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Guibert adds a twist to his vision of his mother's marriage by claiming that the witchcraft was in fact laid by an envious stepmother (also unnamed) who had some nieces of great nobility whom she planned to slip into Guibert's father's bed.10.
The link between Guibert and his mother grew immensely strong, as with St Bernard and his mother. She became his whole world, transferring her attention to him, while simultaneously withholding her affections. She raised him and supervised his education, even insisting that he be taught by his tutor without the company of other students. At the same time, she also appears to have made it clear that his birth was a long and painful one, nearly resulting in her own death.
BETWEEN DEVIL AND ANGEL
But she also deserted him when he was twelve, the age of puberty, withdrawing completely from the world to take the veil. Guibert was forced into the life of the monastery, despite a rebellious nature that sought after the pleasures of the world, until he could subdue that side of his personality with prayers and fasting.
The upshot of this for one thing was that Guibert has left a very detailed account of his mother's psychology. One important instance was a moment of religious experience that occurred several years before his own birth. Guibert's father was a prisoner of war in Normandy, with very little hope of parole. His mother pined, unable to eat, drink or sleep. As she lay on her bed one night, the Old Enemy came and bore his weight down on her, almost crushing the life from her. She lay pinned to the bed, unable to move or speak. At that moment, a good spirit approached, and a battle ensued between the Devil and the Angel, so violently that it awoke sleeping maidservants in another room. The Devil routed, the angel returned and bade her "Take care to be a good woman."
Her attendants found her with the blood drained from her face, and the strength crushed from her body.
Surviving this experience gave her the strength, says Guibert, to endure her later widowhood. When Guibert was barely six months old, she was left to fend for herself, which she resolved to do.
So when his father's relatives came to seize his fiefs and possessions, she fought them. They fixed a court day on which to formalize the handing over of her property. She withdrew into a church, where she was found by one of the plotters, standing before the crucifix. He approached and ordered her into the court: she refused, saying she would take part only in the presence of her lord.
"Whose lord?" asked the man.
She pointed to the image of Christ and replied: "This is my Lord, this is the advocate under whose protection I will plead."
According to Guibert the man and his henchmen were so chastened that they left off their evil intent, and the matter dropped.
Similarly, his mother evaded instructions to remarry, saying that she would only marry again if it was to a noble of higher rank, knowing that this was unlikely.
At last, the baffled relatives left her to her own devices.
These included the filling up of the youthful Guibert's mind, which she apparently totally reserved to herself and his grammarians, with horrible visions of life, death and sex.
One of these involved a story of herself leaving her body and being dragged toward a pit by men whose heads were being eaten by snakes or worms. Again, a spirit appeared to rescue her, a spirit whom she perceived as the young Evrard. She asked the spirit if he was indeed Evrard, as he plainly appeared to be, but he said he was not. Guibert interprets this in a theological fashion - spirits have no substance requiring individual titles.
We might see the story in psychological terms.
Another story from the mother involved a vision of a newborn baby, terribly wounded on its arms and its sides. Guibert thought of this vision as relating to Evrard's youth when he was bewitched, and had turned to other female company.
"...having wickedly attempted intercourse with some loose woman unknown to me, he begat a child which at once died before baptism. The rending of his side is the breaking of his marriage vow; the cries of that distressed voice indicate the damnation of that evilly begotten child."12
Guibert's Memoires are riddled with a sense of revulsion amounting to illness for anything to do with the human body and sexuality in particular. His memories are filled with accounts of his own suffering with his burgeoning sexuality, which he spent his life controlling and subduing, and also with stories relating to excrement. These stories usually result in tragedy for the participant, such as the old monk who has to get up in the middle of the night to answer a call of nature, but who neglects to dress himself adequately. As a result and because he spends so long in the lavatory, he catches a chill and dies.
Another equally illustrative story involves a monk at Guibert's abbey who received a gift of money from a certain noble lady. Soon afterward he fell sick of dysentery. The abbot came to visit him in his last extremes. At that moment, however, the monk yielded to a call of nature, and since he could not walk was placed on a cask. The abbot saw him "in a disgusting condition, sitting on it in pain." The abbot was ashamed at meeting the man in such circumstances and after they stared at each other for a moment, the man was left alone to die. He was indeed strangled by the Devil:
"And thus he died, unshriven, unanointed, and without making disposition for his cursed money."13
Such is the recorded mental framework of Guibert of Nogent, one of the key agents in determining our views of the First Crusade.
FREUD'S VIEWS
The temptation is to interpret his character in Freudian terms: that the domineering mother, and the absence of a father, retarded Guibert at an anal or phallic stage, where fixations on sexuality and other bodily functions developed to a degree that they clouded his vision of the world and impeded him from functioning as a "normal" adult.
And indeed at the beginning of this study, I was working with the assumption that his was a mentality that we might fairly see as largely the creation of his mother. Further, my suggestion was to be that this and other anecdotal evidence may well form a generalised
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