Andrew of Strumi: Vita Iohannis Gualberti

This life of St John Gualbert (d. 1073), the Florentine founder of the monastery of Vallombrosa and of the Vallombrosan congregation, was written by a monk who had been taught by the saint in childhood. The author opens with Plato’s remark in the Timaeus, and Horace’s image of the jar that keeps the scent of what it first held, to show that what we learn as children stays with us; he has found this true of the deeds and words of John, abbot of Vallombrosa, which he saw and heard as a boy. He writes at the command of an abbot, and recounts John’s life, his austerity and his struggle against simoniac clergy in Florence.

The author’s account of his own childhood under Gualbert identifies him as Andrew, abbot of Strumi, who also wrote a famous life of the Milanese reformer Arialdo, and the life is the earliest and most important source for John Gualbert. Its picture of reformist monks fighting simony, as in the sample’s vision of the sun pursuing the moon into deep water, is central to the history of the Gregorian reform in Tuscany.