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.