Just Like a Mother Bee: Reading and Writing Vitae metricae around the Year 1000

Abstract

The monk Rainerus calls his correspondent, the verse hagiographer Johannes of Saint-Amand, a “mother bee” (mater apes). This striking term characterizes Johannes’s method of composition and also demonstrates Rainerus’s participation in an erudite tradition of readers and writers of verse saints’ lives (vitae metricae) who collected, digested, and transformed their sources—Christian and classical, verse and prose—to create texts that were simultaneously original and densely allusive. Johannes’s text and Rainerus’s response to it suggest the existence of an erudite and dynamic monastic literary community around the year 1000.