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.

 

The martyrs of Lyon

 Sanctity is constantly redefined.  What is holy to one group of people in one place will not seem holy at all to others in another time or place.  Think about, even today, the difference between the plain interior of a Presbyterian church, where nothing is supposed to interfere with the contemplation of God, and the ornate decoration of a Catholic church, where the decoration is done to glorify God.

 

(The above is a chapel in Peru.  Different Presbyterian and different Catholic churches will of course differ from each other as well.)

 Similarly, the role of saints did not stay the same throughout the Middle Ages.  Saints, present in their relics, ready to help (or punish) the deserving (or the wicked), now seem like a standard feature of medieval Christianity, but it was not always that way.

The martyrs of Lyon are a good example of the evolving role of the saints.  Supposedly in the year 177 AD a whole group of Christians were martyred in Lyon (traditionally forty-eight of them).  Lyon was a major Roman provincial capital in what is now France, over toward the east side, about three-quarters of the way down.  It's still a major French city.

The emperors of the first few centuries AD were noted for trying to stop the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and there are numerous stories of Christians put to death for refusing to give up their faith and subscribe to Roman state paganism by sacrificing to Jove (Jupiter).  The Lyon martyrs all refused to denounce Christianity and were, it was said in the fourth century, put to death.  Enough Christians escaped to tell the sad story.

So much for the original account.  But this story lacked relics, which by the late fifth century were becoming a part of the stories of most saints.  Christianity was now widely tolerated, and the Christians of Lyon had to explain why, when other cities were discovering the remains of their Christian martyrs, they had nothing beyond the memory.  They explained that when their martyrs were killed, the bodies were burned, and their ashes were dumped in the river

A hundred years later, in the sixth century, things had changed again.  Christianity was now the official religion of the Empire, and saints were widely revered, not just as holy people worthy of remembrance but as figures still active in the present.  Now the Christians of Lyon not only said they had the relics of their martyrs, but they had always had them.  The surviving Christians of 177 were said to have gone downstream, miraculously located the water-soaked ashes, and reverently brought them back to be set in a fitting memorial.  And the martyrs, who had been nameless in the original account, now had names.

Some of the names might seem a little odd to us, such as Rhône River (the river into which the ashes were dumped), or Mature, or Maternal, or Bibles, or Fourth, or October.  They could have originally been nicknames or descriptors, but by the sixth century they were the martyrs' names.  A church was erected to honor them, complete with their  ashes.

We may chuckle now over this story, but for the sixth-century Christians of Lyon, in a time when other churches around Gaul were  finding and honoring the remains of their local martyrs, it was important that the (more or less) historically attested martyrs of their own past be properly acknowledged and revered.  After all, they worked miracles!

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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