Helinand of Froidmont O.Cist.
Life and Works

Last updated:
December 11, 2023

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Life of Helinand

Helinand of Froidmont (Helinandus Frigidimontis) lived from about 1160 till after 1229.  Originating from a Flemish noble family, Helinand was born in the region of Beauvais in France. He studied with the grammaticus Ralph of Beauvais, a pupil of Peter Abelard, and then entered the Cistercian monastery of Froidmont near Beauvais.[1]   Many scholars have assumed that Helinand was a famous minstrel before he became a Cistercian, and that he was familiar to Philippe Augustus, king of France, too. However, there is no solid evidence supporting these assumptions at all.[2]  Helinand has written works in both French and Latin, and he became a famous preacher. In spring 1229, he attended the Council of Toulouse and pronounced three sermons on the occasion of the founding of the University of Toulouse. Helinand died sometime after 1229. 

Les Vers de la Mort

Helinand is the author of the well-known vernacular Les Vers de la Mort, written between 1194 and 1197. In this poem, Death visits the kings and ecclesiastical figures involved in the divorce scandal of Philippe Augustus and Ingeburga of Denmark. This text seems to have provoked, in 1199, a ban on the composition of vernacular polemic verse by members of the Cistercian order.[3]  

Les Vers de la Mort have been much more popular than Helinand’s Latin works, and this popularity continues until today. In 1244, about ten years after Helinand had died, the Dominican friar Vincent of Beauvais († ca. 1264), in his Speculum Historiale (see below), mentions the great fame of Les Vers de la Mort. The twenty-four manuscripts that have come down to us, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth century, testify to this popularity in a physical way. Les Vers de la Mort have been read from the pulpit frequently and were the object of late-medieval commentaries and imitations. Since the end of the sixteenth century, five editions of the medieval French text have been published. Starting in 1930, an impressive series of translations has appeared too, into French, Dutch, English, German, Italian and Spanish. In 1987, Les Vers de la Mort were adapted for the stage, and today one may also find representations of the text on cd and on the Internet.[4]  

Only little is known of the context in which Helinand composed this work. Scholars who studied the text, stressed various elements which they considered important for that context, e.g., the transition from monastic to scholastic writing taking place in the Cistercian environment at the end of the twelfth century, the indifference to monastic life, the rise of the contemptus mundi doctrine, the political situation, or the liberty to satirize high-ranked people using vernacular languages.[5]  

Sermons

Sixty-eight sermons in Latin by Helinand have been identified until now; only half of this corpus is available in printed editions.[6]   These sermons are the products of a preacher who possesses a detailed knowledge of both the Bible and the profane classical Latin authors. Like he did in Les Vers de la Mort, Helinand criticizes ecclesiastical figures and other high-ranked individuals, the rich and the powerful, but he also addresses his fellow-Cistercians and resists topics like contemporary worldly learning.

In the three sermons he preached at Toulouse in 1229, Helinand severely attacked the Cathars. On account of these texts, Kienzle marked out Helinand as one of the clerics involved in the Albigensian Crusade, as a combatant of the many Cistercians involved in the campaign against heresy and heterodoxy.[7]  

Chronicon

Helinand is reputed for the Chronicon, which he compiled during the years 1211-1223. This Chronicon is a voluminous world chronicle in Latin containing 49 books, of which less than half have survived.[8]   Today we have:

• the text of books 1-18, covering the period from the Creation to the death of king Alexander the Great;
• several fragments of books 19-44 which have survived as copies, notably scattered through the whole of the Speculum Maius of Vincent of Beauvais, who already complains about the loss of part of the Chronicon; [9] 
• the text of books 45-49, which deal with the period from 634 to 1204, at which year the text ends rather abruptly.

The greater part of Helinand's Chronicon has never been edited. Today we know of editions of the following sections:

• an edition of the list of chapters of books 1 to 18 as well as the margins of the Vatican manuscript of the Chronicon: Paulmier-Foucart 1986;
• a partial edition of book 6: Malewicz 1974;
• an edition of book 6, chapters 64-66: Smits 1987;
• an edition of book 8, incorporated into an unpublished thesis of the École Nationale des Chartes; see Arnaud-Cancel 1971;
• an edition of selections from book 12: Smits 1983;
• an edition of books 45-49: Tissier 1669, 73-205; reprinted by Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina (...) [PL], vol. 212, 771-1082; this edition omits several sections that must have been present in Helinand's work; see Voorbij/Woesthuis 1996, 348-351. 

In 1986, at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), the "Chronicon Edition Project" was initiated to make all surviving parts of Helinand's work available in a critical edition.

The Chronicon may be qualified as an encyclopedic text book of history, serving Cistercian needs to interpret the scriptures in accordance with the catholic truth and to preach.[10]  Its overall structure is based on the progression of time. It is frequently interrupted, however, by – sometimes voluminous and learned – digressions wherein Helinand includes whatever material he feels pertinent to the historical line. He has taken these digressions from a great variety of sources. Thus we find, to mention just a few examples:

• commentaries on the Scripture (see Geertsma 2013);
• a treatise against astrology (see d'Alverny 1967 and Malewicz 1974);
• several lives of saints and legends (see Woesthuis 1987);
• information on the animal world;
• material from Latin and vernacular literature (see Voorbij 1984). 

For lack of a prologue to the Chronicon, Helinand's intentions with such extensive digressions is left for his editors and interpreters to attempt to understand.

Books 45-49 of the Chronicon have been a source for the fairly unknown chronicle by the Cistercian monk Aubri de Trois-Fontaines (ca. 1241).[11]  Small fragments of the Chronicon also survived through Helinand's sermons, as the author used his work as a source text for his own sermons. By far the largest portions derived from the Chronicon can be found in the Speculum Maius of Vincent of Beauvais, who used Helinand's text in two ways: 

• Many longer and shorter quotations from the entire Chronicon  – as far as available to Vincent – have been incorporated into the Speculum Maius (Speculum Naturale, Speculum Doctrinale and Speculum Historiale);[12] 
• Vincent compiled a long florilegium from Helinand's works, which he included in the Speculum Historiale.[13]  For a large part of this florilegium, he excerpted, abbreviated and restructured sections from books 10 and 11 of the Chronicon and invented chapter titles, thus creating the suggestion that this material was derived from independent texts. Vincent's presentation has led to serious misunderstandings. Several scholars mistakenly deduced from it that Helinand was the author of the moral treatise De cognitione sui and of the mirror of princes De bono regimine principis. These excerpts, however, were not conceived as separate treatises at all; they were just derived by Vincent from the historical exegesis of the Scripture that Helinand had pursued in his Chronicon (see Geertsma 2013). 

Letters

Helinand also wrote a few letters in Latin: 

• a letter to Philip of Val Sainte-Marie that Helinand incorporated into book 6 of the Chronicon;[14] 
• the Epistola ad Galterum clericum (or: Liber de reparatione lapsi), as far as known not preserved in the Chronicon. Vincent inserted this letter into his florilegium of Helinand.[15] 

(Falsely) Attributed works 

One work has falsely been attributed to Helinand: the Passio of Saints Gereon, Victor, Cassius and Florent. Since this Passio has been written before the year 1000, any credit to Helinand is wrong.[16] 

Several other works have been attributed to Helinand: a few Latin poems, including the Vado mori (see note 4), and three further works that are only known by name: Glosses on Exodus, an Anthology of the writings of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and a Commentary on the Apocalypse. For lack of further studies, Helinand's authorship of these works is unestablished.