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.

American Medievalism

 I have blogged before about medievalism, the desire to re-create some aspects of medieval society and culture in the modern world.  A lot of make-quality-crafts-by-hand is explicitly inspired by medieval craftsmen, as of course is the Society for Creative Anachronism, to say nothing of fantasy stories set in a vaguely medieval world.

 

But why is America such a center of medievalism?  What we normally think of as medieval society took place in Europe, three thousand miles (or more) from the American east coast.  Medieval Europe was mostly made up of kingdoms, whereas the U.S. was founded on the premise of We Do Not Have A King.  During the Middle Ages no Europeans (other than the occasional Viking settler) knew the Americas even existed.  Europeans first reached the Americas to stay in 1492, one of the dates often chosen as the end of the Middle Ages.

So why this fascination with medieval Europe by a society so far from it politically, spatially, and temporally?  A big part of it is doubtless a highly romanticized view of a time when (supposedly) love and honor counted, people could make individual decisions without being forced into sameness, when people understood and appreciated their place in society, when objects were lovingly made by hand rather than being cranked out cheaply in a factory, when there were lots of colorful outfits and cool swords and handsome horses.

(You will notice that it is rare to imagine oneself being a peasant.  We all have decided we're knights and princesses.)

But even at the founding of the U.S. there was an attempt to invoke the Middle Ages as a model.  It was seen as a time of at least potential democracy, with things like the Magna Carta and the origins of Parliament, rather than the absolute monarchs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The "manly" knight was considered far better than the dandies of contemporary royal courts.  The cramped (and stinky) cities of  eighteenth-century Europe were compared unfavorably with the supposedly wide-open rural landscape of medieval Europe--just like North America! (supposedly)

One of the chief manifestations of modern American medievalism is the spread of the Renaissance Faire.  Interestingly, it was originally going to be called a Medieval Faire, but sponsors thought the term "medieval" meant oppression and darkness, so the name was quickly changed.  But it never was about the Renaissance.

In spite of its name and often a vaguely Elizabethan look to some of the outfits the performers wear, it is really a celebration of medieval society.  None of the things that marked the real Renaissance appear, such as classical Latin, or gorgeous paintings inspired by Bible stories or by classical mythology, or gunpowder (though one can shoot at an archery range).  One doesn't even get to mimic going into quarantine from the Black Death.  It's true that tournaments featuring riders galloping at each other continued during the Renaissance, but the reenactors you see at a Renaissance Faire are usually wearing lighter weight medieval armor rather than the heavy plate of the sixteenth century (such as seen below).

Medieval scholars are of two minds about all this.  On the one hand, it seems excellent to us that people are seeing the Middle Ages as in some ways admirable, rather than dismissing the era we love to study as dark and backwards and superstitious and disgusting.  On the other hand, we are disturbed when white supremacists try to claim that the Middle Ages is their ideal society (listen up, guys, it was not a utopia of all-white all-Christian people).

There is a new book about American medievalism, called The United States of Medievalism (published by the University of Toronto), edited by Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein.  It is a discussion of all the manifestations of medieval style in American culture, from churches meant to look Gothic to things like Cinderella's Castle in Disney World.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For real medieval social history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval gunpowder

Gunpowder, as I have noted before, came into use in Europe in the fourteenth century, radically changing the face of medieval warfare when it began to be used in cannons.  Cavalry charges, which had been in use since the late eleventh century, were much less effective now that cannon fire could decimate their ranks.  Castles, which had been nearly impossible to capture since the early twelfth century, could be taken if enough cannons shot against their walls.  Sieges which had taken months if they succeeded at all, due to having to starve out the defenders, could now be wrapped up in a week or two by taking out a few major walls.

So what was this gunpowder they were using?  The formulation had been worked out originally in China (for use in fireworks, not warfare), and consisted then, as it does now, of a mix of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), carbon (charcoal), and sulfur.  The saltpeter provides a rush of oxygen, the carbon and sulfur the fuel.  Between them, when exposed to fire or a sufficient spark, the result is explosive combustion.  A stone ball put down the barrel of the cannon would shoot out with devastating force (and a great deal of loud booming and black smoke).

There are a number of recipes that still survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, showing the various ways that gunpowder's ingredients were combined or had additives mixed in.  These are being studied by Dr. Dawn Riegner, a professor of chemistry at West Point.  Different recipes used different proportions for the main ingredients, as well as such add-ins as brandy, camphor, vinegar, quicklime, and varnish.  Dr. Riegner and her team are trying to measure which combinations would have worked best, by taking them out to the firing range and testing them.

(Don't imagine college professors are all quiet and stolid--blowing things up can be fun!)

One of their interesting discoveries is that from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century the various recipes burned progressively less hot, though with continued explosive power.  This made them at least marginally safer for the gunners loading and firing the cannons--exploding cannons were one of the downsides of relying on cannon fire in a battle (and there were as yet no handheld guns--no one wants their hand blown off).

 

Dangerous cannons continued to be a problem, however.  King James II of Scotland was killed in 1460 when he stood too close to a cannon while it was being fired, and it exploded.  (This was during the long wars between Scotland and England.)  The young king (he was only 29 when he died) had always loved artillery.  He had married a niece of the duke of Burgundy a decade earlier and had received a cannon from the duke as a wedding present.  This huge cannon, nicknamed Mons Meg (or Monstrous Margaret) (see above), was installed in Edinburgh castle, where it still is today.  Tourists can climb on it or have their picture taken with it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For medieval warfare and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

The Peasant Bodo

 Peasants keep appearing in this blog, for the excellent reason that they were by far the bulk of the medieval population, maybe 90%.  Today I want to discuss one particular peasant, named Bodo, who has become (and he'd be shocked to learn it), the "Standard Medieval Peasant."  I am discussing him because he provides a good starting point for pointing how how unfounded are many of the sweeping assumptions modern folks have about medieval people.

Bodo was a real person.  He lived in the early decades of the ninth century on a manor belonging to the Parisian monastery of St.-Germain-des-Prés.  He is known because the monastery did an inventory of all its manors, including this one (located outside of Paris), listing the tenants by name and detailing how much each owed in rent.  Bodo was required to work a certain number of days a week on the fields belonging to the big manor house.

The monastery's records about Bodo are extremely skimpy, not much more than this, though noting he had a wife, Ermentrudis, and three (unnamed) children.  In 1924 the historian Eileen Power wrote a book, Medieval People, designed  to give ordinary people more of a role in accounts of the Middle Ages--at the time most historians were focused on institutions, great men, and the rise of the nation state.

This was laudable of course, but she made some great leaps in fleshing out Bodo's story.  She described Bodo's manor as looking like what Charlemagne had, two generations earlier, said he wanted a royal manor to look.  (One must wonder if a monastery had the same idealized vision as a king, much less whether any of Charlemagne's manors ever looked the way he envisioned.)  She added in detail from Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, plus even some manorial rolls from the end of the Middle Ages.  She also gave Bodo and his wife three named children as well as an ox.

The real problem with this "artist's conception" of Bodo is that he has become the standard version of every medieval peasant.  Because Power did not describe any peasants from later centuries, Bodo has come to stand for every medieval peasant, giving a timeless quality to descriptions of peasant life.  Every popular account of "life in the Middle Ages" includes something like the image below, with a castle or manor house, a grouping of peasant houses and a church, and the fields stretching off in all directions.  Although not in this particular image, it's also common to show a barefooted peasant with an ox.  (It's Bodo!)

(Actually I think I see Bodo over near the left, leading his ox, who is bringing a cartload of, I assume, food to the castle/manor house.)

 

The problem is that Bodo and his manor are typical only of great ninth-century manors with their tenants.  Especially as the economy improved and new lands were cleared for agriculture in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, due to peasant initiative, this "typical" arrangement became less and less typical.

 Most peasant villages had neither a castle or a manor house.  Many of the peasants might be tenants of a monastery or a secular lord, but he (or she or they in the case of a monastery) lived some distance away.  And a lot of peasants were what is called allodists, that is they owned their property outright rather than being tenants.

Even the tenants owed much less in labor dues by the twelfth century than they had in the ninth century.  Peasants had been able to negotiate their way out of them, usually for a monetary payment.  The landlord found it easier to hire workers than to try to force unwilling peasants to work.  These payments were fixed in perpetuity, which meant that the amount the peasants had to pay declined in value, while wages for hired labor went up.  "Works for us!" said the peasants.  Bodo would have been jealous.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For medieval peasants and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.