Fantasy heroines

 The fantasy genre is full of women.  And no, I don't mean men fantasizing about some top-heavy lass pressing her unclad body against theirs.  I mean that the fantasy genre, most commonly a vaguely medieval setting with magic and (usually) wizards and dragons, has lots of active heroines.  This is especially true of YA (young adult) fantasy.

We've come a long way since covers showed sword-wielding maidens dressed in chain mail bikinis.  But some of that ethos is still there.  Fantasy heroines are tough.  Especially the YA ones, where everyone's a teenager.

Even though the setting is sort-of-medieval, fantasy heroines tend to live in a society that is not at all patriarchal.  Women can and do everything the men do, and no one thinks anything of it.  Women in these stories may be knights, bishops, ruling queens, shopkeepers, wizards, mayors, and the like.  Although real medieval women were much more active than scholars once thought, there is no question that medieval men were given precedence, and that the careers of knight and priest were closed to women.

YA heroines are inevitably smart, skilled, sassy, strong, and ready to save the day.  They do not menstruate.  They are not wracked by self-doubt.  They do not carry themselves cautiously around men, trying to avoid any situation that might result in sexual assault.  They do not get all embarrassed around a boy they like, nor do they feel they should agree to the sexual urges of the boy they like.  As role models, they have much to offer teenage girls, as the heroines do not assume there are things they just cannot do, and they do not routinely defer to men.

One of the chief ways in which these heroines differ from medieval women is that they are handy with a sword.  Medieval women did not wield swords (okay, a few may have, and certainly there are examples of women leading knights into battle, most notably Joan of Arc but sword-fighting was just not an option).  Sword-fighting requires both upper-body strength and lots of training.  Even the unusual medieval woman with more upper-body strength than most men would not have been offered the training.  Even in the much more egalitarian modern period, women do not play major league baseball, for the same combination of reasons.

Interestingly, male characters in YA fantasy are much more likely to be wracked by self-doubt than are the female ones.  They wonder if they will have the strength or skill to do what needs to be done, they feel the weight of the expectations put on them, and they are cautious around girls if thoughts of sex enter their minds at all, which it does surprisingly rarely.  And no wonder.  If they tried an unwelcome move on a fantasy heroine, they know for a fact she'd run them through with her sword.

Recently I've realized that my own YA fantasy heroines do not conform to the modern norm.  Antonia, heroine of my "Starlight Raven" series, is certainly smart and capable, but she lives in a patriarchal society, where it is considered shocking that a girl would want to become a wizard.  She has plenty of self-doubts as well as unease around attractive young men.  Sure, she gets to save the day, but without the sassiness or ready confidence of many a fantasy heroine.

Am I being more realistic about what teenage girls are like?  Kind of hard to talk about "realism" in a story that has magic and dragons.  Is she more like what I was like as a teenager?  Probably.  It's interesting that the strongest, sassiest, quickest-with-a-sword fantasy heroines are most freuently written by men.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

More Medieval Spain

As I earlier posted, medieval Spain is much less studied than the rest of medieval Europe.  Part of the issue is the language barrier.  One really has to know both the medieval and the modern versions of Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Arabic, as well as Latin.  But a number of younger scholars, most notably Americans, have started studying this fascinating territory.

 

The Iberian peninsula, although its own separate world, was closely tied to the rest of Europe through the Christian rulers who tried for over six centuries to make it their own.  A lot of these Christian kings were in origin French, especially Burgundian.  In addition, Christian Europe did a great deal of trading with Spain, as its ports along its eastern side could take goods into the Mediterranean, where they could be easily transported.  Spanish horses and leather were considered especially valuable.

But there were distinct differences, such as that for most of the Middle Ages the Christians (and even some of the Muslims) used the Era dating, where the years were always 38 more than "anno Domini," so that while it was 1100 in France it was 1138 in Spain.  No one knows how this started.  There was talk at the time of it having something to do with Julius Caesar.

Today I want to expand on some of what I discussed earlier, concentrating especially on what's called the ta'ifa, a term which might be translated as "city state," a small, powerful principality.  Medieval Spain was full of them.  Indeed, there were at least three periods in medieval Spanish history when ta'ifas multiplied, at the expense of those rulers trying to establish large, centralized territories. Political historians tend to focus on those rulers with the most territory, but most politics then (as now) was local, and the ta'ifas filled the vacuum when the centralizers weakened.

Although one can see medieval Spain's history as permeated with conflicts between Christians and Muslims, it's more complicated, because Muslims also fought Muslims and Christians fought Christians.  Political alliances did not always follow religion.  As well as the various Christians trying to conquer their way south from the Pyrenees, there were Christians who had been there since the heyday of the Roman Empire.  As well as Muslims who recognized the rulership of the local caliphs, there were also powerful lords from North Africa who thought that they ought to be in charge, and the local Muslims did not always agree.  The rulers of the ta'ifas were right in the middle of all this.

(If you look at the map, you can see how close southern Spain is to North Africa, and not only at the Straits of Gibraltar.  Spain was influenced as much by North Africa as by the rest of Europe.)

One of the last of the individual principalities to hold out against the governmental centralization that both Christian and Muslim rulers were trying to impose was headed by the dynasty of  Banu Hud.  They had held power as emirs in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula. but they lost their position in the early twelfth century. Far from giving up, they went on to establish a new center, a ta'ifa, in south-eastern Iberia.

But it was not enough to conquer, or even to make alliances with others who could help them.  They also had to project an air of legitimacy, so that they would be accepted by the people they ruled.  They ruled for over a century, even though there is serious doubt whether this dynasty actually was a series of fathers and sons or a succession of men who attached themselves to the line.

They were able to rule their ta'ifa for as long as they did because they were accepted, and the thirteenth-century members of the dynasty were considered native sons.  This legitimacy was created through a combination of success as warriors (against both Christians and Muslims) and grandiose building projects, minting of coins, establishing laws, wearing clothing copied from the caliphs, and corresponding with the rulers of Baghdad as equals.

A fascinating history of this dynasty has recently been published by Anthony H. Minnema, The Last Ta'ifa:  The Banu Hud and the Struggle for Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus (Cornell University Press, 2024).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

Nicene Creed

 The "Nicene Creed" is trending today, so I thought I'd blog about it, given its importance for medieval Christianity.

The word creed means something that one believes, coming from the Latin "credo," meaning "I believe."  The first words of the Nicene Creed are "I believe," so that makes sense, even though the Creed was originally written in Greek.  The whole creed is a list of things a Christian believes.  Although I've seen some discussions where people on-line are saying, "I don't need a creed! I have the Bible!" they are fundamentally misunderstanding it.  The Nicene Creed is the short version of what you need to believe in order to call yourself a Christian.

The Nicene Creed is named that because it came out of the 325 Council of Nicaea.  By the early fourth century the main wave of persecution of Christians was over, but that just meant that Christians were free to disagree with each other.  There had been a lot of debate and discussion in the first three centuries of Christianity about exactly what were the fundamental tenets of Christianity, especially what was the nature of the Trinity.  All the different people with different views naturally declared that everyone else was a heretic.

For example, was Jesus just a man, divinely-inspired but not divine himself?  Was he in fact God who just put on a facade of looking human in order to fool people?  Had he started as straight human but become divine at some point, either before or after the Crucifixion?  The Gospels had him calling himself both "son of Man" and "son of God" and even saying "I and the Father are one," so that didn't help.  And where did the Holy Spirit fit into this?  If you've got Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, does that mean three Gods?  Since the Christian Bible didn't settle on (more or less) the form it has now for another century or two, and was itself a topic of heated discussion, that wasn't going to help.

The emperor Constantine, who had recently decided to become a Christian, believed this arguing was unseemly.  (He was not baptized yet, but Christian women in his family were persuasive, as was a burning cross he saw in the sky over a battle field, which would certainly have gotten my attention.)  Roman emperors had always been the heads of Roman state paganism, so he found it appropriate to call a council to decide.  The council was presided over by the emperor, but he didn't make the decisions, rather encouraging all the assembled bishops, from all over the Empire, to resolve their differences and vote.

What they came up with is essentially the Nicene Creed of today, though some editing was done at the 381 Council of Constantinople, and the precise wording depends on the translation used.  It defined the Trinity as one God in three persons and Jesus as both wholly divine and wholly human.  There.  No multiple gods, no Jesus as just an ordinary human, no Jesus as a divine being in disguise as a human.  It was a compromise to which the majority of the attending bishops agreed.

Of course it didn't stop those people who left the Council convinced that all those bishops were heretics, or those who heard about the Council and disagreed with what they heard or thought they heard.  Heresies concerning the humanity of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity swirled around the Mediterranean for three more centuries, until the rise of Islam essentially ended them.

But mainstream Christianity had settled on a basic definition, supported by all the bishops of the major cities of the Empire.  It began, "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth."  So far it could also be a statement of basic Judaism.  But then it immediately adds, "And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten son of God ... co-substantial with the Father."  There's the just-one-substance, more-than-one-person part.

The Creed continues to give a brief summary of Jesus coming to earth to save everyone, being crucified and rising again, ascending to Heaven from which He will come again to judge us all.  Then finally the Creed gets to the Holy Spirit, who always gets overlooked, "And in the Holy Spirit ... who proceeds from the Father."

Somewhere between the sixth and ninth century western (Latin) Christendom added what's known as "filioque" clause to "from the Father."  The term means, "and the son," so the Holy Spirit was said to proceed both from the Father and from the Son.  Greek orthodoxy declared this was a total heresy.  Eastern and Western versions of Christianity have still not resolved this one, twelve hundred years later.

The 381 Council of Constantinople added a final wrap-up to the Nicene Creed, adopted as part of it, saying that one believed in "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church" and in "one baptism for the remission of sins."  Here the stress was on the idea of a universal church, all Christians being one body (the word catholic means universal, though it's been adopted by one version of Latin Christendom as meaning specifically them).  Stress was also put on the church's origins with Jesus's apostles, not just some people somewhere having some ideas.  Christianity (like Judaism) has always emphasized historical continuity.

The wording seems to suggest that you only get one chance to wipe out sins with baptism, so for a while people would wait until they were dying to be baptized, once they were pretty sure they weren't going to sin any more.  Constantine himself was baptized on his death bed.  However, in another century or so infant baptism came in, as wiping away Original Sin, so that infants and children wouldn't go straight to Hell if they died.  This requires bonus actions to wipe away subsequent sins.  Original Sin assumes everyone since Adam and Eve is born already laden with sin, but Nicaea didn't worry about that, and that's a different story.

Today the Nicene Creed is taught to all Catholics and is sort-of part of the doctrine of most western Protestant churches (not the Unitarians obviously).  The Southern Baptists are currently trying to decide about it, worried over the word "catholic," and feeling that the purpose of baptism isn't stated correctly.  (Some have even questioned whether modern Catholics are even really Christians.  I'm not getting into that discussion.)

As a medieval historian, I'm always sort of bemused by how many modern Christians in the West don't realize that you can't jump straight from the first century to the twentieth or twenty-first.  All versions of western Christendom are the products of medieval Christianity, even if there were conscious efforts to reject big parts of it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Oath Helpers

 People in the Middle Ages totally believed in the rule of law.  They were not always sure what the law was, and often they seemed to be making it up as they went along, but they believed at least as much as do modern people in doing things in a lawful manner.  Even though modern laws in the West grew directly out of medieval legal practice, there are plenty of differences.

One of the best examples of this is oath helpers.  Most discussions of guilt and innocence, of who did what to whom, turned as they did today on witness testimony and physical evidence.  But how to tell if someone was actually telling the truth?

As I have discussed previously, someone's truthfulness might be tested by ordeal, that is that they would swear to something and grasp a red-hot iron as proof of their veracity.  If the burn healed up as it should, they were indeed telling the truth.  Understandably, most people would prefer to be proven to be truthful by less extreme means.  Indeed, more people threatened to undertake trial by ordeal than actually went through with it.  (In some ways it was a bluff, saying "I'm so certain I'm innocent that I'll accept a horrible burn to prove it," forcing the other side to start to doubt their accusations.)

An alternate method was to gather oath helpers.  These fidejussores as they were known in medieval Latin would swear to the truthfulness of someone else's oath.  They were not witnesses, as they need not have any insights into what had happened, and they were not even character witnesses, as they were not expected to say (for example) that the accused was an affectionate husband and father who wouldn't hurt a fly.  Instead they swore oaths that someone else's oath was true.

So someone accused of (say) murder would swear on holy relics that they had never touched the victim.  Everyone would watch to see if he started frothing at the mouth and falling down.  If he didn't, he would provide oath helpers who would similarly swear.  Six or twelve men (or some different number, it wasn't absolute) would swear that this oath was true.  If any of them gasped and choked and fell down while trying to swear falsely, guilt would be pretty well established (pending of course further discussion, medieval judgments always required a big discussion).

But even if the accused managed to get all his oath helpers to swear to his own oath's veracity, he was not necessarily found "not guilty."  Part of any trial was "what everyone knew."  If the accused was, in everyone's mind, clearly the murderer (in this example), then they'd keep going.  They might require an ordeal, with further oaths from the fidejussores.  They might have a combat or dunk the accused in water.  Best of all, they might find that the knife stuck in the victim's throat was the accused's own distinctive knife.

When someone ultimately found guilty was to be punished,  all his oath helpers were also punished.  In the stories they were sometimes hung, although that was probably an extremely rare outcome.  But being an oath helper was a serious business, as the fidejussor knew that if the person whose oath he was helping actually was guilty, he himself would be punished, by the court or by God.

(In the "Court Scar" series I've written with my husband, we include several examples of legal judgments that carry the plot along, based on real medieval events.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Manuscript Fragments

 A lot of medieval manuscripts survive only in fragments.  There is indeed a whole field within medieval studies, fragmentology, dedicated to finding and studying such fragments.  Some of the fragments are due to medieval and early modern monks (and nuns) reusing old parchment, some to modern antiquities dealers cutting up medieval manuscripts and selling them piece-meal.  And that doesn't even include the damage parchment often suffered from floods, fire, and nibbling by rats or mice.

Parchment was valuable, regardless of what was written on it.  Hence if a book or charter became outdated for some reason, there was a strong incentive to reuse the parchment.  A confirmation from king or pope would of course be kept, but the records of donations by petty landowners to a monastery, or the final settling of a quarrel involving people now dead, would have little intrinsic value once the recording charter was copied into a cartulary.  Similarly, if the liturgy had changed, old liturgical books would become useless.

The old parchment would especially be used in book binding.  It would be cut into the appropriate shape and used especially as a backing for the boards of the cover or to shape the curve of the spine.  The bookbinders would make no effort to erase what was written on the parchment.  Scholars studying such fragments are always on the lookout for them in old bindings, though taking them out for closer examination is difficult if one does not want to mess up the book of which they are now a part.

Recently endoscopic cameras have been used to peek inside the gap between the outside of a bound book's spine and the inner part, where the individual gatherings of pages are sewn together.  (Take an old hardcover book off your shelf and open it, and you'll see what I mean.  Most modern books just glue the pages in, but older ones still sewed the so-called signatures as medieval bookbinders did.)  Yes, this endoscopic camera, a tiny camera at the end of a flexible coil, is like what they use to give you a colonoscopy.

As well as monks themselves cutting up medieval manuscripts they considered useless, we have modern collectors providing a market for pieces of manuscripts considered lovely.  There was a nineteenth-century craze for cutting out the illuminated initials from manuscripts and pasting them into scrapbooks.

More recently, art and antiquities dealers have recognized that a lot of people find the Middle Ages interesting and would be delighted to own a small part of it.  A cut-up manuscript, sold page by page, yields a lot more revenue than selling a complete manuscript.  Undecorated manuscripts may end up in a library, but religious manuscripts with interesting initials and colors are often cut up.

This is a page from a missal (a liturgical manuscript) I myself own.  It's late medieval, probably from France or possibly Italy.  It was given to my father many years ago, by one of his students, and there is no record of how it got to the (long ago closed) gift shop in upstate New York where it was purchased.  Although I am now one of those owning such a fragment, I would never go out and buy one.  The argument for doing so is too similar to, "But the snow leopard was already long dead when I bought the coat made from its fur."

One of the most famous missals to be cut up and sold as individual pages is the one from late medieval Beauvais (France).  Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, is leading a project to try to find all the leaves (some are in libraries, some in private hands, some at universities) and create a "virtual" complete missal, images of all the pages in the right order.  They really are lovely, more highly decorated than my missal page (which is not part of the Beauvais missal, I checked).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Medieval Coins

 Medieval people used coins, as had the Romans before them, and a surprising number of such old coins still survive.  Where do they come from? you ask.  Well, a lot of numismatists (those who study coins) and archaeologists (those who study the material objects left by former peoples) would like to know, but the coin market is pretty much a Wild West.

Some coins come from hoards.  That is, at a certain point in the past someone took a lot of coins and hid them, probably digging a hole and burying them, planning to come back "soon."  But they never did, and the coins remained hidden over the centuries.  Coin hoards are very interesting to an archaeologist, because coins can generally be dated (at least roughly), and if one is digging up the foundations of a medieval barn and find a hoard where the newest coins are from the mid twelfth century, then one knows the barn was around then or not much later.

The image above is of a hoard found in Scotland.  It's all Roman coins, doubtless from a paymaster who was getting ready to pay his legionnaires but somehow didn't.  The coins are silver, about the size of a quarter.  This hoard was taken to a museum, as such finds should be.  But unfortunately a whole lot of hoards are broken up, sold one by one, with little or no indication of where they came from.  Such coins without a "provenance" as it's called (information on where it's been since created) can be bought surprisingly inexpensively.

The image below is of a twelfth-century Burgundian coin, given to me as a gift by someone who knew I worked on twelfth-century Burgundy.  It's a silver penny and about the size of a dime or a little smaller.

Silver was the standard for coins of value in the Middle Ages.  The Romans had had gold coins, used to buy more expensive objects, but gold coins were rarely minted in the Middle Ages.  A great deal of ordinary business was transacted with bronze coins, worth less than a silver penny.  Interestingly, the former Vikings of Iceland ran short of coins in the twelfth century, once they stopped raiding, when their only source of such money was Norway buying wool from them (and demanding the money back to pay for timber and other things that Iceland lacked).  So they started using lengths of wool cloth as currency, the Althing (their governing body) declaring each year how much a length was worth in silver pennies.  Sort of like writing a check, but bulkier.

Being in charge of a mint in medieval Europe was a sign of power and status.  A lot of counts had their own mints (my little silver penny was minted under the authority of the count of Nevers).  Kings especially minted larger denomination coins and were proud to put their own image on them, as in this coin of Charlemagne's, where he is portrayed as a Roman emperor.

 Medieval rulers would routinely try to reduce the real value of their coins without reducing the nominal value.  So a silver penny might be made a tiny bit thinner, or the silver might be mixed with tin or bronze, just a tiny bit.  (Then a tiny bit more when the coins were melted down to make new ones.)  This was especially appealing if they had agreed to pay workers more.  ("See, 12 silver pennies, just like I promised.  What do you mean they look kind of funky.")

The Wild West aspect of collecting medieval coins is heightened by the fact that a coin is intrinsically valuable, for the silver (even if alloyed) and for the historical rarity.  So people with collections sell coins if they need (modern) cash.  And why bother verifying the provenance?  Or the grandkids may find a small collection in Grandpa's attic and sell them off one at a time.  Coins can travel great distances.

One of the largest collections of Byzantine coins in the US is in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the university.  The Perry-Campbell collection has some 4000 coins that Mr. Campbell collected in the first half of the twentieth century, while living in Istanbul.  He would buy coins from the locals, who'd found them in their house or dug them up or were breaking down an old collection, and he boasted he paid maybe 10 or 15 cents on average for each.  He liked to show his collection to others interested in old coins, and they'd often trade, further obscuring any provenance that might once have existed.  The coins ended up in Nebraska because that's where Mrs. Campbell was from.  They are uncatalogued, though a graduate student (Samuel Skokan) is doing a good job getting them organized.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Seals

 We use signatures symbolically to indicate our agreement to something or to authorize it.  Go into the bank to set up an account or apply for a loan, and you'll have to sign in a great many places.  A presidential executive order is not official until signed.  A piece of paper with maybe a flower on it that says "this piece of paper is worth $346.18" (ie a check) takes its validity from your signature.  When you agree that you have read and accepted the terms and conditions of a website (yeah, like you've actually read them all), you "sign electronically" by checking a box.

Medieval people occasionally signed, but more often they used seals.  The Romans had used seals, generally lead.  Hot lead would be dribbled onto something, then imprinted with a signet (note the similarity to the word signature).  This might have a small image of something but would have the official name as well.

The Byzantine emperors, heir to the Romans, continued using lead seals.  But they, and the popes, who also were heirs to Rome, soon switched from hot lead to cold lead.  Because lead is quite a soft metal, one could use a powerful press to mark the lead with the signet.  Instead of an uneven blob of (originally molten) lead, one would have a nice round seal, previously made in an even shape, then imprinted.  Of course the imprinting would sometimes be a little off center, but it was still a lot better than a blob.

During the early Middle Ages, wax rather than lead became the standard for most seals.  Lead seals had been used by emperors and popes (who continued to use lead, just as they continued to use papyrus when everyone else was using parchment, as I have discussed previously).  But wax seals slowly worked its way down the social ladder, to kings, to great dukes and counts, to lords of castles, to bishops and abbots, to city mayors by the thirteenth century.

Originally the way to seal with wax was to cut a slit in the parchment and dribble soft wax through, then press a signet on both sides (different images, seal and counter-seal).  But soon instead documents began to be sealed by folding up the bottom an inch or so, cutting a slit through both layers, running a cord or a strip of parchment through the slits, and attaching the two ends together with a ball of soft wax that was sealed on both sides.

 

The above image of Magna Carta shows the document King John was forced to sign, with his seal hung off the bottom.

As was the case here, seals were usually colored red.  But cream colored seals (natural wax color) are also found.  In the nineteenth century some collectors cut the seals off charters, just leaving the slits by which they had previously been attached.  Some people living in farms that had once been monastic buildings melted down the seals to make wax to seal their jars of jam.  This is very depressing for medievalists.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2024

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