Six Hundred Posts

 So I started this blog over eleven years ago, and as of today I'm making my 600th post.  In honor of this milestone, I'd like to make a few comments about medieval social history and fantasy literature, the blog's two (related) topics.

Most fantasy these days is set in some version of a society like that of Europe in the Middle Ages.  Exactly where in that thousand-year period is not always particularly clear, but hey, this is an imaginary past, with magic and wonders, set in an imaginary landscape, so we don't need to get all technical.  Do we?

How did fantasy and the Middle Ages get associated?  Part of it is fantasy's roots in fairy tales and folk tales, which get bawdlerized into sweet pictures of princesses in tall, pointed caps from which a veil is suspended.  Some of these tales (like "Puss in Boots") were written in the early modern period, which from a modern perspective doesn't look that different from the medieval period.  Some (like those of the Brothers Grimm), though written later, depict a country life not wildly different from that of half a millennium earlier.  In some ways the Middle Ages persisted until the railroad and the telegraph transformed transportation and communication in the nineteenth century.

More specifically, all modern fantasy has been inspired by JRR Tolkien, who was a medievalist who specialized in medieval literature.  He was able to keep much of the ethos of that literature while creating characters modern readers could identify with.  Readers loved it and wanted more.

Modern industrialization has taken all the glory out of most work, and with most household objects made by strangers on the other side of the globe, we have lost connection to our own possessions.  The Middle Ages (or at least an imagined version of that time) is seen as a period in which we made our own excellent objects, grew our own food, were close to the natural world, and didn't get stuck in highway traffic.  Plus glory!

 Medieval literature was full of glorious wars and celebrations of bravery.  Right up through WW I a lot of people still believed in this, at least in Europe, though the American Civil War, with its deaths and maimings and friends turned against each other, had reduced American enthusiasm for wars with cannons and rifles.  Strikingly, fantasy battles never have cannons and rifles.  It's mostly swords, where if you kill someone it's an up-close-and-personal event, where you could get killed yourself just as easily.

Cannons reached the real Middle Ages in the fourteenth century, transforming warfare, as foot soldiers became valuable as cannon fodder (the enemy cannons shoot, kill the foot soldiers, and then you quick charge before they can reload).  Castles also changed.  But no one wants to read about this.

Instead most fantasy today is set in a society that looks a lot like Tudor-Stuart or Elizabethan England (sixteenth century), but with twelfth- and thirteenth-century weaponry.  Our heroes wander through a world with few peasants (Tolkien didn't have peasants either, though the hobbits were sturdy yeomen).  There are castles and kingdoms, lots of kingdoms, often just a few weeks' walk apart.  In fact, medieval kingdoms were a lot larger than that, and the division of Germany into multiple little principalities was a later phenomenon.

While I'm on the topic of things that bug me about modern fantasy, every crossroads village in these stories has a tavern, serving brown stew (with meat, probably savory, but certainly brown), and full of ruffians and ne'er do wells (that is, the tavern is full of them, not the stew).  In fact a medieval tavern or brew house was there for the locals, so everyone didn't have to brew their own beer, and was connected with the village bakery, which served a similar purpose.  It might provide food, but it was almost certainly vegetarian.

Then there's fantasy religion.  Some stories have no religion at all, which seems wildly unlikely.  All societies have some version of religion.  More likely, there's some organized religion that appears to be a weird mashup of the modern evangelical movement and stereotypes of the Spanish Inquisition.  Priests tend to be scheming hypocrites who don't actually believe what they preach, or fanatics.  Sorry, I know too much about the history of medieval religion to be able to reconcile this with what is supposed to be (fictional) events taking place in a historically-based medieval society.

But it's fantasy! Yes, I know.  My main "Yurt" fantasy series is set in something that's like what the nineteenth century would have been like if there had been no Protestant Reformation, no American hemisphere to be discovered, no French Revolution, no Industrial Revolution (with magic filling the latter gap).  But with religion.  And magic.  And no gunpowder.  When one is making up a society, one can make up all sorts of things (my sister and I once made up an island society where the people were marsupials).  But if you want readers to think you're inspired by the Middle Ages, change things around on purpose, not because you don't know better.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025 

Holy Week

It's Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week for Christians, the most important religious period in the medieval calendar.  (The Orthodox church still calculates religious holidays based on the Julian calendar, so theirs comes along a little later.)

As I have noted before, Easter tends to be a relatively minor event in the modern world compared to Christmas, more of an excuse to celebrate Mardi Gras with raucous parties, buy a new spring outfit, and justify eating king crab (seafood for Lent!) than a real religious holiday.  Although around Christmas some people insist that one say "Merry Christmas" rather than "Happy Holidays," and some radio stations blast nothing but Christmas songs for a month, Easter doesn't get nearly as much attention.  No one goes around insisting that everyone say "Happy Easter," recording artists don't all feel compelled to issue an Easter album, and no radio stations play "Peter Cottontail" for a solid month.  And let's just say that chocolate eggs and bunnies are not a big feature of the Gospels.

But Easter was crucial for medieval people, the celebration of Christ's resurrection just at the time when spring itself is rising from the barren days of winter.  The forty days of Lent, the period leading up to Easter, were supposed to be devoted to prayer and fasting (sorry, king crab really doesn't count as fasting).  And you really weren't supposed to have a blow-out party (Mardi Gras) just before Lent started, to get in the mood.  Lent fell at a time when last fall's harvest bounty was starting to run out, which made it easier to give up certain things.

The days of Holy Week were tied to events in Jesus's last week of life as a mere mortal, as outlined in the Bible.  Palm Sunday (which is today) recalled Jesus entering Jerusalem, riding a donkey, greeted by crowds waving palm fronds.  He planned to celebrate Passover there, which is why Easter moves around with the moon, as Passover does.  In the Middle Ages, as now, churches tried to get hold of palm fronds to decorate the churches for Palm Sunday.  Obviously this was a lot easier for churches closer to the Mediterranean.

Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week didn't have a whole lot attached to them, but Wednesday was (and is) Ash Wednesday, a day for sorrowful penitence for all the things you did wrong during the last year and for confession of sins.  Ashes were rubbed on a person's forehead as a mark of penitence.  If last year's palm fronds were available, they were burned to make the ashes (but any ashes would do).

Thursday of Holy Week was Maundy Thursday.  In the Bible, Jesus washed people's feet, demonstrating his humility and service.  Washing feet frequently was a necessity in the ancient Near East, where people walked around on dusty streets in open sandals.  Medieval monasteries had poor people lined up to come in and get their feet washed.

Thursday was also the Last Supper in the Bible, when Jesus encouraged his disciples to eat and drink in his memory, the origin of communion.  Fun fact:  in the cathedral of Cusco, Peru, a painting of the Last Supper shows Jesus and his disciples with a guinea pig on a platter, because guinea pig is a celebratory dish in the Andes.

Friday of course was Good Friday.  Because it commemorates the Crucifixion, I used to be bothered by the term "good," thinking "bad" was a better description.  But it was considered good because Christ's sacrifice led to humans being redeemed.  For medieval theologians, everyone went to hell before this, and Jesus spent the time he was dead rounding up all the Old Testament patriarchs and getting them out of hell and into heaven.

Easter of course was the culmination of Holy Week, the celebration of the Resurrection.  Monasteries would put on a little play, where monks would dress up as the women who came to Jesus's tomb early Sunday morning, only to be told, "He is risen."  Easter service was the one church service a year that everyone was expected to attend.  In the late Roman Empire, all baptisms took place on Easter, though in the Middle Ages they might take place at any time.  Easter was also the time to start eating big meals again after the privations of Lent.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

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

Age of Faith?

The Middle Ages is often characterized as an Age of Faith.  It's not entirely clear what this term is supposed to mean, but the assumption appears to be that everyone in the Middle Ages was a devout Christian, living in some odd combination of the stereotypical view of modern evangelical Christians and the Monty Python version of the Spanish Inquisition.

But this vision is false.  By far the majority of the medieval population was at least nominally Christian, as is also the case today in the US and the UK, but this did not mean that their Christianity was anything simple, or that its church enforced certain beliefs on everyone.

To begin, for most of the Middle Ages no one really knew or cared what most of the population believed.  There were no parish churches in rural villages before the twelfth century, so although it was expected that people would come into town to have new babies baptized, church attendance was by no means universal.  Many chronicles took it for granted that the ordinary townspeople and the peasantry would mock the Church and the saints.

One twelfth-century chronicle describes a relic-tour:  the monks needed to rebuild their church and took the relics of their saint on tour, asking for donations wherever they stopped and displayed the relics.  In one town, an ugly crowd approached them, saying, "Ha, if your saint is so powerful, let's see a miracle!"  Then they all laughed.  The monks, terrified, prayed desperately, and to their own shock, as well as that of the crowd, a miracle actually happened (a person healed).

The author of this chronicle was of course trying to demonstrate the power of the saint, but he also assumed that his audience would recognize skeptical townspeople as normal.

There are still plenty of medieval churches scattered across modern Europe, far more than are required for the religious needs of a population now much bigger than the medieval population.  (This is why a number are now ruined or serving other functions, like the theater pictured above.)  But a whole lot of these churches were not set up for the ordinary population, but rather were churches where monks or canons prayed, withdrawn from the world.

If there is one aspect of the "age of faith" vision which is true, it is that far more medieval people entered the church than is the case today.  There are extremely few monasteries in the US or Europe now, but medieval Europe was full of them--and, from the twelfth century on, nunneries for women multiplied as well.  Although these churches did not serve as parish churches, pilgrims and tourists would frequently visit.  It is estimated that perhaps 10% of the male aristocratic population entered the church, even though, of course, there was no "rule," about doing so, and some families sent no sons to the church at all, while others might have everyone convert to the religious life.

The aristocrats and well-to-do merchant families who sent sons to the church produced highly-educated men (and some women) who sought to apply the logic of the ancient Greeks to their own religion.  No one at the time thought the Bible should just be read literally.  It was of course to them the word of God, and therefore it deserved special attention,  but this attention meant having to deal with the contradictions within it (especially between the Old Testament and the New) and the fact that medieval people who considered themselves good Christians were not following Jesus's explicit command to come join him preaching and wandering barefoot around the Sea of Galilee.

So the Bible could certainly be read literally in part (the Old Testament Fathers were real, Jesus's birth and miracles and resurrection were real, and so on), but other parts were to be read morally (urging good behavior), allegorically (so the love poems of the Song of Solomon became a metaphor of Christ's love for His church), or anagogically (so that events of the Old Testament that seemed to make little sense, like Abraham being told to sacrifice his son, were read as prefiguring Christian events, here God sacrificing His Son).

Thus in the supposed Age of Faith, no one worried too much about the majority of the population's rather superficial religion, and the educated leaders of the church devoted themselves to critical analysis of what they sought to believe.

Note:  The Spanish Inquisition began after the Middle Ages were over.  The only time peasant beliefs were a cause for real concern was in southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century, when an Inquisition (not Spanish though) was begun to try to root out the heresy that had been the excuse for the Crusade.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval religion, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Religion as comfort?

These days most people who follow a religion find it comforting.  They take it as reassurance that, as bad as things may be here, a better world awaits.  It also tells them that the universe is not just a series of random events but has an overall plan, or at least direction, even if we can't always recognize the plan.

These days, most Christians assume they will go to heaven when they die.  Studies suggest that most don't even really believe in the devil or in hell.  A lot feel assured that they are saved.

While medieval and modern Christian theology are actually not radically different, the way the religion was perceived and the message it conveyed were very different.  Medieval religion was not comforting.  It was scary.

No one would have tried to comfort someone whose family member had just died by saying they had gone to a "better place."  Instead they would offer to arrange for prayers for the soul of the deceased, to see if they could possibly get them out of purgatory, if not indeed hell.  The liturgy for the dead wasn't sweet songs about passing over to the "other side."  Instead it was the Dies Irae, a poem about the "day of wrath."  Judgment was coming, and everyone was in trouble.

No one would have assumed they were saved.  Instead they would have assumed they were damned.  This was, not surprisingly, very worrying.  Religion did not comfort.  Rather, it provided tools to use against the horrors that it also provided.  But everyone knew how weak these tools were.  Demons roamed the world, seeking the destruction of souls, and even the most holy person was never safe.

One had a better shot at salvation if one were a member of the organized church, as a priest, monk, or nun.  Medieval churches are still thick across Europe, many with very tiny congregations, if any.  But didn't they have a big medieval congregation? you ask.  No, not really.  The churches might minister to the locals, but for an awful lot of them, they primarily served the body of monks or nuns or canons who lived there and spent much of their day in liturgy and prayer. A much larger proportion of the population went into the church than is the case today.

Families who sent their sons (or to a lesser extent daughters) into the church weren't trying to get rid of excess mouths.  They were hoping to have an insider praying for them.  And a lot of people in the church had "converted" (as it was called) to the religious life by their own decision, often against parental wishes.

Protestants tend to think of Jesus as their savior.  Medieval Christians of course assumed that Christ dying on the cross gave them at least a shot at avoiding hell, but they held Him in too much awe to get "personal" about it.  Rather they turned to the saints, who might help them avoid hell, even though they all knew they deserved it.

Note that all these concerns were concerns of the well educated.  It was the uneducated peasant or urban worker who was likely to tell you they didn't believe in religion.  Marx in the nineteenth century called religion the "opiate of the masses," but he was definitely not talking about medieval religion.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on the medieval church and religion, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Superstition

Medievalists don't like to use the term "superstition" when discussing medieval religion.  For one thing, it is always pejorative:  "My religion is good and true, but yours is nothing but superstition."

For another thing, superstition has a very specific meaning.  It means doing certain acts unrelated to the desired outcome, in order to bring about the desired outcome.  Baseball players are notoriously superstitious, as they will acknowledge readily.  Always eating peanuts before an afternoon game, or turning your lucky socks inside out, or twirling the bat twice and tapping it three times are clearly unrelated to whether you will get a pitch you can hit.  This is why it's superstition.

It's possible to make a pigeon superstitious.  Watch until it does a scratch (or other action) in an unusual way.  Quick drop in a food pellet.  Keep watching.  When it does it again, drop in another food pellet.  A few repeats is all it takes.  Now set up the food pellet drop so it's totally random.  The pigeon will keep on doing the unusual scratch all day—and, sooner or later, the pellet will come!

In medieval Christianity, being a good person and praying kept your soul out of Hell.  The actions were clearly related to the desired outcome, so, by definition, it was not superstition.  (Click here for more on medieval belief in miracles.)

In the image above (a capital on a column in the twelfth-century church of Vézelay), a dying rich man (note the bags of money under the bed) has his soul rising from his chest and being seized by a pair of enthusiastic demons, while his wife looks on in horror.

Now a modern person who didn't believe in demons might say, "Hah, nothing but superstition."  But to medieval people, demons were real.  Many claimed to have seen them.  This particular capital illustrated the story of Dives and Lazarus (it's in the New Testament, look it up—Dives is now usually called "the rich man" in modern translations).  The rich man callously turned the poor man from his door and set his dogs on him, but when he died he went to Hell, where his hoarded money did him no good.

Christianity began as a religion preached to the poor and marginal.  In spite of everything, this message was never forgotten in the Middle Ages, any more than now.  A message like this was aimed at rich people within the church hierarchy (like bishops) as well as at rich laymen.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

Medieval fantasy and religion

A great deal of fantasy is set in a vaguely medieval setting.  And yet much of this fantasy leaves out a crucial part of real medieval life:  religion.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a good Catholic, and presumably he did not feel he could properly introduce an imaginary version of the church, especially since "Lord of the Rings" supposedly takes place hundreds of years BC.  George R.R. Martin, who is not a good Catholic, has created his own religions for "The Song of Ice and Fire," all polytheistic, but with organized systems of churches and priests and rituals.

Real medieval fantasy, that is fantastic stories written during the Middle Ages, always included religion.  The authors could not imagine a world without organized Christianity.  People might transform into hawks or see a parade of candles carried by invisible hands, but they still went to church—and worried (often quite appropriately) about going to Hell.

My own fantasy (see more here), set in an alternate version of the Middle Ages, includes organized religion.  It wasn't a deliberate decision; rather, when I started writing about a king in a castle, he logically had a chaplain, a castle priest.  The Christianity of my "Yurt" series will remind a person of medieval Christianity, although it is not a truly accurate depiction.  For one thing, the organized church in these stories has no hierarchy above the level of bishop (no archbishops or popes).  But there are plenty of elements I've taken from real medieval religion, like reliquaries and cranky saints and depictions of Hell.

I always dislike it when fantasy stories that do depict some version of organized religion have all the priests either hypocrites or cunning schemers or foolish and deluded (or all three).  When I made religion a real force in the world of my stories, I had to have at least some priests who were genuinely devout and holy.

Since my stories also have organized wizardry (which of course the real Middle Ages did not), there are lots of opportunities for conflicts between these two institutions and for misunderstandings between people belonging to one or the other.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014