From Local Hero to European Celebrity
The Textual History of the Legend of St. Symeon of Trier

Tuomas Heikkilä
University of Helsinki

On the web pages of the Nordic Conference on the History of Ideas the history of books is described as the social and cultural history of communication by means of the written word. Accordingly, its purpose is to study the production, publishing and distribution of literature, with equal respect to the different stages of a book’s passage, from the author to the reader and finally to its impact.

There seems to be, however, a curious lack of communication between historians of the hand-written and printed book, at least in Finland. It is true that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with their publishing houses, book shops and relatively broad reading public, for instance, offer much for a historian interested in the history of books. In countries like Finland, which essentially lack medieval manuscript collections, studying medieval hand-written books – i.e. manuscripts – is often considered to be only a matter of auxiliary sciences like codicology and palaeography. In many cases the medieval material offers fascinating opportunities to follow the books’ iter from the making of the volume through different generations of owners, the complicated dissemination of manuscripts, through the forming of cultural ties between persons and regions; and the impact and reception of the written texts.

It is from this point of view that I intend to analyse the textual history of the legend St. Symeon of Trier (d. 1035). Symeon was a monk and a hermit like thousands of others; it was his legend that raised him to a status of European celebrity.

The legend of St. Symeon – his vita and miracula – was written in a preliminary form very shortly after his death by a friend of his, the local abbot Eberwin, commissioned by the archbishop of Trier, Poppo. It is easy to see that the local clergy was in a hurry to propagate the cult of their newest saint. Traditionally the tenth and eleventh centuries have been considered to have been an era of a number of new saints – and thus an era of a fierce competition between different saints’ cults. Therefore, it was important to draw the attention of the fellow Christians; hagiographical texts, especially saints’ lives as the most popular form of medieval literature played a crucial part in pursuing this aim.

Abbot Eberwin wrote his version of the legend of St. Symeon already in the same year the saint had died. It contained the life of St. Symeon as well as stories of some miracles he had accomplished. Later on, many more miracles were added to the miracula part of the text. This happened mainly in the 1050s and 1060s, but the text was underwent a modification still as late as in the 1090s. There are about thirty manuscripts of the legend datable to the twelfth – seventeenth centuries.

Since the text was very efficiently disseminated from the beginning, the preserved Symeon manuscripts show a great variety of redactions. This makes it easier to reconstruct the routes of the dissemination of the legend of St. Symeon. The local clergy seems to have been essential in propagating the text. The earliest manuscripts, from the eleventh century, may be found at the libraries of Trier, Bruxelles, Paris, London, Berne and Einsiedeln as well as Munich, Rome and Vatican.

The dissemination of the text seems to have happened partly via the cultural ties between the archbishopric of Trier and other churches, monasteries and towns existing already. Partially, however, the interest in the text and the pilgrimage to the grave of St. Symeon created new ties. In addition came the personal relationships inside the clergy, between old friends and colleagues. They seem to have played an important part in the textual history of the legend of St. Symeon of Trier.

In spite of the relatively large number of manuscripts, the intensive attempts to propagate the cult of St. Symeon and the fact that he was one the first saints canonized by the pope himself, Symeon succeeded in becoming a widely known saint but for a short period of time in the high middle ages. This can be noticed in the dissemination of his life, too.

The methods of manuscript studies shed light on the traditional questions of book history: many questions about the authors, texts and their dissemination as well as their audience – both readers and listeners – may be answered. In addition, there is much to be learned from cultural relations between individuals and communities.