is equally dramatic, in the sense of its architecture and its volumes. There is an exaggerated sense of height relative to the limited length of the building, and the classic Romanesque crossing tower with its mysterious light from above leads you inexorably forward to the eastern end. The solid round columns soar upward 50+ feet, crowned with the limpid beauty of their sculpted capitals, which season the meal of the whole so perfectly; just the right amount of spice for the solid and sober architecture. There would have been painting decorating some of the surfaces in the eleventh century, but I prefer the plain, warm limestone as we see it today. The sculpted forms are so gracefully carved that I would resent any color confusing their shapes.
If Sainte Foy’s golden body and throne was controversial in the tenth century; the window glass designs of the artist Pierre Soulages were no less so in the late-twentieth-century. Soulages, still living at 101, is considered something of a national treasure in France. He was born in Rodez, not far from Conques, and made his name with his “black” abstract paintings, many of which are on view in a beautiful museum in Rodez designed by RCR architects in Olot, Spain. In its heyday in the Middle Ages, Conques would have had mostly grisaille glass, which was a clouded grey color, and Soulage’s windows are just that...with a twist. It was difficult for me to accept them the first time I saw them, but after reading more about his design process I find that I like them very much. I’ll leave it to you to make up your own mind.
My last visit to Conques was in May of 2018, when a colleague from the University of Arkansas who was part of a team leading students on a field trip through southern France, invited me to join them to hear a concert they had prepared for performance in the church. And, not incidentally, we enjoyed a great meal at a one-star Michelin restaurant located on the river in the valley below. So pack your bags, pilgrims!
To give you a sneak preview of coming attractions, November will be about some local churches in this neck of the woods, and in December I’ll finish out the year with two subjects for a double whammy: Thomas Becket, and the missions of California.
Later, gators,
References for Weeks 40 through 43: Sainte Foy and the Benefits of Bling
Websites:
UNESCO site for pilgrimage to Santiago: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/868/
Camino de Santiago:
http://santiago-compostela.net/
Pierre Soulages on his windows at Conques: https://www.tourisme-conques.fr/fr/conques/vitraux-de-soulages
RCR architects:
https://www.rcrarquitectes.es/
The Moulin de Conques restaurant : https://www.moulindecambelong.com/fr/
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Conant, Kenneth John. Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800-1200. Penguin Books, 1990 reprint (first edition 1959).
Entretien: Pierre Soulages—Jacques le Goff. De la pertinence de mettre une œuvre contemporaine dans un lieu chargé d’histoire. Toulouse : Pérégrinateur, 2003.
Geary, Patrick J. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, revised edition 1990.
Sheingorn, Pamela. The Book of Sainte Foy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 1995.
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