Religious Women

 There were many ways for women to show their religiosity in the Middle Ages. The most obvious of course was by becoming a nun, entering a monastery for women.  Although such nunneries became common in the late Middle Ages, when a large proportion of the nuns had entered the cloister as girls, for much of the Middle Ages such houses were far outnumbered by male monasteries.

In the early and high Middle Ages, most of the nuns did not enter as girls but rather as mature women.  Men too did not always enter as boys; the Cistercian order, for example, was made up primarily of monks who had converted as young men, and many an elderly man decided to improve his chances at heaven by spending his final year or two as a monk.  But there were a whole lot of nuns who had entered the house in middle age, not old age, usually because they were widowed--a common event when women tended to marry much older men.

It was these experienced middle-aged women who tended to become abbess.  At the double-monasteries of the early Middle Ages and of twelfth-century houses like Fontevraud, where a male house and a female house had a single head, the head was always a middle-aged woman.

But how else could a woman be religious?  Nunneries usually followed the same Benedictine Rule as male monasteries, but just as there were houses of male canons, who lived more or less like monks but who also served as priests for their community, there were some houses for canonesses.  Although of course they did not serve as priests, they might take care of people at a hospital.  (Even today, nurses in Britain are called Sister, a reminder of this old function.)

Canonesses lived in a cloistered setting, like nuns, but one could still be a religious woman outside the cloister.  In medieval cities, from the thirteenth century onward, there grew up forms of the religious life for women where the women continued to live in their own houses and do their normal activities but still practice a more contemplative life.  They might have a rule formally endorsed by a bishop and practice chastity as well as meeting regularly for prayer.

But some of these lay sisterhoods did not bother with a formal rule.  They followed a life that combined religiosity in both a public and private setting but took no vows.  From their point of view, they were living like the original apostles as described in the Book of Acts in the Bible.  The Beguines, found primarily in cities of Flanders, sought to help their fellow citizens through good works as well as trying to be fair and honest in their own commercial dealings.  They met regularly to encourage each other and to pray together.

The danger was that, without vows or formal oversight from the church hierarchy, they were considered (at least by the church hierarchy) to be in danger of slipping into heresy.  Some of them did, making up their own versions of religious doctrine--which of course they believed was true Christianity (the bishops disagreed).  Some got into serious trouble and ended up shipped off to real nunneries.  Some were allowed to continue as long as they kept quiet about it.

And then there were the recluses, women who set themselves up in a tiny house build on the outside of a church.  They would of course need the approval of the priest or bishop.  This practice was more frequent before nunneries became common.  The woman in essence was a hermit in her cell, except that she was usually in the middle of town or village, not out in the woods, where everyone agreed (even including the women) females ought not to be by themselves.  Most of these recluses had enough food to live on donated by the pious and regularly attended Mass in the adjoining church.  But in an extreme version the recluse might be walled up in her cell and not leave at all.

These recluses are often referred to as "anchorites" by British historians, although no anchor was involved, and there is no medieval cognate for the term.

Some of ways medieval women showed their religiosity must have been very hard on their bodies.  But as Peter Abelard pointed out in the early twelfth century,  because women's bodies were weaker than men's, their virtue was so much greater in enduring physical privation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


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

Ethiopian Miracles of the Virgin

 Ethiopia, in eastern Africa, has been Christian for longer than most of Europe.  The area was never part of the Roman Empire, but missionaries presumably made their way down there from Egypt, which was in the Empire and became Christian early.

Indeed, there has often been assumed to be a long connection between Ethiopia and Judea/Israel.  The Song of Solomon (love poems supposedly written by King Solomon, father of David, now usually interpreted as expressing Christ's love for His church), speak about his beloved as black and comely, and this is often said to indicate that she was from Ethiopia.  Did the queen of Sheba move to the Middle East from Ethiopia?  Hard to say.

Because Ethiopia was predominantly Christian in the Middle Ages, it had saints and miracle stories, just as Europe did.  And, again like Europe, the most common miracle stories involved the Virgin.  She was Mom, the one who would always love you no matter how bad you were.  God would judge you for your crimes, and Jesus was too awe inspiring to approach for everyday issues (he saved your soul and everyone else's, the church said, isn't that enough of a miracle?) but Mary was right there, even edging out the Holy Ghost as the "real" third member of the Trinity.

Ethiopia's stories of the Virgin, like those in Europe, may seem weird to the modern eye, because someone is very bad yet, because they pray to her, they are saved.  In Europe, for example, one of the most common stories was of a knight on his way to a tournament who stopped to pray to the Virgin and prayed so hard he lost track of time, but no problem! the Virgin put on his armor, rode his horse, and won the tournament.  Because she was wearing his armor, everyone thought it was him, and he won the prize.  In another, a monk rowed across the lake every night to visit his mistress, but he always prayed to the Virgin before going, so when his boat sprang a leak and he drowned, she interceded with God to save his soul.  Mom always will love you!

One of the most common Ethiopian stories, retold and illustrated multiple times, involved a rich lord who was also a cannibal.  (A little dig at the powerful there.)  After eating all his friends and family, he set off to find more people to eat, taking a water skin with him.  Soon he met a dying leper, who begged for a drink.  No way, said the cannibal.  The leper begged in the name of God, in the name of Christ.  No luck.  But then he begged in the name of the Virgin, and the cannibal relented and gave the leper a little water as he finished expiring.  Shortly thereafter, the cannibal too died (not clear why, but let's not spoil the story worrying about it, I doubt that he got sick from eating a dead leper).  The devil was all set to seize his soul, but the Virgin intervened, and he was saved.  Better pay attention when someone asks for something in her name!

Since both Ethiopian and European miracle stories can seem weird to us, maybe our role as historians is to stop trying to make the past fit our idea of what religion and society should properly be like and instead try to understand people for their own sake.

Wendy Belcher of Princeton University is leading a team studying Ethiopian miracles of the Virgin.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

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.

The Future of American Medieval Studies - Part 1

 The Medieval Academy of America (of which I am a Fellow) is coming up on its 100th anniversary, so it seems appropriate to think about the past and future of medieval studies, particularly in the US.  The topic is considered in a number of pieces in the January 2025 issue of Speculum, the Academy's journal.

Americans have both an advantage and a disadvantage compared to Europeans in studying the Middle Ages.  On the one hand, we have to travel thousands of miles to get to most medieval evidence.  Some medieval art, a few bits of architecture (like the Cloisters in Manhattan), and the occasional document are found in the US, but the castles, the churches, the medieval street layouts, and almost all the archives require extensive travel to access.  The saying, "The past is a foreign country" certainly applies.

On the other hand, it is much easier for Americans to try to look at medieval evidence as itself, without having to consciously avoid back-extrapolating from the present to medieval times.  For example, we can study the rule of Henry II of England without having to think about how English property titles were until recently traced back to Henry's time.  We can look across international borders far more easily than, say, the French, who know that the English and the Germans are The Other Guys, national enemies for centuries.

This does not of course mean that American medievalists, like other historians, do not always have presentist issues lurking when they study the past.  Industrialization in the nineteenth century created a backlash where people wanted to pursue and celebrate hand crafts, and such crafts were labeled medieval.  There was also a sense that society had become too coarse, and many dreamed of a bygone age of courtesy and chivalry, identified as medieval.  (I here stifle a snort.)

In the early twentieth century, in the aftermath of World War I, Americans wanted to justify becoming involved in a war fought thousands of miles away.  The justification was western civilization, now identified with Europe, considered to have begun with Greece and Rome, with ideals and institutions that developed during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, culminating of course with American democracy.  The eighteenth-century founders of the United States had all had a classical education and used Athenian democracy, Plato's Republic, and the Roman Senate as models, but now the gaps between the year 1 or so and the present were to be filled in with medieval culture and Christianity.

Western Civ is still with us, though it's less and less likely to be a foundational course for all college students.  In the 1960s everything was supposed to be modern and relevant.  We're going to the moon!  Who wants to worry about "dark times beyond the sea"?  Medieval studies however staged a resurgence in the following decades, due to a combination of Tolkien and a desire for an imagined past full of traditional values, rather than all this disturbing new stuff.

(I realized the 60s were officially over during the Ford administration, when I saw a toothpaste ad, done in sepia tones, of a white haired grandma giving a child in a white nightie baking soda to brush her teeth with.  And at a basin, not a sink.  The advertised toothpaste was said to contain baking soda, just like Grandma used to use.  You would never have seen that half a dozen years earlier.  Mini skirts went out at exactly the same time.)

Most students still get their primary exposure to medieval studies via a Western Civ course, though such courses are more and more being replaced by Global Studies.  Global Studies has its own challenges, like how are we going to cover 10,000 years of the history of an entire planet in 30 weeks?  Initial efforts were awkward, like Western Civ textbooks where all the ancient and medieval history chapters were still there, just shorter, and interleaved with other chapters.  So a chapter on Charlemagne was followed by a chapter on Great Zimbabwe in Africa, and one on the Italian Renaissance by one on the Inca of South America.  Efforts were made to "compare European and Japanese feudalism," feudalism being roughly defined as fortified dwellings and guys with swords, and resulting in unsatisfactory results. The Global Studies folks are still trying to figure out how to do this better.

In spite of minimal academic exposure to the Middle Ages, a lot of young people try to learn about it on their own.  Tolkien, including the "Lord of the Rings" movies, have been a major influence, joined more recently by the "Game of Thrones" shows and George Martin's books.  With or without the admixture of magic,  medieval society looks like one in which the individual can make a difference, and where big issues, beyond paying the electric bill or doing the laundry, can dominate.  In spite of its name, members of the Society for Creative Anachronism try to learn (and cosplay) something fairly close to real medieval culture.

Meanwhile academic medieval studies have pulled away from Western Civ to follow its own direction.  When "dark times across the sea" had been declared irrelevant, medievalists initially responded by emphasizing Rise of the Nation State.  After all, neither ancient Greece's little city-states nor Rome's Empire were a good model for modern nationalism, but Europe's countries of today have clear medieval antecedents.

More recently, medievalists have decided we've said all that's needed to be said about the nation state.  Medieval studies have gone off in all sorts of interesting new directions, like gender, or memory studies, or the history of agriculture, or the relationship of the church and secular society.  Stay tuned as I address this in my next post.

© 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.

Early Medieval Magic

 A lot of modern fantasy literature is set in a vaguely medieval world, but one equipped with working magic.  There are castles, kings, peasants, riders on horseback, and wizards.  (This characterizes my own fiction as well as that of many others.)  But how did the real Middle Ages view magic?

Well, it was different.  For starters, no wizards, no wizards' schools, no magical talents developing within the young person who (maybe) is prophesied to save her people.  Although there might be some practitioners who were more versed in magical knowledge than others, magic was primarily worked by people themselves.  For example, a woman might glue caraway seeds to the insides of her legs in the hope of conceiving a child.

Many churchmen worried about the rituals and incantations that could accompany the caraway seeds (or whatever).  Anything they found worrisome could be promptly labeled paganism, saying it compared to whatever the Romans had been up to before they converted to Christianity.  For example, exchanging gifts on January 1 was declared a pagan practice.

Modern scholars have tended to believe the early medieval priests, saying that the "simple folk" continued to follow pagan practices long after they theoretically became Christian, and that anything called Christian at the time was doubtless just superstition.

But this is an attempt to impose modern ideas of correct religion on people 1500 years in the past.  The magical practices that early medieval lay people attempted to carry out were, to them, part of Christianity, a way to get the attention of God and the saints.  The priests might think they were going about it the wrong way, but they agreed with the underlying premise, that the divine was accessible in times of danger.

For early medieval magic was not something opposed to the church and its teachings (as it is in most modern fantasy stories) but rather something parallel to it.  Its incantations, spells, amulets, potions, and herbal remedies were all intended to access the supernatural.  Wise practitioners might be holy hermits (I'm not talking here about the witch scares of the end of the Middle Ages).  The real fear for priests was that incautious lay people might summon a demon when they thought they were invoking a saint, with predictable consequences.

Indeed, priests were often the source of amulets, that were used to protect against fire, or against violent weather, or against various diseases.  The amulets might be made from plants, or from bones, or have touched a saint's relic, or incorporate a few words from the Bible on a scrap of parchment.  Church councils routinely told priests to stop providing such amulets, an indication that the practice was very common.  After all, who better to help access the supernatural than a priest?

An important part of magic was divination, determining what would be a good direction to follow, or for that matter what was the cause of illness, or if someone was trying to poison you.  If someone was, you really were not supposed to poison them right back, unless of course they deserved it.

Divination could be done at home by interpreting dreams or the roll of the dice or strange signs, or by consulting practitioners with their collections of mouse bones or understanding of what a lightning strike meant.  Early medieval people did not follow the early Roman practice of divination through examining chicken entrails, as they all agreed that was pagan. 

William Klingschirn discusses Merovingian-era magical practices in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on tmedieval religion and society, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.