Snakes

 It's Saint Patrick's day! One of the most enduring stories about this late-Roman saint is that he drove the snakes out of Ireland.  But as I noted in an earlier post about good old Saint Paddy, there actually were no snakes for him to drive out.  Pretty much all living things in what is now Ireland, including snakes, had been wiped out by the glaciers, back thousands of years ago, and as the glaciers retreated and plants and animals again reached the British Isles the snakes never made it across the Irish Sea.

Of course for medieval people it was good not to have snakes.  Europe doesn't have all the poisonous snakes found in the Americas (and don't get me started on Australia), but they do have the adder, which while not as serious if it bites you as a rattlesnake, is in fact poisonous, and people can die from the bite.  Great Britain (the island with England, Scotland, and Wales on it) does have adders, even if Ireland doesn't.  So does the European continent (I once almost stepped on an adder in France.  It was cool about it.)

The ancient Hebrews weren't fond of snakes either.  The story of Adam and Eve, where they are tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge after God told them explicitly not to, has a snake as a tempter.  The book of Genesis describes the snake as the most sneaky and cunning of all the creatures.

It's not quite clear what the snake's purpose was in tempting Eve, but he certainly paid for it.  God cursed all three of them, telling Adam he'd only get food by hard labor in the fields, Eve that she'd bear her children in pain, and the snake that he'd have to go on his belly in the dust.  Interestingly, the implication is that up until then snakes had had feet.  However, medieval and Renaissance depictions of the Adam and Eve story always have the snake with no feet (though sometimes it has a human face).

The line between snakes and dragons in medieval imagery was rather fluid.  Both were a sort of serpent, though dragons would usually have limbs as well as long snaky tails.

Now in fact snakes play an important role in the ecology.  Water snakes eat frogs and small fish, and land snakes eat insects, mice, and rats (depending on the kind of snake and how big it is).  When you have an animal without predators, it can multiply to the point of causing serious harm to the environment.  (Hmm.  Humans don't have natural predators other than each other.  Let's not talk about that right now.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval saints and medieval animals, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Performative Acts

 Recently a number of medieval scholars have started examining what are called performative acts, that is not simply that someone did something or other, but that they "performed" it, that is acted in a certain way to underscore what they were doing.  These days a lot of communication is done via text or email or phone call, where you don't see the other person, but medieval communication was more likely to be done face to face.

Now of course we still have performative acts.  People do them instinctively even if they are not thinking through their performance.  Mom coming into the room where she just heard a disturbing crash stands with her arms firmly folded.  The professor steps up to the lectern and gazes sternly out across the students until they stop talking.  The president signs an executive order, waves it back and forth so everyone can see his signature, and hands the signing pen to someone nearby, as (one assumes) a precious souvenir.

Medieval oaths of allegiance were full of performative acts.  One did not simply swear an oath, or (as we do now) raise one's right hand while swearing it.  (Think about it. Why does raising your hand make it more significant? But it does.)  One went down on one's knees and raised one's hands to the person to whom one was swearing allegiance.  This is the basic act of swearing homage, as a knight or noble would do to a lord.  But it doesn't stop there.  The lord would reach down, take the hands, draw the person up, and kiss them on the cheek.  This would be done very publicly.  Everyone would remember it and would understand the symbolism of the person swearing homage both being subservient to and the equal of the lord.

Peasants as well as aristocrats could take part in performances.  In some parts of western France in the eleventh century, a serf was expected to come on hands and knees before his or her lord with a penny balanced on their head.  The value of the penny was trivial.  What was important was the public ceremony.  In some cases the peasant might even have a rope looped the neck, in case the imagery was not clear enough.

Oaths of allegiance among aristocrats were not one-time events.  Chronicles often tell us that, at Easter or other important times, the king might "wear his crown" and have all his men repeat their oaths of allegiance.  Wearing the crown itself was a performative act, as kings did not usually walk around wearing something heavy, valuable, and awkward on their heads.  When they put it on they were signaling their position and authority.

Even property transfers were often performative.  Someone giving land to a monastery would generally place something on the altar, a book, a staff, even a handful of dirt.  Although scholars once considered such acts a sign of a primitive, illiterate society, in fact the public act, which dozens would witness, is only known about today because it was recorded in writing.  The physical action emphasized the spoken and written words and gave the witnesses something striking to remember.

Although the physical act is usually what we think of by a performative act, documents could play a part.  A big piece of parchment with seals dangling from it could be waved around as its own performative act.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval political acts, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

The Donkey Playing a Harp

 The donkey playing a harp.  Or, if you prefer, the ass playing a lyre.  It's an image you'll find carved on Romanesque churches (eleventh-twelfth centuries) all over western Europe.  What could this possibly mean? you ask.

The image above is from Compostela, in northern Spain, but there are plenty of others.

But where did such a curious image come from?  It goes back to someone named Phaedrus. But even before we get to Phaedrus, remember Aesop's Fables?  You must have been exposed to them at some point.  Short little stories, usually involving animals, with a moral to the story.  Well, Phaedrus, who lived in Rome in the first century AD but may have been a Greek slave, translated Aesop from Greek into Latin and added some fables of his own.  Later generations seem to have added a few bonus fables to the collection.

And there in the Phaedrus material is the donkey playing a harp.  It's a pretty minimal fable.  A donkey sees a harp lying in a field, tries to play it with his hoof, and does sound a lovely note though he's incapable of playing a tune.  Too bad, he thinks.  If someone who knew what he was doing had tried to play the harp, I would have enjoyed it.  There follows some lame moral about the right person coming along at the right time.

The fables of Phaedrus became well known in the west, along with the image of the donkey trying to play the harp with his hoof, unsuccessfully I'm sure.  The image became a "marvel," something weird and outside of people's normal experience.  The donkey and his harp always appears around the edges of major carvings, usually along with images of strange creatures such as showed up in medieval travelers' tales, like centaurs, or griffins, or mermaids, or people with the head of a dog, or the people who lived down near the south pole who were upside down, needing strong toes to hang onto the earth and keep from falling off.  (The Compostela carvings include some of these.)

This is an indication that medieval churches were more than just places to contemplate the saints and one's own salvation.  They were educational centers, centers of ideas, places to marvel at all the amazing things in the world.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval churches, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval and Modern Romance

 I have posted before about medieval romance and epic, the two main fictional forms of literature in the Middle Ages, written in the vernacular rather than Latin from the eleventh or twelfth century on.  These were not always distinct categories, but in general an epic focused primarily on knightly deeds and often ended with a lot of dead bodies, whereas a romance focused more on interpersonal relationships and generally had a happy ending.

There could be plenty of variation. Stories of King Arthur, for example,  could be epic, great struggles against the foe, or a romance, because of the focus on personal betrayal and adultery, which while involving love and other interpersonal relationships did not lead to a happy ending.

Today romance has become more formulaic.  Many have commented that Hallmark Channel original movies, for example, all have the same basic plot.  Young woman from a big city/small town moves to a small town/big city for a Reason.  The Reason is what makes the different ones different from each other (such as they are).  Around Christmas, the Reason is always Christmas-themed.

In the small town/big city, our heroine runs into an old flame/a new handsome guy.  Sparks fly!  After a few bumpy bits, they are happy together, at least for now if not necessarily Ever After.  Time for the closing credits!

Writers of romance books follow pretty much the same formula.  They add originality through the back story of the characters (the TV movies don't have much time for that), have interesting settings (maybe the heroine is from a sheep farm in Montana and moves to a pineapple farm in Hawaii), and may put in such variations as having the heroine be divorced or a widow or more mature.  The bumpy bits can be more complicated, though from the time the heroine and hero meet (or reconnect), even though they aren't yet sure they will end up together (the reader is sure), you won't catch them smooching anyone else.

Contemporary romance, such stories set in the modern era, is the single biggest-selling genre of books in the US.  Some readers just gobble them up, reading maybe one a day.  (They tend to be on the short side, and it's not as if you have to read slowly to follow all the plot twists.)  These stories do especially well through Kindle Unlimited, where readers can borrow and read an unlimited number of Amazon's ebooks a month for only about $12, which is great for voracious readers who will probably not want to read a particular book a second time.

Medieval romance was neither so formulaic nor so focused on the heroine.  One very popular romance was "Guillaume de Dole, ou le Roman de la Rose."  Here the hero, the (fictional) King Conrad, is the chief focus.

The story begins with a swirl of love-making, in which he fully partakes.  But then he hears of the beautiful Lénore and her brother, Guillaume, a great tournament fighter.  He invites Guillaume to fight on his side in the tournament and decides to marry Lénore, even though he's never met her.

Here come the bumpy bits!  Those at court are unhappy and slander Lénore, ending the king's plans.  Now she finally becomes the center of the story and figures out a ruse to trick the slanderers and win the king's heart.  All ends happily.

I've rewritten this story for modern readers, calling it The Sign of the Rose.  (For sale on Amazon and other on-line retailers, ebook or paperback.)

Now I had to add quite a bit to the original story, starting with having the king meet Lénore before he falls in love with her, rather than just doing so from second-hand accounts.  Because the original "Guillaume de Dole" is quite short, I added several subplots, including a possible other suitor for Lénore, and Guillaume's activities at the royal court as more than a tournament fighter.  I also worked in more motivation for the slanderers and expanded the details of the happy ending.

So it doesn't match the modern romance-formula.  As a result, I think those who love reading romance have never really taken it up (it's only ranked 6 thousand and something on Amazon among ebooks of historical romance).  Those who like my wizard stories haven't been sure what to make of a story remarkably short on wizards.  But I like it just fine.

One thing I think "Guillaume de Dole" illustrates is that medieval romance was intended for a male readership as well as a female one.  Modern romances are overwhelmingly bought and read by women, and the authors also are usually women (or men writing under a female pen name).  After all, finding the right person through all the bumpy bits has never been an issue only for women.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

Rois fainéants

 The Merovingians have always held an ambiguous position in medieval history.  On the one hand they are considered the founders of France, because, after all, the Merovingian dynasty ruled the Franks, the people who essentially gave France its name, "land of the Franks," rather than Gaul, which is what the Romans had called it.

On the other hand, they are often derided as "do-nothing kings," rois fainéants, which if said in French in a sneering tone really sounds bad.  And not only did they "do nothing," the account goes, they were barbarians! ethnic Germans, part of the supposed fall of Rome (on which see more here).

So how do we reconcile this image, the glorious founders of France, those who first adopted Christianity, with the concept of crude barbarians who were probably half pagan as well as murderers, to say nothing of being weaklings who sat around not doing anything?  Well, we don't.  Let's break it down.

Clovis, considered first king of France (481-511), did indeed adopt Christianity, doubtless urged on by his Christian wife. He also surely realized that getting along with the bishops, who were major political figures in Gaul at the time, would be a whole lot easier if he were Christian.  Saint Remigius, bishop of Reims, baptized him, as commemorated in the ivory carving seen below, dating to somewhat later.  Clovis is seen here sitting in a baptismal font.  Note the dove coming down with an ampoule of holy oil (used to consecrate kings).

 

The bishops of Reims never forgot this glorious moment.  From the tenth century or so on, most French kings were crowned at Reims, in honor to Clovis and tradition.  If one visits the thirteenth-century cathedral of Reims today (well worth a visit), one can see a plaque marking the spot where the baptism supposedly happened.

The Merovingians were a lively bunch.  Clovis's descendants all had it firmly in their minds that anyone descended from him ought to be king, and if Brother stood in the way, well, that was too bad for Brother.  Accounts from the sixth and seventh centuries are full of murders, poisonings, people hustled off to join a monastery whether they wanted to or not, people sent off on pilgrimage whether they wanted to go or not, betrayals, plots, and lots of wicked women.  Someone should make a mini-series out of it.  It would put Game of Thrones to shame.

And yet abruptly the accounts change.  According to Einhard, writing in Charlemagne's court in the early ninth century, two generations after the Merovingian dynasty ended in 751, these active, blood-thirsty kings, who often had multiple wives and concubines (and who founded and supported monasteries), were instead rois fainéants, weaklings who were cognitively impaired and had lost all their wealth on top of it.

Einhard describes them as having long hair and dangly beards, sitting on the throne with no idea what was going on, repeating whatever they were told to say by the mayor of the palace, that is the head of palace activities (we would say "chief of staff").  By a bizarre coincidence, Charlemagne's ancestors were mayors of the palace.

The Merovingian kings, Einhard continued, were driven around in ox carts, like peasants, because they were too feeble to ride a horse.  All they had was a single manor to call their own.  If it weren't for the kindly mayors of the palace, he indicated, they would have perished long since.  And it was almost an act of mercy, he suggested, for Pippin, Charlemagne's father, last mayor of the palace, to depose the last Merovingian king and make himself king instead.

For almost 1200 years historians have believed Einhard.

All of a sudden his creating the image of weakling kings makes a lot more sense.  The Merovingians had been kings of the Franks for three centuries before 751, appreciably longer than the US has existed.  The dynasty of Pippin and Charlemagne, the Carolingians, had to find a justification for deposing them.  Indeed, during the two generations between Pippin taking the throne and Einhard writing about it, royal accounts did not mention the Merovingians at all.  The deposition was too horrible to talk about.  Although Einhard claimed the pope approved the deposition, papal accounts from the 750s record nothing of the kind.

It was a lot better to suggest a confused old man (the last Merovingian) being "put out of his misery" by being sent to a monastery, and the mayor of the palace patriotically stepping up to be crowned because somebody had to do it, than to admit that the Carolingians were usurpers who had staged a coup.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval kings, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Healthy Living and Eating

 Don't get me wrong.  I prefer to eat "healthy" foods.  Lots of fruits and vegetables every day and a minimum amount of the kind of packaged foods where they have to print the ingredients very tiny because there are so many of them that otherwise they wouldn't all fit on the label.  When all you could buy in the store was "WonderTop" bread, we made our own.  It's been years since I had an Oreo (TM).

 

But there's a reason that a lot of food has all those ingredients, as food companies have sought to make their products taste better, to last longer, be more attractive in appearance, and in many cases even include nutritious additions.  Medieval people did not eat processed foods at all in the way we think of processed food, and yet most who survived the ills of childhood did not make it out of their 50s (see more here on medieval life expectancy).

A few years back I had to have eye surgery for a detached retina.  Joking with the surgeon beforehand, I said, "You mean I couldn't clear this up with healthful exercise and a vegan diet?"  Quite disturbed by the question (and probably not realizing I was joking, surgeons are serious people), he told me this wouldn't do the trick.  And yet these days some people at least seem convinced that if we lived and ate like medieval peasants, we would have a long and healthy life.

(Fun fact:  I would have been blind as a bat in the Middle Ages.)

Medieval peasants certainly ate a plant-based diet.  During the summer, they had plenty of fruits and vegetables, though without refrigeration or trucks bringing fresh food from Mexico or California's Central Valley, in the winter vegetables were mostly limited to root crops like onions or turnips and dried beans and peas.  Bread constituted the principal source of calories.  Eggs and cheese were the principal source of protein, along with an occasional fish if one lived along the sea or a river.

Interestingly, meat was considered a health food.  If someone was sick, it seemed appropriate to give them red meat.  Monks, who normally ate a peasant diet, were fed beef broth in the infirmary.  A common accusation against a monastery considered decadent was that most of the monks became "sick" every week.  (Whee! Time for beef broth!)

How about the healthful exercise?  Everybody got far more exercise than most of us do, even those who work out at the gym for an hour every day.  Aristocrats were fairly constantly on the move, and that meant riding.  As anyone who has been on horseback will tell you, riding is a lot more energetic an activity than sitting in a car, even though the horse is doing most of the work.  If you didn't have a horse, you walked, often miles a day.  Peasants would wrestle their animals or their plows around all day.  A little exercise is great, but 12 hours a day is going to wear your body out fast.

I'm still not going to start eating Oreos, but I like having milk (full of calcium) available year round, fortified with vitamin D, and I like being able to get fresh fruits and vegetables all the time.  I exercise a half hour to an hour a day, but it's more likely to be walking than heaving hay bales up into the loft.  I've already made it out of my 50s.  Don't want to take any chances.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

The Future of American Medieval Studies - Part 2

 As I discussed in my previous post, there are disadvantages to being an American when studying the Middle Ages, but also advantages, in that one is not trapped in a national history, taught since first grade, designed to instill patriotism.  Today I want to continue the discussion of where medieval studies might go next, because every academic field is influenced by the wider world.

Right now a lot of people are noticing that white men of European ancestry and (probable) Christian heritage are not automatically superior beings, before whom all others must give way.  Sure, some are great, but so are a lot of people who don't fall under this heading.  Because such men were (for the most part) the rulers who created the Glorious Fatherland (or Motherland) during the Middle Ages, it is harder for European scholars to break away from their dominance than it has been for Americans.

Women's studies was the first to point a new direction.  It's not new any more, it's been fifty years, but as young women started studying the Middle Ages they started asking where all the women were and were not ready to hear that medieval women were passive and silent and so rarely mentioned that it wasn't even worth thinking about them.  As in fact the women (and men) discovered when they started looking for women in medieval records, they were all over the place, active and with a lot to say.

The initial wave of women's studies was full of what I call the Fabulous Females trope, books and articles which basically said, Look!  Girls could do things too!  Who knew?  Here are a few wildly unusual women to prove something or other (cue Joan of Arc).

More recently studies of women in the Middle Ages have primarily focused on gender, that is what was considered proper masculine or feminine behavior, and on the ways that women were able to resist and negotiate their way through a system in which they had far fewer what we would call rights than men did--remembering that most lower status males didn't have such rights either.

Interestingly, scholars have now come to appreciate the high position women held in theological thought, even though they couldn't become bishops (or popes) or university professors (or even university students).  Because they were weaker than men physically, at least on average, many theologians said that their suffering and penance and fasting was more meritorious than that of men, because they weren't as well equipped to endure it.  Many noted that the opening of the Bible (Genesis) has God create both men and women in His own image.  God's creation of Eve from Adam's rib in the next chapter was seen as indicating that men and women were meant to stand side by side, rather than having one dominate the other, as Eve being made either from a piece of skull or a foot bone might have suggested.

Just as those studying medieval women found much to look at when earlier scholars had assumed there was nothing there, so other medievalists were able to study other groups that had been overlooked as less interesting or less worthy of analysis.  Peasants, the urban poor, minority groups (like Jews and Muslims), and queer people have begun to receive proper scholarly attention.  Saints, once dismissed as superstitious nonsense, began attracting scholars interested in the varieties of religious experience.

Medieval history has also expanded geographically.  In the US medieval studies initially focused on England, which after all is the source of our principal language and the inspiration for many of our laws.  But Americans soon crossed the Channel to study medieval France and Flanders.  Art historians plunged into the Italian Renaissance and (mostly) recognized that their period was part of the Middle Ages.  Germany was a little slower to find a place in American medieval studies, in part because Americans were less likely to know German than French, and Spain was slower still, both because knowing Arabic would really help and because of Spain's reputation as a land of superstition and inquisition, the so-called Black Legend.

But more recently medievalists have really branched out, taking in eastern Europe and the Middle East, included North Africa in studies of Europe's Mediterranean coastlands, and also ventured to other parts of the globe.  Here, rather than doing some simplistic compare-and-contrast of Charlemagne's empire and Great Zimbabwe, scholars have tended to concentrate on trade routes (like the Silk Road) and cultural influences, such as how a bronze Chinese lion ended up next to the church of San Marco in Venice.

Meanwhile medieval studies has become increasingly multi-disciplinary.  It has been for a century, in that medievalists have recognized that we really cannot study the political or legal history of the Middle Ages without also knowing something about its church history, its art history, or its literature.

So just as women, minorities, global society, and people with different orientations and belief systems have become important in contemporary thought, so too these issues have influenced medieval studies.  But wait!  The Middle Ages was patriarchal, aggressively Christian, racist, oligarchic, and colonial (as in trying to settle western communities in the Middle East), and society encouraged elite young men to learn violence.  How can we love the Middle Ages when they were like that?

Well, maybe there is value in studying people who are not like us, or at least not like what we would like to be.  I've studied knights and saints, and I would never have been a knight and don't believe in the saints.  But I do believe in people, and it's always worth asking what people took seriously, even if it doesn't match one's own preferences.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on approaches to the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.