The Peace of Amiens-Corbie and Gerard of
Cambrai's Oration on the Three Functional Orders:
the Date, the Context, the Rhetoric
David C. Van Meter
Since the appearance in 1992 of a wide-ranging collection of essays on the Peace of God, scholars have been reminded anew that, for as much as we have learned over the last several generations about that movement, its origins, and its spread, we are still a long way from understanding its real impact on eleventh-century society ('). Among the many points crying out for further inquiry, there is the manner in which the Peace of God seems to have provided a medium through which an unprecedented surge in popular religiosity interacted with the religio-political programs of certain episcopal sees and monastic communities, producing the some of the first stirrings of the ecclesiastical reform movement of the eleventh century (2). In particular, the rhetoric that mediated between the concerns and aspirations of the laity and those of the clergy and monks remains something of a tantalizing mystery. Why, as R.I. Moore asks in this same collection of essays, was the populus - whoever, exactly, is meant by that term - so responsive to the appeals of the monks around the year 1000(3)? Admittedly, Dominique Iogna-Prat has already identified, with memorable verbal panache, the means by which the reforming monks influenced and mobilized public opinion: "notamment leur capacité à mettre le monde en mots", and hence, "le moine de l'an Mil est prophète" (4). But even this formulation begs the question, since - despite the wealth of literature on monastic ideology around the year 1000, despite the work that has been done on relic cults, and despite the detailed studies of social relations between monks and laity - we still have surprisingly little knowledge of the sorts of words the monks used to engage the imagination of the laity. And, in general, we know even less about the rhetoric employed by the secular clergy, despite the fact that, as Hartmut Hoffmann has
(1) T. Head and R. Landes, ed., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year WOO, Ithaca, 1992. See also J. Nelson's important review in Speculum, LXIX, 1994, p. 163-169.
(2) See in particular A. Remensnyder, Pollution, Purity, and Peace: An Aspect of Social Reform between the Late Tenth Century and 1076, in The Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes, p. 280-307.
(3) R.I. Moore, Postscript: The Peace of God and the Social Revolution, in The Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes, p. 320.
(4) D. Iogna-Prat, Entre anges et hommes: les moines «doctrinaires» de l'an Mil, in La France de l'an Mil, ed. R. Delort, Paris, 1990, p. 249 and 258.