“Rebuilding the Lost City: Porphiry’s Grief and a Better Heaven in Clemence of Barking’s Life of St Catherine”
Donna Alfano Bussell

In her late twelfth century Anglo-Norman Life of St. Catherine [of Alexandria], Clemence of Barking addresses the psychological immediacy of loss for those who come in contact with the saint. The exploration of a saint’s loss—her physical suffering and social separation from this world—is a staple of virgin martyr vitae. Clemence, however, is also interested in the loss that is either experienced or anticipated by the saint’s textual audience (those depicted in the narrative). She gives her St. Catherine an unusually elaborate speech on the heavenly city that is remarkable, as I will argue, because this description of the heavenly city provides us with an opportunity to explore one hagiographer’s treatment of conversion as an allegory for the loss. Under the conventional rubric of conversion, Clemence represents the textual audience’s perception of the sacrifice expected of them as a problem that must be addressed specifically in this hagiography.

The description of the heavenly to city is always linked in the Catherine of Alexandria tradition to the conversion of Porphiry (Maxentius’ closest advisor and the Queen’s courtly companion). In Porphiry, we can see the middle ground occupied by the saint’s textual audience in the psychic process of loss cum conversion. He is conventionally neither particularly bad nor good, and affectively almost neutral. However, Porphyri must measure the rewards of his current loyalties against those of heaven. I will examine the hermeneutical strategies Clemence brings to this tradition that help Porphyri apprehend the loss of the earthly life as a condition of his conversion. St. Catherine’s speech describing the holy city is remarkable for its attention to the inhabitant’s emotional interiority and weaknesses. This metonymy of “city-for-city dweller” is central to Clemence’s treatment of sorrow and the strategies through which one finds consolation.

Clemence’s heavenly city is a complex set piece on loss rooted in the Old Testament. I will briefly explore the major variations on this scene found in the Latin and vernacular traditions of the Catherine passion to highlight Clemence’s particular attention to Isaiah in addition to the explicit, traditional reference to I Corinthians 2:9 and Clemence’s Marian imagery. I will also explore Clemence’s methods for rehabilitating the stubborn city dwellers who are metonymic for the disintegrating city in the Old Testament. Finally, I will consider the specific dialogic strategies that alter the interiority of the heavenly city’s inhabitants (moving them from loss to consolation), and the place Clemence gives to this transformation as foundational to the holy city’s architecture as the proposed emotional architecture of devotion.