Church of the Sepulchre

 The church of the Sepulchre is one of the holiest spots in Christendom.  This church, located in the old city of Jerusalem, originally built in the fourth century and added to over the centuries, is built over what is believed to have been Jesus's tomb, from which He rose.  It was naturally a holy spot for medieval Europeans, and many churches in the west adopted elements of its style in deliberate imitation.

The church is noted for having a rotunda, with a dome over it, rather than adopting the standard basilica pattern of most early churches, a long central aisle with side aisles on either side, and a crossing perpendicular to the aisles toward the end opposite the main entrance.  The rotunda encircles the site of the tomb.  This circular style was adopted by Charlemagne's palace chapel at Aachen and in the crypts of many other churches.  For example, the early eleventh-century crypt of St.-Bénigne of Dijon has a circular chapel, as seen here.

 There is a real mix of architectural styles in Jerusalem, even before you get into the modern city which is now Israel's capital.  There are buildings whose roots go back to the Hebrew kings, though mostly those have been built over.  There are plenty of structures from when the Holy Land was part of the Hellenistic world (after Alexander the Great had conquered the area), then  buildings dating from the Roman empire, then Byzantine buildings, then Muslim structures built from the seventh century on, then Crusader structures from the twelfth century, and finally Turkish architecture.  The church complex has been influenced by all of these.

Christians from Europe made pilgrimages to the church of the Sepulchre from the time it was built.  Even when Jerusalem was under Muslim control, it was usually possible to visit the Christian holy sites.  Such a trip would be a trip of a lifetime, with the Sepulchre itself the high point, though all of the Holy Land was thick with places mentioned in the Bible.  It was not a trip to be undertaken lightly, as it would probably take a couple of months just to get there, but some went there several times, usually to try to get out of a particularly bad situation, where volunteering to go on pilgrimage would forestall plans to put one to death for one's crimes.

Originally the area had been a stone quarry back under the Hebrew kings, then, once no longer in use as a quarry, it was used as a cemetery, with burials in little caves cut into the quarry walls.  The emperor Hadrian thought it a great place for a Roman temple.  But when the emperor Constantine made Christianity legitimate in the fourth century, he had this temple torn down.  The local Christian community told him that Jesus's (temporary) burial place had been there, and while tearing down the temple a cave tomb was discovered which has been identified as Jesus's ever since.

The circular rotunda was built over the spot.  Further rebuildings were done in the eleventh century, after the church was partially destroyed by the caliph during a period in which the Muslim rulers of the area decided to get rid of both Christian and Jewish holy sites.  Twelfth-century Crusaders rebuilt again, but the present structure has not been radically changed since.

As one of Christendom's most holy sites, all major Christian groups have claims on the church.  It is currently divided up between Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, and Ethiopian Orthodox denominations.  Part of the difficulty of during further renovations is that everyone has to agree.  There is a ladder against one of the upper windows that has been there for three centuries, because the ladder belongs to one group yet is on the part of the church controlled by another, and they cannot agree on moving it.  (Interestingly, it was briefly moved at one point recently, probably by a workman cleaning windows or the like.  Everyone pretended it hadn't happened.)

The church and its complex stand on a site over an acre in size, including numerous other chapels and buildings.  Archaeologists working at the site are discovering much of the site's history.  The spring 2021 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review summarizes recent findings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For more on medieval religion and pilgrimage, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Leprosy

 Before the Covid pandemic, people would often try to understand the horrors of the fourteenth-century Black Death by saying it must have been like AIDS.  Actually, no.  Even though AIDS has, over the last 35 years or so, killed a lot more people than have been killed (so far) by Covid, it's not particularly like the Black Death (on which see more here).

The actual Black Death (first outbreak in medieval Europe in 1347) was very infectious and transformed society abruptly, with people going from infection to death in a very short time, whereas AIDS is not very infectious, requiring contact of bodily fluids, and, now that the medical profession has worked out treatments, not a death sentence.  (Well, life is a death sentence, but we're not going into that right now.)

Actually the Black Death was more like Covid-19, in its abrupt appearance, rapid spread, and impact on all of society.  But we're not going to have a third of our population dead in a few years, as in the fourteenth century, and there actually are treatments and vaccines, which they did not have then.  (Note:  there were no "Black Death Deniers" in 1347.)

AIDS is more like leprosy, in that it infected a fairly small proportion of the population, and those infected were avoided both as (potential) spreaders of infection and as people considered morally as well as physically compromised.

But let's talk about leprosy itself.  The disease appears in the Bible, called "unclean" in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament Jesus cleansed lepers.  Now it's not entirely clear if all these people in ancient times actually had what we now call leprosy, or if some might have had some other skin disease, but DNA tests have shown the bacterial disease we now call leprosy has been around for thousands of years.  It is also now called Hansen's disease, after the Norwegian doctor Hansen, who in the late nineteenth century first identified the bacterium that causes it.

As a bacterial disease, it can be cured with modern antibiotics, but there was no cure before the mid-twentieth century, and it is still fairly prevalent in some parts of the world, especially India.  The disease attacks the skin and the nerves, so that the infected person may not notice they have wounds, leading to loss of digits especially.  Someone with discolored skin, missing fingers, and maybe shuffling along half blind was frightening.  (Leprosy often infects the eyes.)

Medieval people both feared and pitied lepers.  Although leprosy was (and is) hard to catch, medieval people didn't want to take chances.  Thus lepers were isolated and were supposed to avoid the general population, ringing a bell if they had to go somewhere, to warn people to get out of their way.  The "unclean" of the Bible gave lepers a moral and social stigma, so they were not just frightening but despicable.  The disease has always spread more easily among those living very close together, especially the poor, and encampments of outcasts were "unclean" in the full sense of the word.

But medieval people also pitied lepers and wanted to be Christ-like and, if not actually cleanse them (heal them completely), at least help them.  Just as many hospitals were established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hundreds of leper-houses were set up, essentially sanitariums where lepers would live isolated but properly taken care of.  These were called Lazarus houses, due to the belief that Lazarus, who Jesus brings back from the dead in the Bible, had died of leprosy.  (The Bible doesn't actually say he was a leper, but it's a good story.)

Fun fact:  The abbey of Fontevraud had a leper-house associated with it in the twelfth century, called appropriately St.-Lazare.  It has been remodeled into a luxury hotel.  I bet the Americans who stay there have no idea.  The Paris train station St.-Lazare is located on the site of a medieval leper house.

Leprosy reached the Pacific islands in the nineteenth century.  A leper colony was established on the island of Molokai in the Hawaiian islands, on a lava beach at the bottom of steep cliffs.  Lepers were rowed to nearby, pushed overboard and told to swim to shore.  A Catholic priest, Damien De Veuster, took care of them until he finally caught leprosy himself and died.  He has now been canonized as Saint Damien.  The lepers were there until the later twentieth century, when they were finally cured, though some stayed on at the colony, which had been their home for so long.  The Molokai tourist bureau offered tourists a chance to ride a donkey down the very steep cliff to visit the lepers.  (And they wonder why their island has no high-rise hotels.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Cider

 One of the treats of fall is cider.  Cider is made from raw apples, pressed to get out the juice, as opposed to apple juice, which is made by cooking up apples and straining out the solids to just have the juice.  Cider was also a favorite fall beverage in medieval Europe.

In fact, because apples then tended to be fairly small and sour by our standards (no Honeycrisp), cider was one of the main ways to get the goodness out of apples.  One crushed the apples, leaving core and peel behind along with the pulverized fruit (which could be then fed to the livestock or used for fertilizer).

 

Apples are not native to the New World, but Europeans brought them over.  The semi-legendary Johnny Appleseed grew up around his family's cider mill in the colonial era, and he thought it a shame that all those seeds went to waste,.  And thus he headed west with lots of seeds, figuring that if he planted them, they'd grow into trees, and as settlers moved west they'd be delighted to discover orchards already planted.  The village of Apple Creek, Ohio, is so named because indeed settlers at the beginning of the nineteenth century found many wild apple trees, attributed to ol' Johnny.

Now planting apple seeds is not necessarily a good way to get good apples.  Every seed is the result of a cross, and some of those crosses are a whole lot better than others.  (A wild apple tree grew in our back yard.  The apples were enormous, so you only needed one or two for a pie, but they were so tart you needed a whole lot of sugar.)  Modern varieties are proliferated strictly by grafting branches of the kind of apple you want onto some other apple tree's root stock.

At any rate, for many years, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, cider was a good way to use "drops," apples that had fallen and were probably bruised, as opposed to the perfect-looking ones that were picked.  These days most cider however is made from picked apples, because of understandable concern that drops might have picked up undesirable germs.  Cider made from drops is required to be pasteurized.

But there is nothing like the taste of good raw cider.  The downside is that it will ferment fairly quickly, especially if it cannot be kept refrigerated, an obvious challenge in the Middle Ages.  (Sometimes commercial cider will have potassium sorbate added to keep it from fermenting.  This is an abomination before the Lord.)  But that was fine!  Medieval people found "hard" cider a refreshing alternative to beer.

(A high school friend decided to secretly make her own hard cider. In those days cider came in glass bottles.  She hid a gallon of raw cider in her clothes closet, the lid screwed on tight.  The result, as they say, was not a pretty sight.)

These days in Britain "cider" means hard cider.  It has been pasteurized to stop the fermentation before the cider turns to vinegar (medieval cooks used cider vinegar is various dishes).  They also have hard pear cider, called perry.  But for Americans fresh (or "sweet") apple cider is a delicious taste of fall.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Medieval jewelry

 Without easy access to African diamond mines, Asian pearl fisheries, and the like (if these even existed then, which they didn't), medieval people had far fewer jewels accessible than do modern westerners, who can walk into a jewelry store and pick something out.  If you like, you can even pay heed to the Diamond Sellers of America (or whatever they're called) and spend six months' salary on an engagement ring.

But medieval people valued jewelry and precious metals just as much as we do, for a combination of their beauty and their rarity.  They had gold and silver but in small amounts, the silver mostly from German mines, and a lot of it old, constantly reused material that went back to the Romans.  Coins were officially silver, though there was always a certain amount of "baser" metal mixed in.  Gold, valued more than silver then as now because it doesn't tarnish, was used for jewelry but rarely for coins.

We tend to think of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, but there are a lot of other jewels out there, a lot of which medieval people valued.  You don't hear as much these days about tourmaline, beryls, chalcedony, peridot, and carbuncles, but these are perfectly good kinds of jewels.  For that matter, carefully cut colored class made a nice jewel equivalent (and still does).

Jewels were worn decoratively by the very rich (as they still are), by both men and women.  Rings were highly valued, both as signs of display and as gifts.  We treat rings today as symbols exchanged between engaged or married couples, but they were also given in the Middle Ages to friends, to faithful followers, and to people who performed a special service.  Jewels could also be made into necklaces, but jeweled rings and brooches were more common, because you needed far fewer stones.

Jewels as signs of prestige of course decorated crowns and diadems.  In the stories, jewels were set into the swords of the elite, but this seems very unlikely.  Every piece of jewelry was of course unique, being hand-crafted from whatever stone or stones the jeweler had to work with.

Both precious metals and precious gems were used to honor God and the saints.  An exceptionally fine Gospel book would be decorated with images using thin layers of gold leaf.  Reliquaries would be decorated with jewels.  As I have discussed before, poverty in emulation of the humility of Christ was considered (potentially) holy, but when it came to glorifying the King of Kings, medieval people didn't hold back.

Reliquaries were embossed with gold and silver, as in this arm reliquary, and precious stones adorned them.  In the post-medieval period, a lot of reliquaries were robbed of their jewels or were melted down for their gold and silver, but we still have some of them in more or less pristine form.

These days churches have gone in a much simpler look, but in the Middle Ages they were meant to take your breath away with their beauty and decoration, including statues, paintings, and jeweled reliquaries.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Dune and fantasy

There's a new movie out based on the novel "Dune," by Frank Herbert, so today I'm going to discuss that book's impact on the broader science fiction and fantasy world.  (The movie has the good sense to stick closely to the book and has sought to get the look right, but this post is about the book.  It's number 1 bestseller in the Kindle store on Amazon, so I'm not the only person interested.)

The book was published in 1965, and although it's hard to imagine that it would have had trouble finding a publisher, given that it's sold literally millions of copies world-wide, at the time it seemed too long, too complex, and too weird for the regular SF publishers.  It was published eventually by a small company whose primary business was publishing automobile repair manuals.  But the fans found it and it took off.

Officially it's science fiction.  People are bopping around the galaxy in space ships, and it's supposedly set thousands of years in the future.  (You can tell SF from fantasy because the former has space ships, the latter has wizards and/or dragons.  SF is set in an imagined future, fantasy an imagined past.)  Fantasy as a genre didn't really exist as a genre in the 1960s, but at almost exactly the same time as "Dune" came out, J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" was published in paperback by Ace (it had been published in hardcover a decade earlier.)

(Ace was taking advantage of a loophole in the then copyright laws, and the situation was messy for a while, but we won't talk about that now.)

Nobody quite knew at first what to do with "Lord of the Rings."  One eminent reviewer called it "super science fiction."  But fans loved it, and the genre took off as well as the books.

But modern fantasy is not just the heir of "Lord of the Rings."  It's also the heir of "Dune."  Standard in an awful lot of fantasy these days is a prophecy about a Chosen One, visions, clashes between noble ruling Houses, abrupt betrayals, multi-generational secret plans, free people roaming in the wild lands beyond civilization, and a young person trying to make his or her own way in a dangerous world s/he doesn't even fully understand.  This is all right there in "Dune."  Pretty much none of it is in "Lord of the Rings."

Although Frodo was shown as a youth in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, in the books he's middle aged.  The epic battles are far smaller in the books than the movies.  There are no political clashes between ruling houses in Tolkien's world, almost no prophecies, no wild and free people (orcs don't count, because they're bad).  It's about a quest to destroy an artifact of absolute power.  It's set in a more or less medieval world, though they have a number of New World plants, including potatoes and tobacco.

In "Dune," projectile weapons and computers were banned centuries ago, so although they have a lot of advanced technology, they still fight with knives and swords, increasing the medieval feel.

George Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, which begins with "A Game of Thrones," has a lot of the "Dune" tropes, including the wild and free people north of the Wall (plus Dothraki), betrayals, sword fights, clashes between noble Houses, epic battles, and young people trying to find their way.  But it's unabashedly fantasy, not science fiction.  Also unabashed fantasy is Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, that follows "Dune" with a secret society of women with mystic powers who are trying to find The One who was prophesied.

"Dune" of course also heavily influenced science fiction.  The field decided it was fine to have long, complicated books, not just paperbacks less than 150 pages long.  "Dune" also influenced movies long before a decent movie was made of it.  Think about Star Wars, beginning on a desert planet (like Arrakis in "Dune"), a young person who discovers he has mystic powers, fighting with swords (though they are called light sabers).  But Star Wars had alien sentient species, whereas "Dune," like modern fantasy, is all humans all the time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For my own version of fantasy with clashing noble houses, young people finding their way in a dangerous world, betrayals, and dragons (plus some Norse legend), see Shadow of the Wanderers, available both as an ebook and a paperback from Amazon and other on-line sellers.