Abstract
During the 860s, a Frankish monk named Bernardus returned to his likely home monastery at the end of his Holy Land pilgrimage. Bernardus described the house dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel as situated “on a mountain that juts out of the sea as if two islands.” Having visited the great and fabled cities of Rome, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, the pilgrim now ended his travels while looking out from a rocky beach upon two granite peaks covered with lichens, brambles, and birds. Perhaps the monk could discern below the summit of the nearer isle a small shrine, “round in the manner of a crypt and holding one hundred men.” He would wait until low tide to cross, when the waters would withdraw to reveal a natural passage from the shore to the island. Even then, Bernardus would need to carefully pick his way past the quicksands that lay amid the exposed mud flats and tidal pools.1
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Notes
For the most recent analysis of Notre-Dame-sous-Terre, see Christian Sapin, Maylis Baylé et al., “Archéologie du bâti et archéométrie au Mont-Saint-Michel, nouvelles approches de Notre-Dame-sous-Terre,” Archéologie médié vale 38 (2008): 71–122 and 94 and 97 for the mortar of the “cyclopean” wall.
Sapin includes a historiography of interpretations that now must be modified or discarded: Florence Margo, “Les crypts romanes du Mont Saint-Michel, Ordonnance des espaces,” Espace ecclésial et liturgie au Moyen Âge (Lyon: La Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, 2010), pp. 369–378; Michel de Boüard, “L’Église Nôtre-Dame-sous-Ter re au Mont Saint-Michel,” Journal de Savants (1961): 10–27;
Yves-Marie Froidevaux, “L’ Église Nôtre-Dame-sous-Terre de l’abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel,” Monuments historiques de la France 7 (1961): 145–166;
and Paul Goût, Le Mont-Saint-Michel, vol. 2 (Paris: A. Colin, 1910).
Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 60–61.
Wilhelm Lueken, Michael: eine Darstellung und Vergleichung der jüdischen und der morgenländisch-christlichen Tradition vom Erzengel Michael (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1898). For biographical information on Lueken, see Matthias Wolfes, Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, s. v. “Lueken, Wilhelm,” band XVIII (2001), 844–851, www.bautz.de/bbkl/l/lueken_w.shtml.
Gerd Lüdemann and Martin Schröder, Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schüle in Göttingen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987).
I take the concept of “formation” and its usefulness for conceptualizing Michael from Tony Bennett, particularly his article “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations,” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 16 (1983): 8 [3–17], and his application of the concept to a historicized reading of the popular fictional character James Bond, Bond and Beyond (New York: Methuen, 1987).
A point well understood by Susan R. Garrett, No Ordinary Angel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 237–242;
and Henry Corbin, “La Nécessité de l’angélologie,” Le paradoxe du monothéisme (Paris: l’Hérne, 1981), pp. 81–156. Now, Ellen Muehlberger takes as her principal thesis the centrality of discussions of angels in the formation of late-antique theological discourses: Angels in Late Ancient Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
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© 2013 John Charles Arnold
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Arnold, J.C. (2013). The Problem with Michael. In: The Footprints of Michael the Archangel. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316554_1
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