Introduction

Over the course of the eleventh century, the monastery of Fécamp developed an increasingly unified liturgical, political, and devotional culture. Under the direction of John of Fécamp, abbot of the monastery from 1028 to 1078, the monastery battled for monastic liberties, collected books, reformed ritual practices, acquired relics, and worked to streamline and strengthen the reform programme that had begun at the monastery in 1001 under John’s mentor, William of Volpiano (d. 1031).

In this paper, I set out to trace one motif of the Fécamp reform programme of the eleventh century, one that appeared in many different media within Fécamp’s reform culture. I will call this motif ‘harming to help’, a phrase by which I mean the idea that violent discipline, though seemingly cruel, ultimately reflects ideas of Christian caritas and leads to deliverance and salvation. I will show how this theme of compassionate cruelty is one that originated in late antique anti-heretical rhetoric, and one that abbot John of Fécamp picked up from patristic examples and applied to contemporary ‘heretics’, namely monks needing reform.

John of Fécamp strove to achieve two types of reform on his monastic subjects. The first, in the more traditional style, was the reform of the monks’ exterior practices and obligations (customs, rules, curriculum, privileges, etc.). The second, an effort more unique to John, was a reform of his monks’ interior practices of contemplation – what I have elsewhere called an emotional, affective reform. The letters surviving from the abbey, among other sources, help to define the parameters of John’s proposed exterior monastic reforms; John’s most famous work, the Confessio Theologica, is a devotional treatise that outlines his prescribed emotional reforms. The ‘harming to help’ rhetoric appears in both types of reform.

The ‘harming to help’ motif at Fécamp is epitomized by an iconographic programme in two frontispieces from Fécamp manuscripts dating to John’s abbacy. These two images – both depictions of Church Fathers triumphing over heretics – mirror John’s ideas about how to combat heretical behaviours in false monks, and about how, as a monk, one should reform one’s inner (heretical) sinfulness and one’s emotional relationship with God. I will begin this paper by reflecting on these two frontispieces.