The Autobiography of Guibert of Nogent

Summary

Although the monk Guibert of Nogent (c.1064–c.1125) is best known as a chronicler of the First Crusade, his autobiography, De Vita Sua, which was written towards the end of his life in a conscious attempt to emulate the Confessions of St Augustine, contains many examples of the way the medieval mind tested every experience, however personal, against a theological model. The following story, however, is unusual in that it conveys the extent to which, even in the ‘theo- logically correct’ eleventh-century, a strong-minded individual such as Guibert's mother could take control of the spiritual and emotional pattern of her own life. The story is not a ghost story as such; the apparitions of Guibert's father and his illegitimate child appeared to his mother in a kind of waking vision, which, significantly, occurred on the Sabbath so that its contents would have been interpreted as having heavenly authority. However, it does contain a strong suggestion that Guibert's mother was in effect haunted, as by a piteously crying ghostly child, by the knowledge of her husband's infidelity and its illegitimate outcome. Guibert describes how, with extraordinary self-denial, his mother adopted and cared for an orphaned baby in the belief that by doing so she was relieving the suffering that her vision had shown the spirits of her husband and his child to be undergoing. It was a process of symbolic transference (what Guibert calls ‘measure for measure’) which might have won the approval of a modern psycho-therapist as a means of laying the emotional ghosts of the past.

The Crying Child

Book I, Chap. XVIII

One summer Sunday night, just after Matins, my mother lay down on her narrow bed and began to fall asleep, and it seemed to her that her soul was leaving her body, although she was still aware of what was happening. It seemed that she was being led along a kind of corridor, and at last she left it behind and came to the edge of a deep abyss. Suddenly from this abyss creatures with the appearance of ghosts jumped out, with worms in their hair, and made as if to grasp her and pull her down to them. She was greatly frightened, when suddenly from behind her a voice cried out: ‘Do not touch her.’ At the sound of that commanding voice, the creatures fell back into the abyss.