Cultured Knights

 There are two main stereotypes of medieval knights, one that they were crude and violent, the other that they were refined, with a delicate sensibility to the needs of the weak and of women.  Sometimes these two stereotypes are combined, portraying crude knights who hypocritically wanted to portray themselves as chivalrous and refined.

All these versions take as their starting assumption that one could not be both a violent fighter and a cultured person at the same time.  However, there is plenty of evidence that knights, for all their flaws and sinful behavior (including pride and avarice, as depicted below in a twelfth-century carving), were quite cultured in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that military training and sometimes violent behavior (even vicariously as in playing video games) can go together with education and concern for social issues.  Military veterans are found in positions of responsibility throughout our society, many vets go from the military to college, and even thoughtful, caring individuals may occasionally enjoy grabbing the game controller and shooting up the space invaders from Mars.

Twelfth- and thirteenth-century knights were mostly literate, in that they could read even if not necessarily write—and read Latin at that, at least well enough to look over a charter and make sure it said what they intended it to say.  The Cistercian monk Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (depicted below), had not originally intended to go into the church, but he received a superb education in both reading and writing as a day student at a church school in Châtillon, and he was considered one of the great Latin stylists of the twelfth century.

Oaths that knights were expected to take, from the early eleventh century on, stressed protection of the weak, especially churchmen and the poor.  Anyone living at or visiting court (that is, either in the royal household or in the household of a great lord) was expected to be able to display courtly behavior, which stressed good manners, self-control, and proper dress.  By the second half of the twelfth century, the term chevalerie, which had originally just meant good battlefield skills for a mounted warrior, had come to include courtliness (courtoisie).

A late twelfth-century or thirteenth-century knight was also supposed to know how to approach women politely and courteously, even though they had not been defined as part of "the weak" back in the eleventh century.  Playing an instrument, dancing smoothly, composing elegant love-letters were all part of "courting" a lady (note that word again).  Someone who did not wear well-styled clothing or did not keep himself scrupulously clean and sweet-smelling was rejected by the ladies in the romances of the time.

A knight's house was also supposed to be fairly elegant, with tapestries on the walls and nice tablecloths.  Plates and drinking vessels couldn't have bits of yesterday's meal clinging to them.  When you think about how one was supposed to do all this without modern conveniences (for starters, running hot water) you'll realize that this was something knights had to work at deliberately.

And at the same time of course being a knight involved a whole lot of military training, to be able to fight on horseback with lance or sword (and not fall off or injure the horse), to be able to ride long distances and take proper care of one's mount.  Although there were few serious wars in the twelfth century (we aren't up to the Hundred Years' War yet), there were always plenty of local battles and skirmishes, and tournaments (mock battles) could turn violent.  Knights, full of touchy pride, were always turning on their friends in the epics in response to perceived insults.

In spite of all of this violence, the knights themselves, with serious nudges from the church and from the writers of epics and romances, actually wanted to be cultured.  They saw overcoming evil doers and helping the weak as worthy goals.  They did not merely try to fake a façade of refinement.  They wanted to be refined, even if most of the time they didn't measure up.  They would have thought the Man of La Mancha song "The Impossible Dream" was a swell song.

A good book on cultured knights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is by Martin Aurell, The Lettered Knight (Central European University Press, 2017).

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

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

Iceland

 Iceland is the second biggest island in Europe, smaller than Great Britain (home to England, Wales, and Scotland) but bigger than Ireland.  It still speaks something very close to Old Norse, the medieval language of Scandinavia, though of course they have had to come up with new words for things like TVs and trucks, and it is very proud of its Viking heritage.

 One continuity with the Icelanders' Norse past is they do not have last names in our sense.  Eirik Olafsson is son of Olaf.  His son will be surnamed Eiriksson.  The phone book (I expect there wasn't an Old Norse word for phone book) lists people alphabetically by first name.

Europeans have been in Iceland on and off since the ninth and probably the eighth century, some of the first being Celtic hermits, whose desire to get away from it all certainly took them far from human settlements.  Its traditional foundation date however is 874, when settlers from Norway established a permanent colony in what is now the capital of Reykjavik.  The early settlers were mostly Norwegian, bringing with them Celtic slaves they had captured in the islands north of Scotland.

By the tenth century there were enough settlers that they needed a form of governance, and they established the Althing, what might be called a parliament, a system of democratic government.  (As you probably guessed, the word means "all thing," or the thing/process/get-together for everybody.)  Iceland proudly calls its parliament the world's oldest, though the country's current status as an independent republic (now with a President) dates only to the last days of World War II, and for many of the years in between it was under one of the Scandinavian kings (Norway, Sweden, or Denmark).  The Althing is now the legislature for the country.

One of the most important decisions of the medieval Althing, around the year 1000, was to vote to adopt Christianity for the country.  They had been pagan until then, but they'd been visited by missionaries and decided this Christianity stuff made sense.  The Norse gods we now associate with early medieval Scandinavia are now known from stories written in Iceland, but only several centuries after they had all become Christian.

Besides the eddas, the stories of legendary gods, the Icelanders wrote sagas, more or less historical accounts of early settlers.  Many of the stories are about people deciding to kill their relatives.  One might wonder why a community of peaceful sheep farmers and fishermen would be interested in blood-thirsty tales of revenge, but a lot of the sagas seem intended as cautionary tales and examples of how to defuse violence before it gets out of hand, an activity in which women played a major role.

Sheep farming and fishing were indeed the principal activities of these Viking descendants.  Fishing included going after walruses and narwhals in the icy Arctic seas, coming home with ivory equivalents (tusks that could be substituted for elephant tusks), which made excellent trade goods.

One problem with sheep farming is that sheep eat baby trees before they can become established.  Iceland had had plenty of forests when Europeans arrived, but once they were cut down for ships or building, they did not replenish themselves, as new seeds would have had to travel over the ocean.  This had happened back at the end of the Ice Age, but there hadn't been sheep in Iceland then.

(Fun fact:  The word for mutton in Icelandic is the same as the word for meat.  Beef is cow-mutton.  Pork is pig-mutton.  Meat, just as a word, means meat from the sheep unless otherwise specified, because meat from the sheep was what you were going to get.)

A lot of Iceland is also volcanic, not suited for either sheep or forest.  Its volcanoes periodically erupt, releasing clouds that can foul air traffic.  The volcanoes do  fuel hot springs that help keep Reykjavik warmer than you'd expect for its latitude.  Indeed, modern Iceland's power comes almost entirely from hot springs and waterfalls.  Iceland's population is low, less than that of Vermont though it's substantially bigger, less than 10% that of Ireland, an island nearly as big.

It used to be that the cheapest way for Americans to fly to Europe was through Iceland, to Luxembourg.  One would get off the plane in Iceland while it refueled, and the gift shop was right there.  I have a most excellent sweater made of Icelandic wool that I bought there.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

White Archival Gloves

 It might seem self-evident that people should wear white gloves in the archives, to protect the documents from the touch of human fingers.  But medievalists do not wear such gloves, and most archives not only don't require them, but actively try to persuade visitors not to wear them.  Why is this? you say.

 Gloves have distinct disadvantages for handling rare and delicate objects.  For one thing, those white gloves probably have more dirt on them than a pair of recently washed hands.  Perhaps even more importantly, wearing gloves reduces the sensitivity of one's fingers.  The scholar is thus more likely to tear a page in a book just trying to turn to the next page, or to have a document slip from her hands and fall to the floor.  These obviously are bad events.

There is in fact an excellent reason to allow human fingers to touch medieval documents, and that is that most medieval documents were written on parchment, which started life as animal skin.  There are oils in parchment that are the same as the oils naturally occurring in human skin.  The oils can dry out, making parchment brittle, but careful handling by clean fingers can help restore the natural oils.

(This is very much not an invitation to smear olive oil or linseed oil on medieval documents.  And of course one should not be handling documents with hands freshly moisturized by lotions "in new lavender - nutmeg scent.")

So where does the idea come from that archivists should be wearing gloves, along with any scholars in the archives?  It may be partly related to the common expression, "He had to handle the situation with kid gloves," meaning he had to choose his response delicately.  Gloves! and delicacy! all in one phrase.  But of course the people who originated this phrase were not talking about archives.  (Kid gloves are thin, made from the skin of baby goats, as opposed to the horsehide or oxhide gloves used for heavy work.)

But the ultimate source of the belief that white gloves must be worn in the archives is doubtless movies and TV shows.  Just as scientists are always shown in a lab with strange whirling machines, and doctors are shown with white coats and stethoscopes, so librarians and archivists are shown with white gloves, as a quick shorthand to the audience of what kind of professional this is.  We do not need to copy scenes from the movies.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Performative Acts

 One of the new directions in medieval studies is a focus on performative acts.  Like many aspects of medieval studies, once scholars got past "rise of the nation state" about 50 years ago, this focus can seem obvious when one thinks about it, even if one hasn't thought about it before.  But what are "performative acts?" you say.  I'm about to tell you.

Every act done in public (and for that matter some done in private) is at some level a performance.  A good actor isn't just reading the lines of the script but performing, making you believe that he or she is really that person, really feeling the emotion of the situation.  In the same way, a college professor giving a lecture isn't just conveying information.  She or he is also indicating by subtle or not-so-subtle cues that this is authoritative information, and the professor is very well informed on the topic.  The professor stands up in front, wears more formal clothes than the students, and is the one who announces, "It's time to get started."

In the same way, medieval people surrounded their actions with symbols, visual cues, and ceremonies that reinforced what was happening or supposed to happen.  A king would "wear his crown" (as the chronicles put it) several times a year, when he wanted his loyal men to renew their vows to him.  Normally of course a king would not walk around with jewels and metal on his head, but when he did it emphasized his position.  (Queen Elizabeth II of England did not usually wear a crown either, but she did when addressing Parliament.)

The oath of loyalty itself was full of symbols, the loyal man kneeling to indicate subservience, the lord kissing him on both cheeks to indicate that their bond was one of mutual affection and respect, not just one of master and subject.  Someone making a gift to a monastery would not merely say he was giving something but would do so accompanied by many witnesses, to give the act extra significance.

In eleventh-century Anjou and probably elsewhere, serfs were expected to pay a penny a year to their lord of the body (in addition to any rent they might owe to the same or a different lord), and they didn't just pay it, but came on their knees with a rope around their neck and the penny on their head.  This certainly underscored their subservient position (and it's not surprising that serfs tried to buy their way out of this ceremony, offering far more than the penny-a-year was worth monetarily).

And then there was getting one's doctorate degree from the University of Paris.  One stood on the front steps of Notre Dame and answered all philosophical questions anyone could throw (in Latin of course).  Talk about a performance!

We still do performative acts, even though we're not nearly as conscious of doing so as medieval people were.  Weddings, with a bridal white dress, groups of male and female attendants, rings, and a church setting even for people who rarely attend church are certainly conveying much more than that two people have decided to stay together permanently.  Medieval weddings weren't quite the same as ours, but they had comparable ceremony.

Once you start thinking about such things, you'll be startled at how many such performative acts you do yourself.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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