Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Medieval mystery stories

 Medieval literature is the ancestor of much of modern literature.  Fantasy, of course, began in the Middle Ages:  knights and nobles having adventures with a strong admixture of the marvelous or supernatural.  Romance as a literary genre isn't quite as closely tied to its medieval roots, but the twelfth century was as eager as the twentieth to celebrate the power of love.  A lot of stories, like the "Guillaume de Dôle" tale I retold as the novel The Sign of the Rose, involve couples falling in love and marrying.

 


How about the mystery genre?  That has a lot less medieval precedent.  There is  nothing that could be considered a "whodunnit" in medieval literature. no amateur detective trying to figure out who the killer is before the killer can strike again.  Sure, a lot of people ended up dead in medieval literature, but it was usually pretty obvious who the killer was -- often the hero.  (The butler never did it.)

Now a novel in the mystery genre is actually a comedy.  This may sound strange on the face of it, how can something be a comedy that starts out (by the second chapter anyway) with a dead body?  Well, for the Greeks (who invented the categories of comedy and tragedy) a comedy has a happy ending, with problems solved.

A mystery story involves somebody being murdered, but by the end the evil murderer has been identified and caught, and the amateur detective, who doubtless had some scary moments, is triumphant.  Some detective stories are grittier, but the most popular sub-genre is the so-called "cozy" mystery, where there's a dead body but no gory details and lots of nice human interaction and even humor along the way.

Starting in the 1980s, a number of authors decided to rectify the absence of medieval mystery stories by writing some, set in the Middle Ages but using the conventions of the modern mystery story:  a dead body is found, an amateur detective (like a friar) becomes almost accidentally involved, has a few adventures, thinks things through, follows some clues, and emerges with the murderer revealed and brought to justice.

All lots of fun, but obviously improved if the author actually knows some medieval social history.  There's one popular author of medieval mystery stories (who shall remain nameless) who seems to have missed a lot of medieval reality.  In just one story (made into a TV show) our amateur detective hero becomes involved in a case where a noble wedding is held at a monastery (No! a monastery is a place withdrawn from the world, not a party venue); hides from the murderer by blithely dressing up in a dead leper's clothes (No! no medieval person would think this was fine); and visits an abbess who is sitting on her nunnery's front porch, knitting (No! an abbess doesn't just sit outdoors chatting with anyone who comes by, plus knitting wasn't invented yet).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


For more on medieval literature, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment