The ‘Book of Miracles’ of Peter the Venerable

Summary

Peter the Venerable (c.1092–1156) was abbot of Cluny, the greatest monastic foundation of its time, from 1122 until his death. He was one of the most influential churchmen of the twelfth century, both in terms of his institutional power as head of a network of Cluniac monasteries (thereby representing the traditions of the ‘black monks’ operating within a reformed Benedictine rule at a time when the Cistercian ‘white monks’ were expanding their influence under his friend and rival Bernard of Clairvaux) and because of his extensive writings on theology. The accounts of various apparitions of the dead in Peter's De Miraculis represent the pinnacle of the twelfth-century use of the ghost story for the specific institutional advantage of a monastic foundation. Many of these stories demonstrate Peter's ‘external’ political concern to defend Cluny's interests as a territorial and financial unit. The apparition of Bernard le Gros, for instance, relates to the perennial problem of baronial depredation from lands adjacent to monastic holdings. A significant detail is the fox-fur cloak which Bernard's apparition is wearing: it has been permitted to retain the cloak as a reward for a good deed in life, and is one of its few sources of comfort amid the torments of Purgatory.

The Apparition of Bernard le Gros

Book I, Chap. XI

Bernard le Gros, who was renowned both for his noble lineage and his secular power, owned a number of castles in the vicinity of Cluny. From these fortifications he carried out many raids against the monastic lands and other churches nearby. Finally, however, having undergone a spiritual conversion, he sought out the reverend father Hugo [St Hugh, a former abbot of Cluny] and told him of his wish to go to Rome to pray for his sins. He promised that if he came back, he would renounce the world and become a monk at Cluny.

Bernard duly left for Rome, and there, among the holy relics of the apostles and martyrs, he made use of prayers and alms, attempting to expiate the crimes of his past life with all true remorse and penitence. After spending in this way the forty days normally assigned to sinners for the expression of due penitence, he left Rome on the homeward journey.