Whose Middle Ages?

 Memory studies teach us that those who control the past control the present (and future).  That is, if one can create a particular version of history, and have it accepted, one can seek to have the present (and future) shaped to be more like the Good Old Days.

Historians are always acutely aware of this.  We try to present a history that matches the records and do our best not to portray a past that was like what we would have preferred it to be like.  (This can of course work both ways:  the past could be a Golden Age to which we need to return, or the past can be a horrible, savage time, and we need to do the exact opposite of everything they used to do.)

Every generation thinks it's finally gotten it right, only to have the next generation raise their eyebrows at such evident bias.  But I do think that, over the two-plus generations that I've been a medievalist, we may be getting closer.  At least historians tend to focus on medieval records rather than some romantic vision.

Though here one has to be aware that "the records," things written down in the Middle Ages, supplemented with archaeology, do not give a unitary result.  When you have millions of people doing various things, it's always possible to find someone in the past who said something about their period that matches what you wanted them to say.  One of the great challenges for any historian is approaching the archives with an open mind, not going in determined to find only certain things, because if you do, that's all you'll find.

There's been a recent surge of interest in the general population in the Middle Ages, due in part to the fantasy versions found in the wildly popular Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.  Although medievalists are delighted to have people interested in our period, it does give us pause when people create their own version of the Middle Ages, trying to shape the medieval past to match what they'd like to be the situation now.

Specifically, there has been a strong effort to portray medieval Europe as completely white and completely Christian, where lower-class people "knew their place," so that the wealthy could dominate them, and where women were "properly" subservient to men.  The Crusades are sometimes portrayed as a wonderful time when Christians beat the heck out of Muslims (leaving out the tidbit that all Crusades after the first were disastrous for the West).  Now historians know that none of this is true.  As I have discussed before, there were certainly people of color in medieval Europe, there were significant minority populations of Jews and Muslims, and both women and peasants were entirely capable of resisting any effort by powerful men to dominate them.

And yet the Middle Ages have such a hold on the population that it is often invoked as informing the present.  A great many white, male organizations call their members "knights."  This needn't mean they are white supremacists, but it does indicate an effort to invoke a period believed to be one of honor, strength, and willingness to sacrifice for a higher goal.  (In a period today where such things seem to be in short supply, one can appreciate their approach, though I continue to find men in nice suits, glasses, and a comb-over calling themselves knights somewhat, shall I say, droll.)

Now, as in LotR and GoT, one can create fantasy imbued with at least some medieval aspects.  Part of fantasy's appeal is that honor and glory can find a home.  Just make it clear this is not historical fiction.  After all, medieval people wrote such fantasy themselves, creating larger-than-life versions of their own world for their heroes and heroines to run around in.  But it seems mean-spirited at best (not to say a-historical) to make up a fantasy Middle Ages in which everyone is white and Christian, except for the bad guys, and where women and lower-status people can safely be ignored.

(Interestingly, the "Indiana Jones" movies, deliberately using the language of Crusade as the heroes rampage around the Middle East, did not have Muslims as bad guys.  Rather, the bad guys were Nazis.  Nazis make a convenient all-purpose villainous enemy, though it's disturbing to see Nazi flags show up at some rallies.  Guys, we beat them.  They were not only evil, they were losers.)

There is a new book out, called Whose Middle Ages?, by Andrew Albin et al. (Fordham University Press, 2019), full of ideas for those teaching the Middle Ages, to avoid modern prejudices and stereotypes.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Lost medieval manuscripts

 Most of the Middle Ages was pre-printing press.  Until the second half of the fifteenth century, everything had to be written by hand.  No printing, not even laser jets, no copy machines, only people writing or copying onto parchment or (by the fourteenth century) paper.  Understandably, there were far fewer books and documents than we have now.  This makes the loss over the centuries very noticeable.

Some medieval records we know only because the author's original manuscript (improbably) survives.  Others we know because the work was copied many times, such as the Arthurian stories I've previously discussed.  Property transactions at monasteries are known primarily if the records of these transactions were copied into cartularies.

It was not only the passage of time, with inevitable decay and fading, that did in medieval manuscripts.  Fire or flood will destroy parchment.  So will rats, who find parchment tasty good.  But the biggest losses were caused by humans.  Medieval bookbinders used old manuscripts in their bindings, a handy (free!) source of parchment.  The Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century destroyed many medieval records.  In France, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century destroyed many more, as these records were seen as oppressive tools of the ancien régime that was being overthrown.  Documents that survived into the twentieth century were sometimes destroyed during the two world wars.

And then a number of people set out deliberately to destroy medieval manuscripts.  They didn't do so with destruction per se on their minds, but due to seeing these manuscripts as sort of random pieces of interesting material, to be used or sold or recombined in ways to please the owners.  For example, there was a fad in the nineteenth century of carefully cutting out decorated initials from medieval manuscripts and gluing them to white paper, then framing them as attractive decorations.

Liturgical manuscripts especially, those which had been done with great care and artistry, were especially prone to such mutilation.  Even if the initials were not actually cut out, individual leaves might be separated from the rest of the book and sold individually.  Rare book dealers realized that they could make far more money selling individual leaves of medieval manuscripts than selling the entire book to one person.

A recent interesting example is the Beauvais missal.  It is a liturgical manuscript, highly decorated, which exists as a partial volume.  Recently a number of individual leaves, separated in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, have come to light, most in individual hands.  Some were picked up at an estate sale, where the deceased's heirs thought an attractive late medieval sheet of parchment ought to be worth something.  Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, has been on a mission to identify as many of these missing leaves as possible. This is what one of the missing leaves looked like.

 

I've had folks selling individual medieval manuscript leaves tell me, "Well, the leaves were already separated from the book when I got them."  I consider this similar to, "Well, the leopard was already dead when I made its fur into a coat."

It's disconcerting how limited our collection of medieval manuscripts must be compared to those that existed 500 years ago.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on manuscripts, writing, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Dysentery

 Dysentery, sometimes known as the "bloody flux," is a very unpleasant subject.  But it's important for medieval history because so many important people died of it.  It didn't kill millions within a short period as the Black Death did, but it was a constant concern.

Dysentery of course remains a concern today, especially in developing countries, although the most common (bacterial) form can be cleared up with antibiotics, as long as the sufferer is not too badly dehydrated.  (There is also a harder to treat amoebic version.)  It is spread through food and water that have been contaminated.  Today it remains a real threat in places like refugee camps, where people are crammed together without proper sanitation available.  In the Middle Ages, it was a constant concern in siege camps.

Think about it.  A siege involves a whole lot of men living in tents, close together, without easy access to clean drinking water or to proper latrines (no modern port-a-potties).  The people inside the castle being besieged certainly had problems, but at least they had their own well and their own "comforts" of home.

It was thus one of the reasons that powerful men, the type who would be in siege camps, often died at an age that we would consider very young (in their thirties or maybe forties).  Some notable English kings who died of what appears to have been dysentery include Young Henry, the heir to Henry II of England; King John of England (Young Henry's younger brother); and Edward I (John's grandson).  In France Louis VI probably died of dysentery (though not acquired in a siege), as did Louix IX (acquired in a siege in north Africa).

Medieval cities were acutely aware of the danger of dysentery.  Without modern urban sanitation and water processing, which are really twentieth-century developments, contaminated water was a constant concern.  You could do in your enemy by plausibly accusing him of poisoning the wells (this was one of the accusations made against Jews in the late Middle Ages).  City governments were accordingly extremely strict about anything that might lead to outbreaks of the "bloody flux."  One does not have to know about bacteria to know about infection and contamination.

We do mot know how lucky we are to be able to turn on the tap and get clean water.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

In Search of the Historical Arthur

The noted humanitarian to Africa, Albert Schweizer, wrote a book back in the twentieth century, "In Search of the Historical Jesus."  He and many others wanted to see what sorts of evidence there might be that would be considered the kind of record that historians use, in addition to the religious texts of the Bible, to tell us about the life of Jesus.  That is, he wanted sources that could be read and understood about Jesus's life whether or not one was a Christian, and also to see how the Gospels could be read historically.

The Roman governors of first-ccntury Palestine, the ones who put Jesus to death as a revolutionary, kept zero records of their decisions and activities, or at least none that have survived.  But there are scraps of mentions of Jesus in other (mostly Jewish) records and chronicles, and of course the Gospels themselves, written some two generations after the crucifixion for religious communities that considered Jesus their founder as well as the Messiah.  As Schweizer and other historians have concluded, there's no question of Jesus as a historical person, an itinerant Jewish preacher who attracted disciplines, who spoke of the brotherhood of all people, with special reference to the poor and marginalized, and who was put to death by the Romans.

Other aspects of Jesus's life, the miracles, the resurrection, being the Messiah, are aspects of faith, not subject to being supported or refuted by historical methods.  But a lot of Christians like having the historical underpinnings for their faith.  In a parallel way, a lot of people want to know about the historical underpinnings of the King Arthur stories.  (Big topical leap there, you say?)

Arthur is a far more nebulous historical figure than Jesus.  He didn't have four different accounts of his life written within 40-50 years of his death.  And the stories we think of as the "real" Arthur stories were compiled by Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century, out of bits and pieces spread out over the previous 900 years.

But there may still be a historical Arthur lurking somewhere in there, as I have previously noted.  In the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Roman armies pulled out of Britain and the Angles and Saxons arrived, some local leaders fought back, determined to keep their Christianized Roman culture.  The name Arcturus (Arthur) is a good Roman name, and in areas where the Saxons made little headway (Wales, Cornwall) the Celtic communities had occasional references over the following years to someone being "as brave as Arthur" or a vague mention of the "great warrior Arthur."  This Arthur would not have been a king but a military commander, and nothing we think of as "the Arthurian story" would have been attached to him (Camelot, the Round Table, the Grail, Lancelot and Guinevere, etc.).  There were also stories of the great leader Arthur leading a pig-rustling raid, but we'll let those pass.

A sixth-century account by the monk Gildas mentions the great and glorious battle of Mount Badon by the Britons against the Saxons, which certainly shows the presence of such war-leaders as the supposedly historical Arthur.  Unfortunately for Arthur fans, Gildas named the glorious leader as Ambrosius Aurelianus, somebody totally different.  But never fear!  Three centuries later, the chronicler Nennius retold the story of Mount Badon, and this time Arthur was the hero.  Whew, that was close.

 

But Arthur as we know him really begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth.  He was Welsh and a bishop, writing in the 1130s when the Normans had conquered England, and Geoffrey wanted to glorify his Celtic heritage, which was now threatened by Norman French culture on top of the Saxon influences that had dominated England (not Wales) since the sixth century.  His "History of the Kings of Britain" first made Arthur a king, first told the story of Uther Pendragon who impregnated the duchess of Cornwall while disguised as her husband (resulting in Arthur's birth), first mentioned the magic sword Caliburn (later Excalibur), and first noted a dying Arthur being taken to the isle of Avalon.  Geoffrey seems to have made everything up, including a great many other great British (Celtic) kings.  His book was hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages, and the story of Arthur was off and running.

While Arthur became a very popular hero in Britain, his reputation also spread to the Continent.  Chrétien de Troyes, writing at the court of the counts of Champagne in the 1170s, gave us the story of the Grail and of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere.  The latter he seems to have adopted from the somewhat older story of Tristan and Isolde, a story set in Celtic Cornwall as Geoffrey of Monmouth had set Uther and Arthur in Cornwall.  The name Arthur was given to a grandson of King Henry II of England in the late twelfth century (young Arthur may or may not have been done away with by his uncle King John, but that's another story).

The monastery of Glastonbury decided in the 1190s that it was actually located in the isle of Avalon and "discovered" the tombs of Arthur and Guinevere, leading to much better tourist trade than had ever shown up for their saints.  The earl of Cornwall, younger son of King Henry III, built a castle at Tintagel, in Cornwall, in the mid thirteenth century, explicitly to tie himself to the spot where Geoffrey of Monmouth said Arthur was conceived.

Tintagel today is a spectacular ruined castle high above the sea, and people still come there in search of the historical Arthur.  While there they can enjoy Guinevere's English Tea and Merlin's Beer and buy toy swords.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on kings, legends, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Miracle Stories, Part 2

 In my previous post, I discussed miracle stories, the kind that would be collected at a shrine to extol the power of the local saint in healing the sick.  But how about saints like Mary, who were not nearly as closely tied to a specific locale?  (Though she too would have special veneration in certain places; the most important healing shrine today, that of Lourdes, is dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes.)

Miracle stories of the Virgin would be told and retold in many places.  Although she was entirely capable of healing, many of her miracle stories involved other sorts of intervention in human affairs.  At one time modern scholars tended to be a little embarrassed by some of these stories, and tried to pass them off as the superstitious tales of the unlettered.  But these were stories told by monks and clergymen.

They may have been embarrassing (now) because a lot of them lacked what you might call a clear moral lesson.  Rather, they emphasized the power of the Virgin in helping those who called on her.  In one story, a knight on the way to a tournament stopped at a shrine to Mary to pray, and he prayed so long and so hard that he forgot all about the tournament.  In the evening, he proceeded into the town where it had been held to find a place to stay and was shocked to be heralded as winning the tournament!  It turned out that Mary had been so impressed by his piety that she put on armor, took his horse and lance, and fought disguised as him, winning the prize.

Okay, you can see why some scholars would rather not talk about this as the product of learned priests.  In another story, a criminal, caught and deservedly condemned to death, prayed so hard to the Virgin that she came to the gallows where he was to be hung and, when the trap door opened to drop him and break his neck, she held him up.  After a few hours the authorities realized there was a miracle going on (man with a noose around his neck hovering, unhurt, in the air) and carefully lowered him and set him free.  In this story at least the criminal was reformed, having learned his lesson, and lived the rest of his life very virtuously.

So what is going on?  These were stories both about the power of the saint and stories to tell sinners that anyone can turn to the saints for help.  The greatest sin has always been despair, feeling that you are so evil that you are beyond redemption (which of course requires pride in one's wickedness).  These stories say that anyone, even knights (routinely branded as sinful) and criminals, could count on mercy if it was sought with a truly contrite heart.  Mary took the role especially of the mother who always will love you, no matter what.  (That's a medieval wooden statue of her below.)

 

Other saints would also listen even to sinners.  In fact, a lot of miracle stories were quite subversive, with those in authority, both secular lords and church leaders, being given their comeuppance by the saint.  For example, at Conques (see previous post), Saint Foy routinely broke the chains of escaped criminals, and when the monks tried to lock the church doors to keep poor pilgrims out, she swung the doors open herself.  Not just sinners but the poor and downtrodden were depicted in the miracle stories as helped by the saints.

The New Testament parallels were entirely deliberate.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Miracle stories

 Medieval people, like modern people, believed in miracles, as I've discussed previously.  But miracles were not free floating events, being usually attached to a place, a relic, and a saint.

Miracles were one of the chief attributes of saints.  All saints worked miracles, and from the twelfth century onward one could not become a saint without sufficient post-mortem miracles, all properly verified.  (This is still the case for the modern Catholic church.)  Throughout the Middle Ages, an account of a saint's life and activities, his or her vita as it was called, was routinely accompanied by a second volume, stories of the miracles the saint worked after death.

Major shrines to particular saints all had collected stories of miracles their saint had performed.  By far the majority of these miracles involved healing, everything from the pox to a broken arm to gout, even an infected toe.  In an era without modern medicine, when few people could expect to live past their 50s, they turned to whatever healing procedures might be available.  And they may well have worked!  Who are we to dismiss their testimony, when we weren't even there? (and are in a society that has seen some, well, unlikely "cures" promoted for Covid-19).

Miracle stories tended to be very detailed.  The person who was healed was named, as was the specific ailment for which they had suffered.  We often learn a lot about such a person, their social status, their occupation, even which friends and relatives helped them reach the shrine if they did not walk there themselves.  (Pilgrims on the Santiago route, from Burgundy to northwestern Spain, walked 20 miles a day, pretty impressive considering a lot of them were sick and seeking healing or redemption.)

The specificity of the miracle stories added a note of verisimilitude that would not have been possible if they just spoke of generic people being healed of generic diseases.  The stories always stressed that saints were ready to help even the poorest petitioner, and that even the mightiest might need their help.  The miracle stories also tended to stress one particular kind of healing if the saint had a specialty; Saint Foy of Conques, for example (village seen below), was noted for cures of the eyes.

 

Often the miracle stories would speak of someone who had long suffered from an ailment, had visited shrines to other saints without relief, but had finally found healing when appealing to this particular saint.  Those healed were expected to be suitably grateful.  They needn't make a monetary offering (though it was never refused), but they would leave their crutches as a marker of being able to walk again or the like, and they were expected to live a properly virtuous life in the future.  A sinner who had been cured of an ailment was likely to sicken again if he returned to his sin.  And of course it was hoped that those healed would spread the good word about the saint's power.

The miracle stories then could be seen as a form of advertisement for a particular shrine, but they also stressed that the saints listened to people of all economic or social status, and that a moral, virtuous life was needed to accompany a healthy life.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Medieval summer

 We think of summer as vacation time, a break from school, a chance to get to the beach or just sit under a shady tree sipping lemonade in a welcome break from work.  A medieval summer had different expectations.

On the one hand, one didn't have to worry about keeping warm, a major worry in the winter.  On the other hand, one did need to worry about keeping cool.  We now take air conditioning for granted, but it only began to spread in the second half of the twentieth century.  Working outdoors on a scorching hot day (and most medieval work was outdoors work) was just as much a pain then as now.  Their only advantage is that the weather was overall cooler, before global warming really kicked in during the last generation or two.  (And Europe is still cooler than much of the US—parts of Britain recently recorded 104 F, the highest temperature ever recorded, though parts of the US get there repeatedly all summer.)

A medieval summer was a time to work, not to vacation.  For most of the population, who were all farming, the spring was the time to plow, sow, and plant.  Hay was cut in June, winter wheat in July.  Vegetables had to be tended all summer.  Their harvest began in August, along with dry beans and lentils.  September was time to reap the rye or barley and to pick and press the grapes, October to bring in the root vegetables and start planting winter wheat.  All spring and summer livestock farmers were busy helping with baby animals being born and getting established.  Life didn't calm down until after the great November pig-slaughter.

At least there was food.  Last year's grain would be mostly gone by early summer, as would last year's pork, but there were plenty of vegetables coming along (peas, beans, lettuce, celery, summer squash, cabbage), and once the winter wheat was harvested there would be lots of bread again.  Young animals (lamb, veal) and extra chickens could be eaten.  The woods and wild places provided song birds to be caught as well as mushrooms and wild berries.

And one could look forward to the root crops (turnips, onions, and the like) and especially the pork of autumn, before settling down for winter repose.  (Being cold a lot and wondering how long the food would last.)

All this summer work was why, when modern schooling was established in the nineteenth century, it was determined that children (and teachers) would not be in school during the summer.  They were needed to work on the farm.

For the aristocracy, summer was a time for activity and adventure.  It was hopeless trying to go to war in the winter, when you'd get bogged down in cold mud and have trouble finding food to scavenge.  Tournaments were always summer events, as were most trade fairs.  And landlords also wanted to keep an eye on their peasants.

In spite of the constant rush of work and activity in the summer, everyone was delighted in the spring to see winter go and to get outdoors again.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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