Handbook of Medieval Culture: Volume 1 9783110267303, 9783110266597

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Handbook of Medieval Culture Volume 1

Handbook of Medieval Culture Fundamental Aspects and Conditions of the European Middle Ages

Edited by Albrecht Classen Volume 1

ISBN 978-3-11-026659-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-026730-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038544-1 ISBN (Set Vol. 1–3) 978-3-11-037760-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Poitiers Cathedral, Poitiers, France Photo © Albrecht Classen. Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Volume 1 Albrecht Classen Medieval Culture—An Introduction to a New Handbook  1 Christopher R. Clason Animals, Birds, and Fish in the Middle Ages  18 Charlotte A. Stanford Architecture  55 Frances Parton Visual Arts  80 Thomas Willard Astrology, Alchemy and other Occult Sciences  102 Romedio Schmitz-Esser Astronomy  120 Stephen Penn The Bible and Biblical Exegesis  134 Daniel Pigg Children and Childhood in the Middle Ages  149 Ken Mondschein Chivalry and Knighthood  159 Linda Rouillard Church and the Clergy  172 Johannes Bernwieser Cities  187 Lia Ross Communication in the Middle Ages  203

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Mark T. Abate Convivencia: Conquest and Coexistence in Medieval Spain  232 Nadia Pawelchak Medieval Courts and Aristocracy  278 Gerhard Jaritz Daily Life  301 Hiram Kümper Death  314 Jan Wehrle Dreams and Dream Theory  329 Werner Schäfke Dwarves, Trolls, Ogres, and Giants  347 David Sheffler Education and Schooling  384 Gerhard Jaritz Excrement and Waste  406 Emily J. Rozier Fashion  415 Jean N. Goodrich Fairy, Elves and the Enchanted Otherworld  431 Scott L. Taylor Feudalism in Literature and Society  465 Sarah Gordon Food and Cookbooks  477 Charles W. Connell Foreigners and Fear  489

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Marilyn Sandidge The Forest, the River, the Mountain, the Field, and the Meadow  537 John M. Hill Friendship in the Middle Ages  565 Paul Milliman Games and Pastimes  582 Hans-Werner Goetz God  613 Kriszta Kotsis The Greek Orthodox Church  628 Eileen Gardiner Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven  653 Cynthia Jenéy Horses and Equitation  674

Volume 2 Jacqueline Stuhmiller Hunting, Hawking, Fowling, and Fishing  697 Charlotte A. Stanford Illness and Death  722 Mark T. Abate Islamic Spain: Al-Andalus and the Three Cultures  740 Miriamne Ara Krummel Jewish Culture and Literature in England  772 Oliver M. Traxel Languages  794

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Scott L. Taylor Law in Literature and Society  836 Christian Bratu Literature  864 Albrecht Classen Love, Sex, and Marriage  901 Christa Agnes Tuczay Magic and Divination  937 Alain Touwaide Medicine  954 Scott Gwara Medieval Manuscripts  999 Kisha G. Tracy Memory, Recollection, and Forgetting  1020 Jeroen Puttevils Medieval merchants  1039 Werner Heinz History of Medieval Metrology  1057 Richard Landes Millenarianism/Millennialism, Eschatology, Apocalypticism, Utopianism  1093 Ralf Lützelschwab Western Monasticism  1113 Philipp Robinson Rössner Money, Banking, Economy  1137 Mary Kate Hurley Monsters  1167

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Karl Kügle Conceptualizing and Experiencing Music in the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500)  1184 Moritz Wedell Numbers  1205 Rory Naismith Numismatics  1261 Sarah M. Anderson Old Age  1281 John A. Dempsey The Papacy and the Pan-European Culture  1324 Cristian Bratu Patrons, Arts, and Audiences  1381 Francis G. Gentry Poverty  1404 Charles W. Connell Public Opinion and Popular Culture  1419 John Sewell Religious Conflict  1454 Michael Sizer Revolt and Revolution  1486

Volume 3 Albrecht Classen Roads, Streets, Bridges, and Travelers  1511 Daniel F. Pigg The Rural World and the Peasants  1535

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Christina Clever Saints and Relics  1543 Richard G. Newhauser The Senses, the Medieval Sensorium, and Sensing (in) the Middle Ages  1559 Charles W. Connell The Sermon in the Middle Ages  1576 Timothy Runyan Ships and Seafaring  1610 Ben Snook Threats, Dangers, and Catastrophes  1634 Ken Mondschein and Denis Casey Time and Timekeeping  1657 Romedio Schmitz-Esser Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages  1680 Graeme Dunphy The Medieval University  1705 Ben Snook War and Peace  1735 Ken Mondschein Weapons, Warfare, Siege Machinery, and Training in Arms  1758 Christa Agnes Tuczay Witchcraft and Superstition  1786 Bibliography  1813 Primary Literature  1813 Secondary Literature  1860 Index of Names  2117 General Index  2149 Index of Works  2222

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Medieval Culture—An Introduction to a New Handbook* The European Middle Ages are of great interest and relevance both for scholarship and the broader readership today, and this perhaps more than ever before. In fact, they have exerted a tremendous fascination since their rediscovery in the late eighteenth century, and there is no end in sight as to their continued appeal even for future generations. Medieval fairs and similar public spectacles always attract large audiences; most modern novels or short stories with even a slight reference to the Middle Ages prove to be popular, and the same applies to modern movies with a medieval theme.1 At the same time current scholarship is moving ahead at an astonishing pace in virtually all possible fields of human endeavors, activities, productivity, ideas, dreams, concepts, and organizations utilizing a historical lens. Hardly any day passes without another study on that time period, that culture, its peoples, ideas, values, and its social and economic structure and conditions, appearing in print or in electronic media.2 Any school or university teacher who offers a course on the Middle Ages and commands at least a modicum of pedagogical skills can count on attracting a large group of students.3 Public lectures on the Middle Ages can count on being a

* In contrast to all contributions to this Handbook, in this Introduction I am providing the full bibliographical information, with the book series and the publishers. 1 See, for example, Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western, and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films About Medieval Europe (Jefferson, NC, and London 1999); John Aberth, Knights at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York and London 2003); see also the contributors to Antike und Mittelalter im Film: Konstruktionen – Dokumentation – Projektion, ed. Simma Slanicka and Mischa Meier (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna 2005); William F. Woods, The Medieval Filmscape: Reflections of Fear and Desire in a Cinematic Mirror (Jefferson, NC 2014). See also the contributions by Francis Gentry, “Harlots, Heretics, and the Highborn: Modern Visions of Medieval Murder,” wort und wise, singen unde sagen: Festschrift für Ulrich Müller, ed. Ingrid Bennewitz (Göppingen 2007), 299–316; idem., “Die Darstellung des Mittelalters im amerikanischen Film von Robin Hood bis Excalibur,” Mittelalter Rezeption, ed. Peter Wapnewski (Stuttgart 1986), 276–95. The topic of medieval themes in modern movies has attracted much more interest among scholars than can be accounted for here. 2 The large number of book reviews in scholarly journals such as Speculum, Studi medievali, Mediaevistik, The Medieval Review, Arbitrium, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, and many others is vivid evidence for this claim. 3 See, for instance, the contributions to Mittelalterrezeption: Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanistenverbandes 45.1–2 (1998). For a special investigation, see Ulrich Müller, “The Modern Recep-

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success, and exhibitions on medieval art, history, literature, religion, or politics have regularly opened the gates to huge numbers of interested people, and this for many decades by now, accompanied by excellent exhibit catalogues that tend to be well edited for the general reader and for the scholar alike. The mention of King Arthur and the Round Table continues to arouse deep fascination, especially in the New World where this royal figure is sometimes identified as the substitute for many national mythical figures in the Old World. Camelot and the Round Table, not to forget Excalibur, are iconic in the full sense of the word.4 Of course, great popularity among the larger audience does not guarantee the continued serious study of the Middle Ages, as illustrated, for instance, by the increasing lack of linguistic skills among the present student generation, which seems to know any of the medieval languages less and less, not even to mention classical and medieval Latin. But the output of doctoral theses and master theses worldwide indicates that not everything is lost, as long as scholars and teachers (hopefully always in one and the same person) succeed in transmitting the basic knowledge and can motivate the future medievalists to prepare themselves appropriately for their own research. In light of these perhaps overly optimistic observations, some medievalists may want to rest on their laurels and let things stand as they are. We have excellent reference works available; many texts from the Middle Ages are accessible in good, reliable editions and even in translations into many different

tion of Gottfried’s Tristan and the Medieval Legend of Tristan and Isolde,” A Companion to Gottfried von Strassburg’s ‘Tristan’, ed. Will Hasty (Rochester, NY, 2003), 285–304; see also the contributions to Geschichte des Mittelalters für unsere Zeit: Erträge des Kongresses des Verbandes der Geschichtslehrer Deutschlands “Geschichte des Mittelalters im Geschichtsunterricht” Quedlinburg 20.–23. Oktober 1999, ed. Rolf Ballof (Wiesbaden 2003); and to Zurück zum Mittelalter: Neue Perspektiven für den Deutschunterricht, ed. Nine Miedema and Andrea Sieber (Frankfurt a. M. 2013). American scholars have also paid considerable attention to this basic question, see, for instance, Teaching the Middle Ages IV, ed. Robert V. Graybill, Judy G. Hample, Robert L. Kindrick, and Robert E. Lovell (Terre Haute, IN, 1990); Teaching the Middle Ages with Magnificent Art Masterpieces, Bobbi Chertok, Goody Hirshfeld, and Marilyn Rosh (New York 1999); Perspectives on Medieval Art: Learning Through Looking, ed. Ena Giurescu Heller and Patricia Pongracz (New York and London 2010). 4 Andrew E. Mathis, The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature (Jefferson, NC, and London 2002), 2–3: “The quintessential melding of the Arthurian mythos with American politics came with the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” One of the major reason for the great appeal of Arthur might well have been, as Mathis suggests, that this medieval king avoided all the acrimonious religious conflicts and offered an ideological alternative (140–41). See also Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack, King Arthur in America (Cambridge and Rochester, NY, 1999). See now Jeffrey John Dixon, The Glory of Arthur: The Legendary King in Epic Poems of Layamon, Spenser and Blake (Jefferson, NC, 2014).  

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languages; many aspects of that time have been discussed most thoroughly from many different perspectives, often also very controversially, and we can find numerous lexica and encyclopedias on the Middle Ages resting on the bookshelves of our libraries, both at universities and in the public.5 Why would we then need another handbook, this one focusing on medieval culture? After all, the massive Handbook of Medieval Studies, in which many of the aspects and topics dealt with in the present, new Handbook of Medieval Culture, find consideration as well, only recently appeared in print.6 But while the 2010 publication intends to outline the history of research, rich and expansive by itself, addressing primarily scholars in every possible field, the present handbook wants to deal with more specific topics and ideas relevant both for scholars and students, both for the general audience and the experts, presenting the content, discussing what we actually know, and where the critical information can be found in most recent research literature. We are not covering everything concerning the medieval world, which would water down our efforts once again. Instead, there are specific foci on important, fundamental issues, ranging from architecture and religious heresies to numbers and weights and human waste. Robert E. Bjork explains the purpose of his Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (2010) with the following words: it is “designed to be a resource of first resort for specialists and non-specialists alike for all key aspects of European history, society, religion, and culture, c. 500 to c. 1500.”7 Indeed, this proves to be a first resort, a kind of gateway toward the Middle Ages, providing brief snapshots of whatever might be of importance in terms of ideas, events, people, objects, models, or genres. There are also some bibliographical references, but overall, this dictionary primarily hopes to make available bare-bone information, without being focused specifically on the critical research behind what we know of the Middle Ages today. Approached from this perspective, this four-volume tome answers very conveniently most first-hand questions, and at times also contains more extensive articles on larger topics. The same applies to many other lexica and dictionaries on the Middle Ages, which thus serve well as repositories of our general knowledge about that time period. However, in the present day and age

5 Albrecht Classen, “Survey of Fundamental Reference Works in Medieval Studies,” Handbook of Medieval Studies, ed. idem (Berlin and New York 2010), Vol. 1, xxv–lxvi. 6 One of the best reference works ever published on the Middle Ages, considering its compactness, excellent illustrations, and depth of information, still proves to be the one by Aryeh Grabois, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Medieval Civilization (London 1980). 7 Robert E. Bjork, “Introduction,” The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. idem, 4 vols. (Oxford 2010), vol. 1, ix–xi; here ix. See also the comments by William Chester Jordan, ed. of the Supplement 1 to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (New York, Detroit, MI, et al. 2004), vii–viii.

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with the internet increasingly making much knowledge available, the time might come that printed reference works seem to be almost obsolete. Even the much maligned Wikipedia is gaining in maturity and often provides good summaries of the latest research.8 Although many scholars continue to scoff at this online reference work, particularly because of the anonymity and the ever present possibility that non-peer-reviewed statements could enter the texts, there are countless examples of excellent, extraordinarily well-researched and wellwritten articles available online (and there are bad ones as well, of course, but the same could be claimed for even the best and most authoritative reference works, including the Encyclopedia Britannica). Other webpages and databases are not far behind, as we are in the midst of a true paradigm shift which also affects the way we approach the Middle Ages, upon which our own modern world has been constructed.9 In fact, despite the profound changes in cultural history ever since, identified with, for instance, the Protestant Reformation, the Baroque, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, we continue to be the avatars of our medieval forerunners, and many of the same questions that had been of prime importance then are of great importance until today. It might not be too far-fetched to argue that some of the answers to our own critical problems rest in the past, even though we certainly always have to translate ideas and messages from that time period in order to comprehend how they might work or what they might mean today by means of adaptations, modifications, and careful transformations. This is not to pursue anachronistic approaches, or to level all cultural or ideological differences, but traditional positions based on the assumption of complete alterity certainly mislead us and also deprive us of a pool of timeless values, observations, ideas, and concepts that had been developed in the past and stand ready to serve us even today, if carefully modified and adapted for new conditions and material, political, scientific, or even emotional framework. Our present and future are all grounded in the past, which serves, resorting to an analogy, as the root system of the tree that constitutes our own existence. No canopy can survive without the roots that pump the water from deep down, or the past, up to the top, or the future.10 This finds an

8 A recent example proves this point very illustratively. In doing research on the medieval Irish prosimetric Buile Shuibhne, I found the article in Wikipedia to be most helpful, with an excellent bibliography and a remarkable selection of important links to the text edition and an English translation online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buile_Shuibhne (last accessed on Feb. 21, 2014). 9 Ruth Weichselbaumer, Mittelalter virtuell: Mediävistik im Internet (Stuttgart 2005); Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media, ed. Brantley L. Bryant (New York 2010). 10 The major proponent of the alterity thesis was Hans Robert Jauss, Alterität und Modernität der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Munich 1977). See now the contributions to Praktiken europäischer

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excellent illustration in the recently discovered frescoes depicting scenes from the highly popular pan-European literary material known under the title Josaphat and Barlaam. Those frescoes were hidden under thick layers of plaster in the Gozzoburg (ca. 1250–1275; Gozzo Palais) in Krems, Austria. As much as those impressive images are now coming back to light (Fig. 1), the true importance of the Middle Ages in epistemological terms emerges ever more in the present time.

Fig. 1: Scene from Josaphat and Barlaam, Gozzoburg, Krems a. d. D., Austria (© Benjamin Yuchen, June 2014, with permission).  

 

As I have already outlined in the Introduction to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, there is a whole slew of comparable reference works available, both in the format of handbooks or of massive encyclopedias, such as the Lexikon des Mittelalters and the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, which certainly deserve highest recognition for their scholarly thoroughness and comprehensiveness. But scholarship is moving forward, and we constantly learn to understand and to appreciate the past in new terms, or in light of other conditions, as documented by new

Traditionsbildung im Mittelalter: Wissen–Literatur–Mythos, ed. Manfred Eikelmann and Udo Friedrich, together with Esther Laufer and Michael Schwarzbach (Berlin 2013); to Die Aktualität der Vormoderne: Epochenentwürfe zwischen Alterität und Kontinuität, ed. Klaus Ridder and Steffen Patzold (Berlin 2013); and to Heresy and the Making of European Culture: Medieval and Modern Perspectives, ed. Andrew P. Roach and James R. Simpson (Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2013).

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books and articles, by conferences dedicated to the Middle Ages, and now also by the huge efforts to digitize medieval manuscripts and to create online concordances and dictionaries. Particularly considering the truly intensive and impressive research productivity in many different fields, from History to Byzantine Studies, from Musicology to Art History, from Philosophy to the History of Mentality, it behooves us to take stock from time to time and to address in as concrete terms as possible how we actually have to understand past conditions, events, ideas, texts, images, etc. We are actually also witnessing a remarkable paradigm shift taking us away from traditionally narrow disciplinary areas in History, Religion, German Literature, or Music, to a higher level which we might identify as Cultural Studies, that is, research fields that pursue the Middle Ages, or even more broadly conceived, the Premodern World, from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. Both the History of Mentality and the History of Ideas, not to forget Gender Studies, Masculinity Studies, and Ecocriticism, to mention just a few areas, have already blazed a path toward much larger and more comprehensive concepts of medieval society and medieval mentality. By recognizing both the vast differences between then and today and realizing, at the same time, the many similarities of both worlds/ cultures do we gain deeper insight into the human conditions and our needs both to adapt to new environments and to hold on to traditional values and ideas. Interdisciplinarity is not only a slogan, but a necessity in order to develop new perspectives and to guarantee the survival of Medieval Studies today. The recent establishment of the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World at the University of Minnesota, with strong support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, signals that we are not at all in a slump, but at the brink of the ‘Renaissance’ of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, to use a convenient pun.11 This might be an exceptionally positive case, but we observe constructive movement in many other places as well. There are numerous centers of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (or with another nomenclature) both in North America and Europe, and also in Australia and elsewhere. Some receive very solid funding, others might be struggling, but the existence of such scholarly organizations is highly promising. Parallel to that development and pushing it further, for the last decade or so I have organized small symposia at the University of Arizona at which fundamental aspects of medieval and early modern culture were discussed, such as ‘childhood,’ ‘old age,’ ‘love, marriage, and transgression,’ ‘urban space,’ ‘rural space,’

11 http://www.cmedst.umn.edu/assets/doc/Brief_Sketch_of_CSPW_at_UMN.pdf (last accessed on Sept. 26, 2014).

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‘laughter,’ ‘friendship,’ ‘crime and punishment,’ and ‘East meets West,’ and ‘death and the culture of death.’ Future topics will be, for instance, ‘multilingualism,’ ‘hygiene and well-being,’ and ‘travel.’12 The unique nature of these symposia, of which there are, astoundingly, nowadays many similar ones at universities worldwide, consists of their specific framework, bringing together scholars from many different disciplines who address the same topic from their specific areas of expertise and so learn from each other. This does not mean that Medieval Studies would suddenly turn into a sub-field of anthropology, sociology, or linguistics, as pertinent as all those certainly are as well. Literary texts, historical chronicles, sculptures, stained glass windows, textiles, depictions of animals in stone, in paintings, or in literary texts, weapons, musical compositions, foodstuff, architecture, vehicles, etc. are all individual items and need to be studied with great care, but certainly not in isolation. To be sure, they are all embedded in a larger context, and each one of them reveals remarkable connections with those produced or dealt with in other cultures and languages. Religious attitudes, types of fear, concepts of monsters, stereotypes against foreigners or minorities within one’s own society, etc. can all be studied better if we take a more global approach, i.e., pursue those fundamental topics in an interdisciplinary fashion, as has been strongly suggested by many medievalists by now. An intriguing, very recent case proves to be Medieval Disability Studies, a rather new field that is beginning to attract attention, and which allows us to combine contemporary concerns with approaches already pursued in the Middle Ages. It is simply a fact that there were also people affected by some form of mental and physical disability at that time, and society had to deal with them. We can now ask what their concepts were and what those might mean for us today in the ever ongoing quest for alternatives, improved strategies, and better solutions.13

12 All these symposia were subsequently translated into book publications. Recently the volume on Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time appeared in print (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2013). For an outline of this book series and a detailed list of all titles, see http://aclassen.faculty.arizona.edu/fundamentals_2 (last accessed on Sept. 26, 2014). 13 See the contributions to Transkulturelle Verflechtungen im mittelalterlichen Jahrtausend: Europa, Ostasien, Afrika, ed. Michael Borgolte and Matthias M. Tischler (Darmstadt 2012); see also the articles in Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages, ed. John M. Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie (New York 2013). Consult further Weltdeutungen und Weltreligionen 600 bis 1500, ed. Johannes Fried and Ernst-Dieter Hehl (Darmstadt 2010). For an example of how a global approach can be pursued, see the contributions to Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers, ed. Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho (New York and Basingstoke 2000). For Disability Studies, see now Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment During the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (London and New

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But let us focus first on specifically European phenomena. The Crusades and the Catholic Church were matters shared by virtually all Europeans in the Middle Ages, at least in the West, the South, the Center, somewhat in the North, and a little less in the East, depending on where we set the geographical and political boundaries. But as soon as we turn our attention to more fundamental aspects, we easily recognize how much we can or must study the Middle Ages from a global perspective. Courtliness, chivalry, love, desire for sexual fulfillment, fear of God and fear of death, worries about inclement weather or natural catastrophes, the firm belief in the prophetic value of dreams, the deep conviction that spirituality constitutes the other half of human existence, the dread of the wild and dangerous forests with their ferocious beasts (wolves or bears), but then also the delight in the arrival of Spring, the contempt of peasants, the idealization of tournaments, to mention just a small selection of universal topics, tropes, and topoi, were all of greatest relevance for most medieval people, and actually continue to be so in many respects even today.14 Of course, we have to differentiate between the early, the high, and the late Middle Ages, and it would be very difficult to determine with all the desired clarity when the medieval world came to an end and when the so-called Renaissance began, that is, the early modern age. Actually, however, using some basic ‘technical’ aspects we can identify that transition, or paradigm shift, fairly easily, if we consider the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg (ca. 1450), the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans (1453) and hence the final disappearance of the Eastern Roman Empire, the ‘discovery’ of America by Christopher Columbus (1492), the fall of Granada and the complete unification of the Iberian Peninsula under the Spanish crown, except for Portugal (1492), hence also the expulsion of the Jews from there (1492), along with the end of the famous “convivencia,” and finally the Protestant Reformation, initiated by Martin Luther (1517). But the medieval world continued well into the next centuries, if we consider structural elements, the history of mentality, material conditions, or the continuity of feudalism and the aristocratic courts in many parts of Europe. Of course, that phenomenon can be detected in all other cultural periods as well,

York 2006); eadem, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Conceptions of Physical Impairment (London and New York 2013). 14 One interesting and for our purposes relevant example would be the recent attempts by scientists (climatologists) and historians to understand the history of medieval climate, the changes from a little ice age to the medieval warming period, and reverse; see Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, trans. Patrick Camiller (2007; Cambridge and Malden, MA, 2010), 60–120; Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge 2014).

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whether we think of antiquity, the Renaissance, the Baroque, etc. Radical changes or breaks are rather rare, while continuity, transitions, and slow paradigm shifts are more often the norm than not. Nevertheless, we are still on relatively safe ground by recognizing the end of the fifteenth century as the fundamental threshold after which increasingly the entire cultural framework and the value system looked differently. Naturally, none of these observations represent new insights, and yet we can soundly claim that our understanding of the Middle Ages has grown exponentially over the last two hundred years, justifying us in taking a much broader view of that world, extending that time frame of that age down to the seventh or sixth century, and expanding it to the sixteenth and even seventeenth century. Nevertheless, many debates concerning the periodization, the transition from one phase to the other, the technological and scientific developments, the connections between the various cultures, especially the question concerning potential familiarity between Latin-Europe and the Muslim-Arabic world, the cross-fertilization by European poets and composers, not to mention artists, masons, and architects who all shared their ideas and understanding among each other, the relationship between the Jewish and the Christian population, among many other aspects, continue to escape our epistemological grip and demand ever new approaches and interpretive endeavors. The current Handbook of Medieval Culture does not aim at filling the ‘last’ gaps in our knowledge, or to offer the final details—an impossible task all by itself anyway. However, it intends to serve as a pragmatic, detailed, precise, and highly informative, reliable, and trustworthy reference work for all interested in that culture and age for many different reasons. Anyone attending the international congresses in Kalamazoo, Michigan, or in Leeds, UK, knows how great the interest in the European Middle Ages continues to be, and that this is a truly global phenomenon. Publishers could easily confirm that there is an impressively solid market for scholarly books dealing with the Middle Ages, and academic libraries are filled with enormous scores of relevant studies on that cultural period. Research continues, and our understanding of that past world expands considerably at a steady rate because we examine the archival material ever more and develop new perspectives toward the same material known already for a long time. Our broadly conceived and yet very detailed new Handbook of Medieval Culture hence does not constitute an exercise in repeating or digesting the status quo of our knowledge about the Middle Ages. Instead, it intends to be an innovative platform for future studies on that world, and a gateway for present readers who need to gain full information about a specialized topic relevant in that world, even though I had to make selections and focus only on major issues.

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This is a ‘handbook,’ not a ‘lexicon’ or an ‘encyclopedia,’ that is, a broadly-based work tool for both the experts and for the general reader. I gladly acknowledge the existence of parallel projects, which are not competitions, but publications pursuing similar goals, each addressing their tasks in their own, unique fashion. The contributors to A Companion to the Medieval World (2007/2013), for instance, discuss the early medieval foundations, the population and the economy, religious culture, politics and power, and technology and culture. The world of women and the issues of gender are well covered by the contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (2013).15 These are certainly very valuable articles that help us to gain good global overviews and a solid grasp of the relevant scholarship, but both their scope and intentions differ in many ways from our Handbook, which intends to be much more focused in the specific areas and which also offers a considerably different spectrum of topics concerning the Middle Ages. I hope that we can even appeal to undergraduate students taking courses in the Middle Ages. There are good indicators that the relevance of that world and its culture is increasingly recognized by a growing number of people outside and within the university. For instance, late in December 2013, The University of Arizona launched a new Thematic Minor of Medieval Studies, which I had developed in conjunction with some of my colleagues (especially Prof. Fabian Alfie, Chair, Dept. of French and Italian). As an explanation how to justify the existence of this new minor, I wrote online: “A broadly based thematic minor focusing on the Middle Ages exposes you to many different disciplines in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Art History, then in the History of Music, Architecture, Philosophy, Language, Religion, etc. You become an expert in variety of areas, and thus you will be most flexible for the future job market.”16 Prof. Peter Capelli, in the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 15, 2013), almost had this also in mind when he reflects on the need for students not to specialize too early.17

15 A Companion to the Medieval World, ed. Carol Lansing and Edward D. English. Wiley-Blackwell Companions to History (2007; Malden, MA, Oxford, and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); see also A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph. Blackwell Companions to Art History (2006; Malden, MA, Oxford, and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16 http://aclassen.faculty.arizona.edu/content/new-thematic-minor-medieval-studies (last accessed Sept. 29, 2014). 17 Peter Capelli, “Why Focusing Too Narrowly in College Could Backfire,” Wall Street Journal Nov. 15, 2013, see also online at: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732413

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Medievalists (and that’s what you will become) will be well trained in critical thinking, writing, historical research, interdisciplinary approaches, and cultural awareness, and will also understand the need to know a foreign language.”18 To get a Major in Medieval Studies accepted by our university administration might be a monumental task that I would not dare yet to approach, but the future developments might encourage us to do so. But there are numerous universities in North America, for instance, where that is already a concrete possibility. This then brings me back to this new reference work, which carries as its full title: Medieval Culture: A Handbook. Fundamental Aspects and Conditions of the European Middle Ages. While the previous Handbook of Medieval Studies (2010) focused primarily on the history of research, the present Handbook intends to provide basic information on central aspects characterizing the Middle Ages, without ignoring the history of research. These comprise, but are not limited to, such topics as ‘Animals, Fish, and Birds,’ ‘Architecture,’ ‘Bible and Biblical Exegesis,’ ‘Economy,’ ‘Fairies,’ ‘Foreigners,’ ‘Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell,’ ‘Knighthood,’ ‘Languages,’ ‘Law,’ ‘Love and Marriage,’ ‘Numismatics,’ ‘Poverty,’ ‘Public Opinion,’ ‘Religious Conflicts,’ ‘Saints,’ ‘Time Measurement,’ ‘Waste,’ and ‘Weapons.’ Although many more topics could have been dealt with, the large number of specific areas covered in this Handbook already make this work, as I believe, a very rich resource for its users. No one can cover everything, especially not to the depth which the articles here always pursue. In contrast to standard lexica and encyclopedias, everything presented here is based on thorough and fresh research, as reflected in each article through direct references to the relevant publications. I had hoped also to include entries on topics such as ‘Space and Cosmos,’ ‘Islam,’ ‘Family,’ or ‘Baths and Washing,’ ‘Guilds and Craftsmen,’ and ‘Nutrition,’ but it sometimes simply proved, quite regretfully, just impossible to get extensive scholarly contributions in these areas in good time for publication or after years of waiting in vain that promises to submit such an article would be fulfilled. Those are undoubtedly important, if not central topics, but there are always limitations which I had to accept in the long-run while editing this Handbook. However, each piece sub-

9404579016662718868576#printMode (last accessed on Sept. 26, 2014); concerning Liberal Arts and career plans for undergraduates, including majors in Medieval Studies, see David DeLong, “How Liberal Arts Colleges Can Stop Fueling the ‘Skills Gap’,” Harvard Business Review Feb. 4, 2014; online at: http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/how-liberal-arts-colleges-can-stop-fueling-theskills-gap/ (last accessed on Sept. 29, 2014). 18 http://aclassen.faculty.arizona.edu/content/new-thematic-minor-medieval-studies (last accessed on Sept. 29, 2014).

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mitted proved to be of extraordinary scholarly quality, so I can only hope that the readers will acknowledge the quality of the work altogether and forgive us the shortcomings in specific areas. Some topics proved to be just too huge, and there will be, deliberately or simply by default, some imbalance. The topic of medicine, for instance, or Jewish culture, threatened to transgress all boundaries, so here we limit ourselves to the situation for Jews in England and the Iberian Peninsula. Fortunately, there is also an article on the Islamic culture, coupled with a separate study on ‘convivencia.’ Generally, I granted the individual contributors a fair amount of flexibility, as long as the relevant research was covered and all the essential information critically dealt with. The reader can pursue three different approaches. On the one hand the articles intend to provide the essential information as detailed as possible. On the other, each article concludes with a short list of essential readings, of ca. eight to ten titles. But throughout each contribution, the relevant research is embedded, inviting the serious scholar to consult the cumulative bibliography in the third volume. We believe thus to have made it easy for these three types of specific interests. Both the general reader and an undergraduate student will be, as we hope, well served, especially because we have also built in an extensive index for names of people, titles of works, and subject matter (including names of cities, rivers, mountains, animals, etc.). Both the teacher and the scholar will easily find the important information and specific reflections on what scholarship has said about it both in the past and in the present. But the research literature was not to overshadow the presentation of the basic material, hence the scant references in parenthesis throughout the texts. The fact that reference works such as this Handbook are still in great demand and need to be published over and over again is a very good sign for the wellbeing of our research field. We are expanding and are not stuck in a standstill position. Scholarship also extends its reach into often heretofore little considered topics, and this Handbook encourages its readers to recognize how much Medieval Studies today have gone beyond many previous or traditional disciplinary boundaries. Literary scholars must know, for instance, essential aspects pertaining to horses, to numbers, to banking, to medicine, fashion, astronomy, and so forth, and historians of economics, for instance, are well advised to consider the literary history as the background and framework of their data. A good grasp of religious and philosophical concepts is as much required for a full understanding of that world as are insights into natural sciences and games and pastimes practiced in the Middle Ages. We all pursue, of course, our specialty, which is just right, since generalists can only touch on many different issues without ever going into details. Medie-

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val Studies thus emerge as a rather demanding field where the scholars of today must turn their attention to a vast array of topics all at once. But our own time and abilities to investigate neighboring disciplines are limited, which requires that we find help among our colleagues. This is the reason why this Handbook had been first conceived around 2009 and has appeared in print only now in 2015. Even though the goal to develop into an expert in many different fields of the Middle Ages will remain utopian for everyone, this reference work will empower the reader at least to gain a fairly quick understanding of individual aspects of very different kinds. The effort to edit such a Handbook really would have required a whole team of co-editors and other helpers as one commonly reads on the cover page of parallel scholarly enterprises. That was, alas, not the case with me. I am the sole editor, and I have worked with each individual contributor so long until the piece was close to perfection, as I could perceive it, even if this required numerous rounds of revisions. I have tried to establish uniformity in the structure and the references, but there are, by default, depending on the individual research field, slight differences, but those are only formalities and do not concern the content. The ultimate shortcomings rest with me, of course, but I hope that the reader will enjoy and profit from the wealth of extraordinarily rich and well-researched articles highlighting individual features of medieval culture. After I had finished the Handbook of Medieval Studies in 2009 I was approached by representatives of Walter de Gruyter with the request to edit subsequently a Handbook of Medieval Culture. I must be a glutton for punishment to accept the invitation to take on, once again, such a huge burden in scholarship demanding years of intensive and often thankless work, but as soon as I realized the true value of the outcome of our collective efforts for the future, I was extremely happy about the opportunity to present a second reference work of such a monumental caliber. It is my great pleasure to express my thanks to the editorial staff at the Berlin office of the Walter de Gruyter publishing house, especially to Jacob Klingner, Daniel Gietz, and then Elisabeth Kempf who was the major guiding force for the critically final stage of getting this handbook into print. I hope that it will serve Medieval Studies for many years to come, both students and scholars, and also the general public. Perhaps, to be a little over-optimistic, its publication could serve as a catalyst for some university administrators to accept the bid for a Medieval Studies Major in whatever configuration colleagues might conceive of it. Fortunately, such Majors already exist at Stanford University,19 at the University

19 http://cmems.stanford.edu/ (last accessed on Sept. 26, 2014).

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of Oregon,20 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,21 at the University of Virginia,22 at the University of Notre Dame, IN,23 at the University of Toronto, and at other major North American universities, as far as I can currently tell. There is, however, much room to grow, and all good and solid contributions to medieval scholarship can only help in that respect. I have also to express my great gratitude to the contributors. Every article included here demanded much intensive work, extensive research, and great skills in compiling the relevant information in a condensed, compact, and yet understandable fashion. The authors demonstrated extraordinary passion and motivation, not only while writing their pieces, but especially when the long and demanding editing process began. Our format is unusual and was developed through an extensive trial-and-error process until the publisher and I had figured out the best system, serving three different types of interests at the same time. I am particularly thankful for the authors’ patience with my seemingly endless nagging throughout the entire process which took years to accomplish. At the end, as I feel urged to emphasize, each piece was most impressive and will hopefully be a milestone in our research for decades to come. The Middle Ages are not only simply ‘in’ today, they increasingly reveal their broad and deep relevance for the postmodern world, providing powerful messages about epistemology, spirituality, and culture at large, confirming that we as individuals are historical beings and cannot cut our roots, the Middle Ages, if we want the present tree of our culture to thrive in the future. No biologist in his or her sound mind would limit his or her studies to the canopy, the branches, the trunk, and the leaves, ignoring the roots of a tree. In fact, the very top leaves depend vastly on their direct connection with the roots so that they can breathe, pump water, initiate their photosynthesis, etc. When we turn to the Middle Ages, we study the very roots of our existence, and the more we have available solid and foundational reference works such as this Handbook, the more we can trust that the tree of our culture will grow and bloom today and in the future.24

20 http://admissions.uoregon.edu/majors/medieval%20studies (last accessed on Sept. 26, 2014). 21 http://www.medieval.illinois.edu/ (last accessed on Sept. 26, 2014). 22 https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/medievalstudies/ (last accessed on Sept. 26, 2014). 23 http://medieval.nd.edu/undergraduate-program/curriculum/ (last accessed on Sept. 26, 2014). 24 Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, IL, and London 2005), has demonstrated how much virtually all of the major French theoreticians

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After all, there is a direct blood-line, so to speak, between the medieval world and us today, perhaps best represented by the medieval idea of the Grail, the Gothic cathedral, the trebuchet, mysticism, the concept of King Arthur, and courtly love. And today we are the avatars of the Middle Ages! The well of medieval philosophy, theology, art history, science, medicine, or literature runs deeply throughout time. Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (ca. 525), above all, continues to have profound meaning for all of us and builds a fascinating bridge between the past and the present.25 There are countless other examples from the Middle Ages that demonstrate how much history matters for us today and tomorrow as well,26 and how much medieval culture and literature continue to have a profound impact on us in the modern world. This is not to glorify the past and to identify it as an Elysium compared to our modern world in all of its misery. The Middle Ages were not an ideal time, and anyone dreaming of a return to that period as the long-desired alternative to the present world would be deeply disappointed. By the same token, our own existence, whether in the West or in the East, is not ideal either, quite far from it. However, studying the Middle Ages as an early, but still fairly recent stage of Western civilization not really far removed from us today will allow us to regain access to our cultural, technical, medical, religious, or physical memory and to comprehend that world as a most valuable repository of ca. thousand years of human experiences, culture, history, and social developments. It thus seems most fitting to conclude with an image that might capture this sense of (re)birth, of having our roots in that past world, so to speak, and having grown out of it without having lost our connections. Being fully cognizant of the significant contributions by the Jewish and also Islamic cultures to the European Middle Ages, I still want to present here, as a lasting impression, the fantastic twelfth-century baptismal font of San Frediano in Lucca, the Fonte Lustrale. “The highlight at the entrance is the huge 12th-century Romanesque baptismal font (the Fonte Lustrale). It is composed of a bowl, covered with atempietto, resting on

who have launched postmodernism were deeply influenced and shaped by their studies of the Middle Ages. See also Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis, MN, 2006). 25 For my various classes on the Middle Ages I have developed a textbook that serves my purposes exceedingly well, Medieval Answers to Modern Problems, ed. Albrecht Classen, rev. ed. (2012; San Diego, CA, 2013), and I would like to recommend it to my colleagues. 26 I like to express my gratitude to my colleagues Prof. Marilyn L. Sandidge (Westfield State University), Francis Gentry (Pennsylvania State University), and Sarah M. Anderson (Princeton University), for their critical reading of this introduction and their good suggestions regarding some of the contributions.

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pillars, inside a circular basin. It is the craftmanship of master Roberto (his signature is on the basin) and two unknown masters. The basin is decorated with The Story of Moses by a Lombard sculptor. Master Roberto did the last two panels The Good Shepherd and the Six Prophets. The tempietto was sculpted by a Tuscan master, representing the months of the year and the apostles.”27 The level of artistry in the sculptures on the outer wall of this baptisterium is stunning, and we can easily realize how much here the so-called “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” experienced its triumphant manifestation (Fig. 2). The more we can learn about that past world, such as through a close study of this almost incomparable baptismal font, the more we will also be able to comprehend who we are today, direct descendants of our medieval predecessors and hence part of the same human community, and this despite many differences in the perception and understanding of the world, the mentality, and the cultural framework. The understanding of the Middle Ages thus creates a foundation for the critical analysis of ourselves, now and in the future.

27 Susanne Heydasch-Lehmann, Der Taufbrunnen in San Frediano in Lucca und die Entwicklung der toskanischen Plastik in der 2. Hälfte des 12. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a. M. and New York 1991); Luigi Cortini, Marta Niccoluci Cortini, and Maria F. Vadalà Linari, San Frediano: un culto, un popolo, una chiesa (Florence 1997); Romano Silva, La Basilica di San Frediano a Lucca: immagine simbolica di Roma cristiana (Lucca 2010). The quote is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Basilica_of_San_Frediano (last accessed on Sept. 29, 2014).  

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Fig. 2: Baptismal font, San Frediano, Lucca (© Benjamin Yuchen, June 2014, with permission).

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Animals, Birds, and Fish in the Middle Ages A Theoretical Reflections The “animal” as object inhabits a unique position between the subjective human observer and objective nature, for it comprises a part of nature capable of “looking back” at the subject, thus reversing the subject-object relationship on the biological species level (Oliver 2009, 17–19; Derrida 2008, 3–4). In countless ways animals are like us and they are different, and so for the human being they provide a connection to, and a boundary separating us from, the natural world out of which human life emerges. Animals have always fascinated human beings, and thus have appeared in art from earliest times. Prehistoric cave drawings, stone effigies, and wooden fetishes representing animal figures suggest that early peoples connected animals with magic and religion. As culture developed, so, too, developed ever more sophisticated treatments of animals in sculpture, painting and literary forms. Thus, it is perhaps unavoidable that beasts, fowl, and fish would come to occupy three important, symbolic, areas in human consciousness, each of which achieved a particular and profound expression during medieval times: 1) They represent “other,” a part of uncontrollable nature, competitive, fierce, dangerous, and against which humans need protection. They are competitors, or even opponents, in the human struggle to survive in an inhospitable environment. These are the wild beasts that roar, growl, and inspire “us” humans with fear. They remind us of our essentially mortal selves and contrast with our spiritual nature that, according to medieval theology, sought to leave behind the beastly and rise to “higher” realms. In the stated opinions of the earliest Church Fathers, physical appearance separates beasts from humans, since the later are made “in the image of God” and beasts are not, a notion that carried through to the thirteenth-century writings of Albertus Magnus (ca. 1206–1280) and beyond. Furthermore, church notables such as Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) emphasized the behavioral differences: beasts act bestially, and perform savage and brutal deeds for no apparent reason—humans, on the other hand, while they can at times act cruelly and savagely, have grounds for doing so, as a rule. Additionally, Christian philosophers such as Ambrose (ca. 340–397), Augustine (354– 430), and Aquinas cite the human use of “reason” to be the most profound difference separating homo sapiens from the animal world. This perspective dominates during the early Middle Ages (Salisbury 2011, 3–4).

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2) They represent a part of nurturing nature, which links humans to their natural origins. The animals are companions, friends of humans, and are connected to human beings, who have domesticated some of them (Kompatscher, Classen, and Dinzelbacher, ed., 2010, 20–31). We seek them out, and we desire their presence and their company. They are good omens and give us comfort and aid. They serve as food, satisfy our needs, and accompany us on our journeys through life. As a common component of the locus amoenus topos, they help to restore us to equilibrium and strength (Withers 2010, 98–99). Toward the end of the medieval period, the common ground that humans share with beasts became increasingly significant (Salisbury 2011, 81–107). 3) Separate from their significance as creatures of nature, animals obtain, within a social and historical complex, meanings that are only indirectly dependent upon biological or behavioral observation but rather directly dependent upon cultural and artistic transmission. Especially during classic times and again during the Middle Ages, animals assumed symbolic values, acquired through several lines of both secular and ecclesiastical traditions, that made them unique among things of the world. Animals rarely appeared in any work of literature, art, history, philosophy, or science without evincing some added signification or some nuance of meaning. The medieval audience normally grasped, immediately and without great effort, the standard significance of a certain species of beast, fish, or bird; and so the medieval artist had at her or his command a ready supply of amusing and didactic images, metaphors, symbols, and allegorical figures that were rife with sophisticated layers of nuanced significations. For example, when, in the German Tristan (ca. 1210) of Gottfried von Straßburg, the author creates symbolic associations of Isolde with a falcon, a massive and very complex tradition of images, qualities and poems of high love immediately occur to the educated, courtly reader and color her or his attitude toward the noble lady; furthermore, a boar on Tristan’s shield marks him as a man of great sexual prowess, reinforcing positive qualities of power and potency in the audience’s opinion of him as a warrior and potential ruler as well, while underscoring his destructiveness to King Mark’s marriage and rule (McDonald 1991; Schleissner 1993, 78; 81–82). While scientific knowledge regarding animals as objects of nature progressed relatively little over most of the Middle Ages (Flores 1993, 5–10), certainly no other class of objects could claim such a rich, powerful and diverse range of psychic significance—and few that attracted such keen interest from literary and plastic artists (Classen 2012b, 9–13). Certainly, the defining tendency over the earlier medieval period with regard to human-animal relations was the marginalization of animals as “other,” in order to create and to demarcate a human identity that reflected Christian reli-

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gious thinking, particularly important during the era when Church patriarchs were attempting to consolidate the power of the Church in Europe. Distinguishing Christian beliefs from those of more nature-friendly, pagan religions, they established a qualitative difference between humans and animals: “mankind” was created in the “image” of God, but the beasts were not; humans possess souls, but the beasts do not, etc. According to this view, humans ought to view the world of nature as a revelation of God’s design for the universe (the “book of nature”), a plan that supposedly supports the infinite wisdom of the creator but objectifies the flora and non-human fauna of God’s creation. As proof of human superiority, the patriarchs (the Church Fathers) looked at language, reason, and consciousness as proof that the human “we” should maintain the right and privilege to exploit animal objects for their own purposes and gain. Therefore, the basic patriarchal texts tended to emphasize physical and behavioral differences between beasts and humans (Salisbury 2011, 1–3). This attitude began to change late in the Middle Ages (by the twelfth century), such that humans started to see themselves in the context of the animal kingdom, perhaps even to acknowledge “the animal within” (Leemans and Klemm 2007, 159–61; Salisbury 2011, 7–9).

B Sources I The Physiologus Perhaps the most significant literary source for the early medieval understanding of animals is the Physiologus, a Greek text by an anonymous author in Alexandria composed in the second century C.E., and translated into Latin sometime in the fourth century (Gerlach 1971, 432–33; Glick, Livesey, and Wallis, ed., 2005, 528). It consists of numerous descriptions, tales, and legends concerning a broad variety of fauna, flora and inanimate nature, transmitted through folklore and eventually associated, often allegorically, with religious and moral themes. The Physiologus (so named because many chapters of the original work begin with the phrase “The Physiologus says…” [George and Yapp 1991, 1–2; Beullens 2007, 131]) was one of the most popular and widely read books of the Middle Ages, and formed an important source of influence, if not the very basis, for subsequent works like it, from Book XII of Isidore’s Etymologies (early seventh century) to the myriad of bestiaries that flooded especially the later centuries of the medieval period (Flores 1996, ix–xi; Whitney 2004, 103; Resl 2007, 10–12). Translations appear in numerous vernacular languages from the original Greek; and through these translations, the forty chapters of the original work grew to over one hundred in some of the translated texts.

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Each chapter generally begins with or makes reference to a biblical verse, which the author intends to associate in some way with certain observations about the animal, plant, or stone the chapter is describing. The connections which the author makes are for the most part allegorical and the characteristics he attributes to the described creatures are often whimsical or fantastic (Salisbury 2011, 86–87). For example, the elephant supposedly has no knee joints, and therefore, if it falls, it cannot arise again (Physiologus 1979, 30–31; Werness 2004, 164–65, Classen 2012b, 11). The panther, the author claims, is a quiet and mild animal with pleasant breath, which attracts other animals by exhaling a very pleasing aroma (Physiologus 1979, 42–45; Peil 1994, 113; Hassig 1995, 156; Baxter 1998, 49–50; Werness 2004, 315). Similarly, the whale is said to attract tiny fish with its pleasant breath (Physiologus 1979, 46; Baxter 1998, 80; Werness 2004, 430). Some beasts suffer the misfortune of strongly negative associations; for example, the wild ass and the monkey, which the author links to the devil (Physiologus 1979, 38–39). On the other hand, the turtledove represents chasteness and fidelity to one’s mate (Groos 1968, 631–46; Klingender 1971, 342; 376; Baxter 1998, 52; Mermier 2004, 52–53), while other doves (red, white, speckled, etc.) represent various virtues of Christ (Poeschke 1972, 241–44; Physiologus 1979, 64–66; Baxter 1998, 53–55; Werness 2004, 143–44). However, there are a number of medieval associations between animals and certain behaviors that have endured well beyond the Middle Ages, which one may credit the Physiologus with popularizing. For example, there have been many throughout history who have held that the female pelican feeds her young with her own blood if no food is available for them to eat, a belief which appears in this work; even today, the pelican is thought of as a good avian parent, although any biological evidence of this is lacking (Physiologus 1979, 9–10; Peil 1996, 110–11; Werness 2004, 323–24). Also, a most familiar image, well-represented as a symbol for Christ ever since the Middle Ages, is that of the phoenix, the fabulous bird who dies in a conflagration but after three days arises from its ashes, reborn and renewed; the iconic connection of this classical beast with the notion of Christian resurrection arises from the pages of the medieval Physiologus (Physiologus 1979, 13–14; Mermier 1989, 69–87). Through the later medieval centuries Isidore’s Etymologies and the bestiaries began to exert an ever increasing influence on what was considered “common knowledge” regarding animals (Rowland 1971, 3–4), which in turn had a considerable impact on new editions of their predecessor, the Physiologus. With greater numbers of translations of the text, later Physiologus editions grew ever more distant from the Greek original, and with time became hardly recognizable at all. Eventually, these changes brought more and different beasts into the text, thus contributing further to the great and colorful variety of animals appearing in art and literature (Gerlach 1971, 432–34; Physiologus 1979, xxx).

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II The Bestiaries The numerous bestiaries that appeared throughout Europe from the twelfth century on, especially in Latin, French and English, but also in Catalan, Castilian, and Italian, reveal the many layers of sophisticated meaning that developed in art, literature, and didactic works over the course of the Middle Ages. In most of these texts, direct observation of the animal in nature was unimportant; rather, the bestiaries relied on the authority of texts that preceded them, especially the Physiologus and classical authors (Benton 1992, 17; Wheatcroft 1999, 141–59; Glick, Livesey, and Wallis, ed., 2005, 528). However, there were also vast differences between the bestiaries and the Greek text from almost a millennium earlier (George and Yapp 1991, 5–6). These compendia of wisdom regarding animals provided a rich source of symbolic associations, religious allegory, political satire, and moral and religious instruction, and while they were certainly modeled after the Physiologus they also followed their own multitude of textual, visual, and oral sources as well (Hassig 1999, xi). For example, sources beyond the Physiologus for Oxford M. S. Bodley 764, include Hrabanus Maurus’s (ca. 780– 856) On the Nature of Things, Hugh of Fouilloy’s (ca. 1100–1172) The Aviary, and Peter of Cornwall’s (ca. 1140–1221) Pantheologus, and there were others in addition (Bestiary 1999, 8). While illustrations in the Physiologus are rare, many bestiaries were profusely illustrated, and the visual representations found in them became exemplary for animal representations in Romanesque and Gothic art (Clark and McMunn 1989, 2–8). Bestiary illustrations include both portraits of the individual animal (usually in profile, alone, and with some decorative elements) and/or narrative imagery, in which the beast is performing some activity against a landscape background (Hassig 1995, 10–12). Often, the illustrations are fanciful and what was drawn only vaguely resembles the actual beast in nature. Clearly, the importance of the bestiary was not zoological science and factual accuracy, but rather the transmission of the beast’s significance and abstract qualities (Flores 1993, 3–44).

III Isidore’s Etymologies, Book XII Isidore (ca. 560–636), Archbishop of Seville, is regarded as a great link between the world of classical learning and the Christian-European Middle Ages. Isidore’s extensive Etymologies provided a summa of the knowledge of his time (the early seventh century), which he based largely on linguistic derivations. Book XII is concerned with the animal kingdom: it is one of the two longest books of twenty composing this massive work. He arranges the world of animals into eight chapters

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(Klingender 1971): domestic and useful animals, beasts of prey, small creatures, serpents, worms, fishes and amphibians, birds and insects. Each chapter then attempts to differentiate among various sub-types within a type by analyzing the name according to characteristics or behavior and rationalizing the naming etymologically. Setting Isidore’s articles apart from other such works is his refusal to moralize in his stories regarding his beasts: while the beasts and behaviors Isidore described were often strange or fantastic, he nevertheless resisted falling into religious allegory like many of the later authors of the bestiaries.

IV The Bible The Christian Bible mentions over 100 quadrupeds and birds, making the religious symbolism of beasts and its use as a didactic tool familiar to most devout medieval Europeans (Glick, Livesey and Wallis, 2005). Of course, the Old Testament of the Christian Bible remained a primary source for the Judeo-Christian medieval perspective on nature, and therein one discovers the mandate that human beings were to dominate animals, use them as slaves, and consume them as food. In the story of the Fall in Genesis, Satan acquired the form of a serpent in order to tempt Adam and Eve, and their original sin established the polarity between culture and nature, fixing humans outside the natural world. Adam claimed the power and the right to name the animals, but they did not obtain the privilege to name him. During the great deluge, Noah chose which animals he would save on board the ark, but the ones left behind to perish in the great flood, a punishment for human wickedness, had no choice regarding to their fate. When Abraham’s son Isaac was saved from being sacrificed, a ram was chosen to take his place to be slaughtered on the altar, and so on. In the anthropocentric discourse of the Bible, humans dominate their environment and hold dominion over nature, subjugating the animals and killing them for their own purposes, as food or sacrifice to their anthropomorphic deity. Judeo-Christians conceived of the deity they worshipped not in a bestial form (as is the case in many other cultures, historical periods, and religious contexts) but rather in their own, human image and likeness. Therefore, in the narrative concerning the Jews’ Exodus from Egypt, when some Jews chose to worship an image of a golden calf, the textual tone recording the incident did not merely reveal the act to be erroneous, but also blasphemous, aberrant, and condemnable, especially because of the manufactured, “false” deity’s bestial essence. The beasts of the New Testament, while retaining their nature as objects for human use, also occupied significant roles as silent witnesses to important events in Christ’s life, and further became important symbols in the gospel stories,

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miracles and parables. The language of the New Testament was particularly enriched by the presence of so many animals that color the landscape, while they concretized abstract concepts and spiritual lessons; the camel, the ass, the serpent, as well as herds of swine, sheep, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea populated the stories and parables reported in the gospels, especially that of Matthew. And so it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a wealthy man to achieve salvation (Luke 18:25, Matthew 19:24), and Christ would gather Jerusalem’s children together as a hen would gather its chicks under her wings (Matthew 23:37). Although the fowl of the air do little in regard to cultivation and harvesting, the deity still provides for them; after making this statement, Christ poses the rhetorical question: are not humans much better than they are (Matthew 6:26)? Elsewhere, Christ warns against casting pearls before swine, lest they be stomped into the ground (Matthew 7:6); and against false prophets, who are like ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15). The proverbial flavor of such expressions was already well established in the Middle Ages and carried forth in the literary and visual arts throughout the period.

V Classical Authors Among the authors of classical times perhaps the most influential on the medieval view of animals were Aristotle and Pliny, particularly upon scholars and intellectuals. Pliny the Elder’s (23 C.E.–79 C.E.) great contribution to the medieval understanding of the natural world is certainly his Historia naturalis, which related much of the knowledge of his time. The entire text amounts to a compendium of scientific knowledge, including the geological, astronomical and biological sciences, a significant portion of which is zoological. In it, the factual is often mixed with the fantastic, but the quantities of information and the number of species represented are vast. Pliny’s intent is clear: to show how all beasts were placed on the earth to be exploited by human beings (Rowland 1971, 2). During the Middle Ages, this material could easily be disseminated into the public sphere of knowledge, since Isidore’s Etymologies employed Pliny extensively as a source. Furthermore, Pliny had become broadly known among medieval scholars of science as well: the Historia naturalis could be found by the ninth century in the libraries at Corbie, St. Denis, Lorsch, Reichenau, and Monte Cassino, and by the eleventh and twelfth centuries at many more, such as at Chartres and Oxford (Healy 1991, xxxvii–xxxviii). Aristotle (384 B.C.E.–322 B.C.E.) had some influence during the later centuries of the medieval period (Leemans and Klemm 2007, 161–73), but only after his “recovery” in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when most of his works were

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translated into Latin ca. 1220, by Michael Scotus (ca. 1175–ca. 1235) (Klingender 1971, 350). Perhaps his most important proponent at this time was Albertus Magnus (ca. 1206–1280), who in his zoological treatise De animalibus (On Animals) emphasized Aristotle’s empirical approach to the phenomenal world, appreciating his Greek forebear for his scientific methods and observations; therefore, he took pains to pay careful attention to observation and description (Classen, ed., 2012, 9; Whitney 2004, 148–49). However, the scholastic Albertus did not merely present ancient philosophy, and as he crafted Aristotle’s work to his own rhetorical ends, he embellished it and yet argued with his pagan predecessor, and so produced one of the great works of scholasticism (Klingender 1971, 350–51). Albertus’s zoological investigations were clearly intended for an academic audience and thus did not experience the vast popularity of the Etymologies, the bestiaries or the Physiologus.

C The Hunt The hunt provided a regular opportunity for “polite” society to engage with the natural world, and by the twelfth century had become one of the most significant courtly pastimes. Indeed, with the rise of feudalism, hunting grew into a ritual performance of the medieval nobility, a pursuit in which noblemen and women could bond with one another as privileged members of the elite social class, while also practicing skills important in warfare, and displaying wealth, physical prowess and power (Werness 2004, 229; Sandidge 2012, 389–406). The ruling class strictly controlled the space in which its members hunted. The pursuit of larger animals usually took place in the royal forests, while smaller game would be hunted in “warrens,” uncultivated areas set aside for this specific purpose. The authorities punished poachers severely: the penalties included blinding or emasculation, and even the death penalty was not an unusual outcome for the most egregious cases. Hunting was a dangerous pastime, and accidents often occurred during the chase. Nevertheless, women sometimes took part in many activities associated with the hunt, and participated fully in the feasting and drinking that marked the celebration of a successful outing. There are furthermore records of women who took part in the pursuit and killing of game as well, particularly in falconing (Brault 1982, 357); in the Manessische Liederhandschrift (Manesse Songbook, early fourteenth century) in Heidelberg, several images bear evidence of women falconers, most obviously in the representation of Herr Werner von Teufen (early thirteenth century) (Codex Manesse, 69v). Contemporary manuals describing hunting skills and equipment yield a great deal of information regarding weaponry and tactics, as well as the animals that

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the hunters pursued. Foremost among these is the hunting book composed by Gaston Phébus, the Count of Foix (1331–1391) (Brault 1982, 360; Stuhmiller 2012, 505–28; see also her contribution to this Handbook on “Hunting, Hawking, Fowling, and Fishing”). With respect to hawking and falconing, the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II (1194–1250) produced one of the most beautifully illustrated tomes of its kind, De arte venandi cum avibus (ca. 1250, On the Art of Hunting with Birds); its great significance as a treatise on hunting technology as well as a source for visual representations of various avian species is discussed below. Numerous literary works presented the hunt as a courtly ritual performance as well as an opportunity for characters to demonstrate their bravery, strength and skills, and romances often commenced with hunting. In Chrétien de Troyes’s (late twelfth century) Erec et Enide (ca. 1170), the hunt for the White Stag, a mythic beast of Celtic origins, begins a sequence of forest adventures involving Arthur, his knightly entourage, and the youthful Erec (Thiébaux 1974, 108–15). When Gottfried’s hero, Tristan (ca. 1210), still quite young but well-schooled in the craft of woodsmen, first arrives in his uncle Mark’s kingdom, his initial adventure involves a demonstration of his hunting skills, as he instructs a courtly hunting party in the proper way of dressing and preparing their kill for transport back to court (Thiébaux 1974, 129–34). Wolfram von Eschenbach’s (early thirteenth century) protagonist, Parzival, follows a trail to the Grail that he tracks like a good huntsman, recognizing and pursuing signs that spur him onward (Thiébaux 1974, 172–76). The hunt plays a most important role in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century); three consecutive days of hunting include pursuits of a deer, a boar, and finally a fox–thus giving the tale a particularly English character, since fox hunting is traditionally associated with the nobility of England (Thiébaux 1974, 71–88; Yamamoto 2000, 123–31). The lyrics of the troubadours employ the hunt copiously, as a plot device for moving characters into a natural setting and as a metaphor for the pursuit of love (Cummins 1988). The practice of hunting with hounds was termed “venery,” in which the human participants followed the dogs on horseback or on foot (Smets and van den Abeele 2007, 61). Hunting parties pursue a great variety of animals: deer, boars, rabbits, and many other species were the focus of the chase. Hunting dogs, singly or in packs, were commonly employed for hunting larger game; often, they were housed in kennels, making them susceptible at times to mange and rabies, although most hunters recognized the importance of housing their hunting dogs in hygienic conditions. Falcons and other hawks became the most commonly employed beasts for hunting smaller game (Friedman 1989, 157–58). Although a great number of noblepersons engaged in the practice of hunting, the animals they killed did not constitute a significant protein source for the medieval diet. Rather, courtiers hunted for sport and recreation, and the experience served an

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important social function by forging bonds among the nobility and affirming their elite status (Brault 1982, 356–57); the rituals of the hunt, such as the system of rewards (essentially, body-parts of the slain animal) for the participants who perform certain services, reinforced rituals of the courtly ethos on the body of the beast and in the natural environment, away from the court (Yamamoto 2000, 111–13).

D Religion The medieval mind viewed animal life, like most other aspects of nature, through the lens not only of the Bible (see above) but also from the vast body of patristic scholarship, myth and tradition that followed. The violent rupture between human life and nature that originated in the story of the Fall in the Garden of Eden carried on into medieval times; thus Augustine maintained that humans occupy a privileged position above all animals, for “we” possess a soul, whereas “they” do not. Later, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) would also insist that the beasts are irreconcilably inferior to humans, but for him it is a question of humankind having and animals lacking reason. Thus, for the earlier Middle Ages the “bestial” commonly reflected that which was ignoble, base and evil, to be exploited as food or for our comfort or convenience, or often to be mistrusted or feared as competitive, destructive or dangerous elements of inclement nature. Of course, notable exceptions to these attitudes did occur, as for example, in the fables from antiquity that enjoy popularity throughout the period. These attitudes evolved gradually but decisively over time, such that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries stories and tales began to mark a sea-change in the way humans viewed themselves in relation to the animal kingdom (Salisbury 1994). Primarily responsible were the numerous bestiaries and related texts that represented animals as especially religious exempla of human behavior, assessed as good or bad in accord with values assigned through textual and visual association. Among the good beasts one could regularly count, for example, the lamb, resting on its biblical symbolism of purity, as a preferred Old Testament animal of sacrifice or the New Testament symbol for Christ, the Agnus Dei. Correspondingly, there were evil beasts as well. Perhaps the most notorious was the serpent, the reptilian form of the tempter of the Garden of Eden from Genesis 1. Among spiritually negative beasts, the toad held a special place as a creature evincing harmful characteristics, its bad reputation arising from both classical and Christian sources. Furthermore, by medieval times, through conflation and confusion with its biological cousin the frog (latin rana), the toad (latin rubeta) had uniquely acquired most of the “evil” qualities ascribed to both species, such

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as being the cause of plagues or the vessel of unclean spirits described in the Bible, or as sources of poison in Pliny or Juvenal (ca. early second century). Later, the toad became an emblematic commonplace for the memento mori theme: generally, it was believed that toads possess teeth, and gnaw at decomposing corpses or even at the souls of those in purgatory or in hell. Thus, the toad’s literary and artistic representation as an evil, deadly, and decadent beast, combined with its physical and behavioral characteristics, such as its nocturnal activity, the sounds it emits, and its often unpleasant appearance and smell, connected it during the later medieval period with the worst possible associations, including bubonic plague, witchcraft, and heretical movements (Robbins 1996, 25–47). A special association regarding the symbolism surrounding the four Evangelist authors of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, originated early in the history of the iconography of the Christian Church. These associations stemmed from three biblical passages: Revelation 4:6–8, Ezekiel 1:4–10 and Ezekiel 10:1, 14–15; each of these enigmatic verses related a vaguely similar, dream-like scenario, in which four winged animal-human entities appeared as part of an apocalyptic vision and brought some news or sang praises to God. Already in the second century C.E., St. Irenaeus of Lyons (second century C. E.) attempted to match each of these figures with an evangelist symbolically, linking Matthew with the described angelic-human figure, John with the lion, Luke with the ox, and Mark with the eagle. In this endeavor he was followed by St. Jerome (ca. 347–420) and St. Augustine (354–430) in the early fifth century, each attempting a different symbolic configuration of animal-to-evangelist; finally, the distribution suggested by St. Jerome prevailed, wherein Mark was associated with a lion, and John’s icon was that of the eagle, while, similarly to Irenaeus’s design, Matthew was matched with an angel and Luke with an ox. This iconography became ubiquitous in the art of the Middle Ages (Klingender 1974, 216–37; Werness 2004, 169). Several Christian medieval saints were also associated with animals. The mythology surrounding St. Eustace (second century C. E.) was filled with beasts: various tales involved his vision of a magnificent stag with huge antlers bearing a crucifix, the kidnapping of his children by a lion and a wolf, and his martyrdom by being roasted alive inside a bull fashioned out of brass. St. Francis of Assisi (ca. 1182–1226), the founder of the Franciscan Order, gathered wolves and birds around him in peace and tranquility, according to the myth, and his simple, straightforward intimacy with nature reminded all humans during the later Middle Ages of the omnipresence of divinity. The monastic St. Jerome (347–420) was reputed to have removed a thorn from the claw of a lion; as a result, virtually all representations of the saint included a tame lion in the monk’s immediate presence (Werness 2004, 354–56; Salter 2001, 11–70).

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E Fables The fable, an important inheritance from classical literature, occupied a unique position among the didactic literary genres of the medieval period. For the most part, the genre was an inheritance from classical times, particularly from the fables of the Greek Aesop (ca. 620–564 B. C. E.), although the most important of the medieval fabulists tended to change key aspects. For the classical world, fables provided a means by which the lower classes could criticize the social order, casting individuals from the upper classes as animals and thus evading punishment for seditious writing. However, during the Middle Ages it was not the lower classes but rather the upper classes that produced and read fables; thus the stories generally tended to support the social status quo (Salisbury 1996, 50–51), and although they offered some social criticisms, their primary thrust was to praise certain virtues, such as humility and cleverness (Adams 2005, 909). Growing out of the traditions of the fable, various beast epics became popular narratives during the later medieval period. Noteworthy were the Latin epic poems Ecbasis captivi and the Ysengrinus, as well as the widely known Roman de Renart; each of these tales presented the slyness of the fox and the uncontrollable desires of the wolf, and often brought in other anthropomorphized animals as well (Mann 2009, 17–20). Especially worthy of mention are the hundred three fables of Marie de France (late twelfth century), which often included animal characters (Salisbury 1996, 50–51). The genre was traditionally a masculine one and transmitted conventional, patriarchal social values; Marie’s fables were unique texts in that they were produced by a woman, a practically unknown phenomenon in the period extending from classical times until the eighteenth century (Spiegel 1994, 111). Social relationships among the fable beasts were sophisticated and courtly, and so the animals formed bonds and interacted with one another much as humans would do, according to custom at court (Jauss 1959, 46–47). The social hierarchy represented in these brief works reflected the natural hierarchy of power, and the more powerful beasts consistently exploited the less powerful ones (Adams 2005, 908–09). Thus, the predatory beast was superior to its victim in nature; for example, the wolf had a higher position than the lamb, which was reflected in forms of address—the wolf addressed the lamb as one of inferior rank, and the lamb spoke to the wolf as its lord (Mann 2009, 58–59); and the lion cunningly exploited its position as alpha predator over other animals, tricking them into doing the work of the hunt but then appropriating for himself all the deer they had hunted (Adams 2005, 909). The values informing the fable’s moral were generally those of the court as well, but also present in the broad ethos were

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cunning, suspicion and mistrust, while the most successful characters were selfreliant and clever (Bloch 2003; Mann 2009, 76; Whalen 2011).

F Heraldry The term “heraldry” refers to the bold, bright insignias that adorned the shields of knights, a custom that began in the early twelfth century; animals were almost ubiquitously present in the emblems and usually occupied a place of primary iconographic importance (Hartmann 2009, 178–79). The insignia became more family identifications than purely personal devices, and they were passed from father to son through generations as a treasured inheritance. The granting of the familial crest became a ceremony full of symbolism and pride for the family: the ritual of initiation included a shave and a bath for the young man, who also had to remain awake and stand watch overnight in preparation for the bestowing of the heraldic emblem on the following day (Klingender 1971, 451). The heraldic emblem provided one of the most significant means of identifying knights in battle, since a person under so much armor was otherwise virtually unrecognizable. Since the emblem often included prominent images of various birds and beasts, it forged a strong visual identity between the knight and the animal emblazoned on the shield. Therefore, the emblems provided a highly visible means for spreading and popularizing certain qualities of specific animals in a secular context (Page 2007, 41). Essentially, the heraldic practice served to liberate beasts from their traditional religious connotations, fashioning a new mythology for various species where the qualities previously known only through the Physiologus and the bestiaries were replaced with moral characteristics that related to courtly and knightly virtue. Bravery, strength, and determination were personal qualities that warriors wished to project, and so lions, eagles, and some fantastic beasts, such as griffins and dragons, became favorites in heraldic emblems (Klingender 1971, 452–54). As a result, heraldic beasts tended to be fierce; additionally, in Arthurian heraldry there were some very unusual beasts as well (Nickel 1993, 30). Numerous courtly epics described the shields born by knights as they did battle: very often, the authors mentioned specifically the animals and then characterized the knight with some of the attributes that the beasts evoked (Hartmann 2009, 168–76). The images associated with the authors whose poems were included in the famous Manessische Liederhandschrift (Manesse Songbook, early fourteenth century) carried the heraldic tradition over into literature and forged a visual connection between poets and animal imagery. Furthermore, heraldic images appeared in books, bibles, registers, and other documents associated with church records,

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as well as in the very architecture of the churches: one witnessed familial insignias, for example, in numerous memorials to prominent churchmen and women as well as on tombs and in crypts that held the remains of socially or politically important individuals (Hartmann 2009, 152–68).

G Specific Beasts A great variety of animals appeared in the literature and art of the Middle Ages. While it is impossible to list all of them in the space allotted here, there are nevertheless a number of beasts which appeared often, and whose range of symbolic meanings tended to remain rather constant.

I Wild Lion Perhaps the most significant of all bestiary animals, the lion appeared seemingly ubiquitously in literary and visual works throughout the Middle Ages (Bloch 1971, 112–19). However, although they were reported in Greece as late as the fourth century B.C.E., the actual beast’s original range had, for the most part, extended only across Africa, the Middle East, and India, and by the Middle Ages it had already disappeared from these areas to a significant extent. Nevertheless, medieval Europe remained thoroughly familiar and fascinated with lions, and particularly among the earlier manuscripts there was scarcely a bestiary that does not feature the lion as the first animal. Some actual, flesh-and-blood lions were known in Europe as well, especially among the royalty: for example, the English King Henry I (ca. 1068–1135) kept a pride of lions in his royal park, and for over a century the exhibit was the most popular viewing attraction among the zoological holdings there (George and Yapp 1991, 47–48). Medieval culture almost universally recognized special qualities of bravery, power and pride in the lion. Thus, King Richard I (Coeur de Lion, “Lionheart”) of England (1157–1199) and Heinrich (der Löwe, “the Lion”), Duke of Saxony and Bavaria (1129–1195), acquired leonine epithets because of their daring and valorous deeds. The heraldic emblem of the lion became associated with the English throne and eventually turned into the prominent symbol in the Royal Banner, the Royal Coat of Arms, and other official symbols of England. There are abundant medieval literary works in which the lion appears, often as a major element of the plot or thematic structures. In several, the hero renders

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assistance to the lion, and the lion repays the kindness by serving the hero. Chrétien’s Yvain (Le chevalier au lion, ca. 1177) rescues a lion that is threatened by a dragon; as a result, the lion becomes his loyal companion, aids him in his knightly exploits, and helps him to win back his estranged wife, Laudine. In the tale of St. Jerome (ca. 347–ca. 420) and the Lion, a male lion with a wounded paw hobbles into a monastery; although the other monks flee in terror, Jerome greets the beast without fear, cleans his wound and bandages it. The lion, like Yvain’s companion, loses his wildness and out of gratitude for the saint’s kindness he faithfully serves the monks at the monastery (Salter 2001, 11–24). The lion also acquired negative characteristics in some works, particularly because its reputation for ferocity inspired paralyzing fear in the medieval human heart. Perhaps the most famous example occurs in the opening canto of Dante’s (1265–1321) Divine Comedy (1308–1321): one of the three beasts blocking the poet from recovering the “path that does not stray,” the lion that appears there has commonly been interpreted as a bestial representative of sins of violence. Its presence, along with that of a she-wolf and a leopard, prevents the pilgrim, thwarted by utter terror, from returning to his life’s path, and thus it initiates the metaphorical journey he will take through the Inferno, the Purgatorio and finally the Paradiso.

Boar While the wild boar did not appear in the original Physiologus, it entered into the bestiaries late in the twelfth century, where it was considered to be one of the most savage of all animals (George and Yapp 1991, 74–75). Its evil attributes were at least partly due to its biblical associations, originating in the Old Testament Book of Psalms (80, 13), with the Apocalypse and the Antichrist. Its reputation marked it as fearless and ferocious, capable of killing hunters with its formidable tusks (Cummins 1988, 96–109); furthermore, it personified the cardinal sin of Lust, in polar opposition to the virtue of Chastity (Werness 2004, 49). In this symbolism, the boar was lecherous and gluttonous beyond measure, capable of feeding on its own young, human corpses, and small children (Rowland 1971, 75–78). It became a familiar animal, even in areas populated by human beings, and “domesticated” boars could often be found roaming the urban environment, consuming whatever edible tidbits they might find in streets and garbage dumps (Rowland 1971, 74–75). At the same time, because of its uncontrollable nature and appetites, it retained its essential “otherness” to the court, symbolizing an extreme challenge to its rules for decorum and acceptability (Zips 1972, 134–52; McDonald 1991, 159–78; Schleissner 1993, 81–83; Clason 2004, 285–89).

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Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–ca. 1400) makes use of such negative associations in “The Knight’s Tale,” where he compares “chivalrous” warriors, locked in ferocious combat over the favors of a young woman, to boars. The symbolism here functions appropriately on three levels: boars have a reputation for relentless viciousness; they are particularly ferocious during their breeding season; and finally, they possess a connection to mental disorders as a result of the biblical tale (Matthew 8: 31–32; Mark 5: 11–13) of Christ casting evil spirits out of a human and directing them into a nearby heard of swine, who rush into a lake and drown themselves. Thus, Chaucer implies that courtly love transforms the lover into a murderous beast, whose ardor is fueled not by noble sentiments, but rather by lust and madness (Rowland 1971, 78; see now Van Dyke, ed., 2012). However, very few medieval beasts possessed reputations that were entirely either good or bad, and even the boar was granted some positive qualities. A few medieval literary authors sometimes held the boar in special esteem as a fearless and powerful beast, symbolizing great bravery and strength, but resisting the narrowness and restriction of courtly rules and regulations. In Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan und Isolde, a boar is emblazoned on Tristan’s shield, associating him with these qualities; when Tristan’s companion Marjodo dreams of a wild boar forcing its way into the king’s bedroom, foaming at the mouth and soiling the royal bed, it is clear that the reference is to Tristan, the destroyer of Mark’s marriage (Schleissner 1993, 81–83; Clason 2004, 285–89). Research has shown, however, that Tristan’s linking to the boar was not Gottfried’s invention, but rather arose from old French traditions (Zips 1972, 139). The boar-hunt, probably the second favorite to the stag-hunt (Salisbury 2011, 39), provided several medieval authors with plot elements for their epic works, motivating the heroes’ presence in the woods and supplying the opportunity for an encounter with danger and destiny. In Jean d’Arras’ (late fourteenth century) Melusine, Raimondin accidentally kills his uncle when attempting to dispatch a ferocious boar during a hunt. Immediately thereafter he encounters Melusine, his future bride, for the first time, at an enchanted spring, an event that moves Raimondin’s future, along with the narrative, into the realm of the fabulous and supernatural. One of their offspring, Geoffroy à la grand’dent (“big tooth”) bears a permanent, physical reminder of the parents’ first encounter. Geoffroy’s huge tooth (resembling a boar’s tusk) as well as his extreme disposition (exemplified by the horrific deed he commits of burning down a monastery in anger at a brother, and so murdering a number of monks) indicates that, even later in life, he has retained several characteristics typical of the beast, as a part of his familial inheritance (Hahn 2012, 87–108). This account later enjoyed considerable popularity, such as in Thüring von Ringoltingen’s early-German Melusine (1456).

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Deer The deer, perhaps the most important target of the hunt, was one of the most significant animals of the Middle Ages, and very commonly appeared in works of art and literature. There are several types of deer that the medieval world distinguished from one another: the male deer, or “stag,” also called the “hart,” possesses prodigious antlers that function as weapons but are shed periodically; the female deer is sometimes called a “hind,” especially when designating a doe of the red deer family (Werness 2004, 215). In most areas of Europe, the stag is the largest hunted animal. Because it is timid but also wily and large, it demands the utmost of the hunter and the dogs, and therefore hunting it was both a challenge and a thrill. During the rut, a stag can kill a human being, but at the same time it is extremely shy and fearful, and medieval authors claimed that the heart of the stag contains a bone, which alone prevents the animal from dying of terror (Cummins 1988, 32). Hunters conducted their chase of the deer par force, following strict rules. The huntsman spotted the animal and reported back to the assembly of hunters, who planned the progress of their hunt. The company planted relays of hounds at strategic points, to be released when the animal was spotted; they gave chase, exhausted it and surrounded it, holding it captive until the company arrived and killed the deer with a sword (Hassig 1995, 49). Thereafter a highly specialized ritual was held in order to break up the beast and carry it back to court—this is a process of which Tristan in Gottfried von Strassburg’s eponymous romance (ca. 1210) has great knowledge and in which the boy educates Mark’s hunting party. The dogs were rewarded with bread, blood and chopped intestines (the curee, or “quarry”) spread out over the now empty deerskin. All the while, the hunters continuously blew their horns to signal the successful hunt (Smets and van den Abeele 2007, 61). In the later Middle Ages, the wealthier members of the nobility developed deer parks and staged massive hunting parties, a phenomenon that led to massacres of deer in great numbers (Smets and van den Abeele 2007, 62; Dowling 2012, 384–86; Sandidge 2012, 398–406). Numerous literary works celebrated the stag as a mythic animal, emblem of the “chase” for love. Chrétien’s Erec finds Enide while the rest of Arthur’s court participates in a hunt for a white stag (Thiébaux 1974, 110–12). King Mark is engaged in a hunt for a large white stag when he discovers the resting place of his spouse, Isolde, and his nephew, Tristan, in the minnegrotte (love cave) in Gottfried’s Tristan; the stag becomes a symbol for the lovers, whose tracks are mistaken in the morning dew for those of the deer. It is a counterpart to the hart that the Cornish hunting party slays earlier in the tale. When Tristan schools the hunters in proper preparation and transport of the kill (see above), he begins to

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ingratiate himself with his uncle’s court. Thus, a deer leads Tristan to Mark, and its counterpart later leads Mark to Tristan (Schleissner 1993, 86–88). In Christian art, the mythological symbolisms of the deer were very important–for example, the stag did mythic battle with its bitter enemy, the serpent–a representation of good, purity, and life fighting with evil, corruption, and death (Werness 2004, 131). According to the bestiaries, the stag/hart pants when it thirsts for water in the brook, as the soul pants for God (Thiebaux 1974, 41). But when it discovers a serpent hiding in its lair, it spits water into the passageway leading to the reptile, forcing the snake above ground; as soon as the snake emerges, the stag stomps it to death with its hooves (Hassig 1995, 41; Baxter 1998, 52). The bestiaries further claim that the hart is fond of music and listens to it with its ears up, but with its ears down it is deaf (Werness 2004, 131). While the nobility occasionally enjoyed deer meat from the hunt, it was essentially unknown at the table of the peasantry. Venison was considered an “elite” protein and therefore was afforded only by the rich, particularly in the later Middle Ages (Dowling 2012, 381). Furthermore, virtually any incursion into the king’s lands was held to be a major offense and anyone doing so could suffer blinding or other painful and devastating punishments (Yamamoto 2000, 102–05). The major source of protein for the peasant class until early modern times remained legumes, and was supplemented with cheese, beef, or pork when it was available, and fish on days when the Church forbade meat (Hammond 1993 [2005], 25–37; Adamson 2004, 30–47).

Fox During the Middle Ages the fox gained a reputation for “earthiness.” Medieval authors focused on its body as smelly, repugnant, and polluting, especially with respect to its habit of defecating and urinating when it was being hunted, behaviors that were possibly intended to confuse dogs and humans tracking it. However, the fox also evinced admirable qualities as well, especially with regard to intelligence, evasiveness, and shrewdness, and so its standing with humans remained ambivalent and complex (Yamamoto 2000, 56–60). The Physiologus incorporates the fox’s reputation for cunning as it describes how it rolls about in red earth so that it appears to be bleeding, and then lies still, feigning death. Birds then gather around the fox and at the right moment the fox springs up and catches the unsuspecting birds, and devours them. The fox is then linked to the devil, who catches human souls in a similar fashion; thus, the Physiologus firmly establishes the reputation of the fox as “trickster” beast, which earns it a negative value. Only later, when slyness and shrewdness are more

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highly valued in European culture, can medieval Europe view the fox more positively (Werness 2004, 184). One of the most renowned literary beasts of the Middle Ages was the fox Reynard; stories regarding the clever fox had their origin in the Latin poems such as the twelfth-century work, entitled Ysengrimus, regarding the perennial struggle between the wolf and fox (Mann 2009, 44–52). Subsequently, clerical authors penned the twenty-seven chapters (“branches”) of the French Roman de Renart between 1170 and 1250, and soon the extremely popular work spread throughout Europe in many translations and adaptations. (Klingender 1971, 366–68). In the tale’s social structure, all of the animals are personified as human “types” that technically belong to a kind of stratified nobility (Gordon 2012, 285–89). Their actions and personalities clearly appealed to members of all classes among the reading public, however, since the enormous popularity of the tale cut across all strata of the literate. The character of the fox contains elements both of the hero and the villain, but in every situation he is extremely clever and persuasive, and very skillful as a dissembler and con-artist. Perhaps his most significant attribute is his supreme mastery of nuance in language and his ability to manipulate the meanings he conveys (Yamamoto 2000, 62). Thus, in the later centuries of the Middle Ages when satire became an important literary genre for social and political criticism, the stories concerning Reynard the Fox became ever more significant, providing a vehicle for dissent where other, more direct expressions of disagreement with the status quo could prove to be politically dangerous (Klingender 1971, 368). Aesop’s (ca. 620 B.C.E.–564 B.C.E.) fables include humorous and entertaining views of sly foxes; as one might expect, these qualities come through especially strongly in the fables of Marie de France (late twelfth century) (e.g., “The Fox and the Cock”), which also make use of concepts fashioned and spread by the Reynard material (Mann 2009, 243–45). In Great Britain, the fox hunt became the most popular form of hunting, and its practice extended even into the twentieth century. Already in the Middle Ages the fox was greatly resented, but also somewhat admired at the same time, for its unflinching determination to rob humans of their domesticated fowl. It did not timidly remain at a distance but rather audaciously entered human habitations without hesitation, for example, where chickens were cooped. Its boldness was remarkable, and therefore the fox hunt empowered the human being to exact some measure of justice and vengeance. But it was in the hunt that the fox’s particular wit and skills were most apparent, and this fact perhaps engendered humans’ respect for it. The medieval hunter knew: if the fox was near its den, it was very difficult to catch it, since it disappeared quickly below ground at the slightest alarm, but if the fox was spotted far from the safety of its hole, then the

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chase was on, and it became a battle of wits, physical skills, and endurance on the part of both the hunter and the hunted. The familiar style of hunting foxes par force, with a pack of greyhounds or other fast running dogs, was the customary practice among the nobility in England and France, while elsewhere those who had been robbed of their geese, chickens and other poultry, dispatched foxes by employing snares, traps, poisons, or specially bred dogs (Cummins 1988, 141–44). A detailed description of the fox hunt appears in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century), marking the third day of a hunt by Sir Bertilak (Cummins 1988, 144–46; Yamamoto 2000, 127–29).

Bear The bear was worshipped in ancient times as a god and generally revered until the Common Era, when it begins gradually to lose its status as a regal beast. The major arbiter in the fall of the bear from its high position was the Christian Church, which considered it to be dangerous: not merely because it is powerful, swift, and aggressive, but also as a symbolic entity, because it appears to be a bestial imitation or effigy of homo sapiens. Standing on its hind legs, the bear acquired an oddly human appearance; and so, in the minds of the ecclesiastical patriarchs its posture became blasphemous by seeming to form a grotesque imitation of the human figure, which was supposed to have been made in the image and likeness of God. Furthermore, its unrestrained behavior associated it with evil and the devil. By the advent of the High Middle Ages, the bear’s image as “king of beasts” was tarnished beyond recovery, and it was replaced by the lion as the most noble of animals and emblem of kings. By the late medieval period one witnessed bear spectacles, in which the animals, leashed, muzzled, and chained, were forced to perform inane tricks and acrobatic stunts, rendering the public image of this once prodigious beast innocuous and ridiculous (Pastoreau 2007, 89–90).

Wolf Rapacious and bloodthirsty, possessing strong jaws and a muscular physique, the wolf, the wild, symbolic inversion of the human-friendly canine (see below), was universally feared in the Middle Ages, and posed a genuine danger in the forests and woods of medieval Europe to both humans and their domesticated beasts. Humans commonly encountered packs of from seven to twenty animals, roaming throughout a large habitat, including, for example, the entire expanse of Great Britain and Ireland (George and Yapp 1991, 50–51).

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The wolf was a favorite beast of authors of the fable or the beast epic, often paired with a fox or another animal or group of animals. The Ecbasis captivi, from the eleventh century, relates the story of a wolf (with certain, unmistakably “monastic” features) who, in a framing tale, captures a calf at Eastertime, brings it back to a cave, and prepares to slaughter it. The monkish wolf explains to his associates, the otter and the hedgehog, why he fears and hates the fox by narrating an Aesopian fable, in which the fox outwits the wolf. Animals from a nearby town come to the aid of the calf and kill the wolf. (Ziolkowski 1993, 153–97; Zeydel, intro. and trans., 1964, 9–11). A later beast epic, the Ysengrimus (twelfth century), presents several versions of a narrative in which a fox, similarly to that of the previously described Aesopian fable, “outfoxes” a wolf. Nevertheless, the wolf shows himself to be a cunning and duplicitous creature, whose only flaw is having a more worthy opponent (Mann 2009, 44–52). The wolf in Le Roman de Renart, Ysengrin, similarly falls victim to the wiles of the fox (Mann 2009, 221–29). The adversarial relationship between fox and wolf continues in marginalia, such as those found in the Smithfield Decretals of the fourteenth century. In one such drawing, the fox physician seems to be impersonating a physician and “ministering” to a wolf, while in an adjacent illustration the wolf apparently expires while the fox smiles in scorn and derision (Sprunger 1996, 73–74). The fables of Marie de France (late twelfth century) link the wolf with a variety of bestial companions and victims, for example, the hedgehog, the dog, and the lamb; in these works the wolf’s most defining characteristic is his cruelty (Mann 2009, 28–33). In her lais, Marie also narrates a tale regarding lycanthropy, the metamorphosis of a human being into a wolf; the werewolf of her tale (“Bisclavret”) displays extraordinary mental skills, befriends a king and finally bites off the nose of his wife who has rejected him for a suitor because of her husband’s new and unusual form (Marie de France 1990, 116–33; Salisbury 2011, 144–45). For Dante (1265–1321), the she-wolf is one of the beasts blocking Dante’s way back to the straight-and-narrow path of his life at the opening of his Divine Comedy (1308–1321), and thus represents one of the grand categories of sin in the Inferno, possibly incontinence.

Snake Snakes have evinced a plethora of symbolisms since ancient times, especially relating it to evil (Kemp 1972, 75–81; Rees 1992, 52–57); however, the Physiologus addresses only four of them, and they are positive. In it one discovers that the snake sheds its skin (and thus in earlier times becomes a symbol of rebirth and

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resurrection) by fasting, and thus good Christians can cast off old, sinful ways and be reborn in Christ. Secondly, when the snake drinks it rids itself of its poison, and like the beast the human being should leave all poison and sinfulness outside of the church. Because, as the Physiologus reports, snakes fear naked persons but will bite those who are clothed, so Adam becomes vulnerable to the “serpent” when he loses his naked innocence and clothes himself in the mortality of a fleshy body. Finally, since the snake will, in times of danger, surrender its body and protect its head, so, too, should the good Christian protect his spiritual “head,” which is Christ (Physiologus 1979, 16–19; Wheatcroft 1999, 146–48; Werness 2004, 381).

II Fabulous The medieval menagerie included not only real animals but those of the imagination as well. Literature and art were particularly rich in their representations of fabulous beasts, sometimes as grotesque variations of existing animals (such as huge fish, foxes that speak, etc.), but also species for which there were no known examples in the natural world. Several of these became common in literature and art and obtained certain standard characteristics (Kirschbaum 1970, 1–4).

Unicorn The Physiologus and bestiaries described the unicorn, which they called alternatively the “monoceras,” as a smallish beast of the same general size as a kid, possessing a single horn in the middle of its forehead. It was reputed to be very shrewd, swift and strong, and thus difficult to hunt. However, the sources reported that one could effect a capture with the aid of a virgin: the unicorn would approach the woman and could not help but leap into her lap and embrace her, whereupon he would be caught. In the bestiaries the unicorn was often associated with Christ (Physiologus 1979, 51; White, trans. and ed., 1954, 20–21; Gravestock 1999, 127–29). Among the most striking examples of the unicorn in the visual arts appeared in the series of tapestries known as the “Unicorn Tapestries” of the Musée de Cluny in Paris and those in the Cloisters (the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The beautifully intricate tapestries were woven approximately in 1480 and 1500 respectively, and thus arose at the very end of the medieval period. The former consist of six separate pieces, five of which allegorize the five senses; the composition of each image arranges a central figure

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of a woman flanked by a lion and a unicorn, with a background of smaller animals playing amidst trees, flowers and the high lady’s coat-of arms (Gotfredsen 1999, 90–103). The latter reproduce a hunt for a unicorn in seven panels: among the images are scenes of the beast by a fountain, surrounded by a great variety of animals and birds, as well as a depiction of the standard ruse, to capture the unicorn with the embrace of a virgin. Although the unicorn is successfully hunted and killed, it apparently rises from the dead, because in the last panel, perhaps one of the most famous and beloved of all tapestries from the Middle Ages, the unicorn sits peacefully in an enclosure, restrained by a leash (a “chaîne d’amour”) and resting but very much alive (Freeman and Sipress 1973–1974, 212–14; Gotfredsen 1999, 104–21).

Phoenix In the bestiary account, the phoenix lives five centuries and then performs a ritual self-immolation, sometimes with the cooperation of a priest of “Heliopolis.” In most accounts, it lights either upon a certain tree or a pyre that it prepares for itself out of sweet-smelling wood and herbs and then sets itself aflame; typically, after one day the priest discovers a small worm among the ashes, which after three days becomes a new and fully reconstituted bird. The bestiaries immediately point to the many parallels between the account of the phoenix’s rebirth and the biblical story of Christ’s resurrection (Bestiary 1999, 141–43; Mermier 1989, 73–77; Peil 1996, 111–12; Jones 1999, 99–115; Wheatcroft 1999, 148–51). The phoenix also appears occasionally as a symbolic bird in literary and visual works. The Latin poem by Lactantius (early fourth century), passages from the Book of Job, and elements of St. Ambrose’s Hexameron (late fourth century) combine in a 677 line Anglo-Saxon poem “The Phoenix” from the ninth century (Heffernan 1988). Chrétien employs the phoenix to suggest death-and-resurrection symbolism in his Cligés (ca. 1176) (Varty 1983, 195–200). However, despite the beauty of the phoenix as imagined in some of the speculative descriptions in numerous classical and late medieval sources (such as Albertus Magnus [ca. 1200–1280]), plastic artists usually render it as a generic, non-descript, and colorless bird, which medieval Christians would have most likely interpreted as a symbol for the dogma regarding the resurrection of the flesh (Hassig 1995, 72–83).

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Siren/Mermaid The Physiologus presents the siren as one of the dangers of the sea that deceives men and kills them. Sirens possess the form of a human being from the head to the navel, but then below the waist have the form of a bird; singing a pleasing song, they charm sailors asleep, then attack them, and tear them apart (Physiologus 1979, 23; Hassig 1997, 174; 177). By the eighth century there appear variations of the siren as a creature with the form of a virgin from the head to the waist, but possessing a scaly tail which she hides in the sea (Hassig 1995, 105). Narratives regarding other composite, half-woman-and-half-beast creatures include the tale by Walter Map (ca. 1140–ca. 1210) of Henno-with-the-Teeth in the “Distincto quarta” of the De nugis curialium (late twelfth century, Of Courtier’s Trifles), as well as the later medieval tales of the fairy-mistress Melusine, especially the French versions of Jean d’Arras (late fourteenth century) and Couldrette (early fifteenth century), and the German translation by Thüring von Ringoltingen (1456) in the fifteenth century. Here, the heroine’s body presents a periodically transforming image of woman and then a composite of woman and serpent (Maddox and Sturm-Maddox 1996, 1–11), leading to a confusion between the world of humans and that of animals. Occurring in the foundation myth of Lusignan (as well as other nations of Europe and Asia), the confusion reflects a crisis of legitimacy as well as a “bestiality” inherent in European culture at the end of the Hundred Years’ War (Spiegel 1996, 117–19).

Dragon The Physiologus does not include the dragon, but the mythical beast does appear in Isidore’s encyclopedia and the bestiaries. The Etymologies, for example, depict a much different kind of beast than what later becomes the dragon archetype. The medieval dragon portrayed in these earlier works is reported to be the largest beast on earth; it lived in fissures between rocks and resembled a very large snake, somewhat like a boa constrictor. Some authors claimed that it was particularly dangerous to elephants: the dragon was said to inhabit the lands of India and Ethiopia, and there killed the hapless pachyderms by entangling their legs, and then constricted their bodies, eventually suffocating them (Isidore 2011, 255; Bestiary 1999, 182–84). In the early Middle Ages there appeared a variety of dragons in literary works, probably as inheritances from more ancient folklore and mythology. Among their common characteristics were their symbolic association with evil: they were monstrous and dangerous, and especially in visual art they took a place opposite

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that of a saintly figure or even Christ (Gravestock 1999, 126–27); other details of their appearance and behavior originated, however, from their ancient origins (Rees 1992, 57–59; Lionarons 1998, 1–22). Among the best known of the earlier medieval dragons is the infamous, fire-breathing beast in Beowulf (Lionarons 1998, 23–48), which, before it is slain, manages to wound Beowulf fatally. The anonymous author alternatively refers to it as dragon, serpent, and worm, the final appellation recalling the Germanic Lindwurm, a common term for dragon that suggests its worm-like form and subterranean habitats that echo even into the modern era. The dragons of the High Middle Ages began to assume the role of bestial guardians and psychological barriers, whose purpose was to thwart an individual’s progress, either in love or on some adventure. A battle with a dragon presented the hero with an opportunity to prove valor and strength through combat, and worthiness to claim a title or prize. Furthermore, some parts of the dragon’s body possessed intrinsic, magical properties and exerted potent influences on characters, thereby having great effect on the plot development. In the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), Siegfried slays a dragon, and bathing in the dragon’s blood renders him invulnerable to any kind of wounding, save for a single, unprotected spot on his back that his enemies later exploit (Flood 1998, 42–47; McConnell 1999, 171–84). Tristan’s battle with a dragon in Gottfried’s eponymous romance (ca. 1210) proves his worthiness as a suitor for Isolde. After slaying the monster, he cuts out its tongue and slips it beneath his armor to carry it back to court. Unfortunately, the fumes emanating from the dragon’s tongue are toxic, and render him unconscious; however, he is soon discovered by Isolde, who nurses him back to full strength, and at the decisive moment he produces the tongue, supporting his claim on the princess (Classen 2009, 35–40).

III Domesticated Dog During the Middle Ages, “man’s best friend” uniquely straddled the boundary between the worlds of “culture” and “nature.” In the period shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire (where some dog breeds were developed as pets), human kindness toward dogs was rare, especially because Christian patriarchs dictated that “soulless” animals had to serve humankind in some way if they were to enjoy the privileges and comforts of domestication; when canines grew old and were no longer useful, they were often killed to make way for younger dogs who were able to serve their masters. However, by the thirteenth century there was growing

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evidence that the strict divisions between human and beast were disappearing, and the treatment of canines in general improved dramatically (Salisbury 1994 [2011], 115–20; Boehrer 2010, 22–27). Small lap dogs were popular pets among the nobility during classical Roman times, but during the early Middle Ages disappeared from art and literature. Their reappearance during the later medieval period, which one can trace emanating outward from Italy, is striking, and the evolution of breeds became clear in painting and sculpture. The lap dogs possess especially large eyes and other features imitative of human children, and thus they became icons and foci of affection; one might find it natural, then, that such canines would become metaphors for love and joy in literary works, such as the magical dog Petitcreiu in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan (Classen 2007, 78–81; Salisbury 1994 [2011], 119). The human bond with dogs became especially clear in the performance of the hunt (see above). Perhaps the key canine link to homo sapiens was their production and apparent understanding of language, which they demonstrated especially during the chase; dogs responded eagerly to the name they were called by the hunters, giving each animal a unique identity; furthermore, their barking and yelping during the hunt was said to communicate their contempt for their quarry, and their baying, which grew particularly loud while the hunters blew their horns at the conclusion of a successful kill, indicated strong allegiance to their human masters and their zealous participation in the hunting rituals (Yamamoto 2000, 115–23). In literary works, the acoustic qualities of the dog often identify it as an individual character, revealing how language does, indeed, break down species’ boundaries; thus, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Titurel (ca. 1220), the hunting dog Gardevîaz barks loudly in the forest as it chases down animals wounded in the hunt, while Tristan’s loyal hound Hiudan does so without uttering a sound, making him the ideal companion for him and Isolde as they hide from the court in the minnegrotte (Schleissner 1993, 83–86; Classen 2007, 81). Often, specific attitudes toward animals could prove to be most ambivalent, and at times could achieve polar opposite significations. Thus, the late medieval romances Sir Gowther (mid to late fifteenth century) and Robert le diable (ca. 1250) present an entirely different view of dogs, communication, and how the central characters of each tale relate to the beasts. In both tales the character is born under questionable circumstances, since the devil plays a role in the conception of each, a fact that determines the characters’ extremely sinful, murderous behavior. In the case of Sir Gowther, he is commanded by his confessor, the Pope himself, to keep strict silence and only to accept food from the mouth of a dog (Salter 2007, 90–92). Robert’s penance lies also in enforced silence, but he must live with dogs; after numerous adventures in which he shows great valor, Robert embraces life as a hermit, thus insuring a continuance of his non-communication

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with other human beings Hahn 2012, 87–108). In both situations, the connection of knights with the dogs identifies the human characters as outsiders, something less than human. While language serves to connect the animal world with the human world in some instances, the loss of permission to communicate forces the human being into liminal spaces, into a kind of exile from humanity (Salter 2007, 93). However, at least in Sir Gowther, there remains a possibility of reintegration. Gowther exhibits great valor on the battlefield, saving the Holy Roman Emperor from certain death. For this, the Emperor’s daughter, aware of Gowther’s predicament, rewards him with bread and meat, which she sends to the heroic knight via a greyhound, whose mouth has been washed with wine. Thus, the dog serves ultimately as a conveyor of human communication, gratitude and love (Salter 2007, 93–95; Classen 2007, 67–86). Perhaps the most significant canine characteristic to find its way into the art of the Middle Ages was loyalty. Numerous stories illustrated the remarkable bond between human and dog, in which the dog serves the human even though that service leads to pain or death for the beast, and lends to the animal an additional measure of “human” virtue. An important example of this was the remarkable tale of Queen Sibille (ca. 1437), in which a faithful dog reveals the evil deed that a villainous knight has perpetrated against his master and a queen in his protection; as the instrument of divine judgment, the good beast ensures that the evil knight (along with his malicious relatives) is punished justly (Kompatscher, Classen, and Dinzelbacher, ed., 2010, 261–72). The primary breeds used in hunting were the greyhound, the alaunt, the mastiff, and the chien courant (Cummings 1988, 13; Smets and van den Abeele 2007, 61), and were generally distinguished by their typically acute sense of smell or their speed and agility (Brackert and van Kleffens 1989, 70–72). Beyond these general categories, each type of dog possessed specific characteristics that hunters employed for different hunting situations. Greyhounds were particularly popular, since they could be trained to seize and bring down their quarry while on the run. In many literary works, a typical complement of hunting dogs included thirty pairs; however, in practice, keeping so many dogs for the hunt was possible only for the very wealthy, and many hunting packs were assembled by hunting companions out of several, individual packs of three or four animals (Cummins 1988, 13–24). One of the most important concerns addressed in medieval veterinary treatises is dog care. As one might expect, rabies was a dreaded disease that many such works discuss extensively, especially those concerning the treatment of humans who have been bitten by rabid dogs, above all those that roam in the wild. Some recommend folk remedies; however, implicit in many is the recognition of hopelessness in such cases, where death was virtually assured (Cummins 1988, 29–31).

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Horse Due to its unique connection with the culture of “chivalry,” as the animal most closely associated with the “chevalier,” the horse occupied a unique position among all creatures during the medieval period (Bumke 2002, 236; see also the entry by Cynthia Jenéy on the horse in this Handbook). Certainly, no other beast fulfilled so many important, practical functions in medieval life: as draft animal, mode of transportation, warrior’s carriage, emblem of wealth and prowess, symbol of fecundity and strength, trusted companion and even, at times, as a source of food, the horse obtained great importance (Prestwich 2010, 45–47; Bökönyi 1982–1989, 300; Ehrismann 1995, 151–53). In the execution of medieval war tactics, the horse served the knight in various, essential ways: despite the encumbering weight of its rider’s armor, it swiftly carried the knight into battle to inflict major damage upon vulnerable enemy forces with minimal likelihood of injury to the human or the horse. Together they functioned as the “tank” of the Middle Ages. When knights spoke of their horses, they customarily did not identify them by breed, but rather by purpose or physical attributes, such as training, strength, speed, and agility. The most sought-after horse was the “destrier,” which is often described as the “great horse,” held in reserve for the thick of battle. This horse was also important in jousting, since it was sturdy, broad, and bred specifically for endurance (Kiser 2007, 110). For war and the hunt, the less costly, but lighter, faster, and easier to ride “coursers” were often preferred. Easiest to ride were the “palfreys,” as were the “hackneys” and the ordinary “rounceys.” Particularly in epic literary works, knights bestowed romantic names upon their steeds and endowed them with elaborate ornamentation; in reality, knights had to protect their expensive and vulnerable equine investments as best they could with a good coat of mail (Prestwich 2010, 46). A common passage found in many literary epics (e.g., in Hartmann von Aue’s (ca. 1165–ca. 1215) Erec and Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan und Isolde) was the lengthy description of elaborate gear for horses: blanket, stirrups, straps, saddle cushion, croup, bridle, and headpiece were ornately decorated with the costliest woven materials, leathers, gem stones and precious metals. This often allowed poets to develop fantastic ekphrasis. It seems that no expense was too great for equine decoration, for here the nobleperson could project wealth and status, making the horse an emblem of rank and reputation (Bumke 2002, 236–40). Thus, the horse occupied a profoundly significant position for the nobility, as the beast upon which one had to rely in order to perform the deeds critical to that class, and so entered both courtly and heroic literature as well as the pictorial arts as one of the most highly esteemed species among all animals.

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Nor can the importance of the horse to the lower classes be overstated. In the eleventh century farmers began to use horses for plowing, although oxen remained the beasts of choice for this heavy chore. Horses became an essential means of transportation, especially when one was obliged to travel over long distances. A typical medieval horse could move several times the speed of a human and so could cover a far greater distance. For medieval merchants transporting goods to market, the horse was indispensable, as a draft animal pulling a relatively heavy wagon (Bökönyi 1982–1989, 294–95).

H Birds Birds occupied a special range of significance in the medieval mind that required a separate category when discussing bestial symbolism. Most birds are capable of flight, and many common ones also rest upon the surface of (and hunt for food in) aqueous environments, occupying spaces from which both humans and other animals are usually excluded. Furthermore, many produce sound, even when they are unseen. Thus, the avian species were highly significant for audible imagery in art: for example, the almost ubiquitous melodies of songbirds became a commonplace, even a cliché, in courtly lyric. Some carnivorous birds also hunt, and therefore played a particularly important role in courtly rituals of sport and pastime. Because of its physical skills, beauty and grace, one such bird, the falcon, became the courtly emblem not only for hunting but also for courtly love: perhaps the iconic case occurs in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan und Isolde, where the falcon turns into the animal symbol associated with none other than Isolde the Fair, as a free bird of the hunt while still in Ireland, but as one trapped in the tree of love after she has drunk the potion with Tristan (Schleissner 1993, 78–80). Chrétien’s Erec is identified with a sparrowhawk, as Enide is identified with a white stag, in an intricate mixing of metaphorical values that mark their passionate and tumultuous love for each other (Thiébaux 1974, 112–15). Thus, avian symbolism possessed its own complexities and sophistication, separate from that of the more earthbound members of the medieval animal world. Because birds fly, they have long been associated with spirituality, especially the soul, and related values. During the Middle Ages, other behaviors added into the mixture of meanings, aligning birds very closely with the sacred. According to St. Augustine several species were identified with specific Christian symbolisms: for example, the peacock, because it was claimed to possess “incorruptible” flesh, became a symbol for immortality; the goldfinch, consuming thorny plants as part of its natural diet, was linked to thorns and therefore, according to Augustine, became associated with Christ’s sufferings, especially his crown of thorns; and

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the dove, because of the Pentecostal narrative in the New Testament, became the most common image of the Holy Spirit (Werness 2004, 46; Webber 1938, 147–52). Many birds sing, and so they provide an opportunity especially for poets to give voice to various emotions, ranging from melancholy and sadness to joy and love. Certain kinds of birds sing in a certain manner that identifies that species with a specific emotion: for example, larks are happy, crows complain, nightingales cry forth their yearning for love, etc. There are several cycles of time (e.g., diurnal, seasonal, etc.) for which certain species offer “human” responses: thus, the nightingale (Pfeffer 1985) sings during the nighttime, the chanticleer welcomes the dawn, various songbirds provide the acoustic background to the daytime; forest birds express in song their enjoyment of the spring and summer warmth and sunshine, migrating birds mark the changes of the season, and the complaints of some species (e.g., the “nebelcrâ,” or “hooded crow,” in Walther von der Vogelweide’s (ca. 1170–ca. 1230) “Diu werlt was gelf, rôt unde blâ” [L. 75, 25, “The world was yellow, red and blue”], which shrieks forth its displeasure with the abominable winter weather [Clason 2012, 242–45]) correspond to the typical discomforts humans experience as a result of cold and darkness during that lengthy, difficult season. Some literary works presented allegorical treatments of social, religious, and other issues of the time by employing birds symbolically or metaphorically, or by letting them comment as representatives of some hierarchy. Perhaps the most important example of this usage of avian symbolism was Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules (ca. 1380), in which the poet describes a dream of entering a formal garden. There, Dame Nature presides over the parliament, where the birds, seated in rank with the raptors at the top of the hierarchy and the waterfowl at the bottom, represent the feudal human “pecking order.” Chaucer describes each species as a summary of characteristics taken from the bestiaries, Aristotle, Pliny, the Physiologus, and other folk sources, such that the poem reads like a catalogue of these traits. The birds are selecting their mates, and each speaks out in a rank-appropriate register. But the selection process runs into problems and delays when a “royal” male eagle disputes with two eagles of lower rank over the rights to woo a female; all the birds wish to weigh in on the debate, but no clear decision is made. Nature finally grants the female the right to state whom she selects, but she is indecisive; however, Nature grants her wish that the three males serve her for a year, each demonstrating his worthiness to be her lover. Finally, the other birds can make their selections (Klingender 1971, 373–76). Recently, developments in ecocritical theory have generated fresh perspectives on the significance of avian song and behavior. New, ‘green’ readings of literary works have attempted to deconstruct the ubiquitous, anthropocentric perspective of many former readings of medieval literature (Rudd 2007, 38–40)

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and to relocate the subject from the human to the animal. Thus, in the case of birds, their singing has become important as communication, as a form of language that asserts the legitimacy of agency and the status of subject for its avian source (Kordecki 2011, 1–23).

Specific Avian Species Raptors: Eagle and Falcon Birds of prey often appeared symbolically in literary and pictorial art of the Middle Ages; sometimes, the qualities they represented provide fascinating insights into how the medieval mind understood the animal’s characteristics and evaluated them. When, for example, in the courtly romance Tristan und Isolde, Isolde the Fair enters the sexually charged arena of the court, Gottfried von Straßburg describes her as a falcon and employs images from the discourse of avian anatomy and behavior in order to convey the profound effect she has on the men who gaze upon her. Most significantly, Gottfried emphasizes the manner in which her glances dart back and forth as if searching for prey, recalling the important role that eyes play in the awakening of courtly love in the noble heart, and playing upon the falcon’s characteristically acute vision, for which the bird is renowned. In one of the work’s most significant moments, when Isolde expresses her love for Tristan for the first time, Gottfried once again refers to her as the falcon of love (Schleissner 1993, 78–80; Clason 2008, 281–82). Indeed, by the late medieval period the falcon became one of the most common symbols for love, already beginning with the famous poem by the Austrian poet Kürenberg (twelfth century), “Ich zôch mir einen valken” (ca. 1160, “I Reared a Falcon”) through the late fourteenth-century poetry by Heinrich von Mügeln (ca. 1319–ca. 1380), e.g., “Ein frouwe sprach: myn falcke ist mir enphlogen” (Friedman 1989, 158, “A Woman Spoke: My Falcon has Flown from Me”). Using falcons for hunting, first documented among Germanic tribes in the mid-fifth century (Smets and van den Abeele 2007, 59–60), became a widespread practice among the nobility in the Middle Ages, and a trained falcon became a most valuable possession (Oggins 1993, 48). While dogs customarily pursued larger game, such as the stag, various species of hawks and falcons were employed to catch smaller game (Friedman 1989, 157). Beginning in the tenth century, members of the nobility as well as their fowlers authored treatises on falconry, dealing with training techniques as well as medical procedures for the vast number of ailments that afflict predatory birds held in captivity, and indicating the authors’ desire to exert human control over nature. Eventually, such

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treatises began to fall into two typical kinds of texts, those which described birds of prey as one species among all beasts (tending to reiterate what was already known, with very little original work of value) and those which continued to deal with the more practical aspects of training, hunting and caring for birds (Oggins 1993, 48–53). The latter contributed a great deal toward a grand shift in perspective, from considering nature an abstract, philosophical concept for contemplation, to investigating natural phenomena and recording what one finds scientifically (Salisbury 1993, 8). A most valuable source for knowledge of hunting birds and raptors in the medieval period was the treatise credited to the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich II (1194–1250), On the Art of Hunting with Birds (De arte venandi cum avibus), shortly before 1250. The key to this work, in Friedrich’s own words, was his desire to show “things as they are” and therefore his reliance upon to his own observations and experiments. Although the Emperor based his discussions upon his reading of Aristotle’s writings on animals (recently translated into Latin), he often differed sharply with his ancient model. Furthermore, the Zeitgeist of the anatomical method that was being developed at the medical school in Salerno strongly influenced Friedrich’s writing, marking his text as distinctly anatomical and descriptive (Whitney 2004, 103–04; Glick, Livesey, and Wallis, ed., 2005, 529; Klingender 1971, 447–49). It also marked a turning point in how the medieval mind views animals, no longer through imagination and religious allegory (as in the Physiologus and the bestiaries), but rather through the lens of scientific observation (Salisbury 1993, 6–10). Friedrich was not able to finish this work before his death; his son Manfred, however, brought the project to a successful conclusion with the help of his father’s extensive notes. One of Manfred’s manuscripts of De arte venandi, now held in the Vatican Library (Vatican, Palat. Lat. 1071), was beautifully illustrated with over 900 drawings that provide an authentic impression of the birds’ appearance. The striking realism with which the illustrations reproduce features of avian anatomy and behavior irresistibly lead one to conclude that they resulted from the artist’s first-hand observation and her or his intention to document the species’ actual appearance as faithfully as possible (Klingender 1971, 447–50). The eagle customarily resided at the very top of the hierarchy of birds, such as in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules (Klingender 1971, 374–75). It was heavily weighted with symbolism; thus, it became a symbol for St. John the Evangelist, and in the Physiologus and the bestiaries it plunged into water to renew its fading vision (Rowland 1971, 17; Ziolkowski 1997, 15; Hassig 1997, 172). Among the animals shown in heraldic crests, the eagle was perhaps the most common bird, often associated with the lion, representing courage and strength respectively; for particular emphasis, the eagle was sometimes depicted with the head of a lion, or

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as a griffin (essentially, an eagle-headed lion) (Klingender 1971, 302–03). In literature authors employed falcons because of the connections with the hunt, but eagles also made an appearance from time to time. One of the most significant of these appearances occurs in the anonymously authored Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), in which the female protagonist, Kriemhild, has a dream at the very beginning of the work, wherein she beholds two eagles attack and tear apart a smaller falcon, a premonition of what her family and courtly associates will later do to her great love, Siegfried.

The Owl Various reputations of the owl were already well formed before its appearance in medieval literature and art. The nocturnal nature of owls, their large, apparently luminescent or reflective eyes, and their eerie and unearthly hooting (often the only sign of their presence is acoustic) associated them with darkness, fear, the unknown, ill-fortune, evil, death, and the like. In some stories, other birds reject the owl because it is reputedly filthy (Klingender 1971, 365; Hume 1975, 15–17). This image was compounded by the owl’s parallel but opposite reputation for wisdom, perhaps arising from the bird’s uncannily human facial structure and features. In some fables, other animals come to the owl to seek counsel or justice (Klingender 1971, 364). Thus, the literary-artistic owl evinced a very complex set of significances, and the medieval mind both welcomed and feared the bird (Miyazaki 1999, 24–49). Works such as the poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” (twelfth or thirteenth century), placed two of the most commonly found nocturnal birds to appear in literary works into sharp contrast, their symbolic meanings providing an opportunity for the author to explore social, political, religious, and aesthetic issues on many levels (Hume 1975, 51–118). In this poem of around 1800 lines, the owl warns against the frivolousness of the nightingale’s love song, which distracts human beings from gaining heaven; in this case, the animals decide to present their case to a human arbiter for judgment (Klingender 1971, 365–66).

The Nightingale As the most cited avian beast in Western European literature of the Middle Ages (Pfeffer 1989, 89), the nightingale was welcomed by poets as the bird that represented nocturnal joy, especially that of conjugal love. It migrated to Europe from the end of April until mid-May, and so its song ushered in the new spring

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after a long winter. While the more earnest owl of the Middle English debate poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” deems its song frivolous, its association with lovers’ rendezvous in the middle of the night acquires a dignity of its own that the songbird knows how to defend from the accusations of the stodgy owl (Hume 1975, 51–65; Klingender 1971, 364–66). In one of the most famous renderings of that song, Walther von der Vogelweide’s “Under der linden,” (L. 39,11), the refrain “tandaradei” establishes the nightingale’s song as a kind of language that lovers, embracing each other during a night of erotic fulfillment, perceive as their avian companion’s communication with them, a kind of lovers’ “natural” language that only they and the bird comprehend (Clason 2012, 233–34).

I Fish Since very ancient times, humans have been fascinated by the sea, especially as an environment from which they acquire food. Fish have historically played an important role in the human diet, and the medieval period was no exception. The status of piscatorial beasts as a food item provided the key to their significance in religion, literature and art of the Middle Ages. Fish were carriers of numerous symbolic and thematic associations with the Christian Bible, especially the New Testament. Best known were the narratives regarding the recruitment of the apostles, exhorting them to become “fishers of men” (Matthew 4: 19). Also, the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes underscored the connection between food, deity and fish (Matthew 14: 13–21). Fish were not the equivalent of meat—in situations where religious custom and law required abstinence from the flesh of beasts, fish was permitted as a source of protein. In any case, on fasting days, including Friday and Saturday (some households in Great Britain also observed Wednesday fasting), as well as during the six weeks of Lent (the period before Easter Sunday) and on the vigils of some other important festivals, such as Christmas Eve, the faithful were permitted the consumption of fish (Dyer 1988, 28). Interestingly, this led to remarkable interpretations as to what, precisely, constitutes “fish,” since most any animal that swims in the water qualified for this epithet during much of the Middle Ages. For example, in some instances waterfowl or even beaver were consumed as “fish” when meat was forbidden; of course, such practices were soon stopped by vigilant church officials. In any case, the role of fish as a protein source at times when the church imposed seasonal or weekly fasts contributed to the growth of commercial fishing industries and markets (Resl 2007, 5). In hagiographic narratives fish sometimes come to play a role, particularly as docile and cooperative companions of the saint during some activity. In a story

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regarding St. Francis (1181–1226), the author praises the saint for releasing caught fish; in one situation he is given a rather large tench that a fisherman has caught, and, placing the fish back in the water, Francis prays until it revives and swims away (Kompatscher, Classen, and Dinzelbacher, ed., 2010, 190–91). Another story, concerning a St. Wilhelm Firmatus (1026–1103), relates how this holy man, standing at the edge of a pond, can attract large numbers of fish to himself, and even remove them from the water, caress them and return them to the pond unharmed (Kompatscher, Classen, and Dinzelbacher, ed., 2010, 224–25). Clearly, tales of this type underscored the saintliness of the holy men by revealing their connection to nature, such that even fish, among the most timid of creatures, felt safe in their presence. As one might expect, in many of the medieval zoological works sharks and rays, as well as dolphins and whales, were usually included under the umbrella term “fish,” although some works indicated the author’s awareness that warmbloodedness, giving birth to fully-formed young, and nursing are characteristics that distinguish these later mammalian creatures from fish (Szabo 2008). However, seals and sea lions also qualified in some treatises as fish, merely because they swim in the sea. The translations of Aristotle’s zoological works, first by Michael Scotus (ca. 1175–ca. 1235) (from an Arabic text) in the early thirteenth century, and then later, around 1260, of the same works by William of Moerbeke (1215–ca. 1286) (directly from the original Greek), reinforced an ancient classification of sea creatures into the class aquatilia, which included cetaceans, waterdwelling mammals and sea birds (Resl 2007, 136–39). The medieval activity of fishing fell into three categories: subsistence, commercial, and recreational. Many medieval persons fished to feed their families, and perhaps additionally to provide for their lords’ table (direct and indirect subsistence, respectively). Commercial catches could be brought to the medieval market and there sold to consumers. But recreational fishing was also practiced. Each category dictated its own methodology of fishing, and many of those who fished developed an intimate, respectful relationship with the ecosystem in which (s)he pursued this activity (Hoffmann 1997, 5–23).

J Conclusion As we have seen, the position of animals in the emotional, intellectual and spiritual attitudes of the European Middle Ages was complex and variable. However, there can be no doubt that animals were of great interest to all human beings. During the earlier centuries of the period, beasts were seen to a great extent as the liminal “other,” particularly under the influence of the early Chris-

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tian Church and its patriarchal philosophers: they claimed that animals had no soul, and therefore were of a different order than human beings. Beasts accordingly stood at the outskirts of human existence and, although they might imitate human appearance or behavior, they were subordinate. Animals were part of creation, made by the Creator to be exploited by humans for their own good and comfort. Especially in the twelfth century, however, works of art and literature began to reflect different attitudes, revealing a closer connection between animals and humans. In many of the paintings, drawings, sculptures and literary works of the later Middle Ages, animals began to evince more human characteristics, and were given human roles, dressed in human clothing or provided the capacity to think and to speak. They were sometimes integrated into a hierarchy that resembles human social structures, in a sense completing their integration into human existence. Most importantly, their anthropomorphic treatment showed human foibles from a new perspective, such that the genres of the beast epic and the fable became significant vehicles for political satire and social critique, where they had not been possible previously. These later medieval views on animals, birds, and fish also served to reaffirm a basic principle: that the experience of animals connected human beings with nature: they reminded us of our origins in the natural world and kept in check the tendency of homo sapiens occasionally to think that humans were, or even could be, detached from the natural world. Through observing animals, humans were reminded of their own animal natures. By seeking out animals where they lived, humans projected themselves into new environments outside the boundaries imposed by culture and society. Animals conveyed humans to new and distant spaces, they inspired and enabled them to perform work and to develop new technologies that enhance their lives. In these and many other ways, the later medieval attitude toward animals helped to open the human mind to an awareness and appreciation of nature and the world; the human connection to the natural world would evolve and become dramatically stronger in the succeeding years, fostering a new turn toward Renaissance art and Humanistic thought.

Select Bibliography Classen, Albrecht, ed., Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2012). Classen, Albrecht, “Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: A Significant Domain Ignored for Too Long by Modern Research?,” Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. idem (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2012), 1–191. [= A. Classen 2012b]

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Flores, Nona C., ed., Animals in the Middle Ages: a Book of Essays (New York and London 1996). Hartmann, Sieglinde, ed., Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages (Frankfurt a. M. et al. 2007). Klingender, Francis Donald, Animals in Art and Thought: to the End of the Middle Ages, ed. Evelyn Antal and John Harthan (Cambridge 1971). Resl, Brigitte, ed., A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, paperback ed. (2007; Oxford 2011). Thiébaux, Marcelle, The Stag of Love: the Chase in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY, and London 1974). Werness, Hope B., The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art (New York and London 2004). Whitney, Elspeth, Medieval Science and Technology (Westport, CT, 2004). Yamamoto, Dorothy, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford 2000).  

Charlotte A. Stanford

Architecture A Definition and Brief Historiography Architecture, of all the arts, shapes the totality of one’s space. It is perceived through nearly all the senses—sight, sound, smell, and touch. And while it can bear meaning on many levels, architecture almost always has a fundamentally practical aspect. It is the mixture of utility, durability and beauty, according to the Roman architect Vitruvius (ca. 80–70 B.C.E.), that makes architecture. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, the parameters of what is rightly considered architecture have expanded, particularly in the twentieth century and since then (Brachmann 2014). Scholarly interest in more humble structures has also increased, acknowledging that the homes and work spaces in which people dwelt also shaped space and experience, often far more consistently, than more formal and sophisticated structures, such as churches (Coldstream 2002, 23–24). Scholarly interest in architecture has broadened beyond the historiographically traditional pursuit of the beginnings of styles. Since the Renaissance, theorists such as Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) had decried medieval architecture as breaking from the classical past, and had pointed out the distinct forms of Gothic in particular in constituting that break. This attitude colored scholarly consideration of architecture as a whole, leaving the study of most medieval buildings to antiquarians. But by the nineteenth century, architectural studies had justified itself as a valid discipline primarily through analyzing styles. Scholars organized medieval architecture by characteristic features, identifying periods ranging from First Romanesque to additional schools like Burgundian Romanesque, from Early Gothic to High and then Late Gothic. With these categories often came value judgments such as “undeveloped,” “mature” or “decadent” (see for example Focillon 1963, vol. 2, 67). Seeking the origin, development and substance of styles became wound up in national narratives. Nineteenth-century art historians seized upon what they saw as the key qualities of their country’s own architecture and therefore essential character. In France, the leading figure was the restorer and theorist Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) who saw medieval architecture, especially Gothic, as an expression of rational structure, in which a building’s parts corresponded visually to their function. The Gothic flying buttress was a stellar example of this, demonstrating the exterior support that allowed fragile, glassfilled church interiors to stand. In Germany, romantic love for the medieval also

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expressed itself through revival and restoration. Monuments like the Romanesque Speyer cathedral were restored while the massive nave and west towers of Cologne cathedral, left unfinished since the sixteenth century, were completed as part of a nationalist drive for unity under Prussian patronage (Lewis 1993). English art critics like Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852) and John Ruskin (1819–1900) saw in medieval art an expression of the creative genius of the common laborer and of the intense religious devotion of the period. Early twentieth-century scholars continued to focus on origins and developments, often with a strong nationalist bent. Gothic, derided by Vasari for its northern character, became the focus of much of this scholarship. The art historian Josef Strzygowksi (1862–1941), for instance, strongly championed the “Aryan energy” of Northern art, claiming that Gothic’s key features of buttresses, pointed arches, and rib vaults came from Armenian (“Aryan”) origins in central Asia (Elsner 2011, 11). Though his wide-ranging expertise led to the founding of such fields as Armenian art, as well as Islamic, Jewish, and Byzantine art history, his racist biases left a legacy of political taint to the subject of Gothic nationalism. After World War II, the discipline had to adopt a new approach to survive, and found it in the study of intellectual symbolism. Ironically, this approach was taken by the former Nazi Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) as well as war émigrés like Otto von Simson (1912–1993), Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), and Paul Frankl (1886–1958); the arrival of these three latter scholars in America invigorated Medieval Studies there. Sedlmayr’s concept of the church as the embodiment of the Heavenly Jerusalem on earth and von Simson’s corresponding vision of the church as a Gesamtkunstwerk shaped a mystical view of Gothic as the embodiment of Neoplatonic light metaphysics. The luminous stained glass windows supported by rib vaults and pointed arches in a Gothic church were not to be studied as a collection of fragmented parts but as units of an embracing whole. Panofsky’s seminal studies on the abbey of St. Denis near Paris were particularly far-reaching. He saw in the church’s patron, Abbot Suger (ca. 1081–1151), a driving mind that created a spiritual new style, the physical embodiment of the age’s intellectual achievements; “there exists between Gothic architecture and Scholasticism a palpable and hardly accidental concurrence in the purely factual domain of time and place” (Panofsky 1951, 1). Such interpretations sidestepped the problematic politics in national narratives, and in the wake of the Second World War greatly appealed to a generation of prominent architectural historians. At the same time English-speaking scholars adopted a highly Francophone approach to medieval architecture. The focus on monuments that were deemed the first or the perfected examples of a system (such as the abbey of St. Denis, arguably the first Gothic church) often centered in France, where several prominent schools of Romanesque developed and where

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Gothic first began. Formal analysis of style still could be acute and highly valued, and scholars such as Jean Bony (1908–1995) continued to pursue this approach. But others acknowledged that such an approach was subject to many limitations. Also, focus on architecture as either the study of forms or the reflection of spirituality ignored many factors, such as economics, patrons’ desires, and very nearly the whole category of secular architecture. Yet even when patrons were considered, they had to have their place; Peter Kidson’s classic riposte to Panofsky’s work, which pointed out that “patrons … do not normally invent styles,” reintroduced pragmatism into the far-flung realm of visionary synthesis (Kidson 1987 1). Focus only on pragmatic rationalism, however, could mean that the study of medieval architecture was in danger of being reduced to a mere “formalist positivism [which] offered its topic no heart” (Elsner 2011, 14). This has been countered recently by more integrative approaches that consider the multivalence of medieval buildings. Willibald Sauerländer has observed that the study of medieval architecture is now seen “as part of a semiotic context, of a system of communication comprising the patron, the artist and the audience” (Sauerländer 1992, 28). The range of topics covering aspects of such a wide issue of context is enormous, and the publications in the field are more numerous than ever before. A listing of even some of the most prominent in the field must necessarily be highly selective, but these approaches include a greater interest in design and execution (Recht and Le Goff, ed., 1989; Bork 2011a), study of political, economic, and social conditions (Kimpel and Suckale 1985; Abou-el-Haj 1988; Werckmeister 1988), and studies that break down scholarly subject barriers to consider buildings as lived spaces that encompassed multiple arts: sculpture, textiles, furnishings (Raguin et al., ed., 1995; Gajewksi and Opačić, ed., 2007). Archaeological evidence has been embraced more fully (Grenville 1997) as well as studies that integrate buildings with landscape (Gilchrist 2005). The Francophone focus, especially in the English-speaking world, has begun to dissipate; following the lead of pioneers like Paul Crossley, scholars have begun to examine regions such as Bohemia (Opačić and Timmerman, ed., 2011), Spain (Karge 1989), and Scandinavia (Hohler 1999; Syrstad Andäs et al., ed., 2007). In the present scholarly climate, individual studies of buildings tend to be more frequently pursued, and with good reason. The sweeping syntheses are studies of the past, and introductory texts no longer attempt to fit all buildings, or even one type of building, into the same explanatory mold. But though it is no longer enough merely to gaze at buildings and attempt to understand them, what we see is still critical for our understanding (Sauerländer 1992, 31). Discussion of material and style therefore remain as valuable as purpose and meaning.

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B Materials In most times and regions of medieval Europe, the most prestigious material for architecture was stone. Most churches and fortifications were of stone, or faced with stone. Dressed stone blocks, known as ashlar blocks (pierre de taille, Quadermauerwerk), generally were preferred for their appearance, although rubble stone was often used in wall cores or for humbler structures. The rise of monumental stone architecture in western Europe corresponds roughly with the rise of political stability, such as under the Carolingian rulers, and greater economic prosperity, in connection with technological developments, such as the heavy plow and horse collar (Gies and Gies 1994, 44–46). Stone castles and fortifications were more permanent, durable, and formidable within the local landscape than early wood and earth construction. Continuing down the scale of prestige was fired brick. In stone-rich areas such as Italy, brick was by preference covered with dressed stone. The façades of great buildings, including the cathedrals of Tuscany, followed this usage, which derived from Roman times. In stone-poor areas such as the Baltic, brick made acceptable masonry in its own right from the twelfth century on. By the fifteenth century, fired brick could be considered a luxury substance, for example in the development of castles as they began to emphasize living comfort (Brown 1980). Wood, often utilitarian in use and appearance, could form part of the prestige class of architecture. Most early medieval architecture in the north appears to have been of wood. Few such buildings survive, though some of the later Scandinavian structures, such as the noted stave churches, provide examples that, combined with archaeological evidence, give scholars an idea of this early usage (Conant 1978). The utility and flexibility of wood often partnered with stone. A great church or hall built with ashlar walls, stone vaults, and lead-covered roof would utilize large, well-seasoned timbers in the roof beams (and also in the temporary construction scaffolding). More permanent wood buildings could rival stone ones even in prestige settings. Great halls often preferred wood ceilings over stone vaults because of wood’s ability to span large spaces without interior supports. Skillful carpentry could make half-timbered buildings into significant status sites too. Much domestic architecture employed this technique, also known as timber framing, Fachwerk, or colombage, which consisted of heavy beams linked by mortice and tenon joints, rather than metal nails, with infill between. The beams often utilized the organic, natural curve of the tree. Splitting curved limbs in half, the builders could make symmetrical patterns on the house front, as the timber frame showed vividly against the infill (Fig. 1). Though this infill could be painted or whitewashed, the stark black-and-white of most half-timber today is nineteenth-century rather than medieval in appearance (Harris 2004, 3). Infill

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ranged from stone rubble or brick to wattle and daub. Wattle and daub (also known as cob) consisted of both woven wood strips, usually narrow and flexible smaller branches, as well as a mixture of clay, loam, sand, dung and/or earth.

Fig. 1: Wealden half-timber house, Canterbury, Kent, fifteenth century. A “Wealden” house is a timber-framed building in which the recessed central hall is open up to the roof inside and the forward-projecting two-story chamber blocks at each end are jettied, the whole covered by a single roof. Photo by author.

Earth as a building material was widely used in partnership with any of the above materials, and not simply for utilitarian buildings that by now have left only minor if any traces in the record. The great earthwork ditches and ramparts of castles could be as impressive and formidable as finely dressed stone walls. Earthworks in the form of tumuli or barrows, of which the majority of examples are prehistoric, continued to be built in some northern regions until approximately the tenth century. As a pagan practice abandoned with the rise of Christianity, however, they do not figure within the primary frame of the medieval world. Thatch, which consists of plant stems such as straw or reeds usually bound in bundles, is more properly a roofing substance rather than an actual building material. Thatch is highly perishable, and materials which date back to the

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medieval period are to be found only in some archaeological sites (Johnson 2010, 70), but thatch is still used in some traditional areas (such as rural England) and it is a very old craft if humble in material.

C Categorizing Architecture I Style Though style is no longer the only sine qua non of architectural studies, it is nevertheless useful for general dating and contextualization. Most written work on architecture still refers in large degree to accepted style categories. During the medieval period, two major styles developed, at least in church architecture: Romanesque and Gothic. Terminology, however, is slippery. Though both terms have been employed for so long that changing them is difficult, they were not used by contemporaries, and scholars still debate their utility and precision. “Romanesque,” for example, has been used as a blanket term for styles that have later been separately categorized as Lombard, Saxon, Carolingian, and Ottonian, before the rise of First Romanesque in the tenth century. The key underlying feature of all of these as well as numerous later Romanesque regional styles is a continuity with the classical past, its Roman round arches and preference for fine masonry. Gothic, which began developing in the Paris region in the mid-twelfth century, is seen as architecture that breaks from this past, or very broadly (and not entirely correctly) as anything with a pointed arch. Gothic is employed as an umbrella term for styles as diverse in name as Norman, Perpendicular, and Flamboyant. Despite the confusion of narrow versus wide application of the terms “Romanesque” and “Gothic,” both continue to be employed in the literature. Indeed, some scholars, such as Linda Seidel, have focused on the rich associations in the historiography of these terms, linking, for example, inventive and intricate Romanesque carving with the playful forms of popular “Romanz” literature (Seidel 2006). In the early Middle Ages (ca. 700 through ca. 900), architecture was primarily of the post and lintel type, and monumental structures in stone were not common. Building stones tended to be rough and small in size when used at all. Few wood buildings survive from this period, though archaeological records indicate that these could be sizeable, some 20 to 30 meters in length with aisle posts utilized to expand the width of hall structures (Thompson 1995, 23). The Carolingian period did see the creation of some stone buildings employing more sophisticated techniques, notably in church architecture. The traditional early Christian basilica church elements consisted of central space (nave), flanking aisles, a semicircular apse extending to the east—the home to the principal altar—with the

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extended width of the transept projecting just below, to form from above the shape of a Latin cross. To this the Carolingian period added westworks: a towerlike west block with an entrance and vestibule on the ground level, and a chapel on the upper story. Though only a few examples of westworks survive (Charlemagne’s famous palace chapel at Aachen has the remains of a westwork), it was clearly desirable, as the idealized plan for a monastery, drawn up at St. Gall, Switzerland, ca. 820, envisions a massive curved western segment to its abbey church (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Ground plans of idealized monastery from St. Gall, Switzerland, showing church and cloister (Carolingian, ca. 820), St. Foy, Conques, France (Pilgrimage Roads Romanesque, 1050–1130), and Notre-Dame of Paris (Gothic, 1163–1240 and 1296–1315). At Carolingian St. Gall the westwork and east apse give both church ends equal emphasis; at Romanesque Conques, the additive chapels and ambulatory highlighted the cross shape of the building; at Gothic Notre-Dame the vaults help to integrate the spaces and the blunted transept makes the cross plan less prominent. St. Gall and Notre-Dame plans after Viollet-le-Duc, Conques after Aubert.

The First Romanesque developed about the tenth century, and Romanesque proper continued to flourish up through the early twelfth century (and in some areas later than that). Masonry construction was often brick or brick-shaped stone in the early years, with dressed stone holding in a core of irregular courses. This First Romanesque style was often plastered with stucco to seem more smooth (Conant 1978, 109). Later, ashlar masonry was preferred. Arches were employed for decoration and function, ranging from blind arcades to arched windows or openings (Fig. 3). The latter were usually subdivided by columns. Reused Roman columns were popular in early buildings, but as they became scarce, masons carved their own, often becoming very inventive with capital design.

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Fig. 3: Pfalz Dankwarderode, Braunschweig, Germany. Palace rebuilt by Henry the Lion (1129–1195) after 1175 and restored after 1887. Note its German Romanesque features such as round arches divided by squat columns and fine ashlar stone masonry, especially at the corners, as well as the external stair that gives access to the main hall above. Its surroundings were originally fortified. Photo by author.

Though much of this first Romanesque style derived from Italy, especially Lombardy, the development of the interior bay system for Romanesque architecture proper comes from Northern architecture (Horn 1958). The bay system is composed of repeating vertical units divided by visual elements, such as shafts and transverse arches (Fig. 4). Bays divide space into repeating volumes. They characterize both Romanesque and Gothic buildings and have their origins in the vertical posts that divided barns and other domestic wooden structures. In such buildings the posts connected with open timber beam ceilings, but as Romanesque builders became more proficient the ceilings were replaced by masonry vaults over the church nave and aisles. These vaults could be simple barrel (or tunnel) vaults, which acted essentially as extensions of the arch, or they could be groin vaults, formed by the intersection at right angles of two barrel vaults. The resultant seamed appearance formed an X-shape over the vaulted bay (Figs. 2 and 4). Masonry vaults helped make buildings less vulnerable to fire, provided excellent acoustic effects, and added to the monumental grandeur of a structure.

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Fig. 4: Nave elevation and west narthex interior of La Madeleine at Vézelay, France (Burgundian Romanesque, ca. 1104–1132). Note the groin vaults between the striped transverse arches, the elaborate historiated capitals beneath the arch springing and within the nave arcade arch facings, and the compound colonettes marking the vertical nave bay divisions. Photo by Jesse Hurlbut, with permission.

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While Romanesque buildings throughout Europe explored vaulting, additional developments in France and northern Spain led to what is known as the pilgrimage roads church type (for example St. Foy, Conques, Fig. 2). To accommodate the increasing crowds of pilgrims journeying to visit saintly relics, many of the churches on the road to Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of St. James the Major in northwest Spain, began to enlarge their east ends. Apses were extended, surrounded with a semicircular aisle known as an ambulatory, and small additional chapels, known as radiating chapels, opened into the ambulatory space. Paul Frankl’s description for these changes was “additive” architecture; that is, the chapels formed discrete spaces that stood as self-contained units; by contrast, Gothic was “integrative,” all its parts combining to form a whole (Frankl, 2000, 10). Later Romanesque buildings developed a range of vocabularies and forms within differing regions. Though sharing most key features in common (additive plans and Roman elements, especially round arches, columns, capitals, and stone vaulting), different regions tended to develop individual solutions. In general, northern Europe preferred relatively simple plans and decoration, with steeply pitched roofs and heavy stonework as at Mainz cathedral in Germany, while the south adopted Moslem or Byzantine elements, such as “zebra” striped stonework or cusped archways, for example in Monreale cathedral, Sicily (Conant 1978, 239–40). An additional feature shared by most Romanesque styles is the increasing sophistication in building decoration. Wall painting flourished within the Romanesque period. Early stained glass began to make an appearance as well (for example at Augsburg cathedral, southern Germany). But most distinctive was the sculptural decoration of buildings. Elaborately decorated doorways and capitals sported monsters, grotesques and distorted human figures (Fig. 4). St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s (1090–1153) famous complaint about the extravagant cost of such “marvelous and deformed beauty, that beautiful deformity” in which “so many and so marvellous are the varieties of shapes on every hand, that we are more tempted to read in the marble than in our books,” clearly indicates a fascination with which the ascetic Cistercian himself struggled (Schapiro 1976, 6–8). The Gothic style was even more prone to ornamentation. This style arose in the Ile-de-France region around Paris in the twelfth century and persisted, in one form or another, throughout the sixteenth century. Its name derives from Italian Renaissance critics who branded the style barbaric because of its radical break with past Roman forms. Essential features of Gothic are the rib vault and the pointed arch; later developments such as flying buttresses and window tracery are also seen as characteristic of the style. These features formed the buildingblocks for an architecture that was soaringly vertical, and composed of interlock-

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Fig. 5: Nave elevation at Amiens cathedral, France, by Robert de Luzarches, built 1220–1236. The building interior is divided vertically into bays by thin colonettes that connect to the rib vaults, while horizontal string courses stretch below the clerestory windows and middle triforium zone, forming a classic High Gothic “grid.” Photo by author.

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Fig. 6: East end of Notre-Dame cathedral, Paris (1163–ca. 1240 with rebuilding 1296–1315; the small thin crossing spire and foreground monument are both nineteenth-century additions). Note the simple tracery in the upper windows between the flying buttress arches (twelfth-century High Gothic) and the more intricately ornamented, gable-topped windows at the base, forming a new ring of chapels around the east end (early fourteenth-century Rayonnant additions). Photo by author.

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ing parts emphasizing the linear treatment of the wall surface. The discrete sections of the Romanesque church were now bound together into an integrated whole by the vault’s ribs and their connections to wall responds, thinner massings and architectural details such as horizontal string courses (Figs. 2 and 5). The wall mass did not just appear thinner and more elegant, it actually became so. Relying on the strength of pointed arches and externally supporting buttresses, window space could be enlarged. Gothic buildings became showcases for stained glass: figures and ornament more often appeared in colored light rather than merely on colored walls. Fine ashlar masonry was also skillfully employed. The first Gothic church credited with fully assembling rib vaults, pointed arches, stained glass, and the integrative system in which they were bound together was the abbey church of St. Denis, rebuilt under Abbot Suger from 1140– 1144. Scholarly attention on buildings following St. Denis has been based, until relatively recently, primarily on classifications of style (Frankl 2000, 10). Early Gothic structures experimented with interior organization of piers and vaults, and the variation between openings and solid masonry. The interweaving of horizontal string courses or other elements with thin colonettes rising vertically and framing each bay formed differing balances from church to church. From the late twelfth to the mid thirteenth century a sort of balanced formula of vertical and horizontal elements coalesced into solutions known as the High Gothic style, seen in the nave of Amiens cathedral (Fig. 5). A drive for increased interior height led to the innovation of flying buttresses, arched spans that supported the upper walls at the levels where the heavy interior vaults rested their weight (Fig. 6). This allowed for increased window span, showcasing jewel-toned stained glass. The elegant solutions of High Gothic were long seen by many as the optimal balance between murality and openness, decoration and restraint. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Gothic had begun to alter to Rayonnant, a name meaning “ray-projecting.” The term derived initially from the patterns of window tracery—that is, the supporting stonework bars used in windows (Focillon 1963). Rayonnant buildings also broke up the careful balance of elements, dark and light, void and solid, that formed the Gothic “grid.” Previously delineated zones merged into one another when vertical stone colonettes or triangular gables blurred boundaries (Fig. 6). Outside France, Rayonnant proved popular, being adopted by buildings such as Cologne cathedral. England borrowed from Rayonnant as well, though there creative tracery and playful sculptural decoration also combined with innovative ways of shaping space in the style known as Decorative (Bony 1979). Italy on the other hand shied from the Gothic integrative approach and the use of external supports including flying buttresses, and retained much of its historically Romanesque character even while borrowing characteristically Gothic features, such as stained glass windows

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with pointed arches and rib vaulting, creating a style essentially eclectic (Trachtenberg 1991). By the end of the fourteenth century, Gothic had spread in various manifestations throughout much of Europe. The building of great churches such as cathedrals and abbeys in France and even England had slowed significantly, although important patronage could still command large-scale structures, such as Charles IV of Bohemia’s (1316–1378) efforts with the massive cathedral of St. Vitus at Prague. Talented architects such as Prague’s Peter Parler (ca. 1330–1397) adapted rib vaulting forms and played with architectural supports as if they were sculptural elements, culminating in the rioting, twisting forms of Late Gothic and in Germany, the so-called “Baroque Gothic” (Fig. 7). In France, these forms were often characterized by flame-shaped tracery, leading to the name Flamboyant. England preferred drier, more rigid patterns, especially in neatly subdivided tracery designs. The vertical orientation to these repetitive patterns gave rise to the name Perpendicular.

Fig. 7: Vladislav Hall, Prague castle, by architect Benedikt Ried (or Rijt, ca. 1450–ca. 1531), finished 1500. The organic criss-crossed loops of the rib vaults, which run down the walls without any interrupting capitals breaking their lines, are characteristically “Baroque” Gothic. The simpler window frames are elements of the classicizing Renaissance. Photo by author.

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Fig. 8: Hall cutaway view with plan, showing king post in ceiling, and upper and lower hall divisions. Note the solar behind the upper hall and the screens passage and service section (comprising buttery and pantry) behind lower hall. Image by permission of Richard Harris.

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Fig. 9: Parish church of All Saints, Elston, Nottinghamshire, England. The chancel section at the right has a characteristically lowered roof; the center and west sections are crenellated (often a sign of status rather than of military use in the late medieval period, but most likely added here by nineteenth-century restorers). The extending south chapel (lower center) has Tudor windows and arches; it also houses the main entrance porch. The offset porch design (on the south, rather than to the west below the tower) is common for parish churches. The tombstones in the churchyard mostly date from the eighteenth century onward. Photo by author.

A sober counterpoint to this later Gothic elaboration rose as early as in the twelfth century, inspired primarily by the mendicant orders. These gave rise to hall churches, with nave and side aisles of equal height (especially in German examples like Peter Parler’s Heilig-Kreutz church in Schwäbisch-Gmünd), or squaredoff, plain east ends with few or no chapels (often popular in English churches, such as the Cistercian Fountains abbey), or timber interior ceilings with vaulting restricted to a small choir area (common in Italy, as at Santa Croce, Florence). The Gothic was eventually supplanted by Renaissance ideals, which favored symmetry and simpler geometrical forms. The complex patterns of tracery and the intricacies of design were not as easy to grasp visually or intellectually as the proportion-based system in Renaissance classicism. Robert Bork has recently argued that the very intellectual challenge of Gothic may well have prompted its demise (Bork 2011b).

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Though Romanesque and Gothic styles predominated in nearly all church architecture, most secular architecture did not follow these forms. Timbered structures formed open interiors made up of bays framed by wooden trusses. The most common forms were aisles (in which the ceiling was supported both by innervertical posts and outer walls), post and truss (in which the vertical posts and walls were identical, making the covered space much narrower) and cruck (the use of jointed timbers forming a curved shape rather than a strict right angle) (Harris 2004, 11). Whether employed in an utilitarian barn, prosperous peasant house, or lordly hall, the timbered structure frequently pursued the goal of making the interior as spacious as possible. The aisle posts that made a large expanse feasible also, however, blocked interior view and circulation, and carpenters devised various solutions to support roof trusses, including king posts (Fig. 8) and hammerbeams. King posts are vertical posts that brace the upper roof and sit on a horizontal beam stretching the width of the room below; hammerbeams are short horizontal posts that are cantilevered in horizontally from the outside wall, are braced for support, and thus can hold vertical posts extending up into the roofing system. Westminster Hall in London (1395–1399) was one of the most noted hammerbeam structures. Fortified structures such as city walls, bridge towers, and castles, were more frequently made of stone, and could range from an extremely utilitarian form to a highly decorated one. Decorative motifs frequently were drawn from either Romanesque or Gothic vocabulary, adding such flourishes as decorative blind arcades on a building exterior (as at Castle Rising, Norfolk, England, ca. 1138) to rib-vaulted passageways. One notable military feature, however, is the crenellation or battlement, a rampart along the top of a fortified wall that includes regular gaps for firing arrows, or, later, guns. Though its origins were in defensive function, it came also to be a mark of status, as a license to crenellate was required by royal authority. Crenellation thus reversed the usual pattern of borrowing, being applied first to military, and only later, to ecclesiastical buildings (Fig. 9).

II Building Types and their Uses 1 Ecclesiastical Architecture Most of the exempla of traditional Romanesque and Gothic style are derived from great churches, notably cathedrals and abbeys. Cathedrals were largely urban structures, housing the throne of the bishop (the cathedra) for the diocese. Abbeys could be rural or urban, depending on their order, but served their monastic community, integrating the church with an adjacent cloister (Fig. 2). The cloister

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in turn was bordered by living quarters: dormitory, refectory, library/scriptorium. Service buildings and guest quarters, important parts of the complex used both by monastic residents as well as well as their visitors, are less often studied, though more recently scholars have focused on the study of the monastic complex as a whole (Kinder 2000; Gilchrist 2005). Traditional orders such as Benedictines and Cistercians often preferred remote sites in which the abbey complex formed its own discrete unit in which the community might remain detached even from pilgrims. Mendicant orders, especially the great preaching orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans, usually sited their church and cloister complexes in towns, in order to draw townsfolk into their great, barn-like naves to hear their sermons and bury their dead (Bruzelius 2007). Mendicant churches often eschewed great bell towers and kept their naves relatively plain, but beyond their choir screens, the choir could surpass the remainder of the church in size and splendor. Their success in appealing to the local devout, including their ability to draw offerings away from the parish churches, often led to a rivalry that could be played out in the architectural realm as well as the social one. Parish churches served smaller congregations (Fig. 9), but in size and splendor could be as large as their parish’s funds permitted. Indeed in some areas they rivaled cathedrals in splendor. Organized by neighborhood, parishioners were expected to attend regular services at their church, as well as be baptized and buried there. (There was a financial element to this requirement, as fees for these ceremonies were an important part of the parish priest’s income.) Parish churches often developed piecemeal according to available finances and changing tastes. Many structures retain the core of a small nave and chancel structure to which aisles, towers, higher ceilings, additional windows, and side chapels have been added (Dyas, ed., 2010). Chapels could be attached to a church, forming a semiprivate space for their donors. Guilds, families, and wealthy individuals often founded such chapels, as founding a completely new church required a more costly license. Many of these chapels were known as chantries, a term also employed for the endowment funds established to celebrate prayers for their patrons’ souls (Roffey 2007). Other private chapels could be found in great houses and castles, or placed in prominent public sites, like bridges or graveyards. Chapels even could be integrated with large halls, as at hospitals, where the placement of a chapel at the far end of a row of beds might allow the bedridden sick to see and hear the spiritually healing liturgy (Craemer 1963). Large or small, medieval churches shared much the same symbolism. A church was a house of God, an earthly manifestation of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The design of the church usually was laid out in the shape of a cross, with the main altar to the east at the “head” (as at St. Foy, Conques; see Fig. 2). Churches were sometimes round, patterned after the Holy Sepulchre church at Jerusalem, a

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key Christian monument since the time of Constantine (Krautheimer 1942; examples include Charlemagne’s Palatine Chapel in Aachen, the Romanesque church of SS. Peter and Paul at Ottmarsheim, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge, and several churches of the Order of the Knights Templar, as at London). Whether round, cross-shaped or adapted to some other form by exigencies of site, history or patron choice, the medieval church and its furnishings joined together to form a unity just as individuals together made up the body of Christ (Frankl 2000, 14). Furnishings, which so seldom survive into the modern era, were crucial to the liturgy which was performed within the building. Choir screens, pulpits, chalices and other plates, monstrances and reliquaries, altar cloths, hangings, vestments, books, pax boards, and candles all framed the space of the church proper to create a setting for liturgical devotion. But the church could also serve numerous other purposes, such as housing dramatic performances (Frankl 2011, 25), serving as reception sites for city visitations by notables, and as civic centers for seasonal celebration, as in the parish ales and harvest festivities popular in late medieval times (Burgess 1991, 86).

2 Secular Architecture Secular building was divided primarily into dwellings and fortifications, though the two categories could overlap. Little is known of basic housing, as few remnants survive. Archaeological evidence indicates, however, that these were better built than the flimsy hovels of popular imagination (Johnson 2010, 73). Post holes, stone fire pits, and drains indicate that walls were usually made of timbers, either set in earth vertically or on a foundation horizontally, log-cabin style. Thatch was probably the most common roofing. Houses could be sunk into the ground, with the roof slanting down nearly to the ground level (the Grubenhaus type). Such buildings might be unheated, used as work spaces (like weaving sheds) rather than living quarters. Examples of these structures are best examined through reconstructions and rebuildings, like those found at the Museum of Northumbria at Wearmouth-Jarrow (“Bede’s World”) in England. There was little or no architectural subdivision of space in these simple dwellings, although in a longhouse an internal wall, which usually did not reach to the ceiling, frequently kept animals to one side while still allowing people to share warmth with their stock. A drain typically ran down the animal half of the residence to flush out manure. More sophisticated longhouses might have a passage corridor between the human and animal residents, with doors on each end. Barns and byres were often built separately, to house either cattle or grain; the latter could be raised on short supports to keep rodents from entering the building.

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The center of the house, whether of one room or more, was the hearth fire. A hole in the roof let smoke out; louvers and gables could help shield the fire below from rain. Chimneys did not begin to be employed until the twelfth century, and the central fire remained traditional until very late. As a result, the room below, of whatever size, was generally smoky. This open room was the basic hall. The hall had a pattern and a resonance felt on all levels of society. The owner of the home, regardless of his actual social status, was lord of the hall; indeed, yeomen halls became increasingly common in the later medieval period. This “lord” sat at the far end, often on a fixed bench. Other furniture items, such as benches or tables, were typically moveable. Though a peasant home would be multipurpose, a hall of status was not usually used for sleeping or cooking, but for eating and gathering (Thompson 1995, 30). In Beowulf’s (ca. 1000) Heorot, for example, neither Hrothgar nor his guest Beowulf actually sleep in the hall, beyond the hero’s first night; it is only the warriors of lesser status who bunk down inside. The vulnerability of the hall indicates a social shame and political weakness that draws Beowulf to Hrothgar’s rescue (Beowulf 2008, 1188, lines 411–414). An early hall like Heorot was a separate building from other living and service quarters such as chambers, the kitchens, and storage areas. However, early halls were often placed on an upper floor above storage areas, sometimes cellars known as undercrofts. The hall itself would typically be accessed via an outer stairway which could be defended in case of attack (Fig. 3). In the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), for example, control of the staircase is key to the strategy during the fight between Huns and Burgundians in King Etzel’s hall (The Nibelungenlied 1969, 244). By the mid-twelfth century the freestanding hall began to merge with the chamber block, forming the basis of the later medieval house, especially in England (Blair 1993). To these were added service quarters. The arrangement of these three key elements could take different forms, but one very common plan was the location of a private chamber at one end of the hall and service quarters at the other end (Fig. 8). The chamber, usually well lit (and thus also called a solar) was frequently placed farthest away from the main house entrance. It was commonly placed on an upper level with an internal stair access. Heating could be supplied by a chimney in wealthier households, and the chamber might have its own garderobe or latrine. At the opposite end of the hall from the chamber, one or more doorways led to a passage that served as main entrance, and that opened on two service rooms, the buttery (for drink) and pantry (for bread). Additional service areas such as the kitchen were usually separate structures located behind the house proper, to minimize the risks of fire and to keep far away from the latrines for sanitation. The arrangement of the hall form was one that corresponded to medieval social hierarchy but it differed according to region and custom. In France there

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was usually an upper story salle over a ground floor or basement equivalent where servants and lesser folk congregated (Girouard 2000, 42). In England all classes usually gathered on the same floor, in the same room, with the space differentiated by increased architectural elaboration. A fixed bench at the far, or upper, end was often illuminated by a window, and other architectural details could emphasize the upper half, even down to the orientation of joints between beams (Johnson 2010, 67). These upper and lower divisions were closely akin to the clerical chancel and lay nave of the basic parish church (Johnson 2010, 71). The hall’s location in apposition to the screens passage, behind which buttery and pantry resided, lent itself to the ceremonial presentation of bread and wine, especially in more substantial households, which had Eucharistic associations (Gardiner 2008, 60–61). Indeed, the space of the medieval hall was equated with communal ceremony. The increasing preference of the wealthy for private comfort in a chamber is lamented by William Langland (ca. 1332–ca. 1386): “Elyng is the halle, uche daye in the wyke, / There the lorde ne the ladye, liketh nought to sytte. / Now hath uche riche a reule to eten bi hymsleve / in a pryvé parloure for pore mennes sake, / Or in a chambre with a chymneye, and leve the chief halle / That was made for meles men to eten inne” (Langland 2006, 144, Passus X, ll. 97– 102). By contrast, the old-fashioned liberality of Chaucer’s Franklin also finds architectural form: “His table dormant in his halle alway / Stood redy covered al the longe day. / At sessiouns there was he lord and sire” (Chaucer 1987, 29, ll. 353–55). The abandonment of the hall toward the end of the medieval period has been linked with the rise of the nuclear family (husband, wife, children, servants) as well as with changing expectations of, and indeed concepts of, privacy (Johnson 2010; Ariès and Duby, ed., 1993). The open space of the hall was not just used for domestic space but also wider communities. Town halls, market halls, and guild halls were used for business and commerce, although they could also be used for the same kind of ceremony held in a private house, only on a larger scale. The larger the hall itself was, the more necessary internal supports became, although woodworkers could span large interior spaces with the aid of hammerbeams. In smaller town dwellings, a residential hall could be turned ninety degrees with its narrow end facing the street, and accommodating shop space at the entrance. As burgage (that is, town rental) plots were usually long and narrow, putting service areas in a yard behind the main house block was more convenient for the dweller. Town house halls could also be raised to the upper floor, leaving more room for shops or storage beneath; to increase house size beyond the allotted frontage space, upper stories were often jettied (Fig. 1). In castles, an upper floor location was generally preferred for the hall, with vaulted undercrofts serving as secure storage areas below. The integration of hall and other domestic chambers into castles restricted

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size. In France this corresponded with the multiplication of chambers stacking vertically into towers; the higher up, the more private the room, and often the more difficult to access (Girouard 2000, 55). Castles were both domestic and defensive, though each site design assured how effective these elements were. Indeed the combination of defense with the dwelling place of a lord is, in fact, the definition of what makes a castle (Brown 1980, 16).The simplest type of castle consisted of the motte and bailey type, which probably developed in France before the Norman conquest. An earthwork ditch surrounded a central mound, the motte, on which a timber fortified structure was built next to an enclosed courtyard, the bailey. The motte typically held a keep, or donjon, with living quarters for the lord in residence; it could often be large enough to contain a hall as well as private quarters and storage. A motte and bailey castle of earth and wood could be erected fairly quickly to help control a conquered countryside, acting not only for defense but as a secure site from which to wage offensive strikes. Stone began to replace timber by the eleventh century, though all surviving examples date from the twelfth century onward (Brown 1980). This made castles more imposing as well as expensive and slower to erect. They dominated the landscape, or cityscape, as much as great churches did. Castle design grew more elaborate with the addition of multiple layers of earthworks and stone walls, and reached its military zenith during the late thirteenth century. The motte and bailey type fell out of fashion in favor of large stone keeps, usually fortified with additional curtain walls. Stone towers were common in Italy, where individual families built tall defensive structures within blocks of their rivals in the same city; the best preserved example is the Tuscan town of San Gimignano. Later castles often utilized natural siting such as rocky outcrops, riverine or tidal marsh locations. Strategic ground was frequently high ground, especially for German castles, which were slower to develop than in Normandy and England (Brown 1980, 57). Ashlar masonry could be fitted to rise from living rock so that attack was made more difficult, and ditches or moats could be filled with water to deter assault by sapping or mining. Where early castles may have had a simple palisade, now elaborate outer curtain walls were added, often strengthened at the corners by towers. In fact this towered wall complex formed the basis of most crusader castles, which could dispense with the central keep altogether (Brown 1980, 49). Popular though the keep was, especially in France, it was still optional as the hall, chambers and service quarters could easily be integrated within an inner ward bounded by thick walls (Fig. 10). Shafts along the walls that emptied outward were used for latrines, away from the centrally-defended well. Where sites permitted, concentric and symmetrical layouts were preferred, often with two or

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even more rings of wall defending the residential interior. The most heavily fortified section was the entrance, which often boasted a large gatehouse complex. The entryway to a castle bristled with features that were meant to intimidate as well as serve in actual defense: one or more portcullises blocked the way, while murder holes (open slots to drop missiles from above) and arrow slits (narrow vertical slits behind which bowmen could be posted) also protected the opening. Drawbridges could also be employed. Indeed, many more castles fell through siege starvation or treachery than outright assault.

Fig. 10: Harlech castle ground plan, Wales. Built ca. 1283 by Master James of St. George (ca. 1230–1309) for Edward I (1239–1307) to subdue the Welsh, the castle is set on a rocky outcrop above the sea, which extends to the west. It has no central keep but the gatehouse contained a suite of residential rooms, and the main hall, kitchen and chapel are placed along the periphery of the inner ward. Photo by permission of Cadw, Welsh Government (Crown Copyright).

During the late Middle Ages, castles became less military in function and more focused on residential comfort. Living quarters were enlarged at the expense of towers or gatehouses, and additional windows increased lighting but also vulnerability. The slow decline of the castle as working fortress was complex and based on reasons part military and part social (Brown 1980, 61). One factor is that great lords’ households became less peripatetic and more settled; in early times most

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castles had been left occupied by a skeleton staff for part of the year as their lords traveled. Swift-moving military raids that bypassed castle territory also rendered these buildings less of a deterrent in war. There were other kinds of fortifications besides the personal residence of a lord and his extended family. Town walls with their reinforced gates and towers defended an entire community. These fortifications could be as imposing as any castle and their gateways, often closed at night, could seal up the community from outside threat. Inside encircling walls, the medieval town tended to have a complex narrow network of streets, though city centers might have a grid pattern, usually from the reuse of old Roman fortifications. Towns as a whole tended to grow in rings, as more and more residential areas near the town needed to be included within larger fortified walls. Bridges too were part of the architectural landscape, and could be fortified with towers on either bank, as at the Charles Bridge in Prague, or built up with commercial shops along their lengths, rather in the manner of the modern Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The integration of defense, domicile and worship into various parts of one structure, such as a bridge, is indeed characteristic of the scope of medieval life (see the contribution on “Roads, Streets, Bridges, and Travelers” by Albrecht Classen in this Handbook).

D Conclusions Architecture shaped, and was shaped by, the lives of both rich and poor. People worked, ate, slept, worshiped, gathered, and were governed all within the framework of building. We know more of elite architecture, which is both better documented and better preserved, than we do of more humble structures. Both types of architecture were experienced by a wide range of individuals both inside and outside their target social class. Indeed, as much of the display of a castle or cathedral was likely aimed at impressing outsiders as it was in satisfying the needs and wishes of the upper echelons who regularly used the spaces. Though these spaces have often changed over the centuries, enough of them remains that visitors to them in later days can still experience something of the physical milieu that was formerly created, making architecture unique among the arts. Medieval architecture continues to survive and even thrive as communities today restore castles, churches and houses. Nearly every major cathedral and abbey church in Europe has undergone or is currently undergoing rebuilding campaigns. Stones and glass leading worn by pollution need replacing or reinforcing; roofs and floors need maintenance; sculpted and painted surfaces need careful cleaning. Support for such procedures is very expensive (the 1998–2004 restoration of the north spire at Strasbourg cathedral cost an estimated 4.4 million

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Euros) but cultural awareness of the need for preservation has possibly never been higher. The medieval past may once have been seen as outmoded but now its appeal gives buildings from this time period a special cachet. The Gothic Revival movement of the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries restored much of the appeal of medieval forms—notably such idiosyncratic Gothic features as crenellations, pointed arches, stained glass, ribbed vaulting, and the monstrous but eye-catching gargoyles which served both as rainspouts as well as emblems of fleeing evil. The Renaissance had rejected these in favor of careful proportion systems and regular geometries of the classical world. Centrally planned designs, balanced compositions and classical decorative themes (like fluted columns, acanthus leaves, egg-and-dart moldings, and dentils) came to the fore. But with the rise of Romanticism, the idiosyncracies and brilliant inventions of the medieval period once more captured imaginations. Thanks also to the attraction of “medievalisms” popularized in today’s cinematic, cyberspace culture, medieval architecture is a treasured remnant of our past.

Select Bibliography Brown, R. Allen, Castles: A History and Guide (Poole 1980). Coldstream, Nicola, Medieval Architecture (Oxford 2002). Conant, Kenneth, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture, 800–1200, 4th ed. (1959; New Haven, CT, and London 1978). Craemer, Ulrich, Das Hospital als Bautyp des Mittelalters (Cologne 1963). Frankl, Paul, Gothic Architecture, rev. Paul Crossley (New Haven, CT, 2000). Grenville, Jane, Medieval Housing (London and Washington, DC, 1997). Krautheimer, Richard, “An Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1–33. Opačić, Zoë and Achim Timmermann, ed., Architecture, Liturgy and Identity: Liber Amicorum Paul Crossley (Turnhout 2011). Panofsky, Erwin, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures (Princeton, NJ, 1946). Thompson, Michael Welman, The Medieval Hall: the Basis of Secular Domestic Life, 600–1600 AD (Aldershot 1995).

Frances Parton

Visual Arts A Introduction This essay will give a survey of the range and nature of medieval art from the fourth century to the fifteenth, with a focus on Western Europe. Medieval art is a huge subject, and by necessity this can be only an introductory study of what is now recognized as one of the richest artistic periods of European history. The twelve hundred years between 300 and 1500, stretching from the late antique era to the beginning of the Renaissance, are renowned as a period of enormous regional, cultural, political, economic, and artistic change and diversity. Yet consistency and history were valued and consciously maintained throughout; local practice and inherited tradition were of supreme importance on every social level. By highlighting the nature of these changes, and the desire for continuity which accompanied them, I will offer one way to explore the tremendous wealth and variety of art produced during the medieval period, including architecture, metalwork, manuscript illumination and sculpture.

B Early Medieval Art – The Classical Roman Inheritance I Classical Roman and Early Christian Art An awareness of the significance of the inherited classical Roman past, transmitted via late antique Christian culture, is perhaps the most important key to understanding early medieval culture, politics and art. A brief outline of Roman art, both before and after the emergence of Christianity, is necessary to understand the ways this classical, Christian artistic inheritance was received, developed and exploited by early medieval rulers, artists and patrons. Roman art portrayed and celebrated the actions and customs which defined and reinforced Roman culture, all of which were very visual; the social rituals of the amphitheatre, bathhouse and banquet; religious sacrifices; intellectual rituals such as public debates. The confrontation and combination of a strong Hellenistic tradition with indigenous Italian forms developed into an imperial, cosmopolitan, ‘Romanized’ and ‘Romanizing’ style widely adopted across the multicultural

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societies which made up the Roman Republic (Elsner 1998, 1–11). Communication through images proved an effective way of binding the disparate inhabitants of the empire together and during the later imperial Roman period the desire for the accurate, naturalistic depiction of people and events was overtaken by the development and proliferation of images which conveyed a message, usually one of imperial power. The busts on Roman coins spread a familiar and established motif of authority and unity across wide regions that were linguistically and culturally diverse. In an architectural and sculptural context, narrative scenes communicated events and ideas through the repeated use of formulaic images. In an adlocutio scene, for example, the authority of an emperor addressing his troops is evident from his raised arm and elevated physical position on a platform; in an adventus scene, the power of an emperor on horseback is communicated through the submissive and supplicating attitude of those before him. Detail, individuality, and accuracy were controlled to increase the clarity of the message portrayed (Nees 2002, 17–27; Elsner 1998, 11–14). This strong visual, pictorial language of ideas was widely used and recognized across the later Roman Empire; it was an integral part of both secular and religious life. When the early Christian church developed, springing directly from existing Jewish practices, emphases and traditions, the new cult (like Judaism itself) was immediately noteworthy by its reliance on a central text. Roman pagan religion was local, diverse, polytheistic and tolerant. It was experienced in a devolved way, through images and myths. In contrast, Christ, the focus of the new Christian cult, was to be known and experienced through the written word. Although the total rejection of the worship of images remains a central tenet of Christianity today, as the new religion spread quickly through Roman society during the course of the third century its adherents and advocates adopted and built upon the existing flexible and effective Roman visual language which was all around them as a way of spreading and interpreting the new faith. An argument can therefore be made for much continuity during the transition from the pagan to the Christian Roman Empire, focused around art and the uses of art. The spread and development of Christianity during the first two or three centuries C.E., alongside other emerging religious cults such as Mithraism, left little physical trace and remains opaque and little-known to us today. The earliest Christian symbols that we know about such as the fish, the anchor, the shepherd, and the dove, found on personal seals, on tomb paintings, and on carved sarcophagi, date from the third century onwards, and were borrowed and adapted from those already in use in the pagan Roman world. Polyvalent, these contemporary ideograms were chosen as they were familiar yet open to a range of meanings (Nees 2002, 32–36). A shepherd with his flock had a long Graeco-Roman history as an image of general safety and salvation, but developed into a clear

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image of a specifically Christian, spiritual kind of salvation. The anchor, used in Hellenistic and Roman iconography to symbolize a naval victory, could, within a Christian context, represent a safe harbor, hope, and paradise. They could be used to communicate increasingly complicated ideas, which often necessitated a certain amount of interpretation by the viewer. An image of a fish, for example, was open to a wider range of related meanings; the souls of new believers ‘caught’ by the Apostles; the miraculous fish from the story of Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand; and finally on an exegetical level, Old Testament miracles like this prefigured the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, so the fish can also symbolize Christ’s body and his sacrifice. The image of the fish was often accompanied by the Greek work for fish, IXθYΣ, which was also an acronymn of the first letters of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. Christianity’s emphasis on the written word was also something that was explored and communicated visually in this period. The didactic stories of the Old Testament could be conveyed extremely effectively through extended narrative pictures, and surviving early forth-century tomb paintings from the Roman catacombs often show episodes from the stories of Jonah, of Moses, of Susanna and the Elders (Nees 2002, 36–39; Barral i Altet 1997, 32; Lowden 1997, 25–29). The relationship between word and image, symbolism, and the idea of different layers of interrelated meaning, which would go on to become extremely characteristic aspects of early medieval art and culture, are already present in early Christian art in this way. As early Christianity and pagan Roman art co-existed and were interrelated, the artists who produced these Christian images may or may not have been Christian themselves. In addition, the overlap between Christian and pagan motifs means that imagery alone is not always enough to denote whether or not an object from this period is Christian in character. Some forms of decoration were particularly ambiguous in this way, such as vine leaves, which remained a popular pagan Roman type of decoration while also being open to a new Christian Eucharistic interpretation (Paradise, new life in Christ etc); in many cases, it was the context and received meaning which denoted a Christian message to the viewer rather than any distinct or separate style (Lowden 1997, 29; Nees 2002, 38).

II Late Antique Art and the Rise of Christianity Over the course of the fourth century, following the toleration edicts of the Emperor Galerius in 311 and the co-emperors Constantine and Licinius in 313, Christianity grew exponentially. It was adopted as the state religion of the empire and became fully integrated into late antique culture, both public and private.

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The pagan temples were not officially closed until 396, however, so Christianity and paganism officially co-existed for most of the fourth century. The increased status and authority of the new religion was especially evident in an architectural sense; alongside triumphal arches, the major public monuments of late antiquity, the fourth century saw the emergence and proliferation of a new kind of large public building dedicated to communal Christian activity—the Christian basilica (Stalley 1999, 16–32). Before the early fourth century and the appearance of the great Constantinian basilicas of Rome, Constantinople and Jerusalem, there had been no specific Christian architecture as Christians had simply gathered in converted houses or tituli. One such excavated ‘house-church’ survives at Dura Europos in Syria, decorated with a cycle of wall paintings of Christ’s miracles (Lowden 1997, 18–21; Nees 2002, 39–40). As Christianity grew in power and popularity these ‘house-churches’ were replaced with Christian churches of the kind we would recognize today, which were modelled on a common and distinctly Roman pre-existing building type, the basilica (Stalley 1999, 16–32; Barral i Altet 1997, 43–69). Aristocratic families who might have sponsored the building of a temple or baths in the pre-Christian empire now, following Constantine’s example, became patrons of the new Christian basilicas. The development of the basilica from a Roman legal and commercial building, a meeting place, court house and assembly hall to a center of Christian worship represents the way that beginning with Constantine’s major new Christian basilicas, much of Roman imperial culture proved flexible and was consciously adapted to the demands of a new Christian way of life and way of thinking (Elsner 1998, 3–11). It also underlines the significant continuity which, alongside great upheaval and change, marked the transition from the imperial Roman to the late antique period. The integration of Christianity into classical pagan life which developed into a coherent late antique artistic culture was evident in a private, domestic sense as well as on an imperial, aristocratic, public scale. Continuity between the imperial Roman and the late antique era is evident in the kinds of people who were commissioning domestic works of art, and in their reasons for doing so. Wealthy pre-Christian Roman households had emphasized their learning and education, their social and financial status by decorating their homes with mosaics and frescos, usually depicting mythological, hunting or dining scenes, and with high value objects of great craftsmanship such as fine silver or glass tableware. Throughout the late antique and into the early medieval period, domestic art remained a way of creating and displaying status and identity (Nees 2002, 63–74; Elsner 1998, 44–50; Barral i Altet 1997, 24–25). Piazza Armerina, a residence in eastern Sicily dating to the early fourth century, sumptuously decorated with mosaic scenes of hunting and fishing is a prime example of the vitality of private building during the late antique era and the efforts of wealthy households to

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imitate imperial palaces. Other private villas show clearly the integration of Christianity into classical artistic culture; the fourth-century mosaic decoration of the cupola of a surviving mausoleum at the villa of Centcelles on the Iberian Peninsula combines Christian and non-Christian themes. Silver and glass remained significant luxury materials, and commissioning, owning and using objects made of these materials were important ways of displaying status throughout the late imperial Roman and the late antique period. With objects such as the famous Projecta casket, a forth-century silver marriage gift found in a hoard in Rome in 1793 decorated with a Christian inscription and mythological images, or the Lycurgus cup, a fourth-century drinking vessel of opaque green glass carved with a mythological scene, both now in the British Museum, the value of the materials and the craftsmanship involved in their production spoke louder than their iconography in conveying the status of their owners. Beginning with Constantine’s support of the religion as part of an imperial programme, Christianity became a major and visible part of late antique identity, art and culture. Just as the Jewish Old Testament stories were re-interpreted in the light of the New so that ancient events prefigured those of recent Christian history, the Roman past was re-interpreted within a Christian framework and Christianity, expressed through inherited Roman visual symbols and architectural styles, became a fundamental part of late antique public and private life (Elsner 1998, 7–8). The conscious inheritance and utilisation of the Roman Christian past at the highest social and political levels, the integration of Christianity into every aspect of life, and the total lack of separation between the religious and the secular, transmitted via the Late Antique period, would prove the keystones of early medieval life and art.

III The ‘Germanic’ Period During the course of the fifth century the political map of the western Roman Empire changed fundamentally as the authority of the emperors was irreparably eroded and replaced by that of newly-established regional rulers and Germanic kingdoms; the Vandal kingdom in northern Africa, the Visigothic in Spain and southern Gaul, the Ostrogothic in Italy and the Frankish in northern Gaul. ‘Barbarian’ Germanic peoples had lived around and within the Roman lands for centuries; the empire had always been a collection of disparate ‘Romanized’ communities held together from the center. The once wholly accepted idea of large-scale barbarian population movement and invasion bringing about the fall of the empire during this period is now widely disputed in favour of a more nuanced picture of a general de-centralization of power and a period of ethnogen-

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esis—the deliberate, conscious creation of new peoples and territories around shared cultural ideas and practises rather than ethnic, racial markers (Geary 2002; Pohl and Beaupré 2005). Power became more localized, political centers proliferated, trading patterns changed, and powerful aristocratic families grew increasingly independent and established spheres of influence in the countryside as the wealth and prestige of towns fluctuated. Yet the idea of the restoration of the Christian Roman Empire, or of particular regimes representing the successor to that empire, would remain the political refrain throughout the early medieval period. When the grave of the Germanic fifth-century Frankish king Childeric (457– 481/482) was unearthed in the seventeenth century at Tournai in modern-day Belgium, it was discovered that the pagan ruler had been buried in 482 with a seal ring, complete with a portrait bust and a Latin inscription. Childeric himself may not have been Roman, Christian, or even literate, but he obviously recognized the significance of objects like the seal ring in reflecting the inherited Roman basis of rulership and hoped to exploit this to underscore his own power. In other words, he used objects redolent of the Roman past to underwrite his own authority. Theoderic the Ostrogoth (493–526), who married Childeric’s daughter Audofleda around 493, established a power base around the old imperial city of Ravenna and presented himself as the restorer of the Roman Empire in late fifth- and early sixth century northern Italy. Theoderic, who had been brought up as a high-status hostage at the imperial court in Constantinople, provided circus games in Rome and constructed an amphitheatre at Pavia, another late imperial capital. He was also an Arian Christian, and wrote to the pope to ask for trained mosaicists to be sent to Ravenna to complete in a Roman style the sumptuous decoration of the basilica he built there, now known as San Apollinare Nuovo (Lowden 1997, 120–24). The tremendous architectural impact of Theoderic’s reign on the city of Ravenna is still evident today, especially in the massive and strikingly original domed mausoleum of ashlar masonry he constructed for himself, which still survives on the outskirts of the city (Barral i Altet 1997, 78; Stalley 1999, 64–65). During the course of the sixth century, Justinian (527–565), the emperor of the surviving Eastern part of the Roman Empire, made a concerted effort to reconquer several of the Germanic kingdoms of Western Europe. The resulting wars in Ostrogothic Italy left the kingdom of Theoderic’s successors devastated and depopulated, but in Ravenna at least the early to mid-sixth century had a major architectural impact. Christian architecture flourished in the city under Justinian and the most significant construction of the period, San Vitale, decorated with sumptuous mosaics in a Byzantine style, would prove a key architectural model for centuries to come (Nees 2002, 102–04; Barral i Altet 1997, 135–36; Lowden 1997, 127–35). By around 570 a new Germanic group, the Lombards, had estab-

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lished authority across much of the northern Italian peninsula with a capital at Pavia. The Lombards conquered further areas across the central and southern parts of the peninsula, reaching the peak of their authority during the eighth century and leaving only Ravenna, small areas of the southern coast and Rome and its immediate hinterland under nominative imperial authority. Yet still the idea of the Christian Roman past, and of Roman imperial authority, based on the city of Rome and to a lesser degree, on Ravenna, retained an extremely strong currency in politics and in art. The Merovingian Franks in Gaul, the Ostrogoths then Lombards in Italy, the Visigoths in Spain; all brought rich Germanic artistic traditions with them, evident in surviving metalwork and decorative arts. All of these groups settled in highly Romanized areas, with a rich classical, Christian past. In architecture especially the combination of Germanic tradition, local practice and Christian Roman inheritance developed, for the first time, into national styles (Barral i Altet 1997, 74–75).

IV The Carolingian Renaissance While the Byzantine, the old Eastern Roman empire, survived in the East, the seventh and eighth centuries saw the economic basis of the old western Roman Empire shift away from the Mediterranean towards the north and the establishment and consolidation of the Frankish kingdoms across a large area of western Europe. Beginning as foederati as early as the fourth century, the Germanic Franks settled in the north east of Belgium and around the middle section of the Rhine during the fifth century. Initially pagan, various separate small Frankish kingdoms were conquered and Christianized towards the end of the fifth and beginning of the sixth century by Childeric’s son Clovis (481–509), founder of the Frankish Merovingian ruling dynasty. Clovis’s Merovingian successors continued to expand and strengthen the Frankish territories of Neustria, Austrasia, Burgundy and Aquitaine until the mid-eighth century, when rule transferred from the waning Merovingian ruling family to the powerful and ambitious Carolingian dynasty under Pepin III (752–768). In later Frankish histories this is recorded as having been done with the blessing of Pope Zachary (741–752) in 751. The papacy, in a vulnerable position in the Italian Peninsula with regards to their Lombard, Byzantine and Beneventan neighbours, had long looked to the Franks for military and political support and Pepin, together with his sons Carloman and Charlemagne, were anointed by Pope Stephen II (752–757) three years later in 754. Whereas the Merovingian rulers had tended to divide the separate Frankish kingdoms between their successors, Pepin’s son Charlemagne (768–814) launched

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a major and tremendously successful military and cultural campaign to expand and unite the Frankish kingdoms and to mould them into a single cohesive Roman, Christian and Frankish empire covering most of western Europe north of the Pyrenees, which, at his death in 814, passed intact to his son Louis the Pious (814–840). Part of this campaign was a deliberate literary manipulation and intellectual reworking of the Frankish Germanic past as a Christian narrative which presented the Franks as God’s chosen people. A significant and lasting bond was carefully cultivated between the Carolingian rulers and the papacy and this relationship is a hallmark of the period; Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Franks, Caesar Augustus, on Christmas Day in the year 800 by Pope Leo III (750–816) in Old St. Peter’s, Rome. Charlemagne’s emphatic presentation of himself as a Christian emperor, a second Constantine, and of his people as the new Israelites was a fundamental aspect of his reign and those of his successors, and the significance put upon the imperial Christian Roman past is extremely evident in surviving Carolingian art and architecture. Charlemagne saw the Franks as heirs to the Christian Roman Empire. His ceaseless efforts throughout his reign to revive and emulate the knowledge, the art, and the authority of antiquity encouraged and directed what is now known as the Carolingian Renaissance, an immense, earnest, and extremely significant state-sponsored revival of Classical learning (McKitterick 2008; McKitterick, ed., 1994; Contreni 1995). Charlemagne’s military support for the papacy in Italy took him to Rome and to Ravenna, and the Frankish emperor was much affected by these imperial cities. Although essentially a peripatetic ruler on regular military campaigns, Charlemagne established his own imperial capital, the Carolingian Second Rome, at Aachen, the site of natural hot medicinal springs and the old Roman spa town of Aquae granii. Acutely conscious of his position in the west in relation to that of the Byzantine Empress Irene in the east, Charlemagne commissioned stonemason Odo of Metz to build a major imperial palace complex at Aachen, based on imperial Roman and Byzantine models. The palatine chapel, based on the sixth-century San Vitale at Ravenna, still survives, and makes clear the strength and focus of Charlemagne’s imperial aspirations and the significance of Romanitas. Spolia, recycled Roman remains in the form of architectural columns, were brought from Rome and Ravenna to Aachen to be reused in Charlemagne’s new buildings (Nees 2002, 231; Lasko 1994, 9). The emperor, who had seen the gilded bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius outside the Lateran Palace in Rome (now in the Capitoline Museums), which was then thought to be a representation of Constantine, acquired his own equestrian bronze statue from Theoderic’s imperial palace at Ravenna and had it transported to Aachen; large scale public commissions of bronze statuary had strong imperial classical associations. In addition, although the classical technique of large-scale bronze casting had been

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lost, a bronze casting foundry was established at Aachen and Charlemagne commissioned sets of bronze doors for his imperial complex, like those of the Pantheon (Lasko 1994, 10–11). A small Carolingian statuette of a crowned Frankish ruler with orb and scepter (these are now missing), probably made at Aachen or in the Frankish metalworking center of Metz, survives today in the Louvre (Barral i Altet 1997, 222–23). The second significant strand of Charlemagne’s ruling philosophy was his concept of himself as a Christian ruler, whose power and authority came directly from God; as a result, Christianity was a fundamental tenet of the Carolingian Renaissance and the art it produced. Charlemagne’s relationship with the ecclesiastical ruling elite was key to his rule, and to the development and patronage of Carolingian art, which was imperially sponsored but often mediated through the Carolingian bishops and abbots. The Carolingian era was one of great monastic reform, and under Charlemagne and his successors the major Carolingian monasteries of Metz, Tours, Reims, Lorsch, St. Gall, and St. Riquier developed into vital centers of reform, learning, teaching and craftsmanship. It was at the scriptoria of these monastic centers that the writing of Frankish history was undertaken, and that a new and enduring handwriting style, Carolingian minuscule, was developed. It was also from these major monastic production centers that luxury ecclesiastical texts such as Gospel books and books of Psalms were commissioned, some directly by the imperial family, some by the aristocratic ruling class. Surviving deluxe Carolingian volumes such as the Drogo Sacrementary, the Coronation Gospels, the Aachen Gospels, the Codex Aureus of St. Emmeran, the series of Tours Bibles, and perhaps most importantly, the Utrecht Psalter produced in the 820s at Hautvillers, illustrate the significant and extremely influential development of manuscript illumination during the late eighth, ninth and the early tenth centuries within the context of the Carolingian Renaissance before production halted with the Viking incursions. The illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter, characterized by a calligraphic, energetic quality to the figures’ clothing and an expressive quality to their hands, would prove hugely influential to later generations of artists and were copied and admired into at least the twelfth century. Surviving volumes demonstrate the combination of not only a strong classical inheritance but also the clear influence of insular art. They show the originality, ingenuity and individuality of the Carolingian period together with the passion and ability of Carolingian artists for moulding the classical past into a distinctive, relevant and contemporary Carolingian style. It was at Carolingian monasteries that surviving Roman secular texts such as Terence’s plays were sought out, copied and distributed, evidencing the humanistic, antiquarian interests of Carolingian scholars and securing the survival of many Classical works through to the modern period. Alongside manuscripts,

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monastic workshops also produced imperially, royally and aristocratically commissioned high status luxurious artworks of ivory, precious metal, enamel and carved gems such as reliquaries and book covers together with church furnishings such as altar frontals. The magnificent carved ivory book covers of the ninthcentury Lorsch Gospels, probably produced by the Court School at Aachen, still survive today; the front cover in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the back in the Vatican Museums, and illustrate the skill of the Carolingian artists in achieving a sophisticated synthesis of classical and Byzantine styles in ivory. Although the fact that the Franks had stopped being buried with their jewellery by the end of the eighth century has limited survivals, rare existing pieces of high status Frankish jewellery such as the mid ninth-century peacock fibula now in the Altertumsmuseum in Mainz are evidence for a thriving and sophisticated production and trade in high value secular Carolingian metalwork. The Carolingian era was also one of great architectural activity and significance; during the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious around a hundred royal residencies, over four hundred monasteries, and twenty seven cathedrals were constructed; Carolingian architecture, based on late antique models, displayed a unified style and proved a lasting and influential part of the renovatio of Classical Christian learning and culture (Stalley 1999, 37–57).

V Ottonian Art The imperial idea which so infused the political, architectural and artistic styles and aspirations of the Carolingian era endured much longer than the empire itself which, divided amongst Charlemagne’s grandchildren and weakened by violent and persistent Viking, Magyar, and Muslim attacks, gradually broke up during the second half of the ninth century. By the early tenth century a ducal family from Saxony had established itself as the heir to the Carolingian dynasty under Otto I (762–973), ruling modern-day Germany and Switzerland together with parts of northern and central Italy. The imperial ideal remained strong and relevant; Otto was crowned emperor by Pope John XII (955–964) in Rome in 962, and the desire to re-create Charlemagne’s imperial Roman and Christian empire remained the constant political refrain of the Ottonian period under his successors Otto II (967–983), Otto III (996–1002) and Henry II (1002–1025). The intensely Christian, God-given nature of imperial rule was a fundamental tenet of Ottonian political philosophy. Like the Carolingians before them, the Ottonian ruling family established and maintained strong links with the papacy, building and spending much time in an imperial palace on the Aventine Hill in Rome. The Ottonians also cultivated their relationship with the powerful and sophisticated Byzantine court

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and emulated eastern court rituals. Otto II married a Byzantine princess, Theophanu, in 972, which brought Byzantine influence and artistic models directly to the Ottonian court. Like the Carolingian, the Ottonian period was one of major and sophisticated artistic achievement. More the result of a general royal stimulus rather than a single imperial ‘Court School,’ Ottonian art, mediated through monastic channels, combined late antique models, the Carolingian tradition, an insular inheritance and contemporary Byzantine styles to produce a distinctive style with a strong imperial flavour. This is equally evident in surviving Ottonian works of art across a range of media from sculpture, such as the wooden Gero Cross at Cologne cathedral, produced around the 970s, to manuscripts, such as the Gospel Book of Otto III, produced around the year 1000 and now in Munich, and incorporating a Byzantine ivory carving and classical cameos and intaglios in its golden cover. As with the Carolingian era, the Ottonian period was one of great centrally organized ecclesiastical growth and reform, and monasteries were again the artistic centers of the empire producing exquisite illustrated manuscripts and luxury church furnishings in wood, metal and ivory. The most significant monastic scriptoria were at Fulda, Reichenau, Corvey, and Cologne, each of which produced manuscripts with an individual and distinctive approach recognisable within the wider Ottonian style. This was a time of refined and sophisticated political, liturgical, and theoretical thought, and Ottonian artists introduced strong ideas of imperial power and ceremony into their work (Mayr-Harting 1991). Art became an expression of emperorship. A good example of this is the Aachen Gospels, produced around 996 at Reichenau and now in Aachen, the frontispiece of which, rather than the expected traditional image of Christ in Majesty, shows Otto III in a mandorla being crowned by God himself. By depicting imperial rulership within such a strongly religious context, Ottonian art explored the philosophical, Christian moral limitations of that rule; power given directly by God must be exercized in accordance with His rule. Architecture was an equally significant aspect of Ottonian art in terms of the self-representation, ruling philosophy and imperial aspirations of the dynasty (Plant 2003; see also the contribution on “Architecture” in this Handbook by Charlotte A. Stanford). The Ottonians were itinerant, or peripatetic, rulers who employed powerful ritual and ceremony to bolster their authority. The Ottonian period witnessed an imperially-sponsored boom in ecclesiastical building; the creation of a sacred space with great ceremonial potential allowed the emperors to demonstrate their authority in a particular locality. Surviving Carolingian models and traditions were copied and utilized, such as ‘west works’ (prominent western entrances opposite the altar in the eastern end) flanked with towers, and radiating chapels. New features were added and developed, however, such as alternating

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pillar and pier supports and galleries running the length of the nave (Stalley 1999, 53–56; Barral i Altet 1997, 156). Otto I, like Charlemagne, brought architectural pieces such as columns, bases and capitals from Italy for his new complex at Magdeburg. Henry II established another ‘Second Rome’ at Bamberg, where he constructed his imperial capital. Important nunneries were established at Essen, Cologne, Nivelle, Gernrode and Gandersheim and new cathedrals were built at Cologne, Mainz, and Worms which looked as their model to the huge, doubleended Carolingian church of Fulda, itself emulating Roman models such as St. Peter’s (Stalley 1999, 40–41; Barral i Altet 1997, 181). Royal, aristocratic and ecclesiastical patrons were of great significance in the creation of such buildings. Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (992–1022) constructed one of the most important buildings of the period the church of St. Michael’s, Hildesheim (Barral i Altet 1997, 154–59; Toman 2004, 42–43). Bernward was reputedly something of an artist and architect himself, encouraging the training of artists in his service and commissioning paintings, mosaics, and metalwork for the richly decorated churches in his diocese (Stalley 1999, 104; Sekules 2001, 63). In a gesture brimming with Romanitas, Bernward, who was also Otto III’s tutor and advisor, commissioned a set of elaborate bronze doors for St. Michael’s, decorated with biblical scenes (see also the Gniezno Doors, Gniezno, Poland, ca. 1175, and the bronze doors of San Zeno, Verona, Italy, late twelfth century, both of which demonstrate, close stylistic and technical parallels).

VI Anglo-Saxon Art The Anglo-Saxon period in England, stretching from around 600 to the eleventh century, was an era of immense artistic achievement. Following the withdrawal of the Roman legions from the British Isles in 410, over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries Roman power structures, economic systems and the Latin language were widely abandoned. In the western and highland areas power fell to the indigenous Celtic British, who were Christian and spoke regional Celtic dialects. In the south and east new Anglo-Saxon invaders established themselves, bringing paganism and their own Germanic language which developed into Old English. Small groups of aristocratic warriors, tribal war-bands of Jutes, Angles, or Saxons, gradually coalesced (Higham and Ryan 2013, 70–111). Over the course of the seventh and eighth centuries, these tribal groupings underwent major and significant social and cultural changes, and developed into larger Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, gradually Christianized by proselytizing missions from Rome, the Frankish kingdoms, from Scottish Dál Riata and from the strong Irish Celtic Christian community based at Iona. The papal mission to the Anglo-Saxon king-

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dom of Kent, launched by Gregory the Great in 597, established strong links between Anglo-Saxon England and Rome which would endure throughout the period. The conversion was royally-led; Gregory’s first carefully chosen target was Æthelberht, King of Kent (ca. 590–616), whose Frankish wife Bertha was already Christian. The conversion gave a new cohesion to kingdoms, and opportunities for elite patronage (Higham and Ryan 2013, 158). The church was associated with authority, and there was a clear recognition of all that Roman Christianity represented; the old Roman world of emperors, towns, money, markets, law and legions, the physical ruins and remains of which were still very much in evidence. The imperial Roman idea was still strong; several Anglo-Saxon kings claimed descent from Augustus Caesar himself and intact surviving Anglo-Saxon helmets show a clear imperial heritage in terms of style. The consciousness of the potency of this Roman Christian inheritance, a constant refrain in the early medieval period, was as evident in Anglo-Saxon England as Carolingian or Ottonian Europe; a particular and deliberate re-use of the physical and ideological attributes of the Romano-British past was an important part of Anglo-Saxon ethnogenesis in England (Karkov 2011, 19). The Anglo-Saxon church, under strong royal and aristocratic patronage which often entailed significant donations of land, grew wealthy and powerful over the seventh and eighth centuries, becoming a major patron in its own right. New churches were built, which needed new furnishings; the production of ecclesiastical textiles, books, sculpture and metalwork flourished. Aidan’s mission of 635 brought Irish Christianity to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but in 664 the Synod of Whitby firmly established the primacy of Roman Christianity. The church brought literacy, stimulating the production of historical documents and legal records such as genealogies, histories, law-codes and charters. Secular and ecclesiastical manuscripts were imported from the Continent and from Ireland to be copied and disseminated across Anglo-Saxon England. In turn, the newly-Christianized Anglo-Saxons themselves undertook missionary activity on the Continent, mostly in what is modern day Germany, establishing new sees and taking their artistic skills and achievements with them. Trade was revitalized, coinage began to be minted again in Kent and London, and the new ports of Ipswich, London, York, and Southampton established urban communities. Continental influence remained strong; the wealthy Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent was a natural link with the powerful Frankish kingdoms, importing Frankish wine and Byzantine bronzes together with the dress jewellery fashions of Gaul and Byzantium, while exporting slaves and hunting dogs (Higham and Ryan 2013, 163–65). Learning flourished; in the years after the conversion major schools with significant libraries were established at Canterbury, Malmesbury, York, Lindisfarne, and Monkwearmouth-Jarrow where future generations of native Anglo-

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Saxon churchmen were trained, and there were schools for nuns at Barking, Wimbourne, Bath and Thanet. The famous Lindisfarne Gospels, now in the British Library, probably produced by a single artist at Lindisfarne around the beginning of the eighth century, are a prime example of the remarkable standards of artistic achievement possible at these centers where a mix of classical, Mediterranean and Celtic influences resulted in a distinctive insular Anglo-Saxon style, also evident in contemporary metalwork (Karkov 2011, 33–42; Webster and Backhouse, ed., 1991, 110–14). The huge Codex Amiatinus, produced at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow before 716 and now in the Biblioteca Mediccea Laurenziana in Florence, shows this double monastic center in Northumbria to have been equally significant in artistic terms (Higham and Ryan 2013, 160). The earliest surviving complete Bible in Latin and the most accurate surviving record of Jerome’s Vulgate translation, the manuscript is also significant in that its strong Italian flavour demonstrates the clear influence of the manuscripts gathered by Wearmouth’s founding abbot, Benedict Biscop, on his several journeys to Rome which formed the core of the monastery’s library. Alongside deluxe liturgical manuscripts, many other kinds of texts were produced ranging from copies of the works of Pliny and the Church Fathers to new compositions of history, poetry, philosophy, science and biblical exegesis. Anglo-Saxon scholars like Bede and Aldhelm, together with Alcuin, who moved to the Frankish Empire to head Charlemagne’s court school, spearheaded a significant advance in education as well as remarkable and influential individual scholarship. The famous ‘Mound 1’ ship burial at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia, initially excavated in 1939 and found to contain a remarkable selection of objects, demonstrates the degree of artistic skill, the wealth, the kinds of materials and the wide variety of connections, styles and influences current in Anglo-Saxon England around the 620s (Higham and Ryan 2013, 133–35; Carver 2005). The ancient and imported grave goods which surrounded the body ranged from ten large silver bowls produced in the eastern Mediterranean, two late Roman silver spoons, a huge Byzantine silver dish, and many Frankish gold coins to a Celtic-style bronze hanging-bowl. Alongside these were a group of unparalleled metalwork objects, locally produced, demonstrating the sophistication, distinction, and unprecedented technicality of contemporary Anglo-Saxon craftsmanship and metalworking (Coatsworth and Pinder 2002). They include sword-fittings, a large buckle, shoulder-clasps, and a set of purse fittings, worked in gold, cloisonné garnets, millefiori glass and enamel, showing not only great technical accomplishment but also a coherence and uniqueness of style perhaps suggesting a single maker or workshop. The wealth of the materials and craftsmanship inherent in these objects suggests a royal patron, and Redwald of East Anglia (ca. 599–ca. 624) is the figure usually put forward.

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The more recent discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard in 2009, buried in the Mercian kingdom sometime in the seventh or eighth century, eclipsed even the Sutton Hoo finds in terms of the sheer number of high quality pieces of metalwork (Leahy and Bland 2009; Higham and Ryan 2013, 173–78). The vast majority of the several thousand objects which make up the hoard are disparate, separated pieces of exquisitely wrought war-gear, such as pommel caps and hilt plates, worked in gold, silver, and cloisonné garnets, making the hoard quite different in character from the Sutton Hoo grave goods although similar in terms of materials and techniques. High prestige Anglo-Saxon metalwork, like that of the Staffordshire Hoard and Sutton Hoo finds, drawing on Romano-British, Frankish, Celtic, and Scandinavian styles, techniques and materials, represents a distinctive insular style brought about by the combination of wealthy patronage and potent artistic models and influences with individual talent and vision. The variety of burial practices evident across the fifty-six burials at the Sutton Hoo site, ranging from mound burial with or without grave goods to cremation, testifies to a period of political and cultural change in the early part of the seventh century when the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons was still sporadic, and the competing efforts of the ruling elite to assert their authority created a demand for luxury goods (Nees 2002, 109). The arrival of a new group of invaders from Denmark and Norway, the Vikings, changed the political and artistic situation significantly. Viking attacks and demands for tribute first hit Lindisfarne in 793 and became increasingly wide-ranging over the course of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, spreading from the north of England and Ireland to the south coast and the Frankish river valleys of the Seine, Rhine and Loire. Viking culture had a huge impact across Europe, from England in the west to Russia in the east; in Anglo-Saxon England, it had a devastating effect on the established Christian culture. The pagan Vikings were interested in portable wealth, much of which was to be found in churches, and although not the only factor behind the general decline of the church and monasticism during the ninth century, the Viking depredations of monasteries, their schools and libraries (often located on rivers and poorly defended) did have a cataclysmic impact on Anglo-Saxon learning; knowledge of and composition in Latin declined, manuscript production almost disappeared as churches, monastic communities and their lands were sacked and abandoned. The Vikings, initially opportunistic and seasonal raiders, eventually turned into conquerors and settlers who worked hard to integrate themselves into existing Anglo-Saxon and Frankish culture, establishing successful Viking kingdoms in East Anglia and York as well as Normandy. From around 850 the ‘Great Army,’ a large, unified Viking force undertook a sustained military campaign which, together with internal political and economic shifts, destroyed the Anglo-Saxon

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kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia over the course of the second half of the ninth century and established the Viking Danelaw in northern and eastern England in their place (Higham and Ryan 2013, 232–62). King Alfred of Wessex (871–899) and his educated Christian elite considered the Vikings to be the embodiment of God’s wrath on a people which had neglected its Christian duties. In response, he launched a major cultural and military reform programme which transformed his rule over Wessex into the first fully Christian English kingship (Higham and Ryan 2013, 262–70; Backhouse, Turner, and Webster, ed., 1984, 11). Alfred, nicknamed ‘the Great’ by his biographer Asser, presented himself and his authority to contemporaries and to posterity in a very astute manner. Like Charlemagne before him, he took a very particular attitude to the church and to the arts, modelling himself as another Constantine, as a learned imperial Christian ruler (Pratt 2009). In response to the continuing Viking aggression, Alfred launched a successful military reorganisation of Wessex into a system of fortified centers or burghs. In a deliberate move against the pagan, Germanic, Old Norse, mythological culture of the Viking north and east, he looked south to the Continent, to Rome and the classical past, and stressed the significance of Christianity and a vernacular language. Many of his coins show an imperial-style portrait, a cross and Latin script, emphasising his Romanitas, Christianity and literacy (Karkov 2011, 107–08). Alfred founded schools, a monastery at Athelney and a nunnery at Shaftesbury, and made many major gifts to the church in England and on the Continent. His links to the papacy and to the Frankish territories were strong; he travelled to Rome twice, and his father’s second wife was Judith, the daughter of the emperor Charles the Bald. He worked closely with Continental scholars, instigating a remarkable programme of education which included personally translating key texts such as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care from Latin to Old English, which were disseminated across his kingdom. Many of his manuscript gifts to the churchmen of his realm were accompanied by beautiful rock-crystal or glass jewels such as the Alfred Jewel and the Minster Lovell Jewel, both now in the Ashmolean, Oxford. These jewels, of which around six survive, are widely believed to be œstels, or book pointers, and again represent Roman, Carolingian and Christian ideas, materials and designs in a distinct Anglo-Saxon style which shows a much deeper interest in iconography than the earlier period (Hinton 2008; Karkov 2011, 212–18). Alfred’s reign instigated a great flourishing of artistic production which continued under his successors until the eleventh century and the Norman invasion. Royal patronage was a significant part of this period of intense artistic achievement (which may explain why the reform had much less of an impact in the north of England) as was the role played by significant Anglo-Saxon church-

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men such as Saint Dunstan, Saint Oswald and Bishop Aethelwold, the last of whom is said to have been a talented goldsmith himself. The tenth century was characterized by a monastic reform movement based on the model of Benedict of Aniane, which had so influenced a previous generation of Carolingian reformers, as well as the new establishment at Cluny (Higham and Ryan 2013, 311–22). New or existing ecclesiastical buildings were constructed or re-founded, especially small local churches, all of which needed furnishing with books, metalwork and textiles. The reform encouraged a great change in taste and a move away from flat, linear interlace and pattern led design towards a new focus on classical models with a new realism and dynamism, channelled through the great Carolingian monastic centers of the Continent such as Aachen, Reims and Metz. Surviving manuscripts and carving show a clear shift away from an Insular influence towards a more naturalistic, Continental style. The monastic centers of Winchester and Canterbury were especially significant in terms of late Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination and craftsmanship, and it is important to remember that many forms of artistic production such as ivory and stone carving would have taken place here, not just the production of manuscripts in the scriptorium. The ‘Winchester School’ or style of manuscript illumination reached a peak under Bishop Aethelwold (963–984) with the Benedictional of Saint Aethelwold, made for the bishop by the monk Godeman. Dating to around the early 970s and now in the British Library, the Benedictional is full of classically inspired acanthus decoration and allegorical references together with fleshy, rounded figures, swathed in drapery and full of action. Particular Carolingian models proved hugely significant, and it is possible to see the shivery drapery and frenetic activity so characteristic of the Utrecht Psalter (ca. 820–835) and the Gospel book of Ebbo of Reims (816–840) playing a clear part in the great development of line drawing in late Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, the Utrecht Psalter arrived at Christchurch Canterbury just before the year 1000 and was copied in the scriptorium there at least three times over the next two centuries. The influence of Carolingian minuscule and an increase in calligraphic ideas saw words separated from each other and individual letter forms becoming clearer and more regular. Walrus ivory carving, not previously practiced in England, emerged as a significant part of the ‘Winchester’ style in the later tenth and eleventh centuries. Surviving sculpture such as the Reculver cross shows a similar appreciation of classical drapery, and scrolls of acanthus leaves became a popular motif on monumental sculpture. Acanthus decoration and classical-style figures are also apparent on the remarkable surviving tenth-century ecclesiastical textiles found in St Cuthbert’s tomb at Durham Cathedral. The significance of the Roman, Christian inheritance has been a consistent feature of this brief analysis of the development of early medieval art. The early

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medieval mental viewpoint was in many ways teleological and retrospective; rather than an idea of progress and looking forward there was an idea of Christian society going backwards from the Creation and Resurrection, of degeneration, a consciousness of impending apocalypse. In this philosophical climate, the past held a great authority and art held great power. Craftspeople were in a constant artistic and ideological dialogue with the past and with historical pieces of art, not only as models but as images or objects which could represent and transmit anything from political strength and social standing to a religious truth or spiritual experience.

C Medieval Art – the Influence of the Church Romanesque Art – ca. 1050–ca. 1250 The constant and deliberate creation and forging of links with the Roman, Christian, imperial past in terms of politics and the visual arts emphasized in the previous section culminated with the idea of Carolingian and Ottonian artistic production developing as imperially fostered and sponsored ‘court styles.’ The idea of empire and of a classical inheritance was no less important in the postOttonian, post Anglo-Saxon period but the first two centuries of the second millennium saw the development of a more generally wide-spread artistic style, historically labelled ‘Romanesque’, which is perhaps more helpfully explored in terms of ecclesiastical rather than imperial development, patronage and influence. The western Christian church reached the height of its authority over the two centuries that followed the year 1000, during a period of economic prosperity and political stability. The far-reaching eleventh-century reform movement championed by Popes Leo IX (1049–1054) and Gregory VII (1073–1085) built the foundations for the extraordinary papacy of Innocent III (1198–1216). This was a time of enormous growth, of new foundations, of far-reaching papal authority and ambition. The period saw a huge rise in population, and in the number of people taking part in pilgrimages to holy sites across Western Europe and beyond to worship the relics of the saints; it also witnessed the beginning of the crusading movement to reclaim the Holy Lands in the east from Muslim control, with Pope Urban II preaching the First Crusade in 1095. Despite the centralising power of the papacy in Rome, however, the western Christian Church was far from homogenous. Monasteries were governed directly by their abbots, convents by their abbesses, and particular churches or religious foundations could be under more or less practical local control depending on the balance of power in their locality;

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life in a small foundation established by a powerful aristocrat to memorialize his family could be quite different to that in a major Cistercian foundation with strong royal support. Monastic reform was also a significant factor and the emergence and significance first of the Cluniac movement and later of the Carthusian and Cistercian orders is representative of the differences inherent within the Church as a whole. In the previous section on early medieval art, I outlined the degree to which the secular and the ecclesiastical were intertwined and ultimately became indivisible in the late antique and early medieval period. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was the interaction not only between the secular and the ecclesiastical, but also between different ecclesiastical bodies, which played a vital role in encouraging the production of art. Secular patrons wanting ecclesiastical benefit from a particular establishment, together with a growing, wealthy, competitive and ambitious Church administration promoted the establishment of new parish churches and new monastic foundations, and it was this immense ecclesiastical growth which gave the visual arts the opportunity to flourish (Toman 2007, 7–17; Sekules 2001, 61–62). The term Romanesque is most often used in an architectural sense and this is fitting in that the period from 1000 to around 1250 was one of enormous and comprehensive development in church architecture and church decoration, witnessing not only the emergence of figurative statuary, stained glass, historiated capitals, ambulatories, and a great profusion of characteristic curved archways, but also a huge increase in the number of churches, abbeys, monasteries, and nunneries being built. These new religious foundations were supplied with altars, shrines, reliquaries, chalices, manuscripts, hangings, vestments and frescoes so that the term also extends to the huge range of visual arts which flourished alongside the architectural developments of this period and, responding to the same aesthetic, shared many similar characteristics. If the expansion of the Church and monasticism was the major impulse behind the unprecedented artistic development of this period, the primary source of inspiration for the new Romanesque style, as the name suggests, was yet again the art of the Roman Empire and the important Christian centers of Rome, Jerusalem and Byzantium (McNeill and Plant, ed., 2013). A strong Scandinavian and Islamic heritage was also a significant part of Romanesque art, and although the style developed across the whole of Western Europe in a remarkably distinct and cohesive way, international and regional difference together with local variation were also marked and important. The distinctively curved, round-topped Romanesque arch echoed the great stone structures of the Roman past, the remains of many of which were still visible across Western Europe; stone vaulting was reliant on the precedents set by Roman barrel and groin vaults. The shape was not only a structural development

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but also an artistic one, and frequently frames scenes or figures in metalwork, painted frescoes and manuscripts as well as sculptures. The curved semi-circular space created above church doors became filled with narrative scenes and developed into the tympanum, a sculptural frieze which was used to portray a suitably prophetic biblical scene, often the Last Judgment, as a clear visual message which aimed to prepare those entering the church for the spiritual experience waiting within. The external sculpture of the Romanesque church of Santiago de Compostela, one of the most significant and popular pilgrimage destinations of the period, which spreads outwards from the figure of St. James above the main doorway and across the western façade, clearly illustrates the didactic nature of Romanesque art and its ability to portray the fundamental tenets of Christian faith to the faithful through the medium of sculpture (Toman 2007, 146; 299; Barral i Altet 1998, 69). Cast bronze doors, baptismal fonts and candlesticks had clear Classical associations. Other aspects of Romanesque style reveal a more mixed heritage. Classical scrolling plant decoration incorporated a Scandinavian heritage, an insular influence, and contemporary Islamic tradition. An essentially Hellenistic tradition of portraying the human form clearly under drapery and with emotional, expressive hands and gestures, preserved in Byzantine art, was transmitted to Romanesque Europe via Italy.

D Late Medieval Art – the Importance of Secular Patrons Gothic Art – ca. 1140–ca. 1500 Similarly to Romanesque, ecclesiastical patronage is usually seen as the major impetus behind the initial development of Gothic art, the distinctive artistic style of Western Europe during the late medieval period, but secular patronage was equally significant. The Gothic style developed in Paris around the 1130s and again like the Romanesque, is often interpreted as primarily an ecclesiastical architectural development although the aesthetic is evident in secular structures and the wider field of decorative arts and beyond. Kings and nobles acted as significant patrons as well as bishops and abbots, so that the Gothic style is discernable beyond French churches, cathedrals and chapels, in castles and colleges across Europe. This was a period and a style especially marked by the actions, ambitions and patronage of rulers and the aristocracy, by the emergence and growth of urban centers, craft guilds and a merchant class (Marks and Williamson, ed., 2003, 272–74), when the making and buying of art was increas-

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ingly concentrated in towns and cities. The emerging knightly class developed a particular identity and a set of potent and influential ideas based around chivalry and heraldry, much reflected in Gothic art. Tensions between the spiritual and the temporal were high; the period saw the rise of the new mendicant orders the Franciscans and Benedictines, major and influential heresies such as that of the Cathars and the Hussites, the decline of papal authority, the Avignon papacy and eventually papal schism. The famous Gothic cathedrals of Chartres, Notre-Dame, Soissons, Amiens, and Reims were made possible by a series of innovative, related architectural developments. Beginning with the construction of the abbey church of SaintDenis under Abbot Suger in the 1140s a key advance was the pointed arch which not only gave a more vertical visual impression but could also bear greater weight and open at a wider variety of widths than a rounded arch. These were harnessed together with stone rib vaults which distributed the weight of the ceiling to the ground via columns and piers to construct larger, higher spaces with significantly thinner walls than had previously been possible, which could then be pierced with larger windows of colourful stained glass. Both the pointed arch and the rib vault were a direct result of Islamic influence transmitted to Europe via the Crusades. Externally, the slightly later appearance of arched flying buttresses to absorb the outward thrust of the roof made it similarly possible to reduce the thickness of the exterior framework of the building. The result was an initial series of early French Gothic churches where these architectural developments combined to create light-filled, spacious interiors which drew the eyes upward in emulation of the spiritual lift of Christianity. Gothic art was not confined to ecclesiastical structures or to these particular architectural developments however, although these ‘classic’ French Gothic structures have traditionally formed the basis of much historiography on the subject (Coldstream 2002, 23–30). Gothic style is evident across Europe, from timber-framed housing to the shape of pewter vessels, from furniture and inlay work to the decoration on book bindings. Contemporary clothing took on a more perpendicular aesthetic with pointed shoes and high waistlines accentuating long slender legs. As the range of media across which Gothic art was practised widened so did the hallmarks of the style. Painted and sculpted figures and scenes were enclosed within pointed arches, nature was closely observed and minutely and elegantly replicated by artists working in wood, ivory and stone, and carved, drawn or sculpted figures curved into refined ‘S’ shapes full of movement and expressive with human emotion.

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Select Bibliography Coldstream, Nicola, Medieval Architecture (Oxford 2002). Elsner, Jaś, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire (Oxford 1998). Lowden, John, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (London 1997). Nees, Lawrence, Early Medieval Art (Oxford and New York 2002). Sekules, Veronica, Medieval Art (Oxford 2001). Stalley, Roger, Early Medieval Architecture (Oxford 1999).

Thomas Willard

Astrology, Alchemy and other Occult Sciences A Historical and Conceptual Background I. The term “occult sciences” was applied in the late Middle Ages to a group of disciplines dating back to antiquity. Chief among these were alchemy and astrology, which were construed respectively to include all things below the moon in the sublunary or elemental world and all things above the moon in the superlunary or heavenly world. Linking these two worlds were the esoteric mathematics and geometry of Pythagoras and Plato (Friedländer 1969, 246–60), both of which found a popular form in numerology. These practices were sometimes connected with one another as intellectual magic, chiefly divination from the stars (astromancy) and the four elements. Pyromancy, aeromancy, geomancy, and hydromancy sought knowledge of fire, air, earth, and water. Because this kind of “natural magic” could be hard to distinguish from necromancy or the other “black arts” a separate entry is devoted to magic. The term “occult science” was first used in English in the seventeenth century and owed its early popularity to Cornelius Agrippa’s (1486–1535) De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (“Three Books of Occult Philosophy”), first printed in 1531 but written at least a decade earlier. In these books, Agrippa included knowledge of the elemental, heavenly, and angelic worlds, adding Jewish Kabbalah to Christian angelology. A fourth book of demonology was attributed to Agrippa, but almost certainly spurious. Agrippa used the word “occult” as the opposite of “manifest,” that is, representing knowledge that was not readily available to the five senses. Physicians still speak of “occult bleeding” and of “occult diseases” which require special tests. In the late Middle Ages, before such inventions as the microscope and telescope, the number of hidden things was vastly greater. Since antiquity, science was understood to be a part of philosophy, known as natural philosophy, and the scientist to be a philosopher. In Byzantium, through which much of the knowledge of the ancients passed into late medieval Europe, scientists liked to call themselves philosophoi, while avoiding the stigma associated with magoi (Magdalino and Mavroudi 2006, 13). Scholars who study alchemy, astrology, and other forms of natural knowledge in the Byzantine Empire have found it useful to use the term “occult sciences” as an overarching term. The same can be applied to these arts in the Islamic world and in the Middle Ages generally. Like “esotericism,” the term is used now to describe a

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wide range of approaches to the unknown (Alexandrian 1983; Corsetti 1992; Faivre 1992, 33–42). The twentieth century saw considerable scholarly debate about the extent to which science, especially astronomy, underwent a “paradigm shift” during the early modern period and the extent to which developments like those in medicinal chemistry grew directly out of medieval science (Powrie 2010). Although there is much to be said on each side of the argument, it should be noted that astrology and alchemy were not labelled pseudosciences until the nineteenth century, and were not clearly separated from astronomy and chemistry, respectively, until the late seventeenth century. Throughout the late Middle Ages, the terms chemia and alchemia were largely synonymous, along with such variants as alchemystica, which adds the element of mysticism; while almost all serious astronomers also practiced astrology. II. A general account of the occult sciences in the Middle Ages must deal with two “chains”: the chain of being which links God the Creator to the rest of the creation, stretching from the stars and planets to the minerals underground, and the chain of tradition linking writers and thinkers to their sources in antiquity and throughout the ages. The first of these was sometimes identified as the chain of Homer (catena Homeri) on the basis of a passage at the beginning of book 8 in the Iliad: Zeus looks down on the squabbling creation and tells the other gods he can haul them and everything else back into his grasp. The second was sometimes associated with the “rings” of Plato (annuli Platonici), as Socrates described them in the Ion (536a–d). There was a kind of magnetic pull that held the rings together as they reached from the inspired writer back through the poets and muses to the source of inspiration. It was also known as Kabbalah, in the word’s etymological sense of “reception” or as “tradition” in the etymological sense of being “handed down” from one generation to the next. One classic study called it the “secret tradition” on the premise that knowledge was withheld from the masses and communicated orally from adept to initiate (Waite 1926). Such knowledge was “traditional,” although there were different traditions for the different occult sciences and writers could draw on more than one tradition at a time. Behind both of these chains, as they were concatenated in the late medieval mind, was the principle of original revelation. Surely the secret was so great, the science so powerful, that no mere human could have dreamed it up. Surely it must have been revealed by God—no doubt to Adam, to help him survive after the expulsion from Eden, and by Adam to his son Seth, and so on down to Thoth and to Moses, who was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7: 22). Given the medieval respect for auctoritas (“authority”), genealogies of knowledge appeared in many books of alchemy and other occult sciences. They had the effect

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of showing that the science was not demonic and should not be considered illegal. A late example of this thinking is the treatise De Jure Artis Alchemicae (“On the lawfulness of the art of alchemy”), written by the Basel lawyer Johannes Chrysippus Fanianus, a younger contemporary of Agrippa, and included in several early anthologies of alchemy (Fanianus 1576). One consequence of this thinking was that occult texts were often misattributed to writers of known authority. When alchemical texts were known to have been composed by people with the names of Democritus or Miriam, readers leapt to the conclusions that they must be the work of the ancient atomist and the sister of Moses, respectively. Popular medieval texts of alchemy were thus attributed to Plato and Aristotle as well as to later authorities like Albertus Magnus (ca. 1206–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274; Aquinas 1966). Such attributions were not necessarily fraudulent, but often reflected the author’s sense of tradition (Burkhardt 1960). Also behind the chains was the principle of the unity of knowledge. Alchemy did not contradict astrology; rather it was astronomia inferiora (the lower astronomy). Numerology helped to explain the stages of the alchemical procedure, as geometrical arrangements helped to explain conjunctions of the planets. As Michel Foucault suggested, in a close reading of a late medieval text, the world was legendary in the etymological sense of being there “to be read”—full of hidden significations (Foucault 1970, 17–45). The Bible supported this view. After all, “The Heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19: 1); and “As for the earth, out of it cometh bread … and it hath dust of gold” (Job 28: 5–6). The whole Bible was taken to conceal secrets of science (Willard 1982). A final principle, not named until the early modern period but dating back to antiquity, was that of hylozoism: the principle that all matter is alive. Plato maintained that the world was a “living creature” (Plato 1961, Timaeus 30c). Moreover, just as the earth had a soul and intelligence of its own, so did the heavens (Plato 1961, Timaeus 37a). The planets were “living creatures” (Plato 1961, Timaeus 38e). Like earth, the planets were also globes, which Plato considered the perfect form, and thanks to a robust mythology that no doubt predated Plato they had personalities of their own: saturnine, jovial, martial, etc. The planets became way stations on the soul’s journey to God, as taught in various mystery religions (Godwin 1981). The Greek mysteries fed into the Judaeo-Christian tradition through Gnosticism, adding another dimension to thoughts about the heavens. In learning about the movements of the heavenly bodies, and reading what was “written in the stars,” one learned about the divine aspects of a creator who made man in his own image. Some Christian astrologers proposed renaming the zodiac signs after the apostles of Christ, and some Muslim astrologers suggested doing so after the prophets of Allah. Tradition held, however, and the ascent to God became associated with the shedding of qualities more often

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associated with pagan deities than with prophets and apostles. As Dante ascends from the Mount of Purgatory, he passes the heavens of the Mercury, Venus, and so forth, and at each junction meets souls of people who had problems associated the pagan deity, such as mercurial pride and venereal desires (Paradiso, cantos 6, 8). Whether humans first tried to understand fire on earth or stars in the sky is a matter of debate. But because all animals experience the difference between day and night, we shall start with the stars.

B Astrology “Astrology” is the older word, signifying knowledge of the stars. “Astronomy,” literally “star-arranging,” was coined in later antiquity, probably to indicate the mapping of stars as opposed to telling tales about the stars and their influences. The most famous astrologer and astronomer of the ancient world was Claudius Ptolemy, a Roman citizen who lived in Alexandria, and wrote in Greek, during the second century C.E. Ptolemy wrote three treatises, of which the first and most famous was on astronomy. It concerned the structure of the universe—a structure which is still referred to as the Ptolemaic universe, with the earth at the center, the constellations at the circumference, and the sun, moon, and five visible planets in concentric circles around the earth. The second treatise was on the geography of the known world, and the third was on astrology, reconciling the techniques of casting horoscopes with the principles of Aristotelian natural philosophy. The first book, Ho Megala Syntaxis (“The Great Treatise”), was translated into Arabic as the Almagest and under that title became known in a Latin translation from the Arabic. The others followed, though with less influence, and the pattern of transmission from Greek through Arabic to Latin became the norm for transmission of many scientific and technical works written in late antiquity. The Ptolemaic world-picture, with its geocentric perspective, was in many ways better suited to the occult sciences than the Copernican heliocentric model that later won out. It squared with ordinary human experience, in which the sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west while the earth stands still and the heavenly bodies revolve about it. The geocentric model placed the sun at the center of the universe, midway between the three smaller heavenly bodies (the moon, Mercury, and Venus) and the three larger ones (Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). In Classical tradition, it allowed philosophers and poets to describe the earth as a great globe or orb (Plato 1961, Timaeus 33b; Ovid 1977, Metamorphoses, book 1, line 35). Pythagoreans indeed took the view that the earth revolved around a central fire (Aristotle 1984, On the Heavens, 2.13; 293a), while others maintained that there was an infinite number of worlds (Aristotle, Physics, 8.1; 250b). How-

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ever, Aristotle argued that the logical choice was the model that confirmed what we see, and astrologers have clung to his view, with only a few concessions to post-Newtonian cosmology (Grant 2007). Over time observers realized that it was necessary to make certain adjustments, notably in the dates of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, which seemed to appear at an earlier date every few centuries. The so-called precession of the equinox, caused by a gravitational shift of the earth’s axis, has the effect of making the so-called fixed stars appear to rotate about the earth like the planets (a name derived from the Greek word meaning ‘wanderers’). Ancient astronomers calculated that the stars would make a complete rotation once every 36,000 years. The interval was often associated—wrongly, it turned out—with Plato’s “perfect year” (Plato 1961, Timaeus 39d). That period, the time that it took the planets to return to their original alignment, was closer to 26,000 years (Santillana and Dechend 1969). In either event, the movements meant job security for astrologers, who had to calculate the positions of the planets on any given day as well as the slowly changing positions of the constellations. Although Aristotle and other Greek philosophers taught that the universe was eternal (Aristotle 1984, Physics, 8.1; 250a–252b) and the earth as well (Aristotle 1984, Meteorology, 1.14; 353a), there was widespread popular belief that it passed through different ages, and these were easily associated with the twelve signs of the Zodiac. When they came to power, Christians liked to note that the world had entered the age of Pisces (Latin “fishes”) with Jesus symbolized by the sign of the fish. Icthus, the Greek word for “fish,” was taken to be an acronym for Iesus Christos theou uios sotor (Jesus Christ, son of God, savior). The words became a mantra for Christians committed to the practice of constant prayer (1 Thessalonians 5: 17). Although ancient astronomy and astrology reached a kind of culmination in Alexandria, which became the center of learning in the late Classical world, the first systematic observations were probably made farther east, in ancient Babylonia. The first star maps were made there in the first two millennia B.C.E., but historians disagree whether it was there or only in Egypt, and only with the aid of Greek mathematics, that our duodecimal system began, with its basic divisions of the heavens into 360 degrees, the year into approximately 360 days, and the day into twelve 60-minute hours. The first horoscopes were most likely made in Babylon, with surviving examples at least 300 years older than any written in Greek. Even then the first Greek horoscopes show the influence of astrologers who came to the Mediterranean from Babylon and Persia, following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Greek astrology reached Rome in the second century B.C.E. During the political wars in the first century B.C.E., it was used to plan and predict the assassination of Julius Caesar—made memorable for English audiences in the

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words of Shakespeare’s soothsayer: “Beware the ides of March” (Shakespeare 1974, Julius Caesar 1.2.23)—and to support the claims of the emperor Augustus, who used his horoscope to show that he was destined to rule. There was widespread popular belief, but also many skeptics; Cicero, for example, questioned the utility of horoscopes in his treatise De Divinatione (Cicero 1920–23, book 2, section 44). Perceived as a potentially destabilizing force, astrologers were periodically expelled from Rome, and their rights to predict deaths and other major events curtailed (Smoller 2000). There was, then, a deeply divided attitude toward predictive astrology by the time that Christianity became the state religion, under the Edict of Thessalonica (380 C.E.). The Hebrew Scriptures took strong exception to divination in general, and in particular to “the astrologers, the star-gazers, the monthly prognosticators” of Babylon, who “could not deliver themselves from the power of the flame” that God would unleash on them (Isaiah 47: 13–14). The Book of Daniel scorned astrologers in particular, showing through a quasi-historical example that all true foreknowledge is from God. However, the Christian Scriptures shed a positive light on the “wise men [Greek magoi] from the east” who foretold the birth of Jesus, the “King of the Jews” (Matthew 2: 1–2). Because it supported their claims, this story of a star (which may have been Halley’s comet) gave some legitimacy to astrology. However, such predictions were also linked to the mystery religions with which Christianity had some similarities, especially Mithraism. Saint Paul insisted that the Christian’s battle was not really “against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6: 12). These principalities (archas) seemed to be the Archons of Gnosticism, which were identified with the planets and which had some influence on both Judaism and Christianity in New Testament times as well as on the mystery cults that Paul faced in Ephesus. With the condemnation of Gnosticism, notably by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons in Adversus Haereses (“Against Heresies,” ca. 180 C.E.), astrology was officially rejected along with other systems of prediction. It was regarded as both unnecessary, because Christianity provided a unique system of prophecy, and heretical, because it challenged the Christian belief in the free will of the individual believer. It remained for Augustine (354–430) to recall Cicero’s scorn of auguries (Augustine 1972, 4.30) and to go beyond Cicero in asserting man’s free will (5.9). By the middle of the sixth century, Christians in Europe were explicitly forbidden the use of horoscopes (Smoller 2000). There was a steadier interest in astrology among Christians in the Eastern Church, where there was readier access to technical manuals from antiquity and, later, to new manuals produced in the Islamic world. These included texts from pre-Islamic Persia, some of which carried astrological ideas from India.

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Of all the Islamic astrologers, Abu Maʿshar al Balkli (ca. 805–ca. 885) was probably the greatest, and certainly the most influential in the West (Turner 1997). In addition to popularizing the work of Ptolemy, whom he mistook to be a member of Egypt’s ruling family, he composed influential treatises of his own, including an introductory account translated into Latin by Adelard of Bath (ca. 1080–ca. 1151) and a treatise on planetary conjunctions and their affects on the world’s great religions and dynasties (Abu Ma’shar 1994; Albumasar 1489). Albertus Magnus was among the first to make extensive use of Adelard’s translation. For Albertus, as for his student Thomas Aquinas, the question was how to reconcile astral influences with human free will. Aquinas addressed the question in his Summa Theologica (Aquinas 1911, Part 1, Question 95, Article 5) and concluded that divination by the stars cannot be held illicit or inaccurate because humans lack free will when they let themselves be governed by the passions rather than their reason. Abu Ma'shar also wrote a popular history of astrology and its role in predicting the course of history, Kitab al-milal wa-‘l-duwal (“The Book of Religions and Dynasties”), which was read and cited by scholars like Roger Bacon (1214–1294) (Abu Ma’shar 2000). In Persia itself and in countries to its east, Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was arguably more influential than Abu Ma'shar, on whose work he built. Though he is known in the West for his poetic quatrains, or Rubaiyat, notably in the English translation by Edward Fitzgerald, he is also known as the person who reformed the Iranian calendar, as it is still used, and who presented proofs for the heliocentric view of the universe five hundred years before Galileo. Astrologers, like poets, depended on the patronage of noble or royal masters, and they faced the same occupational hazard. If they said what the saw, rather than what their patrons wanted them to see, they risked banishment or worse. Omar Khayyam lost his position as royal astrologer when one ruler died and was succeeded by a man who did not like his forecasts. Similarly kings often collected whole bands of astrologers about them, such as Daniel encountered at the court of Nebuchadnezzar. They were especially taken to the practice of casting nativities, that is, charts based on the hour and place of one’s birth (Abu Ali Al-Khyyat 1988). One notably large and productive group of astrologers was in Toledo, during the reign of Alfonso X (1221–1284), variously known as El Sabio and El Astrológo (“the wise” and “the astrologer”). Alfonso is credited with the so-called Tablas Alfonsíes, credit he of course shared with the Islamic astrologers and Jewish translators working for him. These tables were widely used in calculating the position of the sun and moon relative to the five known planets. Another large group was gathered in the court of Charles V of France (1337–1380), who, like Alfonso, commissioned translations of astrological works and amassed a large library of books on the subject. Astrological calculations even played a role in

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Church polemics during the Reformation, as Catholics and Protestants interpreted the same astronomical events to support their different causes. Although astrology had much of the popular appeal in the Middle Ages that it has for readers of tabloids today, the people who made the calculations and made the predictions were of a more serious bent altogether. Many were faithful observers of the heavens, carefully trained in calculations. Indeed, astrologers were often called mathematicians (mathematici). Even the most scientific of them were expected to prepare horoscopes and determine auspicious times for important events like coronations. Just as their brothers at court, the alchemists, were usually interested in more than trying to make gold from lesser metals, astrologers had reason to think there were greater secrets in the heavens than the outcome of a battle.

C Alchemy In the same way that the word “astrology” became the ill-reputed accomplice of the younger word “astronomy,” “alchemy” has come to be known as the dark past out of which modern chemistry emerged. In fact, the Latin words alchemia and chemia were practically interchangeable in the Middle Ages, much as was true of astrologia and astronomia. The word “alchemy” simply adds the Arabic definite article al to the Greek word khemia. When the distinction began to take hold, in the seventeenth century, chemistry was understood to focus on the chemicals themselves, while alchemy was regarded as a cosmic science, concerned with the relations between chemicals and other orders of being, whether in the sublunary world or the superlunary one. Chemistry sought increasingly scientific language, of elements and formulas, while alchemy was always a matter of enigmas, depending on metaphoric language and archetypal imagery. Like astrology, alchemy has a long history. It was practiced in Babylon (Eliade 1937), and was brought to Egypt, where it too reached its ancient apogee. From there it passed into the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, where it was refined during the first millennium B.C.E. It reached Europe only in the twelfth century, when the first texts were translated from Arabic. There was a great deal of confusion over names, for some Arabic texts like the Turba Philosophorum (Gathering of philosophers) put chemical ideas and teachings in the mouths of people with the names of ancient Greek philosophers like Aristo (i.e., Aristotle) (The Turba Philosophorum 1896; Plessner 1975). Meanwhile, writings published under the name Geber included theories found nowhere in the authentic writings of the alchemist Jābir ibn Hayyān (ca. 731–ca. 815)—statements so hard to decipher that

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the name Geber was said, wrongly though suggestively, to have been the source of the English word “gibberish.” Most students of alchemy in the Middle Ages also studied astrology, convinced that there was a vital correspondence between the planets and metals. They referred to their opus magnum or “great work” as the operatio solis or “operation of the sun.” Many of them began the work when the sun was in Aries, and not a few consulted an ephemerides if not an astrologer to determine the optimal date on which to begin. They believed that the spirit of Mercury or Venus was present in the metal of that name as well as in the planet. Indeed, they seem to have entered into dialogue with the substances they hoped to create—most notably the lapis philosophorum or “philosophers’ stone,” which could transmute metals and produce powerful elixirs. For alchemical texts sometimes used the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, in which the alchemical philosopher spoke for the stone or another substance, as though it was speaking to him and revealing its secrets. Alchemists also appealed to the spirits of the elements or elementals, widely known in medieval folklore: the salamanders who lived in fire, the sylphs who lived in air, the nymphs or undines who lived in water, and the gnomes or pygmies who lived in earth. The names were not standardized until the sixteenth century, with Paracelsus (1493–1542) and Agrippa, but the concepts were present long before. One major difference between astrology and alchemy in the Middle Ages was in the relative ease of measuring change. It was easier to measure distances between heavenly objects, using the naked eye or the astrolabe, first made in Classical Greece but used extensively in the Islamic world and in medieval Europe. It was harder to measure changes in metals and other substances as they were heated and cooled, for one could only observe changes in color or transitions from solid to liquid to gas. The first instrument to measure changes of temperature in any kind of systematic way, the thermoscope, was invented by Galileo in the late sixteenth century, and the modern thermometer was invented by Daniel Fahrenheit in the eighteenth century. Before that, classification barely went past what Aristotle, who described four qualities of things: hot, cold, moist, and dry. From these conditions came four elements: fire, which was hot and dry; air, which was hot and moist; water, which was cold and moist; and earth, which was cold and dry (Meteorology, 1.3; 399a–341a). It followed that one thing could be turned into another by altering the qualities, for Aristotle held that all material things were of a single substance. In the eighth century, Jabir modified Aristotle’s position by positing the principles of sulphur and mercury as the basis of transmutation (Jābir ibn Hayyān 1923; Kraus 1986, 305–16). However, it remained for Robert Boyle to propose a sound theory of “mixed bodies” in the late seventeenth century.

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From the beginnings of their art into the seventeenth century, alchemists took to discussing the realm of metals by analogy to the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Like vegetables, metals were alive, producing seeds that could be cultivated (Eliade 1962, 169–78). Like animals, they could mate and reproduce. From earliest times, some metals were considered male, others female. Babylonian metallurgists based the distinctions on color (Eliade 1937). Their Greek and Egyptian counterparts may have used other criteria. In any event, the classifications brought the metals into a harmonious, homologous world picture, which the Middle Ages inherited as a set of cosmic correspondences between the seven pure metals (gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, iron, tin, and lead) and the seven planets in the Ptolemaic system (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). The associations extended to the deities whose names were attached to the true planets, while Apollo was identified with the Sun and Diana with the Moon. Alchemy was thus a cosmological science from the beginning, associated with astrology and other arts. Because the human being was considered the epitome of creation, the Microcosm that contained the Macrocosm in miniature, there were further correspondences between the heavenly bodies and the human body, which became important to medieval medicine. Moreover, there were correspondences between the planets or metals and the different parts of the human body and the parts of the hand, developed in the popular art of palmistry, also known as cheiromancy. There were even correspondences with the seven notes on the heptatonic scale in music. Once metals were considered to be living substances, they were subject to torture and even sacrifice at the hands of chemists, followed by death and sometimes by rebirth in new bodies (Eliade 2007; Newman 2004). Sometimes they would be reduced to waste substances, known in the Middle Ages as the caput mortuum (“dead head”; Abraham 1998, 31). This anthropomorphic view of metals led to a good deal of mythologizing. Because mercury volatilized when heated, it really was mercuric, as though it had the powers of Mercury, the gods’ messenger. Christian alchemists regarded the ascent to heaven as a sign that mercury or the substance made from it was a sort of chemical Christ (Jung 1968, 345–431). The medieval penchant for allegory—literally “another way of speaking” about something, employed even in Christian Scripture (Galatians 2: 24)—prompted alchemists to seek clues in all they read. There were thus alchemical interpretations of Classical authors like Virgil and Ovid (Willard 2006), and extensive use of myths such as the labors of Hercules and the Argonauts’ quest of the Golden Fleece (Faivre 1990). Inclusion of the Bible alongside the pagan myths led Church officials to denounce alchemy as a heresy. Such charges made the “sages” all the more likely to obfuscate. As a result, alchemy developed an especially elaborate system of symbolic correspondences (Abraham 1998).

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The first important texts of Western alchemy are on papyri discovered in Alexandria in the early nineteenth century and known collectively as the Leiden Papyri (Berthelot 1885; Caley 1926). Written in demotic Greek and compiled in Egypt during the sixth century C.E. and perhaps earlier, the texts cover a wide range of occult practices, including magical rites, but show considerable knowledge of metallurgy and distillation and the equipment involved. A Jewish woman named Miriam and later called Maria Prophetissima may well be the first chemist known by name. She is said to have lived in Alexandria, to have taught younger chemists, and to have invented such apparatus as the still and the water bath (known as the bain-marie from the Latin balneum Mariae; Abraham 1998, 15). She is attributed with a number of cryptic sayings—for example, “Join the male to the female and you will find what is sought.” She is mentioned in the writings of Zosimos of Panopolis (present day Akhmim), the most advanced of the Byzantine alchemists (Patai 1994, 81–91). Zosimos, who probably wrote in the fourth century C.E., described chemical processes in detail, while using analogies from mythology and mystery religions, and achieved a memorable style (Lendle 1992). Arabic alchemy began with the writings of Jābir (Latinized as Geber) in the late eighth century. Many Arabic texts under his name seem to be the work of an Islamic sect known as the Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity), who gathered in Basra in the tenth century (Newman 1991). The Jabirist teachings about the composition of metals from principles known as sulfur and mercury persisted into modern times, with sulfur giving metals their color, smell, and flammability while mercury gave them weight and fusibility. The two-principle theory was based ultimately on the teaching of Aristotle about vapors arising from the earth (Aristotle 1984, Meteorology, 2.4; 360a–b), and was eventually supplemented by Paracelsus with the third principle of salt, representing embodiment itself. It must be understood that these were principles rather than the modern chemicals known by these names and represented by the symbols Hg, S, and NaCl. They were to be found in every substance to one degree or another, and the Arabic alchemists made many advances in the study of metals and liquids. It must also be understood that there was intellectual commerce throughout the Islamic world, and that discoveries from Persia and perhaps points farther east flowed through Arabia and the Maghrib into Spain and Western Europe. Similarly, Jabirist texts were studied in Persia, especially by Sufi scholars interested in the spiritual body and the spiritual world (Corbin 1986). In 1144, an Englishman who had been translating works of Arabic mathematics and astrology into Latin translated two Arabic treatises on alchemy. They contained teachings attributed to a Christian hermit who had studied with Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher in the court of Heraclius (610–641), to whom works of Greek alchemy were attributed (Linden 2003, 54–60). According to one

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text, Morienus came to Damascus at the request of Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Muawiyya (661–704), a prince of the Umayyad Caliphate and the putative founder of Arabic alchemy (Stavenhagen 1974; Linden 2003, 71–80). Jabir was said to have consulted translations that Khalid made or commissioned. In turn, the translations that brought the ideas of Morienus to a European audience created a demand for further texts of what became known as alchemy (literally, the chemistry). These included treatises by the Arabic alchemist Zadith Senior (Muhammed ibn Umail al-Tamimi, ca. 900–ca. 960) and the Persian physicians and alchemists known as Rhazes (Abu-Bakr Muhammed ibn Zakariya Al-Razi, ca. 845–ca. 930) and Avicenna (Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina, ca. 980–ca. 1037; Linden 2003, 95– 98). A collection of sayings attributed to ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Demoncritus was translated as Turba Philosophorum (“The Crowd of Philosophers”) and became one of the most influential books of alchemy (Ruska 1924; Plessner 1975). However, it was Jābir, under the Latin name Geber, who became the most representative of Arabic alchemists for readers in the West. Many empirical texts were written attributed to him, either by translators or by writers of new works he inspired. The followers became known as “Geber’s cooks.” Paul of Taranto, a Franciscan friar, compiled a group of Jabirist texts under the title Theoria et Practica (“Theory and practice”), several of which he may have composed himself. Attributions to Geber by Western alchemists, like those to Jabir by Brethren of Purity and others in the East, were not made to conceal the authors’ identity as to reveal their affiliations and express indebtedness (Burkhardt 1960). Texts of Latin alchemy tended to include the balance of theory and practice found in the Theoria et Practica (Ganzenmüller 1938). The theory was usually much the same, grounded on the principles of Arabic alchemy and, behind those, the sources in Greek alchemy and philosophy (Principe 2000). The practice, however, took two different directions. Some writers focused on small discoveries: on the apparatus or the process or an alloy or a tincture or, increasingly, a medicament. Others focused on what they saw as the goal of the art: on metamorphosis and the transmutation of metals, including but not limited to the making of gold and the production of the essential agent of change, variously called their stone or powder or elixir (the last word from the Arabic al-iksir). Still others focused on the religious aspect of alchemy as the donum dei (“gift of God”): a secret revealed only to the most pious. Many of the most celebrated treatises touched on all of these. Alchemical texts began to circulate in the names of Great European writers— Albertus Magnus and Ramon Llull (ca. 1235–ca. 1315) were among the more prominent. Some texts took on explicitly Christian themes, such as the Margarita Pretiosa Novella (“New pearl of great price”) of Petrus Bonnus (14th century), which drew

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from a parable of Jesus (Matthew 13: 45–46). They sometimes told personal stories of long quests for the secret of alchemy, such as that of Nicolas Flamel (1330–1418), a Paris scrivener who took years to discover the secrets in a manuscript he found at a flea market (Linden 2003, 123–35); or Bernardus Trevisanus (1406–1490), who spent his whole inheritance and most of his life in search of the philosophers’ stone (Linden 2003, 136–40). The hard truth was that no alchemist provided simple stepby-step directions. Working on the premise that God would enlighten the deserving person, they wrote riddles and gave misdirections that only the most persistent student, guided by the most learned elder, could possibly decipher (Coudert 1980). As a consequence, their prose was ridiculously obscure, but their poetry purported to contain truths hidden by the veils of allegory. Notable among such poets were Jean de Meun (ca. 1240–ca. 1305), who continued the dream-vision Roman de la rose (“Romance of the rose”) originally composed by Guillaume de Lorris in ca. 1230/1240, and the English cleric George Ripley (1415–1490), who wrote a long poem on the twelve stages or “gates” of alchemy (Ripley 1591). Ripley’s name became attached to a famous scroll combining verses and illustrations and reproduced in several countries during the sixteenth century. Alchemical illustration had begun to flourish during the fourteenth century (Obrist 1982; Roberts 1994; Roob 2000; Battistini 2004), providing clues about colors of metals and shapes of equipment in the alchemical laboratory while developing mythic motifs (Evola 1948; Klossowski de Rola 1973).

D Other Occult Sciences I. Hermeticism. When the Islamic texts of astrology and alchemy passed into Europe, during the high Middle Ages, they brought with them the ancient myth of the Egyptian Hermes, a teacher of great antiquity whose basic message was summed up in the words of an emerald tablet found atop his miraculously preserved corpse. The first line of the inscription is commonly summarized in the words “As above so below” (Ruska 1926; Plessner 1954; Linden 2003, 27–28). The message was applied to a large body of writing known as the Corpus Hermeticum (“Hermetic corpus”), recorded only in the early Christian centuries but claiming great antiquity (Fowden 1986). Indeed, because Hermetic thought was largely a revelation, passed on from initiatic father to initiated son son, a traditio mystica soon developed in which every father was Hermes (Egyptian Thoth) addressing his son That (Sint 1960, 60–61). Before long, Hermes was putative founder of Egyptian astrology, alchemy, and magic (Festugière 1967; Luck, 1985, 36–37; 61–64; Faivre 1985–1988). The major Hermetic writings reached Europe in 1484 in the Latin translation by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), providing fuel for the Hu-

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manism of the Italian Renaissance; however, the name of Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great teacher also known as Thoth the ibis-headed scribe of the Egyptian gods, appeared frequently in both Arabic and Latin texts of alchemy. He was sometimes called Idris in the Arabic texts—i.e., the Islamic counterpart of Enoch in Genesis 5: 24—and thus identified with a prophet in the Quran (19.57, 21.85). Arab writers on alchemy gave special veneration to him (Plessner 1954). The major texts in the Corpus Hermeticum did not reach Western Europe until the late fifteenth century. However, the Latin Aesclepius was available throughout the Middle Ages (Hermetica 1992). St. Augustine in his City of God discussed it at length, claiming that it revealed the truth of divine revelation while exposing the falseness of the Egyptian religion and of pagan idols generally (Augustine 1972, 8.22–23). The text is cast as a dialogue in which the semi-divine Hermes enlightens Aesclepius and three other students about the nature of the universe and the place of man within it. The overall message is positive and remarkably close to what is found in the Bible, including the New Testament. As in the Psalms, God has made man a little lower than the angels (8: 5) and has made the heavens to declare His glory (19: 1); as in the Epistles, He has made it possible for man to know the invisible truths of creation through the things that are made (Romans 1: 20). All this seemed quite remarkable to medieval readers, who thought that Hermes was almost as old as Moses if not older. It was not until the seventeenth century that the Hermetic writings were dated to the fourth or fifth centuries (Yates 1964). Details known only in Byzantium during the Middle Ages were collected by Macedonian scholar Joannes Stobaeus in the fifth century. The truth of the matter probably lies somewhere in between, as the writings may well contain knowledge that was once passed down through oral tradition, from the adept to the initiate. II. Kabbalah. The word “Kabbalah,” variously spelt, has the basic meaning of “reception” or “tradition.” It refers to an oral tradition in Judaism—a tradition dating back to the Old Testament Apocrypha and the tradition that Ezra hid seventy books of divinely inspired wisdom for which humans were not ready (2 Esdras 14: 36–48). Such wisdom was said to form an oral Torah (“instruction”) that was passed down by enlightened rabbis and that formed a mystical counterpart to the scriptural commentary in Talmud. The major texts of Kabbalah were written in Spain during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries—the very time at which the major texts of Arabic astrology and alchemy were being translated into Latin, often with the assistance of Jewish scholars whose knowledge of Aramaic gave them a distinct advantage. However, some of the concepts found in the earliest of these texts also appear in documents dating back to the sixth century.

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Perhaps the most basic concept is that of emanation. The early Sefer Yetzirah (“Book of Formation”) describes the whole creation as having emanated from a single point in the mind of God (Matt 1994), through a process which modern rabbis have likened to the Big Bang theory in cosmology. The ten emanations (sephira) represent the major qualities of God; however, they are also the qualities of humanity, for they are arranged to form the body of the primordial man, Adam Kadmon. They also form the tree of life, and the lines between one emanation (sephiroth) represent the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in which the Torah is written. The world is thus a physical expression of God’s Word (dabar) as it was conceived before He said, “Let there be light.” Much of the work in later books of Kabbalah, such as the Zohar (“Splendor”) attributed to Moses of Leon (ca. 1250–1305), attempted to work out the connections between the written Torah and the mystical teachings of God through his emanations (Zohar 1949). The possibility of a connection between Scripture and nature had a strong appeal to Christians, who had long celebrated the parallels between the books of God and nature (Curtius 1948, 311–326). Christians developed their own Kabbalah in the later Middle Ages and began studying Hebrew, convinced that they would then be able to convert the Jews or at least better understand the Hebrew Scriptures (McGinn 1995). Kabbalistic ideas also appealed to Muslims. In Cordoba, the Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) envisioned three concentric spheres beyond the fixed stars. He identified the first as starless sky and the others as the pedestal and throne of God. From these higher spheres, qualities like the Kabbalistic sephira flowed through the visible heavens, conveying a different divine name and quality to each of the seven planetary bodies; and from there they flowed to the earth below. The totality of qualities, as shaped by the planets and changing through the phases of the moon, made up the complete or cosmic man (Burkhardt 1950). Meanwhile, realizing that the constellations were moving through the zodiac signs, as a result of the precession of the equinox, he estimated the length of each zodiacal age, ranging from 1000 years for Pisces to 12,000 for Aries, or a total of 78,000. More practically, he calculated the length of the reciprocal positions of the sun and moon, which, he said, repeated themselves every eighteen years. Meanwhile, Kabbalism promoted new interest in astrology and especially alchemy among Jewish scholars (Patai 1994; Scholem 1974 and 2006). For alchemists, the ten sephira contained the elements of fire, air, and water; for astrologers, they contained the four cardinal directions as well as what was above and below; and for both they contained the concept of the cosmic center. Kabbalism also sparked new interest in numbers.

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III. Numerology. In their scriptural exegesis, Kabbalists often relied on gematria, a term that may have derived from Greek geometria. Gematria assigned numerical values to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and Kabbalists used these numbers to calculate the meanings of words. If two words with distinct denotations had the same numerical value, then there was a kind of equivalence between them. Through Kabbalah, rabbis determined that the “three men” who visited Abraham in Genesis 18: 2 were in fact the angels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. There was a similar system in ancient Greek, which, for example, used the first ten letters of the alphabet to represent the numbers 1–10 and the next nine letters to represent the numbers 20–100. Christian theologians knew about gematria from the “number of the beast” (Revelation 13: 18); they calculated the number 666 to represent KAISER NERON (Emperor Nero), using the values of the letters when they were transposed into Hebrew. Most numerology was far simpler. The number 1 represented unity; 2, duality; 3, the Trinity or spiritual order; 4, the cardinal directions or physical order; and so forth. There were six days of creation and seven days of the week, including the Sabbath. There were ten commandments and twelve tribes of Israel or disciples of Jesus, the number 12 being the product of 3x4. Medieval numerology was largely the legacy of Pythagoras and Plato (Hopper 1938), though it had been popularized in writings by the Church Fathers. Augustine, for example, wrote that the creation occurred in six days because 6 is the first perfect number (1+2+3). The study of number dominated the medieval education in the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), the counterpart of the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), and even in the verbal arts numbers figured in such areas as prosody or versification, which constituted the fourth part of grammar. Astrologers learned numerology from late Classical works like the commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (“Dream of Scipio”), written by Macrobius in the fourth century C.E. Their prognostications often relied on numerological associations (Lucas 2003). Alchemists, meanwhile, took clues from the magic square of Jabir al Hayyam (Laszlo 1996, 30–32). They also drew upon geomancy (Skinner 1980), a form of divination based on random arrangements on the ground, and not unlike Chinese feng shui. Here too number was important, as in the weights and quantities of substances they used in their laboratories.

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E Conclusion With the advent of printing in the 1450s, texts became more available than ever before. Within a century, classic texts of astrology were available as well as new almanacs and ephemerides to assist the makers of horoscopes. Similarly, classic works of alchemy were issued in Latin followed by texts in the vernacular languages. Perhaps the first vernacular text of alchemy, the Rosarium Philosophorum (“Philosophers’ Rose Garden”), written in German with Latin sayings after the model of the Turba Philosophorum, was published in 1550 (Rosarium Philosophorum 1992). Soon afterwards, anthologies of alchemical texts began to appear, first in Latin during the sixteenth century, and then in English, French, and German in the centuries following. Meanwhile, large general studies of “natural magic,” such as Cornelius Agrippa’s, drew together information from a wide range of occult sciences, including numerology and divination. The term “occult sciences” is useful as a reminder that practices as distinct as alchemy and astrology were ultimately parts of a larger cosmological science or outlook. This sort of science is often termed pseudoscience today because it does not display—indeed often flaunts—the criteria of the scientific method, such as communicable procedures and reproducible results. Alternately, it is called pre-science because it led the way toward modern scientific methodology and knowledge. Historians of science have long approached medieval alchemy and astrology, along with related studies, from the outside, emphasizing what made them different from the modern counterparts in chemistry, astronomy, etc. However, the last century has seen increasing efforts to understand them from inside and thus to recognize how they were explained and taught in times past and what they did aim to achieve, as well as what they happened to discover (Powrie 2010). Meanwhile, some historians of science and technology have challenged the conventional dating of the Middle Ages. One leading authority has argued that medieval ideas about magic and experimental science did not die out in the fourteenth or fifteenth century but persisted up to the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century and the industrial revolution in the eighteenth (Thorndike 1958). The concept of occult or hidden sciences is not unique to the Middle Ages; it would persist through later centuries up to the present, just as as it has been traced back to the beginnings of recorded history. Nevertheless, the sciences of alchemy especially and astrology to a lesser extent became defined during the late Middle Ages in ways that have remained fundamentally unchanged in subsequent centuries. In the language of alchemy, the ideas and observations of the ancient world and the Islamic world may be said to have been tried in the fire of European experimenters, and to have been transmuted in the alembic of their writing.

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Select Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas, Aurora Consurgens, ed. Mariel-Louise von Franz, trans. R. F. C. Hull and A. S. B. Gliover (New York 1966). Corsetti, Jean-Paul, L’histoire de ésotérisme et des sciences occultes (Paris 1992). Coudert, Allison P., Alchemy: The Philosopher’s Stone (Boulder, CO, 1980). Ferngren, Gary, ed., The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York and London 2000). Klossowski de Rola, Stanislaus, Alchemy (London 1973). Turner, Howard R., Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction (Austin, TX, 1997).  

 

 

 

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Astronomy A Astronomy, Astrology and the Spread of Astronomical Knowledge The clear distinction between astronomy and astrology is a modern one, and therefore it is impossible to separate them when describing medieval concepts of the stars and the universe. However, it is possible to distinguish medieval physical concepts of the cosmos from ideas about divination, which is the main purpose of astrology. This article only refers to the scientific discourses and their cultural implications for medieval society (for astrology, i.e., the occult sciences, see the contribution to this Handbook by Thomas Willard). In the medieval world view, the universe was an intrinsic part of God’s creation, and the forces that moved the stars also influenced human existence. This was particularly true in the Neo-Platonic concept of the world, which was most influential in high- and late-medieval thought. In contrast, in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Christian thinkers and especially the Church Fathers criticized the idea that a connection between human life and the stars existed. In their perspective, such a proposition contradicted the concept of individual free will, and therefore orthodox Christians rejected any study of the stars that interpreted them as having meaning for a person’s life course. St. Augustine (354– 430) reflected on his own experiences with astrology in his Confessions: “By now I had also rejected the lying divinations and impious absurdities of the mathematicians”; here, the word “mathematicians” refers to astrologers (Augustine 1992, 60 [7, 6]). Looking at the Church Fathers’ position, one could argue that astronomy and astrology were first distinguished from each other because the early Christians criticized divination; however, the medieval approach to the stars did not strictly distinguish astronomy from astrology. Most influential religious authorities in both the Christian Latin West and the Muslim-Arab East condemned astrology because foretelling the future contradicted not only the concept of free will, but doubted God’s own ability to intervene in the course of his creation. On both sides of the Mediterranean, though, religious reservations did not ultimately have much effect, and during the entire Middle Ages, astronomical knowledge remained of interest because the stars provided life guidance and foretold the future. However, the theological problem was of increasing interest in medieval society, and beginning in the high Middle Ages, Western theologians reconciled both ways of thinking about the heavens by

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conceiving of a two-layered creation inspired by Platonic ideas (for this, see D below). There was also a more practical use of astronomical knowledge. A study of the stars enabled people to determine time and the change of the seasons, which meant it was highly useful for pre-modern agricultural production. It is difficult to grasp the extent of such astronomical knowledge in daily life as it was not related to written intellectual culture, but to an oral tradition of farmers and rural people. But there is little doubt that pagan societies in Europe shared an interest in the stars and especially examined the movement of the sun. The origins of many later Christian festivities and saints’ days can be traced back to special days in the solar calendar (McCluskey 1997, 320; McCluskey 1998). It is much easier to evaluate the intellectual and written discourse on the stars during the Middle Ages. Astronomy was an integral part of medieval education. Since antiquity, it was regarded as part of the seven liberal arts. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) identified it as one of the seven liberal arts, as “the seventh, Astronomy, that includes the laws of the stars.” Together with Arithmetic, Music, and Geometry it formed the “quadrivium” (Isidore of Seville 1850, 74 [1,2]). These four arts were based in mathematics, in contrast to the “trivium” (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic), which were based in speech, and therefore they were the foundations of “science,” in the modern sense of the word. However, in Boethius’s (ca. 475/480–524) codification of the “quadrivium” in the early sixth century, astronomy did not play a major role, and thus much of the antique knowledge was lost. This holds especially true for Greek writings, since the knowledge of Greek was neither central to the Occidental church nor to learning in the West in general (Grant 1977, 11–12; Masi, ed., 1981; Hoskin 1997b, 68; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 68–69). However, the Latin commentary on Ambrosius by Theodosius Macrobius (early fifth century), a popular handbook on astronomy, was available to the medieval Occident (Hüttig 1990). Therein, Platonic and Pythagorean ideas were explained and became part of the basic astronomical knowledge of the Middle Ages (as to this cosmological model, see C below). Older scholarly research tends to stress the scarcity of early medieval astronomical knowledge. In this view, Christians in the West only needed enough knowledge of astronomy to determine the date of Easter in any given year, so “some ecclesiastics were therefore needed who could understand something of the course of the stars” (Pannekoek 1961, 173). This somewhat negative stance toward early medieval astronomy has been corrected in recent decades by scholars who have focused on this topic in general and on the Carolingian “Renaissance” in particular. Recent research has shown that there were two main reasons for the interest in astronomy. The first one was the wish to master the “computus”

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and that meant getting the calendar right. This was indeed especially important for determining the date of Easter, since Easter and the whole complex of important dates surrounding Easter in the religious calendar such as Good Friday, Palm Sunday, Pentecost, and the Lent period before Easter, were dependent on the cycle of the moon. Thus, the determination of the date of Easter became a complex astronomical problem (Warntjes and Ó Cróinín, ed., 2011; as to its calculation, cf. Grotefend 1991, 4–8). The second reason for an interest in astronomical knowledge was the worry about the correct times for prayer. In monasteries, the correct time for prayer was crucial, since monastic rules like those attributed to St. Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480–ca. 560) dictated regular and punctual services in the community’s church. Chapter 43 of the rules states that “as soon as the sign for the hour of service is heard, you should leave everything that is in your hands and haste to come together,” since “nothing shall be more important than the service to God.” In chapter 47, the abbot is ordered to oversee that the sign for prayer is punctual “so that all can be done at the fixed time” (Die Regel des heiligen Benedictus 1984, 207–16; 231–32; 234 [chpt. 8–20, 43, 47]). In daily life, this not only resulted in the search for ways to measure time during the day by observing the sun, but since some of the prayer times were at night, the stars and the night sky were important as well (Hoskin 1997b, 71; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 71–72). Since the correct liturgy (and, as part of this, the correct time for liturgical ceremony) was a major concern of the Carolingian reforms, the interest in astronomy was especially great in the monasteries. Manuscripts that provided astronomical knowledge were not only copied, but systematically circulated, in the Frankish Empire and beyond. They not only provided knowledge to serve communities’ liturgical needs, but also sparked widespread discussions about the movements of the stars in general (see section C below). Scholars like the Venerable Bede (673/4–735), Alcuin (ca. 730–804), and Notker of St. Gall (ca. 840–912) engaged in astronomical research. Bede wrote the definitive treatise on the Easter calculation in 725, thus providing a solution to the problem of this moveable feast’s date for centuries to come (Borst 1990; Warntjes 2010). However, the medieval knowledge of astronomy was not nearly as good as it was in antiquity, since the Greek treatises were not yet translated into Latin. The situation south and east of the Mediterranean was very different. Since its conquest of huge parts of the Byzantine Empire, the Arabic and Islamic world had shown great interest in Greek astronomy and developed the science still further. Caliph Harun ar-Rashid (766–809) and his successors sent agents to the Byzantine Empire to buy Greek manuscripts. In Baghdad, a school cared for the translation of learned texts. Moreover, the spread of Islam to the borders of India introduced the Islamic world to Indian approaches to astrology, although the Indian tradition never became as influential as the Greek tradition. Liturgical

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calendar problems made astronomy a useful tool in the Muslim world: astronomical knowledge enabled the calculation of the Islamic lunar calendar, helped to establish daily prayer times, and indicated the direction of Mecca for the daily exercises of the faithful. Although the Islamic world’s reasons for pursuing astronomical knowledge were similar to those of the medieval West, the scale and sophistication of this science achieved a completely different level in the East. In big cities like Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, and Toledo, astronomers used tools that were developed from, and improvements upon, Greek models. Ptolemy’s Almagest (second century B.C.E.), which was translated into Arabic several times beginning in the eighth century, was discussed and reevaluated on the basis of own experiences by astronomers such as Muhammad al-Battani (858–929) in the early tenth century (Berry 1899, 76–81; Hartner 1977; Gingerich 1992a, 45–47; 52; Hoskin and Gingerich 1997, 52–63; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999a, 51–55). One astronomer from Baghdad was Ahmad al-Fargani (ninth century); his work Elements (Jawami) was translated by John of Seville (twelfth century) and again, two decades later, by Gerard of Cremona (ca. 1114–1187). Gerard helped spread Ptolemy’s ideas of an Earth-centered cosmos, and al-Fargani’s work influenced Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) cosmography in the Divina Commedia (Gingerich 1992a, 45; Dante Alighieri 1999). When these sophisticated Arabic studies finally made their way into the Christian West, they had a major impact on Western astronomy. Spain (and, to a lesser degree, Sicily) were centers for the translation and spread of astronomical knowledge. One scholar whose work demonstrates this Arabic influence is Gerbert of Aurillac (ca. 950–1003), the later Pope Sylvester II, who was very interested in this science and went to Spain in order to study it. When he returned to France, he became the head of the cathedral school of Reims (Lindgren 1976; Borrelli 2008, 68; Montecchio 2011, 23–34). In the first half of the twelfth century, the influence of Arabic astronomy grew. For example, Adelard of Bath (ca. 1070– after 1146) went to Spain and translated the astronomical tables of Musa alKhwarizmi (flourished 800–47) and the work of Abu Masar (Albumazar; 787–886) (Suter, ed., 1914; Bliemetzrieder 1935; Neugebauer, trans., 1962; Burnett 1987; Yamamoto 2007). In the second half of the century, Gerhard of Cremona translated into Latin works like Ptolemy’s Almagest and the Toledan Tables of Ibn al-Zarqiyal (d. 1100). First Latin translations of authors like Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), Archimedes (ca. 287–212 B.C.E.), and Euclid (flourished ca. 300 B.C.E.) subsequently spread throughout the West. The Toledan Tables stimulated an interest in astronomy among scholars, since they predicted the planetary positions for any given moment in time, predictions that could be verified by direct visual experience (Mercier 1987). The Alfonsine Tables, compiled in Toledo in 1252 by Jewish and Christian astronomers appointed by Alfonso X (1221–1284),

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which predicted the planetary motions with even greater precision, replaced the Toledan Tables (Poulle 1984; Gingerich 1992b; some scholars do not believe that the Alfonsine Tables originated in Spain and believe them to be of French origin; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 78). These works were much discussed in the emerging European universities, especially in Paris. In the universities, there was an effort to improve the status of the liberal arts in relation to that of theology. The works of Aristotle received special attention, since they were independent of, but not necessarily opposed to, the canonical Christian scriptures and therefore opened up fresh perspectives on science (Hoskin 1997b, 75; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 74–75). Many outstanding authorities on astronomy were members of the new mendicant orders and at the same time erudite, renowned scholars of theology. Two famous Dominican friars became especially important for the course of astronomy during the thirteenth century: Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–80) and Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225– 1274) referred to Aristotle and Ptolemy in their writings, and Thomas Aquinas proposed a cosmology that reconciled Aristotelian ideas with Christian theology. On the British Isles, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (ca. 1219–ca. 1292) and John of Holywood (Sacrobosco; thirteenth century) became important scholars with major interests in astronomy. John, who taught in Paris and died there in 1256, wrote several short works on astronomy, compiling the astronomical knowledge of the time into texts for students; his works became most influential in the later Middle Ages (Pannekoek 1961, 175; Pedersen 1985; Hoskin 1997b, 75–77; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 75–78). The next stage of development in the science of astronomy was triggered in the fifteenth century by the Renaissance interest in learned texts from antiquity. Greek and Byzantine knowledge about astronomy came to the West. In particular, the expansion of the Ottoman Turks forced the learned Byzantine elite to flee to Italy, often with their libraries. The visit of the Greek scholar Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472) to Vienna, for example, aroused the interest of Georg Peurbach (1421/ 1423–1461) and his assistant Johann Müller of Königsberg (1436–1476) from Franconia in such texts, and they tried to get a more accurate manuscript of Ptolemy’s writings by comparing and studying Greek manuscripts. Later, Johann Müller, better known by his humanistic pseudonym Regiomontanus, established a learned circle in Nuremberg and became one of the most influential German astronomers of the time (Zinner 1938). Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) took one of Regiomontanus’s books with him on his fourth voyage. He used the book to predict a lunar eclipse on 29 February 1504, a prediction that helped him to impress the hostile natives of Jamaica. He told them that the eclipse was a sign that his God would punish them if they did not provide him and his men with food. The account, attributed to Columbus’s son Fernando (1488–1539), recounts

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the story and concludes that after Columbus prayed to God and the eclipse had reached its climax, he told the Indians that his God was willing to pardon them: “From that time forward they were always careful to provide us with what we needed, continually praising the Christians’ God, because they believed that the eclipses they had seen in the past were to harm them, and not knowing what caused them or that they occurred at certain intervals, and believing too that noone on earth could know what would happen in the heavens, they were certain that the Christians’ God must have revealed it to the admiral” (Colón 2004, 223 [chpt. 103]). Astronomy was a handy tool for European expansion, as the knowledge provided by handbooks like those of Regiomontanus could impress at least some native tribesmen of the Caribbean. At the end of the century, Copernicus—that is, Niklas Koppernigk (1473– 1543), born at Torun (Poland)—paved the way for radical new approaches to astronomy. He did not believe that the earth was the center of the universe, but instead favored a heliocentric model. In his opinion, the universe had multiple centers of rotation: the moon revolved around the earth and the planets revolved around the sun (Blumenberg 1965; Schmeidler 1970; Zinner 1988). There is a scholarly debate regarding whether or not Copernicus was influenced by the critics of Ptolemaic cosmology by Islamic scholars, namely Ibn al-Shatir (1304– 1375). However, in the light of the immense importance of Arab astronomy on the medieval West, this may not be the important point here. As Owen Gingerich has remarked, “the whole idea of criticizing Ptolemy and eliminating the equant is part of the climate of opinion inherited by the Latin West from the Islam” (Gingerich 1992a, 55). Thanks to developments in knowledge and technology in the late Middle Ages, astronomy increasingly became part of the medieval travel experience (Schechner 2008). In the nautical sciences, astronomy helped in cartography and the navigation of ships. Stars had always been important for navigation at sea, but they became even more important by the late medieval and early modern epoch. Although instruments like the astrolabe were well known, it was not until the late medieval period that astrolabes were used on ships (Paselk 2008). In this sense, the mainly theoretical disputes on astronomy in the high and late Middle Ages set the foundations for the European expansion of the early modern period. Astronomical knowledge and instruments were increasingly put to practical use in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The discoveries that resulted from this practical knowledge of astronomy in turn increased the knowledge about astronomy to an extent that would have been unthinkable within the mainly theoretical discourse of the Middle Ages.

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B Astronomical Instruments The major contribution of medieval astronomers to modern astronomy was the invention of astronomical instruments (for a bibliographically rich research overview on astronomical instruments, cf. King 2010). These instruments could be as simple as the viewing pipe (or viewing staff), an instrument that helped the observer to concentrate on one celestial object at a time. On p. 43, the Carolingian cod. 18 from the Stiftsbibliothek at St. Gall depicts a monk using such an instrument in his observation of the stars (Zinner 1979, 214–15; Euw 1989, 22–23). The most important medieval astronomical instrument was the astrolabe. This instrument is comprised of a disk with a ring on top (so that the instrument can be suspended), and an observing bar that rotates about a pin in the disk’s center, used for measuring (Hoskin 1997a; Hoskin 1999). It was widely used by Islamic astronomers, and many Arabic star names became part of the learned language of this science in the West. These names were not only transmitted through written texts, but through the epigraphic writing on the astrolabes themselves. For example, two astrolabes from the fourteenth century, today at the Merton and Oriel Colleges of the University of Oxford, carry Latinized Arabic star names (Gingerich 1992a, 49–51; Gingerich 1993, 81–114). Gerbert of Aurillac, already mentioned above (see A), certainly encountered the astrolabe in Islamic Spain and may have introduced it to Christian Europe. In the early eleventh century, the instrument was known in the West, and Latin scholars like the monk Hermannus Contractus, that is Hermann of Reichenau (1013–1054) and Ascelin of Augsburg (early eleventh century) wrote treatises on its use. It enabled astronomers in the West to measure the angle between the horizon and the position of a heavenly body (Zinner 1979, 135–45; Pannekoek 1961, 174; Hoskin 1997b, 72–73; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 72; Borrelli 2008). Recent research has scrutinized surviving astrolabes from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. There is some debate as to whether or not there were Carolingian forerunners to high medieval astrolabes from the West; if so, astronomy might have been influenced by an independent, surviving Roman tradition of such instruments as well as an introduced Islamic one (King 2011; for Renaissance astrolabes, cf. Turner 2003). Another instrument was the “old” quadrant, a brass quarter-circle with a plumb bob. This instrument was first used in Europe in the first half of the thirteenth century to measure altitudes and was useful as a sundial at any latitude. It was described in an encyclopedia compiled by the astronomers of Alfonso X. The Montpellier astronomer Profatius the Jew, Jacob ben Machir (ca. 1236–1304), combined it with the astrolabe (Hoskin 1997b, 80–81; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 79–80; King 2010, 127–28).

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For measuring the distance between two celestial objects, the cross staff was widely used. The Jacob’s staff was the most common instrument used to measure the altitude of the sun or a star above the horizon. The latter was invented by the Jewish astronomer Levi ben Gerson (1288–1344) in the first half of the fourteenth century (Zinner 1979, 207–10; Goldstein 1977; 1985). This instrument was one of several that were used by navigators. The “nocturnal” was especially helpful for navigation. It consisted of two concentric circles: the outer circle had a handle and was graduated with an annular calendar, and the handle was attached at that point where two of the stars from Ursa Major (the so called “Guards”) crossed the meridian at noon. The inner circle rotated freely and was graduated into twentyfour hours. This instrument could be used for telling the time at night or for calculating the latitude of the navigator using the position of the Pole Star (Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 80–81). During the fourteenth century, sophisticated clocks came into use. They illustrate the close link between time telling and astronomic observation, since they were often used for astronomical purposes. Richard of Wallingford (ca. 1292– 1336), abbot of St. Albans in England, built one of these astronomical clocks during the first half of the fourteenth century. It showed the phases of the moon and eclipses. Several even more complex astronomical clocks followed, like the famous “astrarium” by Giovanni de Dondi (1318–1389) from the University of Padua (Zinner 1979, 14–46; Dohrn-van Rossum 1995, 170–75). In the fifteenth century, several instruments were built on the basis of descriptions found in Ptolemy’s writings. Regiomontanus describes the “triquetrum” (“Dreistab”), mainly used to measure the altitude of the sun at midday. “It consisted of a lath about 9 feet long (with two sights to direct it toward a star) which was hinged at the top of a vertical pole; the lower end was pressed against a second lath, graduated and hinged at a lower point on the pole; the distance from this point to the lower end of the first lath indicated its inclination” (Pannekoek 1961, 181–82; cf. Zinner 1979, 199–202). Another instrument found in Ptolemy, the “armilla,” was both depicted and built in the fifteenth century (Zinner 1979, 202–03; Pannekoek 1961, 182; Hoskin 1997b, 86–87); however, there is already a depiction of such an instrument in the Libros del Saber de Astronomía, which was compiled during the reign of Alfonso X in the thirteenth century (Gingerich 1993, 116–17). Although there were already observatories in major cities of Asia and the Arab world like Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Maragheh, Samarkand and Istanbul, they were not found in the Latin West before the late sixteenth century, when Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was active (Berry 1899, 76–8; Hartner 1977; Hoskin 1997b, 81; Hoskin and Gingerich 1997, 55–59; 1999a, 55–58; 1999b, 78). In contrast to the Islamic world, medieval astronomical devices in Europe were portable and not permanently associated with given locations.

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C Cosmographic Concepts and Astronomy in Medieval Culture Astronomy was a central part of medieval culture. It was not just perceived as a science, but cosmographic concepts were part of a complex belief system that included all contemporary knowledge on geography, cosmology, political theory, and the religious otherworld at the same time. Depictions of the heavens are therefore common in medieval art, and these depictions could function as symbols of divine and worldly power. Only a few Christian thinkers offered a cosmography that was consistent with the Scriptures as an alternative to ancient Greek models of the heavens. The Byzantine scholar Cosmas Indicopleustes (sixth century) imagined a flat earth that was situated in a somewhat rectangular cosmos (Doig 1950, 44; Dilke 1987, 261–63; Euw 1989, 3). But such a model could not really supplant the older concept of a spherical Earth in the center of a spherical universe. The prevalent geocentric worldview, too, was not uncontested since antiquity, and heliocentric theories, often ascribed to Heracleides of Pontus (fourth century B.C.E.), were known to medieval astronomers through the highly influential allegorical work De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii by Martianus Capella (probably fifth century C.E.). Martianus describes Venus and Mercury as encircling the sun. From Martianus’ work arose the medieval idea that the sun was the first center of the course of those two planets, although they were at the same time indirectly circling around the Earth together with the sun (Hoskin 1997b, 69; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 69–70). In Carolingian astronomy, there were many discussions about the movement of the planets since their erratic movements seemed inconsistent with the idea of an Earth-centered universe. Fol. 160v of the Ms. Nouv. acq. lat. 1615 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris shows some planets moving forward and backward on their way around the Earth to explain these unexpected movements (Stevens 1999, 678). Such ideas of the planetary movements were widespread in the Middle Ages and are found in the popular thirteenth-century text Theory of the Planets, whose author discussed the retrograde motions of planets (Hoskin 1997b, 78–80; Hoskin and Gingerich 1999b, 78). These debates on the planetary movements indicate that the Earth-centered model of the cosmos was challenged during the Middle Ages and that medieval astronomers were as puzzled by the erratic appearances of planets as were their forerunners in antiquity. Despite these well-known contradictions (geocentrical cosmos, but inconsistent planetary movements in regard to this assumption) in cosmographical theory, the main medieval model of the cosmos was still based on Platonic and Pythagorean ideas: the Earth, itself a globe, lay in the center of many similar spheres; a

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planet was fixed in each of these seven crystalline spheres. Behind them, a starry, bluish-dark sphere, the sphaira, rotated daily from east to west (cf. Grant 1977, 60– 82). Heaven was thought to be above the sphaira, which was itself identified with the throne of God, described in Revelations 4:2–3 and 6; Ezekiel 1:26. In art, both the Earth and the cosmos could be indicated by a sphere or by its two-dimensional counterpart, a circle. Since both the Earth and the cosmos as a whole were thought to be spherical, a simple sphere could mean both of them. This ambiguity became important in the representation of power in the Middle Ages. The orb became an imperial symbol, first used in the seals of Otto I (912– 973) in the West. (There is one notable Carolingian exception: a statuette of a ruler with an orb, today in the Louvre. For a summary of interpretations regarding this object, cf. the critical remarks in Hack 2008.) Most probably, the Ottonian court copied the Byzantine court, which in turn imitated the late Romans, who had used orbs as signs of universal power and the rule of the Emperor. In the West, the Roman kings and emperors, the kings of France (Robert the Pious, d. 1031) and England, quickly followed the Ottonian example in adopting the orb as a sign of sovereignty. At first, these orbs suggested that the sovereigns whom they symbolized ruled not merely the earth, but the cosmos, as well. The Star Cloak of Henry II (973–1024), today in the treasury of Bamberg Cathedral, placed the wearer virtually in the center of the universe, residing on the sphaira in analogy to God. But these imperial, cosmic connotations became less prevalent after the first half of the eleventh century. As a consequence, the orb changed and a ring and another horizontal division were added to it; now, it represented the “mundus tripartitus” and became a symbol of earthly (and not universal) power (Schramm 1958; Schramm 1983; Baumgärtel-Fleischmann 1990; Schmitz-Esser 2007). Cosmography did not merely appear in the insignia of power, but in medieval architecture, as well. Since every circle or sphere could be seen as a depiction of either Earth or the cosmos, it is nearly impossible to track all of these architectural allusions (vaults, apses, balls, windows). In many places, a circle or sphere is flanked by cosmic iconography. The thirteenth-century window rose of Lausanne Cathedral shows zodiacal signs, Sol and Luna; the window itself allows celestial light to enter the sacred space, thereby becoming a perfect symbol of the cosmos itself (Beer 1956, 48–50). The central vault of the tomb of Galla Placidia (ca. 391/ 394–450) is not only covered by stars, but also decorated with a cross flanked by the four symbols of the Evangelists; the vault thus becomes a representation of the sphaira, the throne of God, which, according to the Book of Revelation, is flanked by the tetramorph (Rev 4:6–7). Like the orb, this iconography was a Christian adaptation of an older model from Imperial Rome. According to Sueton (ca. 70–after 128), Nero (37–68) in his Roman “Domus aurea” had had a rotating ceiling installed that depicted the stars of Heaven (Suetonius Tranquillus 1908,

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60 [Nero 31,2]). Cassius Dio (ca. 164–after 229) had remarked that the form of the Pantheon resembled that of the firmament (Cassius Dio 1961, 135–36 [53,27,2]). Medieval cosmography was frequently depicted in iconography, and these depictions show the indebtedness that medieval cosmography had to antiquity.

D Microcosmos and Macrocosmos According to Plato (428/427–348/347 B.C.E.), the cosmos can be compared to a spindle with eight whorls. Seven of them, representing the planets, circulate in the opposite direction of the spindle, and the axis of this movement runs through the eighth whorl–the Earth–which is the center of the universe. In this model, the spindle itself is the sphaira, fixed with stars. But Plato’s account does more than provide a metaphor for the erudite pre-modern vision of the cosmos, and his underlying concept of a connection between macrocosm and microcosm survived even the loss of popularity of the idea of the geocentric cosmography in the sixteenth century. Plato writes: “But on every circle stands a siren that participates in its turn and makes thereby a specific sound. All eight together form a harmony” (Platon 1973, 617 [book 10]). This Platonic idea of celestial harmony makes it clear why music, together with astronomy, was part of the mathematical “quadrivium” (see A above). Translations of Plato were well known in the Middle Ages (e.g., Beierwaltes, ed., 1969; von Bredow 1972; Leinkauf and Steel, ed., 2005). In medieval theory, there were three “musics”: the “musica mundana,” created by the “sirens” in Plato’s metaphor and mirroring the harmony of the world; the “musica humana,” which is the counterpart of the musica mundana within the human being; and the “musica instrumentalis” of musical instruments. The last is the only music that humans can hear (Euw 1989, 24; Naredi-Rainer 1999, 21). These “musics,” particularly the “musica mundana” and “musica humana,” were interconnected, which was the reason for the influence of the stars on human life. According to an Aristotelian analogy, the macrocosm, or the course of the stars, influenced the microcosm, the individual’s life. The microcosm was less perfect than the cosmic harmony; although originally God made Man perfect, the Fall alienated Man from this perfect harmony (Braunfels 1973, 46). These both Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic views became fashionable beginning in the twelfth century and served to increase the importance of astrology. As a consequence, theories like the Melothesia Theory influenced the belief systems of the elite (Euw 1989, 25; Holl 1972, 574). According to this theory, every zodiacal sign is related to a part of the body, starting with Aries (head) to Pisces (feet). A zodiacal man is depicted in the famous fourteenth-century Très Riches Heures of the Duke of

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Berry, today in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, Ms. 65, fol. 14v. The theory recommended that certain types of bodily activities and the medical treatment of particular body parts be undertaken during the times that constellations were in particular positions in the sky. It is therefore not surprising that the Physician in Geoffrey Chaucer’s (ca. 1343–1400) Canterbury Tales (ca. 1400) is said to have been “well grounded in astrology” and so “he’d found a favorable hour, by means of astrology, to give treatment” (Chaucer 1998, 11; for Chaucer’s own interest in the astrolabe, cf. Eisner 1976 and King 2010, 128). The Italian physician Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482), born at Florence and a friend of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), had studied medicine at Padua and dedicated a lot of his time to astronomy. Similarly, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) himself had studied medicine, as well (Abetti 1952, 54–62). We can see how far things had changed between the early Middle Ages and the Renaissance when we look into the canons of the Council of Braga, held in 563, which damned the Melothesia Theory. The Spanish heretic Priscillian, who believed in the theory, had been executed during the fourth century (Holl 1972, 574; Reimer and Chuaqui de Reimer 1989). But the relationship between music and astronomy had more than just astrological and medical implications, since in a medieval perspective both shared the same mathematical foundations that made up the cosmos. High-medieval theologians saw in this relationship between music and astronomy the potential to understand God’s creation in a new way, and as a consequence, many aspects of medieval culture, such as architecture and painting, were influenced by these ideas. The underlying principle of the “quadrivium” could be seen in the connections between its four sciences with numbers. The perfect harmony of God’s creation was found in numbers and proportions. In music, the intervals and their mathematical formulae were thought to mirror the same proportions that determined the movement of the heavens, of planets and stars. From this perspective, God had created the world twice: first, he created the numbers and the harmony of proportions as universal principles, and later he created the world according to these standards. These ideas were in accordance with the writings of the Church Fathers. An examination of the number six will provide an illustrative example for this understanding of numbers. Six was seen as one of the few perfect numbers that equal the sum of their divisors (excluding the number itself, i.e., 3+2+1=6). Augustine stated that we cannot say that “six is perfect, because God did all of his work in six days; rather it took God six days to do all his work, because six is a perfect number” (Augustine 1845, 301 [“De Genesi ad litteram,” IV,7,14]). Consequently, the measurements of church buildings like Cluny III, the biggest medieval church in the West, was built with measures directly referring to perfect numbers like six, 28 and 496 (Naredi-Rainer 1999, 74–77). Fol. 1r of Cod. 2554 in

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the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, a bible moralisée illuminated around 1250 shows God as “architectus mundi,” measuring the cosmos with a pair of compasses whilst creating it (Braunfels 1973, 48; Grant 1996, 83–88). In the twelfthcentury mosaics depicting the Creation in the cathedral at Monreale, God sets the planets in place and sets their circular path, as well as their speed, around the Earth within the blue sphaira with its golden stars. As Nicolas Weill-Parot has shown recently, there seems to be a relationship between astronomical (or astrological) images that were used for magical purposes and the high- and late-medieval debate on astronomy, in which Scholastic authors defined a natural, and thus licit, reason for astrological activity (WeillParot 2002). The idea of the two creations and the Platonic-Aristotelian ideas of macrocosm, microcosm, and universal harmony paved the way back to astrological divination, thereby helping to convince early Christians of the value and orthodoxy of such divination. The lines between intellectual, scientific discourse and popular belief regarding the interdependence of the cosmic and the human— in other words, the lines between astronomy and astrology—are never clear in the Middle Ages. Medieval people were startled by disturbances of heavenly harmony. Comets were one such sign of disturbance and frequently reported in medieval accounts. The movements of comets were not explained by the model of the universe in which planets and fixed stars were thought of as mounted on crystal spheres. “Stars have this name because they stay, because they always stay fixed in heaven and do not fall,” explains Isidore. “The stars cannot fall, because they are—as said before—immoveable, and they [just] move [because they are] fixed to Heaven” (Isidore of Seville 1850, 179 [lib. 3, cap. 71,3]). Thus any independent movement of a star was interpreted as a potent divine sign that was, with the notable exception of the Star of Bethlehem, decidedly negative. The Roman astrologer Marcus Manilius (fifth century) had mentioned that comets induce crop failure, epidemics, and war, and even foretell great defeats like that of Varus (d. 9 C.E.) in the Teutoburg Forest (Manilius 1990, 84– 94 [1,813–926]). Isidore agreed that the appearance of a comet “signifies illness, hunger or war” (Isidore of Seville 1850, 180 [3,71,16]). The Bayeux tapestry shows an unusual star in the picture that follows the depiction of the coronation of Harold (ca. 1020–1066) as king of England, clearly implying that the coronation was not in tune with celestial harmony. The star is not a mere invention of the artists, since a comet did indeed appear in 1066: in February of that year, Halley’s Comet was visible in the sky. However, it appeared four months after Harold’s coronation, not immediately after it; the tapestry changes the chronology of the story to underline the injustice of Harold’s usurpation of the crown (Schmitz-Esser 2007, 137–40).

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From the medieval perspective, astronomy was more than a science of the stars; its study touched the very foundations of creation, astronomers asked for the place of men in God’s “Heilsgeschichte,” and therefore celestial appearances could even provide political arguments. This was possible because astronomy seemed to reveal a part of the inner truth of the universe, and by depicting the heavens medieval artists tried to illustrate the functioning of celestial harmony and God’s creation.

Select Bibliography Grant, Edward, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge 1996). Hoskin, Michael, ed., The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy (Cambridge 1999). King, David A., Astrolabes from Medieval Europe (Aldershot 2011). McCluskey, Stephen C., Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge 1998). Naredi-Rainer, Paul von, Architektur und Harmonie: Zahl, Maß und Proportion in der abendländischen Baukunst, 6th ed. (1982; Cologne 1999). Turner, Gerard L’Estrange, Renaissance Astrolabes and their Makers (Aldershot 2003). Warntjes, Immo and Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ed., The Easter Controversy of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Its Manuscripts, Texts, and Tables (Turnhout 2011). Weill-Parot, Nicolas, Les “images astrologiques” au Moyen Âge et à la renaissance: Spéculations intellectuelles et pratiques magiques (XIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris 2002). Zinner, Ernst, Deutsche und niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11.–18. Jahrhunderts, 2nd ed. (1956; Munich 1979).

Stephen Penn

The Bible and Biblical Exegesis A Introduction: the Medieval Bible In his Summa Theologiae, the great Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas described Holy Scripture simply as ‘the Law of the Faith, to which nothing must be added and nothing taken away’ (Aquinas 1964–75, 2.2., q. 1, art. 9, a. 1). This concise expression of a fundamental belief, in the form of an orthodox sola scriptura position, serves to highlight not merely the centrality of Scripture in medieval culture, but also offers, in a self-conscious echo of the book of Deuteronomy, a tacit anticipation of its potential abuses (cf. Deuteronomy 4:2). Copied in whole or in part more widely than any other educational or literary text, the Bible was subjected to intense exegetical scrutiny by students, scholars and ecclesiastics across Europe throughout the medieval period. In the east, biblical texts were translated into Syriac (the Aramaic language of the Peshitta, a translation that circulated widely), Coptic (the language of ancient Egypt, into which the Greek New Testament and the apocryphal Gnostic Gospels were translated), Ethiopic (Ge’ez), Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian. These translations sometimes omitted one or more books, often because of their unavailability rather than anxiety about canonicity, but occasionally lost texts were uniquely preserved in these versions, and many included apocryphal books within their translated canon. Syriac was also the language of the Gospel harmony known in the west as the Diatessaron, produced in the second century by the Assyrian writer Tatian, who converted to Christianity during a visit to Rome. The Diatessaron became the standard version of the gospels in Syriac Christianity until the Peshitta translation displaced it in the fifth century. There is general agreement that the Peshitta drew on the Diatessaron, though scholars are divided as to whether the Diatessaron also draws on the Old Testament of the Peshitta (Joosten 2001). The original Syriac text of the Diatessaron no longer remains, so most scholars look to the Arabic translation as the most authoritative available text. The Diatessaron was also influential in the western church, through a variety of translations (see below). Jerome’s Latin ‘Vulgate’ Bible, commissioned by Pope Damasus during Jerome’s visit to Rome in 382, gradually became the authoritative translation of the medieval Christian church in the west. It was not officially recognized as an orthodox document until the Council of Trent (1545–1563), at which the expression editio vulgata, in the sense understood today, was first officially applied to

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the translation (Sparks 1970, 518). The term vulgate, therefore, though widely used as a convenient term, is potentially misleading as a label for the Latin Bible of Jerome known to medieval readers, or indeed as a term to identify the text that Jerome worked on. Indeed, Jerome himself used the adjective vulgata in a rather different sense, to identify the Greek Bible and the Latin derivatives that preceded his own translation (Bogaert 2012, 69). The Vulgate was preceded by the so-called Old Latin (Vetus Latina) translations, which relied only on the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Errors and infelicities inevitably arose in the extensive process of copying this text, and it was largely due to inconsistencies in the many renderings of identical sections of the scriptural text that Jerome’s edition was commissioned. With a sound knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, Jerome was eminently qualified to offer a new, more accurate translation, and to rectify the pervasive issues that the Old Latin versions presented. He began his translation by looking at the Gospels, which he revised from the Septuagint. When he came to the Old Testament, he again began by comparing the Vetus Latina text to that of the Septuagint. Increasingly, however, he felt inclined to privilege the Hebrew Old Testament over the Septuagint. Hence, he produced two versions of some Old Testament books. The so-called ‘Roman Psalter’ was corrected with reference to the Septugint, but the later ‘Gallican Psalter,’ which appears in the Vulgate, was read alongside the Greek Old Testament translations that appeared in Origen’s Hexapla, a parallel rendering of the Hebrew, the Septuagint and other Greek versions of the text that survives in only a fragmentary form. A third version was a new translation prepared according to the Hebrew (generally known as the iuxta hebraicum version). By the end of his life, he had carefully consulted the Hebrew in relation to the whole of the Old Testament in the preparation of his final Latin version. Comparison of the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate reveals a number of differences, not all of which are explicitly highlighted in the Hexapla. Below is a clause from Genesis 3:1: Serpens autem erat sapientior omnibus pecoribus terrae quae fecerat Dominus Deus. (Vetus Latina) [But the serpent was wiser than all of the animals that the Lord God had made.] Sed serpens erat callidior cunctis animantibus terrae quae fecerat Dominus Deus. (Vulgate) [But the serpent was craftier than all of animals of the earth that the Lord God had made.]

Jerome’s translation rests on his interpretation of the Hebrew adjective ‘arum and the Greek phronimotatos. The Hebrew word is genuinely ambiguous, and can mean either ‘wise’ or ‘crafty’, but the Septuagint adjective phronimos, of which phronimotatos is the superlative form, is more obviously suggestive of wisdom (or prudence), which seems to account for the preference for this interpretation in the

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Vetus Latina version. Jerome presumably felt that the serpent would be more fittingly described as ‘crafty,’ which the Hebrew text sanctions. In spite of the fidelity of his translations, however, Jerome’s innovations were not readily welcomed by a church that knew the older Latin translations intimately.

I Germanic Many vernacular translations of the Bible and of biblical material were made from the Vulgate, but the earliest of the surviving vernacular versions is a translation of the gospels from Greek into Gothic, the only member of the eastern branch of the Germanic languages and also the oldest member of the Germanic language family. This was produced by Wulfila (Latin Ulfilas) in the fourth century, probably for Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths. Though the antiquity of the Gothic language and its unique script, which Wulfila himself invented (drawing conspicuously on the Greek alphabet), have made it into something of a philological curiosity, its status as the language of the earliest vernacular scriptural translation (by several centuries) is no less remarkable. The most comprehensive fragment is the sixth-century Codex Argenteus (Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek, DG.1), so called because of its predominantly silver lettering. The codex has a distinctive purple colour, a result of the application of dyes to the fine vellum, a process that belonged to a broader tradition of prestigious manuscript preparation that dates from antiquity. What remain of the Codex Argenteus are 188 folios, of which 187 are held in Uppsala and the other, which was discovered in 1970, in Speyer Cathedral in Germany. The text is presented in scriptura continua, like the texts of ancient Greece and Rome, and it is therefore likely that it would have been read aloud (Murdoch, 2004; Heather 1996; Saenger 1997, 26). Biblical material in the vernacular was copied in a sporadic manner in Germany up until Charlemagne became king of the Franks in 768, even though Christianity in Germany is traditionally seen to date from the baptism of Chlodowig in 496. The Latin Gospel harmony that survives in the sixth-century Codex Fuldensis was influential in early medieval Germany, as its name confirms. It was taken to Fulda, the sight of an important Benedictine monastery, by Boniface in the eighth century. The preface to the codex, written by Victor, Bishop of Capua, Italy, tells how “fortituo in manus meas incideret unum ex quattuor euangelium compositum et absente titulo non inuenirem nomen auctoris” (By chance a book without a title came into my hands, made out of the four gospels, but I could not find the name of an author) (Ranke, ed., 1848, 1; my translation). He concludes finally, after considering the possibility that this might be the work of Ammonius of Alexandria, that the most likely source is Tatian. Yet the text is an oblique descendant of

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Tatian’s Diatessaron, drawing upon much material from the Latin Vulgate. The Latin text of the Codex Fuldensis was translated into the so-called ‘Fulda-Diatessaron’, a close Old High German rendering of the original document. Beneath are the Codex-Fuldensis (left) and the Fulda-Diatessaron (right) (Tatian 1872, 67): In principio erat verbum et verbum erat apud deum et deus erat verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est. In ipso vita erat et vita erat lux hominum.

In anaginne uuas uuort inti thaz uuort uuas mit gote inti got selbo uuas thaz uuort. Thaz uuas in anaginne mit gote. Alliu thuruh thaz gitan inti uzzan sin ni uuas uuiht gitanas thaz thar gitan uuas. Thaz uuas in imo lib inti thaz lib uuas lioht manno.

The resemblance between the two passages is striking, even if the literary merits of the latter are arguably few. Indeed, this east Franconian version of the Codex Fuldensis has been described by Andrew Colin Gow as ‘a wooden, rather literal translation’ (Gow 2012, 202). But the vernacular translation does illustrate the influence of the Codex Fuldensis beyond the Latin language in the west. It was translated into many other vernaculars, including Flemish, Dutch, Italian and English (Metzger 1977, 20–25). Old Saxon, the distant ancestor of Low German, was the language of a number of metrical retellings of biblical material. The first of these, Genesis, survives in only a fragmentary form (discovered in the Vatican library at the end of the nineteenth century), but also serves as the basis for the Old English Genesis B, which preserves in translation some of the most interesting portions of the text. Parts of the narrative deviate very markedly from the biblical Genesis, a point that inclined critics to assume that the author of the Old Saxon text must simply have interpreted the scriptural story imaginatively, but F. N. Robinson has argued that a likely source is the apocryphal Vita Adae et Evae (Robinson 1906, 390). One departure that has traditionally been identified, and which survives only in the Old English version, is the representation of Satan not as a serpent, but as an angel when he addresses Eve. The text itself, however, is not terribly clear about the form that Satan takes. Certainly, he is a serpent when he initially attempts and fails to lead Adam into sin, after coiling his body around the Tree of Death. When he claims to be God’s messenger, Adam tells him, “þu gelic ne bist/ænegum his engla, þe ic ær geseah” (“you are not like / any of his angels that I have seen previously,” ll. 538–39) There is nothing very explicit about the form he assumes when he goes on to address Eve, telling her, “æt þisses ofetes” (eat of this fruit). He manages to convince her that obedience to his words will allow her to avoid God’s wrath, but it is not until she speaks to Adam about what she has done that it becomes clear that she perceives Satan to be an angel, whatever his actual form is:

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Adam, frea min, þis ofet is swa swete, blið on breostum, and þes boda sciene, godes engel god: ic on his gearwan geseo, þæt he is ærendsecg uncres hearran, hefon cyninges: his hyldo is unc betere to gewinnane þonne his wiðermedo. (655–60) [Adam, my master, this fruit is so sweet pleasant in my breast, and this bright messenger [is] God’s good angel: I see in his dress that he is our Lord the king of Heaven’s messenger: it is better for us [to have] his kindness than his antagonism.] (655–660)

Eve attempts to persuade Adam that he is mistaken, but that the messenger is willing to forgive him and not to disclose his earlier hostility to the Lord. Prior to tempting her to take and eat the fruit, Satan had told Eve that he had known the angels of heaven (“ic can ealle swa geare engla gebyrdo” (583), but had not himself claimed to be one. The degree to which this particular episode departs from Genesis therefore remains debatable (especially given that it only survives in Old English rather than Old Saxon). The ninth-century Heliand (OSax. healer), a modern editorial title, offers a retelling of the gospels as an heroic poem in Old Saxon. This draws heavily, though not exclusively, on the Codex Fuldensis, and hence also loosely follows Tatian’s Diatessaron. Like the Diatessaron, the Heliand draws its narrative from across the gospels, and follows John’s chronology. Its opening song tells how four men were given power from God to produce the gospels, though many others had wished to record Christ’s work (Heliand, 1–12). There is no close parallel to this in Victor’s preface, which concentrates rather on the fact that the gospels are not uniformly concordant, and on the need to arrive at a single narrative that draws upon all of them. This, of course, was the original purpose of the Diatessaron, but the Heliand is an heroic poem rather than a theological treatise, so it is hardly surprising that its author should wish to celebrate the heroic achievement of the four authors of the gospels, and of their mighty leader (mahtig drohtin), Christ himself (Heliand, 37). It survives in five European manuscripts, though a sixth fragment, running from lines 5823–70, has recently been discovered in Leipzig University Library (Schmid 2007; Pakis 2010, 281–304). The Frankish monk Otfried of Weissenburg produced the Evangelienbuch or Liber Evangelium at the end of the ninth century, which resembles a vernacular Gospel harmony. It owes nothing, however, to the Codex-Fuldensis or the Fulda Diatesseron, even though its author was educated at Fulda (and was seemingly familiar with the text of the Heliand). It is arranged into five books, and Otfrid

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labours to explain why the four Gospels should be arranged into a five-book narrative (Otfrids Evangelienbuch, ed. Erdmann, 1957). The chapter headings throughout the book are in Latin, and the first chapter (“Cur scriptor hunc librum theotisce dictaverit” [Why the author wrote this book in German]) is a careful justification of the decision to relate the narrative of the Gospels in Franconian, rather than Latin. It contains exegetical material (under the headings Spiritualiter and Moraliter in chapters 26 and 28 of the first book, and as needed in the four that follow), as well as the literal vernacular rendering of the biblical story. As in the early medieval period, the later Middle Ages saw numerous verse adaptations produced in the Germanic vernaculars. No complete Bible survives from medieval Germany, though Andrew Gow suggests that because ‘Biblecentred people’ were being accused of being Waldensians in the later medieval period, it is not unlikely that such translations would have existed (Gow 2012, 206). The Augsburg Bible of 1350 contained the whole of the New Testament, whilst the Wenzel Bible (1389), a translation of the Old Testament, was widely copied and circulated. Recent research suggests that the Wenzel Bible, which was produced for Wenceslas IV of Bohemia, who was king of Germany from 1376, was possibly composed earlier than 1387, the date recorded in the explicit. The most extensive example of Old English translation of the Old Testament are the late eleventh-century Old English Hexateuch (the first six books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Joshua, now held in the British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B.iv) and the early eleventh-century Old English Heptateuch (the first seven books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Judges, held in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc 509). The first of these is distinguished by its several hundred lavish illustrations (Withers 2007). Seven further fragments existed until the seventeenth century, of which six now survive. The English scholar Ælfric, a monk in Winchester and then Dorset, who later became the first abbot of a new abbey in Eynsham, translated significant portions of the Heptateuch, though the surviving text is clearly the work of more than one translator. He also prepared a valuable preface to the Book of Genesis, in the form of a letter addressed to his patron Æthelwærd, in which he describes his anxieties about producing a translation that might easily be misinterpreted by ignorant readers, who fail to understand the difference between the Old and the New Laws, or even by ungelæredan priests who do not appreciate the spiritual signification of its words. However, he is clear that in spite of the spiritual profundity of this text, he will offer nothing more than the ‘naked’ narrative: We secgað […] foran to, þæt seo boc is swiþe deop gastlice to understandenne and we ne writaþ na mare buton þa nacedan gerecednisse. (Praefatio to Genesis, 4, 43–5.)

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[We say at the outset that this book is exceedingly profound to understand spiritually, and we write nothing more than the naked narrative.]

Ælfric is clear in his preface that he is keen to adhere as closely as possible to the Latin of the Vulgate, but indicates also that the different syntactic conventions of the two languages mean that he cannot always imitate it in its every detail. The Old Testament translations find their companions in the Old English Gospels (once known misleadingly as the West Saxon Gospels), which survive in six complete copies (Liuzza 1994, xvi–xlii). There are also two fragmentary copies, as well as some that are known to have existed but which do not survive (including Bede’s Old English translation of St John’s Gospel). Alongside translations into the Old English vernacular, literary interpretations of biblical books or particular episodes in the biblical narrative are common in the Anglo-Saxon period. Among the most extensive of these are Genesis A and Genesis B, the latter a newly discovered portion of the former (Genesis A 1978; Behagel 1903, 205–40). Other examples include Exodus, Daniel, Christ and Satan, The Fates of the Apostles and a series of poems devoted to Christ. The Dream of the Rood is a dream poem that offers a depiction of the crucifixion in which Christ’s suffering is transposed onto the crucifix itself, which addresses the dreamer and tells of its experience. The Phoenix, a loose translation of an earlier Latin poem by Lactantius, is generally interpreted as an allegorical representation of the resurrection. The Wycliffite Bible was the first complete translation of the Bible into the English vernacular, which was produced in the late fourteenth century and circulated in around 250 copies, exceeding any other Middle English text. To place this in perspective, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a popular text, has only 56 complete manuscripts (Seymour 1997, 1). It was accompanied by a lengthy prologue outlining the need for a Bible in English, and also some important comments on Wycliffite exegetical strategies, was produced by the followers of the Oxford theologian and heresiarch John Wyclif in the late fourteenth century. The author of the prologue remains unknown, though many assume that it was the heresiarch John Purvey, a close follower of Wyclif (though there is no clear evidence to support this assumption). It now seems unlikely that Wyclif was himself personally involved in the translation process, though he may have participated in the production of this translation of the Bible in a supervisory role. Indeed, the only name that can be associated with any certainty with the translation is that of Nicholas Hereford, though even here, the evidence is a reference in a single manuscript to Hereford as translator of the Bible as far as Baruch 3:20. William Caxton identified John Trevisa as a translator of the Bible, though this evidence comes rather too late to be conclusive. What is perhaps more certain than either of these possibilities is that the Wycliffite Bible was the

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product of more than one translator, and most probably a group of translators working as a team.

II Romance The Romance languages served as the vehicles for an equally rich array of translations, paraphrases and poetic adaptations. The twelfth-century theologian Peter Comestor (d. ca. 1180), whose name (Latin ‘devourer’) has often been regarded as a humorous allusion to his voracious appetite for books, made perhaps the most significant contribution to later biblical translations. A student of Peter Lombard at Paris, he produced the Historia Scholastica, a Latin historical biblical paraphrase that was influential in France, England and throughout Europe, and won papal approval at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (Morey 1993, 6). The text proceeds by presenting a section of the scriptural text and then paraphrasing it historically, often drawing on other scriptural material where relevant. It was immensely popular both within and outside the schools, and fast became a standard prescribed text (Smalley 1984, 178–79). A comparable Latin paraphrase is the Aurora of Peter Riga (d. 1209), latterly canon regular of Reims Cathedral. This is an extensive metrical narrative that he completed early in the thirteenth century, and which was widely copied (it survives in over 400 manuscripts). The Aurora, unlike the Comestor’s text, generally gives priority to the spiritual senses, offering a predominantly allegorical commentary. Nevertheless, we are told in the prologue that the literal sense is the foundation of all of the others, and the means by which to gain a rapid understanding of the text (De Hamel 2001, 112). In spite of its popularity, the Aurora was seemingly designed as a convenient way into the Scriptures, and not a resource for the experienced scholar. The name Aurora (‘daybreak’), as Riga explains, gives a clear indication of its purpose: Sicut enim Aurora terminum nocti imponit, principiumque diei adesse testator, sic et libellus iste tenebras umbrarum et veteris legis obscuritates discutiens veritatis fulgore et allegoriarum scintillulis micantibus totus refulgeat. (Fragmenta ex Aurora, Patrologia Latina 112, col. 19) [Just as daybreak forces the night to end and the arrival of the day to be seen, so likewise this little book brings light by dispelling the darkness of the shadows and the obscurities of the Old Law with the brightness of the truth and the flickering sparks of allegories.]

Just as the angel said to Jacob after their nocturnal struggle, ‘let go of me, for it is daybreak,’ (Genesis 32:26), so Peter, we are told, after the struggle and labour that went into his book, speaks the same words, as if to say, ‘I bring about an end to

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this book, because I have dispelled the darkness and the shadows’ (Aurora, pros. prol). The Comestor’s Historia Scholastica was possibly completed by Peter of Poitiers (d. ca. 1215), who extended it with a compendium of Acts (Smalley 1983, 214). He also produced his own biblical paraphrase, in which he sought to abbreviate what had been made available by Riga and the Comestor. What he produced was the Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi, which, as its name suggests, presents biblical history in the form of a genealogical study of Christ’s ancestry, beginning with Adam. The Compendium was presented as a kind of family tree, with accompanying biographical sketches. It was often copied onto parchment rolls rather than codices, for ease of reference, and was translated into a number of European vernacular languages, including English. It served partly as an aid to memorisation, as is indicated in the prologue (Carruthers 1990, 329). Often, this text was copied together with the Comestor’s Historia Scholastica. The thirteenth century witnessed the arrival of a significant number of complete, or virtually complete, French vernacular translations. The celebrated Bible Historiale of Guyart des Moulins (b. 1251), canon and then dean of St Peter’s church at Aire, was an extended prose translation of the Historia Scholastica, and also drew on material from the Vulgate. Many of the manuscripts in which it is preserved are lavishly illustrated. It was completed in 1295 (Robson 1959, 448). Earlier vernacular Bibles include the Acre Bible, possibly produced for St Louis IX of France during his visit to Acre (1250–1204), then capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and La Bible Française du xiiie siècle, as it is now known. The latter is generally regarded as the first complete French vernacular translation of the Bible, whose existence came to light only after manuscripts of Guyart’s Bible Historiale had been studied closely, revealing that the Vulgate translations in the text were not Guyart’s own, but were drawn from an existing translation of two volumes’ length. This translation also exists in three independent manuscript copies (Sneddon 1979, 130). It probably originated in Paris, which had become an important centre of manuscript and codex production by this time. The Acre Bible is preserved in seven manuscripts, the oldest of which is held in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (La Bible d’Acre 2006, xvii–xxiv). Some of the later manuscripts include a series of marginal glosses that seem to have belonged to the original copy, but which were omitted by the scribe who produced the Arsenal version (La Bible d’Acre 2006, xxxvii). Prior to the thirteenth century, vernacular translations generally extended to one or more scriptural books. One of the great monuments of twelfth-century scholarship is Li Quatre Livre des Reis, a prose translation of the four books of Kings (1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, which were grouped together in the

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Vulgate, following the Septuagint). The translation proceeds verse by verse, and commentaries are appended where they are perceived to be necessary. An example is 1 Kings 1 (1 Samuel 1), in which the infertile Anna, one of Elcana’s two wives, is blessed with a child after praying to God and vowing to dedicate her son to his worship for the whole of his life. The commentary interprets the story of Elcana and his two wives allegorically: L’estorie est paille, le sen est grains; le sen est fruit, l’estorie raims. Cist lives est cum armarie des secreiz Deu. Plein est de figure et de significance. […] Helchana, ço est la possession Deu, e signifie le fiz Deu. (Li Quatre Livre des Reis, ed. Curtius, 1911, 5) [The story is straw, [and] its meaning is the grain; the meaning is the fruit, [and] the story the branch. This book is like an armoury of God’s secrets. And this is clear in respect of the figure and its meaning. […] Elcana is in the possession of God, and signifies the son of God.

The interpretation of Elcana as an allegorical representation of the son of God was a popular one throughout the medieval period, as was the suggestion made later in the commentary that his two wives, Anna and Phenenna, represent Holy Church and the synagogue, respectively. Both of these allegorical readings are found in the Glossa Ordinaria, the standard scholarly commentary that was itself assembled in the twelfth century (see Section B, below), in which they are attributed respectively to Jerome and Gregory. The most widely copied of the earliest vernacular biblical fragments in France, as throughout much of the rest of Europe, was the Psalter. Among the best known of the early translations is the Montebourg Psalter, produced around 1200 and used at the Benedictine monastery at Montebourg in Normandy. This is a Norman rendering of Jerome’s Gallican Psalter, and is now held in the Bodleian Library (MS Douce 320). The accents in the text, which occur regularly over stressed syllables, have been regarded as evidence that it was used in public readings (Berger 1884, 10). An earlier example is the trilingual Eadwine Psalter, which was probably composed around 1160 and was based on Jerome’s iuxta hebraicum translation of the Psalms. It contains a Latin text with Old English and Anglo-Norman glosses. In Italy and Spain, vernacular Bible translation developed rather later. The Italian vernacular Bible emerged from the thirteenth or possibly the twelfth century onwards, though the earliest manuscripts date from the fourteenth century (Foster 1969, 452). Evidence for the early circulation of sections of the Bible is therefore largely derived from literary sources. Most prominent among these, of course, is the Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri (Leonardi 2012, 269; Hawkins 1993/2007; Kleinhenz 1986). The Bible is the most cited text here, appearing in the region of 575 times (Kleinhenz 1986, 125). The earliest surviving manuscripts of

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discrete translations (one of books from the New Testament and one of the Psalter) date from the fourteenth century, though both were translations of French vernacular renderings, with accompanying glosses (Leonardi 2012, 269– 70). Copies of the Vulgate, needless to say, were made rather earlier, and include the famous Giant Bibles of the eleventh and twelfth century, many of which were produced in Rome (Ayres 1994). In Spain, vernacular translations into Spanish and Catalan appeared from the twelfth century onwards. Most early Spanish vernacular translations were produced in the Castilian dialect, and the impulse behind these was the monarch of Castile, Alfonso X (reigned 1252–1284), widely regarded as the first Spanish monarch to demand a Spanish vernacular translation of the Vulgate Bible (Avenoza 2012, 289; Morreale 1969, 470). The result was a lengthy text, but not a pandect. Indeed, Alfonso prioritized historical material that could be construed literally in his General Estoria, a kind of world history based on close biblical paraphrase, initially of the Old Testament (Avenoza 2012, 289). This was possibly inspired in part by the Latin Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor (see above), which the translators are likely to have known. The Hebrew Old Testament was in several cases translated directly, and the Hispanic Jewish community played a vital role in this process. Begun early in the twelfth century, and thereby predating the General Estoria, is the Fazienda de Ultramar. It is preserved uniquely in the Biblioteca Universitaria de Salamanca (MS 1997; see http://www.lafazienda deultramar.com/ [last accessed on March 1, 2014] for images of the manuscripts and a transcription of the text). A later vernacular Bible translated from the Hebrew is the lavishly illustrated Alba Bible, which was translated by Rabbi Mosé Arragel de Guadalajara for Don Luis de Guzmán, Grand Master of the Order of the Calatrava. This is a rare example of a Bible that survived in its entirety (Morreale 1969, 466). Jewish translations from the Hebrew continued throughout the remainder of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but attracted suspicion during the Inquisition, which began in 1478. Catalan Bibles were subjected to censorship from an early stage, and none survive from earlier than the fourteenth century. Early translations, such as that commissioned by Alfons III of Aragon in 1287, which was translated from a French Bible, do not survive (Avenoza 2012, 301). Nor does the fifteenth century Valencian version made by Bonifatius Ferrar, except for a single sheet (the others were deliberately destroyed) (Morreale 1969, 467). Evidence of a Bible commissioned by Pere IV of Aragon (1319–1287) survives in later manuscripts. Versions from the fifteenth century mainly survive in fragmentary forms, if at all. A variety of other translated fragments remains in existence today, as well as a fifteenth-century of a gospelbook, Evangelis del Palau (Avenoza 2012, 301–04).

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B Biblical Exegesis Throughout the medieval period, the Bible was interpreted according to its four senses: the literal (the historical sense), the allegorical (used to reconcile the Old and the New Laws), the tropological (or moral) and the anagogic (dealing with the last things). Medieval exegesis followed the techniques inherited from the Patristic period, just as it prized the Patristic Latin translation of the Scriptures prepared by St Jerome. The distinction between letter and spirit, or literal and figurative interpretations of the text of the Bible, was central to Patristic and medieval exegesis: like many who would follow him, Jerome saw the letter of the text as the word made flesh (Smalley 1983, 1). But to see beyond the letter, for the fathers and for medieval readers, was to gain access to the spirit, which, like the human soul, was eternal and incorruptible. Scripture was produced by human authors and scribes, who physically committed the words to the manuscript, but scriptural truths were recorded under the influence of divine inspiration: God was working through the authors in order to make his word known. To this end, early medieval exegetes believed that the spiritual senses were to be accorded priority. The Venerable Bede is now remembered principally as an historian, but his exegetical work (mainly in the form of commentaries) was regarded as authoritative throughout the medieval period. Bede’s writing sought to expound carefully the teaching of the church fathers, whose learning he applied diligently to the study of the Vulgate Scriptures. Indeed, Beryl Smalley goes as far as to suggest that “the patristic tradition ends with the Venerable Bede” (Smalley 1983, 35). Bede produced commentaries on a wide range of biblical books, including Mark and Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline Epistles, and the Apocalypse (from the New Testament), and Genesis, Proverbs, and the Song of Songs (from the Old Testament). This list is far from comprehensive, and it is essential to point out that not all of Bede’s commentaries survive: the commentaries on Isaiah, Esdras, and Nehemiah, Kings and Chronicles, and Job, among several other Old Testament commentaries, have disappeared. Bede is keen to highlight his indebtedness to the fathers, who are frequently cited. Unsurprisingly, he devoted particular attention to Jerome, Gregory the Great, and Augustine (his commentary on the Song of Songs contains extracts from the writings Gregory the Great at the end). During the Carolingian Renaissance, academic study of the Bible took place in monasteries and (latterly) cathedral schools. Carolingian exegesis was seldom original: the fathers and their interpretations were reproduced largely uncritically. Alcuin, a preeminent scholar of the period, was called to Charlemagne’s court at Aachen in 782. His work at the Palace School in Aachen, including personal tuition of the Emperor, transformed educational practice there. His respect for the fathers is epitomized in the final lines of his poem addressed to

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scribes: “Vel nova vel vetera poterit proferre magister / Plurima, quisque legit dicta sacrata partum” (Anyone who reads the hallowed sayings of the fathers / can expound many subjects both old and new; Godman 1985, 138–39). Other significant exegetes of this period include Hrabanus Maurus, Walafrid Strabo, Claudius of Turin, John Scotus Eriugena, Haimo, and lastly Remigius of Auxerre. The latter had some knowledge of Greek. If the period between the beginning of Charlemagne’s reign as Holy Roman emperor and the tenth century was a period of exegetical reflection, characterized largely by a reliance on the hermeneutic insights of the fathers, the twelfth century can be characterized as the period during which logic made its way into the analysis of Scripture, and descriptive commentary was supplanted by the quaestio. Hugh, Andrew and Richard of St. Victor, all of whom studied and taught at the Abbey of St Victor in Paris, are among the most outstanding exegetes of this period. Hugh’s Didascalicon de studio legendi is, as its title suggests, a guide to the reading process. Here, in the last three chapters, he guides his students through the interpretation of Scripture, suggesting in the second chapter of Book 5 that Scripture conveys its meaning according to three senses, the historical, the allegorical and the tropological (he fails to mention to anagogic). He dwells at length on the second of these, arguing in the third chapter that the spiritual sense, in which things signify, is the voice of God, whereas the historical (or literal) sense is merely the voice of men. In Chapter 4 of Book 6, he introduces an architectural analogy. The foundations of a building, he suggests, unlike the building itself, may be constructed from stones that do not fit together precisely. This, he suggests, is often the case with the literal sense: it may contain contradictions or inconsistencies. The spiritual sense, however, like a building, can have no contradictions. This privileging of the spiritual sense above the literal has Pauline foundations, as Hugh points out. The twelfth century also saw the arrival of a standardized biblical gloss, known today simply as the Glossa Ordinaria. This document, which took the form of marginal and interlinear glosses (many of which were extracts from patristic sources), remained authoritative throughout the medieval period. The assumption that it was assembled by Walafrid Strabo (to whom it is ascribed, for example, in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Latina) is no longer accepted. Indeed, the glosses that constitute this massive document have their origins across centuries of scholarship. The Glossa Ordinaria arrived in the form of a unitary sequence of glosses at the hands of the brothers Anslem and Ralph of Laon, but was significantly improved upon by Peter Lombard’s and Anselm’s student Gilbert of Poitiers (Swanson 2001). Peter Lombard, of course, produced his own monumental theological document, the Sententiarum libri quattuor, in the second half of the twelfth century. This gave rise to many academic commentaries, and

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became a standard theological guide, extending to four lengthy books. It was structured according to distinctiones, each of which contained several chapters dealing with a common theological topic. The document proceeds rationally, drawing its authority from a selection of illustrative scriptural passages, together with a range of patristic and medieval scholarly authorities. The exegetes considered thus far were united in their reverence of the spiritual senses of Scripture. With Thomas Aquinas and the tradition of Aristotelian exegesis that grew out of his work, this position shifted radically. In the Summa Theologiae, he argues that the literal sense of the Bible is the sense that God, its divine author, intends. The literal sense, thus construed, contains all of the senses that a passage from Scripture might have (the three spiritual senses, as well as the historical sense). Aquinas deals with this issue whilst considering whether one passage in Scripture can have more than one sense: Quia vero sensus litteralis est quem auctor intendit, auctor autem sacrae Scripturae Deus est, qui omnia simul suo intellectu comprehendit, non est inconveniens, ut dicit Augustinus XII confessionum, si etiam secundum litteralem sensum in una littera Scripturae plures sint sensus. (Aquinas 1964–1975, 1a.1.article 10) [Because the literal sense is the sense that an author intends, and the author of Holy Scripture is God, who comprehends all things together in his understanding, it is not inconsistent, as Augustine says in the twelfth book of the Confessions, there are more meanings in one passage, even if [interpreted] according to the literal sense.]

This interpretation of the literal sense necessarily invests it with supreme authority. Whatever the divine author intends must necessarily be most authoritative. This notion was embraced and elaborated upon by the Franciscan exegete Nicholas of Lyra, who argued in his Postilla Literalis that Scripture in fact had a twofold literal sense (duplex sensus literalis), which encapsulated both literal (historical) and spiritual significations. Like Aquinas (following Augustine), he insisted that the literal sense had to serve as the foundation of any argument, and that the spiritual senses should always be consistent with what is found in the literal sense. He illustrates this with an architectural analogy: ‘just as a building which begins to part company with its foundations is inclined to collapse, so a mystical exposition which deviates from the literal sense must be considered unseemly and inappropriate’ (trans. Minnis and Scott in Minnis 2010, 268). This principle was followed in the late fourteenth century by the Oxford scholar and heresiarch, John Wyclif, who borrowed a term from the fashionable logicians of his day (whose work he deplored) to argue that all parts of Scripture are de virtute sermonis true. For the logicians, to argue that something was de virtute sermonis true was to suggest that it was literally true according to the immediate signification of the

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words, or the ‘force of the utterance.’ Wyclif turned this expression against them, interpreting as the sense intended by the divine author, the sense produced by the inspired human authors of Scripture. Wyclif was not the last medieval exegete, but his literalistic exegesis was significant in bringing about the first complete vernacular English translation of the Bible. Its translators, like Wyclif himself, believed that divine intention could be communicated no better in one language than another. Implicitly, an accurate translation of the Bible relied as much upon the grace and inspiration of God as the product of its original human authors. To this extent, Wyclif serves as a convenient conclusion of this summary of medieval biblical exegesis, even though medieval exegesis continued well into the fifteenth century.

Select Bibliography Ackroyd, P. R. and C. F. Evans, The Cambridge History of the Bible: From the Beginnings to Jerome (Cambridge 1970). Evans, Gillian R., The Language and Logic of the Bible: the Road to Reformation (Cambridge 1985). Evans, Gillian R., The Language and Logic of the Bible: the Earlier Middle Ages (Cambridge 1984). De Hamel, Christopher, The Book: A History of the Bible (London 2001). Lampe, G. W. H., ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (Cambridge 1969). Lubac, Henri de, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’écriture (Paris, 1959–1964), 4 vols. Marsden, Richard and E. Ann Matter, ed., The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2 (Cambridge 2012). Metzger, Bruce, M., ed., The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origins, Transmission and Limitations (Oxford 1977). Minnis, Alastair, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Age, 2nd ed., with a new preface by the author (1984; London 2010). Morey, James H., Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Chicago 2000). Smalley, Beryl, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (1940; Oxford 1983).  

 

 

 

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Children and Childhood in the Middle Ages A Changing Views of Childhood in the Middle Ages Among Scholars When readers encounter texts written during the Middle Ages, they find many different representation of childhood in the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and 1500 C.E. Depending on the particular literary and historical paradigm that scholars use, how these children are viewed can vary widely. A traditional notion developed in Medieval Studies, following the assertions of Philippe Ariès Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Règime (1960; Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of the Family, 1962), asserted that childhood was not really a separate category for understanding human life in a full sense. A quotation such as “Henceforth it was recognized that the child was not ready for life and that he had to be subjected to a special treatment, a sort of quarantine, before he was allowed to join the adults” (Ariès 1962, 412) suggests an attitude built on an understanding of childhood during the Renaissance or early modern period which constructed childhood as a significant category for perceiving life. From the scholarly work of Barbara A. Hanawalt (1993), James A. Schultz (1995), Albrecht Classen (2005), Ruth Karras (2003), Nicholas Orme (2001), and Paul B. Newman (2007), to name just a few, childhood has been reclaimed as a category of significance for the Middle Ages. Ariès’s stridency about adults not having emotional expressiveness toward their children based on the misreading of texts was actually an important catalyst for reconsideration of what literature, historical records, conduct literature, philosophical and theological documents, and material cultural practice as revealed through archaeology could tell observers. How to read the evidence has been the source of considerable attention. Schultz does, however, still support certain aspects of the older thesis: “Middle High German [MHG] writers regard childhood as a time of deficiency that warrants little attention for its own sake. At the same time there is much evidence to support the revisionist critics of Ariès: those who challenge Ariès’s charge of parental indifference will find vocal allies in MHG parents, who are extravagant in expressing love for their children” (Schultz 1995, 19). For Schultz, then, it is important to separate children and childhood in some way. Hanawalt examines a considerable body of archival evidence, but warns historians in particular not to use evidence of the raucous behavior of adolescents, particularly court cases

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involving theft and homicide to create the images of the age category (Hanawalt 1993, 8–9). For scholars such as Classen (2005), Karras (2003), Orme (2001), and Newman (2007), literary study, informed by the work of social historians, challenges the understanding of our ability now to write a macro-history on this topic and instead provide an avenue for understanding the subtle nuances of the topic. In the midst of these newer methods of study, Shulamith Shahar, working from a psychological paradigm, finds a good deal of precedents in medieval texts for some of what we might today call a “psychological awareness” of childhood and adolescence (Shahar 1990, 1–42). Childhood in the Middle Ages was indeed a rich and varied experience depending upon geographical location, gender, social class status, disease, and time period. As Paul B. Newman observes, “adults in medieval Europe did recognize childhood as a time in which children learned and developed and that they did not treat children simply as little adults” (Newman 2007, 1). How to separate the boundaries of childhood from adolescence and adolescence from adulthood can be understood both from the perspective of biology and development as well as the social construction of roles in society. Each social class seems to have had different ideas. Shahar notes a tripartite division of ages that can serve as a basis for understanding childhood, commonly known to medieval people: birth to age seven (the infant stage), seven to fourteen or fifteen as the stage of boys and girls, and adolescents beginning around age fifteen (Shahar 1990, 28). Such a tripartite division finds literary expression in a Middle English text called The Parliament of the Three Ages. The ages of the human being are a standard topos of medieval literature.

B The Boundaries of Age How to determine the parameters of childhood was certainly a question that had a number of different answers in the Middle Ages, depending if one looks at medical sources. For those who consult medical sources, the ages of 13, 14, and 15 arise, with some discrepancy between boys and girls as markers for the onset of typical hormonal changes, but as Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) maintained, the processes for both males and females were not complete until around twenty years of age (Newman 2007, 241). Adolescence meant that marriage was now a possibility, particularly for girls, and the evidence suggest a variety of ages from 12 to 18 as normative across various segments of the class structure. At the same time, it also shows that males married later, and that in most cases married younger women, particularly if they were a part of the crafts. While modern medicine might quibble over the ages here slightly, one might

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say this understanding accords well with a modern understanding of the maturation process. Given the abundance of literature about childhood and adolescence available and the characterization of adolescence with a lack of discretion, there also seems to have been some mild awareness that mental growth was not complete during the childhood and adolescent years. In the early twentieth century, G. Stanley Hall suggested a date of 30 as the end of adolescence (Hall 1904, 1: 2–56); there is evidence that the medieval world considered adolescence lasting well into the 20s (Havinghurst and Dreyer 1975, ix). While it might be tempting to end a study of childhood at an age between 7 and 15, if the motif of protection and education are important concepts in childhood, some consideration should be given to the adolescent years. As scholars such as Karras (2003), Hanawalt (1993), and Fitzgerald (2007) have shown, there is a rich literature of instruction for the noble classes and a rich body of evidence for the life of the guilds in cities such as London and York to demonstrate “parental roles” and “guardianship” extend well into the late teens and twenties in this social class.

C Childhood and Law The world of law also attempted to define childhood with respect to punishments, if a person became involved in some kind of crime. Determining what could be termed an “age of understanding and accountability” suggests differing results as the Middle Ages progresses. The ages seven and twelve emerge in legal texts. As Edward James has noted in the Merovingian law code, “boys under twelve are protected by wergild three times that of an adult Frank, and that cutting the hair of a long-haired boy (puer criminis), or cutting the hair of a free girl, is punishable by a heavy fine” (James 2004, 12). The code distinguishes between a boy and a boy with long hair, and the consensus is that long hair indicated a free-born status (James 2004, 12). What is more intriguing is that the wergild assigned a woman who could bear children was three times that of a young girl (James 2004, 12). While drawing conclusions here would be difficult and premature, the evidence suggests a higher status for boys than girls, but understands the procreative abilities of females as a central commodity less in its future than in its present state. The protected status of childhood moved quickly to the responsible status of adolescence noted as either twelve or fifteen in various Frankish law codes (James 2004, 12). They could be officially charged with crimes and sentenced. In Anglo-Saxon England, a male was considered of age to serve on a jury at age 15 and at age 12, he was to “swear to keep the peace” (Orme 2001, 322).

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From the time of King Aethelstan (ca. 893–939) in the 10 century C.E., a male could be charged with theft of property if he were older than 12 (Orme 2001, 322). Children as early as the thirteenth century could apparently serve time in prison for homicide, whether intended or accidental (Orme 2001, 323), except for cases where the church or crown intervened. Later in the Middle Ages, the age of 14 seems to have become fixed as an age after which a person would have to bear the full weight of responsibility for a felony (Orme 2001, 324). From these diverse references across multiple centuries and countries, it seems apparent that age seven and fourteen are important in establishing the passages of childhood. Even with these clearly noted age distinctions, Orme notes that “Most people’s adulthood, in the modern sense, was postponed until much later. Noble and gentle heirs did not inherit until twenty-one, allegedly because their military duties needed greater strength and understanding. In the world of work, apprentices came out of service only in their twenties, and in that of the Church, clerks could be made priests only at twenty-four” (Orme 2001, 327). These last observations suggest just how fraught the educational process for adulthood could be and precisely how much was expected.

D Birth and Early Years No doubt the birth of a child produces feelings of happiness along with potential anxiety. Those feelings are likely transhistorical, but in the medieval world, problems existed around delivery that complicated matters more directly. Scholars differ on the actual number of infants who died in delivery or shortly after, with some theories suggesting one in three. At the same time, the number of mothers who died during delivery might range from one in ten to one in forty (Newman 2007, 20–21). While some very poor women might have delivered their children in a hospital, it seems that midwives delivered the majority, with little to no assistance from a physician. In the midst of a Christian Europe, many of these midwives were Jewish women (Shahar 1990, 33–45; Newman 2007, 10–22). Sometimes midwives performed emergency baptisms, if the infant was not expected to live. With a successful birth, godparents would likely present the infant for baptism often one week after birth, given that women had to be readmitted to the church formally after the birth of a child (Shahar 1990, 45–51; Newman 2007, 21–35). In Jewish communities, circumcision ceremonies might occur as early as eight days after birth, but more likely later, either at home or the synagogue (Newman 2007, 35–37). Depending on the economic fortunes of the family, the infant would be assigned a wet nurse, if the mother did not nurse her own child. Nursing itself might continue for up to three years for males, with a typically

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shorter period given to females (Hanawalt 1993, 58–59). The care of infants, involving such activities as bathing and swaddling, was also functional, for swaddling was seen as actually contributing to the shape of the newborn who had little shape and, of course, to keep the body warm (Shahar 1990, 83–90; Newman 2007, 62–66). As can be imagined, the period from birth to age 7, the typical end of the infancy stage, was not without its own perils. As children began to move outside the house, their potential for injury increased, and even inside the house, there was the potential for falling into the cesspits under the houses and drowning (Hanawalt 1993, 28). Medieval homes were probably less “child-proof” than modern homes. Moving outside the house, however, also provided a space to introduce children to the world of play and formal education.

E Older Childhood I Play and Education If social historians disagree on the role of conduct books and moralizing rhymes on the daily lives of children, they are united in their consideration of the place of play in the life of the child during the infant and child stages. These texts do give significant windows onto the culture of the period, so a popular one is provided below: By street or way if thou shalt go From these two tings thou keep thee fro: Neither to harm child nor beast With casting, turning west nor east (Orme 2001, 131)

On the surface, the lyric seems innocent enough, but it suggests a knowledge that children do throw things at other children or animals. In doing so, they would anger either child or animal and might pay significant consequences for the action. At the same time, the lyric builds in parental advice at a level that the advice goes with the child even when the parent is not present. That it might have been memorized is clearly possible. In a chapter devoted to childhood play, Newman notes a variety of toys made from wood and other substances, kites, balls, marbles, and dolls; and he also finds what we might now call leisure activities such as swimming, water jousting, tennis, football, wrestling, and archery (Newman 2007, 76–95; also noted in Shahar 1990, 103–05). Clearly, some of these kinds of play and instruments of play are for older children, and their ability to engage in them would have been related

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to the economic fortunes of the family. It is hardly surprising then that when children do surface in literary texts, they are often engaged in the world of play. While it is certainly easy to see the development of play connected with the improvements in technology in the Middle Ages, there is also ample evidence as Sally Crawford has shown that Anglo-Saxon (seventh–eleventh century C.E.) children had toys and games as evidenced by their appearance in burial findings (Crawford 1999, 139–45). Education certainly occupies the life of the child as well. That would certainly begin at home amidst a child’s parents and other siblings, but it would also involve more “formalized” for some. Certainly educational attainment varied a great deal, with some never learning basic literacy skills at all to those how where able to debate in Latin at the university. Where there actual expectations? At one end of the scale, Hanawalt notes that by 1478 the Goldsmiths of London would only take as an apprentice a person who could read and write, and that as much as 40 percent of the London non-clerical male population might have been able to read Latin (Hanawalt 1993, 82). Such a rate may sound astounding, and the rate would certainly not be that high in other cities or in the countryside. Orme suggests that the first “free standing schools” began in the eleventh century, and that from the early Middle Ages, education to some level would have been available at local cathedral and monastic schools (Orme 2001, 239– 41). Since there are some liturgical books that include rudimentary instruction in liturgical Latin, we may assume that there was some expectation of learning open to many, yet we are certainly not at the early modern period when we find the beginnings on more compulsory educational expectations. Chaucer’s (1343– 1400) “litel clergeon” of “The Prioress’ Tale” is seven years old and has a primer from which he is not only learning his letters, but is also learning Latin according to the tradition of paradigms, while an older student at the school is learning his Latin through singing, with only the awareness of the sense of the text. Certainly the average medieval family would never have envisioned their offspring—male offspring—as future scholars at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Bologna, or Heidelberg.

II The World of Work and Apprenticeship The lure of the city was certainly significant, and there is quite a body of evidence that social historians can point to with reference to the education of children as early as fourteen as they move into the structures of apprenticeship. As Hanawalt observes, “society in the late Middle Ages extended the period of social childhood for males well into biological puberty and proportionately raised the age of exit

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from adolescence well into biological adulthood” (Hanawalt 1993, 111; Karras 2003, 116–29). In this period of liminal time, Karras notes they were “more than boys, less than men” (Karras 2003, 129). The charge of the family providing the male or female moved to the family with whom the person contracted an apprenticeship. One size, however, does not fit all in our day or this period. Orme notes a significant division here related to the economic. In fact, Newman suggests that as much as 90 percent of the population was employed as servants in agricultural labor (Newman 2007, 170).The children of the poor thus become servants to nobles—including working on their estates—but to become an apprentice typically meant they were “young people of some status and money” (Orme 2001, 312). Work was thus multifaceted and dependent at times on social location as well as timing. An apprenticeship would last approximately seven years, and then the possibility of being admitted to the freedom of the city provided significant prospects for the future. Chaucer’s (1343–1400) “Cook’s Tale” presents an image of a young man, Perkyn Revelour, whose desire for dicing, gaming, and dancing destroy his prospects of becoming a master of the craft. The rules of the contract were quite extensive and certainly intended to curb the behaviors of the adolescent whose judgment was not well formed yet. That experience, of course, lies well beyond the consideration of childhood, but at the beginning of the experience, the earliest years were still those most closely guarded by the watchful eyes of the master and the family of the craft.

F Representation in Literature Scholarly studies of literary texts in which children are presented are not new, but a study which focuses on the manner of representation in light of a newer understanding of the social, psychological, and cultural dimensions of childhood opens up the possibility for revisionist thinking. A collection of essays that has served as a catalyst for further revision of the paradigm of Philippe Ariès is Childhood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Albrecht Classen (A. Classen, ed., 2005). Many of the essays address children as an historical issue, but for those that address literary texts some intriguing patterns emerge. Classen’s introductory essay, in addition to setting up the parameters for the new study, examines texts such as Floire and Blanchefleur, the Roman de Renart, Mai und Beaflor, Aucassin and Nicolette, the writing of Hartman von Aue (ca. 1160–ca. 1220), the Hildesbrandslied, Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376–1445), and several saints’ lives and suggests the depth of devotion to children and their education and material wellbeing across a number of centuries in French and German literature (Classen 2005, 1–65). The relationship between the Virgin Mary and the Christ child can be seen

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in a tender way through a study of Frau Ava’s (ca. 1060–1127) Leben Jesu, an early twelfth century text, by Eva Parra Membrives (Membrives 2005, 87–103). Mary Dzon’s examination of a selection of Middle English poems about Jesus reflect the care of medieval parents, perhaps somewhat heightened as in the case of Mary, but with a Jesus who possesses some childlike perversity (2005, 135–57). In Hartmann von Aue’s (ca. 1160–ca. 1220) Der arme Heinrich, David Tinsley explores the representation of a peasant girl who is willing to die in order that her lord can be saved to suggest children’s ability to understanding suffering and loss as well as triumph and altruism (Tinsley 2005, 229–46). In her study of the Old French prose Lancelot, Carol Dover demonstrates the text’s sensitive to the growth in both physical and mental ways of the young Lancelot and the special connection that develops with the fairy “mother” who raised him (Dover 2005, 247–63). Such a study of this topic in one collection cannot be exhaustive, nor can the reference summaries here. Readers are likely to find a mental awareness among these children that some might label as “precocious.” At the same time, however, these scholars have uncovered writers who have tapped into a consideration of the development of the children’s ethics. While childlike perversity and selfishness may dominate some presentations, these writers suggest how children may rise above these classifications. In the literature of the late Middle Ages in England, childhood figures prominently. In the canon of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, we find not only the young girl who accompanies the merchant’s wife in the “Shipman’s Tale,” the crying infant of the “Man of Law’s Tale” as well as those of the “Clerk’s Tale,” but also Virginia who is willing to be sacrificed by the hand of her father to avoid being corrupted by an unjust judge in the “Physician’s Tale.” In a more studied way Chaucer presents a detailed presentation of the “litel clergeon” of the “Prioress’s Tale.” The last of these is one of Chaucer’s most concentrated representation of childhood at age seven. In this tale, a seven-year old boy, the only son of a poor widow, is killed by Jews who throw the body into a “wardrobe” used as a place for waste. His desire to learn O Alma Redemptoris, a hymn in praise of the Virgin Mary, is presented as an emblem of childlike perversity and play, given that he is willing to be beaten three times in a single hour. He has forsaken the study of the grammar lesson in his primer for the grammar of song. A miracle story, “The Prioress’s Tale” suggests the value of children in society, the deep level of concern of the mother for her son who does not return home, and the profound lament of those in the monastic community who prostrate themselves on the ground in grief for the child’s death. Told as a religious act by the Prioress who describes herself as a child who has not reached one year of age, “The Prioress’s Tale” is a significant statement about medieval childhood deeply engulfed in the mire of anti-Judaism.

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As readers can imagine, a good deal of scholarship has been devoted to the anti-Semitic issue, but seen through the prism of children and childhood, the voice of the child emerges as one of playful confidence and obsession with religious devotion—even one that leads to his death, even if it is unintentional. Chaucer (1343–1400), however, complicates what appears to be a straightforward story with a reference to “Hugh of Lincoln,” who was discovered in Chaucer’s day (1343–1400) to have died through an accident rather than a murder. The pathos of this story would bring into question the assertive claims of Philippe Ariès. There are clear parallels between the Virgin Mary and Christ and the widow and her son in the tale that suggest how deeply the Marian paradigm of child care is written into the deep structures of the late Middle Ages. This widow cares about her son and the community even laments his loss. Such a loss of life of a child is also felt in Pearl, a poem of the Sir Gawain-poet (ca. 1360s). In the poem, the speaker laments the death of his daughter Pearl whose untimely death has lead him into a period of inordinate mourning. Through a series of logic-based sequences as through several exegetical moments in biblical parables, the Pearl maiden— emblematic of his soul—helps the dreamer to come to terms with the loss. Represented as the unapproachable maiden, she is included in the train of virgins of the Virgin Mary, thus reinforcing the connection between the death of a child and the place of Mary as mother to her child. What these texts taken as a ground suggest is the powerful feelings of loss and self-reflection that are produced by the loss of a child. What seem apparent is that children and their particular ways of being in the world were of value to their parents and to their society as a whole. That legal considerations were given to their ability to understanding themselves and their environment is an indication that the medieval legal system was not filled with blind unfeeling persons when it came to children and their mistakes. What also seems clear is that the material history of the period which covers the possibility of the death of children during the period of infancy and later would have bound parents and children together in a way that would be reflected in the literature when children become ill, are injured, or are orphaned. It would be wrong to conclude that the Middle Ages had a sentimental view of children and childhood in the way that the nineteenth-century Romantic period writers had about children and their understanding, growing out of a neo-Platonic vision of life. At the same time, the literature does show a level of understanding of children and others and separates them from the world of the adult, but does not render their understanding as deficient and unworthy. A balanced approach to reading the archaeological, historical, archival, theological and literary evidence is significant in re-visioning the place of children in the understanding of what it meant to be human.

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Select Bibliography Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (1960; New York 1962). Ariès, Philippe, Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Règime (Paris 1960). Classen, Albrecht, ed., Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (Berlin and New York 2005). [= A. Classen, ed., 2005] Crawford, Sally, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud 1999). Hanawalt, Barbara A., Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford and New York 1993). Karras, Ruth Mazo, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 2003). Newman, Paul B., Growing Up in the Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC, and London 2007). Orme, Nicholas, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT, and London 2001). Shahar, Shulamith, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York 1990).

Ken Mondschein

Chivalry and Knighthood A Overview The self-conception of the medieval ruling elite was that of the professional warrior. Chivalry, combining the ideas of militia (military service), chivalry (the physical skills, notably horsemanship), and courtesy (an aristocratic way of life), was the code by means of which members of this elite related to one another. It thus had very real political, social, and military repercussions. Emerging from the confluence of classical values, barbarian culture, and Christian piety, ideas of chivalry and knighthood raise issues of conduct in war, class and habitus, and problems of Christian warfare. Though its importance was somewhat downplayed by the emphasis placed on common experience by the social-historical turn of the late twentieth century, a new generation of historians is rediscovering the significance of the mentalité of chivalry and knighthood for our understanding of the Middle Ages. The business of knighthood was, after all, the business of war—“politics by other means” as Clausewitz put it—and is critical for understanding not only medieval culture, but understanding the making of modernity. Historiographical controversies abound. Many scholars have debated the reality and effect of such an idea, from Johan Huizinga calling it “an aesthetic ideal assuming the appearance of ethical ideal” and accusing its practitioners as being out of touch with reality (1919; Huizinga 1924, 58), to Malcolm Vale (1981) and Maurice Keen (1984) rehabilitating the idea, to Matthew Strickland, in his landmark War and Chivalry, arguing that, at least in the Anglo-Norman world, it was more observed in the breach than the observance (Strickland 1996). More recently, historians such as Steven Muhlberger (2002; 2005) and Richard Kaeuper (2009) have used the texts of chivalry to illustrate dynamic conversation within societies. To write on such a fraught and significance-laden subject as chivalry is no easy matter. The sources themselves are difficult to contend with: fantastic romances, anti-knightly clerical harangues, ideological tracts by knights and churchmen alike, chroniclers’ accounts that may or may not be filtered through the lenses of idealism and patronage. Added to this is the fact that the study of chivalry reaches into many categories of concern to modern historians—power structures, religious observance, gender, and violence, to name a few. My aim in this brief article is not to discuss the definition or role of the nobility (for this, see Nadia Pawelchak’s article on “Courts and Aristocracy” in this handbook), but

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rather to limit myself to the major points made in the scholarly literature and major issues in the history of chivalry and knighthood. I shall begin with a historiographical overview, then proceed to discuss secular and religious conceptions of chivalry, the transformations of the late Middle Ages, the role of tournaments and deeds of arms, regional variations, and, finally, the afterlife of chivalry in the early modern period.

B Historiography Nineteenth-century scholars saw chivalry through the lenses of both romanticism and historical positivism. While there was never any doubt as to the reality of such a code, it was seen as a figment of irrational barbarism, a symptom of the benighted feudal age from which Western civilization would need to awaken. Sir Charles Oman, for instance, called chivalry an “absurd perversion of the art of war” (Oman 1885, 125). While writers such as Scott and Hugo and painters such as Waterhouse, Leighton, and Rossetti might romanticize the days of old when knights were bold, and certainly chivalry could make for picturesque (or picaresque) literary scenes, insofar as the science of war went, a strategy based on notions of chivalry was seen as a fundamentally unsound idea. This critical perspective of the military historians was continued in a cultural vein by Johan Huizinga in his Waning of the Middle Ages (1919 Dutch: Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen; 1996 The Autumn of the Middle Ages), the Dutch historian eloquently argued that late medieval society was a time of decadence and decline. Whereas the high Middle Ages had been a time of high culture and ideals made manifest, by the fourteenth century the eloquent language of chivalry and courtly love was a fair skin concealing a rotten core. In many ways, the sense of decay and the worthlessness of norms found in Huizinga is typical of post-World War I thinkers such as Spengler; Huizinga participated in Hegel’s idealistic impulses, but the dominant theme in his narrative is decline, not progress. While Huizinga’s pessimism was echoed by Kilgour in his Decline of Chivalry (Kilgour 1937) and Ferguson’s The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Ferguson 1960), Malcolm Vale, in his War and Chivalry (Vale 1981), and Jean Flori, in his L’idéologie du glaive (Flori 1983) did a great deal to rehabilitate the idea of chivalry. Not only does the idea of jus in bello seem to be a human universal (even if one more honored in the breach than the observance), but chivalric orders were integral to the development of the state. Similarly, for Maurice Keen in his seminal monograph Chivalry (Keen 1984), chivalry was not only the self-conception of the elite, and thus valuable to study in its own right, but a means through which Christian ethics could be absorbed into society at large. Amongst its legacies was

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that it provided the currency for an economy of honor. For Vale, Flori, and Keen, chivalry was something real, meaningful, and valuable to later ages. Matthew Strickland (1996, 19), looking at “chivalry” as overwhelmingly something that happens on the battlefield, has questioned Huizinga’s assumption of a golden age. While not disputing the essential utility of a code of chivalry, Strickland argued that the pragmatic and often savage actions wartime of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy rendered it a code more honored in the breach than the observance: “The tensions between ideals of conduct and actual behavior in war itself were present ab initio in the Anglo-Norman period, if not indeed existing as a universal paradox within the culture of any warrior aristocracy.” More recent historians have sought to resolve contradictions by looking more closely at the ideology and internal logic of chivalry. In his several works, Steven Muhlberger (2002; 2005; 2012; 2014) has examined tournaments and deeds of arms as activities integral to the identity and performance of the medieval elite. Malcolm Vale has identified the lordly court as the locus of advancement as one of the reasons behind the growth of courtesy (Vale 2001), while C. Stephen Jaeger has identified its origins with neo-classical virtues in tenth-century German episcopal courts (Jaeger 1985). For his part, Richard Kaeuper has stressed the knights’ own role in recognizing and debating the various paradoxes that so concern modern historians (Kaeuper 1999a) including the religious ideology of chivalry (Kaeuper 2009). In his forthcoming Medieval Chivalry, Kaeuper will provide a capstone to his work by emphasizing the practicality of chivalry for its practitioners and how it affected, and was affected by, the emerging ideals and institutions of modernity (Kaeuper, forthcoming).

C Secular and Sacred Chivalry Secular Chivalry Knighthood emerged from the disorder of the post-Carolingian world. In the tenth century, Europe was in a state of anarchy: There was no central authority, but rather local powers claiming legitimacy by building fortresses in a process known as encastellation. Magnates, exercising “bad lordship,” oppressed, extorted, and bullied the peasantry. Underlying this was an economic malaise and endemic violence and feuding between the various local powers. The manner in which these magnates and their followers fought, as the word for “knight” in most European vernaculars reveals, was as mounted warriors. This was the Frankish way of war, developed in the Carolingian era (see “Weapons, Warfare, Siege Machinery, and Training in Arms” in this handbook). (It is worth mentioning here

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that we are speaking of the Anglo-French conception of chivalry, which we will take as the normative one.) In its most basic form, we can see the emergence of a code of chivalry as a series of rational choice decisions amongst the members of this fighting elite: If you spare my life today, my people will spare yours tomorrow; you can profit from capturing me, if you trust me to ransom myself. Likewise, in civil life, the feudal relationship of vassal to lord was essentially one of service. This included personal service, such as carving at table and pouring wine. In time, this courtesy (“how one behaves at court”) became an elaborate code of behavior specifying the ideal behavior of the knight to all he might encounter, friend or foe—the habitus of the ruling class. Chivalry was, in other words, the self-conception of the Frankish warrior-elite. To be a miles was not just the profession of soldiering, but part of ruling-class identity. Thus, while not all knights were high nobles, high nobles thought of themselves as knights. However, to take such a reductionist view would be to ignore the ethical and religious qualities of chivalry. The Transformation of the Year 1000 resulted from a conflux of factors ranging from agricultural innovation to the institution of primogeniture to the reform of the Church. For our purposes, the crucial element in this cultural revival was the Peace of God—the assertion of moral authority by ecclesiastical leaders, the condemnation of internecine war between Christians, and the insistence on the idea that the rights of the Church and of non-combatants should be respected (Landes and Head, 1992; Contamine 1987, 270–77). Not only was the Christianization of the miles a crucial step in the transformation from “soldiers” to “knights,” but it introduced the idea that the life of the militia could be a sanctified one. Chivalric ideology became intimately bound up with religious service, and fighting could become a path to salvation. So successful was this that by 1096, Urban II could issue a call for the European nobility and have it received with mass enthusiasm.

D Knighthood in Christian Society The discourse of chivalry existed in dynamic relation with other social symbolic discourses, especially those of the Church. Richard Kaeuper (2009), in his Holy Warriors, takes a broad synthetic overview of the religious ideology of secular chivalry, examining how knights appropriated symbols, rituals, and forms of practice; accepted those ideologies and rituals laid out for them by churchmen; and invented their own meanings. In short, they exhibited considerable creativity in formulating an ideology and set of symbols meaningful and useful to their profession. Chivalry could become a form of lay independence, a way to appro-

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priate and establish norms of belief and practice independent from the Church. Such analysis brings the study of chivalry into the broad historiography of the roots of the Reformation and thus, of modernity. While many of the aspects of this mentality, such as toughness, a taste for the rigors of the campaign, and a disdain for luxury are to be expected, knighthood also developed its own ceremonies and symbolism similar to those of the priesthood. This can be seen in the late thirteenth-century Rationale divinorum officiorum (Order of the Divine Office) of Guillaume Durand, Bishop of Metz; the anonymous thirteenth-century L’Ordène de Chevalerie (The Order of Chivalry) and an allegorical painting in Harleian MS 3244 discussed by Richard Kaeuper (Kaeuper 2009, 1–5); the Catalan mystic and polymath Ramon Llull’s early fourteenthcentury Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria (Book on the Order of Chivalry); the Livre de chevalerie (Book of Chivalry), and Demands pour la joute, les tournois, et la guerre (Questions on the Joust, Tournaments, and War) of the French knight Geoffroi de Charny (ca. 1300–1356); and Christine de Pizan’s early fifteenth-century Fais d’armes et de chevalerie (Deeds of Arms and Chivalry). These works share a common interest in the elements of the knightly panoply, and, through these symbols, the virtues of the knight. Though the symbols often vary between sources, what we find in common amongst all is that there is something sacramental about being dubbed, akin to the sacrament of ordination, and the knight’s equipment participates in this. The candidate stands vigil, he is cleansed physically and spiritually, and he is girded with a two-edged sword to administer justice and a white belt for chastity. This, of course, is chastity within lawful marriage: Medieval writers were concerned about how nobility is passed on through the generations (Keen 1984, 158–60), and Geoffroi de Charny even called marriage, that sacrament so key to maintaining the secular world and continuing a lineage, an “order.” This, in some ways, foreshadows Reformation thought and gives us an additional example of the independence lay piety in the Middle Ages. The writings of these various authors also give us a further anatomy of ideology. From them, it is apparent that a set of knightly virtues arose not in opposition to, but in dynamic conversation with, those espoused by theologians. Virtues such as courage, fortitude, and prowess, or skill at arms, are of course to be expected amongst military men. Others were aimed at constructing social difference: Largesse was magnanimity of spirit, the willingness to sacrifice not just one’s body, but one’s substance, which we can contrast with the ideology of an elite of commerce. Courtesy was not just etiquette, but literally the culture of the court—the habitus of the ruling class. Good counsel, which a vassal owes to his lord, was often considered as a virtue. This is shown in the concept of the preudhomme, which may be translated

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literally as “a trustworthy man” or “man of judgment,” but which carried the connotation of knightliness. This, as the name implies, had as much a connotation of behavior as of lifestyle: “Car grant difference disoit estre entre preuhomme et preudhomme,” as Jean de Joinville has St. Louis put it—“there is a great difference between a preuhomme [man of judgment] and preudhomme [warrior].” Finally, there was the rather diffuse virtue known as franchise—literally, to act as a free man (the term for which is, interestingly, etymologically derived from the “Frank”). This was not just the idea of political enfranchisement—in other words, lordship—but also that which was concomitant with it—the right to administer justice and the right to lawful violence. Ultimately, in Scholastic legal theory, this was derived from the prince. In other words, to wield the secular sword was to exercise franchise—but this was more than an office, an entire way of being that encompassed an idea of gravitas. Thus, a single term encompassed both classical ideas of the state—for the knight, in theory, serves a prince—and Germanic warrior-culture.

E The Military Orders The military orders were perhaps the most explicit linking of Christianity and violence. These were, in the most general terms, monastic orders of knights and their retainers founded to aid in the defense of the Holy Land. Though the Crusader states were definitively lost by the late thirteenth century, military orders figured large in the Baltic Crusades of the later Middle Ages and in the struggle against Ottoman dominance of the Mediterranean in the early modern era. The first of these orders to be founded, the Hospitallers (also called the Knights of St. John) actually began in the 1020s, before the First Crusade, in order to provide aid to sick and injured pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land. Prominent early orders included the Order of St. James of Altopascio, which may have been the first order to have a military wing; the Spanish Order of Santiago, and the Teutonic Knights. The Templars, founded by Hugues de Payens, originated ca. 1120. At the time, Bernard of Clairvaux was preaching a militia Christi to aid the Holy Land, and the idea quickly gained popularity. The Rule of the Templars, attributed to Hughes and Bernard, was confirmed in 1129, and firmly established the knight-monks as a disciplined group of soldiery. The loss of the Holy Land weakened the rationale for the Knights Templar and, combined with the inordinate wealth the order had acquired, contributed to the rationale for their dissolution in 1312. The Crusading orders were marked by their discipline, but more importantly, they prominently linked military service and service to God. The Christianization

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of the milites was complete: Fighting on behalf of the Church could be seen as meritorious and even a path to salvation.

F Transformations of the Later Middle Ages By the end of the fourteenth century, the diffuse lower limit of who belonged to the chivalric class had become a subject of contention. The realities of the Hundred Years’ War meant that thousands of armed men claimed the right to lawful violence and a successful soldier could assemble all of the accouterments of knighthood, from armor to horses to followers. Likewise, the Black Death enabled unprecedented social mobility while imperiling the landed class as the price of grain plummeted, with a corresponding reduction of income from estates. Much of the discussion hinged on idea the gentilhomme—that is, someone who literally came from gens, “people” but having the connotation of “good family.” This amorphous boundary was a zone of anxiety; the general understanding was that, much as with the Paston family of Norfolk, only the passing of generations could distinguish nobility from common ancestry (see “Time and Timekeeping” in this handbook). It is also true, as Contamine points out, that a certain stratification took place in England between the high nobility and what would become the “gentility” such that an earl would be insulted to be called a mere gentilhomme, whereas in France, to be gentilhomme was unquestionably part of the noblesse and thus was regarded as having more in common with a count or baron than this English counterpart (Contamine, 1987). A gen d’armes (man at arms), even if not a knight, if properly and lawfully clad in full armor, was fit to contest with even a king on the field of battle. Yet, in civil life, we also see the lowest rungs of the noblesse—those who could only be called gentilhommes in France, and, later, the hidalgos or “sons of someone” in Spain—regarded as almost a parody of knightliness, poor country cousins desperately holding onto claims of status that, from the point of view of the true grandees, were all but imaginary. It is also in the late Middle Ages that we begin to see, in association with the consolidation of modern states, high chivalric orders come into being. Notable early orders include the Garter in England (1348) and the Star in France (1352), though most, such as the Order of the Golden Fleece in Burgundy (1430) and the Order of St. Michael in France (1469), are fifteenth century. The goals of these orders were rooted in politics—to tie the high nobility to the monarch, and to bind him, in turn, to them in mutual obligation (Vale 1981). The Duke of Burgundy, for instance, had to consult with the members of the Order of the Golden Fleece before going to war. We can thus recognize in them a step toward the creation of the nation-state and parliamentary government.

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G The Role of Tournaments and Deeds of Arms The origins of the tournament likely lie in late Roman military exercises, filtered through Carolingian military drill. By the eleventh century, it had taken the form of nominally friendly battles that nonetheless ranged over hill and dale and often employed archers and foot soldiers. These rough-and-tumble events strongly shaded into internecine war and drew condemnation from the Church and secular rulers alike. The tournament was also a useful way to gather together the notables of the land, and thus politically expedient. In time, these activities became more regulated, with accepted rules and often an emphasis on state-theater, such as in the round tables held by Edward I and his grandson Edward III. Conversely, the earls who murdered Edward II’s favorite Piers Gaveston used the pretense of a tournament to organize their forces. As prizes were awarded and other participants could be captured for ransom, tournaments were also a path to upward mobility: William Marshal began his career as a successful veteran of the tournament circuit. In addition to politics, personal aggrandizement, and, of course, combat training, such events were also an opportunity to evaluate horses under the stresses of combat and exchange equine breeding stock. Besides the political and economic uses of tournaments, an argument can be made that tournaments helped to define class and gender difference. Participation in a tournament—or one’s ancestors having done so—was prima facie evidence of nobility and of the right to bear a coat of arms. Ruth Mazo Karras, in her From Boys to Men (2002, 21–66), discusses the performative aspect of the tournament: In a sense, one only becomes male under the gaze of others, displaying prowess—skill at arms—in front of both men and women. Combat-by-convention transformed along with the anxieties and needs of the knightly class. The early-to mid-fourteenth century tournament as described by Geffroi de Charny in the early fourteenth century was still primarily a mêlée, albeit one that had become civilized, with defined boundaries and rules. However, Froissart, in his late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century Chronicles, concentrates more on “deeds of arms” which took the place of individual combat, interspersing scenes of the destruction of society—the realities of war—with its reaffirmation, that is, men-at-arms meeting in idealized combat. These encounters were quite different from tournaments proper. They could be conducted with sharp weapons and were often more antagonistic than agonistic, taking on more the character of judicial duels, or, as with the Combat of the Thirty in 1351, Homeric contests of champions. Others, such as the St. Inglevert Jousts of 1390, were troublesome to royal authority, but helped to reassure both the participants and audience (both first- and second-

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hand) of their common social status despite the reality of war between their kingdoms. Because they were so troublesome to royal authority—for the issuing of challenges to the English without royal permission bordered on lèse majesté—the obvious solution was to put them under royal control, with Charles VI paying the expenses from his own pocket. Thus began the royal, centralized sponsorship of tournaments that would become the norm over the next two centuries. Normative writings on chivalry also give us insights into the elite concept of jus in bello and an elite concept of war as, ideally, a sort of grand (if potentially lethal) tournament with expected norms. Charny, in his Questions Concerning the Joust, Tournaments, and War (Muhlberger 2002; 2014), is very much concerned with how knights should conduct themselves in the liminal regions of expected behavior, offering questions, but no answers, to his reader. The central issue in his questions on the tournament and jousting is interpreting the rules of the tournament to determine “who gets the horse?,” while many of his questions on war center on when, and if, someone has broken their word. This at first seems at odd with the Vegetian nature of fourteenth-century warfare (see my article on “Weapons, Warfare, Siege Machinery, and Training in Arms” in this handbook). However, it was a way of negotiating between the realities of war and the ordained structure of medieval society. In the same way as the deeds of arms of the fourteenth century resolved the disorder of the Hundred Years’ War, we can see the class anxiety of the fifteenth century played out in tournaments. Jousting, with its greater emphasis on individual performance and display, began to replace mêlée, though this latter form continued to be popular—most famously, in the ca. 1460 tournament book of René of Anjou (1409–1480), who also specifies that if anyone who is not of unimpeachably gentle descent comes to be lightly beaten by the great princes as a sort of ritual welcoming into the company. The Burgundian court was particularly famous for its theatrical, allegorical pas d’armes. This form of deed of arms, sprung from the custom of a knight holding a bridge or gate against all comers, is attested as early as the eleventh century and probably has Germanic roots. In the fifteenth century, such deeds took on the form of state theater—though the combat was no less real or intense. Noel Fallows, in his excellent Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia (2010), gives a detailed description of expected behavior in similar events in fifteenth-century Iberia. Jousting manuals detailed all elements of comportment, from the manner of riding to the quality and type of armor used to the handling of the lance. By the fifteenth century, the tournament may thus be called a “martial performance”: a means of demonstrating, through learned gesture, acquired taste, and carefully practiced skill, one’s class and status.

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René’s sumptuous book detailing plans for a tournament that was probably never actually held, also shows the decreasing role of and increasingly dependent nobility, from sponsor of tournaments to arbiter of taste. From the other end of the social scale, burghers and others whose estates were rising were also becoming increasingly interested in the tournament and martial performance. Early civic jousts are ill-attested, but probably took place in the Low Countries by the thirteenth century. By the later Middle Ages, fencing schools were flourishing, jousts and civic festivals were commonly held in Italian town squares, and several German cities kept jousting equipment for loan to the sons of the burghers in the municipal armory. One early sixteenth-century jouster, Walther Marx of Donauwörth, Bavaria (1456–1511), even made light of his humble origins by bearing a helmet crest of three sausages on a spike.

H Regional Variations of Chivalry The preceding passages referred to the Anglo-French understanding of knighthood and chivalry. This was not, however, the only understanding of the concept, though a case might be made that, as they were a Frankish ideas, they were the normative one. Nonetheless, substantive variations of ideas of chivalry and knighthood existed in other parts of Western Europe.

I Chivalry in the Germanic World The institution of knighthood was different in German-speaking lands. As nobles were not inclined to take service under other nobles, a class of ministeriales, or unfree knights, arose in the eleventh century. Such status was passed on in matrilineal line. These knights could perform valuable administrative tasks, including holding castles, judgeships, and stewardships, could enjoy high social rank, and even had vassals of their own. Others found themselves in dire financial straits and even reduced to banditry. Yet, these ministeriales all shared common legal status: They were unfree, not able to marry without their lords’ consent, nor, in theory to pass on their holdings to their spouses and heirs. This last, of course, was not universal, and ministeriales could and did enjoy both heritable fiefs and social mobility. Since holding castles and performing a knight’s military role meant having access to considerable wealth, the status and lifestyle of this group tended toward that of the nobility of the rest of Europe, and their unfree status tended to serve the purpose of binding them to their liege lords (Arnold 1985).

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By the fourteenth century, this class had come under two types of stress: the contraction of the manorial economy, which further bifurcated the divide between rich and poor knights, and the consolidation of what Arnold calls “more state-like territorial lordships” (Arnold 1985, 252). Further, the ties of personal unfreedom had become legally outmoded. Arnold, who interprets the ministeriales in the light of classical feudal models and state-formation, holds that those who survived the crisis formed the basis for the Freiherren who “carried over the ministeriales’ tradition of military and administrative service into the princely territories and states of early modern and more recent times” (Arnold 1985, 253).

II Chivalry and Chivalric Performance in Italy Knighthood in Italy was a more malleable idea than in northern Europe, as a semipermeable membrane existed between those born to the purple of commerce and those risen from the ranks of the aristocracy. This was complicated by the omnipresence of successful mercenaries, favored bastards, nobility exiled in internecine conflict, occasional imperial grand tours, and burghers placed in charge of communes and endowed with landed estates. As William Caferro points out, in the late fourteenth century the term “sir” could equally be applied to the English mercenary John Hawkwood (ca. 1320–1394); Ambrogio Visconti (1344– 1373), bastard son of the ruler of Milan; and Francesco Carmagnola (1380–1432), son of a cowherd (Caferro 2006, 9). Political events such as the Ciompi revolt of 1378 were likewise accompanied by frenzies of knight-making. Many of these “knights” were highly unmartial: The fourteenth-century writer Franco Sachetti (ca. 1335–ca. 1400) tells a comic story of a meek knight who is chosen podestà of Padua and, to make himself seem more impressive, has a crest of a ferocious bear made for his helmet. On his journey to the city he has been elected to govern, he encounters a gigantic and bellicose German knight who happens to carry the same crest of a bear. Rather than fight, the Italian knight sells his crest at a profit, and each man departs thinking he got the better of the bargain. Leonardo Bruni, in his De Militia (1440), called for a reform of knighthood and cast it in a return to classical values. The knight, in this humanist rendition, was the defender of the city-state or body politic. But, in fact, most of the performance of chivalry in Italy took in a conventional form: the splendid pageants of the d’Este and Visconti were echoed by Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492), and Italian knights such as Galeazzo da Mantova (d. 1406) took part in deeds of arms with no less gusto than their northern counterparts. And, while the elite of the communes liked to imagine themselves as chivalric warriors, mercenaries, including both scions of noble houses and those of lesser birth, ruled the battlefield.

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I Chivalry in Literature The subject of chivalry in literature, and the chivalric romance, is far too vast a subject to give a proper account here (see the contribution to this handbook by Cristian Bratu on “Literature”). Chivalry and chivalric themes can be found in all genres of medieval literature: history, poetic epics, didactic works, satire, travel accounts, etc. Certain characters occur and reoccur over the centuries, altered, from the Chanson de Roland at the very beginning of the formation of the chivalric ethos to Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (published in 1495) and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516–32), written to flatter Renaissance despots. Biblical heroes such as David were recast in a chivalric light as the Nine Worthies. Most famous, of course, is Arthur, King of the Britons, who went from a reference in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fanciful twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae, to Chrétien de Troyes’s romances a generation later. In his train we find agglutinated other characters, such as Lancelot and Gawain, Catalan stories of the Grail, and Provençal ideas of courtly love. The German tradition of Minnesang (“love-songs”) began in the late twelfth century and is best exemplified by works dated from that century such as the poems and verse narratives of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Hartmann von Aue. Though the Minnesänger were clearly influenced by the Provençal troubadours and northern French trouvères, the minnelieder were clearly designed for a court milieu, matching the importance of courts as centers for social advancement east of the Rhine (see Albrecht Classen’s contribution on “Love, Sex, and Marriage”). Similarly, in the late fifteenth century, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur reflects the anxieties of the chivalric class in the rapidly changing early modern era. In short, what we can say for the Matter of Britain is what we can say for chivalric literature in general: It bears the imprint of its times.

J The Sixteenth Century and After Most authorities see the decline of chivalry as brought by the military revolution and the increasing emphasis on large, state-sponsored infantry armies (Keen 1984). The economic, social, and military justification for the knight was ended; his modern descendent is the military officer. As for the performance of social role at sword’s point, factional conflicts and the desire to prove oneself with arms were channeled into the private duel (Anglo 2001, Neumann 2010). Even as ritualized tournaments became sundered from military realities during the course of the fifteenth century, private quarrels became matters carried out in shirtsleeves, decried by traditionalists such as the fencing master Pietro Monte in 1509

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as fit for “pimps, blasphemers, and shopkeepers” (Anglo 1989, 266). The private civilian duel, not requiring a field granted by the ruler, became firmly established by the Chataigneraie-Jarnac debacle in 1547 and the condemnation of the Council of Trent in its twenty-fourth session. Nonetheless, concepts of knighthood and chivalry remained important to early modern statecraft, and jousts became a de rigueur state ritual. Elizabeth I’s (r. 1558–1603) official program of propaganda included the Accession Day jousts and other chivalric spectacles in which the nobility vied for her favor, as well as literature such as Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the works of Philip Sidney. In ancien régime France, equestrian carousels, jousts, and other state theater had distinct chivalric overtones (van Orden 2004). In Italy, such efforts were attempts by regional princely rulers to bolster their images even as they became increasingly marginalized. For instance, in the 1560s Alfonso II d’Este attempted—disastrously—to imitate the French show-tournaments in order to improve the status of his regime and city (Marcigliano 2003). Likewise, Cervantes’s picaresque humor in Don Quixote relies on his readers’ familiarity with tropes of chivalric literature. Long after the armored knight lost his place of honor on the battlefield (if he ever held it—see my article in this handbook, “Weapons, Warfare, Siege Machinery, and Training in Arms”), chivalry as an ideology and a cultural touchstone remained very much alive in Europe.

Select Bibliography Huizinga, Johan, Waning of the Middle Ages (1919; Chicago, IL, 1997). Kaeuper, Richard W., Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia, PA, 2009). Kaeuper, Richard W., Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford 1999). [= Kaeuper 1999a] Keen, Maurice, Chivalry (New Haven, CT, 1984). Muhlberger, Steven, Charny’s Men-at-Arms: Questions Concerning the Joust, Tournaments, and War (Wheaton, IL, 2014). Muhlberger, Steven, Royal Jousts at the End of the Fourteenth Century (Wheaton, IL, 2012). Muhlberger, Steven, Deeds of Arms (Highland Park, TX, 2005). Muhlberger, Steven, Jousts and Tournaments: Charny and Chivalric Sport in 14th Century France (Highland Park, TX, 2002). Oman, Charles, The Art of War in the Middle Ages (London 1885). Strickland, Matthew, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217 (Cambridge 1996). Vale, Malcolm, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe (1270–1380) (Oxford and New York 2001). Vale, Malcolm, War and Chivalry (Athens, GA, 1981).

Linda Rouillard

Church and the Clergy There are many ways to analyze and categorize a society: by gender, occupation, civil status, region, social class, literacy, wealth, education, political association, and so forth. How did the medievals themselves categorize members of their own communities? In the late classical period, St. Augustine (354–430), for instance, classified people according to their status as being married, celibate, or as clerics (Reynolds 2001, xvii). Adalberon, Bishop of Laon (d. 1030), divided the world into categories of those who pray, those who fight, and those who work, or the religious, the knights, and the laborers, a division maintained by his contemporary Gerard of Cambrai (ca. 975–1051) (Duby 1977, 88–89). This article is specifically devoted to those members of medieval society who prayed, that is members of what we call the clerical culture. While some definitions of the term “clergy” range from the learned clerks of minor orders to men who have been ordained priests, other definitions of the term also include women who have taken formal religious vows as nuns. This article considers medieval clergy in the wider sense and will discuss specifically the culture and lifestyle of both medieval religious men and women in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. While clerics such as Abbot Alcuin of York (735–804) and Bishop Jonas of Orléans (d. 843) certainly saw the clergy and the laity as two distinct classes of people, they nonetheless saw much commonality between the two ways of life, namely in the call to live a virtuous life pleasing to God (Romig 2010, 42–43). Of course, there were tensions between secular and ecclesiastical leaders, but numerous also were the internal tensions of clerical culture, for hierarchy, authority, and prestige are certainly issues within the Church as well. We find instances of conflict up and down the different levels of clerical positions: bishop against bishop, pope over bishops, English or French Church versus the pontiff, mendicant friars against secular clergy, abbots against bishops, and so forth (Nelson 2001, 578–82; Burns 2001, 539). Boniface the VIII (1235–1303) in his 1302 bull Unam sanctam made his opinion clear: everyone who expected to be saved was to acknowledge the supreme authority of the pope (Burns 2001, 542). In the last quarter of the fourteenth century during the period of the Great Schism, the question then became: which pope was supreme–Urban VI or Clement VII? The evolution of the church is a sweeping saga: from isolated groups of Christians in the first centuries, to persecution, to tolerated religion, to state religion, the Christian Church of the Middle Ages drew on its Roman legacy in the development of canon law and in its elevation of a pope reminiscent of Roman monarchs and emperors (Southern 1970, 25; Kantorowicz 1997, 19). Medieval

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iconography depicted these blurry lines between secular power and ecclesiastical authority. For instance, the crucified Christ with an emperor’s crown was typical of certain Romanesque crucifixes, referred to as Volto santo. By the same token, secular powers were often depicted with divine characteristics. For instance, a miniature in the Aachen Gospels (ca. 975), a product of the Abbey of Reichenau, depicts the Emperor Otto II with divine iconographic motifs: the encapsulating mandorla or halo, and the hand of God above the Emperor (Kantorowicz 1997, 61–78).

A Clerical and Secular Conflicts This clerical imitation of a Roman secular society set the stage for subsequent ambiguity, tension and conflict. Secular rulers implicated themselves in certain types of spiritual appointments: from naming priests to their resident churches, to participating in consecrations of bishops with the symbolic gift of the staff and ring, powerful laity were often seen by the Church as too active in clerical affairs. Spiritual leaders who received material possessions and political authority from powerful laity were thus beholden to their benefactors (Logan 2002, 113–15). The Church, in its turn, however, could dominate secular powers by imposing excommunication on recalcitrant or overly ambitious rulers, effectively withholding sacraments from everyone of every class in that kingdom, or by supporting a lay ruler’s adversary (Southern 1970, 20). For instance, in 1075, when King Henry IV of Germany (1050–1108) attempted to assert his royal authority in the question of appointments of bishops, Pope Gregory the VII (d. 1085) responded with an excommunication of Henry and a declaration that the German people were no longer subject to the monarch. Henry responded by refusing to recognize Gregory as Pope. In 1077, Henry reversed his position and humbly begged for and received forgiveness from the Pope, who then promptly supported Henry’s opponent Rudolph of Swabia. Henry then turned on Pope Gregory once more, and drove him out of Rome, named a new pope and declared himself now to be emperor (Logan 2002, 113–15). In short, the relationship between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII exemplifies the potential for perpetual conflict when lay rulers were involved in spiritual appointments, and when the clergy were beholden to the laity for material wealth and authority.

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B Secular Clergy Medieval male clerical cultures were divided into secular clergy and regular clergy, the former designating men who lived with and served the public in parishes, and the latter designating men and women who lived according to monastic rules (regulae) in abbeys set off from public life for the most part. Secular clergy was then organized into a regular canonry or Canons Regular, made up of ordained priests bound by the Rule of St. Augustine, such as the Victorines whose order survived from the twelfth century to the end of the eighteenth century; and secular canonry or Canons Secular, made up of priests who were not organized around any rule in particular (Logan 2002, 137; 142). Canons regular were responsible for collegiate churches and cathedrals. Secular canons lived together in a household, sometimes under a bishop’s watchful eye, as they carried out their pastoral duties or even missionary functions (Lynch 1992, 209– 10; Logan 2002, 79). In contrast to regular clergy who lived cloistered lives according to extensive rules or regulae, secular priests lived and ministered in parishes and were responsible for the spiritual welfare and instruction of their congregations. Parish priests said mass, administered sacraments and preached the gospel. John Capgrave (1393–1464) presented St. Gilbert of Sempringham (d. 1189) as an ideal pastoral example: learned, gracious, Gilbert’s parishioners were said to be distinctive and recognizable, since “he had taught them so well to bow their backs and their knees to God, and so devoutly to say their beads” (Ross, McLaughlin 1949, 75). Vicars and chaplains, while ordained priests, typically did not have their own assignments or benefices (salary), but rather were subject to a rector (not necessarily a priest) who was beneficed and responsible for a particular parish church (Thibodeaux 2010, 144–52). Guibert of Nogent (ca. 1055–1124) described a plan to procure a prebend or a benefice for him through his brother who was owed money by a nobleman. It was hoped that the said nobleman might be convinced to give Guibert a canonry appointment in lieu of payment. Guibert would have been about 12 years old at the time and obviously not even an ordained priest (Benton 1984, 51). A cousin of Guibert, also owed money by the same nobleman, attempted to procure the same canonry for him as well; finally, Guibert’s mother found another position for him with fewer complications (McAlhany 2011, 18–20).

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C Clerical Orders In addition, male clerical culture was also divided into minor and major orders leading up to ordination and priesthood. Members of all these categories, minor and major orders, were considered to be clerks. Within the category of minor orders were the positions of porter in charge of church doors; lector who performed some of the readings for the services; exorcist who helped with ceremonial blessings and the casting out of demons; and acolyte who was allowed near the altar (Thibodeaux 2010, 142). Within the major orders were subdeacon, deacon, priest (presbyter), and finally bishop who controlled his diocese (a collection of parishes), a designated region subject to his authority and decisions. It must be added, though, that land owners and villagers sometimes constructed their own churches, independent of the bishop, as were any moneys raised in that church (Lynch 1992, 14; 38–39). Clerics at any level, or from any category were subject to the laws and courts of the Church, but were not subject to secular laws and courts, a decided perk since Church courts did not use the death penalty. Physical violence aimed at members of the clergy entailed immediate excommunication, which must have provided a modicum of protection from rowdy laity (D’Avray 2005, 157; Logan 2002, 166). Additionally, clerical property was exempt from taxes imposed by secular rulers (Southern 1970, 39). Abbots sometimes even saved criminals from secular punishment if they entered religious orders (Speed 1997, 69).

D Regular Clergy Monks were members of the regular clergy. Early monastics of the fourth and fifth centuries were comprised of isolated hermits as well as coenobites, or monks who lived together in communities. Initially, these individuals and groups were selfdirected, though bishops eventually asserted their authority over such initiatives. Monks were not necessarily ordained priests, though the abbot typically was and hence was able to administer the sacraments to the faithful, monks and laity included. By the twelfth century, monks were more frequently ordained as priests (Brooke 2003, 106–07). Medieval female religious culture had functional designations, if not quite as stratified a hierarchy as in male clerical houses. At the head of the convent or monastery was the prioress, or abbess who exercised administrative authority over activities and monastic properties. Other offices included the infirmaress, cellaress, wool-mistress, and the porteress as described by Caesarius of Arles’ Rule (cited in Amt 1993, 226). One category of abbess was that of canoness with such

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privileges as the right to own property, if not administer it, and the right to baptize women. Lest we be too quick to assume the continual and complete subjugation of nuns to priests and monks, we should remember the Benedictine canoness Hrosvita of Gandersheim (b. ca. 930), who said of her own abbess: “The authority of the abbess was supreme; she had her own court; she sent her own men-at-arms into the field; she coined her own money” (Allen 1985, 254). Of course the abbess in question, Gerberga (940–1002), was a noble woman with powerful family members and material resources at her disposal; but, nonetheless, as an abbess, she still exerted a formidable authority both within and without her abbey (Bodarwe 2006, 1–4). Monastic daily life was regulated by the Divine Office, though secular clergy also followed to a degree this division of time. The Divine Office divided the day into matins (which occurred in the middle of the night), lauds (shortly after matins), prime (at approximately 6am), terce (approximately 9am), sext (noon), none (3pm), vespers (late afternoon) and compline (evening) with accompanying prayers, assigned psalms, readings and hymns, in addition to daily mass and meditation (see also the contribution to this Handbook on “Time and Timekeeping” by Mondschein and Casey). In addition, in the segregated space of the monastery, monks relied on the product of their own labors, making manual work a foundation of daily life (Burton and Kerr 2001, 107). Benedictine monks spent a great portion of the day in silence, relying on sign language for basic communication (Brooke 2003, 72). The Custumal of Syon Monastery (n.d.) includes some of the following signs that enabled monks to observe silence and yet communicate their needs when asking for the following: “Book—Wag and move the right hand, as if turning the leaves of a book. Drink— Bend the right forefinger and put it on the lower lip. Fish—Wag the hand sideways, in the manner of a fish tail. Mustard—Hold the nose in the upper part of the right fist and rub it. Text—Kiss the back of the left hand and cross the breast with the right thumb” (cited in Speed 1997, 81). Monasteries were often known for their bibliographic collections; Saint Gall, for instance, established in the seventh century, was celebrated for its exemplary compendium. And indeed, one of the daily tasks of monks was typically manuscript production; abbeys played a major role in the translation, transmission and preservation of classic texts, both religious and secular, for clerical and lay use, as exemplified by Cassiodorus in the Italian monastary of Vivarium (Brooke 2001, 52–53). Examples of some of the more spectacular monastic manuscripts are the late seventh-century Lindisfarne Gospels (British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV) copied and translated into Old English by the monk Eadfrith from Northumbria; the Irish Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin MS 58), another gospel manuscript with luxurious illustrations and decorations, dated from the late eighth century.

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Nuns were equally prolific and celebrated for their manuscript production with dedicated scriptoria in their convents. The Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480–547), adapted in large part from the Rule of the Master, dates from about 530 and is the foundational text for Benedictine monasteries; it centers on opus dei or works of God, as well as on vows of poverty, obedience and chastity (Logan 2002, 20; Brooke 2003, 48; Lynch 1992, 32). It is important to note that Benedict envisaged monks as individuals engaged in constant regular prayer and religious reading, and as also responsible for their own material sustenance (Lynch 1992, 32), though monastic houses often accumulated great wealth and demonstrated considerable business affinity (Burton and Kerr 2001, 169). His directives included the stipulation that the monks choose their own abbot and also allowed for oblates. Benedictine monks were sometimes referred to as the black monks for the color of their habits (Lynch 1992, 199). The Benedictine Order, begun at the monastery of Monte Cassino, was the main player for about six centuries and also had women followers. St. Benedict’s sister, Scholastica (ca. 480–542), observed the Benedictine rule in her nunnery not far from Monte Cassino. Devoted to prayer and governed by a rule of silence, the Cluniac order, a reformed Benedictine order, was founded by a charter of William I, Duke of Aquitaine (875–918) who named Berno (850–926) as the first abbot of the monastery. Peter the Venerable (1092–1156) was one of Cluny’s best known abbots, appreciated for his promotion of orthodox Benedictine discipline. Cluny’s original charter created the order as one answerable only to the pope and not to any local authority. Additionally, the abbot was to be elected and not appointed. The Clunaic order lasted for nearly 700 years (Logan 2002, 106–07; Burton and Kerr 2011, 2). The Carthusian Order dates from 1084 and was a combination of community life and ermetic life. With the exception of mass and prayers, Carthusian monks inhabited their individual quarters and worked in solitude, engaged in manual labor and in manuscript work. The Cistercians (or white monks), an order founded in 1098 by St. Robert of Molesmes (1029–1111), attempted to re-assert a more orthodox engagement with the Rule of St. Benedict. Originating in the Burgundian town of Cîteaux, the order spread throughout Europe, thanks in large part to Bernard of Clairvaux (1090– 1153). Bernard’s Cistercian way life accentuated a literal adherence to the rule of St. Benedict and to manual labor though later Cistercian monks shifted the more laborious chores to a category of lay monks or conversi, or “second-class” monks (Southern 1970, 257; Logan 2002, 140). Generally uneducated, these lay monks did the bulk of the heavy labor. A class of lay sisters also performed similar functions for Cistercian nuns (Burton and Kerr 2011, 153).

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Bernard in fact stressed the differences between the Cluniac order and his preferred Cistercian lifestyle: the former, he believed, was softened by its overappreciation of the material world, while the latter was more austere and hence, in his opinion, a more genuine spiritual order (Logan 2002, 140). William of Malmesbury (1090–ca. 1143) said admiringly of the Cistercians: “Their efforts are all spent on the adornment of the character and they prefer pure minds to goldembroidered vestments” (Burton and Kerr 2011, 20). When the Cistercians were criticized, it was often for their business acumen and territorial acquisitions, as exemplified in Walter Map‘s (ca. 1140–1209) sarcastic judgment of the order that with their agricultural holdings “they have such a reserve of wealth accruing from their care that they could enter the ark in the same spirit of security as Noah who had nothing left outside to look to” (Burton and Kerr 2011, 149). Gerald of Wales (1146–1223) demonstrated more admiration for the Cistercian business sense in comparison to the Cluniac order, declaring that one need only give Cluny some land to see it go to waste while Cistercians would turn a forest into a thriving property (Burton and Kerr 2011, 186). The Cistercian order, both male and female houses, participated in the fight against heresy, the mission underlying the Crusades. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, campaigned for the Second Crusade. Numerous Cistercians preached against the Cathars in Southern France; Abbot Arnaud Amaury (d. 1225) even led battalions of knights to battle with the purpose of slaughtering heretics. Nuns were recruited by the Cistercian order to specifically pray for such military operations (Burton and Kerr 2011, 197–98). In the thirteenth century, friars appeared on the scene as new caretakers of the souls of the laity, challenging and competing with traditional secular clergy. A hybrid of the monastic orders and the secular clergy, the mendicant friars were wandering ascetics who lived in poverty, begging for alms, at least in their beginnings. They eventually challenged the authority of the traditional parish priests and universities: they taught, preached and pardoned sins (Miller 2010, 243–44). Followers of Dominic de Guzman (1170–1221) and the Rule of St. Augustine were known as Dominicans; part of their preaching mission was devoted to attacking heretical sects such as the Cathars and the Waldensians (Lynch 1992, 235). Followers of Francis of Assisi (ca. 1181–1226) were known as Franciscans or Friars Minor. Some Franciscans lived a form of “community-eremetism” (Şenocak 2012, 41), that is they lived in small groups in seclusion, with rotating responsibility for gathering alms in the public sphere. While the women organized around Clare Favarone of Assisi (ca. 1193–1253) were prohibited from wandering the world, or preaching in public, these Franciscan women lived in communities as the Second Order of Franciscans and strictly adhered to the rule of poverty.

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The friars’ contributions to the fight against heresies were bolstered by their university training, both for Dominicans and Franciscans (Şenocak 2012, 18; 147). Şenocak notes the increasing emphasis by the Franciscan order on requiring that new admissions be educated individuals. A mid thirteenth-century statute declares: “No one is to be received into our order unless he is a cleric competently educated in grammar or logic or medicine or canon law or civil law or theology” (Şenocak 2012, 78). The friars’ public preaching mission, in addition to hearing confessions, often led to confrontations and conflicts with secular clergy who keenly felt the competition (Şenocak 2012, 128–29; 149–50). The friars, however, were protected in large part by the pope (Lynch 1992, 236). The friars’ perceived determination to live in poverty was in great contrast to the material wealth accumulated by the Church in general and by particular churches and abbeys. For instance, an early thirteenth-century Franciscan sermon says: “The means to go to God is poverty, which is proved by the argument from opposites…If riches are the way to go to hell, then poverty is the way to go to paradise” (Şenocak 2012, 123). In the twelfth century, Abbot Suger had justified his stunning expenses for Saint-Denis by professing that contemplation of beautiful material things can lead one to understand the beauty of the divine (Panofsky 1979, 63–67). And yet, even the friars’ organizational mission to live without riches eventually gave way to the collection of material goods, including books (Şenocak 2012, 201–08).

E Clerical Education Educational levels among clerical groups varied greatly, from clerics who thrived in the cultural and intellectual centers of monastic houses during the reign of Charlemagne, to individual parish priests who could be virtually illiterate (Lawrence 2001, 661). The eighth-century Bede (ca. 672–735), for instance, concedes that there are “those clerics or monks who are ignorant of the Latin language” (D’Avry 2005, 35, from the letter of Bede to Archbishop Egbert). Monastic schools, often located outside cities, ensured that the members of the cloistered community were literate. In addition, they sometimes accepted noble boys for instruction. By contrast, the secular clergy, most often those from wealthy noble families, received their education in urban cathedral schools staffed by peripatetic and sometimes controversial instructors, such as Peter Abelard (1079–1142) (Lynch 1992, 243–44). The establishment of the College of Sorbonne by Robert of Sorbon (1201–1274) was founded in the desire to meld theological studies with pastoral training in imitation of the mendicants who claimed that their lengthy university studies made them better ministers to the laity (Şenocak 2012, 154–55).

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Indeed, it was the appearance of the friars that undermined the traditional position of monks as the guardians of knowledge (Nelson 2001, 584). For most women, the best way to acquire an education was to become a nun, for women were not admitted to cathedral schools or monastery schools. For instance, Beatrice of Nazareth (1200–1268), a Cistercian nun at Florival, was sent to another abbey specifically to learn to write so that she could make copies of manuscripts at her home abbey (Burton and Kerr 2011, 118). Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), a German nun and mystic, was widely respected for her knowledge and wisdom, in addition to her musical compositions and a morality play entitled Ordo virtutum; Hrothvita (ca. 935–1002), a German canoness, was a playwright, and the abbess Hilda of Whitby (614–680) was a noted teacher. Whatever the location, the basic curriculum was the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and the quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, music). Monastic schools favored traditional approaches while the cathedral schools presented more innovative methodologies and subjects such as Aristotelian logic, though the latter schools still remained under the thumb of the bishop. Medieval universities developed in part to emancipate teachers and students from the bishop’s authority; while still staffed by clerics as teachers, these new schools were now, for the most part, self-regulating institutions (Lynch 1992, 246–51). Religious houses often became repositories for children, offered as oblates or gifts to God by their parents. Such institutions also served as refuges for children considered to have no viable future due to other heirs or due to physical deformities. The sixth-century Caesarius of Arles (ca. 470–542), in his rule for nuns, stipulated that no girl younger than six or seven would be accepted into a monastery (Amt 1993, 222). Guibert of Nogent describes his father’s promise that should his wife safely deliver her child after prolonged labor, he would offer that child to the Church. Guibert then professes to be glad of his father’s early death when he was still an infant, for he feared that his father would have eventually broken his promise, though Guibert more pointedly criticized the practice of turning children over to the Church at a young age. Religious houses also served as refuges for husband and wives, mothers and fathers. For instance, Guibert’s memoirs also narrate his mother’s entry in a monastery at Saint-Germer de Fly where she lived as a nun, and the disastrous effects this decision had upon him as a twelve-year old child. Upon hearing that her son was fast becoming a delinquent, she prevailed upon the abbot of the monastery at Fly to allow Guibert to study there, taking advantage of the abbot’s receipt of his benefice from Guibert’s grandfather. Not long after, Guibert became a monk there (McAlhany 2011, 9, 12, 21, 41–45).

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F Celibacy One of the distinguishing features of the Roman church was the requirement that priests be celibate, and by implication that they also be chaste, though both these initiatives proved gradual and difficult. Pope Siricius (ca. 334–399) had decreed as early as the fourth century the requirement for priests and deacons to live apart from their spouses. In the fifth century, Pope Leo I (d. 461) declared that this requirement applied to subdeacons, too. Priestly celibacy was not definitively imposed until the eleventh-century Gregorian reform and later articulated by the 1123 First Lateran Council, by the 1139 Second Lateran Council, and outlined by Gratian’s Decretum in the mid-twelfth century (Baldwin 1970, 337; Thibodeaux 2010, 188). Indeed the numerous articulations of this requirement testify to the difficulty of imposing celibacy and chastity on priests. Even after the Gregorian reform, however, there were still outlier priests whose sons sometimes succeeded them in their church (Lawrence 2001, 660). The underlying reason for this requirement that priests be unmarried and sexually abstinent stems in part from the need to distinguish the priestly class, specifically the secular clergy, from the laity, though celibacy was already a traditional feature of the monastic orders. By removing ordained priests from the sexual arena, Gregorian reformers “purified” them from the ordinary, secular life and created a spiritual elite who were still presented and regarded as virile warriors, protectors of the Church, and spiritual parents who paternally guided and directed their children in Christ (Thibodeaux 2010, 6–7, 24). The obligation of celibacy applied only to the major clerical orders, while the minor orders of clerics were allowed to marry. The dilemmas that resulted from this “partial” obligation is exemplified in the story of Abelard and Heloïse (ca. 1101–1164). As a teacher at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame in Paris and as a canon, Abelard lived in the house of another canon, Fulbert who also employed Abelard to tutor his niece Heloïse. There ensued a tumultuous affair and a pregnancy. Abelard’s solution to this situation was to marry Heloïse, keeping the marriage secret, though, from everyone except Fulbert. When Fulbert made public the news of this marriage, Abelard sent Heloïse to stay in a nunnery (though she did not become at nun until later), not to repudiate her, but rather to maintain a certain amount of discretion to protect his professional clerical ambitions. Fulbert, however, interpreted this as abandonment of his niece and charged his men to punish Abelard by castration. Abelard then entered the monastery at St. Denis and Heloïse took vows to become a nun (Logan 2002, 155–57).

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G Recent Scholarship The mark of the clergy, tonsure, or the shaving of the crown of the head, is believed by some scholars to have signified a rejection of masculinity, in addition to being an outward sign of the cleric’s submission of all his heart and mind to God. Lay brothers in fact sometimes grew a beard specifically to signify their different status from monks (Murray 2008, 44). If masculinity is determined by making war, making love, having children and accumulating wealth, and if the clergy were required to reject such masculine behavior, how then did medieval clerics identify themselves as men? This is indeed one of the most important recent developments in the scholarship on clerical culture: the study of celibacy and its consequential effects on masculine identity among clerics, and on the lay perception of clerical male identity. Ruth Mazo Karras for instance, reminds us that chastity or more specifically virginity, was not the exclusive purview of clerics, for it was certainly expected of unmarried laity, but obviously only until the day of their nuptials. Clerics of the major orders were marked by the expectation of perpetual chastity, though the practical reality was that even though such clerics might remain celibate or unmarried, they were not always sexually abstinent. Karras cites the example of a fifteenth-century priest who was known to live with his concubine. His more serious offense, however, was considered to be his adulterous relationship with a parishioner’s wife (Karras 2012, 53–54). How then did celibate priests identify themselves as masculine when they renounced sexual relationships and the establishment of a family line as well as military prowess? Some research suggests a rhetorical strategy that claimed a virtual military characteristic: clerics sometimes presented themselves as soldiers of Christ fighting for the spiritual well-being of the laity and as parents aggressively protecting their charges (Werner 2010, 163; Thibodeaux 2010, 86, 99–100). They advised crusader knights engaged in just wars; such knights could and should fight in exchange for forgiveness of their sins. Bernard of Clairvaux’s In Praise of the New Knighthood explained how military valor could serve God (Holt 2010, 189–90). The Chanson de Roland, the twelfth-century Old French assonanced epic poem, includes numerous lengthy descriptions of Roland and Olivier, engaged in mortal and spiritual combat with the enemy Saracens; and it also includes descriptions of the Archbishop Turpin who fought, killed, and died alongside the secular heroes of Charlemagne’s army, a stunning literal example of a clerical soldier of Christ (Moignet 1969, laisses 95, 108, 121). Some of the current discussion focused on religious men and women of the Middle Ages is framed by the modern concept of a third gender which can include a variety of life circumstances such as celibacy and castration, or more simply

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anyone who does not satisfy the masculine or feminine categories (Murray 2008, 35). It is important to note, however, that medievals did not consign themselves to a third gender. Rather than embracing asexual images, medieval religious men and women often embraced hybrid sexual images. For instance, spectacularly virtuous women were ascribed to the category of virago, or manly women. The word “abbess” is derived from “abbas” which designates an abbot or a father, and thus implies a woman-father (Bodarwe 2006, 1). Caroline Bynum Walker’s scholarship has amply demonstrated the sexually ambiguous images associated with Christ as savior. The Abbot Guerric of Igny refers to the Holy Spirit as “sent from Heaven like milk poured out from Christ’s own breasts.” Especially humble and paternal abbots did not shy away from maternal images for Christ, even presenting themselves as mother hens to their monks. In an amplification of Matthew 23:37, one of Anselm of Canterbury’s prayers refers to Jesus as a mother, then to Saint Paul who in his imitation of Christ also becomes a mother to Christians. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his position as abbot, regularly portrayed himself as a maternal, nurturing figure (Bynum 1992, 122).

H Nuns Like male clerics, nuns were enjoined to remain celibate and chaste, and like their male counterparts, some women infamously ignored the rule. In the thirteenth century, Eudes (d. 1275), archbishop of Rouen, visited nunneries in Normandy and reported on the compliance or lack thereof to this rule. At Villarceaux, in addition to his discovery of such infractions as eating meat, wearing luxurious clothing, talking too much, not singing in time and keeping pets, Eudes professed to be shocked by fornicating and procreating nuns (Amt 1993, 247–48). For the most part, religious men and women lived separately in their respective monasteries or convents, though there were double monasteries where men and women lived in segregated quarters in one abbey. Seventh-century Gaul had several of these double monasteries, one of the first located in Luxeuil, with others in Chelles, Jouarre, Faremoutiers, and Remiremont. Abbesses in these institutions heard confessions, though not with sacramental effect, and administered benedictions, practices which still demonstrated a fair amount of respect for women’s religious authority (Bodarwe 2006, 2). Some of these monasteries established co-ed schools and ran scriptoria for the important work of copying of manuscripts. In seventh-century England, Hilda of Whitby founded a double convent at Whitby where the monks were in fact subject to Abbess Hilda’s authority even as they provided the nuns with the necessary sacraments and rituals. Hilda was also a recognized teacher and several of her male students went

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on to be named as bishops (Allen 1985, 253). By the ninth century, however, the authority of abbesses was seriously curtailed, though in the twelfth-century double orders or monasteries of Fontevrault in France and Sempringham in England, the chaplains or canons remained dependent on their female charges in financial matters. Yet, Simeon of Durham (d. ca. 1130), in his late eleventh- or early twelfth-century description of a double house at Coldingham, writes that some of these co-ed monasteries had “changed into resorts for feasting, drinking, conversation, and other improprieties, those very residences which had been erected as places to be dedicated to prayer and study” (Amt 1993, 231–32). Double monasteries in Italy continued with the orders of Humiliati and Humiliatae, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century when Pope John XXII (1239–1334) determined that such establishments were taking in women of “ill repute.” In addition to nuns who lived in an abbey or cloister, there also existed a group of religious women known as anchoresses, anchorites, recluses or hermits. These women devoted themselves to a spiritual life without necessarily being members of an organized order, sometimes living in isolation, though they sometimes chose to live in a convent without taking vows. A variation on this group, particularly associated with the Low Countries, the Beguines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were religious women who lived in the lay community, took no vows and worked for a living. In general, men and women who wanted to devote their lives to spiritual devotion without pledging to a closed community, could become members of Third Orders: as tertiaries they received spiritual guidance from monasteries and nunneries, but they pursued their religious devotions in the lay world, as for instance the Third Orders of Franciscans (Şenocak 2012, 39). Together with observing the rule of chastity, religious women were expected to be obedient and responsive to their religious superiors. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), however, demonstrated on more than one occasion her own determination to go beyond mere obedience and do the virtuous thing, the right thing. In one instance, she refused orders from her bishop to exhume an excommunicant, resulting in an interdict placed upon her community of nuns by local canons. This punishment forbade the nuns communion, until the interdict was rescinded by an archbishop. In another instance, Hildegard refused to be subservient to the abbot of her Benedictine double monastery at Disibodenberg, insisting on and eventually winning the right for her nuns to live in a segregated abbey at Rupertsberg, rather than be continually subject to the abbot. Her plans to found a nunnery at Rupertsberg were temporarily frustrated by the abbot who refused to release the nuns’ dowries, but Hildegard prevailed (Allen 1985, 312; Berger 1999, 1–3). Indeed, the tendency of the eleventh century was to establish single-sex convents with an abbess. The twelfth-century Abelard, however, in the rule for female

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monasteries which he wrote at Heloïse’s request, states that nuns should be “governed by the rule of spiritual men” (Allen 1985, 280), though he acquiesces that the abbess or deaconess as he called her, should always be consulted on any matter pertaining to the life of these religious women. Hildegard of Bingen is also an important example of a formidable, learned abbess of renown, even within her own lifetime. She was known both for her scientific writings, spiritual texts, musical compositions as well as for her preaching and sermons. She was praised by Pope Eugenius III (d. 1153); and even allowed to preach in cathedrals. Hildegard was bold enough to scold Emperor Barbarossa (ca. 1123–1190) and reproach popes. Of particular importance in Hildegard’s biography is her experience and interpretation of what is currently believed to be intense symptoms of migraines: Hildegard vividly described visions she had, interpreting them as divine gifts that could offer spiritual teachings which she chronicled in her Scivias (Logan 2002, 176–82).

I Clerical Culture and Art Monastic orders did not only export religious culture and practice, or offer prayers: they could also circulate other products such as architectural styles, calligraphy styles and even agricultural products. For instance, some scholars credit the Cistercian order with the dissemination of the Reinette Grise apple and the Warden pear from France to different European sites (Burton and Kerr 2011, 97). On a higher level, Abbot Suger (ca. 1081–1151) of Saint-Denis (a Benedictine abbey and royal necropolis just outside of Paris), is credited with the introduction of the Gothic style in northern France, in addition to his diplomatic service to the French King Louis VI (1081–1137). Renovations of the abbey church of Saint-Denis contributed to the economic development and enrichment of both the abbey and the town: these renovations in part improved access to relics which then increased pilgrimages to the church and hence improved revenues for both the church and its surrounding region. Woven throughout the centuries of numerous clerical orders, both male and female, remain the spiritual convictions, devotions, and dedication of generations: men and women who believed that their faith and their prayers could save the world. While people of the twenty-first century may have difficulty comprehending the medieval traffic in relics, repetitions of formulaic prayers, or the insistence on celibacy for priests and nuns, we must remember that clerical culture also commissioned and created some of the greatest inspirational works of art that we know. One need only open the early thirteenth-century Peterborough Psalter or examine an illuminated page from the late twelfth-century

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Winchester Bible to be confronted with the artistic incarnation of religious belief. The monophonic repertoire of Gregorian Chant constitutes an aural legacy of clerical culture and daily life, along with the development of polyphony beginning with Leonin and Perotin, clerics associated with the twelfth-century NotreDame School. Our legacy from Hildegard of Bingen includes her musical compositions compiled in Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum. Guillaume de Machaut, fourteenth-century priest and composer, recreated his faith through his compositions of music for the mass, in addition to his secular compositions. Bishops organized campaigns to construct some of the most beautiful edifices ever designed to manifest human faith in a holy being. While there certainly were political motivations behind ecclesiastical building campaigns, nonetheless, Romanesque basilicas and Gothic cathedrals, along with all the other examples of medieval art created within and for clerical culture, exemplify a collective belief in something greater than mere human beings.

Select Bibliography Brooke, Christopher, The Age of the Cloister: The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages (Mahwah, NJ, 2003). Burton, Janet and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2011). Bynum, Caroline Walker, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, 1982). Linehan, Peter and Janet L. Nelson, ed., The Medieval World (New York 2001). Logan, F. Donald, A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (New York 2002). Şenocak, Neslihan, The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 (Ithaca, NY, 2012). Thibodeaux, Jennifer D., ed., Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (New York 2010).

Johannes Bernwieser

Cities A Critical Issues The question, “What is a city?” at first seems to be easy to answer when it comes to the medieval era in Europe: Densely built, with towers, castles, or churches and surrounded by walls, the silhouettes of these settlements are noticeably different from those of the surrounding areas. Often, medieval cities were located at important traffic intersections, such as rivers or traditional trade routes. Inside the city walls the inhabitants would form a distinct society with a specific sense of community and culture, its own legal system, and lively mercantile activity (Jäschke and Schrenk, ed., 2007). John of Viterbo, who was a jurist in Florence in the first half of the thirteenth century, points out some of these aspects of cities in his Liber de Regimine Civitatum (ca. 1228): The word city (civitas) implies the following: The freedom of citizens (civium libertas) or of inhabitants (habitantium immunitas); this interpretation is based on the three syllables of the word civitas: ci stands for citra, which refers to the interior that is surrounded by walls, vi stands for vim, the military strength of the inhabitants, and tas stands for habitas, referring to the living space of the inhabitants that is protected against foreigners and enemies (John of Viterbo 1901, 218).

At the same time, it is important to note that no medieval city was identical to any other. Each city had its own shapes and its own particular social, political, judicial, and economic aspects that caused it to develop in a particular way (Johanek and Post 2004). In order to explore medieval cities in greater depth, it is necessary to differentiate between formal, regional and chronological aspects. In the following, three different types of cities shall be discussed: first, Roman cities from late antiquity in central and southern Europe; second, trading cities from the early and high Middle Ages, which mainly emerged in Northern Europe; and last, market towns that developed in Central Europe at about the same time (Brachmann 1991; Schwarz 2008). In addition, some basic features of urban life will be discussed, including how an urban citizenry developed (Schulz 1992) and the peculiarities of city councils. Finally, living conditions in cities during the early and high Middle Ages will be explored, including the constant threat of epidemics. Urban fringe groups and city chronicles will be the final topics (for a comprehensive discussion of the medieval city, see the contributions to Classen, ed., 2009).

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B City Types I The City of Late Antiquity When talking about the city of the early Middle Ages (fifth to tenth centuries) one usually refers to cities that were founded in Roman times and had endured the political end of the western Roman Empire (Clemens 2003). Many of these early medieval cities are located on rivers or coasts, like the southern French city of Arles (Brühl 1975, 234–44). This settlement, located at the southern end of the Rhône delta, used to be inhabited by the Celts and was probably founded by the Greeks. At the end of the second century B.C.E., Arles was used by the Romans as a military base (Fossae Marianae) because it was close to the sea. In 46 B.C.E., Julius Caesar granted Arles the status of a colonia (Colonia Iulia Paterna Arelate Sextanorum). However, the rapid rise of Arles began only under Constantine (306–337), who decided to make the city one of his residences. In 417, Pope Zosimos († 418) made Arles a metropolitan see. In the sixth century, Arles was conquered by the Frankish kings, who arranged circus games there, according to the report of Procopius of Caesarea (ca. 500–ca. 565) (Procopius Caesariensis 2001, 442). Although the Franks took over the Roman prefecture’s constitution, they moved the prefecture from Arles to Marseille at the end of the sixth century. The city’s harbor was of great importance, because it helped the settlement to become a center of trade, including long-distance trade. Eugen Ewig has referred to sixth-century Arles as “the gateway to the world” (Ewig 1952, 673). In the following centuries, the city seems to have lost its prominence. The Carolingian and Burgundian rulers of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries stayed there only on rare occasions. However, when Pope John VIII (ca. 852–882) escaped from Rome in 878, he first went to Arles in order to meet up with Boso of Provence († 887) (Grat, ed., 1964, 223). Arles suffered greatly from the invasions of the Spanish Muslims (737/738, 842) and the Normans (859/860). In the second half of the ninth century, Arles and its surrounding area were invaded by the Saracens, who settled down close to present-day Saint-Tropez. In 869, they even captured Archbishop Roland of Arles (852–869), who was only released in exchange for an enormous ransom. Other cities of late antiquity are London, Marseille, Genoa, Cologne, Trier, and Mainz.

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II The Medieval Trading City Apart from these very old civitates, there are many cities that do not have roots in antiquity, but were instead founded in medieval times. These cities were usually trading centers, and in areas where Germanic languages were spoken, their names are identifiable by the suffix “-wik” (Old High German for “trading place”) (Schütte 1976). Trading cities emerged in the Early Middle Ages as commerce developed quickly in Northern Europe, especially in the areas of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The estuaries of navigable rivers, such as the Rhine, the Scheldt, or the Meuse, were situated along the most important trading routes and were therefore particularly attractive sites for trading cities. Haithabu (Old Norse for “place on the heath”), which is today deserted, is one of the earliest settlements of this kind. This city is located close to the River Schlei, on the Jutland Peninsula and is part of the current administrative district of Schleswig-Flensburg in northern Germany (Brandt, Müller-Wille, and Radtke 2002). Goods and products were shipped from Haithabu to Scandinavia and the entire Baltic area. Salt, fish, wheat, timber, metal, flax and fur were loaded onto ships at Haithabu and transported to Norway, Sweden, and Russia. The city, which probably consisted of a few shacks at the beginning of the ninth century, rapidly became a flourishing trading post. According to legend, a church was built in Haithabu under the auspices of the missionary Ansgar of Hamburg-Bremen (ca. 860); soon afterward, a wall was constructed around the city. Although this city became a popular destination for Christian merchants, its population was probably mainly pagan. This is, at least, what the Maghrebi traveler al-Tartushi of Cordoba suggests in his account dated 950: In honor of their god, they are celebrating, eating and drinking. Everyone who slaughters a sacrificial animal has a wooden rack in front of his door where he puts the animal […] so that everybody can see that this person is honoring their god (Giese, ed., 1988, 43).

The heydays of Haithabu lasted only for a short period of time. It was probably the siltation of the harbor in the eleventh century which forced larger ships to call at other ports. Additionally, the raids of the Norwegians and Slavs (1050/1066) destroyed the city so extensively that it was not rebuilt afterwards. Haithabu’s fate was shared by a few other important northern European trading sites, such as Quentovic (dép. Pas-de-Calais), Kaupang (southern Norway), and Birka (west of Stockholm). Today, none of these sites exist.

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III Market Towns in the European Inland Normally, market towns developed in the vicinity of already-existing structures such as Roman settlements, episcopal sees, monasteries, royal palaces, and castles. They can often be found in northern France, Flanders, the Lower Rhine, and eastern Germany. One such market town is Bruges, which grew rapidly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and became “the international trade center of Northern Europe” (Peyer 1987, 69). Archeological findings show that Bruges, which had been a Roman settlement, was well developed as early as the third century B.C.E. Apparently, in the early Middle Ages, a second settlement was founded in the immediate vicinity of the original settlement. Sources from the eighth century identify this second settlement the main site of the pagus Flandrensis (i.e., the County of Flanders) (Ryckaert 1983, 742). However, nothing remains of the old Roman city. It was destroyed in the second half of the third century by German tribes and the sea flooded its ruins. Bruges’ rapid rise began in the ninth century, around the time that the a castrum was built for protection. The marketplace was situated just west of the oudeburg (today’s “Simon Stevinplein”). As the population increased, the city grew to the north and east. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the city was so densely populated that the politically significant People’s Assembly could no longer be convened in the city center but had to be moved outside of the city to provide space for every inhabitant. In the thirteenth century, the mendicant orders moved to Bruges and built hospitals. Franciscans (ca. 1225), Dominicans (1234), Carmelites (1266), and Augustinians (1276) came to the city. Bruges became one of the most important centers for the arts in fifteenth-century Europe. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390–1441), Hans Memling (1433/1440–1494), and Gerard David (ca. 1460–1523) worked there. The population reached its peak in the fifteenth century at about 40,000 inhabitants.

C Basic Conditions of Urban Life in the Middle Ages I Population growth One cannot describe the development of medieval cities without also describing the immense population growth at that time. After the period of the great migrations and the plague of the seventh century that decimated a large part of the European population, a “demographic revolution” started in the tenth century

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(Bairoch et al. 1988). It is estimated that between the years 300 and 1340, the population rose from 4 to 9.3 million in Italy, from 5 to 19 million in France, and from 3.5 to 11.6 million in the Roman-German Empire (including Scandinavia). Agricultural improvements like the three-field crop rotation system and innovations like the cold-turning plough were responsible for this development (Rösener 1986). Although it is very hard to estimate the population with any accuracy, it is safe to say that Europe’s population doubled between 1000 and 1400. This development caused extensive deforestation and led to the expansion of cities. As with Bruges, mentioned above, cities often outgrew their boundaries. In response, new neighborhoods were built, existing structures were expanded, and sometimes remote regions were settled. The greatest influx of people into cities occurred during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. City living became more and more attractive. Everyone who hoped to improve his living conditions left the countryside and moved to the city (Nicholas 1997). The biggest cities in medieval times were Paris, Milan, Florence and Venice. In the thirteenth century between 20,000 and 40,000 people lived in each of these cities. Bonvesin dela Riva’s (ca. 1240–ca. 1315) work On the Marvels of the City of Milan illustrates very well how life was in late medieval cities. Although this text is painting an idealized picture, it gives rare insights into the life, culture, and proportions of a medieval city: In regards to housing […] the truth is there before the eyes of those who see. The streets in this city are quite wide, the palaces beautiful, the houses packed in, not scattered but continuous, stately, adorned in a stately manner. […] Dwellings with doors giving access to the public streets have been found to number about 12,500, and in their number are very many in which many families live together with crowds of dependents. And this indicates the astonishing density of population of citizens. […] The roofed commons (open to all) neighbors in those squares which are popularly called coperti (roofed arcades) almost reach the number of 60. […] The court of the commune […] spreads over an area of 66 acres. […] In the midst of it stands a wonderful palace, and in the court itself there is a town, in which are the four bells of the commune. […] The city itself is ringed as a circle, and its wonderful rounded shape is a mark of its perfection. […] Outside the wall of the moat there are so many suburban houses that they alone would be enough to constitute a city. […] The main gates of the city are also very strong, and they reach the number of six. The secondary gates […] are ten. […] The sanctuaries of the saints […] are about 200 in the city alone, having 480 altars. […] (In honor of the Virgin Mary) 36 churches have been built in the city alone, and undoubtedly there are more in the surrounding city. […] The steeples, built in the manner of towers, are about 120 in the city. […] Then there are […] 94 chapels […], six convents of monks, and the nunneries are eight. […] In the city […] there are ten hospitals for the sick, all properly endowed with sufficient temporal resources. The principal one is the Hospital of the Brolo, very rich in precious possessions; it was founded 1145 by Guffredo da Bussero. In it […] there are […] more than 500 poor bed patients and just as many more not lying down. All of these receive food at the expense of the hospital itself. Besides them, also, no less than 350 babies

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and more […] are under the hospital’s care. Every sort of the poor people […] except the lepers, for whom another hospital is reserved […] (Lopez and Raymond, ed., 1955, 61–65).

II Urban Law and “Freedom” The “boom” of the cities was certainly one of the most important turning points in medieval Europe’s history. Societies that had been predominantly agricultural were now becoming urban. This led to the development of an “urban law.” The most important feature of this law was that every citizen had the right to personal freedom and the right to own and inherit land (Schwarz 2008). The often-quoted phrase “city air sets you free” made sure that serfs from rural areas did not have to suffer from a lack of freedom when mingled with citizens. Free citizens, who sometimes elected their own judges, formed their own judicial communities. This community was liberated from the general constitution of the courts and had its own city district. Due to the fact that in those districts a “higher peace” was applied, they formed an “island of free law.” This model of “city in a legal sense” (Planitz 1973) constitutes itself for the first time in eleventh-century northern Italian cities (Milan, Piacenza), as well as in the Roman-German and Northern French cities of the twelfth century (Cambrai 1077, Laon 1107/12, and Freiburg im Breisgau 1120) (Schulz 1992). In the old cities with a bishop residence at the Rhine and the Danube, this development set in later. Only at the end of the twelfth century was the struggle of the citizens against the lords of the towns successful. Thus, local autonomy could develop. This is illustrated by the Charter of Lorris (dép. du Loiret) of 1155, which was imitated by the charters of many cities: (1) Everyone who has a house in the parish of Lorris shall pay as rent only 6 pence for his house, and for each acre of land he possesses in the parish. (2) No inhabitant […] shall be required to pay a toll or any other tax on his provisions; and let him not be made any measurage fee on the grain which he has raised by his own labor. (3) No burgher shall go on an expedition, on foot or on horseback, from which he cannot return the same day to his home if he desires. (4) No burgher shall pay toll on the road to Étampes, to Orléans, to Milly or to Melun. […]. (6) No person while on his way to the fairs and markets of Lorris, or returning, shall be arrested or disturbed, unless he shall have committed an offense the same day. […]. (7) No one […] shall exact from the burgers of Lorris any tallage, tax, or subsidy. […]. (16) No one shall be detained in prison if he can furnish surety that he will present himself for judgment […]. (17) Any burgher who wishes to sell his property shall have the privilege of doing so […]. (18) Anyone who shall dwell a year and a day in the parish of Lorris, without any claim having pursued him there […] shall abide there freely and without molestation. (Ogg, ed., 1908, 328–30).

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III Development of the Urban Citizenry All of that provides the background for the development of an urban “bourgeoisie.” Modern research often points out that the charter exemplifies a struggle for “civil self-determination” or “civil liberty.” However, this assumption falls short of the mark: the overall aim of the citizens was to ensure permanent peace within the city walls (Oexle 1996). As mentioned above, some cities gained a measure of autonomy in northern Italy at a remarkably early date, the eleventh century. During the church reform movement and the so-called “Investiture Controversy” (eleventh and twelfth centuries) the traditional episcopal lords of the cities lost their authority. They had been accused of simony and criticized for allowing priests to marry. Because of their loss of authority, they were no longer capable of settling intra-city conflicts (Zumhagen 2002), so the inhabitants of the cities took the initiative. Evidence from different places suggests that at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries, the urban nobility, the nobiles from the area surrounding the city as well as the non-aristocratic clergyand laymen, tried to settle conflicts peacefully in the context of people’s assemblies. It seems that the commitment on oath played a central role in these people’s assemblies. After the debates, a common oath was taken that obliged all parties involved to uphold everything that had been laid down before (Zumhagen 2002). Anyone who did not take the oath and did therefore not join the coniuratio, or even broke the oath he had taken, risked being excluded from the community. The dissenter usually had his house destroyed and the rubble dumped outside the city walls.

IV The City Communes The forms of common decision-making and mutual duty on oath directly led over to the constitutional municipalities. At the heads of constitutional municipalities were consuls, who are mentioned from the middle to the end of the eleventh century. The consuls’ rulings, which originated from arbitral settlement, supported the community, even without the legitimation of a traditional ruler. The inhabitants elected consuls on an annual basis and gave them authority by swearing that they would follow all of their lawful instructions (Schulte 1998). It is important to point out that the development of municipalities was not the result of a revolutionary transformation linked to the religious restlessness of the Northern French and Lombard cities. It seems that, in many places, municipalities developed with the blessing of the local bishop. The bishop still claimed sovereignty over the city and held his vassals responsible for keeping order (Grieme,

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Kruppe, and Pätzold, ed., 2004). Within this complex the sworn unity led to new forms that brought order into society. Beginning around the year 1100, certain local constitutions determined the overall constitution not only in the cities, but also in rural areas. There were rural communities with their own consuls that were elected from the classes of both the nobility and peasantry. In other villages, the local peasant consuls were subordinant to a noble or ecclesiastical lord. How strange this municipal movement, which was limited to Northern Italy in the first half of the twelfth century, must have appeared to a nobleman from north of the Alps, is nicely illustrated by an excerpt from the Gesta Friderici by Otto of Freising (ca. 1112–1158): They (the Lombards) are so attached to their liberty that, to avoid the insolence of rulers, they prefer to be reigned over by consuls than by princes. And since, as it is known, there are three orders among them, of captains, vassals, and the commons (plebs), in order to keep down arrogance, these consuls are chosen, not from one order, but from each, and, lest they should be seized with a greed for power, they are changed nearly every year. From which it happens that that territory is all divided into cities, which have each reduced those of their own province to live with them, so that there is hardly to be found any noble or great man with so great an influence, as not to owe obedience to the rule of his own city. And they are all accustomed to call these various territories their own comitatus (county), from this privilege of living together. And in order that the means of restraining their neighbors may not fail, they do not disdain to raise to the badge of knighthood, and to all grades of authority, young men of low condition, and even workmen of contemptible mechanical arts, such as other people drive away like the plague from the more honorable and liberal pursuits. From which it happens that they are preeminent among the other countries of the world for riches and power. And to this they are helped also, as has been said, by their own industrious habits, and by the absence of their princes, accustomed to reside north of the Alps (Schmale, ed., 1965, 308–09).

D The Council in the Medieval City The constitutions and institutions of medieval cities were so diverse that only a few aspects shall be discussed, including the creation of the city council. At first, the lord of the city and his representatives were responsible for the city’s administration. In the high Middle Ages, the citizens of a city could, as described above, develop their own administration departments; these departments eventually transformed into city councils (Rigaudière 1993). In the empire north of the Alps, the earliest council structures can be found in Utrecht (1196) and Lübeck (1201). The council was a committee of variable size, depending on the city’s population, whose members belonged to the city’s prominent families. Cities had different regulations regarding how one became a city councilor and how long one could

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stay in office. In some cities, a councilor could only serve a one-year term; in others, he would be elected for life. A mayor was at the head of each city council; the mayor’s period of office could last from a few weeks up to several years. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the structure of the city council became more complex. Often, city policy was not discussed in the council itself, but only in special committees. For the most part, councils were simply named after the number of members—a “committee of five,” “of nine,” or “of thirteen,” for example. The councilors always had to attend committee meetings, and one could be fined for arriving late. The council met frequently, particularly in larger cities like Nuremberg; at first the council only met three days a week, but later they met on every workday. Often the council judged in trials of lower jurisdiction, while high justice and blood court were not passed on to the classes. Besides the council meetings, the council had other tasks as well: taking over offices, making lengthy journeys, commanding the urban contingent, and participating in other boards. Council members were usually unpaid; only beginning in the fourteenth century do sources show that attendance money was paid. In return for their service, council members received free meals and did not have the obligations of ordinary citizens. Nevertheless, rich families complained about the having to serve on councils, which was very time-consuming. Due to the great demands placed on council members’ time, the number of potential candidates remained relatively small. A simple craftsman who had to live from what he earned simply could not afford to be a council member. In the late Middle Ages, city councils typically evolved into authorities that demanded obedience (Meyer 2009). The citizens’ assembly was increasingly less politically powerful. Only in times of tax increases or crisis did the council send for members of the citizens’ assembly in order to authorize its decisions. The city council regulated ever more facets of medieval life. Among other things, the council expanded the regulations concerning markets and trading, and controlled measures and weights. It also established price regulations for basic foodstuffs, supervised sanitation, inspected meat, coordinated the sale of meat and bread, and set quality standards for various items sold in the marketplace. The council also regulated the distance between properties, coordinated fire protection, oversaw the diversion of water, and regulated the number of buildings that could be built and the height that those buildings could be. The council was also in charge of the defense of the city, the construction of city walls, and warfare. The Regulations on the Sale of Meat and Fish enumerates many of the regulations put in place by the local council. It was valid from 1365 to 1409 in Beverley (Yorkshire). An excerpt reads:

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Orders as to the butcher’s market: Also, it was ordered, in 1365 […] that no market should be held for selling meat anywhere in Beverley except in the ancient butcher’s market and in Barleyholme, fair and market days only excepted. Of meat kept or sold out of season: Also, it was ordered […], that if a butcher sell, or put out for sale, meat maggoty or kept beyond the proper time, or dead from murrain, or carrion, for every time any of them has been duly convicted of any of the crimes or offences aforesaid, he should pay, without remedy, to the community 6 shillings 8 pence. Of blood or any tainted matter placed in the streets: Also, it was ordered by the community that if a butcher or any of his men put offal, blood or any tainted thing in the high streets […], everyone so offending is to pay the community 40 pence. Of the custody of butchers’ dogs: Also, because of diverse complaints made about butchers’ dogs it was ordered […], by the keepers of the town of Beverly, that if any butcher’s dog be found in the road without a keeper, or if he bite a stranger’s pig or dog, he whose dog commits the offence should pay to the community 40 pence. Of meat for sale: […] proclamation was made, […] that every butcher must sell his meat within four days from the time of killing, or on the fourth day put in in salt” (Leach, ed., 1900, 28–29).

E Methods of Building and Housing Conditions in Early and High Medieval Cities It is not clear how long, or to what extent, Roman stone buildings were used in the cities north of the Alps. However, it can be said that the knowledge of how to build stone houses nearly disappeared in the sixth century in this area. Once the knowledge was lost, experts from southern Europe were consulted whenever stone buildings were constructed; however, stone was rarely used as a building material except in the cases of churches, monasteries, and imperial palaces (Binding 2006; 2010). In suburban settlements, it is likely that simple post houses were predominant until they were replaced by framing constructions, probably in the eleventh and twelfth century: Shim-like bricks, which were in parts only loosely connected to the foundation, protected the sleeper beams better from humidity and rotting than had the buried posts of the earlier buildings. At first, tamped clay probably served as a ground floor and the fireplace was elevated just slightly above the ground. In Lübeck, archaeologists found the remains of a sixmeter-tall building that was probably built in the twelfth century. This structure seems to have had two floors, so that its inhabitants were no longer forced to sleep on the cold ground (Dirlmeier 1998). It is possible that the first stone houses in the cities of the early and high Middle Ages were primarily erected by the lords of the city, the ministeriales, or the noble upper class. It was very expensive and difficult to produce bricks and red bricks, so it was not until the thirteenth century that stone buildings began to shape the cityscape. An early example of a stone

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building is an eleventh-century structure, which was excavated in Münsterhof Square in Zurich. It had two stone floors and an additional wooden floor. Its relatively small groundplan of 5.7 by 7.0 meters meant that this three-story building gave the impression of being a tower. The walls (or a wall) of the top floor was/were decorated with the oldest known mural in the city. This mural, as well as a valuable drinking cup, children’s shoes, and other artifacts indicate that the people living there were of a higher social class (Fuhrmann 2006). Around 1200 a widespread building activity of an unprecedented intensity started, not only in the Holy Roman Empire. Open space in cities disappeared almost entirely in the thirteenth century, and land parcels were now made much smaller. The closely-spaced buildings could only be enlarged if additional floors were added, and taller buildings meant that less sunlight could shine into neighboring houses. In the thirteenth century, the streets had buildings that stood right next to each other, the classic medieval cityscape. Previously, upper floors of buildings had been reachable by means of upper entrances or external staircases, but these external stairs vanished. However, there was no clear line of development from wooden houses to stone houses, because stone houses were often superseded by half-timbered houses in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This indicates that timber was a very popular building material. Bigger windows, which became more common in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were probably considered an essential improvement. Not only did the rooms become brighter, but it also became easier to ventilate them. Closed stoves, which were used by the middle of the eleventh century, ensured smokeless rooms and had a positive impact on standards of living. An early example of this invention can be found in Basel. In the living room of the Basel house there was a closed tile stove that was heated by the fireplace in the kitchen. Such tile stoves were first used by the upper class. Their use probably spread from castles to the cities beginning in the twelfth century (Dirlmeier 1998; Fuhrmann 2006). Not much is known about the furnishings of the high and late Middle Ages. The custom of using a large table for shared meals was spreading slowly and probably was not common until the late twelfth or rather thirteenth century. The custom may have spread slowly because a table used up too much space. It is therefore assumed that everyday life mostly took place close to the ground. Stools and benches, which were fixed to the wall and used for sleeping as well, were the main seating accommodations. Stoves remained open fireplaces for a long time, but they were increasingly raised from the ground; a stovetop, which was coated with clay, rested on a brick or stone construction. Stoves were also moved from the center of the room to the outer walls, making it easier to build chimneys; this, in turn considerably improved the kitchen atmosphere. Iron fragments of locks that belonged to chests in which acquired property was stored are frequently

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found during archaeological excavations. Initially, ceramic vessels and pots with convex bottoms were used for cooking. Tripod stands and pots that stood on legs first appear around 1200, and cooking utensils increasingly became flat. At the same time that urbanization was occurring, craftspeople began to specialize in their trades, which led to the development of a great variety of shapes of household appliances (Carlier and Soens 2000). Supply and waste disposal problems became more and more serious as cities, and urban populations, expanded (see the contribution to this Handbook by Gerhard Jaritz on “Waste”). Municipalities solved these problems in very different ways. It may be true that medieval cities did not live up to modern sanitation standards, but the image of dirty and stinking medieval cities does not depict reality and is an invention of nineteenth-century historiography. It is true, however, that these issues were addressed slowly and in the beginning the authorities only rarely issued regulations. However, one question must remain open: were regulations repeatedly proclaimed because they were so successful or rather because they were rarely obeyed and therefore had to be reiterated?

F Epidemics in Late Medieval Cities Apart from hunger, cities were constantly threatened by epidemics that were caused by the dense living conditions. It is very hard to identify which diseases were responsible for specific epidemics (Jankrift 2003). Thus, three of the most frequent diseases will be discussed: leprosy, ergot poisoning, and plague, particularly the plague of 1347–1351.

I Leprosy and Ergot Poisoning Leprosy has been known since antiquity. It is a disease that takes a wide range of forms. In the most severe cases, lumps and pus patches appear on the face, followed by abscesses in the nose and throat. Vital organs are affected later. Facial lumps eventually merge together, creating the classic sign of leprosy, and changes in the larynx cause the voice to roughen. Ultimately, the disease can cause mutilation and loss of sight. It is remarkable, however, that the disease progressed without any symptoms in 98 percent of all cases. The first leper houses in the imperial area north of the Alps are documented in the seventh century. Their number rose notably in the high and later Middle Ages (Rosskopf 2006). The leper house in Cambridge, UK, is still standing today. The third Council of the Lateran (1179) completely separated lepers from the remaining population, and separate

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churches and graveyards were even allocated to sick persons. People who were suspected to be suffering from leprosy were inspected at so-called “leprosy exhibitions.” In Cologne, for instance, sufferers were examined by a committee of three persons in broad daylight, in order to prevent a false diagnosis. It was not until the fifteenth century that the responsibility of diagnosis was handed over to the medical departments of universities. The patients who lived in these segregated leper buildings formed a kind of confraternity. They lived according to a special organization and elected a “master leper.” Lepers had possessed the right to beg since the early Middle Ages, although this right was often subject to regional and temporal limitations. Alms paid for the upkeep of leper houses, which achieved significant wealth from these donations and foundations. “Saint Anthony’s Fire” or “Holy Fire”—that is, ergot poisoning—was caused by a parasitical fungus that infected the ears of rye and turned their grains black. It occurred particularly often in the late Middle Ages, when the climate was particularly humid. When infected grains were used to bake bread or eaten in any other form, they caused cramps, hallucinations and tissue necrosis that could ultimately be fatal. The sufferer’s arms and legs turned dark blue or black and eventually fell off. The cause of this disease, which mostly occurred in times of hunger and generally affected the poor, was not revealed until the eighteenth century.

II The Plague of 1347–1351 The recurring plague was certainly the worst event in the later Middle Ages. The medievals perceived this disease as something completely new and, like so many other times before, it seemed like an instrument of divine justice to them. The last pandemic, which historians call the “Plague of Justinian,” returned periodically as bubonic plague between the years 541–542 and 746–748. However, in the decades and centuries following the last plague in the eighth century, knowledge about this epidemic disappeared. It was only in 1894 that the bacterium was isolated and detected. The germ’s main vectors were small rodents, primarily rats, but various other animal species (like the rat flea) spread the disease also. With an increasing number of infections within the population, a mechanism kicked in that increased the mortality rate by making it possible for the disease to spread from human being to human being. “Bubonic plague” was carried by rat fleas and it caused vomiting, circulatory collapse, and changes in vital organs. After some days, the patient’s lymph nodes swelled up and buboes, which gave the bubonic plague its name, developed. If these swellings burst, there was a higher chance that the patient might survive, but once the barrier of the lymph nodes was taken,

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death was almost certain. Although they knew that the disease was highly infectious, the medievals knew very little about its cause and cure. The physicians of the late Middle Ages relied on authorities from late antiquity, who believed that diseases were the result of a deficiency of one of the four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile). By removing some blood from the patient, the physicians tried to regulate the amounts and relative proportions of these fluids. Emetic agents, laxatives and enemas were supposed to eliminate foul gases and rotten food from the body. The air in hospital rooms was cleaned with aromatic fires. Aromatic substances were also put into the masks of doctors, while hands and faces were fumigated with water mixed with vinegar (Bergdolt 1994). Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) describes the epidemic of 1348 in Florence in the introduction to his famous collection of short narratives, the Decameron, with the following, most dramatic words: I say, then, that the years of the beatific Incarnation of the Son of God had reached the tale 1348. The mortal pestilence then arrived in the […] city of Florence. Whether through the operations of the heavenly bodies, or sent upon us mortals through our wicked deeds by the just wrath of God for our correction, the plague had begun some years ago in Eastern countries. It carried off uncounted numbers of inhabitants, and kept moving without cease from place to place. It spread in piteous fashion toward the West. No wisdom or human foresight worked against it. The city had been cleaned of much filth by officials delegated to the task. Sick persons were forbidden entrance, and many laws were passed for the safeguarding of health. Devout persons made to God not just modest supplications and not just once, but many, both in ordered processions and in other ways. Almost at the beginning of the spring that year, the plague horribly began to reveal, in astounding fashion, its painful effects (Rigg, trans., 1921, 5).

G Fringe Groups and Outsiders In all the cities of the Middle Ages there was a more or less extended circle of inhabitants who could not obtain citizenship and were therefore not allowed to participate in the political decision-making process. Among them were in most cases clergymen, Jews, journeymen, farm hands, maids, and day laborers. This phenomenon becomes especially obvious in the case of persons who practiced a “dishonorable” profession, like executioners, hangmen, knackers, wandering bandsmen, and gravediggers (Dankert 1979). Often, these people were not allowed to join guilds or visit drinking parlors. Prostitutes occupied a similar position: while women’s shelters were considered to be an important part of many cities in the fourteenth century, their reputation considerably worsened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Moreover, barber surgeons, maids, and barbers often gained a doubtful reputation, too. Abbey sweepers and cleaners of

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latrines—people who performed important tasks for the public good—were constantly in danger of becoming outsiders. Any contact with “dishonest people,” such as those who removed carcasses, or doing the tasks relegated to “dishonest people” could make a person “dishonest” or diminish his honor. Science could not resolve the question of which actions could lead to the label of “dishonesty,” a status which was normally passed on to following generations. However, it can be assumed that a person’s prestige was reduced by performing “dirty” services that were considered reprehensible (Schubert 2005). “Dishonest” people were also those with physical disabilities or other peculiarities. These people were constantly at risk of having their social status lowered. This was especially the case for people who carried visible marks of physical punishment (like a missing ear, a cut-off nose, a mutilated hand, a gouged-out eye, or a stigmatized forehead). They all belonged to a fringe group.

H Urban Historiography Town chronicles recorded the events and deeds of urban communities. They were written between the eleventh century and the end of the Middle Ages by clerks, notaries, members of the mendicant orders, clergy, and burghers. The main purposes in writing a town chronicle were to increase the honor of the city (honor civitatis) and to benefit the communal leaders. The intended audience were the inhabitants of the city, especially the urban elites. The subject was the town as a place, a legal entity, and a community, as well as its interaction with political partners and enemies. Urban chronicles were written in towns stretching from northern Italy to the North Sea, throughout the German lands and in Barcelona, London, and Riga. The typical author of a town chronicle sought to address both the needs of his readers (by providing information about specific events, rights, conflicts, or rhetorical strategies) and of himself (by writing the chronicle, he could better his own position within the urban community) (Dale, Lewin, and Osheim 2007). In the high Middle Ages, towns were often ruled by noble groups (MaireVigueur, 2003). These groups acquired a political culture of their own without losing their connections to the courts of bishops, kings, and emperors. The nobility were often patrons of historical writing as well as chroniclers themselves. For example, Jans Enikel († 1302; perhaps better: Jans of Vienna), the author of the earliest known Austrian town chronicle, was also a member of the Viennese patriciate (upper social class of the city population). However, clerks of the urban chancelleries, notaries, and lawyers serving the city councils (especially in France, Italy and Spain) were the most common town chroniclers. Their work was

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very intimately linked to the government of their cities, as they usually were members of the government. Notable examples of such chroniclers include Gottfried Hagen (1230–1299) in Cologne, Peter Eschenloher in Breslau, Nicolaus Rüsch in Mulhouse, and Basel, Bernardo Maragone in Pisa, and Caffaro and his successors in Genoa. Chronicle-writing also had a very practical aspect: a detailed knowledge of friends and enemies, prizes, weather conditions, behavior in battles or at the royal court, the organization of public rituals, and royal acts of grace could be very useful in day-to-day politics (Schweppenstette 2003). All events affecting urban life were noteworthy: fires, hailstorms, and floods damaging the buildings in the city; the settling-down of the mendicant orders, which changed the religious, social, and cultural life in the town as well as its architecture; visits of kings, emperors, and popes that secured or heightened the prestige of the town. In accordance with the rise of humanist practices and interests, the range of quotable sources became wider as Roman inscriptions, the topic of the “founding father” became more urgent, and the town, its citizens and leaders could be praised in even more flowery phrases with an antique model in mind. (I would like to express my gratitude to Frieder Dlugosch, Tony Ziegler, and Kevin Rodgers for their great assistance.)

Select Bibliography Coleman, Edward, “The State of Research: The Italian Communes. Recent Work and Current Trends,” Journal of Medieval History 25 (1999): 373–97. Dale, Sharon, Alison Williams Lewin and Duane Jeffrey Osheim, Chronicling History: Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (University Park, PA, 2007). Ennen, Edith, The Medieval Town, trans. Natalie Fryde (1972; Amsterdam 1979). Jones, Philip, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signora (Oxford and New York 1997). Kowaleski, Maryanne, ed., Medieval Towns: A Reader (Toronto 2006). Verhulst, Aadrian, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge 1999).

Lia Ross

Communication in the Middle Ages A Introduction: Oral vs. Written Communication The emphasis of current research on medieval communication rests on its means of conveying information, in particular the topic of oral versus written method. The consensus is that medieval society was traditionally oral, and that orality has affected written production and even literary style. For example, narrative poems were long and lacked unity of action, as they were meant not to be read silently but to be recited in episodes, much like modern television series (Chaytor 1950, 58). “[H]eavy reliance was placed on oral transmission even by literate elites. Insofar as dictation governed copying in scriptoria and literary compositions were ‘published’ by being read aloud, even ‘book’ learning was governed by reliance on the spoken word producing a hybrid half-oral, half-literate culture that has no precise counterpart today” (Eisenstein 1983, 7). Some scholars push the influence of orality as far back as late antiquity. For example, Brian Stock argues that the early Latin versions of the Bible, “which drew heavily on colloquial usage, influenced speech patterns among Christian communities […] reflecting in turn the often low social origins of the converts” (Stock 1983, 22). Popular oral influence was also felt in techniques of writing, with the introduction of a new cursive in the third century, the scripta latina rustica, which took its vocabulary, morphology and syntax from popular usage, and “adopted new graphic signs to express the sounds actually spoken” (Stock 1983, 21). Early medieval society was composed of a tiny literate minority and a large majority who only communicated through word of mouth, in fact through distinct vernacular dialects, as a common standard language was lacking. However, after the eleventh century society came to rely increasingly on the written word (Stock 1983, 14, 16, 19). By the late Middle Ages the process seems to have accelerated: Johan Huizinga attributes the diffusion of prose version of poetic literature in that period to the fact that silent reading “was superseding recitation” (Huizinga 1924 [1919], 295). The matter is complicated by the duality of Latin versus vernacular use (and extremely so in the trilingual atmosphere of England in the fourteenth century), a fact that has led medieval scholars to propose subcategories with such formulations as “secondary orality,” “vernacular literacy,” and “textuality” (Gellrich 1995, 5–7). While oral communication “remained central to the day-to-day workings of English society, in the form of speeches delivered in parliament, pleadings in law courts, teaching in schools, and preaching and catechizing in church”

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(Crick and Welsham, ed., 2004, 17), the persistent presence of Latin as the written language added confusion to communication in general. On the one hand, being the only language whose grammar was widely available, Latin continued to represent literacy and make possible “an education in formal disciplines like Roman and canon law, theology, and from about the time of Abelard, in philosophy.” On the other hand, at least from the eleventh century onward, its identification with written tradition was a source of conflict, as it “also opened the door to controlling fiscal, property, and more general economic relations, which from the later twelfth century were increasingly written down” (Stock 1983, 26). Latin came to be seen as “a foreign tongue employed by a minority of clerici” (Stock 1983, 31) that left its elitist mark even on orality, being the language spoken within university precincts even outside the classroom (Cobban 1975, 209). Leaving aside the blurry duality of oral versus written and the controversial one of vernacular versus Latin, this chapter proposes a simply utilitarian categorization of formal (official) and informal (personal) communication. Both include oral and written components in Latin and vernacular, and both aimed at conveying information, either for didactic purposes or in order to elicit a certain behavior from the recipients. Most surviving sources for either category show the flow of information in one direction only. In some cases this was intentional (for example, in charters and manuals), but in other cases this is due to the whim of fortune (for example, it is quite rare that we possess both sides of personal correspondence). Examples of formal communication include charters and other legal documents, official letters, manuals (including textbooks), lectures, public debates, and sermons, while informal communication includes autobiographical narrative, personal letters, and books on personal conduct and self-help for nonacademic readership. This is a partial list only, as it can be argued that art and literature, official chronicles, gestures, and graphic symbols (especially maps) also convey information. However, these broad topics are left out, either because the communication aspect is subordinate to self-expression and tradition, or because they are discussed in dedicated sections of this volume (for example, medical texts, navigation aids, and sermons).

B Diffusion: Medium and Delivery Before the invention of printing a major reason for the limited diffusion of written communication was its medium. The earliest, wide-spread writing material in the Middle Ages was parchment, made from animal skins, and the “process to render it usable was lengthy and costly” (Wigelsworth 2006, 58). The tenth or eleventh century saw the introduction of a cheaper substitute made from a mixture of linen

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rags and water. In the thirteenth century paper mills appeared in Spain and Italy, and in the fourteenth century in France. But it was not until the fifteenth century that paper became widespread, thanks to the increased demand associated with the invention of printing in Europe (movable type was known in China at least since the eleventh century). Until much later, however, important documents were still written on parchment, while non-permanent information was still inscribed in wax tablets as in antiquity (Wigelsworth 2006, 59; Vickery 2000, 59). Some documents have generated great interest and launched an entire branch of scholarship thanks to their unusual medium. The so-called “Novgorod birchbark letters” are disparate documents impressed on birch bark with a stylus (only one was written in ink), first discovered in 1951 in Novgorod and since then also in other Russian cities, and now numbering over a thousand. They date from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, when cheap paper started becoming more available, and consist of private letters and memoranda, contracts, students’ exercises, dispatches to city authorities, and one intense letter of an eleventh-century lady to her lover. Given that birch bark was considered a temporary medium, the letters were probably read and discarded, only to be rediscovered centuries later because the bark, once stripped and boiled in alkaline water, remained supple and easily preserved in the muddy layers of the city streets that were paved with successive strata of wooden planks. As a group, they are testimonies of social mores, economic trends, rate of literacy, and the evolution of the Cyrillic alphabet (they also include a sample of ancient Germanic text) (Ianin 1997, 14–40). After Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1398–1468) and at least four contemporaries had invented printing with movable blocks in the mid-fifteenth century the technology spread fast. By 1480 over one hundred towns had printing presses, and by 1500 the number had tripled, and over thirty-five thousand titles had been in print. The impact of this invention is still debated. While in the past scholars thought that “the boundary between ‘script’ and ‘print’ demarcated the barrier between the medieval and early modern eras” (Crick and Walsham 2004, 3), more recent studies tend to blur such contrast. Apart from the fact that the first Gutenberg bibles were extremely costly and still illustrated by hand, the same period saw “the evolution of increasingly sophisticated systems of glossing and mechanisms of reference, including the use of running titles, indexes and tables of contents [and] an entire hierarchy of cursive scripts […] to facilitate the rapid copying of sought after texts” (Crick and Walsham 2004, 10). “The highly competitive commercial character” of printing, which catered increasingly to the needs of a “lay intelligentsia,” also stimulated the introduction of footnotes and diagrams (Eisenstein 1983, 21). Another innovation was the separation of words, and by 1500 modern punctuation and the introduction of page numbers, to facilitate the use of indexes. The consequences of the “printing revolution” were also not

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immediately obvious as “for a long time print was regarded as a cheaper surrogate for manuscripts” and was accompanied by techniques that attempted to preserve the more intimate and personalized qualities of manuscripts, such as margin annotations (Crick and Walsham 2004, 10–12; 16; Wigelsworth 2006, 68–69). Even after the invention of the press most books were still manually produced by scribes, mainly professional copyists paid by the book and working for private booksellers, who could complete one book every few days upon request (but booksellers would carry a few popular books, like devotional texts, in stock). Universities created a demand for standard books, and this, in turn, for a standard system for producing textbooks known as the pecia system. A prototype (pecia) was agreed upon by the faculty and distributed among scribes to produce as many copies as needed for a particular course. For students who could not afford a personal copy booksellers would rent out the finished books for the duration of the semester (Wigelsworth 2006, 64; Vickery 2000, 49; Chaytor 1950, 136; Cobban 1975, 215). Even after the increased diffusion of texts in the late fifteenth century, it took a while for libraries to reach previous levels in circulation. Since 4000 B.C.E. libraries existed in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where books were kept on papyrus scrolls and clay tablets (the library of Alexandria supposedly held well over half a million scrolls). With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, libraries continued to exist only in the Byzantine Empire, where the library of Constantinople “remained a center for learning until 1453 when the Turks sacked the city” (Wigelsworth 2006, 64). In the West it is known that Charlemagne (ca. 742–814) owned a library, which was sold upon his death. Monasteries owned modest libraries where books were kept within chests and on small shelves, while cathedral schools offered more diversity and included devotional and philosophical titles. But the core collections of both libraries were the same: bibles, patristic authors, devotional manuals, Books of Hours, and Latin grammars, with scientific works poorly represented. By the fifteenth century book chests had been replaced by small rooms with entire sections of monasteries dedicated to libraries, parts of which were public, where books were chained to the shelves to prevent theft (Wigelsworth 2006, 64–65). Private libraries were also in existence, but they were usually owned by nobles and their access “was strictly limited” (Chaytor 1950, 108). A significant aspect of communication is its delivery system, which in the Middle Ages deteriorated considerably, if unevenly. The efficient public postal service of the Roman Empire, the cursus publicus, did survive as an effective institution in the Byzantine Empire at last until the sixth century, while in the West its survival was more spotty: King Theodoric (454–526) of Italy still maintained a system of messenger relays to Spain and the Visigoths in Spain attempted

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to maintain one in the seventh century, but in Merovingian Gaul it worsened dramatically. Messages, often in duplicate, were entrusted to clergymen, but even they were not immune from capture by rivals of the sender, a situation that necessitated various ruses to deliver messages safely. Further, the decline of literacy was probably also accompanied by the increased use of couriers to carry oral messages, who were often just servants. A different type of envoy appeared in the time of Charlemagne. The missi dominici not only carried information but, being noble, were empowered to act for the monarch as they made their rounds inspecting conditions and hearing cases” (Leighton 1972, 21). They usually traveled in pairs, a bishop and a count. When central authority declined after the death of the emperor, however, the institution also declined and messengers once again became people of lower status, from armed retainers to serfs, who travelled by foot, boat, or horseback. The Church, which had the most to gain in fostering communication, and that was the moving force behind the increase in recordkeeping since the eleventh century, “organized congregations to repair roads, build bridges and hostels for messengers and travelers and thus filled the void left by the demise of the cursus publicus” (Leighton 1972, 18–20, 42; Stock 1983, 18, 35). Pedestrian travel was much more common than by horse or light wheeled vehicle. The messenger “had the right of way and was empowered to make short cuts across any man’s fields or crops” (Leighton 1972, 62). He carried a spear as symbol of authority and could use it as vaulting pole to cross small streams and low hedges. Stilts were used in swampy countries like the lands in Gascony, Flanders, and the English fen country in Lincolnshire. The roads were unsafe due to persistent wars and brigandage, and expensive due to the multiplication of tolls. There are few precise data on the speed of letter delivery: a letter from London to Rome via Marseille would take approximately a month, the same as it took in the first century B.C.E., as attested by Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.). During peacetime, news would take months to cross the continent; during wars and emergencies less time but still at least days or a week (covering an average of twenty miles a day). Towns often employed their own couriers, but France had a central poste royale from the fifteenth century onward and the Empire since the thirteenth (Leighton 1972, 62, 176–77; Wigelsworth 2006, 67). A new medieval institution associated with relaying messages was that of heralds. There is sporadic mention of them as early as the twelfth century, when— apparently—they were employed by nobles in war thanks to their ability to recognize combatants completely covered in mail. By the late thirteenth century they began to have more stable employment and regular pay, and perform official duties for their masters. At this point, too, there is a firm definition of the vocabulary of heraldic terms and “a cursus honorum in the herald’s profession

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becomes established, from pursuivant (apprentice) to herald and ultimately to King of Arms” (Keen 1984, 125, 137). They achieved increasing dignity, reflected in the elaborate pomp of the ceremonies for their appointments, where they took a formal oath and received a new name reflecting their heraldic title. By the fourteenth century heralds accrued more functions: they recorded promotions to knighthood, noted the names of those who had distinguished themselves in battle, and identified the dead. Most important, they had achieved “immunity from hostile action, and therefore acted in war as messengers between belligerents, either to deliver a challenge or to seek a truce.” In tournaments they became the ultimate arbiters, both to “register prowess” and to “inspect the arms and crests of all those proposing to take part; and verify from their records that all are of sufficient gentility in blood to enjoy the privilege of participating” (Keen 1984, 134–38). Because of their neutrality and reliability, heralds came to fulfill another role in communication: they were the favorite primary sources for chroniclers, who would then rework the information into complete histories. It is not a coincidence that the late Middle Ages, the period that saw the ascendance of heralds, is also when a great part of medieval historical works were written (for example, Le Fèvre 1876–1881, I: 4; Chartier 1858, xxx; d’Escouchy 1863, 2–3).

C Examples of Formal Communication I Charters and Legal Documents Charters served a variety of purposes, but most commonly to transfer property or rights, and because of their importance are some of the most abundant surviving medieval documents issuing from royal chanceries. Written in their own unique script and style and cast in the form of letter addressed “to specific individuals or to posterity,” they consist of a protocol (or greeting to the recipients), a “corpus or text, which conveys the purpose of the charter and includes prohibitions and punishments; and an eschatocol (sometimes called the final protocol), which includes the names of those present at the issuing of the grant, the date, and a formulaic ending” (Clemens and Graham 2007, 222–23). These would be followed by signatures and a seal of authentication. A well-known example is the Magna Carta, first issued by King John (1166–1216) of England in 1215 and subsequently re-issued with modifications. Like other medieval charters, it “took the form of a legal letter, recording agreements that the parties had already made verbally” and authenticated by the king’s Great Seal (Breay 2002, 34). Its text, originally in Latin, has circulated widely in modern translations. It is addressed to “his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards,

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servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects” (Breay 2002, 49) and shows the signs of being put together in haste, as it was the result of concessions extracted from a weakened sovereign by third parties. Some of its articles were soon abolished under the reign of John’s successor Henry III (1207–1272), while others persisted in English tradition to become a set of “constitutional rights.” Yet, most of its clauses deal with specific—and often long-standing—grievances of the baronial class rather than with general principles: one clause confirms the freedom of the Church to elect and appoint its own officials, and about two-thirds of the rest address royal abuses of feudal custom in the areas of inheritance fee, wardship of minors, and scutage, while others reflect the fear of barons of being subjected to arbitrary justice or to the exactions of moneylenders (Breay 2002, 28–29). Another example is the lesser known Ordonnance cabochienne, issued almost exactly two centuries later. It is a much longer catalog of two hundred fifty-eight articles, in French, extracted from the court in 1413 at the height of a popular revolt in Paris nominally led by a butcher nicknamed Caboche (but with backing from an aristocratic party). Each article starts with the expression “le Roy ordonne” [“the king commands”] but the king, the mad Charles VI (1368–1422), had probably not much of a say in it, just as he was too little in touch with reality to have been truly responsible for the bankrupt state of his household that prompted the document. The primary difference from the earlier charter is that it bears the imprint of its bourgeois origins and concerns. There is no mention of abuses of feudal rights (which were still practiced and much resented). Rather, the vast majority of its clauses address budget issues, such as the enormously inflated royal administration and remuneration of greedy officials. Specific demands are for transparency in the functioning of the royal treasury and equity in the application of the salt tax (gabelle). The largest group attempt to redress injustices (false arrests, extortions, arbitrary confiscations) and abuses of power (nepotism, misuse of per-diem and paid travel, excessive legal fees). Another set addresses the management of public waters and forests, and here the difference with Magna Carta is the most striking, as the majority of these provisions rectify the abuses of royal officials vis-à-vis common people, who were harassed when hunting, fishing, and collecting wood to support their families, and often arrested without specific charges and then released only after payment of what amounted to a ransom (Coville 1891, 1–181). The provisions of this document were never enacted, although they received the praises of contemporary historians (Religieux 1842, V: 48–52; Jean-Juvénal 1836, 479; 486; Classen, ed., 2009, 447). Other medieval legal documents differ in two ways from modern ones. First, they were confined to fewer areas of life, mainly birth, death, baptism, marriage, terms of service, and transfers of property. And second, they were “suffused with

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oral tradition” as often they merely recorded an agreement that had already taken place. The new Germanic kingdoms in the West did adapt (vulgar) Roman law, but maintained the northern tradition of formalism in recognizing the “legal validity of words, rituals, and symbols.” For example, “in place of the author’s signature one had a sign, a cross, or simply manumissio, the ceremonial placing of hands on the parchment.” Another case in point is the ceremony of the levatio cartae: before a contract was written, “the parchment, pen, and ink were placed on the land to be sold” so that the very instruments of the contract “became impregnated with earthly forces […] It was both a legal record and a quasi-magical object.” The role of legal texts within oral culture became an integral part of feudalism: “oral features were either translated into written terms—festucare, for instance, which earlier denoted symbolic traditio, coming to mean ‘to ratify’—or, like ceremonies of investiture, were framed as verbal ritual within an ever-widening network of written law” (Stock 1983, 18; 46–49). As written records became more widespread, the late Middle Ages witnessed a growing body of police and trial records. For example, Jacques Rossiaud has based his study of medieval prostitution in great part on a large collection of documents from the archives of the city of Dijon related to criminal investigations, trials, briefs of pardons, and sentences dating from the fifteenth century through 1550. And Sue Walker’s collection of essays on medieval wives and widows in England is largely based on court records and wills. Among trial records, the most notorious relate to Joan of Arc ([ca. 1412–1431] Hobbins 2005) and the infamous mass murderer Gilles de Rais ([1404–1440] Bataille 1991), both dating from the first half of the fifteenth century. Their preservation may be due to being ecclesiastical trials (that of Gilles was actually a dual trail, but only the records pertaining to the ecclesiastical proceedings are preserved in a state of near completeness). Both documents are in Latin, including transcription of witnesses’ statements which were originally recorded in French, so they offer only indirect samples of speech, except for the rare textual quote (Classen and Scarborough, ed., 2012, 359–402).

II Official Letters Sovereigns issued a number of official letters other than charters that were often transcribed inside other texts (such as chronicles). The earliest were in Latin, but starting from the fourteenth century native languages were most often used, except by prelates and by princes when the occasion was particularly solemn (for example, a treaty). Seals played an important part in authenticating correspondence and were of utmost importance in royal letters. As in charters, dating differed from modern usage, did not follow precise standards, and is therefore

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often ambiguous (dating methods are discussed in Clemens and Graham 2007, 223–25). Their structure, on the other hand, was rather consistent. In general, when addressing subordinates or civic magistrates within their dominions, they opened with expressions that we would find surprisingly intimate (such as “dearly beloved”), and often mitigated gracefully the warnings about “incurring our displeasure” if the orders were not followed. Most letters reflect an overwhelming concern with money: for example, sale of new or confirmation of old civic privileges against payment and requests for forgiveness of loans long overdue. In some cases the persistent demands of princes met with delicate but obstinate stonewalling that could turn into overt resistance, witness the series of lively exchanges between Duke Charles the Bold (1433–1477) of Burgundy and the Estates of Flanders (a parliament made up of guild leaders) in the 1470s, during his incessant—and expensive—campaigns against France and the Empire (Gachard 1883–1885, 252–66). A special case of official letter is the papal bull, so called after the round lead seal (bulla) that authenticated it. Bulls were written in Latin with a distinct sentence structure based on accent (unlike classical texts) and are traditionally identified by their first two or three words (for example, Unam Sanctam). Papal letters represent some of the most ancient medieval documents, dating from the ninth century, as the papal chancery “was the longest continuing governmental organization in the Middle Ages” (Clemens and Graham 2007, 230). Another typical formal communication was the chivalric challenge, whether sent in writing or delivered orally by a herald (usually both). Princes often resorted to elaborate personal challenges to set the stage for a dynastic claim or to declare intent to avenge a family injury ostensibly without the costs and bloodshed of a true war. While chroniclers apparently took them at face value and reverently recorded them, they were nothing but posturing and actually never carried out. However, the custom became pervasive also among the gentry: the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet (ca. 1400–1453) opens his voluminous Chronique in the year 1400 with the account of an ill-fated challenge between an Aragonese squire and an English knight. Thanks to missed deliveries and crosscommunication, the series of elegant letters specifying the minute details of the planned duel (location, weapons, and so forth) dragged on for four years, causing much distress and offended pride on both parts. Despite the actual duel never taking place, the chronicler devotes over twenty pages to the affair, which was so scandalous as to prompt the intervention of the king’s sergeant-at-arms in defense of English chivalry (De Monstrelet 1857–1863, I: 11–31). The fifteenth century saw the birth of new type of formal letter: the diplomatic dispatch was inaugurated by Italians, who were the first to keep permanent ambassadors at the major foreign courts of Europe to monitor their political

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activities and report to their masters (prior to this time ambassadorial functions had been performed informally by businessmen or clerics). Among the most significant are collections of dispatches sent by Milanese ambassadors assigned by the dukes of Milan to the courts of Burgundy and France during the critical period of rivalry and occasional open conflict between the two states in the 1450s–1470s. The dispatches were sent frequently, often a few days apart or even daily, and usually were quite brief and “telegraphic” in style. However they reveal a day-to-day sequence of official and semi-official meetings, private confidences, or simple gossip, not unlike modern-day journalistic coverage of international events (an amusing dispatch about a quarrel between the elderly duke of Orléans and his young wife is recorded in De Mandrot 1916–1923, II: 59). Other formal letters dealt with business matters (purchase orders and bills, requests of mediation, or instructions to servants) and testify to a certain degree of literacy at least among members of the gentry. “The common form of the letter was to begin straight away with the salutation, suitably couched according to the rank of the addressee as either inferior or superior to the writer, and then to press on with the matter until the end, without breaking it into paragraphs, and then follow with an indication of the date and place at which it was written” (Crowford 2002, 7). Letters often were “read aloud to a community or circulated publicly. They served as legal documents as well as means of personal communication.” The Paston letters (which will be examined under D–II), for example, were saved as potential evidence in future litigations (Cherewatuk and Wiethaus, ed., 1993, 4).

III Public Speeches Three types of public speeches were the object of extensive practice: university lectures, public debates, and sermons (the last are discussed in a separate chapter of the present volume). The university lecture is one of the most originally medieval communications. It was a component of the comprehensive approach to learning known as scholasticism, which had adopted the dialectic method since the twelfth century but reached its mature form only in the thirteenth century, when the curricula of the famous universities, Paris, Oxford, and Bologna were formalized (Leff 1968, 120; 125). “Study took the form of the critical evaluation and discussion of a prescribed corpus of writings by means of the commentary, the disputation and the question. […] The mastery of a difficult discipline, the sharpening of the critical faculties, the ability to expound logically, the careful digestion of approved knowledge, these were the features of the average university education. Teaching and learning were innately conservative processes and, at

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the ordinary student stage, questioning was conducted as a form of training within an accepted intellectual framework” (Cobban 1975, 167). By the late twelfth century the dialectical form of disputatio became universally practiced and proficiency in it a requirement for graduation in the most important faculties. For example, in Paris a candidate for the bachelor degree in arts had to attend a minimum of four years of lectures and do class exercises, but also participate in public disputations for a further year. To achieve the mastership, beside the study of additional texts, he had to deliver a lecture in the presence of the vicechancellor, commit to lecturing for a further two years, and dispute for forty days. If successful, he then had to undergo the inception, which consisted of a series of formal acts (such as attendance to some religious services), among which another solemn disputation on the night before graduation, followed by the delivery of an inaugural lecture (principium). The ceremony ended with the new master hosting his new colleagues at a favorite tavern, where (presumably) a more friendly discussion could finally take place (Leff 1968, 148–57). The series of formal disputations for the inception was even more complex for candidates in theology, especially in Paris, which was the “doctrinal and intellectual nerve center” of Christendom until the late fourteenth century (Leff 1968, 164). All masters and students had to attend, while all other lectures and activities were suspended. The candidate (inceptor) had to choose four questions, two to be disputed at Vespers and two at the aula (bishop’s hall) on the following day. The disputes were presided over by a master and carefully choreographed between questions, answers, and counter-arguments to continue for days. After successfully passing this ordeal, the candidate received his cap (biretta), and gave his first formal lecture (principium). Once licensed to teach, the master might also face quodlibeta (free questions) that could be raised by any student and cover a range of topics. The structure of the quodlibet consisted of the disputatio (the general debate) and the determinatio (a separate session in which the presiding master alone drew together the threads of the preceding disputation). There were also private disputations held in school or religious house by its members, a sort of practice disputations called collationes (Leff 1968, 165, 168–73; Cobban 1975, 214). It is evident from this complex form of communication distinguished by extreme formality but also carrying the potential for unruly aggression that the master had to be completely versed in the texts and be ready to discuss them at any time and from every point of view. In the faculty of theology the student was essentially trained to defend the Church from attacks by building a veritable encyclopedia of quotes, examples, anecdotes, and associating them in the most disparate ways to create logical constructs. This technique owed much to the influence of Peter Abelard (1079–1142). In his Historia calamitatum (discussed also under section D–I) he recalls how enthusiastically the student body received

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this teaching style, before it became channeled into the later rigid curriculum, and how they attended rival lectures, pitting a teacher against another (Bellows 1958, II: 1–3). The popularity of the dialectic method was reflected in written debates, dialogues, and disputes that dominated religious literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the so-called altercatio or conflictus, usually between two individuals, but at times among three or more, as in Abelard’s Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian (Constable 1996, 128–29). There are several mentions but few examples of public debates preserved in medieval records. A rare instance is related to one of the most famous criminal acts of the fifteenth century: the murder of Duke Louis of Orléans (1372–1407), brother of King Charles VI of France, in 1407, perpetrated by assassins at the service of the victim’s rival at court, Duke John the Fearless (1371–1419) of Burgundy. The culprit, who at first tried to hide his deed, eventually confessed, but brazenly presented it as a necessary political act to protect the royal family from an unscrupulous tyrant. The chronicler de Monstrelet reports how Master Jean Petit (ca. 1360–1411), doctor of theology at the University of Paris, delivered a four-hour long oration in defense of the murderer, attended by lords and faculty (and later repeated to members of the royal family). Petit, who was not a lawyer, chose to deliver essentially a sermon on covetousness, filled with erudite biblical references, using the victim as an example of this sin. His thesis was that the duke’s mad desire for power had led him to treason and tyranny (for which he brought specific examples, ranging from the barely believable to the totally absurd) and that Duke John had rescued the kingdom with a distasteful but necessary act, not unlike the killing of King David’s rebellious son Absalom. Tyrants must be killed for the sake of public welfare, and the more powerful they are the more necessary is their death, in obedience to the spirit, if not the text, of the law (and to drive home this point, he provided twelve reasons in honor of the twelve apostles, a well-known preaching technique) (De Monstrelet 1857–1863, I: 61–81; Guenée 1992, 189–98). Few pages later the chronicler records the reply on behalf of the widow and orphans of the victim, delivered at the Louvre in the presence of the dauphin, from a prepared text, by a monk (who is not explicitly mentioned as the author). His argument rested on much more solid legal grounds and appealed to contemporary views of royal power: it is a main duty of the king to apply impartial justice, in addition to the moral duty of protecting widows and orphans. Burgundy not only had killed an innocent man out of covetousness for power (turning the charge of “tyranny” against him), and certainly not for the public good, but out of jealousy of his powerful rival. To the abstract sermon of Petit the author responded with a simple and emotional speech, at times evoking the widow and orphans tearfully begging for justice, at others summoning the ghost of the victim

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to address the king directly. Then the author moved to the practical implication of not punishing the murder: end of respect for the law, people taking justice into their own hands, potential for bloody feud and civil war (which became only too real). He also argued that Orléans was not a tyrant because he did not act according to the definition of tyrant found in the fourth chapter of the Ethics by Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.). There is a passage of the oration that exhibits a notable critical spirit, akin to the nascent historicism of the Italian Renaissance, as the author rejected en bloc the biblical examples of the defense on the ground that customs mentioned in several biblical passages were not applicable to contemporary mores (for example, killing by a priest or repudiation of a wife). An analysis of these two speeches reveals both similarities (the result of scholastic training with its emphasis on disputatio) and differences in views between the faculties of theology and law, as the second work revealed rather the “jurist than the theologian” (Guenée 1992, 203–07).

IV Manuals The influence of university teaching affected also the way formal textual information was conceived and organized. The Compendium ascribed to Bartolomeo da S. Concordio (ca. 1260–1347) shows how moral philosophy was taught in the early fourteenth century. This book is actually an extract from the De regimine principum of the Augustinian friar Giles of Rome (ca. 1243–1316), one of the chief ancillary texts in use in Paris and around Europe. It drew from Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric, and from De re militari by Vegetius (fifth century?) a combination not surprising to medieval readers (for example, Christine de Pizan [1363/65–ca. 1430] also incorporates ethical precepts in her famous military treatise the Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie based on Vegetius). The chapters of the Compendium devoted to war exhibit a bizarre combination of high principles and down-to-earth practical advice. They bear titles like “That is useful for an army to construct ditches and fortified encampments, and how fortified encampments should be constructed, and what things should be considered when building these encampments,” “That in war it is useful to bear banners, and to appoint generals and officers,” “How to stand and fight” (which includes the chapter of the De regimine titled, “That all those who slash with their swords are worthy of derision, and that is preferable to stab”). Other sections deal with virtues and vices, passions, the character of men at various ages and social status, rules for household management and child rearing. This organization follows Aristotle’s taxonomy: rule of self (ethics), household (economics), and state (politics), cast in Christian terms. Sometimes Bartolomeo disagrees with his

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source Giles: for example, where the latter credits philosophers with inventing Latin so that they could have a broad (latum) idiom, Bartolomeo affirms that it derived rather from the kingdom of Latini, who in turn took their name from their ancient king Latinus (Begley and Koterski, ed., 2005, 185–91). The last argument is illustrative of the medieval obsession with etymologies, which are ubiquitous in medieval texts and usually wrong. Traces of the platonic concept that names are the essence of things inspired many medieval etymologies, and most strongly, the Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX of Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636). This bias is evident in the technique used to prove a point in most medieval scriptural commentaries and philosophical texts: the authors string together a series of quotations from disparate sources, so long as they have in common a concept or even just a word, in order to prove the truth of an argument. In the simplest instance the texts are cited integrally, and the association of ideas is quite evident. But in other cases they are simply invoked, leaving the reader to recall the full text and thus establish the full meaning of the argument (and theologians—as already seen—knew those passages by heart). Another expression of this peculiar reasoning is to replace a foreign term (most often a Hebrew name: for example Jacob becomes “luctator”) with a translation designed to convey a meaning that the author believes true, usually based on Liber interpretationis hebraïcorum nominum by Saint Jerome (ca. 347–420) and Isidore of Seville. Medieval writers were so convinced that to discover the nature of a thing one had only to interpret its name, that they thought it possible (for example) to prove the dogma of the Trinity from the very name of Jerusalem through a tortuous process in which one name leads to another (Gilson 1932, 155–69). This method of thinking went beyond etymologies of biblical places and personalities, and infected with obvious deficiencies medieval scientific texts, for example the Speculum maius by Vincent of Beauvais (ca. 1190–ca. 1264), librarian and tutor of King Louis IX (1214–1270) of France. Conceived as encyclopedia that covered applied sciences, history, and a dictionary, it actually approached natural science in the form of commentary on the first chapter of Genesis. The value of medieval scientific manuals is debated: some modern scholars emphasize the variety of scientific topics covered, yet the majority of scientific texts in use were translations of Aristotle (both authentic and spurious) primarily by Arab commentators (Leff 1968, 120; 132–36). Some scholars have noted that technical literature was handicapped before the introduction of printing because of the difficulty of reproducing tables and diagrams. Only with print “visual aids multiplied, signs and symbols were codified” and made available to several readers simultaneously, thus facilitating the diffusion of scientific scholarship and science (Eisenstein 1983, 17, 37, 41). Among the few medieval scientific authors, Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1175–1253), bishop of Lincoln and first chancellor of the Univer-

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sity of Oxford, wrote original works on sound, heat, color, geometry, comets, optics, the astrolabe, poisons, and other subjects, which earned him the reputation among some modern scholars as the “father of scientific thought in England” and of having influenced the Franciscan Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1294) toward practical experiments (Vickery 2000, 45–46). Other critics concentrate on the quality of the information conveyed and come up with less complimentary judgment. For example, William Brandt finds many faults with the mental process of medieval authors, from whose writings the natural world emerges as a collection of discrete objects not organized in any meaningful structure. They are described through “spurious analogies” that would not always hold (hence the use of terms such as “at times” or “usually” to qualify statements) or “unfathomable internal principles.” Attributes of objects appear unique, not related to anything else, and also impermanent because of the pre-existing belief in a “nature whose essence is a capacity for spontaneous change.” Thus, they could not explain why light produces heath, but could only list some circumstances under which it does so, and had to resort to “pseudo-mechanical explanations,” such as “like attracts like” to explain physical forces (Brandt 1968, 3; 17–18). In his opinion the Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century changed little, except to add the belief that the natural state for all bodies is rest and that in order to be moved they need an external mover. This carried within itself the moral implication that immutability was a godly virtue, while on the earthly plane everything is possible for things change into other things without a clear distinction of cause and effect. Inevitably, changeability became associated with moodiness and frivolity (Brandt 1968, 22; 25; 29). There is more agreement on the quality of medieval manuals dealing with non-scientific subjects. A particularly successful (and innovative) genre was the ars dictaminis (or ars dictandi), the rhetorical study and practice of epistolary compositions. “This field of rhetoric had its roots in Italy where the professional teacher of epistolography, the dictator, first appeared.” The manual of Alberic of Monte Cassino (d. 1088), the earliest handbook of ars dictaminis to survive, “lists the five parts of the letter which became standard in medieval Europe: the salutatio or epistolary greeting, which articulates the recipient’s social position; the benevolentiae captatio, which usually consists of a proverb or quotation from scripture intended to secure the recipient’s good will; the narratio or statement of particular purpose; the petitio in the form of an argument deduced from premises established earlier in the letter; and the conclusio. The format derived from the divisions of classical oration, with the letter adding a formal salutation. Formularies or dictamina, books of sample letters, survive from all parts of medieval Europe, indicating the popularity of the ars dictaminis at cathedral schools and universities.” By the thirteenth century such treatises had appeared in Italian

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dialects and in the following two centuries in other languages (French, German, Czech, and Polish) (Cherewatuk and Wiethaus ed.,1993, 5; Cobban 1975, 221). Eventually, dictamen became associated with the study of law (at first in Italy) as the art of drawing up legal documents, and grew with the increased needs for notaries from the eleventh century onward (Leff 1968, 125). In the course of the thirteenth century Franciscans and Dominicans entered the universities in large numbers, and after graduation dispersed into provinces as preachers, confessors, and teachers in the provincial studia. It is not surprising, then, that universities taught the art of composing sermons through teaching aids that would become collectively known as ars predicandi (or ars concionandi). An early author, Alain de Lille (twelfth century), had listed the various categories of audiences in his Summa de arte praedicatoria: the faithful, obstinate, minors, luxurious, poor, rich, soldiers, orators, doctors, prelates, princes, cloistered and religious men, married, widowed, and virgins, and had recommended diverse sermons ad status for each. Others followed his lead, even if the categories varied slightly (Constable 1995, 329). Thirteenth-century manuals advocated using different styles depending on the nature of the audience, laic (extra) or clerical (intra), using more concrete images for the first and abstract for the second. Once the orator has decided for an intra or extra argument, he ought to use appropriate techniques, called claves (keys) to facilitate the understanding and memorization of scriptural text. For example, reinforcing each argument by discussing the opposite; presenting and then refuting objections to arguments; resorting to concurring scriptural sources to buttress an argument; making use of scriptural metaphors to build ideas, moving from the literal meaning to the allegorical, moral, or anagogical; and substituting words of a sacred text with others to produce assonance or even rhyme (a common mnemonic practice [Eisenstein 1983, 34]). Above all, the presentation must allow members of the audience to come to conclusions on their own, thus reinforcing their convictions, and should never be allowed to lapse into a scholastic argument, more appropriate for a university setting (Gilson 1932, 113–14, 118–48). Subsequent authors, such as Thomas of Chobham (ca. 1160–1233/36), master at Paris and author of a Summa de arte praedicandi (1210–1215) and Robert de Basevorn (fourteenth century) who wrote a Forma praedicandi, developed the precise structure and language of what would be known as the “thematic sermon,” where a main subject (thema), always derived from the Scriptures, would be interrupted by a brief digression into a different subject (prothema), whose relation to the thema could appear incongruous, but that served to lead the audience back to the thema after a propitiatory prayer. Another theoretician, Jean de Galles (thirteenth century), listed four categories of subjects appropriate for the sermon: what one must be and do; the duties of preacher and audience to induce

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them to invoke God; the sacred Scriptures themselves, to implore divine light to enlighten; and direct invocation of God and Virgin (Begley and Koterski 2005, 91–92; Gilson 1932, 99–104). Beside artes praedicandi masters had numerous other teaching aids at their disposal for developing sermons: the Scripture with its glosses, collection of biblical reference works such as exampla, florilegia, similitudines, and distinctions (which explained the possible meanings of terms at various levels, from historical or literal, to tropological, allegorical, and anagogical), alphabetical lists and topic charts to locate materials, and collections of model sermons. New techniques made those tools accessible and useful: by the fourteenth century the development of layouts for both book and page; the adoption of Arabic numerals; and acceptance of alphabetical order to arrange words and ideas (a concept that was long resisted on the ground that it would have been unthinkable to discuss the Filius before Pater or Angelus before Deus just because the alphabet required it!). Biblical glosses came also to be widely circulated, with the “lecture-commentary” becoming a source for sermon making. Various types of annotations appeared in manuscripts to facilitate their use: marginal notes or headings that indicated the suitability of certain passages for specific sermons; indexes by subjects; breaking up the commentary and re-transcribing it as subject matter for sermons “arranged according to the liturgical year” (Smalley, 1960; Rouse, 1979; cited in Begley and Koterski 2005, 92–95). Probably the most notorious (late) medieval manual of clerical origin is the Malleus maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer), a treatise for preachers and ecclesiastical and secular judges on how to identify and combat witchcraft. First released in 1486, it was the work of two German Dominicans: Jacobus Sprenger (1436/38–1495), lecturer, reformer, and administrator, and Heinrich Kramer (Henricus Institoris, ca. 1430–1505; being the prime author), a preacher, inquisitor, and rather prolific author (however, the double authorship is disputed). It is composed of four parts: proof of the existence of sorcery; elements involved in sorcery (demons, sorceresses, God’s permission); the practice of inflicting sorcery and how to cure from various sortileges; and judicial prosecution of sorceresses (investigation, witnesses, when to apply torture, ruses to facilitate confession, methods of passing sentence, appeals). After the first print several followed throughout the seventeenth century, but its influence is not clear as it was often lumped with other treatises on witchcraft (Mackay 2006, 80–103, 148–51, 170–71). Its style is typically scholastic. It makes heavy use of deductions from disparate authoritative sources, which “could be combined to reach conclusions that had little to do with the thought of the works being quoted.” It also displays a pervasive “intellectual argumentativeness […] ascribable to the methods of scholastic pedagogy, which placed a heavy emphasis on formally structured open disputation with others.” Therefore much of it is written in the form of the

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“standard quaestio disputata, which begins with an indirect question to which first is given an incorrect negative answer which the author eventually refutes [and] it is suffused with arguments in the form of syllogisms, or “presented in the form of a reply to theoretical question: ‘If it is asked why… then it should be said/ responded that …’” (Mackay 2006, 16, 17, 22–23). The content of the work is quite informative as to the mentality of the authors, contemporary scientific knowledge, and legal traditions. For example, in discussing how witches influence love and hatred in human minds, it conveys some interesting ideas on dreams; and in the section on protecting people, animals, and crops from spells it regales the reader with a curious list of enchantments based upon the authority of Saint Thomas (Mackay 2006, 2: I–VII; II–VI). The section dedicated to the prosecution of witches is probably the most illustrative of diverse styles of communication, as it details how to examine witnesses and what constitutes a valid deposition; how the defense attorney should advise his client; and how to deal with appeals. In particular, from the chapter devoted to torture one learns that torture should only be applied when the accused refuses to confess and must be interrupted for an interval of days to allow the subject the chance to confess spontaneously (or risk invalidating the proceeding). Finally, the judge should feel free to lie to the accused to entice confession, for example by promising clemency: but after a short incarceration to save appearances the accused should be burnt in any case (Mackay 2006, 2: III–V). On the political plane, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a period of augmented princely powers, which caused a growing need to codify both the behavior of princes and the manners and functions of those serving them. Hence a veritable flurry of what have come to be known “mirrors for princes” (for example Christine de Pizan’s Livre de Trois Vertus written in 1405 for a young princess – see Barnhouse 2006, 13) and “courtesy” or “conduct” books. The most famous manual of this second type is the L’Estat de la maison du duc Charles de Bourgoingne, dit le hardy by Olivier de La Marche (1425–1502), which so impressed King Edward IV (1442–1483) of England that he had a similar one made for his own household. In this booklet de La Marche describes the composition of the household of his master the duke of Burgundy (chapel, council, kitchen and dining, personal wardrobe and chamber), with the relative functions of staff members. This is a world of men only, rigidly ranked through their specific duties: maitre d’hôtel, panetiers, sommeliers, garde joyaux, personal physicians, squires, and so forth. It establishes who eats and sleeps at court and even who is tasked with fluffing up the duke’s pillow and sleep in the duke’s chamber. The most peculiar aspect of the handbook is the quasi-religious language that pervades the exposition of household rituals, especially those surrounding the duke’s meals, which were choreographed as public spectacle, and therefore managed by high-

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ranking men. These were the panetier, échanson, écuyer tranchant, and écuyer d’écurie: all four had the same pay and status, because they served the body and the mouth of the prince, but the panetier was the most important because he served the bread, which represents the body of Christ, and to underlie his preeminence, he was assisted by fifty squires in his functions (De La Marche 1883–1888, 11–28). It is to be noted, also, that during special banquets offered by and for royalty, the usual servers could be replaced by figures of princely rank, who would be expected to be honored by the choice (see an example in Austin 1888, xii).

D Examples of Informal Communication I Autobiographical Narrative Medieval autobiographies were modeled on the Confessions of St. Augustine (354–430), focused on the interior transformation of the writer rather than on events of his external life. The two best known were written in Latin by twelfthcentury abbots. One is the work of Guibert abbot of Nogent (ca. 1055–1124), De vita sua sive monodiarum suarum libri tres written in 1115. Only the first of the three books contains appreciable autobiographical material, related to his own childhood as an oblate (vowed to monastic service from birth) in the abbey of Saint-Germer, where he was subject to Benedictine Rule since the age of thirteen until the time he was elected abbot of Nogent. Like Augustine the author is ostensibly engaged in a conversation with God and attempts “introspection but with less insight” (Benton 1970, 21; 31; 101). Another notable parallel with Augustine is the writer’s open ill will toward his dead father, whom he hardly knew and who would have “certainly” led him to a life of worldly sin (but he offers no evidence for this opinion, and in fact makes it clear that his father had vowed him to the church in exchange for his safe birth) and admiration for his mother, who alone provided for his upbringing. She placed him under a stern—if unskilled— tutor who forced him to a harsh life of study apart from other boys his age, to forestall any potential rebellion on the boy’s part, and who used to beat mercilessly his otherwise gifted pupil for not learning fast enough, as he was unable to admit his own shortcomings as teacher (Benton 1970, 47–48). The author, however, seems to be more comfortable with less personal topics. He devotes quite a few chapters to historical trends in monasticism, edifying tales of conversions of contemporary noblemen, colorful stories of ghosts and demons, and (usually critical) vignettes of contemporary prelates. This tendency is more evident as he expands his horizons in Book II with the history of Nogent from

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antiquity, the foundation of its church and small monastery (again based on a long anecdote), and the deeds and qualities of its abbots, only briefly touching upon his own tenure (Benton 1970, 119–29). And it culminates in Book III which is dominated by the account of the revolt of nearby Laon against its bishop and the murder of the same (in which the narrator’s part is only incidental and not quite edifying), and an inquiry against heretics in which he took part. In total, the portion of the memoirs dedicated to matters other than his life is almost twice as long as the one dedicated to himself. Despite this being considered the first “comprehensive” medieval autobiography, the work stretches the concept of “autobiography” or even of “personal confession,” as the author wrote “for the edification of his readers and to provide material for sermons” (Benton 1970, 7–8; 11). Works like this have led some scholars to doubt that there was a true autobiography until modern times (Ariès and Duby, ed., 1988, II: 541). As to the accuracy of some of his anecdotes, it is useful to recall that “oral tales or exempla were also influenced by rhetoric and used for sermons, and later gathered into collections of dreams, advice, and miracles (Constable 1996, 128). Probably the most famous medieval autobiography is Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, mentioned under C–III. Unlike the previous example, which was cast in the form of confessio, this work assumes the structure of consolatio, a genre popular since antiquity. The author ostensibly writes to console a friend through the example of his own history of conflicts and persecutions that would follow him wherever he would go and teach. It is notable, however, that no clear identification of this “friend” has been made, and that the writer never makes concrete mentions of the other’s alleged misfortunes. Such audience “may be no more than straw men for public (and self-serving) airing of Abelard’s views” (Ziolkowski 2008, xlv). The personal confession is limited to an episode of his adult life, the seduction of his pupil Heloise (ca. 1101–1164) and continuing relation with her. The author seems far more interested in giving an account of intellectual life in Paris while venting his frustrations at ex-teachers and rivals, as he reworks his philosophical and theological positions, synthesizing for the reader the contents of his theories, and reliving his dialectic successes for his own consolation and perhaps to present a positive self-image to posterity. His “autobiography” shares with that of Guibert the driving idea of an exemplary life through confession of its less bright aspects. The genre continued to be popular, and can be recognized in the early fifteenth century Book of Margery Kempe, an autobiography apparently dictated to a priest by an English bourgeois woman to narrate her spiritual awakening and conflicting relations arising from the need to share her intense religiosity with others. However, unlike the previous works, she “maintains a third-person narrative, perhaps to import more authority to the book as issuing from a male writer, or to protect herself from charges of heresy, by not

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presenting herself directly as a figure of authority” (Staley 1996, x–xi). Hers is an “autohagiography, not yet written from the posthumous retrospect of accepted sanctity” in which tortures have been replaced by society’s humiliation and “character assassination” (Windeatt, ed., 2000, 19–20). A rare example of diary outside literary models is the so-called Journal of a Bourgeois of Paris (1405–1449). The anonymous author, who was likely a clerk attached to the University, left a series of entries, in chronological order but irregular in frequency, on the dramatic political events of the Hundred Years’ War, as partisan violence and rival armies exacted their human and economic toll on the city. It is difficult to determine who the intended audience was supposed to be: perhaps it was nothing more than an attempt at recording exceptional events for his own later use. Public events dominate the entries, often accompanied by angry commentaries, and reflect the intense partisan spirit of the times that was shared by the leaders of his city and institution (largely pro-Burgundian and antiOrléanist). Whatever his intentions, this is an invaluable source for cultural history of the late Middle Ages in northern Europe (and also a most believable one, given its unofficial nature), rich in indelible vignettes of the horror of the civil wars. He records, for example, that hungry wolves would swim up the Seine at night under the bridges to snatch the cadavers of those who had been publicly executed on the previous day and whose bodies were left to rot on the city gates (Beaune 1990, 172). An emotional passage of this journal provides a rare example of allegory in non-literary context. In describing the massacre of political prisoners during an uprising in 1418, the writer imagines a dialog between the city provost, flanked by personifications (Pity, Justice, and Reason) urging moderation, while others (Anger and Madness) shout back through the angry voice of the people (Beaune 1990, 117). This outmoded device, which a modern reader sees as encumbering communication, provided instead “a reference easily comprehensible to the allegorist’s audience,” and taken in the sum of its components (dialogue, allegory proper, and symbolism) results “in a form of communication of an extraordinary complexity and comprehensiveness” (Piehler 1971, 19, 78).

II Personal Letters and Conversation Recently there has been growing interest in medieval private correspondence, which, given the volume of material uncovered, scholars tend to collect in selected works based on some common characteristics of authors. For example, a particularly rich trove of letters, numbering in the hundreds of thousands of leaves, has been discovered over a century ago in the Cairo Geniza (an annex of the synagogue that was torn down at that time) thanks to the Jewish tradition of

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burying sacred writings, but also any texts “on which the name of God was or might have been written […] in order to preserve them from desecration.” Curiously, this cache includes “a huge quantity of writings of a purely secular character, such as official, business, learned, and private correspondence, court records [and] prescriptions” because of the custom of appealing to God even in mundane correspondence. Most material belongs to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when Cairo was the economic center of the country and was written “in a semi-literate Arabic with Hebrew characters, even if the better merchants were fluent in Arabic” (Goitein 1973, 3–6). Another popular category is correspondence of medieval women. An example is Anne Crawford’s rich collection of letter of women living in England between the twelfth and the fifteenth century (most in English and others translated from the original Latin or French). The editor introduces the collection with a description of the physical appearance of medieval letters that were quite different from modern ones. In the earlier part of the Middle Ages they “were written on parchment, usually a long thin strip in ‘landscape’ shape with a tag on which a seal could be affixed.” In the fifteenth century paper started to be used, in sheets usually ten or twelve inches wide and sixteen or eighteen inches long. “This was a large area to fill, so most correspondents would simply cut off the rest when they came to the end of their letter. The paper letter could then be folded into a small oblong packet and fastened by passing a thread or strip of paper through the folded thickness and sealing the ends. The letter was then superscribed with the recipient’s name and location, a style which remained in use until the introduction of the envelopes in the nineteenth century.” As in the case of official documents, discussed under C–I, dates were rarely precise, often given by reference to the nearest saint’s day, and if the year was given at all, it was only the regnal year of the current king. At times it has been possible to date a letter by its content (specific reference to another letter or to a known event), but often the date of composition remains guesswork. “Whatever the relationship between writer and recipient, the salutation was almost invariably formal, and a child would write ‘my right worshipful father’ and not ‘dear father’ and there was no place for endearments or even Christian names. […] Women sometimes addressed their husbands as ‘sir,’ other times as ‘cousin.’ Terms like ‘brother’ and ‘son’ were used more loosely than today, to indicate a bond of friendship or patronage.” The line between personal and formal is thus difficult to detect (Crawford 2002, 6–8). The authors almost exclusively belonged to the aristocracy, and while probably all could read, some may not have known how to write, as they could rely on secretaries for that task. It is apparent that many–at least many secretaries–were familiar with the principles of the ars dictandi discussed under C–IV, especially where the distinction between personal and formal is blurry, such as the diplo-

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matic missive (ca. 1279 and originally in Latin) in which Eleanor, wife of Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (ca. 1223–1282) of Wales, addresses her cousin King Edward I (1239–1307) of England to proffer friendship and submission in her own name and in that of her husband (Crawford 2002, 137). The greatest numbers of samples belongs to the fifteenth century, and specifically originate from two families of the gentry, the Pastons and the Stonors. Their subjects are generally mundane: shopping lists, requests for favors, courtesy calls to solicit news, but very few deliver personal news of an intimate nature or even idle gossip. Correspondents were often uneasy at “entrusting their secrets to paper” and a letter often served only as a brief introduction to a confidential messenger who carried it (Crawford 2002, 67; 5–6). Therefore, the boundary between “speeches and letters was less clear at that time than is today, since letters were frequently read aloud to their recipients” (Constable 1996, 128). This may be why there is also a noteworthy scarcity of love letters. In the entire Paston collection there is only one letter that can be assigned to this genre, written by Margery Brews to her betrothed John Paston III (Paston Letters no. 897, Feb. 1477 in Crawford 2002, 93– 94). In it she addresses him as “well-beloved valentine” (in itself a break from the formal address to relatives and spouses), lingers less on news than on her feelings (even if expressed with modesty and reserve), breaks into poetry twice, and ends by signing herself “your own Margery Brews.” As expected, monastic letters may touch on different topics. “[S]pecial subgenres were formed by letters of vocation proposing entry to religious life, letters of recruitment praising a particular house or order […] and letters of encouragement to monks and nuns whose resolution was weakening” (Constable 1996, 128). However, mundane and practical topics were also common. For example, in the collection edited by Joan Ferrante and dedicated to correspondence between women, the majority of letters written by nuns are requests for funds or for permission to elect an abbess. The few that contain personal advice were authored by Hildegard, abbess of Bingen (1098–1179) and her younger contemporary Elisabeth, magistra of Schönau (1128–64/65), two “scholarly visionaries” who served as role models for other nuns, and whose advice was widely sought. Hildegard’s full extant collection numbers three hundred and ninety letters, and Elisabeth’s (who died younger) twenty-two. Even in such a vast gathering true intimate subjects are seldom breached: Hildegard did send a revealing letter to a young protégé, Richardis of Strade, who had apparently helped Hildegard on a project but was later called away from the monastery to become abbess in her turn. A distraught Hildegard laments feeling abandoned by her “daughter” and confesses that her excessive personal attachment had elicited criticism (Ferrante 1997, 18–22).

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Sometimes intimate letters are revealing less as tools of communication than for the miscommunication they engender. The short but famous series usually known as “love letters of Abelard and Heloise” (in Latin) are rather an exercise in “self-definition” arising from the autobiographical impulse that continues Abelard’s own in the Historia calamitatum, discussed under D–I. In these letters Heloise’s voice is finally heard, as she switches between the roles of lover, wife, and abbess, and casts Abelard in that of master, father, husband, and brother. In her first missive she obliquely asks him to share in the responsibility for her loss of identity. When he replies ignoring her appeals and referring to her only as “beloved sister in Christ,” she becomes more insistent, hinting at repressed anger as she suggests that her conversion is not as complete as Abelard’s own, while asking for his strict but wise advice and encouragement (perhaps to revive their initial bond between brilliant master and gifted student). After his second noncommittal answer, she finally accepts their changed relationship. Addressing him now only as spiritual father, she reverently requests of him a history of nuns and a rule more apt for women than the one envisioned by St. Benedict (ca. 480–543), to which her monastery adhered (Cherewatuk and Wiethaus, ed., 1993, 64–79). The French translation of this famous correspondence by Jean de Meung (ca. 1240–ca. 1305), and his misogynist comments that Heloise was admirable for having “overcome” her female nature through her studies, inspired yet another type of epistolary, “the humanist epistolary polemic on literary questions” by Christine de Pizan, through which she argued that culture was universal and “misogyny represented a fundamental perversion of literary tradition.” With this collection she followed Petrarch ([1304–1374] who had consciously imitated Cicero) in what would become the common “humanistic practice of collecting and polishing her own correspondence.” The rest of her vast epistolary production in verse and prose “synthesized the […] traditions of vernacular courtly verse and Medieval Latin dictaminal writing.” Once again, she had models to follow: for her verse epistles the Heroides by Ovid (43 B.C.E.–17/18 C.E.), the chançons royaulx by Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406), which addressed a prince always in reverent tone, and Petrarch’s erudite epistola metrica (he wrote sixty-six of them in 1331–1361, addressed to contemporaries and dealing with “specific historical events”) (Cherewatuk and Wiethaus, ed., 1993, 139–49). Both her verse and prose epistolary “stress erudition rather than the expression of personal feelings.” This tendency—as already seen—is present to a varying degree in most medieval letters. In conclusion, we are left with Giles Constable’s observation that “in the Middle Ages letters were for the most part self-conscious, quasi-public literary documents, often written with an eye to future collection and …. They were therefore designed to be correct and elegant rather than original and spontaneous” (Cherwatuk and Wiethaus, ed., 1993, 152–59).

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Perhaps because of the general uniformity, the few letters that do not fit the mold are particularly striking. Most surprisingly, two were written by highlyplaced fifteenth century men, and reveal a truly intimate side of communication. The first was penned by the chancellor of Burgundy Guillaume Hugonet to his wife on the day of his execution, April 3, 1477. He was condemned to be beheaded by the guilds of Ghent, who had rebelled against the party of his late master the duke, and who were determined to prevent any influence of his servants on their new ruler, the young duchess Marie of Burgundy (1457–1482). The letter is notable for its loving tone and repeated use of terms of endearment, and for the eloquence with which it conveys both concern for family and personal resignation (the full text, in old French, is in Duclos 1968, 371–72). The other was sent by the young Duke Maximilian of Austria (1459–1519), the future emperor Maximilian I, to a childhood friend describing in tender terms his beloved wife, the same Duchess Marie of Burgundy, and concluding with a thrilled “she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen” (Bartier 1970, 236). This young couple, destined to a sudden separation by Marie’s premature death, is likely the subject of the least celebrated, but most authentic, love story of the Middle Ages (Hommel 1959, 134). The other set of correspondence that defies classification consists of the three hundred eighty-two extant letters that were dictated by the famous mystic St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) in the last decade of her life and were devoutly copied and preserved by her disciples. They form a genre of their own for several reasons. The author was from humble artisan origins, and yet the missives were addressed—beside family, friends, and total strangers—also to princes, sovereigns, and popes. They were all written in a Tuscan dialect rather than Latin and share the same “blunt, passionate, concrete” and spontaneous style regardless of the rank of the addressee (in itself a departure from dictaminal principles). They have been called, with good reason, “individually tailored sermons,” both because they seem to be motivated by the need to elicit a reformed behavior, whether from a wayward brother or a king, and because they are imbued with orality to a degree not found in most other correspondence. They are rich in religious imagery, and yet only rarely did the author “give a supernatural or prophetic flavor to her statements,” while her advice never departed from the practical (Cherewatuk and Wiethaus, ed., 1993, 96, 101, 105, 110; Noffke, ed., 1988, 3, 7, 11). Significantly, given the similarities in social origin, gender, and unlikely political visibility, the same style is reflected in the memoranda dictated by her near-contemporary Joan of Arc (see examples in Quicherat 1965, vols. 3–4). Not surprisingly, there is little documentation on conversation, which may be viewed as the oral counterpart of personal letters and narrative. While eloquence was appreciated, in this period “there seems to be no real equivalent to classical or modern discussions of ordinary conversation.” The famous treatise on courtly

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love De amore by Andreas Capellanus (twelfth century) does not belong to this genre, as its “model speeches” are rather examples of “stylized flirtation” or “dalliance” mentioned in medieval romances (Burke 1993, 90; 97). Conversation, according to Roman models (Cicero and Varro [116–27 B.C.E]) applies more properly to groups of at least three persons, usually at dinner parties. Following their example even early modern manuals on this topic avoid specifics, and limit their advice to rules of politeness: keeping subjects light to be discussed without passion, avoidance of malicious gossip, and “the general and rather vague recommendation to avoid the extremes of garrulity and taciturnity. […] From the Middle Ages, all that remains are fragments overheard, tantalizing echoes of speech conventions of the period.” Formalization of informal talk (so to speak) does not occur than from the seventeenth century onward with the institutions of salons and coffee-houses. In Peter Burke’s survey of Early Modern conversation there is also scant reference to “parlor games,” which did have predecessors in medieval times, and, most likely, well before then (Burke 1993, 97, 107–19; Classen 2002).

III Conduct and Self-Help Books Conduct books are the popular complement to the “mirrors for princes” mentioned under C–IV. They are characterized by the tendency to mix lofty religious and moral concepts with advice of an extremely utilitarian nature. Rather than being safeguarded in libraries they were kept within private homes and presumably also lent out, thus increasing the chance of being lost (for a estimate of general manuscript loss see Crick and Welsham, ed., 2004, 55–58). The two bestknown belong to the last decade of the fourteenth century. The Ménagier de Paris is a manual of good housekeeping written by an anonymous elderly Parisian bourgeois for the benefit of his inexpert adolescent wife. Throughout the work he addresses directly both her and two domestics in a conversational tone. The first part contains general advice on religious duties and good behavior, but then he addresses practical matters like airing sheets and pillows, removing stains from clothing, caring for servants and horses (in the same chapter!), and ridding the house of pests (with a recipe for rat poison). A large section is dedicated to food: where to buy meat and other foodstuff and how to appraise its quality (there is a charming little poem on how to judge good cheese), methods to preserve and cook meat, fish, eggs, casseroles, and soups, and complete menus (he specifically mentions weekly consumption of princely households) (The Good Wife’s Guide 2009, 49, 55–103, 215–28, 253–339). The departure from modern communication styles is most evident in this section: while modern recipes follow a fixed format

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(ingredients and dosage, preparation, cooking time, serving), here the author often digresses from a topic and follows a tangential trend of through. Most remarkably, two standard components of modern cookbooks, precise doses and cooking time, are usually absent, as the concept of standard measures was yet unknown, and the cook (or a substitute) was expected to stand by the fire until the food was ready. The other well-known conduct book is the Livre pour l’enseignement de ses filles du Chevalier de La Tour Landry, a didactic work written by the French knight Geoffroy IV de la Tour Landry (ca. 1320–1391) in 1371–1372 for the instruction of his daughters on virtuous behavior. The widowed nobleman had apparently written a similar book for his sons (now lost). This work became the most popular educational treatise of the Late Middle Ages, and was translated into German and English (one version by William Caxton [ca. 1415/22–ca. 1492] in 1483). The work is essentially a long sermon on the proper behavior in private and public and consistent religious practices, but is enlivened by a simple and entertaining style that emulates conversational language, and by a wealth of parables, some of biblical or classical origin and others derived from contemporary life, to illustrate a point. For example, in one curious tale he talks of a rich lady who spoiled her dogs by feeding them fancy meats that she should have properly reserved for the poor. In another he recalls an argument between himself and his late wife on whether it was appropriate for young ladies to have lovers, and turns the story into a long cautionary tale of the ever-present danger of seduction for women of his class (Barnhouse 2006, 3; 8–9; 134; 157–58). A curious late-medieval self-help genre was the Ars moriendi, a guide for the common man on how to die in a state of grace even in the absence of proper confession and absolution. These books became popular after the plague epidemics of the fourteenth century and the continuous wars of the following century contributed to a general sense of the precariousness of life, while the papal schism of 1378–1417 diminished respect for ecclesiastical authority (Beaty 1970, 38–39). There are about three hundred exemplars of this type in block books in various languages, all apparently abbreviated forms of an anonymous Tractatus artis bene moriendi. They were translated in various languages and structured in a way to reach the widest audience including (at least partially) illiterate people. A typical example addresses five temptations that the dying person must overcome: disbelief, despair, impatience, pride, and avarice. The bulk of the booklet consists of five double sets of illustrations, each set accompanied by a one-page explanation in Latin. The first image of each set is a temptation, represented by hideous demons that surround the bed on which lies the emaciated figure of a dying man. The second image of each set is an uplifting one of heavenly rescue, usually dominated by an angel who sends the demons scurrying

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away. Frequently the various figures are shown speaking, with text coming out of their mouths inside flowing ribbons, like in comic strips. One final plate illustrates the last breath of the patient as his soul ascends to heaven (Ars moriendi ca. 1475, 5r–15v; Beaty 1970, 2–3, 10–16). The whole is accompanied by directions for specific prayers to be recited in the last hour with the help of family and friends, directed in turn to God, the Virgin, angels, and then martyrs, apostles, confessors, and virgins. The insistence on litanies and their correct order of recitation, while representing “one more expression of the ritualizing tendency of the late-medieval spirit” (Beaty 1970, 48), presumably served the therapeutic purpose of distracting the mind from the distressing thought of imminent death.

E Conclusion Communication has left abundant and varied, if uneven, records of its presence in the Middle Ages, so that it is possible to draw some general conclusions even from the limited samples presented here. First, scholasticism—and in particular its dialectic form of teaching—was so entrenched among educated people as to permeate both oral and written formal communication (manuals and speeches). Second, the continuing presence of orality affected the composition of written texts (for example, the cryptic content of some correspondence destined to be completed orally). This second point deserves special emphasis: when the written text was only a mnemonic device for a more complete verbal message, the comprehension of the text diminishes greatly with the passage of time (as a parallel, modern readers may consider grasping the meaning of a presentation developed with a common software tool and isolated from its accompanying live delivery). And third, what survives likely constitutes a minuscule portion of the total medieval communication, and not necessarily the most important. While it is true that many documents and texts considered important at the time of their issue were stored as safely as possible (for example, in government archives or libraries), many have been lost due to accidents to those same buildings (for example, the library of Alexandria). In other cases the most improbable repositories have proven to be the safest. For example, the Cairo Geniza (Goitein 1973, 3) or the old streets of Novgorod, where it is estimated that an additional twenty thousand birchbark documents remain still unrecovered (Ianin 1997, 17). In all cases, however, the critical factor in the preservation or loss of texts seems to be the medium on which the original or subsequent copies of the communication were preserved. As it is true today, its choice was mainly determined by price, availability, and deliverability (including the ease of hiding a sensitive message). And as of today, this choice affected the life-span of the text itself, either because

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of its intrinsic properties (such as the short shelf life of cheap paper made of rags) or because it was associated with an outdated technology (for example, the abandonment of vellum with the diffusion of printing). The result of these fortuitous choices may affect—at least in part—future appraisals of a culture, and, paradoxically, even destine what may be known to contemporaries as an “age of information” to be labeled in the future as a “dark age.”

Select Bibliography Abelard, Peter, The Story of my Misfortunes: the Autobiography of Peter Abélard, trans. Henry Adams Bellows, rpt. ed. (1922; Glencoe, IL, 1958). Begley, Ronald B. and Joseph W. Koterski, ed., Medieval Education (New York 2005). Benton, John F., Self and Society in Medieval France: the Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (1064?–c. 1125) (New York 1970). Cherewatuk, Karen and Ulrike Wiethaus, ed., Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia, PA, 1993). Clemens, Raymond and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca, NY, 2007). Cobban, Alan B., The Medieval Universities: Their Development and Organization (London 1975). Crawford, Anne, Letters of Medieval Women (Stroud 2002). Crick, Julia C. and Alexandra Walsham, The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge and New York 2004). Ferrante, Joan M., To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Role in the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington, IN, 1997). Gellrich, Jesse M., Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writing in Philosophy, Politics, and Poetry (Princeton, NJ, 1995). The Good Wife’s Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris): A Medieval Household Book, trans., with critical intro. Gina Greco and ed. Christine M. Rose (Ithaca, NY, and London 2009). Leff, Gordon, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: an Institutional and Intellectual History (New York 1968). Leighton, Albert C., Transport and Communication in Early Medieval Europe AD 500–1100 (Newton Abbot 1972). Stock, Brian, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1983). Wigelsworth, Jeffrey R., Science and Technology in Medieval European Life (Westport, CN, 2006).

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Convivencia: Conquest and Coexistence in Medieval Spain A Convivencia: Historiographical Debate and Historical Subject Few terms in scholarship on medieval Europe have been as “loaded” as the term convivencia. With the exception of “feudalism,” so much has never been packed into so short a word. Literally meaning “living-together-ness,” the term refers to a historical subject (interrelationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain), an ideologically charged historiographical debate (the making of the Spaniard and Spanish-ness), and some would argue a historical methodology (examination of inter-cultural exchange as a motor for historical development). All three meanings were or came to be interrelated.

I Spanish National Identity and Origins of the Debate Convivencia as a debate and methodology began as an exchange between Americo Castro (a philologist and literary historian) and Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz (an institutional historian). Both were members of the “Generation of 1898” movement, both were Spanish Liberals, and both became exiles from Franco’s Spain. The “Generation of 1898” movement made the roots and nature of Spanish identity the center of national intellectual and political debate. The Spanish American War, which to some Americans might have seemed to be a “splendid little war,” was a devastating and humiliating blow to the Spanish national psyche. With the loss of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico the tattered remains of the once great Spanish Empire were reduced to a slice of Morocco, a piece of the Sahara, and the Canary Islands. The movement was also a belated response to the failure of Spanish Republicanism. Representative government had become the hallmark of modern states; the First Spanish Republic created in 1873 lasted only 22 months before conservative forces orchestrated a royal restoration. Industrial production, that other great marker for a “great power” at the turn of the century, also lagged in Spain. “What went wrong with Spain?” became the crucial cultural question for the Generation of 1898.

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Who were Spaniards? How and why did they differ from other Western Europeans? Were Spaniards inferior to other Europeans? If so, how did this happen, what was the cause, and could it be corrected? The Spaniard became an “enigma,” a riddle to be solved by the intelligentsia. Spanish national identity became the preeminent preoccupation of a generation. The search began in earnest for Homo Hispanus. Franco and the Nationalists provided their answers to the question. Two political exiles—Americo Castro in the U.S. and Claudio SanchezAlbornoz in Argentina—provided their answers as well and in the process created the “Convivencia Debate” or “the Polemic of Spanish History” (Gomez-Martinez 1975; Barcia, ed., 1976; Araya 1983; Glick 2005). While resident at Princeton University in 1948, Americo Castro published his Spain and Its History: Christians, Muslims, and Jews and ushered in a new period in the historiography of Spain. Castro’s central thesis, which he elaborated upon and further developed over the years but never deviated from, was that the Spaniard (Homo Hispanus) was forged over a period of approximately three centuries (roughly from the late eleventh to the late fourteenth) through the comingling and interactions—the convivencia or “living-together-ness”—of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula. Through contact, conflict, and cultural cross-fertilization Christians, Muslims, and Jews created a hybrid culture that came to be known as “Spanishness” and it was this, more than anything else, which made the Spaniard so different from other Europeans. Seneca, Trajan, Isidore, and all the Visigothic kings might have inhabited Iberia but they could not properly be called Spaniards because, simply put, the Spaniard did not yet exist (Castro 1956). Language and literature were focal points for Castro’s analyses and his preferred approach was the case study. This focus was not simply because he was a philologist and literary historian but because he believed language and literature were the most accessible windows through which to view the “mesh of interconnected values” from which the Spaniard became “articulated.” Still, Castro gave considerable attention to institutions and historical events and was forging a methodology similar to what today is called the “New Historicism” and he did so long before Michel Foucault published his first book. Two historical developments—the Cult of Santiago and the concept of “purity of blood” held by the Spanish Inquisition—can serve as excellent examples in describing what Castro meant by convivencia. Both were uniquely Spanish and both were used by Castro as exemplary case studies in understanding the process.

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II Santiago and “Purity of Blood”: Two Examples of Castro’s Convivencia Castro saw Santiago—the saint, the cult, and the pilgrimage—as central to Spanish identity and as products of convivencia. How did Santiago, a peaceful apostle and for some the brother of Christ, become the iconic “Moor-Killer” and his shrine the destination for the greatest pilgrimage site outside of the Holy Land? For Castro, the Galician location played a crucial role in Santiago’s militarization. In the wake of the Islamic conquest the northwest remained a tiny bastion of Christian independence in the peninsula. The need for divine assistance was great and produced an intense desire for a tangible manifestation of it. Shouts of Muhammad’s name by Muslim troops gave them a type of unity and confidence that Christians needed. The militarization of Santiago, Castro believed, was produced by a cross-cultural appropriation of the Muslim example and the need for a sort of “counter-Muhammad” to unify Christians. Refashioning Santiago’s shrine into a pilgrimage site followed through the creation of what can be considered a “counter-Kaaba.” Today Santiago and Compostela are as Spanish as tapas; for Castro, however, they originated as transplants from Islam that recreated, in Christian form, the functional roles played by Muhammad and Mecca (Castro 1956). Just as Santiago and Compostela were Christian recreations of Islamic concepts, the Spanish Inquisition owed its distinctiveness, Castro believed, to the fact that it was a Christian recreation of rabbinical courts. Before the fifteenth century there was no sense of “purity of blood” in Christian society. Christians, even ones from extremely distinguished families, intermarried with Jews frequently enough for it to be no real shock to sensibilities. Penalties were levelled against Christian women having sexual relations with non-Christian men but this was usually the case only with repeat offenses. Conversion after the fact, moreover, was an acceptable remedy because the problem was a religious not a racial one. Spanish Jews, however, were very much concerned with maintaining and policing the purity of bloodlines and saw the corruption produced by miscegenation as pollution. Castro cited responsa and verdicts in rabbinical courts that included such punishments as facial mutilation for Jewish women convicted of miscegenation. For Castro it was “not a paradox but an elemental truth” that as more Jews converted to Christianity, Jewish views on blood and purity first emerged and then became increasingly more pronounced in Spanish Catholicism. Converts and descendants of converts retained Jewish scruples about blood yet also wanted to separate themselves from their Jewish past. Torquemada and several other priests who manned the apparatus of the Inquisition were of Jewish ancestry. The nature of rabbinical courts and the Jewish emphasis on blood crossed the cultural

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boundary, was recreated in Christian terms, and became the Spanish Inquisition with a new found focus on the “purity of blood” (Castro 1956).

III Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz and the “Eternal Spaniard” The riposte to Castro’s convivencia thesis came from Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz in 1956 with the publication of his Spain: A Historical Enigma. His thesis, a polar opposite to Castro’s, was the “Eternal Spaniard” theory: it held that one could clearly trace the immutable line of “Spanishness” from Seneca to Unamuno. Influenced by Darwinian and evolutionary theory, Sanchez-Albornoz posited the existence of a “temperamental inheritance” (herencia temperamental) that was resistant to external cultural forces. Just as the nature of a frog cannot be transmuted by proximity to a fox the long-extant nature of the Spaniard could not be transmuted by proximity to Jews and Muslims (Glick 2005). Detectable influences of Islam on Spaniards, for example the existence of Arabic loan words in Spanish dialects, were purely cosmetic and had no substantive cultural effects. He also questioned how truly “Islamic” Islamic Spain was given the mass conversion of Neo-Muslims (Hispano-Romans who converted to Islam) and their role as the demographic backbone of the peninsula. It made much more sense to speak of a “Spanishizing” of Islam than an “Islamization” of Spain. The only significant influence Islam had on the Spaniard was the Reconquista. Much time, energy, and resources were expended in trying to expel the Muslim occupational force; this waste of resources delayed certain aspects of subsequent Spanish development in comparison to other European societies that did not confront a similar threat (Barcia 1976; Araya 1983; Gomez-Martinez 1975; Glick 2005).

IV The Transformation of Convivencia This “Polemic of Spanish History”—the debate on the origins of the Spaniard and Spanishness—was transformed in the 1970s. Historians from outside Spain with no vested ideological interest in “Spanishness” began to use and modify Castro’s convivencia construct for different purposes. In 1969, Thomas F. Glick published a seminal article, “Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish History,” which began the process of rebuilding Castro’s construct using anthropological and sociological theory to underscore the value of convivencia as a methodological approach to historical cultures and culture creation. Ten years later Glick published Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages which expanded the article into a full-blown recreation of convivencia using the social sciences.

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R. I. Burns combined intensive archival spadework with social sciences theory to depict Christian “colonial” societies in creative “symbiosis” with their defeated Muslim populations—along with a fascinating recreation and application of Turner’s “frontier thesis” for medieval Iberia. With Franco’s death in 1975 the “polemic” lost much of its polemical importance for Spaniards themselves. The idea of convivencia was now fully cut from its original ideological moorings and free to float in subsequent scholarship.

B Reconquista and Conquest I Origins and Nature of Reconquest Pelayo, a figure drawn from a potpourri of history and legend, begins the beginning of the story of post-Visigothic Christian Spain. Rodrigo, the last Visigothic King, was allegedly his grand-uncle. When Rodrigo was betrayed and killed, and the onslaught of the Muslim advance plowed through Iberia, legend has it that Pelayo retreated to the far north-west of the peninsula with a rump-army and made a final stand at the Battle of Covadonga. Some, like Oppa the Bishop of Seville, advised submission and collaboration. Pelayo had none of it. Here legend became far more important than history. Pelayo and his army won for the day. For the Muslim chronicler ibn Hayyam, Pelayo’s forces were nothing more than “thirty barbarians perched on a rock” who were doomed to die. For the soon to emerge Christian states he was iconic as the great religious patriot who stood his ground and whose foot marked the toe hold from which the reconquista—the Christian reconquest of Iberia—would begin. Whether this centuries-long military movement was a “reconquest” or a “conquest” has been debated. Traditionally-minded interpretations have considered the Christian expansion into, and absorption of, territory in Islamic Spain to be a “reconquest.” Pelayo, mythically or in reality, represented the original Visigothic polity that was stripped of power and authority in the early eighth century. A rump Visigothic government formed in the northwest and began a concentrated response to recover territory from the victors. Whatever territory this surviving Visigothic polity subsequently gained in the peninsula would constitute a recovery of land or “reconquest.” Revisionist historians have been much more sanguine. The movement was a conquest rather than a reconquest because the populations (and cultural roots) were quite different. The builders of the northern Christian states did not even speak the Germanic tongue of the Visigoths. The northern extremities of the peninsula, moreover, were never completely Romanized or Germanized, making their Hispano-Roman-Visigothic pedigree question-

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able. From the revisionist perspective the nuclei of the northern states were distinct from the Visigoths, were never themselves actually conquered, and thus could not be agents initiating a reconquest. Reconquest was a concept manufactured a century after the arrival of Islam by the kings of Asturias to justify their expansion. To meet that need they mingled their lineage with that of the toppled Visigothic line (Lomax 1978; Fletcher 1987; O’Callaghan 2004). Conquest or re-conquest, the Christian advance into al-Andalus was not a unified movement. It was produced by small independent states pursuing their own interests, states which over time expanded and coalesced with others— through arms, shrewd marriages, and occasional fratricide—to create larger states. Larger states, on the other hand, could sometimes split and then later recoalesce in different combinations. Leon and Castile, for example, were “unified” three separate times within a one hundred year period of time. Leon, Castile, Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia clashed with each other just as much as, if not more than, the Muslims across the strip of “no man’s land” to the south which served as the frontier. The collapse of the Cordoban Caliphate in the fitna years and the emergence of the taifa states made the picture even more complex with a mosaic of Muslims states (Arab, Berber, and Slav) competing with one another as well. Alliances of Christians and Muslims against Muslims, or Christians and Muslims against Christians, could easily occur, not just in the sense of mercenary recruitment but actual alliances between states. Political pressure or military support could affect affairs of state or succession across the religious divide: a Muslim state might have “its candidate” in mind for succession in a Christian state and the reverse was true as well. There really was not much of a religious divide to speak of in terms of state relations. Balances of power, political gain, and territorial expansion were the clear driving forces. As Christian states grew stronger and the balance of power shifted in their favor, financial shakedowns of taifa states resulted in much gold flowing north. Paria (protection money) was extorted from taifa states and this, in turn, increased the power of Christian states in the north and gave them the ability to apply even more military pressure. Extortion shifted eventually shifted to conquest (O’Callaghan 1975; Lomax 1978; Wasserstein 1985; O’Callaghan 2004). The rules of convivencia in Christian Spain were established by a combination of conquest and diplomacy. Understanding its logic and rules requires some understanding of the conquest itself. Two excellent examples for understanding the process of conquest and the foundations for convivencia in the Christian Spanish kingdoms are Alfonso VI of Castile and James I of Aragon.

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II Alfonso VI: An Example of Conquest Strategy The career of Alfonso VI of Castile, the conqueror of Toledo and the first great (re)conquistador, is an excellent early example of the dynamics involved in the advance to the south. His grandfather Sancho the Great managed to unify Leon, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre but then divided it among his sons upon his death. Fernando I, Alfonso’s father, inherited Leon and subsequently absorbed Castile. He exacted heavy paria payments from taifa and ravaged their countryside whenever payment was refused. Upon his death Fernando, too, divided his lands (and significantly divided paria payment rights) among his sons. When Alfonso was driven out of his kingdom by his older brother Sancho, the future conqueror of Toledo was given asylum by that very city. There he enjoyed the hospitality of king al-Mamun until the death of Sancho. Previously, Sancho had also driven his youngest brother, Garcia, into exile in the taifa kingdom of Seville. When Garcia finally returned Alfonso had him imprisoned for life. Alfonso reunified the kingdoms into one polity and became “King of the Spains.” Muslims could be allies but brothers were always enemies. This was power politics pure and simple without even a slight indication of anything approximating religious warfare (Lomax 1978; Reilly 1988; O’Callaghan 2004). Alfonso’s strategy was quite clear: weaken the taifa states by extracting exorbitant paria tribute, strengthen his own position with their gold, turn them against each other when possible, wait until their economies and armies wasted away, and then absorb them with little trouble. This strategy was by no means secret: Alfonso’s envoy very clearly explained it to the king of Granada himself. It was an incredibly effective strategy as well, one which resulted, after the taking of Toledo, in the request for assistance from the Almoravids. Al-Mutamid, the King of Seville, summed up the logic well: he “would rather be a camel-driver in Marrakesh than a swineherd in Castile.” Domination seemed a foregone conclusion at this point; the only real question now was who would dominate or absorb the taifa states: Marrakesh (the Almoravids from North Africa) or Castile (Alfonso’s juggernaut). Toledo was the natural target for the transition from tribute to annexation. Strategically it was positioned well on the Tagus. Even greater in importance was Toledo’s political significance: it was the capitol of the Visigothic monarchy. The capture of Toledo was not the result of a mass storming and massacre of a hated religious enemy. Alfonso’s siege of the city was actually requested by al-Qadir— the new Muslim king of Toledo. Al-Qadir, grandson of the king who gave Alfonso asylum during his exile from Leon, had to flee Toledo after being deposed by his subjects. Alfonso and al-Qadir reached an arrangement: Alfonso would put alQadir back on his throne in exchange for hefty tribute payments, control over

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regional fortifications protecting the city, and the understanding that al-Qadir would eventually surrender Toledo to Alfonso and relocate to Valencia. Alfonso’s re-imposition of al-Qadir to the throne of Toledo agitated the population even more. Added to their list of complaints against their king was now the exorbitant tribute money that had to be extracted to pay off Alfonso. Attempted negotiations between the Toledan population and rulers of other taifa states to depose al-Qadir all failed; they, too, were reduced to making tribute payments to Alfonso and so were in no position to take advantage of the offer. Isolated and with no real options, Toledo surrendered to Alfonso, after an uneventful siege, on 6 May 1085. Alfonso took possession of Toledo and a contingent of his troops dutifully marched east to install and defend, as previously negotiated, al-Qadir as the new ruler of Valencia. At the time, the immediate significance of the capture of Toledo would have seemed to be political (the “reconquest” dimensions of taking the old Visigothic capitol) and strategic (pushing the Christian-Muslim border from the Duero to the Tagus and firmly establishing Christian regional hegemony). Intermediate significance, from the viewpoint of Granada, Seville, Zaragoza, and Badajoz, would have been chills down royal backs regarding an imminent end to the pariapayment relationship. Long term significance, however, surely lay in the fact that much of the Muslim population chose to remain and live under Christian rule. Previously, Muslims tended to migrate when faced with such a possibility. Following the conquest of Toledo in 1085 many Muslims chose to stay. Alfonso’s terms seemed reasonable and it should be noted that they were drafted in conjunction with al-Qadir. Muslims wishing to emigrate were permitted to do so and could take property with them. Muslims deciding to remain would retain their property and the right to practice their religion in exchange for an equivalent of the jizya poll tax (which came to be known as “bezant” money). Jews would retain their existing status. Alfonso appointed a Mozarab as governor. The city’s main mosque would remain in Muslim hands. The last stipulation was violated without Alfonso’s knowledge: while the king was away the new archbishop seized the main mosque and consecrated it as a cathedral. Enraged by this undermining of his policy, Alfonso planned to take stern measures with the archbishop but the Muslim population asked him to desist. They did not want the sort of trouble that such a confrontation would produce for them. Among his several monikers (including Emperor of All Spain), Alfonso took the title “emperor of the two religions.” Surely this was in part prompted by his desire to stake a claim, even if theoretical and in title only, over all inhabitants of the peninsula. Alfonso was not (nor was anyone in medieval Spanish history) a representative or advocate of what is today considered tolerance or multiculturalism although Muslims and Christians can be found equally both in lists of his

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allies and his enemies. Such a split can even be found in his own family history: some of his most difficult opponents were his brothers but his son, Sancho, was born from the Muslim princess Zayda hailing from Seville. Papal political and economic ambitions were a concern; Alfonso, however, responded to Gregory VII’s claims (rooted in the fraudulent Donation of Constantine) that Spain was the property of St. Peter with assuming the title of “emperor” of Spain—a not so subtle rejection of the claim. Other Iberian Christian states gave grudging nods to the title with, of course, the provision that they were completely independent and could act as they please in their own states. They were, in other words, amenable to what we today would call a letter-head change.

III James I: An Example of Conquest Strategy By the time James I of Aragon conquered Mallorca in 1230 much had changed regarding the nature of the reconquest. The Almoravids, followed by the Almohads, broke the momentum of the mid-eleventh century Christian push to the south. The real age of reconquest was delayed until the thirteenth century. Crusading—in ideological, judicial, organizational, and financial respects—transformed the reconquest in innumerable ways even if territorial expansion and political consolidation were still very much the major driving forces. Just as significant, possibly more so, were growing royal interests in and uses of Roman law. Roman law, favoring centralized authority as it did, was an extremely useful tool in attempts to curtail feudal claims and rights of the aristocratic potentates. The patchwork way in which Spanish states were coming into existence, moreover, introduced yet more complexity. The Aragonese and Catalans of James I’s kingdom, for example, were of very different temperaments, had their own legal traditions, and often had different (sometimes even contradictory) goals (Bisson 1986). All of these issues were influential in shaping the conquest of Muslims and thus played roles in how subject Muslims would be integrated into a Christian state. James I became king at the age of five. A truce with the Almohads made for a relatively peaceful minority on the border but he learned much (far more even than most minor royals) during that time about baronial intrigues and internal challenges to royal authority. At age 17, immediately following the expiration of the truce, he made a failed attempt to take Peniscola. It did, however, enervate King Abu Zayd of Valencia enough to make substantial paria payments to James and, after later being deposed as king of Valencia, to convert to Christianity and swear homage to James. James’s Aragonese subjects favored a push into Valencia while his Catalan subjects advocated the conquest of the Balearics. James was receiving tribute from Valencia while Mallorca was, in addition to being a rival

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Islamic state that was not a source of revenue, a major base for piracy. The causus belli that prompted the invasion of Mallorca its king Abu Yahya’s rebuff to James’s demand for Catalan compensation for piracy. After receiving Abu Yahya’s dismissive response James reportedly claimed he was not worthy of the title of king unless he grabbed Abu Yahya by the beard. Aragonese subjects, who favored striking Valencia, remained aloof and the invasion was generally organized as a Catalan venture, although its status as a crusade facilitated much foreign assistance and participation (Burns 1973; O’Callaghan 1975; Bisson 1986; Lourie 1990; O’Callaghan 2004). The taking of Mallorca was particularly bloody. Although the only enemy the Christians faced at sea was the weather, resistance was fierce enough on land. The capitol (modern Palma) resisted the siege and all attempts at negotiated surrender collapsed. Failure to negotiate surrender terms and the fact that the city was secured by storming rather than dealing meant the population was vulnerable to anything and everything. Wholesale massacre followed. One Islamic source estimated that 24,000 citizens of the city were butchered on the spot and that Abu Yahya was tortured to death in captivity (true or not he died shortly after being taken into custody). Guerilla bands continued to fight in the hinterland but by and large the island was conquered by May 1230. A majority of the Muslim population opted to flee when given the opportunity, many of them heading for asylum in North Africa. Resettlement activities generally replaced them, not surprisingly, with Catalans. Mallorca was taken by force not diplomacy and this entailed a wide division of the spoils to the constituencies that took it. Spoils and rights of conquest were not restricted to seized property. James also had to decide which legal system would be established in Mallorca. Not surprisingly, he chose Barcelona law for the conquered island. When the dust settled, Mallorca was a New Catolonia and the newly constituted population decidedly Christian (Burns 1973; Lourie 1990). The conquest of Valencia was quite different. It was produced by negotiated capitulations rather than bloody conquest and resulted in a Muslim dominant regional demographic. A five month siege of the capitol city resulted in minimal if respectable terms for the conquered: the Valencian king and his entourage could leave unmolested, the general population was to be evacuated within five days taking with them all portable items, general safe passage without search or seizure was permitted for twenty days, and Muslims were allowed to sell nonmovable goods to the conquerors. Real estate would be apportioned to Christian immigrants. Outside the capitol, Muslims would negotiate their own variable terms of surrender which, frequently, were actually quite good. Technically a “crusade,” the venture was jointly led by a Christian king and a deposed (but converted) Muslim. Muslim and Spanish Christian troops, augmented by crusa-

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ders (mostly from southern France) together plowed the trail into creating a “Christian” Valencia. James certainly presided over slaughters and enslavements but usually his preferred approach was negotiated settlement. Benefits of negotiated settlement were obvious, so obvious politically that his barons often fought against it and pushed for direct conquest. Kings gained much more from negotiated surrender than they did from direct conquest. Negotiations produced much “lordless land” that would revert, according to Roman Law, to the king. If an area was stormed, however, feudal rights of conquest created a cacophony of judicial and financial claims. Although not a zero-sum game per se, kings gained more for negotiated surrenders and barons profited more and were strengthened by direct conquests. James had on occasion employed agents to negotiate a Muslim surrender to himself without the knowledge of his feudal warriors prosecuting the siege. Negotiations rather than assaults strengthened royal power with, of course, the opposite being equally true (Burns 1973; Lourie 1990). Centralization of royal power was an obvious benefit to capitulations. So, too, was their strategic importance in conquest. Medieval Spanish armies were feudal armies and hence, generally speaking, seasonal armies. From the moment they mustered the clock began ticking and, progress or lack thereof notwithstanding, the term of service eventually ran out on variable timetables. When the clock ran out service would be withdrawn and armies disappear. If paid more, or convinced that continued service would benefit them, armies might decide to stay. If not, they would leave and a strategically strong position could collapse. An example of how problematic this could be can be found in Fernando III’s siege of Cordoba. Cordoba, after having negotiated surrender terms to lift the siege, promptly reneged on the arrangement after learning that the Leonese contingent decided not to remain as its three month term of service concluded. Pressuring key positions into negotiated settlements, while bypassing defensive sites dependent on them, were a brilliant strategy that James knew how to work well. It kept momentum speedily moving forward, created a virtual critical mass in further negotiated settlements not requiring force, and left in its wake centers of Muslim power that would collapse beneath the weight of supply and morale problems. Finally, negotiated surrenders often made great economic sense to monarchs like James. Conquest often wreaked havoc on defenses and infrastructure and both were costly and time consuming to repair. Food stores in protracted sieges could be reduced to nothing. Cordoba, the former “ornament of the world,” provides a stark example. Possession of the city had great strategic promise: it provided a gateway for hegemony in the Guadalquivir valley. The problem with the newly won prize was the city’s acute food shortage produced by the siege itself. Financially, the city was a bleeding wound that drove Fernando to the

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papacy, hat in hand, for desperately needed relief. Negotiated settlements (the earlier the better) resulted in the least amount of destruction and dislocation and provided for the maximum amount of continued economic productivity. Christian immigration might always be welcome. Valencia, however, was not Mallorca, and relatively quick population replacement was by no means feasible. In a region such as Valencia the bedrock of the economy, at least for some time to come, would be in the existing Muslim population and making some degree of accommodation not only made strategic sense but was an economic necessity.

C Surrender Contracts and the Rights of the Conquered The Dhimma contract and the legal constructs Christian states developed to deal with their Muslim and Jewish subjects shared similarities. The Muslim model certainly provided much inspiration in devising a means to regulate a religiously pluralistic society. It would, however, be a gross oversimplification—which would produce fairly misleading results—to view the latter as nothing but borrowed versions of the former. Both had the same primary goals and functions: to create segmented, segregated societies that maximized benefits for the ruling class. The dhimma arrangement was a concept obviously known to the conquered and thus could serve as a readily understandable model for negotiating the new relationships. The foundations, justifications, articulations, applications, and enforcement, however, were quite different—as were the cumulative results on minority communities. Religious minorities in al-Andalus, through the dhimma arrangement, had legal protections that were rooted in revelation. Jurists could have different interpretations on specific points but all agreed that the basic arrangement and its general features flowed from divine rather than human will. This fusion between safeguards for minorities and Islamic law created a marked degree of stability. When some terms were not rigorously enforced or tacitly ignored it usually worked in favor of dhimmis. Gross violations of basic dhimmi rights generally occurred only under very weak or very tyrannical rulers, or under puritanical fanatics like the Almohads. When violations did happen it was usually justified as a response to dhimmi violations of the contract. Dhimma contracts were not written out per se between the state and its minorities; the religious weight behind the arrangement, however, made the contract far more solid and secure than could any written document. Provisions for exploitation were just as solid as protections but the system itself was as stable as could be expected.

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While the religious roots of the dhimma system made it universal and fairly resistant to change, the decidedly secular legal arrangements Christian states made with their religious “minorities” (which in the case of Muslims could often be the demographic majority) were contingent and subject to modification and long-term erosion. Conquered communities’ rights and obligations were defined, piecemeal and subject to variations, through individually negotiated terms of surrender that were articulated in written contracts and charters. From the conqueror’s perspective the main objective was to produce as little dislocation as possible for the population and thereby maintain peak economic productivity. From the perspective of the conquered the main objective was to maintain their property and lifestyles as best possible knowing full well that if an agreement was not reached the results would be expulsion, enslavement, or slaughter (examples exist for all three). Significantly, once terms were successfully negotiated the contract was often written out in two copies: one in Arabic to be retained by the conquered community and one in Latin to be held by the conqueror. Terms for surrender contracts were not standardized but were the products of separate negotiation processes. Different communities, therefore, could have different rules for convivencia. Details varied, sometimes drastically, but surrender contracts typically contained common features and areas of concern. Cash ransoms per person could be demanded. Muslims who wanted to emigrate (and were capable of doing so) were usually allowed to leave, sometimes with a grace period during which they could decide to return. Muslims remaining would pay the besant tax, a poll tax that was similar to, and no doubt inspired by, the jizya. Crucially important was the right to be segregated in semi-autonomous communities regulated by their own communal leaders who they themselves would select. Often they received the right not to have Jews or Christians live among them and sometimes even the right to deny them access to their neighborhood. Muslims in Chivert, for example, received a communal wall separating them from Jews and Christians built at state expense. This might have been more of a concern in pluralistic urban and town settings than in the rural countryside, which would often be much more homogenous and segregation probably happened by default. Muslims could acquire the right not to be moved although at times, as was the case in the surrender of Tudela, the entire community could be relocated outside the city walls. The “moreria” itself, the Muslim living area or neighborhood, could range in size from a single street to an entire village or town (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978; Powell, ed., 1990). Religious organization would undergo little to no change: they would retain mosques, their qadi and sharia court (even their own jail), a muezzin for the call to prayer, the right to hold Friday religious services, the right to conduct daily prayers in the street, and the right to practice marriages and burials in accordance

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with Muslim ritual. In large cities, for example Cordoba, Huesca, Murcia, and Lisbon, the main mosque needed to be surrendered to the Christians to be “cleansed of filth” (an ubiquitous phrase), consecrated, and turned into a cathedral (O’Callaghan 2004). Provisions were often made for the religious education of Muslim youth. Making the pilgrimage to Mecca, water rights for ablution fountains in mosques, and Muslim maintenance of their own halal butcher shops —an issue of exceptional importance—were frequently addressed. Particularly interesting were continuations of tax-exempt status for many religious properties. Jews experienced virtually no change in the initial transition. They were already subjugated communities and all that changed at first was to whom they were subjugated. Continuity seems to have been something that all had some stake in (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978). Economic concessions loomed large. To lubricate the transition, holidays for major taxes, for one or two years, could be granted to the conquered population. Existing property rights were acknowledged and Muslims retained full rights regarding possession and inheritance of property. Sale of property to other Muslims was almost always permitted; property sales to Christians, however, could be prohibited without royal approval. If the new Christian rulers needed to appropriate certain properties the Muslim owners might be compensated with new properties, often coming from the land of co-religionists who fled before the surrender. Limited guarantees of the proprietary status quo ante were offered to those who had fled through a grace period in which to return and reclaim their property or at least receive its fair value. Taxes on agricultural products (crop or animal) were clearly defined. Military service to protect the immediate community was assumed; any other forms of military service, which clearly had economic ramifications, needed to be articulated, as did any sort of feudal labor service (if any). Terms could also be exceptionally harsh, if the land was exceptionally valuable or the population particularly distrusted, granting little more than life itself. The conquest of Minorca is instructive in this (Lourie 1990). We know little about the conquest itself. It involved a siege but only a short one, just three weeks, nothing that in and of itself would have prompted draconian measures. The ruler along with his family and friends (about 200 people) were given free and safe conduct to North Africa but could take nothing but clothes and bedding with them—with the exception of books and 50 swords. Men, women, and children within the castle fortifications could each pay a ransom, within six months, to prevent their sale into slavery. Those captured outside the fortifications could be ransomed as well but without the niceties of a six month grade period. They were, at least temporarily, the immediate property of the king who could rent their labor or pawn their physical persons as collateral on loans (both of which happened within a month). There was an expectation that the Muslim ruler would ransom

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many of his people although it is puzzling where this money was to come from as all his assets were seized. Ransomed captives were subjected to full body searches upon departure to make sure they were carrying nothing of value. Provisions were made for Muslim women to be searched by women. Beyond that, the terms essentially end with the guarantee that ransomed women would not be raped or de-veiled (Burns 1973; Lourie 1990). An important backdrop to all charters, one that might not have been explicitly clear in the beginning, was that all Muslims, in the final tally, were under royal jurisdiction. Kings directly enjoyed the fruit of the labor of Muslims on royal lands but they also technically had jurisdiction over urban Muslims and Muslims living on seigneurial estates. This legal provision, which could roughly be compared to federal law trumping state law, was rooted in Roman jurisprudence and thus favored central authority over feudal remonstrance and protections of aristocratic privileges. To what extent this royal prerogative was pushed varied by time, place, and circumstance. The impact on Muslims themselves varied as well: the exercise of royal prerogative could be advantageous or troublesome depending on the case. Muslims in any case were seen as both useful and important to Christian monarchs ruling over them. In the words of the Crown of Aragon, Muslims were “the royal treasure” and “the servants of our household” (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978).

D Mudejars Mudejar is the general term used for Muslim subjects of the Christian states. Etymologically speaking the term is anything but flattering; it comes from the same root as the term for “domesticated animal,” which, in the very least, captures the essential subjugated nature that broadly defined the group and its experience. Mudejars first came into existence in the eleventh-century push south. Almoravid and Almohad occupations, however, delayed their true proliferation until the thirteenth century. Historians of medieval Spain often speak of a “Mudejar” experience or of “Mudejarism” in general terms but it must be remembered that Mudejars, despite the occasional appearance of homogeneity, were a rather diverse group. Mudejars in Navarre had a different experience than those in Castile and those Castile had experiences different from those in Valencia. Such differences were not just cosmetic as they included, for example, such core issues as daily language (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978; Guichard 1990–1991; Harvey 1990; Harvey 1992a). The genesis of Mudejar communities began with conditions far below ideal. Long before a Muslim community was conquered much of its intellectual and

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administrative elite had usually fled. Many more, at least those who could afford to do so, emigrated after negotiated surrenders. Some leaders fled, some were killed, and some converted. Generally speaking those who remained did so because they had no other choice or because they feared giving up what they had to start life all over again further south in the peninsula or in North Africa. Although surrender contracts always made provisions for religious freedom for Mudejars, most Islamic jurists believed that living under non-Islamic rule was prohibited. Living alongside non-Muslims was only permissible in an Islamic state and only in accordance with the terms of the Dhimma contract. Emigration was incumbent upon all conquered Muslims, if at all possible, to Islamic territory as quickly as circumstances permitted. Muslim intellectual elites were already in a state of serious decline due to previous Almohad excesses. The mass exodus of elites following Christian conquest probably just killed a class that was already terminally ill. Mudejar and Moor eventually became synonymous with poverty. Sharecroppers, serfs, and the urban workers are the most common images conjured up when discussing Mudejars. Like all stereotypes it does not withstand close scrutiny. There were prosperous multi-generational Mudejar farmers in Aragon but they do not seem to have retained such status past the mid fourteenth century. In some areas prosperous urban merchants survived through the fourteenth century at least. Mudejars could create and own businesses and enter into business partnerships with Christians or Jews. The Belvis family, probably the most powerful Mudejar family known, provides a notable success story. Very wealthy Mudejars in Aragon, they loaned large amounts of cash to the crown, mingled in royal circles, and had a legal dispensation making them exempt from all Mudejar dress and service regulations. For the most part, however, the majority of Mudejars did not even have their freedom by the close of the fourteenth century. Mudejars, comparatively as a group, were economically and intellectually impoverished in relation to Jews and Christians. The roots of this reality undoubtedly stretch back to the initial years of conquests and the mass hemorrhaging of members of the political and intellectual elite. The Quran, unlike for example the Talmud, did not even conceptualize much less address the possibility of the faithful living under infidel rule. Emigration and resistance were the two sanctioned options. Jews had much more religious flexibility (and historical experience) regarding such a transition. Jewish communities also experienced no comparable migration of elites during the reconquest and their social structure remained intact. While Mudejars were seen largely as rural and poor, Jews were generally viewed as urban and prosperous. Jewish intellectual life not only continued under Christian rule but flourished. Not so with Mudejars. We know of no great Mudejar poet. We know of no great Mudejar philosopher. We know of no

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great Mudejar mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, or even theologians (Burns 1975; Boswell 1978; Harvey 1990; 1992a). Mudejars did, however, make an enormous contribution to architectural craftsmanship and art through the “Mudejar Style.” Construction historically has often been the grand artistic canvas of the laboring-man and it is not surprising that it was in this area that Mudejars reached their historical height of expression. Mudejar style was characterized by the use of simple, low cost, modest materials. Its ultimate origins were rooted in the ferocious anti-sumptuary tenor of Almohad religious ideology. Railing against the opulence in lifestyle, art, and architecture that they found in Spain after conquest, the Almohads launched a campaign of demolition and whitewashing to remove the physical signs of spiritual laxity that they believed could be found everywhere. Brick would substitute for marble. The humble, pure beauty of plaster would replace decadently designed ceramic. Muslim craftsmen working under the Almohad artistic yolk were innovative and developed a remarkable ability to create beauty within the confines of simplicity and modesty. The style survived the withdrawal of the Almohads and as free Muslims became Mudejars they continued the technique. Emancipated from its original religious context, Mudejar style flourished and crossed interfaith boundaries. Public buildings were constructed in Mudejar style. Mudejar style, however, was not considered plebeian in any way. Christian aristocrats employed Mudejar workers to decorate their estates. Palaces would be adorned in Mudejar style. In addition to constructing mosques, Mudejar craftsmen built churches and synagogues. Some of the best surviving examples of Mudejar architecture, in fact, are synagogues (later transformed into churches). Santa Maria la Blanca and El Transito (both in Toledo) are outstanding exemplars (Harvey 1990; 1992a; 1992b; Mann, Glick, and Dodds, ed., 1992). Mudejar language has been one of the most hotly debated aspects of their history. One must always be sensitive to the constant shifting of time, place, purpose, and possible venue of language use. Paucity of evidence is also a major factor in trying to ascertain the historical realities of mudejar language. The traditional/linguistic school of thought has argued that Mudejars were ArabicRomance bilingual speakers but primarily, and in personal life, Romance speakers. Here this school further breaks down into two views. One group holds that Romance was the practical day-to-day language of Mudejars and that Arabic was retained only as a language of religion, scholarship, and officials. Another group envisions a class-based division: Arabic speaking elites alongside Romance speaking masses. Yet another group places the linguistic divide along a city/ countryside axis: urban Mudejars were bilingual while rural ones spoke only Romance. Some have pointed out that chronology is the determining factor in understanding who spoke what language and when. This “traditional/linguistic

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school” is really unified only in the claim that, for one reason or another, Romance was the dominant language for Mudejars. Some revisionists, however, have claimed that the Mudejar population was overwhelmingly one of monolingual Arabic speakers; bilingualism was exceptional, if not idiosyncratic, rather than the norm. Others have seen geography and demographics as being the deciding factors: southern regions with Mudejar majorities like Valencia had Arabic speaking Mudejar populations while northern areas with Christian majorities, such as Navarre and Aragon, had Romance speaking Mudejars (Burns 1984). Evidence regarding the use of interpreters seems to support the last view best. In 1363, for example, the King of Aragon had to send to Lerida for a translator because he “heard” there was a Mudejar there who could read Arabic and, as it turned out, he did not seem to be very good. The emergence of aljamiado— Castilian or Catalan written in Arabic characters—for religious texts certainly seems to indicate a mass loss of Arabic in favor of Romance. In the far south the opposite problem seems to have existed: nearly every town had official translators to render documents and edicts from Romance into Arabic—which seems to have been the most commonly spoken language (Boswell 1978; Burns 1984; Harvey 1990; 1992a; 1992b).

E Aljamas Corporate identity was something that Christian conquerors, vanquished Muslims, and Jewish bystanders all understood and valued. Conquest resulted in the designation, or in some cases reaffirmation, of physical space in which subjected communities could live: for Muslims it was called the moreria and for Jews, depending on where, it was known as the juderia or call. For segregated semi-autonomy to work functionally the local Muslim and Jewish communities needed corporate organizations, not only to regulate themselves but to represent their interests before the Christian state; such organizations were also needed to discharge their communal responsibilities to the state such as tax collection. They would define, direct, and defend the community and provide the necessary oversight in maintaining communal life and satisfying communal obligations.

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I Aljama Structure Aljamas, Muslim, and Jewish were these corporate bodies. The best known and most studied have been the Muslim aljamas of Aragon and Valencia. Their organization followed a rough model but regional variations, emergent traditions, and internal as well as external issues arising gave them all their own individual forms and logic. At the head of an Islamic aljama was usually the qadi who served as chief administrator. Qadis were religious judges and trustees for charitable organizations and endowments. They were the obvious choice for heading internal community regulation. Usually from influential families, they had powerful connections within the community and occasionally had some literary talent or theological training. Judicial, moral, and internal administrative functions were their focus. The amin was, at least in Valencia, the second ranking position in the aljama. He was the chief liaison between the qadi and the population as well as between the qadi and Christian authorities. As chief financial officer, the amin was the primary tax supervisor, aljama treasurer, customs officer, and also supervised probate issues and the care of orphans. The amin could also be in charge of internal law enforcement although that task seems to have been frequently entrusted to another officer, the alami. The positions of qadi and amin could be held by the same individual but it was not the norm. Creating the position of amin might have been partially influenced by its Christian functional equivalent in the bailiff. If the bailiff did not play a role in the creation of the position at the very least, over time, it influenced it. In the original surrender contracts Muslim communities were almost universally granted the right to select their own qadis. By the middle of the fourteenth-century all but a few of the community qadis were royal appointments and almost all amins were selected by the state (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978; Lourie 1990; Guichard 1990–1991; Harvey 1990; Meyerson 1991). Adelantati were another tier in aljama officials. There could be two or three adelantati on a panel but usually four served at a time. Their task was regulating the internal affairs of the community on the ground. As was the case with the amins and bailiffs, there was a rough equivalent to the adelantati in the Christian jurados. Adelantati were elected officials. Although the position was assigned no salary the post surely provided benefits to the holders. Possessing very little real power in the community itself, their main official responsibilities were handling the basic mechanics of fiscal obligations of the aljama to the crown as well as being the official spokesmen and liaisons for the king. Tax agents and public relations representatives, they were, in essence, de facto royal agents in the community and this made them unpopular. The council of sheiks was the final pillar of Islamic aljamas. How Islamic as opposed to how Christian the origins of this institution were is open to interpreta-

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tion. Shura, an advisory council and consultative body, was an ancient tradition in Islam going all the way back to the original community in Medina. Not so ancient but very present and palpable in the region were the Christian commune movements and their associated town councils, councilmen, and corporate institutions jealously guarding their rights against royal or seigneurial encroachments. Some synchronization between the two traditions most likely provides the best explanation. They were a council of “elders” (better read as important personages though many were probably elderly) that played a role in deliberations about community matters and recommending actions. The specific mechanics on how they functioned seems to have varied place to place. What makes their true functioning so difficult to ascertain with confidence is the fact that our Christian accounts of them use their own functional equivalent terms in describing them. Thus the council of sheiks becomes described as a “commune” and, in terms of Roman law, a “universitas” (which it certainly was not). Terminological assimilation, practical as it may have seemed at the time, skews the historical picture. References to sheiks as “councilmen” and councils or aljamas as a whole as “communes” or as universitas sarracenorum is probably as accurate as many equally common cross-faith phrases such as “Sarracen Synagogues” (a very misleading description of mosques), “Jewish Sunna” (a questionable term for Jewish law), and referring to Ramadan as the “Pagan Lent.” They all, of course, have a cross-cultural logic to them but cannot really be described as accurate depictions. Latin influence, however, went beyond terminological issues. By the mid fourteenth century many of these councils were composed of elected officials rather than pure tribal ties.

II Aljama Finances Financial administration was, after socio-religious regulation, the most important function of aljamas. Beneath the upper administrative structure of qadis, amins, alamis, adelantati, and sheiks was a wide array of posts regulated by the aljama that were necessary for its religious and economic functioning. Salaries and sometimes retirement pensions needed to be provided. Imams or cantors, for example, needed to be hired. Religious schooling needed to be provided. Market inspectors needed to be maintained and scribes retained. Administrative staffs handling issues relating to property sale and probate management were required. Meeting payroll requirements could be a difficult challenge for aljamas particularly since their semi-autonomy was not full autonomy regarding fiscal matters. Levying any new taxes or modifying old ones required royal approval which could be denied.

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More nightmarish than meeting payroll requirements was discharging the aljama’s tax burden to the Christian state. In addition to royal taxes some aljamas were even responsible for paying tithes. As the corporate representative of the community the aljama had the final responsibility in meeting the financial obligations of any of its members. Individuals could default but not the corporate body. The aljama, for example, was responsible for payment of poll taxes on any members who personally could not afford it. The aljama was also responsible for the delinquent loans or unpaid fines of community members. Aggravating the problem were the franchitas, exemptions from aljama and royal taxes, monarchs granted to favored Muslims or Jews that shrank the community tax base. These were granted to wealthy individuals of importance and, given that most franchitas became hereditary, they compounded the financial problems of aljamas and surely created class discord within the community. Consequently, aljamas sometimes had to resort to borrowing money to meet their financial obligations to the state. Pragmatism mediated the damage. Sometimes almost half of the aljamas in a region could be in default on technical/formal tax obligations. The state needed recourse to a wide array of fiscal bootstrapping to make things work: deadline extensions when appropriate, temporary tax remissions (in part or whole) when needed, pro-rating when prudent. Deals were sometimes struck in which the tax burden was paid off at one third of the official amount (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978; Lourie 1990; Guichard 1990–1991; Harvey 1990; Meyerson 1991).

III Aljama Judicial Systems In functional terms the aljama, like the dhimma community before it, was a construct that promised to guarantee religious segregation and serve as a boundary-maintaining mechanism to prevent acculturation. Just as a moreria or juderia might have physical barriers, such as gates or walls, to isolate the neighborhood and control relations within it, so the aljama was conceived of as a legal and social barrier that controlled cultural traffic. For Judaism and Islam the most important expressions of communal identity and its preservation was religious law. Aljamas were the institutional venues in which the maintenance and enforcement of religious law, and thus the protection of communal identity, took place. Legal dimensions for the aljamas are thus crucial to understanding their nature and the shared experiences of their members. Two approaches to aljamas and law are required to understand their status and functioning: the legal standing of aljamas themselves as corporate units and the practice and execution of law within the community and, as needed, across confessional lines. The exist-

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ence of aljamas as semi-autonomous corporate institutions was always predicated on the pleasure and wishes of monarchs. Promises of surrender contracts aside, all Muslims were legally the property of the king who “technically” could enslave them for any reason or for no reason at all. Contingent is the most accurate term in describing any aspect of their legal existence. Muslims and Jews could generally expect certain rights but also knew these rights could completely disappear with no warning. In extraordinary conditions (such as war) the entire functioning of an aljama might be suspended and placed under the direct jurisdiction of a royal representative. Particularly after the second half of the thirteenth century, when original rights from conquest charters had almost completely eroded, monarchs at times even installed Christian bureaucrats as aljama qadis. Aljama functioning and status was always contingent on the discretion of rulers and it could be revoked, along with the very physical freedom of members, at any time. Comparing them to communes or a universitas, then, even if monarchs themselves occasionally did, is conceptually useless in understanding the institution. Communes and universitas had durable rights that aljamas themselves never enjoyed. Urban commune members were not conceived of as the “property” or “treasure” of monarchs who could theoretically be seized as property. Sharia and rabbinical courts in aljamas could adjudicate civil cases but usually not criminal ones. The latter would be handled by the Christian state through a justicar. Civil cases, providing they were intra-faith, were handled within the community itself. Qadis and Rabbis, for reasons as moral and cultural as they might be economic or political, wanted to keep as many cases within the community as they could and avoid, whenever possible, internal matters being aired in infidel courts. Neither Jewish nor Islamic jurisprudence had an appellate division. Extra-cultural appellate hearings emerged in the form of royal courts or the creation of Christian-initiated chief qadis that served as regional appellate divisions. In both cases the cohesive force of communal law was compromised. Aljamas could purchase very specific judicial rights, for example, buying concessions for the right to condemn community women guilty of miscegenation to mutilation or execution (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978; Lourie 1990; Guichard 1990–1991; Harvey 1990).

IV Aljama Policing of Miscegenation Miscegenation provides abundant and illuminating examples of aljamas regulating members of their communities while trying to maintain legal barriers to preserve identity. The thriving cross-faith sexual economy was a source of grave

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concern for all. All three faiths as communities demonstrated an abhorrence of miscegenation and took severe judicial measures, which proved largely unsuccessful, to delimit or eradicate it. Numerous individuals obviously did not share communal disgust for interfaith sexual activity. Miscegenation was also one of the issues most likely to produce an explosion of violence. Christian attacks on interfaith sex or marriage began as early as the fourth century and intensified over subsequent centuries. Jewish attacks on miscegenation were of equal and sometimes greater ferocity: from Deuteronomy on it was severely condemned and two of the greatest Jewish intellectuals the peninsula produced, Maimonides and Nahmanides, both saw it as a clear and unquestionable violation of the covenant. Islamic legal thought held that Muslim men could have intercourse with and marry Jewish and Christian women but that Muslim women having relations with non-Muslim men was prohibited. For Mudejars in Spain, however, the opinion narrowed considerably into the view that neither males nor females were permitted to have intercourse with or marry non-Muslims (Nirenberg 1996). Christian states were quite brutal regarding miscegenation cases although that brutality could sometimes be mitigated by the possibly of financially profiting. Commutations of punishments by mutilation, enslavement, or death into cash fines occurred although states themselves almost always profited from enslavements in any event. Power, money, or political connections could circumvent law and custom as in the case of Guig, a powerful Jewess moneylender who served the crown, who procured an official dispensation to live with her Christian lover. Conversions were a possible means for escaping final punishment. Interestingly, Christian miscegenation with Jews was treated more severely than with Muslims. In Valencia, for example, the law stated that the punishment for Christian men fornicating with Jewish women was burning both together while the punishment for Christian men fornicating with Muslim women was having the pair whipped naked (again together) through the streets along with the possible enslavement of the woman. Non-Christian men having intercourse with Christian women generally resulted in executions or castrations for males and, for first offenses for the women, loss of property rights—with recidivism being dealt with by execution. This prohibition extended to prostitutes: the state licensed brothel in Valencia City, for example, had a gallows outside the door that served as a reminder to potential Jewish and Muslim customers of the punishment for miscegenation. Although all three communities—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—had intermural romances and prostitution, Muslim women were by far the most vulnerable and at the proverbial bottom of the heap. Mudejar communities tended to be the poorest and particularly impoverished Muslim women were the most susceptible to sexual exploitation. Muslims, who were a “conquered people” could be en-

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slaved. Miscegenation accusations against them, then, could be great sources of profit, especially since successful charges of miscegenation against Muslim women resulted in a splitting of the profits for enslavement between the successful accuser and the state. Anyone turning in Muslim prostitutes, even their customers, was in line for financial gain by doing so. Most egregious among recorded examples was a group of monks at Roda who were using Muslim prostitutes for sexual gratification and then turning them in to the authorities on charges of miscegenation so that they could collect proceeds from their enslavement (Burns 1973; Boswell 1978; Nirenberg 1996). Muslim and Jewish aljamas were extremely vigilant, almost obsessive, with regulating their communities’ sexual borders. They were not alone in this, however, as average community members themselves not only took interest but sometimes took action in the patrolling of those borders. In Zaragoza a Jewish woman who was impregnated by a Christian was murdered by her brothers. In Huesca, a group of Muslims seized a Jew who frequented a brothel in the moreria, stripped him naked, and left him in the street. An interfaith riot in Zaragoza broke out over a Muslim woman who, having been pardoned for sexual activity with both Christian and Jewish men on the promise not to do so again, was then caught in the juderia fornicating with Jewish men. Some miscegenation stories from the royal registers produce a sense of hilarity, for example, the case of a Jew who found a naked Christian hiding under his wife’s bed and believed the story that he hired her to mend his pants and shirt and was waiting for the job to be complete. Some stories are as confusing as they are fascinating, such as a Jew who poisoned his son because, both having fallen in love with the same Muslim slave, the son threatened to convert to Christianity if the father would not stop having sexual relations with her. More often than not, though, the stories are not amusing and are quite clear and tragic for most of the cast (Burns 1973; Boswell 1978; Nirenberg 1996). Aljamas policed and prosecuted what they saw as the sexual jungle around them but actual official punishment of high offenses, particularly those involving execution, went into the hands of the Christian state. Muslim women convicted by their aljamas, for example, were handed over to the Christian state which usually commuted their death penalty to enslavement or collected a hefty fine for those who could raise it. Jewish women could be subjected to a variety of punishments but generally not enslavement since, unlike Mudejar women, they were not conquered people and thus not technically liable to enslavement. The Muslim aljama of Valencia City purchased from the crown a concession that guaranteed Muslim women convicted of miscegenation could not have the death sentence commuted to a fine. Families, though some would inform on inter-faith promiscuity or kill their own offending women for it personally, could often rise to the

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occasion and work toward financial remission. Families were not alone in trying to pay such fines to spare a Muslim woman about to be executed for miscegenation. In Zaragoza Muslim spectators took such pity on a woman who stood publicly naked about to be flogged to death that they took up a collection to pay her fine on the spot. It was these loopholes of mercy that both Muslim and Jewish aljamas wanted to close down. The rabbinic tradition in Spain unequivocally condemned miscegenation. Yehuda ben Asher ben Yehiel, a rabbi from Toledo, not only claimed that any Jewish man having sexual relations with a non-Jew should be put under the ban but that it was incumbent upon all Jews to report miscegenation whenever known. Another community in Castile even defended Jewish prostitutes as a necessary evil as they gave Jewish men an intra-faith outlet for illicit sex and therefore curbed miscegenation. Jewish men, however, still only rarely received any official censure, much less punishment, from the aljama for extra-faith sexual activity. Not so with Jewish women. Jewish aljamas were exceptionally vigilant— and generally ferocious and uncompromising—when it came to policing the sexuality of its women. Punishment could include facial disfigurement and exile. Jewish aljamas apparently had a widespread problem with poor Jews maliciously bringing allegations of miscegenation against wealthy Jew to Christian courts. Muslims, too, could use miscegenation accusations as a legal weapon. Individuals attacking individuals, and groups attacking groups, through miscegenation accusations were also common occurrences in Muslim aljamas.

F Mudejars, Jews, and Military Service Surrender contracts usually exempted the conquered from military service beyond the normal expectation of immediate community defense. Like so many articles of the original surrender contracts, the exemption from military service eroded under the pressure of state revisionism. Monarchs invoking Roman Law were trying to transform themselves from first among equals into true sovereign rulers. The centralizing force of monarchs promoting and applying Roman Law had profound effects on all political and economic relationships. Mudejar and Jewish communities were more vulnerable to the encroachments of new royal laws than were barons or communes but attempts to centralize authority and the consequent effects were society wide. Evidence suggests that Jewish military service usually remained localized in defense of the immediate community but that this was not always the case. Jews were notable in marching out to defend Toledo against the Almohads in 1197. Jewish military participation being greater in Spain than other parts of Europe is

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suggested by the testimony of a twelfth-century German rabbi who mentioned that it was the custom of Jews in Spain to accompany the king to war. Mentions were occasionally made of Jewish casualties in conflicts. Some Muslim accounts mentioned the participation of Jews in crusading activity. There is a record of Jewish archers receiving land grants in 1266 and the inventory of the estate of Samuel b. Manasseh, secretary to the king, included weapons and armor. Froissart mentioned that Pedro the Cruel made great use of Jews and Muslims in his war against his half-brother. The mercenary career of Abrahim el Jenet is fascinating: he was a Jew fighting in a Muslim mercenary band employed by the Christian king of Aragon. Fascinating as his case is it gives no indication of widespread Jewish participation in military services to the crown or feudal lords. This could be due to the much smaller numbers of Jews in Spain in comparison to the Mudejar and Christian populations. It could also be related to the relative wealth and political influence of Jewish communities as opposed to Mudejar ones. Generally speaking, at the grassroots level, military service was something that one tried to avoid (hence its appearance in original surrender-contracts). Jewish communities, although they had their fair share of impoverished members, had much more wealth and political influence than Mudejars. Mudejars ran a much greater risk of “getting stuck” with military service and hence their prevalence. Possibly one of the most illuminating pieces of evidence was the way in which the crown resolved a dispute between Jews and Muslims in Fraga over which group would march first in the mourning procession for Peter the Ceremonious: Muslims would march first because they risked their lives in battle for the king while Jews did not (Burns 1973; Lourie 1990; Nirenberg 1996). Mudejars, by and large, became fully integrated into the feudal order. From the land-bound peasantry to military service obligations Mudejars differed little from their Christian counterparts. Many Mudejars were considered formal vassals and the term itself was employed in a way that did not differ at all from Christian usage. Mudejars were even used to fight foreign Muslims. With most of the Mudejar community being relatively poor, their most common form of military service was in community militias for local defense. There were, however, the aljaferias, Muslim units that were permanently assigned to posts and as such exempt from any other form of military service. The bulk of Muslims rendering military service to the crown served as infantry or as archers and crossbowmen. Some fought as separate Mudejar units under a Mudejar commander but most fought, at least in the early centuries, in fully integrated units alongside Christians. In Aragon, after a few centuries of such normal military integration a sort of “separate but equal” approach to military service was adopted: Muslim and Christian troops would have equal military duties but serve in segregated units each with their own chain of command. Mudejars did provide cavalry service

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which was not negligible. Cavalry was drawn from aljamas although some aljamas procured exemptions from providing cavalry service—which indicates how widespread the practice was. Mudejar potentates were obligated to provide cavalry as needed although some did so voluntarily beyond obligation. Mudejars were a major component in the military strength of the state and in this regard differed little from their Christian fellow subjects (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978; Lourie 1990; Guichard 1990–1991; Harvey 1990).

G Mozarabs The community of Toledo is the most significant for understanding the shift from Islamic to Christian Spain for Mozarabs. Toledo became a magnet for Mozarab immigration following its conquest in 1085. Emigration and persecution at the hands of the Berber dynasties decimated other once thriving Mozarab communities. Even the community of Cordoba, though it still existed, was weak and in serious decline. The Toledan Mozarab community, on the other hand, was dense and its membership was not restricted just to those tracing their lineage back to Hispano-Roman-Visigothic stock: in the wake of the conquest many Muslims and even some Arabic speaking Jews converted and became “Mozarabs.” The main problem in reabsorbing the Mozarab population into Christendom was, surprisingly, not linguistic but liturgical (O’Callaghan 1975). Mozarabs adhered to the Visigothic rite which, despite its approval in Rome in 1065, was not to the taste of subsequent papal reformers or consistent with the French influences spreading from the north across the Pyrenees. Catalonia’s proximity to and influence by the Franks resulted in an early abandonment of the Mozarabic rite. Deep in the heart of Castile the situation was much different. Alfonso VI was very receptive to the idea of liturgical change and bringing Spain into line with continent-wide customs but he knew popular resistance to this would be significant. Tradition has it that he resorted to submitting the issue to trial by combat with a champion representing each liturgy. When the champion for the Roman rite was defeated the king then submitted it for trial by ordeal through fire. When both liturgies were thrown into the fire, tradition has it that the Mozarabic rite leaped out of the flames and Alfonso kicked it back in saying “Let the horns of the laws bend to the will of kings.” Whether or not laws bent to the will of kings the liturgy in Spain would. Awash in Cluniac monks and missionaries promoting the Roman over Visigothic rite the tiny, weakened Mozarabic communities, with the notable exception of Toledo, went through the liturgical change. In the Mozarab chapel at the Cathedral in Toledo, however, one can still today attend the Mozarabic rite every morning at 8:00 AM.

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Intellectually, the Mozarab community was on the verge of collapse by the time it was absorbed. Like Mudejars, Mozarabs did not adapt well intellectually as minorities. This is, of course, based on surviving sources and it is doubtful that Jews, Muslims, or Latin Christians would have spent much effort trying to preserve Mozarabic texts. Still, there is no evidence of any great Mozarab intellectual. Learned Mozarabs certainly existed. Some Arabic poetry was composed and some Latin works copied. The Mozarab author of the Liber denudationis, a polemic work against Islam, refuted the miracle of Muhammad splitting the Moon based upon Aristotelian physics. Mozarabs also played a role, even if a modest one, in the translation of Arabic scientific and philosophical texts into Latin. Intellectually speaking the community got a significant boost through (re)connection to the wider Christian cultural landscape. The greatest potential contribution Mozarabs could have made to Latin Christendom would be in the understanding of Islam (if only to develop refutations of higher quality). Arabization and Islamization were two distinct processes but they could overlap on the edges. Mozarabs (at least the literate ones) retained their identity but did have significant exposure to Islam. If one were to become literate in Arabic in the pre-modern world it would almost certainly involve some contact with the Quran as it was considered the greatest exemplar of the language and a pedagogical device as well as a revealed text. The Mozarab creation of a Latin equivalent of the Bismallah in their texts is just one obvious reaffirmation of this assumption. They also had access to and knowledge of Quranic commentaries and other important literature. Many Mozarabs knew of kalam (Islamic theology) and made attempts to create some bridges between it and Latin Christian conventions. Mozarab polemics against Islam demonstrated a marked degree of knowledge about the religion in comparison to anything else in Europe and their distaste for the religion should not be confused with ignorance about it (Burman 1994).

H Intellectual Exchange The transmission of the Greco-Roman scientific tradition through Spain and into the rest of Europe is generally considered to be one of the most important events in medieval intellectual development. It was an important aspect of the “renaissance of the twelfth century” and one of the driving forces behind the rise of universities in the thirteenth century; institutions which, in a manner of speaking, emerged as workshops for dealing with this information as well as clearing houses to distribute it. The transmission also provided Europeans with the general framework of the universe as they would see it until Johannes Kepler (1571– 1630).

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Most of the fundamental concepts and texts, but certainly not all, that revolutionized European scientific thinking originated in the East. Spain became the conduit for transmission for two primary reasons. First, it was part of the Islamic world and thus had the cultural connections for the reception of the intellectual products hailing from the East. Second, in Spain the Greco-Roman tradition was more widely available in an Arabized form and was accompanied by such brilliant commentaries as those by Averroes. Arabization of the GrecoRoman tradition was of the utmost importance as it continued and intensified the Neoplatonizing of Aristotelian thought. Many of the conceptual conflicts and rough edges of pure Greco-Roman thought that would cause problems fitting into Abrahamic monotheism were resolved and smoothed in their Arabized versions. This at least partially explains the primacy of Spain and Toledo for the transmission of such knowledge as opposed to Sicily and Palermo. Sicily overall had textual traditions that remained very Greek, in language and context, and did not exhibit as much of an effort in reconciling Aristotle with Moses as had the Spanish tradition (Lemay 1962; Peters 1968; Vernet 1975; Lindberg 1978; Glick 2005). Following the conquest of Toledo and the revelation of the rich intellectual treasures to be found in Spain, scientifically-minded men from throughout Europe came to the peninsula. Texts that were known only by title and author, long thought lost for all time, were now available for the intrepid scholar. Astronomy and astrology were, all things considered, the most sought after form of knowledge, particularly in the shape of Ptolemy’s Almagest. One of the highest forms of knowledge in the Middle Ages, astrology in general and the Almagest in particular, brought Robert of Ketton from England in the 1140s. Together with his collaborator Herman of Carinthia the pair worked on the Almagest and other treatises. When Peter the Venerable visited the Ebro Valley (and seems to have been horrified by the impact of Islam and the heterodoxy it encouraged) he retained the services of the two to create the first Latin translation of the Quran. Significantly, neither man was interested in such a project; they were there to work on scientific texts and had absolutely no interest in Islam or the Quran. Resistance to the project collapsed under generous remuneration. Ketton’s comfort level and knowledge of Arabic can be seen in many ways. Possibly the most significant was that, despite his lack of enthusiasm for the Quran translation project, he used al-Tabari’s commentary for understanding and translating difficult or contestable issues. Although not personally interested in the project he was conscientious and this, combined with his abilities, resulted in a quality product for Peter the Venerable and the first translation of the Quran in a European language (Lemay 1962; Kritzeck 1964; Alverny 1982; Burnett 1992; 1997; 2001; Glick 2005). Translators of texts from Arabic to Latin sometimes worked alone but translation activity was generally done by teams of scholars, often associated with other

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teams and thus forming a “school.” Usually the translation from Arabic into Latin was channeled through Romance vernacular such as Castilian or Catalan. One member of the team would read the Arabic and speak it in Romance while the other member listened to the Romance and wrote it in Latin. Jews were particularly important in this as they tended to be bilingual or trilingual and comfortable in both Arabic and Romance. Translation teams often included a Jew, converted Jew, or Mozarab. John of Seville, the first great translator in Toledo, probably was a converted Jew himself. Dominic Gundisalvus worked on translations with Abraham ibn Dawud. Plato of Tivoli worked with Abraham bar Hiyya. Gerard of Cremona worked with a Mozarab named Galippus. Quality of translations varied not just due to the linguistic skills but also philosophical views on proper means of translation. Some took a euphemistic approach and translated the concepts as opposed to the direct words. The other approach, the “verbo ad verbum” approach, stuck to literal word for word translations. Gerard of Cremona, who with little doubt was the most prolific translator of his age, is an example of the latter. Sometimes in reading his work one can have the confused feeling that they are reading Arabic in Latin script (Alverny 1982; Glick 1992b; 2005; Burnett 1992; 1997; 2001). The city of Toledo gained a reputation for being the capitol of scientific knowledge and particularly the magic arts. Toledo’s legacy in astronomy was particularly strong. In the late eleventh century the qadi Said of Toledo presided over a project that produced the famous Toledan Tables that synthesized the most sophisticated mathematics available with new astronomical observations. In the Middle Ages the line separating science and magic was often thin and sometimes non-existent (Lemay 1962; Glick 2005). The reputation was a somewhat deserved one as some translation activity did involve what would be considered black or demonic magic, particularly astral magic manuals like Picatrix. Arabic was seen as a language of revealed secrets both natural and supernatural and became firmly associated with the Toledan tradition. The reputation of Toledo as a capitol for scientific activity was clinched when Alfonso X centralized the work of scholars in the city to make efforts more efficient. Alfonso even made provisions for individual scholars to specialize in research, translation (now into Castilian rather than Latin), or in the technical editing of manuscripts. The translation team that Alfonso put together included five Jews, one Muslim convert to Christianity, four Spanish Christians, and four Italians; the composition of the group itself is eloquent testimony to the type of cross-cultural effort needed for the tasks to be completed successfully (Vernet 1975; Burns 1983; Samso 1984; Jimenez 2004; Glick 2005). Ranking high among the many important texts channeled through Spain was al-Khwarizmi’s text on Indian calculations which introduced Europeans to a new

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numerical system that eventually would become the Arabic numeral system of today. The numeral system in the Middle Ages was widely known as the “Toledan Numbers” (for numbers, see the contribution to this Handbook by Moritz Wedell). In particular, it seems that 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 0 in their current forms originally took shape in Toledo during the translation movement (Lemay 1977). Al-Khwarizmi’s contribution did not end there: the corruption of his name in Latin into Algoritmi provided us with the term algorithm. Related to this and of equal importance was the recovery of Euclid’s Elements which had previously only been known to Latins in the rather unsatisfactory bare bones translation made by Boethius. This revolutionized geometry as a discipline in Western Europe. Euclid, moreover, became connected with another translated text of the utmost importance: Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. The Posterior Analytics, translated by Gerard of Cremona in Toledo in 1187, was Aristotle’s great exposition on demonstrable proof—the closest that the pre-modern world had to a scientific method. Aristotle’s method of demonstration held mathematics to be a fundamental exemplar for ascertaining proof and Euclid’s Elements came to be seen by medieval scholars as its clearest expression (Glick 1992b). Numerous other works transmitted through Spain were of tremendous importance—not least of them Ptolemy’s Almagest—so numerous that it is impossible to enumerate them concisely. Jews were central to the intellectual transmission of Arab science to Europe. Spanish Jews, however, were also important producers and consumers of science in Spain themselves rather than simply mediators between traditions. While Jews were serving in translation teams to render the Arabic corpus into Latin or Romance they were also translating texts into Hebrew and creating a scientific corpus of their own. Translation and composition in Hebrew was an extremely difficult challenge before the fourteenth century as it was customary to use biblical and rabbinic Hebrew rather than spoken medieval Hebrew. This made translation or composition of technical scientific works a particularly daunting task. Regardless of the difficulties involved an exceptionally rich Hebrew scientific corpus was produced. Jewish scientists also translated works into Latin and even composed original works in Latin as well as Hebrew (Glick 1992b). Two outstanding exemplars of the Jewish scientific community were Abraham bar Hiyya and Abraham ibn Ezra. Bar Hiyya was a translator who worked with Plato of Tivoli but he also wrote original works in Hebrew that include a compendium on mathematics and a treatise on geometry which became, in 1145, the first scientific work originally composed in Hebrew to be translated into another language. Abraham ibn Ezra translated works into Hebrew, such as a commentary on Khwarizmi’s tables, but also composed works in Hebrew including three works on mathematics and The Copper Instrument, which was his own treatise on the astrolabe. Abraham ibn Ezra also composed works in Latin such as

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an original work on astronomical tables and possibly a Latin treatise on the astrolabe. He took his Spanish scientific training and went on to be an “international consultant” of sorts: he traveled city to city abroad synchronizing local meridians to astronomical tables. The career of Petrus Alfonsi (1062–1110) is very instructive in revealing the differential in scientific knowledge between Islamic Spain and Christian Europe during the early transitional period. He was no Abraham bar Hiyya or Abraham ibn Ezra. Alfonsi was a converted Jew from Islamic Spain who migrated north to Aragon and eventually crossed the Pyrenees into France and England. There he became a great promoter of the Andalusi scientific tradition as well as a great promoter of his own career through it. His scientific works were greedily received and he quickly reached the status of an auctor—a great authority. He railed with pious indignation against the juvenile intellectual traditions he found in the north and rode a wave of applause that carried him right into a position as the personal physician to Henry I. The most fascinating thing about his stellar career is that by the standards of Andalusi science he was only a mediocre scholar even when performing at his very best. Much of the time he did not fully understand his own subject and his works were completely corrupted by gross errors. Once better translations by more qualified scholars began crossing the Pyrenees, Alfonsi’s scientific work became quickly and utterly obsolete. From then on it was primarily his polemical works against Islam and Judaism that were considered worth reading—particularly for an understanding of the Talmud and how to attack it. The fact that a third-rate Andalusi scholar could launch such a successful career in the north serves as a real foreshadowing of the intellectual impact Spain would soon have on all Christendom (Tolan 1993).

I Confrontations I The Importance of Segregation Aljamas, morerias, juderias, and the entire social system in which they were embedded were designed to limit, as much as possible, contact between the three faiths and to regulate such contact when it was unavoidable. Distinctive clothing was legislated for Jews and Mudejars so that they could always be easily distinguished from Christians in the streets. Legislation for men also included beard length and hairstyles. Attempts were made to ensure separateness and preserve identities in a variety of arenas ranging from butcher shops to brothels. Social barriers were considered the foundation of co-existence and even though many individuals sometimes opted to slip past those barriers for reasons of their own.

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The three communities themselves—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—all corporately believed, however, in the absolute necessity of separateness. Proximity, they reckoned, did not produce better mutual understanding of one another but simply provided more opportunities for conflict and cultural contamination. Crossings of such social boundaries can sometimes be amusing to the modern reader as, for example, when a scribe in Barcelona complained that a Jewish sewer was running through his neighborhood and that the smell of non-Christian waste was offending the local Virgin of the Pine. In the minds of some, then, even feces needed to be segregated. Sometimes such crossings could be revolting, such as Christians pasturing pigs in Muslims graveyards (supremely offensive itself on multiple counts) even after the animals began digging up corpses. Sometimes they reveal a web of interconnected economic issues such inter-faith uses of butchers or artisan disputes about competing cross-faith workshops being open during holy days (Nirenberg 1996). Christian and Jewish traffic into morerias reveals an entirely different shadow world of inter-faith relations. These usually impoverished communities became centers for a wide array of low-life and illicit activities. Christian state official had no authority in morerias and actually could not even enter them without being accompanied by the local amin unless specifically charged to do so by the crown. Certainly this made them even more appealing venues for nefarious pursuits. Poverty produced a relative abundance of Mudejar prostitutes although numerous of their Christian counterparts were drawn to the moreria as well (Boswell 1978; Nirenberg 1996). Taverns, despite the Islamic prohibition on alcohol, were abundant. Gambling was a major activity in the moreria. A game called tafueries was played in almost all sizable morerias. Legal for Muslims to play but not for Christians, the proliferation of the game resulted in the emergence of a new official, the Tafurarius, whose function was to collect fines from Christians caught playing. Fines from the game were so extensive that they eventually became a significant revenue stream for the crown (Boswell 1978).

II Ritualized Aggression and Massacre Holy Week attacks on Jewish communities, an annual ritualized event rooted in mainstream rather than fringe clerical and popular culture, provide clear and instructive examples on the social barrier between Jews and Christians. David Nirenberg, in his tour de force study Communities of Violence, demonstrated how these attacks were reinforcements of the social barrier more than penetrations of it. Holy Week attacks on the juderia or call were not pogroms but rituals— aggressive rituals but rituals with “rules” nonetheless. “Ideally” it would involve

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children under eighteen years of age throwing rocks at the walls of the juderia. The intent was to intimidate, maybe cause property damage, but not to murder. The “ideal” could and did on occasion escalate. Adults, usually clerics, might join the ritual and produce confrontations with the Christian officials assigned to guard the juderia and make sure the ritual did not spiral out of control. Most of the physical violence that occurred in the Holy Week attacks was between Christian officials and the Christian population (usually clerics). When it escalated to the extreme, however, it could result in a sack of the juderia. Serious injuries, however, were relatively rare. According to Nirenberg the ritual reminded all of their differences and served to symbolically reinforce the social boundary. In so doing, it mimicked but partially vented the violence that could explode from a desire for vengeance against Jews for deicide (Nirenberg 1996). Before 1348 religious massacres were not an aspect of Iberian existence. The one exception—and really only a partial exception due to the convoluted nature of the events—was the massacre of 337 Jews in the village of Montclus in 1320. The primary agents were not Spanish locals but French radicals, the Pastoureaux, who tore a path of destruction through Jewish communities wherever they went. Some Montclus locals participated in mob looting and at least one played an active role in the death of Jews but the massacre itself cannot be considered a “native” occurrence. The machinery of royal justice, moreover, came down very hard on all who played any role, even a slight one, in anti-Jewish activities during the tragedy. The moreria of Naval was sacked and looted by the “shepherds” with some locals also joining in but there were no deaths. Generally speaking most Jewish and Muslim communities were protected by state officials and the local populations against the threat. The massacres of Jews in 1348, however, cannot be blamed on a radical group coming from France. Nor can the massacres of 1391, the darkest year for Sephardic Jewry before 1492, in which thousands of Jews were butchered and staggering numbers were forcibly converted. Brutal, vicious, and destructive as these pogroms were it must also be noted that decades of relative peace and normalcy separate them (Nirenberg 1996).

III Conversion Attempts Another notable arena for confrontation was a new approach to missionary efforts in the thirteenth century. Older polemical approaches to Judaism (and later Islam) were much more geared toward Christian audiences to reinforce their own faith and demonstrate its superiority. In these cases, the “Jew” or the “Muslim” was more often than not a straw opponent to be rhetorically whipped without being able to strike back. Efforts that genuinely tried to convert Jews were based on

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Christian sources which, naturally, were not considered to be legitimate by target audiences. The Christian “discovery” of the Talmud and access to better information about Islam (for those looking for it) helped pave the way for a new approach, one that had living, breathing opponents rather than straw targets, an approach that would culminate in public disputations designed to prove the superiority and truth of Christianity (J. Cohen 1982a). In theory the approach was designed to convert both Jews and Muslims. In practice efforts were usually focused on Jews. Judaism was generally considered by Spanish Christians to be more abhorrent than Islam but this was not the reason for focusing primary efforts on Jews. Much more likely, the reason lies in the comparative conditions of Jewish and Mudejar communities. Intellectual life among Spanish Jews made the transition from Islamic to Christian rule with no disruption. Brilliant rabbis like Nahmanides were produced by the Jewish educational system and could be taken on in a public disputation. If an iconic religious expert were defeated and toppled in public debate, the theory posited, intellectual resistance and then popular resistance would crumble. There were, however, no Mudejar counterparts to Nahmanides. The Muslim intellectual elite was essentially decapitated by flight and migration during the initial conquest. Another reason for the focus on Judaism over Islam in practice rather than theory was that a number of educated Jewish converts took up the cause of attacking their previous religion. Mudejar communities, just as they had no counterpart to Nahmanides, had no counterpart to such converts (J. Cohen 1982a). Converted Jews were often the most dangerous Christian opponents of Judaism in intellectual and theological terms. Already in the early twelfth century Petrus Alfonsi, in his Dialogi contra Iudaeos, launched a brutal attack on Judaism, particularly contemporary Judaism, by focusing on the Talmud. After killing Jesus the Jews broke with the Old Law and created a new one, based on a web of lies, a web called the Talmud (Tolan 1993). The potentially devastating end game of this argument was, if not immediately recognized, at least not immediately acted upon: the Talmud, as post-biblical religious writings, constituted heresy and could thus open up rabbinic Judaism to Christian machinery for suppression. Other than bringing attention, sometimes for the first time, to the nature of the Talmud, Alfonsi’s attack had minimal impact. A century later the Jewish convert Nicholas Donin waged a campaign, in an entirely new key, on the Talmud as post-biblical heresy and as a tradition encouraging Jewish blasphemy against Christianity. In 1240, Donin’s war on the Talmud reached its apex with the trial, conviction, and burning of the Talmud in Paris. The Talmud was now something that was receiving significant Christian attention. The belated Christian “discovery” of the Talmud revolutionized the missionary approach by promising insight into the psyche of the contemporary, living

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Jewish community rather than just a biblical, ossified understanding of their thought. Converting Jews meant understanding contemporary Jews and that meant understanding Talmudic scholarship along with contemporary methods of rabbinic exegesis. The Dominican Ramon of Penyaforte became the dean of a missionary think-tank dedicated to designing and piloting a new approach to conversion. The school was to pioneer conversion methods for both Muslims and Jews. Many of the recruits seem to have been more interested in converting Muslims but pragmatism steered most toward-dealing with Judaism. Requisite languages were a must: to debate learned rabbis the sources must be known in their original language. Extensive training in rabbinic literature was also required for any chances of success. Penyaforte’s school even licensed graduates for disputation to ensure that only qualified alumni could appear in public and thus prevent any counter-productive embarrassments. Pablo Christiani, a converted Jew originally hailing from a prominent Jewish family in southern France, was Penyaforte’s initial point man and became the group’s original “Jewish expert.” The new approach would focus on using Jewish sources and logic to force the conclusion that Jewish sources themselves supported Christian belief and doctrine (J. Cohen 1982a; Chazan 1989). The grand debut for the new approach was an affair of the greatest magnitude: the 1263 public disputation in Barcelona between Pablo Christiani, Penyaforte’s Jewish expert, and the rabbi Nahmanides, pound for pound the most knowledgeable and respected rabbi in the peninsula at the time. The deck was set, so to speak, in that Pablo Christiani could take the offensive against Jewish principles but that Nahmanides could not directly malign Christian tenets, restricting himself only to logical argumentation based on presented premises. The result was a sparring match in which Christiani would constantly be on the offensive with Nahmanides restricted to parries and ducking. Nahmanides, whose showing was much greater than one would think the circumstances permitted, consistently fell back on the questionable logic of Christiani’s presentation: all of his points, in fact the entire agenda for the debate, were predicated upon an initial Christian premise that itself had not been logically proven or on premises that had been stripped from their original context. In the end, both sides believed that they had won the disputation although Nahmanides himself was exiled a few years later on the charge of writing false and malicious accounts of the event. Ramon of Penyaforte approached the results of the disputation with characteristic pragmatism: the performance was good but it could have been better and the approach must be tweaked based on the experience (Chazan 1992). Pugio Fidei, the “Dagger of the Faith,” the most knowledgeable and devastating attack on Judaism written by a medieval Christian, was textually speaking the high water mark for the new method in converting Jews. Its author, Ramon

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Martini, was not a converted Jew but a Christian drawn to the project of conversion. When he originally joined the Penyaforte School he seems to have been more interested in the conversion of Muslims than Jews. Practical concerns, as well as the spectacle of the Barcelona disputation of 1263, steered him toward a career in anti-Judaism. In 1264, the year after the Barcelona disputation, Martini began an intensive 15 years of study of rabbinic literature (in its original language) and emerged from it with Dagger of the Faith (ca. 1280), a manual par excellence for attacking Jewish belief. Although written in Latin it only deals with Hebrew and Aramaic sources. Rabbinic citations were always provided in the original language with painstaking and very accurate translations. Problematic terms for interpretation were always addressed and resolved using rabbinic sources and authorities to insulate the arguments from attack. Martini’s command of rabbinic literature was sophisticated and extended into understanding the differences between halakic material (legal and obligatory) and aggadic (nonlegal and debatable)—an understanding and distinction that Pablo Christiani did not truly grasp and was consistently targeted by Nahmanides (J. Cohen 1982a; Chazan 1989). Evaluating the danger of the new approach of this philosophical “dagger” held to the Jewish communities of Spain is difficult to gauge. Jews, through involuntary sermons, were exposed to the new logical approach but it is doubtful that this had much effect. The old story about Jews putting wax in their ears as they marched to compulsory sermons probably has deep down a solid foundation in reality. Much more compelling regarding conversion was the increasing violence visited upon Jewish communities along with converts who ingested the new approach and plied it upon their former co-religionists. The new sermons and disputations netted few converts. Massacres and fear of massacre were what produced significant conversions. Still this explosion of interest in effecting conversion, as well as the concerted efforts in developing an appropriate methodology to achieve it, demonstrates a growing sense of desire in the Christian community to be rid of its Jewish (and most likely Muslim) population. Before expulsions ever even entered the historical equation attempts were being made to remove, so to speak, the non-Christian population through conversion. The eventual expulsions of Jews and Muslims, though multi-causal in origin, were both connected to a growing realization that conversion was no longer viable (Jasper 2012; with an extensive bibliography).

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J Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Shattering of Convivencia I The Converso Issue Convivencia in all of its aspects essentially came to an end during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Centuries of coexistence did not end with one act or one policy and it cannot be completely connected to a specific year, even a year as significant as 1492. Convivencia came to an end in stages and at different rates for Jews and Muslims. The end did not begin as a preconceived policy of “purity of blood” (that idea came later) but was produced by specific sequences of actions, reactions, and evolving approaches. Ferdinand and Isabella themselves had fairly different views regarding minorities even though they both welcomed and worked for conversion in their own ways. Muslims in Isabella’s Castile were given the option of expulsion or conversion to Christianity while those in Ferdinand’s realms continued their existence without facing forced conversion or banishment until after his death. The collapse of convivencia was a multi-causal event but the Converso issue and subsequent changes in state approaches to Jews were the most important. The horrible year of 1391 resulted in the butchering of thousands of Jews in Castile and the forced conversion of a stunning one-third of the Jewish population. These forcibly converted Jews, the Conversos, adapted to the new conditions either by striving for full assimilation into Spanish Christian society or by publicly leading a Christian lifestyle while privately practicing Judaism. Assimilation, sometimes supplemented with inter-marriage, could prove very successful for those so disposed, sometimes leading even to high rank in the church. For example, Juan Arias Davila, Bishop of Segovia, was of Converso stock. Hernando de Talavera— Archbishop of Granada, Confessor to Isabella, and the greatest Spanish churchman of his day—was partially of Converso stock. Ferdinand himself has even been said to have had some Jewish blood from his mother’s side of the family. Conversos truly not interested in either Christianity or substantive assimilation to its social structure became “Crypto-Jews.” Outwardly and publicly they would live Catholic lives with children being baptized and adults going to Mass. Privately within homes and across the community they would practice Judaism and get by as best they could (Baer 1961–1966; Meyerson 1991; Roth 1995). For the first decades following 1391 the Converso ssue does not seem to have been a particularly troublesome one. In the 1440s this began to change and the Converso issue graduated to crisis. Anti-Converso riots broke out and the sincerity of conversion became a major issue amidst reconsiderations of what being

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Christian meant. “Judaizing,” falsely professing Christianity and spreading or reinforcing Judaism by working against the conversion of remaining Jews, became a fear of considerable consequence. Conversos who were “Crypto-Jews” were technically relapsed heretics and thus fell within the jurisdiction of the inquisitorial process. The establishment of the inquisition institutionalized the fear of Judaizing and created the machinery for prosecution and information collection, “information” that would in turn feed more fears. Castilian laws called for stricter enforcement in the segregation of Jews. Inquisitors claimed to uncover a plot in which Conversos and Jews colluded in the crucifixion of a Christian child and were using necromancy to attack Christianity. Despite the personalities and excesses of some individual inquisitors, the objective was to sort through Conversos to identify and separate the Crypto-Jews who would impede the conversion of remaining Jews. As was the case with all heresies, Crypto-Judaism was seen as an infection that would spread unless somehow cauterized. Cauterization of Judaizing was the nominal purpose of the inquisition from 1478–1483. Trials and executions began in Seville in 1480. When cauterization came to be seen as ineffective then amputation through mass expulsion, a measure very much pushed by the inquisition as an institution, was implemented in 1492. Jews were given six months in which to sell their property and leave Spain.

II Changes Among Mudejar Communities Christian suspicions of and animosities toward the Mudejar population were originally rooted in very different issues. Before the sixteenth century there was no major population of converted Mudejars who could be suspected of preventing the conversion of their supposed previous co-religionists. Mudejars, however, could be and occasionally were a significant military threat in ways Jews never could be. They were integrated into the feudal order and not all as sharecroppers and urban artisans: some performed significant military services (Burns 1973; 1975; Boswell 1978; Harvey 1990; Meyerson 1991). There were many more Mudejars than Jews. Mudejar foreign connections were not commercial and intellectual but political and military in nature: their potential foreign allies had armies. Such external armed threats could help ensure that their rights would not be violated but it could also increase fear of Mudejars as possible traitors. Mudejars could have affinity for and be supportive of external threats making them potential fifth columns. In Valencia, where the Mudejar population was thickest, there were significant Mudejar revolts from the late 1240s into the 1270s with notable ones also occurring in 1359 and 1364. Revolts in the 1270s were coordinated with forces from North Africa and Granada and surely contributed to the sense, and with

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some justification, that a significant part of the population had external loyalties which could prove strategically disastrous. Attacks on morerias in Valencia tended to break out during periods of war or impending war with Granada: 1288, 1299, 1309, 1385–1386, 1428, 1455, and other possible attacks on morerias were quelled by local officials before actually erupting. Rumors about Mudejars profiting from shipping Christians off to foreign slave markets emerged as functional equivalents to those of Jews conducting anti-Christian activities or the murder of children. Muslims in Spain, by the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, had actually become minorities in real demographic terms. In Valencia the Mudejar population, primarily due to the pressures of Christian immigration, had dwindled to 30% and in Aragon to 20%. The conquest of Granada, of course, disrupted this long acquired balance in both numbers and interactions; Castile suddenly had an enormous population of Muslims and Muslims who had not been acclimatized to Christian rule over multiple generations. Important in this equation was also the general decline in power or at least organization unity in North Africa and its comparative inability to exert much influence on the peninsula. Without a significant threat from North Africa or a Muslim Granada, Mudejars would be more vulnerable to pressure and, if they rose to defend themselves, would learn that they were essentially alone (Meyerson 1991). The surrender contract for Granada was both reasonable and consistent with about four centuries of conventional wisdom. Conquered Granadans retained their religious rights, lifestyle, and their property. Expulsion of Jews, at least at this point, had nothing at all to do with Muslim policy. Ferdinand and Isabella were not, as some have believed, immediately trying to construct a form of Spanish proto-nationalism based on a push for ethnic homogeneity. Ironically perhaps, Ferdinand and Isabella initially brought in more Muslims rather than expelling any they already had. When Portugal deported its Mudejar population in 1497 the monarchs allowed these refugees to resettle in Granada and Castile— hardly an act consistent with a coherent policy that would include expulsion from Castile a mere four years later. The differing personalities of the monarchs themselves are somewhat informative in understanding how convivencia ended. Isabella was certainly more puritanical regarding her faith, was less patient in areas of compromise, and more disposed to using heavy-handed measures regarding conversions. Ferdinand was much more sensitive to the social, economic, and potential military repercussions of an aggressive approach to the conversion of Muslims. If this sensitivity ever slipped his mind, the aristocracy back in Aragon would surely remind him of the economic devastation and military complications that would undoubtedly arise from an attempt to forcibly convert Mudejars. Fiscal concerns could, however,

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sometimes be trumped by matters of faith: Ferdinand foresaw the economic damage that would be done by letting the inquisition run roughshod over Conversos and Jews but he saw the “Judaizing heresy” as grave enough to run that risk. There is no reason to think that Ferdinand’s desire for Muslim conversions was any less sincere than Isabella’s but there was a distinct difference in opinion on approach and intensity. There is also no reason to think that Ferdinand was any more well-disposed to Muslims than was Isabella. Beneath his economic and political pragmatism in dealing with Muslim subjects there was a deep dislike for the religion. An excellent illustration can be found in Ferdinand’s reaction to learning that Muslims near Tortosa were using a church on Islamic holy days to pray together. Enraged, he ordered the cleansing of the church and that all officials allowing Muslims into a church were to be slapped with a hefty fine. Muslims entering a church would earn either capital punishment or enslavement. Ferdinand was also a particularly zealous enforcer of all segregation laws although it must also be noted that he could be very protective of his Mudejars when they were threatened (Meyerson 1991).

III From Mudejars to Moriscos Mudejar policy went through its volte face in Castile (but not in Ferdinand’s realms) at the very turn of the century. Hernando de Talavera, the Archbishop of Granada, had been engaged in peaceful missionary efforts based on persuasive methods working incrementally toward conversions. Talavera’s strategy was to develop good relations with the ulama, provide financial support for impoverished Muslims and those suffering from drought, and to translate Christian scripture into Arabic. Numbers of converts in these early years were not significant but neither was the amount of social discord produced by the effort. The arrival in Granada of the inquisitor Cardinal Cisneros in 1499 began the process of disintegration. Inquisitors were pushing for an expansion of their charge into Islamic affairs. Isabella seems to have been receptive to his arrival. Ferdinand, however, had a fairly low opinion of Cisneros himself and a particularly low opinion of his methods. Ferdinand even quipped that he expected nothing more from Cisneros as previously he had never even seen a Muslim face to face much less know anything about them. Ferdinand was concerned that ham-handed aggressive approaches would recreate the Converso problem within the Muslim population. One could just as easily describe this fear as common sense or as prophetic. Cisneros came to Granada for the expressed purpose of dealing with the Elches (Christians who had converted to Islam). Legally speaking, at least according to the surrender contract, this was a violation of terms as it was specifically

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stated that Elches were included in the religious freedom clause and could practice Islam unmolested. Far more controversial and troublesome, however, was Cisneros’s extension of his activities to the children of Elches. The issue of proselytizing to or the pressuring of children always had explosive potential. Ferdinand understood this himself and, although he was always happy to have a Mudejar convert to Christianity, he balked when it came to minors asking to convert if they had living family members; in such cases he thought it best to allow them to convert only upon reaching their age of majority. Tensions in Granada increased and the situation exploded through what appears to have been a botched attempt by Cisneros to take a child from the Albaicin. A young girl screaming and crowds forming, the fiasco inevitably led to a neighborhood-wide riot in the Albaicin that was not easily suppressed. Talavera came to negotiate and was well received in the Albaicin. The approach of Cisneros and Isabella, however, prevailed over that of Talavera and Ferdinand. The punishment for the Albaicin rebellion was the choice of baptism or expulsion for the entire population. Once news of this spread many Mudejars became convinced that the Christian state, despite any contractual promises, was bent on a policy of forced conversion. The Alpujarras erupted into Muslim revolts during 1500–1501 and the Cisneros approach prevailed in all negotiations ending these hostilities: the price for peace was baptism or deportation. Capitulation did not always spare Muslims: in Andarax, after Muslim men had turned in their weapons, an argument over pillaging produced a confrontation in which the army slaughtered over 3,000 men and women in the streets. The mosque, where over six hundred women took refuge, was set ablaze and they were all burnt alive (Meyerson 1991). The surrender contract for Granada was now deemed null and void due to this Mudejar revolt and the breaching of the peace. In July 1501 the border of Granada was shut down to prevent any Muslim migration into it. By September 1501 it was decided that all Muslims in Castile were required to convert to Christianity or leave the realm. Ferdinand’s fear about replicating the Converso problem in a Mudejar form was quickly becoming a reality. Talavera’s approach to nurturing voluntary conversions collapsed beneath the weight of the new inquisitorial approach. The options, baptism or expulsion, were even narrower and bleaker than they appear at first glance. Expulsion, as offered in this case, required leaving one’s children behind in the hands of the Christian state and essentially abandoning them forever. How “voluntary” such emigrations were when a requirement was leaving all children behind is extremely questionable. In 1502 the order was finally delivered that Muslims not willing to convert needed to leave the kingdom and, significantly, the order referenced the danger Mudejars would present to newly converted Christians of Muslim origin and directly compared the predicament to the Converso problem. It must also be remembered that

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these forced conversions (and essentially they were forced) took place in Granada and Castile but not in Ferdinand’s ancestral territories. Mudejars in Valencia and Aragon as well as the tiny amount in Catalonia experienced no compulsory conversion and continued to exist until the reign of Charles V. Moriscos is the term applied to those Muslims who were forcibly converted following the events of 1500. The term, literally meaning “little Moor,” is quite old and emerged in the middle of the sixteenth century. They should not be confused with Mudejars who continued to exist to the east in Valencia and to the north in Aragon. Moriscos were the Muslim equivalents of Conversos, the coming existence of which Ferdinand himself had almost predicted, and in particular Muslim equivalents of Crypto-Jews. There is no evidence suggesting that sincere converts went into the making of the Moriscos community. Muslims, like Jews, did not legitimately fall under the jurisdiction of the inquisition. Moriscos did, however, like Conversos, fall under their jurisdiction as they were technically Christians who were suspected as being particularly prone to relapse. In the words of one inquisitor who, at least in this respect, recognized the farce for what it was, the Morsicos were “as Muslim as Algerians.” Attempts by Spanish Muslims to solicit assistance from North Africa, from Mameluk Egypt, and from the Ottomans all failed. They were weak and they were alone. In a situation much like that lived earlier by Crypto-Jews, the Moriscos tried to be as Muslim as they could while being as Christian as necessary (Meyerson 1991; Harvey 1992b). Policy made it difficult for these “Crypto-Muslims” to maintain faith and culture. A series of decrees incrementally circumscribed their lifestyles in ways that no Mudejars had ever experienced. Arabic script was banned in 1508 although how well this prohibition was enforced is questionable. In the next decade the cultural vice tightened to include legislation regarding a variety of areas of what would seem to be Muslim life ranging from food to public festivals. In some respects it was similar to the Soviet hujum in Central Asia and the emergence of “every-day-life crimes” that sought to eradicate Islam by destroying most aspects of public ritual and behavior. By the 1520s circumcision, halal butchering, Islamic wedding, and burial customs, were all illegal. Even eating while sitting on the floor became cause for suspicion. Authorities charged with suppressing Crypto-Muslim activities were quickly drawn to Moriscos’ homes and developed a particular focus on women. Women were often seen—and correctly so—as ringleaders in maintaining the strength of private Islam in the home. In trying to reach the young, Jesuits created schools for Moriscos children. Boys and girls brought into these schools were thoroughly versed in Christian doctrine. Girls, the future mothers, would need to nurture their children in the proper faith. Boys if talented enough could help the Jesuits in their efforts to instill real Christianity among the Moriscos and, for the most talented pupils of all, a career in the Jesuit order itself was possible.

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Piety among the Moriscos was also severely challenged. Whether or not they were legitimately Muslims anymore could have been called into question. Islamic law took a dim view toward Muslims who continued to profess Islam while living in a non-Islamic state. The status of a Morisco “Crypto-Muslim” would be much more dubious. Did women running make-shift mosques out of their homes, for example, constitute a true community? Regarding “Crypto-Muslim” existence many have pointed out the doctrine of taqiyya, precautionary simulation to avoid detection, but it is not at all certain how much of the Morisco population even knew about this doctrine and it is even less certain that, in the eyes of most Muslims, it would seem applicable to an entire society brought under compulsory mass apostasy. In a fascinating and very important request to a mufti in Oran for a fatwa on their plight, Moriscos were given legal advice that permitted them to simulate Christian life in almost all respects so long as the believers denied it in their hearts. Idolatry, wine, pork, abstention from ritual prayer, even denial of faith was all permissible if absolutely necessary and the act was internally denied. Moriscos now had a legal warrant for living Crypto-Muslim lives that, in broad terms, might be somewhat comparable to the Talmud in providing a framework that eased restrictions of the law to permit a reasonable amount of assimilation… or at least simulation. In addition to the fatwa from Oran, the Morisco community sought ritual guidance through the “Segovian Book” or Breviario Sunni by the earlier mufti of Segovia Ice de Gebir. Moriscos also produced and circulated a not inconsiderable literary corpus in aljamiado, Romance in Arabic characters, which went completely undetected by Christian authorities. Due to the prohibition against Arabic script they were usually hidden but even when aljamiado texts were found and either impounded or burned they were usually assumed to be copies of the Quran (Harvey 1992b). Fairly sharp declines in agrarian and industrial production clashing with a demographic rebound and inflationary pressure made the Moriscos and Mudejar predicament even worse. Economic distress had been a dependable companion to outbreaks of anti-minority sentiments and the friendship emerged robust as ever in 1519. The Germanias, brotherhoods composed mostly of artisans reacting primarily to basic issues like food costs, rose in protest and demanded relief and reform. The movement became radicalized (as such movements often did) and dedicated itself to overthrowing rather than reforming the system. Primary targets were those of privilege in the eyes of the Germanias, namely commercial oligarchs in the cities and the nobility in the countryside. The first two years of the revolt made little mention of much less focus on Mudejars, even when the threat of Muslim corsairs on the coast loomed large in the minds of the movement’s leadership. Beginning in 1521 Mudejars became a significant focus. Attacks on them,

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surprisingly even those involving forced conversion, were not really religiously motivated—at least initially. Germanias began attacking Mudejars because of their ties in the countryside to the nobility that they worked for and sometimes militarily served. Killing Muslims or converting them (both of which would financially impact the seigneurs) was seen as a means for economically undermining the real opponent which was the nobility. Mudejars, moreover, were often employed by the nobility in their armies in attempts to suppress the Germanias. Eventually anti-Mudejar sentiment, which was really anti-nobility sentiment by proxy, spilled over into the morerias with terrible results (Meyerson 1991; ed. note: see now the contributions to The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, ed. GarcíaArenal and Wiegers, 2014).

K The End of Convivencia The end of Iberian Islam (Mudejar and Crypto) and with it the disappearance of the final traces of convivencia in the peninsula, is a tragic but an anticlimactic story. No new elements were really added to the mix; it was little more than expansions of previous policies and the replication of earlier events that, with the exception of tragic losses of life, have almost a bureaucratic drudgery to them. Ecclesiastical opinions, on theologically questionable but politically uncontested grounds, validated the forced conversions that produced the Moriscos. Soon after, in 1526, Charles V extended the conversion or expulsion policy to all remaining Mudejars and thus demolished the protective barrier that his predecessor Ferdinand maintained between lands held by the Crown of Aragon as opposed to those that were Castilian. Mudejars thus came to an end as a category of people and Moriscos status became the only option for Iberian Muslims choosing to stay in the peninsula. Moriscos, like their Mudejar predecessors, did not all quietly accept such treatment. Rebellion again emerged in the Alpujarras in 1568 as Moriscos waged guerilla warfare. Although the rebels managed to persist for almost two years they all ended up dead, enslaved, or deported. Moriscos continued to reach out to any foreign power, Muslim or Christian, which might share a common enemy in Spain and help their plight. Continuously all attempts failed, whether with the Ottomans or the Egyptians or the French or the English (Meyerson 1991; Harvey 1992b). During the sixteenth century the Morisco problem, like the Converso problem before it, loomed large in the minds of Spanish monarchs and statesmen. The general baseline of the story underwent little to no change. In 1602 a royal committee was formed to study the Morisco question. The final decision to expel the Moriscos, however, was made seven years later. The delay had nothing to do

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with any scruples regarding the Moriscos population itself and everything to do with the international scene: Spain’s relationship with France and England and particularly Spain’s situation in the Netherlands. The final decision to expel the Moriscos was made on 9 April 1609—the same day Spain secured a twelve-year truce with the Netherlands. Proper expulsion required a military presence and even then removal needed to be staggered regionally to create effective timetables and deal with possible Moriscos resistance (of which there was surprisingly little). Within a period of about five years an estimated 272,000 Moriscos (the actual figure was probably significantly higher) were expelled and ended nine centuries of a Muslim presence in Spain (Harvey 1992b).

Select Bibliography Barcia, Jose Rubia, ed., Americo Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization (Berkeley, CA, 1976). Boswell, John, The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the 14th Century (New Haven, CT, 1978). Burnett, Charles, “The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain,” The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma K. Jayyusi (Leiden 1992), 1036–58. Burns, Robert I., Islam under the Crusaders: Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia (Princeton, NJ, 1973). Castro, Americo, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton, NJ, 1956). Chazan, Robert, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1989). Cohen, Jeremy, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY, 1982). [= J. Cohen 1982a] Glick, Thomas F., Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, 2nd rev. ed. (1979; Leiden 2005). Jayyusi, Salma K., ed., The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden 1992). Lindberg, David C., “The Transmission of Greek and Arabic Learning to the West,” Science in the Middle Ages, ed. idem (Chicago 1978), 52–90. Lomax, Derek W., The Reconquest of Spain (London 1978). Lourie, Elena, Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Aragon (Aldershot 1990). Mann, Vivian, Thomas F. Glick and Jerrilynn Dodds, ed., Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain (New York 1992). Meyerson, Mark D., The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade (Berkeley, CA, 1991). Nirenberg, David, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1996). O’Callaghan, Joseph F., A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1975).

Nadia Pawelchak

Medieval Courts and Aristocracy Introduction The aristocrats and nobles of medieval Europe were defined by a large category of people and occupations: land-owners, warriors, knights, ladies, courtiers, and ecclesiastical leaders. Commonalities that united these various aristocratic identities were power, legacy, and often materiality. Europe’s upper classes asserted their identities via the politics, art, religion, music, and literature of their time. Unlike the peasantry, aristocrats left tangible historical footprints with which scholars may understand them. The ruling elite of this time cannot be understood in monolithic terms. Rather, subgroups of nobles and aristocrats existed together as a complex and malleable “spectrum” in society (Fouracre 2000, 21–23). The following chapter discusses the simultaneous diversity and commonalities of European aristocrats from the early to late years of the Middle Ages. Although medieval nobility did not confine itself to a standard definition, collectively speaking, it was distinguished from other groups of people based upon its land, power, and social and political legitimacy. The status of a noble or aristocrat transcended material wealth and also existed as an “ideology” in medieval culture (Juggan 2000, 1). Modern portrayals of medieval nobility latch on to this ideology and convey it via motifs of the knight in shining armor, the damsel in distress, the oppressed peasants, all in the midst of a fairytale castle backdrop. The historical and social complexity of medieval nobles defies this simplistic ideology. This chapter also addresses the relationship between aristocrats and courts. As with the terminology that describes an elite member of society, the meaning of a medieval “court” refers to diverse social entities. For example, a royal court often differed from that of a lesser prince or aristocrat. Courts were both itinerant and localized, depending on geography, one’s status, and time. Despite these differences, common organizing factors such as economic transactions, official postings, and political exchanges provided medieval courts with a fluid structure. Kings, queens, barons, counts, knights, staff, and servants defined and molded their identities via the courtly scenes. Each participant in this courtly drama had both personal ambitions and socially-dictated duties to perform. The tension between individual desires and the delineations of status contributed to conflicts at court. Conversely, yet simultaneously, medieval courts produced political alliances, art, literature, music, theology, and other markers of culture.

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A Early Medieval Nobles and Rulers: Redefining the “Barbarian” The characteristics that classified one as an early medieval noble varied from region to region. The collapse of the Roman Empire, once a unifying force, led to the formation of new localized social hierarchies. The methods of achieving “noble” status thus came to revolve around a culture’s regionally-upheld means of securing and legitimizing power. For example, continental nobility differed from that of Anglo-Saxon or Norse regions. How scholars classify noble classes for each region depends on the type, quality, and quantity of the historical evidence. Evidence provided by land charters and family records and inventories gives information about the material status of the elite classes. Legal procedures and issues of interfamilial heredity of property similarly explain how power and status were maintained and transferred over decades or centuries (Fouracre 2000, 18–23). Despite the fact that Rome lost its status as the locus of intellectual activity after its “fall,” other centers of learning emerged alongside it in the early Middle Ages. The notion that the Roman Empire “fell” was promulgated by English historian Edward Gibbon in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). This belief was also earlier popularized by the Carolingians. Charlemagne and his supporters were motivated to recall antiquity through the establishment of courts at Aachen and learning institutions (Hen 2007, 1–3). The notion of the “Carolingian Renaissance” was self-serving for the Carolingians in their quest to discredit Frankish Merovingians. Although Charlemagne’s court was influenced by ancient Rome, courts from Byzantium and “barbarian” kings likely also influenced it. More specifically, the courts of the Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Merovingians existed as powerful intellectual centers alongside Rome and Byzantium (Hen 2007, 3). The term “barbarian” represented the “other,” or those who resided outside the boundaries of culture. This measure of inferiority is subjective and therefore only true for those who use classical antiquity as a standard for comparison. Hen argues that early medieval scholarship assessed barbarian culture solely in the context of religion and the tribes’ likeness to classical culture (Hen 2007, 5). This methodology existed concurrently with the idea that the Germanic tribes caused sudden and widespread chaos after their sacks of Rome: ca. 410 by the Visigoths, by Vandals in 455, and the Ostrogoths in 546. Alfons Dopsch (d. 1953) and Henri Pirenne (d. 1935) argued that Rome’s decline as Europe’s superpower was gradual and “continuous” rather than characterized by an abrupt end. In this context, “barbarian” rulers “saw themselves as part of a Roman continuum” (Hen 2007, 14–15). This newer understanding of Rome and its relationship to the Germanic tribes helped legitimize early medieval courts as viable intellectual centers.

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In order for the barbarian leaders to attain legitimacy, they had to use military victories to gain political power and territories. Odoacer was one such barbarian who “deposed” Romulus Augustulus, Roman emperor of the Western portion of the empire, in Italy in ca. 476. The eastern Emperor Zeno (474–491) did not officially protest against Odoacer’s victory from his ruling seat in Constantinople due to his own military issues. One of Zeno’s problems was a group known as the Ostrogoths, led by a king named Theodoric (454–526), who had been raised at the Byzantine court. Zeno believed that by turning Theodoric’s attention on Italy, the Ostrogoths would no longer bother Byzantine territories. Theodoric led his armies to Italy in ca. 488, giving Zeno the impression that this was done in his name. Theodoric successfully captured the Italian peninsula by ca. 489, save for the city of Ravenna. During the Ostrogoth invasion, Odoacer retreated to Ravenna with his army. They held out for four years until Ravenna “opened its gates” for Theodoric. To legitimize his power, Theodoric killed Odoacer and ruled over Italy. The emperor of Constantinople from ca. 491–518, Anastasius I, supported Theodoric’s claims to the Italian peninsula so long as Theodoric admitted that Constantinople was “supreme.” This pact between Anastasius I and Theodoric allowed the Ostrogoth king to rule from 493 to 526 (Hen 2007, 27–29). Despite Theodoric’s assertion of political authority over Italy, he ruled in the tradition of Roman emperors in terms of law, dress, coinage, and public ceremonies. After conquering the peninsula, he worked with Roman aristocrats and senators to establish “continuity” with the past. As both an Ostrogoth king and de facto ruler of Rome, Theodoric’s rule over Italy demonstrates the simultaneous change and continuity of Roman tradition after its alleged fall (Hen 2007, 30–32). His palace in Ravenna contains a mosaic that features “two allegorical female figures approaching him–Rome, wearing helmet and holding a spear, and Ravenna, wearing a mural crown, with her right foot still in the sea and her left foot on dry land” (Hen 2007, 32–33). This portrayal of Theodoric illustrates the importance of diplomacy and peace within his court (Hen 2007, 33). The mosaic also demonstrates Theodoric’s necessary binary identity, that of Ostrogoth and Romanized emperor. His court co-opted the local aristocracy through acceptance and respect for Roman traditions. Theodoric’s attitude is reflected in the organization of Ravenna’s architecture and urban design. In the tradition of Roman emperors, Theodoric commissioned public works, ecclesiastical structures, and imperial buildings. He made Ravenna the administrative center of Ostrogoth Italy, yet still paid homage to Rome as an important historical and religious center. He patronized the construction of new buildings in Rome and repaired extant structures as proof of his respect for antiquity. The architecture in Ravenna reflects both Roman and Byzantine characteristics, which echoes the hybridity of Theodoric’s reign

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(Hen 2007, 33–38). Modern scholarship on Theodoric suggests that he acted as a “restorer” of Rome rather than a “conqueror” (Nees 2002, 83). It would be a mistake to characterize Ostrogoth courts as products of a “Dark Age” due to their continuation of antiquity and their vibrant intercourse between Roman and Byzantine architecture. Theodoric encouraged intellectual development during his reign. Contrary to traditional images of “barbarians,” Theodoric may have been educated at a young age in the Byzantine court. He portrayed himself as a “philosopher king,” who ruled through knowledge and wisdom, and even ensured that his daughter Amalasuintha (d. 535) received training in classical languages and perhaps law (Hen 2007, 37–39). The motif of the philosopher king can be seen in Roman emperors such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. These emperors used wisdom and diplomacy in addition to military might to rule. Their connection to philosophy dates back to classical Greek philosophers. Partially through its explicit connections to antiquity, the Ostrogoth court remained vibrant during Theodoric’s rule. The Roman aristocracy and the king maintained a reciprocal relationship. While Theodoric gained legitimacy as ruler through their support, the aristocrats retained status (without political power). The king’s court attracted scholars from around the peninsula, which made it a locus of cultural development in the sixth century (Hen 2007, 52–53). Through his cooperation with local aristocrats, often from the Roman senatorial class, Theodoric created a strong, stable, and culturally-productive political system on the Italian peninsula in the sixth century, though the Ostrogoths were eventually defeated by a Byzantine army under Belisarius (500–565), appointed by Emperor Justinian I (ca. 483–565), ca. 535. In the seventh century, the Frankish King Clothar II (584–629) utilized a similar strategy to become king of the Merovingians. Clothar II started his rule as king of Neustria in ca. 584. Neustria was one of three Frankish polities (Neustria, Austrasia, and the Burgundian territories), each with its own set of nobles vying for power. Clothar embraced the aristocrats of Francia and permitted them their own courts in exchange for their acknowledgment of him as the king of the Merovingians. His son, Dagobert I (603–639), became ruler of Austrasia by his father’s decree. After Clothar’s death, Dagobert successfully maintained his father’s political rapport with Merovingian aristocrats (Hen 2007, 94–97). The court culture of the Merovingians thus existed at the local aristocratic level and with the Merovingian king himself. Before the existence of Clothar’s royal court, Frankish court culture existed among the many Merovingian kings and queens. The important Italian poet named Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus (530–603) witnessed the marriage between King Sigibert (535–575) and Queen Brunhild (543–613) of the Visigoths in ca. 566. After having enjoyed patronage from this royal couple, Fortunatus visited the courts of other Merovingian kings and queens, as well as

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aristocrats such as the Duke of Champagne (Hen 2007, 98–99). Fortunatus’s popularity among the Frankish elite demonstrates the dynamism of Merovingian court culture. These courts were not only loci of culture, but they also gave an impetus for cultural “dissemination” by the nobles and courtiers who frequented them. Culture and patronage became tied to status, which prompted competition among aristocrats for “reputation and supremacy” (Hen 2007, 99). As such, aristocratic identity partially relied on one’s ability to patronize courtly activities and produce tangible, innovative cultural markers. Under Clothar’s reign, aristocratic courts still retained their local prominence. The royal court, however, changed from itinerancy to stability when Clothar established a permanent court in Paris in ca. 613. Dagobert continued with this tradition. A permanent court encouraged more retainers and courtiers to locate themselves in Paris throughout the year. Additionally, court culture grew stronger and more permanent now that its location was no longer transient. One such example is the court school sponsored by Clothar and Dagobert. In this system, Merovingian nobles studied at court while the royal court gained educated advisors and ecclesiastical leaders. Such an arrangement benefited both the royal court and Merovingian aristocrats. The Parisian court also did not exclude other elites, as when Æthelburgh (ca. 673–740), an Anglo-Saxon queen, decided her sons would receive a good education in Dagobert’s court school (Hen 2007, 101–03).

B The Development of Anglo-Saxon Nobility and Kingship As with the Merovingians, the Anglo-Saxon nobles and kings had both individual and royal “courts” that varied by region and century. The early Anglo-Saxon nobility in the seventh and eight centuries existed as a warrior society of many kingdoms. The elite of early Anglo-Saxon England were the lords and some of their retainers. Their status was derived from success in war and conquest. In exchange for loyal service, a lord would bestow upon his retainers material gifts won during battle. The amount of power a retainer possessed was often linked to the amount of favor bestowed upon him by the lord. Physical and symbolic proximity to a group’s leader also manifested itself through the bestowal of material items. The economic power of gift-giving was a driving force that fueled this social structure. In this context, lords and their followers were bound in a social contract based upon material exchange. Social mobility may thus have existed due to the dangers that a warrior society presents. Not all warriors were

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successful and not all sons could inherit land. A connection between multiple heirs and the growth of the Christian Church in this period may be linked (Runciman 1984, 3–11). In the seventh and eighth centuries, the measure of noble status varied from kingdom to kingdom. Without a single, consolidated power, a stable, standardized system of aristocracy did not yet exist (Keynes 1995, 20). The terminology for the elite of this period comes from Old English poetry and law books. In the kingdom of Kent, the term eorl or eorlcund described a landed noble from ca. 600–650. In much of Anglo-Saxon society, the word gesith described both landed nobles and proven warriors of high status from ca. 650–700. From ca. 750–900 the terms gesith and thegn connoted nobility, yet thegn always implied military service while gesith did not. By ca. 900–950, a thegn could describe both a retainer and a lord with an estate (Loyn 1955, 529–32). The choice of terminology is not conclusive, as the meanings of the words overlapped in this period. Some scholars believe that the uppermost elite stations of early Anglo-Saxon society were “static” and hereditary in nature. However, this rigidity slowly changed with the granting of land through charters. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the West Saxon kings began to consolidate power and to create a more unified notion of “England” (Loyn 1955, 540–49). Ealdorman, a tenth-century term for a landed noble, was sometimes also used to describe a military leader. Although the terminology for thegn could describe a variety of positions, an earl or ealdorman was always someone at the highest ranks of Anglo-Saxon nobility. Recent scholarship suggests that thegns could become eorls, yet an eorl required a decent amount of money to maintain his status (Williams 2008, 19–21). A famous example is Byrhtnoth of Essex, who was killed by Vikings in ca. 991 at the Battle of Maldon. Byrhtnoth was raised to heroic status due to his unwillingness to submit to the Viking invaders. The poem The Battle of Maldon describes the noble’s Christian sacrifice against the heathen Vikings. Here, it is more nobility of character and status of ealdorman that defines Byrhtnoth’s elite status than military prowess. After this military loss, the English paid off the Viking invaders, something Byrhtnoth refused to do (Higham 1997, 22–23). As Anglo-Saxon kingdoms became more centralized, court life in each kingdom likewise gained structure. The Vikings invaded England in the late eighth century, ca. 787, and these invasions continued into the ninth century. Early raids caused some minor damage, but later ones became more concentrated. Britons from Cornwall and Vikings joined forces against King Egbert of Wessex’s army ca. 834, yet Egbert successfully defeated the invaders. After ca. 851, the Danes made a concentrated series of attacks against the Anglo-Saxons and gained some territories. Following 871, King Alfred of Wessex (849–899) and his brother

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Æthelred, grandsons of Egbert, won victories against the Vikings. Once Alfred ascended to the Wessex throne in 871, the West Saxon court grew in strength as Alfred the Great sponsored intellectual pursuits and strengthened his kingdom. His court biographer, Asser, Bishop of Sherborne (d. 910), wrote Alfred’s Vita in ca. 893 and praised the king for his wisdom and successes. Outside of his military victories against the Vikings, Alfred made his royal court a place of education and cultural production, and he himself translated, for instance, Boethius’s De consolation philosophiae into Anglo-Saxon (Peddie 1999, vii–xiii). Thanks to Asser’s label of Alfred as “The Great,” many scholars recognize him as the first “king” of England. Matthew Paris’s (1200–1259) writings about Alfred support those of Asser. Recent scholarship suggests, however, that his grandson, Æthelstan (r. 924–939), was truly the first “king of England” to rule the AngloSaxons as a monarch (Foot 2011, 2–3). Æthelstan continued in his grandfather’s tradition to unify the Anglo-Saxons and was successful in taking back Northumbria from the Danes. Æthelstan also re-established Christianity in territories where Scandinavian paganism had coexisted with Christianity during Viking invasions and settlements. In addition to his important military victories, Æthelstan was a book-collector, religious and political diplomat, and the holder of a very large royal court (Foot 2011, 13–15). Foot’s description of Æthelstan’s court is one of simultaneous permanence and dynamism. It was filled with both immediate and extended royal family members, royal and ecclesiastical officials, domestic servants, slaves, courtiers, retainers and their personal staffs, foreign envoys, and guests, among others. As with other early medieval royal courts, Æthelstan and his entourage were often itinerant, or peripatetic. They would travel from royal residence to the villas and homes of nobles to eat, feast, and exercise justice over the kingdom. Such travels also permitted the king to maintain control over the nobility and ensure loyalty by presence. Just as courtiers came to court to obtain power, so the king went to the nobles to enforce power (Foot 2011, 72–80). The variety of people that attended or made up this court was sometimes in flux as some had a more permanent presence than others. Compared to other kings, Foot claims that Æthelstan had a very large retinue that included bishops, ecclesiastical officials, and foreign envoys. These envoys brought gifts for the king as diplomatic tools and to curry favor or influence (Foot 2011, 89–92). Æthelstan’s patronage of Old English poetry also added a cultured ambiance to the court. The Battle of Brunanburgh describes the king’s victory over the Vikings, yet the poetic structure bears the characteristics of contemporary Norse poetics. Still, the poem functions to paint the king as the “sovereign” over all of Britain. It is unsure if more famous poems, such as Beowulf, have origins in Æthelstan’s court. The problematic dating of a work such as Beowulf contributes to the problem of identifying a patron. Despite this ambi-

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guity, the king was a well-known book collector and patron of education, poetry, and learning in monastic institutions. His court was thus an intellectual center and producer of culture that lives to this day (Foot 2011, 110–17). Poetry painted the Anglo-Saxons as heroes of noble character in addition to elite status. Although poems such as Beowulf first existed as oral tales and were later written down, themes that glorified the early Anglo-Saxon warrior culture remained prominent in tenth-century written texts. A cohesive vision of Anglo-Saxon pride is also the subject of The Battle of Maldon. Byrhtnoth, an aristocrat of the rank of eorl, gathers his men at the river Pante to defend his shores against Viking invaders (Clark 1968, 52–59). Although he dies in battle, perhaps due to his ofermode (pride), the poet celebrates Byrhtnoth’s noble character (Gneuss 1976, 129–31). His selfless, Christian sacrifice is explicitly connected to his martyrdom. Byrhtnoth and his loyal retainers, despite their military loss, take charge of their fate and do not retreat in fear or pay tribute to the Vikings. This elegiac poem links nobility of spirit and character to aristocratic status (Clark 1968, 52–59). As aristocrats of noble character, there was an obligation to render service or provide stability of government. This exchange represents a political type of giftgiving. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the gift-giving culture among the aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavian territories existed in both tangible and intangible terms. Wealthy ecclesiastics, earls, and women demonstrated their simultaneous generosity and piety through the exchange and donation of luxury items. Although bishops existed in the political world of the church, scholars suggest that they, like lay aristocrats, were generous “public figures” (Smith et al. 2001, 569–71). Such bishops did not seek notoriety in the modern sense of the word. Instead, this practice of gift-giving was simply an expression of the culture in which they existed. Many bishops, the most famous of them named Spearhavoc (eleventh century), were considered to be “artisan-bishops.” Spearhavoc worked as a goldsmith to King Edward the Confessor (1003–1066) of England (Smith et al. 2001, 572–73). Some scholars suggest that this ecclesiastical generosity functioned as an important cog in the gift-giving community, and similarly helped other segments of aristocratic society and community (Smith et al. 2001, 575). Spearhavoc’s identity as an artisan-bishop illustrates the layering of occupation at medieval courts.

C Carolingians and Ottonians As discussed earlier in this chapter, the Carolingian agenda called for aligning Charlemagne with classical Rome via a “Carolingian Renaissance.” His court biographer Einard (775–840) is partially responsible for this propaganda, which

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also served the useful purpose of legitimizing Carolingian rule and deposing the weaker Merovingian dynasty (Hen 2007, 1–4). As with the Anglo-Saxon kings, Charlemagne’s court biographer painted a heroic vision of his patron. On December 25, 800, Pope Leo III (ca. 750–816) crowned Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne established his capital at Aachen, now in Germany, from where he would rule his empire within Europe. Aachen came to represent Charlemagne’s power through it self-sufficiency and as the locus of Carolingian courtly activities. Although Charlemagne’s court was technically still itinerant, the architecture of Aachen established the city as a veritable capital of the Carolingian empire. In addition to a palace chapel, Aachen had a basilican reception hall in the style of Rome, as well as a hunting lodge for recreation. Einard and Alcuin of York (735–804) described the court as a lively place full of drinking, hunting, and aristocratic leisure (Nees 2002, 173–75). As part of Charlemagne’s campaign to create his vision of Rome at Aachen, the city functioned as a comparandum to imperial Rome itself. From this location, the king administered policy and culture. Carolingian culture was also codified through the Caroline minuscule script that aimed for increased through fewer ligatures on the letter forms (Clemens 2007, 143). Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon monk and advisor in Charlemagne’s court, joined the monastery of Saint Martin in Tours in 796. The Tours scriptorium produced a large quantity of written materials that circulated this script across Europe. Charlemagne’s sponsorship of monasteries and monastic development testifies to his religious intentions as a royal patron (Clemens 2007, 143). Before his tenure as Abbot of Tours, Charlemagne appointed Alcuin as advisor in his royal court beginning in ca. 782. In his letters, Alcuin strove to find a common ground between his secular duties to Charlemagne and his personal spiritual needs. Despite Charlemagne’s work in education, law, and standardization in the Carolingian Empire, Alcuin’s struggle points to the conflicted identity of many medieval courtiers and courtly officials (Alberi 2001, 896–901). As a noble, one had duties to the monarch that supported the maintenance of one’s title, yet this could, at times, conflict with one’s personal agenda. In many cases, Carolingian rulers were able to use the nobles to support their right to rule. At the same time, Frankish nobles also successfully competed among one another for positions and status. An environment of simultaneous “cultural homogeny” and fluidity coexisted in this period (Fouracre 2000, 19–23). The fluidity of courtly life and identity depended on the social rapport between a ruler and his subjects. This dynamism represents “an active, rather than passive” culture (Warner 2001, 255). Kings of the Ottonian dynasty (ca. 919–1024) relied upon their audiences to legitimize their power and rule. The adventus was a ritual where a king would enter or arrive in a location with pomp and circumstance. Similar to the adventus examples from the Roman Empire, the

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arrival of Ottonian kings at a location reinforced their presence with a compelling visual performance. As such, the king’s travels from church, palace, and other locations enforced his power over his territory. His subjects, as witnesses, played a vital role in this drama when accepting or rejecting the king’s legitimacy. Monasteries and homes of nobles to which the king traveled functioned as the setting for this drama. In this context, the itinerant royal court of a king became a political tool for maintaining control and broadening political relations. Ottonian writers were likely biased toward reporting this ritual in a manner befitting Ottonian rulers. This bias created a gap between the factual occurrence of adventus and the “adventus of memory” (Warner 2001, 255–61). Each monastic leader and noble family thus likely had diverse, personal responses to an adventus despite any continuity in its received tradition.

D Tenth-Century French Nobility: General Life and Social Mobility The nobility in the tenth century was, according to some scholars, a developing social class rather than a segment of society with an official legal designation (Fichtenau 1991, 138). Others indicate that the concept and designation of nobilis differentiates into separate categories: “nobility of spirit” and nobility of wealth. In Champagne and other areas of France, the possession of land, peasants to work the land, fortifications and estates, weapons, family, vassals, horses, and other material goods defined the developing rural aristocracy. The status of an aristocrat first depended upon his amount of cultivated land and a suitable number of laborers to harvest the crops. Control over this land was partially maintained, through the help of loyal vassals, against those who wished to seize it. Vassals also implicitly marked the status of a lord through their numbers. When conflicts with fellow aristocrats arose, a lord would often bribe another’s vassal into his own service. In this scenario, loyal followers functioned as symbols of a lord’s power and influence (Fichtenau 1991, 138–43). In addition to land and service, other tangible indicators of tenth-century aristocracy included gold, silver, gems, and other luxury objects. Although the possession of material wealth signified power, a lord was also expected to reinvest his wealth into his land instead of “hoarding” money. This mutual exchange between a lord and his servants represented a social contract in early feudal society. The lord promised protection, food, and shelter to those who served him. As compensation, a noble expected loyalty and faithful service (Fichtenau 1991, 142–43). The early feudal social contract exhibited in the tenth century was potentially stable and codified

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by means of reciprocity. The markers of nobility adopted the need for permanence in addition to military prowess. As with warrior leaders through plunder and material goods, land-owning nobles provided those under their protection with a place of residence. The gifts of this brand of elite thus became more permanent along with the markers of nobility. Although this early feudal system appeared to be a simple exchange between a lord and his subjects, the issue becomes more complex when one attempts to define the nobilis as a class. According to historical documents from the tenth and eleventh centuries, the nobilis stood apart from others due to their elite status. On the other hand, the concept of the nobilitas as an official group with legal stature did not yet exist during this time. From the ninth century until the twelfth century, the size and hierarchical type of the nobility increased dramatically. Constance B. Bouchard argues that the French elite class grew as a result of the “new” type of nobles that moved up through society after the collapse of the Carolingian empire. Bouchard posits that the French nobility did not exclusively derive from the nobles of Charlemagne’s court. Instead, ambitious and capable men earned their new elite status through success. As such, a complex mixture of old nobility based on family heritage and new nobility of social climbers defined the eleventhand twelfth-century French aristocracy (Bouchard 1981, 501–03). A modern parallel of this dynamic is the coexistence of “old” and “new” money families in countries around the world. The view of this new type of noble was likely mixed during its rise. According to the Chronica de gestis consulum Andegavorum, “At the time of Charles the Bald (823–877), many new and nonnoble men, stronger than the nobles in goodness and virtue, became great and renowned” (Bouchard 1981, 502). This twelfth-century document praises the value of the “new” men, while at the same time pointing out their difference from the “noble.” One term used to describe these new, but tethered, knights was ministeriales (Duggan, ed., 2000, 172–73). Here, however, the new men possessed nobility of character where the established nobles might not. Other attitudes regarding the emerging nobles lean more toward inferiority. Despite these varied attitudes, new nobles came to define later important families in France. For example, the Anjou family traced its origins to a forester, while the Capetian kings have a soldier named Robert the Strong as an ancestor (Bouchard 1981, 502). The social mobility exhibited by these new nobles added to and redefined the ranks of the elite by the thirteenth century. Not only did they attain a new status, but also allegedly a new attitude of nobility, of courtliness. C. Stephen Jaeger analyzes the “ideas of men” in his study of nobles’ civilization between ca. 939 and 1210. Jaeger suggests that nobles became civilized and mannered due to government (or courtly) sponsored educational facilities. He argues against the idea that courtliness arose out of social change, and instead believes that newly

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educated men took it upon themselves to adopt the principles of courtesy. Jaeger cites the royal court of Otto the Great (912–973), and the cathedral schools of Brun of Cologne (1030–1101), as the first examples of such educational institutions (Jaeger 1985, 4–9). Ottonian court chapels served many purposes, among them to keep the nobility loyal to the king and provide education for the newly-appointed nobles. A new type of noble called a courtier bishop arose in tandem with lay aristocrats (Jaeger 1985, 21–25). The courtier bishop acted with loyalty, bravery, and wisdom. These ideals manifested in both royal and princely courts across Europe into the twelfth century. Jaeger does not suggest that Ottonian courts started the trend of the courtier, but rather that this type of noble arose among the existing aristocracy who themselves acted both noble and ignoble. His study reinfornces the coexistence of social stratification among nobles and their common expectation of courtesy from society (Jaeger 1985, 100–09).

E Courts and Rulers in Multicultural Settings The presence of a “new” type of nobility was especially prevalent in the eight to tenth centuries in the Iberian Peninsula. In 750, the Abbasids murdered members of the Umayyad dynasty and relocated the caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad. Abd al-Rahman I (731–788) was the only Umayyad to escape, and he eventually established an Umayyad emirate in Cordoba, Spain. He gathered together and unified Muslims who had been ruling a territory known as al-Andalus since ca. 711. The Umayyads ruled from Cordoba from 750–976 and patronized architecture such as the Great Mosque of Cordoba (Mikaberidze, ed., 2011, 904). Music, literature, poetry, and art emerged from the Umayyad royal court. Umayyad caliphs also sponsored talented people via their court. An Arab singer named Ziryab (d.850) arrived at the court from Baghdad and composed poetry, songs, and established a musical conservatory as he gained prominence. Through the patronage of Abd al-Rahman II (788–852), Ziryab’s work developed into a distinctive Andalusian style (Bisheh 2000, 124–25). In periods of peace, al-Andalus was known for its tolerance of other religions. The combination of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian visual motifs created a unique artistic style that remained an influence in Spain even after the end of the Reconquista in 1492 (Nees 2003, 218). The Reconquista existed both as a series of historical events and also as an ideal for Christians in Spain. Between 711, when Moroccan Berbers and Arabs conquered Visigothic territories, and the Fall of Cordoba in 1013, the Muslims dominated much of Spain’s territory. After 1013, Christian rulers and armies gradually claimed Muslim territories for themselves. The final push came in 1492, when Aragon and Castile captured Granada. Periods of peace and war between Chris-

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tians and Muslims thus existed in flux between the eight and fifteenth centuries. Scholars debate whether or not this reconquest was an historical ideal. Manuscripts from the tenth century such as the Chronicles of Alfonso III demonstrate that rulers and religious leaders conceived of the Reconquista as an ideology, but nothing is know of the opinions of “ordinary” people (O’Callaghan 2003, 1–7). European royalty and nobility had a decisive role in both directing and embodying the ideals of the Reconquista. As a result of their military conquests, they gained control of land previously owned by Muslim leaders. For example, in 1212, a group of Christian mercenaries called Las Navas invaded al-Andalus and won an important victory, for this region would, by the mid thirteenth century, remain Christian territory by majority. Las Navas were comprised of religious and lay warriors, many of them Spanish aristocrats. French warriors who had experience on Crusade may have influenced the Spanish nobility through their aggressive ideologies. After the battle, successful nobles were granted territories and awards for their efforts. Gradually, the Spanish aristocracy and its rulers replaced the Islamic royal courts (Collins, ed., 2002, 23–27). As in Spain, a change in the noble ranks occurred in eleventh-century England. After the Norman Conquest over the Anglo-Saxons, the “invaders” utilized architecture to solidify their position. The Normans’ construction of castles and fortresses in England is another manifestation of power, as well as a tool of its maintenance. The White Tower of the Tower of London, ca. 1077, serves as the first example of this new trend in architectural patronage by England’s conquerors (Petzold 1995, 75). The purposes of castles were to hold territory, defend, and define it as belonging to a king or lord. These structures also left a psychologically-intimidating imprint upon viewers. Early castles were cold, militaristic structures rather than luxurious centers for courtly activities. The changes from AngloSaxon to Norman nobility led to cultural changes in political power, language, and manner of defining authority. Although many scholars mark the Norman Conquest of 1066 as the physical turning point in England, David Crouch believes that the social transformation in England was more complex than meets the eye. Crouch admits that the Norman usurpation of political and aristocratic power post–1066 was perhaps the historical trigger for social change. He diverges from other scholars in that he believes it took much longer for this change to be perceived by an individual who placed him- or herself in this new established social hierarchy. Aristocrats in England had, whether Anglo-Saxon or Norman, distinguished themselves as elites due to land, power, and duties of knighthood. After 1170, and with slow progression to 1230, nobles categorized themselves according to a new hierarchy where nobility was not defined or based on martial prowess. From a sociological point of view, individuals and like groups defined themselves in terms of their relation to others. The results for thirteenth-century

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nobility were hierarchical levels of the aristocratic class encompassing magnates, knights, and, in the fourteenth century, gentlemen (Crouch 2010, xv–xvii). Although English nobles defined their identity in relation to other aristocrats, perhaps the most important relationship one had was with his king. If a noble possessed the king’s favor, he would be given gifts of money, land, title, power, and status at court. Aristocrats often relied on a king’s patronage to maintain their estates and retinue. A noble out of the king’s favor may still own an estate and title, but may have difficulty maintaining his status. The royal court itself functioned as the locus of exchange between a king and his nobles. The court had a physical and metaphorical perimeter through which one with royal favor could enter. Political and economic transactions, as well as cultural activities, took place inside this sphere of existence (Bothwell 2008, 2–8). The king’s selection of favorites partially contributed to the rise and fall of various aristocratic families in medieval England. In the case of William the Conqueror (ca. 1028–1087), the new king of England removed from power in 1075 the Anglo-Saxon eorls from Hereford, Norfolk, and Huntingdon (Bothwell 2008, 58–59). After the Norman Conquest, Norman and French aristocrats held many of the elite positions that had once belonged to Anglo-Saxons. The Domesday Book (ca. 1086) discusses the social changes that took place post–1066. The newly-appointed Normans defined and asserted their elite status by establishing French as the new language of the elites. Castles and fortresses enforced Norman geographical ownership of territories. However, despite Norman dominance, intermarriage with Anglo-Saxon nobility occurred at some level. Norman-French remained the elite language, so the remaining AngloSaxon elites adapted to accommodate this change unlike the rest of the English population. Post-conquest England thus evolved into an Anglo-Norman that differentiated itself from Continental France (Green 1997, 2–15). As with other itinerant medieval courts, the Anglo-Norman kings moved among various castles, estates, and royal residences. The king functioned as the center of the court, and his followers as his entourage. William of Malmesbury (ca. 1096–1143) reported that William the Conqueror wore his crown as a shining marker of status. This visual example perhaps parallels the Ottonian adventus ritual. C. Warren Hollister suggests that the psychological impact of the king’s crown served a dual purpose. First, it reinforced William’s position as king and conqueror of England. For the audience, the crown reminded them of the king’s ability to bestow potential favors. Later Anglo-Norman kings abandoned this tradition due to their “secure” kingship. While formal procedures dictated the king’s court, feasting and entertainment added an air of informality. Anglo-Norman courts had both regular attendees that traveled with the king and others who moved in and out of the courtly circle. Those who wanted to gain the king’s favor followed the official entourage (Hollister 1988, 2–6).

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F Royal Consolidation of Territories and Nobility After the youngest son of William the Conqueror, Henry I (1068–1135), became the King of England in 1100, he obtained the title of Duke of Normandy in 1106. This allowed the Anglo-Norman world to distinguish itself as a political and cultural entity from that of continental France until 1135, the year in which Henry I died without a male heir. After Henry’s death, his daughter Matilda (1102–1167) campaigned against Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois (ca. 1045–1102), for power over Normandy, although Stephen lost control to Matilda despite retaining the English throne. The son of Matilda and Geoffrey V of Anjou, Henry II (1122–1189), ascended to the English throne and secured Plantagenet interests. The king maintained his Norman dukedom in 1154 and gained political power in Maine and Anjou from Geoffrey V. He also gained Aquitaine after his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1124–1204) in 1152 (Grant 2005, 7–8). As the King and Queen of England, Henry II and Eleanor emerged as major players in a long and complex history of political relationships between England, the duchy of Normandy, various polities on the continent such as that of Anjou, and the Capetian kings of France. Although in terms of “political and administrative ties” England and Normandy “remained strong” and the duchy functioned as the proverbial “hinge on which the Angevin Empire swung” in France, Norman cultural and “legal customs” differed from those in polities such as Anjou (Grant 2005, 7). The qualifiers “Angevin” or “Plantagenet Empire” described not only the territories, but also the imperial and dynastic ambitions of Henry II. Mark Aurell posits that Henry’s “‘polycratic’ world was held together by the royal family,” or, more precisely, the image it put forth despite the political conflicts internal to the Angevins (Aurell 2007, 1–7). Just as the English royal family would be plagued with drama amongst themselves, the Plantagenets faced external political pressures through Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, which helped reduce tensions with the Capetian kings after the Queen’s divorce from King Louis VII of France. Although Eleanor had two legitimate daughters with the French King, she had her marriage annulled based upon consanguinity “in the fourth degree.” Through this act, Eleanor and Henry retained her continental properties in southern and western France and removed them from Capetian control, an act that later exacerbated the political relations between Richard I (1157–1199), John of England (1166–1216), and Philip Augustus of France (1165–1223) (Weir 1999, 73–80). Eleanor took an active political role as Queen of England, whether working with, or against, Henry II, by participating in Henry the Younger and Richard’s 1173 revolt against their father. When this revolt failed, Eleanor was imprisoned until 1192 when Richard I became the official King of England following his father’s death (Per-

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noud 1968, 140–42). Eleanor obtained even more political power when Richard “The Lionheart” left for the Crusades in 1190 by functioning as regent of England (Regan 1998, 24–28). The heroic name of “Lionheart” described King Richard’s military campaigns against continental France and in the Holy Land. Although his reign was brief, Richard built several castles, such as Chateau Gaillard, as fortresses that kept King Philip Augustus of France out of Normandy (Grant 2005, 1–5). The relationship between the English and French kings was tempestuous, as they allied in 1190 to fight in the Third Crusade against Saladin’s forces. Despite this temporary unity, Richard still refused to bow to Philip Augustus’s implied supremacy in Angevin continental territories. Richard had some success in the Third Crusade when contracting a treaty with Saladin, yet his critics in England felt he “abandoned” England in order to pursue personal glory (Barratt 2001, 262–26). Additionally, Eleanor arranged for and delivered the money for Richard’s “ransom” from the Holy Roman Emperor in 1191 (Weir 1999, 262–26). Richard’s “unromantic” death in 1199 further weakens the image of the supposedly heroic Crusader king (Gillingham 1979, 1–20). Although Chateau Gaillard fell in 1204 while John was in control of Normandy, Grant comments that a King’s architectural commissions, especially fortified ones that held territories, often represent the tangible results of a leader’s reign and ability to maintain power (Grant 2005, 1–5). Scholars who look for the “man behind the myth” of Richard the Lionheart often downplay Eleanor’s political influence during these years (Grant 2005, 1–5). While Richard was on Crusade, she helped John administer both English and continental interests (Weir 1999, 120–40). After a period of imprisonment, Eleanor spent her remaining days in Poitiers with her daughter, Marie of Champagne (1145–1198). It is here that she and Marie, according to Andreas Capellanus (late twelfth-century courtier and writer), held the ubiquitous “court of love.” The exact nature of this court is debated among scholars, yet its idealization contributed to the chivalric ideals that defined aristocratic life in the twelfth century and onward (Plain 2006, 77). Pairs of lovers and courtiers moved through Eleanor’s court while she remained in stasis. Her limited political power in later life transformed into a position of power in the court of love. In the midst of the conflicts between the English and French monarchies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there were also periods of compromise and peace through diplomacy. The fact that Aquitaine and Ponthieu were held by the English crown made contact between the rulers of England and France a necessity. The royal court culture of these two countries thus became intertwined despite their distinctions. A distinctive intermingling of court cultures also existed in medieval German territories. Benjamin Arnold indicates that the imperial court was well known among Germany’s other secular and religious leaders, but that it did not

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have much power over their governance. Some states enjoyed autonomy, while many urban centers and dynastic aristocrats maintained complicated relationships with the reigning emperor. Arnold speculates that Germany’s princes and bishops “consolidated” their power and maintained distinct identities from the imperial court. Some of these authorities enjoyed a collegial relationship with the emperor, in which case each political entity coexisted peacefully. On the other hand, during periods such as the reign of Emperor Henry IV (1056–1106), German princes challenged royal authority (Arnold 1991, 1–5). The Holy Roman Emperors, since the title’s restoration under Otto the Great, possessed an impressive title as the “western Roman” emperor. This secular position allowed the emperors to distribute certain amounts of wealth and power in Germany and Italy, yet their actual authority remained shared with other consolidated powers. The established German aristocracy legitimized their own power through hereditary land and titles. Newer nobles, such as the ministeriales, free knights, and ecclesiastical heads achieved and maintained status through success (Arnold 1991, 15–20). Although the German royal court built palaces at prominent locations such as Aachen, it remained itinerant in the Middle Ages. As the emperor traveled, he had access to the material wealth of princely and ecclesiastical courts. The emperor’s hosts provided him with food and board for him and his retinue, as well as servants and often military support. When the nobles were called to court at a royal residence, the king displayed his wealth via architecture, consumable commodities, and a courtly atmosphere. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1122–90) wore a gold diadem that linked him to the Ottonian’s crown-wearing tradition. As with other medieval royal courts, the German imperial court functioned as an arena for political show and exchange (Arnold 1997, 158–62). The royal estates themselves were run efficiently, as already described in the eighth century Capitulare de villis, and usually for the exclusive use of the king (McKitterick 2008, 149–52). It is important to distinguish between royal courts and those of lesser princes, as the court cultures of each often varied. England, France, and Germany were the primary sovereign rulers in fourteenth-century North Western Europe. The political machinations between these powers also involved lesser princes and aristocrats. In contrast to early European nobility, princes and aristocrats in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries held titles such as counts, dukes, and earls, among others (Vale 2001, 2–4). Lesser princes and other aristocrats also asserted their political power by establishing courts (Vale 2001, 3–5). Vale’s study highlights the complex web of courts in North Western Europe through a thorough assessment of “consumable commodities” present in each princely court. The term “court” is also problematic in and of itself. Some, but not all, princely

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households had courts, while others maintained estates with households. To clarify, for North West Europe, a court was “not merely the ruler’s household. The court was greater than the household and was not identical to it. It was the prince’s environment, both a place, normally of unfixed location, and an assemblage of people” (Vale 2001, 31). Positions of court staff, though sometimes hereditary, were also open for those with talents. This implies that courts could function as elements of social mobility. Although this definition of a princely “court” implies high malleability, in thirteenth-century England the amount of money spent for courtly pleasures and functions was stated in household ordinances. In the fourteenth century, many princes curtailed and moderated spending as part of reform movements. Some courts were lavish; others more structured (Vale 2001, 42–43).

G Courtly Love, Leisure, Scholasticism, and Aristocratic Identity through a Secular Lens The idea of courtly love may be a modern construction superimposed upon the fourteenth century, yet the ideals of chivalry are reflected in the secular art of the period. Ivory luxury items such as combs, mirror cases, and caskets became popular consumer items among the European aristocracy. Vernacular literature from the twelfth century and onwards provided inspiration for images and themes of courtly love. On these objects, richly-dressed men and women engage in games of chess, melees under castles, hunting, and other aristocratic pastimes. These leisure activities testify to the ideal activities of noble life. Ivory itself became available for use after the Crusades of the thirteenth century. Trade between Arab and European merchants established ivory as a luxury item in terms of its materiality alone (Randall 1997, 63–66). Although accessible to the noble class and royalty, ivory remained an expensive item to procure. The decorative carvings on these objects demanded sophisticated craftsmanship due to ivory’s nature and difficulty in carving. In utilitarian terms, mirror backs and combs were used for grooming, while secular-themed caskets often held the toiletry items of aristocratic women. Although some ivory objects depict specific scenes from literature, the visual narratives on most remain ambiguous. Instead, they illustrate idyllic scenes of aristocrats engaged in leisure activities (Bober 1952, 5). The spread of literacy among the medieval nobility has ties to both monasteries and the University of Paris, with its secular and classical collections. An increase in book production for private ownership was due to the demand by nobles and students, as well as the growing popularity of vernacular literature in

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addition to Latin (Backhouse 1997, 123). Both royal courts and individual aristocrats commissioned great and expensive manuscripts. Sometimes books were patronized for private use, or for public use as a status symbol. Oral tales and songs from troubadours became popular in the courts of France. In the royal court, poet Chrétien de Troyes (late twelfth-century), wrote Arthurian tales heard in court and composed Lancelot romances. In the thirteenth century, other French scribes recorded Chrétien’s tales in manuscripts along with Arthurian variants (Backhouse 1997, 123). Secular and heroic tales also became popular in Germany. The Rolandslied (ca. 1170) recounted the German version of the song. German author Wolfram von Eschenbach (d. ca. 1220) composed the romance Parzival and the chanson de geste, Willehalm and the anonymous poet of the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), working at the court of Bishop Wolfger von Erla at Passau, describes a heroic world in epic terms. Minstrels and troubadours are partially responsible for this exchange of courtly literature as they moved from court to court in Europe (De Hamel 1994, 146–47). The royal court in Paris, along with the newly-founded University of Paris, created a demand for scribes, illuminators, and artists to be located near the capital. In this context, a court’s luxury items contributed to the urbanization of certain economic sectors in medieval society (De Hamel 1994, 146–49). The popularity of vernacular literature, particularly French, among aristocrats led to an increased production of secular codices. The courts of England also produced French literature after the Norman Conquest. The works of Chaucer were collected by Richard II of England (ca. 1367–1400), but there are no large records of English aristocrats collecting works in Middle English due to the popularity of French among the elite (DeHamel 1994, 156–58). Popular patrons include King John the Good (d. 1364), King Charles V (d. 1380), Jean, Duc de Berry (1340–1416), and Queen Isabella of France (1348–1372), among many others. Famous authors such as Petrarch (1304–1374) and Boccaccio (1313–1375) also found patronage in aristocratic Italian courts (Backhouse 1997, 123–25). The popularity of books among aristocrats in Europe testifies to a rise in literacy and the economic means to produce them. Books were expensive items to produce, and the complex and beautiful illuminations and illustrations of late medieval manuscripts demonstrate the aesthetic value of books as objects. They could be shown among fellow aristocrats and function as markers of culture and status. Nobles with extensive libraries conveyed their wealth via consumable commodities, their scholasticism, and also their cosmopolitan nature with a wide variety of texts. Certain codices also became means of transporting information among European courts. Popular trends, stories, and heroic renditions of history were shared among the elite. At this level, the ideals of aristocratic existence supplanted reality through aggrandizement and fiction. The Très

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Riches Heures (ca. 1412) of Jean, Duc de Berry illustrates the patron’s wealth in a scene from his court. He sits at his table and courtiers vie for his attention. The folio’s background consists of one of the Duke’s heroic scenes outdoors. In another folio, peasants work in the fields and appear happy and well-fed. The wealthy created and portrayed their own realities through court and through book patronage. After his death, the Très Riches Heures became a pawn in settling the Duke’s debts rather than immediately passing on to his heirs (Reynolds 2005, 526–32). In the case of this personal codex, its patron’s personal ideal of self and his place in society is reflected more accurately than his existence in reality.

H Gift-Giving Culture and Patronage The culture of gift giving in the Middle Ages was as diverse as medieval nobility itself. Early Anglo-Saxon warrior-based cultures relied on the exchange of material goods to fuel their lord and retainer relationship, to communicate status, and for political maneuvers. Gifts cemented alliances and ensured compliance from their recipients. The manner in which people exchanged gifts was as crucial as the gift itself for purposeful diplomacy. In Germanic literature, a proper and deliberate exchange of words set the stage for the gift-giving process. In the Hildebrandslied (copied down early ninth century), Hildebrand and Hadubrand do not effectively communicate with words. Additionally, a physical gift would have complicated the situation between the father and son. The result, instead, is a physical battle (Classen 1995, 1–8). In this context, gifts could act as a proverbial double-edged sword. What is a gift to one functions as a “weapon” against another where political alliances are concerned (Buettner 2001, 598–99). The nature of gifts varied from ecclesiastical postings, promises of marriage, luxury objects, to architectural funding for monasteries and cathedrals. Marriage contracts between aristocratic families involved the “gift” of another person as well as money, land, and sometimes political alliances. For feminist critics, women here became stripped of their personhood and reduced to chattels. The extent to which this was true depends on time and place, as certain aristocratic women exercised their own authority despite their limited personal power. Empress Matilda (1102–1167), daughter of King Henry I of England (1068–1135), worked to secure a position of power throughout her life despite the efforts of her male relatives (Beem 2009, 1–6). Wealth and aristocratic status did not always go hand in hand, so poorer, but titled, families were often motivated to marry into families with means. The ability to climb up the social ladder existed for aristocrats due to their access to titles, lands, and potential ties to a monarchy. Marriage also united

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families through legal channels and thus made official political and economic ties (Duggan 2000, 5–7). The gift of status came not only through marriage, but also through luxury items. Luxurious secular objects always communicated the status and sophistication of the owner, whether the patron kept it for him- or herself, or if it was used as a diplomatic or persuasive gift. One such object was the Dunstable Swan Jewel, made in England or France ca. 1400. The object is composed of gold and white enamel and is one of the only extant livery badges. It shows the nobility of the owner and perhaps his connection to a king. Scholars speculate that this badge, which perhaps also functioned as jewelry, is associated with house of Lancaster of Bohun (Cherry 1991, 24). While the Dunstable Swan is clearly a status symbol, whether or not it was a diplomatic gift remains uncertain. The Royal Golden Cup, however, ca. 1380, was a gift from Jean, Duc de Berry, to Charles VI of France to smooth over diplomatic relations. Later, the Duke of Bedford acquired it, and Tudor inventories mention it. The addition of Tudor roses suggests that as owners changed, they desired to personalize it and thus make it more of a personal status symbol. The original narrative of St. Agnes initially was relevant to the Duc de Berry’s brother’s Saint’s Day (Robinson 2008, 42). As with aristocratic titles and lands, a new owner would seek to imprint his or her mark on the object. This link between identity and materiality is one of the commonalities between medieval nobles. While some princely medieval courts embodied political power through luxury, others integrated Christian piety into their structure. Many aristocrats, nobles, and royalty supported monasteries through endowments. These endowments could manifest regularly, or as a bequeathal of property after one’s death. Although the church technically retained control of its properties, its reliance on the nobility for funding placed some control in the hands of the laity (Barton 1997, 185). In the eleventh-century, nobles from Léon, Castile, and Galicia owned the property of many religious institutions. As such, they would collect revenue, make appointments to office, and influence church decisions. By the late eleventh century, papal reforms by Leo IX (1049–1054) and Gregory VII (1073–1085) led to some churches gaining control over their affairs. Rather than exploit the church, a noble should “protect” it. This partially ended the faux-piety of aristocratic religious patronage (Barton 1997, 185–87). Medieval courts not only functioned as means for a ruler or aristocrat to maintain power. They additionally became loci for individuals not of noble birth to exercise their talents, achieve a reputation, and secure the means to earn a living. One such famous individual was Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–1434), born in Venice to a father who acted as counselor to the city. He was educated at the University of Bologna, and moved with his family to the Parisian royal court of

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Charles V (1338–1380). During her father’s work as court astrologer, he arranged a marriage for Christine when she was fifteen years old. Her husband was similarly educated, but died at a young age. As a widow who needed to support her family, Christine obtained patronage in Burgundian courts (Cosman, ed., 1989, 27–29). One such patron was of Isabeau of Bavaria (1370–1435). Christine became a renowned author in her courtly circle and an embodiment of an independent medieval woman. Christine’s place at court allowed her to earn a living and exercise her art. She reciprocated with her queen through a book dedicated in her honor. This feminine court also became a forum for political critique and discourse (Allen 2002, 590). In her Advision Cristine (ca. 1405), Christine created a personification called Lady Opinion. Through this character and her other writing, she reflects upon the nature and complexities of opinion. Douglas Kelly argues that her writings are thus both self-reflective and critical of her time period (Kelly 2007, 1–3). Many scholars have written about the gender issues of Christine’s writings, Kelly’s argument elevates Christine’s discursive themes above gender. The French court provided Christine, a woman of educated by untitled birth, with the opportunity to elevate her status.

I Final Remarks This chapter has provided general information about the identities and development of medieval nobility and aristocracy. Although a concise definition of medieval nobility is impossible, people of elite status from Europe shared in the struggle to maintain their status in a politically tumultuous world. As Fouracre states, nobility is a “spectrum” (Fouracre 2000, 21–23). Those within that spectrum relied on patronage or political support from a powerful ruler. Often, this patronage occurred within the context of a court, which provided an arena for courtiers and rulers to assert their powers. This reciprocal power helped fuel the identity of each participant, yet, at the same time, required him or her to perform the requisite courtly drama. We have records of how medieval aristocrats lived, yet these very often reveal an idealized fiction rather than historical reality.

Select Bibliography Aurell, Martin, The Plantagenet Empire 1154–1224 (Harlow 2007). Barton, Simon, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century Léon and Castile (Cambridge et al. 1997). Crouch, David, The English Aristocracy 1070–1271: A Social Transformation (New Haven, CT, and London 2010).

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Duggan, Anne J., Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2000). Hen, Yitzhak, Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture in the Early Medieval West (Houndmills et al. 2007). Jaeger, C. Stephen, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia, PA, 1985). Vale, Malcolm, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe (1270–1380) (Oxford and New York 2001). Williams, Ann, The World Before Domesday: The English Aristocracy, 900–1066 (London and New York 2008).

Gerhard Jaritz

Daily Life A Everyone Has a Daily Life On February 25, 1348, Pope Clement VI wrote a letter to the young Charles, “king of the Romans,” later Emperor Charles IV, in which he referred, among other things, to the complaints of some German magnates that had reached his ears (Klicman, ed., 1903, 555–56). They were disturbed about Charles’s dress habits. According to them, he wore very short and tight items of clothing and enjoyed tournaments greatly; by doing these things, they claimed, he was not maintaining the necessary imperial dignity. Clement (who was born Pierre Roger) had been young Charles’s educator at the French court. In the letter, he emphasized his paternal affection and his wish to increase the honor of his former pupil. He asked him to wear wide and long pieces of clothing, to abstain from tournaments, and to show maturity and dignity in all his activities. In 1462, during the conflict between Emperor Frederick III and his brother, Archduke Albrecht VI over the regency of Austria, the emperor, his family, and their court were besieged in the imperial castle of Vienna by the citizens of Vienna being on Albrecht’s side. The so-called “Book of the Viennese” (Buch von den Wienern) by Michel Beheim reports on the siege and the occurring food shortage in the castle. It refers, in particular, to the problems of the three-year-old son of Frederick III, who was later to become Emperor Maximilian I. According to Beheim, Maximilian was used to being served only meat; when meat ran out, he was given barley and peas. One day, he was again served peas and he reacted by insisting that he had had enough of them and that they should be taken away: this kind of food did not suit him and should be given to the enemies: … dy speiss wer im nit eben, man solcz den veinden geben. (Karajan, ed., 1867, 128–29)

The two anecdotes above refer to the quotidianity of people who are not usually included in modern historical studies of medieval daily life. Such studies normally deal with the lives of burghers or members of the peasantry, and sometimes of the nobility, but usually not of rulers or members of royal families. A general, theoretical and methodological overview of the study of the history of daily life states: “much research and most presentations that deal with the history of everyday life […] center on the actions and sufferings of those who are frequently labeled ‘everyday, ordinary people,’ a term as suggestive as it is imprecise. […] In

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researching the history of everyday life, attention is focused not just on the deeds (and misdeeds) and pageantry of the great, the masters of church and state. Rather, central to the thrust of everyday historical analysis is the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history—the ‘nameless’ multitudes in their workaday trials and tribulations, their occasional outbursts or dépences (Georges Bataille)” (Lüdtke 1995, 3–4). Such a concentration on the “nameless” is not and cannot be “central to the thrust” of the research into the daily life of the Middle Ages. It has to be emphasized that, for Medieval Studies, everyday life, its repetitiveness and routine touched everyone, rulers as well as members of the lower classes, which makes manifold comparative approaches necessary. The analysis of the similarities, differences, and contrasts in the lives of the distinct members of society are of particular relevance for any research. Thus, the history of medieval daily life should not solely be seen as a “history from below” or as (only) a history of the powerless (Jaritz 1989, 15).

B Daily Life and Its Patterns All the spheres of everyday life are connected with communication that reached from the local area to ‘international’ contacts and co-operation. Communication itself has to be seen as both part of, and an influence on, daily life. In the broader sense, daily life can be seen as a result of the relations and connections of humans in their routine activities with objects and their attributes. In a variety of respects, daily life is determined by order and disorder. Many of the available written and visual sources that present information about quotidianity offer various evaluations of everyday life. They often either describe an ideal to be followed or they criticize those who do not observe rules and norms given to please God and secure social harmony. ‘Neutral’ daily life does not exist in the sources. The discourses about, let us say, good and bad daily life can often be recognized as being stated and disseminated in a manner that emphasized the contrasts between positive and negative realizations to strengthen the message and didactic effects. When interested in medieval daily life and its routine, one must concentrate in tracing and studying patterns in the extant evidence. The patterns’ appearance, roles, and meanings depend on aspects of space, social order, the languages of signs, and so on. A historian’s ‘quasi knowledge’ about any individual situation, activity, object, or quality alone must be seen as meaningless. Significance can only be recognized if one becomes aware of, and acquainted with, the contemporary contexts, classifications, evaluations, and connotations, and if one is able to integrate them into one’s analysis. One has to recognize the fact that there were

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different levels and patterns of meaning that operated simultaneously and supplemented each other. Context-bound patterns of daily life can be seen by analyzing many source corpora, textual, visual as well as archaeological ones. With the help of last wills, for instance, one comes across the important, life-influencing, mainly socially dependent value structures, functions, and esteemed qualities of material objects like clothing, vessels, beds, jewelry, weapons, books, and so on. Similar patterns can also be seen through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the contents of account books. Their contents may range from the type of objects mentioned, their value, need, and respective contexts, to certain aspects of quality and esteem offering the basis for a comparative framework. Literary sources also offer a great deal of information about aspects of medieval daily life and mentality. For most historical as well as literary sources, it has to be emphasized that the ‘real fiction’ and ‘fictitious reality’ of the varying daily life evidence from the medieval past does not mean a loss of information, but, through comparative and purposeoriented analysis, may be seen as enrichment. The recognition and comparison of late medieval patterns of daily life lead to various conclusions in context with their role and position in the social, socioreligious, and socio-economic system. This also offers clearer results in cases in which specific activities and objects were considered to be positive and highly esteemed by one or more social groups, while for others they were negative and symbols of vanity. This seems to have been particularly important, regarding tasks and things that were expensive, new, and fashionable. Similar results can be attained when comparing the patterns of norms and patterns of practice in the study of daily life. One of the main outcomes of such comparative analyses of norm and practice has been the conclusion that one cannot generalize about whether people accepted, rejected, or followed the manifold laws and rules that were meant to influence daily life. In this respect, one is also regularly confronted with various types of compromises that determined and influenced life. A good example of visual norms that were meant to influence the daily life of their rural viewers are the Sunday Christs that one can find from the British Isles to Central Europe (Fig. 1; Reiss 2000; Jaritz 1995). The medieval written and visual sources documenting daily life were overwhelmingly produced by clerics or men from the literate upper or middle classes of society; this is also true when the sources document the daily lives of women, peasants, and paupers. The sources also often deal with exceptional, that is, nondaily situations, rather than daily life. However, many connections lead from the ‘daily’ to the ‘non-daily’, and vice versa. In addition, there are connections between everyday life and politics, religion, the economy, the arts and sciences, and so on, that must be analyzed.

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Fig. 1: Sunday Christ wall painting in the public space of the outer wall of a village church. It tells the beholder with the help of depicted, mainly agricultural, activities and objects standing for such, which work or tasks should not be carried out on Sundays or other Christian holidays. End of the fifteenth c., Saak, Carinthia (Austria), outer wall of the parish church. © Institut für Realienkunde, University of Salzburg.

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Moreover, one has to concentrate on different kinds and levels of the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” (Jaritz 2009, 124) in the sources. Certain objects, persons, situations, and attributes may seem to have a clear closeness to everyday life, but they may also be secular or religious symbols or metaphors. Such different phenomena and functions of closeness and their utilization as patterns of argumentation can be found regularly: as in the use of well-known daily life objects as visual or literary symbols for the Virgin Mary (for instance, vessel, glass = immaculate conception; confectionery = sweetness; towel = purity, etc.) (Salzer 1967). One finds different variants of socially, economically or religiously determined connotations and evaluations of daily life situations in all types of sources. They are based on comparison, on constructed differences and opposition. Old and young, rich and poor, small and large, close and distant, high and low, up and down, left and right, much and little, clean and dirty, and so on, all of them are regularly used pairs of difference or opposition that refer to daily life. Didactic arguments were often constructed with the help of such pairs gathered from daily life. There are the many instances of patterns of the good and beautiful in the broadest sense of the word versus the bad and the ugly—always to be seen in their manifold levels of social, economic, and moral adequacy. In an urban context these might have been connected with a rather large number of innovations and improvements: with window glass, roof tiles, the paving of roads (Jaritz 2001), mechanical clocks (Dohrn-van Rossum 1996), and so on. Such items that increased the standard of living, security, and prestige seem to have played an important role in a number of other contexts, especially in the early days of their adoption. They were used as general signs of one’s material success, as well as to mediate other messages: for instance, the buon governo in a community. Parts of already existing or just developing ideals of material culture became—in new or other contexts—explanatory signs for positive, often immaterial and spiritual aspects of daily life. The opposites of such positively connoted objects were used to symbolize negative aspects of daily life. The authors or painters regularly confronted context-bound patterns of different positive ideals versus patterns of negative deviation from the social order. During the late Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century one can recognize an intensification of the discussions about and regulations of such nuisances in the daily life of the people that became more and more detailed.

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C A Daily Life of Contrasts? Public and ‘Private’ Space, Elites and the ‘People’, Women and Men Representations of daily life were, as has been noted, always connected with some sort of value judgment. The “festive” coat was contrasted by a “daily” coat, the “good” bed by a “bad” bed, and so on. The focus on contrasts influenced norms and didactics, as well as daily life itself. In this context, one just should think of the confrontation and polarization of one’s own and others’ lives, the demand to concentrate more on the spiritual values of daily life than on material goods exclusively (Fig. 2; Jaritz 2007), or the clash of elite and ‘popular’ culture. For all these spheres, a context-bound comparison of the different ‘realities’ of the sources is indispensable as well as a connection of qualitative and quantitative approaches and analyses, particularly when dealing with types, stereotypes or topoi, and their usage. The public aspects of daily life were particularly important, such as public ceremonies, public meetings, and dress worn outside the home. They became the regular subject of evaluating descriptions, critique and praise, as well as of control and laws. Addressing the public, which led to a reaction and assessment by its members, and following regulations could happen with referring to or activating all the human senses (Wolgar 2006): – – – – –

sight (any public display, dress); hearing (noise deemed either pleasant or unpleasant); smell (for instance, the stink of latrines or the odor of flowers at the occasion of the entry of a lord into a community) the gustatory sense (gluttony); pain.

The more people were affected by such public daily life arrangements, the more strenuous were the discussions about them, particularly when social, economic or moral values were at stake. It has to be considered, however, that ‘public’ and ‘private’ space in the context of daily life must be understood as very ambiguous terms, aspects with different meanings and existing at distinct levels (Austin 1998). The most public spaces of urban communities, that is, the church, the marketplace, and specific roads, for instance, have to be clearly differentiated from the public space in monasteries, where more or less nothing was recognized as private. The influence of such a difference can be found especially in regard to the given norms of daily life which referred to the material as well as the immaterial spheres of the respective quotidianities. The urban and territorial

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Fig. 2: Good and bad prayer in daily life. The good and pious, conservatively clad man on the good, right side of the crucifix (that is, on the left side of the image) concentrates his prayer and thoughts on the Passion of Christ; the bad and impious, fashionably clad, man on the bad, left side of the crucifix just pretends to concentrate on the Passion but only thinks of the worldly joys and material goods depicted behind him. Panel of a Poor Souls-Altar, 1488, Regensburg (Germany), City Museum. © Institut für Realienkunde, University of Salzburg.

sumptuary laws of the late Middle Ages mainly regulated outerwear, the outer appearance of houses, and festivities (e.g., Eisenbart 1962; Bulst 1988; Hunt 1996; Killerby 2002; Muzzarelli and Campanini, ed., 2003; Muzzarelli 2009). On the other hand, the monastic consuetudines, which date mainly from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, also regulated the use of underwear, baths, bloodletting, the necessary procedures for getting into and out of bed, and the prevention of sinful behavior in these contexts (Zimmermann 1973). In these

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monastic rules, nothing was really ‘private’, not even the privy; everything was subject to regulation. In the normative evidence and concerning each of the different ‘public spaces’, the discourse about aspects of daily life, behavior, and material culture was extraordinarily rich. This richness is, however, also sometimes true for chronicles, charters, travel descriptions, religious and secular literature, sermons, and so on; the discussion could become detailed and heated. Besides general arguments of status, other religious, social, economic, and national criteria also played decisive roles in the discourse. Thus, on the one hand, to recognize others by their outer appearance and to be recognized oneself was, generally, a very decisive domain of medieval daily life and order. On the other hand, however, this had to be seen in connection with the situation that any pieces of outer appearance received their meaning and connotation only in context with the status, position, and function of their wearers as well as with the occasions and actions when they were used. Without such a context they could be rather meaningless or very ambiguous. The same piece of dress might, for instance, in one context have produced a positive image of its wearer, in another one or with regard to a different wearer, it could raise negative connotations. Without knowing the contexts one might be at a loss to identify something or do it incorrectly. Altogether, the following aspects must be emphasized: –

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The interdependences and contexts of daily public life, behavior, material culture, secular legal ordinances, and religious discourse are important. The public use of material objects affected discourses and arguments, and both the Church and the secular authorities influenced the use of these objects and determined the laws about them. From the religious point of view, but not only concerning the arguments given by representatives of the Church, the prevention of superbia, that is, pride and haughtiness, played a relevant role in this respect. Superbia was one of the capital sins and sometimes seen as the first sin of mankind, the one that provoked the wrath of God. In their respective arguments, the secular authorities not only referred to the economic and social profit of the communities. They also connected them regularly with references to sin and to averting God’s wrath and punishment. Inadequate presentation and gaudiness had to be slowed down and only adequate presentation ensured and promoted social peace. Such discourse, on the one hand, was used in general arguments against superbia. On the other hand, this discourse was also used in arguments against specific objects, mainly fashionable dress and their form: pointed shoes (Jaritz 2009,

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134–35), ladies’ horned headgear, different types of sleeves, short clothing for men, and so on. Other types of luxury goods, such as prestigious furs, expensive cloth, precious jewels, costly gowns, and so on, were also regularly referred to in the sumptuary laws, but were not so much connected with any religious discourse. There, the social and economic elements seem to have counted most. With regard to the differences between the culture and daily life of medieval elites and popular groups of society, one can support the thesis that was formulated by Willem Th. M. Frijhoff in the 1980s. He stated that elites of different character created specific cultural codes of expression and developed them to status symbols (Frijhoff 1984, 21–28). These cultural constructions and codes they used were strong and influential (Jaritz 1989, 128–31). In such a way, and at the same time, areas of unacceptable cultural forms of expression were created which one attributed to the ‘people.’ Thus, the elites practiced in many regards an explicit and often well structured “non-popular culture.” Concerning ‘global’ as well as individual aspects of daily life, this could certainly lead to contrasts which often became stereotypes and determined socio-cultural assignments and evaluations, for instance: – – – – – –

good order among the elite versus chaos among the ‘people’; the intelligence of the elite versus the ignorance and dullness of the ‘people’; the proper faith and piety of the elite versus the magic and superstition of the ‘people’; the well-organized feasts of the elite versus the excessive amusements of the ‘people’; the festive and well-ordered dancing of the elite versus the doltish jumping of peasants; the meat, white bread, and wine of the elite table versus the vegetables, brown bread, and water of the peasant and other lower-class table.

Some of these stereotyped juxtapositions have survived into the present day. However, sometimes one cannot strictly separate the daily-life culture of medieval elites and that of the ‘people.’ Ever and again there are conformities and transfers to be recognized; therefore, one has to use any classificatory terms carefully (Jaritz 1987). In this context, it has to be kept in mind, however, that the daily life of the ‘little people,’ their behavior and actions, were rather generally of no interest to those members of medieval society who were the regular producers of the written texts or visual representations that serve as our sources. This is particularly true

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with regard to such actions of the ‘people’ that did not deviate from normality. If they followed the conventions and norms of the social system and their communities in an accepted way without attracting specific attention, they were ‘people’ often not worth describing or even speaking of. Getting interested in them was connected with: – – –

extraordinary or unbelievable phenomena in their lives; specific negative actions by them that contradicted the order of the social system and could threaten stability; their role as a good example or model for other members of society.

Therefore, when common people and their quotidianity appear in the sources they are again not ‘neutral,’ but regularly exceptional. Through this exceptionality, the lower-class people became interesting objects, and as such objects they and their daily lives found the way into the written and visual source evidence. The peasant, in particular, was seen as an object to be used as both a bad and a good example (Jaritz 2002). This way, he and his daily life could become the basis for didactic messages, motivations, or warnings (see Fig. 3). When he was used as a good example, he was depicted as one of the foundations of the social order; all other members of society were dependent on him and his work. But the peasant was also used simultaneously as both a good and a bad example (Braet 1995; Classen, ed., 2012). He offered the advantageous opportunity to be utilized as a didactic model based on both the positive and negative connotations and still be perceived and understood by everybody. The social determination of gender roles also influenced medieval daily life and its representation decisively. Again, contrasts and the evaluation of difference had an important influence. In the male-dominated environment, in which life took place and the sources that we use were produced, the following aspects can be recognized as particularly emphasized. They influenced the discourses on and also the practice of daily life of women heavily, which also led to the creation of stereotypes: –

the factors of male strength and female weakness, referring to physical as well as mental areas, as a specific criterion for differentiation. In female religious communities, for instance, the statement propter fragilitatem sexus could be emphasized when permitting nuns to pray in the vernacular instead of Latin, to eat meat, or to possess property (Jaritz 1989, 139). This ‘fragility’ was also the reason to introduce stricter regulations for the enclosure in female religious communities than in male monasteries (Gilchrist 1994). Similar references to female weakness can also be recognized in secular space.

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Fig. 3: A sinful peasant who is not ready for the Last Judgment; he wears clothes that are not appropriate for his social status, and he still concentrates on his work when he should prepare himself to meet the Lord. Panel of a winged altar (detail), first quarter of the sixteenth c., Kortsch, South Tyrol (Italy). © Institut für Realienkunde, University of Salzburg.

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the spheres of non-domestic male and domestic female space. The latter was connected with childbearing, food preparation, and textile-related activities (spinning, laundry, mending) (Hanawalt 1998). With regard to food and textiles, however, one also finds extensions of female activities from the domestic into the non-domestic sphere (for instance, as retailers, in urban or rural spinning rooms, etc.). the component of male responsibility for the family, the economy, the finances and functioning of the household in general, only taken over by widows or by married women on occasions when the husbands were away from home. However, the temporariness of such situations of female responsibility is regularly stressed. The role and influence of the body that is clearly connected with female space. This led to regular, mostly critical, discourses about women and morals or women and sexuality.

In all these areas the focus of argumentation can also be recognized in the emphasis on the woman in her role as object. In this aspect of the discourse she is close to the peasants and their representation.

D Fuzzy Borders, Quiet Nuances, and Open Perspectives The history of daily life in the Middle Ages is an exciting field of research that has offered a number of important new findings and leads to a better understanding of medieval women and men of every social status. When recognizing, on the one hand, the relevance of contrasts, particularly in the given norms and existing conventions of life style, one also has to be aware, on the other hand, that the borderlines in practice were not always strict and sometimes represented fuzziness and only nuances of difference. This also shows leeway and possibilities for compromise that seem to have determined many areas of medieval daily life. Such a situation even increases the relevance of comparative approaches in research and the necessity of various ways of contextualization. Thus, medieval daily life is no longer a field of historical analysis that merely lives from decorative description and illustration, as it sometimes represented itself in the past. It has become an important research topic, standing in an indispensable and mutually stimulating connection with approaches and methods of social, cultural, religious, political, economic, environmental, and art history.

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Select Bibliography Garver, Valerie, “Everyday Life in Medieval Studies,” Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms – Methods – Trends, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York 2010), vol. 1, 525–39. Gilchrist, Roberta, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge 2012). Goetz, Hans-Werner, Life in the Middle Ages: From the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century, trans. Albert Wimmer, ed. Steven Rowan (1986; Notre Dame, IN, 1993). Jaritz, Gerhard, Zwischen Augenblick und Ewigkeit: Einführung in die Alltagsgeschichte des Mittelalters (Vienna and Cologne 1989). Lüdtke, Alf, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer (Frankfurt a. M. 1989; Princeton, NJ, 1995). Zimmermann, Gerd, Ordensleben und Lebensstandard: Die cura corporis in den Ordensvorschriften des abendländischen Hochmittelalters (Münster 1973).  

Hiram Kümper

Death A Introduction: Death and the Medievalists I Discovering Death: the Late Emergence of a Fundamental Subject For the last few decades, the cultural practices surrounding death and dying have been an extremely prominent subject on medievalists’ agendas. Inspired by cultural theory, scholars from a variety of disciplines have discovered death and mankind’s awareness of its own mortality as “first rank generators of culture” (Assmann 2000, 14). Until the late 1970s, however, more broad-ranging research on death and dying in the Middle Ages was relatively sparse, with Alberto Tenenti’s La vie et la mort à travers l’art du XVe siècle (Tenenti 1983) and Thomas Boase’s Death in the Middle Ages (Boase 1972) being two noteworthy exceptions. Just as Johan Huizinga had done in his classic The Waning of the Middle Ages (Huizinga 1924, 134–46), Boase stresses the late-medieval morbid feeling of a “fin de siècle,” the contrast between the splendor of the here-and-now and the fear of possible torments in the beyond. Both Huizinga and Boase posit that a major reason for the seemingly sudden proliferation of death imagery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the fact there was an increase in the actual visibility of death, produced by the terrible epidemics of the time, such as the Plague. Tenenti, on the other hand, stresses that a humanist view of life emerged earlier than is usually thought and that much of late-medieval death imagery was evidence of an intellectual insurgency against, or a certain melancholy about the inevitability of dying. Both these studies, Boase’s and Tenetini’s, can be seen as forerunners of the turn to the history of mentality that would finally lift death as a prominent subject onto the tableau of Medieval Studies in the late 1970s.

II Modern Classics: Philippe Ariès and Michelle Vovelle Thanks to the rising interest in cultural history and the history of mentalities, death, which is a fundamental experience in all societies and times, was soon studied by scholars from every discipline. Two foundational studies that particularly revitalized medievalists’ interest in death and its cultural embedding came

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from France: Philipp Ariès’s The Hour of Our Death (Ariès 1981; published 1977 in the French original L’Homme devant la mort) and Michel Vovelle’s La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Vovelle 1983). Considerably earlier actually than these two works of reference, however, the history of death has haunted its authors and other historians of what came to be called the Annales school (see Burguière 2009, 163–94; French orig. 2006). Ariès’s and Vovelle’s earlier studies on the subject of death date back to the 1940s. But it was not until the publication of Ariès’s The Hour of Our Death that the subject gained wider recognition by an international scholarly audience from across the disciplines, and even by an interested public. Even today, Ariès’s monograph is the most frequently quoted work on the subject of the history of death and dying, even though its broadscaled narrative certainly did not fail to attract critics (e.g., Borst 1980; WilhelmSchaffer 1999; for an interesting case-study-test of Ariès’s theses, see Besten 1996). A little later his preliminary studies, including Western Attitudes Toward Death, a series of lectures that he presented at Johns Hopkins University in 1977, attracted considerable interest. (One should be careful not to confuse these books with each other.) Ariès suggests that Western practices of mourning developed in four overlapping stages that mirror the changing cultural attitudes toward death. He begins his observations with the “tamed death” (mort apprivoisée) of the high Middle Ages, when death was accepted as an integral and collectively shared part of life, and the dead occupied a place in the lives of the living (also see B below). This stage transitioned into a stage in which there was an individualized understanding of “one’s own death” (mort de soi). According to Ariès, the transition between the first and second stages was characterized by a rising awareness to prepare for the final hour, which now felt more horrifying because individual eternal salvation was at stake. The new intimacy of private life was reflected by more intimate mourning rites. The stage of the mort de soi is followed by that of the mort de toi, “the death of the other,” which occurs at the end of the Ancien régime. In this stage, the death of beloved ones becomes a locus of great affection and its representations. Death is romanticized and invested with a sentiment that is both morbid and erotic. Moreover, mourning is relegated to the private sphere. This stage, marked by the segregation of private mourning and public life then gradually shifts into the even more rigidly “forbidden death” (mort interdit) of our contemporary age. The individual vanishes into mass society and talking about death becomes taboo to a certain extent. Death and mourning are perceived as a disharmonic intrusion into a life in which the pursuit of (momentary) happiness is the central imperative. Mourning, Ariès proposes, becomes impossible in this stage. Though Ariès’s four stages of mourning are seldom utilized as actual structural devices in historical or literary studies of the Middle Ages, his grand narrative

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has inspired many scholars across the disciplines. He later supplemented his best-selling study with a volume on the history of the imagery of death (Ariès 1983). Vovelle’s study has never gained as wide a reception outside academia as Ariès’s has. Still, his work is recognized as being just as fundamental as Ariès’s to the scholarly study of death. Vovelle proposes that there was a definite change in the attitudes toward death that happened as the Baroque culture of the seventeenth century changed into the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. At that point, death changed from the ultimate penance for mankind’s sins into a natural inevitability. Vovelle sees this change expressed by waning fear in purgatory, fire of hell, and eternal damnation. Still, as Vovelle goes on to argue, the marked divide between the discourse of death during the Ancien régime and that of modern times was not simply due to cultural secularization. Rather, he sees repeating dialectic patterns throughout the intellectual history of the West. For instance, there were debates about how to commemorate the dead between those argued for austere simplicity and those who wished to honor both the dead and God by pompous displays. Vovelle’s book had all it takes for an inspiring debate with Ariès’s theses, and indeed, both scholars had debated with each other for about a decade, until Ariès died in 1984 (for a good summary of this debate, see Hutton 2004, 113–28). Many of their differences of opinion, however, pertained to themes and materials from the early modern era, especially the Baroque, so much of this debate has not reached Medieval Studies. Vovelle’s book has only once been translated into another language (Italian, La morte e l’Occidente dal 1300 ai giorni nostri (2003), a fact that may have contributed to his relative obscurity outside academic circles.

III More Recent Studies on Death in the Middle Ages Beginning in the late 1970s, research on the cultural context of death and dying blossomed. This research resulted in a large number of essay collections: Sitto, ed., 1979; Braet and Verbeke, ed., 1983; Borst, Patschovsky, et al., ed., 1993; Alexandre-Bidon, ed., 1993; Wenninger, ed., 1998; DuBruck and Gusick, ed., 1999; Bruce and Marshall, ed., 2000; Walker Bynum and Freedman, ed., 2000— and these are just the collections that focus more or less exclusively on the Middle Ages! It also resulted in such a plenitude of single monographs that it must by now elude any critical bibliographic assessment. However, two recent monographs that tie together observations from various disciplinary perspectives are Paul Binski’s Medieval Death (Binski 1996) and Norbert Ohler’s Sterben und Tod im Mittelalter (Ohler 1994). Both aim to provide students and general readers with compact and broad overviews. While Ohler

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intends to draw a comprehensive picture that is easily digestible for a general readership, Binski pays more attention to scholarly debates and bibliographic references and has also compiled a useful annotated bibliography (Binski 1996, 215–21). In the last decade, scholars have continued to pay attention to medieval ideas and practices regarding death and dying. Yet recent articles and essay collections tend to be increasingly specialized. A number of specific studies shall therefore be discussed in the following sections.

B Living with the Dead I Memoria as Culture To understand medieval notions of death and dying, we must consider the large extent to which the dead were an integral part of everyday life in the early Middle Ages (Geary 1994a; McLauglin 1994; Williams 2006). This does not necessarily mean that stories of ghosts or voices from the after-world circulated, though they certainly did, and they were not as opposed by the Church as they would be in the early modern period (Schmitt 1999; Körner, ed., 2002). Many medieval ghost stories are contained in the collection of exempla, Dialogus miraculorum, written by the German Cistercian Master of Novices, Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180– 1240). The living did not merely fear (or hope) that the dead might come back for a visit once in a while. Rather, the dead never really socially left the community. As Patrick Geary puts it, “Death marked a transition, a change in status, but not an end…. The dead were present among the living through liturgical commemoration, in dreams and visions, and in their physical remains, especially the tombs and relics of the saints. Omnipresent, they were drawn into every aspect of life. They played a vital role in social, economic, political, and cultural spheres” (Geary 1994a, 2). Otto Gerhard Oexle (1983; ed., 1995) has condensed the idea that the dead were ever-present to the living into the formula “memoria as culture,” which has become famous among medievalists. Especially in the early and high Middle Ages, liturgical commemoration within the monastic orders helped create spiritual communities across wide geographic distances. In their necrologies, monks and nuns in their monasteries and nunneries commemorated not only numerous brothers and sisters of their orders from all over Europe but also the various benefactors of their institutions. With the twelfth-century monastic reform, however, this identifying function of necrologies by and large came to an end (Wollasch 1989). Though the number of masses celebrated for the dead increased somewhat throughout the later Middle

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Fig. 1: London, British Library, Harley 2915, f. 43v: Last Judgment scene from an English Book of Hours (ca. 1440/50).

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Ages, the necrologies and confraternity books of these times do not seem to demonstrate that religious houses identified themselves with supra-regional communities, but rather with local networks. Still, there are illustrative counterexamples to this general trend, even in the later Middle Ages (cf. Geuenich 2011). On a smaller, more local scale, the concern for proper memoria created new networks, especially in the cities (Tracy 2009). Mendicants, monastic orders, and beguines competed for donations pro remedio anime (‘for the healing of the soul’), while confraternities were concerned with commemorating their deceased members (Banker 1988; Jensen 2004). Some even specialised in assisting people during their last hours. In the sixteenth century, after the Council of Trent (1545–63), the Societas Jesu (founded in 1540) was especially active in this respect (Ebner 2005).

II Fear of the Afterlife and the Birth of Purgatory We can only understand the central place that the dead occupied in both medieval Christian thought and in everyday life by their profound alignment toward the afterlife. The dreaded uncertainty of what awaits the individual beyond the earthly existence was amplified even further when the fear of hell became increasingly more important in early Christian thought (Bernstein 1993). Jean Delumeau (1990) has characterized the pre-modern West as having a specific type of “guilt culture,” in which the fear of death and eternal damnation dominates life so much that life becomes centred on its own end and structured by a series of rituals that are designed to prepare the individual for that end. Still, for early medieval individuals the question of afterlife remained rather open during their lifetimes. One could never really tell if one was welcomed to heaven or condemned to hell. The long line of deadly sins, however, made hell the more likely place. Only in the twelfth century then, the two-fold eschatological landscape of heaven and hell was gradually invaded by Purgatory, an in-between space and time, a locus for the cleansing and propitiating of the soul. Now, people could actively work for their own salvations, not only during their lifetimes, but also through the good deeds and prayers of the bereaved (which the dead might have secured for themselves during their lifetimes). The now-classic study on the emergence of the idea of Purgatory is Jacques Le Goff’s famous Birth of Purgatory (Le Goff 1990; French original 1981). Though considerable criticism was soon raised against many of Le Goff’s broad assumptions (see, for example, Edwards 1985) and a lot of details have been added to the general picture, his book, for good reasons, is still cited by virtually any study that engages with the medieval idea of Purgatory (for more recent accounts of this subject, see Dinzelbacher 1995; 1999; Illi and Haas 1994; Marshall 2009).

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Concerns about individual salvation intensified in the late Middle Ages, maybe partly because large epidemics, such as the Plague, put death on daily display (Boase 1972; Esser 1999). Ultimately, we have to consider that for the medievals, both intellectuals and ordinary people, ideas of death and the afterlife must have been closely linked with concerns about eschatology, although ideas and death and eschatology have usually been treated separately by medievalists. Caroline Walker-Bynum and Paul Freedman have acknowledged that the separation is counterproductive (Walker Bynum and Freedman, ed., 2000; also cf. Aertsen and Pickavé, ed., 2002; and Dinzelbacher 1999). In the last few years, more monographs and collections of essays have dealt with eschatology, especially ideas of the apocalypse, in medieval times (a Brill compendium on the medieval apocalypse is about to be published by Michael Ryan in 2015, which will include an extensive and up-to-date bibliography).

C Thinking Death: from a “Philosophy of Death” (meditatio mortis) to an “Art of Dying” (ars moriendi) I The Patristic Foundation and its Scholastic Heirs Contemplating the nature of death has a long tradition. Early Christian thinkers built upon the ideas of their classical forebears, such as Cicero, Seneca, or Epictetus. Some medievals used classical modes of contemplation, such as the etymological interpretation of the Latin word mors (cf. Spoerri 1999, 211–25). Others were more elaborate in their discussions of the nature of death and the process of dying. Among the most influential early texts on the meditatio mortis are Ambrosius’s Liber de bono mortis (PL 14, 559–96), Cyprian’s De mortalitate (CSEL 3.1, 295–314), and the chapter De morte in St. Augustine’s Enarratio in Psalmum 48 (PL 36, 555–58). To get a much broader idea of the range of patristic concepts concerning death and dying, however, one must check the plenitude of references to the lemma de morte in the index volumes to the Patrologia Latina (PL 120, 197–212), as a broad-ranging monograph on the subject is still missing. Most of the patristic texts suggest meditation on death not so much as a preparation for the last days but rather as a tool for leading a pious life in the actual present. This idea never vanishes completely from the texts of the later ars moriendi tradition, although it steps to the background. In the pastoral tradition, the focus is on caring for laypeople, but the idea of memento mori lives on in the monastic and the mystic traditions. Illustrative examples of the memento mori

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tradition are the Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem (PL 184, 1199–1306) and the epistle Ad Romanum Romanae Curiae Subdiaconum (PL 182, 240–41), both written by Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090–1153) (for Bernard’s concept of death, also see Pranger 1992), or Bonaventura’s (1221–1274) contemplation on death, De mortis inevitabili necessitate (III.2 of his Soliloquia). The general tone of many early Christian texts on death may seem at first surprisingly positive. Indeed, many patristic writers viewed death as a transitional stage, as some kind of sleep that only bridged the time between life and the time when all bodies would be resurrected in imitation of Christ. Consequently, many cautioned their readers not to forget the joyful and victorious experience of Christ, who had conquered death (see, for instance, Augustine, Confessiones, IX.12, 29–32, on the occasion of the funeral of his mother, Monica). From the eleventh century onward, an increasing number of theological writings began to contemplate on the inevitability of death, the ephemeral character of this world (contemptus mundi), and the hope for a better afterlife in Christ. Probably one of the most influential texts of this genre was written by pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216), De contemptus mundi sive de miseria conditionis humanae (PL 217, 701–76). However, there were also many such texts in the vernacular, usually shorter ones, such as the well-known poem Von des todes gehugede (Ehlert, ed., 1994) by Heinrich of Melk (twelfth century). A late representative of this literary genre is Bernhard of Siena’s (1380–1444) widely circulating Speculum peccatorum de contemptu mundi. But this work already breathes the air of another tradition, the literature of pastoral and lay assistance, which we shall discuss in the next paragraphs.

II Assistance for the Dying Certain rites for attending the sick and the dying are known even from the earliest times. Still, early Christianity does not seem to have developed strict rituals for this purpose. Only during the early Middle Ages did spiritual assistance became more ritualized (Paxton 1990). The emergence of rites performed in preparing for death is probably connected to the shifting attitudes of early Christianity toward death from confidence to fear. No longer was eternal salvation the first thing that medieval people associated with death; now, they thought of penance and the Last Judgment (Fig. 1). Éric Rebillard plausibly attributes this shift in attitudes to the influence of Augustine and his contemporaries (Rebillard 1994, 18–19; 62–63; also cf. Cavadini 2000). Philippe Ariès then has pointed to the reflections of this shift in church architecture (Ariès 1981, 97–101). Extreme Unction became the heart of the death ritual, and it was accompanied by prayers, psalms, and lita-

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Fig. 2: London, British Library, Royal 11 D IX, f. 152r: Deathbed assistance to a dying bishop. Scene from a French manuscript of the Decretum Gratian (late thirteenth or early fourteenth century).

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nies for the salvation of the dying. Consequently, by the twelfth century, rites that helped people prepare for death had grown considerably (see, for instance, Franz, ed., 1912, 71–89). The late medieval ordo (‘ritual’) for the visitation of the sick that was utilized by the English church (Ordo ad visitandum infirmum, printed in Maskell, ed., 1882, vol. 1, 66–82) provided detailed instructions for the priest not only regarding the administration of the Sacrament of Penance and the Eucharist, but also regarding the organization of the street procession that preceded a burial. By the late Middle Ages then, the quest for salvation increasingly focused on the believer’s very last moment in the deathbed (Fig. 2). People envisioned the moment of death as a struggle between good and evil, the latter sometimes represented in art by demons sitting beside the deathbed. Many late medieval carvings and manuscript illustrations depict this scene as decisive for the soul’s salvation. Still, at times it could be difficult to get the assistance of a priest in one’s very last moment. Therefore, increasingly, laypeople were instructed how to attend the spiritual needs of the dying. Among the earliest and most widespread sets of instructions for lay people is the anonymous Admonitio morienti et de peccatis suis nimium formidanti (PL 158, 685–88), which was attributed to Anselm of Canterbury (ca. 1033–1109) and hence is often titled simply Quaestiones Anselmi. This short set of questions that should be asked of the dying person travelled throughout Europe not only in its original Latin form, but also in various translations and adaptions (Maskell, ed., 1882, vol. 3, 413–19; Kümper, ed., 2007, 99–101; 116–17; 122–25).

III The Art of Dying (ars moriendi) The Anselmian questions were taken up by the Parisian chancellor and prominent pastoral theologian Jean Gerson (1363–1429) in his Médicine de l’âme (Medicine for the Soul). This work was the third part of his Opus tripartitum, which was written before 1408 and circulated in both Latin and French (for a facing-page critical edition, see Gerson 1998; for a useful discussion of this classical text, see Brunelli 1964, Schönberger 2002). Gerson’s ars moriendi, along with its close relatives, the anonymous Speculum artis bene moriendi and the illustrated Ars moriendi, would become the most influential treatises on dying of the later Middle Ages. The Speculum was written ca. 1414/18 and spread rapidly in different manuscript versions, its dissemination probably stimulated by the Council of Constance. Beginning in the 1450s, various versions and vernacular translations of the text circulated as incunabulae. There is still no critical edition of the text because its highly complex textual history makes it hard to determine which text is the primary one. However, a number of critical editions of individual texts have

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been published (cf. Akerboom 2003). Building upon the Speculum, the incunabula of the Ars moriendi, which combined text and block-printed pictures, became one of the bestsellers of the fifteenth century (cf., for instance, Renger 1994). Many later pastoral handbooks and catechetic writings for lay people, such as Stephan of Landskron’s (1412–1477) Hymelstrasz or Marquard of Lindau’s (d. 1392) commentary on the decalogue borrow elements or even whole passages from both the Speculum and the illustrated Ars moriendi that deal with the art of dying well (see Rudolf 1957 for details of this textual tradition, and Kümper, ed., 2007, for an anthology of exemplary texts). The multifaceted texts of the ars moriendi tradition served a double function. First, they reminded believers of the inevitability of death, so that none would die unprepared; second, they prepared not only the dying person but also those who assisted him in his last hours. Consequently, these texts widely circulated also in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reform circles. Both Erasmus of Rotterdam (Bietenholz 1978) and Martin Luther (Wicks 1998; Akerboom 2003) devoted extensive writings to the art of dying well. “Many books have been written … on how we are to prepare for death: nothing but error, and people have only become more downcast” (Luther, transl. from Reinis 2007, 1). Luther, however, by this dismisses the importance of giving hope to the dying, as is articulated by the late medieval Speculum-tradition. The transformation in attitudes toward the art of dying and the literature devoted to this art that happened during the Reformation has been well-studied in the last few years. There have been intensive studies on England (Duffy 1992, 313–27; Houlbrook 1998, 147–82; Marshall 2002), France (Carbonnier-Burkard 2000), Spain (Eire 1995), and Germany (Reinis 2007).

IV The Dance of Death A fascinating heir of the ars moriendi tradition is the French Danse macabre, an allegory of the universality of death, just like the (usually quite unallegorical) earlier medieval memento mori. The term “Danse macabre” first appears in the fourteenth century in a poem by Jean Le Févre, entitled Le respit de la mort (Le Févre 1969, 133, ll. 3078–80). In English, it is usually referred to as the “Dance of Death,” a name that is echoed by most other European languages (Danza della Muerte; Totentanz; Dodendans). In the Dance of Death, people from all groups of society dance in pairs alongside a personification of death, usually a skeleton. The skeleton dances with a living person and wears clothes that are similar to this person’s clothes. The dancers usually include emperors, kings, and popes, but the extent of the pictorial program varies greatly and there also may be craftsmen, labourers, peasants, and women.

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Medieval and Renaissance Dances of Death are preserved in a great number of different media, from monumental murals to illuminations in misericords, paintings on wooden panels, and illustrations in printed books (Oosterwijk 2007; Gertsman 2010). Some of the most prominent and oldest Dances of Death, such as those in Basel or Lübeck, have been destroyed in the past two centuries. However, because these pieces have long fascinated researchers and travellers, drawings or even photographs of the destroyed pictures have usually survived. Consequently, a large number of exhibition catalogues make available a lot of material in all different sorts of media (see Collins 1977; Heppe and Knirim, ed., 1982; MildnerFlesch and Krüger 1982; Kasten, ed., 1987; Schuster, ed., 1992). Utzinger and Utzinger (1996) have compiled a comprehensive catalogue of extant and destroyed medieval Dances of Death. One of the most recent studies of the subject was conducted by Elina Gertsmann (2010); her work is not only richly illustrated but also includes a good selection of untranslated texts in the original Spanish, French, English, and German (Gertsmann 2010, 181–252), According to most scholars, the sixteenth century was a period of transition for the Dances of Death. Gradually, the straightforward parallel between Original Sin and the coming of death into the world, so characteristic of the symbolism of the medieval Dance of Death, begins to vanish. In later depictions, the Dance of Death becomes only an episode (though certainly an inevitable one) within the ever-repeating history of mankind that stretches from the Creation until the Last Judgment (cf. Gertsmann 2010, 161–80). This transition started with Niklaus Manuel Deutsch’s monumental painting of 1516/19 in Bern (destroyed in 1660) and came to its peak probably with Hans Holbein the Younger’s Les simulachres & historiees faces de la mort, cut by Hans Lützelburger and first published in 1538 by the brothers Trechsel in Lyons.

D Performing and Representing Death I Burial We have already mentioned liturgical rites for the bedside assistance of the dying in the paragraphs above. Processions that took place before the burial were organized by even more formalized rites (Fig. 3). The three substantial volumes edited by Hansjakob Becker and his collaborators (ed., 1997–2004) are a helpful repository of burial and deathbed liturgies from Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish traditions. Only few studies, on the other hand, have investigated the role of music in medieval funeral ceremonies and processions for the dead (Ameln 1989; Heymel 2003).

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Fig. 3: London, British Library, Additional 52539, f. 7r: Funeral scene from an Italian Book of Hours (ca. 1390/1400).

In contrast to pagan Germanic traditions, Christian tradition dictated that believers had to be buried in consecrated ground. For a long time, “consecrated ground” would have meant the walled churchyard, the enclosed area of a monastery, or even the respective church itself (Zadora-Rio 2011, for France). Even in the later Middle Ages, the local elites chose a burial place as near as possible to one of the altars of the local church, preferably, of course, the main altar. This was not only a matter of public display, but it also reflected the deeply religious demand to be as near as possible to the spiritual power (the virtus) of the saint’s relics that were deposited in the altar. From the thirteenth century onward, the rising mendicant orders frequently had to struggle with the urban clergy over burrial rights (and the fees that could be collected for burials). It was not until the later Middle Ages that cemeteries were sometimes detached from their parish churches. These cemetaries were usually located outside of the city walls. Population growth and epidemics such as the Plague made this necessary. Later, the Protestant Reformation and its refusal to venerate the saints stimulated this process even more. Late medieval and especially early modern cemeteries would not necessarily have been places of constant mourning or quiet, inward devotion. According to many contemporary accounts, sometimes they were rather lively meeting places (cf. Harding 2002, 101–13).

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II Tombs and Epitaphs Beyond their pragmatic function as mere containers of dead bodies, tombs have, from the earliest times, expressed people’s attitudes toward to death and dead bodies. A classic survey of tomb sculpture, From Ancient Egypt to Bernini, was published by the godfather of iconography, Erwin Panofsky (1964). Despite its overarching approach, this study remains an inspiring account and is well worth reading by any medievalist interested in tombs. More recent works in medieval and Renaissance studies usually focus instead on single tombs or groups of tombs, such as Philipp P. Fehl’s and Rainer Fehl’s study of the tombs of popes and princes in St. Peter’s, Rome (Fehl and Fehl 2007) or Marek Walczak’s article on the Gothic tombs of the Kings of Poland in the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow (Walczak 2013). Epitaphs frequently represent an even more complex media of commemoration for the individual (Guthke 2006; Friedrich 2008). Early Christians tended to anonymize graves by burying the corpses ad sanctos (i.e., near the Saint’s relics). People gradually began to use epitaphs in the twelfth century, and more intensively from the fourteenth century onward. Often, epitaphs were crafted during the lifetimes of the deceased. Hence, cultural historians have long recognized them as important sources for understanding medieval modes of self-representation. Georg Misch, for instance, begins his well-known literary history of autobiographical writing with the descriptions of the lives of deceased people on Egyptian tombstones (Misch 1949, 25). During the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the inscriptions of tombs and epitaphs excessively glorify the dead. In the first centuries of the Middle Ages, monumental graves were reserved for the elites of society: kings, nobles, and high clerics (Spieß and Warntjes, ed., 2012; Bijsterveld 2011). Their deaths were often cited as exemplars of the art of dying. With the rise of the medieval city and its political importance, however, burghers also frequently had themselves buried in monumental tombs. A frequently cited, seminal work on commemorative architecture that spans the period from antiquity to the nineteenth century is Howard Colvin’s Architecture and the After-Life (Colvin 1991).

Select Bibliography Bayard, Florence, L’art du bien mourir au XVe siècle: Etude sur les arts du bien mourir au bas Moyen Age à la lumièr d’un Ars Moriendi du XVe siècle (Paris 1999). Binski, Paul, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (New York 1996).

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DuBruck, Edelgard E. and Barbara I. Gusick, ed., Death and Dying in the Middle Ages (New York 1999). Geary, Patrick J., Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994). [= Geary 1994a] Gertsman, Elina, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout 2010).

Jan Wehrle

Dreams and Dream Theory A Late Antique Foundations of Medieval Dream Theory The discourse surrounding dreams was always concerned with their origins and significance. The idea that dreams might be mediators of supernatural knowledge or even reveal future events was both ancient and common. Influential classical philosophers such as Plato (428/427–348/347 B.C.E.) and Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) had been compelled to comment on the subject (Kruger 1992, 18; Manuwald 1994; Näf 2004, 55–62; Walde 2012). Medieval dream theory relied heavily on authorities from classical and late antiquity. Initially, Western scholars relied on a Christian tradition of dream lore, which later went alongside Neoplatonist teachings. A thorough re-evaluation of the dream phenomenon took place during the time of high scholasticism, after the works of Aristotle on natural philosophy, as well as Arab and Greek medical literature, had been translated into Latin. Neoplatonist dream lore, as exemplified by the influential writings of Calcidius (ca. early fourth century C.E.) and Macrobius (ca. early fifth century C.E.), attempted to merge earlier, dualistic traditions of dream lore, which had postulated either a physical or a transcendental origin for dreams. The Neoplatonists devised coherent systems that ranked dreams hierarchically, according to the amount of “truth” they contained (Kruger 1992, 17–21). Calcidius discusses both dreaming and waking visions within the wider context of his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. He briefly describes four types of dreams and one type of waking vision. One of the dreams is the purely mundane dream, while the others are, to differing degrees, inspired by celestial agents or higher functions of the soul (Kruger 1992, 24–33; Näf 2004, 168–69). Macrobius takes a similar, but more comprehensive, approach in his commentary on Cicero’s (106–43 B.C.E.) Somnium Scipionis. Cicero’s text describes a dream vision experienced by Scipio the Younger, which prompted Macrobius to comment exhaustively on the phenomenon of dreams. In the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Macrobius describes five types of dreams, two being insignificant, three significant. Insomnia are mundane dreams, caused by distress of the body or the mind. Visa (or phantasma) arise from imagination, but can manifest themselves as specters or incubi during that state when one is not fully awake yet not fully asleep, either. These two types of dreams are counted among the mundane dreams, but touch on the transcenden-

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tal. The somnium is a veridical dream that provides the dreamer with transcendental knowledge, but its meaning is hidden in allegorical form and requires interpretation. The visio and the oraculum are dreams of truly revelatory nature. Within the former type of dream, the dreamer sees future events as they are about to happen; within the latter, a figure of authority appears and reveals future events to the dreamer (Kruger 1992, 21–24; Macrobius 1970, 9–11; Näf 2004, 169–70). Both Calcidius and Macrobius thus defined what has been called a “middle ground” of dreaming. Within this middle ground, best represented by Macrobius’s somnium, dreams contain truth, but in hidden or distorted form. These kinds of dreams were not considered to have been directly inspired by the divine. Instead, they were supposed to have been mediated by the higher functions of the soul or by celestial agents; as such, they required interpretation (Kruger 1992, 19–20; 32–34). While the reception of Neoplatonist philosophy had a profound impact on perceptions of dreams during the Middle Ages, the scholastic approach to the subject was for a long time dominated by a Christian tradition of dream lore. As the pagan philosophers had demonstrated, questions concerning the origins of dreams were linked to questions regarding relationships between the human and the divine, as well as questions about the nature of the soul. Accordingly, the Church Fathers and their successors were encouraged to comment directly or indirectly on the phenomenon of dreaming. Christian theologians were conflicted in their approach to dreams, however. Holy Scripture describes prominent dream revelations and veridical dreams, including Jacob’s dream of the Ladder (Genesis 28: 10–19), the dreams and dream interpretations of Joseph (Genesis 37: 1–11, 40, 41), and the visions and interpretations of Daniel (Daniel 2; 4; 7–12). In the Liber Numerorum 12: 6–8, it is announced that God would speak to prophets by appearing to them in visions or dreams, a statement mirrored by Job 33: 15–16. Veridical dreams and revelations are known in the New Testament, as well: for example, the warning to Joseph delivered in a dream in Mattheum 2: 19–2. At the same time, the Bible explicitly condemns the practice of divination in Leviticus 19: 26 and Deuteronomy 18: 9–11, warning against false prophets and deceiving illusions. Ecclesiastes 34: 1–6 explains that dreams are meaningless, unless they are sent directly from God. It was especially the equivocal “middle ground” of dreaming that concerned the Doctors of the Church. They were not willing to rule out a transcendental or even divine influence on some dreams, but ambiguous dreams of the somnium type could not easily be accepted as divine visions. Evil influences on ambiguous dreams could not be ruled out, and, consequently, dream interpretation might be erroneous and lead to sin. Christians had to observe a fine and not always clearly drawn line between legitimate dream interpretation and forbidden divinatory

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practice (Busse 1994, 52–53; Kruger 1992, 7; 35; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 90–98; Biblia Sacra Vulgata 2007; see F, below). The most influential Christian authors on the subject of the dream were Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.) who discussed the nature of the soul, visions and dreams in De genesi ad litteram, and Pope Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604 C.E.) by way of Moralia in Iob and the Dialogi. Augustine’s work outlines a range of dream types that are reminiscent of Neoplatonist dream lore. Martine Dulaey assumes that both Augustine as well as Calcidius and Macrobius ultimately relied on the same source: namely, the teachings of Porphyrios (ca. 233–305 C.E.) (Dulaey 1973, 90–92). In his epistemological writings, Augustine differentiates between three kinds of vision: corporeal, spiritual and intellectual. An external object seen by corporeal vision is translated into an internal, non-corporeal image that can be experienced by the non-corporeal soul through spiritual vision. Such spiritual images can be recalled from memory during sleep. These remembered images can be combined to form new images. Such “dreamt” images can also be of transcendental origin, however. In this case, the soul perceives spiritual images which are presented by spiritual agents such as angels, who “commingle” their spirit with that of the dreamer. Augustine cautions that spiritual images could also come from demons disguised as angels. These “angels” might even disclose useful information in what is ultimately a ploy to deceive their victims. Whether a dream is divinely inspired or not, intellectual vision is needed to understand and interpret the perceived images. The ability to interpret dreams is granted only to men who strive for intellectual and spiritual wisdom. Augustine also discusses the moral implications of dreaming. As reason is impaired during sleep, one cannot be made responsible for things seen or done in dreams or physical consequences of those dreams, such as nocturnal emissions (see the exhaustive discussions in Dualey 1973; Kruger 1992, 35–56; Näf 2004, 161–64; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 99–103). Attitudes toward nocturnal emissions during the Middle Ages are further examined in Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 211–26). Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) relies on a tradition of Patristic dream lore, which originated from the considerations of Tertullian (ca. 150–220 C.E.). Patristic dream lore postulated the existence of three types of dreams: good dreams sent directly from God, evil dreams sent by demons, and dreams that resulted from images seen throughout the day. Gregory expands on this system, considering physical factors and mixed, ambiguous dream forms. He postulates a six-tier dream classification. According to Gregory, there are two kinds of mundane dreams, caused by either an empty or a full stomach. Demons can cause deceptive illusions, and such illusions can also mingle with the dreamer’s own thoughts (cogitatione simul et illusione). One can receive true, angelic revelations, but these

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revelations can again be mingled with the dreamer’s thoughts (cogitatione simul et revelatione). Gregory is even more skeptical than Augustine that his fellow men could correctly discern the origins of dreams. Gregory implies that this ability is granted only to holy men. Consequently, Gregory goes further than Augustine in warning against an imprudent belief in dreams and generally discourages attempts at dream interpretation. Gregory’s writings were prominently employed by Isidore of Seville (ca. 556–636 C.E.), who used both Gregory’s dream lore as well as Augustine’s epistemological theory in his Liber sententiarum. Isidore again emphasized the possibility that dreams could be demonic deceptions and expressed a deep mistrust of dream interpretation. Both Gregory’s dream lore and Isidore’s very skeptical approach to the dream became doctrine among the clerical elite and dominated attitudes during the early Middle Ages (Busse 1994, 54–55; Gregory the Great 1979, VIII, 42; Haag 2003, 52–54; Kruger 1992, 35–56; 60; Näf 2004, 153; 173; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 105–08).

B Dream Theory during the Early Middle Ages During the Carolingian Renaissance, Western scholars examined the topic of the dream, but they basically followed the established authorities, Gregory and Augustine. In their comments on the Iconoclastic Controversy and the Second Council of Nicaea (787 C.E.), the composers of the Libri carolini (ca. 790 C.E.) insisted that the truthfulness of supposedly veridical dreams could not be verified, as dreams were experienced privately and there could be no witnesses to them. They emphasized the fundamental difference between divine visions and regular dream experiences and repeated Gregory’s sentiment that the former were granted only to saints. The examinations of Alcuin (735–804 C.E.) were mainly founded on questions of morality. His concern was that even meaningless dreams might lead people to commit sinful deeds. As a consequence, he advised against acting on dreams, even though he did believe in the veridical nature of some of them. Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856 C.E.) tried to reconcile Holy Scripture’s contradictory stances toward the dream, but in the end followed Gregory’s authority, advising that it was better to avoid dream interpretation altogether. The very popular legend of saint Swithun by the Benedictine monk Ælfric (955–1020 C.E.) expressed the same sentiment (Busse 1994, 55–56; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 110–14). Veridical dreams were respected phenomena, however, if they appeared within the adequate social and religious contexts. Dreams were recorded and could be interpreted within the spheres of royalty and members of the clergy. In the Carolingian empire, accounts of dreams were used to chastise royalty and nobility, read as signs that legitimated one’s deeds, and similar purposes. The

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practice of recording and employing such “political dreams” would continue throughout the Middle Ages (Busse 1994, 53–55; for an exhaustive discussion see Dutton 1994 and Hehl 2012; see also below, E). The dismissive attitude that impeded scholastic occupation with the dream phenomenon started to change, beginning in the eleventh century, when social and ideological developments led to a re-evaluation of dreams. The interpretation of dreams was no longer limited to royalty and clergy, as dreams of laymen and even women were recorded and analyzed (Busse 1994, 57–58; Le Goff 1977; Schmitt 1999, 277). The distribution of late antique literature on the subject was still limited and Gregory’s dream lore remained dominant, although it must be noted that the Neoplatonist tradition of dream lore was already available in parts of the Latin West during the early Middle Ages (Kruger 1992, 58–59). Attitudes toward dreams remained ambivalent; the monk Onulf (ca. eleventh century C.E.) presented Neoplatonist and Christian dream lore side by side in the Vita Popponis (ca. 1050 C.E.), recommending the reader to consider the advice of the heathen philosophers whenever they didn’t contradict Church doctrine (Haag 2003, 52; Kruger 1992, 68). Adam of Bremen (ca. second half of the eleventh century) was familiar with the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, but took a deprecatory stance toward members of the clergy who concerned themselves too much with dreams (Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 127–30). All in all, scholastic considerations of the dream during the early Middle Ages appear to have been rare, as a dependency on Gregorian dream lore and an attitude that saw only holy men or the highest members of the clergy in a position to ‘safely’ interpret dreams, seems to have been the rule. It has to be noted, though, that there is much room for additional research concerning early medieval assessments of dreams, though the work of Paul Edward Dutton is a notable exception to the rule (Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 103–04).

C Dream Theory and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance During the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, there was a distinct scholastic interest in dreams, spurred by an influx of newly translated Arab and Greek literature into the West. Neoplatonist philosophy and dream lore became important influences on medieval scholasticism. This development initially emanated to a prominent part from scholars, such as William of Conches (ca. 1080/90–1154 C.E.), who are associated with the intellectual movement represented by the School of Chartres. William discussed the dream lore of Calcidius both in his comments on the

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Timaeus as well as in De philosophia mundi and the Dragmaticon. William is also among the early scholars who echoed Aristotelian ideas about the somatic formation of dreams (Kruger 1992, 64; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 115). As far as the Neoplatonists were concerned, it was especially Macrobius’s five–part categorization of dreams that found its way into the medieval discourse of the twelfth century. John of Salisbury (ca.1120–1180 C.E.) cited the five dream types of Macrobius in his Policraticus, and expanded on them in one of the most exhaustive medieval discussions of dreams. John concerned himself with the basic problem of dream interpretation, the inherent ambiguity of symbolic images. His conclusive approach has been identified as an early theory of dream semantics. He pointed out that dream images could have multitudes of meanings, depending both on how familiar the symbols are to the dreamer, as well as on his personality (Le Goff 1977, 306; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 134–38). Macrobius’s dream lore was also widely distributed since it was featured prominently in the very popular De spiritu et anima (ca. 1170), which was falsely attributed to Augustine (Schmitt 1999, 278–79). The early translator of Arab and Greek sources, Adelard of Bath (ca. 1080– 1152 C.E.), adapted Macrobius’s system, but modified it by linking the process of dreaming to matters of digestion and mental health. Greek and Arab medical tradition had long employed dream interpretation for medical diagnosis and regarded physical and psychological factors on the basis of Humorism as major causes for dreaming. This tradition was introduced to the Latin West by such works as Gerard of Cremona’s (ca. 1114–1187 C.E.) translation of al-Kindi’s (ca. 800–873 C.E.) Liber de somno et visione, which was in part indebted to Galen (ca. 129–200/16 C.E.). Other important works that connected dream interpretation to medical diagnosis became available in Latin translation: Algazel’s (ca. 1058– 1111 C.E.) Metaphysics, Avicenna’s (ca. 980–1037 C.E.) Liber canonis, and Rasis’s (854–925 C.E.) Liber ad almansorem. The Liber thesauri occulti (ca. 1165 C.E.) of Pascalis Romanus was a compilation of dream lore that quoted not only Macrobius and Aristotle, but also the Oneirocriticon of Artemidoros (ca. second century C.E.) and Achmet’s (653/654–728/729 C.E.) work of the same name, as well as medical treatises on the dream (Kruger 1992, 68–73). Neoplatonist and medical dream lore were distributed alongside the wellestablished Christian tradition. Honorius Augustodunensis (1080–1154 C.E.) described Patristic dream lore, with its three-tier classification of dreams, in his Elucidarium, a popular catechism that was translated into French and German during the thirteenth century. The Elucidarium is of special note, as it was one of the main sources for the Lucidarius, a German summa preserved in 66 manuscripts that provided laymen with general and religious knowledge (Haag 2003, 54; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 116, Schmitt 1972, 5).

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The dominant authority on the dream amongst scholars remained Gregory, however. His thoughts on the subject were contained in two of his most popular writings, the Moralia in Iob and the Dialogi, which both enjoyed wide distribution. His six-tier dream classification was furthermore included in the Disticha cantonis, a common medieval school text. The works of the equally prolific Isidore of Seville also found wide distribution, further promoting Gregorian and Augustinian teachings about the dream. Both Gregory’s and Augustine’s works were employed as textbooks at the major schools and universities, such as Paris, and their works remained foundational well into the fifteenth century (Kruger 1992, 59–62). Scholars of the twelfth century generally agreed that some dreams might indeed be divine and beneficial. However, the very skeptical stance taken by the Christian tradition of dream lore continued to influence the discourse. Thomas of Froidmont (ca. second half of the twelfth century) described Gregory’s scheme of dream classification, but recommended that the dreamer disregard his dreams entirely as he believed that a belief in prophetic dreams was irreconcilable with a belief in God (Kruger 1992, 83–84). A similar sentiment was expressed by Peter of Blois (died ca. 1204 C.E.), who saw any attempt to gain knowledge of the future as a sin, even though he conceded that some dreams might indeed contain truth (Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 139–40). Such suspicion of dream interpretation continued well into the late Middle Ages. Penitentiary manuals such as Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng synne (ca. 1303 C.E.) referred to Gregory and repeated the century-old advice to leave the matter of dreams to the clergy (Busse 1994, 57). Scholars and poets also showed a tendency to correlate the moral conduct of a dreamer with the kind of dreams that he or she experienced. Richard of St. Victor (died 1173 C.E.) and Alain de Lille (ca. 1116/17–1202/03 C.E.) reinterpreted Augustine’s teachings in a way that emphasized the relationship between the dreamer’s moral conduct and state of conscience and his ability to perceive the truths revealed by dreams. Hildegard of Bingen (ca. 1098–1179 C.E.) explicitly linked bad moral conduct with a susceptibility to demonic dreams, and good moral conduct with a susceptibility to angelic dreams. Hildegard was also careful to point out that her own visions had not appeared in sleep, thus illustrating the suspicion that dreams were potentially deceptive. She did, however, express the belief that a soul unburdened by sin could indeed gain transcendental knowledge during sleep. Her writings on the subjects of dreams and visions are also noteworthy, as they are among the few works on dreams of that period that rely more on original thought than on the teachings of late antique authorities (Kruger 1992, 76–78; Schmitt 1999, 279; 281; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 130–33). Some scholars took a cautious departure from the Gregorian tradition of disregarding the dream. Adelard of Bath had approached the topic of veridical dreams quite positively. Scholars such as Peter the Venerable (ca. 1092–1156 C.E.)

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and the German theologian Rupert of Deutz (ca. 1075/80–1129 C.E.) described veridical dreams that they had experienced themselves (Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 119–26). As a result of his extensive examinations of dreams, John of Salisbury allowed that dreams could be determined to have value on the basis of moral and religious considerations. His status as a respected authority not only helped the distribution of Macrobius’s dream lore, but encouraged educated discussions and considerations of the dream among members of the clergy. Still, John condemned dream diviners and regarded the use of dream books as a superstitious practice, a sentiment that represented the consensus of his educated contemporaries (Busse 1994, 58; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 134–38). In a summary of the dream theories of the twelfth century, Maria Elisabeth Wittmer-Butsch states that even though some prominent scholars were convinced that the soul could indeed gain knowledge from dreams, the majority warned against a too naïve belief in dream interpretation. This caution was partially founded on the still ongoing fear of demonic influence on dreams, but scholars also increasingly pointed to the inherent vacuity of dreams that were caused by psychosomatic processes, as well as to the polysemy and equivocal nature of dream images (Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 141).

D Dream Theory and High Medieval Scholasticism The translation of Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy, beginning in the early thirteenth century, lead to a profound re-evaluation of the dream. Aristotle’s teachings had already indirectly influenced the dream discourse, but his outspoken denial in the Parva naturalia of both the prophetic value and the supernatural origin of dreams stands in radical contrast to late antique dream theories. According to Aristotle’s “systematic, naturalistic, and rationalistic analysis of the world” (Bartlett 2008, 31), dreams are caused by vapors rising in the body during sleep; these vapors then loosen impressions that the sensory organs have received during the day. The central senses become aware of these impressions during sleep, which leads to the impressions manifesting as dreams. Aristotle also links the disposition of a sleeper’s body and mind to the qualities of his dreams. He concedes that dreams might reveal certain truths about a person and might be related to future events. For example, hidden illnesses might first manifest themselves in the form of dreams, or dreams might convince a person to act in a certain way. Aristotle denies that dreams have a transcendental nature and favors psychosomatic explanations, although he is not willing to completely rule out the possibility that some dreams could indeed be divinely influenced (Aristotle 1996; Bartlett 2008, 29–32; Kruger 1992, 83–85; Näf 2004, 60–62).

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Similarly, few scholars were willing to fully deny that some dreams might have a divine origin, as that assumption would have been incompatible with the prophetic visions of the Bible and legends of saints. Certain scholars, such as Boethius of Dacia (died 1284 C.E.) and Adam of Buckfield (ca. 1220–1294 C.E.) embraced Aristotelian dream theory almost completely, however. Boethius of Dacia himself extensively analyzed the diverse natural causes of dreams (Kruger 1992, 86–87). In the early thirteenth century, the University of Paris was sentenced for the heresy of teaching, amongst other things, that raptures and visions were purely natural phenomena (Busse 1994, 59–60). A more common approach to the dream during the period of high medieval scholasticism was an attempt to present the teachings of Aristotle alongside the established dream doctrine or even merge the two traditions through eclectic or synergetic methods. Scholars could refer to Gregory, Augustine and Macrobius whenever a possible supernatural origin of some dreams was discussed and at the same time employ Aristotle’s teachings to further theorize about psychosomatic and other explanations for mundane, or internal, dreams. Bartholomaeus Anglicus (ca. 1190–1250 C.E.) followed such an eclectic approach in the encyclopedic De proprietatibus rerum, relying on recently translated authorities such as Galen, Aristotle, Constantine the African (1017–1087 C.E.) and Avicenna as well as on the established sources of Christian and Neoplatonist tradition. His approach was mirrored by other encyclopedists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including, according to Steven F. Kruger, Ramon Llull (1232–1315 C.E.), Pierre Bersuire (ca. 1290–1362 C.E.), and Robert Holcot (1290–1349 C.E.) (Kruger 1992, 89–99). An extensive theory on the subject of the dream was developed by Albertus Magnus (1193–1280 C.E.) in his commentary on Aristotle’s Parva naturalia and his treaty De somno et vigilia. This dream theory was then most notably adapted by Vincent of Beauvais (ca. 1184/94–1264 C.E.) in the Speculum maius. In his work, Albertus is careful to point out that he examines only the natural and philosophical properties of dreams. He does not attempt to answer theological questions concerning such dreams that were indeed supposed to be divine revelations. Albertus agrees with the Aristotelians insofar as basic principles regarding dream formation are concerned. Albertus therefore regards most dreams as pure products of the imagination, combinations of memories and physical influences that act on the soul. As he believes in a psychosomatic source for dream formation, he recognizes that many dreams of supposedly supernatural nature are instead rooted within the self. Albertus further argues, however, that some dreams may indeed reveal knowledge of future events. According to him, “beings of the highest order” move the celestial bodies, and these celestial bodies, in turn,

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exert influence on humanity by way of their light. This influence is transmitted to the soul by way of the body. The soul is much more receptive to celestial influences during sleep, and then interprets these celestial influences in the form of metaphorical images. In an approach that is somewhat indebted to the work of Moses Maimonides (ca. 1135/38–1204 C.E.), Albertus develops a ten-tier system of dreams that describes the range of possible combinations of physical and celestial influences on the dreamer. His dream theory interestingly led to a certain recognition of men who were able to interpret metaphorical dreams via astrological and other means, although he himself cautioned that, when interpreting dreams, the psychosomatic causes for dreaming always had to be accounted for. Albertus furthermore warned against unreasonable dependence on dreams, citing the dangers of interpreting pure coincidence or self-fulfilling prophecies as divine influence. Dream images were caused by the fundamental principles that moved the world, not by the future events themselves. True divination, in the sense of the determination of a causal connection between dreams and future events, was therefore impossible; dream images, if interpreted as metaphors, could only hint at possible truths (for an exhaustive discussion, see Slenczka 2012, 143–60. Also see Kruger 1992, 99–113; 119–22; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 143–50. For Maimonides’s and other Jewish scholars’ work on the dream, see Lehnardt 2012.). In contrast to his mentor Albertus, Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274 C.E.) took a somewhat distrustful and more traditional approach to the dream. In his Summa theologiae, he comments on dream interpretation while dealing with the topic of superstition. He sees dream interpretation as an attempt to gain knowledge of the future and therefore thinks it illegitimate hubris. Thomas acknowledges instances in which God made knowledge available through dreams, as he did in biblical revelations. Thomas was concerned with the difficulty of differentiating between divine revelations and meaningless dreams, and he was even more fearful of the influence demons could have on dreams however, through spiritual images. In the Summa contra gentiles, Thomas recommends the reader to only pay attention to dreams that have a clear message and that encourage ethical conduct. Thomas also recognizes the influence that external factors such as stars or the weather can have on the formation of dreams, although he is careful to emphasize that celestial bodies can not influence the free will of an individual (Slenczka 2012, 139–40; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 150–52). The impact of Aristotelian thought changed medieval dream lore, and the rather benevolent deliberations of Thomas Aquinas and especially Albertus Magnus may have allowed the development of more sophisticated and open-minded considerations of the dream phenomenon (Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 153).

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From the perspective of natural philosophy, the examination of a dream could be detached from any theological concerns. Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320/25– 1382 C.E.) regarded dreams as psychological phenomena. When John Travisa (1342–1402) translated and commented on Bartholomaeus’s De proprietatibus rerum, he argued that the individual should have the authority to interpret one’s dreams. The individual significance of dreams had come to the foreground, diminishing the Church’s authority in interpreting and assessing dreams. Aristotelian theory did not, however, replace the dream lore of late antiquity. Boccaccio (1313–1375 C.E.) consciously decided to ignore Aristotle’s teachings about dreams and continued to rely on the established authorities, Augustine and Macrobius (Kruger 1992, 98–99). Petrarch (1304–1374 C.E.), himself not a believer in the veridical properties of dreams, still considered both Calcidius and Macrobius as authorities on the subject and reflected the plurality of opinions on the nature of dreams. In the fifteenth century, William of Vaurouillon (ca. 1390/94–1463) employed both Christian and Neoplatonist dream lore in the Liber de anima (Busse 1992, 62–64; Kruger 1992, 59–64; 86–89; 118–19; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 162–63). Late medieval scholars were familiar with various theories and could draw from an extensive discourse on dreams. During the period of high medieval scholasticism, the topic of the dream had become both vivid and accessible.

E Dreams and Literature The notable interest in dreams that one can infer from the number of scholastic considerations is mirrored by the prominent role dreams take in medieval literature. A. C. Spearing explains the appeal of the dream as a literary device in this way: “Many of the themes, genres and conventions of medieval literature— romance narrative, allegory, debate among symbolically embodied principles, religious revelation, and so on—are non-realistic. They belong to the world of the mind, could not be part of anyone’s objective experience, and might therefore appropriately be framed in dreams” (Spearing 1976, 2). The use of the dream as a framing device was especially popular during the late Middle Ages. Kathryn L. Lynch names the period from the twelfth through the fourteenth century “the Age of the Dream Vision.” To some modern scholars, the dream frame defines its own distinct genre of medieval literature, the “dream poem” (exhaustive: Lynch 1988; Spearing 1976). It is, however, important to note that the literary dream visions of the Middle Ages developed from a long tradition of both classical as well as Judeo-Christian vision narratives (Spearing 1976, 6–23).

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A prominent topic in classical literature was the journey to the afterlife, such as in Virgil’s (70 B.C.E.–19 C.E.) Aeneid. While Aeneas’s journey to the underworld is physical, classical literature also knew purely “spiritual journeys,” as in the Somnium Scipionis, which of course employed a dream as a framework for the journey. Similar to these classical “otherworldly journeys,” one finds near-death acting as a ‘gateway’ to transcendental places, to a locus amoenus or to a place of punishment, already in late antique Christian and early medieval visionary literature (Spearing 1976, 6–11). In the Dialogi, Gregory the Great describes an allegorical vision of a mortally wounded soldier, who then returns to life. In his Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, Bede (ca. 672/73–735 C.E.) retells the Vision of Drycthelm. Drycthelm, while lying seemingly dead, is granted a vision wherein an angel takes him to Hell and the Earthly Paradise, successfully admonishing him to mend his ways in order to avoid damnation. Walafrid Strabo (ca. 809–49 C.E.) put to verse the Visio Wettini. The monk Wetti, lying on his deathbed, is led through the underworld by an angel, observing the punishment of sinners. Amongst the tormented sinners, Wetti observes Carolingian officials, members of the clergy, and even Charlemagne himself, who must suffer contrapassio punishment for their sins, before they are forgiven (Dinzelbacher 1989, 40–41; 52–53; Spearing 1976, 11–16). While visions experienced during near-death-experience are not technically dream-visions, they defined and shared the conventions of the genre. Literary dream visions of the high Middle Ages were also influenced by a tradition of philosophical personification allegory, masterfully exemplified in as in De consoliatione philosophiæ by Boethius (ca. 480–524/25 C.E.), which became one of the most widely distributed and influential secular works of the Middle Ages. The prosimetrical work takes the form of a dialogue between Boethius’s lyrical self and the personification of philosophy. The Lady Philosophy appears not to a dreaming, but a desperate Boethius, in a way reminiscent of the authoritative oraculum of Neoplatonist dream lore (Spearing 1976, 18–24). Peter Dinzelbacher’s seminal work makes apparent the significance of vision narratives for medieval literature. He identifies over 225 spiritual visions written down between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries. Of these, a majority of 70 percent was written down after the beginning of the twelfth century. The most popular of these vision narratives was the Visio Tnugdali, which was written down in Latin around 1149 and had been translated into fifteen languages by the end of the fifteenth century (Dinzelbacher 1981, 13–28; 39–45; 1989). It has to be noted that Dinzelbacher’s listing does not differentiate between dream visions and ecstatic visions (see Haag 2003, 20–26 for an excellent discussion of this issue). The question of whether or not texts that use the dream as a framing device indeed constitute a genre of their own is not without controversy.

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Themes commonly associated with dream visions or dream poems are also explored in works that render their narratives in ecstatic visions or make do without any apparent framing device. The use of the dream as framing device still shouldn’t be dismissed as merely an accidental use of a literary convention, as “a poet makes choices among conventions for specific reasons […]” (Lynch 1988, 3; 4–11). The dream form gains even more significance, as some medieval poets have their narrators explicitly refer to the literary tradition of the dream vision or reflect on scholastic dream discourse. The most influential dream poem of the Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose, begun by Guillaume de Lorris (ca. 1230–1240 C.E.) and finished by Jean de Meun (ca. 1260 or 1270), explicitly puts itself in the tradition of the Somnio Scipionis and reflects the significance of dreams on the basis of Macrobius’s Commentary. The dream poems of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400 C.E.) demonstrate his profound familiarity with both classical and Christian traditions of visionary literature and dream lore. Chaucer provides a humorous but learned discussion of the dream in House of Fame, while the dreamer in Parliament of Fowls falls asleep while reading the Somnio Scipionis. The dream vision is used as a framing device also in the Book of the Duchess and the Legend of Good Women. William Langland (ca. 1332–1386 C.E.) employed the dream vision as framing device in Piers Plowman. The protagonist of the Pearl (ca. late fourteenth century) experiences a dream vision, as does the protagonist of Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio (ca. 1355). The Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321 C.E.) is a recursion to classical journeys to the afterlife—it is, after all, Virgil himself, who leads the protagonist through the underworld—and not framed within a dream, but masterfully employs the conventions of the genre (Busse 1994, 61–62; Kruger 1992, 130; Spearing 1976, 3–5; 24–40; 48–110). Apart from their use as framing device, dreams are also a common motif in epic poetry. Within their enclosing narratives, these literary dreams foreshadow, warn, promise, and instruct. They can provide structure to a narration, offer psychological insights into characters, or hint at the metaphysical machinations of fate. They are usually symbolic, and often their meaning becomes apparent to the dreamer only after they come true. Some notable literary dreams of this kind are, for example, Herzeloyde’s and Parzival’s dreams in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1205 C.E.) and Kriemhild’s dreams of the hawk and later of the boar in the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200 C.E.; cf. Dinzelbacher 1981, 40–42; Classen 1992, 19–23). We even find important dreams in such fifteenth-century prose novels as Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken’s Herzog Herpin (1437 C.E.) where God sends a messenger to King Charles informing him that he must stop persecuting his presumed enemy, Herpin, who is really the legitimate heir to the Dukedom of Berry and deserves to be acknowledged by the rather foolish and irrational French king.

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The dream is also an important motif in Old Norse literature. Dreams feature in all of the three original Old Norse genres of Eddic poetry, Skaldic poetry, and Saga, with the clear majority encountered in the latter. Together, the historiographic saga genres, that is: Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), Sagas of Bishops (Biskupasögur), Sturlunga saga, as well as the Kings’s sagas collected in the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson (1149–1241 C.E.), feature around 300 dreams (Jónasson 1986, 470). This doesn’t include the many dreams encountered in the more fantastic saga genres. In general, the dreams encountered in Old Norse literature share the functions of those found in continental literature. They predict the fate of a character or his or her descendants, they warn of impending harm (or predict it, at least), they provide counsel through figures of authority, and they provide religious revelations or visions of events that transpire far away. Dreams are also used to justify political claims to power, as for example the dreams of the Norwegian king Sverrir Sigurðarson (ca. 1145/1151–1202 C.E.), recorded in the Sverris saga, which was composed under close supervision of the king himself. The dreams of Old Norse literature stand out as they are, to an extent, detached from the Christian and classical traditions that are reflected in continental, courtly literature. Alongside Christian imagery and concepts, they often feature images and concepts associated with pagan and heathen belief, such as family fetches or guardian spirits. As the Sagas of Icelanders describe a social class unique in medieval Europe, the free farmer (bóndi) and chieftain (goði), they offer a very interesting insight into dreams as they are experienced outside the spheres of church and nobility (Jónasson 1986; Lönnroth 2002; Schmid 2012). The dreams of Old Norse literature should not, however, be regarded as an isolated phenomenon. Continental doctrine, scholasticism, and literature were known and reproduced in Iceland. The Gregorian influence on Icelandic depictions of dreams has long been apparent, and the dreams recorded in the sagas of bishops and kings draw heavily from Latin hagiographic and historiographic literature, in turn influencing saga literature as a whole (Boyer 1973; Roberts 2006; Turville-Petre 1972; 1968). Still, Old Norse literature is unique in its combination of continental and original traditions, for which Gísla saga Súrssonar (ca. thirteenth century C.E.) is a prominent example. It retells the life of one of the most famous Icelandic dreamers, Gísli Sursson (ca. tenth century C.E.). Throughout his life, Gísli dreams of two women, one good and one evil. The good dream woman consoles Gísli and urges him to lead a good life, the evil one terrifies Gísli and predicts his violent end. The dreams are recounted both in prose, as well as in skaldic verse, which predate the Saga. The dreams of Gísli demonstrate a fascinating amalgamation of Christian ethics, pagan imagery, and original, artistic thought (Langeslag 2009).

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F Dream Books Belief in divination was regarded as pagan superstition, and, as such, was attacked by both worldly and clerical authorities. This was especially true in the early Middle Ages, when attempts to establish Christian doctrine met with remnants of heathen culture. Pope Gregory II (669–731 C.E.) issued a decree that explicitly instructed his bishops in Bavaria to inform the populace about the vacuity of dreams and auguries. The Admonitio generalis of Charlemagne’s reign went so far as to decree that all kinds of divination should be punished with death. At the Council of Paris (829 C.E.), mantic practices, among them dream divination, were explicitly condemned as being of heathen origin. In contrast to Charlemagne’s draconian policy against diviners, the Council of Paris decreed that the punishment for such activities should consist of a maximum of five years of poenitentia publica (exclusion from the church), while pointing out that heathen practices of the kind were still quite common. As time went on, the hostile assessment of dream divination did not change: all divination remained forbidden by canon law, as outlined in the Decretum Gratiani (ca. 1140 C.E.) (Kruger 1992, 11–12; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 108–10). In spite of such laws and statutes and all theological concerns and admonitions, an interest in dream divination appears to have been both common and widespread during the Middle Ages. Scholars dealing with the dream phenomenon often lamented the superstitious beliefs that were common among the populace or even their own peers. A more manifest indication of the popularity of dream divination even among the literate classes is the high number of preserved manuscripts of so-called “dream books.” Dream books were intended to be used as manuals for the divinatory interpretation of dreams. They are traditionally classified into three different types, according to the methods of divination that are employed: “dream chancebooks” (also known as “dream alphabets”), “dreamlunars,” and, most popular, the “dream book” proper. The late Middle Ages saw the emergence of a fourth kind of dream book, the “physiological dream book” (Fischer 1978, 26–27). Dream chancebooks link possible meanings of dreams to the letters of the alphabet. In order to interpret his dream, the dreamer is supposed to speak a prayer, open a book at random, pick the first letter of the page he or she opened, and then use the chancebook to find the significance of his or her dream. Some chancebooks, circulated under the name of Somnile Josephi, require that the dreamer use the Bible for this divinatory process. Dreamlunars link the significance of dreams to the phase of the moon in which the dream occurred; some of them cite biblical events related to lunar phases. In many codices, a dreamlunar is paired with a dream book proper

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(Martin, ed., 1981, 13–15). Neither chancebooks nor lunars address the actual content of dreams in any way; their methodology, in fact, is shared by a wide variety of texts dealing with divination of all kinds, not only dream divination (Fischer 1978, 26–27; Kruger 1992, 7–9). In contrast, the dream books proper address the contents of dreams and provide interpretations linked to things seen or experienced during dreaming. As these books offer only one fixed interpretation for each dream image, however, they are as “rigid and mechanical” as the chancebooks and lunars (Kruger 1992, 9). The dream books proper descended from the work of Artemidoros, who compiled older traditions of dream lore in his Oneirocritica during the second century C.E. The most popular and widely distributed of all dream books was called the Somnia Danielis. This compilation was translated into Latin (probably in seventh-century Gaul, but no later than during the ninth century) from a fourth-century Greek version. Latin versions of the Somnia Danielis are preserved in more than 80 manuscripts that originate from all over Christian Europe and date from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Vernacular translations of the Somnia Danielis were sometimes rendered in poetry, as in the English A bok of sweuenyng. Verse renderings of the Somnia Danielis are found in Old and Middle English, Welsh, Irish, Italian, Old French, Old Icelandic, and Early New High German texts. Dream books were more widely available after the introduction of the printing press, in a tradition still ongoing (Fischer 1978, 25; 28; Martin, ed., 1981, 1–2; 13–62; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 177–81). The dream books proper were often prefaced by a statement that reminded the reader to consider, when attempting to interpret a dream, the lunar phase during which the dream occurred, as well as the “class, sex and astrological sign of the dreamer,” although the interpretations listed in the dream books did not take these circumstances into account (Fischer, ed., 1982, 7). Like the Somnile Josephi, the Somnia Danielis sought association with, and legitimation within, Christianity through its title and a short preface which link it to the eponymous biblical figure. The dream interpretations of the Somnia Danielis were written in prose, and topics were catalogued alphabetically. For dreams related to birds, for example, one would find a list of interpretations under the headword “Aues.” According to this entry, fighting birds signified anger, approaching birds signified personal gain, dying birds signified loss, and so on (Fischer, ed. 1982, 33). Since the Latin versions of the Somnia Danielis listed their headwords alphabetically, some vernacular translations kept the Latin headwords. Other vernacular translations translated the headwords, but kept them in their original order (Phillips 2000, 42–43).

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The headwords and associated interpretations were taken from classical dream topoi, only marginally expanded with some Christian imagery (Philips 2000, 247). Errors during the translation or copying of manuscripts often led to differing dream interpretations, and the Somnia Danielis was, in general, subject to “variations, misinterpretations, rationalizations, additions, and omissions,” as Stephen Fischer puts it. Helen Phillips names one example: to dream that one is eating a specific item is supposed to signify that one will come to harm in the future, but the item in question is different in different Latin manuscripts, ranging from thistles (carduos, cardones) to coals (carbones), hinges (cardines), or meat (carnes) (Fischer 1978, 26; Phillips 2000, 241–43). The physiological dream books fall into another category than the divinatory dream books, as they were intended as manuals for medical diagnosis and were based on Aristotelian dream lore. The genre of physiological dreambooks includes the works of Rasis and Pascalis Romanus (see above, C), as well as the treatise Expositiones visionum que fiunt in somnis ad utilitatem medicorum non modicum, probably composed by one William of Aragon (ca. fourteenth century C.E.) but attributed to both Albertus Magnus and Arnald of Villanova (ca. 1235– 1311) (Fischer 1978, 29; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 173–74; 182–84). The popularity and wide distribution of divinatory dream books tell us much concerning medieval attitudes toward dreams. For most of the time from the early to the late Middle Ages, it must have been members of the clergy who copied, adapted, and distributed these texts. This implies that the ostensibly strict Church doctrine relating to superstition and divination was neither thoroughly enforced, nor fully internalized, by the clergy. The Decretum Gratiani explicitly condemned the consultation of the Somnia Danielis and pointed out that the book was falsely attributed to the biblical prophet; this condemnation apparently had little effect (Kruger 1992, 12–13). Even leaving aside official Church prohibitions, divinatory dream books were in conflict with the learned medieval discourse on dreams. Scholars open to dream interpretation emphasized the polysemy of dream images as well as the necessity of considering the psychological and physical circumstances of the dreamer. The simple linkage of sign and meaning in the Somnia Danielis did not fit easily within this rather intricate scholastic discourse. Nevertheless, dream books were copied and consulted by members of the same social class which furthered the learned approach toward the subject. Maria Elisabeth WittmerButsch has pointed out an interesting discrepancy between the wide distribution and large number of extant copies of the Somnia Danielis and the fact that there is no documentation of its use during the Middle Ages (Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 101). The physiological dream books of the late Middle Ages represented the scholastic discourse of their time better than their divinatory counterparts, as they were rooted in Aristotelian dream lore. It was, however, the divinatory dream

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books that were most widely distributed and most popular. They continued to be circulated after the introduction of the printing press (Kruger 1992, 11). Noteworthy authorities were sometimes at odds over whether or not dream books were under certain circumstances allowable. John of Salisbury disapproved of dream books, while Albertus Magnus took a benevolent stance at least toward astrological dream interpretation, which, Maria Elisabeth Wittmer-Butsch argues, also includes the use of dreamlunars (Kruger 1992, 14–16; Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 184–88). Some theologians were compelled to counteract the superstitions associated with belief in dreams or astrology. Augustinus Triumphus (1243–1328 C.E.) took an exceptionally radical stance against visionary dreams, stating that communication between man and God by way of dream visions had not occurred since the Christ’s death brought salvation to mankind. “Dream visions” were therefore much more likely to be temptations of the devil. Jacopo Pessavanti (ca. 1302–1357 C.E.) pointed out that astrological and medical dream interpretation was prone to error, and described mantic dream interpretation as a sin akin to the practice of magic or necromancy. Later, Nicolaus Magni (ca.1355–1435 C.E.) expressed similar sentiments in the initially very popular Tractatus de supersticionibus (ca. 1405), which could be regarded as a precursor to the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (ca. 1486). In their very hostile assessment, these condemnations represented not only a fallback to the early medieval rejection of the occupation with the dream, but may be argued to anticipate the witch hunt obsessions of the early modern period, as well (Wittmer-Butsch 1990, 156–61). Dream books thus demonstrate further the ambiguity of medieval attitudes toward the dream. Neither Christian doctrine nor natural philosophy could quell the allure of dream divination; a fascination which seems to have continued well unto this day and clearly signals how ancient pagan concepts have managed to survive even in spite of religious opposition and remained a part of everyday life.

Select Bibliography Dutton, Paul Edward, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln, NE, and London 1994). Gerok-Reiter, Annette and Christine Walde, ed., Traum und Vision in der Vormoderne (Berlin 2012). Haag, Guntram, Traum und Traumdeutung in mittelhochdeutscher Literatur: Theoretische Grundlagen und Fallstudien (Stuttgart 2003). Kruger, Steven F., Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1992). Spearing, A. C., Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge 1976). Wittmer-Butsch, Maria Elisabeth, Zur Bedeutung von Schlaf und Traum im Mittelalter (Krems 1990).

Werner Schäfke

Dwarves, Trolls, Ogres, and Giants A History of Research Since concepts of dwarves and gargantuan beings (giants) can be found in texts of courtly, heroic-epic, and mythic character, they have been primarily understood by most researchers as mythical beings, and only secondarily, after a process of Literarisierung (turning into literary figures), as stock character types. Since much comparative research on medieval Europe was based on reconstructing an assumed common Germanic culture within a historical-comparative framework, literatures that were not expected to have a link to Germanic mythology have been neglected in the overall research on those beings. E.g., Celtic literature was not considered a fruitful field for researching dwarves or giants (the only work on Celtic dwarves is Harward 1958; a discussion on the existence of proper giants is given in Ciklamini 1961, 284–91), but instances of these stock character types in Old French literature were understood as links to their Germanic counterparts (Wohlgemuth 1906; Lütjens 1977 [1911]; Ahrendt 1923), since Old French Arthurian romance was thought to preserve remnants of Germanic mythology regarding dwarves (Lütjens 1977). Also, texts that more clearly have a “literary” character—and thus were regarded as of less value for the reconstruction of “true” mythology—were less researched. The bulk of mythological research on these beings concentrates on their occurrences in Eddic lays and on onomastic material. But since dwarves and giants are found in abundance in Arthurian romance, they were given a fair deal of attention in literary studies in turn (Wohlgemuth 1906; Lütjens 1977; Ahrendt 1923). Even more frequently, however, dwarves and giants feature in literature that is derivative of Arthurian romance and characterized as “fairytale-like,” e.g., aventiurehafte (aka märchenhafte) Dietrichsepik, Spielmannsepen and fornaldarsǫgur. Dwarves and giants in those texts, however, were mostly researched regarding their Stoffgeschichte and less examined in their overall role in the narrated worlds, since these texts were considered by literary critics to be of low artistic value. After the 1960s, the turn from literary criticism to a less evaluative and more scientific literary studies led to a new interest in those stories. Thus, most research on dwarves and giants in those texts was conducted by historicalcomparative Germanic philology that assumed that the only value of these late texts lies in preserving some “true,” albeit disconnected common Germanic features of those beings.

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The literature held in highest esteem for the prospects of research on “lesser beings” of common Germanic mythology were texts containing Old Norse myths, especially Eddic poems and the Prose Edda (first half of the thirteenth century, citing older poetry) as well as Heldendichtung, which includes the Nibelungenlied and Vǫlsunga saga (late thirteenth century), but excludes the far better attested genres of Bridal Quest Romances, e.g., late medieval Icelandic romances (aka indigenous riddarasǫgur or lygisǫgur [“lie sagas,” i.e., non-factual sagas]) and Middle High German Spielmannsepik. Old Norse mythology was thought to provide the clearest picture of Germanic dwarves, even though the opinion has gained acceptance that works such as the Prose Edda (aka Snorra Edda) do not simply preserve ancient Germanic myth. Especially the Prose Edda shows a high degree of systematization, as it is not a mythology per se but a Gattungspoetik (poetics of a specific genre) for Skaldic poetry written in Christian times that supplies the mythological knowledge needed to use metaphorical system of that genre. Old Norse mythology thus appears (a) more systematic, and perhaps more consistent than ancient Germanic myths ever were (Maier 2003, 41–46), and (b) shows significant parallels to classical and Christian traditions that are regarded to be the product of syncretism (See 1988). The same goes for Germanic Heldendichtung. Even though Middle High German works such as the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200) are older than the oldest extant versions of Old Norse fornaldarsǫgur (mainly fourteenth to fifteenth c.) and Eddic poems (mid-thirteenth c.), both convey their pagan-heroic matter at times when their respective literatures had already been strongly influenced by courtly culture (Müller 2009). While this survey presents the research on dwarves and giants within the boundaries delineated by previous research, i.e., Old French, Middle High German, and Old Norse literature (with a peak in Celtic literature), it attempts to supply a synchronic ordering of the material based on the literary-historical development of the genres the discussed literary characters are found in. Statements on the diachronic development of dwarves and giants as mythical entities that were later incorporated into literary texts will be discussed critically below.

B Dwarves In the research tradition, it has been established that dwarves are elements of Germanic mythology that were introduced into Arthurian romance and later fairytale-like narratives. Research on dwarves is usually interested in only one of those kinds of sources, either mythological or literary. Most of the research was conducted when either Romantic ideas of a common Germanic mythology were still active (ranging from Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythology in the nineteenth century

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to Lotte Motz’s extensive work in the 1970s to 1990s), or where the history of motifs and matters was a key concern of literary studies (Harward 1958; Lütjens 1977 [1911]; Wohlgemuth 1906). While research on dwarves of Arthurian romance and its follow-up genres limits itself to those genres, research on Germanic dwarves sometimes include these “later” texts as well, as they are often judged to preserve some “traditional” elements that can help to reconstruct the common Germanic dwarf. It is never debated that there is no evidence for Common Germanic dwarves because it never existed. It is obviously assumed that the Common Germanic dwarf is unattested by any sources by mere chance. Looking at the history of research on dwarves, it comes as little surprise that they are either researched as mythological beings whose inclusion in medieval folk belief is a debate going on for more than 135 years (e.g., Grimm 1992 [1875]; Gould 1929; Reichborn-Kjennerud 1934a; Motz 1973; 1993b; Battles 2005), or as a literary stock character type (Boor 1924; Lagerholm 1927; Jakobsson 2008; Schäfke 2010). Furthermore, it is also debated whether the dwarves in literature are more or less identical with the dwarves of ancient or medieval Germanic or Nordic folk belief (e.g., pro: Gould 1929; Reichborn-Kjennerud 1934a; Motz 1973; rather contra: Battles 2005; clear contra: de Boor 1924; Lagerholm 1927, XXXVII). Characters that are to be considered “Germanic dwarves” or “courtly dwarves” are both found in Celtic, Old French, Middle High German, and Old Norse literature. Since the Germanic dwarf is found in Old Norse myths and features in Old English literature most prominently in magico-medical treatises, it is assumed to have been an element of common Germanic mythology, and that it has a root in folk belief. In these contexts, the concepts of the dwarf and the elf show similarities, hence the nature of the belief in them remains largely a product of the historical-comparative method. Old French dwarves, nains, are thought to be basically amalgamates of common Germanic tradition and Celtic dwarf-like characters, the latter becoming known in Old French literature through Celtic Arthurian legends that were re-interpreted with the rise of courtly literature (Wohlgemuth 1906). While the stock character type of the courtly dwarf was obviously transferred along with courtly romance from Old French literature to the Germanic literatures, it is in some cases not entirely clear what characteristics of dwarves are to be considered “truly” Germanic (i.e., common Germanic) and what to be courtly innovations—a question that is only troubling when trying to reconstruct some sort of historical archetype of a dwarf of an assumed common Germanic culture. However, recent research still approaches dwarves from a diachronic perspective scrutinizing their characteristics as elements of common Germanic myth and cult, and their medieval literary afterlife (Battles 2005). Following a never ceasing interest in the history of literary motifs and matters, most recent research has continued to illuminate the ways by which this stock character type was

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transferred among European literatures, this time using cognitive semantics (Schäfke 2011). However, the diachronic perspective has sometimes been switched to a typological and rather synchronic one, re-evaluating what the base characteristics of dwarves are (Jakobsson 2008; Schäfke 2010; 2012), as much of earlier research was still heavily indebted to Grimm’s view of dwarves and judged eclectically what was typical, e.g., dwarves being vengeful (pro: Lecouteux 1981, 372; Halvorsen 1958, 378; Motz 1993a, 623; moderating: Motz 1977, 48; Motz 1983, 110, 112 et passim), which they rarely are (Schäfke 2010, 266–67, fn. 249), and even keeping the lid on literary evidence on female dwarves, the assumed lack of which inspired tragical-comical fictional concepts of single-gender dwarf societies in Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring and Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Elaborating on this example, Lotte Motz states that “the race of dwarves does not encompass women” (cf. Motz 1993a, 623; Motz 1993b, 84–96), leading up to a Festschrift article dedicated to her memory that asks “What Happened to Female Dwarves?” (Liberman 2002). It is clear what happened: research willfully ignored them. Dwarves are found in the heroic epics of Old French, Middle High German, and Old Norse literature, in traditional Celtic literature, and in the Arthurian romances of all medieval literatures. As Celtic dwarves are usually researched as part of the Arthurian tradition, they are used for confirming literary historical theories about the spreading of the Arthurian matter throughout national literatures. As Celtic dwarves show characteristics that are, at least in part, also found with Old French, Middle High German, and Old Norse dwarves, they are regarded as their direct or indirect predecessors. As Arthurian romance is considered to stem directly from Celtic tradition, Celtic dwarves had a direct impact on Old French nains. As laid out below, Old French dwarves are either considered to be influenced by common Germanic (mythological) dwarves, or the other way around. Both opinions can be found in older German scholarship, so those contradicting opinions cannot clearly be attributed to nationalist tendencies in the writing of literary history, but are purely depending on Romantic axioms of a pre-literary and thus thought-to-be mythological concept of dwarves pre-existent to high medieval Old French and Middle High German literature. The scant contemporary data on this rather independent concept is discussed below under the label “Common Germanic and Ancient Nordic dwarf.” It is, however, difficult to draw clear lines between Celtic dwarves and dwarves in Arthurian and heroic tradition in other literatures, as Celtic dwarves in non-Arthurian texts are already influenced by Celtic dwarves in Arthurian texts (Harward 1985, 20), just as all other dwarves (except the ancient Nordic and Old English dwarves). When abandoning neo-grammarian thought patterns that demand linear traditions, and when regarding medieval European literature as so strongly interlinked as Stoffgeschichte shows us, dwarves rather allow the conclusion that medieval European

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literatures borrowed character types, matters, and plots back and forth and contacts between single “national” literatures were not confined to discrete points in time and need not be unilateral. From the dwarf perspective, it seems futile to raise national boundaries between medieval literary traditions with the advent of courtly romance. It is possible to establish clear dwarf motifs (e.g., the “grateful dwarf,” the “dwarf smith” etc.). Many of the numerous instances of those motifs show strong parallels that imply direct intertextual relationships, so it is often not possible to judge which one of the texts is the one borrowing and which one lending or if they both use a common stock motif. Only a fraction of medieval literature is extant and, regardless of direct borrowing, medieval readers possessed an abstract knowledge about stock motifs (Schäfke 2012). The following survey thus presents dwarves (and later giants as well) sorted by their literatures (even though courtly literature and the dwarf motif in particular show that national and/or language boundaries are truly a relic of nineteenth-century research tradition), albeit only dealing with the canonical literatures of France, England, Germany and the WestNordic countries. In the following the dwarf’s most distinctive features regarding their appearance are being described, including their appearance, their habitat and the motifs they appear in, also provided are an etymological discussion of the language’s respective appellative for “dwarf” and of the dwarves’ personal names and further onomastic material related to dwarves.

I Celtic leprechauns The entities corresponding to dwarves in medieval Celtic literature are called leprechauns. Harward (1958) includes later folklore in his study on dwarves in Celtic tradition and Arthurian romance, as is usual in this line of research, just as it is in research on Germanic dwarves, and thus also counts the Morganed and the korrigans as dwarves. The former are supposed to be a little, handsome pagan people the inhabitants of the Isle of Ouessant believed in since the last half of the nineteenth century. The latter are an entity of early nineteenth-century Breton folk belief. They are mischievous, hideous, small, black creatures with supernatural powers that sometimes dwell underground. Harward (1958, 19) summarizes that Celtic dwarves are, apart from being tiny in size, either very beautiful or ugly. They thus show characteristics common to dwarf character types in all the other medieval European literary traditions examined here, and might well be their literary predecessors. Usually, single literatures only show one trait apart from the diminutive size. Old French nains and Old Norse dwarves are exceptionally ugly, even though in slightly different

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respects. Middle High German dwarves are handsome, corresponding with their predominant function as kings and knights which the other literatures do not use. Celtic dwarves show a range of personal traits that are partially well known from the other dwarf types. They are strong, just as Middle High German dwarves (contrary to most Old Norse dwarves), they have clairvoyance, as is known from a number of Old French nains, and are skilled in musical performance to such a degree that they can charm the listener. They ride small steeds like Middle High German dwarves and some Old French nains, unlike all Old Norse dwarves. Their immortality is only matched by the longevity of the dwarf in the extant Latin translation of the lost Middle High German epic Ruodlieb (late twelfth century). Celtic dwarves live in various locations, which again are found to certain degrees in the other literary dwarf traditions discussed here. They live on islands, underground or under lakes or seas. They do not appear as sole individuals as in Old Norse tradition but rather form kingdoms as in Middle High German tradition. Their courts are numerous and the kings wealthy, possessing magical objects and magical weapons. Various roles, supportive as well as antagonistic, again found in the other traditions, are filled by Celtic dwarves. Characteristically they can be “gracious host, combative opponent, truculent servant, supernatural helper, abductor, seer and betraying spy” and are associated with magic items (Harward 1958, 120).

II Old French Dwarves There are two types of Old French dwarves, nains, and larrons, that are human with dwarf-like characteristics. The Old French nain (from Latin nanus; Picoche 2002, 375) signifies a supernatural being very similar to the Germanic dwarves. The relation between the nains of Old French and the (ge)twerc of Middle High German literatures has been debated in the early monographs on Old French and Middle High German dwarves in Arthurian romance and heroic legend during the beginning of the twentieth century (Wohlgemuth 1906; Lütjens 1977), but rarely thereafter (Harward 1958). Wohlgemuth (1906, 98–99; 107) argues that Old French nains adapted individual features from the common Germanic dwarf but were also significantly influenced by real “court dwarves.” Lütjens (1977, 6–15) shows traces of the Old French concept of nains in a number of Middle High German texts, but also notes the differences between the typical Middle High German concept and the Old French one (Lütjens 1977, 68). He rejects the idea that “court dwarves” influenced literary dwarves (Lütjens 1977, 5). Both Lütjens (1977, 5) and Harward (1958, 21–27) consider the evidence for medieval “court dwarves” too scant to derive a custom that could have influenced the

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concept of dwarves in courtly literature. Based on a number of individual analyses of dwarves in Old French literature, Harward (1958, 21–27) argues that the concept of Old French dwarves is influenced by Celtic models (cf. Wohlgemut 1906, 105–07). The distribution of nains and larrons varies greatly by genre. There are no nains to be found in the Chansons de geste, only larrons. But nains feature in abundance in Arthurian romance, where they constitute a strongly conventionalized stock character type. Nains thus seem to be a courtly innovation (Wohlgemuth 1906, 96). Vice versa the larron, which is rather a human with dwarf-like characteristics, is mostly found in the Chansons de geste. Here he is usually associated with the Christian side of the literary ensemble, and can rarely be found on the Saracen side. Corresponding to that, jaiants, the Old French giants, are usually found on the Saracen side in the Chansons de geste, as they form more demanding enemies in combat. Just as larrons, they are again rarely found in Arthurian romance. Wohlgemut (1906) establishes three types of dwarves, both in the Chansons de geste and in courtly romance, which he calls “shrunken humans” (“verkleinerte menschen”), “humans with traces of elfish nature” (“menschen mit spuren elbischer natur”) and “true nains” (“wirkliche nains”).

1 Larrons Larrons are of human nature but show extensive dwarf-like features. Among the larrons Wohlgemut (1906) counts Maugis (Maugis d’Aigremont, Renaus de Montauban), Basin, Serveins, and Malaquin (Jehan de Lanson), Fourchier (Girart de Roussillon), Gebitus (Boeve de Haumtone), Espiet (Maugis d’Aigremont), Galopin (Elie de St. Gille), Picolet (Bataille Loquifer), and Maubrun d’Aigremolée (Fierabras) as well as Auberon (Huon de Bordeaux), Malabron (Gaufrey, Renaus de Montauban), and Cramelin (Galiens li Restorés). With the exception of Auberon (Huon de Bordeaux), Pippin, and Seguçon/Seguiton (Auberi le Bourgoing), however, larrons are never called nains, and the cases above might be influenced by courtly literature (Wohlgemuth 1906, 83–85). Wohlgemuth (1906, 89) believes the thieving larrons to preserve a trait of the Common Germanic dwarf (contra: Lütjens 1977, 102). Larrons are mostly found in the Chansons de geste and mostly belong to the Christian side, unlike jaiants that are most often found among the Saracens. Only the larrons Picolet, Gebitus, Maubrun d’Aigremolée, and Agrapars are Saracens (Wohlgemut 1906, 96). The paragon of the larrons is Maugis d’Aigremont. He robs various ladies, a treasure, and enemies’ weapons. He is also able to unlock any door, and thus to break in or to escape from any place. Maugis, however, does not

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appear as a larron but as a human in his “spin-off” Maugis d’Aigremont. Other notable larrons that are considered by Wohlgemuth (1906, 90) to be based on Maugis are Basin and Malaquin (Jehan de Lanson), Perdigon (Garin de Montglane), and Fourchier (Girart de Roussillon). Such larrons need not be considered vile in their texts, as they might only rob the rich, leaving peasants and travelers in peace. There are a number of Saracen counterfeits of Maugis in other Chansons de geste: Maubrun d’Aigremolée (Fierabras), Picolet (Bataille Loquifer), and Gebitus (Boeve de Haumtone). Maugis, Malabron, and Maubrun are lecherous, thus showing a vague resemblance to the quite frequent Middle High German dwarf kings who abduct virgins to their hollow mountain homes. Larrons are fast, such as Auberon (Huon de Bordeaux, Malabron (Gaufrey), Maugis (Renaus de Montauban), and Galopin (Elie de St. Gille). Galopin is even able to stride alongside of a knight on horse. This very feature is also known from the dwarf Lepus walking beside the mounted eponymous protagonist in the Old Norse Gibbons saga. Malabron, Maubrun d’Aigremolée, and Galopin are capable swimmers. Auberon and Malabron know how to prophesy, just as the nain in Tristan and Lepus in Gibbons saga. Only Galopin, however, owns a treasure. This feature is well known from Middle High German narratives as well as the Old Norse Vǫlsunga saga and related texts, where the dwarf Andvari curses the treasure the god Loki extorts from him. Malabron (Maugis d’Aigremont, Renaus de Montauban) and Maugis (Huon de Bordeaux, Fierabras) can shift their shapes, just as a number of dwarves in Old Norse sagas do. In the Old Norse sagas and also the rest of Old Norse literature, however, shape shifting occurs frequently in both courtly and heroic contexts and this ability is not limited to dwarves but rather a usual power of magic users.

2 Nains Wohlgemuth (1906) counts three groups of nains in the Chansons de geste, none one of them being actual nains. First, there are characters insulted as nains. These are Pippin (Ogier de Danemarche), Seguçon/Seguiton (Auberi le Bourgoing) and Charlemagne (Girart de Roussillon). Then, there is Auberon in Huon de Bordeaux, who is called a nain. The fact that Auberon is called a nain is explained by Voretzsch (1900) with courtly influences on heroic epic. Lastly, there is an unnamed nain in Macaire, called Segonçon in a later prose version of the text, perhaps alluding to above named Seguçon with whom he shows similarities. He, however, also shows similarities to the nain Frocin in Béroul’s version of the Roman de Tristan, and thus seems not to be an element native to heroic epic (Wohlgemuth 1906, 95). The small human Agrapars in Aliscans is counted by

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Wohlgemuth (1906, 96) to the “shrunken humans” type of dwarves. He shows that the Saracen Agrapars indeed looks like a miniature Saracen jaiant. In courtly romance, however, nains are a highly conventionalized stock character type (Wohlgemuth 1906, 98). They usually appear in the service of knights or ladies, and are riding horses. Their services include saddling horses or transporting hunting equipment. They also appear to be bad singers (Wohlgemuth 1906, 103) in Durmart le Galois. The nain in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan is also able to foresee the future, but, unlike the larrons Auberon and Malabron, does this by means of astrology (Wohlgemuth 1906, 101). Humans with traces of elfish nature are rarely found in the courtly romances (Wohlgemuth 1906, 103). There are three cases. One is Guivret (Erec), who carries the by-name le petit (“the small”), and is attributed as a helper by Erec after having been overcome in a fight. While this motif shows resemblance to Auberon (Wohlgemuth 1906, 103), it has also been made use of to a great extent in Old Norse literature—with troll women (cf. Schulz 2004, 211–13). Another case is Bilis (Erec), who might rather count as an atypical nain, since he is a dwarf king, a feature uncommon with nains, but very common with Middle High German dwarves. Lastly, Wohlgemuth (1906, 104) names Druidain (Vengeance Raguidel), a misshapen human, possessing typical nain features, such as a hunch and a short torso. He is, unlike the otherwise ugly nains, beautiful and strong. Habicht (2010) characterizes the dwarves of Old French and Middle High German courtly romance as being magical creatures to a considerably lesser degree than their counterparts from heroic epic. She explains this as part of the adaption of the character type to the new genre’s poetic system. Dwarves then become more strongly associated with artistry. They function as intra-diegetic narrators and thus mirror the extra-diegetic narrator of courtly romance. By this, dwarves become carriers of meta-fictional discourses. The stock character type thus becomes a vehicle of discussion e.g. re-categorization of the wondrous Other as the heathen Other.

III Common Germanic and Ancient Nordic Dwarves As stated above under section A. and the introduction to section B., researchers have often attempted to reconstruct a common Germanic dwarf as an entity of folk belief. There is, however, no common Germanic evidence, and reconstruction of a common Germanic concept of “dwarf” has to rely on the historical-comparative method. As onomastic evidence forms the most extensive data on dwarfs, it is used most extensively in the search for a common Germanic dwarf. Onomastic evidence includes the appellative “dwarf,” place names including this lexeme,

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and all the proper dwarf names. The historical-comparative research rarely acknowledges that the proper dwarf names in their analyses are high and late medieval Old Norse creations, and thus rather inform us about high and late medieval Old Norse concepts of dwarves. Researchers of mythology and pagan beliefs, however, have also included material from clearly literary sources. The hypothesis that dwarves as we know them from literary texts are also elements of folk belief, has been doubted early in research history, and their nature as being literary stock character types has been pointed out (Boor 1924, 544–57; Lagerholm 1927, XXXVII). This hypothesis is supported by recent analyses (Schäfke 2010; 2012). This view against using literary data on dwarves in research on dwarves as entities of pagan belief or folk belief, however, has not gained currency in recent mythological research (cf. Battles 2005). The oldest, yet rarely discussed attestation of a Germanic concept of “dwarf,” in a context linking it to pagan belief, is an Ancient Nordic runic inscription on a cranial fragment from Ribe (cf. section B.III.2). As the ancient Nordic period is, unlike medieval Germanic literatures, a pre-literary period of sorts, from which we know only short runic inscriptions, the evidence it bears is more likely nonfictional, and thus can in certain cases allow to be interpreted as a source for pagan beliefs.

1 Onomastic Evidence Onomastic correspondences between German and Nordic mythology have led several researchers to the conclusion that there must have been a Common Germanic mythological entity, if similar characters appear in German as well as Nordic myth (and their literary derivatives) and have cognate names (Grimm 1992 [1875], vol. 1, 9; Meid 1992, 498).

a Appellatives In accordance to the thesis of identity of etymology and the date of the concept denoted by the lexeme in question, a number of researchers have assumed that because Middle High German (ge)twerc and Old Norse dvergr are etymologically linked, there must have been a Common Germanic concept of dwarf. While it is uncertain whether a PIE cognate existed (pro: Walde and Pokorny 1973, s.v. “dhu̯ ergh-”; contra: Vries 1977, s.v. “dvergr”), cognate appellatives are extant in a number of old Germanic languages, namely: Old High German (gi)twerg, Middle High German (ge)twerc/querh, Old Saxon gidwerg, Old English dweorg, Old Norse

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dvergr, Old Frisian dwerch, and with zero Ablaut for female dwarves in Old Norse dyrgja (Kluge and Seebold 2002, s.v. “Zwerg”). According to researchers who believe in the congruency between etymology and mythology, the lack of a Gothic word for dwarf has been dismissed as “accidental” (Helm 1953, 101), concluding that the concept denoted by this cognate must have been common Germanic (Battles 2005, 32 and 70). The uncertain etymology even has been misused as an argument for the old age of a common Germanic concept denoted by the noun (Helm 1953, 101). For the PIE cognate Walde and Pokorny (1973, s.v. “dhu̯ergh-”) propose the meaning “Trugwesen” supported by the meaning of Old Irish dvarás “female demon.” Considering dwarves “deceptive spirits,” however, might seem unsatisfying to researchers bent on the reconstruction a common Germanic mythology, as there are no such beings with corresponding narratives attached to them. Thus, research has concentrated on the rich material of proper names of dwarves, most of which stem from Old Norse myth (i.e., Eddic lays) or high medieval Old Norse mythography of various types (i.e., the Prose Edda).

b Place Names Place names containing the element “dwarf” are known from Germany and England (Battles 2005, 33), Denmark (Boor 1924, 544), Norway, Iceland, and the Orkneys (Reichborn-Kjennerud 1934a, 282–88). These place names associate dwarves with mountains and caves. The two English place names including the element “dwarf,” however, simply refer to dwarf dwellings (English Dwarraden and Dwerryhouse; Battles 2005, 33), and can well stem from Scandinavian influence as they are place names in northern England (Battles 2005, 33).

c Proper Names Based on the study of their proper names, dwarves have been characterized as (1) the spirits or souls of the dead or the living dead, (2) Carnival and Yule demons, and (3) megalithic people encountered by the Germanic tribes as they migrated to Europe. As the proper names in question stem from Old Norse literature, Gould (1929, 965) proposed that the concepts one might reconstruct from the semantic fields these names are thought to form might not be older than the twelfth century, and thus might even be imported from outside of Scandinavia (Gould 1929, 967). This hypothesis, however, has never been discussed by the interpreters of dwarf names as sources for Germanic pagan beliefs. Instead, Gould’s subsuming of dwarf names of various meaning under the portfolio of death has been challenged by later, equally speculative analysis (Motz 1973).

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Since many Old Norse dwarf names contain the element alf- (post-classical Old Norse álf-), Grimm (1992 [1875], vol. 1, 366–76) concludes that dwarves and elves are closely related mythological concepts. Based on this hypothesis, he also proposes that dwarves with names that are synonyms for “dead body” rather testify of the concept of elves as the dead or the souls of the dead in common Germanic mythology (Grimm 1992 [1875], vol. 3, 129). Gould (1929, 967) restricts his similar conclusion to Old Norse mythology. He states, based on the same plus some additional onomastic data that “the dwarves are also draugar,” i.e., one of the types of the undead in Old Norse literature which are usually regarded as entities of Nordic pagan belief. Gould, however, also subsumes names that denote professions under the death portfolio, as he interprets them as denoting activities of the living dead or the deceased when they lived, and thus abandons Occam’s razor for good. Motz’s arbitrary arguments on common Germanic dwarves are rather outlandish and show the late flowering of the historical-comparative method in cultural studies shortly before its abandonment caused by the advent of structuralism in the early 70s. Motz (1973) connects dwarf names like Litr “the colored” to Carnival and Yule traditions mostly from the nineteenth century and later, proposing that both are common Germanic tradition, and disregarding that it is commonly accepted that Carnival traditions changed often and varied greatly locally, and that the early modern traditions do not continue medieval ones. Most importantly, those traditions were created as contrafacta to contemporary social conditions (Kühnel 1989). Twenty years later, Motz (1993b) induces from various dwarf names, and the fact that, like pagan altars, dwarf habitats are situated in forest clearings (Motz 1983, 102–03), that dwarves are in fact literary remnants of the megalithic culture encountered by the ancient Germanic tribes as they moved to Europe. According to Motz, dwarves, then, are remnants of megalithic “craftsmen-priests-astronomers” and the dwarf stones are megalithic boulders. Despite the topical function of wooden clearings as places of encounter in the Old Norse saga genres Motz finds her dwarves in, the temporal distance between thirteenth- to sixteenthcentury sagas and the migration of Germanic tribes to Europe many centuries B.C.E. make this conclusion rather arbitrary (cf. VI.2.a)).

2 Runic Evidence Runic inscriptions are shunned even by recent research that follows in Grimm’s footsteps (e.g., Battles 2005), even though these inscriptions form the material most close to any common Germanic mythology in respect of the periods it stems

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from. There is, however, one runic inscription from the Ancient Nordic period that contains the word dwarf, a cranial fragment from Ribe, Denmark, with an inscribed healing charm, dated 717–730 (Marold 2003, 403–17). Ribe was founded as a planned market place with sea-trade connections to northwest Europe, Frisia, England, and Dorestad (Bencard, Bender Jørgensen 1990, 145–68). Slightly varying transliterations have been suggested due to two runes that are not easily readable, but the transliteration by Stoklund (1996, 202–09) has now been accepted (Marold 2003, 404–17). The “[hole]” in the transliteration denotes where a hole was bored into the cranial fragment, most probably at the time the inscription was cut: ulfuʀA ukuþinA ukH utiuʀ'H iA lbburiisuiþʀþA iMA uiA rkiA uktuirkunin [hole] buur Ulfurr ok Ōþinn ok Hōtiwʀ. Hjalp buri es wiþr þæima wærki. Ok dwerg unninn. Bōurr. “Ulfurr and Ōðinn and High-tiuʀ. Help is by the borer against this pain, and the dwarf is conquered. Bōurr.”

It has now been commonly accepted that the inscription is a healing charm (Marold 2003; Düwel 2008, 89). The fact that the inscription was inscribed in a cranial fragment allows for the association of trepanation as an archaic cure for headaches (Kabell 1978; Mørup 1989; Grønvik 1999; Marold 2003). Since the hole in the cranial fragment was drilled from the inside out, it cannot, however, be the result of an actual trepanation (Marold 2003, 409). Also, the hole was not made while the person, to whose cranium the fragment belonged, was alive (Grønvik 1999, 103). Furthermore, the hole shows no signs of wear, i.e., as from use as an amulet, which means that the cranium fragment probably very soon ended up in the layer of cattle dung that covered the market place where it was found (Stoklund 1996, 202). The disposal was probably part of a magical ritual, where the disease was disposed of through the analogical act of disposing of the object carrying the healing charm (Stoklund 1996, 204), following a ritual trepanation of the cranial fragment, which by analogy stands for the trepanation of the skull of the subject of the healing charm. As the inscription is interpreted as referring to a male or female (Grønvik 1999) dwarf, it can be concluded that the dwarf is conceptualized as a disease agent responsible for a disease that results in headaches (Moltke 1985, 360; Stoklund 1996, 206; Grønvik 1999, 114; Marold 2003, 408–10). Marold (2003, 409–10) points out that dwarves are considered disease agents in modern Norwegian folk belief according to Reichborn-Kjennerud (1934a, 285–88). In another article, Reichborn-Kjennerud (1934b) also shows that modern folk belief appears not to be influenced by the dwarves of Old Norse literature. Furthermore, the function of the dwarf in the inscription in the cranial fragment seems compliant with the function of dwarves as disease agents, diseases, or as mere symptoms of

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diseases in Old English medical charms, and an Old English plant name. This supports the interpretation of the inscription mentioned above and makes Old English dwarves the literary successors of Ancient Nordic dwarves (cf. IV). This, in turn, underlines Reichborn-Kjennerud’s finding that other Germanic dwarves from Middle High German and Old Norse literature are derivatives of various types of courtly literature, including innovative refashioning of their role within indigenous Middle High German and Old Norse literary traditions. As ReichbornKjennerud (1934b, 141) notes, it remains, however, a desideratum to comprehend how modern dwarf traditions in the other Scandinavian countries are related to medieval literary and non-literary traditions of dwarves. Contrary to this interpretation, Battles (2005, 74) concludes that dwarves have the power to influence human health in Middle High German and Old Norse traditions as well. He interprets motifs of dwarves as healers as remnants of the function of dwarves as disease agents, diseases or disease symptoms. However, he uses this assertion to bolster his point that, together with the Old English dwarves that were obviously believed to influence people’s health negatively, this represents a common Germanic dwarf trait, in agreement to the explicit aim of his article, which makes this far-fetched analogy of dwarves supplying the hero with healing salves and roots and dwarves causing headaches suspicious. Even though it seems possible to deduce that the trait of dwarves being connected to disease (vs. dwarves influencing human health both positively and negatively!) is ancient Nordic, it is impossible to state that it was Common Germanic, too.

IV Old English dweorgas In Old English literature and culture, dwarves (dweorgas, sg. dweorg) are confined to medical treatises and healing charms, and a plant name. In addition, there are a two English place names (see III.1.a), which may stem from Scandinavian influence, and probably pertain to dwarf habitats. In the very restricted distribution outside of epic texts, Old English dwarves show a remarkable similarity to the dwarf on the cranial fragment from Ribe. Both the data on Ancient Nordic dwarves (one runic inscription) and the data on Old English dwarves (four healing charms, a medical recipe, and one plant name) are extremely scarce. It seems, however, probable, that Old English dwarves continue the function of Ancient Nordic dwarves. Furthermore, if one assumes that the ancient Nordic dwarves’ function was limited to that of the Ribe fragment and if one assumes that Old English epic texts featuring dwarves are lost, one could conclude that all the dwarves showing Arthurian characteristics would be more or less an innovation from High Medieval courtly and heroic fiction. Only the Old Norse mythic dwarf

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(VI.1) would then remain a joker in the pack, its sources entirely obscure, as they are not linked to Scandinavian pagan belief instead.

1 Healing Charms and Recipes There are four extant charms and a medical recipe against a “dwarf” (Battles 2005, 33–82): three charms are found in Lacnunga (ca. 1000) Metrical Charm 3 “Against a Dwarf” (Dobbie 1958, 121–22), Prose Charm 13.2 “Wiþ dworh” (Storms 1974, 305–36, no. 78), and “Writ ðis ondlang ða earmas wið dweorh” (in two versions) (Grattan, Singer 1952, 158, nos. 87 and 88). The fourth charm is “Dweorg onweg to donne” in the Medicina de quadrupedibus (eleventh or twelfth c.; de Vriend 1984, 266–67). The medical recipe is found in the Peri Didaxeon (twelfth century; Löweneck 1970, 30–31). The meaning of Old English dweorg in the individual charms, however, is much debated (cf. Battles 2005, 33–35). They are sometimes thought to refer to “fever” (Geldner 1907, 9–10; Cameron 1993, 10; 152–53), or thought to have a whole spectrum of meaning ranging from “disease agent” and “disease” to “disease symptom” (Thun 1969, 386–96). Battles (2005, 34) sees the translation of a passage in the collection of medical recipes Peri Didaxeon as indicating that dweorg means a disease agent, causing the symptom of shivering fits. The Peri Didaxeon translates “interdum et febriunt” with “hwile he riþaþ swilce he on dweorge sy” (Löweneck 1970, 30–31; “at times he shakes as if from a dwarf,” translation by Battles 2005, 34). He concludes that the translator would regard shivering fits as a symptom of a dweorg rather than a fefor, which would be the regular translation of Latin febris. From the fact that “Dweorg onweg to donne,” in the Medicina de quadrupedibus, corresponds to the Latin ad verrucas, “against warts,” Battles (2005, 34) concludes that dwarves were believed to be agents of various diseases, not only fever (or shivering fits). As there is only such limited evidence of Old English dwarves, it is impossible to reconstruct any coherent semantics of the word, or even multiple semantics for different beliefs in dwarves at different places and times. But the data shows that the general shape of the concept(s) of dwarves in Old English culture correspond to the dwarf in the inscription on the cranial fragment from Ribe and not to the dwarves found in any of the other literatures dealt with here.

2 Plant Name Mentha pulegium has the ominous Old English name dweorgedwos(t)le “dwarf dwos(t)le” (with side forms; Bierbaumer 1976, 35). As the meaning “little

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dwos(t)le” can be ruled out due to the late use of “dwarf” in compound appellatives denoting miniature versions of another entity (Battles 2005, 35, fn. 30), the plant name obviously is somehow connected to the concept of Old English dwarves. Mentha pulegium is often mentioned in medieval English medical recipes for treating diseases that were connected with elves or other demonic disease agents (Jolly 1996, 135). As healing plants are often named after the disease they are used to combat (Storms, ed., 1974, 168), or the disease agent that causes the disease in question (Battles 2005, 35), the Old English name for Mentha pulegium and its inclusion in English medical recipes indicates the same underlying concept of dwarves as in the medical charms. It cannot, however, further clarify the semantics or the concept of Old English dweorg.

V German Dwarves 1 Old High German (gi)twerg There is little Old High German material on dwarves. Traces of dwarves are exclusively found in glosses, and thus there is little information on dwarves before the advent of courtly romance in Germany. The Old High German appellative for dwarf, (gi)twerg (with numerous side forms) which is cognate with the Middle High German appellative for dwarf, is solely found in glosses. It glosses Latin codrus, comicus, eridii, homullus, homuncio, homunculus, nanus, parvus, pumilio, Pygmaeus, and tuber. The diminutive gitwergilîn glosses Latin Pygmaeus. The common characteristic of Old High German and Middle High German dwarves thus seems to be small size, but there is little more that can be said about Old High German dwarves based on the glosses.

2 Middle High German (ge)twerc Middle High German dwarves (twerc or getwerc) are most often found in the fairytale-like epics, especially the “märchenhafte” or “aventiurehafte” sub-group of Dietrichepik. There are a number of dwarf episodes in Arthurian romance, and Battles (2005, 55) regards the dwarf episode in Hartmann’s von Aue Iwein as the most popular one that also influenced the various pieces of the fairytale-like Dietrichepik. Just as with Old French Chansons de geste, dwarves rarely appear in “historico-epic” texts such as the “historische” Dietrichepik. This distribution of dwarves is also true for Old Norse texts, where dwarves are solely found in late medieval Icelandic romances (aka indigenous or original riddarasǫgur, Märchen-

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sagas, or lygisǫgur), and the more adventurous Viking and Adventure sagas, a subgroup of the fornaldarsǫgur. In the more heroic sub-group of the fornaldarsǫgur, Old Norse dwarves only feature in Vǫlsunga saga that treats the Nibelungen matter.

a Appearance and Habitat Lütjens (1977, 69–72) differentiates three types of dwarves by their appearances: the Nibelungen dwarf, the Ortnit dwarf, and the chivalric dwarf. He assumes that the Nibelungen and the Ortnit dwarf preserve Common Germanic features, and that the chivalric dwarf is a younger development that superseded the other two types (Lütjens 1977, 70). Battles (2005, 64) argues that the Ortnit dwarf is an amalgam of the Common Germanic dwarf and the noon demon. The rare Nibelungen dwarf is small in size and has the appearance of an old, bearded man. The only other extant Nibelungen dwarf is found in the Dresdner Heldenbuch version of Wolfdietrich B. The Ortnit dwarf, on the other hand, is small in size due to his likeness to a child. The numerous chivalric dwarves are not described in respect to age. Their small size is compared to the size of a child, but unlike the Ortnit dwarf they are not mistaken for a child (Lütjens 1977, 71). Chivalric dwarves are equipped like knights and show knightly conduct. Much unlike Old French nains and Old Norse dvergar, Middle High German dwarves are not ugly. The only exception is the allegedly conservative Nibelungen dwarf (Lütjens 1977, 72). The habitat of the Middle High German dwarf is a hollow mountain that might be situated in woods, as a part of The Wilderness, the semanticized space of the aventiure. A similar habitat is found in Old Norse literature where the dvergar live, nearly without exception, under boulders (never inside mountains or hills, however) that are most often located in clearings. Inside his hollow mountain, the Middle High German dwarf might rule over an entire kingdom of dwarves, featuring much splendor. The association with the wild space of the aventiure is in some texts extended to the dwarf kings also ruling over giants who serve in their armies.

b Motifs Lütjens (1977, 94–104) differentiates three motifs by the relation of protagonist and dwarf: animosity, friendship, and the avoidance of the hero by the dwarf. All three of these are known from Old Norse literature, even though the first one is rarely found there. Animosity between the dwarf and the protagonist stems both in Middle High German and in Old Norse literature from the dwarf having abducted a virgin (Lütjens 1977, 103), or, in the case of Laurin (thirteenth century), in the hero deliberately thrashing the dwarf’s estates.

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The most common motif, however, is that of the friendly dwarf, serving as an advisor or donor character (Lütjens 1977, 98). There are three instances of dwarves equipped with magic healing plants (Hürnen Seyfrid, the Dresdner Heldenbuch redaction of the Eckenlied, and Seifrid de Ardemont), and two instances of dwarves supplying the protagonist with a magic plant for other purposes. When Middle High German dwarves fight (sometimes against the protagonist, sometimes at his side), they fight with melee weapons, or wrestle. If they help the protagonist, they are usually related to him. This type of relationship is utterly unknown in Old Norse literature where dwarves form a distinct race and, while being physically able to have sexual intercourse with women, never beget children with them. Instead, Old Norse dwarves are sometimes the foster parents of the protagonists they support. The Middle High German dwarf might also help the protagonist out of gratitude, if, for example, he fell victim to a giant or a dwarf kingdom got usurped by one, and the protagonist subsequently came to his rescue. There are only four instances of thieving dwarves in Middle High German literature. This trait is thus considered by Lütjens (1977, 102) and Lecouteux (1981, 372) not to be common Germanic. They argue against Wohlgemuth (1906, 89) who stipulated that thieving Old French larrons preserved a Common Germanic feature (see above). While the dwarfish trait of invisibility is often considered to be Common Germanic, Battles (2005, 79) states that this motif can only be found in Middle High German texts. The “vengeful dwarf” or treacherous dwarf that is a rare motif in Old Norse texts is also rarely found in Middle High German literature. In the Nibelungenlied, the dwarf Alberich wants to avenge his masters on Siegfried who killed them. By overcoming the dwarf, Siegfried attributes him as his true servant. In Laurin, the eponymous dwarf king drugs Dietrich and his companions at a feast, after he invited them to his kingdom in the aftermath of a first melee he lost that ensued when Dietrich and his fellows thrashed his locus amoenus. Laurin is eventually killed, and in Walberan, a sequel of sorts, the eponymous dwarf king moves his invisible armies against Dietrich von Bern in order to avenge Laurin. The dwarf motif changes from high medieval to late medieval Middle High German literature. In fifteenth-century romances and ballads, dwarves are solely found as threatening representatives of the monstrous Other. Interaction with this sphere results in catastrophe for the human individual, even if the alien being in question, e.g., a dwarf, does mean no harm (Classen 1999). One could consider this development from supernatural helper (or enemy) to dooming encounter to have been enabled by the function of Middle High German dwarves as vehicles of meta-fictional discourse in courtly romance (cf. B.II.2). The re-categorization of the ambiguous, wondrous Other as the negatively connoted heathen Other (Habicht 2010) could well be an intermediary step toward the dwarf as representative

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of the sphere of monstrous. Habicht (2010, 238–39) underlines the dire consequences of Ortnit’s interaction with his dwarf father, which shows a global structural similarity to Volkslied no. 131 in the Heidelberger Liederhandschrift Pal 343 in which a young lover’s interaction with a dwarf ultimately results in her and her lover’s tragic deaths (Classen 1999, 364–65).

VI Old Norse dvergar ON dwarves (dvergar, sg. dvergr) are mostly found in genres that are commonly characterized as “fairytale-like.” More accurately, they are found in genres that show a strong connection to Nordic heroic matter and Arthurian romance, the fornaldarsǫgur and the Märchensagas (aka indigenous/original riddarasǫgur, or lygisǫgur). Eddic lays and the manual on Skaldic poetry, the Prose Edda, feature a number of dwarves in mythological and heroic-legendary narratives that are partially also known from fornaldarsǫgur and deal with the same matter. Beyond that scarce data of briefly mentioned dwarves, numerous dwarf names are extant. The distribution of dwarves is thus reminiscent of that in Old French literature and Middle High German literature. These literatures do not boast extant “mythological” texts such as the Poetic Edda, a collection of lays in Eddic meter partially dating back to the ninth century, and the Prose Edda that conveys a systematized mythology as part of being an introduction to Skaldic poetry which is highly reliant on the knowledge of Nordic myths. There are also dwarves in fornaldarsǫgur featuring Eddica minora, i.e., Eddic lays that are not preserved in the Poetic Edda’s collection, and there is a single dwarf in Sneglu-Halla þáttr, a short prose narrative interwoven with Kings’ sagas. This dwarf, Túta, might actually have been inspired by historical court dwarves, as he is a historical king’s retainer, and does nothing a typical dwarf does in a saga, but has the typical appearance of a regular saga dwarf (Schäfke 2010, 210–11; 214–15, fn. 47), except for being clad in armor on one occasion. He is thus partially reminiscent of the chivalric dwarves of Middle High German literature (Schäfke 2011, 201–02). His special status is apparent, as he is only compared to a dwarf in size, and no actual dwarf in the Morkinskinna version of Sneglu-Halla þáttr. In the Flateyjarbók version, however, he is denoted as a dvergr. There appears to be no genetic bond between Middle High German and Old Norse dwarves going back to a Common Germanic dwarf. Also, Middle High German dwarves seem not to have influenced Old Norse dwarves synchronically through Arthurian romance or Dietrichepik (Schäfke 2011). Neither of the two literary traditions preserves features of the ancient Nordic dwarf outlined above which shows similarities to the dwarves found in Old English healing charms.

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However, while they differ from Middle High German dwarves, Old Norse dwarves show similarities to Old French nains. Thus, unlike Middle High German dwarves that mainly are beautiful knights, Old Norse dwarves are ugly like Old French nains. There are subtle differences in the exact descriptions between Old French and Middle High German dwarves. In addition, literary dwarves, i.e., saga dwarves, have little in common with the mythic dwarves that feature in Eddic lays and the Prose Edda, and do not show any resemblance to ancient Nordic dwarves. That leads to a conclusion which is far removed from neo-grammarian thinking patterns: Old Norse saga dwarves are not a fusion of mythic dwarves and continental Arthurian dwarves, they are an innovation triggered by the translation and creative reception of Arthurian romance. There are motifs resembling Old French or Middle High German dwarf motifs, such as dwarves abducting women or endowing the protagonist with magic items, but the stock character type of the Old Norse dwarf shows its very own individual traits that are highly conventionalized, similarly to the way the traits of Old French and Middle High German dwarves are. This hypothesis is bolstered by the young age of Old Norse dwarf names (cf. Gould 1929, 965; cf. section B.III.1 above).

1 Mythic Dwarves There is only scarce data on mythic dwarves, i.e., dwarves in texts containing myths or re-telling myths in a mythographical manner. However, there are plenty of dwarf proper names in mythic texts, their number being stated by Motz (1973, 100) as 195 tokens, i.e., names and name variants in the list compiled by Gould (1929). The following overview groups dwarves by their function in the texts, as suggested by Jakobsson (2005). For a discussion of all instances of dwarves in these genres, see Battles (2005). Dwarves have three functions in mythic texts. They have aitiological functions, feature as actants in two further non-aitiological myths, and are related or are identified with other mythic groups. Lastly, there are two extensive lists of dwarf names. One can be found in Vǫluspǫ́ (st. 10–16), and is referred to by the modern name “Dvergatal.” The other one is called the Dverga heiti in the Nafnaþulur. Their use in the history of research is discussed above under section B.III.1. Gould (1929) and Motz (1973, 112–15) have provided comprehensive collections with etymologies and translations.

a Aitiological Functions Dwarves are mentioned in the creation of the world in different functions in the Eddic lay Vǫluspǫ́ and in the Prose Edda. They brewed the mead of poetry in the

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myth explaining how Óðinn acquired the domain of poetry and thus became patron of the poets, and just like Æsir (one of the two groups of gods in Old Norse myth) and Jǫtnar (a type of giant) they possess knowledge of runes (Hávamǫ́ l, st. 143). In the Prose Edda’s account of the creation of the world, dwarves grow as maggots inside the flesh of the primeval Giant Ymir (Gylfaginning, ch. 14) out of whose body the world is shaped, and are thus an emergent species like the gods and giants, unlike humans. Ymir’s braincase is set over the world forming the celestial dome, which is held up by four dwarves, named after the directions of spatial orientation: Vestri, Austri, Suðri, and Norðri (Gylfaginning, ch. 8). In Skaldskaparmǫ́ l (ch. 23) two Skaldic metaphors (kenningar, sg. kenning) for the celestial dome refer to this function. The kennginar are “dwarf’s burden” (byrðr dverganna) and “helmet of West, East, South, and North” (hjalmr Vestra ok Austra, Suðra, Norðra). The name Norðri is also used by the tenth-century poet Hallfreðr Óttarsson vandræðaskald in his poem Óláfsdrápa (erfidrápa, st. 26,3; ca. 1001) and Austri in one of his lausvísur (st. 5,4). In Skaldskaparmǫ́ l (ch. 35–39) Loki cuts off Sif’s hair. In order to avoid punishment by Sif’s husband Þórr, he travels to the svartalfar to have them forge a golden wig for her. When he arrives, he meets two dvergar and has them smith the hair and another five items that are given to five gods, and are their respective attributes known from various other Eddic lays and the Prose Edda.

b Non-Aitiological Myths Only three dwarf characters can be found in non-aitiological mythic texts (Jakobsson 2005, 57), Alvíss in the Eddic lay Alvíssmǫ́ l, Litr in the Prose Edda’s recount of the myth of Baldr’s death, and Andvari in the Prose Edda’s explanation of the kenning for otrgjǫld, which recounts part of the Nordic Nibelungen matter (Skaldskaparmǫ́ l, ch. 39). The frame narrative of the gnomic poem Alvíssmǫ́ l uses the “unwanted suitor” motif in combination with the “battle of knowledge” motif which is also known from other gnomic Eddic lays. The dwarf Alvíss fulfills the function of the unwanted suitor of the daughter of the god Þórr (i.e., Thor) for a wife. Þórr will allow the marriage, if he can overcome him in a battle of knowledge. This leads to a series of questions by Þórr which are answered by Alvíss by giving lists of Skaldic synonyms (heiti) for various nouns of the prose register. The poems end with Þórr telling Alvíss that the sun now rises, which is interpreted as a second ending-condition (other than Alvíss being unable to answer one of Þórr’s questions), even though such a condition is unknown from other battles of knowledge. Many, scholars posit that the dwarf turns to stone as the rays of

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the sun touch him, but the lay does not convey this information. There is, however, additional circumstantial evidence that indicates that dwarves were thought to be heliophobic in one way or another. First, there is the epithet dagskjarr (“day-shy”) of the dwarf in mythical Ynglingatal (st. 2,1) who is, in the prose surrounding Ynglingatal in Ynglinga saga, met at sunset by King Sveigðir at the dwarf’s abode. Second, in the saga motif of the “extorted dwarf,” dwarves are always chanced upon by the protagonist at night time (Schäfke 2012). The only exception to that rule, interestingly, is found in the one instance of the motif that is closest to mythical matter: Vǫlsunga saga (cf. Acker 2002, 219). Furthermore, there is no reason to regard Alvíss as a draugr (‘revenant,’ see Battles 2005, 38), as he is only teased for having spent the night with a corpse, and is not one himself. A scene, for which no widely-accepted motivation has been reconstructed, is the death of the dwarf Litr at the funeral of the god Baldr. As Þórr hallows Baldr’s funeral pyre with his hammer, Litr, who had not been mentioned earlier in the text, runs before his feet and gets kicked into the funeral pyre where he dies. Various interpretations have been offered, the most sensible up to now are that Þórr got angry due to an apparent interruption of the funeral rite (Williams 2003, 90), which fits the aggrieved emotional state the entire universe is in after Baldr’s untimely death, or that the short intermezzo is an aitiological myth for the color of fire (Williams 2003, 91–94). The latter explanation lacks a marking of this episode as such, as could be expected by the Prose Edda’s usual narrative framing of such myths (Jakobsson 2005, 63–64 with further literature).

c Relation to Other Mythic Groups Lastly, dwarves are referred to as an ætt (“race, kin,” pl. ættar) in relation to other ættar such as the Æsir and Norns in Fáfnismál (st. 4–6). This kind of information is also related in Gylfaginning (ch. 15) of the Prose Edda. In the systematizing mythography of the Prose Edda, dvergar are also related to alfar (“elves,” sg. alfr; later álfr, pl. álfar) because they are identified with a sub-group of elves, the svartalfar that live in alfheimar (“home, world of elves”) in Gylfaginning (ch. 34) and Skaldskaparmǫ́ l (ch. 39). They are never identified with døkkalfar (“dark elves”), who are mentioned as one of two kinds of alfar along with the ljósalfar (“light, bright elves”) as the inhabitants of alfheimar in Gylfaginning (ch. 18). It remains an open debate whether it is correct to assume that svartalfar are identical to døkkalfar or not (pro: Golther 2000 [1895], 116; Simek 1998, 729–30, Jakobsson 2008, 192; contra: Grimm 1992 [1875], vol. 1, 368; Schäfke 2010, 232–33). As this question is a loose end, it also remains open what insights can be gained by reaching any conclusion, other than bolstering the assertion that dwarves are associated with

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the subterranean, since døkkalfar are, too (pro: Motz 1983, 98; contra: Schäfke 2010, 232–35).

2 Saga Dwarves Dwarves feature in abundance in the fornaldarsǫgur and the Märchensagas. These genres are prose texts composed in Iceland mostly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and up until the eighteenth century with individual even later texts. The Märchensagas are considered an amalgam of the translated Old French Arthurian romances and the indigenous fornaldarsǫgur that treat Germanic, and more specifically Nordic heroic matter. In the fornaldarsǫgur, dwarves feature prominently in only two of its three sub-groups, which are more “fairytale-like,” less tragic, and thus thought to be younger (and less worthy of individual attention): the Viking and Adventure sagas. In the fornaldarsǫgur sub-group of “heroic-legendary” sagas, which is regarded as the oldest one and is the most tragic in tone, there is only one saga in that group that treats the Nibelungen matter, Vǫlsunga saga, and features a dwarf, Andvari by name.

a Appearance and Habitat The appearance of saga dwarves is strongly conventionalized. Schäfke (2010) reconstructed patterns of features that are named in the description of a dwarf’s appearance in relation to the description’s length: small size, ugliness, body deformity. These Dwarves are unlike all types of Middle High German dwarves discussed by Lütjens (1977) (Schäfke 2011). They share, however, ugliness as a common feature with Old French nains. The specific bodily features that make them ugly are, however, different. While Old Norse dvergar are disproportional, e.g. with long arms and short legs, a short abdomen and an oversized head, Old French nains are hunchbacked or have humps. The most distinctive difference between Eddic dwarves and saga dwarves is that saga dwarves do not live underground. Some participate in “earth diving,” a feature they share with giants and trolls such as the demonic Grím-Ægir in GǫnguHrólfs saga (fourteenth c.), or know about secret underground passages (e.g., in Gibbons saga), as do their Middle High German counterparts, or even emerge from rock slides; but saga dwarves are not subterranean creatures. Saga dwarves live in boulders that sometimes have house-like features such as doors, and in some cases they live in poor huts, or at the courts of kings. The latter is characteristic for the dwarves of the fornaldarsǫgur tradition. While dwarves sometimes live with families which includes female dwarves (dyrgjur, sg.

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dyrgja) and dwarf children (dvergsbǫrn, sg. dvergsbarn), they never form kingdoms like Celtic or Middle High German dwarves. They sometimes are subject to human kings, if they live in their domain’s forests, or work as smiths at their courts, e.g., in Norna-Gests þáttr (thirteenth c.) that contains a re-telling of the Nordic tradition of the Nibelungen matter (Schäfke 2010, 220–99). Dwarves’ boulders are situated in the topical places of encounter in the space of aventiure in the fornaldarsǫgur and Märchensagas. These abodes are thus happened upon by the protagonist in wood clearings, or at coasts or on islands when they travel the seas (in fornaldarsǫgur where the protagonists often are Vikings) or when travelling by horse (in Märchensagas where protagonists are almost always princes). Other entities encountered in such locations are e.g., dragons, berserker packs, other knights, or troll women. Furthermore dwarves appear in a number of motifs troll women appear in, so they in some respects form a common paradigm in the fornaldarsǫgur and Märchensagas (Schäfke 2010, 225–99). As noted under section B.III, Motz’s (1983, 102–03) theory that dwarves are in fact megalithic priest-smiths as their stone abodes are situated in clearings just like megalithic monuments, instead appears to be a literary convention of the Late Middle Ages (Schäfke 2010, 231–32). An interesting, but probably meaningless and accidental parallel to Middle High German dwarves that can be attributed to the length of the respective descriptions is that dwarves’ abodes are described as being next to rivulets (Schäfke 2010, 205–06).

b Motifs Dwarves mostly function as donors and healers in the sagas, and they sometimes also support the protagonists in battle. All these functions are also filled by troll women (Schulz 2004, 211–13), showing the literary semantic similarity between these two stock character types (Schäfke 2010, 219). Saga dwarves support the protagonist in combat by shooting arrows. Dwarves do this with a bow, not by shooting magic arrows out of their fingers as troll women do (Schäfke 2010, 278– 81). In Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga the most notable of all Old Norse dwarves, Mǫndull, has a magic duel lasting for several days with the sinister and demonic Grím-Ægir. There is only a single case, in Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar (fifteenth c.), where an unseen dwarf apparently helps the protagonist in a close quarter’s melee, thus showing the preferred combat style of Middle High German dwarves: invisible wrestling, as well as great bodily strength, which is an untypical feature for Old Norse dvergar, but a typical one for Middle High German getwerc. There are two recurring motifs, the “extorted dwarf” motif (Schäfke 2012), and the “grateful dwarf” motif (Boor 1924, 553). In the first motif, a dwarf that tries to avoid the human protagonist, is captured by him or is prevented from

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entering his boulder. The dwarf is thus coerced into supporting the protagonist in one of his major goals, e.g., by supplying him with magical items or supporting him in abducting a courtly woman. But the hero is also required to reward the dwarf, if he wants to avoid being cursed (Schäfke 2012). Thus reciprocity is also an aspect of human-dwarf interaction (Battles 2005, 70). The instances of the motif where the human fails to reward the dwarf and is cursed, is often referred to as the “vengeful dwarf” motif, and is considered to be the most characteristic dwarf motif showing their true nature (pro: Lecouteux 1981, 372; Halvorsen 1958, 378; Motz 1993a, 623; moderating: Motz 1977, 48; Motz 1983, 110; 112 et passim), even though this is one of the least common interactions between human and dwarves in Old Norse literature (Schäfke 2010, 266–67, fn. 249). These instances hardly constitute a motif, but only one of its possible “tracks” (track1b as per Schäfke 2012). The “grateful dwarf” motif that sometimes involves dwarf children lacks the extortion aspect. The rewarding of the dwarf by the protagonist is sometimes replaced by the protagonist rescuing or endowing the dwarf’s child. The avoidance of the protagonist by the dwarf in the “extorted dwarf” motif is reminiscent of the respective relation between dwarf and protagonist that was noted by Lütjens (1977). The rescuing of the dwarf’s child has a vague parallel in the dwarf being rescued from a giant by the protagonist in Middle High German literature. There are only three instances of Old Norse dwarves that abduct women. One is the highly atypical Mǫndull mentioned above. The other two, in Nitiða saga (fourteenth c.) and Samsons saga (ca. 1500), are coerced by humans into abducting or assisting in abducting courtly women. In this respect, Old French larrons and Middle High German getwerc are more similar to each other.

c Dwarf-like Characters As noted above, dwarves as a stock character type fall under the same paradigm of encounters as giants and troll women, fulfilling comparable functions in recurring motifs such as donor or healer. It is therefore not surprising that there are a number of characters that possess features of more than one category, and that they therefore cannot clearly be assigned to one category as their primary one. Most of these vague elements of the literary semantic categories of dwarves, trolls, and giants, are never denoted by an appellative of either of the categories, but are menn (‘men,’ or rather ‘humanoid beings’). There are, however, also dvergar (‘dwarves’) that possess features of categories other than that of dwarves. They are always small, if they are denoted as dvergar, as this is the constitutive feature of Old Norse dwarves, as Schäfke (2010, 212–13) demonstrated.

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For example, the notable dwarf Mǫndull first acts as an antagonist, removing a friend of the protagonist from his position as a jarl’s advisor, and then is attributed by the protagonist in a variant of the “extorted dwarf” motif. As he is originally antagonistic, and not frightful and/or supportive, as dwarves most often are, Mǫndull has a giant feature: black skin. The little man Nípr in Sigurðar saga þǫgla (fourteenth c.) can be categorized as an atypical giant with dwarf features, as he fights with a club, the prototypical giant weapon (Boberg 1966, 118; F531.1.1. and F531.1.2.; Schulz 2004, 290–92), does not live in a stone, but a hut, which is quite un-dwarfish, but is small, unlike giants (Schäfke 2010, 278–81). An interesting case of apparently unconventional use of appellatives is Ectors saga. There are two svartalfar in it. One, Tarsus, resembles a giant, riding a camel, swinging a club, and is described with mineral metaphors. The other one, his son, is small, but has black skin, as only Mǫndull does among the dwarves. He also attempts to rape a dwarf girl; the protagonist prevents this by goring the little fiend (as part of the “grateful dwarf” motif). Tarsus’ son thus functions as a sort of anti-dwarf, or “black dwarf.” Battles (2005, 48–82) posits parallels between the spámaðr in Þorvald þáttr víðfǫrla (early thirteenth c.) and Mǫndull in Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga, as well as the dwarf father in Sigurðar saga þǫgla: the close relationship between the nonhuman entity and a human, or the complaints of the non-human about his children having been hurt in some way by a human. These parallels are rather vague, as the spámaðr’s role in the plot is utterly different from that of any dwarf. He functions as an entity of pagan belief driven away by a Christian missionary. This saga thus might rather preserve a medieval Icelandic notion of folk belief in house spirits, or infer Christian stereotypes about such pagan belief into the saga. Lastly, there are the many instances of Reginn, a dwarf-like smith and later dwarf proper, who features in the Nordic tradition of the Nibelungen matter. He is a “dwarf in size” in Vǫlsunga saga, Skaldskaparmǫ́ l, Fáfnismǫ́ l, and Reginsmǫ́ l, obviously underlining his great skills as a smith. He is a dwarf in Norna-Gests þáttr even though he is also called a maðr there, which is in fact sometimes the case with saga dwarves, but is rare. Also, Reginn has obviously even less dwarflike kin, who are usually considered humans, and this is otherwise never the case with dvergar, who have dwarf women (dyrgjur) and dwarf children (dvergsbǫrn) as kin. The slow and not entirely complete transformation of Reginn from dwarflike smith to dwarf smith shows the strong conceptualization of dwarves as smiths (Schäfke 2010, 283–85), which is frequently found in Old Norse literature.

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C Trolls, Ogres, and Giants The basic concept of large beings seems to exist in nearly every medieval culture and all their literatures. Unlike with dwarves, however, there is a large variety of different entities subsumed under the term “giants.” As the heading of this section implies, rather than identifying all the various beings as derivations of a common mythological blue-print including an archetypical function and positing relationships between them, an overview will be given of the different beings addressed as giants in research on the canonical European literatures and the myths that are part of their traditions. The concept of giants as indigenous people populating an area before the arrival of the people in whose culture’s myths and literatures they feature in, cannot be found in Old French and Middle High German literature (Ahrendt 1923, 92). This theory, however, once held some currency in the study of Old Norse mythology regarding the wars between the two groups of Nordic gods, the Æsir and the Vanir. The trolls and giants of saga literature are thought to resemble Sámi (Gallo 2006; Straubhaar 2001), even though those appear non-camouflaged in the same genre and even the same texts, too. The most fitting theory, is a more general one in agreement with findings of cultural semiotics (Lotman 2005), and monster theory (Cohen 1996), that has, however, been formulated much earlier: a culture’s neighboring societies might feature as giants in their cultural texts, if their relations are characterized by war (Grimm, 1992 [1875], vol. 1, 436) or to justify their assimilation, exclusion, or the killing of their members (Cohen 1996, 7–12).

I Celtic cewri It seems that “what makes a Celtic giant is […] hard to grasp” (Ciklamini 1961, 287). However, Celtic literature contains entities of huge size that are commonly referred to as giants, the cewri (sg. cawr), who feature most prominently in the Mabinogion and in Arthurian tales (Grooms 1993). Cewri are noted for their huge size and great strength. Contrary to Old Norse saga giants and Middle High German Wilde Leute, they are not uncivilized monsters, but live in courtly structures, just like most Old French and Middle High German giants. In the Welsh romance Culhwch ac Olwen (thierteenth c.), for example, the antagonist Ysbaddaden Bencawr (‘chief of giants’) lives in a castle typical for any king of Arthurian tales. A motif known from Old French and Middle High German texts is that heroes from the heroic age are of gigantic size. This is especially true of Bran the Blessed, and of Arthur in Breuddwyd Rhonabwy (late twelfth c.). In the latter text,

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for example, the protagonist Rhonabwy visits the heroic past in a dream, and meets many of the great heroes. When coming to Arthur, the latter comments on the small size of the people of the future. Apart from the cewri there are entities that are not denoted by this appellative and do not share enough features with other literature’s giants to be commonly accepted as such. I.e., the Fomóiri are regarded by Eldevik (2005, 103, fn. 51) as an example of giants. The Formóiri constitute a group of people driven away by the Irish gods invading Ireland. They thus can be subsumed under the category of a culture’s “earlier people” that feature as giants in origin myths. Ciklamini (1961, 284–86), however, interprets the Fomóiri as pre-Celtic fertility gods, “if one thinks of giants as deposed deities” (ibid., 286). She considers this a parallel to the relation between gods and giants in Old Norse mythology. As Old Norse giants are not deposed gods, however, this constellation rather parallels the war between the two groups of Old Norse gods, the Æsir and the Vanir in (esp. Skaldskaparmál, 1; Ynglinga saga, 4), of which the latter are fertility gods—and clearly not giants.

II Old French jaiants Old French giants (jaiants, sg. jaiant) appear in the Chansons de geste nearly exclusively on the Saracen side. There are hardly any Christian giants in the Chansons de geste, rather giant-like heroes (Wohlgemuth 1906, 79). The distribution is thus complementary to that of Old French dwarves in this genre. In courtly romances, jaiants occur far less frequently than dwarves (Wohlgemuth 1906, 78). Wohlgemuth (1906, 39–40) sees little influence from other mythologies and literatures on jaiants, other than some reminiscences of “Germanic” giants on jaiants that feature on the Christian side in the Chansons de geste. There is, however, strong Celtic influence in individual cases. Wohlgemuth (1906, 76–77) identifies a number of jaiants that are especially monstrous as “keltische Vollriesen” (full Celtic giants), especially Orgilleus in Huon de Bordeaux (thirteenth c.). Most of them feature in courtly romances (Wohlgemuth 1906, 79).

1 Appearance Jaiants are characterized by their large size, their heavy weight, enormous strength, the heavy weight of their huge weapons, and their looks. Like dwarves, jaiants are most often characterized by their size. The size is either given in feet (usually 15 ft., ranging from 7–17 ft.), or circumscribed (Wohlgemuth 1906, 12–13). For example, Corsolt in Li coronemenz Looïs is so big that Gillaume, when

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attempting to strike his helmet, cannot reach it with his sword (Wohlgemuth 1906, 14). Jaiants are also characterized by their excessive weight resulting from their enormous size. It is impossible for the giants Nasier (Gaufrey) and Rainuoart (Aliscans) to ride a horse (Wohlgemuth 1906, 15). A jaiant’s strength is often illustrated by his handling humans like a human could handle a small animal, picking several of them up at one time, throwing them around, or tearing them apart (Wohlgemuth 1906, 16–17). The size and weight of the jaiants’ weapons—usually a club or club like instrument—is a further means of illustrating their superhuman strength. These clubs are often made from whole trees (Wohlgemuth 1906, 18–23). Jaiants are usually ugly, but in some rather exceptional cases they are described as beautiful (Wohlgemuth 1906, 27). Many of them have black skin (as do Old Norse saga giants) which marks them as ugly—and as Saracen. The sole exception to that is the Saracen jaiant Rainouart in Aliscans whose face got darkened with coal by a cook (Wohlgemuth 1906, 27). A number of jaiants have unusually large heads (Wohlgemuth 1906, 28), just as Old Norse saga dwarves do. A few jaiants have animal heads or horns (Wohlgemuth 1906, 28–29), underlining their devilish nature (Wohlgemuth 1906, 35–36) or placing them close to the many man-animal hybrids known from medieval encyclopedic texts and marginal manuscript illuminations. When the eyes of jaiants are mentioned, they are, with a few exceptions, topically compared to red glowing coals (Wohlgemuth 1906, 29). The great distance between their eyes is also frequently mentioned, as is the deviant shape and size of their noses and their gaping mouths, and their long, white teeth (Wohlgemuth 1906, 30–31). If the jaiant is described as ugly, he might have long, shaggy hair that might reach the ground (Wohlgemuth 1906, 32). Their hair is sometimes given as the reason for the frequent invulnerability of jaiants (Wohlgemuth 1906, 33). Vulnerability is feature they share with Old Norse saga giants, trolls, troll-like warriors, and berserkers. A feature that sets Old French jaiants apart from other medieval giant characters is their ability to breathe fire or smoke (Wohlgemuth 1906, 34). In addition they have very loud voices (Wohlgemuth 1906, 34–35). There are other individual features, including double body parts (Wohlgemuth 1906, 34–35). Some jaiants have limited mental capacities and are clumsy (Wohlgemuth 1906, 49–50).

2 Motifs In the courtly romances, jaiants sometimes kidnap virgins or virgins’ lovers. More often they are knights that, once overcome by the protagonist, enter into their service. Only very few jaiants are man-eaters (Wohlgemuth 1906, 49). When

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appearing on the Saracen side in the Chansons de geste, jaiants function as the most challenging enemies of fabulous size and strength. On the Christian side, Wohlgemuth (1906, 40–41) describes a number of characters that he classifies as “enlarged humans” which share features with proper jaiants, such as their extreme size and the weight of their weapons. He regards this as an influence from “Germanic” concepts of giants (Wohlgemuth 1906, 40–41). But more interesting is the parallel to the hyperbolic size and strength of heroes in Middle High German heroic epic, such as the Nibelungenklage, and especially the like often almost courtly Dietrichepik. It could well be that in Old French literature, the heroic ethos demonstrated in the Chansons de geste alienated the historical audience and the heroes were marked as deviant through their Gigantifizierung. Ahrendt (1923, 16) considers the gigantic heroes of the Chansons de geste to be traces of the literary taste of the Carolingian age. The character type of the Ritterriese (giant knight) subsumes antagonistic giants that function in more or less courtly contexts, such as giants living in (sea) fortresses taxing the surrounding areas—sometimes demanding human tributes (i.e., Ahrendt 1923, 24–25, § 35). While both Ahrendth (1923) and Wohlgemuth (1905) see many similarities between the Old French and Middle High German instances, neither of the two concisely define this stock character type at any point, so their analyses remain a desideratum of comparative teratology.

III German Giants Old High German material is scant, and apart from etymology, there is little that links this material to the Middle High German concept of giants. This, however, is due to the character of the sources. The Old High German material stems from a monastic context, and with one exception consists only of glosses, while the Middle High German material stems from courtly romance and heroic epics.

1 Old High German Appellatives Giants are almost unknown in the extant Old High German sources. Only Notker offers an insightful remark, as he equates demons (and indirectly heathen gods) with tursa when paraphrasing “dii paganorum sint daemonia” with “kota dero heidenon sint tursa” (Notker 17, 34). Tursa is a cognate of Old Norse þurs (pl. þursar) and Old English þyrs (pl. þyrsas), from proto-germanic *þurisaz. Apart from the passage by Notker, the appellative turs and its side forms thuris, thures, and dur(i)s are otherwise only found in glosses, as is the other German term, risi/

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riso that is exclusively found in such. Duris glosses Latin deus ‘god’; Dis, Pluto, Orcus, deus inferni ‘god of the underworld’ (Schützeichel 2004, s.v. “”), and cyclopum (Helm, 1953, vol. 2, 89). There is also a compound duriseslizzi ‘devil’s visage’ (Schützeichel 2004, s.v. “”). Risi glosses Latin gigas and Cyclops (Schützeichel 2004, s.v. “”) and thus indicates partial synonymy with turs. The usage in Notker’s remark and the glosses indicate that the word could be used for demonic beings on the one hand (including gods that were regarded as such by German Christians), and Romano-Greek gods on the other.

2 Middle High German Literature Ahrendt (1923, 21; 118) considers Middle High German giants to be influenced by the Saracen giants of the Chansons de geste. As noted above under II.2, there are also heroes of giant like size (e.g., Nibelungenklage, Laurin; Ahrendt 1923, 16, 95). In Middle High German, giants are denoted as rise (pl. risen), less often as turse/ türse. The giant-sized heroes of Dietrich in Laurin are called recke, which is interpreted by Ahrendt (1923, 95) as meaning ‘half giant’ in this context, but is one of the usual terms for ‘hero, brave warrior’ in Middle High German heroic epics. There are also frequent references to biblical giants where giants are concerned in Middle High German courtly romance (Ahrendt 1923, 118).

a Motifs As noted under section C.II.2, the stock character type of the Ritterriese (or, alternatively, Ritter- und Räuberriese) appears in both Old French and Middle High German literature. It subsumes antagonistic courtly giants that demand taxes from the surrounding areas, or fight other knights and steal their women (i.e., Ahrendt 1923, 21–22, § 31). There are three instances of the motif of a young knight having to rescue a virgin that is being held by a giant: Lanzelet, Gawan im Parzival und Gawan in Diu Crône (Ahrendt 1923, 25–26, §§ 33–39). As in Old French literature, there are two variant motifs of a giant robbing a virgin’s lover or wooing a virgin, and subsequently threatening or attacking their home court (cf. Ahrendt 1923, 26–28, §§ 39–42). Giants often live in caves, like the Wilde Leute (“wild people”) of Middle High German literature (Ahrendt 1923, 94). The motif of a giant taking over a dwarf mountain is not uncommon (Ahrendt 1923, 94–95). Due to the nature of the Eckenlied as a Carnivalesque critique of chivalric values, the giants live in castles in this piece of Dietrichepik. Giants often appear in pairs or groups of twelve just like Old Norse berserkers or berserker-like troublemakers. Their number rarely

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exceeds 13. If they appear in pairs, they are either husband and wife or brothers, triggering the motif of blood vengeance (Ahrendt 1923, 93).

b Appearance Unsurprisingly, giants are of a huge size in Middle High German literature (Ahrendt 1923, 94–95, § 113), and if measures are given, they are several klafter or shoes tall (Ahrendt 1923, 95). Likewise, they are also very heavy (Ahrendt 1923, 95, § 114). Interestingly, Middle High German giants are rarely described as ugly. Ugly giants rather seem to display features of the Wilde Leute. However, Wilde Weiber, i.e., female Wilde Leute, can hardly be distinguished from female giants (Ahrendt 1923, 95). Interestingly, this continuum seems comparable to the Old Norse situation, where giantesses and troll women can hardly be distinguished (Schulz 2004, 48), but the terminology denoting giantesses and troll women there is again much more varied, and an attempt to distinguish types of female giants and trolls remains a desideratum. Middle High German giants, however, often have black skin (Ahrendt 1923, 95–96), which might be due to the influence of Old French Saracen jaiants (Wohlgemuth 1905, 27). Ahrendt (1923, 96) suspects there to have been oriental influences, as this skin color is often found with wild men, especially man-eaters, in Middle High German literature. The black skin, however, might nonetheless mark the giants as belonging to the Other. Middle High German giants are also shaggy, or have single outstanding features, such as very long pony tails or long eyebrows (Ahrendt 1923, 96, § 116). Other bodily features are rarely mentioned, but include broad faces, eyes that are set wide apart, or are deep in the skull and/or glowing like coals, and deformed noses (Ahrendt 1923, 96–97, § 117). Multiple body parts are only found in isolated cases, and could stem from Wendish or oriental traditions (Ahrendt 1923, 97–98, § 118). If their clothes are described, they are made from animal hides or dragon skin, but most often giants wear armor (Ahrendt 1923, 98, § 119). Furthermore, giants have extremely loud voices in Middle High German literature, just like Old French jaiants do (Ahrendt 1923, 102, § 125). In combat, giants are swift, strong, and deadly (Ahrendt 1923, 98–99, § 120– 121), making them the most dangerous foes in Middle High German epic, much like Saracen jaiants function in Old French Chansons de geste. Invulnerability is not often mentioned with regard to giants or wild men, and is usually overcome by magical means, such as a special sword (Ahrendt 1923, 100, § 122). There are plenty of comparable motifs featuring invulnerable giants, trolls, and berserks and special (usually dwarf made) swords in Old Norse literature. Man eating is a rare feature of Middle High German giants (Ahrendt 1923, 100–01, § 123), as it is with Old Norse giants, though some of them are even denoted by the appellative

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jötunn ‘giant’ < proto-germanic *etunaz ‘eater’. Most of the rare instances of anthropophagic humanoid entities in Middle High German literature are from biblical and encyclopedic context, and the few man-eating giants show clear classical or oriental influences (Ahrendt 1923, 102). In combat, giants often fight with poles or clubs (Ahrendt 1923, 108–114), just like Old French and Old Norse giants. Middle High German giants are true followers, once attributed by the hero, and especially giantesses are good at treating wounds (Ahrendt 1923, 106–107). This is also a common motif especially for female giants in Old Norse literature (cf. B.VI.2.b and C.V.2).

IV Old English Giants There is only scant material on Old English giants (Ciklamini 1961, 4). The sole giant known from Old English literature is Grendel in Beowulf. Appellatives and proper names of giants do not offer much additional material.

1 Onomastic Evidence a Appellatives Five appellatives denote giants in Old English: ent, eoton, þyrs, gígant, and fífel (Ciklamini 1961, 19). Fífl also designates sea monsters in human and animal form (Ciklamini 1961, 19–20). Eoton, þyrs, and fífl have cognates in Old Norse, but only eoton (cf. Old Norse jǫtunn) and þyrs (cf. Old Norse þurs) are appellatives for giants in Old Norse as well. Gígant is a Latin loan word and except in Beowulf is only used in psalms (Ciklamini 1961, 20). The etymologies of the Old English appellatives are rather uncertain and give little insight into role and function of Old English and Proto-Germanic giants (see Eldevik 2005 for a recent discussion).

b Proper Names There are two Old English proper names referring to giants (Jente 1921, 194–95). A plant name, Fornetes folm, obviously contains a giant name otherwise known from Old Norse, Fornjótr. It is unfortunately unknown which plant this name refers to. Then there is a sword name, Mimming, which is thought to contain another giant name otherwise known from Old Norse, Mímir. The latter is also found in Old High German place names (Helm 1953, 95).

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c Place Names There are numerous place names, especially in northern England, that include the lexeme þyrs in later forms such as thrush, thrus, thrust or dross (Cardew 2005, 201–02). These place names are connected to water, fens, and caves, which are “traditionally the haunt of monsters, devils, and evil spirits” (Ciklamini 1961, 11). The concept of þyrs, at least as it is attested in these later place names, thus differs from that of Scandinavian giants who dwell in lava fields and on mountains (Cardew 2005, 205; cf. V.2), but they have in common that they both live in spaces bordering the cultural sphere, as all these areas are non-arable. In agreement with the interpretation of the place names, a gnomic verse associates þyrsas with fens: “þyrs sceal on fenne gwunian ana innan lande” (Maxims II, 42–43; Ciklamini 1961, 21). Lastly, a connection to Master Builder tales is made by the Wade’s Causeway, a Roman road, which had been built by the giant Wade’s wife according to folklore (Ciklamini 1961, 4).

2 Grendel Grendel might be the most well-known Old English giant, but his status is ambiguous, as he is denoted both as eoten and wer ‘man’ (Eldevik 2005, 104), and might have features of Old English þyrsas, which are giant entities believed to live in the fenlands of England, as indicated by the places names above (Cardew 2005, 201–02; cf. Cardew 2005 and Eldevik 2005 for recent discussions and further literature). Another major difference to Old Norse giants and trolls is Grendel’s cannibalism. It is a rare feature with Old Norse, Middle High German, and Old French giants to display cannibalism, which makes it hard to root the literary character Grendel in these literary traditions. Maybe Beowulf shows features typical of Old English heroic epic in this respect which we do not know of since there is so little material, or features its very own concept of a monstrous character. The latter possibility is rarely taken into account in historical-comparative research.

V Old Norse Giants Giants can be found in all three indigenous genres of Old Norse literature, saga literature, Eddic lays, and skaldic poetry.

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1 Appellatives and Names There are numerous appellatives for giants that are traditionally translated into English not only as ‘giant’ but also as ‘ogre’ or ‘troll’. Some appellatives refer only to female giants. These appellatives are often translated as ‘giantess,’ ‘troll woman’ and ‘ogress,’ and especially in saga literature they often denote entities that have many similarities to folk tale hags. The most common appellatives for giants are jǫtunn, þurs, and troll. Especially the last term has a wider meaning in saga literature, as it is being applied to humans with giant-like characteristics and even becomes synonymous to berserkr ‘berserker’ in some sagas. However, there are far more than those three appellatives: Schulz (2004, 37–50) lists more than twenty appellatives for giants and their distribution in Old Norse texts—not including runic inscriptions. Some of these appellatives are composites that paraphrase giants in a kenning-like fashion, such as hraunbúi ‘lava-dweller,’ as giants often live in desolate, rocky areas, (Schulz 2004, 45; Boberg 1966, 119, F531.6.2.1.; Motz 1993b, 86–96) beyond arable—and thus cultural—space. Even though the reconstruction of sub-groups of giants by their appellatives has been attempted (Motz 1987), Schulz (2004, 30–37) finds that there is no obvious pattern in the usage of appellatives for giants. She points out that individual sagas create their own taxonomy, e.g., of friendly vs. unfriendly giants. For example, in Þorsteins þáttr bœjarmagns friendly giants are jǫtnar (sg. jǫtunn), and antagonistic, heathen giants are þursar (sg. þurs). Another text, Bárðar saga Snæfelsáss, contrasts four groups of giants: jǫtnar, þursar, risar, and troll. In this text, the jǫtnar and þursar have the same characteristics as in Þorsteins þáttr bœjarmagns. So, further study might still reveal conventions regarding concepts of giant sub-groups, even if these might not be consistent for larger parts of Old Norse literature.

2 Motifs In Eddic lays giants usually have alien powers, with the potential to threaten the gods in more or less fatal ways (Schulz 2004, 119), such as the robbing of Þórr’s hammer in Þrymskviða or the apples of Iðunn that grant the gods their eternal youth in Haustlǫng and Skaldskaparmǫ́ l. They are consistently characterized as ancient, since they also feature in the cosmogony of Old Norse mythology: in Gylfaginning (st. 6–7), the gods Óðinn, Vili, and Vé slay the primordial giant Ymir, and create the world out of his body. Corresponding to their primordial existence, giants possess great knowledge (Schulz 2004, 120). This is especially seen in the gnomic lay Vafþrúðnismǫ́ l, in which the giant Vafþrúðnir makes a formidable

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contestant in a battle of knowledge with Óðinn. According to the mythological cosmogony, they are the god’s previous generation, much like ancient Greek titans and gods, but there are also more direct family ties, such as the god Týr who is Hymir’s son in Hymiskviða. Their wealth is only mentioned implicitly. Schulz (2004, 120) supposes a poetic restriction, as wealth is the characteristic attribute of a leader in skaldic praise poems, and would thus be a far too positive attribute for the rather fiendish Eddic giants. Skaldic verse mostly depicts the animosity between gods and giants (Schulz 2004, 134–35). Most of the kennings either characterize giants as kinsmen of other giants, thus marking them as part of an out-group, or associate them with rocks and mountains, i.e., the non-cultivatable wilderness (Schulz 2004, 134). Only a few kennings presuppose the knowledge of Eddic characteristics of giants, such as their wealth, knowledge, or primordial existence. More kennings rather associate giants with destructive natural forces who damage objects, like vandar jǫtunn ‘giant of the mast’ (Schulz 2004, 135) for ‘storm’. Saga giants and Eddic giants feature in a common set of motifs: They are primordial entities, function as antagonists or abstract threat and are located at the periphery beyond the homes of gods and men (Schulz 2004, 309), just like Old Norse dwarves and so many more monstrous entities. Some saga giants, however, are stupid, contrary to the knowledgeable giants of Eddic lays (Schulz 2004, 309). Unsurprisingly, saga giants can be huge, but more often size is not mentioned, or they appear to be big and strong humans, especially in the troll-part of the continuum (cf. Jakobsson 2008). Saga giants are nearly without exception ugly, but saga giantesses sometimes function as objects of desire, as they do in Eddic lays such as Skírnismál, and are described in these cases as possessing great beauty (Schulz 2004, 164–66). Another typical feature is their tremendous strength, and since they frequently function as monstrous foes, they are the topical most deadly enemy a hero can encounter during his adventures in saga literature, and—vice versa—the most deadly foes of heroes are often attributed with giant like features, even if they are basically humans. This function is similar to that of Old French Saracen jaiants and Middle High German risen. Just like Old French jaiants, Old Norse giants most often use clubs (or staffs) as weapons. These weapons, however, are made from iron, and not from trees, as is the case with jaiants. Still, the iron rods are usually interpreted as showing giants’ cultural backwardness. This backwardness, their marginal spatial situation, and their aberrantly strong appetite for horse meat and human flesh, have led to interpretations of giants—and saga giantesses especially—as symbols of the cultural Other, i.e., Sámi (Gallo 2006; Straubhaar 2001), and as a demonizing symbol for women with a deviating, i.e., aggressive, sexuality (Schulz 2004, 184–98). Considering their appearance, their lust for

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sex and eating human flesh, many appellatives denoting them could more readily be translated as “hag.” The fluid continuum between giants, trolls, and berserkers is best illustrated by the fact that there are no Master Builder tales in saga literature involving giants, as is the case with Eddic lays. There is, however, a Master Builder tale in Eyrbyggja saga about the building of a road through the Ljósufjöll on Snæfellsnes, the Berserkjahraun (‘berserker’s lava field’) that involves two berserkers.

Select Bibliography Ahrendt, Ernst Herwig, Der Riese in der mittelhochdeutschen Epik (Güstrow 1923). Battles, Paul, “Dwarves in Germanic Literature: Deutsche Mythologie or Grimm’s Myths,” The Shadow-Walkers, Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous, ed. Tom A. Shippey (Tempe, AZ, 2005), 29–82. Grooms, Chris, The Giants of Wales, Cewri Cymru (Lewiston, NY, 1993). Jakobsson, Ármann, “The Trollish Acts of Þorgrímr the Witch. The Meanings of Troll and Ergi in Medieval Iceland,” Saga Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research 32 (2008): 39–68. Lütjens, August, Der Zwerg in der deutschen Heldendichtung des Mittelalters, rpt. ed. (1911; Hildesheim 1977). Schäfke, Werner, “Was ist eigentlich ein Zwerg? Eine prototypensemantische Figurenanalyse der dvergar in der Sagaliteratur,” Mediaevistik 23 (2010): 197–299. Schulz, Katja, Riesen: Von Wissenshütern und Wildnisbewohnern in Edda und Saga (Heidelberg 2004). Wohlgemuth, Fritz, Riesen und Zwerge in der altfranzösischen erzählenden Dichtung (Stuttgart 1906).

David Sheffler

Education and Schooling A Introduction Textbooks and popular works on the Middle Ages rarely mention schooling. When they do, it is typically to assert either its absence or its alleged dependence on the Church. At the same time, interest in schooling among specialists has been slowly growing (Orme 2006, 2–11). Recent scholarly works have centered around a number of key debates: the extent of women’s literacy and access to education (Green 2000, Essay VII); the expansion of schooling (Orme 2006); the role of the universities (Ridder-Symoens, ed., 1992), and the social and religious impact of increasing literacy (Stock 1983; Clanchy 1993; Biller and Hudson, ed., 1994). The purpose of this essay is to provide a brief overview of formal schooling in the Middle Ages in the Latin West between ca. 500 and ca. 1500. The essay will focus on four major categories: the schools themselves, teaching and learning, curricula, and finally the students. Although important subjects in their own right, schooling in less formal contexts—homes, guilds, private tutors—will be discussed only in passing. Jewish education is addressed elsewhere and will not be discussed here. The education of women, about which we now know a great deal more than we did just a few decades ago, does not receive separate treatment, but will be discussed throughout the article.

B Schools I Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages Historians have long since abandoned the image of a benighted Middle Ages precipitated by barbaric Germanic hordes inundating the sophisticated and civilized world of the Romans (Fontaine 2005, 735). Although political centers shifted and multiplied, and in some areas the value of traditional Roman education declined or vanished entirely, the process unfolded over multiple generations and even then remained incomplete (Riché 1976, 17–21; Fontaine 2005, 736–37; Wood 1990, 70–71). Thus, despite the political and military instability that ultimately fractured the Western Roman Empire, the legacy of Roman schooling continued even as new educational forms and priorities emerged. Gregory of Tours’s famous lament that in his day the study of letters had

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“virtually disappeared altogether” (Gregory of Tours 1979, 63) no longer rings as true as it once did. As Ralph Mathisen has shown, the secular schools that dominated the educational landscape of late antiquity continued to function into the sixth and seventh century (Mathisen 2005; cf. Wood 1990, 73; Riché 1976, 48–51). The late fifthcentury bishop of Clermont, Sidonius of Apollinaris (d. ca. 489), mentions schools in Arles, Narbonne, Bordeaux, Périgueux, Clermont, and Lyon, and Gregory of Tours describes a curriculum at Marseille indicating an active secular school there (Mathisen 2005, 5–8). Traditional Roman education continued in Northern Italy as well, as evidenced by the career of Ennodius of Pavia (ca. 473–421) who drew students from as far away as his native Provence. The town schools in Milan and Rome likewise continued to operate, the latter serving as a center of study for law and rhetoric (Riché 1976, 24). In Visigothic Spain, lay literacy remained relatively high among the elites suggesting that schools continued to operate there as well (Collins 1990, 114–15; Riché 1976, 36–37). The schools of North Africa also remained important centers of learning. Martianus Capella, a scholar and jurist in Carthage, produced the influential pedagogical text, The Marriage of Mercury and Philology some time before 430. Following what was likely a decline in the activities of the schools during the initial phases of the Vandal conquests, the schools of Carthage and Vandal North Africa reemerge in the sources with a flurry of activity in the last quarter of the fifth century. After Justinian’s conquest of North Africa, the emperor restored public funding for schools in several key cities including Carthage. Although renewed public funding ensured income stability for the teaching personnel in the official city schools, it did not represent a restoration of schooling, which in Carthage, at least, had never really ceased (Riché 1976, 39; Fontaine 2005, 740). Even in rural areas under Vandal rule, witnesses to property transactions were still expected to be able to sign their own names, suggesting that some level of elementary education survived outside the cities as well (Riché 1976, 20). Traditional Roman learning survived to the extent that it continued to carry value as a practical skill and an indicator of social prestige and identity. Political elites, who took over as Roman imperial structures collapsed, continued to require individuals skilled in both law and the rhetorical arts who could provide the newly established regimes with a legal foundation and legitimacy (Fontaine 2005, 736). This close connection between political power and schooling is perhaps best illustrated in Justinian’s Pragmatic Sanction in which he sought to reestablish official salaries for teachers of grammar, rhetoric and law after his reconquest of portions of the western Mediterranean (Fontaine 2005, 740). And although in many regions the value of a traditional Roman education as a marker of social class declined with the rise of a militarized aristocracy, engagement with

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Latin texts and authors did not entirely cease. Nor did literacy ever become the exclusive preserve of clerics or the highest stratum of society (Kelly 1990, 60–61; McKitterick, ed., 1990, 330). Merovingian royal courts in particular often hosted scholars and teachers who educated the royal household and the children of key magnates (Wood 1990, 74). At the same time monastic, parish, and diocesan schools grew in importance (Fontaine 2005, 736). The need for competent clerics and ecclesiastical administrators spurred bishops and other church officials to establish schools early in the history of the institutionalized Church. In his work De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine (354–430) concerns himself first and foremost with the training of teachers to serve these schools. The Council of Provence and the Second Council of Toledo, held in 529 and 531 respectively, required the establishment of schools for the education of future clerics. The Second Council of Toledo further stipulated that when these boys reached the age of eighteen they could choose between the church and a secular life (Fontaine 2005, 744; Riché 1977, 282–90). Many monastic communities also developed schools. In the prologue to his monastic rule, St. Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480–ca. 547) refers to the monastery itself as a school for the Lord’s service. The Rule does not specifically discuss the establishment of schools, but the expectation that the monks participate in the lectio divina (divine reading) coupled with the practice of accepting oblates, assured that most monasteries provided at least a rudimentary education (Fontaine 2005, 743). Although somewhat unique in its unapologetic embrace of pagan learning, and intense focus on the preservation of texts, Cassiodorus’s (ca. 490–ca. 585) foundation, the Vivarium, provided a model for the establishment of a rigorous monastic school that combined the study of both sacred and secular letters (Hildebrandt 1991, 26– 27; Leclercq 1982, 19–21). Some of the most influential monastic schools emerged from the peregrinations of the Scotti. Most notable among these, the seventh century Irishman Columbanus (ca. 543–ca. 615) established a series of monasteries from Burgundy to Northern Italy including the important scriptoria of Luxeuil, St. Gall, and Bobbio. These schools later played a significant role in the eighth and ninth centuries by providing many of the texts and scholars that sparked the so-called Carolingian Renaissance. In England too, the Irish monks played a decisive role, especially in Northumberland, where the unique elements of Celtic Christian culture came into contact with Roman missionaries moving North from Canterbury. The Northumbrian monasteries of Whitby, Wearmouth, and Jarrow, and the cathedral at York developed schools whose reputations extended well beyond the British Isles (Fontaine 2005, 754; Orme 2006, 22).

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II Carolingian Schooling Although the so-called Carolingian Renaissance still stands out as a period of remarkable scholarly activity, the centuries both before and after Charlemagne’s reign no longer appear as dark as they once did (Wood 1990; Moore 2006). At the same time, overly optimistic interpretations of Charlemagne’s educational policy, especially as it relates to monastic schools, has further distorted the relative significance the Carolingian Renaissance. Nevertheless, Charlemagne and his immediate successors did provide significant financial support and leadership that encouraged the growth of schools and scriptoria and resulted in the development of new spiritual and intellectual networks. (McKitterick 1989, 163; Contreni 1995, 711; Hildebrandt 1991, 108). In addition, the more than 50,000 surviving texts bear witness to the existence of an intense intellectual and literary culture producing biblical commentaries and histories, and engendering new debates on long dormant theological questions (Contreni 1995, 710). Charlemagne also cultivated a dazzling court and palace school employing renowned scholars Peter of Pisa and Alcuin of York who taught the Emperor’s children and those of his courtiers. Two key documents attest to Charlemagne’s educational program: the Epistola de Litteris Colendis and Admonitio Generalis. The De Litteris Colendis takes the form of a letter to the Abbot Baugulf of Fulda directing the Abbot to educate “each according to his capacity.” Despite the apparent universal call for education, the letter aims primarily at the training of future clerics (Hildebrandt 1991, 56). Likewise, the Admonitio, which required monasteries and bishoprics to establish schools for children from both free and servile families, clearly aimed at the education of priests (Contreni 1995, 715; Hildrebrandt 1991, 58). The real innovation was the employment of monastic schools for the education of clerics. This intent is clear from the capitula of Theodulf (ca. 760–821), bishop of Orléans, which permitted priests in the diocese of Orléans to send their relatives to either the cathedral school or one of the monastic schools with “no hint here that those who chose to learn their letters in a monastic school intended to become monks” (Contreni 1995, 713). As a further indication of the growing presence of nonoblates in monastic schools, the Council of Aachen reversed earlier policy and expressly forbade all but future monks from attending monastic schools (Contreni 1995, 714). The famous plan of St. Gall, with its school located outside the convent close, may have been an effort to circumvent these new strictures against the mingling of oblates with external students (Hildrebrandt 1991, 91–93). In all, some seventy schools left behind significant traces of their activities in the surviving sources with major centers at St. Amand, Corbie, St. Denis, Auxerre, Laon, Lyons, Lorsch, St. Gall, Fulda, Tegernsee, Reichenau, Verona, Milan, and Pavia (Contreni 1995, 721).

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Women also participated in the intellectual activities associated with the Carolingian revival. Many female religious communities housed significant schools intended for the education of the nuns. Paschasius Radbertus received his early education with the nuns at Soissons and later dedicated several works to them in appreciation (Contreni 1995, 718). The scribal activities of the nuns is also well attested; the scriptoria at Chelles, which Bernard Bischoff first identified, now sits alongside a growing list of female houses that produced a significant number of texts (McKitterick 1994; Contreni 1995, 719). Aristocratic women outside of religious institutions might also receive high levels of education. Two of Charlemagne’s daughters, Gisela and Rotrud, wrote to Alcuin requesting assistance in their efforts to understand St. John’s Gospel (Garver 2009, 162; Contreni 1995, 718). Even outside the immediate circle of the imperial court, the education of the noble woman Dhuoda attests to a high degree of aristocratic engagement with schools and learning (Contreni 1995, 718).

III High Middle Ages Judging from the relative dearth of manuscripts surviving from the tenth century, historians have long argued that the end of Carolingian political hegemony signaled a dramatic decline in intellectual activity, including schools. When coupled with accounts of Viking attacks on once flourishing monastic communities, the impression of decline seemed confirmed. Yet a more recent systematic examination of the textual productions of the tenth century suggests a rather more optimistic assessment of education within the core of the old Carolingian lands. Indeed, even areas at the periphery of Latin Christendom experienced “a period not of decadence but rather of renewed interest in study and intellectual activities” (Leonardi 2000, 191). In Anglo-Saxon England and Christian Spain, courts continued to attract scholars and provide schooling for those closest to political power. In Southern Italy, Salerno near Naples served as a center for the translation of Greek texts (primarily hagiographical accounts) into Latin (Leonardi 2000, 193). Scholars working in both Southern Italy and the recently conquered Toledo, also translated significant numbers of texts from Arabic (often mediated through Hebrew) that would have profound effects on the curriculum of European schools (Pedersen 1997, 119–20). Perhaps the most famous educator of the tenth century, Gerbert of Aurillac (ca. 945–1003), who took the papal name Sylvester II, taught and studied in many of the most important schools of his day. A restless scholar, Gerbert began his studies at his home convent of Aurillac, continued in Catalonia and later taught at the cathedral school of Rheims before serving as the tutor to Otto III. Gerbert’s

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studies in Catalonia brought him in contact with Islamic scientific and mathematical learning which he famously incorporated into his curriculum at Rheims (Leonardi 2000, 209; Zuccato 2005, 748). Gerbert’s pupils at Rheims came from across the former Carolingian realms and often returned to their home regions as bishops, administrators, and teachers (DeMayo 2012). Many of the older monastic and diocesan schools that had flourished under the Carolingians continued to do so, while new ones, most notably in Saxony and Bavaria, emerged. The famous scriptoria of Quedlinburg, Reichenau, and Hildesheim crafted beautiful illuminated manuscripts and trained scribes. Female religious houses including Gandersheim provided schooling for the daughters of the Ottonian elite and produced the poet and playwright, Hrotsvit, whose works remain some of the most famous literary productions of the tenth century (Leonardi 2000, 194; 199). The cathedral schools of Liège, Cologne, Hildesheim, Bamberg, Cologne, Rheims, and Chartres enjoyed particularly high reputations as well as royal patronage. Many of these schools trained the men who staffed the royal and episcopal administrations and provided these courtiers with the skills and mores appropriate to their station (Jaeger 1994, 36–52). The prestige of the cathedral schools and associated libraries drew students from across Europe and played an important role in the reproduction and transmission of texts. Monastic houses, both male and female, continued to staff schools to educate their oblates and in some cases non-oblates (Opitz 1994, 67). Although often overshadowed in the historiography by the reputation of cathedral schools on the one hand, and the subsequent rise of the universities on the other, monastic schools occupied a position of prominence in the educational and intellectual landscape (Vaughn and Rubenstein, ed., 1–7). The monastery of Bec, with its abbey school, provides perhaps the most compelling example of the continued vibrancy of monastic schooling. Headed in turn by two future bishops of Canterbury, Lanfranc (ca. 1005–1089) and Anselm (ca. 1033–1109)—both originally from Italy—the school of Bec epitomized the continued transnational character of schooling and the fluid boundaries that separated monastic and cathedral schools (Vaughn and Rubenstein 2006, 15). Bec also serves as an example of “feepaying pupils without any aspirations to become monks” in monastic schools (Swanson 1999, 17). Even as oblation became rarer during the twelfth century, children might still be brought into monasteries for schooling (Orme 2006, 257). By the end of the twelfth century, new educational structures competed with traditional cathedral and monastic schools for students (Luscombe 2004, 467). In some places, collegiate churches, with their emphasis on pastoral care and greater engagement with the world, developed new schools to serve a growing urban population (Swanson, 18). The schoolmaster William of Champeaux (ca. 1069–ca. 1122), whom Abelard savaged in his Historia calamitatum, founded just such a

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school at St. Victor in 1109 where he taught students free of charge (Swanson 1999, 18). Paris, in particular, also gave rise to a number of independent masters whose frequently brutal rivalries left a trail of bruised psyches and broken careers. Students crowded around popular masters near the Petit Pont and the Mont Sainte-Geneviève (Pedersen 132–33). Rival schools challenged each other to high-stakes debates, which, if Abelard is to be believed, could destroy the defeated master’s reputation and decimate his school. Although lacking institutional continuity, these independent masters continued to draw students and scholars to Paris and helped to establish the city as the intellectual center of Latin Christendom (Swanson 1999, 22). Paris, of course, did not possess a monopoly on education in this period. Higher level teaching is attested to in most major towns and Councils diocesan cities. Abelard’s travels give some indication of the range of towns in which independent masters could earn a living. Both the Third (1179) and the Fourth Lateran (1215) decreed that every cathedral should provide for a grammar master (whether they did or not is of course another matter entirely). As was always the case, those with sufficient resources, like the mother of Guibert of Nogent (ca. 1053–ca. 1122), might make arrangements with private tutors. And even small parishes likely trained one or two clerics in the basics of reading and perhaps writing (Swanson 1999, 23). Twelfth-century Italy, where monastic and cathedral schools were less dominant than in the North, saw the rise of schools for the study of the ars dictaminis as well as the development of vibrant city schools (Swanson 1999, 24). Montpellier and Salerno developed as centers for the study of Medicine and by the middle of the twelfth century Bologna ruled in law (Swanson 1999, 32; Verger 1999, 256).

IV Rise of the Universities By the opening of the thirteenth century the first universities (studia generalia) had begun to emerge (Rüegg 1992, 6). These institutions fundamentally altered the medieval educational landscape. Once flourishing intellectual centers like Chartres and Rheims now possessed only regional significance (Verger 1999, 257). For reasons of local and institutional pride, various schools have claimed the title of oldest university. Salerno, which in the early twelfth century already had a large number of practitioners and teachers of medicine, was an early candidate (Pedersen 1997, 122–24). But its claim has given way to the rival claims of Paris and Bologna. Bologna’s case rests on the Authentica habita (ca. 1155), in which Frederick Barbarossa granted special protection to the students of Bologna, and on the initial formation of Bologna’s law students into nations in 1191. The

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competing claim of Paris asserts that a true university requires an association of teachers and students across multiple disciplines, something that did not emerge until 1208 at Paris (Rüegg 1992, 6; Verger 1999, 258). Regardless of primacy, the universities of Paris and Bologna provided the institutional models followed by most subsequent universities. Born in conflict with local authorities, students (at Bologna) and masters (at Paris) joined together for mutual protection. By the 1230s, in response to pressures from the commune of Bologna, two student universities formed at Bologna, one for Italians (excepting those from Bologna whose presumed loyalties to their home city made them suspect) and one for the ultramontanes (mostly Germans). Excluded from official universities structures, the professors contracted with the student universities (Verger 1999, 258). The statutes of 1252 reflect the full institutionalization the University of Bologna as a student controlled university focusing on the study of canon and civil law. In contrast, at Paris, it was the masters who joined together to form a university in response to the demands of secular and ecclesiastical authorities. It is clear from the early statutes of Paris that the masters also sought to impose some level of discipline on the growing number of students flowing into the city to study (Ferruolo 1985, 285–86; Verger 1999, 259). Although it is important not too draw too sharp a distinction between the two archetypes, indeed universities such as Salamanca reflected structural elements of both Paris and Bologna, Bologna’s ‘student’ university provided the model for many of the universities of Southern Europe (Verger 192, 49). Paris meanwhile influenced many of the Northern universities. By the end of the thirteenth century, eighteen studia generalia operated in Europe, three in the Iberian Peninsula (Lisbon, Salamanca, and Valladolid), eight in the Italian Peninsula (Naples, Rome, Siena, Arezzo, Bologna, Padua, Vicenza, and Vercelli), five in the Kingdom of France (Montpellier, Toulouse, Angers, Orléans, and Paris) and two in England (Oxford and Cambridge). Fifteen of these show evidence of significant activity throughout the latter half of the thirteen century, with Bologna, Padua, Salamanca, Paris, Montpellier, Oxford, and Cambridge emerging as truly international centers of study (Verger 1992, 55). The German Empire, however, remained without a true university until the fourteenth century when Emperor Charles IV founded the University of Prague in 1348 (Šmahel 2007, 9–10).

V Mendicant Studia Nearly as important as the rise of the universities, mendicant studia emerged as centers of schooling in the thirteenth century. In order to assure a steady stream of educated preachers and teachers, the four main mendicant orders (Francis-

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cans, Dominicans, Augustinian Hermits, and Carmelites), developed highly structured educational systems (Mulchahey 1998; Roest 2000; Lickteig 1981; Andrews 2006, 148–62). The Dominican system emerged first, but the other mendicants quickly adapted these innovations to the needs of their respective orders. At the lowest level every Dominican priory employed a lector who provided basic instruction in theology. Although in theory the Dominicans only accepted literate members as friars, elementary and basic grammar education may also have been available in some convents. Moreover, these schools may have included a few external (non-mendicant) students. For higher levels of education, several convents pooled their resources to support a school of arts (primarily logic) and natural philosophy (science). These schools rotated between convents to help defray costs. Students who succeeded at this level might be selected to study at one of the studia generalia for the order. (Courtenay 1987, 61–66; Mulchahey 1998, 219–350). Each year a small number of the most promising students entered one of the convents associated with the universities at Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. The Dominican studia of St. Jacques in Paris and Blackfriars in Oxford drew the best and brightest from within the order. By the 1230s, the Dominicans held two of twelve chairs of theology at Paris and one at Oxford. Within two decades the Franciscans had similarly acquired control of theology chair at both Paris and Oxford (Asztalos 1999, 415; Mulchahey 1998, 381). The reputation of the mendicant theological schools was so high that some secular students began to attend the lectures. A second tier of mendicant studia generalia coalesced around other centers of study particularly Bologna and Cologne. Not surprisingly, many of the secular masters saw the growing influence of the mendicants as a threat to the university and their positions within it. Already in the mid-thirteenth century, secular masters at Paris sought to limit the recruitment of students into mendicant orders. At Oxford, the secular masters created new statutes which would have effectively barred mendicants from becoming theology masters had not dispensations to the statutes been routinely granted (Asztalos 1999, 416).

VI Late Middle Ages By the beginning of the fourteenth century, a crowded and complex educational landscape had emerged. In many of the expanding urban centers, older monastic, collegiate, parish, and cathedral schools operated alongside, and at times competed with, mendicant studia, city schools, and private schoolmasters. Even in rural areas and small towns, parish priests frequently educated a few young scholars. Many parish libraries were sufficiently well stocked to provide at least basic education leading to elementary literacy. The high number of university

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matriculants from small towns and rural areas, suggests that geography was not the most significant barrier to education (Schwinges 2000, 40). The surviving evidence also suggests an increase in the number of schools, students, and texts during the late Middle Ages. By the fourteenth century, established city grammar masters and ecclesiastical schools complained about competition from small, often illegal, vernacular schools. In Germany so-called deutsche Schulen taught basic vernacular literacy and numeracy to the children of urban merchants who adapted the curriculum to their social and economic needs. Similar developments can be seen across Europe in the fifteenth century (Willemsen 2013, 22–30). Patrons eager to solidify earthly reputations and secure heavenly rewards established schools and scholarships for poor scholars (Moran Cruz 1985; Alexander 1990). Cities and towns founded new schools and expanded existing ones. In many cities across Europe, schoolmasters began to appear in urban account records as paid civic officials. One recent study estimates that there were sixty grammar schools in the Northern Netherlands by 1500 (Willemsen 2008, 23). Cities across France founded new schools at civic expense and at times ecclesiastical offense (Huppert 1984, 12–13; Willemsen 2008, 31). Similar growth is also evident within Germany (Endres 1991, 153) Italy (Grendler 1989, 13) and Scandinavia (Willemsen 2008, 33). The expansion of schooling in Italy is particularly remarkable. Here, town schools predate the opening of the fourteenth century. By the middle of the fifteenth century they appear in nearly every city from Lombardy to Sicily. Many towns provided free schooling to the children of its tax-paying citizenry, although the elite, above all in Venice and Florence, still preferred private tutors (Black 2004, 23–24). These sophisticated educational structures often included separate elementary and secondary institutions (Black 2004, 19–20). Alongside the traditional secondary schools aimed at developing Latin literacy, Italy also saw the rise of abacus schools, an alternative secondary education aimed at the acquisition of basic numeracy (Black 2004, 23). Although the overall impression is one of dramatic expansion, some caution is necessary here. Some of the apparent increase may simply be the result of the higher survival rate for more recent documents. A simple narrative of incremental increase that overlooks regional differences and fluctuations must also be avoided (Orme 2006, 341). Nevertheless, other evidence seems to confirm broadbased growth across Europe. New universities appeared in Scotland, Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland. In all, thirty-five universities opened their doors between 1400 and 1500. Enrollments at Oxford and Cambridge increased fifty percent, and German matriculations rose five-fold. Private libraries, as well as those attached to religious and civic institutions, increased in size and richness (Verger 1998, 225; 241; Schwinges 1986). The increase in university graduates is

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also attested in the intensifying competition for the most desirable positions (Moraw 1995, 286). Two additional institutions made significant contributions to late medieval education: the beguines and the Sisters and Brethren of the Common Life. Schools appear in the houses of many beguines from the beginning of the movement in the early thirteenth century. By the fourteenth century, at least in Germany and the Low Countries, beguinages housed more religious women than any other monastic order and attracted a variety of students to their schools (Simons 2003, 85). The Sisters and Brethren of the Common Life, similar in some ways to the beguines as they did not take permanent vows, joined together in a communal life centered on religious devotion and pious reading. Given that many of the brethren had themselves been schoolmasters, including the founder Geert Groote, it is unsurprising to find a keen interest in education among the brethren. As an extension of their core mission, many of the houses established bursae (hostels) which provided food, lodging, tutoring, and moral instruction for Latin scholars (Van Engen 2008, 149–50). The house associated with the school at Deventer could boast several of the leading intellectual lights of the late Middle Ages including: Nicolas of Cusa, Erasmus, and Rudolf Agricola. And although Erasmus famously criticized the brethren as unsophisticated and antiquated, the Brethren’s direct approach to reading the Bible echoed aspects of the humanist movement and contributed to both religious and educational reform at the end of the Middle Ages (Verger 1998, 228).

C Teaching and Learning I Discipline The trope of the harsh schoolmaster dominated the medieval image of the classroom. Guibert of Nogent complained about the cruelty (and incompetence) of his master from whom he “was deluged everyday with a hail of blows and whippings” (Guibert of Nogent 1996, 16). The twelfth century royal portal of Chartres includes the image of Lady Grammar, switch in hand, correcting a cowering pupil (Münster-Swendsen 2006, 307). In late-medieval Germany, school-children celebrated the annual Virgatumgehen singing songs and cutting new switches for later classroom use (Sheffler 2008, 153). The fifteenth century German humanist Conrad Celtis (1459–1508), admonished his students to bear harsh words patiently that they might learn more from words than from blows (Celtis 1963, 4). A collection of fifteenth-century school exercises associated with Bristol offered up for translation into Latin “my fellow being beaten with a birch rod, I am to be

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beaten with a whip” (Orme 2013, 54). Fines and systematic humiliation were also employed (Sheffler 2008, 148). These examples, which could be easily multiplied, limn a grim picture of the medieval schoolhouse. This picture, however, is misleading and incomplete. Daily practice was often much gentler. In contrast to the brutality of the scenes portrayed above, William of Conches (ca. 1100–ca. 1154) and John of Salisbury (ca. 1120–1180) advocated a pedagogy based on “affinity and love.” According to John of Salisbury, students “listen with pleasure to those whom they love, and believe what they say…” (Münster-Swendsen 2006, 308–09). The noble religious women who composed the so-called Regensburg Love Songs in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, similarly express keen affection for their schoolmaster (Dronke 1968, 422–47). The fourteenth century German schoolmaster, Conrad of Megenberg (1309–1374), instructed teachers to adjust their methods to the needs of the students and to “correct the timid by words, master the frivolous with the switch, and dispense to each according to his abilities the gift of letters” (Conrad of Megenberg 1984, 38). A fifteenth century statute from the city of Bayreuth cautions schoolmasters to do nothing cruel to the students (Sheffler 2008, 148–49). Beatings, of course, did take place—regulations limiting their brutality would make little sense otherwise —but at no time did they comprise the sum total of classroom experiences (Orme 2006, 146–47).

II Instruction 1 Elementary and Secondary Schools Depending on the size and type of school, classroom practices could vary significantly. Class size ranged from a handful of students studying under a parish priest or a tutor hired by a wealthy family, to eighty or more in a large cathedral or town school (Orme 2006, 141–42). In larger schools, the schoolmaster typically supervised one or more assistants often called locati (ushers). Conrad of Megenberg described a system with two additional levels of teaching assistants including a pedagogue and an accusator to maintain discipline (Conrad of Megenberg 1984, 25). Students might also be divided into separate classes by skill level. One late fifteenth-century schoolbook imagined the students separated into groups according to their primary instructional texts (Sheffler 2008, 110). Despite individual variations, pedagogical methods at the elementary and secondary level remained relatively stable throughout the Middle Ages. Students frequently learned to read using a hornbook made of wood or slate inscribed with the letters of the alphabet and important prayers. The students learned to recog-

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nize the letters and to read them first as syllables and then as entire words. Even as book ownership became more common in the later Middle Ages, learning and teaching remained intensely personal with a high degree of “face-to-face encounters and a direct, oral transmission of knowledge” (Münster-Swendsen 2006, 310). The oral component of teaching included the use of frequent repetition and rhyme to ensure proper memorization. Even the texts used in the classroom reflect the essential oral/aural aspect of medieval teaching and learning. The Donatus and many later grammars presented a series questions to which the students were expected to provide a suitable oral response. Nomen quid est? (what is a noun?). Students would then be expected to provide the appropriate answer, Pars orationis cum casu corpus aut rem proprie communiterve significans (a part of speech with a case signifying an object or an abstract thing either generally or specifically). More advanced grammar schools often expected their students to speak only Latin on the school grounds. At this level, instruction might also include disputations in Latin and, in larger towns, competitions between schools (Orme 2006, 148–49). Instruction in writing involved first learning to form letters by copying them onto wax tablets using a bone or metal stylus. The tablets made of wood or slate were covered with a thin layer of wax that could be easily erased and written over. Such tablets, some inscribed with school exercises, have been excavated across Europe (Willemsen 2008, 57).

2 University Instruction In all the faculties, university masters lectured on texts listed in a standardized syllabus. Masters too, were increasingly interchangeable. During the course of the lectures, which lasted one and half to two hours, the master read and explicated portions of the mandated text. A typical school year included between 130– 150 days of lecture (Verger 1992, 154–55). During the lectures students followed the readings in their own copies and took notes on the explication. In the afternoon, professors (or formed bachelors) delivered additional (extraordinary) lectures. At least once a week, professors arranged disputations in which the bachelors and masters argued controversial questions (quaestiones) while less advanced students observed. After the disputations, the professor concluded with the determination of the disputed questions. About once a year faculty held disputatio de quodlibet covering any topic of the master’s choosing. The school day concluded in late afternoon and early evening with additional exercises and repetitions conducted in the less formal setting of the master’s household. It was often here that the most important and creative interaction occurred. Here students learned to argue and apply authority in an appropriately scholarly

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manner and honed their Latin skills (Schwinges 1992b, 233). Having attended all the required lectures and disputations, a process which typically took between four and six years, students might submit themselves for examination and determine as a bachelor. Only a minority proceeded to the licentiate which included permission to teach. Although the emphasis differed from region to region and school to school, this basic form dominated all universities and faculties throughout Europe after the fourteenth century.

D Curricula I Liberal Arts as a Curricular Ideal While the liberal arts provided the most pervasive curricular model it is important not to overstate the extent to which individual schools and schoolmasters fully implemented the ambitious educational program. Few if any schools emphasized each of the seven liberal arts equally and many never progressed much beyond the rudiments of grammar. In some cases, the assertion that a school taught the full liberal arts curriculum, or that a particular individual was expert in the arts, was merely formulaic. Medieval conceptions of the liberal arts had roots in antiquity; both Plato and Aristotle outlined educational programs that emphasized grammar, literature, music, and arithmetic as preparation for the study of philosophy. In the fifth century, St. Augustine adapted this model of profane learning to the service of theology (Leff 1992, 307–08). The enormous popularity of Martianus Capella’s The Marriage of Mercury and Philology both reflected and ensured the persistence of the liberal arts as a pedagogical model in the Middle Ages. This early fifth century work, copied continuously throughout the Middle Ages, distilled late Roman pedagogical traditions into the seven liberal arts. Boethius (ca. 475–525) further divided the liberal arts into the trivium—comprising grammar, rhetoric, and logic—and the quadrivium consisting of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (Fontaines 2005, 742). Cassiodorus’s Institutiones Divinarum et Humanarum Lectionum also provided a useful model for the integration of divine and profane learning (Contreni 1995, 727). Even more influential, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) sets out what becomes the standard hierarchy of medieval learning. A hierarchy understood to progress from the most foundational subjects of the trivium through the quadrivium and finally culminating in the higher disciplines of medicine, law, and above all theology (Isidore of Seville 2006, 20). With only few changes this ideal remained firmly in place throughout the Middle Ages. In practice, the curriculum was much more limited, often focusing primarily on grammar, rhetoric, and logic with only

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limited attention paid to more advanced subjects of the quadrivium. Even within the trivium grammar tended to dominate with logic more important in Northern Europe and rhetoric retaining its significance in Italy.

II Pre-university Curriculum For many children the earliest formal literacy training likely came at home, in some cases from their mother. Indeed, as Pamela Sheingorn has noted, the popular image of St. Anne teaching Mary to read, presented a domestic ideal in which the mother had primary responsibility for the rearing and educating of children (Sheingorn 1993, 77; Clanchy 2011, 152–53). For both boys and girls, the increasing access to books, most commonly books of hours and other devotional texts, offered opportunities to acquire some of the rudiments of basic literacy and expanded the ways in which individuals and communities accessed the spiritual power of texts. (Orme 2006, 60; Zieman 2008, XII–XIII). Collegiate and monastic churches and new pious foundations might also provide the opportunity to acquire basic training in literacy through service in the choir. Choristers learned to recognize letters and read the texts necessary for performance. However, even simple recognition of letters might allow for the easier acquisition of vernacular literacy which expanded dramatically in the later Middle Ages (Orme 2006, 61–63; cf. Zieman 2008, 1–39). In most grammar schools, the Ars Grammatica of Donatus and the Institutiones Grammaticae of Priscian provided the primary texts for the study of Latin grammar. Even after the introduction in the thirteenth century of the popular verse grammars by Alexander de Villedieu and Eberhad Béthune (Doctrinale Puerorum and Graecismus, respectively) and the humanist inspired grammars of the of the fifteenth century, the Donatus (as it comes to be known) remained the standard introductory grammar. In the Netherlands, a region otherwise heavily influenced by humanistic reforms, Donatus was reprinted twenty-nine times in the first quarter of the sixteenth century (Willemsen 2013, 25). The association between the Donatus and elementary grammar students was so strong that in many schools the youngest grammar students were called donatists. (Sheffler 2008, 110). In addition, many schoolmasters also employed the Distichs, a series of versed couplets falsely attributed to Cato, which provided moral instruction as well as exempla for teaching grammar and style (Orme 2006, 41–44). Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, even as education allegedly became more secularized in the fifteenth century, religious and moral instruction remained central to the educational ideal. Alongside grammar and moral instruction students may also have learned to write, although this was not always the case.

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III The Universities 1 The Arts Although the medieval universities adopted the hierarchical model of the liberal arts described above (C I) the schema never perfectly fit the actual content of the courses offered. By the middle of the thirteenth century, new classifications emerged. In some universities, for example, natural, moral, and metaphysical philosophy augmented (and even supplanted) the traditional classifications of the liberal arts. Moreover, the basic elements of the arts curriculum developed unevenly within the universities. In Northern universities the emphasis on logic largely subsumed grammar and relegated rhetoric to the margins. Whereas in Italian universities rhetoric retained its important position within the curriculum. At Paris the trivium remained the curricular center of gravity, whereas at Oxford interest in the quadrivial subjects increased from the 1230s. The position of the arts and its emphases also depended on the relationship between the arts and the higher faculties, particularly theology. At Paris and Oxford, where the arts students and masters significantly outnumbered the other faculties, it was the arts faculty that generally controlled the most important university offices. In Bologna and many of the Southern universities, the size of the arts faculty and its influence was much more limited (Leff 1992, 308; see also the contribution to this Handbook on “The Medieval University” by Graeme Dunphy). In addition to the ideal of the liberal arts inherited from antiquity, the arts curriculum reflected the influence of new translations emerging from contact with Islamic and Jewish learning in Spain and Sicily. Previously unknown Aristotelian texts mediated through Islamic commentaries poured into the West. For nearly a century the arts faculties worked to assimilate these new texts and ideas into the existing hierarchy of knowledge. Newly integrated Aristotelian texts such as the Posterior Analytics combined with a growing interest in the analysis of meaning to create a grammar that exhibited an increasingly philosophical bent. This philosophical approach to grammar is especially evident in the concern for the relationship between words and things. The study of logic initially focused on the old logic, a group of texts that included Aristotle’s Categories and Interpretations as well as a translation of the introduction to Porphyry, Boethius’s commentaries on Porphyry, and Cicero’s Categories. By the thirteenth century the introduction of the new logic, chiefly the Posterior Analytics, revolutionized the study of logic in the universities (Leff 1992, 314–15). In addition to the newly translated works of Aristotle, Islamic commentators, above all Ibn Rushd (Averroës) (1126–1198) also entered into the university arts curriculum. Despite a series of official condemnations, the influence of Aristotle and his commentators continued to grow. At Oxford, Robert

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Grosseteste’s (ca. 1168–1253) commentary on the Posterior Analytics included his theory of scientific demonstration. His pupil Roger Bacon (ca. 1220–1292) argued for the primacy of mathematics over logic and helped to inspire a new approach to natural philosophy that found its most complete development in the fourteenth century Mertonians (Leff 1992, 322–23). The quadrivial subjects of geometry, artihmetic and astronomy also benefited directly from the introduction of Islamic texts, especially Ptolemy’s Almagest known in the West through Gerard of Cremona’s (ca. 1114–1187) translation from Arabic, Ibn al-Haitham’s (Alhazen), Optica, and the work of al-Kwarizimi on Arithmetic (North 1992, 341–48).

2 Medicine Even after the foundation of the first formal medical schools, most practitioners of the healing arts had no schooling in the formal sense. In the fifteenth century, it was still important to distinguish between learned doctors and less formally trained barbers and surgeons. In addition, like other crafts early medieval medical knowledge passed from master to student primarily through apprenticeships (Demaitre 2013, 2). The oral nature of this transmission makes analysis of early medieval medical curriculum difficult, although surviving manuscripts from the early Middle Ages provide some insights into the content of early medieval medical knowledge (Contreni 1995, 747). Most notable is the importance of Hippocrates, Galen, and Isidore of Seville. In the eleventh century, the Salernitan Garipontus compiled his Disease Book (passionarius) comprising a large number of works from antiquity, including Galen’s Therapeutics (De Ingenio Sanitatis). Garipontus’s actvities and the twelfth-century work De curis mulierum attributed to the Trota from Salerno, attest to the intensity of medical study in Salerno before the rise of the universities (Demaitre 2013, 320; Green 2001, VIII, 33; Green 2001). As with the arts, the translations from Arabic and Greek sources that began in the late eleventh century proved essential to the development of the medieval curriculum. The Canons by Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina (980–1037)— better known as Avicenna—quickly became one of the most important medical texts. The Tunisian merchant and later monk at Monte Cassino, Constantine the African (ca. 1020–1087) also brought a treasure trove of new Arabic text to Southern Italy, which he translated for the educators and medical practitioners of Salerno (Demaitre 2013, 11). In addition, authors in Salerno compiled the articella, a collection that included the Aphorisms and Prognostics of Hippocrates, and the Galenic treatise sometimes called Ars Medica. Thus, a century or more before the foundation of the first universities, Salerno was already well established as a center of medical education where men, and at least some women, practiced,

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taught, and wrote (Siraisi 1992, 366; Green 2000, XII). The twelfth century in Montpellier saw a similar intensification of medical activity. By 1220 medical teachers there had organized themselves into a fully-recognized university (Siraisi 1992, 367). Paris had an active faculty of medicine by 1213. And although not officially part of the university, Bologna was also an important center of medical education. By this time, a substantial body of medical literature was available and incorporated into the curriculum. Evidence from surviving statutes suggests that lectures focused on Galen and Avicenna (Siraisi 1992, 278). As in the other faculties, extraordinary lectures supplemented those prescribed by statute. The course of study lasted from five years (for those already proficient in the arts) to six (for those not yet proficient). Later statutes from fifteenth-century Bologna required three years of philosophy, three years of astrologia and “four years each of medicina and practices” (Siraisi 1992, 379). Although some universities did offer training in surgery, much of the curriculum was based on texts and made use of the same pedagogical tools as the other faculties: lectures and disputations. (Siraisi 1992, 382). Medical teaching also made use of Aristotelian texts, above all the libri naturales (O’Boyle 2000, 205). The key concepts of learned medicine focused on Complexio, the balance of hot, wet, cold and dry and the relationship between the movement of the heavens and health. These basic concepts and approaches likely differed little from university to university as learned medicine became institutionalized and text based. As a result, non-learned practitioners of medicine, both male and female, became increasingly marginalized (Green 2008, 2).

3 Law Before the establishment of the universities, those who wished to study law did so under the direction of a private master. These teachers operated independently of one another and developed their methods, curriculum, and texts individually (Brundage 2008, 220). The curriculum of many of these schools may well have resembled that of the twelfth century Bolognese jurist, Bulgarus (d. 1158). Bulgarus, who taught Roman law, assigned hypothetical cases to two groups of students; one group took the side of the plaintiff and one that of the defendant. He selected the cases to illustrate important points of law and capture the interest of his students; one case hinged on whether a cross-dressed woman who stood surety for a man who defaulted on his loan could be sued—it was ruled she could not be (Winroth 2006, 44–45). The early teaching of the famous canonist Gratian seems to have taken a similar form. But it was only with the first university that a

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uniform curriculum developed (Brundage 2008, 220). In the universities the language of instruction was Latin, although commentaries and important legal works began to appear in local vernaculars in the thirteenth century. The universities employed two major texts that were virtually identical across Europe: the Corpus iuris canonici and the Corpus iuris civilis. The former collection ultimately came to include the Decretum of Gratian (mid-twelfth century), the Decretals (Liber extra) of Gregory IX (d. 1241), the Liber sextus of Boniface VIII (1298), Clementine Decretals (1305), and the Extravagantes of John XXII (1325). The latter included the Digest, the Code, the Institutes, and the Novels. To this older body of texts, medieval lawyers added constitutions from the German Emperors Libri feudorum (García y García 1992, 392–93). Despite their importance, the universities did not hold an absolute monopoly on the teaching of law. Basic instruction in canon law continued to be available in many cathedrals (Brundage 2008, 122). In London, the Inns of the Court taught English common law, but may also have offered some training in Roman law (Brundage 2008, 369).

4 Theology Unlike law and the arts, where independent masters contributed to a dynamic and extremely fluid educational landscape, teachers of theology were much more likely to be attached to formal religious institutions (Courtenay 2000, 246). Given the sensitive nature of the subject matter, it is hardly surprising that many within the Church desired tighter controls over the teaching of theology. The rise of the universities further institutionalized both the content and credentialing. Until the fourteenth century, only Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge offered degrees in theology. The papacy, and later the privileged universities themselves, jealously guarded this virtual monopoly. The efforts to control the study of theology betray broader anxieties about the potential dangers of unchecked theological speculation. This increasing standardization is most evident in the narrowing of acceptable texts. The texts were basically two, the Bible and the Libri sententiarum (Sentences) of Peter Lombard (ca. 1100–1160). Dominican theology students were also required to possess a copy of the Historia scholastica of Peter Comestor. The demanding course of study included five to seven years auditing lectures on the Bible and the Sentences, two years actively lecturing on the Bible, followed by participation in disputations. Successful completion of the disputations allowed the newly minted baccalarius sententiarius to lecture on the sentences. After completing lectures on the four books of the Sentences, the would-be master engaged in four more years of lectures and disputation. Finally, after a period of study lasting roughly fifteen years, the bachelor was ready to be promoted to

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master and receive the license to teach (provided he had reached the minimum age of thirty-five). With some local variations, and exceptions for mendicant students, the outlines of the curriculum remained fairly stable for the remainder of the Middle Ages (Asztalos 2000, 417–19).

E Students Throughout the Middle Ages, access to formal schooling remained a privilege accessible to a minority of the population. Ecclesiastics were more likely to have access than the laity. The wealthy, the urban, and the male enjoyed significant advantages over the poor, rural and female. Even with the establishment of charitable endowments to support poor scholars, many families could not afford to sacrifice the productive labor of their children. Legal impediments to study also remained for those of unfree status (Orme 2006, 131). However, at no time was schooling the exclusive monopoly of the elite. As discussed above (B VII), educational opportunities and rates of participation increased dramatically in the later Middle Ages. Even in the early Middle Ages, a period not generally associated with lay education, laymen and women appear among the ranks of the literate (McKitterick 1994). It is possible that most who learned to read, whether girls or boys, did so in the home, an environment much less likely to leave traces in the historical records. Here, mothers may have taken a leading role in the education of their children. Psalters, prayer books, and books of hours served as key pedagogical texts in schools, and by the fourteenth century were accessible in many homes as well. These texts were also increasingly feminized. Already in the thirteenth century, the Sachsenspiegel listed psalters along with cooking utensils as items belonging to the female sphere (Clanchy 2011, 139). In the fifteenth century Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364/65–ca. 1430) simply assumed that women, at least women of a certain social class, would take an active interest in the education of their children (Sheingorn 1993, 69). Fourteenth- and fifteenth- century images of St. Anne also begin to link explicitly education and motherhood (Sheingorn 1993, 77; Clanchy 2011, 149). At the same time, educated daughters of merchant families appear in the sources with increasing frequency (Willemsen 2008, 22–23; Kammeier-Nebel 1994, 81). Students who pursued formal Latin education beyond the elementary level, likely anticipated further study at a university (Courtenay 1987, 17). As a result, a significant majority of students in secondary schools were boys. There were, of course exceptions; some cities in the Low Countries, France and Italy had official secondary schools for female students (Willemsen 2008, 28–29), and monastic

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schools continued to provide education for its members and a few outsiders (Opitz 1994). In one famous case, a woman dressed as a man to study at the University of Kraków (Shank 1989, 190–97). In general, however, most parents saw Latin literacy like that obtained in higher grammar schools as more beneficial for boys than for girls. Those who completed their grammar studies, typically between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, might continue their education at a university. Barriers to university study included geography (there were no universities in the German Empire before the middle of the fourteenth century), living expenses, which were frequently higher in university towns, and knowledge of Latin. Matriculation fees for the poorest were often waived, although expenses associated with promotion could be significant. Nevertheless, university students were drawn from a broad segment of medieval society (Schwinges 1992a, 185). In fact, in most universities the wealthiest and most privileged were only a small percentage of the overall student population—although they did represent a much larger portion of the student body in the higher faculties, especially canon law. Despite the relative accessibility of the medieval universities, and the undeniable mobility they afforded, they continued to reflect and reinforce medieval hierarchies. University honors, living arrangements, patronage networks all depended on social status and often trumped university achievement (Schwinges 2000, 42).

F Conclusion It should come as no surprise that medieval schools primarily served the interests of power. Secular and ecclesiastical elites (frequently drawn from the same families and networks) invested in education because they expected tangible rewards. First and foremost, education served to reinforce ecclesiastical and secular authority. Kings, princes and bishops demanded educated individuals to manage burgeoning bureaucracies and to enhance the prestige of their courts. With the growth of cities and towns after the eleventh century, civic leaders increasingly employed civil servants with at least a modicum of formal education. Even simple parishes required educated individuals to administer the sacraments and provide basic religious instruction. Thickening networks of trade encouraged new groups to pursue education to ensure access to privileged positions and the wealth and honor they provided. Though unintended, growing rates of literacy allowed access to the power of texts and ideas in ways that were less easily controlled. Literate men and women could also facilitate the textual engagements of friends and neighbors, forming textual communities and shaping new identities that might challenge entrenched religious, political, and economic interests

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(Stock 1983, 88–92). Nevertheless, elites continued to support education, and individuals and families continued to pursue it, not to overturn the social hierarchy but to ensure their places within it.

Select Bibliography Black, Robert, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (New York 2001). Courtenay, William J., Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ, and Guildford 1987). Green, Monica H., “The Possibilities of Literacy and the Limits of Reading: Women and the Gendering of Medical Literacy,” Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West, ed. eadem (Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2000), Essay VII, 1–76. Grendler, Paul F., Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, MD, 1989). Hildebrant, Madge M., The External School in Carolingian Society (Leiden 1991). Jaeger, C. Stephen, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia, PA, 1994). McKitterick, Rosamond, ed., Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge 1990). Orme, Nicholas, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven, CT, 2006). Pedersen, Olaf, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of the University Education in Europe (Cambridge 1997). Schwinges, Rainer C., Deutsche Universitätsbesucher im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte des alten Reiches (Stuttgart 1986). Verger, Jacques, “Patterns,” A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages, gen. ed. Walter Rüegg, ed. H. de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge and New York 1992), 35–76. Willemsen, Annemarieke, Back to the Schoolyard: the Daily Practice of Medieval and Renaissance Education (Turnhout 2008).

Gerhard Jaritz

Excrement and Waste A Modern Shit—Medieval Shit In his planned but then prohibited radio play from 1947/1948, “Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu” (“To Have Done with the Judgment of God”), Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), the French playwright, poet, actor, and representative of surrealist avant-garde theater (the Theater of Cruelty), offered the following statement: “Là ou ça sent la merde ça sent l’être …” (Artaud 1976, xlvi–xlvii): There where it smells of shit it smells of being. Man could just as well not have shat, not have opened the anal pouch, but he chose to shit as he would have chosen to live instead of consenting to live dead. Because in order not to make caca, he would have had to consent not to be, … (Artaud 2011)

Artaud’s statement was undoubtedly odd and exceptional for an audience of the twentieth or twenty-first century. One does not talk about shit when expecting to be accepted in society. A similar situation is true for any studies into it. Thus, the research into shit, defecation, excrement, latrines, and also dirt and waste is not very popular and common in Medieval Studies, as in a number of other fields too, as, for instance, anthropology (Van der Geest 2007) or literary and art historical studies (Persels and Ganim, ed., 2004, xiii: “Scatology, the Last Taboo”). A representative of the research community of medievalists who published a “Manifesto for Waste Studies” (Morrison 2008, 153–55) is still an exception. Many aspects continue to escape our full understanding, but one may hope that some recent research will push us further in recognizing the cultural significance of how people treated waste in the past (Wagener, ed., 2014). When concentrating on statements, discussions, and discourses of the medieval period, one can at least partly agree with the late Michael Camille’s remark in his famous book Image on the Edge where he emphasized that “… we have to forget our modern, post-Freudian, notions of excrement linked with decay, infection and death. Medieval people did not problematize faecal matters as dirt, as

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Freud’s ‘matter out of place’. Shit had its proper place in the scheme of things” (Camille 1992, 111). On the other hand, one always has to be careful with generalizations, in particular when dealing with such a topic like “Excrement and Waste.” Thus, one also should not offer general statements like “Excreting and urinating in public was, as we might say, no big deal” (Coudert 2009, 715–16).

B Privies The studies concerning the toilet culture of ancient Rome are well advanced (Neudecker 1994; Hobson 2009; Jansen, Koloski-Ostrow, and Moormann, ed., 2011; Koloski-Ostrow 2014). A recent collective volume has offered valuable multidisciplinary, comparative approaches and particular insights into the manifold contexts of ancient society and latrines—in private and public space, concerning personal hygiene, with regard to the construction, technology, and decoration of the toilets, and so on (Jansen, Koloski-Ostrow, and Moormann, ed., 2011). The situation with regard to the Middle Ages is different. Still much has to be done to achieve the level of results that Ancient Studies have reached. The earliest recorded use of the term privy [ME prive, from Old French privé, from Latin privatus; Middle High German privet; ital. privato] in England from ca. 1200 was the noun for toilet, and this remained the most frequent and regular usage during the Middle Ages (Austin 1998, 183). The context of secret and private could be modified in specific situations and communication and discussion about the privy could even become important for a broader public with regard to its use, any legislation and quarrels about it, its visual image, literary texts, symbolic and allegoric meanings, and so on. Concerning monastic houses of the high Middle Ages, defecating and privies were seen as a part of community space that had to be regulated in detail, as is proved by a number of descriptions and rules of monastic life (consuetudines). The Cluniac Constitutions of Farfa from the mid-eleventh century describe the monks’ latrine quite accurately. It is supposed to be 70 feet long and 23 feet broad, has 45 seats, and each seat has a small window. Each seat is also provided with a small pile of wooden splinters (Zimmermann 1973, 412). To make it possible to clean oneself these wooden splinters (ligneae astulae) or soft hay and herbs had to be offered, as the Consuetudines of Hirsau from the end of the eleventh century spell out in great detail (Zimmermann 1973, 413). Some eleventh- and twelfthcentury regulations stipulate that the novices are not allowed to go to the latrine alone but only together with their novice master. If a novice has to visit the latrine during the night, he has to wake up the novice master, the latter wakes up another novice, and then they walk together to the latrine. The novices are to have their

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own latrines or seats in the latrine, separated from the ones of the monks (Zimmermann 1973, 411–12). Urban building regulations sometimes also deal with the construction of latrines. Often, it was not a private decision where an individual had a latrine constructed (Jørgensen 2006, 11). Some laws order that the garderobe (i.e., the toilet) should only be built in those parts of the houses which were on the far side from the street (Jaritz 2005, 61). Other ordinances determined a certain distance from the neighbor’s property (Sabine 1934, 319). The filth was either held in cesspits or, when available, one built the privies over the running water of rivers and brooks or over the city ditches. The privies built over running water could lead to massive problems and controversies because of the resultant filth fouling the watercourse. From a number of cities, London, for instance, there is quite rich evidence about public latrines that were constructed over running water for clearing filth (Sabine 1934, 306–09). Often one comes across individual cases and controversies concerning latrines that deal with annoyances because of smell or leaking. One finds discussions about the common use of latrines or the division of their use and their role with regard to the selling and purchase of houses. Sometimes accidents happened and led, in particular, to the death or injuries of the cesspit cleaners. The latrines were not only used as toilets but often served as universal garbage chutes (Küster 1998, 323–24). They were used as disposal for organic waste, pieces of wood, clay, glass, etc. In many urban communities, the cleaning of the privies and cesspits was professionally organized. The latrine-cleaners were mostly members of marginal groups of society, and sometimes they also worked as grave-diggers (Kamber and Keller, ed., 1996, 14–15). It can be assumed that the cleaning and repair of the privies generally took place at night (Sabine 1934, 316; Lehnert 1981, 152; Frieser 1999, 196). In a number of cases, the discussion about privies, their construction, and the activities in them exceeded the specific concern of the affected members of medieval communities and became a popular topic of prose and poetry. There, the privy, excrement, and farting could particularly contribute to mediating humoristic and satiric matters, often in a didactic way (Classen 2009, 71–72). One great example proves to be Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1400), in particular the scatological Miller’s Tale, “with the most famous fart in all English (if not world) literature” (Morrison 2008, esp. 67; Beidler 1977). Boccaccio (1313–1375) is generally “fascinated with latrines and privies” and shows “an uncompromising disgust in the presence of filth” (Biow 2006, 170; 173). There is, for instance, the well-known story about the young horse-dealer, Andreuccio da Perugia, in the Decameron from ca. 1350 (II, 5) who was staying in Naples and, “nature demand-

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ing,” wanted to visit the privy, “set his foot on a plank which was detached from the joist at the further end, whereby down it went, and he with it.” He took no hurt “beyond sousing himself from head to foot in the ordure which filled the whole place” (Boccaccio 2003). In the illustrated manuscripts of the Decameron one also finds visual representations of this story. The story is comparable to the one about Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, mentioned in some sources for the year 1183. The emperor was holding court in a hall at Erfurt, when a number of planks broke. Eight princes, many noble lords, and more than hundred knights fell down into the cesspool; only the bishops and clerics were not harmed. The emperor saved himself by jumping out of the window (Annales Stadenses 1859, 327; 350–51; Kamber and Keller, ed., 1996, 24). An Alemannic author from the South German town of Constance, Heinrich Wittenweiler, also uses shit in his satiric and didactic verse narrative, the Ring from ca. 1400: The main protagonists are two peasant lovers from the fictional village of Lappenhausen. In a quarrel between the girl, Mätzli Rüerenzumph, and her father, Fritzo, the latter locks her into a shed and exclaims: Da sitz und scheiss! Der ars ist dir ze dik und feiss (Röcke 2012, 70, v. 1546–47) [Sit down and shit! Your arse is too fat]

– meaning that she is doing too well, or is too lazy. Two other female protagonists in the same text are Jützin Scheissindpluomen [= Shit-into-the-Flowers] and Elsbeth Völlipruoch [= Breeches-Full-of-Shit]. The use of fecal language can also be traced particularly in quarrels and at the judicial court, which was not only part of male space. An example from Basel offers evidence of a quarrel between two women, in which one of them shouted at the other “Ich scheiß auf dein Recht” (I am shitting on your right), to which the other shouted back “Ich scheiß dir in dein Maul” (I am shitting into your mouth) (Kamber and Keller, ed., 1996, 45). There is also evidence of using smeared excrement against adversaries and their possessions (Kamber and Keller, ed., 1996, 46).

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C Excremental theology In his Divina Commedia (ca. 1308–1321), Dante Alighieri’s hell “offers perhaps the most profound meditation on excremental theology” (Allen 2007, 80; Biow 2006, 157–58). Sinners sit in shit (… in sterco che da li uman privadi parea mosso—“in excrement that seemed as if it had been poured from human privies;” Inferno xviii, 113–14), and they wear shit for hats (… vidi un col capo sì di merda lordo, che non parëa s’era laico o cherco— “I saw a man, his head so smeared with shit one could not see if he were priest or layman;” Inferno xviii, 116–17). A “foul, dishevelled wench” scratches herself with “shit-filled nails” (quella sozza e scapigliata fante che là si graffia con l’unghie merdose; Inferno xviii, 130–31) (Dante 1966; Dante 2001; Allen 2007, 80; Barański 2003). Defecation and excrement also sometimes turn up in the image-text wordplay connections in illustrated religious manuscripts, of which the late Michael Camille has shown a good number (Camille 1992). These contexts, mainly based on mnemotechnic aspects, may often be hard to understand for a modern beholder. An example from an Austrian manuscript from the last third of the fifteenth century owned by the Lower Austrian Premonstratensian house of Geras (Ms. 6, fol. 153r; see Fig. 1) shows a squatting and defecating boy who might, at first sight, not fit well into the context of this Gradual, that is, a liturgical manuscript. If, however, one looks for the contextualizing text-image word-play, everything becomes clear. The text beside the image offers the Vulgate Psalm 138:2: Domine probasti me et cognovisti me, tu cognovisti sessionem meam et surrectionem meam … (O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known [me]. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising …). This sitting down (sessio), is clearly meant to be recognized as connected with the content of the image, that is, the activity of the squatting and defecating boy. This context had a clear function in the specific, monastic, and aristocratic mnemonic “riddle and word-play culture” that one can trace regularly and which had its proper place in the intellectual life of the period. The objects, activities, and relations could certainly be special and conspicuous, but at the same time not problematic (see also Wentersdorf 1984). Theological symbolism, biblical typology and natural allegory also used excrement. One might, for instance, think of examples out of the so-called Concordantiae Caritatis of Ulrich of Lilienfeld from the mid-fourteenth century (Douteil 2010). It represents the textually and visually transferred relation of the Christian antitype with its pre-figurations in the Old Testament as well as with natural allegories. In the core, the manuscript seems to be a sermon collection following the Sundays, the feasts of the Church Year, and saints’ feasts. In the allegories from nature, excrement, this time of animals, again can play an important role. One example is the New Testament story of Jesus driving the money-

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Fig. 1: The defecating boy of the Vulgate Psalm 138:2. © Institut für Realienkunde, University of Salzburg.

lenders from the Temple that, as an allegory from nature, is referred to dogs being chased away as they foul places with their stinking excrement: Hinc canis abscedat, loca nam male stercore fedat (“From here the dog should depart, as he fouls the place with his stinking shit”). Further, the explaining text becomes more detailed: “Aristotle says and also general experience proves: Dogs are expelled, as they dirty and soil the most beautiful and blossoming places with their excrement. Bad clerics and other bad persons living near churches, they are shameless dogs: As with stinking excrement their bad example dirties and soils the God-

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pleasing and virtuous life of simple people. Following Christ’s example, these bad persons have to be expelled by the true shepherds of the church, like rabid dogs” (Douteil 2010, vol. 1, 78–79 and vol. 2, 459).

D … not for the eyes and noses of pious people … Garderobes as parts of stone castles or urban houses on the far side from the street did not have the problem of not being shielded from view. This was different for common and public privies as well as for free-standing latrines in rural space. There, laws can be traced which ordain that privies be concealed, sometimes stating that they should not be seen by pious people (Jaritz 2005, 63). Medieval culture also shows a tight connection between cleanliness and noses (Biow 2006, 183; see also Jørgensen 2013). Besides the problems with latrines and the trade of the butchers, complaints were also made about the odour from other trades, as from tanners (Jørgensen 2010b, 38–40), dyers (Illi 1987, 20–22), or potters (Paris 1496: Thorndike 1928, 203). The surviving sources offer not only a picture of such difficulties with the trades but also with individuals concerning other matters than latrines (Leguay 2007, 16–31). In 1349, the English king wrote to the mayor of London and protested “that filth was being thrown from the houses by day and night, so that the streets and lanes through which people had to pass were foul with human feces, and the air of the city poisoned to the great danger of men passing, especially in this time of contagious disease” (Sabine 1936, 27). In some laws human filth was routinely put together with sour wine and garbage in the broader sense, as in 1307 in the Istrian town of Piran, or with wastewater, straw, or litter. “The implication is that human waste products were viewed as simply another form of litter blocking free access to the town’s roadways …” (Zupko and Laures 1996, 52). The contamination of streets with waste of any kind as well as the waste disposal in rivers and brooks led to a large number of conflicts, arbitrations, regulations, and prohibitions. One of the main threats could also come from people disposing of filth, defecating, or engaging in other unhygienic activities in and around the fountains (Magnusson 2001, 122). Altogether, “the forces which motivated public action on cleansing were the aesthetic objection to the appearance and smell of rubbish, the association between putrefaction and disease, and a sense of pride in the dignified appearance of a town” (Keene 1988, 28). Clean streets and rivers were seen as part of “proper moral behaviour” (Jørgensen 2010a, 303). Attempts to create and keep a clean community can generally be seen as tightly connected with good rule (Jørgensen 2006, 16).

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E Management strategies Dolly Jørgensen stated rightly that “the uncomplicated technologies of streets, gutters, waste bins, and latrines required complicated management strategies in the late medieval city” (Jørgensen 2008, 565). For the treatment of waste in medieval communities, the craft of the butchers offers perhaps the most important evidence. Butchering can be seen as the trade that, more than any other, led to complaints, controversies, and regulations with regard to cleanliness and smells (Carr 2008, 451; Ciecieznski 2013, 95). Medieval and early modern “butcher’s space” was context-dependent. The two opposites, that is, “public” and “secret” performance and representation of the trade, were meant to lead to a similar result, that is, protecting the communities and their members in a number of analogous respects. The two different types of space were meant to have similar outcomes. A large number of surviving norms and regulations show that slaughtering the animals and selling the meat was meant to be as public as possible so that controllers and customers could see the quality of the livestock and meat as well as the correctness of the method of slaughter (Sabine 1933, 336; Faugeron, 2006, 60; Jaritz 2010, 235). Sometimes, however, slaughtering in public space was seen as a danger to the health of the people. When plagues swept the community in the 1360s, it was ordered in London that all beasts should be slaughtered outside the city (Sabine 1933, 344). In Coventry, it was ordained in 1442 that animals should only be slaughtered outside the city walls but cows, calves and sheep could be slaughtered in the butchers’ houses and pigs in the “common slaughter houses” for one year (Carr 2008, 457). For getting rid of the offal, the “butcher’s space” should be as secret as possible (Faugeron 2006, 60–61). This situation can be seen as comparable to a number of regulations concerning public latrines that sometimes were to be concealed in such a way that they were not in sight of pious people (Ciecieznski 2013, 97). Butcher’s waste seen as a visual offense and danger to health can be found in a number of European communities as, for instance, London. Butchers were not allowed to throw entrails, intestines, blood, and other waste on the road in order not to disturb the public in any way. In some communities it was decreed that the offal had to be carried away from the butcher stalls so as to prevent smell and not to endanger health. It should be disposed of into the nearest river, or to some segregated spots outside the community. In fourteenthcentury London the butchers were assigned a jetty in the Thames, called the ‘butchers’ bridge,’ from which they were supposed to dispose of the entrails from their slaughtered animals (Keene 2001, 168). If a large river, like the Danube or the Thames, was not at hand but only a smaller one or a brook, the latter could also sometimes be selected for taking the waste from slaughtering,

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but only where the water was about to flow away from the community (Jaritz 2010, 238; Carr 2008, 457). Other communities, however, saw waste disposal in the river as a general problem. For the English towns of Norwich, Coventry, and York, Jørgensen found that the actions of the authorities concerning river pollution were far-reaching, from prohibiting disposal of waste into them to the organization of water cleaning operations, river scouring, and dredging projects (Jørgensen 2010b, 50). In Coventry, the town council banned waste disposal in the river nine times between 1421 and 1475 (Jørgensen 2010c, 53). Based on archaeological evidence, Jørgensen states that in Scandinavia there was less waste disposal on the streets of towns in the late Middle Ages compared to earlier periods (Jørgensen 2008, 560). With the help of written sources, however, there is always the problem of finding out to what extent and how vigorously the communities enforced their own cleaning requirements and waste disposal prohibitions, as the number of surviving court records that deal with transgressions is regularly rather low (Jørgensen 2008, 559).

Select Bibliography Biow, Douglas, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca, NY, 2006). Jansen, Gemma C. M., Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Eric M. Moormann, ed., Roman Toilets: Their Archaeology and Cultural History (Leuven 2011). Jørgensen, Dolly, “What to Do with Waste? The Challenges of Waste Disposal in Two Late Medieval Towns,” Living Cities: An Anthology in Urban Environmental History, ed. Mattias Legnér and Sven Lilja (Stockholm 2010), 34–55. [= Jørgensen 2010c] Leguay, Jean-Pierre, La pollution au Moyen Âge, 5th ed. (1999; Paris 2007). Morrison, Susan Signe, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (New York 2008). Persels, Jeff and Russell Ganim, ed., Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (Basingstoke 2004). Zupko, Ronald Edward and Robert Anthony Laures, Straws in the Wind: Medieval Urban Environmental Law—The Case of Northern Italy (Boulder, CO, 1996).

Emily J. Rozier

Fashion A Introduction I Overview Fashion does not simply refer to the wearing of clothing, or even to an interest in personal adornment and finery. Instead, fashion is the creation of, and adherence to, a codified approach to sartorial display in which there is an established, and yet constantly metamorphosing, popular concept of what constitutes stylish dress. Fashion is thus a unifying force, in that its followers must adhere to the sartorial aesthetic in vogue at the time, which is based on a consistent desire for constant and systematic change (Heller 2007, 8–10). Fashion is often popularly viewed as a modern phenomenon, driven by capitalism, consumerism, and advertising. As the following article will show, however, fashion was a key facet of European culture throughout the Middle Ages (Payne 1965; Racinet 2000). Indeed, clothing played such an important role in the medieval psyche that to knock the hat off a man’s head was considered so severe a breach of a person’s dignity as to be grounds for legal proceedings (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 102). The significance of dress in the medieval mind is further evidenced by the fact that coronations and appointments to the priesthood or knighthood all relied upon the donning of special robes for their semiotic weight. Many of these rituals were even called “investiture”—a solid sign of the importance dress played in the social imagination. Conversely, to take clothing away from an individual effectively removed them from society. Condemned criminals were stripped to their underclothes, and disgraced members of knightly or holy orders were undressed so as to reverse the power given to them at their investiture (Elliot 2004, 61). This article seeks to outline the main approaches to medieval fashion, both in terms of scholarship on the subject and the attitudes to dress expressed in the Middle Ages.

II Sources Available A sizeable corpus of work has been undertaken on the styles of dress that were popular during the Middle Ages. General guides to medieval fashion include Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane’s Dress in the Middle Ages (Piponnier and Mane 1997) and Margaret Scott’s Medieval Dress and Fashion (Scott 2007), both of

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which provide a sound introduction to medieval clothing studies. The articles collected in Clothing Culture 1350–1650 (Richardson, ed., 2004) analyze the social discourses of fashion as exercised in a range of sources, from Russian clothing edicts to Irish effigies, and offer a firm starting point for investigation of panEuropean clothing culture in the late-medieval period. There are also a number of excellent scholarly works that offer a well-documented account of the fashions of a particular period and geographical location. Thor Ewing, for example, presents a vivid account of Scandinavian clothing culture in his monograph Viking Clothing (Ewing 2006) and Gail Owen-Crocker’s Dress in Anglo-Saxon England (OwenCrocker 1986) offers a thorough report of English dress from the fifth to the eleventh centuries. Most focused is Stella Mary Newton’s Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years 1340–1365 (Newton 1980), which closely examines the sartorial changes that occurred in the English and French courts of the mid-fourteenth century. Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, 1325–1515 (van Buren 2011) offers a richly illustrated guide to the evolving fashions of France and the Netherlands in the late-medieval period. For an account of late-medieval attitudes to, and economies of, fashion one can also turn to Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Jones and Stallybrass, ed., 2000), which combines close reading of texts and analysis of a range of other sources with the aim of uncovering the role played by clothing in the formation and transmission of culture in the sixteenth century. Similarly, Carole Collier Frick’s Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (Frick 2002) offers a through account of the Italian clothing trade and investigation of the cultural significance of fashion toward the end of the Middle Ages. When discussing medieval fashion one major obstacle impedes the scholar’s progress, namely that very few examples have survived. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, textiles are prone to decay and so do not withstand the ravages of time. Secondly, due to the intrinsic value of material, clothing was recycled and garments were frequently refashioned to serve new purposes (S. Crane 2002, 11). This means that many examples were destroyed during the Middle Ages. Archaeological finds have helped to shed light on medieval methods of textile production, the types of materials used and sewing techniques (Crowfoot 1992, 1), but much of the evidence is fragmentary (Wolff 1993, 124) and so can tell us little about the appearance of the garment as a whole. Noteworthy exceptions to this trend include the garments that were found during archaeological excavations undertaken in 1926 at Herjólfsnes, Greenland, which uncovered a large selection of headwear, tunics, and leg coverings from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Nørlund 1924). Wardrobe accounts can offer documentary proof of what clothing was ordered for a particular household but, as they were not kept with the intention of documenting the specifics of contemporary styles, they lack the level

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of detail that would allow for a complete understanding of concurrent fashions (Staniland 1989, 275–81). One faces a similar problem when considering the evidence offered by sumptuary legislation as the Acts of Apparel that were enacted across Europe during the period, which are discussed further below, offer little proof of what the garments mentioned therein actually looked like. They do, however, offer a useful repository of clothing terms and an index of the styles that were deemed popular and dangerous enough to be legislated against at the time of enactment. The items of clothing listed in the legislation can be further elucidated through recourse to lexical databases, such as the online, illustrated catalogue of clothing lexis in Old and Middle English, Welsh, Old Irish, Anglo-Norman, Old French, Medieval Latin, and Anglo-Norse that was produced as a result of the “Lexis of Cloth and Clothing” project (Owen-Crocker et al., ed., 2012). The legislation is also an effective tool for examining the social significance of particular items of clothing as it rations different styles of dress on a class basis. Artistic representations of fashions, as found in literature, portraiture, and other visual mediums, can offer an important cache of sundry evidence. Such sources must, however, be treated with caution as they are open to artistic license and flights of fancy (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 3–7). Art is by nature symbolic and although it is tempting to assume that the evidence provided by memorial brasses and funerary monuments is an accurate reflection of contemporary trends, it is more prudent to assume that such representations are idealized versions of reality (Bertram, ed., 1996). As such, the fashions depicted on memorials may not reflect those actually worn by the commemorated individual during their lifetime, nor indeed even by their peers at the time of dedication. Instead, the articles of dress may have been chosen to convey a particular spiritual or socio-political message. This is a concern that becomes increasingly compounded when one considers artistic representations of purely fictional individuals, such as those adorning manuscripts and church walls. There is, however, no reason to assume that such works were purely the product of fancy and indeed it seems more probable that they were grounded in some form of reality so as to appeal directly to their audience. There is, after all, little point in torturing wicked souls in hell on a church mural if they bear no resemblance to the individuals whose souls the depiction is intended to save. It must also be remembered that even written sources that purport to offer an accurate description of contemporary styles were composed by social commentators who so reveled in criticizing concurrent fashions that they chose to describe only the most extravagant examples. How far these caricatures reflect reality is therefore uncertain. As such, visual and literary evidence can be used to elucidate the articles of dress listed in wardrobe accounts and legislation, but the sources should be used collaboratively.

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III The “Birth” of Fashion Much academic endeavor has been expended on establishing a particular point in time that can be identified as the starting point or “birth” of fashion. Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane trace the European penchant for luxury goods to the Crusades, which they claim “introduced the glamour and variety of textiles produced or used in the Islamic world to a large number of Western soldiers” (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 59). Indeed, Spanish modes of dress had been shaped by Saracen and Persian fashions since the Arab invasion of the Spanish peninsula in the year 711 (Tierney 2003, 3). Byzantine styles also influenced European fashions, causing, for example, women’s undergarments to extend into a train in eleventh-century Germany and Spain (Dlugaiczyk 2001, 128; Bernis-Madrazo 2003, 238). Much has also been made of the increased urbanization of Europe that took place over the late-medieval period and the concordant shift from local to international textile production that this brought about (Deceulaer 2006, 124–25; Rosenthal, ed., 2009, 460). Jennifer Harris has argued that fashion began in the West in the twelfth century thanks to the tailoring innovations of that period (Harris 1998, 99). For Katherine French it is in the “quickening economies” of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that fashion first becomes a widespread cultural phenomenon (French 2013, 197). Anne Hollander ascribes the dawning of what she terms “true fashion,” which she defines as consisting of a “reshaping of the body-and-clothes unit,” to ca. 1300 (Hollander 1978, 90). For many scholars, however, it is in the royal courts and great households of fourteenth-century Europe that fashion as we understand it today first materialized (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 65; Heller 2007, 50). The exact geographical location of this burgeoning has spurred some debate, with Paul Post arguing that fashion as a codified cultural practice originated in Burgundy (Post 1910), Mary Stella Newton attributing fashion’s naissance to the interactions between the French and English courts during the Hundred Years’ War (Newton 1980), and Rosita Pisetzky identifying Italy as the birthplace of fashion in the mid-fourteenth century (Pisetzky 1964, vol. 1). As Sarah-Grace Heller has previously observed, however, the instigation of fashion as a cultural phenomenon tends to be identified as having occurred in whichever period is being studied and the attribution of the roots of fashion to the latter part of the Middle Ages is often fuelled by the paucity of extant evidence from the earlier centuries (Heller 2007, 58–59). As such, attempting to trace the first burgeoning of a Western fashion system is a somewhat fruitless task. What can be said about the fourteenth century is that it is an interesting period of sartorial change for which we have a good level of evidence on which to draw. Whilst the surface details of dress, such as decorative motifs and embellishments, changed frequently throughout the Middle Ages, its form changed rarely

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(Heller 2007, 9). Fundamental shifts in clothing styles have been termed tracht changes (Redlich 1963, 3–4) and it is such a tracht change that occurs in the fourteenth century. The male silhouette changed very little over the early medieval period, throughout which time male dress typically consisted of the Germanic model of a “short, girdled tunic worn over close-fitting trousers” (Bernis-Madrazo 2003, 237; Owen-Crocker 2012, 493)—a style of dress that was mirrored in the Spanish Saracen mode (Tierney 2003, 3). The outfit tended to be completed by “flat, ankle-high shoes and a rectangular cloak, usually secured on the right shoulder by a round brooch” (Owen-Crocker 2012, 493). This combination of short tunic and visible leg coverings fell out of favour in the thirteenth century and was replaced by long, full gowns that were often lined and hemmed with fur (Wild 2012, 499). This shift to a loosely draped form meant that the reintroduction of the short jacket in the fourteenth century struck social commentators as a shocking departure from traditional clothing styles despite, in many respects, actually being a return to an earlier form. Like its male counterpart, women’s dress also became more figure-hugging over the course of the fourteenth century. Throughout the early-medieval period the blueprint for women’s apparel had remained the Greek peplos—a long gown that was fastened at the shoulders by brooches (Ewing 2006, 24; Owen-Crocker 1986, 42–54). In the late-medieval period women’s dress shifted to an ensemble that was tightly fitted at the top, especially around the bust, and increasingly full in the skirt (Wild 2012, 499). The neckline of these garments varied greatly over the late-medieval period, vacillating between the extremely low-cut style that came into fashion in the first decades of the fourteenth century and the high-collared design in vogue from ca. 1400. Women’s hair remained covered throughout the Middle Ages and the headdresses favored became increasingly ornate, such as the cofia de tranzado that spread out from Spain in the fifteenth century (Bernis-Madrazo 2003, 238). What emerged in ca. 1340 was apparel that was shaped by and reshaped the body. This tracht change to the silhouette was dependent on several technical advances. Improvements in weaving techniques allowed for tighter fitting garments, as did “setting the sleeves into small rounded armholes at the point where the arms spring from the shoulder” (Newton 1980, 3). Buttons were also a considerable advance, negating the need to sew up the sleeve every time the wearer put on the garment (Egan and Hayward 2012, 106–07). As with all fashions, however, these functional attributes were taken to their extremes to serve stylistic aims. Buttons were often enameled or set with precious stones, even being listed amongst the jewels in royal inventories (Newton 1980, 4). Fashionable clothing often incorporated gold thread into its weave, thereby increasing the intrinsic value of the item (Geijer 1983, 89–93), and expensive accessories such as silver belts became an integral part of a fashionable outfit. In Germany

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the belts worn by the elites, introduced since ca. 1200, were adorned further by small bells (Brüggen 1989, 100–05; Kühnel 1992, 93–95; Dlugaiczyk 2001, 128; Classen 2008). In mid-fourteenth-century Florence silver belts became so valuable that they were worth one tenth of a respectable bride’s dowry and came to be the focus of much sumptuary legislation (Stuard 2011, 129). Sleeves also became more opulent, growing wider over the fourteenth century and having long pieces of purely decorative material, or tippets, added as extensions. As Robin Netherton notes, often “a costume feature would expand, elongate, exaggerate, or otherwise develop over time until it reached its physical limit” (Netherton 2005, 121). The physical limits of garments are their edges and even these were cut into intricate patterns, or had pieces of material attached to the hem—a practice known as dagging. This was a labor-intensive and costly decorative technique that received negative attention from numerous quarters, including “members of parliament, preachers, satirists, and chronicle writers who yearned for the plainer costumes of the ‘good old days’” (Hodges 2000, 62). It has frequently been argued that it is in this period that a clear divergence between male and female dress can be observed (French 2013, 198). Indeed, it is the sartorial inclinations of men that drove fashion forward during the later Middle Ages and on average they spent more on clothing and made more frequent purchases than their female counterparts (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 77). Although men and women continued to wear similar layers of clothing—both donning an undershirt, or smock for women, as the base-layer, followed by a jacket for men or a kirtle for women, each of which was topped with a gown—and the outfits of both sexes became tighter, the male tunic shortened drastically in the mid-fourteenth century and male dress came to be used increasingly to mark the wearer’s virility and to reveal and enhance the masculine form. The shortness of the tunic, or doublet, meant that the hose, which had previously been undergarments, came to be on display. For the sake of decency the hose, which were originally independent leg coverings fastened by either laces or aglets, therefore had to be refashioned into a garment that was joined at the top (Hayward 2012, 280–81)—though it should be remembered that joined leg coverings had already been a feature of Germanic and Scandinavian dress for many centuries by this time (Ewing 2006, 74). What is striking about the hose of the fourteenth century, however, is the fact that their tightness showed shapely legs at their best and that the buttocks and genitals were left on display. The lascivious implications of the new clothing style were not lost on moral commentators and complaints such as that which Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343– 1400) has his Parson express about the incitement to lust caused by the “horrible disordinat scantnesse of clothyng, as been thise kutted sloppes, or haynselyns, that thurgh hire shortnesse ne covere nat the shameful membres of man, to

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wikked entente” (Chaucer 1987, 300–01) were widespread. The short jacket, like the hose, also enhanced the male physique, using a combination of padding, “unpressed, symmetrical pleats, stitched horizontally across the chest” (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 69), and binding in the waist to create the perfect physique of knightly prowess. Indeed, the shift in male fashions that began in the mid-fourteenth century tailored the body to fit the chivalric ideal of broad shoulders, slim waist, and strong, long legs, as was espoused in romances such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s (ca. 1170–1220) Parzival (ca. 1205), in which much is made of how splendid the eponymous hero’s legs look in fine woolen hose (Wolfram von Eschenbach 2004, 54; see Raudszus 1985, 100–38; Brüggen 1989, 114). The feet also became much more conspicuous and so greater attention came to be paid to the choice of footwear. The long-toed shoe known variously as a poulaine, pike, and crakow came into vogue for the first time in the mid-fourteenth century and remained popular until ca. 1410, making a further appearance amongst the fashionable classes during the latter half of the fifteenth century. These shoes were wholly impractical and the toes became so long that they had to be stuffed with substances such as bone so as to retain their shape (Grew, Neergard, and Mitford 1988, 88). As Diana De Marly has observed, this was a fashion that was deemed to be “very elegant by those who did not have to walk far” (De Marly 1985, 20). The tailoring changes of the mid-fourteenth century therefore create in fashionable attire oddities of style that serve a purpose that is in no way practical, something that contemporary writers were quick to criticize. Sleeves come under attack for being so long that, to quote Thomas Hoccleve (ca. 1368–1426), they “sweepe away the filthe out of the street” (Hoccleve 1999, 55) and impede movement. Unnecessary embellishments, such as embroidery, also received negative comment. They were deemed a frivolous luxury, indicative of the pride of the wearer. Embroidery, like dagging, was incredibly labor-intensive. Several heavily embroidered items in the great wardrobe accounts took over 800 working days to produce (Staniland 1986, 236–46). Whether the reference was to tight hose, short doublets, voluminous gowns, or embroidered cotes, however, the items were all treated with condemnation and fashionable dress continued to be used as a vehicle through which to criticize the lasciviousness and excesses of contemporary society throughout the medieval period, as the article will now turn to consider.

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B The Social Meaning of Fashion The importance of viewing fashion as an expression of cultural and social identity has long been appreciated, from the publication of Johann Carl Flugel’s The Psychology of Clothes in 1930, to, for example, Alison Bancroft’s recent monograph Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self (Bancroft 2012). Numerous studies have considered the nuances of dress, such as Alison Lurie’s The Language of Clothes (Lurie 1983) and Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System (Barthes 1985), in which he described clothing as an extra-linguistic but analytical code of social expression. Anne Hollander’s Seeing Through Clothes even goes so far as to describe fashion being in itself “a form of visual art, a creation of images with the visible self as its medium” (Hollander 1978, 311). Whilst these studies do not contain any detailed analysis of the cultural significance of medieval fashion, they do set important precedents for serious consideration of the semiotics of dress. The significance of undertaking such an endeavor has been neatly summarized by Barbara Burman in the abstract of Material Strategies: Dress, and Gender in Historical Perspective, in which she posits that: “integration of close object and textual analysis can enrich our understanding of wider historical factors and illuminate otherwise obscure facets of gendered historical experience” (Burman 2003). By “reading” medieval clothing as a form of cultural discourse one can uncover a wealth of socio-political messages and the tensions between group and personal identity at play in the Middle Ages. The interpretation of fashion as an arena for serious cultural expression is an approach that has come to be increasingly applied to the material culture of the Middle Ages in recent years, with a number of studies using clothing as a key interpretative factor in their analysis of medieval culture and literature. Laura Hodges’s Chaucer and Costume: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue (Hodges 2000), in its close analysis of the pilgrim’s costume features and the role thereof in the socio-political satire of The Canterbury Tales, helped to bring sartorial issues to the fore in medieval studies. This was followed by Susan Crane’s The Performance of Self (S. Crane 2002), which uses a variety of sources, including wardrobe accounts and archaeological finds, to examine the role of clothing in the formation of personal identity during the Hundred Years War. Similarly, the collection of essays contained in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Cloth Work, and other Cultural Imaginings (Burns, ed., 2004) and Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages (Rudy and Baert, ed., 2007) marry pure clothing studies and literary criticism to explore how the material nature of textiles fed into the abstract world of artistic representation. This approach is also taken by Monica Wright in her recent monograph Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance,

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which argues that clothing informs and shapes the narrative structure of the texts she examines (Wright 2009, 41). An understanding of the politics of fashion in the medieval period is crucial to the interpretation of the cultural discourses exercised in the period. It is, to quote Jane Burns, by “reading through clothes” (Burns 2002, 15) that the “cultural formations and literary paradigms” of the Middle Ages can be navigated. As the following brief analysis of some of the sartorial discourses exercised in the period will indicate, clothing carried a weight of meaning far beyond sartorial display and modishness. The section will begin by exploring the socio-political factors behind the clothing laws enacted across Europe in the Middle Ages and the role of clothing as an indicator of class and as a vehicle for the expression of anxiety at changes to the social order. The section will then turn to consider the relationship between fashion and morality in medieval art and literature and clothing’s role therein as an indicator not only of social position, but of spiritual health as well.

I Sumptuary Legislation Sumptuary laws have their roots in antiquity (Harte 1976, 133) and first become part of the legal framework of the Middle Ages in thirteenth-century Italy (Brundage 1987; Killerby 2002) and France (Moyer 1996). Sumptuary legislation was introduced to England in 1337 and Sweden in 1345 and its widespread appeal was spurred by, it has been argued, the “rapidly increasing luxury and extravagance” of the late-medieval period (Baldwin 1926, 21). It should be noted, however, that the emphasis on the role of clothing as a marker of social status and the desire to protect fashion’s ability to define visually class barriers that is apparent in the later laws is no different to the earlier edicts (Lachaud 2002, 122–23). As the centuries progress, however, the laws do become increasingly detailed and this may, in part, be a direct reaction to the fact that society became more complicated over the medieval period and so the regulation of dress, when fashion was used as a status marker, became increasingly convoluted (Scattergood 1987, 263). Racial concerns also played a part in the legislation, particularly in Spain where the clothing of the Muslim population was controlled by the Castilian courts as early as 1252 (O’Callaghan 2013, 463). Economic motives can also be clearly discerned behind the legislation and many of the clothing laws actively sought to protect the interests of insular cloth workers and artisans. The legislation passed in Nuremberg toward the end of the fourteenth century, for example, explicitly banned Italian jackets, daggers, and Venetian cloth of silver (Greenfield 1918, 107). There are, however, certain themes to the laws that survive the test of time and are culturally universal, and it is these

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broad concerns that are reflected in the literature of the day. Firstly, fashion is discussed in moral terms, with specific aspects coming under attack from both legislators and moralists. Secondly, a desire to protect the identity of the nobility in the face of the emergent merchant and gentry classes through limiting dress on the basis of class over financial situation forms the main thrust of the legislation. The general tone of the sumptuary laws when speaking of contemporary fashions has been described by John Scattergood as being one “of high moral outrage” (Scattergood 1986, 265). This can in part be attributed to a legislative tendency toward conservatism and neophobia (Baldwin 1926, 10). The concerns also have their roots in the desire of the Christian Church to control all forms of pride and ostentation, fuelled by a belief that excessive sartorial splendor was innately wicked (Newton 1980, 131). The sumptuary restrictions frequently sought to curb the excesses of fashion by prescribing, for example, the maximum length of pikes that were to be allowed on shoes and the amount of material that could be used in the fashioning of any one item. Dagged clothing came under particular attack (Phillips 2007, 26), with the objection being based on the fact that cutting fanciful shapes into clothing was horrendously wasteful as the remnants had to be discarded. This “moralization of luxury” as Alan Hunt has termed it (Hunt 1996, 77) names very specific aspects of the concurrent fashions as being particularly at fault. Some features, like the aforementioned padded doublets, receive criticism because of their deceptive nature. This sentiment is echoed in literature, for example in a macaronic complaint poem of 1388 in which the author bemoans the fact that contemporary sartorial trends bastardize God’s creation by making the wearer “Brodder then ever God made / humeris sunt arte tumentes [they puff out shoulders artificially] / Narow thay bene, thay seme brod” (Dean, ed., 1996, 129–31). This sense that fashionable attire is inherently deceptive continues to be a key facet of social satire throughout the medieval period with, for example, Sebastian Brant (1458–1521) dedicating an entire chapter of his Das Narrenschiff, which was published in 1494, to the subject of “von neuen moden” (new fashions; Brant 1962, chpt. 4, see also chpt. 32). A great deal of importance was thus placed upon outward appearance reflecting reality. The bulk of the statutes attempted to enforce and protect a visible class distinction by rationing fashionable attire on the basis of rank over wealth, with the higher echelons enjoying more freedom than the lower classes. Whilst the laws cite moral reasons for this, it is clear that a primary goal of the legislation is to make an individual’s status instantly recognizable from their clothing. Fashion was dangerous because clothing “could actively produce status, not just passively reflect it” (Sponsler 1997, 13). The legislation was therefore universally careful to state that the population must dress according to their place in the social order. The Acts of Apparel (sumptuary and sartorial laws, see below) enacted in Europe

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over the course of the Middle Ages reveal that the legislators were well aware of the power of fashionable garb to enhance the wearer’s status (Jacoby 2004). They all, barring those that merely repeal previous edicts, regulate dress along clear class divisions, allowing the highest members of society to enjoy considerably more sartorial freedom than the lower orders. Further than this, the structure of the Acts also suggests that the legislators were aware that many of the arrivistes were financially able to purchase luxury goods. This was in part caused by the improved prospects of the merchant and gentry classes in the latter part of the Middle Ages—an economic shift that meant that members of the lower orders were often actually better placed, in terms of wealth, to indulge in finery than were their noble counterparts. There was also a boom in production of luxury materials, with Italian manufacturers starting to offer relatively cheap silks in the fourteenth century (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 20). So successful was this manufacturing of more affordable silks that archaeological finds of “silk textiles from London are second only to those of wool in quantity” (Crowfoot 1992, 6). Sumptuary legislation was thus needed if silk was to remain the reserve of the upper classes and so retain its symbolic value.

II Sartorial Semiotics To the medieval mind clothing not only served as a physical marker of class and status but also as a symbolic representation of the wearer’s inner nature and spiritual health—a duality of purpose that allowed garments to be “tenuously positioned as equally material and symbolic” (Burns 2004, 8). The physical qualities of clothing, such as the material, acted as an expression of the wearer’s status. The stylistic features also served, however, as a symbolic representation of the owner’s soul (Camille 1998, 107). Whilst the nobility were expected to use sartorial display to convey and re-enforce their power and authority, didactic texts and images used the same styles of clothing to represent sin. Sermons frequently accused all those who indulged in fashion of being guilty of pride and lust (Owst 1966, 404)—a message that was reinforced by the fact that the vices portrayed in church murals were often dressed in the highest fashions of the day. The link between the sin of pride and clothing is most obvious in visual treatments of the Seven Deadly Sins—an “ancient moral-devotional-homiletic tradition” (Yunck 1988, 138) that was explored in Middle High German, Middle English, Spanish, and Provençal morality plays (Woolf 1980, 414), poetry and murals alike. An excellent extant example of the latter medium can be seen in the fifteenth-century tree-diagram housed in the Church of St Ethelbert in Hessett, England. In this depiction the personification of Pride, situated at the apex of the

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tree, is represented by a fashionably dressed young man wearing mi-parti hose, a short and tight-fitting tunic with wide sleeves, and a plumed hat. These fashionable costume features ensure that the figure and the message it carries cannot be mistaken. The fact that the figure is dressed so as to draw maximum attention to his body, through his colorful and tight-fitting clothing, identifies him as Pride. Likewise, the plumed hat exudes a sense of self-worth that can only be judged as hubris. In case the audience failed to understand the negativity to be associated with this style of dress the figure stands on a hell-mouth, giving a very clear indicator of the consequences of such proud array. Similar usage of sartorial iconography is also evident in treatments of Les Trois Mortes et les Trois Vifs, which in English was commonly referred to as “The Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead.” The earliest origins of the Legend have been ascribed to an oriental tale (Oosterwijk 2004, 62) and to folklore (Stork 1912, 249) but “the form in which the legend was known to medieval artists was inspired by four short thirteenth-century French poems” (Williams 1942, 31). The Legend survives across Europe in some 200 murals and went on to be translated into Middle English, German, and Italian. There is also evidence that suggests that a broad selection of examples of the Legend have been lost, “including a panel diptych, sculptural forms, and even paintings on the sides of houses in Paris and Chartres, where addresses were often given by visual cues taken from images on the walls” (Kinch 2008, 1). The story, in both its written and pictorial form, is an account of three young kings or nobles who encountered three cadavers when they were out hunting. The Legend acts as a memento mori tale and treatments of the subject make much of contemporary fashions to emphasise the moral message of the piece: beware of earthly vanity for it is indeed vanity. The medieval perception of aristocratic clothing culture therefore raises some interesting questions about the duality of fashion discourse in the Middle Ages. Michael Camille has investigated this in relation to the Luttrell Psalter, using the illustrations contained in the manuscript to explore the “double bind” that women, particularly wives, were caught in on account of their having “to strike a delicate balance between dressing with enough richness to identify her status and allure her spouse but not so richly that it put her in the wanton category” (Camille 1998, 110). One particular aspect of female dress that received a great deal of criticism was the horned headdress—as one anonymous Irish author writing in the early-fourteenth century complained: “God that berreth the crone of thornes / Destru the prude of wome[n] hornes / For his der passione” (Cosgrove, ed., 2008, 233). The horned headdress is an item of clothing that, like the male clothing maligned in the macaronic poem quoted above, again remodels the physical appearance of the wearer into a shape that it nonhuman and could even be said

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to be demonic. The same clothing discourses thus surround both sexes and male members of the fashionable classes were caught in a similar trap to their female counterparts. On the one hand luxury was perceived by didactic authors and social commentators to be a destructive force, responsible for demolishing the social fabric of Europe. Members of the nobility were, however, expected to dress in a manner that reflected their status and an opulent facade was even presented as “a social duty for people of rank” (Smuts 2001, 34). Despite this need for sartorial display by the upper classes the adoption of fashionable attire, particularly the most innovative and a la mode of contemporary trends, was criticized indiscriminately by didactic authors and social commentators, even when undertaken by the elite. There is therefore something of a dichotomy in medieval attitudes to clothing culture. In romance literature, however, there is little debate surrounding sartorial display. This is a genre that was designed to entertain the nobility and as such these tales use opulent dress to represent chivalric virtues (see the article on “Chivalry and Knighthood” by Ken Mondschein in this Handbook), rather than as a gloss for sin as was the case in the didactic material. In courtly literature “it is noticeable that, at all periods, the physical features selected for praise by poets are those which are emphasized in the current fashion in dress” (Newton 1980, 40). The Parlement of the Thre Ages admiringly describes Youth as “balghe in the breste and brode in the scholdirs” (Ginsberg, ed., 1992, 112), yet “in the medill als a mayden menskfully schapen” (Ginsberg, ed. 1992, 114). As was discussed above, the male fashions introduced in the mid-fourteenth century tailored the body through tight-fitting garments and padding to fit this chivalric ideal. The style of the new fashion does not, therefore, receive criticism (Brüggen 1989, 41–45). Similarly, the authors of romance also praised opulence. In Ipomadon (ca. 1180), for example, the expensive materials used in the manufacture of the hero’s attire are lingered on, including the red velvet used to make his doublet and the gold for his buttons. Several of the costume features were restricted by the Acts of Apparel to the highest orders of society and their inclusion in the description therefore helps to identify the character as a member of the ruling class. There is no moral censure attached to the description, which instead concludes that the outfit became him well (Newton 1980, 40). The authors of romance literature take fashionable modes of dress and imbue them with a chivalric identity. Instead of viewing the figure-hugging new fashion as lascivious, the author of Ipomadon uses it to represent virility. Even dagging, which was greatly maligned in didactic literature and frequently legislated against, is used to represent sartorially the wounds won in battle (Denny-Brown 2004, 237). This is in direct contrast with how such garments were used in didactic texts as symbolic of the moral and social rifts perceived to be apparent in society.

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Tournaments and festivals also offered the upper classes legitimate platforms for sartorial display as they were expected to “display superfluous splendor” at public occasions (Smuts 2001, 212). Such events were a chance for ambitious courtiers to appear in all their finery and the wardrobe accounts attest to the fact that expenditure on dress rocketed around such festivities. These occasions were not only an opportunity for the elite to compete in sartorial display with one another, but also a chance to impress their magnificence upon the commoners who formed part of the audience. By appearing in luxurious and ornately worked clothing the peerage retained an aura of grandeur in the eyes of the proletariat. This was of paramount importance as by appearing superior the nobility were able to continue to actually enjoy a position of elevated status. Sartorial magnificence was equally important for the maintenance of kingship, with contemporary commentators drawing on classical authorities in their endorsement of the employment of lavish clothing as a solidifier of royal power (Aristotle 1926, 204–13). Adherence to fashion was as important in this respect as opulent materials. By appearing innovative in dress kings visually accentuated their role as leader of the nation. This concern is reflected many times in literature. In the Middle High German epic poem Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), for example, the king Gunther is extremely anxious that he should be dressed in the finest raiment when wooing Brünhild so as to not be shamed in front of her and her people, who are reported to wear only the best fashions (Armour, trans., 1999, 28; Brüggen 1989, 121). Fashion thus took on different meanings for different agendas. The nobility used sartorial finery as a platform from which to present itself as a ruling caste, depending on luxury and ceremony to retain their air of supremacy. For their critics, however, fashion was used as evidence of the morally corrupt and decadent nature of the court and the nation that they ruled.

C Conclusion Whilst the sources outlined in this brief article have been shown to have judged luxury differently, they all bear testimony to the importance of dress in the cultural mind of medieval Europe. The power of fashionable display to confer status was well appreciated and legislative measures were taken to curb the sartorial excesses of all but the very upper echelons of society. The clothing discourses exercised in the period were, however, complex and fed into wider concerns about immorality, sexual temptation and sin. By investigating medieval culture through “a dual lens in which material culture and cultural imaginings cross in productive and surprising ways […] clothes and other adornments become flexible cultural formations; their use and meaning extend far beyond the

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functions of practical cover, decorative adornment, or index of social status” (Burns 2004, 7). Fashion was not only used to confer social position but also to indicate the character of the wearer. When wielded by authors whose sympathies lay with the fashionable classes, fine clothing represented inner strength and purity. Literary sources that were designed for an aristocratic audience support and re-enforce this interpretation of luxury. The well-dressed heroes and heroines of romance literature share the costume of their didactic counterparts. They are, however, immune to the usual accusations of immorality that were attached to such an appearance and instead enjoy the adulation of their author and audience alike. It is not that their clothing choices are ignored; indeed the sartorial features are usually described in detail and with a sense of relish. Nor can the adoption of fashionable clothing by such characters be excused simply on account of rank, as moralities such as “The Three Living and The Three Dead” always depicted their target as aristocratic and yet the clothing of these figures was used to represent the vanity of earthly pleasures. These clothing discourses thus go beyond the socio-political to the spiritual, expressing eternal concerns about the corruptibility and wayward nature of the vain. A strong desire to document and discuss fashionable attire is evident in the literature of the Middle Ages. In the last verse narrative by the German (Swabian) author Heinrich Kaufringer (d. ca. 1400), entitled New Foolishness in Fashion (Kaufringer 2014), Kaufringer lambasts contemporary clothing culture with vehemence. His detailed attack on concurrent fashions also acts, however, as an inventory of them. Kaufringer’s verse continues a rich tradition of sartorial criticism, echoing the work of the Middle High German poet Neidhart (fl. ca. 1220– 1240) and the didactic poet Hugo von Trimberg (ca. 1230/35–after 1313; vol. 2, 12639–779; cf. Lehmann-Langholz 1985; Raudszus 1985), among others. Such traditions of sartorial discourse flourished across Europe. In England they manifested into the satiric figure of the galaunt—a prevalent caricature of fashionably dressed youth that was used as a warning against a profligate lifestyle in English literature and visual art from ca. 1380 (Davenport 1983). In its cycle of manifestation and reaction, fashion offers an excellent medium through which to study the cultural history of the Middle Ages (Keupp 2011).

Select Bibliography Brüggen, Elke, Kleidung und Mode in der höfischen Epik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg 1989). Burns, E. Jane, ed., Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Cloth Work, and Other Cultural Imaginings (New York 2004).

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Crane, Susan, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia, PA, 2002). [= S. Crane 2002] Ewing, Thor, Viking Clothing (Stroud 2006). Heller, Sarah-Grace, Fashion in Medieval France (Cambridge 2007). Hodges, Laura F., Chaucer and Costume: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue (Cambridge 2000). Jones, Ann R. and Peter Stallybrass, ed., Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge and New York 2000). Newton, Mary Stella, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years 1340–1365 (Woodbridge 1980). Owen-Crocker, Gail R., Dress in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge 1986). Piponnier, Françoise and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Beamish (Paris 1995; London 1997). Richardson, Catherine, ed., Clothing Culture 1350–1650 (Aldershot 2004). Stuard, Susan Mosher, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia, PA, 2011).

Jean N. Goodrich

Fairy, Elves and the Enchanted Otherworld A Introduction The term “fairy” refers to a category of supernatural beings, usually more human than monster, but also to the Otherworld homeland of such beings, as in “Fairyland.” Sources from later in the medieval period may associate the fairy with nature spirits or elementals, like classical dryads or nymphs. The term is also used to describe characteristics of such creatures and the magical abilities they are purported to have. The word “fairy” entered the English lexicon from Old French faerie or fay after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and became the preferred word in texts from the medieval period. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first instances of the word (spelled fayré) in the Middle English metrical romances, Sir Orfeo, ca. 1320 and Kyng Alisaunder, ca. 1300 (Auchinleck Manuscript, NLS Adv. MS 19.2.1). Prior to the Norman Conquest, and afterward in texts not so exclusively aristocratic, the term “elf” could be used (Old English aelf, ylf; Middle English alve, alfe); sometimes synonymously, and sometimes simultaneously to mark a distinction in status between the creatures being described. Thus, a single elf or group of elves hails from their otherworld homeland, Elfland. The characteristics attributed to fairy in English-language texts were influenced by the continental traditions dominant at the given period in history as well as the population for which the text was written. The earliest instances of “elf” that occur in English are the result of the settlement of Germanic peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) during the fifth century and the later Viking invasions of the ninth century. Prior to these influences, texts would have been written in Latin by Romano-Celt monastic scribes, and are more likely to show the influence of classical and/or native Celtic traditions. One such classical influence may be seen as early as the eleventh century in Bishop Burchard of Worms’s penitential Decretorum libri viginti, which attacked belief in the classical Parcae, goddesses of destiny also known as the Fata or Fates, as well as the popular belief in “women of the forest,” sylvaticae, who offered their love to mortal men (Harf-Lancner 2000). French lais, chansons de geste, and courtly romances were widely circulated, translated, and adapted into other vernacular languages across Europe, intended at first for aristocratic audiences. After 1066 and the adoption of the French language by the court of William of Normandy (1028–1087), aristocratic audiences read or told stories of Fairy and the courtly fairy knights and ladies who peopled its landscape. With time, the literary texts became popular with a wider

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and more diverse audience, adapted from metrical text to prose romance, ballads, lyrics, and folklore. It is through the collections of “curiosities” and travel writing of monastic authors and chroniclers such as Giraldis Cambrensis (ca. 1146–ca. 1223), Walter Map (ca. 1140–ca. 1209), and Gervase of Tilbury (ca. 1150–ca. 1228) that we see evidence of the survival of Germanic and even Celtic traditions among the common people during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Briggs 1967), even as the consciously literary texts continued in popularity among the literate and elite. By the early modern period, the texts that preserve elements and tales of Fairy are a combination of popular folk tales and the aristocratic Fairy of literary medieval romance. Texts intended for a more elite audience continued to depict the aristocratic and romance version of Fairy, often stressing the quest for the enchanted fairy mistress. However, with increasing literacy and a wider audience, the more folkloric version of fairies begin to emerge alongside and eventually in favor of aristocratic fairy. Writers such as William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Ben Jonson (1572–1637) made liberal use of contemporary fairy folklore, inspiring the fashion for diminutive fairies that became popular with later writers such as William Browne (ca. 1591–ca. 1645), Michael Drayton (1563–1631), and Robert Herrick (1591–1674). At the same time, more learned, non-fictional texts begin to explore the belief in fairies, especially in relation to accusations of witchcraft and witchcraft trials in England and Scotland. By the mid-seventeenth century fairies became more of a literary trope, used for political commentary, satire, and parody. In all such texts, the distinction must be made between the recording of an actual belief in the Fairy or Elven Otherworld, and the use of these ideas as literary figures and tropes.

B Fairy in the Early Middle Ages I Elf Traditions in Old English The earliest Old English mention of elves, ylfe, occurs in a number of West Saxon texts: in Beowulf, in Anglo-Saxon medical texts known as leechbooks, and in some of the vernacular glosses of Latin texts, such as Ælfric’s Glossary. The prefix Ælfalso occurs in a number of personal and place names during the period. The instances of the mention of elves at this time seem to fit into one of five sets of characteristics: (1) in the medical leechbooks, elves are the supernatural source of disease suffered by humans and livestock due to elf shot, invisible arrows shot by malignant elves at the unsuspecting; (2) also in the leechbooks, elves are malign spirits capable of physically possessing their victims, causing foolishness, mad-

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ness, or seizures; (3) in the Old English poem, Beowulf (ca. 900), elves are monstrous beings that inhabit the wastes; (4) found as vernacular glosses in the feminine form, elfen / ælfenne, they are nature spirits, like classic nymphs, that inhabit woods, fields, mountains, and water sources; and finally, (5) surviving as part of proper personal or place names, usually denoting a benign or complementary aspect, as in the adjective ælfsciene (elf-bright), and the names Ælfwine (elffriend) and Ælfric (elf-powerful) (Stuart 1976, 313–14). In the epic poem, Beowulf, the monster Grendel is said to roam the wilderness with eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas. Eotenas has been translated variously as giants, monsters, or enemies (Clark Hall 1960), and ogres (Swanton, ed., 1978). Orcneas has been translated as demons or evil spirits (Hall 2007, 69–73), monsters (Clark Hall 1960), and goblins (Swanton, ed., 1978). The grouping of eotenas, elves, and orcneas are described by the Beowulf narrator as untȳdras, monsters or misbegotten creatures (Hall 2007, 70–71), and swylce gīgantas þa wið gode wunnon, such giants that struggled against God. This translation suggests the influence of the Christian scribe copying out the pre-Christian tale, as well as the classical tradition of the struggle of the Titans against the Olympian gods. In this case, the clustering of ylfe with eotenas and orcneas may suggest a grouping of the monstrous against the human, as defined by ancestry or language, but also an association by group inclusion as suprahuman creatures (Hall 2007). Examples of ylf / elf found in the medicinal texts known as leechbooks suggest that elves were believed to be the source of mysterious illnesses such as wasting diseases, fevers, and warts. The leechbooks contain a miscellaneous collection of remedies for human and animal illnesses such as fever, stomachache, and snakebite, but also remedies against theft and demonic possession as well as for safe journeys and to obtain favors. The Lacnunga (British Library MS Harley 585) written ca. 950, compiled by Oswald Cockayne as Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft in Early England (1864), contains a number of medical recipes to cure diseases caused by being shot by the spear or arrow of an elf. The recipe, Wið Færstice (against a sudden pain or “elf-shot”), is a treatment against the gescot (projectile) of ēse, ælfe, and hǣgtessan (pagan gods, elves, and witches) (Jolly 1996; Hall 2005; 2007). The association of elves with sinister, demonic forces is also suggested by the remedy þis is sē hālga drænc wið ælfsīden 7 wið eallum fēondes costungum (“This is the holy drink against elf magic and against all tribulations of the fiend”) (Hall 2007, 120–21). The Lacnunga also contains the remedy Wið dweorh (“Against a dwarf”). As the ailments are rarely presented with a list of symptoms, dweorh (“dwarf”) has been variously translated as “a warty eruption” by Cockayne, a tumor, a paroxysmal disease, a nightmare, and a fever by various scholars (Storms 1975, 168).

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Bald’s Leechbook (I and II) and Leechbook III, found in British Library MS Royal 12, D xvii, a tenth-century manuscript produced at Winchester (Cameron 1983), also contains a number of medical remedies for disease brought on by elves. Bald’s Leechbook provides a remedy Gif hors bið gesceoton, (“If a horse is elf-shot”) and another for patients suffering Wið ælfe 7 wið uncuþum sidsan (“Against elves and against unknown magic”) (Hall 2007, 120), both intended to address illnesses caused by mysterious, unseen magic or invisible arrows. Leechbook III, bound together in the manuscript with Bald’s Leechbook, provides remedies for elf-related illnesses not explicitly caused by an elf’s arrow. Wiþ ælfādle oððe ælfsogoðan (“Against elf-sickness or elf-disease”) presents a cure for generic elf-sickness, and the more specific “elf-disease,” which may be jaundice (Hall 2007, 105). Leechbook III also provides relief for patients Wiþ wæterælf-adl (“Against the water-elf disease”), possibly chicken pox (Storms 1975). In the event of an anticipated encounter with the dangerous unseen, this collection provides the recipe for Elf Salve, Wiþ ælfcynne and nihtgengan and þam mannum þe dēofol mid hǣmð. (“Against elfkind and against nightwalkers and against/for those people who have sex with the devil”) (Hall 2007, 104), which explicitly links the non-Christian belief in elves with the Christian belief in devils. Other remedies are provided to treat fevers, nightmares, falling-sickness (perhaps epilepsy), and for those victims out-of-mind or foolish (Jolly 1996, 45–47). The remedies present a combination of herbcraft, ritual performance, and invocation of Christian saints and iconography, demonstrating the amalgamation of Christian cosmology with local pagan customs. They also demonstrate the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint that the unseen elves were as physically and spiritually dangerous to mankind as demons, devils, and witches. The Old English Herbarium from the late tenth century (Hall 2007, 127), includes similar remedies against attacks by elves, as well as two treatments against dwarves. The remedy Wið Dweorh (“Against a Dwarf”) treats the patient for trembling or convulsions and a fever, while the second remedy, Dweorg onweg to donne … (“To be rid of a dwarf…”) treats the patient for fever, as well as possible warts (Griffiths 1996, 54). The similarity between the illnesses caused by elf and dweorg, as well as the remedies prescribed for them, suggests that the elf and dwarf are distinct kinds of supernatural creature that have the same malign effects on the humans and animals they encounter. The monastic scribes of the time recorded the remedies used in communities around them in an effort to incorporate current medical practice into the body of learned Christian and classical knowledge. This process occurred across Europe as well, in various languages and different kinds of texts. The effort to resolve the two bodies of knowledge also resulted in a number of texts where the vernacular language is glossed with another language, usually Latin, written by clerical, didactic, and literate lay-readers, sometimes for private use and sometimes for

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circulation. In the case of the word elf or ælf, a number of sources survive which gloss Latin-to-English or English-to-Latin, allowing us a broader understanding of the early medieval conception of elves. The influential 7th-century text, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, provides a list of Latin-English glosses for the feminine form ælfinne: Nimphae . aelfinne eadem. & muse Oreades dūun . aelfinni . Driades. uudu . aelfinne Amadriades uater . aelfinñ Maiades feld . aelfinne Naiades sāe . aelfinne

(Nymphae: ælfinne, and at the same time musae) (Oreades: mountain-ælfinne) (Dryades: wood-ælfinne) (Hamadryades: water-ælfinne) (Maiades: open-land-ælfinne) (Naiades: sea-ælfinne)

Similarly, the tenth-century Third Cleopatra Glossary (MS Cotton Cleopatra A.iii, folios 92r–117v) provides glosses of ælf in compound words to similar figures from Aldhelm’s Carmen de virginitate (BL MS Royal 7. D. xxiv): Ruricolas musas : landælfe Castalidas nymphas : dūnælfa

(country-dwelling Musae: landælfe) (Castalian nymphae : mountain-ælfa)

The First Cleopatra Glossary (folios 5–75) also glosses Aldhelm’s text, providing: Nymphas : gydena

(Nymphae : goddesses)

Both the First and Second Cleopatra Glossaries gloss the classical nymph Echo, known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as a wudumær (a wood-nightmare), mær being the Old English word for a nightmare, or a creature which causes nightmares. Ælfric’s Glossary (Codex Junii 71 Bodleian and Bodleian MS Barlow 35), a late tenth-century text written by Ælfric of Eynsham (ca. 955–ca. 1025) to assist students in learning Latin, also glosses feld-ælfen as hamadryas. The AntwerpLondon Glossary (Plantin-Moretus Museum, M 16. 2 and BL Add. 32246) from the eleventh century, glosses the Latinate figures with English elfen: Oriades . muntælfen. Driades . wuduelfen . Moides . feldelfen . Amadriades . wylde elfen . Naides . sǣelfen . Castalidas . dunelfen

using both the ælfen and elfen plural forms of the word. In each case, the elf is associated with the nymphs of classical tradition, beautiful divine or semi-divine women, often the companions of goddesses such as Diana/ Artemis or Venus/ Aphrodite. The classical nymphs are usually found in natural settings, associated with trees, streams, bodies of water or mountain meadows, marking them as nature spirits or elementals. The word ælf is a frequent first element in Old English compound personal names, and suggests both a benign and complimentary meaning (Hall 2007, 58).

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Some of the names recorded by scholars of onomastics include: Ælfric (noble or rich as an elf), Ælfred (elf-wise), Ælfnoth (elf-noble), Ælfwine (elf-friend), Ælfgifu or Elfgiva (elf-dear or gift of the elves), Ælfgar (elf-spear), Ælfheah (elf-high), Ælfwold (elf-rule), Elfhilda (elf-battle), and Ælfthryth or Elfthrythe (elf-strength or elf-fearsome). The positive nature of the names suggests they survive from a time when elves were viewed sympathetically or as friendly to humans. Elf place names in England include ælfrucge (elf-ridge) in Kent from a charter from the year 996 C.E.; ylfing dene (elf valley) in Berkshire from a charter from the year 956 C.E.; and Elveden in Suffolk as it appears in the Domesday Book (Hall 2007, 64–66). Whether the result of earlier, more positive associations with elves or the glossing of ælf as analogous with the generally beautiful classical nymphs, the word ælf appears a number of times in Old English texts, free of the association with disease. Ælf occurs twice in the Old English translation of Genesis A of the Old Testament Bible, to describe Abraham’s wife, Sarah, as ælfscīeno (elf-shining or elf-bright), where the Latin text used pulcher, meaning seductive beauty. Despite her own virtue, twice Sarah is taken from her husband by other men because of her beauty. Similarly, in the Old English Judith, bound in the tenthcentury Nowell Codex with the Beowulf manuscript, the virtuous and beautiful heroine Judith is described as ælfscīnu, as if aglow with holy light, even as she beheads the Assyrian general, Holofernes. Laȝamon’s Brut is a late (twelfth century) example of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry based on the Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut by Wace (ca. 1100–1174). Though composed during the Middle English period (after 1066), the text preserves the language and conventions of the earlier linguistic period. In The Brut, King Arthur is said to wear armor made by an aluisc smið (elvin smith), associating the elves with the fashioning of magical weaponry and armor, usually reserved for the most worthy of warriors (Hall 2007, 33). Similarly, the beautiful Argante, Queen of Avalon, who will heal King Arthur’s mortal wounds, is described as aluen swide sceone (a very beautiful elf) and fairest alre aluen (most beautiful of all elves). Argante is one of many queens of Fairy, like the White Ladies of Scandinavian myths, or the Fairy Queens of Middle English romance, who intervene in human activities for only the most worthy of men. And finally, though the text does not use the term aelf / elf explicitly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year C.E. 1127 seems to describe the Wild Hunt of Fairy, riding as a result, perhaps in protest, of the abbacy of Peterborough having been granted to Henry of Poitou, to which the chronicler objects: … as soon as he came thither … immediately after, several persons saw and heard many huntsmen hunting. The hunters were swarthy, and huge, and ugly; and their hounds were all swarthy, and broad-eyed, and ugly. And they rode on swarthy horses, and swarthy bucks. This was seen in the very deer-fold in the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods

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from that same town to Stamford. And the monks heard the horn blow that they blew in the night. (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1912, 202).

Recorded more commonly in later texts, the Wild Hunt is the mythic supernatural hunting party, common to folklore across Europe. It is a cause for fear among the country folk, and often occurs as a sign of the disorder of the world or to presage a future disaster. Since the chronicler ends the year’s record with: “This was [Henry of Poitou’s] entry; of his exit we can as yet say nought. God provide,” it seems the chronicler agrees with this interpretation. Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1100–ca. 1155), a cleric living in the town of Monmouth on the Welsh border, wrote the first secular historiography in England known as the Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1136). The text purports to present the history of England back to its mythical founding by Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas. Most of the material presented is fictional, taken from the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, and sixth-century Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, in addition to local oral traditions. Due to the popularity of the text, Geoffrey’s depiction of the mythic English hero, Arthur Pendragon, from conception to his mortal wounding against Mordred, spread widely in learned and lay circles as historical fact. According to Geoffrey, the boy Merlin is found by agents of king Vortigern, a “youth that never had a father.” His mother claims to have lain with no man, but dreamed of a young man that no one else could see who embraced her. One of Vortigern’s learned advisors explains this as the result of an incubus, thereby defining forever Merlin’s demonic, or perhaps fairy, origins. In the chapters that follow, Merlin provides the king with numerous prophecies and eventually assists Uther Pendragon magically in impersonating Gorlois, the duke of Cornwall, to lay with Gorlois’ wife, Igerna. Arthur’s conception is the result. Later Arthurian texts present an Arthur whose success and fall is frequently linked to the Fairy Otherworld, but not in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history. There is no explicit mention of Fairy. Arthur’s sister is Anne, not Morgan. There is no Lancelot, the protegé of the Lady of the Lake, however, Merlin prophesies his own death at the hand of the Lady of the Lake. Arthur’s sword is named Caliburn, and was made on the Isle of Avalon, called the “Island of Apples” in Geoffrey’s later work, Vita Merlini, where Morgan herself is first introduced. However, the story ends ambiguously, with Arthur carried off to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his mortal wounds. The means of transport and the identity of those who implemented it is never explained. Nevertheless, the Historia Regum Britanniae became a primary influence on later Arthurian tales and the medieval conception of Fairyland.

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II Scandinavian Traditions The Scandinavian cultures (primarily Icelandic and Norse) have preserved a rich tradition of literature concerned with a magical or enchanted Otherworld of elves, often referred to as hulda-folk. The cognate for elf in Icelandic is álfr, and in Old Norse, álfar. In both cultures, the álfar are often associated with the pre-Christian Norse gods, primarily the Æsir, but the Vanir as well: Odin, Thor, Feryr, Freya, Loki, etc. The Prose Edda, also known as the Snorra Edda after its compiler, Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), is a twelfth-century compilation of mythological stories, including quotations from the earlier verse Elder Edda. The Snorra Edda includes a prologue and three books: Gylfaginning, Skáldsaparmál, and Hattatál, which reproduce older works, often citing older verse mythologies. Gylfaginning is concerned with the creation and destruction of the world of the gods; Skáldsaparmál with mythology and the art of poetry, and Hattatál with verse forms in Old Norse poetry. While the álfar are usually associated with the æsir, perhaps purely for alliterative effect, some texts also associate them with the vanir, the Norse gods of fertility, wisdom, and vision. In Gylfaginning, Snorri distinguishes the æsir from vanir, whereas other texts do not make a distinction. The Poetic Edda, containing the older material, includes ballads and lays of mythological and heroic nature, such as Grimnismál, Reginsmál, Hamðismál, Skírnismál, and Alvíssmál, the Lokasenna and Vǫlundarkviða. These Old Norse poems are preserved in the thirteenthcentury Icelandic manuscript Codex Regius, as well as the brief citations in the Snorra Edda. The Álfr are primarily male and live in Álfheimr, Home of the Elves. Equivalent female characters are usually described instead by the words dís (supernatural lady, as in the Verse Edda Grimnismál, Reginsmál, and Hamðismál), norn (noble and supernatural lady, the Fates), or valkyrja (choosers of the slain). There is also a medieval Icelandic compound word, álfkona (elf-woman, elf-kin) to designate a female álfr. The literature makes a distinction between the ljósálfr (light) and døkkálfar or Svartálfr (dark) elves. The ljósálfr live in Álfheimr, a sky realm, and døkkálfar live underground, though they are distinct from dvergr (dwarves) and jọtnar (giants) which also inhabit underground realms. The ljósálfr are described as bright as the sun, while the døkkálfar are black as pitch. In Snorri’s Viðbláinn, the ljósálfr are more like angels, suggesting a Christian influence. Jacob Grimm (1883, vol 2 444–56) suggests that the dark elves might be the souls of dead men (Griffiths 1996, 52 n 37). In Vǫlundarkviða, an Old Norse poem from the Verse Edda, a common formulaic phrase is ása oc álfa (gods and elves), which are grouped together for alliterative purposes. In Lokasenna, the álfar are described as akin to the vanir,

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but the poems Sigrdrífumál, Skírnismál, and Alvíssmál mention álfar as different from the vanir. Alvissmal, a twelfth-century poem about poetics associates the álfar with the god Freyr because of his association with the sun. The word alfroðull used in Snorri’s Skáldskarpamál to mean the sun, is also associated with Freyr. In skaldic verse, Old Norse praise poetry which is primarily historical, álfr is used as a common epithet for men in metaphoric verse called kennings (Hall 2007, 28–31). The epithet is used to stress the wisdom, strength or battle prowess of the human warrior. Thus, in Bragi inn gamli Boddason’s ninth-century poem, Ragnarsdrápa, one man is described as sóknar alfr (álfr of attack), and another as raðaralfr (álfr of the ship). Similarly, another hero in the ninth-century skaldic poem, Ynglingatal, is described as brynjalfr (armour-álfr). While the use of álfr is commonly used in epithets for heroes, words for male supernatural beings with negative connotations such as dvergr, jøtunn, mara (evil spirit, nightmare) or þurs (giant), are rarely used as epithet for humans. In Sigvatr Þorðarson’s eleventhcentury skaldic poem, Austrfararvísur, he describes an encounter with a Swedish household, which denied him hospitality because they were observing an álfablót (sacrifice to the elves). The woman of the house explained that they feared the wrath of Odin because Christians were not welcome during this time of sacrifice (Griffiths 1996, 53). Vǫlundr, the hero of the Vǫlundarkvida, equivalent to the English hero Weland, is described as álfa lioði (member of the álfar) and isi álfa (wise one of the álfar). Like many of the Scandinavian álfar, Vǫlundr is associated with metalworking, forging rings of gold and gems. He married Hervor Alvitr (Hervor the Allwise), one of three supernatural women who appeared on the lakeshore one morning. To rest from their travels and spin flax, the women put aside their swangarments. Scholars have compared these ladies to the Fate-dispensing norns and to swan maidens. Thus, the Old Norse and Icelandic traditions that survive suggest that the early Scandinavian peoples saw the elves as associated with the gods. The males are wise and warrior-fierce; the women magical, wise and beautiful. There is a clear distinction between ljósálfr (light) and døkkálfar (dark) elves, both of which are distinct from the more monstrous dvergr (dwarves), jọtnar (giants), and mara (nightmares). And yet, each of these types of creatures inhabits the Otherworld with the elves.

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III The “Elf” Tradition in Germany As with England, early written texts in Germany were the result of the missionary work and the Christianization of the Germanic tribes of the area. While early texts such as the Merseburg Charms— written during the tenth-century on a blank page within a ninth-century theological text—recorded the pagan oral traditions of the Norse god, Wodan (Odin), Frija (Freyja), and Balder (Baldr), elves are not mentioned. Linguistic evidence for the existence of elves in medieval German literature and folklore is scarce (Thun 1969), however this suggests a preference for different word choices as well as a different conceptualization of the idea of “elf.” A number of these earliest texts contain figures that would be recognized in later works as enchanted, elven or fairy. Early secular literature such as the alliterative mid-ninth-century poem, Muspilli, and the twelfth-century epic, König Rother, have characters that are giants, but there is nothing to characterize these figures as inhabits of Fairyland. Muspilli’s giant is from a land of fire, not unlike a Greco-Roman titan, and the giants of König Rother seem like unusually-large humans. There is nothing inherently magical about them. More common in the literature of this time is the dwerg / twerg (dwarf). The eleventh-century romance Ruodlieb, written in Latin verse, features a prophetic dwarf who tells the hero where to find treasure and foretells his future marriage. Dwarves are often associated with hidden treasure and metalworking. Each of these may owe more to classical Latin works but still demonstrate the uneasy combination of classical learning and native folklore. The English word elf is a loan word reintroduced into German during the eighteenth century by Wieland’s translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1764 (Bächtold-Stäubli et al., ed., 1927, vol. 2, 760). In both Old High German (ca. 750–ca. 1050 C.E.) and Middle High German (ca. 1100–ca. 1450 C.E.), the cognate word for elf is alp or alb (Graff and Massman 1846; Grimm and Grimm 1854; Meyer 1891). The word elbisch in Middle High German meant “pixielike” obut also “confused because of elves” (Köbler 1993). An alp was considered a mahr (nightmare), a naturgott oder damon (nature god or attendant spirit), a faun, or a malign ghostly presence (Köbler 1993), and a genius (Graff and Massman 1846; Grimm and Grimm 1854). As a nightmare, the alp was believed to sit upon the body of the sleeper, causing pressure that made breathing difficult, and bringing bad or often erotic dreams; in many ways similar to the classical incubus (Meyer 1891). In some cases, the alp was believed to be the spirit of a deceased person. In one Old High German charm, the disease malus malannus (in Latin) is glossed as alpe in German (Edwards 1994).

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IV Celtic Fairy Traditions In Ireland, the fairy people are the Daoine Sidhe, the People of Peace. In Gaelic, they are the síth or sidhe, the sluagh (fairy host), and Daoine Síth or maithe. In Scotland, they are the “guid wichts,” the Good People, the Good Neighbors, the Little People, the Gentry, and the People of Peace. In Wales, they are the Tylwyth Teg, the Fair Folk. In Cornish, they are the spyrys (spirits) or an bobel vyghan (the Little People) and in Manx, ferrish or ny guillyn beggey (the Little Boys) (MacKillop 1998, 177). Individual fairy creatures often have their own names, as if identifying them as a sub-species, which are highly dependent upon location: brownie, gruagach, badhb or bean-shithe (Henderson and Cowan 2004, 14–15), cluricaune, dullahan, ellyll, fenduree, glaistig, pixie, and pooka (MacKillop 1998, 177–78), to name only a few. Indeed, in Scottish folktales, some fairy creatures become so infamous in a particular locale that they have earned a personal name known to all the local inhabitants: Whoopity Stoorie, Habetrot, Aiken Drum of Galloway, Wag-at-thewa’ from the Borders, Puddlefoot from Perthshire, and Meg Mullach from Strathspey (Henderson and Cowan 2004, 16), as well as more ubiquitous individuals such as Hind Etin of the ballads and Jenny Greenteeth. Fairy often plays a significant role in the literature of early Ireland. The best of warriors, the most beautiful of women, wondrous magical weapons, and the warnings of prophecy often owe their origins to the Fairy Otherworld. As such, the characters that appear in these works are magical, semi-divine, and predominantly aristocratic. The Leabhar Gabhála Éireann, in Middle Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn, “The Book of Invasions,” is a twelfth-century compilation of poems and prose narratives telling the mythological story of the early inhabitants of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danann (Children of the Goddess Danu), who fled underground at the coming of the Gaeil, the Milesians or sons of Míl (Bhrolcháin 2009, 26). This explains the Celtic belief in a Fairy Otherworld that is entered via neolithic ruins, barrows, and fairy mounds as well as lakes, ponds, and springs. Most of this mythological material is preserved from a rich oral tradition in the Aisling Oengusa (“The Dream of Oengus”), Cath Maige Tuired Chonga (“The Battle of Moytura of Cong”), Cath Maige Tuired (“The Battle of Moytura”), Tochmarc Étaíne (“The Wooing of Étaíne”), Altram Tige dá Medar (“The Nourishment of the House of the Two Vessels”), and Serglige Con Culainn (“The Love-Sickness of Cú Chulainn”) (Bhrolcháin 2009, 31). In Irish literature, the Otherworld is named often as euphemistically as its inhabitants: Tír na mBeó (the Land of the Living), Tír na mBan (the Land of Women), Mag Mell (the Plain of Delight), Mag Mór (the Great Plain), In Tír Tairngire (the Promised Land), or Tír na nÓg (the Land of Youth) (Bhrolcháin

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2009, 79). It has also been associated with the legendary island of Hy Brazil, usually ensconced in a fog, invisible but for a brief appearance every 7 years (Bhrolcháin 2009, 80). The poem Eochaid in the Lebor Laignech, the Book of Leinster (ca. 1160), identifies the Tuatha De Danann as the conquerers of the Fir-Bolgs, an earlier race of people inhabiting Ireland. They are the hosts of siabra, an Old Irish word meaning fairies, sprites or ghosts (Evans-Wentz 1966, 285).

1 Ulster / Heroic Cycle The stories of the Heroic or Ulster cycle are concerned mainly with the mythic hero Cú Chulainn, and contain frequent, critical interactions with the fairy Otherworld. Cú Chulainn himself lives a year with with the fairy woman Fedelm Foltchaín (fair-haired), wife of the god Elcmar. In the Tochmarc Emere (“The Wooing of Emer”), Cú Chulainn is trained in the Otherworld by the fairy woman Aife (Bhrolcháin, 2009, 49) and the female warrior Scáthach (shadowy one). When he returns from the Otherworld, he brings with him the magical spear, the gae bolga (Bhrolcháin 2009, 84). The best of warriors, Cú Chulainn receives the benefit of fairy wisdom, martial training, and the magical weapon that always strikes true. The Táin Bó Cuaulnge (“The Cattle Raid of Cooley”) is the most famous of the Irish heroic epics. It details the challenge between Aillil, king of Connacht and his wife, Mebd, to see who has the best cattle. In oral tradition, Medb herself is considered a fairy queen (Gribben 1986; MacKillop 1998, 178). As a result of losing the bet, Medb decides to raid the Ulstermen of their prize bull, the Donn of Cuailnge to ultimately outdo her husband and his prize bull, Finnbennach. The origin of the two bulls is recounted in the De Chophur in dá Muccida (“The Conception of the Two Swineherds”): the bulls were conceived as a result of a quarrel between the kings of two fairy mounds, whose magical shape-shifting pigkeepers took up their masters’ quarrel. The shapeshifters transform eventually to maggots, which are consumed by cows that subsequently give birth to Finnbennach, the white-horned bull of Connacht and the Donn of Cuailnge (Bhrolcháin 2009, 46). In the Táin itself, Medb and Aillil are given a prophecy by the fairy seer, Fedelm, as they gather their army; a prophecy of their upcoming defeat, which they promptly ignore (Bhrolcháin 2009, 50). Thus, in this story cycle, the cattle, which symbolize wealth, masculinity, and rightful sovereignty, are a result of disorder in the fairy Otherworld that spills over into the mortal world. In a related story, the Táin Bó Fraích (“The Cattle Raid of Fraech”), Fraích, the most beautiful warrior in Ireland, owns twelve red-eared white cows from the

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Otherworld, a gift from his mother Bé Finn, sister to the Boann river. Fraích woos Finnabair, daughter of Medb and Ailill, with cloaks, tunics, silver shields with rims of gold from the Otherworld (Bhrolcháin 2009, 48). These possessions make Fraích a worthy suitor for Finnabair, though her father Aillil refuses to allow the marriage by demanding an exorbitant bride price.

2 The Fenian Cycle The Fenian cycle is a series of heroic tales about Finn mac Cumall and the warriors of the Fianna. In Macgníomhartha Finn (“The Boyhood Deeds of Finn”), the fairy Otherworld also plays a significant role. The tale features multiple shape-shifting characters —like the women of the Serglige Con Culainn who transform into birds (Bhrolcháin 2009, 84–85)—but most especially women who appear as deer. In one episode, Finn gains prophetic knowledge when he attempts to catch an invisible thief and has his finger slammed in the door of a sidhe mound. In another, he meets three women “with horns of the síd” upon them. He chases them, and obtains a brooch from one, who promises him a reward if he returns it. The story ends abruptly before the reward may be remitted.

3 Cycle of Kings The more closely historical of the early Irish story cycles is the Cycle of Kings, a compilation of stories about prehistoric and historic kings of Ireland, still predominantly fictional. Despite the “non-mythical” nature of the stories, the fairy Otherworld continues to play a significant role (Rider 2012). In Immram Bran (“The Voyage of Bran”), Bran hears music that puts him to sleep, whereupon he dreams of a silver branch with white blossoms, the symbolic invitation of a mortal to Fairyland. When he awakens and returns home, there is a woman “in strange raiment” who appears and sings verses about the Otherworld, the Land of Women. The next day, Bran sets sail and voyages to the Otherworld where he meets the sea-god Manannán mac Lir, who prophecies the birth of Mongán mac Fiachna, king of the Dál Fiatach in Ulster. Bran and company continue on to the Island of Joy and thereafter, to the Land of Women. When the company returns home, they discover that many years have passed and they are now the heroes of stories. One sailor sets foot on land and immediately turns to ash. Bran recounts the tales of his voyages for his countrymen and then leaves, never to be heard from again (Bhrolcháin 2009, 80–82). In Coimpert Mongáin (“The Concep-

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tion of Mongán”), the prophecy of Mongán is fulfilled, starting a new generation of heroes. Manannán mac Lir takes Mongán, who is actually his own son, to the Otherworld for twelve years. Mongán himself is a shapeshifter, a legacy from his sea-god father (Bhrolcháin 2009, 82–83). These stories feature the theme of the enigmatic passage of time in Fairyland as well as Fairy as the source of prophecy. The fairy mistress theme is featured in Echtra Conli (“The Adventures of Conla”). Conla son of Conn sees a fairy woman no one else can see, who gives him a magic apple. Conla survives solely by eating this apple, which always remains whole. The fairy woman later reappears and invites him to the Land of Women. Conla sets sail the next day and is never seen again (Bhrolcháin 2009, 80). Passage to the Otherworld is open only to the worthiest of men in these tales, but it also serves as a locus for testing the worthiness of the individual hero. The Echtra Cormaic maic Airt (“The Adventures of Cormac mac Airt”), again features the seagod Manannán, who takes Cormac’s daughter, son, and wife, leaving a musical silver branch with three apples in exchange. The silver branch grants safe passage of humans into the fairy Otherworld. Cormac sails to the Otherworld to retrieve his family. Passing a test of truth, Cormac awakens back home with his family beside him and a goblet of truth that distinguishes truth from falsehood (Bhrolcháin 2009, 126). Similarly, the hero of Echtra Thaidhg meic Céin (“The Adventures of Tadg son of Cian”), Tadg must also retrieve his wife from the Otherworld, where he meets many people, including Conla (Bhrolcháin 2009, 86). Scotland shares many of the same mythical stories in Gaelic as those of the Irish during this early period. Scottish Fairies and Fairyland become more distinct from their Irish counterparts in later texts.

V Welsh / Brythonic Traditions While there is much early native Welsh poetry—religious, commemorative, and praise poetry—that survives, the most significant corpus of Welsh literature concerned with Fairy and the Otherworld is the collection of prose tales known as The Mabinogion, based on the Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi (“Four Branches of the Mabinogi”). The name Mabinogion (tales of youth) (MacKillop 1998, 276) was given to the collection by Lady Charlotte Guest (1812–1895) in the nineteenth century, and usually refers to twelve tales including the original four branches. The original tales were written in Middle Welsh between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, based on oral tradition that circulated long before the written versions. The tales survive in two fourteenth-century manuscripts: The White Book of Rhydderch (Peniarth MS 4, National Library of Wales) and The Red Book of Hergest (Bodleian MS Jesus College 111).

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The Four Branches are Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed (“Pwyll Prince of Dyfed”), Branwen ferch Llŷr (“Branwen daughter of Llŷr”), Manawyden fab Llŷr, (“Manawydan son of Llŷr”), and Math fab Mathonwy (“Math son of Mathonwy”). The first tells the story of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, who encounters the Lord of the Otherworld, Arawn and his pack of hounds—white dogs with ears of red—while hunting the same stag. To repay his discourtesy for chasing off Arawn’s hounds, Pwyll agrees to take Arawn’s shape and place as ruler of Annwn for a year, at the end of which Pwyll must challenge and defeat a rival king who has been troubling Arawn. Annwn is both the Otherworld and Afterlife. Later in the tale, Pwyll sits upon an enchanted hill in order to see a wonder. A beautiful woman appears on a white horse, and though he tries three times, he cannot catch up to her. On the fourth time, he addresses the fairy lady, who introduces herself as Rhiannon and declares her love for him. They must meet again in a year’s time at her wedding feast, and Pwyll must best a rival suitor with the help of a magic, unfillable bag. Thereafter, having married Rhiannon, Pwyll and his wife conceive a child which is stolen away on its day of birth. Rhiannon is suspected of killing the child, but eventually it is discovered far away in a barn by a lord whose mares were robbed of their foals just after foaling. The child is returned to Pwyll and Rhiannon, and named Pryderi. The second tale, Branwen daughter of Llŷr, tells the story of the children of Llŷr, the sea-god. The eldest brother, Bendigeidfran (Bran the Blessed) is so large, he can wade across the Irish Sea. Branwen is married to Matholwch, the king of Ireland. Her brothers give Matholwch a cauldron of regeneration that will heal slain warriors. The third tale, Manawyden son of Llŷr, continues the previous story with Branwen’s brother Manawyden and includes Pryderi son of Pwyll. After Manawydan marries Rhiannon, now widowed, Pryderi and Rhiannon are abducted while hunting, after chasing a gleaming white boar into an enchanted fort. They are returned only after Manawydan demands a ransom for the life of a mouse, which is the transformed wife of a powerful stranger (identified as a bishop) who has been behind the abductions and devastation of Dyfed in revenge for the humiliation long ago of his friend, Rhiannon’s other suitor. The last tale, Math son of Mathonwy, features the enchanter Gwydion, Math’s nephew, who is able to conjure phantom horses and hounds in exchange for Pryderi’s swine, and later, to fashion a bride, Bloddeuedd, out of flowers for his own nephew, Lleu. Gwydion himself and his brother Gilfaethwy are transformed to deer, pigs, and wolves and give birth to three deer, pig, and wolf children. When Lleu’s flower wife commits adultery and then plans his murder with her lover to prevent discovery, Lleu transforms into an eagle. When this is discovered, Gwydion transforms Lleu back to human form before he wastes away and turns Blodeuedd into an owl.

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The remaining stories in the Mabinogion collection include two eleventh-century native Welsh Arthurian tales: Culhwch ac Olwen, and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy (“The Dream of Rhonabwy”). In Culhwch ac Olwen, the hero Culhwch must win the hand of the giant’s daughter, Olwen by accomplishing forty impossible tasks. One of Culhwch’s many tasks is to obtain the comb and scissors mounted on the head of the mythical boar, Twrch Trwyth, who can only be hunted with the aid of Gwyn ap Nudd, king of the Tylwyth Teg, the Welsh Fairy folk. In Gwyn ap Nudd, “God has set the spirit of demons from Annwn, lest this world be destroyed” (Jones and Jones, trans., 1949, 99). As part of the completion of the forty tasks, the enmity between two kings is presented: Gwyn ap Nudd abducted his sister Creiddylad from her betrothed, Gwythyr, and the two kings agree to fight for Creiddylad each May-calends until doomsday, and the victor on the final day wins the lady. King Arthur is able to reconcile the quarrel, allowing Culhwch to continue with his tasks (Jones and Jones, trans., 1949, 107). It is also through the aid of Gwyn ap Nudd that the great boar Twrch Trwth is located, and the blood of the Black Witch obtained to enable Culhwch’s quest (Jones and Jones, trans., 1949, 110–12). In the second native Welsh tale, Breuddwyd Rhonabwy, the hero Rhonabwy dreams of joining king Arthur’s court. These two tales are followed by two early Welsh histories: Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys (“Lludd and Llefelys”) about king Lludd, son of Beli Mawr and his brother Llefelys, and Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig (“The Dream of Maxen”) about Macsen Wledig, founder of the Powys and Gwent dynasties. The collection is completed by Welsh adaptations of three tales influenced by the twelfth-century French poet, Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1165–1180): Iarlles y Fynnon (“Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain”), based on Chrétien’s Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion, Geraint ac Enid (“Geraint and Enid”), based on Chrétien’s Érec et Énide, and Peredur son of Efrawg, based on Chrétien’s Perceval, le conte du Graal.

C Fairy in the High Middle Ages I French Fairy Traditions With the succession of William II of Normandy (ca. 1028–1087) to the throne of England in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, the English court, government, and nobility turned to the official language of Norman French, though much court business and the learned elite maintained correspondence in Latin. With the change in language and shift in power to Norman French nobles, the preferred literary works at court were in French and began to express French aesthetic

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and cultural concerns, specifically chivalric behavior and courtly ideals. Increasingly, French as the language of culture and prestige was adopted by many of the European elite, as were the romances, lais, and shorter verse pieces that were adapted or translated into the local vernacular languages (Lacy 2006). French author Robert de Boron is credited with the composition of a metrical trilogy of the Arthurian literature (ca. 1200), which was expanded into two prose versions, Le Roman du Grail and the more extensive five romance Prose Lancelot, also known as the Lancelot-Grail Cycle or Vulgate Cycle (Lacy 2006; McCracken 2008). The collection of tales known as the Post-Vulgate cycle, containing the Suite du Merlin, Queste del saint Graal, and Mort Artu, survives only in fragments in the original French, but was adapted into Spanish and Portuguese (Lacy 2006). The earliest literary genre in the French language is the chansons de geste (songs of heroic deeds), which date from mid-twelfth century onward. The thirteenth-century chanson, Huon de Bordeaux, is one of the chansons considered part of the “Matter of France.” The hero, Huon, must perform a list of impossible tasks in recompense for killing the son of Charlemagne. Huon must pass through the forest domain of Oberon, the Fairy King. Oberon is described as no higher than three feet in height, with an angelic face. When Huon encounters him, he is upon a horse, dressed in rich robes encrusted with gems that glow like the sun. He carries a horn made by four fairy women that could heal any illness, satiate any hunger or thirst, bring great joy, and summon anyone from a great distance, including Oberon himself. Oberon is a dwarf, and Huon declares him so beautiful, he must be a devil from hell. King Oberon gives Huon a magic cup that fills itself with wine and the ivory horn that will summon the fairy king and his army in a time of great need. This story, translated into English by John Bourchier, Lord Berners (ca. 1467–1533) in 1540, was an influence on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Early romances from this period often stress the wisdom, strength, beauty, and the bountiful, marvelous gifts a fée, or fairy, gives the worthy hero: Oberon’s horn, Lancelot’s ring, Arthur’s sword Excalibur, Érec’s coronation robes. In the Roman d’Escanor by Gerard d’Amiens (ca. 1280), Gawain’s strength, which waxes and wanes with the sun, is a fairy gift. The French fée usually takes the form of either a benevolent fairy godmother, counseling or aiding the worthy human, or the enchanted fairy mistress/lover, who may be sought by the worthy hero or who may seek him out herself (Harf-Lancner 2000). An enchanted or magic-wielding woman may share all of the characteristics of a fairy enchantress in these tale, but not necessarily be referred to as such. Later romances treat fairy characters, women especially, much more ambiguously, if not negatively (Paton 1902).

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The Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1165–1180) also became popular throughout Europe, where they became models for chivalrous and courtly behavior. The tales include: Érec et Énide (ca. 1170), Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette (ca. 1178), Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion (ca. 1170s), and Perceval, le conte du Graal (ca. 1182). In these romances, the Otherworld is often entered without warning and may seem indistinguishable from the mortal world (Rider 2012). In addition, while there are numerous characters in Chrétien’s works identified as Otherworld or fairy in similar tales, Chrétien de-emphasizes the otherness of these characters. Morgan le Fay, or Morgan the Fairy as she is known in other works, is introduced as the sister of Arthur in Érec and the probable lover of Guinguemar, Lord of Avalon (Chrétien 1990, 25). Morgan fashioned the green silk chasuble “such as had never been seen” placed upon the altar at Érec and Énide’s wedding, a silken cloth embroidered with gold thread (Chrétien 1990, 30). She may be the creator of the sumptuous garment, but it is not credited to any fairy magic or knowledge. She is also credited with making a healing ointment that could cure any wound, given to Arthur by his sister, and used on Érec after his battle with Guivret the Small (Chrétien 1990, 53). In Yvain, another miraculous healing ointment is attributed to “Morgan the Wise” (Chrétien 1990, 292). This normalization of the Morgan character in Chrétien might be compared to later depictions of Morgan; for instance, by Thomas Malory in Le Morte Darthur two hundred years later, or to Claris et Laris, from a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, where Morgan is explicitly identified as a fairy and a witch, and Claris is imprisoned by a fairy mistress because she loves him and he refused her. The most explicit references to Fairy in Chrétien’s works are limited: when Lancelot, the hero of Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette, is described as having a ring: “But the knight … had a ring on his finger …. The lady who had given him this ring was a fairy, who had raised him in his infancy” (Chrétien 1990, 199); and when the robe Érec wore at his coronation is described as embroidered “by four fairies with great skill and mastery” (Chrétien 1990, 84). However scholars have noted similarities with several established fairy folklore motifs: Érec is a hero who must fight a giant for his lady, Énide, who has supernatural beauty like a fairy mistress; Yvain must also fight a giant for a lady associated with a magic fountain, equating the lady Laudine as well to a fairy mistress. The Anglo-Norman writer, Marie de France, popularized the Breton lai in the English court during the late twelfth century. Of the works that have survived, Lanval and Yonec have characters that are explicitly fairy. Lanval is the worthy knight who earns the love of a beautiful, unnamed fairy mistress who showers him with gifts. He breaks her prohibition not to speak of her, but she appears in Arthur’s court, rescues him from infamy, and takes him away to Fairyland (Marie de France 1999, 81). Yonec is the name of the unborn child, the offspring of a fairy

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knight who comes to his beloved in the form of a hawk, while she is imprisoned in a tower by her jealous husband (Marie de France 1999, 86). To be sure that the fairy knight is not a devil, the lady requires him to take the Eucharist, proving he is Christian. Like the author of Amadas et Ydoine, Marie makes a particular effort in Yonec to demonstrate the fairy knight’s godliness. The knight is mortally wounded when visiting the tower, and the lady follows his trail of blood to his underground Fairy kingdom. The knight gives her a magic ring and his sword, and prophesies that their son Yonec will avenge their deaths. Of the other lais by Marie, the hero and heroine of Guigemar benefit from a magic boat and a set of knots magically tied so they can only be untied by the lovers, and the hero of Bisclavret is a shape-changer, a werewolf. The thirteenth-century work by Adam de la Halle (ca. 1237–ca. 1288), Le Jeu Adam, òu de la Feuillie, describes the visit of three fairies—Morgue, Arsile, and Maglore—to a bower prepared for them, though Maglore is displeased to discover a place has not been set for her (Briggs 1959). This may be the origin of the fairytale grouping of three fairies as well as the consequences of having forgotten the third (Briggs 1959). In the Anglo-Norman romance Amadas et Ydoine (ca. 1220), three witches save the heroine Ydoine from consummating a marriage she does not want, an example of the three fairy godmothers of more modern fairy tales. Later, Ydoine is rescued by an otherworldly knight. The story de-emphasizes the marvelous fairy elements by explaining that the “witches” are actually three maidservants play-acting, and the otherworldly knight was sent by God. Like Marie de France’s knight in Yonec, the proof that the fairy knight is a Christian or servant of God attempts to dispel anxiety that the fairy character is malevolent, or a servant of evil. Perhaps the most influential of the French medieval romances concerned with Fairy is Jean d’Arras’s prose romance, Roman de Mélusine, compiled between 1392 and 1394 in Norman French (Pairet 2001). Mélusine is part fairy mistress, part mermaid/serpent, and part banshee, heralding the death of one of her progeny with her woeful cries. D’Arras wrote the romance as a dynastic origin myth at the request of John, Duc d’Berry (1340–1416) for the house of Lusignan. Mélusine is a fairy lady who was cursed for disobedience: she is half-fish (or serpent) from the waist down. She is able to disguise this, meeting her future husband at an enchanted fountain, marrying and bearing children, but must bathe once a week in fish form. She requires of her husband a promise not to enter her chamber each Saturday. Mélusine is responsible for the rise in power and wealth of the Lusignan family, including magically building the castle of Lusignan. When her husband breaks the prohibition, Mélusine transforms into a dragon and flies screeching out the window. Thereafter, she appears over the castle in dragon form, wailing, to announce the death of one of her descendants. The story was so popular, it was

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borrowed and adapted numerous times, including Coudrette’s fifteenth-century version, Le Roman de Parthenay ou de Lusignan, Thüring von Ringoltingen’s (ca. 1415–ca. 1483) translation into German in the mid-fifteenth century, and into Castilian as Historia de la linda Melosina (1489) by Juan Parix (fl. 1472) and Estevan Cleblat (Rivera 1997). A number of variant Mélusine tales have been identified in Irish folklore as well, which pre-date the d’Arras romance (Almquist 1999).

II Middle English 1 The “Trifles” of Monastic Writers While the literature of nobility and court in England turned to romances of chivalry and courtly ideals, a number of learned, monastic writers collected the continuing fairy folklore descended from Germanic and Celtic traditions from across England. Such stories were collected as curiosities to entertain a literate elite audience back in “civilization.” One of the earliest examples of peasant fairy lore that contributed to the popular conception of faerie was recorded in The Itinerary through Wales (ca. 1191) by Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Wales (ca. 1146–ca. 1223). Gerald records the story of Elidorus (or in Welsh, Elidyr) and the fairies. Elidorus was a 12-year-old boy who was approached by “two little men of pygmy stature” who invited him into the underground world of Fairyland to be a playmate for the King of Fairy’s son (Cambrensis, 1863, 390). On his return, Elidorus described Fairyland’s sunless sky, the sumptuous wealth of the diminutive fairy people, even the food they ate. Shortly thereafter, Elidorus was able to return again to Fairyland, but he stole a ball from the king’s son. The two “pygmy” fairy men came to retrieve the ball and chastised him for his dishonesty. After that, Elidorus was no longer able to find the entrance to Fairy, but soon after was seen to have been “restored to his right way of thinking” (Cambrensis 1863, 390) that Fairyland was only a tale. Walter Map (ca. 1140–ca. 1209), a contemporary and friend of Gerald, also recorded fairy folklore in his De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles). Map recorded several tales of Fairy including the story of a knight who pulled a lady from a circle of dancing fairy women, and made her his wife. Her fairy nature was evident in her great beauty. The lady set a prohibition on the knight that he would never reproach her, a prohibition he eventually broke. Map explicitly compares this tale to the “demons that are incubi or sucubi” (Map 1983, 159). Map recorded a similar story of a man who buried his dead wife, only to see her dancing in a fairy ring, from which he snatched her (Map 1983, 161), a story that associates the

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fairies with the dead. A third story of dancing fairy ladies ends with the women fleeing into the nearby lake and transforming to swans, an instance of the swan maiden folktales. Map also recorded the story of the ancient Briton king Herla, who met another king, described as a pygmy in stature with the legs of a goat (Briggs 1967, 50). This fairy king agreed to attend Herla’s future wedding if Herla would attend his in Fairyland. The fairy king brought rich gifts to Herla’s wedding, and a year after, Herla’s party entered Fairy through a cave high in a cliff. After the revelry, Herla returned to the surface to discover his time was long past. Map concludes by explaining that Herla is now the leader of the Wild Hunt, a spectral hunting party of riders, horses, and hounds believed to hunt the souls of men. Gervase of Tilbury (ca. 1150–ca. 1228), in his Otia Imperialia (“Entertaiment for an Emperor”) (ca. 1211) recorded a number of folklore stories, including tales of the water spirits of the Rhone Valley, called dracae, that lured young women into the water at their peril; the tale of a stolen fairy drinking horn; the story of the woman taken into Fairyland to be midwife to the fairies and the magic ointment that allowed her to see through the fairy illusions; to the naming of very tiny fairies as “Portunes” (or “Neptunes” in France) (Briggs 1967, 6–7). Ralph of Coggeshall (d. ca. 1227) a thirteenth-century monk, recorded the story of a human changeling named Malekin stolen into Fairyland (Briggs 1967, 7) in his contribution to the Chronicum Anglicanum (ca. 1223, preserved in manuscript BL Cotton Vespasian D. X.). He also recorded the story of the Green Children from St. Martin’s Land, about two green-skinned children found wandering in Wolfpits (or Woolpits), Suffolk, England (Briggs 1967, 7–8). The two claimed to be from an underground country. Historian William of Newburgh (1136–ca. 1198) repeats the same story in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum (1198), but adds that it was the girl child who claimed to be from St. Martin’s Land (Briggs 1967, 8).

2 Courtly and Chivalric Romance Other stories of Fairy and Fairyland in Middle English all survive in texts more literary than “historical,” and usually of the romance genre. The fifteenth-century verse romance, Thomas of Erceldoune, is based on the late twelfth to thirteenth-century figure from the legendary history of Scotland, Thomas of Erceldoun or Thomas the Rymour. Thomas was known for his powers of prophecy, but also as a poet credited for a version of the Tristrem romance (Murray, ed., 1875). The earliest versions of the poem, dating from ca. 1400, begin with the story of how Thomas lay on the “Huntlie” bank one afternoon when the Queen of Fairyland rides by. Thomas makes the mistake of hailing her as the

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“queen of heaven.” Having caught the lady’s attention, Thomas is taken into Fairyland by the Queen as her lover to serve her for seven years. Upon his return, Thomas begs a token of the Queen, and is granted the ability (or curse) of speaking only truth, as well as the knowledge of the future of Scotland. This romance is one of the sources of the Thomas the Rhymer and True Thomas Scots border ballads collected by Walter Scott and Robert Jamieson in the nineteenth century (Murray, ed., 1875, lii). Many of the ballads collected by Francis Child in English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1889), and Walter Scott in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) including “Thomas the Rhymer,” “Tamlin,” “Hind Etin,” “Sir Orfeo,” and “Lady Isobel and the Elfin Knight”—originate from sources during the medieval period. The Thomas romance and ballads use the tropes of the fairy mistress, abduction—from a river bank or under a tree—into Fairyland, and service in the Otherworld for seven years that became a convention of fairy lore in literature and popular belief. The classical story of Orpheus and Euridice is the basis for the fourteenthcentury verse romance of Sir Orfeo (Auckinleck, MS National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1), likely an adaptation of a French Breton lai, Lai d’Orphey, which does not survive (Burrow and Thorlac-Petre 2004, 112–13). In Sir Orfeo, the queen Herodis is abducted by the Fairy King and taken to Fairyland after sleeping under an impe-tree or apple tree. Orfeo wanders across the land in search of her until, after ten years, he sees her riding among the fairy host. He follows them into a cave and down into Fairyland, and into the castle of the Fairy King, where he sees Herodis sleeping in the company of people Orfeo recognizes as long dead. Orfeo entertains the Fairy King with his harp, and as a reward for his music, Orfeo asks for Herodis. Unlike his namesake Orpheus, Sir Orfeo is able to return to the mortal world successfully with Herodis and live out the rest of their lives happily. Queen Herodis is an example of the woman abducted into Fairyland, along with many folk believed to have died, demonstrating the association of Fairy with the dead and the Underworld (Briggs 1967, 141–42; Maxwell-Stuart 2001). Other scholars have interpreted “being taken by the fairies” as a euphemism for madness (Spearing 2000). Two other texts included in the Auckinleck manuscript mentioned above are the anonymous, Sir Degarré, an early fourteenth-century romance, and Guy of Warwick, a fourteenth-century English metrical romance. Degarré is the abandoned son of a princess who was raped by a fairy knight while traveling to an abbey in the forest. The child is raised by the sister of the hermit who found him, with nothing but a pair of magical gloves and a broken sword. Once grown, Degarré defeats a dragon, which earns him knighthood, and then unknowingly fights his grandfather for the hand of his mother. After winning the challenge and

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marrying his mother, Degarré and the princess discover his identity because of the magical gloves that will fit only her. Learning the story of his birth, Degarré goes off in search of his father, with whom he fights and is discovered because of the broken sword: the fairy knight has the missing half by which he will one day identify his son. Degarré is the means by which his parents are reunited and properly married. The romance, Guy of Warwick, recounts the adventures of Sir Guy, who defeats an evil duke, a dragon, and two giants, until he becomes the greatest knight in the world to impress his lady. His son Reinbrun will fight a fairy knight to free an old friend of his father’s who has been imprisoned by the fairy in a magical palace. The fourteenth-century romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x., Art. 3) is the story of Gawain, the preeminent English knight in King Arthur’s court, who accepts the challenge of the Green Knight’s Yule beheading game. The Green Knight survives Gawain’s blow from the ax, and calls upon Gawain to find him in a year’s time to receive an ax-blow in return. Gawain must undergo a series of tests in his quest for the Green Chapel. In the end, it was Arthur’s sister, Morgan le Fay—“Morgne the goddes”—who arranged the beheading game, both to test the courage of Arthur’s court and to frighten Guinevere to death (Cawley and Anderson, ed., 1996, 273–74). Fairyies appear in two of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1390s) as a tale of long ago and as the subject of Chaucer’s self-satirical verse romance. The Wife of Bath explains in the beginning of her tale that in “th’olde days” of King Arthur, was “this land fulfilld of fayerye. / The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye” (Chaucer 1987, 116–17). Unfortunately, she explains there were “none elves mo” because there are now churchmen that walk everywhere the fairies used to go. The Wife tells the tale of a disgraced knight of King Arthur’s court, who is tasked by the queen and her ladies to discover what it is that women most desire. The disgraced knight finally obtains an answer from an old woman he found in a clearing filled but a moment past with four and twenty dancing ladies. The loathly old woman extracts a promise of the knight that he will do as she asks for the true answer. When he finally learns his lesson and redeems himself, the knight finds the loathly lady he has agreed to marry is actually a beautiful fairy enchantress. “The Tale of Sir Thopas” is the tale provided by the pilgrim Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, a doggerel verse romance about a knight who rides forth to find an elf-queen as his beloved. Sir Thopas rides all the long afternoon until he comes to the country of Fairye but is challenged by a giant before he can find his elf-queen (Chaucer 1987). Chaucer’s tale is a parody of outdated verse romance as well as the conventional trope of the quest for the fairy mistress, a rare undertaking of great difficulty which became a clichéd, common occurrence in medieval romance by Chaucer’s day.

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III Medieval German (ca. 1050–ca. 1350 C.E.) Under the influence of Christianity, the alp of Old High German transformed from a ghostly nature spirit with ill intentions into a demonic creature in league with the Devil (Köbler 1993). Like the classical incubus, the alp would still trouble the sleeper with dreams, but in the service of demonic forces tempting the individual into a mortal sin (Bächtold-Stäubli et al., ed., 1927, vol. 1, 282; vol. 2, 759). The alp sometimes appeared in an animal shape such as a sheep, a cat with glowing eyes, or a horse (Bächtold-Stäubli et al., ed., 1927, vol. 1, 285). During this period, the alp developed the characteristic of being tricky, leading travelers astray or paying for goods with fairy gold, which turns to twigs once the deal is done. In Middle Low German, the alf was a böser geist (evil spirit), and was still predominantly male (Lasch et al., ed., 1928). The alf continued to cause trouble by bringing nightmares to sleepers, but they were also the source of alfschot, which caused eye diseases in people and breathing difficulty in cattle (Lasch et al., ed., 1928; Thun, 1969). The few examples that survive from Middle German suggest a similar view of elves as that demonstrated in Old English texts. One early version of the elben occurs in the lyrics of the minnesinger Heinrich von Morungen (Lied V, “Von den elben”) from the thirteenth century: “Von den elben wirt entsehen vil manic man” (Full many a man is bewitched by elves) (Edwards 1994). The Middle High German Der Münchener Nachtsegen (fourteenth century) provides a charm against evil spirits in general, including alp and the plural elbelin (Edwards 1994). Konrad von Würzburg’s (ca. 1125–1287) verse romance Trojanerkrieg (ca. 1281–1287) associates the magic of elber with the confusion of love: “Ich wene die elber triget mich / Machet mine daz ich reben” (I think the elves are deceiving me / Is it love that makes me confused) (Edwards 1994). For thirteenth-century poet Bruder Wernher, elves are described in the Sangsprüche as the source of deception and dreams: “Elbe triegent niht so vil” (Elves do not deceive as many) (Edwards 1994). Similarly, the thirteenth-century text Irregar und Girregar quoted by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in Irische Elfenmärchen (1826) conflates the alp and the nightmare: “dich hat geriten der mar, / ein elbisches as” (You have been ridden by the mare, / an elfin phantom) (Edwards 1994). The fourteenth-century North German penitentials ask, “hostu icht gelewbit … an dy maren ader an dy alben ader an dy weysin frawen ader an keyner hande truknisse?” (Have you believed in… mares or elves or in the wise women or any kind of deception?) (Edwards 1994), associating nightmares, elves, wise women, and deceit. By the twelfth century (ca. 1170), the romance genre was translated or adapted into German (Rasmussen 2012). The Lancelot story was translated into Middle High German by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven (ca. 1194) in his Lanzelet. The

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Alexanderlied, composed in the twelfth century and modeled on the French poem about Alexander the Great by Albéric de Besançon (ca. 1120), contains the story of the knight’s erotic encounter with flower maidens, strikingly similar to fairies. In the late twelfth century, Hartmann von Aue (ca. 1160–ca. 1210) translated Chrétien’s Érec and Yvain into Middle High German (Gibbs and Johnson 1997, 132). While aristocratic romance continued to gain in popularity, other texts of Germanic origin show the influences of the French fée. The thirteenth-century Nibelungenlied (anonymous, ca. 1200) tells the story of the dragon-slaying hero Siegfried, which includes the dwarf Alberich (elf-ruler) who guards the Nibelung, the treasure of the Burgundian royal line, and water spirits called Nixes who predict the death of the Burgundians. The guardian Alberich may in fact be an analog of the dwarf fairy king Oberon in the thirteenth-century French chanson, Huon of Bordeaux. In Albrecht von Halberstadt’s (b. ca. 1200) translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (first printed in 1545), the male and female elves are equated with classical nymphs: “die elben und auch die elbinnen / desgleichen alle wassergöttinnen” (the male elves and also female elves / likewise all water goddesses) (Edwards 1994). Fairy literature besides the Arthurian cycle would also eventually make its way to Germany. For instance, the Old French Partonopeus de Blois was translated in the late thirteenth century by Konrad von Würzburg as Partonopier und Melior, and Jean d’Arras’s French Roman de Mélusine was translated into German by Thüring von Ringoltingen in 1456.

D Fairy in the Early Modern Period I English Aristocratic Romance Le Morte Darthur compiled by Sir Thomas Malory (ca. 1460–1470) was one of the first texts printed by English printer, William Caxton (ca. 1422–1491) in 1485, and presents the collected Arthurian tales that comprise much of the “Matter of Britain.” Malory’s primary source for the early books of the Morte is the French Suite du Merlin, and magical use is dominated by Merlin, who is practitioner of both natural magic, illusion/enchantment, and prophecy (Saunders 2010, 236–37). Malory de-emphasizes Merlin’s origins explored in his source texts as the half-human offspring of a demon. Instead, unlike many of his sources, Malory’s Merlin is often mistrusted or feared as a witch. Later books ascribe most magical use to female enchantresses, whether benevolent “white ladies” like Le Belle Isode and her mother of the Tristram stories—usually human women gifted or knowledgeable in healing arts—or the

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more ambiguous or outright sinister enchantresses who use illusion, deception, and enchantment to obtain their goals. These include Nenive, who entraps Merlin in a stone tomb, Dame Brusen, who enchants Sir Lancelot against his will to father a child on Elaine, and Morgan le Fay herself, “the false sorceress and witch most that is now living” (Malory 1998, 204). Many of these sinister enchantresses use natural magic as well as “nigromancy” and illusion, but only Morgan retains a kind of super-human agency when presented by Malory. It is Morgan who attacks other fair ladies she considers her rivals, repeatedly tests the virtue of Sir Launcelot, and plots the downfall of Arthur and his queen. Malory de-emphasizes the otherworld origins of most of the enchantresses. Heroes may fight giants and enter into the unmarked boundaries of foreign lands in ways usually associated with the Fairy Otherworld. However Morgan is “fay” because she is learned and magical, not explicitly of fairy. Even the Lady of the Lake, who is ruler of a magical island or underwater kingdom in the French sources, becomes the ruler of a kingdom hidden in a great rock in Malory’s work, and Nenive, a damosel of the Lady, becomes a mortal maiden in Arthur’s court with an interest in magical studies. The English poet Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) took the model of aristocratic romance for his own work, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). His figure of Gloriana, the Queene of Faerie, is an idealized allegorical double for Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603). Spenser’s hero is the youthful Arthur, instructed and armed by Merlin, and sent into Fairyland on a quest for the Queene, of whom he has had a vision. Spenser’s “faerie” and elf characters, sometimes indistinguishable from humans and often allegorical representations of virtue or vice, are conventionally indebted to courtly and chivalric ideals of medieval romance, however many are also reflections of more popular, less-elite representations of fairy folklore (Woodcock 2004; Lamb 2006; Micros 2008). Conventionally, such characters are used to legitimize the Elizabethan hereditary aristocracy (Swann 2000).

II Royal Progresses and Entertainments The trope of the Fairy Queen was used in a number of courtiers’ entertainments in honor of Elizabeth Tudor in extravagant displays of hospitality and elite generosity. The 1575 Kenilworth entertainment depicted the Lady of the Lake in need of rescue from a villainous Sir Bruse, who could only be overcome by the presence of the Queen (Woodcock 2004, 40). The entertainment at Woodstock later in the 1575 Royal Progress featured a fairy queen bringing a sumptuous gift to the visiting Queen Elizabeth (Nichols 1823), portrayed as an equal sovereign able to give Elizabeth counsel. The entertainment at Norwich in 1578 presented a more folkloric version of fairies, with water nymphs and fairies dancing in a ring

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(Woodcock 2004, 47). Soon thereafter, Elizabeth was entertained at Hengrave Hall in 1578, where she was presented with the gift of a rich jewel by a show of fairies. Many years later in 1591, in an entertainment at Elvetham, Elizabeth was portrayed as the favorite of the Fairy Queen, who invokes her name nightly in a Dianic prayer (Woodcock 2004, 48). In 1592, at Quarrendon, Ditchley, the royal entertainment portrayed a gift-bearing damsel of the Queen of Fairies, and an enchanted knight asleep who can only be awakened by the Queen’s interpretation of the “charmed pictures” displayed around him (Woodcock 2004). In each of these cases, the entertainments staged for the Queen were lavish and flattering, reflecting images of the Queen back to herself as beautiful, immortal, powerful, singular, and magical, and intended to earn royal favor. After the ascent of James I (1566–1625) to the English throne in 1603, Queen Anne (1574– 1619) was presented a jewel by Mab, Queen of Fairies at a masque authored by Ben Jonson (1572– 1637) at Althorp (Swann 2000). These entertainments were often the vehicles of non-commercial acquisition and conspicuous consumption expected of the nobility (Swann 2000).

III Shakespeare The fairies of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) are perhaps the best known in Early Modern fairy literature, and illustrate the nature of the folkloric fairies usually ascribed to the past or the lower orders of society (Swann 2000). In Henry IV Part I (1597), King Henry wishes he could prove his own son, Harry, a changeling, having been exchanged by a fairy with Henry Percy at birth, which would explain the prince’s dissolute youth. In Comedy of Errors (1589), the disorder of multiple twins and confused identities is attributed to fairies. Hamlet (1600) describes the dawning as having the power to stop fairies from taking mortals and witches’ power to charm. In Antony and Cleopatra (1606), Cleopatra’s influence over Antony is described as the love enchantment of a fairy. In Pericles (1608), Marina is believed a fairy vision when first reunited with her father, and Cymbeline’s (1609) Imogen is believed a fairy, an angel, an “earthly paragon” when first discovered in the cave of Belarius. The abandoned infant Perdita is taken up by the old shepherd with “fairy gold” in The Winter’s Tale (1610). The Tempest (1611) presents Prospero’s “airy spirit” Ariel as a fairy, or so Caliban believes. Recognition of, if not belief in, fairies was common enough to all social classes throughout Shakespeare’s play-writing career to make it suitable for the public stage. However, three of Shakespeare’s plays develop the folkloric fairy material more fully. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–1596), Shakespeare weaves the story of the disordered human world of Athens with the world of Fairyland. In this

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play, Fairy is represented both by the King and Queen of Fairies, Oberon and Titania, Oberon’s servant Puck or Robin Goodfellow, and the various natureinspired fairies Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed. The quarreling of Titania and Oberon over a changeling child brings disorder both to the natural world of the fairies and the mortal world of humans. Shakespeare’s fairies are the “stuff” of folklore (Briggs 1959; Lamb 2000; 2006). Puck admits to being the mischievous hobgoblin who ruins the cheese and brewing, and misleads travelers. The flower fairies, Peaseblossom and Mustardseed, are the inspiration for later depictions of fairies as diminutive and associated with particular flowers, especially British Victorian fairies. Contemporary with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1594–1596) also presents Mercutio’s extended portrait of Queen Mab, “the fairies’ midwife” who rides a hazelnut shell of a chariot “Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love,” bringing dreams of fees to lawyers, or of cutting throats and warfare to soldiers. She plaits the manes of horses into knotty elflocks, and acts as the “nightmare,” like an incubus pressing down upon the sleeping maids that they “might bear,” implying pregnancy. Mercutio’s fanciful speech, repeating much of early modern folk belief concerning fairies, is a response to Romeo’s claim that dreams present truth. Mab brings dreams both pleasant and ill, Mercutio demonstrates, but hardly true. Thus, Mercutio uses the fanciful story of Queen Mab to satirize Romeo’s equally fanciful belief in true love. The Merry Wives of Windsor (ca. 1597), a later play by Shakespeare, makes use of the story of Herne the Hunter, a local legend of Windsor park (Fitch 1994). Herne rides about on horseback at midnight, blasting the oak known as Herne’s Oak in Windsor Park, rattling chains and sickening cattle, a version of the Wild Hunt of Fairy. In Shakespeare’s play, Mistress Page presents the tale as superstition and the basis of the trickery of Sir John Falstaff: the wives will have Sir John meet them at night at Herne’s oak, disguised and horned like Herne. Various children, dressed as fairies, will swarm the “unclean knight,” pinching him blue until he admits the truth of his intended lechery, enacting a ritual shaming for his wooing of virtuous wives. The fairy lore depicted in the play is presented as superstitious nonsense, only believed by the ignorant Falstaff, and used to trick or gull the simple-minded, but it also served to regulate personal behavior (Swann 2000). In contrast to this light-hearted treatment, Shakespeare uses fairy lore in Macbeth (1606–1607) by the witches in their conjuring. Hecate, the goddess of witches, commands the Weird Sisters to sing around the cauldron “like elves and fairies in a ring” as they enchant the ingredients for a charm “of powerful trouble.” Shakespeare uses this brief reference in direct association to witches in

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the Scottish play about the quasi-historical regicide that eventually led to the founding of the Stuart royal line through the characters of Banquo and his son, Fleance. A prospective audience, James Stuart (1566–1625), James VI of Scotland and newly crowned James I of England, was a believer in witchcraft, having been the target of an assassination attempt in 1591 by a conspiracy of witches (“Newes from Scotland,” a pamphlet originally printed in 1591, in Stuart 1597; Purkiss 1996; Gibson 2000).

IV Unlearned Belief and the Gulling of the Ignorant Perhaps in response to this experience with witchcraft, the then-James VI of Scotland wrote Daemonologie (1597) in refutation of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). James himself makes explicit the connection between witches and fairies in Daemonologie, explaining that fairies are a vision sent by the Devil to delude simple folk: “the deuil illuded the senses of sundry simple creatures, in making them beleeue that they saw and harde such thinges as were nothing so indeed” (Stuart 1597). And when asked why they appear, … to the innocent sort, either to affraie them, or to seeme to be a better sorte of folkes nor vncleane spirites are, and to the Witches, to be a cullour of safetie for them, that ignorant Magistrates may not punish them for it, as I told euen now (Stuart 1597).

Thus for James, fairies are illusions, even unclean spirits, sent to people simple enough to believe such visions, and used by witches to camouflage their wicked activities. The association of fairies and witches will continue on during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during the last great surge of witchcraft persecution in England and Scotland. In Ben Jonson’s (1572–1637) comedic play, The Alchemist (1610), the gullible Dapper is convinced to “throw away all worldly pelf” so that he might be gifted with an even greater treasure by the Fairy Queen. The comedy depicts a thoroughly ignorant Dapper, gulled into giving his money away to the three conartists, exemplifying the claim that fairies are visions of deceptions used to cover wicked deeds. Jonson based his plot on the 1595 scam run by a London woman who took money to introduce clients to the Queen of Fairies, and the 1609–1610 arraignment of Sir Anthony Ashley for swindling a young man of his fortune as payment for marrying him to the Queen of Fairies (Swann 2000, 454). Jonson returned to fairy material again a year later. Oberon, the Faery Prince (1611) was performed in the court of King James and commissioned by his son, Prince Henry (1594–1612). The masque included courtiers, professional actors, and Prince

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Henry himself playing fairies, satyrs, and Oberon, depicting a combination of folkloric elements and classical motifs (Lamb 2006). The masque presented Prince Henry’s legitimate descent from the Tudors and his newly acquired status as Prince of Wales. The masque functioned as both a self-presentation of the new Prince of Wales in his father’s court, a demonstration of princely munificence, and a manifestation of the superiority of the aristocracy (Lamb 2006). It also served as a subtle critique of Jacobean court excess.

V The Association of Fairies and Witches 1 England After the coming of the Reformation to England (ca. 1534), many stories of Fairy and Fairyland became more explicitly associated with witchcraft and the devil. Often, part of the witches’ celebration, or sabbat, includes a dance with fairies. Englishman Reginald Scot (ca. 1538–1599) wrote his treatise, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) to refute the existence of witches, witchcraft, and the claims of witch-hunters and “witchmongers,” especially of the Catholic Inquisition. He repeats a number of witchcraft trial cases where the accused mentions an interaction with fairies to explain the use of magic, believing that traffic with the fairies is to be preferred over traffic with the devil. Scot reports one case of a man (as recorded by witch-hunter John Bodin) who was transported many miles in the air to “the fairies danse” to spy upon his wife. Another accused witch associates “the divell and the ladie of the fairies” with “ladie Sibylla, Minerva, or Diana,” associating once again the fairy lady with the classical goddesses. Other witches claim to “ride abroad with Diana … or else with Herodias… and doo whatsoever those fairies or ladies command,” a possible reference to Herodias, the mother of Salome. Still others claim to have witnessed the passing of the fairy troupe: “a great noise of minstrels, which flie over then, with the ladie of the fairies.” In refuting such stories, Scot reasons that ignorant and superstitious people were once afraid of “spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies” including “Robin good-fellowe” from the stories of their mothers’ maids, but reformed religion has put an end to all such illusions. Robert Burton (1577–1640), the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) devotes an entire section of his work to “A Digression of the Nature of Spirits,” characterizing fairies as “terrestrial devils” and explaining how these “most dangerous of devils” can cause melancholy (Briggs 1959). In a number of legal cases throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both men and women accused of witchcraft or sorcery used the story of

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traffic with fairies as an explanation for privileged knowledge, the ability to heal or “unwitch” a sick or cursed victim, and the ability to counter malignant fairy influence: Agnes Hancock of Somerset (tried in 1438), Joan Tyrrye of Taunton (1555), John Walsh of Dorsetshire (1566), Bessie Dunlop of Ayrshire, in Scotland (1576), Alisoun Pearson of Fifeshire, Scotland (1588), Andro Man of Aberdeen (1597), Joan Willimot of Leicestershire (1618), Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn, Scotland (1662), to name a few (Macculloch 1921; Evans-Wentz 1966; Purkiss 1996; 2000). Bessie Dunlop, who claimed to have recognized a dead man among the fairies, cured “elf-grippit,” that is, being gripped by elf, as in a sudden pain (Hall 2005). One accused witch who managed to escape punishment was Anne Jeffries of Cornwall (1646), the “prophetess of Bodmin,” who claimed to have seen six fairies dressed in green who taught her healing by laying-on of hands. Jeffries survived when incarcerated on food provided by the fairies, and later began to prophesy (Purkiss 1996; Buccola 2006).

2 Scotland In Scotland, there were periods of more intense witchcraft accusations in 1591–1597 and 1628–1630, many of which involved encounters with fairy (Purkiss 2000). In 1616, Elspeth Reoch was tried for witchcraft, claiming knowledge gained from the fairies, and later explained her own pregnancy by a fairy (Purkiss 2000). In 1615–1616, Katherine Carey, Janet Drever, and Katherine Jonesdochter of Orkney were all accused and tried for witchcraft, having met fairies out upon the hills or having entered into a fairy hill. Isobel Sinclair, also of Orkney, under control of the Fairy claimed to have second sight (1633). Donald MacMichael of Inverary (1677) claimed to have visited a fairy hill on multiple occasions and gained the knowledge of lost and stolen things. Early claims of fairy influence are often associated with the influence of Catholicism and the fear of corruption of the Protestant state by the papacy, while later cases during the seventeenth century are often linked to Royalist sympathies (Buccola 2006). Like the earliest English Anglo-Saxon and German sources for elves, a number of the Scottish witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries include mention of elf-shot or elf-stones (Hall 2005). In at least six trials from 1576 to 1716, the belief that fairies caused illness, specifically sudden internal pain in both humans and livestock (Hall 2005, 27). The sudden pain or illness itself was called “elf-schot,” as was the invisible projectile shot by elves. Some deponents would identify “elf-arrow heidis” or elf-stones as the offending projectile (Hall 2005). In 1650, Joanet Scott and Jeane Scott were accused of witchcraft for the healing of cattle by elf-shot (Hall 2005, 25). Katherene Ross (tried in 1590), Christiane Roiss

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(1577), and Marion Meyne McAlester (1590) were each tried for witchcraft, having used elf-stones or elf-arrows to “schute” their victims (Hall 2005, 28–29). Accused witch Stein Maltman (1628) referred to “fairies schott;” he healed illness caused by the “fairye folk” and also gained knowledge to heal with an “elf-arrow-heid” or elf-stone from “Fairye folk” themselves (Hall 2005). Many of the accused witches in Scotland attributed their magical skill to a fairy, which prosecutors and/or clerks reinterpreted as evil spirits or the Devil, who, like fairies, was often associated with or dressed in green (Wilby 2000). The functions of the witch’s familiar, which usually appeared in animal form in England, was fulfilled in Scotland by a fairy or devil “spirit” in human form (Wilby 2000). Despite the refutation of fairies as illusions created by witches, many Scots believed in the fairies, in Scots Gaelic sìthean, at all levels of society (Maxwell-Stuart 2001), and well into the twentieth century.

3 Germany The belief in elves and illness caused by their malignancy continued on in Germany into the sixteenth century as well, as evidenced by at least two German witchcraft trials (Edwards 1994, 21). Anne Beringer (1573) was convicted of sending “Elben oder Unholden” (inflicting elves) to one victim and “die reißenden Elben” (tearing elves) to another (Edwards 1994, 21). Similarly, Katharina Wille (1573) sent six pairs of elves to torment a village boy, but confessed that she learned this from the devil (Edwards 1994).

VI Literary Texts and Political Satire The learned of the seventeenth century, in general, characterized fairy as either the superstitions of the ignorant or completely fictional literary tropes. While actual belief in fairies and elves may have been recorded in witchcraft trials—that is, beliefs of the unlearned accused as recorded by the learned judge or interrogator—into the seventeenth century, fairies were also used in texts as literary tropes for explicitly political purposes. An anonymous royalist pamphlet of 1648 titled The Faerie Leveller: or King Charles his Leveller Descried and Deciphered in Queene Elizabeths Dayes uses Edmund Spenser’s episode of Artegall and the egalitarian Giant as an allegory that supports King Charles I (1600–1649) against the “leveller” Oliver Cromwell (Buccola 2006, 170). Spenser’s allegory of Justice from Book 5 of The Faerie Queene is presented as a prophetic warning of the rise of the Parliamentarians

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against the Crown in the English Civil Wars. Another anonymous pamphlet ascribed to Robin Goodfellow, “The Midnight’s Watch, or Robin Goodfellow his serious observation; Wherein is Discovered the true state and strength of the kingdom as at this day it stands, without either Faction or Affaction” appeared in 1643, in support of King Charles I, and criticizing the King’s unscrupulous secretaries (Halliwell 1845; Buccola 2006). The Stuart fairy poetry of the seventeenth century depicts pastoral idylls in an escapist fantasy of sumptuous detail and aristocratic revelry using the pastoral images of diminutive fairies inspired by Shakespeare’s flower fairies (Swann 2000). William Browne (ca. 1591–ca. 1645) in his Britannia’s Pastorals (1616), demonstrates a clear debt to Spenser’s Faerie Queene as well as the pastoral folkloric fairies in an idyllic rural landscape in Books 1 & 2, but Browne shifts to the miniature fairies of Shakespeare for a critique of the Stuart monarchy and its conspicuous consumption in Book 3 (Swann 2000). While Browne uses the fairy banquet to satirize the inadequacies of the Spanish court, he also critiques King James’s love of sport and the excesses of the Stuart monarchy in the person of the diminutive King Oberon. Influenced by the Queen Mab of Mercutio’s speech in Romeo and Juliet, Michael Drayton’s (1563–1631) Nimphidia (1627) presents the mock romance-epic of the quarrel of King Oberon and Queen Mab in a comedic critique of Jacobean court decadence. In complimenting James’s successor, Charles, in a set of pastoral eclogues in his next work, The Muses Elizium (1630), Drayton presents the tiny fairy nymph, Tita, in the preparations for her marriage. The detailed catalogue of Tita’s bridal clothing and jewels naturalizes rather than critiques the material consumption of the Caroline court (Swann 2000). Robert Herrick’s (1591–1674) verse collection Hesperides (1648) combines a pro-Royalist attitude with a criticism of Anglican church ceremony. In the poem “The Fairie Temple: or Oberons Chapell,” Herrick’s miniature fairies seem to parody the church rituals they portray, while the fairies of “Oberon’s Feast” and “Oberon’s Palace” rely upon the detritus of nature and human debris to construct their elaborate material culture. Thus, the Stuart poets such as Browne, Drayton, and Herrick use the fairy court and monarch the way earlier writers used foreign and fictional courts: to safely critique and parody their own aristocracy and the material consumption of English monarchic court culture. Near the end of the seventeenth century, Scottish Presbyterian minister and early folklorist Robert Kirk (1644–1692) attempted to study methodically the world of fairies. In 1691, he wrote The Secret Common-Wealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, recording the folk beliefs of the Lowland and Highland Gaelic Scots, which were presumably free of the more literary traditions of the south (Briggs 1959). Many of the stories collected are nevertheless similar to folklore collected in England. His treatise was presented as serious scholarship of the unseen world of fairies,

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ghosts, and poltergeists, including a study of phenomena of the second sight, which allowed his informants to see the fairies. The Secret Common-Wealth was not published until 1815 by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), as part of the efforts to collect and preserve folklore and oral tradition that became widespread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century (Briggs 1959).

Select Bibliography Bhrolcháin, Muireann Ní, An Introduction to Early Irish Literature (Dublin 2009). Briggs, Katherine, The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature (London 1967). Briggs, Katherine, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors (London 1959). Gibbs, Marion E. and Sidney M. Johnson, Medieval German Literature: A Companion (New York 1997). Hall, Alaric, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2007). Harf-Lancner, Laurence, Les Fées au Moyen Âge: Morgane et Mélusine La Naissance des fées (Geneva 1984). Henderson, Lizanne and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Lothian 2004). Jolly, Karen, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996). Lamb, Mary Ellen, The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson (New York 2006). MacKillop, James, The Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (New York 1998). Purkiss, Diane, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (London 2000). Rider, Jeff, “The Other Worlds of Romance,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger, paperback ed. (2000; Cambridge 2010), 115–31. Saunders, Corinne, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge and Rochester, NY, 2010). Swann, Marjorie, “The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 53.2 (Summer 2000): 449–73. Thun, Nils, “The Malignant Elves: Notes on Anglo-Saxon Magic and Germanic Myth,” Studia Neophilologica 41.2 (1969): 378–96.

Scott L. Taylor

Feudalism in Literature and Society A Historical Time Frame and Theoretical Reflections “Feudal,” as Ralph von Caenegem (1988) has observed, is derived from feodalis and concerns fiefs, the fief generally being called in Latin a feudum or feodum, and also referred to in the Middle Ages according to region or dialect as a feud, fie, feu or in England, sometimes a fee. Although these terms occasionally referred to a piece of land in general, as is the term “fee” in modern English usage, or somewhat more frequently to a dependent tenure in the nature of a benefice, the term most frequently referred to the tenure of a vassal, particularly one whose obligations, or servitium debitum, included military service or its equivalent. Hence, “feudalism” properly understood, though the term itself was coined only in the modern era, relates to lords, vassals, and fiefs, and so to the aggregate of principles and usages governing land tenures under feudal law. This was the sense in which it was used by sixteenth-century humanist legal scholars such as Charles Du Moulin (1500–1566) and Pierre Pithou (1539–1596), and subsequently Louis Chantereau-Lefebre (1662) and Nicolas Brussel (1750) (Kelley 1970; Evergates, trans. and ed., 1993). However, from at least the eighteenth century onwards, the idea of a “feudal system” as characteristic of the political and/or social milieu of the Middle Ages was loosely employed by leftist political philosophers, republican apologists, free-traders, and most important for present purposes, scholars. As a consequence, every historian has undertaken to define the term for him/herself, as was conceded by Marc Bloch, whose own reputation rested largely on his Feudal Society (1939–1940). Perhaps no term has engendered such debate as that surrounding the concept “feudalism” over the last forty years, particularly since the publication of E. A. R. Brown’s “The Tyranny of a Construct” (1974), which transcended the dissatisfaction already evident with the concept manifest in contributions such as Frederic L. Cheyette’s introduction to Lordship and Community (1968). The criticism reached a crescendo twenty years later in Susan Reynold’s Fief and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994). Even before the penning of these attacks on the so-called “classical model” of feudalism, usually associated with François-Louis Ganshof, medievalists were more than casually divided over the definition and use of the term, and whether the terms “feudalism” and “feudal system” were synonymous. Today, while some

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scholars avoid the term altogether, others are investigating the contemporary arrangements, usually on a regional basis, which in some part resemble the more traditional concept of feudalism. The following subsections will undertake very briefly: (1) to describe the evolution and development of the concept up to the Second World War, i.e., through Bloch’s masterwork of 1939; (2) to detail the major post-war developments to the mid-1970’s; (3) to consider the criticisms leveled against the concept in general; and (4) to consider the continuing research into feudalism over the last twenty years. In the second section, various medieval literatures will be reviewed, and an assessment proposed regarding the continuing viability of the concept of “feudalism.”

I Pre-War History of the Concept Critics of the concept “feudalism” are fond of recalling Frederic William Maitland’s quip to the effect that the feudal system was introduced into England by Henry Spelman (1562–1641), whose discernments particularly in the posthumous Reliquiae Spelmannianae (1698) – italicize Reliquiae Spelmannianae constituted early essay in comparative jurisprudence, and which achieved its most perfect form in the mid-eighteenth century (Maitland 1946, 142). Certainly, it is true that Spelman identified an hierarchical feudal law dictated by the state, which he contended regulated social and political relationships, and, in contrast to Cokean insularity, which could be reasonably compared to continental institutions as described by François Hotman (1524–1590) and Jacques Cujas (1520–1590). Less often mentioned, but building upon Spelman in the aftermath of the English Civil War, James Harrington (1611–1677) in the Oceana (1656), argued a principle of balance based on the premise that political power always follows economic power, argued by some, such as Achille Loria, to be the precursor to Marxian dialectical materialism. Contending that the monarchy had distributed its land to the barons, Harrington hence argued that Gothic politics had been aristocratic, since the commons were bound to the nobility by feudal tenure. Maitland, though bemoaning the inchoate character of the feudal concept, proceeded to use the expression, attempting particularly to differentiate English and French feudalism. Part of his argument was that the basic features of the English system were preexistent in Anglo-Saxon aspects of commendation, as opposed to Round (1895), who believed the Norman invasion of 1066 essentially transformed the English system into an idealized version of Norman tenure and accompanying institutions. In his approach, Maitland in fact had much in common with Stubbs, who largely rejected the views of Montesquieu and thus, Eichhorn, in favor of Waitz’s theory that feudal notions of lordship and vassalism were

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alien to the ancient Germanic constitutions, which recognized only sovereign and subject (Waitz 1865). This perspective dovetailed with a certain corporatist thesis, advanced particularly by Gierke (1868–1881), that German Genossenschaft was ultimately displaced by Herrschaft. Maitland, blind to Stubb’s Whiggish historicism, and perhaps Gierke’s German exceptionalism, saw to the translation and publication of the third volume of Gierke’s masterwork (Gierke 1900). Stubb’s subsequent critics, Richardson and Sayles (1963), condemned the very use of the terms “feudal” and “feudalism,” though grudgingly persisting in their use. To some extent, however, the discomfort with the idea of feudalism was the rejection of any a priori conceptualizations as obstacles to reconstructions of the legal past, Maitland and Milsom after him being, after all, essentially functionalists who believed that legal doctrine was not the product of analysis and reasoning within a closed system, but efforts to respond to problems and forces within society. Insofar as feudalism was conceded to exist, therefore, it dealt with the prevalence with which dependent and derivative land tenure was conjoined to the relationship of lord and vassal, which varied over time and geographically, and perhaps changed in its import. Phrased somewhat differently, some set of phenomena existed that might be labeled feudalism, but models of feudal systems or, for that matter, manorial systems, are “apt to make the texture of medieval society look simpler than really it was …” (Pollock and Maitland 1898, I:296). Unlike Maitland, across the Channel the dominant influence was that of the Annales school of French historiography, emphasizing totality and a search for deeply ingrained mentalities. It is not surprising, therefore, that Marc Bloch, one of the followers of the movement, would describe in his magnum opus (Bloch 1939–1940) more than define feudalism as to include so extensive and inclusive a list of aspects of European life as to render it conceptually meaningless and essentially synonymous with European medieval society itself. For Bloch, all hierarchical aspects of European society, which he conceived in terms of the three estates of nobility, church, and peasantry, were symptomatic of a feudal system, although he did maintain a conceptual distinction between feudalism per se and manorialism. Bloch hypothesized a feudal revolution that had accompanied what he perceived to be the fragmentation of unitary authority in the eleventh century.

II Post-War Attempts to Refine the Concept In contrast to Bloch’s integral approach, Ganshof (1944) attempted to limit feudalism to the socio-military tenancy of lord and vassal, with rights of seigniorial jurisdiction, so important to Strayer (1965), being merely optional. Stenton (1952)

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would adopt Ganshof’s model in his introduction to the English translation of Ganshof’s work, accepting that a single classical model pertained in most of France, Burgundy and Germany. While the definitions continued to abound, they generally fell into one of three categories: The Ganshof approach, emphasizing tenure; the Strayer approach, emphasizing seigniorial rights of jurisdiction; and the Annales approach, emphasizing the totality of institutions and mentalities. The resulting perplexity is nowhere more evident than in the work of Duby, who in 1953, seemingly attempted to bridge the first two categories, suggesting feudalism had two aspects, the political and the economic, pouvoir banal and feodalité, and then in 1958 proposing that feudalism could best be explained as a psychological complex, approaching Bloch’s totality approach.

III Critiques of the Concept Perhaps reflective of a certain Anglo-American hyper-empiricism dominant in the second half of the twentieth century, Brown (1975) asserted that there was little in the way of evidence to demonstrate that the terms for fiefs, vassals, and lords reflected their meaning in the early Middle Ages, and argued that feudalism was little more than an anachronistic construct that modern scholars had imposed on medieval data. Two decades later, Reynolds would argue exhaustively, that the concept actually arose only with the twelfth-century legal palingenesis, at the very time when state authority was being consolidated into a unitary system obviating the legal construct learned lawyers were assembling. More recently (Reynolds 2011), while acknowledging criticisms of her own technique, she has maintained her position that the concept has distorted the image of the Western Middle Ages, concentrating on the upper classes and their dyadic arrangements, while ignoring more collectivist ideas and activities, a topic she pursued in other work (Reynolds 1997).

IV Recent research A number of scholars, though taking issue with a simplistic view of feudalism, have nevertheless hesitated to dispose of the concept altogether. Dominique Barthélemy, for example, while finding no evidence for an eleventh-century transformation in the Vendômois and the Loire Valley, suggests that feudalism might be found already in the Carolingian period (1993), though he suggests that feudalism should be rethought in terms of lord and vassal, without necessarily

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requiring exchange of a fief (2005). Indeed, when thought of in those terms, comparison may become possible with areas not feudalized in a Ganshofian sense, such as Denmark (Opsahl 2011). Others, such as Gerd Althoff in his studies of German Lehnswesen (1990; 2011), continue to find at personal bonds were fundamental and indispensable to medieval governance, and depended highly on an endowment or fief, though by a certain period, those fiefs had become hereditary. Continued research on England, rather than dispelling feudal notions per se, have suggested that Maitland may have been correct in believing certain rudimentary ideas existing before the Conquest facilitated the transportation of Norman feudalism, which itself adapted to some aspects of Anglo-Saxon tenure (Hudson 2011).

B The Medieval Literature of Feudalism I The Genesis of the Libri Feudorum The beginnings of feudal law as the subject of scholastic concern lay in two midtwelfth-century letters by the imperial judge at Milan, Oberto dall’ Orto, to his son who was a student at Bologna, purporting to reduce to writing the customary law pertaining to feuds. These were subsequently supplemented, but largely ignored by the Bolognese doctors, though they themselves voiced opinions on feudal controversies (Meijers 1934a). Pillio of Medicina (d. after 1207), a student of Placentine (d. 1192), composed a Summa on the collection, and commenced an Apparatus, probably before 1187. Although frequently attributed to his student, John Bassian (d. ca. 1197), it was probably Accursius (ca. 1185–1263) himself who added to the Corpus the tenth collation containing the Authenticum, and the Libri Feudorum, together with the glosses of Bassian’s student, James Dove (Jacobus Columbi), who also was responsible for completing Pillio’s unfinished Apparatus (Meijers 1934b). Baldo Ubaldi (ca. 1319–1400), perhaps the most illustrious pupil of Bartolo of Sassoferrato (1313/14–1357), prepared notes on the Libri Feudorum, which became the standard gloss. At Padua, a student of Zabarella (1360–1417), James Alvorotto (1385–1453), commented on the Libri Feudorum.). The Libri Feudorum was subsequently recast in six books by Antony Minucci of Pratovecchio (d. 1468), along with James Dove’s gloss, which was published in 1431, with the whole consolidated and revised in 1442 (Smith 1975). Perhaps inspired by the latter work, Matthew d’Afflitto (1448–1528) in Naples composed various works on Neapolitan feudal law, while in Turin, Giacomino Micheloni of San Giorgio (Jacobinus de Sancto Giorgio) (d. 1494), published in 1487 twin treatises, De feudis and De homagiis et roydis, along with fifty problems on feudal law.

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II Pre-Scholastic Evidences Although critics of feudalism as a useful concept are correct that evidence of feudalism in the sense adherents of classical feudalism envisioned or employed the model is sparse, it is not non-existent. Some of that evidence has been discussed in prior sections of this article. A number of other examples are proposed herein as at least suggestive that the concept of feudalism is not quite as spectral as its harshest critics would assert, nor as late a development as advanced by others.

1 Carolingian Diplomata In 717, Charles Martel transferred from his allodial property [quod contra allodiones meos recepi] (Diplomata Karolinorum 1906, I, #9), as opposed to a subsequent transfer in 722, which involved properties belonging to the fisc [quae in ditione fisci sunt], and which, though confirming the grant, he repaid in cash to the fisc (Diplomata Karolinorum1906, I, #11). At first glance, these two documents could suggest merely a distinction between property owned personally and lands administered as part of the treasury. However, an interesting provision is included in a grant to a certain Paulinus of the estates of one Waldandus, who apparently sided with Duke Rotgaud of Friuli in his revolt against Charlemagne in 776: “Igitur notum sit ominium vestrum magnitudini, qualiter cedimus atque donamus a novis viro valde venerabili Paulino, artis grammatice magistro, hoc est res quasdam et facultates, que fuerunt Waldandi, filii quondam Immoni de Laberiano, que ad nostrum palatium devenerunt, pro eo quod in campo cum Roticauso inimico nostro a nostris fidelibus fuit infectus … .” (Diplomata Karolinorum 1906, I, #112). [Therefore, let all our largesse be transcribed, in what manner we ceded and gave to the exceedingly venerable man, Paulinus, master of the grammatical arts, that which was the certain property and powers which were Walandus’s, son of a certain Immo of Laberiano, and would have returned to our fisc, for the reason that he was killed on the battlefield with our enemy, Rotgario, by our faithful men … .”

The use of the phrase “ad palatium devenire” seems to imply that to return to the fisc, it must have been considered as originating from the fisc, which sounds somewhat more like a traditional feudal formulation, rather than mere confiscation. Indeed, this same tone dictates the complaints against Liedingerus, Duke of Saxony, where it is recorded:

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“… quod cum Liedingerus dux Saxonis ducatum suum iure feodali teneret ab imperio nec hoc recognoscere curare et tributum de suo ducatu a Cesare Augusto statutum, quod a predessoribus suis consuetum fuit singulis annis predessoribus nostris exhiberi, nobis dare contempneret et modis omnibus se imperio et nobis contumaciter per suam superbiam opponeret et se in preiuducium et gravamen imperii pro rege gereret et se regem Saxonie vocari precepisset … .” (Diplomata Karolinorum 1906, I, #269). [… that although Liedingerus, the duke of Saxony, held his duchy from the emperor by feudal law, and yet did not take care to recognize this and the tribute established by Caesar Augustus pertaining to his duchy, which was the custom by his predecessors to pay over each year to our predecessors, he despised to pay to us, and confronted contumaciously the emperor in every way through his haughtiness, and had borne himself as a king, to the grave prejudice of the emperor, and had begun to be called king … .]

Still, the case of Saxony was peculiar to lands reduced to tributary status, though the document certainly suggests that feudal status implied some form of dependent tenure. Perhaps clearest is the 813 confirmation of a grant made by a certain count Angelbert of a forest to a religious house, which confirmation was required “quia de camera et feodo imperiali erat” [“because it was from the fisc and in imperial feud”] (Diplomata Karolinorum 1906, I, #284). Feudal land, therefore, seems to have a tie to the fisc, and further, perhaps because of this, implies an inalienability of the granted estate.

2 Early Poetic References Terminology usually associated with feudalism was in relatively early use in French literature. For example, in La Chanson de Sainte Foi d’Agen dating from Province ca. 1050, the emperor is described as summonsing his fiefholders: “Trames sas letras els correus, / Manded aqelz q’en tenun feus … .” (1925, ll. 517–18) [He summonsed those who held fiefs from him]. This work predates by a century or more Girart de Roussillon (1036–1080), whose plot is largely dependent upon the protagonist’s rather confused tenancy, and which Paterson (1993) points to as an early Occitan example of feudalism in literature. In Gormund et Isembard (ca. 1100), an imprecation of the king recites, “ber sainz Denise, or m’en aidiez!/jeo tenc de vus quite mun fieu, / de nul autre n’en conois rien,/ fors sul de deu, le veir del ciel”(1906, ll. 375–79; “Baron St. Denis, now aid me in this / I hold my fief from you freely, / from no other do I recognize any of it, / only from God alone, truly from heaven”). Surely this reflects an old hierarchical mentality that while others may hold from some superior, the king holds from God and no other, to whom alone he owes fidelity and must answer.

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The Chanson de Roland (ca. 1108) [Oxford text], contains multiple references that suggest the dependent status of fiefs and their frequent association with offices. For example, “jo vos durrai or e argent asez, / teres e fiez tant cum vos en vuldrez,” (ll. 75–76; “I will give you much gold and silver, and as many lands and fiefs as you might want”); “Qu’il devendrat joints ses mains tis hom, / E tuto Espaigne tendrat par vostre dun” (ll. 223–24; “That he would become your man, with hands folded, / And all Spain hold through your grant”); Ganelon’s prayer for his son, “E lui aidez e pur seigneur le tenez” (l. 364; “And aid him and take him for your lord”], having previously made his bequest), “A lui lais jo mes honurs e mes fieus” (l. 315; “To him I leave my offices and my fiefs”); similarly conjoining fiefs and offices in lines 819–20, “Virent Guascuigne, la terre lur Seignur. / Dunc le remembret les fies e des honurs …” (l. 2680; “They see Gascony, land of their lord. / Then they remember their fiefs and offices.”]; or “Mei venget pur reconoistre sun feu” (l. 2680; “He will come to me to acknowledge his fief”), or “Deven mes hom, en fiet le te voeill render” (l. 3593, “Become my man, I will convey it back to you in feud”). Indeed, the dependent nature of the fief is emphasized by an interesting colloquialism, “Dunez m’un feu” (l. 866), meaning “do me a favor.” Vassalage, when referred to at all, is usually used in the sense of “courage” (e.g., ll. 744, 1080, 2981, 3037, 3447, 3901), suggesting that the early use of the term, at least in French, was consistent with a Latin root, “vas,” meaning military equipment, and suggesting that the term “vassal” merely meant someone who bore arms. As a final example, consider the dialogue between Garins and William in La Geste des Loherens (La Mort de Garin le Loherain 1862), dating to the last third of the twelfth century: “Garins parole qui ot cuer enterin: ‘sire Guillaume, li sire de Monclin, Tu ies mes home mon fie a tenir Et mes parens et mes riches amis. Por mes pechies, biaus sire, ai la crois pris, Outré la mer irai as Sarrasins; Se nule rien a nul jor vos forfis, A tos vos pri por amor Deu merci. Chi remanra l’enfes Gerbers, mes fix, s/estes si home, de luis deves tenir; s’il a mestier – jones est et mescins – aides li, sire, si feres que gentis. Se Dex co done que puisse revenir, Vos volentes ferai et vo plaisir.’ ‘Comment, diable?’ li quens Guillaumes dist, ‘vos otroiastes, quant tenistes mon fil,

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Tos les marchies de Mes quite a tenir; Il n’en a nul, ne il n’en est saisis.’” (La Mort de Garin le Loherain 1862, ll. 4636–53) [Garins spoke what his heart entertained:/ ‘Sir William, sire of Monclin, / you are my man my fief to hold / and my peer and my powerful friend. / For my sins, good sir, I have taken up the cross, / I will go across the sea to the Saracens; / You have never done anything wrong / for all I beseech for you the merciful love of God. / Here remains the child Gerbers, my son, / If you are my man, you must hold from him; / If he has need – he is young and tender– / Help him sir, if you be a gentlemen. / If God grants that I am able to return, / you will have your wish and your pleasure. / ‘How, devil,’ says count William / ‘You promised, when you held my son / all the marches of Metz to freely hold; / he has none of it, nor have you possessed him of any of it.’]

Here we see various characteristics usually associated with classic notions of feudalism, including the notions that the duke’s men hold through the grantor of the fief; the supposition that vassals will hold through the duke’s son in his absence; and the intimation that the enfeoffed has a duty of aid and advice to their lord.

3 Histories A number of early histories and reports employ language generally associated with feudalism, though often within contexts leaving doubt as to their precise significance. One of the more pregnant is the remark by Notker the Stammerer attributing to Charlemagne his explanation for limiting the number of counties he assigned his counts: “Cum illo fisco vel curte, illa abbatiola vel ecclesia tam bonum vel meliorem vassallum, quam ille comes est aut episcopus, fidelem mihi facio.” (1959, 17, l. 13; “With this estate or manor, from that monastery or church, I make my confidant as good or better a vassal than any count or bishop”). Dudo of Saint-Quentin in De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum (187), suggests that around the year 1000 when he wrote, it was known that Norman lords had begged land from the Duke in exchange for military service, suggesting an earlier date for the development of Norman feudalism than advanced by some scholars such as Douglas. The extent of the relationship between military tenurial aspects of feudalism and administrative aspects sometimes associated with feudalism may also be illuminated by consideration of the facility with which certain gastaldates were converted by the Normans into fiefdoms in eleventh-century Lombardy (Kreutz 1991).

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4 Tentative Conclusions The primary documents, while not determinative, suggest that fiefs differed from precaria and beneficia, and suggest further that fiefs (a) were freeholds in the sense that they were held freely (quite) by free men, meaning primarily that the holders are absolved from the ban or hereban (bannum aut heribannum non solvere debeant); that feudal holdings are conceived as part of the fisc (de camera et feodo imperiali sunt; quae in ditione fisci sunt), and are subject to returning to the fisc (ad palatium devenire); that as a consequence, fiefs are not subject to voluntary alientation without confirmation by the grantor, although upon death they constitute a patrimony (heredium), which in normal circumstances descends upon death to the heirs, albeit not as an inhereitance (hereditas) subject to testamentary disposition or free collateral inheritance; (4) because they remain part of the fisc they constitute sovereign land, not subject to diminution by such usages as praescriptio or usucapio; (5) that they are subject to at least reasonable expectations of loyalty and to certain customary obligations, including response to summonses.

III Feudalism Post-1200 Legal compilations after 1200, whether assembled by the curia regis, such as the Livre du justice et plet or by imperial direction, such as Frederick II’s Liber Augustalis, or by diligent jurists determined to provide practical handbooks of customary law, such as Philippe de Beaumanoir’s Coutumes de Beauvaisis, that proliferated in the thirteenth century (see “Law in Literature and Society” in this handbook), all presume the existence of fiefs and vassals as characteristic of a specific and peculiar tenurial regime. Perhaps this should not be surprising, since all also borrow heavily from the Corpus iuris civilis, which by then included the Libri feudorum as part of its tenth collation. However, this also corresponds to a period of exploding documentation of feudal usages, since by 1200, the most powerful princes were maintaining records concerning fiefs, homages and military service as part of their fiscal administration. Hence, in areas such as Champagne, a trove of data exists concerning feudal practices (Evergates 1975).

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C Conclusions Critiques of feudalism as a useful concept seem to proceed from at least three perspectives. The first is a radical empiricism that resists the temptation to read the twelfth or thirteenth-century signification of terminology such as fief or vassal back onto Carolingian use of such terms. In some respects, this is a healthy tendency, recognizing the historical and evolutionary aspects of language. On the other hand, it is not a response to the ultimate question of where and when, if ever, those terms signified the same or similar phenomena, nor does it establish they never did; and to the extent there was a shift in meaning, how, why and when did it occur? The second, and related perspective, is a severe chronologism that would prohibit application of any concept not current in the subject society. It bespeaks a certain anti-Weberian mentality that would obviate social scientific comprehension of historical events once they are understood initially within their historical context. The same argument raised against feudalism because the term was not used by medieval writers would bar the use of terms such as “colonialism” or “imperialism,” or for that matter, “socialism” or “capitalism,” or even “Calvinism” or “Lutheranism.” Such “isms” are merely generics for purposes of modern comparative sociological or political analysis, admittedly less useful for purposes of intellectual history, but anachronistic only if imputed to historical actors. The fact that historians disagree on definition is merely evidence of their disagreement on what phenomena are purely local, which are more regional, and which aspects are most important. The last is a proclivity for collectivist or communitarian analyses that concentrate on aspects of social and political affairs other than the bilateral arrangements among the nobility. In itself, this is a legitimate avenue of inquiry that bears significant promise. However, there is no reason why such research necessarily obviates parallel inquiry into feudal arrangements, unless those advancing such perspectives intend to generate a “master narrative” as “tyrannical” as they claim feudalism to represent. It is perhaps regrettable that the term “feudalism” was early coopted by polemicists of various stripes, even as it is regrettable, as Evergates has observed, that Bloch discarded an earlier historiographical tradition that employed the term in a more restrictive fashion, limiting the use of “feudal” to describe a particular type of tenure and the laws governing it, linking such terms as homage, fidelity and liegance, with proprietary concepts of mouvance, escheat and relief. However, it is as unlikely that feudalism can be so restricted, as it is that the term will be abandoned altogether. As the editors of one recent collection have noted: “Feudalism in practice differs considerably from Ganshof’s neat picture—in itself

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not intended as a complete picture of practice over the whole feudal area—but it seems premature to pronounce its death at the present moment” (Bagge, Gelting, and Lindkvist, ed., 2011, 13).

Select Bibliography Bagge, Sverre, Michael H. Gelting and Thomas Lindkvist, ed., Feudalism: New Landscapes of Debate (Turnhout 2011). Bloch, Marc, La Société féodale (Paris 1939). Brown, Elizabeth A. R., “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1063–88. Evergates, Theodore, trans. and ed., Feudal Society in Medieval France: Documents from the County of Champagne (Philadelphia, PA, 1993). Evergates, Theodore, Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes under the Counts of Champagne, 1152–1284 (Baltimore, MD, and London 1975). Ganshof, François-Louis, Qu’est-ce que la féodalité? (Paris 1944). Kelley, Donald R., Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York 1970). Lehmann, Karl, ed., Consuetudines Feudorum (Göttingen 1892–1894), 2 vols. Maitland, Frederic William, Constitutional History of England (Cambridge 1946). Meijers, Eduard Maurits, “Les glossateurs et le droit feudal,” Tijdschrift 13 (1934): 129–49. [= Meijers 1934a] Reynolds, Susan, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford and New York 1994). [= S. Reynolds 1994] Round, J. H., Feudal England (London 1895).  

 

Sarah Gordon

Food and Cookbooks A Introduction Because food is a human necessity and at the center of all life, looking at food and research on eating, table manners, cooking, diets, famine, hunger, food preparation and preservation, the material culture of food, and other foodways of medieval culture can tell us much about daily life. Eating is a biological need and a culturally determined activity. Kitchen account documents, manuscript illustrations, and of course cookbooks, along with other visual and textual sources, reveal much about medieval cuisine. From cookbooks and household bookkeeping to literary feasts and manuscript miniatures of harvests, a varied menu of scholarship on medieval food is ever expanding (for an exploration of many extant European culinary manuscripts, see Lambert, ed., 1992). Medieval cookbooks are rare and culinary manuscripts were limited of course to those with means, and as such we may study “this function of the medieval recipe collection as a pseudo-social document” (Scully 1995, 8). Throughout the Middle Ages, food and narrative had a strong link. Mealtime storytelling is represented from epic to Arthurian romances to Chaucer. A commonplace scene in romances represents King Arthur’s court as waiting to eat until some news of adventure arrives. Many commonplace descriptions of lavish courtly feasts appear in wedding and feast scenes in the romance tradition. Romances in the Perceval/Parzifal tradition have as their central scene a feast at the Grail castle. Troubadours and trouvères often performed lyric verse or conducted courts of love during mealtime at court. Scenes of eating, drinking, and even food fights appear in medieval epic, romance, and theater (see Gordon 2007). The Anglo-Saxon hall was a community space, creating community and identity through eating and drinking together (as Hagen 1992 and others have shown). Obtaining, cooking, and consuming food was a community effort, from harvest to table. In fact, through the fifteenth century in Europe, it was common to share drinking cups and food dishes, such as large stale bread bowls, called trenchers, on French and British tables. Utensils and table settings were simple and table manners were complex (including not spitting over the food, not using dogs as napkins, using table clothes as napkins, not drinking too much, and not scratching at the table, all common to manners lists). People would eat with their hands out of the same dishes, sometimes carrying their own knives, but always sharing out of communal dishes and

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breaking bread together (for an extensive study on medieval bread, see Desportes 1987). Community stores and granaries supplied people too, in times of siege and famine (for a recent study of the archeology of agriculture and food storage of rural medieval England, see Woolgar, Serjeanston, and Waldron, ed., 2009). Community mills, communal ovens, and public bakeries were common. Open fires with large pots and cauldrons and hearths in the home constituted the kitchen in most houses (for specifics of medieval kitchen equipment, utensils, and architecture in England, for example, see the study by Brears 2008). Most homes, even larger households, did not have an oven, so baking or buying bread publicly, as well as buying pies or other baked items at cookshops were a common communal practices, to generalize.

B Food Variety, Availability, and Famine Contrary to popular belief, medieval food was not elaborate multi-course aristocratic feasts, nor was it all sloppy, tasteless peasant porridge, or piles of grilled chicken legs, but somewhere in between. True, blancmanger, a sort of risotto or white porridge recipe, was very popular in England and Western Europe, as was frumenty, another type of porridge type dish with varied ingredients, but many refined and gastronomically complex recipes exist. Varieties of dishes similar to porridges, soups, potages, purées, stews, broths, and pasta soups (in Italy, France and beyond) were popular (Redon, Sabban, and Serventi, ed., 2000, 53–68). Herbs, spices, cooking methods, and hygiene all appear in middle-class household manuals and in literary texts. Many recipes include complex flavors and seasonings (Hieatt, Hosington, and Butler, ed., 1996; Black 1992, and others have attempted to edit and adapt many such recipes for today’s cook). Spices and complex flavors often included for example: black pepper, cardamom, grains of paradise, galingale, ginger, cinnamon, cassia, cloves, nutmeg, mace, salt, honey, sugar, verjuice (unripe grape juice), vinegar, olives and olive oil, and rose water were common (Adamson 2004, 14–31). There is a sense of gastronomy, of what is considered good food and bad food, in household manuals and in literature. Chaucer’s cook receives negative restaurant reviews, accused of having flies in his pie shop, and draining the gravy from his meat pies, scolded for serving stale leftovers, criticized for his indigestion-provoking use of parsley. Urban pie and food shops were common during Chaucer’s time, and appear in several manuscript traditions. They were not known for their fair trading practices, but these medieval equivalents of fast-food take-out establishments offered pre-cooked foods to city dwellers and grew in popularity in the fourteenth

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through fifteenth centuries; for instance, the fifteenth-century French farce Du pâté et de la tarte acts out the unsavory practices of a bourgeois couple’s urban pie shop (Gassies, ed., 2011). Many literary texts include feast menus or cooks’ repertoires, as with Chaucer’s cook in the General Prologue: A cooke they hadde with hem for the nones, To boille the chiknes with the marybones And poudre-marchant tart and galyngale; Wel koude he knowe a draughte of Londoun ale; He koude rooste and sethe and broille and frye, Maken mortreux and wel bake a pye. But greet harm was it, as it thoughte me, That on his shyne a mormal hadde he, For blankmanger, that made he with the beste (Chaucer 2008, GP ll. 380–88).

Different cooking techniques, such as boiling, broiling, frying, and baking appear, as well as roasting, basting, marinating, and braising, in literary representations of cooking, such as this passage from Chaucer (on Chaucer, see Biebel 1998, 15–16 and in contemporary cookbooks, of course). Adamson discusses further images of food in the Canterbury Tales (Adamson 1995, 94). Drying, smoking, salting, brining, pickling, fermenting, curing, and confit techniques with fat or honey, were all common methods of food preservation. Salt was particularly valuable in preserving meat and pork products, of course. There are well over a dozen extant collections of English recipes that have yet to be edited, estimates Hieatt (Hieatt 1998, 105), but many common ingredients and techniques are seen across the recipe compilations discussed below. Common seasonings found most in medieval European cookbooks and literary representations are: garlic, black pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, parsley, and others. Ginger, fennel, caraway, anise, honey, also were included in what made up the many common sweet and sour recipes, with vinegar, grape, and later citrus as common flavors.

I Menus and Foodstuff What was on the menu? For banquets, both household documents and literary representations give us an idea of menus (see Laurioux 1989 for more on medieval menus and flavors). For everyday life, staples and available foodstuffs were much less elaborate, of course. Socio-economic status played the largest role in food availability and daily diet, for “medieval food culture, like medieval society, was hierarchical in nature” (Adamson 1995, 233; see also Klemettilä 2012 on socially-

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determined diet and cooking; see Mennell 1995 on socially and nationally or culturally determined cuisine in France and England). Adamson also details the consumption and preparation most popular foodstuffs in the Middle Ages, providing a food-by-food overview, from various grains and vegetables to meat and fish to escargot and porpoise (1995, 1–55). Medieval diet was highly dependent on grains. Historian Christopher Dyer’s work has underlined the importance of grain in the medieval peasant diet (Dyer 1998, 53–72, for example, and elsewhere). Adamson lists the common European staples and available alternatives in meat, poultry, game, and fish, to give some idea of the possibilities for medieval cooks depending on availability: pork, suckling pig, wild boar, venison, beef, veal, lamb, mutton, hare, rabbit, peacock, pheasant, partridge, pigeon, dove, quail, crane, heron, salmon, sturgeon, caviar, bream, carp, perch, pike, trout, crayfish, eel, lamprey, porpoise, whale, oysters, mussels, cockles, scallops, frogs, and snails (Adamson 1995, 1–55). Frogs and other available foods were also commonly eaten (Albala, ed., 2006, 115). For further discussion of animals, game, hunting, and fishing, see Clason on “Animals” in this Handbook, and for fishing in the Middle Ages, see the extensive study by Hoffman, ed., 1997). Chicken, rooster, capon, duck, goose, and other poultry were consumed regularly. The poultry and meat were limited to fleshdays. Pig breeding was a hallmark of medieval economy (Flandrin and Montanari, ed., 1999, 168–70). Popular non-meat staples in the diet or side dishes were vegetables, primarily onions, garlic, and leeks, cabbages, lettuces, chicory, chard, kale, endive, peas, chickpeas, carrots, radishes, parsnip, and turnips. Fava beans and broad beans, fresh and dried peas, nuts, and legumes appear in a large majority of non-meat recipes. Almonds were a staple across the medieval European diet. Almond milk often replaces milk or is in many sauce recipes as ground almond or almond milk. Other nuts were popular and eaten whole, ground, cooked, boiled, roasted, dried, pureed, pounded, used in stuffing to stuff poultry or meats, or mixed into both savory and sweet recipes. Nuts often replaced meat on nonmeat days. Nuts common to the European diet were: almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts/filberts, pine nuts, pistachios, chestnuts (Adamson 2004, 24–26). Flours varied greatly, including nut flours, and were far from limited to wheat. Cheese, butter, and eggs were an important part of the medieval diet for many. As for fruit, apples, pears, berries, peaches, cherries, quince, strawberries, pomegranates, citrons, lemons, limes, oranges, and grapes were popular (Henisch 1990, 114–16 and Adamson 2004, 21–25). Some fruits especially appear regularly in manuscript illustration and in fictional narrative (such as the Old French fabliau Jouglet, in which a traveling minstrel feeds the bridegroom too many leftover pears, or the rotting fruits thrown in the royal food fight of the Old French

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chantefable of Aucassin et Nicolette). Dates, raisins, figs, and dried fruits were popular. Flandrin and Montanari’s important study underlines that the variety and the availability of a wide variety of foods led to a more varied and balanced diet in medieval Europe at all socio-economic levels than seen in other periods (1999, 169). Likewise, Laurioux’s extensive study on archeological evidence and cookbook references has demonstrated a wide diversity of ingredients and dishes, a vast array of colors, flavors, spices, and economically or culturally determined diets (2006). Variety is also addressed in the Lambert 1992 volume. Perhaps surprisingly, everything edible was on the table, for “there was not a category of foodstuff that was unused in the Middle Ages to produce food for the table. A modern dietician, or even a modern conservationist, could not fault the medieval cook for a narrowness in his choice of food sources. At least potentially, the medieval diet was neither restricted, unhealthy, nor monotonous” (Scully 1995, 9).

II Nutrition and Famine People had no need for elaborate recipes and menus when hunger was rampant. Famine and poverty (see related articles in the present volume, “Poverty” by Francis Gentry) are also important issues in medieval food studies. Significant famines occurred for instance in Western Europe in: 400–800, 1005 (England), 1016, 1097 (France), 1235 (England), 1315–17. France alone suffered famine for much of the fourteenth century, for example: 1304, 1305, 1310, 1315–1317, 1330– 1333, 1349–1351, 1358–1360, 1371, 1374–1375, and 1390–1391. The Great Famine of 1315–1317 touched most of Europe and had wide-ranging grave ramifications for mortality, agriculture, diet and nutrition, as well as cuisine (Jordan 1998 provides an extensive study of the Great Famine). Some famines were so grave that chronicles and literary texts record cannibalism, though not common (Marvin 1998, 73–86). In some areas, this famine was pervasive. Crops and vineyards suffered in England and the north in the mid fourteenth century due to the colder climate. Both man-made and environmental factors played a part in these famines. Poor crops and poor nutrition also played a role in the spread of disease and epidemics (see articles on medicine and plague in the present volume). Food storage for grains, salted and preserved meats, legumes and vegetables, was not often dependable, due to weather, animals, disease, market pricing, and food spoilage. Beyond just poor crop years and poor food storage, there were many local and regional famines, caused by weather, drought, natural disasters, disease, population growth, and politics (see Jordan 1998 study on causes and consequences). Moreover, in addition to famine, disease, weather, and crop fail-

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ure, poor food storage and fears about spoiled food or taboo food were everpresent worries for some (for food fears, see Ferrières, ed., 2002). Some nobles were accused of hoarding while peasants starved, particularly in England in the fourteenth century. Food could be highly political indeed, as for example when Philip of Valois passed the salt tax in mid-fourteenth-century France, la gabelle, to finance his military that stayed in the books until 1946 (salt was needed of course for meat preservation as well as flavoring and survival). Although extreme hunger and even cannibalism appear in English chronicles (Marvin 1998, 73–86), historian Christopher Dyer has shown that not all peasants were starving in Medieval England, contrary to some views (Dyer 1998, 53–72). Post plague years, there was a bounty of food available to many survivors in Europe, and the late fourteenth-century saw a boom in culinary discourse, both in literary texts and in the production of the first cookbooks.

III Food, Gluttony, Vice Gluttony was a sin that even exemplified other sins. Throughout the Middle Ages, in countless cautionary tales, such as those of St. Augustine’s Confessions and Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, in which pleasure in eating and over eating are viewed as sinful (Prose 2003), as well as in various exempla, the Old French fabliaux, courtly romances, theater, and beyond, gluttony was a ubiquitous thematic literary preoccupation and apparently a real-life temptation for many who were not living in poverty. Symbolic and religious aspects of food were of course important in the Middle Ages (see Bynum 1987). Biblical references to food, food imagery, and depictions of eating and fasting played an important role in the Middle Ages, as Henisch shows (Henisch 1990, 3–6). Illustrated Books of Hours often provide seasonal images of agriculture, crops, harvest, and food for each month of the year and held religious meaning. Weekly religious fast and lean days marked the calendar and cookbooks include fish, egg, and vegetable recipes for fast days and for Lent. As for monastic eating habits, of course the Rule of St. Benedict emphasized moderation in daily meals, often limited eating to two simple meals per day, consisting of mostly vegetables, bread, cheese, eggs, and some fruit and wine. Chaucer’s Monk, on the other hand, is a gluttonous monk, who loves rich dishes like swan, and whose morality is judged by his excessive diet (Biebel 1998, 17). Christian rules of conduct dictated fast days and dietary restrictions as with meat and animal products often restricted for Lent (see Henisch 1990 for a discussion of fast days and holidays). All of the culinary manuscript collections cited here include meatless dish recipes. Dietary laws distinguished Christians, Muslims, and Jews, since of course

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food was tied to religious and cultural identity as it still is. Pork was a major part of the Christian diet in Medieval Europe, and many ways of preserving and preparing pork or using pork fat appear in surviving cookbook compilations.

C Cookbooks and Cooking From banquets and feasts to alms and meager sustenance, foodstuffs and diet varied of course according to socio-economic status and region. A wide range of foul, grains, vegetables, and legumes were especially popular in Western Europe, as scholars have shown through looking at shopping lists, merchant records, and cookbooks. The Roman cookbook by Apicius is the oldest surviving western cookbook and medieval cookbooks share many similarities with it in form and content. It was written and compiled in the late fourth century to fifth century and we have an extant manuscript dating from ca. 900 in the Benedictine monastery of Fulda in Germany (Grocok and Grainger, ed., 2006; and Milham, ed., 1969). Ancient cooking had some influence on medieval cooking techniques and cookbooks (Bober 1999). An overview of some of the most important extant medieval cookbooks shows that medieval cooking was varied and codified. The end of the thirteenth century through late fourteenth century was marked by a vogue of cookery books in Europe, particularly in France; however, “we shouldn’t think that this flourishing of the cookbook genre in France indicates some sort of spontaneous stirring of canny ingenuity among a handful of chefs. High standards in cookery—to say nothing of the highly valued recipes themselves, undoubtedly developed over many generations of apprenticeship. If nothing else, the sudden appearance of this small array of cookbooks shows that the French themselves now realized that good cookery was indeed a legitimate and worthy branch of knowledge” (Scully and Scully, ed., 2002, 8). Well over 100 western European culinary-related manuscripts dating from the mid to late fourteenth through fifteenth centuries have been identified or edited and studied by scholars, and especially notable are the three lengthy French culinary texts discussed below. Specific quantities, techniques, temperatures, and cooking times strike today’s cook as absent in many of the edited extant texts. Details are not lacking even if quantities are. Culinary competence in techniques, methods, and quantities are assumed. Taste, texture, color, and presentation are often mentioned, however. In French, the earliest large compilations of recipes are extant in Du fait de cuisine, in Le Viandier de Taillevant and the Ménagier de Paris. In France, Le Viandier de Taillevant (The Viandier of Taillevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts, ed. Scully, 1998; Le Viandier d’après l’Édition de 1486, ed. Hyman and Hyman, 2003) is a roughly contemporary fourteenth-century recipe compilation (it

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has not been accurately dated, but the generally accepted dates are either ca. 1375 or ca. 1380–1381). Four extant copies of Le Viandier exist and copies were widely circulated in the century to follow, with the first printed edition, enlarged with recipes from other later anonymous cooks, and revised, appearing probably ca. 1490. French lengthy cookery book attributed to Taillevent, calling the author Guillaume Tirel (born ca. 1310–1312 in Normandy, he became a court cook, then chief cook for Charles V in 1373), though the veracity of this attribution remains unclear. Tirel/Taillevent could be potentially seen as the first known figure of celebrity chef, putting a name on his courtly culinary repertoire, and demonstrating a coherent style of cooking under this name. The term viande did not apply only to meat as it does in modern French, but rather to food in general. It includes many meat recipes, mostly slow-cooked, braised, and roasted, and many complex and refined recipes including many costly spices and sauces. The variety and diversity of ingredients is remarkable, as shown throughout Laurioux’s study on the food of Taillevent’s time (Laurioux 1997). Fourteenth-century French literary texts also echo some of the menus and recipes found in these roughly contemporary cookbooks, such as in the poetry of Eustache Deschamps (1340–1406), which includes descriptions of food and food imagery (Scully 1998, 248). A combination of cookbook and conduct manual, the Le Ménagier de Paris, dates from ca. 1393 (ed. Albertano and Renault 1846; 2011; and translated as The Good Wife’s Guide, trans. Greco and Rose 2009). The Ménagier de Paris is a household manual and cookbook that includes a significant menu and recipes section in the second part of the book (with a wide variety of recipes for soups, meat, poultry, eggs, fish, sauces, pastries, sweets, fried foods, and more) as well as other specific conjugal, behavioral, and home economics advice. Moderation and frugality are notable characteristics throughout the food and household management sections. It is written as a didactic manual, in verse and prose, from the point of view of a middle-class husband who means to educate his young wife. Recipes appear more as ingredient lists or shopping lists that assume some knowledge of a variety of cooking techniques. Recipes are divided into main dishes, as well as those that include spices or thickener, for example. There are also medicinal recipes with herbal beverages and special soups for the ailing. Diet as medicine plays a major role in medieval medical treatises, making some of them read like cookbooks. The Ménagier includes a significant discussion of food, menus, and diet for the sick. Particular spices that are popular in recipe books and medical manual recipes are: ginger, black pepper, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, and others. The Ménagier offers a wide range of household advice interspersed with the recipes, from how to thicken split pea soup to how to save money to suggested hobbies for women in the home. This is more than a cookbook; it is a marriage conduct manual. The Ménagier has much to tell us about fourteenth-century bourgeois

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lifestyle, from food preservation and preparation to gardening, shopping, and entertaining (as Crossley-Hollande 2000 explores in detail). Chiquart’s French cookbook from ca. 1420 (Du Fait de Cuisine, ed. Scully 2010) details cooking utensils and accessories, from cauldrons to cheese cloths, gives multi-course meal menus for an aristocratic context, and gives recipes for meat, fish, soup and cheese dishes and includes an extensive pastry section that discusses techniques as well. The recipes include everything from peacock to mutton, from whole pigs to pigeon, from eels to dolphin. Many basic recipes, especially those for soups and sauces, echo the earlier Viandier and Ménagier. He is very detailed about flavors and methods, more so than the Ménagier, reminding cooks for example to periodically to check on the food, to taste the amount of salt, to make sure it is not too sour or to add more wine to the broth, to verify the correct color of the sauce, or how to neatly and appetizingly plate the dishes. He also emphasizes clean pots and pans and culinary hygiene. The book addresses seasonal recipes and availability of foods and discusses appropriate menus for different occasions and social status of guests. Chiquart refers to cooking as both an art and a science. Chiquart was cooking for Burgundian and Savoyard banquets, on occasion for hundreds of people. Adamson notes that the cuisines of medieval France varied greatly from north to south (Adamson, ed., 2002, xi); Chiquart’s recipe collection contains recipes from several regions. Other important French culinary manuscripts, slightly earlier, though not as lengthy nor as well studied as Viandier, Ménagier, or Chiquart, are: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, lat. 7131, fol. 94–99v, dating from ca. 1304–1314 and the early fourteenth-century Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, lat. 9328, fol. 129–39v, containing the Tractatus de modo preparandi et condiendi omnia cibaria and the Liber de Coquina (both ed. Mulon 1971; and Maier, ed., 2005). In the German tradition, we have for example the Das Buch von guter Spiese from ca. 1350, then for the next generation of cooks, ca. 1400 the Salzburg Kochbuch, and later the widely disseminated Das Kochbuch des Meisters Eberhard (ca. 1450), an extensive compilation of recipes and dietary or nutritional information from the court of Bayern-Landshut. These manuscript cookery compilations were followed by the early printed Küchenmeisterei (Nuremberg ca. 1492), as well as by others appearing at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. Medieval German diet and cuisines were varied and had many foreign influences and varied ingredients (Adamson 2002, 153–96). As for Poland, Dembinska (1999) provides a historical view of Polish food, based on the grocery shopping lists of medieval royal account books. A wide variety of recipes includes for example: many grains, lentils, mustard sauce, sauerkraut, game, fish, tripe, stews, trencher bread, as well as soups and baked recipes with buckwheat, millet, oat, spelt, rye, and barley flours.

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The most significant insular cookbook of this period is perhaps the English The Forme of Cury, ‘cury,’ ‘curye,’ or ‘curry’ meaning ‘cookery’ here, a wellcirculated and often copied late fourteenth-century cookbook, composed ca. 1390 (Hieatt and Butler, ed., 1985), in which a later hand notes in the manuscript that it was compiled in the reign of Richard II and presented subsequently to Elizabeth I. The English Forme of Cury includes approximately 200 recipes, depending on the manuscript version anywhere from 195–206 recipes, from main dishes to sauces, which may have been prepared for the court of Richard II or by later cooks. Cereals, grains, and porridges are plentiful in this collecton. For example the recipe for frumenty (also spelled furmenty): “Nym clene Wete and bray it in a morter wel that the holys gon al of and seyt yt til it breste and nym yt up and lat it kele and nym fayre fresch broth and swete mylk of Almandys or swete mylk of kyne and temper yt al and nym the yolkys of eyryn boyle it a lityl and set yt adoun and messe yt forthe wyth fat venyson and fresh moton” (Pegge, ed., online 2014). Several copies of the Forme of Cury exist with many variations and a great influence on other cookbooks. Important culinary manuscripts in the fifteenthcentury English tradition are: Harleian ms. 279, Harleian ms. 4016, Ashmole ms. 1439, Laud ms. 553, and Douce ms. 55 (Renfrow, ed., 1991, and see Austin, ed., 1964). Also notable is Sloane ms. 1986, the Liber Cure Corcorum (Morris, ed., 1862), which includes a poem on cooking in rhymed verse, probably from Northumbria, as an appendix to the “Boke of Curtasye,” in the Sloane culinary manuscript. It includes many dishes under the rubrics of potages, broths, roasted meats, backed meats, sauces, and others. In the Iberian tradition, we have the ca. 1423 Arte Cisoria o tratado dell’arte de cortar del Culchillo (De Villena 1984), a manual on food preparation. The Arte Cisoria is about the art of carving and serving meat and other dishes at the table, by an author better known for his literary works, Enrique de Villena. It was written on behalf of Juan II of Castilla’s royal carver. This commissioned manual is not only about carving also about table manners and table service and has much to teach us about the relationships between food and identity. Both Spanish cookbooks above show some North African influence. Roughly contemporary is the mid-fourteenth-century Catalan text of the Libre Sent Soví cookbook, ca. 1430 (Santanach, ed., 2008). It is an upper-middle-class cookbook that includes everyday and somewhat lavish special occasion dishes. Medieval Catalonia had its own distinct culinary tradition that is still echoed in Catalan kitchens today (as shown throughout Lladonosa i Giró 1984). In addition, the ca. 1400 Libre de totes maneres de confits is a Catalan treatise on candymaking (de Saint-Germain 1946, 105–21). In the Arabic tradition, even earlier, we have the ca. 1243–1348 Fuǭālat-alHiwan Fi Tayyibat al-Ta’am Wa-l-Alwan (Marìn, ed., 2007; The Delicacies of the

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Table and the Finest of Foods and Dishes), including a compilation of recipes with both Maghrebi and Spanish dishes. There are at least two other roughly contemporary manuscripts that contain recipes of this regional cooking in Arabic. It is notable that some dishes in the Spanish and Catalan cookbooks above show the influence of recipes from this earlier Arabic recipe tome (for more on HispanoMaghrebi cooking and influences in both directions, see the studies by Marín 2007 and Miranda 2010). There is also a tenth-century extant cookbook from medieval Baghdad, Kitab al-Tabikh (Rodinson, Arberry, and Charles Perry, ed., 1998), with versions dating from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and copies in Istanbul and the British Library, including over 600 recipes that give insight into medieval Islamic culinary traditions. There is a rich medieval culinary literary tradition in Arabic as well (see Zaouali 2009, as well as Salloum, Salloum, and Salloum-Elias 2013). As the Middle Ages came to a close, the vogue of cookbooks continued in the courts and bourgeois households especially in France and Italy. At the close of the Middle Ages and beginning of the Italian early modern period is Maestro Martino’s Libro de Arte Coquinaria, ca. 1465 (Ballerini, ed., 2005), written by a well-known chef from Northern Italy (probably in or near Como or Milan, though else little is known about him; see the review article by Jenkins 2007, 97), who cooked in Rome and the Vatican. Cooking methods as well as kitchen management and manners appear in the recipe collection, of which at least four copies survive. He is known for his surprise and decorative specialty dishes, or mirabilia gulae that included live birds, live fish, elaborate decorations, or even stuffed peacocks spitting flames (Jenkins 2007, 102). Many more modest sauces, pasta, and meat recipes, as well as some dishes demonstrating possible Spanish influence, are featured. For further investigation of medieval Italian food, see the volume edited by Moudarres 2010, exploring food imagery in Dante, Boccaccio, Michele Savonarola, and Catherine of Sien. Of course, the less fortunate did not have access to cookbooks or the great variety of foodstuffs described within (the sociological and agricultural study by Birlouez 2009 shows how food and diet varied greatly by socio-economic groups). These aristocratic and bourgeois cookbooks and household manuals give us much insight into food availability, variety, culinary methods, and taste in this period, helping scholars to better piece together the complex picture of daily life in the Middle Ages.

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Select Bibliography Adamson, Melitta Weiss, Food in Medieval Times (Westport, CT, and London 2004). Carlin, Martha and Joel T. Rosenthal, ed., Food and Eating in Medieval Europe (London and Rio Grande, OH, 1998). Gordon, Sarah, Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature (West Lafayette, IN, 2007). Henisch, Bridget Ann, Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (State College, PA, 1990). Laurioux, Bruno, Manger au Moyen Âge: Pratiques et discours alimentaires en Europe XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris 2006). Redon, Odile, Françoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi, ed., The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, trans. Edward Schneider (Paris 1991; Chicago 2000). Scully, Terrence, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge 1995). Woolgar, Chris M., D. Serjeanston and T. Waldron, ed., Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition (Oxford 2009).

Charles W. Connell

Foreigners and Fear “All the world is foreign soil to those whose native land should be heaven.” (Hugh of St Victor, In Ecclesiasten Homiliae, 1961, 216 n. 84)

A Introduction As is perhaps made most poignantly clear in the words of Hugh of St. Victor quoted above, the entire physical world might be considered foreign in the Middle Ages. Like many stereotypes of the medieval culture, however, that reduction does not hold up so well under further scrutiny. Whereas in the modern world we usually make more of a distinction between the “foreign” as either a strange physical space or a person from another culture and/or religion, and the “other” as something even more distant from our understanding, such as a conceived and constructed other (devil, monster, ghost, etc.), or someone of a physical deformity or different sexual orientation, the medieval world often made no such distinction. Yet, it is only in more recent years that the complexity of that medieval notion has been more seriously considered by scholars. As Mary Campbell has observed, the medieval world was “self-centered” and its “ethnocentricity is reflected in the concentrically divided world of [its] maps and geographical writings” (Campbell 1988, 65). The illustrations on medieval mappaemundi reveal monstrosities placed at the far edges of the world, Jerusalem is dead center, and Europe is in the inner circle. The most inhabitable part of the world was depicted as the climate of the northern Mediterranean, and the farther from “home” you went, “the more outlandish, unheimlich, became the bodies and manners of men” (Campbell 1988, 65). Yet, even this limitation to the internal versus external boundaries of the study of the foreign or the “Other” and the familiar are shifting. Perhaps receiving its greatest impetus from the movement of modern medieval scholars to the study of the “other” provided by such works as that of Edward Said, or the post-colonial applications to the medieval outlined by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and other recent scholars, the concept of both the “foreign” and the “other” has become more prominent in the study of the medieval culture (Said 1978; Cohen 2000). This essay will provide an overview of that study and also examine how the stereotypically expected reaction to both the foreign and the other, namely fear, has been modified to show that the medieval response was much more complex. We

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turn first to the evolution of the concept of the foreigner and its significance in medieval culture.

B Foreign and Foreigner In the attempt to better understand medieval portrayals of the foreign we rely largely on various genres of medieval literature. David Tinsley, in his more recent study of medieval German courtly literature, for example, examines the etymology of the concept of the vremde and the connotations of its related word fremde in the modern German, where it bears two connotations. The first is that of foreign in the sense of place, or a difference in geography and culture, and the second which bears a sense of the unconventional in appearance. He argues that both connotations can be detected in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s (ca. 1170–1220) Parzival (ca. 1205), wherein “foreignness” is “rooted in unconventional behaviors usually associated with visits from foreign cultures and registered in the reactions of the indigenous” (Tinsley 2002, 46; see also Krusche 1985; Wierlacher, ed., 1985; Pochat 1997). Tinsley also points out that the Middle High German word “ellende” connotes “persons who have been banned or exiled from their own society” and thus must live in a “foreign culture,” and notes how this quality of the displaced who become strangers in a strange land is explored in the character of Rüdiger of Pöchlarn at the end of the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200; Tinsley 2002, 45). Overall, Tinsley is concerned with the way this literature reflects on how identity is explored in encounters with the foreign, and how “identity is born in the recurring interaction of the individual, the social group, and the exemplar.” Thus, “notions of the foreign are inevitably shaped by social expectations surrounding conduct, dress, and obligation” (Tinsley 2002, 47; see also Haymes 1997). This dynamic notion of the concept of the foreign also led the medieval world to include those who violated social norms within society as being “foreign” based on subjective notions of the social group. For example, as he points out, the nobility considered commoners as foreigners, and peasants were little more than animals. As well, for the clerics, “the laity constitute the ‘Other’; men proclaim their physical and moral superiority to women; whereas in the cities foreignness comes to reside ever more outside one’s particular guild or profession” (Tinsley, 2002, 48; Stråth, ed., 2000; see also Phillips 1997; Reyerson 1997). Perhaps the most dominant notion of the foreign, however, was the simple medieval conviction voiced in the Song of Roland that “Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,” a principle that stood at the base of the interface between Christians and non-Christians throughout the Middle Ages (Strickland 2003, 157). Another interesting aspect of the role of literature in defining the foreign in found in the relationship between the

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author and his audience. Wolfram, for example, adapted his romances based on models from the Old French and a variety of other sources, but he had to prepare his version for an audience familiar with the heroic epics and songs of the German literature. So also the author of the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200) had to blend the oral heroic poems with the newly emerging norms of the courtly literature, which, in Tinsley’s terms meant that the “act of authorship itself presupposed in the thirteenth century intensive interaction with the foreign.” Thus, as Tinsley concludes, both authors had to give “familiar shape to what was in essence, foreign material” (Tinsley 2002, 48–49; cf. also The Nibelungenlied 1966; Das Nibelungenlied 1997; Wailes 1978; Lionarons 1998; Haymes 1994). Albrecht Classen, in his introduction to Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, has provided further direction for those who wish to explore the foreign in the Middle Ages. He first of all calls attention to the phenomenology of human existence which demands definition and explanation as developed by Martin Heidegger and Hubert Dreyfus. In essence, in Classen’s summary, “Without the foreign there would be no familiar” (Classen, ed., 2002, xi; Dreyfus 1984). He postulates that this modern concept can be applied to the Middle Ages even though modern concepts of the self, personal identity, or “nationhood” were not in place, because in the twelfth century we begin to see that “radical changes can be observed in literature, the visual arts, politics, and religion” that suggest the early emergence of such. In Classen’s words, “human existence and its development over time is determined by a process of distinguishing the self from the other” (Classen, ed., 2002, xii; cf. also Harris 1992; Hanning 1977; Benton 1982; Bynum 1972; Patterson 1987). Secondly, Classen reminds us how much of the visual arts, religion, and politics in the Middle Ages were concerned with and reflected upon the opposition between self and the other. Whether that conflict was between Christian and pagan, Jew, or Muslim, or between the human and the non-human, namely monsters, the record is found in architectural gargoyles, manuscript illuminations, tales in travelogues, and the accounts of miracles, myths, and legends. Though Classen is cautious, he is positive in his assessment that: “It will remain uncertain how far medieval artists, writers and travelers fully understood the implications of the opposition between self and other, but they certainly observed the distance and tried to come to terms with it in many ways” (Classen, ed., 2002, xiii; see also Classen 1997; McKendrick 1996; Leonardi 1999; Camille 1992). Contrary to the stereotypes of the Middle Ages as an age of intolerance, Classen argues that during that era “the relationship between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ was still a matter of complex and open-ended negotiations.” Classen does acknowledge that this openness was declining by the late Middle Ages, when “the need for self-identity and the establishment of nationhood … increased tremendously,”

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and that the decline involved the development of a “disturbing trend…to erect race barriers, to discriminate against non-conformists, and to expel non-Christians.” By the end of the fifteenth century, as nations began to be more clearly developing, “the monstrous became more commodified than ever and turned into a topic of both public and private debates” (Classen, ed., 2002, xv). Thirdly, Classen further opens the dialogue on the debate over the characterization of the Middle Ages as an age of intolerance in the context of defining the “other” by focusing on the minority groups in medieval society, namely, Jews, lepers, homosexuals, and heretics. It is clear that violence was prominent in the Middle Ages, especially in times of stress from disease, famine, or external invasion, and was often directed against the minority populations, but the minorities were not the only ones to suffer from the perceptions of the other. As Classen points out, “even the majority felt threatened by external forces, by unknown elements of nature, and by the impact of myth on everyday life” (Classen, ed., 2002, xvi; see also Nirenberg 1996). Furthermore, Classen takes a more moderate position on the issue of rejection and/or violence toward the foreign. Using such evidence as the travel narratives of John of Mandeville and the Mappaemundi, Classen sees these as demonstrations of how the medieval world was reflecting a “strong concern to use the other simply as a catalyst to identify and characterize the self.” Though a modern sense of “tolerance” was absent in the collective, “there were certain early indications that some individuals espoused a remarkable open mind toward other cultures” (Classen, ed., 2002, xvi; cf. also Flasch and Jeck, ed., 1997). Furthermore, heroic epics (e.g., Beowulf and the Thidrekssaga) depict a conflict between heroes and creatures from another world, and the courtly romances led knights on quests in which they encountered worlds full of danger; all of which led to self-reflection. In many cases, as Classen notes, the foreign creatures might point out the weaknesses or faults of the familiar society, or the monster creatures might even seem to represent a “higher form of culture.” Kâlogrenant in Hartman von Aue’s (ca. 1160–ca. 1220) Iwein (ca. 1202), for example, encounters a “wild man” living in a peaceful setting, which is in direct contrast with the knightly world of violence and fighting which characterizes the court of King Arthur. Similarly, in other romances, such as Tristan und Isolde or Parzival, the wilderness is depicted in a dual fashion, sometimes as something to be feared, or in contrast, as something more like a wooded refuge from a corrupt society (Classen, ed., 2002, xviii–xix; Hasty 1990; Rider 2000; Yamamoto 2000). In his extensive introduction to Meeting the Foreign, Classen calls attention to several other ways in which the foreign was confronted in the medieval context. Perhaps most simply, the differences among cultures, or the notion of the stranger, or racial, cultural, or political differences are those we might most expect to

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find (Classen, ed., 2002, xxii; xxiv; xlv). However, Classen also draws upon the work of scholars who are exploring the views of women toward the other, as well as how the medieval men viewed women and their roles being depicted as often “foreign” (Classen, ed., 2002, xxv–xxviii; xxv; cf. Oswald 2012). He points out that much of medieval culture was defined as being in a liminal status, where the foreign was often deemed attractive, and not to be feared, where the despicable heathen was also an admirable warrior, or where heroes such as Gawain experienced the “foreign” as they ventured out on their quests (Classen, ed., 2002, xxx; xxxv–xxxix). The foreign other could be as concrete and to be feared as the Viking, Magyar, Mongol or Saracen invaders, or as symbolic as the dangerous mountains, mysterious monsters, or dark forests of the legends and myths which found some origins in Scripture (Classen, ed., 2002, xlii; Connell 1973). It could also be found in the visions and mystical experiences of those who sought to connect directly with God. Thus, in those worlds the foreign could be Evil in the form of the Devil or Good in the form of God (Classen, ed., 2002, xli–xlii). Because the range of notions regarding the “foreign” was so broad, space does not allow us here to review each in depth. Thus, we will focus on those encounters which were most persistent, most prominent, and perhaps most characteristic of the way the medieval world responded to the other.

I The Heretic as Foreigner Focusing in particular on some of the most concrete experiences with the other, the medieval experience with heretics and other perceived enemies of the Christian faith is exemplary. Although there are examples of religious toleration and reaching out to the other by such individuals as Peter Abelard (1079–1142), Petrus Alfonsi (ca.1062–ca. 1110), and John of Salisbury (ca. 1120–1180), the most consistent and persistent reaction to heretics, Jews, and Muslims was ambiguous, though regularly negative to the point of violence (Classen, ed., 2002, xxix; xxxii; xliii; xlix–li). We turn first to examine the emergence of heresy. Beginning in the eleventh century Christian Europe experienced an accelerated contact with the foreign. As trade expanded and pilgrims multiplied, stories of encounters with new cultures began to spread, ideas from the East began to circulate, and eventually even began to challenge traditional Christian beliefs. Malcolm Lambert reminds us, at the “beginning of the eleventh century, leading churchmen in Western Europe had no living experience of heresy,” but by midcentury they had come to know a new set of ideas supposedly influenced by the teaching of a third-century Persian prophet known as Mani (ca. 216–276), whose ideas became associated with the end of the world (Lambert 1999, 4–5). Raoul

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Glaber (ca. 985–ca. 1047), the Benedictine chronicler most associated with the fears of the first millennium, stirred up fears of the developing sects of heretics in southern France as adherents of the Devil. Similarly, Ademar of Chabannes (ca. 988–1034), another monastic chronicler residing at St. Martial of Limoges, wrote in 1018 describing the alleged Manicheans of Aquitaine as messengers of Antichrist, whose major offense was that although they practiced asceticism, they were really not what they seemed to be; that is, they really were secret practitioners of vice (Lambert 1999, 5–6). Without real knowledge of the teachings of these sects, the influence of Augustine, who had an encounter with real Manicheans, even belonging to a group for nine years before denouncing their Elect members for “secret vices,” predominated as the eleventh-century revival of heresy was subsequently accused of such vices as magic, demonic possession, poison, seduction, orgies, and physical contagion (Lambert 1999, 6–8). To combat these evils of the “other,” the clergy had to steel themselves against “devilish deceit” with the sign of the cross, and prayer, as well as daily communion in preparation for trying the heretics after they were apprehended. In dealing with the heretics, the clergy early on had accepted “ideas and preconceptions [of the foreign, that is, those who rejected Christianity] from the past broadly dictating their views on heresy” (Lambert 1999, 8–9; Moore 1976; Fichtenau 1992; Grundmann 1927). However, in fact, the heretics of the eleventh century were not Manicheans at all. Instead, they derived impetus from “the religious and social history of their own age,” particularly with the failed attempt at reform of widespread abuses by clergy and lay lords associated with the Peace of God movement (Lambert 1999, 11–12). By the twelfth century, however, significant heretical movements did arise which attacked and threatened the ethical and hierarchical bases of the Church. There were those accused of being Donatists, that is, did not believe that the sacraments delivered by “evil-living” priests were valid, and others who attacked the need for the clerical institution itself. Wandering preachers such as Robert of Arbrissel (ca. 1045–1116) and Bernard of Tiron (ca. 1046–1117) caused suspicion as they attracted crowds by calling for a return to the vita apostolica. Peter of Bruys (fl. ca. 1117–d. 1131) questioned the mass and communion, and rejected the need for church buildings or traditional forms of worship, especially the veneration of the cross (Lambert 1999, 14–15). These developments are placed in the context of significant social change in medieval society, especially that of the rise of the urban economy, which occurred so rapidly that the Church had difficulty in responding to this new form of the “foreign.” Those charged with responding to heresy had great difficulty. First, they had to pin down the nature of the heretical beliefs. The bishop of Soisson in 1114, for example, found those whom he questioned about their beliefs to be responding

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quite like Christians. Some of the accused were found guilty by means of the ordeal or confessed, but were not punished immediately. Confusion led to a postponement of punishment of some of the accused, and, in one case, in the temporary absence of the bishop to attend a regional synod, a local crowd broke into the jail and burned the prisoners. Thus, violence became the popular method of responding to the fear of the unknown, but the use of force in confronting the foreign created a number of ongoing difficulties for the Church, including the undermining of confidence in the hierarchy itself (Lambert 1999, 16–17; Moore 1984; 1975). One of the most serious threats came at the hands of the Cathars, who became prominent and widespread in the middle of the twelfth century. The visionary abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) dated their appearance along the Rhine to 1140, and upon reading the Apocalypse, even began to have visions about the heretics. One of these recorded in 1163, reported that “the wicked works of men which are blown out from the mouth of the black beast … [were] causing great destruction” (Lambert 1999, 19), reflected a common way that the medieval world dealt with the unknown by dehumanizing the “other” (Connell 2013). But characterization did not lead to successful elimination of the threat. Ekbert, brother of St. Elizabeth of Schönau, a friend of Hildegard’s, took the lead in responding to Catharism in the Rhineland. In a series of sermons preached in 1163, Ekbert expressed the dangers of the heresy. First, he once again erroneously demonized its beliefs as Manichean and wrongly borrowed from Augustine to refute it. Yet, he also correctly identified the heresy as having a set of beliefs that were likely to outlast the idiosyncratic teachings of any one individual, and thus truly posed a threat to the Christian faith (Lambert 1999, 19–20). The Cathars were foreign to the traditional Roman Church, which they labeled the Church of Satan, but the dualism of the Cathars in the division of its followers between the most committed, celibate, ascetic “elite,” and the ordinary members who remained in the world and lived a simple life of marriage, children and a normal diet, does not seem that far from the separation of clergy and laity in the traditional Roman Church (Lambert 1999, 21). By attacking the traditional church at its ritual roots and claiming to be more true to the apostolic church, the Cathars represented a new kind of foreign threat, and perhaps most dangerous because it came from within the culture of Christianity itself. A strange twist in the struggle against heresy is found in the so-called Albigensian Crusade, an attempt to eliminate the Cathars in Occitania that lasted from 1209 to 1255. It is strange in several ways. First, because the geographical region south of the Loire was “foreign” in many ways to the kings of France who resided in Paris, yet it was those kings who intervened in the matters of the inhabitants of that region upon receiving a call from Pope Innocent III in 1209 to

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crusade against the heretics. Influenced by the work of Frederic Cheyette, Sharon Kinoshita portrays it as follows: “with Pope Innocent’s call; throughout Occitania, nobles—heretics and good Christians alike—were about to find out what it meant to have Normans, Frenchmen and other foreigners ‘in their house’” (Kinoshita 2006, 203; Cheyette 2001). The crusade was strange in a second way because the crusaders took no mercy on even the orthodox inhabitants of the territory who were merely tolerant of the Cathars. As the papal legate who accompanied the first expedition is alleged to have said, “Kill them all; God will recognize his own” (Kinoshita 2006, 203; Roquebert 1999; Sumption 1978). Following the success of the early stages of the crusade, the invaders began to treat the conquered territories as colonies by imposing northern customs and practices, which in turn led to a broad-scale resistance by Occitanians to the northern “foreigners” (Kinoshita 2006, 206). However, even appeals by the orthodox to the pope could not overturn the destruction of feudal society in the region. Much of the early turmoil caused by the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1255) is recorded in the anonymous Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, but the courtly poets of Occitania subsequently apparently gave up the fight and left for Iberia or the courts of northern Italy, where in turn they experienced another form of “foreignness” (Kinoshita 2006, 234–35; Huot 1984; Paterson 1993). Similar to the Cathars in some ways were the Waldensians of southern France who in the later twelfth century also challenged the notion of the hierarchical church. Symbolic of changes in society which raised the level of the laity and the importance of the masses which were not being reached spiritually by the clergy, the Waldensians argued for lay preaching and the rights of women to be included as preachers. Peter Waldo (ca. 1140–1218) of Lyons, who, according to Bernard Gui (ca. 1260–1331) in his Manual for Inquisitors, began to preach poverty and care for the poor in or about 1170. He later met with church hierarchs at the Third Lateran Council (1179) to try to persuade the Church to soften its stance on preaching by the laity. That effort was unsuccessful, and subsequently he was formally condemned as a heretic at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The Waldensian challenge to papal authority and its focus on the poverty of the apostles as the best model of Christianity, reminds modern scholars of several other issues regarding the way the Church dealt with the foreign within the context of the medieval struggle with heresy. Perhaps most interesting is the way the heretics were often depicted as illiterate, which was another way of distinguishing the “other,” especially as the laity began to challenge the clergy after the year 1000. As Peter Biller describes the association, “the topos of the heretic as illiterate,” is both early occurring and persistent throughout the Middle Ages. Despite the explicit claim of St Augustine (354–430) in his On Heresies that heresy originated in philosophic speculation, the tradition of the apostles as unlettered

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fishermen whose holiness created suspicion surrounding learning, led to subsequent confusion. Whereas earlier churchmen often ignored Augustine on this point, and instead relied on Scripture to create images in the eleventh century of the heretic as illiterate, namely “outside of the Latin ‘educated-world’” and thus a foreign other, later churchmen had to come to grips with increasing literacy among the laity which undermined the earlier image. Often, the complex nature of that difficulty led to the creation of the notion of the heretical sect as consisting of masters or teachers who were literate, and able to secure “diabolical assistance,” which enabled them to seduce the simple or stupid masses of illiterates (Biller and Hudson, ed., 1994, 1–3; see also Stock 1983). Despite the recognition of more sophisticated heretics, as well as the rise of the vernacular languages in various forms of literature, including the sermon, and the need to better educate the clergy to deal with heresy, in the mid-thirteenth century the text by the Anonymous of Passau still linked the theme to a division of social ranking and power and sex: “every kind of man has our faith: philosophers, the illiterate, and Princes; but only a few have the faith of the heretics, and these are only the poor, workmen, women, and idiots [ydiote, i.e., the illiterate].” By the fourteenth century there were still examples of the topos of the heretic as illiterate, but it was no longer the predominant image (Biller and Hudson, ed., 1994, 4–5). By the time we reach the age of the Lollards in fourteenth century England, “The attractiveness of heresy as a choice against orthodoxy is not necessarily conditioned by literacy, but it may be assisted by it” (Swanson 1994, 290).

II The Saracen as Foreigner The bibliography on the Western reaction to Islam and the development of the derogatory term Saracen is enormous and growing. One might start with the work of Richard Southern entitled Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962), and continue with Norman Daniel’s work, Islam and the West: the Making of an Image (1993), and then sample from various anthologies such as those edited by Maya Shatzmiller on Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth Century-Syria (1993), and Michael Frassetto and David Blanks called Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other (1999). Images of the Saracen in medieval Christian art have been analyzed more carefully and insightfully as well. This has been brought to light in more comprehensive studies such as in The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image Making in Medieval Art (1989) by Michael Camille, and in Saracens, Demons & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (2003) by Debra Higgs Strickland. More prominent individual views of Islam in the Middle Ages have been portrayed in studies such as that of James Kritzeck in Peter the Venerable

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and Islam (1964). The ambiguity and more positive nature of the Saracen image has been examined as well, beginning with such works as Norman Daniel’s Heroes and Saracens: an Interpretation of the Chansons de Geste (1984), and Robert Burns in Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia (1984), and continuing most recently in the work of the authors featured in the anthology edited by Albrecht Classen entitled Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages (2002), and in his East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (Classen, ed., 2013; see also Goetz 2013). For the past twenty years or so, the work of John Tolan, including his more comprehensive overview of a large representation of the studies prior to 2002 which bears the title, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002), offers a combination of bibliographical analysis and thought-provoking interpretations to encourage ongoing examination and highlight where we have come in this study of the Western reaction to the Muslims over the past forty to fifty years. Tolan opens his broad-reaching study of the Saracens with a long quote from a letter by Riccoldo of Monte Croce (ca. 1243–1320) bemoaning the Fall of Acre in 1291. Riccoldo was both amazed and confused in his visit to Baghdad where he viewed the splendor of the Saracen capital while at the same time reflected on the loss of Acre (1291), the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, “What could be the cause of such massacre and such degradation of the Christian people? Of so much world prosperity for the perfidious Saracen people?” For Tolan, this statement “expresses all the ambivalence, the attraction and repulsion, that medieval Latin Christendom felt for the world of Islam” (Tolan 2002, xiii). He subsequently details the evolution of the medieval reaction to the Saracen as the “other,” beginning with first Christian encounters with the Muslim world and tracing the development of that dynamic encounter through the thirteenth century. The history of that experience is in many ways a microcosm of the medieval Christian world’s reaction to the foreigner in general. As Tolan sums it up, “Western attitudes toward Muslims and toward Arabs (terms that are often poorly distinguished) are still problematic, still tinged with condescension and mistrust, still rife with contradictions.” The same has been said about the Muslim attitudes toward the Christians or Franks (terms often poorly distinguished in the Middle Ages), especially in the Holy Land (Tolan 2002, xvii). In portraying the evolving Christian perception of Islam, Tolan begins with Isidore of Seville (ca. 540–636), who conflated human geography with human history, and relied upon Scripture where Ishmael fathered twelve sons that became identified with the twelve tribes of the Arabs. Thus, Ishmael, born of Hagar and Abraham, bred the Ishmaelites, whose name became corrupted into Saracens (Saraceni), but Isidore did not conflate Agarenes, Saracens, Ishmaelites and Arabs together into interchangeable terms for the same people as did his

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contemporaries. For Isidore, the Arabs were foreigners in a distant place who pierced their ears and were heretics who believed in reincarnation. On the other hand, the Saracens “are so called, either because they claim to be born from Sarah or because (as the pagans say) they are of Syrian origin” (Tolan 2002, 287 n. 25; Shaid 1984; Rotter 1986). Eusebius of Caearea (ca. 260–339) and other earlier Eastern writers described the Arabs as ferocious warriors, and as “blood-thirsty cannibals,” or as “robbers of Arabia,” or “wolves of Arabia” (Tolan 2002, 10–11; Lamoreaux 1996). Regardless, those writing and living in Europe prior to the midseventh century had little actual experience with the Arabs before or after they became practitioners of Islam. In contrast to the early Christian perceptions of the Saracen was the Muslim view of Christians. Amidst the doctrine found in the Koran and the Hadith, as well as other early Muslim texts, the “religious others,” in particular Christians and Jews, were portrayed as “corrupt, superseded versions of the true religion, Islam; their adherents were to be tolerated, but were not to be considered equal to Muslims” (Tolan 2002, 21). In the face of the reality of the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land and their subsequent expansion as far West as Spain, Christians had to find new ways to confront the foreign. Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580–662), for example, not even aware of the new religion of Islam, wrote a letter from Alexandria in the 630s labeling the newly Muslim invaders as “Jews and followers of Antichrist,” a “barbarous nation of the desert,” consisting of “wild and untamed beasts” who laid waste our civilization (Tolan 2002, 43). An anonymous author of the antiJewish text, the Doctrine of Jacob Recently Baptized (634), saw the Arab invasions as part of the apocalyptic drama of the final days of the creation as portrayed in the Book of Daniel (Tolan 2002, 45). Tolerated and given the option to convert to Islam, which occurred more frequently with the passage of time, the defensive rhetorical response of Christians changed to one labeling the Muslims as heretics, which of course was the worst kind of medieval Christian. John of Damascus (ca. 655–749) was among the most influential of apologists and polemicists of the era who took up the cause. Having played a role in the Umayyad (ruling Caliphate, ca. 661–750) government in Damascus before he retired to write, John took a unique position regarding Islam. He characterized it as not a new religion, but as the last of one hundred heresies, “the religion of the Ishmaelites, which still dominates today, leading the people astray, precursor of the Antichrist” (Tolan 2002, 51–52; Sahas 1972). By the ninth century, when it was clear that the Muslims were not going away, the apologists tried to provide Christians with an explanation for their success in the context of Christian history. Theophanes (ca. 758–818) for example, who compiled his Chronicle around 815, spoke of Muhammad (ca. 570–632)

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as a “leader and false prophet of the Saracens” who are the descendants of the Ishmaelites. Theophanes further wrote that Muhammad had fooled the Jews into thinking of him as their Messiah, and that Islam was a heresy composed of both Jewish and Christian components. But he becomes less certain when trying to explain why God allowed the Muslims to conquer so much of the known world. Though he saw the conquests as having some part in God’s plan, he did not place them directly into the Christian apocalyptic tradition (Tolan 2002, 64–66). Continuing in their ignorance of the true Muslim beliefs, especially that of Islamic monotheism, many Christian texts in Latin, French and other vernacular languages portrayed the Saracens as pagans who paid homage to many gods and demons. This propaganda became particularly rampant during the era of the First and Second Crusades (1095–1148). Earlier, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (ca. 935– 1002) had claimed that the Muslims “inflicted the death penalty on anyone who blasphemed the gods they made of gold” (Tolan 2002, 106). She also provided an example by telling the story of a Saracen king (allegedly Abd al-Rahman III, 912–961) who “stained with bodily lust,” attempted to seduce a Christian boy named Pelagius, who rejected the king and was eventually decapitated for insulting the king and blaspheming the pagan gods he worshipped. As the first Latin author to describe Saracen paganism in such lurid detail, Hrotsvit became a model for later chroniclers of the crusades. The Chronicles of the Archbishops of Salzburg tell the story of Archbishop Thiemo who was killed during the latter stages of the First Crusade (1097–1099). Thiemo was accompanying a group of pilgrims, which was captured by a band of Saracen warriors, who were angered by the success of the Christians and so took vengeance on unarmed pilgrims. While a captive, Thiemo, who was also a trained goldsmith, was asked to repair an idol made of gold. When he smashed it instead, and subsequently responded to the charge of blasphemy by warning the leader of this group of Saracens to desist from worshipping obscene idols, he was martyred in a brutal manner, including the cutting off of his limbs and the drinking of his blood. As Tolan sums it up, while not so lurid in detail, other chroniclers did not contradict this hostile picture of the Saracens (Tolan 2002, 108–09; Tolan 1999; Flori 1992; 1995; 1997; Loutchitskaja 1996; 1999). Other chronicles of the First Crusade where Saracen paganism plays a central role include those of Petrus Tudebodus (fl. ca. 1080–ca. 1120), and Raymond d’Aguilers (d. ca. 1100?). It is also key to the drama of the Chanson d’Antioche (ca. 1180), a collection of poems inspired by the various crusading events from 1097– 1099. The poets and chroniclers were clever in stirring up the emotions of their Christian readers by creating fictions of scenes wherein a supposed pagan Saracen, such as the alleged ruler of Jerusalem at its capture, would bemoan to the pagan gods the losses of territory to the “power of the crucifix,” or report the

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discovery of a silver idol of Muhammad in the temple of Solomon, where d’Aguilers described knights riding in blood up to their knees as they captured Jerusalem (Tolan 2002, 118–19). In the Christian mind, the temple of Solomon was the center of a cult, the cult of Muhammad, and the idolatry of that temple was portrayed as a form of “pollution” of the holy city by the pagan followers of that cult (Tolan 2002, 120; Camille 1989; Cole 1993). Even though the crusaders who settled in the Holy Land after the First Crusade (1097–1099) learned that Muslims were not polytheists, that false perception did not disappear in either the Chansons de Geste or the chronicles of the later crusades. Perhaps most influential in the West was the Chanson de Roland (ca. 1100; Tolan 2002, 105; 312 n. 1, uses Chanson de Roland 1990; Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) 1978), which depicts the Saracens as pagans worshipping a triad of gods, including Muhammad himself as one of them (Tolan 2002, 125; Kedar 1984; Dufournet 1987; Bervoc-Huard 1978; Haidu 1993). Also important was the Chanson d’Antioche (ca. 1100), which as Tolan describes it, made “the Crusade central to Christian eschatology by having Christ himself predict it,” when, at the time of his crucifixion, He speaks to the good thief to predict the future arrival of the crusaders (Franks specifically) to free the Holy Land and eliminate paganism. Since the Romans were the original pagans in this narrative, it became necessary to replace them with the Saracens as the target for avenging the death of Christ: “The crusaders’ historical model was the capture of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus, in revenge (as was commonly believed in the Middle Ages) for the killing of Jesus” (Tolan 2002, 121). Thus, medieval architecture picked up on this theme, as in the church of Moissac, wherein the porch was modeled on Titus’s triumphal arch to symbolize the successful recapture of Jerusalem by the crusaders (Seidel 1986). The image of the Saracen foreigner as the pagan became so pervasive that even the ancient Greco-Roman pagans were referred to as “Saracens” who “worship Mahomet,” and many pagan idols became referred to by the name of Muhammad or some other corrupt form (e.g., Mahomet, Mahon, Mahoun, Mawmet). This stereotype of the Saracen as pagan prevailed well beyond the era of the initial crusades to the Holy Land. The Hereford map of the thirteenth century labels the golden calf worshipped by the Israelites during the exodus as a “Mahom;” the Decreta of the Council of Vienne (1311) accused the Saracens of worshipping Muhammad; and, even English plays of the fourteenth century took great liberties in declaring that the ancients Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Pontius Pilate all acknowledged “Mahound” in some way (Tolan 2002, 126–27; Bancourt 1982; Daniel 1984; Keller 1987; Camille 1989; Metlitzki 1977). The dynamic interplay of Christian and Saracen in the Middle Ages often led to the simultaneous projection of different images. This was true in the twelfth century, for example, where in contrast to the persistent picture of the Saracen as

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the archetypical pagan, there was the conflicting notion of the Saracen as heretic. Four Latin polemics of that era, for example, portray Muhammad as heretic, trickster, and magician (Tolan 2002, 137). Embrico of Mainz (Vita Mahumeti, written ca. 1100), Gautier de Compiègne (De otia machometi, ca. 1155), Adelphus (Vita Machometi, ca. early twelfth century), and Guibert of Nogent (ca. 1055–1124; brief biography of Muhammad in his Gesta) all combine a mix of real knowledge of Islam with numerous popular images of the prophet to reflect a growing curiosity about the man and his religion (Tolan 1996b, 2012). The significance of these works, according to Tolan, is that although they borrow from earlier Eastern and Latin texts that describe Muhammad as a heretic, they go far beyond in creating a view of him as a scoundrel who fools the Saracens through trickery of various sorts. At least three of these four authors openly demonstrate that they are taking much of their opinions from popular vulgar legend, and though “they distance themselves from their material … they exploit its potential to defame the Saracen enemy” (Tolan 2002, 139). In the context of heresy and reform within Europe of the twelfth century, these four accounts show how one needs to define the other in order to come to grips with one’s self. As Tolan briefs the views of Guibert, for example, “Orientals are clever, flighty intellectuals whose brilliant circumlocutions carry them off into heresy, contrasted implicitly to the stodgy, earthbound, authority-respecting Latins. Is it any wonder, Guibert continues, that virtually all the heresiarchs were Orientals, from Mani (216–276 C.E.) and Arius (256–336 C.E.) forward?” (Tolan 2002, 145) One might expect those Christians living together with Muslims, as in Spain, to have a more enlightened view of Islam. Yet, the turmoil of reconquista meant that there was a constant migration of Christians and Muslims moving north and south across the peninsula as the Christians pushed further south to reconquer Muslim-held territories throughout the later Middle Ages (Burns 1999). As a result, a number of polemical and apologetic works were produced by Judaic, Christian, and Islamic authors. All were trying to confront the “other” in their own ways, but the Christian authors for the most part continued to paint the Muslims as heretics. Muhammad was a false prophet; the Koran was illogical; polygamy and the promise of sexual pleasure in heaven were a joke; whereas the Bible was truth. What was new perhaps in these treatises was their demonstrated familiarity with Arab science, and with the approaches of Latin theologians such as Hugh of St Victor (ca. 1096–1141) and Peter Abelard (1079–1142) using the “new logic” to construct their arguments. Petrus Alfonsi (ca. 1062–ca. 1110) perhaps best illustrates this approach in crafting his anti-Muslim polemic as part of his Dialogues against the Jews, wherein Alfonsi characterizes Muhammad as a false prophet

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who is violent, lustful (the latter being a sign of his lacking in the signs of a true prophet), and the Islamic rituals and beliefs as merely a collection of confused, heretical Christian practices (Tolan 2002, 150). Alfonsi was widely read in the Middle Ages, and his ideas apparently had some influence on Peter the Venerable (ca. 1092–1156), the abbot of Cluny, who used Alfonsi’s anti-Muslim tract to compose his own treatises against both the Muslims and the Jews in the 1140s and 1150s (Tolan 2002, 155; Tolan 1993). Though the abbot’s approach was ultimately more analytical and careful (he traveled to Spain and had the Koran translated into Latin, for example), his first response to his more direct encounter with Islam was to compose his Summa totius haeresis ac diabolicae sectae Saracenorum siue Hismahelitarum. Therein he saw his purpose to prepare Christians to understand Muhammad and what he taught before they read the new edition of the Koran in Latin. In this tract, however, he still concluded that Muhammad was “a poor, vile, unlettered Arab” who went on to deceive others by claiming a religious vocation that led to his role as prophet, and eventually to his partnering with a heretical Nestorian monk and several Jews to establish a new heretical doctrine of his own (Tolan 2002, 157; Tolan 1998; Kritzeck 1964). In around 1156, he later wrote a more reasoned treatise (Contra sectam siue haeresim Saracenorum) in order to plead with potential Muslim readers to hear him out and to convince them to accept Christian scripture. In book two of this work, he tries to prove logically that Muhammad was not really a prophet by comparing him disfavorably with the Old Testament prophets (Tolan 2002, 159). Tolan presents a succinct overview of the European reaction to the Muslim other from the ninth through the twelfth century in these words: “Islam [was] a new variety of … pagan idolatry, heresy, the cult of Antichrist, or a confused blend of all of these” (Tolan 2002, 171). He goes on to describe how the writers in the thirteenth century used this base to propagandize the reconquista in Spain or to try to launch a new crusade to the Holy land. However, the rhetoric took two directions in the later period. First, there was the overreaching militant crusading optimism that ultimate victory over Islam could still be obtained through force. Second, others began to conceive that peaceful missionary work could better lead to ultimate victory through conversion of all of Islam to Christianity. The missionary advocates changed the rhetorical strategy to portray the Islamic world as “ready to convert to Christianity given a proper mix of political allegiance and rational argumentation” (Tolan 2002, 172). Interestingly, the ambivalence of the Western perspective appeared in the way the primary missionaries, the Franciscans and Dominicans, adopted different approaches to engage the Muslims. The Franciscans decided not to learn the Arabic language or study the Koran; instead they relied on the model of preaching apostolic poverty. On the other hand, the Dominicans took a more organized and planful approach which included the

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study of Arabic, engagement with both the Koran and the Hadith, and direct theological debate with Muslim scholars. Ultimately, neither the militant nor the missionary approach succeeded. The last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land fell in 1291 with the capture of Acre, and as Tolan concludes, by the fourteenth-century Christian protagonists, such as Riccoldo of Monte Croce (ca. 1243–1320), had decided to revert to portraying “Muslims as illogical, invariably hostile enemies.” Thus, they were no longer considering the possibility of even logically demonstrating that Christianity was superior to the Islamic other (Tolan 2002, 173).

III The Jew as Foreigner Very similar to the ambiguity of the Saracen image, was the everchanging Christian view of the Jew as an “other” to confront throughout the Middle Ages. For example, Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) in his treatise Against the Jews presented a picture of Jewish culture that was more based on his “reading of Jerome rather than on any contact with real Jews.” He chastised them for not converting, accusing them of being illogical and stubborn, and thus saw them as a threat to his constructed narrative of the ultimate triumph of Christianity. In the mind of Isidore, since the Visigothic Arians had been converted the only remaining threat to Christianity was the infidel Jews (Tolan 2002, 15–16; Albert 1982). The reflection of such Christian attitudes toward Jews in later attitudes toward Islam ironically had a parallel in Jewish attitudes toward Christianity. For example, some Jewish polemics refer to Jesus as a magician who led Israel astray, and passages in the Talmud also present Jesus as suffering in hell for having mocked the Jewish prophets (Tolan 2002, 16; Green 1985). As a minority struggling to preserve its religious traditions, the Jews took to an aggressive defense, even to the point of liturgical condemnations of the Christians as heretics (minim) (Tolan 2002, 16; Green 1985). Of course, the Jews were foreign to the Muslims as well, and the Muslims were not consistent in their portrayal of or in their attitude toward the Jews (Tolan 2002, 33). On the one hand, the Jews were afforded a place in Heaven as “people of the Book,” but, on the other hand, were accused of misinterpreting that same scripture to deny the prophethood of Muhammad or the antiquity of Islam (Tolan 2002, 33–34). However, for the Muslim in the seventh-century Islamic capital of Damascus, the proof of superiority was found in the conquest of both Christians and Jews. As Tolan summarizes it, “Their weakness and submission were appropriate to their inferior, secondary status in the eyes of God” (Tolan 2002, 39; see also M. Cohen 1994; Chazan 1996).

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We have a problem sorting out the medieval perception of the Jew because, in the words of Debra Strickland, “It is far more difficult to draw a line between the actual and the fantastic during the Middle Ages given that constructed views of living non-Christians were nearly entirely stereotyped and imaginary. Contemporary descriptions of Jews illustrate this very clearly.” Thus, she concludes that medieval views of the Jews could be seen in the extreme as the “embodiment of everything medieval Christians dreaded and feared about themselves, their society, and their own religion (Strickland 2003, 95). Jean Delumeau, in writing a history of late medieval and early modern fear, devotes a chapter to the Jews as one of the agents of Satan, wherein the Jew is often portrayed as the “absolute Evil” to be feared (Delumeau 1978, ch. 9). However, more recent scholarship does enable us to determine that not all medieval views of the Jews were negative. Especially from the twelfth century forward, at least in northern Europe, images were sometimes neutral, sometimes positive, as in the exegesis of the Old Testament. For example, the role of David as model king, or the illustration of the genealogy of Christ as part of the Tree of Jesse with roots in the Old Testament, offer samples of the positive role played by the Jews in Christian thought (Strickland 2003, 97–98; Shapiro 1960; Wright 1993; Hourihane 2002). Unfortunately, there is more evidence on the negative side of this perception, and the work of such individuals as Bernhard Blumenkranz and Ruth Mellinkoff provide insight as to the breadth of medieval anti-Jewish images. Cecil Roth early in the twentieth century argued that the Jews were so detested because not only were they “non-Christians,” but they “deliberately rejected Christianity, and they did so with authority,” an explanation that still bears consideration according to Strickland (Strickland 2003, 96; see also Roth 1938; Blumenkranz 1965; 1966; 1980; Mellinkoff 1993; 1999; Stow 1992: Rubin 1999). The image of the Jews as the enemies of Christ came from the New Testament because Jews were too stubborn to recognize Christ as the Messiah. Peter the Venerable called them out on this in his Against the Inveterate Obstinacy of the Jews (Against the Jews, in brief). Alternatively, and again as verified in the New Testament in passages from Luke 23:21, the Jews were said to cry out to Pontius Pilate: “crucify him!” Thus, the Jews, instead of the Romans who were carefully often edited out of the medieval versions of this text, became known as “Christ-killers.” As Jeremy Cohen has pointed out, this tradition was one that persisted throughout the Middle Ages from the time of Augustine to that of the late medieval friars (Strickland 2003, 99; J. Cohen 1982a; 1983; Blumenkranz 1958; Fredriksen 1996). In contrast to a tendency to want to slay the Jews in revenge for Christ’s death, there was the goal to convert them in order that they play their assigned role in Christian eschatology. Using St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans (Rom. 11:16–27) as

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evidence, it was believed that the Jews must remain alive because their mass conversion was necessary to initiate the Second Coming of Christ. Another later medieval mystic and prophet, Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–1202), who believed in the nearness of that Second Coming, wrote in his treatise Against the Jews, that “the time is at hand to take pity on them, the time of their consolation and conversion” (Strickland 2003, 99–100; Hirsch-Reich 1966; Bloomfield 1957; Reeves 1969). Even earlier, the Third Lateran Council (1179) had encouraged the support of Jews for the sake of humanity; and later in thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas argued for toleration of the Jews since they played an important role in history and in Christian theology (Classen, ed., 2002, xliii–xliv). However, as Leonard Glick argues, the justifications for toleration were not always humanitarian: “the reason for their survival…was that they were useful—often all but indispensable—as sources of liquid capital. But once that usefulness, declined, they were doomed” (Glick 1999; see also Classen, ed., 2002, lxviii, n. 168; Hood 1995). Though Glick’s pessimistic view is somewhat offset by more recent research, the pogroms that accompanied the organization of the army for the First Crusade, or the expulsion of Jews from England in the late thirteenth century, should not be overlooked in trying to strike a balanced view of how the Christians treated the Jews as others” (Classen, ed., 2002, xliii–xliv; Yerushalmi 1979; Classen 1998; J. Cohen 1996). One cannot avoid the question of “usefulness” that Glick raises. The official Christian doctrine saw too much profit from the loaning of money (i.e., usury) as sinful and therefore forbidden by the Church, which put the Jews in an enviable economic position in the rising urban world of the later Middle Ages. Even though the Jews also regarded “immoderate profit” as wrong, they believed it was permissible to loan money at interest to “foreigners.” Of course this bred resentment among the Christians, and in the subsequent twelfth- and thirteenth-century persecutions it is possible to determine that they were undertaken to relieve Christian debtors from paying their Jewish creditors. This was certainly true at York in 1190, and likely so in England overall in 1290 (Strickland 2003, 140; Kirschenbaum 1985; Jordan 1989; Lipton 1995; Stacey 1992). Debra Strickland has called attention to the degree to which art played a role in attacking the Jews in the Middle Ages, and has accumulated a significant collection of examples to demonstrate how art was both powerful propaganda and played an important role in what she labels “a much broader, multifaceted campaign that employed pictorial, literary, dramatic, legal, economic and political mechanisms to suppress and to persecute Jews within Western Christian society.” Persecution and physical expulsion from England came in 1290; from France in 1306, and again in 1332 and 1394; from Spain in 1492; and from dozens of German principalities and towns during the fifteenth century, as well as Italy in

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1541. The campaign was so effective that “By the fifteenth century, there were almost no Jews in Western Europe” (Strickland 2003, 105). The art of the era contributed the stereotypical male Jewish icon, portrayed as bearded, hook-nosed, and hat-wearing. The medieval Jewish “hat” was usually either the softer flatter Phrygian cap, or a more pointed tall hat with the most exaggerated forms looking like an inverted funnel, the modern “dunce’s cap.” Though it is not likely that the Jews in fact wore distinguished costumes before the Lateran Council of 1215, which required both Jews and Muslims to wear a form of dress to distinguish them from Christians, the fact is that in the thirteenth century the “foreignness” of the Jew was emphasized (Strickland 2003, 105–06). Though the wearing of a hat per se was not necessarily negative or confined to Jewish figures, it was often perceived as a sign of evil regardless of the wearer. Even familiar Old Testament figures such as Moses took on some negative connotations for the Jews when depicted in medieval art. In a register from the thirteenth-century French manuscript of the Somme le roy (Dream of the King), “a horned Moses receiving the tablets of the Law kneels opposite the image of a blind-folded Synagoga grasping her broken staff,” and below in another frame, the Israelites are shown worshipping an image of the Golden Calf (Exod. 32:1–6, 3 Kings 28–30), suggesting an affiliation of Moses with idolatry. Often, Moses was portrayed as having horns, which for medieval theologians were construed as symbols of honor and power, but for the average medieval viewer horns were more likely seen as derisive, especially since one of the more common views was that contemporary Jews concealed horns and tails beneath their clothing (Strickland 2002, 106; Mellinkoff 1970). The pejorative views of the Jews began to become prominent in northern Europe from the late twelfth century as Jewish-Christian relations really deteriorated. Jews were burned in London in 1189, for example, and a massacre of Jews occurred in York in 1190 (Jones and Watson, ed., 2013; see also, Alexander, ed., 2004, and Bale 2010). Increased settlement of Jews in the urban areas of England, France, and Germany was a likely cause for increased conflict (see, for example, Auslander 2005). Artistic productions bear witness to the transformation, where the number one theme became the belief that the Jews murdered Christ, which provided an opportunity to fan the fires of Christian hatred because of the perceived evil and guilt of the Jews in the Passion. Thus, Christians regularly assumed the Jews to be agents of the Devil, and assigned them to prominent places in Hell in the medieval Christian iconography, as illustrated in the Bible moralisée, which dates from Paris in the 1240s (illustration in Strickland 2003, 126; see also Lipton 1999; Trachtenberg 1993). In the anthology of work collected and edited by Scott Waugh and Peter Diehl under the title Christendom and its Discontents, various authors address the

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question of how religion shaped both personal identity and the culture (Waugh and Diehl, ed., 1996, 5). Drawing upon Freud’s notion that constraints on individual behavior in a civilized society often lead to “neuroses and unresolved conflicts among individuals in that society” (Freud 1961; Waugh and Diehl, ed., 1996, 3), various authors therein explore how often medieval society dealt with conflict with the other by excluding individuals or groups from society, and how obedience became the test of inclusion or not. As well, studies by R. I. Moore, Jeffrey Russell, and John Boswell all confront related issues regarding the systematic condemnation of a wide range of “others” in medieval society, especially Muslims and Jews, but also heretics, lepers, male homosexuals and female prostitutes, and conclude that there is a linkage between these actions and the neuroses and fears of the dominant culture (Moore 1987; Russell 1992; Boswell 1980; Waugh and Diehl, ed., 1996, 3–8). Close to the alleged role of the Jews in the Passion was the accusation of ongoing idolatry, and the two portrayals are seen in manuscripts, stained glass, and other forms of artistic representation. Color, particularly yellow and red, played a key role in denigration of the Jews. In certain regions the Jews were forced to wear the yellow badge; the funnel hat was usually yellow, the Phrygian cap red or yellow; the stockings were red; the skin usually dark. Red and black or dark are symbols of evil or criminality; yellow was used because it stood out in a crowd, thus distinguishing the foreigner. Gold was also used as a way to emphasize the timeless nature of an event being depicted, which thus linked the Jews of the Passion itself to their guilty ancestors in the contemporary world (Strickland 2003, 109–11; Kisch 1957; Petzold 1999). One further illustration of artistic anti-Judaism is found in the prominent role played by the drama of the Apocalypse that is especially true in English illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth century. Perhaps the most famous of these for its strong bias is the Gulbenkian Apocalypse of around 1260–1270, which contains a direct anti-Jewish commentary that claims that the Jews worshipped dragons and were followers of Antichrist who is depicted as a Jew. In this manuscript traditional figures of the Apocalypse are replaced by Jews, including one or more of the Four Horsemen. Therein, the pointed hat, the veil of Moses in the form of a cowl, and other symbols of Jewishness are used to heighten its “unusual virulent anti-Jewish imagery,” as noted by the work of Suzanne Lewis in her examination of the manuscript (Strickland 2003, 130; Lewis 1986). In many ways the Jews were ‘classic’ foreigners in the medieval world because they were perceived as barbarians, monsters, ethnically different, and sometimes even viewed as fools (the latter for having failed to convert to Christianity) (Strickland 2003, 133–40). As in Greek times, where the barbarian was anyone whose physical appearance and social customs differed, in the Christian

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medieval world Jews were “different.” They lived in different sections of the cities, they ate a strange diet (no pork); the spoke a different language (Hebrew) from either the vernacular or the Latin; and they were sexually licentious. Moreover, they were physically deformed (males were circumcised), they had a foul odor, they concealed tails and horns under their clothing, and they followed an alien religion! (Strickland 2003, 133; Hood 1995). Unfortunately the anti-Jewish polemic became more and more organized and stereotyped as the image of the Jew deteriorated with the increasing Jewish settlement within the urban centers of later medieval life. By the middle of the twelfth century, the Jews were resented because of the increased visibility of their economic activity, and because of the way they were treated positively by the Christian authorities who supported Jewish money-lending. After their persecution in northern Europe that occurred in the context of recruitment for the First Crusade, the image of the Jew as an “enemy of the faith” was enhanced in the public imagination leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 (Funkenstein 1971; Chazan 1996; 1997; J. Cohen 1982a; ed., 1996; Foa 1996; Mirrer 1996; Despres 1998; Lipton 1999). With the approach of the fifteenth century in England, for example, this “differentness” became further accentuated when a sense of identity became more based upon a national sense of geographic place, and later, in the case of Shakespeare, with a sense of “Englishness” (Shapiro 1996; Lampert 2004). Regarding the connection between a sense of geographic space and one’s identity in the Middle Ages, David Leshock undertook a closer examination of two medieval texts that in his view began to exclude both Jews and Muslims from any legitimate place within either “England” or “Europe.” In his article regarding how Jews and Muslims became designated specifically as “foreigners,” Leshock uses the Hereford mappaemundi and The Book of John Mandeville to show how in “a Christian-centered world, identity is connected with religion,” but in these two texts it is also connected with geographic space. Thus, he argues further that: “These two texts in particular show the ways that both geography and religion can influence the construction of identity, and thereby determine what is ‘foreign’ ” (Leshock 2002, 202). It is clear to Leshock that religion “trumps geographic proximity” regarding those who belong and those who do not. However, in expelling the Jews, Leshock also avers that this was an act of “medieval nationalism” supported by the idea that “many people felt that foreign people inhabited their land” (Leshock 2002, 203, emphasis his). He cites in support of contemporary ideas related to this concept the chronicler Pierre de Langtoft (d. 1305), who stated “there is nobody who opposes it / To expel the Jews” (Leshock 2002, 203). His focus on the two main texts ultimately leads him to point out how the Hereford map, for example, “erased Jews from Europe and placed them in Asia,” while Mandeville claimed that “only the enclosure of Gog and Magog is the true

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home of Jews until they emerge during the Apocalypse” (Leshock 2002, 220). Thus, in the sense of constructed communities as defined by the work of Benedict Anderson and Nelson Goodman, Leshock argues that a geographical location did not define a community for Jews or Muslims who might be residing in medieval England, that is, “Those who do not meet further requirements could be defined as foreigners in their own homeland” (Leshock 2002, 221; Anderson 1991; Goodman 1978; Westrem 2001; see also the contributions to this Handbook by Miriamne Krummel and Mark Abate).

IV Death and the Ultimate Confrontation of God as the Foreign Returning to the theme of the other as the mirror image of the self, there is one other persistent confrontation with the “other” in medieval life, namely the human challenge to understand God. To Saint Anselm (1033–1109), “God is radically other, dwelling in ‘light inaccessible,’ eluding our senses and our understanding alike” (Clayton 1998; Classen, ed., 2002, xli). Similarly, it has been argued that Beowulf’s encounters with Grendel and Grendel’s mother in the cave under the sea, Gawain’s journey confronting his sense of self in the wood, or Dante’s meeting with death in The Divine Comedy while in the “midway journey of life” can all be seen as necessary and positive ways of confronting the divine other. In a related way, attempts to face up to death might have led to encounters with revenants, that is, the ghosts who inhabited regions beyond the known world, but returned to help the living. Aline Hornaday argues, “that sometimes unwelcome and intrusive third [party] was an ideal self which both the living percipient and the ‘undead’ ghost needed to internalize in order to enter the heavenly world, the ‘celestial fatherland’ as Gregory the Great calls it” (Hornaday 2002, 71). Thus, overall, as observed by Charles Dahlberg, “unlikeness is a part of likeness, that unlikeness exists only as a consequence of man’s likeness to God” (quoted in Classen, ed., 2002, xli; Dahlberg 1988). The later medieval mystics, such as Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1329) and Mechthild von Magdeburg (ca. 1208–1282/ 1297), pursued this quest to the ultimate, believing and hoping, as Classen states in his prelude to Anselm’s remark above: “To witness God would indeed be to witness the final otherness” (Classen, ed., 2002, xli). Other recent scholarship has turned even more attention to exploring how modern analysis of the loss of psychological form leading to a bifurcated reaction of repulsion and attraction might better enable an understanding of the medieval confrontation with God during the coming of the Last Days. David Williams relates, for example, that “The loss of identity of the self is met with abhorrence, for it betokens an assault not only upon the individual being that is the self but on

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the very possibility of Being” (Williams 1996, 79). As Williams develops the analysis, the deforming of self is both a psychological and a religious question “since it is an experience that extends beyond the dimensions of psyche to encounter those of metaphysics.” Furthermore, he states that “as personal form structures the understanding of the self and makes possible the various rapports between self and other, it is also that form that permits and limits the relation of the self and God” (Williams 1996, 79). To provide a specific medieval example, Williams calls attention to the language of the mystics, such as St. Catherine of Siena (ca. 1347–1380), who speak of being permeated by God or of their divine ravishing and absorption into God, thus emphasizing the “disappearance of self into the Godhead, not in the pantheistic sense of diluting God into the forces of nature, but rather in the erotic sense of union in which lovers become as one” (Williams 1996, 81). Especially in confrontations with sin and guilt, and the prospect of the Last Judgment, Williams points out that “in the roles of penitent, petitioner, and seeker, the devout are provided with discourses in which God is cast as the ultimate Other: the Just God who punishes, the Merciful God who answers our prayers, the Hidden God who is the object of a life-long search” (Williams 119, 81). To conclude this part, we again turn to Catherine of Siena, where we find these words about her confrontation with God in her meditation on The Cell of Self Knowledge: “Daughter, do you not know who you are and who I am? … You are she that is not, and I am he who is” (Catherine of Siena 1981, 29; Williams 1996, 81). Modern scholarship sampled above regarding the most dominant and more obvious ways the medieval world confronted the foreign does not reveal or exhaust the totality of the forms of foreignness. More of those will be discussed below as we focus on medieval fears. But to review briefly before we move on to discuss “fear” in some detail, the foreign could be a military opponent such as the pagan barbarians, whether they be Celts, Goths, Vikings, Magyars, Tartars; or non-Christian monotheists such as the Muslims and Jews; or those abandoning their Christian faith for heresy; or the mythical and mystical others in the worlds of theologians and poets. The “other” might also be someone close by who was not of the same clan, or not of the same guild, or women who did not hold equal status with men, or peasants and merchants who could not rise to become lords or knights. In response to both the concrete foreign others and the symbolic, the medieval world was ambivalent and ambiguous; resulting in encounters which resulted in “violent and vitriolic forms of hostility, rejection and fear, and they can also trigger a quest for self-analysis, possibly producing tolerant attitudes” (Classen, ed., 2002, xlii; 226–48; Nederman 2002; Patschovsky and Zimmermann, ed., 1998; Dinzelbacher 1996). Unfortunately, much of the perception of the foreign in the Middle Ages, as in the modern world, was based on a fear of the

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unknown. We now turn attention to a review of some of the ways in which the medieval world experienced and dealt with fear.

C Fear in the Middle Ages In the 1970s, as Jean Delumeau undertook the writing of La Peur en Occident (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles), he reminded his readers that fear is natural, and at the same time he wondered why such a history had not been written before. He concluded that this had something do with the way humans juxtapose fear and cowardice, or courage and rashness. He also pointed to the work of Delpierre, who had insightfully noted that the word “fear” is “charged with so much shame” (Delpierre 1974, 7; Delumeau 1978, 3). Similarly in the medieval world as portrayed in the romance literature and the chansons de geste, the archetypal knight in shining armor is portrayed as “without fear if not always without reproach,” and is contrasted sharply with the masses who are reputedly without courage (Delumeau 1978, 4). Dorsey Armstrong more recently has examined the work of Malory (ca. 1405–1471), who in his tale of Sir Lancelot “stresses preoccupation with a knight’s identity as here to enclose ‘male,’” and contends that the knight, out of fear of a loss of identity, seeks violent adventures in order to maintain his male identity (Armstrong 2002; Scott and Kosso, ed., 2002, xxxiv; Crane 1997). Delumeau also reminded us that the poet Virgil, who was a favorite among medieval readers, wrote that “Fear is proof of a lowly birth” (Delumeau 1978, 4, quoting from Enéide, IV, 13). Tracing these ancient world traditions regarding fear as an introduction to Fear and its Representations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Cynthia Kosso lists several ways that fear was significant to the Greeks and the Romans (Scott and Kosso, ed., 2002). Fear of losing power, for example, because it led to the shame of dishonor (infamia). Fear of death was linked to their fear of the gods; and they also feared the “pollution” of their religion by less powerful gods or new gods that were “foreign” (Scott and Kosso, ed., 2002, xviii; Bailey 1971; Gilmore, ed., 1987; Barton, 2001). Since the new religion of Christianity was eclectic in nature and not far from its pagan roots, these ideas carried forward and built into new fears in medieval society, such as fear of sin that might incur the wrath of the one God (Delumeau 1990). Fear of women and fear of sex with women was added to the list of everyday fears as fear became embraced in many different forms. Fear of the sea began with the Greeks and Romans, and persisted thereafter, as did fear of divination and sorcery. One could add somewhat less rational fears, such as fear of the night, continued in the medieval world alongside the more rational fears of famine, pestilence, and war. Diffusion of fear was made possible through rumor

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mongering, as well as by the sermon on a Sunday (Delumeau 1990). Fear was an emotion that needed to be cultivated, explored or exploited. Fear in the Middle Ages was potent; it could teach lessons that enhanced faith; or, it could motivate cultural and political changes. Fear played a significant role in the Inquisition and its associated use of torture, or in the use of excommunication to control the faithful (Peters 1988; 1996; Vodola 1996). As David Scruton’s collection of studies in Sociophobics: the Anthropology of Fear (Scruton 1986) provides examples across all cultures, the experience of fear is physiological (within the body), physical (e.g., external threats to the body), and social (i.e., anxieties develop over social interactions, leading to both fear of and fear for others) (Scott and Kosso, ed., 2002, xii). Evidence of social fear-building in medieval society is found in the way the Christian belief system excluded others (Jews, Saracens, heretics, and “witches”), and built images of them that led to fear of individuals who were so labeled (Kors and Peters, ed., 1972; Delumeau 1990). As Kosso continues in her introduction, other medieval fears included fear of eternal damnation and pain in hell; fear of sexual or social deviants, including homosexuals, prostitutes and gypsies; and the penultimate fears of the devil, death, and God. Of course Christians, with these fears in mind, would not want to confront them directly, which often meant they feared going to confession where they had to confront their own sins and the penance these might incur (Scott and Kosso, ed., 2002, xiv–xxvi; Duggan 1984). In the medieval world, fear was used in religious writings or even the secular medieval romances to promote repentance or to “overcome spiritual paralysis,” and, of course, to coerce, control and manipulate others (Lander 1971). Fear was an issue of masculinity in the chivalric romances (Kaeuper 1999; Armstrong 2002; cf. Crane 1997). For Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274), fear was something to be embraced; it could be a natural and instinctive reaction to deal with things that might corrupt the human world, or it could be non-natural as a reflection of man’s laziness or shame or anxiety. Fear could be disabling also, especially if sermons in response to natural disaster or religious wars fed on pessimism to breed fear and to bully parishioners (Delumeau 1990). Because man was rational, Thomas thought that human fears should be regarded as significant; as when fear represented an intuitive shrinking by man from a future evil, such as in the fear of hell (Scott and Kosso, ed., 2002, xxiii–xxv; Taylor 1999; Bernstein 2000; Loughlin 2002). Though only somewhat less true today, the medieval world was regularly threatened by a number of physical dangers, such as the severity of the environment, which the literary metaphor of the deep, dark woods so often captured (Semmler 1991). Also, European society was periodically challenged by outside invaders—from the Germanic tribes of the fourth and fifth centuries to the Vikings of the eighth and ninth, to the Mongols of the thirteenth who struck fear into the

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hearts of countless numbers from Russia to England, and signaled to many the end of the physical world itself (Strickland 2003, 192–206; Jackson 2005; Morgan 2007; Connell 1973; Saunders 1969; 1971; Bezzola 1969; Turnbull 1980). At a more local level, the peasants and clerical populace often had to fear the wrath of the local lords who might ravage their lands, steal their corps, or even kill them as the knights fought one another in the midst of a growing population beginning in the late tenth century. Others, such as pirates, highway robbers, or thieves who represented threats to personal property, security, and even life, had to be feared. One needed, as well, to fear the effects of famine and disease which truly threatened survival on a regular basis. Yet, medieval manuscripts and elements of church architecture are filled with grotesque images, gargoyles, and other forms of fantastic creatures to engender fears that do not seem so related to the actual physical dangers. In the last twenty years, the research of Ruth Mellinkoff and Dolores Frese, among others, has explored more deeply how “these images were not simply fantastic notions, but often reflected … deep seated fears and concrete existential problems which medieval people could not solve, wherefore the artists … resorted to forms of psychological substitution via illustrations, sculptures, and literary texts when dealing with outsiders, namely members of religious, ethnic, racial, and gender minorities” (Mellinkoff 1993; Frese 1991; Camille 1989; J. J. Cohen 1994; 1999). There is not space herein to offer greater details on all the fears experienced in the medieval world, but we will examine a few that more clearly relate to perhaps the more prominent medieval confrontations with the “other” (for broad looks at the “other” in the arts and literature, see, for example, Ramey 2008; Kinoshita 2006; Strickland 2003; Nederman 2002; Devise and Mollat 2010; J. J. Cohen 2000; Rider 2000; Goodich 1998; Lionarons 1998; Kruger 1997; Dinzelbacher 1996; Uebel 1996; 2002; Williams 1996; Classen 1993; Stow 1992; Friedman 1983; Camille 1989; 1992).

I Fear of the Monster in the Middle Ages As the medieval world confronted the multifaceted foreigner, various forms of monster were created and evolved as symbols evoking fear. For example, the figure of the dwarf in the early Middle Ages was depicted as representing an advanced underground world to be feared. By the late Middle Ages it had become more concretely “a dangerous, horrid, mean-spirited, and evil being which deserved to be eliminated” (Classen, ed., 2002, xxiii; 1999; Habicht 2010; see also the article on dwarves in this Handbook by Werner Schäfke). Jews and Arabs (Saracens) were feared and subsequently demonized into monsters. As well, those

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who were perceived as or looked different were often depicted as objects of fear. Thus, those of a different skin color, particularly black, and those with terminal diseases or physical deformities (e.g., lepers), or different sexual preferences, or of a lower social class were more and more portrayed as evil and marginalized in society, or worse. Whereas in the ancient world monsters had been seen as harbingers of ill-doing and a disruption of the natural order of things, in the Christian era, monsters were a sign of God’s power and a part of his plan. On a positive note, for example, Augustine said that God would even restore monstrous men to perfect form at the Resurrection. But most of the medieval world more agreed with Bishop Patrick of Ireland who said that the monstrous races were given by God; yes, but as “Signs of future ill/that He might frighten those whom He willed to see them”(Friedman 1981, 109; Jackson 2001). Of course there were exceptions to seeing all monsters and foreigners as evil, such as witnessed in the writings of Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) in his Willehalm and Parzival or in the text of his lesser-known contemporary Wirnt van Gravenberg’s Wigalois (ca. 1210–1220) where the people of “difference” were better treated. There were even “good monsters” (Classen 1997). However, for the most part, and regardless of one’s status in medieval society, fear played a significant role in daily life and shaped the images of the other in art and literature (Classen, ed., 2002, xxiii–xxv; 1993; Stråth 2000; Goss and Bornstein, ed., 1986; Maksymiuk 1992; Mellinkoff 1993, 229; J. J. Cohen 1994). Examination of medieval art and architecture is perhaps most revealing of the ways the medieval world confronted its fears. It was natural for the inhabitants of that world to be ambiguous because they were confronted with a theology that looked forward to the next world and had contempt for the nature of the world they physically inhabited in this life. This view came from the very top of the religious establishment. Pope Innocent III (1160–1216; r. 1198–1216), who was very active in dealing with worldly matters, in his work entitled De Contemptu Mundi, sive de miseria conditionis humanae wrote that: “Man is born for work, for suffering, for fear—and what is worse—for death” (Delumeau 1990). This conflict of holding out a hope for a better next life, while living a miserable life on earth, was reflected in many artistic ways. For example, artists throughout the Middle Ages, depicted monsters in abnormal physical forms while performing “uncivilized” activities. From the twelfth century onward, demons “by contrast transcend the realms of sin and barbarity to embody concepts more abstract … That is, demons represent an attempt to visualize the nature of evil itself” (Strickland 2003, 61; cf. Marx 1995, 5). Of course, one must fear embracing evil, for it threatens achievement of the good life in the next world. Thus, intentionally and ironically, devils were created with features from “all of God’s creatures,” and shaped into a more abhorrent and “hideous hodgepodge,” often “sporting horns, a tail, shaggy hair, wings, goat or

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bird legs, and hooves, paws, or claws.” Human parts were usually “distorted, with long, hooked noses and ugly grimaces, and unnatural coloring, usually dark” (Strickland 2003, 61–62; see also Erich 1931). After the eleventh century, the most common characteristic of the Devil was horns, an ancient symbol of power, with the next two most common being the tail and wings (Strickland 2003, 62). Fear was further promoted by the instruments of torture depicted as being carried by the devils, namely tridents, pitchforks, and flesh hooks, all of which were common agricultural implements then turned against both the peasant laboring man and his master to torment them in hell as they were made to fear the wrath of the devil (on torture in general, see Peters 1996). One also often sees devils portrayed with cat-o-nine-tails-style whips or ladles pouring molten lead down the throats of the damned, as shown in illuminated manuscripts such as the Guthlac Roll (ca. 1210) or the later Livre de la Vigne de Nostre Seineur (ca. 1450– 1470) (Palmer 1992; also, Mellinkoff 1970; and, manuscripts illustrated in Strickland 2003, 62–63). The use of wings to depict devils likely caused some confusion among viewers of various representations because wings were normally used to designate positive Christian figures such as the angels or saints. However, in the depictions of devils, they usually have wings in the wrong places, as in the example of the Devil who is shown tempting Christ in a stained-glass image from Troyes Cathedral (ca. 1170–1180; image in Victoria and Albert Museum, London), where the wings “sprout not from the conventional angelic location of between the shoulder blades, but perversely from the wrists, ankles, and backside.” As Strickland observes, such portrayals convey “demonic perversity … using an attribute which in other contexts has positive connotations in order to underscore what demons are not” (emphasis hers, Strickland 2003, 63–64, with black and white image of the stained glass panel on 64). Similar to the images of the Monstrous Races, the devil and other demons are seen nude or minimally clothed in order to represent them as barbarous, and to better highlight their physical deformities, as well as to indicate sin. Naked images of Adam and Eve were the prototype of this form of representation, but other generic representations of sinners in general followed. One can see such an example of a naked sinner who is surrounded by fearful bulls in an illuminated initial D for Psalm 21 in a twelfth century Psalter from St. Albans (Albani Psalter) (Strickland 2003, 64; Dodwell, Pächt, and Wormald 1960; Klingender 1971). Naked images are used by the artists to contrast them with the virtuous, as is the case in the Last Judgment tympanum at Autun. In one of the details, an angel figure is graceful, with delicate features and a serene expression; the body is mostly hidden by long robes. Opposite are the demons whose bodies are completely naked, even to the point of muscle and ribs exposed; they are grotesquely

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presented with angled postures that imply “violent and erratic movements,” with large heads and open mouths that accentuate “gleeful, sadistic expressions.” Even the soul of the damned in this scene is represented in demonic fashion (Strickland 2003, 72–73, with illustration on 69). Modern research by Barbara Palmer and others indicates that throughout the Middle Ages the iconography of angels remained consistent, but that of the devil was more variable. Strickland comments that, “This suggests that evil held a greater fascination than good, or perhaps that the negative incentive of nightmarish and terrifying images was the most effective in encouraging the Christian to stay on the proper moral path” (Strickland 2003, 73; see also Palmer 1992, 20; Caciola 2003).

II Fear of the Saracens and the Jews As the medieval world progressed beyond the year 1000 and began to settle down into a pattern of reurbanization and population growth, there was increasing interaction between Christians, Jews and Muslims. This created an opportunity for what the research of David Scruton and others has characterized as “sociophobics,” or, the “study of human fears as they occur and are experienced in the context of the socio-cultural systems humans have created” (Scruton 1986, 9). Thus, “Fears are situational,” and fear is a method “to symbolize and to feel in order to cope with problems that arise from living” (Scruton 1986, 40). This concept seems applicable to the way Christians reacted to both the Jews and the Saracens, and the similarities of the response seem to make the “other” interchangeable as Christians responded in the crusade era in particular. Despite the rather euphoric response of Fulcher of Chartres (ca. 1059–1127) to what he observed of the Crusader Kingdom immediately following the success of the First Crusade, namely, “I pray and reflect in our time how God has transformed the Occident into the Orient … . He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean, or a Palestinian [sic]” (quoted in Menache 2009, 67; see also Fulcher of Chartres 1913; Peters 1971; Dressler 1995; Morris 83), the analysis of Sophia Menache has illustrated how unique he was. Even Fulcher’s emotional outburst is better seen in her words as reflecting “the expectations and perhaps also some of the compensation mechanisms that gradually developed among the Latin settlers” (Menache 2009, 68). The Christian response to the Saracen quickly turned more to fear. Even in Fulcher’s own lifetime the tide was running against the Christian settlers, who lost in the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119, which likely heightened a growing sense of alarm that accelerated after the Christian defeat in the Second Crusade that occurred after the fall of Edessa in 1144.

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In the crusading culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the hatred of the Jews and Muslims was often combined. At the cathedral of Chartres, for example, the Royal Portal contains in its iconography, especially the depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents, “anomalies which can be read as coded references to Jewish guilt and Muslim vice,” which are meant to inspire knights to become crusaders (Dressler 1995, 191; see also 200–03). The Massacre became a symbol linking Jews and Muslims around the city of Jerusalem as a destination for the crusaders. As the Roman Emperor Titus (ca. 41–81) captured the Jewish Jerusalem in 70 C.E., the account of Josephus reported that a wealthy female resident killed, roasted, and fed her own son to the Roman soldiers to save herself. This horrible image terrorized the medieval imagination, and it was recreated in numerous manuscripts. Subsequent Christian interpretation of those events saw the Roman victory as God’s judgment against the Jews, and as fulfillment of Christ’s prophecy of Jerusalem’s fall as told in Luke 19:40–44 and Luke 21:20ff. This led to ongoing anti-Jewish polemic dating from Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–339) forward to various Christian texts and images of the twelfth century when Jerusalem became a Muslim city (Dressler 1995, 204–07; see also Schreckenberger 1996; Schreckenberger and Schubert, ed., 1992). The north embrasure of the Royal Portal at Chartres includes sculptures of three figures which, according to the interpretation of Dressler, “allude to Muslim depravity and evoke Christian virtue” and play upon Christian anxiety over alleged Muslim sexual license and religious idolatry (Dressler 1995, 207). As elaborated in related Christian polemic, from that of John of Damascus (676–749) to William of Tripoli (fl. late thirteenth century) and Riccoldo of Monte Croce (1242–1320), even though the latter were encouraging missionary work among the Muslims, the attack of Muhammad’s pagan childhood, as well as his sensuality did not let up. Also, in the more popular crusader chronicles and epics, “Muslims emerge as violent, sensual and idolatrous” (Dressler 1995, 207–08). It was not difficult for Christians to project from the leader to the followers, and thus a blanket condemnation and fear of “Saracen depravity” followed, and was played out in the great iconographic attention given to the battle of the vices (Muslim and Jewish) against the virtues (Christian) (Dressler 1995, 208–17). Among the more vitriolic attempts to raise crusaders in the era of Innocent III was presented by Jacques de Vitry (ca. 1160/1170–1240), who left us with a rather unique characterization of the Saracens. In order to justify their “extermination,” Jacques proclaimed the Saracens as heretics, who were “poisonous limbs” and “decayed flesh” that threatened the heath of the entire Christian body. This was a powerful way to combine the Christian fear of both heresy and disease by planting the seed of fear in the minds of Christians that Saracen heresy was a disease

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which threatened to spread its “poison and decay” unless it were eradicated (Menache 2009, 74; see also Moore 1976). Anti-Jewish art of the Middle Ages may appear to some moderns as more of theoretical propaganda by intellectuals and artists, but the work of Debra Strickland provides evidence that it was so widespread “that it is safe to assume that everyone—religious, lay, old, young, male, female, Christian and Jew—would have been familiar with and understood the meanings of all the types of images,” and therefore, “such imagery must be recognized as powerful propaganda” with “devastating effects on the Jewish populace, from civic persecution to mass murder, and ultimately, physical expulsion” (Strickland 2003, 105). And indeed, there were expulsions of the Jews from England in 1290; France in 1306, 1322, and 1394; Spain in 1492; as well as from numerous German principalities in the early fifteenth century and even from southern Italy as late as 1541. Thus, it does not seem to have made a difference that there was a history of cross-fertilization of cultures as in Spain or southern Italy; the fear of the corruption or contamination by the Jews rose to a point of violent action against them. The artistic portrayals or the anti-Jewish sermons most often heard by most Christians reveal numerous aspects of the Christian fear. The Jews were accused of numerous “crimes,” especially avarice and usury, which was one of the justifications offered for the massacre of the Jews at York. Sexual intercourse with a Jew was deemed a “crime” as well as mortal sin. The souls of Jews were alleged to be the “dwelling places of demons,” or at least, the Jews were “friends of the devil” (Strickland 2003, 122–30). They were portrayed as monsters, such as in the Westminster Abbey Bestiary (ca. 1275–1300) showing a three-faced monster wearing a bright orange Phrygian hat, and a Sciopod wearing a similar orange hat as well (Strickland 2003, 134). Often the Jews were accused of desecrating the hosts of the Eucharistic rite, and as the “sociophobia” of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries intensified, Jews were accused of ritual torture and the murder of Christian boys, which was added to the charge of killing Christ himself. So in the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts, more and more one could find images featuring the Jews as physically deformed monsters, evil torturers, or even as non-humans, such as in the Fetternear Banner, where Jews are shown as heads only, and bearing instruments of torture (Strickland 2003, 108; also see ch. 3 passim). Even those Jews who actually decided to convert to Christianity under the pressure could not escape the Christian fear of the Jews. “Once a Jew, always a Jew …” was the underlying suspicion that led Christians to continue to express their hatred toward Jews at large; hatred and violence often resulted from that fear. The counterpart to that fear was the one that Christians would convert to Judaism. Thus, the contamination by the Jews could result in “spiritual death” for Christians. In the summation of Strickland, what Christians imagined about the

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Jews represented “everything medieval Christians feared and doubted about their own religion” (Strickland 2003, 155; Stacey 1992). The more recent work of Anthony Bale on Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (Bale 2010) has opened up a wider realm of possible ways to examine medieval literary and artistic images of the imagined Jewish aggression toward Christians in the age of fear. Specifically, he explored images expressing Jewish aggression against Christ, Mary, the Eucharist, and Christian children in order to try to understand how those operated within the medieval mind. He speculates that Christians used those images, particularly in the late Middle Ages that focused on the way the Jews were portrayed in the pictures of the suffering of Christ, to “help Christians to identify emotionally with the fear and agony of being persecuted and tormented to death. In these images Jews were deliberately depicted as depraved and grotesque beings enacting violence against Christ, ridiculing Mary, and attacking Christians … . Reliving the pain of those … who had been persecuted by Jews … was meant to encourage introspection and prayer … negative imagery of Jews was used to serve Christian devotional purposes” (Abulafia 2012, 180, review of Bale’s work). What one can say about the specific fears of Jews applied with equal force regarding the Saracens in medieval culture. The fear of Muslim contamination appears in articles of various Church councils and was even codified in canon law. The Council of Nablus in 1120, for example, mandated harsh penalties against Latin men who might have sex with Muslim women, and Gratian’s Decretum (1140) even set the penalty for living in Muslim households as excommunication. The distinguishing dress for the “others” mandated in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was designed to prevent Christians from having sexual contact with either Jews or Muslims (Strickland 2003, 288, n. 92). This fear is represented in various iconography as well. In a reliquary, the Chasse of Saint Valerie from Limoges (ca. 1175–1185), the martyrdom of Saint Valerie (legendary saint of Roman period) is depicted. Beside her there is a Saracen executioner, who is wearing a distinctive headgear that was a stereotypical portrayal of the Saracen in medieval art. Strickland suggests that this juxtaposition of the two figures, male Saracen and female Christian saint, “may have had resonance for viewers in light of Christian fears of Muslim ‘contamination’ (Strickland 2003, 174; see also Hahn 1999; Uebel 1996). Even traditional crimes or roles of Jews were apportioned to Saracens, such as the Saracen participating in the execution of Christ himself. As late as the fifteenth century, perhaps more influenced by the Turks, a stained glass image from Cologne portrays a Saracen with scimitar and turban among those accompanying Christ as he bears his cross on the way to death (Strickland 2003, 177). Illustrations in the Bible moralisée (1220s) substitute Saracens for Philistines in the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines (I Kings 5:1–2) that brought

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about the theft of the Ark of the Covenant. The images in the illustrations portray the Saracens as “grimacing, misshapen demons” bearing “the skin colors of infamy: red, yellow, and black” (Strickland 2003, 171–72). The use of dark color skin to stereotype the Saracen made it sometimes difficult to separate the Muslim from the Ethiopian, but most often illustrators also used other attributes, such as headgear and the scimitar, to distinguish the Muslim. For Strickland the appearance of Saracen/Ethiopian “hybrids” indicates the “extent to which a common pejorative visual vocabulary is applied across different enemy types [demons, Jews, Ethiopians and Saracens]” (Strickland 2003, 173; 169). In the chansons de geste, however, Saracens specifically are variously characterized as “people of the devil, enemies of God, people of Satan, sons of Satan, sons of the devil, and diabolical beings” (Strickland, 2003, 169). A chronicle of the Third Crusade emphasized blackness in connecting the Saracens to the devil in an “almost genetic” way by describing the enemy other as follows: “Among the opponents was a fiendish race, forceful and relentless, deformed by nature and unlike other living beings, black in color, of enormous stature and inhuman savageness” (Stickland 2003, 169, emphasis mine; see also 173; 179–81). Just as the Jews had been, the Saracens were frequently depicted as idolaters, which meant for Christians that both were to be feared since idolatry meant they both had allegiance to the devil. Illustrations of the Flight into Egypt that show idols falling off of pedestals as the Holy Family arrives, for example, are interpreted as showing “a sign of Saracen idolatry owing to the fact that the crusades of the first half of this century [thirteenth] were directed against the Ayyubid sultans of Egypt” (Strickland 2003, 168; Camille 1989, 135). Whereas the Jews were seen as followers of the devil, the Saracens were more likely to be identified as actual demons. Early in the Spanish encounter with Muslims, Eulogius of Cordoba (ca. 819–859) feared Muhammad as the “angel of Satan,” and “precursor of Antichrist,” and at the time of Urban II’s call to the First Crusade, Fulcher of Chartres warned of the Saracens, whom he stated were a race enslaved by demons (Strickland 2003, 169). Various images of the Muslim warrior meant to invoke fear persisted into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries despite the long-standing actual contact with the people and the culture of the followers of Islam. Of many examples cited by Strickland, the Luttrell Psalter (ca. 1320–1330) provides an illustration of a text of Psalms wherein a Saracen is juxtaposed with a “foreigner,” and a “naked, hairy, Ethiopian Wild Man, aliens three if not downright barbarians.” Then in the fifteenth century we find a tapestry likely produced in Strasbourg, which depicts a castle occupied by “comparatively small Saracens” being besieged by “giant Wild Folk.” The Saracens are all dark-skinned, and interpreted to be the main subject of the scene, as well as the personification of evil, or at least the scene

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itself as “one wild, barbaric type engaged in combat with another” (Strickland 2003, 183). In the case of the fifteenth century, it is likely that the scene reflects the latest fear of invasion and directed toward those Christians who might have to take up the fight against the latest Muslim assault by the Ottoman Turks. Continuing this analysis, Strickland further concludes that, “As was the case in images of Jews, it is really just a short step form this type of fanciful, wild, Saracen portrayal to one that pictures the Muslim as wholly monstrous, such as the Saracen gryllus on the Ripon misericord (fifteenth century) of the spies returning from Canaan” (Strickland 2003, 184, with a picture of the Ripon gryllus on 57). A fifteenthcentury carving on the end of a pew shows a hairy Wild Man clad in only loin cloth, but brandishing a scimitar as if to attack the incoming worshippers. Other such portrayals exist in the margins of the earlier Oscott Psalter (ca. 1250–1300), wherein we also find numerous pejorative images of the Jews in the Passion illustrations. Apparently, in the evolution of the ongoing relationship between Christians, Jews and Saracens in the later Middle Ages, Christian patrons and viewers of such art, as they went to worship, were even reminded to view the Muslim and the Jew as dangerous enemies to be feared (Strickland 2003, 184, with a picture of the Saracen bench-end).

III Fear and the Color Black The use of the dark to portray evil was accentuated in the evolution of the color black to depict both imaginary demons and real people in the art of the medieval world. Early portraits of the devil as a featureless, black imp were probably based on the work of the Pseudo-Dionysius (late fifth–early sixth century) among others that suggested that the devil is dark and possesses no existence (like the “black hole” of modern physics). The ninth-century Book of Kells exhibits “a lanky, sooty imp standing in profile beside the temple in the image of Christ’s temptation” (Strickland 2003, 80). However, these vague images were later replaced by either bestial demons, such as those described above, or by a human, namely the Ethiopian. Although most Europeans had never seen an Ethiopian (nor would they), artistic creativity “manipulated the idea of ‘black’ by transforming the image of the Devil from a black void to a black man” (Strickland 2003, 81; emphasis hers). This interchangeability of demons and Ethiopians is evident in such illustrated manuscripts as the twelfth-century Canterbury Psalter which portrays Christ healing some demoniacs (Matt. 8:28–32), who are depicted as very black Ethiopians in loin cloths, and even the demons being driven out by Christ are small, black, winged Ethiopians, thus “creating a strong visual identification between Ethiopians, demons and evil” (Strickland 2003, 81, illustration on p. 80)

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The color black became a defining feature of the Ethiopian figure in the art of the Middle Ages, though other dark colors such as brown, dark blue, purple or dark green were used, especially when the artist wanted to more fully expose other stereotyped facial features (e.g., large eyes, flat noses, everted lips). Thus, “Black,” “Ethiopian” and the “Devil” became synonymous, and in the late medieval theater, demons “conventionally wore black faces, and in literature and folklore, the Devil had titles such as ‘Black Knight,’ ‘Black Jehovah,’ ‘Black Man,’ and ‘Black Ethiopian.’” No color can be said to have carried a clear, consistent, or absolute meaning in medieval iconography, but the color black was most often interpreted negatively as spiritual darkness, vice, and sin by the Christian world (Strickland 2003, 83–84; Devise 1979, vol. 2, pt. 1, 51; Erich 1931, 89–90).

IV Fear of the Tartars Though most Europeans did not encounter the Ethiopian, many were confronted by the “Tartars” whose invasion of eastern Europe in 1241 caused panic and fear that reached all the way to England, and led the fishermen of the North Sea to cease their activity lest their lands be overrun next. The sudden eruption of this new fremde caused a subsequent series of Western reactions, not the least of which was fear (Schmieder 1994; Jackson 2005; Ruotsala 2001; Bezzola 1974; Connell 1973). The name of “Tartar” for these Mongol-led forces was derived from the reports of their strategy of indiscriminate slaughter of the enemies as they advanced toward Vienna, which led the witnesses to associate them with the region of biblical tartarus, the infernal region of Hell, wherein the demons lived. Matthew Paris (ca. 1200–1259), the English chronicler of St. Albans, graphically illustrated his chronicle entry for 1243 with a portrait depicting the Tartars as cannibals (illustration in Strickland 2003, 192, and, in Claster 2009, 242; see also Guzman 1991; Lewis 1987; Saunders 1969; Ruotsala 2001). A letter of Ivo of Narbonne enclosed in Matthew’s Chronica majora provides a description of the invaders as “dog-headed cannibals—Anthropophagi” who raped the Virgins, and whose chiefs were described as having such physiological features as “short, distorted noses,” “teeth long and few,” and “eyes shifty and black” (Matthew Paris 1872–1873, vol. 4, 273; 275; trans. Giles 1852–1854, vol. I, 469–70; 471; Strickland 2003, 193; Saunders 1969). The widespread fear and threat of total disaster for the West led Pope Gregory IX to attempt unsuccessfully to raise a crusade against the Tartars early in 1241. At the same time, he sent an emissary to the Mongol camp in China. John of Plano Carpini (1182–1252) was so appalled that he called the Tartars in effect, “tricky devils,” which must be resisted with utmost force or be slaughtered by them

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(History of the Mongols, in John of Plano Carpini 1955, 45–46; see also Strickland 2003, 198). By late 1241, however, as the Mongols retreated from Vienna and settled in Russia and the Near East, the fear lessened. In fact, missionaries were sent in the hope of converting the Mongols to Christianity, or at least enlisting them as allies in the fight against the Saracens in the Holy Land. Even though the effort to understand who they were and their purpose continued, most often the Tartars were depicted as descendants of the peoples of Gog and Magog as described in Scripture (Connell 1973). A mysterious letter from a certain Prester John, who was perceived as Christian ruler in the “East” who might be an ally, and envoys to the popes from the Mongols, as well as first-hand reports from individuals such as Riccoldo of Monte Croce (ca. 1243–1320) kept hopes alive well into the early fourteenth century (Jackson 2005). In its response to the Tartars, we see the ambiguity of the Western reaction to the foreigner from the farthest reaches of the East. Though cast as mythical monsters, these were nonetheless a real people who represented a real threat to safety. Well after the initial horror, the nervousness about a possible invasion continued into the fifteenth century. For example, in the Livre des merveilles (Book of Marvels) presented to the Duke of Berry in 1413 there is an image of gigantic warriors passing through mountains bursting through to devastate the countryside. The Tartars are often portrayed in later iconography within the tradition of the Monstrous Races, rather than as heretics as were the Jews and Saracens, because of their appearance and because of a lack of knowledge of what the Mongols really believed and thought. In this sense they were closer to monsters, and Christian missionaries often reported seeing other monsters— Sciopodes, Dogheads, Apple-Sniffer/Straw Drinker hybrids, and other Wild Folk—in the lands of the Tartars. Thus, the Tartars moved into the literature of the exotic and the marvelous. Both the Travels of Marco Polo (1254–1324) and John of Mandeville (ca. 1300?–ca. 1383?), one based on real experience, the other entirely fictitious, were much more favorable in their impressions of the Mongols, even to the point of admiration such as we witness in the account of Marco Polo (Strickland 2003, 198–209; Uebel 2005; Fleck 2000; Mandeville’s Travels 1953; Olschki 1960; Larner 1999). Recent research on the question of barbaric practices, especially cannibalism, among the Mongols has developed new insights into the Western reaction in the Middle Ages. Anthropologists and historians alike have begun to think more about cannibalism in the context of colonization, and are wondering whether “cannibalism” was a product of the “European imagination, a tool of Empire with its origin in the disturbed human psyche” (Hulme 1998), or simply a handy derogatory ethnic stereotype, rather than an observation and reflection on an actual practice (Guzman 1991; Lindenbaum 2004; Daston and Park 2001; Kilgour

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1990; 2001). With a greater focus on interdisciplinary research and a response to Western Orientalism (Said 1978), those of the Orient might also argue, what about the alleged Frankish cannibalism of the Saracens in the siege of Antioch as reported by the Western chronicler Raymond d’Aguiliers (fl. late eleventh century). His story of crusader cannibalism appears also in the Arabic chronicles of Ibn al-Qalanisi (ca. 1070–1160), author of a chronicle of Damascus; and in the works of Ibn Al-Athir (1160–1233), a Kurd historian who lived in Aleppo and Damascus; and, Kemal al-Din (1192–1262), a historian at Aleppo trusted for his knowledge of the Assassins, but who probably used al-Qalanisi for his narration of crusade period events (Heng 2003; 1998). Rumors of this forbidden act in the West must have caused a horrific reaction. The crusaders had been charged to eliminate the pollution of the holy places by the Saracen, not to soil those places themselves, even if there was a terrible famine at the time that may have led to an act of desperation for survival. Geraldine Heng has provided greater context in pointing out that a Christian at this time lived in a culture “in which eating was overlaid with sacramental, ritual, and symbolic significance… . The apotheosis of that culture turned, of course, upon the symbolic eating of sacramental food—a sacred cannibalism …—the shared experience of which created and bound the identity of the individual Christian to a symbolic community that crossed divisions of country, region, ethnicity, family, tribe, caste and race” (Heng 2003, 26). In contrast to the eating of God, which in Christian doctrine placed one on the path to divinity, the eating of any “unclean other body” led Christians to regard cannibalism with a fundamentally disproportionate horror” (Tannahill 1996, 32; Heng 2003, 27; Kilgour 1990). As Caroline Walker Bynum concludes in her study of The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, “cannibalism—the consumption in which survival of body is most deeply threatened … is the ultimate barbarism, the ultimate horror” for early Christians, and likely not much less so in the later Middle Ages (Bynum 1995). The horror of cannibalism is brought forth in late medieval representations of the hell-mouth wherein “humans are God’s victim” (Williams 1996, 144, with illustration from the Winchester Psalter, British Museum, Cotton Nero IV). As David Williams analyzes the ambiguity of the hell-mouth, it “may be seen as destroying or as purifying, for the act of eating is primarily a reducing of substance to its most fundamental constituents. The symbolic eating by the hellmouth does the same, distilling humans to their spiritual essence by eating away their physical dross” (Williams 1996, 145). Moving further with his analysis, Williams, asserts that “In general, one eats one’s inferior.” Thus, God can eat the highest of physical beings, but the eating of one’s equal, i.e., the act of cannibalism does “of itself establish monstrosity.” But, cannibalism is also an “indication of a monster’s participation in human nature”

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which “enjoins the question of the distinction between the self and that which is not the self” (Williams 1996, 145). Why is this so threatening? Normally, at death the soul is liberated from the body through the process of decomposition, but the integrity of the “self” is maintained. However, with cannibalism, the body is absorbed by another, “suggesting a grotesque and perverse postmortem continuation of the self within and as a part of another, a monstrosity, without identity or even consciousness.” Yet the ambiguity continues if one interprets the human act of eating another of the same species as the “extension of the self to the point of inclusion of the other. It is for this reason that much ritual cannibalism has to do with the eating of parents and other close relatives to avoid the loss of a part of the self” (Williams 1996, 146; Osborne 1997). Whether it was real or not, the impact of an imagined cannibalism was widespread, and the fear of it was reflected in the art and in the literature of the later medieval world. Based upon an ancient analysis of cruelty derived largely from Seneca (4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.), any “other” that was associated with barbarian characteristics, especially excessive violence, was often linked to cannibalistic practices. This appeared especially true in the case of the Mongols, wherein “Detailed accounts of systematic violence, sexual barbarism, and cannibalism carried undeniably affective intent and repeatedly labeled the Mongols as cruel” (Kaeuper 2004, 587; Guzman 1991). But, as Andrew Fleck has speculated in analyzing The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, cannibalistic ritual could also be operating as “a kind of mimicking inversion that causes instability in the perception of a distinct self and other during this encounter” (Fleck 2000, 394). Regardless, by the fourteenth century, “Tartary was a land of fable liberally sprinkled with fiction,” as found in the likes of Mandeville in his Travels and Chaucer in his Squire’s Tale. As summed up by Alan Ambrisco in a more recent article, “the claims made about Mongols in romances, chronicles, and travel accounts present them as provoking both fear and wonder in their European counterparts” (Ambrisco 2004, 206; Campbell 1988).

V Fear of Women Antifeminism and its concomitant fear of women were not new to the later Middle Ages (Blamires 1992; 1997; 2004). The fear of women could be expressed in numerous ways. There is the “wild woman” tradition, for example, which is documented in various literary and visual sources, which modern studies suggest represents an “ideal substitute for repressed sexuality and fear of the unknown” (Classen, ed., 2002, xx; see also Stock 2000). There is also the example of the woman as a “death-figure” which appears in the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200) in the

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person of the Burgundian queen Kriemhild who takes revenge on her relatives because they slew her husband (Classen, ed., 2002, xliv; 2011, ch. 2). However, the most prominent way fear of women was developed into anti-feminism in the Middle Ages is found particularly related to the portrayals of the institution of marriage in both clerical and secular sources of several types. Anxiety and animosity directed at women throughout the Christian Middle Ages was based on two traditions, specifically the secular satire found in the literature of Greece and Rome, and the beliefs and teachings of the early Church Fathers. The most influential ancient works were those of the Roman satirists Horace (65–8 B.C.E.), Persius (34–62 C.E.), and especially Juvenal (ca. late firstearly second C.E), whose depiction of the vices of women in his sixth satire greatly influenced the strongest of the misogynists among the medieval clergy (Smith 2005). Ovid (43 B.C.E.–ca. 18 C.E.) was important because of his satire on female lust in his Remedia amoris, which became “grist to the mill of medieval satirists as they compiled their catalogues of complaints against women’s errant behavior” (Walsh 2005, 224). The historian Sallust (86–35 B.C.E.) was also popular among misogynists in the later Middle Ages, especially cited for his depiction of the vices of Sempronia in his Catilinae coniuratio (Walsh 2005, 224). However, as one might expect, the Latin patristic writers carried even more weight in the onslaught against the temptations of women. Borrowing from Scripture and the more idealistic Greek Fathers, Tertullian (160–220), Cyprian (ca. 200–258), Jerome (347–420), and even Augustine (354–430), though he was more evenly balanced in his treatment, took to the idealization of a sacred form of virginity which led to their condemnation of or advisement against marriage, and a particular provocation of fear for men (Walsh 2005, 225). Jerome was a model for the use of this theme in his treatise Adversos Jovinianum (Against Jovinian, 392 C.E.), wherein he responded to Jovinian (d. ca. 405), a monk who had made the case that the married state had as much merit as that of “sacred virginity” (Walsh 2005, 225). Moving forward as Scripture began to emerge in its written medieval Latin form (the Vulgate) as produced by Jerome in the fourth century, individuals such as Macrobius (fl. early fifth century C.E.), and then later the monks of the tenth and eleventh centuries built on the anti-feminine base provided by the ancients and the Church Fathers. Odo (ca. 878–942), second abbot of Cluny, and Marbode (ca. 1035–1123), bishop of Rennes and then monk at Angers, for example, developed such arguments as “the beauty of women is only skin-deep” or that the worst trap of men provided by the “enemy [the devil],” and the most difficult to evade, is woman, the “deadly vine-trap of misfortune” (Delumeau 1978, 313). The fame of Peter Abelard’s Historia calamitatum (1118) added to the fire by providing an account of his love affair, marriage, and the significant “calamities” that

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resulted from this series of events (Walsh 2005, 226–27; see also Blamires 2004). Andreas Capellanus (mid- to late-twelfth century) provides another example, though he does so in a confusing fashion. In the first two parts of his De Amore (ca. 1185), Andreas depicts men of various stations in life being instructed as to how to court ladies of either the upper or the lower class in society. Then, in part three, he unexplainably takes to a “scurrilous catalogue of their [women in general] alleged vices” (Walsh 2005, 227). Andreas goes so far as to label the female as a “true devil, an enemy of peace, a source of impatience” (Delumeau 1978, 314; see also Classen 2002d). The medieval view of women was not consistent, perplexingly ambivalent, and even bipolar in the ironical way it fluctuated between the extreme models of the character and role of women found in Eve and the Virgin Mary. It is also important to remember in this context, for example, how women were portrayed in the New Testament as loyal servants of Christ, present at his crucifixion and at his tomb when the male disciples were nowhere to be found. Also, in the early expansion of Christianity, we learn that women played key roles, often persuading husbands, especially some of the pagan kings in the West, to convert to Christianity. Ironically, it was those talents of persuasion that later become the targets of the clergy as they began to fear that women might persuade their husbands to heresy. Even the appearance of the medieval cults of the Virgin Mary, or the much lesser-known devotion to Jesus our Mother in the twelfth century, had little impact on the male anxiety regarding the female (Bynum 1982). As argued more recently by Carolyn Waters, ultimately it appears that it was the combined fear of women’s speech and sexual allure that led to the ongoing development of the fear of women in general (Waters 2004, esp. ch. 5). The views of St. Jerome (ca. 347–420) regarding marriage became very popular in the clerical community of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Since the time of the eleventh-century church reform movement ordained clergy could not be married in the Western Church. Therefore, it was necessary to find arguments to persuade simple clerics from marrying and forfeiting the option of eventual full ordination as priests (Walsh 2005, 225). Moreover, of course, women of the thirteenth century were explicitly forbidden to preach. Prior to that time, as Innocent III became aware before he issued the prohibition in his bull of 1210 (Nova quaedam nuper), women had become involved and effective in responding to a growing need for preaching to the laity. He issued the bull with the explicit denial of the “power of the keys,” which according to church doctrine, was only available to men who were the only ones permitted to receive the priestly ordination. The pope’s fears regarding the potential spread of the Waldensians or the Cathar heresy in southern France surely played a key role here as the lay women preachers in these movements were rumored to be effective (Shahar 2001).

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Apparently the inference that one need fear the temptations of women toward marriage contributed more widely to a generalized fear of women as the population grew in that era and the demand for ordained clergy grew along with it. Sermons seeking to recruit preachers, as well as to tend to the other spiritual needs of the laity, made it harder for listeners not intending to become clergy to not be influenced by the general message about the problems of marital entanglement. As Claire Waters reminds us, however, our knowledge and perception of the fear of women in the Middle Ages comes to us from literature and from the “mouths of skilled rhetoricians with a purpose” (Waters 2004, 86–89). Like our understandings of much of the heresy of the era, we must be wary of the sources of those views. Yet, we do have such direct evidence as that of Humbert of Romans (ca. 1200–1277), who in his thirteenth-century preaching manuals for the training of the Dominican friars, excluded women from preaching for four reasons. These included what he regarded as a deficiency of understanding within women, the subordinate status of women overall, the memory of the “foolishness of the first woman,” and, the fear that if women preached, they might provoke men to lust because of their appearance (Waters 2004, 37). In the same period, the influential and perhaps somewhat more neutral Vincent of Beauvais (ca. 1190– 1264) compiled a massive Speculum maius in which he tried to catalogue all knowledge of the world by grouping it into three categories, which he called the natural, the doctrinal, and the historical. In one of those categories, which he titled Speculum naturale, he devotes a chapter to the vices of women, where he drew upon the authority of ancient authors such as Terence (ca. 190–159 B.C.E.), Macrobius, and Seneca (4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.). Relying especially upon the latter of these, Vincent determined that the root of the vices in women is avarice. The sermons of the emerging new preaching orders, which had an enormous widespread influence throughout Europe in the thirteenth century, often portrayed woman as less than man and predestined to evil (Delumeau 1978, 315). In much of this literature, there was a particular focus on marriage and the reasons why men should not marry. Accusations against women ranged from frailty of the species which requires men to work hard to take care of their wives, to the fickleness, greediness, and lustfulness of women, the latter leading men to “take the fatal step” into marriage, or to adultery when married. Wives are also cited as being irascible, arrogant, and spiteful, all of which could lead men to ruin; therefore, marriage was to be feared and shunned (Walsh 2005, 223). Such onslaughts against women continued into the fourteenth century vernacular literature as well. John Lydgate (ca. 1370–ca. 1451), for example in his Payne and Sorrow, borrowed from the ideas of Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400) in his “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” where one finds a compelling satire on the institution of marriage, though more recent analysis reminds us of possible alternative readings. Accord-

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ing to Warren Smith, for example, there is ambiguity in Chaucer’s approach, for “the Wife of Bath, while at times mocking Jerome’s procelibacy biblical exegesis, is not quick to contradict Jerome’s position.” He goes on to conclude that it is his belief that the Wife of Bath presents a reasonably balanced, “even Augustinian view of celibacy and marriage that triumphantly defends a literalist interpretation of the Bible against the mischief of its male glossators” (Smith 2005, 245). Beyond the association of women with a myriad of vices to ruin men, the fear of women was pushed further in their characterization as agents of the devil. Although this occurred more in the later Middle Ages, and more in conjunction with the attack against the Jews, it was both the clergy and the lay judges who enhanced this view. Jeffrey Jeremy Cohen has argued that the medieval world was “almost always faced by outsiders, foreigners, hence the other,” which often included peasants, women, and Jews, especially in the later Middle Ages (Classen, ed., 2002, xlvii; J. J. Cohen 2000, 98). The attitude of the males in society toward the “second sex” had always been contradictory and swinging back and forth from attraction to repulsion or from wonder and admiration to hostility (Delumeau 1978, 305). But, on the eve of the Reformation, the Alsatian Franciscan preacher Thomas Murner (1475–ca. 1537) still found occasion in 1512 to focus on the negative by writing that the female is “commonly unfaithful, vain, vicious and a flirt,” in sum, a “domestic devil” (Delumeau 1978, 315; Blamires 1992; 2004). Thus, in the samples provided of the fears surrounding woman as the “other” we see how fear could damage institutions that could stabilize a society—the family, childrearing, and trust between the sexes that compose that society. In this essay we cannot address all the fears in detail, but we must turn our attention to that complex, convoluted, and ultimate fear, namely death.

VI Eschatological Fear: Death, the Last Judgment, and Hell In many ways fear in the Middle Ages was connected to the Christian Apocalypse. Anticipation of The Final Coming must have been the “super storm of fear” in the Middle Ages. Imagine confronting famine, plague, war, and death at the same time as the crisis of fourteenth century presaged once again the coming of the Antichrist, then death, then the fear of God as he would judge whether you went to the pains of hell to join the devil (Emmerson 1981; Emmerson and McGinn, ed., 1992; Wright 1995; Aberth 2000; 2010; Backman 2000; Bernstein 2000). Thus, many of the “others” were also placed into the construct of the Last Days so as to account for their ongoing persistence and success in the conflict with Christianity (Dinzelbacher 1996).

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As Michael Uebel and David Burr have pointed out, this was especially true of the Christian response to the Jew and the Saracen (Uebel 1996; Burr 1996; cf. Jackson 2001). Even though the Apocalypse and its early commentaries predate the founding of Islam, in the later Middle Ages it became somehow necessary to write its followers, as well as the Jews, into it. The ongoing success of the Saracens led the Franciscan Henry of Cossey, for example, in his fourteenth century commentary on the Apocalypse to say: “Many Christians, seeing so many people follow the Islamic sect, will say that God could never have wished so many people to be lost … .Thus deceived, they will follow the Beast” (as quoted in Strickland 2003, 211; using Burr 1996, 145). Andrew Gow has focused on how the role of the Jews in Christian eschatology became “gradually more incriminating, from necessary participants in the final conversion to Christ to eager servants and supporters of Antichrist” (Gow 1996, 259). Various legends stated that the Antichrist himself would be a Jew, or, as in one fourteenth-century play, Le Jour du Jugement (The Day of Judgment), that he would be the offspring of the devil and a Jewish whore (Strickland 2003, 213). As well, images in medieval art featured the Antichrist in stereotypical Jewish costume or physiognomy or both. The Eton College Apocalypse provides evidence wherein the bright red pointed hat on the Antichrist, or other images with the grotesque physiognomy, profile stance, and the proximity of the beastly figure next to the devil, leave no doubt about the anti-Jewish nature of the portrayal. There is also the misericord at Cartmel Priory in Cumbria which shows a threefaced Antichrist with the stereotyped Jewish features of the large nose, bulging eyes, and prominent beard (Strickland 2003, 213). In many versions of the Apocalypse in the later Middle Ages, there is the suggestion that “the Saracens as well as Jews will receive the mark of the Beast.” In a copy of the Bible moralisée known as the Oxford Bible, for example, Apocalypse 13:12 indicates that a two-horned beast (symbol of Judaism for many) “will be given the power to compel the inhabitants of the earth to worship the first (seven-headed) beast.” Below that frame in the illustration there is a bearded Saracen wearing a knotted turban depicted in conversation with a dark demon, while next to him a second demon clubs a praying bishop, while the text explains that “God will give the beast the power to destroy the saints in a world that has fallen into the hands of the impious” (Strickland 2003, 215–16). In the analysis of Strickland, “Eschatological images of Jews … require a more nuanced interpretation because Jews were a local as opposed to a distant enemy who were perceived as a very real social and economic threat to the Christian majority.” Though the most extreme form of this fear was developed in the legend of the Red Jews that was based on a characterization of the Jews as inherently evil, the reality of this anxiety being based in a more local socio-political experience is likely (Strickland

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2003, 239). One of those experiences was the Black Death outbreak in the fourteenth century, which in the city of Zurich was specifically blamed on those socalled “Red Jews.” Labeled a “more dangerous strain of superhuman Jews,” they were invented in the minds of fearful Christians to explain the horrors of the plague. In this case the Jews were accused of poisoning wells with serpent venom to spread the disease (Strickland 2003, 232–33). As for the Muslims of the crusade era, they were presented to the Christian faithful as a “necessary part of salvation history, which had now reached the stage of the final persecution of the Church” (Strickland 2003, 239; see also Whalen 2009; Rubenstein 2011; Flori 2007; Cole 1993; 1991). One can find antiMuslim association with the Apocalypse, especially among the Franciscans of the later thirteenth century, but also earlier by Pope Innocent III, who, in his call for the Fifth Crusade in 1213 in the bull Quia maior, had identified Muhammad as the Antichrist. Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–1202), in his Liber Figurarum (Book of Figures), singled out the “Islamic menace” as a significant indicator of the forthcoming “End of Time” (Strickland 2003, 220–23; Burr 1996; Southern 1962). Joachim was especially concerned with Saladin (1138–1193), the feared and admired leader of the Muslim forces that captured Jerusalem in 1187. This led Joachim to identify him as the sixth head of the apocalyptic seven-headed dragon. However, in 1190 Joachim prophesied to King Richard I (1157–1199), who had failed to re-capture Jerusalem but negotiated with Saladin a truce to allow Christian pilgrims regular access to the Holy City following the end of the First Crusade, that Saladin would lose control of Jerusalem and would be killed (Strickland 2003, 225.) Later polemics and treatises became a bit more optimistic that the Saracens could be converted to Christianity. Even though they might portray the military successes of the Muslims as being accomplished with brutality and fearful acts of various sorts, they were confident that this was all part of God’s plan (Tolan 2002, ch 8.; Strickland 2003; Goss and Bornstein, ed., 1986; Kedar 1984; E. R. Daniel 1969). Also difficult to place in God’s plan was the appearance of the plague known as the Black Death of the fourteenth century. A recent study by Laura Smoller argues that the writers of that era “entered into a tangled web of symbols,” and as a result of debating its “naturalness” versus its eschatological significance they “appeared to be unwilling to say that plague was either entirely natural or entirely apocalyptic” (Smoller 2000, 158). Symbols of both fear and marvel were being “mapped,” which meant that the chroniclers “mapped God’s apocalyptic torments onto an orb whose image already was pregnant with religious meanings apparent in the great mappaemundi“ (Smoller 200, 158). Thus, apocalyptic signs such as snakes and toads or hail and fire were portrayed as raining down in the East, which was also the land of the marvels such as monsters, Prester John, or

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Gog and Magog. By the fourteenth century the East was also the land of potential converts such as the Tartars or the Saracens. On those “maps” the plague moved from east to west, from the land of pagans to the land of Christians in the west. Contemporary authors apparently thought, Smoller speculates, that if they could plot the progress, they might be able to control the plague itself, and simultaneously place it into the apocalyptic plan. As Smoller concludes, “Mapping has been called a form of conquest and control of territory, and mapping plague’s progress was perhaps an attempt at mastering and possessing the feared disease.” (Smoller 2000, 159). At the same time the apocalyptic plan portrayed in Matthew 24:14 called for a mass conversion of all the non-Christians, and a subsequent “universal passage of all the faithful” to the Holy Land prior to the appearance of the Antichrist (Smoller 2000, 157–59). Thus, Jerusalem, the center of the world in the mappaemundi would become the locus of the final denouement and the fulfillment of the apocalyptic prophecy. The most feared aspect of the final denouement, namely hell itself, was increasingly portrayed in later medieval art and sculpture in such a way as to identify it with all of the negative symbols of disorder and darkness to heighten the fear of the unknown (Davidson and Seiler, ed., 1992; Sheingorn 1992). The early descriptions of hell by Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite (ca. 500), who drew an “ugly, disproportionate, dark, disordered, incongruous” picture of it and its inhabitants, set the tone and others followed throughout the Middle Ages (Strickland 2003, 7). Examples are provided by the Livre de la Vigne (ca. 1450–ca. 1470), a manuscript which emphasizes the dark coloration of the twelve devils therein; while the green devil of the earlier Tanner Apocalypse (ca. 1250–1255) is shown forcing a dragon into a large welcoming fiery hell-mouth. This green devil has an extra face of it own on its belly “with a mouth of its own spewing a flame precisely [from] where a penis should be” (Strickland 2003, 71, with Fig. 25 showing the illus. from the Tanner ms.). The image of hell in the Hortus Delciarum (Garden of Delights) of Herrad of Hohenbourg produced in Alsace in the late twelfth century reveals some of most vivid images of the damned caught up in a multi-leveled chasm. The text that accompanies the images describes hell as “dark with perpetual flames, frigid cold, demons, vermin,” and it is filled with “sinners and criminals” such as the “prideful, liars, drunkards, thieves, murderers, fornicators, and blasphemers, among others” (Strickland 2003, 123–24). In other words, it describes plenty of characters with whom everyday persons might identify around them. A twelfth-century English anonymous painting depicts a huge hell-mouth in the shape of a two-headed monster engulfing the damned while the angel prepares to lock the gates after them, and the demons prepare to administer various tortures. Details of the Last Judgment painted by Stefan Lochner about 1430 reveal several monster-formed demons in various dark colors dragging the

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damned in chains into a deeper darker abyss (illustrations in Evans, ed., 1966, 228–29). Bynum and Freedman in their introduction to their work on Last Things as conceived in the Middle Ages, note that “last things sometimes referred to events (such as…advent of Antichrist, or the resurrection and Last Judgment) that might come to all humanity in time,” and thus society could be seen as constantly on a pilgrimage, “confidently expectant or cowering in fear” (Bynum and Freedman, ed., 2000, 5). But, as they also note, there were other times when the focus was not on the collective end, but the individual, from temporal to beyond time or atemporal, from a stress on spirit to a sense of embodied or re-embodied self” (Bynum and Freedman, ed., 2000, 5). Recent scholarship has also shown a change in the attitude toward death in the Middle Ages, from a death experience in a community to one of “personal death” which was reflected in a change in the view of the afterlife. Instead of seeing the resurrection after death as one literally of the material body to face judgment, the idea of a “twofold eschatological landscape of heaven and hell” evolved into one stressing the concept of a separated soul from body that after death could experience a “three-tiered afterlife, including the in-between space and time of purgatory” as a possibility (Bynum and Freedman, ed., 2000, 6). From their reading of the scholarship on eschatology Bynum and Freedman conclude that “religion is not so much doctrine as a way of life.” Therefore, we should not be too concerned about changes or contradictions and ambiguities in the medieval Weltanschauung, because “Medieval eschatology was, like life, profoundly inconsistent” (Bynum and Freedman, ed., 2000, 6). Since the watershed study by Johann Huizinga entitled The Waning of the Middle Ages (Huizinga 1996; orig. 1919), which portrayed the fourteenth century as a time of total gloom and doom, we have come a long way in our analysis of fear in the Middle Ages (e.g., Fanning 2002, 296). Still, the power of that image has adhered into the late twentieth century. Popular thinking was still being influenced by such mid-century studies as Ziegler’s The Black Death or Barbara Tuchman’s still widely-read The Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century (Ziegler 1969; Tuchman 1979). Only more recently have scholars such as John Aberth in his From the Brink of the Apocalypse tried to offset the dark picture by presenting a more balanced study illustrating how a closer examination of prayers, chronicles, poetry and commemorative art reveals a greater sense of optimism within the late medieval culture (Aberth 2000; 2010). Perhaps this is best illustrated with a specific example. In his essay “To Fear or Not to Fear, That is the Question” (Classen 2002c), Albrecht Classen argues that Oswald von Wolkenstein “mirrors the typical fears of his time.” He had been imprisoned, tortured, suffered personal failures, and yet, his poetry was not filled with despair. Oswald’s attitudes toward

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death and damnation may have been typical, but he expressed more concern about the issues of everyday life and remained “unconcerned with His presence” (Scott and Kosso, ed., 2002, xxxv; Classen 2002c). The study of fear and the foreigner in the Middle Ages reveals much ambiguity. The foreigner was treated with force and violence, sometimes tolerance or the early appearances of it, attempts to make the foreigner “like us” through missionary work, or the attempt to demonize or “wonderize” the various foreigners by pushing them into the realm of eastern exotica in travel tales or mappaemundi. Often those who did not accept Christianity, or were otherwise considered “different” or the abstract “other,” became objects of fear. What drove these concepts was most simply a fear of the unknown. However, the medieval world did not collapse out of fear. It came to live with it, and by the late Middle Ages, seems to have focused more on everyday existence and the practicalities thereof. This perhaps means that hope triumphed over fear so long as you did what you could in pursuit of the best life you could possibly live leading toward a “good death.” The immediacy of the Last Judgment had been relegated to the margin, and whenever it came, a “good life” was more likely to result in a “good death,” meaning a favorable judgment. Whether Christian, Jew or Muslim, you experienced the foreign and the fear that accompanied it; and, you came to accept it as all part of God’s plan.

Select Bibliography Alexander, J. C., ed., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley, CA, 2004). Camille, Michael, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge 1989). Classen, Albrecht, ed., East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2013). Classen, Albrecht, ed., Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages (London and New York 2002). Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York 2000), 85–104. Daniel, Norman, Islam and the West: the Making of an Image, rev. ed. (1960; Oxford 1993). Delumeau, Jean, La Peur en Occident (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles): Une cité assiégée (Paris 1978). Dressler, Rachel Ann, “Deus hoc vult: Ideology, Identity and Sculptural Rhetoric at the Time of the Crusades,” Medieval Encounters 1 (1995): 188–218. Emmerson, Richard K. and Bernard McGinn, ed., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, and London 1992). Frassetto, Michael and David R. Banks, ed., Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other (New York 1999). Kruger, Steven F., The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN, and London 2006). Lambert, Malcom, The Cathars (Malden, MA, 1999).

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Scott, Anne and Cynthia Kosso, ed., Fear and its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout 2002). Scruton, David L., ed., Sociophobics: The Anthropology of Fear (Boulder, CO, 1986). Strickland, Debra Higgs, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ, 2003). Tolan, John, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York 2002). Walsh, P. G., “Antifeminism in the High Middle Ages,” Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage: from Plautus to Chaucer, ed. Warren S. Smith (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 222–42. Waters, Claire M., Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2004). Waugh, Scott and Peter D. Diehl, ed., Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution and Rebellion, 1000–1500 (Cambridge 1996).  

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The Forest, the River, the Mountain, the Field, and the Meadow A Early Sources for Beliefs about Landscape Features Whether the subject is forests, rivers, and mountains or fields and meadows, the medieval world drew on classical and Judeo-Christian sources for their understanding of the creation of these features, their purposes, and their places in the cosmology of the Christian universe. As individual communities developed at different times and places throughout the European Middle Ages, a rich body of associations with and beliefs about these features came to be reflected in the philosophy, literature, folklore, artwork, music, drama, laws, and archeological evidence that we draw on for cultural studies of the period. First developed by Empedocles in the fifth century B.C.E., the doctrine of the four elements was used in conjunction with Aristotle’s principles of causes to form the basic ideas on the form of the earth (Alexander 1986, 38–49). Drawing on the natural philosophy of Aristotle and Ptolemy, the treatises of Muslim writers such as Avicenna (980–1037) and Averroes (1126–1198), and contemporary Christian writers such as Albertus Magnus (ca. 1193–1280) and Ristoro d’Arezzo (ca. 1282), a widely-held view in the twelfth century said that the earth was first subject to forces that briefly generate or recreate forms and then to a protracted period of corruption during which the effects of gravity, water erosion, alluvial deposition, earthquakes, etc., transform the landscape (Alexander 1986, 47). As a result, all features of the landscape were viewed at times with a sense of misgiving because of their instability. The river that provides water and transportation one day may wash out fields and towns the next. An ambivalent sense of respectful appreciation and fearful awe, therefore, underlies the cultural views of these features. At the same time, early medieval clerics of the twelfth-century renaissance, drawing on Plato’s Timaeus (ca. 360 B.C.E.), envisioned humans as existing in a complex framework, designed by God, called nature (Chenu et al., ed., 1997, 5). William of Conches (ca. 1080–1154), noting the spiritual value of all things in nature created by God, and other monastic thinkers at Chartres came to view humans in terms of their role in the microcosm of God’s divine universe (Chenu et al., ed., 1997, 129; 162). Stating that nature is God’s intermediary, Alan of Lille (1128–1203) called God the Vicar of Nature. Working the land by plowing, tilling,

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and sowing, and by tending the meadows, the mountain sides, and the forests is seen as attempts to recreate Eden after the fall (Glacken 1967, 308; 348). These features in the medieval landscape—rivers, mountains, fields, forests, and meadows—therefore, took on symbolic values as well as practical ones. In Kenneth Clark’s words, the depictions of the natural world became a “landscape of symbols” (Clark 1979, 1). Ernest Robert Curtius notes in his seminal work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages that medieval Christians had an image of the locus amoenus, developed earlier by classical writers, available to use in iconic descriptions of the ideal landscape: a place containing at least one tree, a spring or brook, and a meadow (1948; Curtius 1953, 195). Each of these same features, but with the addition of mountains, is praised by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in On Kingship, To the King of Cyprus (1267) when he gives advice on where to build a city. The site should “claim the inhabitants by its beauty,” and the best setting for beauty combines broad meadows, abundant forests, mountains, groves, and plenty of water (Glacken 1967, 270). As a statement of aesthetics, Aquinas’s advice on the placement of a city provides a clear link between appreciation of beauty and these features of the landscape in thirteenth-century Europe. Depending not only on the individual’s perspective, but also on the particular feature under discussion, the symbolic value of these landscape features could range from the best possible associations with God’s perfect universe to the worst possible associations with deadly sin and eternal damnation. As universal figures in the landscape, these features “offered natural imagery for archetypal aspects in human life” (Classen 2012b, 24). Whether expressed in religious or secular settings, the attitudes held by medieval people who depended on the good will of a natural world beyond their control always included reverent respect for the magnitude of its power and no small degree of fear for its potentially hostile forces that could easily challenge or destroy their communities (Le Goff 1988). The following sections will examine cultural attitudes toward each of these features individually.

B The Forest The medieval concept of the forest represents a complex combination of realism, symbolism, and fantasy, reflecting attitudes ranging from absolute terror to immense delight depending on the perspective of the viewer. As something quite different from our own concept of a forest as an abundance of trees, the medieval forest incorporated much more than woodlands: villages, manors, swamps, meadows, and arable fields (Young 1979, 4–5). When William I created his New Forest

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in England, for example, it encompassed between 15,000–20,000 populated acres, including over thirty villages, and 75,000 acres of partially populated woodland (Battles 2010, 211 n.74). In addition to timber, firewood, and meat, medieval forests were sources of iron, hides, grain, salt, peat, honey, and wax, raw materials for industry in rural towns, and grazing space for horses, swine, sheep, goats, and cattle (Young 1979, 58; Glacken 1967, 294; 324). Cultural attitudes toward the forest were, therefore, complex and depended on the viewer’s perspective. A peasant relying on the wood and food sources found within a forest would probably see it in terms different from those of an aristocrat who enjoyed hunting in this space. Showing delight in the forest while reflecting on the wonders of the natural world as a reflection of God’s glory, St. Bernard (1090–1153) said that we learn more from a forest than from books or teachers. On the other hand, Albertus Magnus (ca. 1193/1206–1280) saw forests as unhealthy places: the middle of forests, he says, is stifling, heavy with moist vapors, whirlwinds, and dense clouds, where walnut, oak, and other trees poison or stifle the air. Wise men, he says, cut down forests (Glacken 1967, 213; 270). Peasants in the Southern Alps who viewed trees as useless vegetation, as leeches of the nutrients in the soil, would have agreed (Glacken 1967, 345). Translating from Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s work De proprietatibus rerum (1240), John of Trevisa (1342–1402) calls the forest a place of deceit where passing men are often despoiled, robbed, and slain (Withers 2010, 89). As the border between the known, civilized, courtly realm and the unknown, isolated territory beyond human consciousness, the forest could evoke terror of wolves and monsters and, thus, presented trials to be overcome, or it could offer challenges that led to sublime rewards (Clason 2011, 1570.) In Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World, Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter first stated that the medieval forest was a place associated in literature with mystery, testing, and evil while later scholars, particularly Corinne Saunders, have expanded the associations in the archetypal romance forest to include spiritual vision, refuge, transformation, and growth, love, adventure, and action, which was usually hunting or fighting (Pearsall and Salter 1973, 52–53; Saunders 1993, 71; Hooke 2010).

I Hunting Hunting, often associated with the forest in the Middle Ages, was described in great detail including not only the techniques and equipment, but also the pleasure and social nature of the experience in the forest by Gaston Phébus, the Count of Foix, in the classic Livre de la chasse (1387–1389), and many other

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hunting manuals drawing heavily on it (Gaston et al. 1986). The royal forest, a specific type of medieval forest, was seen in dramatically different terms depending on the viewer’s socio-economic status and feudal rank. At least as far back as Charlemagne’s reign, royal rulers seized large tracts of land and imposed forest laws controlling the use of this land, particularly the hunting of animals such as deer and boar, but also the cutting of trees and grazing of animals (Young 1979, 4). The attitude of the royals toward these forests can be summed up in a phrase from a forest law which states that the sole purpose of the land is for the king’s delight and pleasure (Griffin 2010, 453). This politically charged land gave monarchs a space in which to display their preeminence in both the wilderness of the natural world and in human political, social, religious, and economic communities. For obvious reasons, the rest of society, those who lived in, depended for subsistence on, owned or worked land in these royal forests, greatly resented having to sacrifice their property for royal entertainment. Although it refers to the need to obey William the Conqueror’s strict new forest laws, this passage from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle would have described the views of many during the Middle Ages: His rice men hit mændon 7 þa earme men hit beceorodan. Ac he wæs swa stið þæt he ne rohte heora eallra nið, ac hi moston mid ealle þes cynges wille folgian, gif hi woldon libban oððe land habban, land oððe eahta oððe wel his sehta. Wala wa, þæt ænig man sceolde modigan swa hine sylf upp ahebban 7 ofer ealle men tellan. (Irvine, ed., 2004, 1086) [Powerful men complained of it and poor men lamented it, But they had to follow out the king’s will entirely If they wished to live or hold their land, Property or estate, or his favour great.] (Whitelock, ed. and trans., 1961, 165)

Many literary works from across Europe during the Middle Ages, especially romances about great characters like King Arthur’s knights of the Round Table, Orpheus, Alexander, and Charlemagne, frequently show nobles enjoying themselves in the forest—their aristocratic pleasure ground—gracefully hunting and hawking in fine attire. Although we read on occasion about characters poaching deer or rabbits in forests, the central cultural view associates hunting in forests with regal pastimes.

II Spiritual Space As the domain of gods, the forests of Germanic tribes were spiritual places; therefore, in their quest to wipe out paganism, early monks, including St. Benedict (ca. 480–543), cut down groves of trees to clear these spaces associated with

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pagan divinities. Later on, however, Christian monasteries recognized forest enclaves as places of contemplation and refuge for wild animals (Glacken 1966, 29; 310). St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) in particular found the forest to be a quiet place to contemplate and pray and is said to have had deep mystical experiences there (Fumagalli 1994, 130). Celtic tales reinforced this sense of divinity in the woods by locating in the forest the entrance to another world parallel to the human one (Saunders 1992, 54). In other literature of the Middle Ages, religious hermits inhabit the forests and offer spiritual guidance and healing. Parzival in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s (ca. 1170–ca. 1220) Parzival (ca. 1205) is able to find the Grail only after he spends two weeks in the woods with his uncle Trevrizent, a holy man who teaches him about sin and penance and the true meaning of the grail (Wolfram von Eschenbach 1980). By the late Middle Ages, however, a more naturalistic sense of the forest as a commodity needing managing prevails, and in a parody of earlier beliefs about deities in the forest, the great medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) claims in the Knight’s Tale from the Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) that “goddes ronnen up and down” (Chaucer 2008) when great numbers of trees are cut down for Arcite’s funeral (Rudd 2007, 63).

III Refuge and Exile Historically forests were used as places of refuge for both the law-abiding person escaping danger and the lawless outcast. Describing the forest as a “place of terrors and vast solitude,” the saint Robert of Knaresborough shared his hermit experience in Yorkshire with a knight fleeing the political intrigue of King Richard I (Young 1979, 59). Eadric the Wild and Hereward the Wake, among other Anglo-Saxon noblemen, took refuge from the Normans in the forests, hunting, raiding, laying ambushes for Normans, and offering support to others who suffered injustice from corrupt authority (Battles 2010, 205; Keen 2007, 9–38.) In an early Swedish proverb, the forest is called the mantle of the poor, suggesting its importance in the life of the peasant as a source of nurture as well as protection (Glacken 1967, 320). Romance characters such as Chaucer’s Palamon in the “Knight’s Tale” (ca. 1387) and the eponymous hero of Gamelyn (ca. 1350) seek exile from unjust societies in the forest. For commoners as well as nobles, the forest was seen as a safe space where one could flee from trouble and maintain an existence though this expectation of a safe refuge could sometimes prove to be an illusion. For a female character who has been violated or fears being violated in some way, the green and lush forest becomes a sanctuary. Most notably, in Confessio Amantis (ca. 1386–1393) John Gower’s (ca. 1330–1408) version of Ovid’s tale of Tereus and Philomela (Metamorphoses 6.426–676), Philomene, after being raped

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and having her tongue cut out, looks to the forest to protect her and to hide her shame even though she has been turned into a bird, the nightingale: Whan that she seeth the bowes thikke, And that ther is no bare stikke, But al is hid with leves greene, To woode comth this Philomene And makth hir ferst yeres flight; Wher as she singeth day and night. (Gower 2006, Book 5, 426–31)

(bows thick) (branch)

(first flight of the year)

For another woman, Perceval’s mother in the Perceval (ca. 1170) composed by the late twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes, as well as in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s later Parzival, the forest is also seen as a safe space where she can protect her son from the allure of chivalrous knighthood that had previously led to the deaths of her two older sons and her husband; unfortunately, however, the refuge in the secluded forest proves illusory as civilization in the form of knights of King Arthur enters her land, and Perceval runs off to join the Round Table (Classen, ed., 2012, 48–50). In the medieval German prose novel Queen Sibille (1437), by Elisabeth of Nassau Saarbrücken (who had translated that text from French), the forest is both a terribly frightening place and a safe space. After Charlemagne’s wife had been falsely accused of adultery and exiled, an evil knight kills her escort in order to rape her, but she escapes by riding deeper into the forest. Although she is protected by the dense woods she rides through, she is petrified the whole time that the rapist will catch up with her, turning her experience in the secure space into an intensely terrifying journey (Classen 2011c). If we turn to another work by Chrétien, Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain, the Knight with the Lion) (1170s), Yvain retreats to the forest when driven mad by love in the same way that Lancelot does in the Prose Lancelot written in the early thirteenth century (see also Hartmann von Aue’s slightly later translation into Middle High German, Iwein, ca. 1200). For these characters, the forest is more than just a refuge in which they can suffer in isolation. As a dark, unexplored, and lawless space, the forest in these works is used metaphorically to reflect the irrational state of these rejected lovers’ minds (Saunders 1993, 71). For pairs of lovers such as Tristan and Isolde the forest can serve as a place of escape such as in the twelfth-century Béroul’s or Gottfried von Strassburg’s (ca. 1210) Tristan (Scarborough 2013, 22–23; Classen 2014b). Originally a secret haven reflecting love’s secrecy and danger, the forest becomes less an idyllic refuge and more a savage exile in other versions. As Corinne Saunders notes, its role as the boundary between civilization and the wilderness highlights the conflict between individual passion and social responsibility when the lovers flee into the forest (Saunders

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1993, ix; 93). For other pairs of lovers, the forest provides the only privacy possible and is associated not only with love but also with sexual fulfillment, fecundity, and natural regeneration. In the Spanish poem Razón de amor con los denuestos del agua y el vino (Reason to Love with a Debate between Water and Wine) from the first half of the thirteenth century, for example, the description of the pleasant and sensual forest clearing is designed to celebrate the physical delights of love (Scarborough 2013, 154).

IV Danger, Adventure, and Transformation The world of the medieval forest is often thought of as dark, dangerous, and perhaps even evil, full of wild animals like bears and wolves, if not lions, and deranged or wicked humans out to kill all that they encounter (see also Ben Snook’s entry on “Threats, Dangers, and Catastrophes” in this Handbook). For ordinary people, as the poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) makes himself out to be in the first canto of The Divine Comedy, the forest can be a dark, savage, and fearful place, reflecting the anxiety, confusion, distress, and despair that the isolated human experiences: Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier rinova la paura! [Ah, how hard it is to tell the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh— the very thought of it renews my fear!] (Dante 2000, 1. 4–6)

Kings and emperors during the Middle Ages made good use of this fear of the forest to display symbolically their preeminence in the wilderness of the natural world, and literary characters gained respect and obedience when they tamed this perilous space as well (Sandidge 2012, 390). The late twelfth-century romance Havelok the Dane claims that Havelok forced the hostile nobles to bow under his command, his will, and his mercy by taking control of the perilous woods full of wicked men. In this sense, the forest presents itself as an enemy to be defeated, a challenge or opportunity for a ruler to prove himself the master of everything in the natural world. As indicated by the historical evidence, military leaders during the Middle Ages saw the forest as a possible site for ambushes or for enemies to hide. Chronicle and archeological evidence attests to English rulers such as Henry II (1133–1189), John of Lancaster (1389–1435), and Richard II (1367–1400) cutting down and burning large tracts of woods during invasions into Wales and Scotland to prevent their enemies from making use of them.

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We can find this view reflected in literary works as well, such as in the Alliterative Morte Arthure (ca. 1400) and Malory’s Morte Darthur (1470) when forests are cut or burned before battles or around towns under siege (Withers 2010). For many romance heroes, however, that same dark unknown space promises unlimited adventures. The Knights of the Round Table are probably best known for riding off into the forest to seek quests to prove the virtues of chivalrous knighthood and to reaffirm their places within the hierarchy. Both Lancelot and Gawain, Arthur’s top two knights, believe the forest offers them the best opportunity for adventure, and they ride off into the woods whenever they have the chance. Just as often in medieval works, the experience in the forest results in an initiation, transformation, or growth for that person whether it be in spiritual, ethical, or social terms. Sir Gawain in the late fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight faces his fundamental challenges in the wilds of the forest before he returns to Arthur’s court a much more self-enlightened and humbled person.

V The Forest in Art Medieval artists seldom moved past workshop formulas to depict actual forests in their paintings or the miniatures illustrating manuscripts. A forest could be shown by several stylized trees inserted in the background of the picture. However, a remarkably powerful forest scene appears in an illustration from René d’Anjou’s Livre du Cœur d’Amour épris (1457) (René d’Anjou 2003). In this allegory on love, Cueur and Desire are shown in the illustration on folio 9 emerging from a wicked and sinister forest to ask for lodging. Said to be the work of René himself, this forest still encloses the figures when we see them about to step out over a broken stump. The most prominent vertical figure in the piece is a large, tall tree standing between the characters and us as though blocking their release from this dark, dense forest where large rocks and scrub cover the little bit of ground visible. Since Cueur and Desire are asking a hideous character named Jealousy for lodging, the forest also projects a sense of their continual blind confusion and ignorance as they stumble along on their journey. Much more positive views of the forest come through in the books on hunting from the period. The Hunt Book of Gaston Phoebus (MS. Français 616), for example, includes a scene of hunters eating in the forest which clearly mimics royal banquet scenes in its sense of order, hierarchy, and plenty. In fact, except for the six large trees that form the background and the dogs and horses watching from the sides, it would be hard to distinguish this scene from one at court. Here the noble hunter is shown in control of the forest in the same way he presides at court (Gaston 1998).

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A quite unusual hunting scene is found in an illustration from the Grande Chronique de Normandie (ca. 1460) depicting the death of William Rufus, the king of England, in 1100 (British Library Yates Thompson 33, fol. 186). On the left-hand side of the illustration, a view from above lets the viewer look into the dense forest where the dead king lies with a spear through his midsection as his riderless horse stands not too far away and a number of well-dressed hunters aim in his general direction. On the right-hand side, nobles swarm out of a castle as a messenger informs the new king, Henry I, about his brother’s death. Despite the conventional finery depicted in great detail, the chaotic movement of armed hunters, horses, aristocrats, and their retainers makes it impossible to equate this royal hunting scene with aristocratic privilege at all. The most remarkable set of illustrations of nature from the medieval period is found in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a book of prayers to be said at canonical hours created for Duke Jean de Berry first by the Limbourg brothers between 1412–1416 and completed by an intermediate painter and later Jean Colombe between 1485–1489 (Longnon et al., ed., 1969). Although the illustrations for most of the months in the accompanying calendar depict beautiful field and meadow scenes outside of the different residences owned by the duke, the November picture shows a forest scene. In this picture of the autumn acorn harvest, the trees, still shown with green leaves at the top of their tall trunks, provide a carpet of acorns for the hungry pigs to devour as a peasant throws sticks to knock them down. Although November is often viewed as a cold and bleak time, this picture illustrates instead the abundance associated with the forest that provides sustenance for humans and animals even in the late fall landscape (see Classen 2012c).

C The River In an important way the river differs from other landscape features in that it tends to be at the center of human activity instead of separate from or outside of the heavily populated areas as mountains and forests, fields and meadows are. From the earliest times, rivers have been associated with deities and life or creation. For example, the Nile in Egypt was thought to be the source of all gods, and the Styx in Greek belief was considered the primeval darkness from which the beginnings of life arose. “As nature’s most protean element,” a river flows through both time and space, resistant to stasis (Herendeen 1987). Comprised as it is of water, the river carries metaphorical as well as literal associations of cleansing, baptism, and rebirth. As not only a geographical marker of place, but also a pathway for travel, the river is easily connected to founding myths for cities as well as for

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countries. Moreover, the pathway that a river takes suggests divine order and lends itself well to allegorical thoughts on the journey of life, including barriers and boundaries as well as opportunities humans face. As perhaps the most significant river for European culture during the Middle Ages, the Rhine had been used as a central artery for trade and transportation at least since Roman times. As a result, the river’s associations with the wealth and splendor of the nobility, as well as their churches, cathedrals, castles, and other structures that line the river, have given the Rhine a mythic quality, and German, French, and Dutch literature and cultural history are all deeply interconnected with the Rhine (Classen 2008; see also his entry on “Roads, Streets, Bridges, and Travelers” in this Handbook). Early Christian sources like Basil envision the perfect landscape as encircled by a river: “When in 357–359 Basil had described his new abode in the positive language of cultured retirement (otium liberale), his was an Eden-like retreat into a thick forest, featuring deep ravines and an encircling river. Cool breezes off the river nourished the sense of tranquility” (Goehring 2003, 445). When the sixthcentury writer Cassiodorus describes the monastery he founded at Vivarium in Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum (ca. 530–550), his guide to reading for the monks there, he states that no one should fear the river Pellena next to the gardens or dismiss it because its waves are neither too large nor too small, and, furthermore, it works where it is needed and then moves on. This panorama of an ideal landscape, thus, gives us a glimpse into attitudes toward rivers: rivers can be quite dangerous and damaging if they get out of control, but when full and calm, they are of service to humans who depend on them for production (Cahn 1991, 15).

I The River in Literature Rivers can be sources of national pride used in encomiums of praise. In the laus Hispanie found in the thirteenth-century Castilian Poema de Fernán González (ca. 1250), for example, passages highlighting Spain’s rivers extolled the country’s landscapes: “Just as the rivers flow through these lands, uniting them and watering the fields without regard to political division so, too, the writers imply that Spain is one united kingdom. The fertility of its lands depends on all the rivers in the peninsula to nurture it as a whole” (Scarborough 2012, 148). As one would expect, the river in Christian poetry is frequently associated with cleansing of the soul or is seen as the dividing line between spiritual states. In the fifteenth-century translation of the French work Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme (ca. 1355) by Guillaume de Deguileville (1295-before 1358) entitled The Pilgrimage of

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the Life of Man, the river allegorically represents the rite of baptism which the pilgrim must undertake before he can even begin the journey to Jerusalem. When the pilgrim tells the Grace Dieu that he cannot swim, she chides him for fearing something that little children usually do and wonders how he can think of traveling to Jerusalem if he is afraid to pass the small, smooth river at hand: “What menyth thys? what may thys be, That thow art now, as semeth me, So sore a-drad of thys Ryver, Whch ys but lytë, smothe & cler? Why artow ferful of thys streem? And art toward Ierusaleem, And mustest of Necessyte Passen ferst the gretë see, Or thow kome ther….” (Guillaume de Deguileville 1996, 891–99)

(sorely afraid) (are you fearful)

(first the great sea) (before you come there)

Most medieval writers place a river (or at least a spring feeding a stream) within their depictions of the locus amoenus, following the tradition of Greek poets begun with Homer and popularized by Virgil (1948; Curtius 1953, 186; 190). The Middle English poem The Pearl (ca. 1375) features a dream narrator who first enters a scene described in terms similar to that of the conventional locus amoenus where his grief for his daughter slowly gives way to happiness (Cawley and Anderson, ed., 2005). The farther he follows this river, the greater the joy in his heart grows until he becomes suddenly aware that across the river bank was paradise. Although hoping at first that the river is just a device connecting two garden areas, he then realizes that the water is in fact a barrier, not a connector, and that his beloved daughter is on the other side. She is the one who tells him that first he must die to be able to cross that river: “Thou wylnes over thys water to weave; Er moste thou cever to other counsayl: Thy corse in clot mot calder keve.” (318–20) (Cawley and Anderson, ed., 2005, 14) [“You wish to cross over this water; First you must listen to other counsel: Your body must sink down into the cold earth.”]

The beautiful river that leads him to envision Paradise marks the boundary between life and death. The river is used in Dante’s Divine Comedy in the same way, as the boundary between life and death, but then later, more importantly for the people taking the journey to Paradise, it is used as a boundary line between Purgatory

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and Paradise, and then as a purifier of human souls. After Dante reaches the top of Purgatory, he sees wonderful sights across a river that he cannot cross until Beatrice pulls him across it. Beatrice then pushes Dante down underwater in the first branch of the river, the Lethe, to make him forget his human sorrows and then asks Matilda to take him to the second branch of the river, the Eunoe. Although Dante will not tell us anything else about this very sweet water, after he drinks it he is pure and ready to enter Paradise. Drawing on its ancient associations with life, cleansing, purification, transition, and blood of the divine, the river proves to be in symbolic terms the last essential element for a human before attaining eternal life. One of the most popular French secular works of the Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose (ca. 1230 and continued 1275) begins with the narrator walking along a river whose water is cold, clear, and refreshing (Guillaume de Lorris 1968). As soon as he washes his face in this water, smaller but more “belle” than the Seine, and walks a short way by the side of the river, the walled garden of love, into which he seeks entry, appears. Bringing together several iconic associations, this river cleanses and renews the narrator, i.e., baptizes him, before he can attempt to enter a space that frequently signals the Garden of Eden, a walled garden. The beauty and pleasure of this experience are also conveyed through the description of the river. The difference between these iconic associations and the cast of characters he meets inside this particular garden, beginning with Idleness, however, underscores for the reader the decided contrast from this point onward in the poem between Christian love and courtly love. Although Chaucer also makes use on occasion of the convention in which a river flows through a locus amoenus, it is not to validate the traditional ideas associated with this idyllic space, but instead to invert or deflate them through irony or parody as though envisioning human life in any ideal terms was no longer possible for an author in the late medieval world. In the Parliament of Fowls (1382), for example, the river is fed by cold well streams where, the narrator says, “nothyng dede” (nothing is dead), underscoring in a comical inversion the usual topos of life associated with rivers (Chaucer 2008, 187). Since this work is a debate between birds of different types over which male bird the female formel should choose as her mate on Valentine’s Day, the courtly lovers in the scene are not even human, and their debate is basically a satire on late medieval class divisions. Moreover, in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387–1400), Chaucer’s Wife describes a lusty bachelor who is riding alone by the river when he spies a young maiden. At this point, the reader expects to hear about the beginning of a love affair. Instead, the usual expectations of a medieval romance are shattered when the sentence describing the river setting ends abruptly with a rape:

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And so bifel that this kyng Arthour Hadde in his hous a lusty bacheler, That on a day cam ridynge fro ryver, And happed that, allone as he was born, He saugh a mayde walkynge hym biforn, Of which mayde anon, maugree hir heed, By verray force, he rafte hire maydenhed. (Chaucer 2008, WoBT, ll. 882–88)

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(riding by the river)

(despite her attempts to stop him) (he took away her maidenhead)

As the single feature given in the setting, the river takes on ironic associations of brute force and betrayal by an Arthurian knight whose oath bound him to protecting and aiding women. Often in the chivalrous literature of medieval Europe, crossing a river symbolizes a rite of passage for young protagonists. For Parzival in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s eponymous romance (ca. 1205), the failure of his first adventure after leaving home is symbolized by his trouble crossing a shaded river. His inexperience and ignorance, shown in misjudging the depth of the river and in wandering indecisively beside it all day, lead to serious trouble when he reaches the other side and attacks the beautiful duchess he finds there, only trying to get food, but endangering her well-being in the process because her husband Orilus, when he later returns, believes that she had an affair behind his back. Learning how to conduct himself in the chivalric world of King Arthur’s knights is a difficult task for Parzival, who had been kept isolated in a remote forest up to this point by his mother, and his inept manner of crossing the river signals that he is not yet prepared for the rite of passage into knighthood. For more seasoned knights such as Sir Lancelot or Sir Gawain, finding a way to cross a particularly treacherous river often represents passage into a dark world of unknown peril which they do not at first recognize or understand. As they confront layers of challenges after reaching the other side, they realize that their heroic crossing of the ferocious river was just the beginning of the ordeal. In his discussion of the Middle High German epic Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), Albrecht Classen points to another interpretation of crossing the river: “Those who face a river or a sea quickly understand that their ultimate challenge has arrived, since the crossing of that body of water constitutes the moment of truth” (Classen 2012b, 21). In this work, the Burgundians must cross the river Danube to make their way to King Etzel and their sister Kriemhild. Their leader Hagen tests the prophecy of some water fairies and throws the chaplain into the water although he cannot swim. Miraculously, the chaplain survives, which tells Hagen that they all will die in Etzel’s land because the first part of the prophecy has thus already been confirmed. In this case, the Danube becomes the dividing line between life and death much like the role the Styx plays in Greek mythology

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although the knights who are fated to cross it don’t realize beforehand that this crossing will lead to the next stage in their lives, death (Classen 2012b, 21; Scott 2009, 407–25).

II The River in Art In the many secular as well as religious renderings of the locus amoenus in medieval art, there is, as in poetry, always a river. These rivers curve slowly around the landscape with just enough movement to indicate the freshness of the water without suggesting dangerous flooding or wild currents. In a pastoral scene taken from an illustrated manuscript of The Eclogues by Virgil with a Commentary by Servius (1469), three contented men seem to relax by the river that forms a half circle through the mid-ground of the scene. With their pipes and their staffs in their hands, the two young men in the foreground are almost embraced by the river. Displaying a beautiful symmetry, each feature in the landscape, the flowers, the trees, and the humans, is aligned in a reflection of cosmic harmony (Ms 493 fol. 14 Shepherds by a River). However, in other illustrations from the Middle Ages, the river can be depicted as a terribly frightening space. For example, the Thames is shown as a wild and dangerous space in two miniatures from John Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund (1461 and ca. 1475) (BL MS Yates Thompson 47, f. 94v). In the first, a boy falls from London Bridge after being pushed by cattle, and large bold brush strokes of blues and whites swirl as the river current rushes through the archways and a boat is tossed sideways. In the second miniature, a kind and brave river man hands the boy to his mother as the civilized stability and order of London in the left background is contrasted to the raging waves of the river on the right. Another late-medieval river scene, this one of Charon rowing Dante and Virgil across the river Acheron to hell, is truly frightening (BL MS Yates Thompson 36, f. 6). As the only clothed figures in the scene, Dante and Virgil are afloat in the boat midway between two banks lined by small peaks of purple, blue, and grey mountains rising out of the river. In a dark and eerie background, suggestions of smoke and fire swirl. Chunks of the mountains litter the ground as the denizens of hell struggle with each other, and the swift current and waves echo the chaos of the scene. In this diabolic vision, Priamo della Quercia has inverted the traditional associations of rivers in the human imagination, rebirth, cleansing, fertility, and life, to show instead in most graphic terms the horror of the eternal damnation of the human soul.

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D The Mountain Writing in the fourteenth century, Dante believed that, while gravity accounted for all things being drawn down into the Inferno, the pull of the stars’ almost magnetic force created mountains whose shapes mimicked the shape of the zodiac. Furthermore, he said that the heat of the sun pulled water vapors up into the mountains (Alexander 1986, 41). Based on his understanding of natural science, Dante’s explanation of the origins of mountains is quite different from those in earlier periods where mountains were considered sacred spaces since their heights made them the space closest to the deity. It was thought, therefore, that the difficulties and dangers inherent in ascending this space were meant to keep the human and the divine separate (Kirchner 1950, 412). An eleventh-century chronicler from the monastery of Novalese located in a valley of the Alps reports that those attempting to climb nearby peaks were forced back by wild animals, bad weather, and “stones hurled at them,” which was a clear sign to them that mountains were not meant to be climbed (Kirchner 1950, 421). Other narratives such as one on the twelfth-century attempt by John de Bramble from Canterbury to climb the “Mount of Jove” and another on the thirteenth-century climb by King Peter III of Aragon up Pic Canigou reinforce the popular view of mountain tops as incredibly treacherous territory inhospitable to human beings (Kirchner 1950, 421). It is only with the attempts to understand nature and geography found in twelfth- and thirteenth-century encyclopedists such as Bartholomew of England that cultural attitudes toward mountains began to shift. Although mountains were sometimes viewed with respect within medieval culture—Marco Polo, for example, praises the refreshing, pure air at the top of mountains—the sheer ruggedness of terrain and massive size as well as the barriers they provided to travel still made them formidable impediments (Classen 2014a; Classen 2013c, 194).

I The Mountain in Literature Beginning in the literary and artistic works of the twelfth and thirteenth-centuries, concepts associated with mountains begin to go beyond their outward physical appearances as gigantic masses that impede human travel to reflect more abstractly on their symbolic use as “important boundary markers in the human consciousness” (Classen 2012b, 27; see also Classen 2014a). Dan Hooley explains the significance of mountains to the human imagination in this way: “[M]ountains give us perspective…. [T]here is always something metaphysical in that view” (Hooley 2012, 23). Often in medieval literature, that view of the mountain as

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something frightening comes from the anxiety over the immensity of this unknown and obscure space which emphasizes a person’s own weakness and vulnerability. When the hero has overcome in some way this enormous monstrosity, it proves to be a triumph of the highest value (Thomasset and James-Raoul, ed., 2000). This is apparent in Dante’s Divine Comedy (1307–1327), for example, where Purgatory is envisioned as a mountain with seven terraces corresponding to the seven deadly sins. Unlike the many weary souls Dante meets who have stopped climbing, Dante himself, with much aid from others, makes it to the top of the mountain ready to enter Paradise with Beatrice. Frequently linked to giants, the mountain can project the same spiritual and social depravity that the obscenely large creature represents (Thomasset and James-Raoul, ed., 2000, 272.) The extent of the evil in the acts of perversion and villainy committed by the giant at the Mont Saint-Michel in Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur (1470), including among other things raping, roasting, and eating young girls and women, is reflected in the grotesque size and shape of the mountain. Only later is the mountain tamed and Christianized when a chapel to St. Michel is built on top. In a similar way, it is up into a forested mountain that the Infantes Fernando and Diego in the Castilian epic The Poem of the Cid (El Poema de Myo Çid) (ca. 1195–1207) take their wives to tear them apart like wild beasts and leave them to die (Simpson, trans., 2007; see Scarborough 2013, 20). At times, the journey is not up the mountain, but down inside the mountain, into a cavern, cave, or grotto where the character may regress into infantilism, bestiality, or monstrosity, essentially losing his or her humanity and all sense of clarity (Thomasset and James-Raoul, ed., 2000, 269). Mountains form a grotesque image of hell in the very popular medieval work The Travels of John Mandeville (ca. 1355), where Alexander is said to call on God to move the Caucasus mountains to enclose the twenty-two Jewish kings and their people after his men had chased them there so that they could not kill Christians. God complies even though Alexander was a pagan, the author says, and “closed the mountaynes togydre,” creating a hellish space thought to be appropriate for those who had rejected Christ (Mandeville 1923, Ch. 24). At the same time, however, just the opposite sense of a mountain—that of sacred space—is evoked by its associations with the sacred nature of the deity (Thomasset and James-Raoul, ed., 2000, 273). In biblical stories, Moses receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, and Ezechiel 28: 13–14 says that Eden had been perched high up on a mountain. John Mandeville tells us in chapter 21 of The Travels of John Mandeville that Adam and Eve spent the first one hundred years after their expulsion from Paradise weeping on another great mountain on the Isle of Silha. The deep lake formed from their tears contains pearls and precious stones which the poor can dive for once a year as alms (Mandeville 1923,

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Ch. 21). Dante’s placing Paradise at the top of a mountain in the Divine Comedy, as just discussed, is another well-known example of sacred space being depicted on a mountain top. In most Grail stories within the Arthurian Legends, the chateau of the Grail is located in mountainous territory, and in Italian folklore Morgan Le Fay is said to live on Montegibel on Sicily. Moreover, an experience on a mountain is often an initiation into a more spiritual or enlightened state of being where a person emulates the suffering of Christ and contemplates the spiritual world. Instead of the deserts in which biblical saints withdrew for decades of isolation, mountains, like forests, in Western Europe became associated with ascetic withdrawal from human contact (Goehring 2003, 444). In the early sixth-century Lives of the Jura Fathers, for example, Romanus seeks spiritual isolation in the Jura Mountains northeast of Lyon and undergoes the same type of hardships that biblical figures had endured in the hostile deserts (Goehring 2003, 446). This pattern is also seen in, among many other similar works, the Castilian poem Vida de San Millán de la Cogolla (Life of San Millán de la Cogolla) by Gonzalo de Berceo (ca. 1197–1264). When San Millán retreated into the mountains where he suffered physical hardships and had to do battle with the devil, his incredible determination to live the contemplative life is underscored by the hostile environment of the mountains (Scarborough 2013, 55). In a more positive connection, the Noah stories retold in works from the medieval period link the mountain on which the ark is perched after the flood to a sense of progress or renewal in humanity (Thomasset and James-Raoul, ed., 2000, 274). Albrecht Classen argues that in a letter Petrarch (1304–1374) wrote to a friend sometime between 1336 and the late 1350s we get perhaps the earliest sense of a mountain as a tantalizing, mysterious place to explore in medieval culture. As Petrarch describes his ascent up Mont Ventoux, however, his conception of the mountain changes, and he begins to view the mountain as a worldly distraction, a symbol of the greatest earthly appetites that must be suppressed, as something that impedes his journey toward God (Moore 2008, 61). The climb comes to represent the struggle to attain spiritual salvation, and the mountain essentially becomes a metaphor for human life where all people need to keep climbing or striving and to recognize that the search for the soul is the only worthwhile journey (Classen 2013c, 11–15).

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II The Mountain in Art In the symbolic landscape of medieval art, the outlines of mountains are drawn with hard and sharp angles cut into long slabs of vertical planes, lacking the softness that a cover of trees gives in later depictions. In a worldview built on vertical perspectives, where spiritual truth and authority come from on high, the sheer height of the mountains in paintings signifies transcendence which can elevate, intimidate, or alienate the figures in the landscape. In Christian paintings during the Middle Ages, mountains could serve as places where humans encountered God or reenacted biblical scenes of sacrifice or exile (Classen 2012b, 37–38). One of the best examples of a mountain used to elevate and intimidate is in the Stigmata of St. Francis painted by Giotto around 1300. The artist has placed St. Francis on the edge of a cliff on a very stylized version of Mount Alverno with sharply cut edges and a high vertical peak rising above his head. With the sides of the mountain darkened, an illuminating downward-sloping vertical line points to St. Francis. Jesus appears as a seraph in the sky next to the mountain peak and seems to direct sharp gold volts from his wounds onto the kneeling figure of St. Francis who has his hands up as though to protect himself. The majesty of Christ is underscored by his raised position next to the peak of the mountain while the sense of fear and isolation that St. Francis experienced is shown visually as he is overpowered by the immensity of the mountain overtop of him (Fossi 2004, 110). Another event frequently shown in the mountains is Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. In Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze panel depicting the story of Abraham on the doors of the Florence Baptistery called the Gates of Paradise, the jagged edges of the rugged mountain projecting into his back suggest the intensity of spiritual belief that would lead a father to sacrifice his son (Radke, ed., 2007). In one of the illustrations from the text of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry called La Tentation du Christ (The Temptation of Christ) (1411–1416) by the Limbourg brothers, Jesus stands on top of a steep and narrow mountain as he looks down on the earthly temptations he must resist (fol. 161 v). The suggestion seems to be that only someone so far above the other mortal beings could possibly resist the devil’s offerings (Longnon et al., ed., 1969; see Lecouteux 2008).

E The Field Agricultural fields were used in conjunction with other types of landscape, the forest, meadow, and pasture, because each type was necessary to supply the different resources and products needed for farming during the Middle Ages.

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According to archaeologists, farmers began to enter the lands of the hunter/ gathering clans in Europe some time after the advent of agriculture in the Middle East 11,000 years ago, gradually spreading the use of fields as well as the domestication of animals from south-east regions eventually to north-west Europe. By the Middle Ages, therefore, fields had been used for thousands of years, and a cycle of clearing of forest or scrub land for cultivation followed by re-growth of forest had been repeated many times throughout the landscape in Europe. During periods of high population growth, more land would be cleared and cultivated to feed the larger numbers of people while plagues and natural disasters would lower the population and lead to fewer fields in use. After both the collapse of the Roman Empire (fifth century) and the Black Plague (1347–1351), much abandoned land was turned back into forest or scrub, “waste,” land. By the eleventh century, however, larger tracts of land were being put to use as fields since a growing population supplied both the labor to work the fields and the need for increased food production (Unger 2003, 65). In a blend of ideas taken from classical and biblical sources, the medieval world attributed poor fields to the fall from Eden. Hesiod had pronounced in the eighth-century B.C.E. that soil had been naturally fertile in the much earlier Golden Age, and the Old Testament said that as a result of the fall humans must till barren, rocky, or thorny fields. Connie Scarborough reminds us, moreover, that agricultural fields can also be linked to death in battle, destruction, and political upheaval when they are used for combat (Scarborough 2013, 206). In Summa Theologiae, however, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) shows through his discussion of Eden that arable land makes up his ideal landscape (Thomas Aquinas 1964). As Clarence Glacken notes, “To St. Thomas, tilling the earth in a quiet rural setting in a temperate climate seems to have been an idyllic existence worthy of man even before the Fall” (Glacken 1967, 235). As early as Charlemagne’s Capitulare de Villis (Capitulary of Manors and Farms) (ca. 800), a balance is called for between forested land and cultivated land which includes this decree: “[W]here there is a place suitable for clearing have it done, not allowing the woods to increase in the fields” (Glacken 1967, 334; Boretius and Krause, ed., 2001). During the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the active life the church encouraged included cutting forests to construct convents, churches, and cathedrals and to cultivate fields to support the members of these Christian communities. In the twelfth century, as we can see from the Topography of Ireland (1187) by Giraldus Cambrensis (ca. 1146-ca. 1220) which features a hierarchy of landscape features, the field is shown to be central to human society:

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In the common course of things, mankind progresses from the forest to the field, from the field to the town, and to the social condition of citizens…. [The Irish] lead the same life their fathers did in the woods and open pastures, neither willing to abandon their old habits or learn anything new. They, therefore, only make patches of tillage; their pastures are short of herbage; cultivation is very rare, and there is scarcely any land sown. (quoted in Glacken 1967, 281)

Good tillage of fields is linked to higher civilizations and those who prefer to live in the woods, hunting and gathering as their ancestors did instead of embracing the agricultural lifestyle, are considered barbaric by Giraldus (Giraldus 1968).

I The Field in Literature In Spain, the crucial importance of agricultural fields is evident not only in the thirteenth-century lawcode Siete Partidas of Alfonso X which covers the good management of fields (Alfonso 2003), but is also shown in the use of fields for the setting of many works in Alfonso X’s collection of Marian tales, the Cantigas de Santa Maria (1282) (Alfonso 2003). Through their biblical associations with Adam after the fall of mankind, fields represent nature tamed by humans and under human control. “Medieval audiences saw the cultivated field, especially one that was productive, as emblematic of God’s favor” (Scarborough 2013, 105). As the farmers or vintners worked to increase their crops or to save them from destruction in these Marian tales, they looked to God or the Virgin for help, and if they followed the right steps for Christian salvation, their fields usually prospered. In the Middle English work Piers Plowman (ca. 1368–1374), the field is a symbolic space equaling God’s world on earth with Piers serving as a vision of St. Paul laboring on one half acre to achieve justice and truth on earth (Pigg 2012, 356). After Piers tells a group of pilgrims that he will show them the way if they will help him plough and sow his half acre, there is one brief span of early morning work with everyone contributing to the plowing and weeding of the field. By 9 a.m., however, the shirkers have quit working, bringing on an attack by hunger (Langland 1990, Passus VI, 63–65). The work on this one-half-acre field is, in fact, the pilgrimage, and Piers’s helpers fail to achieve an ideal Christian society by abandoning their work there (Rudd 2007, 199). Furthermore, Chaucer also uses the image of the plowman as a person who lives the good Christian life in the Canterbury Tales (1400). As the brother of the Parson, the only cleric on the pilgrimage truly journeying toward the city of God, the Plowman is described in ideal terms, said to live in peace and perfect charity, to love God first and then his neighbor as himself, and to work hard to help the poor. Interspersed with these are details describing the work of a farm laborer: “That hadde ylad of dong ful

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many a fother” (He had hauled many a cart full of dung) and “He wolde thresshe, and therto dyke and delve” (He would thresh and in addition make ditches and dig) (Chaucer 2008, I, 530, 536). Simple, physical, earthy labor in the field is linked to a good Christian life. The medieval cultural view of fields is illustrated in secular works such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1205) as well as in later versions of the story, where the fields of Parzival’s mother are hidden in the forest into which she has retreated to raise her son. Wolfram describes the work the knight sees going on in the field as they furrow, sow, and harrow the soil. These honest field workers are good men who tell the knight what he wants to know and lament the fact that young Parzival has gotten his first seductive view of the splendor of knighthood (Wolfram von Eschenbach 1980). We see their steadfast labor for and loyalty to their queen in a much more positive light than the muddled actions of knights who chase other knights who carry off young ladies. At the same time we see the quiet, fertile field associated with the simple life in sharp contrast to the tangled wilderness of the forest in which knights compete for glory. We get glimpses of peasant attitudes toward fields in several ways. One is their illegal clearances of fields deep in forests or on a far edge where they think no one will notice (Bechmann 1990, 78). Their heavy dependence on the crops from fields for survival made them risk the punishment they would receive if these fields were detected; for them, fields are essential to life. In another source, Latvian folksongs originally created during the Middle Ages, the views of field workers toward this space come through in song and poetry. Fields as well as other elements of the ordinary landscape are shown to be intertwined with natural and human rhythms of life. In one poem, the speaker states that the best land possible is made up of a little field in the middle of a green birch grove: The land that I wished, Such land did I get: A green birch grove all around, In the middle a beloved little field. (Švābe, Straubergs, and Hauzenberga-Šturma, ed., 1952–1956, 48275; Bunkše 1978, 563)

The pleasure the speaker takes in having gotten this space comes through in the positive force of the imagery. In another poem, the very pragmatic reason for clearing the forest to make a new field is suggested: Her brothers have come New ground they will clear Where their sister’s barley Will be cut this summer. (Švābe, Straubergs, and Hauzenberga-Šturma, ed., 1952–1956, 26020; Bunkše 1978, 564)

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The sister’s upcoming wedding means the family needs to increase the amount of land it cultivates to produce extra barley. Sometimes there is crop failure in the field: “I wanted to plant oats, / God threw in a little lake” (Švābe, Straubergs, and Hauzenberga-Šturma, ed., 1952–1956, 28218; Bunkše 1978, 564). And sometimes the deforestation necessary for new fields brings tragedy: Tired are my brothers, Having cleared the land. Where will the little rabbit, little bear Spend a nasty day? (Švābe, Straubergs, and Hauzenberga-Šturma, ed., 1952–1956, 5006; Bunkše 1978, 565)

The clearing of the forest to increase field acreage in order to produce food for human consumption comes at a cost for wildlife.

II The Field in Art In the many renderings of fields by painters during the Middle Ages, we find almost realistic detail in contrast to the heavily stylized portrayals of other features in the landscape. By projecting either positive or negative associations, the manner in which the fields were depicted in the paintings reinforced the artists’ themes concerning human society. A prosperous, well-tended field, for example, could suggest wise leadership and adherence to Christian values while a scrubby, untended or wasted field could suggest evil behavior, spiritual death, or incompetent leadership (Jaritz 2003, 54–55). In more than half of the months in the famous Très Riches Heures, workers can be seen in their fields carrying out their seasonal duties in an idyllic landscape. Perhaps because of their familiarity with them as well as the importance of fields in the cyclical patterns of the natural world, artists focused on the actual features, such as the furrow lines evident where the peasant has plowed the field with two oxen and the mounds of earth about to be seeded in another field on the page for March in Duc du Berry’s magnificent manuscript. The well-ordered and cultivated fields in works like these reflected the economic success of the landowner as well as his benevolent oversight of his estates and those who work on them. The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a series of frescoes painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Sienna between 1338–1339, displays contrasting scenes of town and country life to illustrate the beneficent effects of virtuous government and the horrendous effects of despotic rule on Italian society (Southard 1979). With a winged figure of Security hovering over the landscape, the countryside in the good government section is populated by peasants and farmers leisurely

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working at various activities in well-ordered, bucolic, fertile fields. On the other hand, the fresco entitled The Effects of Bad Government shows the horror of two armies advancing on each other in burned fields, reminding us that agricultural fields could take on associations with death, destruction, and political turmoil when they become places for battle and displays of dominance. In Lorenzetti’s detailed landscapes, the carefully attended, fertile field clearly reflects human society at its best as a part of a regenerative world mirroring God’s spiritual one while the dead fields illustrate the consequences of shameless denial of the precepts inherent in the Christian universe.

F The Meadow As a second type of rural feature to be carved out of forest spaces, the meadow in its earliest sense was a field covered in grass to be mown for hay but later became associated with either a space to pasture animals or an area of grassy lowland usually beside a river. Early on meadows were generally used as common land for the grazing of a community’s animals, but increasingly during the Middle Ages disputes over access to meadows and common land grew, indicating the importance of this type of space to European farming. One thirteenth-century law on land use, the 1236 Statute of Merton in England, restricted expansion of arable land so that pasture and forest land would not be lost (Unger 2003, 75–76.) In the later Middle Ages, the percentage of land set aside for the grazing of animals grew as a greater prosperity led to greater demand for meat (Fox 1998, 12). In economic terms, therefore, the meadow was becoming a more valuable space, and this process of turning fields into pastures for animals would result in massive enclosures of land in the centuries to come, causing much hardship in the countryside. For medieval Europe, however, the meadow was still a very pleasant place for the human population to rest, to dream, to reflect on its relationship to the natural world, and to contemplate love in both its romantic and spiritual senses.

I The Meadow in Literature Although the early modern period would revive the pastoral conventions inherited from Virgil in his Eclogues, often employing the meadow as a space in which to debate the world of politics and court, the meadow in much medieval literature is not connected to the realities of urban life, but, like the river discussed earlier, is a common feature in the locus amoenus portrayed in classical literature and in

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medieval poetry. These rich spaces of lush grass and flowers became associated with love as pairs of lovers throughout the literary canons of medieval Europe retreat there for private time together. In “Under der linden,” by the German poet Walther von der Vogelweide (ca. 1170-ca. 1230), for example, a young woman describes the bed her true love has made for her in the grass and flowers of a meadow where they enjoy a thousand kisses and more (Walther von der Vogelweide 1996, no. 16). The private and secret nature of the space is underscored when she says that she would die of shame if anyone knew that he lay with her. Instead of taking on associations with sin, however, this richly verdant space is linked to “innocent, sublime, pristine and natural love” (Clason 2012, 235). The Spanish poet Gonzalo de Berceo adapts the locus amoenus convention as the setting for an elaborate allegory about the majesty and mercies of the Virgin Mary. In Milagros de Nuestra Señora (before 1264), the perennially green meadow in which the pilgrim/poet rests on his journey is the space in which stories about Mary’s miracles are heard, which links the fertile and peaceful space to a Christian paradise. Instead of sharing his locus amoenus with a beautiful young woman of courtly romance, Berceo shares this meadow with the Virgin (Scarborough 2013, 155). One of the most telling details Chaucer gives us about the young squire in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (1400) is that his shirt is embroidered as if it were a meadow full of fresh flowers red and white. Evoking not only the beautiful fullness and lighthearted pleasure of the meadow, but also the youthful exuberance of this “lusty bachelor,” this passage shows us again the popular cultural associations linked to this landscape feature. Although his father, Chaucer’s knight, has spent his time on battle fields fighting the enemies of Christianity, this young squire has his heart set on meadows. Not surprisingly, the writer who popularized the love sonnet during the fourteenth century, Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), often used the pastoral image of the meadow when reflecting on love. In Rima 310, for example, the meadow is said to laugh while love fills the air, earth and water in an idyllic spring scene meant to contrast with the emotional despair that the poet experiences over the loss of Laura. Ridono i prati, e ‘l ciel si rasserena; Giove s’allegra di mirar sua figlia; l’aria et l’acqua et la terra è d’amor piena; ogni animal d’amar si riconsiglia. (5–8) [The meadows laugh and the sky is serene; Jupiter gladly gazes on his daughter; Love fills the air and the earth and the water; And all the creatures’ instincts on love lean.] (Petrarca 1978, 231)

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Also associated with this meadow scene is a sense of harmony among the various parts of the natural world which the human yearns to experience. When we turn again to the landscape features found in Dante’s Divine Comedy (1307–1327), it is in the Inferno that we cross a stream to find a “fresh, green meadow” (Dante 2000, IV.111). Here Dante at first feels at home with those whose words were sweet, the great pagan spirits from the classical world whose deeds or teachings gained them much respect. Although condemned to eternal life in the Inferno because of their pagan beliefs, these figures, such as Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Electra, Euclid, and Seneca, are given the pastoral paradise of the meadow celebrated by their poets where they will passively repose for eternity. Despite this meadow’s being populated with almost silent, almost still symbols of human sapience and despite moral courage appearing very attractive to Dante at this stage, he will come to understand the meadow’s inadequacies compared to the Christian paradise at the top of the mountain at the end of his journey.

II The Meadow in Art In some of the earliest European Christian art, paintings and mosaics in Roman catacombs frequently portray the Good Shepherd based on Christ’s parable of the lost sheep in which a herdsman searches for the one lost sheep out of one hundred. In addition, Orpheus is also depicted in these works charming the animals. A detail taken from a third-century tomb in the Catacomb of Domitilla depicts an Orpheus-Christ, pipe in hand, relaxing next to carefully painted sheep in a lovely meadow or pasture (Bourguet 1965, 27). As in other paintings of this type, the meadow is suggested by tall, stylized sprays of grass or flowers interspersed around the background. Another source for early images of herdsmen is Virgil’s Georgics III. A scene taken from a fifth-century illuminated Vatican manuscript (Vat.lat.3867, 44v.) depicts two herdsmen, one playing a pipe, enjoying the day in the meadow with lively horses jumping or mothering a fold while goats munch on the stylized foliage interspersed among the figures (Bourguet 1965, 175). As spaces of salvation and natural harmony, the meadows in these works prefigure the more detailed versions that appear in late medieval secular as well as religious medieval art. The magnificent mille-fleurs tapestries woven in France and Flanders during the fifteenth century use backgrounds of meadow space where many species of plants and flowers appear scattered throughout, and animals and birds are often placed in random patterns. What could be more appropriate for northern Eur-

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opeans to visualize on their cold bleak walls than brightly colored meadows (Stokstad 1986, 383). In a series of late medieval paintings called the Madonna of humility or Madonna of the meadow because Mary sits holding the Christ child on a stool or on the ground in a meadow, the meadow reflects a rich union of spiritual and natural fecundity in a beautiful, harmonious scene (Williamson 2009). In the Madonna of Humility painted ca. 1442 by Giovanni di Paola, for example, the dark green carpet of the meadow blends into the folds of Mary’s dark blue clothing, linking the symbols of Christian salvation with the beauty of the meadow. Sheltered by a half circle of fruit trees behind her, Mary is surrounded by plants such as strawberries and white blooming flowers as she and her infant symbolize regeneration for the human world. The Adoration of the Lamb of God, the magnificent altarpiece for Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, (1432) by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, uses a beautiful green meadow into which saints stream for the setting of the adoration of the Lamb (Dhanens 1973). Although mountain scenes frequently displayed dramatic, intense, active interplay between humans like Moses, Abraham, or St. Francis, and the divine, it is in the verdant peaceful meadow that artists often envisioned the divine love that Jesus and Mary offered humans. The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the book of prayers (or Book of Hours) including the famous illustrated calendar discussed earlier, is full of beautiful meadows (Longnon et al., ed., 1969). Lovely scenes of meadows appear in the illustrations for every month from March through August, sometimes as the primary space, such as when the April scene sets a newly betrothed couple exchanging rings surrounded by friends and family in a meadow bordered by a forest, a river, and a walled garden, or when in the June scene peasants harvest hay in the meadow, or sometimes simply as a background feature. The late medieval move toward more detailed viewing of natural scenes allows us to feel the idyllic intersection of contentment and pleasure, harmony and plenty, and the human, natural, and divine worlds symbolized by the medieval meadow.

G Conclusion The analysis of cultural attitudes toward these landscape features in the Middle Ages shows Western Europe moving from strictly conventional views inherited from classical and early Christian sources to a more complex vision that incorporates knowledge taken from medieval studies of nature and practical considerations about their utility into a Christian framework of the physical world. The symbolic or iconographic associations were usually based on the physical char-

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acteristics such as size or shape or on sense perceptions of each of these features. The immense size of a mountain, for example, led to its use in contrasting human infirmity and insignificance with divine strength and eminence, while the darkness of forests, the amorphous movement of rivers, or the fertility of fields and meadows, as well as other characteristics we could identify, gave authors and artists the material for scenes of either exaltation or condemnation. Of the five, the mountain was perhaps the least appreciated of these features, and, in fact, natural scientists in the early modern age debated whether it even existed in the antediluvian world (Glacken 1967, 413). On the other hand, the meadow retains its positive cultural associations with fertility, relaxation, and harmony almost without fail. Although earlier modern studies of the natural world such as Curtius’s seminal work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages highlighted the conventional and artificial uses of these features in medieval culture, later scholarship, i.e., current studies looking at medieval works through an ecocritical lens, has shown that many medieval writers and artists did work realistic details about the natural world gained through firsthand experience into their depictions of life in Europe during this period (see Rudd 2007; Moore 2008; Siewers 2009; Clason 2012; Classen, ed., 2012; and Scarborough 2013).

Select Bibliography Bechmann, Roland, Trees and Man: The Forest in the Middle Ages, trans. Katharyn Dunham (New York 1990). Chenu, Marie-Dominique, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little, paperback ed. (1968; Toronto et al. 1997). Classen, Albrecht, “The Discovery of the Mountain as an Epistemological Challenge: A Paradigm Shift in the Approach to Highly Elevated Nature. Petrarch’s Ascent to Mont Ventoux and Emperor Maximilian’s Theuerdank,” The Book of Nature and Humanity: Natural and Human Worlds in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hawkes and Richard G. Newhauser, with the assistance of Nathaniel Bump (Turnhout 2013), 3–18. [= Classen 2013c] Classen, Albrecht, ed., Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2012). Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1948; Princeton, NJ, 1953). Fumagalli, Vito, Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1994). Glacken, Clarence, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (London et al. 1967). Howe, John and Michael Wolfe, ed., Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe (Gainesville, FL, 2002).

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Laszlovszky, József and Péter Szabó, ed., People and Nature in Historical Perspective (Budapest 2003). Saunders, Corinne, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (Cambridge 1993). Thomasset, Claude and Daniele James-Raoul, ed., La montagne dans la texte medieval: Entre methe et realtite (Paris 2000).

John M. Hill

Friendship in the Middle Ages A Introduction While friendship is an important matter globally, especially in small or otherwise face-to-face societies, its ethical and personal prominence during the European Middle Ages is still little noted outside of specialized, scholarly circles. That prominence has not survived into modern times, certainly not into an age when people have hundreds or even thousands of facebook “friends,” along with buddy systems hyping networking above all else. Medieval European societies of course stressed the instrumental importance of friendships in the needs and activities of daily life, perhaps especially where kinship support was not strong or did not exist, and in business and organizational ventures as well as in political affairs. In the latter arena people sought and valued the “friendship” of powerful figures, who in turn used friendship for political purposes vis-à-vis other rulers or kings as well as vassals or groups of vassals (Althoff 1991, 91–94). But medieval discourse on love, ethics and friendship is what matters intellectually concerning deep friendships between good men. That discourse, with two, intertwined strands, will be the main concern of this essay, with noble friendship being the more important strand, however spiritualized through Augustine (354–430) and in eleventh and twelfth-century monastic contexts. Noble friendship originates with Aristotle’s (367–38 B.C.E.) Nicomachean Ethics, where it is the highest ideal, superior to friendship within the family because disinterested. Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) re-establishes it as a central political and social topic through De amicitia, with lesser contributions by Ovid (43 B.C.E– 17 C.E.) in some of his exilic letters (Ex. Ponto 1–3, Claassen 1999), and by Seneca (4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.) and Sallust (86–34 B.C.E., for some resonant phrases). Greek ideas from Pythagoras (sixth century B.C.E.) especially become part of the early Church’s self- identification as a communal brotherhood (McEvoy 1999, 7–8). But noble friendship awaits the full development Cicero gives it. Augustine, influenced by Ambrose (340–397; see McGuire 1988, 41–44), responds deeply to Cicero’s ideal in his transformation of noble friendship into the lasting friendship that can only come in and through Christ, thus making the ideal’s Neoplatonic potential religiously transcendent. Some Western Church Fathers, such as Gregory, and some philosophers follow accordingly. Although misfortune will expose false or convenient friends, noble friendship is an unalloyed good in

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Boethius’s (480–524) Consolation of Philosophy, where misfortune can help one discover who is a true friend and who is not. From there it travels into theological and ethical discourse during the high Middle Ages, most notably via eleventh and twelfth-century monastic circles first—such as in the writings and letters of Anselm (1033–1109), Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Peter the Venerable (1092–1156) and Peter of Celle (1115– 1183)—and especially via Aelred of Rievaulx’s De spiritali amicitia (ca. 1110–1167; McGuire 1988, 268–79; 296 and following). In the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste’s (1168–1263) university scholarship firmly establishes Aristotle’s Ethics, as he produces the first continuous text and commentary in the 1230s or 1240s. That account of friendship entered the Middle Ages first through Byzantine reception and then in the theology and ethics of such figures as Bradwardine (1290–1349; see Barber and Jenkins, ed., 2009). The Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX, nevertheless takes a back seat to Cicero’s De amicitia in that it was not much studied as a whole until the thirteenth century, by which time Aristotle’s account of friendship, while received as philosophical background to Cicero’s treatment (McEvoy 1999, 26–27), would not have seemed novel. In other contexts noble friendship owes something to Augustine’s influence— via The Confessions it is reflected in Aquinas’s (1225–1274) debt to Aristotle, and appears in Jean de Meun’s (1240–1305) continuation of The Romance of the Rose. That discourse has already probably influenced other poets, such as Chretien in the twelfth century (at least in Yvain in a scene where, unknowingly, two close friends nearly kill each other). Warrior companions and friends appear in earlier Germanic epic, such as the eighth- or ninth-century Beowulf or the eleventhcentury The Song of Roland, or the tenth-century Latinate Walter of Acquitaine (Waltharii poësis; Magoun and Smyser, trans., 1950). While Roland has Oliver the wise against the Saracens, Beowulf has Wiglaf in the last third of the poem against the dragon. But the latter friendship at least is better characterized by the reciprocities of the war band, the artificial kinship of the hall that intensifies a distant blood relationship (Hill 2008, 82–83; Classen 2011a). Earlier in the poem Hrothgar, who has grieved for a long-time ‘shoulder-companion’ and counselor killed by Grendel’s mother, tearfully feels intense emotion for Beowulf, whom he has come to appreciate deeply for the latter’s celerity, courage, enormous prowess and considerable wisdom (especially the wisdom of promising help should Hrothgar have future need—this upon Beowulf’s imminent departure from the land of the Danes [lines 1822–39; Fulk, et al., ed., 2008]). The tearful moment in lines 1870–80a is highly emotional but within the expected, friendly reciprocities of a good king, a sweeping form of which Hrothgar has just pronounced between Danes and Geats (lines 1853–65). Friendship from kings and lords in the poem has legal weight, as it does in other Anglo-Saxon poems and in the law codes (Hill

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1995, 99; 187 n 30), but does not exclude strong feeling. Beowulf will even think of his chosen retainers late in the poem as deserving of good luck, a better luck at least than he seems to have drawn for himself given the fiery dragon. But while there is great respect and praise involved, as well as repeated service, Beowulf and Hrothgar, who once settled a feud for Beowulf’s famous father, are not good friends, although an adoptive, father-son-like feeling is possible, especially on Hrothgar’s part. Moreover Hrothgar does tearfully think of Beowulf as ‘dear,’ leof (1876), a term applied also to the old shoulder-companion Grendel’s mother killed and by Beowulf to Wiglaf, the warrior and kinsman who steps up for him against the dragon. The term suggests affection and love for the warriors concerned but not a blood brotherhood or a union of souls. Strong, emotional ties, especially in intense, combat situations, also appear in the eleventh-century The Song of Roland and in the twelfth or early thirteenthcentury Nibelungenlied among warriors who are loyal friends (Oliver and Roland) or who have been denominated friends in the course of excellent hospitality, escort and the giving of gifts (along with in-law ties) between Rüdiger and the Burgundians. Kings and warriors sorrowing over the deaths of comrades and favorites appear in both poems (Classen 2011a). Moreover, secure friendships between figures in Saga literature matter in any overview of medieval friendship, as between Gunnar and Njal in the thirteenth-century Njal’s Saga (Classen 2011a). While Njal always gives Gunnar excellent legal advice and counsel, and is willing to have his son aid Gunnar in troubles with other parties, such friendships, however personal or deep in the moment, are not Ciceronian. Arthurian and courtly literature will feature friendship in homosocial and homoerotic contexts (Zeikowitz 2003, 35–43). Then one should note the early Dante and Petrarch, one of whose letters sets out character quirks among his friends (Classen and Sandidge, ed., 2010, 64), while Dante may have structured The Paradiso along Aristotelian friendship lines, modified via Aquinas so as to climax in friendship with God (Bourbeau 1991, 57–61). Dante (1265–1321) no doubt was in various ways indebted to his beloved teacher, Bruno Latini (1220–1294), who believed that good and full, true friendship can only exist between good men of similar virtue who love each other for their respective virtue (Classen and Sandidge, ed., 2010, 59). Boccaccio (1313–1375) in the Filostrato sets friendship into a go-between relationship, which Chaucer (1343–1400) especially intensifies and elevates into “full” friendship between Troilus and Pandarus. That narrative masterpiece, Troilus and Criseyde, is arguably the greatest, Western European treatment of friendship in relation to a love story before Shakespeare’s (1564– 1616) Romeo and Juliet. The friendship between Pandarus and Troilus hardly looks back to simple sources. Chaucer in fact brings together Boethian, Ciceronian, and literary threads:

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the Boethian idea that true friendship lies outside the goods of fortune, the Ciceronian, taken directly or else derived in part from Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose (in Reason’s discourse, 4680–762), and then ideals from twelfth- and thirteenth- century French and Latin romance, especially the Amys and Amylion tradition of avowed friendship between look-alike knights. In turn that tradition may owe something to the spiritualizing of noble friendship begun with Augustine.

B Spiritual Friendship Historians of monastic life and of friendship have set out the overall contours of spiritual and communal friendship within and between monastic orders and between prominent abbots. Often their analyses of late probe for personal feelings, for affects accompanying even utilitarian aims whenever the language of spiritual friendship appears. In addition, the phenomenon of letter collections has drawn attention (Haseldine 2010, 393) for its expression of various political, diplomatic and institutional purposes. An overview of recent scholarship on early medieval and twelfth-century appropriations of Cicero in monastic contexts can content itself with findings from at least three volumes, two of which are notable essay gatherings: Brian Patrick McGuire’s Friendship and Community (1988), Julian Haseldine, ed. Friendship in Medieval Europe (1999), and selections from Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandige, ed., Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (2010). The initial problem is that noble friendship in the life of an aristocratic, Roman polity cannot transfer entirely to a monastic, rule-bound community headed by an abbot. Deep, paired friendships threaten communal harmony and even organizational assignments. Yet noble friendship is an attractive ideal: two men are bound to each other non-instrumentally by their appreciation of each other’s virtue, philosophical intellect and political ethics. They are each teachers to the other, confidants in a fickle, treacherous world, and thus a mutual refuge. They are also allies and counselors in adversity: friends in deed who would do everything they could, perhaps even die, for their virtuous friend in need. Even aid in an ambiguous matter is thinkable if there is a threat to life or honor. It is as though there is one soul in two bodies, golden even beyond death when memory of one’s friend is sustaining in that season of loss. Who, believing in a virtuous life, removed from family, extended kin and interested neighbors, would not desire such a rare friendship? Yet who among monks living with others can champion such a friendship given their Christian community of pious, striving souls? Supposedly all are friends, moreover friends in and through Christ, the only “friend” who is always, eternally true. Here, as

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McGuire tells us, Augustine takes the lead in “forging attitudes towards friendship in Western monasticism” (1988, 41). Yet Augustine has a precursor, Ambrose of Milan (ca. 334–397), who substitutes examples of biblical friendship for Cicero’s pagan ones. In this and in his account of friendship’s duties, he is a bridge between Cicero’s De amicitia and Aelred of Rievaulx’s De spiritali amicitia (McGuire 1988, 43). For Ambrose, adversity tests friendship, eliciting compassion and a willingness to bear another’s burdens. “For what is a friend if not a companion of love, to whom you join and bind your mind, and so you are enmeshed, and you want to be made one from two with him to whom you entrust yourself as it were to another self, from whom you fear nothing, and of whom you seek nothing dishonorable for the sake of your own gain” (McGuire 1988, 44)? That splendid question encapsulates the heart of spiritualized noble friendship, with love transfiguring the virtue Cicero would otherwise emphasize. Yet even if such a friendship is true, never betrayed and deeply satisfying, no friend lives forever. Augustinian securitas in friendship rests only in Christ, merging the insecurity of temporal affairs with the human love Augustine valued (McGuire 1988, 48). He “truly loves a friend who loves God in the friend, either because God is in him or so that God may be in him” (McGuire 1988, 48). Attaining the highest good is something one does with others: “we together in harmony can look into our souls and at God” (from Augustine’s Soliloquies). As McGuire would have it, “the bonds of friendship in the monastic life” formed a bulwark against “heretics and barbarians.” In the Christian community of late antiquity, friends sought each other out in alliances to protect and defend the true religion. For Ambrose friendship provided a language for bonds between men. For Augustine it was the very substance of human life and love (McGuire 1988, 57). The aims of friendship here are both deeply interpersonal and outwardly protective. Skipping from Egypt to Anglo-Saxon England, from monastery to missionary, we find Boniface (675–754), who carries on friendship’s salutations and comforts. His letters had utilitarian as well as spiritual aims. It is the custom of men in distress, he says, to seek comfort from those bound to them in friendship (McGuire 1988, 112). This would be true for Alcuin (730–804) as well, who writes to King Æthelred of Northumbria (reign 774–79) about the duties of friendship. One expects various kinds of help and feelings of love and piety, he says. Overall, Alcuin and others, such as Einhard (775–840), believe that true friendship is reserved for a few confidants, is a precious gift, comes close to kinship and love, and develops gradually. Old friendships are especially esteemed. Friendship involves mutual obligations, such as truth, faithfulness and constancy. In an uncertain world of sorrow and temptation, friends truly matter. Friendship is thus both heartening and pragmatic (Goetz 1999, 129–30), ideal as well as a recourse. Only in the network of friends does Alcuin find the peace and meaning he desires (McGuire 1988, 118).

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Rarely finding limitations in his friendships, Alcuin seems more personally committed to them than, say, Anselm about three centuries later (1033–1106). What matters to Anselm, perhaps because of the Benedictine reform, “is the state of loving within a monastic community, not the personal affection between one monk and another” (McGuire 1988, 218). Anselm subordinates personal feeling to a life leading to God, even if that means a dear friend’s absence in another community. Unlike Peter the Venerable, for whom friendship according to McGuire (1999, 259) is an end in itself, Anselm remained analytical in the interests of community. “You cannot be wherever you are being loved: but wherever you are you can be loved and be good” (McGuire 1988, 219). By contrast, Peter the Venerable “found in his friend alone and almost singly that definition of true friendship: we are not two in two bodies but one single soul would seem to be in our bodies” (McGuire 1988, 261) with Christ appearing wherever two gather in his name. Yet such individual bonding is not independent of community or the supreme need for salvation. Indeed, bringing a friend into the community may complete the friendship, as McGuire suggests for some of those with whom Peter the Venerable corresponds (1988, 267–68). That impulse to complete friendship through a merging with community seems supreme in McGuire’s account of Aelred of Rievaulx, for whom “there is nothing to fear when one sets forth on the paths of friendship” with other members of the monastic community. Because God is also friendship, loving the friend in the context of community means loving God (McGuire 1988, 298). For Aelred there are stages in the formation of friendship and there are also physical manifestations, which of course can be misused or used well (McGuire 1988, 314–15). With Aelred we are almost back in Ambrose of Milan’s world, eight centuries earlier. Still, the differences are two-fold: noble friendship has been reshaped to monastic and communal ends without entirely losing Cicero’s idealism; and in Aelred and the Cistercians an interest in male beauty and rhetorical elegance seems to sublimate erotic potential into Christian caritas. Where fully communal friendship and love appear, there group sublimation, although idealized, seems pervasive. McGuire quotes Aelred in translation: The day before yesterday, as I was walking the round of the cloister of the monastery, the brethren were sitting around forming as it were a most loving crown … . In multitude of brethren I found no one whom I did not love, and no one by whom I felt sure I was not loved. I was filled with such joy that it surpassed all the delights of this world (McGuire 1988, 316).

Mature friendship, however, requires more than apparent group sublimation—it requires a transcendence of personal desire rarely achieved and often the shoals upon which friendship founders. This in part is Jean Gerson’s (1363–1429) experience in what Brian McGuire calls the end of the religious age of friendship

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(McGuire 1999, 230). For McGuire, Gerson’s letters reveal a monk compelled to “sacrifice his concern for friends and family in order to save his own soul. Other people were simply extra baggage that had to be thrown off his sinking ship” (1999, 233). Personal anxiety and fear, disappointment in the behavior of socalled friends, attraction to women, separation from his beloved kin—all of that deeply isolated Gerson from a possible community of friends of the sort Aelred celebrated. But is spiritualized noble friendship then dead for the devoutly religious? Perhaps. Yet it is not dead as a vibrant motif, even a dramatic necessity in secular literature.

C Secular Friendship Jean de Meun (ca. 1240–ca. 1305) and Petrarch (1304–1374) owe much to Cicero when presenting true friendship. Petrarch in fact thinks of Cicero as a great hero, a profound, exciting thinker, a virtuous man who, if born at a later time, would have been a fine Christian. Petrarch’s letters testify to his absorption in Cicero’s various works, with some letters even addressed to Cicero and a late letter confessing his lifelong devotion (Bishop, trans., 1966, 292–95). Although rarely echoing De amicitia, Petrarch clearly knows the work on friendship. His letter about ascending Mont Ventoux surveys the characters of his many friends, one of whom he thought to invite as a fellow climber. However, after considering the matter, he found hardly any who would be suitable: “for even among one’s intimates a perfect concord of character and purpose is very rare… [they have] defects that are tolerable enough at home (for charity suffers all things and friendship rejects no burdens), but they are much too serious on a journey” (Bishop, trans., 1966, 45–6). He weighed his friends in silence, not wanting to injure friendship, finally approaching his younger brother instead, who jumped at the chance. So while Petrarch can think of no friend quite suitable as a mountain climbing companion, he values all of them enough not to say anything injurious to the friendship, especially, one supposes, regarding those who are otherwise delightful companions, who are witty, gay or prudent. He does not here reveal an overview of noble friendship, aside from invoking the rarity of a perfect concord of character and purpose. Yet his canvassing on behalf of a physical, athletic enterprise reveals how much he values friendship in itself. In a sense he goes through a process of reasoning, which is what Jean de Meun’s Reason undertakes on the topic of true friendship itself. Invoking Cicero, Reason, in The Romance of the Rose, tells the lover that one kind of love is friendship, a love that does not deprive one of one’s proper senses. “It consists of mutual good will among men, without any discord, in accordance

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with the benevolence of God” (Dahlberg, trans., 1983, 100). True friends readily help each other, are dependable, wise, discreet and loyal. One can without fear confide one’s thoughts to one’s friend, just as to oneself. “He who comforts a friend, in any way he can, bears half his sorrow and partakes of his joy, as long as their love is rightly shared” (Dahlberg, trans., 1983, 101). Classical virtue has been subsumed in the mastery of love, as has been the case all along in eleventh and twelfth-century monastic thought about friendship. The proviso about rightly sharing love, however, warrants further attention. Cicero says that as long as one’s request of a friend is honest one can make it according to the law of friendship, a request one’s true friend should perform if made with “right and reason.” But without such a just request, one should act in only two cases, two exceptions. Should one’s friend be in danger of being sent to death, one should try to deliver him from it; or if the friend’s reputation is assailed, one should “take care that they are not defamed” (Dahlberg, trans., 1983, 101). In those two cases one need not wait for right or reason. Romances in the Amys and Amylion tradition, which goes back to AngloNorman texts, reflect a similar language but to absolute effect. The two look-alike knights come, in the words of the Middle English version, to plight their troth for as long as they live. They would be to each other “bothe be dai and be nyght, / In wele, wo, wrong and right / Fferly scholde hem fonde, / Hold togeder at every nede, [exceedingly should they busy themselves to hold together in every need] / In wele, woo, word and dede, / While thei myght stonde” (Amys and Amylion 1993, 32). Neither would fail the other in joy or woe, to which they commit their hands. With its repetitions, this is somber friendship ritual combined with something like a wedding vow, leaving no room for right or wrong to divide them. Such friendship leads at times to strange commitments, such as the slaying of one’s children to heal one’s friend’s leprosy (the children then in turn miraculously revive). Moreover, in death both lie in the same grave. Here in romance we are not in Petrarch’s world of deliberations over appropriate, mountaineering companionship. Nor are we in Jean de Meun’s right domain where honesty and reason prevail, two exceptions aside. But we are in a world where oath- bound friendship is the primary, dramatic given, one that Boccaccio flirts with two centuries later in Il Filostrato (see Barney, ed., 2006, for a translation paralleling his edition of Troilus and Criseyde). While drawing much of his story from earlier sources, Boccaccio virtually invents Troilo’s friend, Pandaro. A plausible source for that character is Galehot in Lancelot du Lac, a seemingly dear friend of Lancelot’s and a go-between regarding Guinivere (Kirby 1940, 110–15). Indeed that relationship has been read as homoerotic recently (Zeikowitz 2003, 40). However, Boccaccio is not interested in transferring to Pandaro the intense love Galehot has for Lancelot. Troilo and Pandaro are friends, young men of good lineage and spirit. Upon being discov-

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ered in his undisclosed love suffering, Troilo initially refuses to share with Pandaro. Their’s is not a Ciceronian friendship, however willing to help Pandaro is. Yet more than casual, their friendship partakes somewhat of the Amys and Amylion tradition, as Pandaro presses Troilo for information about what ails him. He calls upon their friendship, urging Troilo to share because friends share pain and pleasure. Moreover, he says Troilo knows how he, Pandaro, has loved him in right and in wrong and that he would serve Troilo in whatever the action (Il Filostrato 2.5). From there, Troilo reveals his pain but not the lady. Eventually Pandaro gets that information out of him and the tale becomes one of rather quick seduction via Pandaro who is cousin to Criseida. Chaucer’s version of this is much more complex, extended and intensified, especially in the professed nature of the friendship we first hear of through a much more substantial version of Pandaro, Chaucer’s Pandarus. Although the Ciceronian ideal of virtuous friendship between aristocrats, amicitia, functions mainly in political and philosophical contexts for Cicero, not in affairs of love, a redirection to other areas of personal and social life, as we have seen with monastic, that is, spiritual friendship, is possible. And redirection with something close to the Ciceronian is what Boccaccio has done before Chaucer, bringing together the ami figure, the friend as procurer, with the friend as aristocratic companion and intimate. He does so because his is a love story and that is the social world that matters. Chaucer follows accordingly while emphasizing both the courtly in the love story and especially the noble in the friendship whenever possible. His cue for the latter may come from Cicero directly. Chaucer refers to Cicero (Tullius) on friendship in the envoy to Scogan. Or else Chaucer takes his cue from a reflection of same in Jean de Meun’s Reason, who introduces Ciceronian friendship into The Romance of the Rose to counter the instrumentally Ovidian friendship embodied in Ami. Moreover, much as Troilus’s suffering removes him from public life and performance, public worth and ennoblement are outcomes at each stage of love’s progress. Before love strikes, Troilus is a callow, cynical commentator on the foibles of lovers. After, and with help a real prospect, he becomes a public resource in the war against the Greeks, where in combat he ‘plays’ the lion: “Wo was the Grek that with him mette a-day” (1075, in Chaucer 1987, for all Chaucer quotes). Moreover, in town he commands love from all who see him, so goodly and gracious is he. In principle, for Cicero, the true friend is a soul mate who might be older, a close conversant on deep topics, a help in every need and a sincere counselor who would not assist his friend in questionable matters. He would in such cases take the better option of counseling, unless he fears for his friend’s life or reputation, provided further that help in such cases does not court disgrace. In a

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Middle English translation of The Romance of the Rose sometimes attributed to Chaucer, those provisions emerge as follows: one should help always in matters of reasonableness and honesty, “Except oonly in causes twoo: / If men his freend to deth wolde drive, / Lat him be bisy to save his lyve; / Also if men wolen hym assayle, / Of his wurshipp to make hym faile, / And hindren hym of his renoun, / Lat hym, with full entencioun, / his dever don in ech degree / That his freend ne shamed be / In thise two caas with his might, /Takin no kep to skile nor right, / As fer as love may hym escuse / This oughte no man to refuse” (RR B. 5292–5304, in Chaucer 1987). Transferred to a love story, such extenuations become a virtuous duty whenever the true friend, who has been found steadfast and whose heart inflames with love for the other’s, fears for his friend’s life if not for his reputation (such friends share each other’s joy and woe, RR.B. 5278–79, and need not in those cases noted above always attend to reason or right when clear vice is not the issue). And of course reputation and honor might suffer if one’s forlorn friend sickens, withdrawing then from public life. Reputation also matters when the prospective love affair requires secrecy, a veil protecting the lover’s honor as well as the lady’s, not to mention the friend’s. Moreover, unless we consign the world of private sexual love and feeling to sinfulness entirely, we must distinguish between honorable and dishonorable varieties of love (such as “lust voluptuous”) and thus also between honorable and dishonorable acts of assistance in love. The overarching forms of love and “trouthe” in love, as in friendship, are not easily envisioned. Could he have moved forward in time, Cicero might have condemned the affairs of courtly love entirely, as does Jean de Meun’s Reason. But that is hardly the case for Boccaccio or for Chaucer, despite the latter’s interest in Boethian perspectives, one of which, we can recall, sets true friendship apart from the goods of fortune. Such friends come of virtue, constituting something almost holy—a point that applies to Pandarus, who, while not holy or even a soul mate, remains close to Troilus, his friend to the bitter end (Chaucer’s Boece, Bk III Prosa 2, 55–57). Chaucer has constructed a positive version of Ciceronian friendship materialized in a love story, if not the best version of such friendship as an approximation of pure form. It pays at this point to investigate an important, early scene in the poem for its professions of friendship, its dynamism, and the ritual intensifications of that bond near its end. Friendship in classical, monastic and medieval secular contexts is not automatic or without its rituals of progress and intensification. Nor is ‘full’ friendship dramatized as acutely anywhere else in medieval literature. As well as being Troilus’s friend, Pandarus is also a substantial figure in the aristocratic circles of Troy. He is not primarily interested in love games or in the maneuverings of hoped for courtship, even as he proves quite able on Troilus’s behalf. Moreover his efforts are not uniformly likely or manipulative. He even has

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anxious moments when his plans might suddenly go awry, as in Criseyde’s response to the Horaste fiction in Book III. Still, Barry Windeatt reflects the opinions of many: at his first appearance Pandarus is moved with what proves an unflaggingly sympathetic desire to help his friend, but a confession of love is for Pandarus the beginning of ‘game’ (I. l. 868), and his enthusiasm is so infectious that his own feelings and motives can barely be seen separately from his zest for the game. Pandarus will apparently go to any lengths to make friends happy, without pondering the nature of happiness … . yet Chaucer’s narrative leaves it to the reader to define an ulterior motive for Pandarus (Windeatt 1995, 293).

So Pandarus here is an unreflective enigma, seemingly shallow and pleasureloving, completely dedicated on his friend’s behalf but lacking in philosophical forethought. One can point out immediately that Pandarus certainly worries, most pointedly when alone with Troilus in Book III, about how Troilus might see him in his role; he hardly goes in general about Troy making friends happy; and he knows there are lesser goods, lesser consolations for the consolable. His learned pouch of proverbs adds a flexible source of applicable wisdom. Still, perhaps he is too sympathetic and too fond of “game.” What then? If even that lesser point is accurate, then Chaucer’s elevation of Pandarus in relation to Pandaro becomes quite puzzling. Chaucer’s Pandarus is a valued advisor to Priam, has Troilus’s brother as a great friend, with ‘great’ distinguished from ‘full,’ knows geometry and astronomical calculation, knows civil and property law, is Criseyde’s uncle and advisor (rather than just a cousin) and is full of proverbial wisdom. Why so extensively ennoble a character, giving him both personal and public scope, if one simply constructs him as a hedonistic companion, whether capable of reflection or not? To elevate him as Chaucer has is to give his opinions on friendship and on love much more weight than they could have as the bon mot of a mere player. Pandarus of course can be demonstrative, playful, manipulative and deceitful, at least once politically so (the Book II ruse about a law suit against Criseyde) and later outrageously and almost disastrously (the Horaste fiction, in terms of which in Book III he conjures up a desperate, jealous Troilus for a surprised Criseyde, whom he has confronted in her temporary bedroom). But arguably his playful and manipulative traits intertwine both instrumentally and functionally with his concern over Troilus’s woe to a far greater extent than is so with Pandaro. His playful ruses draw Troilus out and his manipulative and playful ways both start and help sustain the affair with Criseyde on Troilus’s behalf. For the poem and in Pandarus’s case, one needs to emphasize the Amys and Amylion principle, so to speak: the proposition that “trouthe” in full and especially in ties of noble friendship trumps avuncular and otherwise familial ties; indeed as ideals the two kinds of relationships are incommensurable in friendship literature and perhaps even in historical fact (Bray 2003, 111). In the Nicomachean

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Ethics, Book VIII, Aristotle notes friendship within family ties, friendship that brings pleasure and usefulness. It is the latter benefit that makes such friendship lesser than the best friendship between two men of virtue. Cicero hardly disagrees as in De amicitia he distinguishes between friendship and relationship, thinking of friendship as “nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection … with the exception of wisdom, no better thing has been given to man by the immortal gods (Aristotle 1962, 238). Boethius also follows suit as Philosophy raises true friendship above any other good or partial good in this world. True friends come of virtue; they are not among the goods of fortune—see Chaucer’s Boece (Bok III Prosa 2, 55–57). There are few noble friendships in the world, but among them Cicero notes the friendship between Theseus and Perotheos, which Chaucer invokes as a love that transcends death between two “felawes” in The Knight’s Tale (1191–1200), although in that tale Theseus himself will later praise the God of Love after softening to the discovered Arcite and Palamon (defeated knights whom he initially imprisoned for life). And, as a second proposition, Love somewhat exceeds friendship, in effect, as Troilus realizes that Criseyde is much more than he ever anticipated, their consummated love removing the two for a time from the three-way gladness Pandarus early on anticipated, placing them in a paradise Pandarus in Book III can only imagine as a kind of wager: “he / That ones may in hevene blisse be, / He feleth other weyes, dar I leye, / Than thilke tyme he first herde of it seye” (1656–59). So, when approached Neoplatonically and through the lenses of (a nearly) noble friendship, which in effect is a game changer, the poem’s love drama and friendship story take on a different cast overall and in close readings from the assessments most readers form, assessments usually critical of Pandarus by reading pander back into his name and by supposing he should attend more to Criseyde’s interests than to Troilus’s. Only a few recent readers see it otherwise, with Richard Zeikowitz noting how the text privileges friendship over the uncle-niece relationship (Zeikowitz 2003, 46, while pursuing a homoerotic reading; and Hill 2003, on the Ciceronian). Pandarus works assiduously on Troilus’s behalf, having committed his “trowthe” to doing so. Indeed, his enlarged role and his relations with Troilus make the poem as much a work in the tradition of vernacular friendship literature, and as such clearly the best instance of that tradition, as it is a tragic love story. We have inside Troilus’s double sorrow an extraordinary friendship, Pandarus and his Troilus, which emotionally and intellectually changes the dramatic situation radically. It notably alters expected obligations and imperatives. When Pandarus goes to Criseyde on Troilus’s dire behalf (Troilus seeming capable of dying) he completely serves his “fulle” friend, having already offered wise counsel in Book I—such as this, “Requere naught that is ayeyns hyre name; / For vertu

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streccheth naught himself to shame” (902–03)—while simultaneously considering his lovely niece’s honor and inclinations. In the course of those embassies she shifts internally after her first outbursts and refusals, then considers, and then eventually finds security, albeit not an eternal security, in love. When discovered in Book I, and after being prodded, Troilus, insists on hiding his love whereas Pandarus calls on the intensity and constancy of their friendship in his effort at discovery: “if evere love or trouthe [emphasis mine] / Hath be, or is, betwixen the and me, / Ne do thow nevere swich a crueltee / To hidden fro thi frend so gret a care! / Wostow naught wel that it am I, Pandare” (584–88). Clearly, whatever we think of his eventual maneuvers in Books II and III, where he lies to Troilus’s brother and to Criseyde about a legal suit against her and especially to her about Troilus’s jealousy in Book III, Pandarus in the moment resorts to the depth and constancy of the friendship. The powerful subjunctive, the emphatic calling up of what has been or is, and even the end rhyme of Pandare and “care”–all intensify what Chaucer finds in Boccaccio so as to expresses the depth of Pandarus’s worry. He is not angling for some juicy information to enliven his afternoon. He is straightforwardly, truly concerned, as well as somewhat angry. Essentially he says, ‘Don’t throw me, your best friend, out of your life in this your time of need. Trust me, confide, let me share with you your great care.’ Sharing here is more than cozy or friendly. It is central to the gift of friendship given and reciprocated. Not sharing is wrenching; it tears the friendship asunder without cause: in short a kind of insane cruelty. Pandarus continues, with Chaucer expanding upon Boccaccio, by reminding Troilus of their great friendship as a kind of covenant for sharing each other’s woes as well as glad play, a covenant Pandarus has always upheld and always will: whether in matters of true or false report, in wrong or right he has always loved Troilus. The force of that covenant eludes Barbara Newman (1980, 269), who has doubts about a “trouthe” defined in some such way. But Chaucer here has tapped into the classical and medieval tradition of look-a-like blood brothers bound by something like a marriage vow, familiar to us especially in the Amys and Amylion tradition. In this tradition, as indicated above, the friendship, which may involve feudal vows, supersedes, indeed overrides, all family and marital ties as well as those of vassal and lord. At a personal level, Pandarus needs his “fulle” friendship. He needs its intimacy and love in the face of the world’s ups and downs. It is what Cicero would say is the greatest bond of admiration and well-wishing between men of virtue, arousing love and calling out love in turn (but not countenancing just any passion). For his part in the moment, Troilus would not have Pandarus think ill of him, eventually sighing that he, love-afflicted, is in despair, a revelation that should now satisfy his “fulle frend” (610).

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So that is the problem, not battle fatigue or stress, and not spiritual remorse (presumably woes Pandarus can less well address). Relieved, he speaks to Troilus a little superciliously now: how have you long and unnaturally hidden this from me? But how indeed, Pandarus might wonder, suggesting Troilus’s past freedom in his feelings, confidence in Pandarus and callow scorn for lovers. By helping Troilus, Pandarus can do well and conserve their “fulle” friendship, not one injured by his withdrawal. He can perhaps compensate also for his own disappointments in love, while still needing to discover the object of Troilus’s suffering. A few stanzas later, after many efforts at prying out whom Troilus loves, Pandarus comically shakes an almost terrified Troilus, who quakingly, finally says, “Thanne is my swete fo called Criseyde” (874). Despite that “swete” the stress of revealing her name nearly kills him, something Pandarus comically overlooks as he tells his “frend so deere” that Love has established him well. For she is an excellent woman, of good name, wise, well-mannered and noble. That she is beautiful he supposes Troilus already knows. His excited praise continues by comparatives and negations reflecting his admiration of Criseyde as well as his sense that she is approachable, will have doing well in mind and some idea of what to do when Pandarus tells her about Troilus. Moreover, because there is nothing vicious or hard-hearted about her, “so foloweth it that there is some pitee” (899)—a crucial moral claim. At this juncture Pandarus articulates a valuable truth: it is nothing but good to love well and to have fallen in love with a most worthy person. Surely this has happened more by grace than happenstance (894–96). Pandarus’s praise perhaps idealizes his niece too much, although its terms and tenor recall the Man in Black’s portrait of his lady in Chaucer’s early The Book of the Duchess. That extended report, if seen in retrospect, becomes Chaucer’s preliminary sketch for honest love and turmoil, coinciding in several points with Troilus’s much more lyrical and more dramatically imagined arc (cf. BD. 835–40; 1034–43; 1277–80). With both the Man in Black and Troilus well “beset” in love, Chaucer does more than draw upon the love-struck Troilo as a model. He works toward the best that can be thought and felt about heterosexual love, about “trouthe” in love. When Pandarus adds that Troilus is not to require anything of her that would dishonor her, we hear a wise friend, counselor and doting uncle, after which teasing time comes again as he recalls Troilus having once called Love Saint Idiot and Lord of Fools. Troilus should now repent, asking the God of Love for grace. This Troilus does as he and Pandarus turn the scene into a moment of religious obeisance, with Pandarus becoming a kind of confessor on behalf of the God of Love. Then the hierarchical relationship shifts, a shift to which we should attend carefully and which Chaucer adds to the comparable moment in Boccac-

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cio’s poem (Troilo merely jumps down from his bed and embraces Pandaro). When Pandarus vows his all he says that because it would redound upon Criseyde well to love and cherish a worthy knight, “I am, and wol ben, ay redy / To peyne me to do yow this servyse; / For bothe yow to plese thus hope I / … / And so we may ben gladed alle thre” (989–94). The stanza begins with an announcement of devoted service, ever ready, in the hope that he can please both. It ends with a prospect of gladness for all three (for Pandarus gladness in the success of his “servyse”; for Troilus and Criseyde, gladness in their mutual pleasure and in Pandarus’s service for both of them—the fluid pronoun applying first to Troilus and then to the prospective lovers). The two points envelope a notion of secrecy as wise counsel. Now if Pandarus would serve his “fulle” friend, what will the friend do in turn? Invoking Venus’s help, Troilus hopes that before he dies he might do something to deserve Pandarus’s thanks. That settled, Troilus becomes urgent about how his woe will be lessened, an urgency that expresses an instrumental strand in his embodiment of friendship (a strand in part characterizing him until after the first consummation). In response Pandarus soon enough urges gladness and the receiving from Troilus of “this labour and this bisynesse” such that his success will be Troilus’s “swetnesse” (1043, the rhyme underlining Pandarus’s hopes in all of his labor). Such a request and promise require yet another in return, which Troilus forms by first kneeling and grasping Pandarus. What seems abject upon casual notice is in fact the prelude to a vow of prowess against the Greeks, if life and God are willing, followed by a concatenated commitment of his life unto Pandarus’s hands, along with a plea for help (“thow wis, thow woost, thow maist, thow art al! / … Help now!–an exclamation filled out in the line by Pandarus’s unqualified asseveration, “Yis, by my trowthe, I shal”). The fluency of the rhyme royal stanza is exploited maximally here to tie hopes, words and prospects tightly together. Troilus then can offer no more for his ‘friend,’ that term placed in the middle of the line within which he invokes God’s reward for Pandarus’s promise and especially for Pandarus’s commendation of him to Criseyde, who may command his death. Tilting the bond of friendship from the horizontal to the vertical nearly sacralizes this exchange of vows and asseverations. Hardly is Pandarus merely appointed a manager of lovers’ affairs. As though to do more than reiterate his promise and deserve Troilus’s trust in everything, Chaucer tells us that, “desirous to serve / His fulle frend,” Pandarus bids farewell, urging Troilus to think that he will deserve Troilus’s thanks, doing so on his “trouthe,” a vow repeated to seal the promise between them and Pandarus’s desire on Troilus’s behalf. For now, at least, Troilus needs to forbear while newly energized for the wars or “elles al oure labour is on ydel” (to reflect an earlier point, 955). The plural possessive, repeated a few lines later (“oure bothe labour,” 972), shows Pandar-

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us’s complete identification with Troilus in the work of love to come and his assumption that his labor, however it goes, is one Troilus will accept as his own. Whatever Pandarus labors to do, so in effect does Troilus. The labor he intends is not grossly the seduction of Troilus’s ‘foe.’ Rather he would labor to bring his great friend, his virtuous and worthy niece, and himself to gladness. He would do this to save Troilus, who might die for lack of love returned, and please his niece (who presumably is apt for love whether she currently knows that or not). Neither of the two sees any moral hindrance in the niece-uncle relationship. Does Chaucer? Should we? As Pandarus binds himself seriously to Troilus’s service and Troilus puts his life and death in Pandarus’s hands there is no hint on Chaucer’s part of anything untoward in this love prospect and this work of true friendship. He even has had Troilus say that he would rather die than have Criseyde understand anything about him other than what might conduce to good, which provokes some bemusement from Pandarus (don’t all lovers say so?). Yet Pandarus knows Troilus is in earnest, especially as Troilus wishes God’s help and reward for Pandarus his friend who will recommend Troilus to Criseyede. Their “fulle” friendship is dynamic and primary, subject to deepening, especially in Troilus’s gratitude, as Pandarus succeeds on Troilus’s behalf, a point reaching its apotheosis in Book III when Pandarus shares his doubts about how Troilus might see him in this affair of ever more intimate closure around Criseyde. That the poem’s arc of augmentation moves through several moments, crucially after each early development, indicates the dramatic nature of their “fulle” friendship. There is nothing static here, no simple, plot-useful given. And while true that the instantiations of friendship are not as fully noble or pure as Cicero would have liked, this more so on Troilus’s part, because of his urgent need, than on Pandarus’s, all is hoped for out of concern for life and given the love that is in friendship. Right now Troilus is glad enough to increase his manly virtue both in the field and in town, having for some time fought hardily against the Greeks, not out of hatred, but in the hope that his renown would please Criseyde. Now he becomes a virtual lion against the Greeks as well as the friendliest, most noble and generous of knights at home. That such good comes immediately after the scene closes is already cause for some joy as Pandarus casts about for a plan, a way to found the house of Love. If on occasion his means strike us as sly and possibly underhanded; if on occasion they involve deceit, those means do not invalidate or else corrupt his purpose, assuming his end is good and he in fact achieves it, which he does in Book III. Chaucer dies in 1400, but the discourse on friendship continued. The Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson shows us, for instance, the vicissitudes of friendship for monastic culture in the decades following. Secular literature does not quite match that trajectory as the idea of friendship courses through

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European literature on the strength of Aristotle, Cicero and of idealizations indebted to the latter (Achilleos 2010, 647). But that is a subject for early modern studies and thus beyond the scope of this overview. One can say, however, that noble friendship is far from dead in the literary life of vernacular literature, especially courtier literature and humanist essays, and especially with Shakespeare, who wrote or collaborated in the writing of at least five plays that focus in part or in whole on various phases of the subject: the early Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet, the great, middle period plays, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, and the late play The Two Noble Kinsmen (in part a reworking of the eventually broken blood brotherhood Chaucer dramatized between Arcite and Palamon (“The Knight’s Tale”). In Gentlemen there is Proteus and Valentine, young and hardly mature in their friendship; in Romeo and Juliet we have the sociable group of young friends led by Mercutio; for Hamlet in the dark vicissitudes of court there is Horatio; and in Merchant there is Antonio, willing to commit his “extremest means” so long as Bossanio’s needs stand within “the eye of honor” (I.i.137).

Select Bibliography Amys and Amylion, ed. Françoise Le Saux (Exeter 1993). Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN, 1962). Barber, Charles and David Jenkins, ed., Medieval Greek Commentaries on the Nichomachean Ethics (Leiden 2009). Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA, 1987). Classen, Albrecht, “Friends and Friendship in Heroic Epics: With a Focus on Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, the Nibelungenlied and Njal’s Saga,” Neohelicon 38.1 (2011): 121–39. [= Classen 2011a] Classen, Albrecht and Marilyn Sandidge, ed., Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse (Berlin and New York 2010). Haseldine, Julian, ed., Friendship in Medieval Europe (Phoenix Mill 1999). Hill, John M., “Aristocratic Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde: Pandarus, Courtly Love and Ciceronian Brotherhood in Troy,” New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Woodbridge 2003), 165–82. McGuire, Brian Patrick, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250, paperback ed. (1988; Ithaca, NY, 2010). McGuire, Brian Patrick, “Jean Gerson and the End of Spiritual Friendship: Dilemmas of Conscience,” Friendship in Medieval Europe, ed. Julian Haseldine (Phoenix Mills 1999), 229–50. Rosenberg, Samuel N. and Samuel Damon, trans., Ami and Amile: A Medieval Tale of Friendship, Translated from the Old French (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996).

Paul Milliman

Games and Pastimes A Historiography, Methodology, and Chronology I Historiography Games and pastimes have been important topics for medievalists since the beginning of medieval studies as an academic discipline in North America and Europe (Carter 1988). Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), the second president of the Medieval Academy of America—which he played a principal role in founding— chose as the topic of his 1927 presidential address, “The Latin Literature of Sport.” His lecture begins with this statement: “The Mediaeval Academy of America … is interested in every phase of mediaeval civilization. Literature, language, art, archeology, history, philosophy, science, religion, folklore, economic and social conditions and matters of daily life—nothing is foreign to us” (Haskins 1927, 235). He could not have found a better way to demonstrate the breadth and depth of this new organization’s commitment to the interdisciplinary study of the Middle Ages, because games—along with the Latin language, the other main topic of his address—permeated every aspect of medieval society. Since Haskins’s time medievalists have demonstrated that games and pastimes played a central role in the social, cultural, political, intellectual, religious, economic, military, and environmental history of the Middle Ages. In fact, no scholar has done more to advance the academic study of play—not just in the Middle Ages, but in all times and places—than the Dutch medievalist, Johan Huizinga, whose 1938 book, Homo Ludens, analyzes how all aspects of human culture developed as play. This book can certainly be criticized for at times making some rather facile comparisons and conclusions, and other scholars have contributed substantially since then to theories of game and play (Sprague 2010; Anchor 1978; Geertz 1972; Caillois 1961). But, as Henk Aertsen rightly surmises, “it is true that Huizinga was so obsessed with play that he saw instances and elements of play almost everywhere, yet there can hardly be any exaggeration in his statement that ‘medieval life was brimful of play’” (Aertsen 2008, 53). Modern popular culture has also embraced medieval games as one of the most defining characteristics of the Middle Ages. One of the most apparent current manifestations of medievalism is in games and pastimes, as anyone who has ever attended a Renaissance festival or Medieval Times restaurant or played a variety of computer and role-playing games can attest (Cangemi and Corbellari

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2012; Müller 2010; Ortenberg West-Harling 2009). Yet, this vision of the ludic Middle Ages is not entirely a recent construct. The idyllic image of the “Merrie Olde” Middle Ages was also a defining feature of nineteenth-century Romanticism, as demonstrated by the writings of Sir Walter Scott and the famous Eglington Tournament of 1839, which—despite the horrible weather and remote location—drew around 100,000 spectators from Britain and abroad, some of whom joined the “knights” in dressing and acting “medieval” (Bull 2005, 26–28). The early nineteenth century also saw the first attempt to study medieval games and pastimes systematically. Joseph Strutt’s The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England from the Earliest Period, Including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May Games, Mummeries, Pageants, Processions and Pompous Spectacles, Illustrated by Reproductions from Ancient Paintings in Which Are Represented Most of the Popular Diversions, first published in 1801 and republished several times in the nineteenth century, is the classic work on medieval games and pastimes. As the title indicates, this work framed the language of medieval games and pastimes for its readers in both text and image by including engravings from medieval illuminations, particularly from Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264, the Roman d’Alexandre. This remarkable fourteenth-century manuscript’s bas-de-page depictions of all kinds of games and pastimes provide one of the most reproduced and therefore most recognizable illustrations of medieval ludic culture. They also bring us to the issue of sources and methodology.

II Sources and Methodology Because games and pastimes permeated medieval society, we must look for evidence in a wide variety of sources. There are some medieval sources, particularly several beautifully illustrated manuscripts, devoted entirely to games. But, more often than not, games are marginal (sometimes literally, as they are often depicted in the margins of manuscripts), mentioned in passing, or serve as metaphors in works concerned mainly with other topics. Games and pastimes are everywhere and nowhere, so one must look for them in a wide range of sources. In addition to the references to games in a variety of written sources (chronicles, sermons, romances, legislation, legal proceedings, accounts of financial transactions, instructional manuals, biographies, letters, etc.) and the images depicting games in a variety of media (manuscript illuminations, misericords, tapestries, mosaics, frescos, stained-glass windows, stone sculpture, ivory carving, etc.), one must also look at the material remains of the games themselves (gaming boards, boxes, pieces, dice, etc.). The remains of the spaces—indoors and outdoors—in which these games were played as well as references to land-

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scape and material sources which no longer exist must also be considered, because entertainment structures and playgrounds were often intended to be temporary, while others have not withstood the test of time. Even most materials for play (if any were required) were often ephemeral. For example, sticks, stones, and dirt were the only materials necessary for playing merels, one of the most popular games of the Middle Ages, while many popular pastimes (singing, dancing, wrestling, running, etc.) required no special equipment. Finally, games were played in different ways by different people at different times in different places. Medieval games have their own histories, and—just like the medieval societies that played them—were not homogenous or timeless. We must also carefully consider how games and pastimes were used to decorate a variety of objects. It is sometimes easy to understand why games were chosen to decorate certain objects. For example, hunting scenes were used to decorate both leather scabbards (Gilchrist 2012, 92) and ivory mirror cases (Koechlin 1924), because hunting (and also chess and the tournament) could provide metaphors for both love and war, as will be analyzed in more detail below. But, we also see games depicted in places that seem incongruous, like the cockfighting sculptures inside some Romanesque churches, the various games and pastimes depicted in marginal illustrations in Gothic religious manuscripts, and the carved misericords which began appearing in church choir stalls in the late Middle Ages so clergy could rest while standing in prayer. Careful attention must also be paid to the context in which games are depicted or else these games can be dismissed as marginal even though they are central to understanding the Middle Ages (Forsythe 1978; Randall 1966; Randall 1989; Randall 1972; Camille 1992; Hall 2009; Kraus and Kraus 1975; Grössinger 1997). For most people during the Middle Ages playing and praying were generally not seen as being at odds with each other. As will be discussed in more detail below, there were ambivalent attitudes about games throughout the Middle Ages. And even during the Reformations of the sixteenth century, which produced a more thorough critique of games and pastimes as social evils, communities throughout Europe continued to play. Various games were subjected to regulations and bans at different times and in different places, just as they had been throughout the Middle Ages. But, categorical condemnations of games and pastimes—for example, those of the Puritan Phillip Stubbes, who dedicated a large part of his 1583 The Anatomie of Abuses to attacking games and pastimes, particularly those played on Sundays, including the “horrible Vice of pestiferous Dauncing,” most kinds of music, cards, dice, tables, tennis, bowling, bear-baiting, cockfighting, hawking, hunting, football, “the reading of wicked books,” etc. (Stubbes 1583)—reflect the aspirations of particular people or groups of people rather than the practice of the majority of the population, who enjoyed the games

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and pastimes the Puritans and other medieval and early modern reformers thundered against. Throughout the Middle Ages certain games and pastimes, and games and pastimes in general, had their proponents and opponents, with both clergy and laity on both sides of the aisle.

III Chronological Developments The centuries of the early Middle Ages were an important transitional time in the history of European games and pastimes. This era witnessed the end of Roman spectacle in all places except for Constantinople’s Hippodrome (Milliman 2014; Roueché 2008). But this does not mean that all Roman games and pastimes ended. The legacy of Roman spectacle gave legitimacy to other regimes, like the rulers of Kievan Rus’, who decorated their church of St. Sophia with an enormous fresco of scenes of Roman spectacle from Constantinople’s Hippodrome (Boeck 2009). Other less spectacular Roman games, like board and ball games, also continued into the Middle Ages in one form or another. And, more importantly for our analysis here, medieval Latin Christians adapted Roman games and pastimes or developed new ones or ones newly introduced by their neighbors in unique manifestations of medieval culture. For example, as Eric J. Goldberg has recently argued, Carolingian propagandists elevated hunting “from an elite pastime of little political significance into a central component of kingly representation” (Goldberg 2013, 614). This is even more apparent in the following centuries, when the opportunities presented by the collapse of the Carolingian Empire and the creation of chansons de geste, which celebrated that well-ordered semi-legendary past, provided the perfect conditions for a new elite to develop an entirely new, medieval ludic culture. The heyday for games and pastimes in medieval Europe was in many ways the high Middle Ages, which saw the emergence and rapid rise in popularity of the two games that have come to symbolize medieval society—chess and the tournament. The former was imported from the Muslim world into Latin Christendom via Spain and Italy around the turn of the eleventh century (Gamer 1954; Eales 1985, 39–48), while the latter was developed along the northern French borderlands in the late eleventh century (Crouch 2005, 1–16). This period, and the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in particular, also saw the production of some of the most comprehensive discussions of games and pastimes. Foremost among these are Emperor Frederick II’s (ruled 1220–1250) hawking manual, De arte venandi cum avibus, and King Alfonso X “el Sabio” of Castile’s (ruled 1252–1284) manual for board and dice games, Libro de los Juegos. This period also produced some of the most detailed marginal manuscript illustrations of contem-

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porary games and pastimes, as well as beautiful ivory game pieces and boxes, among other works of art which contributed to the ludic culture of the Middle Ages. The late Middle Ages and early sixteenth century also saw several important developments in the history of European games and pastimes. The rules of chess were changed to make the game more engaging and entertaining (Eales 1985; Monté 2013; Taylor 2012; O’Sullivan, ed., 2012). Tournaments became much less like real battles and much more like courtly spectacles, although they could still be dangerous and even deadly events, as the death of King Henri II of France (ruled 1547–1559) in 1559 attests (Barber and Barker 1989). The palio horse races rose to prominence in northern Italian cities, in some ways reviving the glories of the ancient Roman circuses (Mallet 1996; Tobey 2005). This was also an important period for the future of both gambling and state economies, as playing cards were introduced from the Muslim world into Europe and then exported to North America, and the first lotteries were developed as a means of raising revenue for the state (Schwartz 2006, 41–91).

B Ambivalent Attitudes Toward Games and Pastimes I Vices and Virtues Throughout the Middle Ages games and pastimes occupied a problematical place in the minds of secular and religious leaders. Those who favored games argued that they could provide rest and relaxation and acknowledged enjoyment as an important function of games. As will be discussed in more detail below, the main justification espoused by proponents of play was its restorative power. Men and women needed a certain amount of mirth in their lives, but it had to be the right amount and the right kind. Others, however, argued that games and pastimes were at best a waste of time and at worst taught lessons which were far more sinister and so should be avoided. These ambivalent attitudes were also reflected in the fact that people in the Middle Ages recognized a utility in games and pastimes that transcended mere enjoyment. Because games and pastimes were ubiquitous in medieval society they provided malleable metaphors, which could be used to fulfill a variety of symbolic purposes. Games could be used by secular and religious leaders as pedagogical aids to teach and train and so were useful for instruction in a wide variety of intellectual and moral lessons. But, games and pastimes could also subvert those messages, as some songs in the thirteenth-

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century Carmina Burana and other parodies demonstrate (Bayless 1996). Similarly, games could provide symbols of power and authority; for example, hunting parks like the one constructed at Hesdin at the turn of the fourteenth century demonstrated how rulers dominated their subjects and the environment, while also displaying the exotic fruits of their networks of influence (Farmer 2013). But, games and pastimes could also provide powerful symbols of resistance, and this was especially true of poaching (Hanawalt 1988; Dowling 2012). The court of King Henry II of England (ruled 1154–1189) amply demonstrates how these ambivalent attitudes played out in the politics of the royal family as well as the knights who defended the realm and the clerical administrators who ran the government. For example, Henry’s concern with restoring order to his kingdom after years of civil war explains why he seems to have banned tournaments in England, but apparently viewed his sons’ profligate spending on tournaments in France as part of their courtly education (Barker 1986, 9). In fact, the Young King Henry was trained in combat by the greatest tourneyer of the day, William Marshal (Crouch 2002, 42). We can also see these ambivalent, and sometimes outright positive, attitudes among some of Henry’s courtiers, who were both clerical and royal administrators. For example, Richard fitz Neal uses the game of chess to teach readers of his administrative manual, The Dialogue of the Exchequer, about how the king collects revenue and the justness of this system (Milliman 2012). Descriptions of games and pastimes occupy a substantial part of William fitz Stephen’s panegyrical Description of London. A variety of recreations practiced by Londoners—debating, horse racing, miracle plays, cockfighting, ball games, combat games on land, water, and ice, archery, throwing objects, bear-, bull-, and boar-baiting, ice-skating, and hunting with birds and dogs—are all praised because, as William explains, “We now come to speak of the sports of the city, for it is not fitting that a city should be merely useful and serious-minded, unless it be also pleasant and cheerful” (Douglas and Greenaway, ed., 1981, 1199). Similarly, John of Salisbury dedicated two of the first five chapters of his Policraticus to hunting and gambling. While for the most part, these passages are preoccupied with the evils caused by these “frivolities of courtiers,” he does allow that games and pastimes can have some positive uses: “There are, however, times when, viewed from a certain aspect, games of chance are permissible. For example, if without evil consequences they alleviate the strain of heavy responsibilities and if without harming character they introduce an agreeable period of relaxation. Liberty to do as one pleases is justified if moderation controls the act” (Pike 1938, 37). Alexander Neckam mirrors John of Salisbury’s ambivalence. He condemns the violence and wastefulness associated with chess and gambling in De natura rerum, while at the same time penning a poetic encomium to the virtues of cockfighting in De laudibus divinae sapientiae (Nequam 1863, 323–26; 391–92; Forsyth 1978, 268–69).

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Medieval theologians also demonstrate this ambivalence. Some associated all games with gambling or the Roman spectacles condemned by early Church Fathers. For example, when Peter Damian saw the bishop of Florence playing chess, he condemned him for sinning, even though the bishop attempted, unsuccessfully, to argue that chess and gambling with dice were dissimilar activities, and so clerics should be allowed to play chess (Damian 1989, 387–88; Adams 2006, 49–50). Similarly, Isidore of Seville condemns games and pastimes in his Etymologies: Surely these spectacles of cruelty and the attendance at veil shows were established not only by the vices of humans, but also at the behest of demons. Therefore Christians should have nothing to do with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theater, the cruelty of the amphitheater, the atrocity of the arena, the debauchery of the games. Indeed, a person who takes up such things denies God, having become an apostate from the Christian faith, and seeks anew what he renounced in baptism long before—namely, the devil and his pomps and works (Barney et al., ed., 2007, 370–71).

Yet, both of these scholars present anachronistic views of games. Isidore of Seville is merely summarizing condemnations made by moralists during the heyday of the Roman Empire, because by the time he was writing (at the turn of the seventh century)—and even more so in the early ninth century, when Hrabanus Maurus copied this passage almost verbatim into his De Universo (book 20, chapter 38)— Roman spectacles had for the most part ceased to exist, except for chariot races and some other performances at Constantinople’s Hippodrome (Milliman 2014; Roueché 2008). Similarly, when Peter Damian was writing in the middle of the eleventh century, chess was for the most part still a novelty, and although chess was sometimes played with dice and often used to gamble during the Middle Ages, the more common view of chess was that it was both different from and superior to games involving dice (Adams 2006, 50–51), which will be explained in more detail below. Such anachronisms are also apparent in later humanist writings, such as Francesco Petrarca’s fourteenth-century De remediis utriusque fortunae. In the first book, on the remedies for prosperities, Reason harangues Joy for enjoying a wide variety of contemporary games and pastimes—music, dancing, ball games, board and dice games, wrestling, hunting, and hawking—but Reason also parrots ancient Roman moralists in condemning a number of Roman spectacles which had long ceased to exist, such as chariot-racing, gladiatorial combat, and wild animal hunts (Rawski, trans., 1991, 70–100). Although there were plenty of other leaders—both secular and religious—who condemned games and pastimes, most medieval scholars had a more positive, or at least more ambivalent, view of games and pastimes. Some of these leaders were advocates of certain games and pastimes and so claimed that their pursuits were entirely beneficial. For example, Edward of Norwich claimed in the prologue

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to his early fifteenth-century hunting manual, The Master of Game, that “hunting causeth a man to eschew the seven deadly sins” (Edward of Norwich 2005, 4), a sentiment which he copied from Gaston Phébus’s fourteenth-century Le Livre de Chasse (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fr. 616, f13v), an English translation of which forms the bulk of Edward’s text. The greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), also weighed in on the benefits of games in a number of places in his Summa Theologica, but especially in the second part of part two, where under the virtue of temperance he proposes “Question 168: Modesty as consisting in the outward movements of the body,” which includes three articles directly related to games and pastimes: “Article 2: Whether there can be a virtue about games,” “Article 3: Whether there can be sin in the excess of play,” and “Article 4―Whether there is a sin in the lack of mirth.” As one would expect from the placement of his analysis of games under the virtue of temperance, games and pastimes can be virtuous because they provide rest and relaxation; but they can also be harmful if they are “indecent or injurious” or are played at improper times and places and so get in the way of more important matters (Aquinas 1921, 292–303). In the following century another Dominican, John Bromyard, presented a similar view of games in his encyclopedic preaching manual Summa Predicantium. In his entry under “ludus,” he divides games into two groups, licit and illicit, and then describes the characteristics of each. Licit games are those that are honest and provide rest and relaxation, while dishonest games are those, like tournaments and gambling, that cause cupidity, lust, violence, and other sins. Although he presents both sides of the argument, he spends much more time denouncing the evils of illicit games than singing the praises of licit games. This is in keeping with a preaching tradition in which the seven deadly sins were commonly associated with games. This tradition preceded John, as can be seen in Jacques de Vitry’s sermons from the turn of the thirteenth century, specifically in his condemnation of tournaments, during which he claims that all seven deadly sins were committed (Crane 1890, 62–64). And it is also apparent in John’s fifteenth-century confrères, Meister Ingold and Girolamo Savonarola, and also the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena. The latter two popular preachers railed against games in their sermons and also used dice, cards, and board games to help fuel their bonfires of the vanities. Similarly, in the 1420s Meister Ingold wrote Das goldene Spiel (The Golden Game), which uses seven games to preach about the seven deadly sins. The Dominican links chess with pride in his most extended discussion of the relationship between a game and a sin, and then he continues his allegory with much shorter treatments of six kinds of games, which he links with the other deadly sins: board games with gluttony, dice games with greed, card games with lust, dancing with sloth, “shooting games” (by which he means

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bowling, other ball games, and “all games in which one takes aim”) with wrath, and the playing of stringed instruments with jealousy and hatred (Schröder 1882, 1; 74–75). However, as Meister Ingold explains, the reason that around half of his work is dedicated to chess is because he is following in the footsteps of Jacobus de Cessolis, another Dominican, who over a century earlier wrote Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium or Libellus super ludo scacchorum (The Book on Chess), an allegorical exploration of the lessons that can be learned from the game of chess (Schröder 1882, 1). This regimen principum or mirror for princes was wildly popular and was translated into many vernacular languages, including William Caxton’s 1475 English translation, The Game and Playe of the Cheese, and has attracted a great deal of attention from modern scholars (Cessoles 2009; Burt 1957; Adams 2006, 15–56; Boyle 1988; Mehl 1975; Antin 1968; Plessow 2007; Ferm and Honemann, ed., 2005). This work and the allegorical uses of chess and other games will be discussed in more detail below. Here the pedagogical uses of games will be briefly considered. The ubiquity of games and pastimes made them perfect memory aids for instructing people and instilling morality in them (Luchitskaya 2010; Di Lorenzo 1973). Just as in Jacobus de Cessolis’s story the wise scholar invented the game of chess to correct the evil king’s injustices, so also can the wise preacher use the game of chess to correct the sins of the people listening to his sermons.

II Games as Pedagogical Aids Jacobus de Cessolis is one of the most prominent examples of scholars who have used games as pedagogical aids to teach about a variety of topics. This has a long tradition, going back to Plato and Aristotle, who both used the ancient Greek board game of polis metaphorically (Milliman 2012, 66). In fact, Aristotle used this game to help explain his famous statement that man is a political animal. But, people in the Middle Ages would not have been aware of this, because when the Dominican William of Moerbeke translated Aristotle’s Politics into Latin in 1260 he apparently did not understand the game and so completely altered the Philosopher’s metaphor; a man without a polis (civitas) was not compared to an isolated and therefore defenseless piece in the board game polis, but rather an unbridled beast (Susemihl, ed., 1872, 8). Considering the popularity of gaming metaphors in the Middle Ages, one can only imagine what commentators like William’s contemporary confreres Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus would have made of this if they had known. Games were not just used metaphorically to teach. Actual board games were used to teach the subjects of the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and

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astronomy—in late medieval English schools and universities (Burnett 1997; Moyer 1999; Moyer 2001). Also, playing during recess was recognized as an important aspect of education, as an anonymous fourteenth-century educational treatise explains: “Nor should the scholars be always kept intent upon their books and writing tablets, but they should be given an occasional recess and set at suitable games, so that their spirits may be raised and their blood stirred by the pleasure of play. For thus boys’ minds which before were fatigued by the tedium of classes are refined and refreshed” (Thorndike, ed. and trans., 1944, 225). Richard Mulcaster also devoted a large part of his 1581 Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children to physical education (Mulcaster 1994). But, games did not just provide a means for teachers to instruct students in the liberal arts and for student to relax and recover from those studies. Games could also provide an arena for students to demonstrate their mastery of these skills, especially rhetoric and logic, both to other students and to their teachers. Disputation, according to Ruth Mazo Karras, was “inherently competitive—in Walter Ong’s term, agonistic […] a sort of ceremonial combat,” and William Courtenay compares it to a knightly tournament “along the lines similar to a ‘round table’ with capped lances [in which] young scholars would enter the lists to prove their skill, their subtilitas, against an appointed foe …” (Karras 2003, 90). The twelfthcentury logician, Peter Abelard, who was the son of a knight and therefore well acquainted with tournaments, perhaps best described the similarities between these two forms of competitive games (and also between peripatetic scholarship and knightly errantry) in the beginning of his Historia Calamitatum: … I was so enthralled by my passion for learning that, gladly leaving to my brothers the pomp of glory in arms, the right of heritage and all the honours that should have been mine as the eldest born, I fled utterly from the court of Mars that I might win learning in the bosom of Minerva. And – since I found the armory of logical reasoning more to my liking than the other forms of philosophy, I exchanged all other weapons for these, and to the prizes of victory in war I preferred the battle of minds in disputation. Thenceforth, journeying through many provinces, and debating as I went, going whithersoever I heard that the study of my chosen art most flourished … (Abelard 1922, 1–2).

The combat of the tournament was just one of the ways in which games helped train a knight. All of the seven knightly skills Petrus Alfonsi lists in his influential twelfth-century Disciplina Clericalis are games and pastimes that trained a knight for success at war and at court: chess, riding, swimming, archery, boxing, hawking, and verse writing (Hermes, ed. and trans., 1977, 115). A twelfth-century preudome had to demonstrate physical prowess, but he also had to demonstrate restraint and refinement (Baldwin 2000, 69). A very similar depiction of games providing the training for an ideal of nobility characterized by both physical and mental acuity can be found in early medieval Ireland, as Mark A. Hall explains: “Both fidcheall

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and brandubh [two board games similar to tafl (see below)] are listed in Irish law texts of the seventh and eighth centuries as games to be taught to boys of noble birth—along with how to swim, ride a horse and throw a spear …” (Hall 2011, 150). As Eileen Power demonstrated in the early twentieth century, games were also central to the education of noble women. In fact, Cambridge University Press’s most recent reprint of her still important and influential Medieval Women bears the cover illustration of one of the queens from the Lewis Chessmen (Power 2012). Incidentally, John H. Arnold’s What is Medieval History? earlier used a different queen, a more anxious-looking one, from the same collection on its cover (Arnold 2008). These chess pieces (and why they have become so representative of the Middle Ages) and the importance of the game of chess in our understanding of the Middle Ages will be discussed in more detail below. Now, we should turn our attention back to Power, who very effectively used a quotation from Robert de Blois’s thirteenth-century Floris et Lyriopé to demonstrate the importance of games and pastimes in a noblewoman’s education: “She could carry and fly falcon, tercel and hawk / She knew well how to play chess and tables / how to read romances, tell tales and / sing songs. All the things a well-bred / lady ought to know and lacked none” (Power 2012, 78; Ulrich, ed., 1889, 16–17). Games and pastimes were also important in the education of the bourgeoisie, both male and female, as demonstrated by Le Ménagier de Paris, which was written at the turn of the fifteenth century. In this household guidebook an elderly man instructs his teenage wife on a variety of topics, including the importance of “games and amusements to help you socialize with company and make conversation” (Greco and Rose, trans., 2009, 50). He had intended to write three articles in this section, the first on board games, the second on falconry, and the third on puzzles, but he only completed the section on falconry (Greco and Rose, trans., 2009, 52; 229–52). Games also played an important teaching role in society as a whole. Hugh of St. Victor included hunting and theatrica among the seven mechanical arts in his early twelfth-century Didascalicon, the latter of which encompassed a wide range of games and pastimes: acting, singing, dancing, wrestling, foot races, horse races, boxing, and dice playing. This idea of the art of theatrica was copied in part in the thirteenth century by the Dominican Bonaventure in On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology and the Franciscan encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais in Speculum Maius (Tartarkiewicz 1965). Hugh goes on to explain that the ancients numbered these entertainments among legitimate activities because by temperate motion natural heat is stimulated in the body and by enjoyment the mind is refreshed; or, as is more likely, seeing that people necessarily gathered together for occasional amusement, they desired that places for such amusement might be established to forestall the people’s coming together at public houses, where they might commit lewd or criminal acts (Taylor, trans., 1961, 79).

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These two points anchor many medieval perceptions of games and pastimes. If played in moderation, games were permissible and could even be beneficial. But, games and pastimes could also lead to trouble, so it was necessary to regulate them.

III Regulating and Generating Revenue from Games and Pastimes The tension between the benefits of playing games in moderation and the problems they could cause when they got out of hand, particularly when gambling was involved, is most thoroughly considered by King Alfonso X “el Sabio” of Castile (ruled 1252–1284), who wrote or commissioned others to write about a wide variety of games and pastimes (walking, running, hunting, fishing, bullbaiting, riding horses, wrestling, throwing stones or other objects, fencing, playing ball games, playing board and dice games, dancing, listening to and making music, watching theatrical performances, and reading) in a wide variety works, including the Setenario, a mirror for princes, the Siete Partidas, a general law code, the Libro de las Tahurerías or Ordenamiento de las Tafurerías, a law code specifically about gambling, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, songs dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the Libro de los Juegos, a book about how to play a variety of board and dice games. The latter two, which will be discussed in more detail below, are preserved in beautifully illustrated manuscripts depicting games and pastimes, especially board and dice games (MacDonald, ed., 1995, 24–29; Keller and Cash 1998, 1; 43–44; Schädler 2012; Romeo Pérez 2008; Musser Golladay 2007; Carpenter 1988; Carpenter 1998). Gambling was ubiquitous. Just as today, people in the Middle Ages gambled on anything and everything, including various kinds of games and pastimes. As the Cantigas de Santa Maria lament, “God gave people games so that they might have amusement, [but] they turn everything into gambling and try to prosper in this way” (Kulp-Hill, ed. and trans., 2000, 257). Gambling—or at least excessive gambling—was almost universally regarded as a dangerous and harmful pastime, even by unrepentant gamblers, such as the author of “Verses on Dice” in the early thirteenth-century Carmina Burana: “Dice are the root and branch of / every deterioration: / Dice degrade humankind, con- / found divine aspiration. / Guess who accompany gambling? – / Trickery, Trumpery, Shaming, / Breakingof-pledge, and Theft, / and Having-no-property-left (Parlett, trans., 1986, 168– 69). But, this poet failed to mention that dice’s other associates were violence and blasphemy, which were the main concerns of secular and religious authorities.

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Despite these social ills, however, along with attempts to curb gambling, there were also attempts to control and therefore profit from gambling (Ortelli 2006). For example, Alfonso X in the 1260s prohibited gambling in his realm and hoped to profit from fines but in the next decade decided to legalize gambling because selling permits to gambling houses and taxing these establishments proved to be a more effective means of both generating revenue and controlling the behavior of his subjects (MacDonald, ed., 1995, 27). Of principal concern both to Alfonso and to other secular and religious leaders throughout the Middle Ages was blasphemy (Purdie 2000). These concerns appear in both legislation and literature, perhaps most strikingly in similar stories told in both the late thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa Maria and the early fifteenth-century Scotichronicon of a gambler becoming so enraged by his losses that he threw a stone at a statue of the Virgin and Child and broke off one of Jesus’s arms (Kulp-Hill, ed. and trans., 2000, Hall 2009, 74). So, the first of the 44 sections in the Iberian king’s Libro de las Tahurerías deals with “blasphemy and corresponding punishments” (Carpenter 1988, 269). But, gambling games were also linked to the development of probability and economic theories which contributed to scientific and commercial advances (Bellhouse 2000; Bellhouse 2005; Ceccarelli 2006; Franklin 2001, 262–300; Schädler 2012). Dice games like “hazard” and also “jeopardy” problems relating to various tables games show the link between gambling and some understanding of probability theory in the late Middle Ages (Murray 1941, 64; Schädler 2012, 43). Also, these medieval neologisms show an understanding of risk and its role in economic exchange, especially because the wide variety of dice and tables games required players to agree on rules before they started playing. The requirement of ensuring fairness in gambling through some understanding of probability, so that “each gambler must be equally exposed to the chance of winning or losing … [a] principle, initially developed within the debate on gambling profits, was crucial in subsequent discussions on other kinds of contracts like commercial partnerships …” (Ceccarelli 2006). Gambling games were not the only games and pastimes condemned or controlled by various secular and clerical authorities. Violent and destructive games like the tournament and football were also subjected to periodic bans, especially in England, where a series of late medieval English kings ordered their subjects to spend their free time practicing archery rather than engaging in “dishonest and unthrifty or idle games,” like football (Magoun 1929, 38). Likewise, fears of violence, destruction of property, and sedition justified several English kings’ attempts to ban tournaments, a move which had the support of popes and church councils from 1130 to 1316 (Barber and Barker 1989, 139–41). However, Richard I (ruled 1189–1199) reversed this trend by granting licenses for

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tournaments, a response similar in some ways to Alfonso’s granting of licenses for gambling houses in that if the rulers were unable to stop these games, they might be able to control when and where they were played and also profit from them (Barker 1986, 53–56).

C Places and Times for Play and the Social Aspects of Games and Pastimes I Playgrounds Games and pastimes took place everywhere. Unlike the Roman world, with its circuses, theatres, and other arenas for spectacle, there were few permanent, purpose-built places for most people to watch or play games in the Middle Ages, so people used whatever spaces were available. Sometimes these ancient sites of spectacle were used for medieval games, but usually they were mined for materials or used for different purposes; and, in any event, the few games that took place in these ruins were very different from the ludi that took place there during the heyday of the Roman Empire (Milliman 2014). There were, however, specially constructed areas for nobles to enjoy their games and pastimes. Often these were temporary structures or spaces which usually fulfilled other functions, but there were some purpose-built playgrounds or areas whose primary purpose was for games and pastimes. Among the most spectacular of these places were game parks with carefully manicured grounds to ensure that a steady supply of the best animals could be hunted in the most enjoyable ways. Often pavilions and other structures were built with advantageous sightlines so that both the hunters and the animals, especially birds of prey, could be observed by spectators and other participants (Farmer 2013; Shearer 1961). These parks might be within a “forest,” an institution first developed by the Merovingian kings and then exported to England and elsewhere by the Normans and others, which—contrary to both Roman law and Anglo-Saxon law—gave the king exclusive hunting rights, even in forest lands that were not part of his demesne (Goldberg 2013; Mileson 2009; Griffin 2007). Or, they might be smaller-scale gardens or parks which contained menageries of exotic and spectacular animals which may or may not be hunted (Ševčenko 2002). Spectacular indoor spaces were also constructed for the purposes of games and pastimes. One of the most impressive of these was built for King Vladislav Jagellonský of Bohemia at the turn of the sixteenth century. The Vladislav Hall in

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Prague Castle is an enormous vaulted space which could be entered by the “knights’ staircase,” a stone ramp which enabled horses to be brought into the hall for jousts (Kaufmann 1995, 59–63). Most indoor spaces, however, were not designed for play, and because games—both physical and sedentary—could become quite boisterous, they were usually not welcome in secular and religious structures designed for other purposes—halls, churches, cloisters, etc. They were also not welcome in outdoor spaces designed for other purposes, including cultivated fields that could be trampled during a tournament or the hunt (Magoun 1929, 39; Crouch 2005, 55). But, games were still played in all of these places and also in more public spaces, like town streets, squares, and bridges, and this playing could often lead to large-scale violence. Late medieval Italy provides some of the most striking examples of this in the form of the palio, a horse race, and the battagliola, an often quite violent mock battle (Burke 1993; Davis 1994; Mallet 1996, Tobey 2005). In late medieval England some villages had common spaces reserved for games called “camping closes” and “playing places,” where violent ball games could be played without doing too much damage to property, while some larger towns also had public bowling alleys and tennis courts (Dymond 1990; Dyer 1994, 305; Mate 2006, 292). Communities throughout Europe also had a place that functioned as both religious and social center for their community, the churchyard, which was one of the most popular places for people in late medieval England and elsewhere to engage in all kinds of games and pastimes, including wrestling, ball games, dancing, singing, theatrical performances, and church-ales (Dymond 1999, 476–82). Just as the churchyard was the social center of many communities in medieval Europe, and so the most likely place to stage games and pastimes, so too did the church calendar affect the permissibility of certain games and pastimes.

II “Omnia tempus habent” Just as Ecclesiastes 3 recognized a “tempus ridendi” and a “tempus saltandi” among all of the other activities described, so also were games and pastimes affected by the two calendars that governed the lives of people in medieval Europe—the religious and the seasonal. Games and pastimes dominated activities on Sundays, feast days of saints important to particular communities, and the times before and after the most important periods of solemnity or rejoicing, including Carnival (just before the start of Lent) and the Twelve Days of Christmas (between Christmas and Epiphany) (Hutton 1994, 4–48). Of course, some moralists complained that people profaned during periods when they should be most penitent, but Sunday games were as much a part of medieval society as Sunday

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NFL games are in the United States today. Game playing was also affected by the seasons of the year, as we can see illustrated in the calendars in various books of hours, where different games and pastimes are associated with different months. This can also be observed in the list of reforms Einhard claims Charlemagne enacted, including renaming February Hornung or “Antler Shedding” (Goldberg 2013, 613). Games and pastimes were also integral to the celebration of important events in the lives of individuals (weddings, knightings, etc.) and political communities (coronations, royal entries, peace treaties, etc.) (Barber and Barker 1989; Brown and Regalado 1994). But, there were more informal, quotidian amusements, such as conversation or “gossip,” which could be combined with work and thus could be enjoyed year round, because as Mavis E. Mate astutely argues “the distinction between work and leisure was extremely fluid” (Mate 2006, 277).

III Status, Gender, and Age in Courtly Amusements and Popular Celebrations Although men and women, religious and lay, children and adults, young and old, and nobles and commoners shared certain games and pastimes, certain games were seen as more appropriate for certain groups. The group most associated with playing was children. Children’s love of games was recognized as one of their defining characteristics by illustrators of the “ages of man” throughout the Middle Ages, where children are often depicted playing with a top or some other toy (Hindman 1981). Children played in many ways that would be familiar to children today. They used their imaginations to bring dolls and other toys to life. They pretended to be engaged in adult activities, both secular and sacred. They engaged in physical activities and in sedentary games. All of these activities can be observed in one form or another in Peter Bruegel’s mid-sixteenth-century Children’s Games, one of the most famous and revealing depictions of children’s games ever created (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). This painting depicts nearly 100 games, and when studied in conjunction with other late medieval artwork—especially books of hours like the nearly contemporary Golf Book (London, British Library Add. MS 24098)—can give us a fairly full view of late medieval children’s ludic culture. We also learn something about medieval children’s games through material culture. Just as Bruegel’s painting depicts many scenes of children acting out adult activities (marriage, etc.), so also can we see this in the archeological evidence, where children are buried with miniature weapons or domestic items. Children, then as now, can make toys out of most things, but there were also purpose-built toys in the Middle Ages (Gilchrist 2012, 147–51; Gardeła 2012; Nickel 1966; Orme 2001; Hanawalt 1993).

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But, as already outlined above, people in the Middle Ages knew that games were not just for children. The questions of which games were appropriate for which groups of adults—men or women or mixed company, clerics or laypeople, noble or common—has already been addressed somewhat and will be addressed in more detail below. Here it is worth pointing out that no opinions regarding these categories were universally accepted throughout the Middle Ages. For example, in the early sixteenth century Baldassare Castiglione framed his Book of the Courtier by having his main characters invent courtly games and pastimes, because the ability to perform well in certain games and pastimes—both violent and social, physical and intellectual—was an important aspect of being a courtier (Greene 1979). But people at court, especially women, were cautioned that many of these games and pastimes posed a grave threat to morals. For example, the French knight Geoffrey de la Tour Landry wrote a courtesy book for his daughters in the late fourteenth century, which was translated by William Caxton a century later into English as The Book of the Knight of the Tower. In this book he related several anecdotes about women who lost their reputations by enjoying the attention of men who were not their husbands during the dancing, singing, feasting and other social activities that accompanied late medieval tournaments and other courtly amusements (Barnhouse 2006, 142–49). But, not everyone took such a stodgy view of men and women interacting at court. As Albrecht Classen’s entry on “Love, Sex, and Marriage” in this volume demonstrates, love itself could be a game (see also Classen 1989). And there were also games played at court which were intended to promote this idea, especially fortune-telling games, like “have your desire” and “ragman’s roll,” which were, as Nicola McDonald persuasively argues, examples of “a kind of amorously inflected social game that was popular in élite society in late medieval Europe,” which “did not simply socialize women in conformity with dominant ideologies but rather afforded them a space in which to play with – to debate, nuance, challenge – those ideologies” (McDonald 2006, 176; McDonald 2008, 234).

D Board, Dice, and Card Games I Categorizing and Ranking Games People in the Middle Ages recognized that not all games were created equally, and they debated the origins of certain games in order to link them with more of less reputable historical or legendary figures in order to demonstrate the positive or negative aspects of these games. This was particularly true of board, table, and dice games. For example, although chess was introduced into Western Europe

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from India through the Muslim world, medieval scholars sometimes sought its origins in the “Matter of Rome,” usually crediting its invention to Ulysses, rather than the “Matter of Araby” (Nequam 1863, 324; Murray 1913, 482; O’Sullivan 2012, 1). Playing cards on the other hand, which were also introduced into Western Europe from the Muslim world via the Mediterranean, were recognized as a novelty introduced by Muslims and were not thought to have been invented by classical heroes (Parlett 1990, 35–36). Ranking and categorization is also apparent in medieval literature and artwork. For example, in the Song of Roland, the young knights are depicted playing tables, while Charlemagne’s “older and wiser” men spend their time playing chess (lines 110–14). Similarly, William Tronzo has demonstrated that the games depicted in a twelfth-century mosaic pavement in a northern Italian church should be read as social signs, where chess symbolizes justice while dice symbolizes discord (Tronzo 1977). But, nowhere is this more apparent than in Alfonso X’s Libro de los Juegos or Libro de acedrex, dados e tables, a richly illuminated manuscript completed in 1283, which depicts a wide variety of board and dice games, gives detailed rules about how to play them, and also provides social commentary through both words and images (Musser Golladay 2007; Constable 2006). In the prologue to this work Alfonso explains that “chess is more noble and of greater mastery than the others [tables and dice],” but that all three games are better than all others: … because these […] games are played sitting they are everyday and they are played as well at night as in the day; and because women who do not ride and are confined are to use them; and also men who are old and weak, or those who like to take their pleasures separately in order not to be irritated or grieved by them; or those who are under another’s power as in prison or captivity or who are at sea. And equally all those who have harsh weather so that they cannot ride or go hunting or elsewhere and have perforce to remain indoors and seek some kinds of sport with which to amuse and comfort themselves and not be idle (Musser Golladay 2007, 106–07).

He was not alone in viewing these three games as nearly equally praiseworthy. Game boards in the later Middle Ages often had spaces to play chess, tables, and merels, as the tables board was often the interior part of a folding square board, which had chess and merels boards on the exterior sides (Murray 1941, 58; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 4429, 7832, 220, 154). And manuscripts concerned with board games often contained problems for all three games, as can be seen in the Libro de los Juegos as well as in late medieval problem collections known as Bonus Socius and Civis Bononiae. Although the chess problems in these works usually far outnumber the tables and merels problems combined, signifying the pride of place held by chess above these other games, tables and merels were also recognized as strategy games which were worthy of serious study (Murray 1913, 564–735; Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 372). The high

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regard in which these games were held is also demonstrated by the fact that tables and chess boards and chess pieces were used as reliquaries in the Middle Ages (Shalem 1996, 190; http://www.stiftsschatz.de/e/schatzkammer_brettspiel.html, last accessed on March 3, 2014; http://www.navarra.es/home_en/Temas/Turismo +ocio+y+cultura/_Museos/Museos+de+arte+sacro/roncesvalles.htm, last accessed on March 3, 2014).

II Chess and Other Games Played on a Chessboard Chess was introduced into Latin Christendom through Spain and Italy around the year 1000 (Gamer 1954; Eales 1985, 39–48). But, as with other medieval board, dice, and card games, there was no one game of chess in the Middle Ages. Different parts of medieval Europe played according to various “assizes,” and games could often last for a very long time, because the queen was generally allowed to move only one space diagonally, while the bishop had to move exactly three spaces (Murray 1913, 455–70). Because of this, “jeopardies” or chess problems were extremely popular because, according to Alfonso X, they were “… like things new and strange to hear and therefore they are enjoyable, and also because they are played more quickly …” (Musser Golladay 2007, 140; Murray 1913, 564–735). The queen did not acquire her modern move until the late fifteenth century (Taylor 2012; Eales 1985, 71–93). Chess pieces—then as now—were also called by different names in different languages and in different works written at different times in the same language. These pieces could also be used allegorically or metaphorically, both in literature like Jacobus de Cessolis’s work and in the designs of the actual pieces (Camber 2005). The most famous medieval chess pieces are most likely the Lewis chessmen, which are divided between the British Museum and the National Museums Scotland. The expressions and gestures of these twelfth-century walrus ivory chess pieces have captivated the imaginations of viewers since their discovery in 1831 and in many ways symbolize the modern popular image of the medieval game of chess (Robinson 2004; Caldwell, Hall, and Wilkinson 2010). But, it took time for the pieces to acquire the names and shapes we associate with them, because the pieces introduced into Spain and Italy by the Muslims had very different shapes and names. How the queen completely displaced the vizier by the end of the Middle Ages can provide important insights into late medieval gender studies, as Marilyn Yalom has demonstrated (Yalom 2004). Chess, like hunting, could be both a public and a private game as well as a metaphor for both war and love. Both games could engage large groups of people in a conflict—chess could become a team game because the common practice of

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kibitzing blurred the boundaries between players and audience and could sometimes lead to real violence (Murray 1913, 475–76; Milliman 2012, 70–75)—and also provide an excuse for intimates to spend private time together. This is why both hunting and chess (and also the tournament, which served the same publicprivate purposes) functioned as metaphors for love in the visual and material culture of the Middle Ages: the early fourteenth-century Codex Manesse (Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift, Cod. Pal. Germ. 848); an early fifteenth-century stained-glass window at the Musée de Cluny (Cl. 23422); early fourteenth-century ivory caskets and mirror cases (Walters Art Gallery 71.264 and 71.268; Victoria and Albert Museum 803–1891; Louvre OA 117; Cleveland Museum of Art 1940.1200; Metropolitan Museum of Art 41.100.160; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 69.45); early fourteenth-century ivory writing tables (Randall 1993, 123; Barnet 1997, 237–39); and a collection of ivory marriage caskets, which also depict several other games which served as metaphors for love, including dancing and “shaking the pear tree” (Nuttall 2010). But, chess also allowed plenty of other allegorical uses (Ferm and Honemann, ed., 2005; Plessow 2005). As Daniel O’Sullivan argues, “Its rules and potential for metaphorical and allegorical representation invite poets and preachers to note the similarities between the world on and the world off the chessboard” (O’Sullivan 2012, 2). One of the most common images medieval chess conjures in modern popular culture, at least for those who have seen Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, is its allegorical connection with death (Koskinen 2005). This was also a popular image in the Middle Ages. It appears in church decorations, like Albertus Pictor’s turn-of-the-fifteenth-century mural in a church in Täby, Sweden, and the early sixteenth-century stained glass window in St. Andrew’s Church in Norwich, England (Melin 2005). And it also appears in many late medieval texts and illustrations (Wilkinson 1943). In the early thirteenth century Odo of Cheriton dedicated one of his fables to the game of chess as a means to humble “nobles glorifying in their station,” because all of the pieces end up in the same place after the game is over, just as all of the players in the game of life end up in the ground after they die (Jacobs, ed. and trans., 1985, 111–12). Another common image in these “chess moralities”—as H. J. R. Murray, the leading scholar on the history of chess, calls them—is to have the devil as an opponent (Murray 1913, 529–63; Juel 2012; Taylor 1990). The chessboard could also be put to other gaming uses. Checkers was a late medieval invention which was not very popular before 1500. It combined chess and merels, using the board and the medieval queen’s move of the former with the number of pieces and rules of play of the latter (Murray 1951, 72–76). Chessboards could also be used for other games, including dice and other gambling games, because the board provided a level playing surface and because the

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different colored squares could be used for roulette-like games, like the game of queke. For example, in the Prodigal Son stained-glass window in Chartres (referenced below), the men are playing dice on a chessboard, while Villard de Honnecourt depicted two men playing a dice game on a plain board in his Portfolio / Sketchbook (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Fr 19093, fol. 9r.; Barnes 2009, 66). Or, like shaved or loaded dice, the gambling boards could be altered to make certain outcomes more probable. We see this in a couple of cases from late medieval London, where chessboards were manipulated so that in different parts of the board the squares of one color were raised while the squares of the other color were depressed, so that an object cast on a certain part of the board would always land on one color or another (Riley, ed. and trans., 1868, 395–96; 455–57).

III Tables, Merels, Rhythmomachia, and Other Board games Tables games are similar to backgammon and were derived from the Roman game of alea / tabula, a game which used three dice to move counters around a board. And whereas chess was invented in south Asia in late antiquity and introduced into Western Europe by Muslims many centuries later, tables was a European invention, which was introduced into western Asia in late antiquity, and from there spread by Muslims both further into Asia and also back into Mediterranean Europe as a different variant of the game, nard, which is played with two dice (Murray 1951, 113–29; Murray 1941). But, there was even more variety than playing with two or three dice, because the tables board, like a deck of playing cards today, was an instrument which could be used in a variety of games. Merels was one of the most popular games of the Middle Ages. Merels boards carved into the stone and wood of a variety of medieval buildings, both secular and religious, are a testament to the popularity of the game (Hall 2011; Watkins 2007, 148). Because it was a scalable game, it was played by everyone in one form or another. The goal of the game was to place three pieces in a row, so it could be as simple as the children’s game of tic-tac-toe. But, by adding more squares and more pieces, it could become an extremely complex game. This is why these forms of the game, including the extremely popular nine-men’s-morris, were deemed sufficiently challenging to be included on game boxes with chess and tables boards in the later Middle Ages and why problem collections for these three games were produced (Schädler 2012; Murray 1941, 64; Murray 1951, 37–50). At the turn of the sixteenth century Anne of France also advised her daughter, Suzanne, to “keep busy and occupy yourself honorably but not too eagerly in pleasant games like chess, tables, and merels, or other such minor amusements,

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nothing too novel or that requires too much attention. […] Such things should be employed in moderation; they are an appropriate way of passing the time instead of doing nothing” (Jansen, trans., 2012, 29–30). This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of these three board games, but it does reiterate the prevalent medieval idea that all three games can be worthy intellectual endeavors as long as they are not taken so seriously that they arouse dangerous emotions or interfere with more important matters. Common throughout Scandinavia in the early Middle Ages and introduced into Britain and Ireland by the Vikings were tafl or table games, including hnefatafl. This board game was played by two opponents with unequal numbers of men. One player had a king, who was defended with half as many men as his opponent used to attack him. The pieces have the move of the rook in chess, and a piece was captured when it was caught between two opposing pieces. The king was captured when surrounded on four sides by opposing pieces. Both literary sources and surviving boards demonstrate that a merels board was sometimes inscribed on the other side of a tafl board, and a surviving board also shows that the game could be played with pegged pieces placed in holes on the board, a useful device for playing the game at sea. This game in many ways fulfilled the same functions as chess. Playing it well was seen as a mark of nobility, and it was also used allegorically in both religious and secular literature. Perhaps because of this, when chess was introduced into Scandinavia, Britain, and Ireland, tafl was almost completely abandoned (Murray 1951, 55–64; Hall 2011, 147–50). Another medieval board game which has not survived was rythmomachia, or “battle of the numbers,” which as the name suggests was a complex mathematical board game. This “philosopher’s game,” as it was also called, was extremely popular among intellectuals, particularly in England, during the later Middle Ages and was one of the games enjoyed by the inhabitants of Thomas More’s early sixteenth-century Utopia (Moyer 2001; Burnett 1997). Medieval manuscripts also preserve other mathematical games and puzzles (Moll 2008; Eldredge, Schmidt, and Smith 1999), while dice games provided the first attempts to understand probability in the later Middle Ages (Bellhouse 2000).

IV Dice Games As discussed above, people gambled on many things. But, there was something special about dice games, because they were games of chance rather than games of skill or games that combined chance and skill, and they were almost always played for a stake. Gambling with dice received almost universal condemnation from secular and clerical authorities throughout the Middle Ages. For example, in

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the early sixth century Caesarius of Arles called the gaming table “the nursery of all sins” in one of his sermons (Hen 1995, 214), and over six centuries later John of Salisbury called gambling “the mother of liars and perjury” (Pike 1938, 36). Yet, gambling with dice was also associated with salvation in a number medieval works of art and literature. The turn-of-the-thirteenth-century Jeu de saint Nicolas has attracted a great deal of attention from scholars both because of its significance in the history of French theater and because of its ludic aspects (Mandel, trans., 1982, 43–75; Cowell 1999, 54–110; Kavanagh 2005, 31–48; Symes 2007, 27–68; Dinshaw 1980; Bruckner 2006; Raybin 1988; Hüe 2012). Around half of Jean Bodel’s play takes place in a tavern in which gamblers partake of two of the most popular dice games of the Middle Ages, highest points and hazard. These dice games were usually played in conditions—“too much wine and too little light”—which could lead to conflict, a situation which was exacerbated by the complexities of hazard, which required players to pay close attention and remember who threw what when (Bruckner 2006, 42; Kavanagh 2005, 44–47; Purdie 2000, 171). So, it may seem odd to a modern audience that St. Nicolas chose this environment to intervene to save a man who asked for his protection and as a result convert a large number of Muslims. But, there are some parallels with “Saint Peter and the Jongleur,” a fabliau written about the same time in which gambling is also linked with salvation (DuVal, trans., 1992, 130–39; Kavanagh 2005, 42–43). In this story the devil entrusts all the souls of hell to a jongleur with a gambling problem, which prompts the wily saint to go to hell to gamble the jongleur for the souls placed in his care. Peter eventually wins the salvation of all the damned, including the jongleur he had played against. Dice could also serve a contemplative function in medieval society as both a tool of prayer and through cautionary tales. For example, in the tenth century Archbishop Wibold of Cambrai invented ludus clericalis, a complex contemplative game using three dice which prompted its players to think about all of the various virtues depending on the roll of the dice (Schädler 2013, 199–209). This game appears not to have become very popular. A far more common link between dice and contemplation was their depiction as one the Arma Christi, the instruments of the Passion, because the soldiers cast lots for Jesus’s clothes (Hall 2009, 75–76; Cooper and Denny-Brown, ed., 2014). Another popular way in which dice games were used to instruct sinners was through depictions of the “Parable of the Prodigal Son.” Even though it was not part of the biblical account, the Bible moralisée as well as the stained-glass windows of Poitiers, Chartres, and Bourges cathedrals all depict the Prodigal Son gambling away his possessions in a tavern (Guest 2006, 42). Medieval records also preserve accounts of real life prodigal sons, who usually were not as fortunate the biblical one. Despite what Jesus said

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in Luke 15, profligate spenders, including degenerate gamblers, were shunned by their family and friends (Carlin and Crouch, ed. and trans., 2013, 262–66). And sometimes money was not the only thing they lost. The early thirteenth-century account from Caesarius of Heisterbach of a young man hanging himself after gambling away all of his possessions is just one of several gambling-associated suicide stories from the Middle Ages that were meant to deter people from partaking in an activity which could be so socially disruptive (Murray 1998, 309– 10). But, it was not just violence against oneself that worried religious and secular authorities. As outlined above, gambling with dice was also recognized as a source of conflict and discord, because it led to violence against others (theft, homicide, etc.) and against God and the saints (blasphemy). And so a common fate awaited all gamblers, as the bas-de-page illustration of naked gamblers roasting in the flames of hell in a mid fourteenth-century book of hours demonstrates (London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 13 f149v). In addition to causing conflict, however, dice could also be used in conflict resolution, as Proverbs 18: 18 tells us: “contradictiones conprimit sors et inter potentes quoque diiudicat.” We see dice serving this function in medieval literature. For example, in the Saga of Olaf Haraldson in Snorri Sturluson’s early thirteenth-century Heimskringla, the Swedish and Norwegian kings, both named Olaf, settled a land dispute by throwing two dice. The saintly Norwegian Olaf won the contest even though his opponent threw two sixes because, through divine intervention, one of his dice split in two, so that he threw a six and a seven (Sturluson 1844, 128–29). Similar stories of splitting dice also appear in the Cantigas de Santa Maria and Jacobus de Cessolis’s Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium, but the result of these matches is not the settlement of a dispute but the acquisition of a church by the Virgin Mary and a soul by St. Bernard, in some ways paralleling “Saint Peter and the Jongleur” to demonstrate that God and the saints could intervene in dice games to perform a greater good but not just to help gamblers profit, because as the cantiga explains, “such profit does not please Holy Mary” (Kulp-Hill, ed. and trans., 2000, 257; Cessoles 2009, 95).

V Cards Like chess, cards were introduced into Italy and Spain from the Islamic world, but this occurred more than three centuries later, in the mid fourteenth century. Also like chess, cards spread rapidly to rest of Europe, so that by the 1370s there are references to playing cards in France, Germany, and Switzerland (Parlett 1990, 35–36; Depaulis 2013; Ortalli 1996). One of the earliest references to playing cards in medieval Europe is a bas-de-page illustration in a mid-fourteenth-century

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South Italian manuscript of the mid-thirteenth-century French Arthurian romance Meliadus or Guiron le Courtois, part of the romance of Palamedes (British Library Add MS 12228 f. 313v.), which also depicts its protagonists jousting (ff. 214v–215v., f. 151v.) and playing chess (f. 23r.). This link between cards and other courtly games and pastimes illustrates how when playing cards were first introduced into Latin Christendom, they were luxury items associated with elite courts, especially the tarot or trump cards, which had nothing to do with fortune telling at this time (Dummet 1980). The first European playing cards were expensive, hand-painted objects, and those used at courts throughout Europe remained so well into the fifteenth century (Ortalli 1996). Cards did not remain just a courtly pastime for long, however. Cards were soon mass produced with wood blocks and stencils, which made them relatively cheap and plentiful (Dummet 1980, 15). They became so popular by the early fifteenth century that the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena railed against both cards and dice in his frequent sermons against gambling, calling the former “the devil’s breviaries” and using them to help fuel bonfires of the vanities (Depaulis 2013; Frugoni 2003, 69). Two of Bernardino’s contemporary confreres, John of Capistrano and James of the Marches, also joined in his invectives against dice and cards (Depaulis 2013; Ortalli 1996, 177). Yet, not all late medieval friars were opposed to this new pastime. Following in the footsteps of Jacobus de Cessolis, the Dominican Johannes of Rheinfelden wrote his Ludus cartularum moralisatus or De moribus et disciplina humanae conversationis at the turn of the fifteenth century to show how card games could help to teach people about morality. Yet, despite the rapid rise in popularity of card games in the fifteenth century and later, Johannes’s treatise on cards never achieved anywhere near the popularity of Jacobus’s treatise on chess (Jünsson 2005).

E Physical Games I The Tournament No game or pastime has come to symbolize the Middle Ages more than the tournament, especially jousting. In North America we can see it performed live at Renaissance festivals and Medieval Times restaurants, as well as in films like Brian Helgeland’s 2001 A Knight’s Tale and in two (!) reality-television shows: National Geographic Channel’s “Knights of Mayhem” and the History Channel’s “Full Metal Jousting.” Yet, these stylized events were a creation of the late Middle Ages. The tournament as it first appeared in the late eleventh century along the northern French borderlands was for the most part indistinguishable from regular

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warfare (Crouch 2005, 1–16). These mêlées, which ranged over many miles, remained the most popular form of the sport until the thirteenth century, when jousting, which had at first been regarded merely as a preliminary, became the main event. There are rich sources for twelfth- and early thirteenth-century tournaments in both literary and historical texts. For example, in the late twelfth century Chrétien de Troyes depicted tournaments in his romances—Cligés, Érec et Énide, Le Chevalier de la Charrete (Lancelot), Le Conte du Graal (Perceval)—and mentioned one very briefly in Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain). Jean Renart’s Le Roman de la Rose and Gerbert de Montreuil’s Violette and Continuation also have accounts of tournaments. These literary accounts provide interesting points of comparison with L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, the early thirteenth-century biography of William Marshal, the ideal twelfth-century preudome who translated his enormous success in tournaments into political power (Baldwin 2000, 72–73; Benson 1980; Crouch 2002; Crouch 2005; Holden, ed., 2002). In fact, literature influenced the development of tournaments, especially the introduction of “round tables” and other forms of stylized combat which acted out “historical” themes while also providing contemporary social commentary (Cline 1945; Crouch 2005, 116–21). As the name for this theatrical tournament implies, participants and sponsors of tournaments most often looked to the “Matter of Britain” (i.e. Arthurian legends). For example, the “Arthurian enthusiast”—to use Roger Sherman Loomis’s characterization—King Edward I of England (ruled 1272–1307) put the Matter of Britain to good use in demonstrating his right to rule all of Britain, including holding round tables to commemorate important events, like in 1284, when Edward celebrated his victory over the Welsh or in 1306, when he and his son vowed vengeance on the Scots (Loomis 1953; Davies 2000). Round tables, however, did not take place only in Britain and were not limited to propagandistic purposes. In the thirteenth century round tables were held from Cyprus to Spain, and one of the most famous and detailed accounts of knights performing the Matter of Britain comes from Central Europe—Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst, in which the protagonist dresses first as Lady Venus and then as Arthur, in an expression of courtly love and knightly errantry rather than an attempt to stir up support for or commemorate a military campaign. Despite these other kinds of tournaments, the mêlée tournament—the violent (and sometimes deadly) sport which was banned by clergy since its inception and also banned or heavily regulated by many secular authorities—remained popular into the fourteenth century (Crouch 2005, 125–31), and remained the preferred form of combat for battle-hardened knights like Geoffroi de Charny, the “theoretician of chivalry,” to use Richard Kaeuper phrase, and one of the greatest preudomes of the fourteenth century, who met his death at the battle of Poitiers in

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1356. Geoffroi wrote that tournaments “earn men praise and esteem for they require a great deal of wealth, equipment and expenditure, physical hardship, crushing and wounding, and sometimes danger of death” and were superior to jousting. But, he does understand the appeal of jousting as well as its social function and ranks it among “the finest games and pastimes” along with “conversation, dancing, and singing in the company of ladies,” which often accompanied the feasting that followed tournaments (Kaueper and Kennedy 1996, 3; 87; 113; Crouch 2005, 108–09). These social and political functions of the tournament grew as the spectacle and pageantry of both the tournament and all the social events associated with it increased during the late Middle Ages, so that “… throughout Europe from the late thirteenth century onwards … diplomacy and jousting went hand in hand” (Barber and Barker 1989, 50). We can see this in events like The Field of Cloth of Gold, the 1520 meeting between King Henry VIII of England (ruled 1509–1547) and King Francis I of France (ruled 1515–1547) (Russell 1969) and also in the “sports diplomacy” of a group of Bohemian nobles who toured around European courts in the mid fifteenth century participating in and / or watching a wide variety of games, including jousting, hunting, bullbaiting, stone-throwing, and wrestling (Letts, ed. and trans., 1957).

II Ball Games The world’s most popular sport—soccer—and many other sports involving balls— tennis, cricket, baseball, bowling, field hockey, billiards, golf, etc.—can trace their origins in one form or another to ball games played in the Middle Ages (Flannery and Leech; Gillmeister 2002; Gillmeister 1998; Magoun 1938). Yet, unlike hunting, the tournament, chess, tables, and even dice games, all of which have at least one major literary or didactic work dedicated to their play in the Middle Ages, ball games are mentioned only in passing. But, these references go back to the very early Middle Ages. Sidonius mentions ball games in serveral of his letters, and Gregory of Tours employs a ball game metaphor in his History of the Franks (Hen 1995, 215–16). In fact, the metaphorical uses of ball games throughout the Middle Ages provide important insights into medieval society and the transmission of ideas, as Heiner Gillmeister, the leading expert on medieval ball games, has demonstrated by tracing the origins of the famous tennis balls scene from Shakespeare’s Henry V (Gillmeister 1996a; 1996b). Gillmeister has also demonstrated that the rough ball games of the Middle Ages provided venues for commoners to demonstrate their masculinity to other participants and spectators in much the same way that tournaments fulfilled the same function for nobles. In fact, “medieval football had its roots in the medieval tournament” (Gillmeister

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1996a, 273). Not all ball games were so violent, though. Despite Meister Ingold’s association of bowling games with the deadly sin of anger, a certain type of bowling game, called the game of spheres, was used by his early fifteenth-century contemporary, Nicolas of Cusa, to teach philosophy, which he justifies because various “… branches of knowledge have their instruments and games; arithmetic has its number games, music its monochord—nor is the game of chess and checkers lacking in the mystery of moral things” (Cusa 1986, 55). Ball games were also among the most popular marginal illustrations in late medieval religious manuscripts, one of which contains one of the earliest depictions of the game of golf and so has come to be known as the Golf Book (London, British Library Add. MS 24098 f.27r).

III Other Physical Games Other games were also played and watched both for amusement and for a variety of other purposes, and like the ball games mentioned above, play fighting could quickly degenerate into real violence. Running, wrestling, swimming, and throwing and targeting games, as well as a wide variety of winter sports are mentioned in several sources. For example, in William Marshal’s biography his achievement in stone-throwing is depicted as impressing spectators and other participants almost as much as his achievements in tournaments (Holden, ed., 2002, 92–95). Wrestling is also depicted in sculpture, stained-glass windows, and manuscripts (Barnes 2009, 91), including the drawings of Villard de Honnecourt’s Portfolio / Sketchbook (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Fr 19093, fol. 14v.) and Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 16, fol. 58). In fact, Matthew Paris’s illustration accompanies an account of a riot in London in 1222, which was caused by discord between Londoners and suburban inhabitants arising from wrestling bouts between the two groups (Lewis 1987, 228–29). Wrestling bouts are also imagined as places of ill repute by the author of the fourteenth-century How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, who advises the young woman “Ne go thou not to no wrastlyng,” (line 73, Shuffelton, ed., 2008). But, wrestling was also thought of as a sport appropriate for nobles and could even act as a substitute for jousting when conditions did not allow for it, as was the case for one of the days of The Field of Cloth of Gold (Russell 1969, 131–32). Also popular were targeting games, like quoits, which resembles the American game of horseshoes, although the object thrown was usually a stone (Aertsen 2008, 59); a variant of this game was cockthreashing, in which restrained roosters were the target of thrown objects (Hutton 1994, 19). Crossbow and musket shooting were also popular pastimes in the late Middle Ages, especially in the shooting

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tournaments held in German towns (Nickel 1975; Kusudo 1999). Games played in water or on ice were also enjoyed by people, especially youths, in the Middle Ages. Swimming was discussed in Erasmus’s early sixteenth-century Colloquies, along with a variety of other sports, and was a common pastime (Erasmus 1997, 74–110; Orme 1983). William fitz Stephen’s Description of London lists combat games on water and ice as well as ice skating among the amusements enjoyed by Londoners in the late twelfth century, an activity, along with sledding, which is also depicted in late medieval books of hours (Douglas and Greenaway, ed., 1981, 1200; Hindman 1981, 473–74). Bone skates, along with skis, have been found in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, and Icelanders already enjoyed bathing in hot water springs in the Middle Ages (Gardeła 2012, 241–42). These were among many games and pastimes enjoyed by medieval Europeans in the winter (AlexandreBidon 1993).

F Games Involving Animals The discussion here will focus on games—other than hunting, hawking, and fishing—in which humans employed animals as helpers or pitted them against each other for their amusement. For a more detailed analysis of hunting, hawking, and fishing, see the entries in this handbook on “Hunting, Hawking, and Fishing” (Stuhmiller) and “Animals, Birds, and Fish.” (Clason). Clerics’ and commoners’ disdain for the tournament, the favorite sport of knights, does not mean that they failed to enjoy other blood sports. Members of all social groups in medieval Europe were often avid fans of sports which pitted animals against each other, including cockfighting, bear-, bull-, and boar-baiting, horse races; and, whenever possible, they enjoyed hunting with birds and dogs as well. Yet, while all groups enjoyed these sports, they often did not experience them in the same way. Commoners hunted animals, but—unless they were specially-trained huntsmen—not in the spectacular hunting parties of the nobility. Poaching a lord’s animals was a perilous business and was usually done under cover of secrecy, although it could also be performed as an overt act of revolt (Hanawalt 1988). Other blood sports involving animals transcended the noble / common and clerical / lay divides. Among the most popular of these sports was cockfighting (Forsyth 1978). Bear-, boar-, and bull-baiting fulfilled a similar function in medieval society, as people, both noble and common, watched and bet on the outcome of a contest which pitted packs of dogs against a much larger animal; bear-baiting was also depicted in a variety of media, appearing for example in the margins of the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter and the late eleventh-century Bayeux

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Tapestry (British Library Add. 42130 f. 161r.; Brown 2005). In Iberia it was already popular for men to fight and run with bulls, and throughout medieval Europe other forms of animal combat were staged involving dogs, foxes, cheetahs, antelopes, lions, bulls, leopards, bears, asses, rams, and even an elephant and a rhinoceros (Ševčenko 2002, 75–76; Kiser 2007, 113–24). Horses were also baited, as were badgers, apes, and asses, and horses were also pitted against each other in fights, as we see in Norse sagas (Kiser 2007, 118– 19; Gardeła 2012, 242). But a far more common form of using horses for entertainment was horse racing. Chariot racing was the most popular sport of the sixthcentury Roman Empire, and even though all the other hippodromes ceased to function by the following century, chariot racing remained popular in Constantinople’s Hippodrome for several centuries, becoming a symbol of Roman imperial authority (Cameron 1973; Boeck 2009; Giatsis 2000; Milliman 2014). Horse racing was popular in the Middle Ages throughout both Europe and the Near East, where other animals, including camels, dogs, and especially pigeons, were also raced (Ahsan 1979, 243–52). Horse racing was especially popular in late medieval and early modern northern Italian towns, which commemorated the feast days of saints important to each community by racing horses throughout the town’s streets and squares to claim a palio, a banner specially made for each event to serve as a trophy for victory (Tobey 2011; Kiser 2007, 114–15). In the sixteenth century Cosimo I even revived the practice of chariot racing in Florence’s Palio dei Cocchi (Tobey 2005, 130–35; McClelland 2007, 108–10). Both Byzantine and Muslim nobles also enjoyed using horses to play polo (Giatsis 2007; Ahsan 1979, 252–55), and some Byzantine rulers also participated in tournaments both against each other and against the Franks in the Holy Land (Jones and Maguire 2002). People also enjoyed watching animals perform in acts similar to those in a modern circus, particularly when the animals imitated humans, as they did both in travelling shows and on the margins of medieval manuscripts (Randall 1966). People, especially children, also dressed up like animals or used fake animals, like hobby horses, in their amusements. Animals could also be used in liturgical performances, like the Christmas crèche, the Nativity scene which St. Francis of Assisi is credited with having created in 1223 using living animals (Kiser 2007, 120–25).

G Conclusion Space does not permit an analysis of all the games and pastimes of the Middle Ages, nor does it allow for a full exploration of everything that games and pastimes meant to people in medieval Europe. In addition, the limitations of

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surviving sources for both spectacle performances and quotidian recreations complicate the study of medieval ludic culture. Rich and poor, old and young, men and women, clerics and laypeople all found ways to entertain themselves with a wide variety of games and pastimes, but most of these have left little trace in the historical record. Despite these limitations, however, this fascinating topic continues to provide new insights into every aspect of the Middle Ages, as demonstrated both by the number of books and articles published each year on this topic, and also by the number of entries in this Handbook which explore forms of medieval amusement (e.g. “Literature”; “Love, Sex, and Marriage”; “Music”; “Hunting, Hawking, and Fishing”; and “Animals, Birds, and Fish.” Following in the path of Haskins and Huizinga, this article has attempted to demonstrate that medieval societies were indeed “brimful of play” and understanding medieval games and pastimes is central to understanding all aspects of these societies.

Select Bibliography Archangeli, Alessandro, Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675 (Basingstoke 2003). Barber, Richard W. and Juliet R. V. Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages, 1st American ed. (Woodbridge 1989; New York 1989). Carter, John Marshall, Medieval Games: Sports and Recreations in Feudal Society (New York 1992). Cavaciocchi, Simonetta, ed., Il Tempo libero: Economia e società (Loisirs Leisure, Tiempo Libre, Freizeit) secc. XIII–XVIII. Atta della ventiseiesima settimana di studi, 18–23 Aprile 1994 (Florence 1994). Classen, Albrecht, “Erotik als Spiel, Spiel als Leben, Leben als Erotik: Komparatistische Überlegungen zur Literatur des europäischen Mittelalters,” Mediaevistik 2 (1989): 7–42. Eales, Richard, Chess: The History of a Game (New York 1985). Gillmeister, Heiner, Tennis: A Cultural History (New York 1998). McClelland, John, Body and Mind: Sport in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance (London and New York 2007). Mehl, Jean-Michel, Des jeux des hommes dans la société médiévale (Paris 2010). Murray, Harold J. R., A History of Board-Games other than Chess (Oxford 1952). Murray, Harold J. R., A History of Chess (Oxford 1913). Musser Golladay, Sonja, “Los Libros Acedrex Dados e Tablas: Historical, Artistic and Metaphysical Dimensions of Alfono X’s Book of Games,” Ph.D. diss. University of Arizona, Tucson, 2007. O’Sullivan, Daniel, ed., Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2012). Reeves, Compton, Pleasures and Pastimes in Medieval England (Stroud 1995). Sonntag, Jörg, ed., Religiosus ludens: das Spiel als kulturelles Phänomen in mittelalterlichen Klöstern und Orden (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2013). Strutt, Joseph, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (London 1801).

Hans-Werner Goetz

God Introduction Since religion is an important part of culture, it seems to be appropriate to include a historical article on “God in the Middle Ages” in a compendium of medieval culture. The object of such an article cannot be God Himself—according to theological belief, God is eternally invariable—but human perceptions and concepts of God, which have indeed varied over history. In an “age of faith,” such as the Middle Ages, God is a central figure. Contrary to some recent studies (Arnold 2005; Dinzelbacher 2009; Weltecke 2010), there are no real indications that there was any atheism in the Middle Ages (what has been interpreted as atheism is mostly simply “unbelief” in the eyes of orthodox Christians). Since the vast majority of medieval sources were written by monks or clerics who are supposed to have a distinctly religious view, we will never be able to draw a reliable picture of the religious perceptions and beliefs of the lower classes in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, also medieval clerics had a religious standpoint that was primarily specific to their epoch (and not only of their status). Although it comes as no surprise that people thought and wrote much about God, concepts of God and divinity were seldom discussed in comprehensive treatises, but are rather scattered over a multitude of various statements in our sources. In the following pages, I shall try to characterize the specifically medieval representations of God, which have their roots in the Old and New Testament, but also include Oriental, Greek, Roman, philosophical (Neo-Platonic) traditions that have all been interweaved by the Church Fathers of the patristic age. I shall restrict myself to the most prominent ideas about God, and concentrate on the early and high Middle Ages, with only a few prospects into the later Middle Ages. While this article has to be brief, a more detailed treatment with further references can be found in a monographic study on this theme (Goetz 2011). People in the monotheistic Christian Middle Ages were, of course, convinced that there was only one God, although this was a threefold, Trinitarian God comprised of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, with one and the same origin or “principle” (principium). The existence of pagan gods was not denied, but they were regarded as demons who, in their turn, could be interpreted as the fallen angels. God was responsible for the existence of the whole universe, including all of its parts (heaven, earth, and hell), its creatures (angels as well as human beings and animals), and its natural environment (plants, etc.). All this

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was good, as God Himself saw, according to Genesis (“And God saw that it was good,” a phrase that was repeated after every single act of Creation). The belief that the whole Creation was God’s work, had two consequences. First, dualistic theories assuming the existence of two principles, good and evil, were definitely declared to be heretical. Second, the existence of evil in the world, which simply could not be denied, had to be explained: historically (by the Fall), morally (by human nature), and philosophically. St. Augustine (354–430), inspired by NeoPlatonism, claimed that evil was nothing else than the absence of good, but had no existence in itself; it was not being, but nothing. Further, God was a ubiquitous, but transcendent being: how, then could people know and learn something about Him? The simple answer was: through divine revelation (revelatio divina): first and foremost, from God’s own word, as it was revealed in the Bible; second, all history was divine revelation—as a consequence, history was open to theological interpretation—; third, deep religious contemplation, as it was propagated by the “school” of Saint Victor in Paris, could lead to divine revelation; finally, people believed in mystical revelations of those who were worthy of having visions and being enraptured to heaven, as revealed, for example, in Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098–1179) visionary books. Most of these sources of divine revelation, however, did not speak for themselves. The meaning of the words in the Bible, for example, had to be extracted by human interpretation, namely biblical exegesis, particularly by applying allegorical (figurative) and anagogical interpretations (concerning the beyond), which gave sufficient freedom for individual ideas and development. Moreover, beside and beyond these authorities (including former, particularly patristic guidelines), medieval authors also searched for philosophical explanations and argued within the tradition of logic and dialectics. (In the twelfth century, these debates led to the first scholars being put on trial for heresy.) Since in the final analysis God was unrecognizable and inexplicable, theologians tried to describe Him in terms of negative theology: that is, by saying what He was not: He was immortal, invariable, indivisible, not created, etc. Man could try to understand God only by human explanations (humanae rationes) (Otto of Freising 1912, Chronicon 3 prol., p. 131). For Otto (ca. 1112–1158) and many others, however, the full realization of this insight was not possible until Eternity which consisted of seeing God face-to-face (ibid. 8,33, p. 451). Human representations of God Himself can be roughly divided into two parts, which are nevertheless intertwined: first, God’s activity, or work; and second His character, or nature.

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A God’s Work God’s work is threefold. Firstly, He is the Creator (of everything). Secondly, He is the Ruler who governs, guides, and controls His Creation from its beginning to its end; medieval authors liked to call Him the King, or the king of kings (rex regum). God makes sure that everything develops according to Providence, His predestined plan of history. Thirdly, He is the Judge who punishes sins already on earth and He, that is, Christ, will finally redeem or condemn all human beings in the Last Judgment. It is a universal medieval belief that God created the universe (“heaven and earth” in the words of the beginning of Genesis) from nothing, and that the universe and all existence, including history and time (in contrast to eternity) came into being only from the moment of Creation onward. In the twelfth century, Hugh of Saint Victor († 1141), in a simple dialogue between teacher (M. for magister) and pupil (D. for discipulus), describes the essentials of Creation: D. What was before the world was created? M. Just God. D. Since when did He exist? M. From eternity. D. Where was He when there was nothing but Himself? M. He was there then where He is now. D. Where is He now? M. In Himself, and everything is within Him, and He is within everything. D. When did God create the world? M. In the beginning. D. Where was the world created? M. In God. D. From what was the world created? M. From nothing. D. How was it created? M. First everything was created simultaneously in substance; then the world was composed in its present form in six days, and everything was arranged in order (Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis legis naturalis et scriptae 17 C).

The six days of Creation (the Hexaemeron), three days of creation and three days of decoration, or perfection, correspond with the perfect number six, the only number that according to Augustine (1928, De civitate Dei 11, 30, p. 350) is formed by an addition as well as by a multiplication of the first three numbers (1 + 2 + 3 = 1 × 2 × 3). Creation, however, is perfect because God is perfection (Hugh of Saint Victor 1966, De sacramentis Christianae fidei 1, 4, 5–6, col. 236). Furthermore, Creation provides proof of God’s existence because the world would not exist without Him. In the Middle Ages, no story in the Bible was commented on more often than was the story of Creation in Genesis, the opus conditionis. Medieval exegesis of Genesis offers insight into the concept of God: although Creation is symbolically divided into six days, according to God’s nature the world was actually created simultaneously in a single moment. When, according to the biblical report, God is “speaking” (for example, “Let there be light”), His words are the act of Creation. Medieval natural philosophy combines this work with its concept of nature: God created still disordered substance from nothing and then ordered and divided it into the four elements out of which all lifeless and living things are composed.

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It was generally acknowledged and believed that the Creator ruled and conserved His Creation (his “second work”), and that nothing happened that God did not either do Himself or permitted to be done (Augustine 1970, De dono perseverantiae 6, 12, col. 1000). “He who has created this,” the priest Salvianus of Marseille († after 470) wrote in the fifth century, “the creator of all elements, must be the same who reigns it; He who has founded all this through His power and glory, will rule it by His providence and reason” (Salvianus of Marseilles 1975, De gubernatione Dei 1, 4, 19, p. 118). Consequently, Honorius Augustodunensis, who lived and wrote in the first half of the twelfth century, taught that everything should be in “a well-organized disposition” (ordinata dispositio) (Inevitabile col. 1211 C). According to Hugh of Saint Victor, everything happened according to a threefold order: of space, time, and the sequence of events (2001, De arca Noe 4, 1, p. 111). Historically, God’s activity was particularly reflected in the sequence of the great realms, as well as in the belief in a constant process of an increasing Christianization. In the twelfth century (with much older roots, though), many authors tried to discover God’s providence in symbolic schemes: the four great realms; the six ages of the world, parallel to the six days of Creation (with one or two further “ages” after the end of the world); or the seven epochs of ecclesiastical history (Goetz 2012, 220–30). A favourite example of demonstrating God’s “reign” in history was the explanation of why Christ arrived so late: mankind had to learn beforehand, and thereby become “mature” enough to understand the significance of His coming. In addition, it was not by chance that He arrived precisely at the time of the foundation of the Roman Empire by Augustus (63 B.C.E. 14) (cf. Orosius [380/85–after 418] 1967, Historiae adversum paganos 6, 22, p. 426–30; 7,1, p. 431–33; Otto of Freising 1912, Chronicon 3 prol., p. 130–35). Moreover, God’s “government” is mirrored in the government of kings who were regarded as God’s deputies on earth (as was the bishop, in his ecclesiastical office) and who ruled by God’s grace (Dei gratia). In this conception, historical events could be interpreted as signs from heaven. When medieval chronicles frequently commented on historical events using terms such as providentia Dei, nutu Dei, iudicium Dei, and so forth, these phrases are not merely topoi, but theological interpretations of history. In the famous account of Gregory of Tours (538/39–594), Clovis (466–511) implored Christ for His assistance in the battle against the Alamans, and promised to be baptized in case of his victory (Gregory of Tours 1951, Historiae 2, 30, p. 75–76). Because God (or His saints) were thought to be present at battles (Graus 1977), each victory could be interpreted as a sign of God’s grace whereas each defeat was conceived as a punishment for sins committed. God, therefore, acted either to offer assistance and shelter or to punish sinners (or both at the same time for the two ‘parties’ respectively). Liutprand of Cremona (ca. 920–970/72) underlines the

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fact that the victory of Otto I (912–973) at Birten over the rebelling dukes (939) “did not happen by chance but by God’s disposition” (1998, Antapodosis 4, 26, p. 113). It goes without saying that God was expected to help His people, the Christians, as long as they were worthy of His aid. God’s assistance or punishment becomes particularly visible in wars between Christians and heathens (such as the attacks of the Vikings and Hungarians in the ninth and tenth centuries), or between Christians and Muslims (as in the Crusades). Natural phenomena (such as astronomic constellations, earthquakes, eclipses of the sun or moon, or heavenly lights) as well as natural disasters (such as pestilences or inundations), were all interpreted as omens and as signs of God’s warning, predicting and intervening “activity.” God also communicated by way of the innumerable miracles that were retold not only in miracle stories and saints’ Lives, but also in chronicles. Many authors, such as Gregory of Tours and Thietmar of Merseburg (975–1018), offer ample evidence of all these manifestations of God’s “work.” God’s third “activity,” after Creation and governance, was judgment. There is no governance without passing severe judgments (Salvianus of Marseilles 1975, De gubernatione Dei 1, 5, 26, p. 118); this rule applies not only to the Last Judgment, but already to judgments here on earth. Historical events, therefore, were frequently interpreted as God’s judgment (iudicium Dei), particularly when something happened unexpectedly (like a victory by an army that was in the minority), when Christendom was threatened by pagan attackers (Vikings, Magyars, or Saracens), or when human legal authorities were unable to do justice. Tyrants who rose up against their lords never remained unpunished, wrote Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856) (ep. 15, p. 408). People even expected, prayed for or called for God’s revenge, in judicial ordeals as well as in everyday life. Of course, people also feared God’s punishment: when the Merovingian king Chlothar I (511–561) wanted to tax the churches, a bishop threatened him with God’s revenge and thus persuaded the king to drop his plan (Gregory of Tours 1951, Historiae 4, 2, p. 136). The story shows that the expectation of God’s judgment could even be exploited. In another story, a feigned miracle by an Arian bishop, according to Gregory, necessarily failed, thus proving at the same time without doubt that Arianism was the wrong faith (Gregory of Tours 1951, 1, 47, p. 30–31). When, however, human sinfulness got completely out of hand, God punished mankind with great disasters such as the Flood. And of course, people always lived in fear of the End of the World and the Day of Judgment.

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B God’s ‘Nature’ While all medieval people may have believed that God constantly and actively intervened in human affairs, discussions of His nature were more or less restricted to scholars, with their Neo-Platonic thinking. It is remarkable, though, that during the early Middle Ages, the Christian missionaries, while preaching the truth of their faith and the power of the Christian God to the pagans, underlined that there was only one eternal and almighty God who had created everything (cf., for example, Bede [673/74–735], Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum 2005, 3, 22, p. 280–82). From a philosophical point of view, God is invariable and “simple,” that is, consisting of one substance and not composed of elements. Furthermore, God alone is immeasurable, eternal, and not created, because there can only be one being like God, and only an eternal being can be immeasurable (thus Richard of St. Victor [† 1173] 1958, De trinitate 2, 6–8, p. 112–15). The “highest good” (summum bonum), thus Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), must necessarily be the “highest one” (summum unum), and the only highest one (unice summum) (1968, Epistola de incarnatione verbi 8, p. 15). According to Hugh of Saint Victor, God is “simple” in His existence, universal and omnipresent in space, eternal in time, good in nature, and invariable in state (1966, Didascalicon 7, 17–20, col. 825–31). Gilbert of Poitiers (ca. 1080–1154) and Otto of Freising emphasized the fundamental difference between the Creator and His creatures: only God is “genuine,” that is, not composed, unique (singulare), and sole (solitarius) (Otto of Freising 1912, Gesta Frederici 1, 5, p. 128–42). Consequently, first, in God there is no difference between existence and nature, being and acting. In Him, to be wise is the same as wisdom, to know the same as knowledge, living is the same as being or as being wise (thus Ermenrich of Ellwangen [ca. 814–874] 1899, Epistola ad Grimaldum 31, p. 570–71). For Him, “speaking,” thinking or wishing is the same as creating —thus Creation was just the realization of His will being pronounced in His words. Second, from an ontological perspective, God is being, or existence, or the epitome of being: that is, in human understanding, the highest form of being. “If God is good, great, holy and wise,” Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) writes, “all this is manifest in one word: He is” (1963, De consideratione 5, 6, 13, p. 477). He is He who is (and not what He is) (Est qui est, non quae est: Bernard of Clairvaux 1963, 5, 7, 16, p. 480). He is the “Onest” (unissimus, ibid. 5, 7, 17, p. 480–81). If God has divinity, then He is divinity (ibid. 5, 7, 15–16, p. 479–80). In this regard, God is the absolute opposite of His creatures, who nevertheless, although only in part, participate in His being. Thus, one might say that while, on earth and in history, God demonstrates his omnipresence in his activities, philosophically he is absolutely transcendent, a feature emphasized above all by John Scot Eriugena

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in the ninth century: “The invisible and incomprehensible God transcends all capacity of comprehending, yet He created in all this an image similar to Himself” (1996–2003, Periphyseon 2, 28, p. 81). Creation exists because God knows that it exists (ibid. p. 97). God cannot be defined, because He is beyond all being. Regarding space, God’s domicile is a heaven beyond the physical heaven and even beyond the spiritual heaven of the angels: the “heaven of heavens,” as Honorius Augustodunensis named it (1954, Elucidarium 1, 10–11, p. 362). Regarding time, there is no difference between past, present, and future because in God, everything is omnipresent (cf., for example, Honorius Augustodunensis 1966, Inevitabile col. 1199 B). His omnipresence also explains His omniscience, or, from a human perspective, His “prescience.” In the eleventh century, Peter Damian (1007–1072), while discussing the question of whether God can or cannot “undo” a historical event such as the foundation of Rome, admits that God cannot do evil (because He is absolute goodness), and he equally cannot undo what has happened, not because he is incapable of doing so, but because events would never have happened if He did not want them to happen (ep. 119). Thus, despite the underlying contradiction, the concept of God’s nature corresponds to the concept of His activity.

C The Trinity as a Theological Problem The main difference to other monotheistic religions, and the very characteristic feature, but also the main problem of Christianity, was its belief in the Trinity: that the one God manifests Himself in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, who are all equally divine and, all three of them, are God Himself. This Trinitarian problem, the paradox of “three in one,” was difficult to understand and caused innumerable discussions and attempts to explain it. At the same time the Trinitarian doctrine distinguished orthodox belief from other religions and from heretical beliefs: arianism with its conviction that the three persons of the Trinity were not equal but in a hierarchical relationship to one another, or even the Greek Orthodox Creed that lets the Holy Ghost emanate (procedere) from the Father alone. Jews and Muslims considered the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as being polytheistic. It seems that the Trinitarian doctrine was hard to comprehend even for Christians themselves. Therefore, numerous authors tried to confirm the indispensability of this doctrine and to explain its contents. Alius non aliud, Augustine taught: that is, “different in person, but of the same substance”: “This trinity is one God” (1928, De civitate Dei 11, 10, p. 330). To believe in three gods is pagan, but to deny the division between the three divine persons is impious,

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wrote Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) (2006, De differentiis rerum 2, 2, p. 10). Even the Merovingian Countess Dhuoda, as a laywoman in the middle of the ninth century, could teach her son the following truth: “One in ‘threeness’ and three in unity: that is trinity” (1991, Manuale 2, 1, p. 118). On the one hand, Gregory of Tours tried to convince the Arian bishop Agila that God could never be without the Son (just as He could never be without wisdom or light), and that the three divine persons were absolutely equal in their status (1951, Historiae 5, 43, p. 249–52). On the other hand, Gregory also had to reprimand the Frankish king Chilperic (ruled 561–584) for denying any difference between the divine persons (ibid. 5, 44, p. 252–53). While debating with a Jew, Gregory had to defend the Christian belief that Christ was God (ibid. 6, 5, p. 268–69). Thus, in the three “religious debates” that Gregory inserts into his Histories, he, who had headed his chronicle with the Catholic Creed, explicates all the aspects of Christian Trinitarian belief. Alcuin (ca. 730–804) taught at the end of the eighth century (with regard to the Spanish heresy named Adoptionism) that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God of the same substance, the same essence, and the very same inseparable divinity; each Trinitarian person is of the same whole, integral, perfect, eternal, and simultaneous substance (Alcuin 2012, De fide sanctae et individuae trinitatis 1, 2, p. 20); the three persons are inseparable in their nature as well as in their activity, and, as has been established, demonstrate the equivalence between God’s nature and work. It is remarkable how many authors resumed this theme again and again. Because the Trinitarian persons are one God, and because God is wisdom, together they are one Wisdom or one Almighty (and not three wisdoms or three almighties), as Ermenric of Ellwangen comments in the ninth century (1899, Epistola ad Grimaldum, 170– 71). Because they are inseparable, Hildegard of Bingen writes, one cannot be imagined without the other, so that it would be wrong to see God as the Creator and Christ as the Redeemer. Instead, Hildegard emphasizes that Christ was born before all times and was already there at the Creation while the Holy Ghost appeared during Christ’s baptism already under the sign of the end of the world (1978, Scivias 2, 2, 2, p. 125–26). Bernard of Clairvaux admits that the Trinitarian concept could not be comprehended only with reason, but without faith (1963, De consideratione 5, 7, 18, p. 482). For authors in the context of twelfth-century early scholasticism, such differentiations became even more sophisticated. When theologians like Gilbert of Poitiers or Peter Abelard (1079–1142) tried to explain the Trinity by transferring principles of logic to theology, they were accused of having heretical opinions by Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Saint Thierry (ca. 1085/90–1148/49), and Pope Innocent II (pope 1130–1143). Those authors ventured to the limits of human thinking, and they irrefutably did so in order to confirm the Christian faith by

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solving apparent inconsistencies and thus making the problem of the Trinity more comprehensible. Gilbert distinguished between “Being God” and “Being God the Father” in order to make clear that the three persons are three unique beings. They are all God because they consist of the same divine substance, but different in their relationship to each other. The scholastic movement did not use reason as an alternative to authority, let alone to challenge faith, but instead tried to reinforce the elements of the Christian doctrines by using reason, logic and secular philosophy. In the same manner scholars tried to prove God’s existence by using rational arguments. The most famous attempt was the ontological argumentation of Anselm of Canterbury. Since there is no one who doubts the existence of “good,” he argues in his Monologion, there must be something by which it is good, and this must necessarily be the highest good (summum bonum) which is good by Himself, namely the Creator. The same conclusions can be drawn about being: there must necessarily be a supreme being from whom everything derives its (own) being while only partially participating in it. In his Proslogion, Anselm transfers this argumentation to a completely intellectual level: there must be a highest being, beyond which one cannot imagine the existence of an even higher being because this would be illogical. These arguments apply only on the Neo-Platonic assumption that every being derives its being from some higher being. Although Anselm’s proofs of God’s existence are the most familiar, there are many others demonstrating that to prove God’s existence was as necessary as to explain the Trinity. God must exist, William of Conches (ca. 1080–ca. 1154) teaches, because the world exists. The world cannot have been created by pure coincidence because this would require preceding causes; nor can it have been created by nature, for conflicting elements would flee from each other instead of being composed into things and beings; nor by a craftsman (artifex) because a human creator would have necessarily been created himself by someone else (William of Conches 1980, Philosophia 1, 2, 6, p. 19). Richard of Saint Victor argues in De trinitate that God must be eternal because otherwise he would have an origin in time, and he transfers these ideas to the Trinity: God the Almighty must be One because there cannot be several almighty beings, and He must be Three because the highest being requires perfect love and perfect goodness. The concept of one God in three persons has repercussions upon the idea of God’s activity, including Creation, which, in fact, is performed by all three persons. At the same time, each of the three persons has a specific characteristic (proprium). Hugh of Saint Victor attributes power to the Father, wisdom to the Son, and kindness to the Holy Ghost (Hugh of Saint Victor 1966, De sacramentis Christianae fidei 1, 3, 26, col. 227 CD; ed. Berndt 2008, p. 87–88). Otto of Freising

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extends Hugh’s description of the three persons into a kind of “trinity square” (1912, Chronicon 7 prol., p. 307): Father: Son: Holy Ghost:

power wisdom kindness

majesty providence grace

creation government protection.

D The Christological Problem Christ has various functions: He is mediator, thaumaturge (miracle worker), exorcist, teacher, prophet, logos, shepherd (pastor), healer, savior, pantocrator, God, priest, king, judge, child, and even bride or mother, particularly of his Church (Angenendt 2009, 123–47). Of the greatest importance is the fact that Christ is seen as being both God and human being, thus having two natures (and one can attribute His characteristics to one of them respectively), and yet He remains one and the same in both natures. While trinitarian theology tried to reconcile the “oneness” of God with the idea that He was divided into three persons, Christology tried to reconcile Christ’s two natures (God and human) with His divinity. Eadmer of Canterbury (ca. 1060–after 1128) believed that Christ descended, but was not born, from the Father in eternity and was born by a virgin (Eadmer 1967, De quatuor virtutibus quae fuerunt in beata Maria 8, col. 585 A). He was fathered but not created (thus Abelard, Theologia scholarium 1, 122, p. 362). Fathered by the Holy Ghost and born by the Virgin Mary, He descended from Heaven to redeem mankind from their sins (thus, for example, Gezo 1976, Liber de corpore et sanguine Christi 2–3, col. 377–79, in the second half of the tenth century). In the Middle Ages, Christ’s incarnation and passion are much more discussed than are His resurrection and ascension (Marschler 2003), obviously being the greater problems. It is not without good reason that Christ’s divine nature as Son of God was the main theme in the polemical literature directed against other religions, particularly Judaism, in order to defend the specific character of Christianity and to prove its being the only true faith. According to Saint John’s Gospel (John 1,1), Christ is God’s word and was incarnated in the beginning. In his work De victoria verbi Dei, Rupert of Deutz (1075/ 80–1129/39) pursues and describes the whole process of the history of salvation as the developing victory of God’s word over the devil. For Hugh of Saint Victor and many others, Christ is the center of the “work of restoration” (opus restaurationis) after the Fall (1966, De sacramentis Christianae fidei 1, 8, 4, col. 308). Anselm of Canterbury’s question Cur Deus homo? (Why did God become man?) is answered by stating that it was necessary for mankind to be redeemed by someone who was not

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a sinner; since all humans are sinners, the redeemer could not be a human being. Christ is the center and fulfilment of the whole history of salvation. He is usually also seen as Judge in the Last Judgment (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Tympanon, St. Denis, Paris (© Albrecht Classen).

On earth, Christ is the “king of kings,” the ruler of history, and the lord of the Church (which is His Church and is itself a symbol of His body). The Church, however, is united by the Eucharist that allows man to participate in Christ’s flesh and blood. (Thus, the disputes over the nature of the Eucharist in the ninth and eleventh centuries centered on the question of whether Communion was a literal or a symbolic act.) Christ’s role in history as well as His human nature explain why primarily Christ is represented in paintings, sculptures, and art objects, although there are also artistic medieval depictions of God the Father (particularly as Creator or Ruler, with His hand stretching from Heaven to intervene in earthly affairs) and of the Holy Ghost. Christ is depicted as a child with the Virgin Mary, or being crucified on the Cross, but also in other roles: as ruler of the world (mostly inside the ‘mandorla’), sitting enthroned on the globe or crowning earthly kings and queens; as teacher, in illustrated scenes of the New Testament; as judge in the Last Judgment (see Fig. 2); or, symbolically, as a lamb (the “lamb of God”).

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Fig. 2: Tympanon, St. Denis, Paris (©Albrecht Classen).

It would be wrong to imagine that representations of Christ refer exclusively to His human nature; many of them underline His divine nature, by placing Him in heaven, or His dual nature. In the world map of Ebstorf, the largest extant medieval map dating from around 1300, Christ embraces the whole world with His head above, His feet below, and His hands on either side of the globe; at the same time, another image of Him being crucified in Jerusalem, the very center of the world, underlines his life on earth.

E The Holy Ghost The third divine person, the Holy Ghost, may have played a minor role in the popular piety of the Early and High Middle Ages (thus Le Goff 1964, 199) In theological discussions, however, the Holy Ghost was considered to be completely equal to the Father and Son in substance and divinity. Unlike Christ, the Holy Ghost is not fathered and born, but emanating (procedens) from Father and Son. As the spirit of God, “floating over the waters” (Gen 1,2), It is incorporeal. Like Christ, the Holy Ghost is involved in all deeds of divine creation, government, and judgment. It is represented in medieval artistic depictions by a dove or by rays of

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light coming from Heaven. The Holy Ghost is particularly supposed to be responsible for the “adornment” of Creation, and for breathing life into all living things. It is characterized as divine goodness and, above all, as the embodiment of divine grace. The Holy Spirit is said to be “sevenfold,” because Its seven gifts (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God) distribute divine grace to everyone who is worthy of receiving them. Everything, Honorius says, is from the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Ghost (Honorius Augustodunensis 1954, Elucidarium 1, 2, p. 362–63), who is particularly effective in bestowing sacraments, such as baptism or consecration, and effects the unity of the Church. Rupert of Deutz dedicates nine of his 42 books of De sancta trinitate Dei et operibus eius to the Holy Ghost. Clearly, the Holy Ghost did not play a minor role in the theology and belief of the early and high Middle Ages but is an indispensable part of the Trinity.

F Conclusion and Outlook In spite of a very consistent framework of the medieval view of God, concepts of God include various and sometimes even contradictory ideas. Although God was imagined as being incomprehensible, people tried to comprehend and to imagine His existence; they even literally pictured Him in the visual arts; and although He was thought to be invariable, He was at the same time assumed to be active in concrete historical situations. God, the Lord (dominus), “dominates” everything. He communicates with human beings by various revelations that appear through historical events, signs, miracles and visions. In return, people communicate with Him, although frequently through the Church and its clerics: by means of rituals (such as baptism, consecration, and Communion) and prayers. Nevertheless, God remained a theological problem because it was problematic to reflect about divinity in human concepts and thinking, and the continuous attempts to explain the Trinity show the difficulty of explaining this doctrine where explanations, on the one hand, were crucial to distinguish Christianity from other religions, but on the other hand, might always be in danger of adopting heretical opinions. However hard scholastic thinkers tried to prove God’s existence with logic, in the last analysis, all belief in God and in divine nature still resulted from faith. Although medieval concepts of God differed in many nuances, they were, and remained, quite consistent, and medieval theologians were eager to demonstrate the consistency of all its aspects. Particularly in the twelfth century, scholars developed a systematic symbolic or figurative view, and a system of argumentation based on reason. However, the characteristic features remained the same. Theologians did not alter the tradition that was handed down from patristic

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authors and carried on and developed further in the early Middle Ages, but tried to “prove” with logical arguments that it was correct. This holds equally true for the later Middle Ages. Late medieval Scholasticism further developed, systematized, and differentiated their concept of God (Angenendt 2009, 116–17), for example, by distinguishing between a “first cause” (God) and a “second cause” (man) of Creation. Late medieval mysticism, beginning with Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century, internalized human relations to God, and both directions emphasized God’s love and kindness toward human beings. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25– 1275) interprets God’s anger as being quite moderate: God’s revenge is working gently (Angenendt 2009, 103). Thomas and Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280) distinguish sharply between “relations” and “proprieties” in the three divine persons. Nevertheless, these developments suggest no more than tendencies. Unlike some recent suggestions, I cannot see clear trends in the concept of God over the course of the Middle Ages: for example, there was no clear development from an image of an irascible and severe God toward “the good Lord” (thus Le Goff 2003, 25; 99). Both irascibility and goodness are characteristic features of God throughout the medieval centuries. God loves His creatures well before the Later Middle Ages, and man has both loved and feared God throughout the Middle Ages. Similarly one-sided seems the suggestion, resulting exclusively from the analysis of depictions, that the concept of Christ developed over time, from a “warrior god” and ruler in the Early Middle Ages toward the suffering Christ in the Later Middle Ages (Dinzelbacher 2008, 142–45), or from an enthroned to a suffering Christ (Le Goff 2003, 99), and that this progression indicates religious internalization. Both perspectives remain characteristic features of the concept of God in all periods of the Middle Ages: the idea of Christ’s kingdom remains important in the later Middle Ages (Leclercq 1959), and a suffering Christ is depicted also in earlier centuries (Sepière 1994). The specific medieval concepts reveal themselves in the abundance of current ideas. In addition, the idea of God as the Lord may correspond to a “feudal age” (thus Le Goff 2003, 53–69), but has nevertheless unambiguous roots in the Old Testament. Medieval concepts of God may, of course, appear naïve in our eyes, but they nevertheless are characteristic of this period which adopted concepts that, from our point of view, may seem pagan, but probably corresponded simply to the specific thinking of that period. Thus, the Trinity may be interpreted as a substitute for polytheism. However, medieval authors did not at all recognize such an interpretation and instead defended the unity of God vehemently against attacks from other religions, heresies and probably also against doubts of some Christians. The ‘medieval God’ bears both characteristics: He is imagined and explained by earthly concepts, but at the same time He is the sublime and transcendent being beyond any human imagination.

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In medieval convictions, God is incomprehensible, yet reveals Himself constantly through His deeds. This contrast causes a tension that seems to be characteristic of all medieval religious thinking, and is not merely a distinction between popular thought and theological reflexions. Admittedly, we do not know much about the ideas that the common people had about God, but they surely heard about God every Sunday from their priests’ sermons. It seems reasonable to assume that they, too, believed most of what they heard.

Select Bibliography Angenendt, Arnold, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter, 4th ed. (1997; Darmstadt 2009). Goetz, Hans-Werner, Gott und die Welt: Religiöse Vorstellungen des frühen und hohen Mittelalters, vol. I, part 1: Das Gottesbild (Berlin 2011). Kessler, Herbert L., Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia, PA, 2000). Le Goff, Jacques, Le Dieu du Moyen Âge: Entretiens avec Jean-Luc Pouthier (Paris 2003). Schmitt, Jean-Claude, “Dieu,” Dictionnaire raisonné de l’Occident médiéval, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris 1999), 273–89. [= Schmitt 1999a]

Kriszta Kotsis

The Greek Orthodox Church A Introduction The designation Greek Orthodox Church collapses multiple layers of meaning and historical development; it can refer to: the Greco-Roman linguistic and cultural context of the newly emerging religion of Christianity in contrast to its Jewish roots; the Churches of the Eastern Mediterranean; the Church of the Byzantine Empire; and all orthodox Churches in operation today that use the Greek language and the Byzantine rite (Harakas 2005). This essay examines one of these, the Church of the Byzantine Empire whose territories historically encompassed the capital, Asia Minor, much of the Balkan Peninsula, and the Aegean Islands, although by the fifteenth century this domain diminished to barely more than the capital itself. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the complexity of the concepts ‘Byzantine’ and ‘orthodoxy.’ The term Byzantine, first used by Hieronymus Wolf in the sixteenth century, derives from Byzantion, the settlement Constantine I refounded and renamed Constantinople in 324 (Evans 2004, 5; Dagron 1974, 13–47). It was frequently applied as a derogatory label to distinguish what was perceived as a depraved medieval state in the Eastern Mediterranean from its august ancestor, the ancient Roman Empire. The people of the Eastern Roman Empire, whom we call Byzantine, however, called themselves and their empire Roman, yet Western medieval polemical texts tendentiously call them not Romans but Greeks (Stephenson 2010, 429–30; Page 2008, 11–71; Kaldellis 2007, 68), highlighting their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural difference. Yet, following the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, Greek and Hellene became labels of selfidentification used by Byzantines to articulate resistance to foreign rule (Page 2008, 123–29; Angelov 2005). While Greek was the dominant language in Byzantium after the sixth century, the empire also incorporated populations who spoke other tongues (Smythe 2010). Recent scholarship has examined the intricate ethnic, national, cultural, and religious threads that underpin Byzantine identity (Smythe 2010; Page 2008; Kaldellis 2007). Tia Kolbaba has emphasized how the Byzantines’ encounters with Westerners crystallized and consolidated notions about their own identity, which was complex and mutable (Kolbaba 2000; 2001). Defining what constitutes orthodoxy is similarly difficult. Averil Cameron argued that, although orthodoxy is frequently evoked by scholarship, it should not be the primary analytical framework in studying Byzantium. She further noted that

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orthodoxy is “not at all something fixed and easily definable” (Cameron 2008, 135). Recent scholarly work underscores that orthodox doctrine fluctuated, was continuously fought over, and its definition and enforcement required considerable effort (Louth and Casiday, ed., 2006; Cameron 2008; 2007; MacMullen 2007; Williams 2002). The uncritical use of the terms Byzantine and orthodoxy can obscure the dynamic nature of Byzantine civilization, a feature emphasized in recent scholarly work (e.g., Cameron 1987; Herrin 2007). The Byzantines prized taxis (the orderly hierarchy of both Church and state), a principle particularly strongly articulated in imperial and religious ceremonials (Cameron 1987; Mango, ed., 2002, 16; Porphyrogennetos 2012), and visual images. Yet, taxis was tempered by oikonomia (compromise or dispensation offered in imitation of God’s grace), which allowed flexibility especially in the enforcement of rules governing the Church (Kazhdan 1994, 203–06; Neville 2004, 101–02). Byzantine culture is paradoxical: its insistence on tradition creates the impression of a calcified and rigid society, a view echoed by many modern historians, yet, under the veneer of stability great changes unfolded, social mobility was possible, and flexibility could be exercised (Kolbaba 2000, 129–33; Kazhdan and Constable 1982, 117–39). Complex interactions of order, hierarchy, change, and flexibility characterize the history of the Byzantine Church. This essay highlights noteworthy themes in the life of this institution from the early through the late Byzantine periods (fourth through fifteenth c.). The themes progress broadly chronologically. The essay first sketches the evolving role of the See of Constantinople within the universal Church, the emperor’s position within the Church, and the Church’s organizational structure to signal developments rooted in the early Byzantine period. Next, it explores icons and the Iconoclastic Controversy in the period of transition between the early and middle Byzantine periods. Finally, it assesses the liturgical, structural and decorative developments within church buildings of the early through the late Byzantine periods to chart the changing confluence of these elements within religious worship.

B Church Organization and Structure I Constantinople, the Universal Church, and Conflicts with the West The See of Constantinople could not boast of apostolic foundation or impressive early Christian martyria as Rome or other Churches in the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g., Antioch, Ephesus). Although originally under the ecclesiastical authority of

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the Metropolitan of Herakleia in Thrace (Taft 1992, 23), by the fifth century Constantinople emerged as one of five major sees that acquired supra-metropolitan status, serving as the five heads (pentarchy) of the universal Church. Two canons in particular contributed to the elevation of the hierarchical status of the See of Constantinople: Canon 3 of the First Council of Constantinople (381) declared that “[t]he bishop of Constantinople has the primacy of honor after the bishop of Rome, because this city is the New Rome” (Mansi, ed., 1901–1927, vol. 3, 560CD, from hereupon Mansi; translated in Taft 1992, 23); Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon (451) confirmed this and extended the authority of the See of Constantinople over a large territory in the Eastern Mediterranean (Mansi, vol. 7, 428B-D; Dvornik 1958, 50–56; 81–105). Constantinople’s promotion was part of the development (termed “principle of accommodation”) which adjusted the organization of the Church to the divisions of the empire’s political administration (Dvornik 1958, 3–38; 50–56). According to the theory of the pentarchy, which received legal status in the code of Justinian (Nov. 109, 123.3, 131.2, Schoell and Kroll, ed., 1912, 518; 597; 655; Dvornik 1966, 74–76; Meyendorff 1968, 49–50), Christendom was governed by the five patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem who were on equal footing and oversaw their respective territories independently, although the pope in Rome was accorded honorary primacy (Herrin 2004; Chadwick 2003, 49; 164–65; 213–15; Anastos 2001, 55–59; Gahbauer 1993; Peri 1988; Siciliano 1979; Pelikan 1974, 164–66; De Vries 1965). While the five patriarchs did not form a de facto collegiate body, the pentarchic principle underlay various processes of church governance, including the notifications new patriarchs sent out to colleagues announcing their election and confirming their faith; the view that ecumenical councils required representation from all five patriarchates; and the right of appeal to the college of patriarchs (De Vries 1965). The pentarchy persisted as an organ of ecclesiastical government till the late ninth century when it finally morphed into “a metaphor for Christian unity rather than [functioned as] a decision-making organization” (Herrin 2004, 618). The pentarchic configuration of the Church was gradually replaced by the diarchy of Rome and Constantinople. Dogmatic disagreements of the fifth century led to the splintering off of several branches of the universal Church in Syria, Armenia, and Egypt (Gray 2005; Finneran 2010; Louth 2011). Islamic conquests in the seventh century cut off the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem from the rest of the orthodox community, leaving Constantinople the dominant ecclesiastical see in the East. The collapse of imperial power in the West in 476 left Rome and its church increasingly outside the political sphere of the Roman/Byzantine Empire and by the eighth century the papacy established its firm independence from Byzantine imperial authority (Kazhdan ed., 1991, Oxford

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Dictionary of Byzantium, vol. 1, 520, from hereupon: ODB). The last pope to seek confirmation from the Byzantine emperor before his consecration was Zachary I in 741 (Noble 2008, 261). By the mid-eighth century the territories of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire had become equivalent (Louth 2008a, 221–24; Louth 2008c, 55). The shrinkage of Byzantine lands contributed to the decrease in cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity (Kolbaba 2008, 215), and by the seventh century Latin was abandoned in official use (Kaldellis 2007, 67). Henceforth Rome and Constantinople co-existed in a tense diarchy characterized by regular conflicts that occasionally developed into schisms (Runciman 1963; Meyendorff 1983, 91–114; Erickson 1970; Whalen 2007). The history of the relationship of the two Churches has been studied extensively (e.g., Geanakoplos 1966; Pelikan 1974, 146–98; Gill 1979; Schatz 1996, 41–77; Anastos 2001; Chadwick 2003; Kolbaba 2000; 2001; 2006; 2008; Gallagher 2008b). Although their nexus was characterized by ebb and flow, at least until the twelfth century the Latin West and Byzantine East were largely within the same orthodox fold (Kolbaba 2006) and the disputes between the two Churches were confined to individuals or small groups on each side (Kolbaba 2008). The pillaging of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade (1204) and the establishment of Latin rule in the Byzantine capital along with a Latin patriarch (Laiou, ed., 2005), however, deepened the estrangement: the schism became permanent and the two sides viewed one another as heretics (Gill 1979, 247). The disagreements between the two churches pivoted around three types of questions: 1) of ecclesiastical authority, 2) customs (liturgical practice, clerical discipline), and 3) dogmatic disagreements (although Kolbaba notes the difficulty of maintaining neat classification when examining the sources, 2000, 88–101). With regard to ecclesiastical authority, Rome continued to advocate its primacy within Christendom based on its apostolic foundation (Durā 2006; Larchet 2006; Schatz 1996; Meyendorff 1989, 59–66; Dvornik 1966). Conversely, Constantinople stressed its own ecclesiastical supremacy because of its imperial standing even though Canon 3 of Constantinople and Canon 28 of Chalcedon had been consistently ignored or rejected in Rome and some other territories (Dvornik 1966, 44– 54; Meyendorff 1968, 46; Meyendorff 1989, 184; Durā 2006, 179–80; Duba 2008, 65–66). By the late seventh century Constantinople also developed the legend of its own apostolic foundation by Andrew although it did not gain the wide popularity as the Roman Petrine story (Dvornik 1958; Anastos 2001, 7–9). Some Byzantine authors even argued in favor of the absolute primacy of Constantinople (Anastos 2001, 57–59; Siciliano 1979), although more frequently they evoked the principle of the pentarchy to counter Roman claims. While the use of the title Ecumenical Patriarch by the hierarch of Constantinople did not intend to convey universal authority over Christendom merely within his own patriarchate, it was

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strongly rejected in Rome as early as the sixth century (Anastos 2001, 25–26). The divergent views on Roman primacy became increasingly more pronounced during the twelfth century in response to strengthening papal claims of authority (plenitudo potestatis) and the crusades (Kolbaba 2001; Schatz 1996). Arguments about ecclesiastical customs and dogma were not always easy to disentangle. Canons of the Council of Trullo of 692 condemned Latin customs at variance with Byzantine use, namely strict clerical celibacy and fasting on Saturdays during Lent (Herrin 1989, 286; Herrin 2011). The inventory of Latin religious errors was elaborated and extensive lists outlining the differences between Byzantine and Western practices were produced in the ninth-thirteenth centuries combining criticism of discipline, praxis, and dogma (Kolbaba 2000). Strict celibacy, incorrect fasting, clean shaven priests, the consumption of unclean foods, and numerous other Latin errors were condemned, yet two points of contention emerged as pivotal: the addition of the Filioque (“and of the Son”) to the Creed, and the use of azymes (unleavened bread) for the Eucharist. Latins viewed the use of leavened or unleavened bread simply as a difference in custom, yet several Byzantine writers decried the use of azymes as heretical (Erickson 1970; Pelikan 1974, 176–79; Gill 1979, 70–71; Kolbaba 2000). The question of azymes emerged as the central topic of controversy in the schism of 1054 and continued as the dominant motif into the twelfth century. Byzantine authors link azymes to heretical understandings of Christ’s two natures and suggest that unleavened bread prevents theosis (deification) through the Eucharist (Erickson 1970). Byzantine thinkers conflated the liturgical practice of using azymes of the heretical Jews and Armenians (whose status within the Byzantine church had become pressing in the eleventh century when Armenian territories were reconquered) with their heretical beliefs (Kolbaba 2000, 37–39; 2001). The controversy over the Filioque was primarily theological in nature, although it was also linked with questions of authority and liturgical use (Kolbaba 2000, 88). When Patriarch Photios first condemned the addition of the Filioque to the Creed in the ninth century as heresy, this was aimed at the Franks who adopted the dogmatic error that the Holy Spirit proceeds both from the Father and the Son, first articulated at the Council of Toledo in 589 (Meyendorff 1983, 91–94, 180–90; Pelikan 1974, 183–98; Herrin 1989, 230–32; Kolbaba 2000, 40–41; Herrin 2004, 598–601). The Filioque was accepted by the Roman Church in 1014 and was reaffirmed at the Councils of Lyon II (1274) and Ferrara-Florence (1438–1439). Kolbaba argued that while the question of the Filioque was of import in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it became the pivotal topic in anti-Latin discourse around the 1270s when it emerged as a prominent rallying point in union attempts between the two Churches (Kolbaba 2001, 130–32). Although the Byzantine representatives acquiesced to papal primacy, the dogma of purgatory, and the use of the Filioque at

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the Councils of Lyon and Ferrara-Florence for the sake of Church union and in the hopes of receiving military support, the Byzantine Church rejected their rulings as well as attempts at union with Rome in local councils held in 1285 and 1484 (Hussey 2010, 220–94; Bryer 2008, 878; Chadwick 2003, 246–73; Geanakoplos 1966, 84–111). The numerous attempts at union (Angold 2008, 742–49) engineered at the highest level, however, never materialized because of the hopeless tangle of political, ecclesiastical, dogmatic, ethnic, and cultural differences underpinning the discussions.

II The Emperor and the Church A distinguishing feature of the Byzantine Church from the other patriarchates is its close association with the imperial office. Empire and religion, Church and state were connected conceptually because they were born at the same time, thus a connection was drawn between the Roman/Byzantine monarchy and Christian monotheism mutually legitimizing one another (Nicole 1991, 54–55). The interdependence of the imperial and patriarchal offices is also linked to other factors: New Rome was both the imperial and ecclesiastical capital of Byzantium; and Byzantine political theory held that the terrestrial empire was a reflection of the celestial kingdom and the emperor was the vicegerent of Christ. According to Eusebius, the earthly ruler was a reflection of the divine monarch, a friend and interpreter of God, and derived his power and virtues directly from Christ (Eusebius 1976, 85–89). The emperor as a mirror image of Christ remained a prominent theme of imperial ideology, for example, Archbishop Theophylaktos of Ohrid (ca. 1050–1126) stated: “every emperor … is an image of God, … just as the archetype is higher than all [creation], so the likeness will be above all [others]” (translated in Maguire 1997, 247). Pictorial representations also convey this concept: for example, the ninth century representation of the enthroned Christ placed over the imperial throne in the Great Palace visualized the divine source of the ruler’s power and presented him as a parallel to Christ (Belting 1994, 164–65). Even imperial garments could encode this association. The Book of Ceremonies (tenth c.) testifies that the loros, a bejeweled narrow band draped atop other garments, worn on Easter Sunday signified Christ’s burial shroud and transformed the emperor into his embodiment (Porphyrogennetos 2012, vol. II, 638). Although visual images associate and parallel the emperor and Christ, the ruler is never depicted in his likeness (Woodfin 2012, 187). However, a competing vision existed alongside the Christomimetic understanding of the emperor’s role. The patriarch was also described as an image of Christ starting in the early Christian period. The overt visual paralleling of the earthly church and the heavenly court

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emerged in the eleventh-twelfth centuries and became a prominent iconographic theme in late Byzantium. By the late twelfth century ecclesiastical garments began to show Christological narratives underscoring the connection between the bishop and the incarnate God, and starting in the fourteenth century Christ was shown ministering to his apostles in patriarchal garments drawing the association even tighter (Woodfin 2010; Woodfin 2012, 178–207). The spheres of imperial and patriarchal authority coexisted in an ambiguous balance regarding their ecclesiastical and political roles since a systematic constitutional demarcation of the responsibilities of the two realms was not developed until the late fourteenth century (Boojamra 1993, 27; Nicole 1991, 71–73). Justinian’s Novel 6 provides the foundation for the understanding of the relationship of emperor and patriarch throughout the Byzantine period: The two greatest gifts which God in His infinite goodness has granted to men are the Sacerdotium and the Imperium. The priesthood takes care of divine interests and the empire of human interests of which it has supervision. Both powers emanate from the same principle and bring human life to its perfection. It is for this reason that the emperors have nothing closer to their hearts than the honor of the priests because they pray continually to God for the emperors. When the clergy shows a proper spirit and devotes itself entirely to God, and the emperor governs the state which is entrusted to him, then a harmony results which is most profitable to the human race. So it is then that the true divine teachings and the honor of the clergy are the first among our preoccupations (trans. Dvornik 1966, 72; Schoell and Kroll, ed., 1912, 35–36).

Scholars have noted that Justinian does not clarify how the harmony between the two spheres is to be achieved, and confines the primary duty of the priesthood to the performance of prayer and religious rituals and intercession on behalf of the emperor (Meyendorff 1968, 49; Meyendorff 1989, 209; Boojamra 1993, 25). The harmony of the religious and temporal realms suggested by Justinian did not always exist in Byzantium. Tension and conflict often undermined this relationship: emperors could dismiss patriarchs, for example Photios (858–867, 877–886) was removed twice from office (ODB, vol. 3, 1669); but a patriarch could also impose penalties on an emperor, as demonstrated by the controversy fought over the unlawful fourth marriage of Leo VI (r. 886–912), when the patriarch levied penitential exercises on the emperor and barred him from services at Hagia Sophia (ODB, vol. 3, 2027). Yet, Justinian’s ideal was reiterated or amplified by later authors. The Eisagoge (also called Epanagoge), a law book likely drafted by Patriarch Photios proposes a more equal position for emperor and patriarch. It describes the patriarch as the “living and animate image of Christ” and advocates that he should stand up to the emperor when necessary (Boojamra 1993, 26; Dagron 2007, 229–35; Angelov 2007, 363; Lokin 1994, 78–82). The chronicle of Leo the Deacon (tenth c.) reports that Emperor John Tzimiskes (r. 969–976) said:

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“… I distinguish two [earthly powers], the hierosyne [priesthood] and the basileia [empire], to which the creator has entrusted, to the former the care of souls, to the latter the care of bodies, so that one of the parts does not drag compared with the other, but that they form together a complete and appropriate whole” (trans. Dagron 2007, 303 n. 71). Later authors could inflect this idea in various ways. Theodore Balsamon (canonist and patriarch of Antioch in the late twelfth c.) argued that the emperor was responsible for the enlightenment of both body and soul, while the patriarch only for the care of the soul. Yet, Patriarch Athanasius I (1289–1293, 1303–1309) believed that the emperor’s role was to support and serve the Church (Nicole 1991, 69–70; Boojamra 1993, 26–40; Angelov 2007, 393–416), yet, he did not view the patriarch as the ruler’s superior, rather, the emperor was “God’s minister” (393 n. 146). As Angelov notes, Athanasios reordered Justinian’s conception of the two great gifts granted to mankind, and substituted Christian domain for mankind; in this scheme Christendom is an all-encompassing category that includes both Church and state (402–04). The notion that empire and Church are thoroughly intertwined endured till the fall of Byzantium in 1453, when the resilient Patriarchate of Constantinople was entrusted with oversight of all aspects of Christian life in the Ottoman state (Runciman 1968; Nicole 1991, 70–74; Zachariadou 2006). The emperor’s prerogatives within the Church included the convocation of ecumenical councils and the signing of their acts into law, the election and deposition of the patriarch, entry into the sanctuary and quasi-priestly participation in the liturgy (Majeska 1997; Dagron 2007), although by the forteenth century these liturgical privileges had diminished somewhat (Woodfin 2012, 201–02). The emperor could only occasionally affect a change in doctrine, since doctrinal definition was the purview of church councils (Meyendorff 1968; Nicole 1991; Arnason 2010, 499), yet he was seen as the guardian of orthodoxy and the unity of the Church (Dagron 2007, 298). The interdependence of the two spheres is also demonstrated by the spatial proximity of the imperial and patriarchal palaces near Hagia Sophia and the emperor’s regular participation in the liturgy of the patriarchal church (Porphyrogennetos 2012). On these occasions the emperor and patriarch appeared together at key moments of the ceremony, underscoring the close association of their two domains of authority (Majeska 1997). The patriarch performed imperial coronations since the mid-fifth century, although this was not a constitutional requirement (Nicole 1991, 63). After 1204 anointment by the patriarch was also added to the coronation ceremonial, following Latin practice (Angelov 2005, 308–09). The production of nomokanones (compilations of civil and religious law in a comparative format) also confirms that the empire and the Church were intertwined entities (Nicole 1991, 65–66; Kondiaris 1994; Dagron 2007, 258–59).

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Modern scholars of Byzantium no longer characterize Byzantine rulership as caesaropapist (Arnason 2010). Gilbert Dagron’s nuanced study has explored the sacerdotal aspects of the Byzantine emperor’s role and argued that it is meaningless and anachronistic to apply the term caesaropapism to Byzantium where the separation of Church and state was not an operative concept; he further notes that the “clericalisation of all ecclesiastical structure specific to the West” should not be applied to the analysis of Byzantium (Dagron 2007, 311).

III Church Hierarchy and Organization Twenty-one surviving documents (Notitiae Episcopatuum, seventh-fifteenth c.) listing the dioceses in hierarchical order shed light on the organizational structure of the Byzantine Church and reflect ecclesiastical and political changes over time (Angold and Whitby 2008, 578; Darrouzès, ed., 1981; Porphyrogennetos 2012, vol. II, 791–98; 820–23). The supra-metropolitan bishop (i.e., the patriarch) stood at the top of the hierarchy elected by the emperor based on the recommendation of the metropolitans, although the emperor could promote his own nominee. Justinian’s Novel 123.3 established patriarch as the title of supra-metropolitan bishops (Schoell and Kroll, ed., 597; ODB, vol. 3, 1599). The patriarch appointed metropolitan bishops, yet often emperors also interfered in this process (Falkenhausen 1997, 186). Each metropolitan resided in a major city and his episcopal territory corresponded to a province of the civil administration. Suffragan bishops served under the metropolitan and were responsible for their individual bishoprics; they had the right to elect bishops to vacant sees within their province, although starting in the ninth century, many episcopal elections were held in Constantinople, conflicting with canon law (Hussey 2010, 326; Cunningham 2008, 530). The smallest organizational unit of the Byzantine Church was the bishopric centered in a city or town. Because a bishopric comprised a relatively small territory, a parish system on par with that of Western Europe did not develop (Angold and Whitby 2008, 578–79). Additionally, country bishops, reporting to the bishop of the nearest city, could be appointed in rural areas. Outside the strict hierarchy of this structure stood the archbishops of autocephalos churches (e.g., Cyprus), independent of the five patriarchates, and archbishops of notable cities who did not preside over suffragans but reported directly to the patriarch (ODB, vol. 1, 155–56; 234–35). The term bishop (episkopos) was used broadly in Byzantine texts, meaning either suffragan, metropolitan, archbishop, or even patriarch (ODB, vol. 1, 291–92). Bishops and patriarchs had manifold duties beyond overseeing religious worship: they upheld orthodox doctrine, performed clerical and civic administrative

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duties, carried out municipal responsibilities, held judicial powers, and managed charitable works (Angold and Whitby 2008; Louth 2008b, 102; 128–29; Cunningham 2008; Falkenhausen 1997; ODB, vol. 2, 1359; ODB, vol. 1, 291–92). Kekaumenos’s Strategikon, a moralistic treatise reveals the perception of the patriarch’s role in the second half of the eleventh century: And when you become patriarch, do not become haughty, do not let spear-bearers escort you, and do not amass money; do not concern yourself with gold and silver and costly banquets, rather you should be concerned about food for orphans and widows, about hospitals, the redemption of prisoners of war, peace, and help for the weak, but not about accumulating houses and properties and robbing your fellow man, in the process telling yourself: I am not doing this for myself and my family but for God and the church … . Day and night your zeal should be focused on the divine and the edification of the rich and the poor (translated in Falkenhausen 1997, 182).

Kekaumenos, a layman, presents a vivid account of the patriarch’s diverse responsibilities and maintains that this office must be taken up as a true vocation in serving God and safeguarding the spiritual and social needs of the population. Metropolitan and suffragan bishops also undertook similar duties within their communities, thus, a complex episcopal bureaucracy developed to attend to these varied tasks (Cunningham 2008, 530–32; Hussey 2010, 314–35). An essential organ of decision making within the Byzantine Church was the council (Gallagher 2008a). Councils brought together representatives of the clergy to formulate determinations about contested aspects of doctrine or liturgy, to regulate discipline, and to facilitate the election of bishops. The early church even before the Peace of Constantine operated as a conciliar body in dealing with contentious matters (Cameron 2011b, 2). Councils were held at each organizational level: episcopal councils of a single bishopric, metropolitan councils of one province, patriarchal councils of the patriarchate, and ecumenical councils of all five patriarchates. Metropolitan councils were required to gather on a regular schedule stipulated by Canon 5 of Nicaea I, Canon 19 of Chalcedon, and Canon 8 of Trullo. The patriarchal council of Constantinople, the Endemousa Synodos (standing synod) became a permanent conciliar body by the eleventh century (ODB, vol. 1, 540–43), yet ecumenical councils were convened on an ad hoc basis to deal with major heresies plaguing the universal Church. The Byzantine Church recognized seven ecumenical councils: 1) Nicaea I in 325, 2) Constantinople I in 381, 3) Ephesus in 431, 4) Chalcedon in 451, 5) Constantinople II in 553, 6) Constantinople III in 680–81, and 7) Nicaea II in 787. Two other synods were considered of ecumenical nature: the Quinisext Council of 691–92 held in the Trullo Palace in Constantinople (a supplement to the fifth and sixth councils), and Constantinople V of 879–880. Ecumenical councils were convoked by the emperor following the tradition established by Constantine I at

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Nicaea I, and emperors presided over the proceedings or attended some of the sessions. The councils produced doctrinal statements and canon laws governing the church (Louth 2008a, 244–47; Gallagher 2008a; Peri 2006; ODB, vol. 1, 512– 16; 404; 707; ODB, vol. 2, 1464–65; ODB, vol. 3, 2126–27; Mansi, vol. 1–13; 17; Tanner, ed., 1990, vol. 1). The ecumenicity of some councils had been questioned by the other patriarchates, and Vittorio Peri emphasizes that the acceptance of councils as ecumenical was the result of a complex “process of assimilation and implementation” (2006, 144–45). By the late ninth century the Christian West and East have grown sufficiently distant to cease convoking universal synods (Herrin 2004, 622–26). Two later councils convoked by popes did address Byzantine concerns and aimed at uniting the churches of Rome and Constantinople, namely Lyon II (1274) and Ferrara-Florence (1438–1439); although seen as ecumenical in the West, they were rejected in the East (Hussey 2010, 220–94; Chadwick 2003, 246–73). After the ninth century the Endemousa Synodos had become the primary source of newly developing canon law along with the work of canonists who provided commentaries and revisions to the established body of canons (Hussey 2010, 318–25; ODB. vol. 1, 372–74; Kondiaris 1994).

IV Monasticism Although monastic communities originally flourished outside the structure of the early church, the Council of Chalcedon entrusted the oversight of monasteries to local bishops (McGuckin 2008, 615). Justinian’s Novel 5 decreed that a bishop should consecrate the site of a monastery and had the right to elect the abbot (Mango 1980, 113; Schoell and Kroll, ed. 1912, 28–35). A vast majority of Byzantine bishops emerged from monasteries, and monks dominated the episcopate following the iconoclastic period: from 705 to 1204 forty-five of sixty-seven patriarchs were formerly monks, and in the late Byzantine period the patriarchate was almost completely dominated by monastics (Rapp 2005, 147–52; Sterk 2004, 219–44). Sterk emphasizes that the monk-bishop archetype emerged in the fourth-fifth centuries, exemplified by such ascetic bishops as Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzens, and John Chrysostom, also noting that other factors, namely the iconophile victory in 843 and the influence of the writings of Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022) and Gregory Palamas (d. 1359) contributed to the dominance of this paradigm in ecclesiastical government through the late Byzantine period. Clearly, monastic life provided spiritual authority to its practitioners, an essential qualification for a bishop (Sterk 2004, 219–44). Rapp also argued that asceticism was the most important of the three interlinked threads that comprised patriarchal authority in late antiquity, namely

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ascetic, spiritual, and pragmatic authority. Asceticism, in her view, facilitates the reception of the Holy Spirit from God (i.e., spiritual authority) and justifies the pragmatic leadership of bishops (Rapp 2005, 16–18). Additionally, monastic asceticism enabled the maintenance of celibate lifestyle required of bishops (Falkenhausen 1997, 192–93; Rapp 2005, 147). Byzantine monasticism falls into one of three forms: eremitical (solitary), lavriotic (communities of hermits who live in the same compound and gather for services and supplies on Saturdays and Sundays), and cenobitic (communal). The first two types accentuate the importance of poverty and ascesis, while the third also stresses the virtue of obedience (Talbot 1987, 232). Byzantine monasteries were not organized into orders similarly to the medieval West; rather, they belonged to one order loosely founded upon the Rule of St. Basil (Basil 1950, 223–337). Each monastery had its own foundation document, the typikon, in which the patron set out the regulations for his or her institution. A recent publication includes sixty-one such texts (seventh-fifteenth c.) offering insight into a wide array of monastic institutions (Thomas et al, ed., 2000). Although some monasteries were built in inaccessible places and were off limits to certain segments of the population (e.g., Mount Athos did/does not allow women), most were closely associated with the lives of the populace. Peter Charanis estimated that on average about 1% of the Byzantine population led a monastic life (Charanis 1971, 72–73). While monasteries did not offer schooling for the public, they served the community in other ways: by providing medical care in their hospitals, offering a place of retirement, distributing alms and managing charitable institutions (e.g., orphanages, leprosaria, homes for the elderly), as well as by cultural production ranging from spinning and weaving to the creation of manuscripts and scholarly work (Talbot 1987; Mango 1980, 105–24; Hussey 2010, 335–49).

C The Role of Images in Byzantine Devotion I Icons Icons are perhaps the most well-known manifestations of religious devotion in Byzantium. Eikōn simply means image, yet its broad semantic range includes painted and carved representations, likenesses, mirror reflections, and waking or dream visions (Liddell and Scott 1940, vol. I, 485). As the faithful understood it at least by the late seventh century, an icon was a material image that served as a portal to gain access to divine or holy personages. Icons can range from minute objects held in the palm to monumental representations on a wall, and can be made from various materials. What defines an icon is not its size or material, but

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its dynamic relationship to the prototype (or archetype, i.e., the person depicted) and to the faithful gazing at the image (Kartsonis 1998; Brubaker 2010). Theodore of Stoudios (759–826), an iconophile leader, characterized icons as follows: Every artificial image is a likeness of that whereof it is the image, and it exhibits in itself, by way of imitation, the form (charaktêr) of its model (archetupon) …: the truth in the likeness, the model in the image, the one in the other, except for the difference of substance. Hence, he who reveres [proskunōn] an image surely reveres the person whom the image shows; not the substance of the image, but him who is delineated in it (Theodori 1992, vol. I, 164–65; translated in Mango 1993, 173).

According to Theodore, verisimilitude between the icon and its prototype allows the icon to convey the “truth” about the prototype without erasing the fundamental difference in substance between them. In this way idolatry can be avoided: it is possible to give honor to the image without fear of venerating its material since the honor paid to the image passes on to the prototype, an idea first expounded by Basil of Caesarea (329–379), (Mango 1993, 47; Ladner 1953). Iconophile writers distinguish between worship or adoration reserved exclusively for God (theīa latreīa) and veneration offered to saints and sacred objects (timetikē proskȳnesis) (Sahas 1988, 108 n. 45). They emphasize that material objects provide a channel to access the realm of the holy and suggest that the veneration offered to hallowed objects may lead to sanctification of the faithful: Thus we, who offer our worship in spirit and truth to God alone, knowing these things, shall continue kissing and embracing everything consecrated and dedicated to Him—whether the divine form of the precious cross, or the holy gospel, or venerable icons, or holy utensils—in the hope that we may receive sanctification from them. We shall also continue paying the veneration of honor to them (translated in Sahas 1988, 132; Mansi, vol. 13, 309C).

The distinction between latreīa and proskȳnesis was lost in the Latin translation of the acts of the iconophile council of 787 that reached the Frankish court, and this has been traditionally seen as a reason leading to a fierce attack on the veneration of icons in the Libri Carolini prepared for Charlemagne by Theodulf ca. 790 (ODB, vol. 2, 1225). Recent scholarship, however, underscores that Byzantine texts do not consistently preserve the distinction between latreīa and proskȳnesis, and that Theodulf was well-versed in Byzantine sources and theology (Noble 2009, 91, 180–83). The theory of the icon was developed systematically during the age of Iconoclasm (726–843) when the legitimacy of visual images in the service of devotion was contested (Pelikan 1974, 91–145; Schönborn 1994; Parry 1996; Giakalis 2005). Yet, the date of the emergence of the cult of icons is still debated.

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The difficulty of understanding the rise of the cult of images is compounded by the poor rate of survival of Byzantine icons prior to the thirteenth century. Although Rome and the Monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai preserve a corpus of early icons dating back to the seventh century (Wolf 2005; Belting 1994, 47–77; Nelson and Collins, ed., 2006), the methodological problems inherent in extrapolating about the Byzantine and Constantinopolitan use of icons based on material evidence from Rome and Sinai have been noted (Pentcheva 2010a, 11–13; 2010b). Scholars have traditionally argued that the cult of images was already fully developed by the mid-sixth century (e.g., Kitzinger 1954; Cameron 1992). Yet, recent examination of sources has demonstrated that texts evincing the early cult of icons had been reworked by iconophile authors to bolster the cause of religious images; this recognition led to the conclusion that not until the late seventh and the eighth centuries did a widely developed cult of images emerge in Byzantium (Speck 1990; Brubaker 1998; Brubaker and Haldon 2011, 50–66). Critics of this view, however, note that the cult of icons must be considered within the broader context of the cult of the saints and emphasize the fundamental correlations between relics and icons, and maintain that there is strong evidence for the rise of devotional images before the age of Iconoclasm (Cameron 2011a). The definition of icons has also been contested in recent literature, and scholars have drawn greater attention to their material and sensual qualities, as well as to the importance of the site- and medium-specific developments in their production (Barber 2002; Pentcheva 2010a, b).

II Iconoclasm A protracted dispute over the role of images in religious devotion shook Byzantine society in the eighth and ninth centuries. The quarrel, referred to as the Iconoclastic Controversy, lasted from ca. 726 to 843 and coincided with a period of fundamental social, economic and cultural reorientation in Byzantium (Bryer and Herrin, ed., 1977; Herrin 1989, 307–89, 417–24, 466–75; Brubaker and Haldon 2001; Brubaker and Haldon 2011). Some scholars note that the term iconomachy (dispute or struggle over images) is more accurate than iconoclasm (image breaking), as the former is fully grounded in the textual sources of the period (Brubaker and Haldon 2011, 2; 10; Brubaker 2010; Pentcheva 2010b, 267). This complex controversy was strongly motivated by the political, economic, spiritual, and environmental realities of the day and specialists are still divided in identifying its causes and origins (e.g., Kitzinger 1954; Brown 1973; Gero, 1973; 1977a; 1977b; Haldon 1977; Crone 1980; Cameron 1992; Brubaker and Haldon 2011). Significant methodological problems plague the study of Iconoclasm: the visual and archae-

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ological evidence is highly fragmentary (Grabar 1984; Brubaker and Haldon 2001); iconoclastic texts do not survive with the exception of passages interpolated into iconophile documents due to the careful destruction of such works after the iconophile victory (Cameron 2007, 11); furthermore, iconophile authors fabricated certain historical ‘facts’ and revised scores of earlier texts to solidify their position. Such texts have been reexamined in recent decades and the new history of Iconoclasm published by Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon draws on these reassessments and previous scholarship to present an extensive analysis of the phenomenon. They argue that Byzantine Iconoclasm “remained throughout its history an entirely imperial phenomenon” (Brubaker and Haldon 2011, 657) far from the all-embracing social movement it is reputed to have been, and carefully deconstruct the threads of iconophile propaganda woven into Byzantine texts and modern scholarship. They propose that the emergence of the cult of images and Iconoclasm were responses to a deep spiritual crisis brought on by the advance of Islam: icons offered direct access to the realm of the holy through “limitless multiplication,” stepping into the role formerly accorded to holy men, relics, and icons made without human hands; iconoclasm on the other hand was an attempt at controlling and purifying Christian rituals in the face of a deep crisis (Brubaker and Haldon 2011, 772–99). Modern historians usually begin the narrative of Iconoclasm with reference to an imperial decree promulgated by Leo III (r. 717–741) by 726 or 730 against the use of images (Cormack 1985, 106–07; Belting 1994, 147), yet current research questions whether such a decree existed. While Leo III was likely in favor of a “critique of images,” the full-blown policy of Iconoclasm is linked with his son, Constantine V (r. 741–775) (Brubaker 2010, 328–29; Brubaker and Haldon 2011, 69–247). Constantine indeed convoked a council at the Hieria Palace in Chalcedon in 754, where the iconoclast platform was articulated and the veneration of images condemned (Anastos 1954). The first phase of Iconoclasm was brought to an end in 787 at Nicaea II during the reign of Constantine VI (r. 780–797) and his mother, Irene (r. 797–802), and the iconophile policy was set out in the council acts (Sahas 1988; Speck 1978; Herrin 2001). A second period of Iconoclasm was inaugurated by Leo V (r. 813–820) in 815 but was terminated at a council in 843 during the reign of Michael III (r. 842–867) and his mother, Theodora (Alexander 1953; Karlin-Hayter 2006). The Synodikon of Orthodoxy summarizes the decisions of this council and is still read on the feast day commemorating the Triumph of Orthodoxy (i.e., the end of Iconoclasm) on the first Sunday of Lent. The feast was established in the late ninth century and the synodikon was produced between 843 and 920 (ODB, vol. 3, 2122). Three particularly enduring myths are associated with Iconoclasm, namely: the close association of women with icons; broad monastic resistance to Icono-

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clasm; and the iconoclasts’ opposition to relics. Somewhat polarized views have been proposed about the role of women: it has been argued that women had a greater proclivity for the veneration of icons than men (Herrin 1994; 1982), yet the role of empresses in the defeat of Iconoclasm has been also minimized suggesting that the restoration of icons should be attributed to a power vacuum during the regencies of Irene and Theodora which allowed clerics and courtiers to influence imperial policies (Cormack 1997). While it is unlikely that icon worship was particularly favored by women, it is clear that Irene and Theodora were skilled politicians who realized that a useful source of legitimization rested with the restoration of images—iconophile policy offered a way to solidify and justify female power in a misogynistic world (Kotsis 2012). Monks have also been upheld as iconophile heroes who steadfastly resisted iconoclast policies and suffered persecution as a result, yet recent scholarship has demonstrated that this highly exaggerated view stems from iconophile propaganda (Ringrose 1979; Brubaker and Haldon 2011, 234–47; 650–64). Iconoclasts have also been accused of blanket hostility toward relics by their opponents, however, it has been shown that this view does not stand up under scrutiny (Wortley 1982; Auzépy 2001; Brubaker and Haldon 2011, 38–40). A clear articulation of the iconoclast policy was defined at the Council at Hieria: … we DECREE unanimously … that every icon, made of any matter and of any kind of gaudiness of colors by painters, is objectionable, alien, and repugnant to the Church of the Christians … . No man should ever attempt to occupy himself with such an impious and unholy endeavor. He who from now on attempts to make and icon or to venerate one, or to set one up in a church or in a private home, or to hide one, if [he be] bishop, presbyter, or deacon, let him be unfrocked; if monk or layman, let him be anathematized and subjected to the royal laws, as an opponent of the commandments of God and an enemy of the doctrines of the Fathers. (Mansi, vol. 13, 324D-E, 328C; translated in Sahas 1988, 143–44; 147)

In the view of the iconoclasts, the true image and the original, on which it is based, must share the same essence (Theodore 1981, 10; Barber 2002, 78–80). They objected to the possibility of depicting Christ in visual images, arguing that because God is not circumscribable, neither is the Son of God. Consequently, if a painter attempts to depict Christ this results either in the separation of his human and divine natures, or a confusion of the two, leading to heresy. They reasoned: “This man makes an image and calls it Christ: now the name “Christ” means both God and man. Hence he has either included according to his vain fancy the uncircumscribable Godhead in the circumscription of created flesh, or he has confused that unconfusable union … and in so doing has applied two blasphemies to the Godhead, namely through the circumscription and the confusion” (Mansi, vol. 13, 252A; translated in Mango 1993, 166; Parry 1996, 100). The word

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translated as circumscribe is perigraphō, whose meaning ranges from draw, make a line around, delineate, circumscribe, to conclude and determine (Liddell and Scott 1940, vol. II, 1370–71; Barber 2002, 78). The iconoclasts attributed both a concrete and abstract sense to perigraphō and suggested that making an image is equivalent to circumscription (Schönborn 1994, 173). The iconoclasts further argued that the veneration of images was not supported by the authority of the ancient Church, and upheld the Eucharist and the cross as true images within religious devotion (Barber 2002, 79–105; Brubaker 2010). One of the central iconophile counterarguments focused on the incarnation: because God took on flesh in the incarnation, he was witnessed and described by the Gospels and he can be depicted in visual images (Parry 1996, 70–80; 99–113). Some iconophile theologians note that iconoclasts use the term perigraphō incorrectly; according to the iconophile patriarch Nikephoros: “something can be ‘circumscribed’ as to its place, its time, its beginning, or its understanding …” (translated in Schönborn 1994, 209), yet circumscribing is different from painting or drawing (graphē); being circumscribable (being defined with regard to time and space) is a precondition for the possibility of representation but is not equivalent to it (Schönborn 1994, 209–10). Additionally, the iconophiles insisted that the making of images is a venerable old tradition of the Church: The making of icons is not the invention of painters, but [expresses] the approved legislation of the Catholic [i.e., public] Church … . The name “Christ” is indicative of both divinity and humanity—the two perfect natures of the Savior. Christians have been taught to portray this image in accordance with His visible nature, not according to the one in which He was invisible; for the latter is uncircumscribable and we know from the Gospel that no man hath seen God at any time. When, therefore, Christ is portrayed according to His human nature it is obvious that the Christians … acknowledge the visible image to communicate with the archetype in name only, and not in nature; whereas these senseless people [the Iconoclasts] say there is no distinction between image and prototype and ascribe an identity of nature to entities that are of different natures (Mansi, vol. 13, 252B-D; translated in Mango 1993, 172–73).

The iconophiles acknowledged that Christ is circumscribable as a man but uncircumscribable as God (Parry 1996, 99–113) and maintained that because of his incarnation (i.e., being circumscribed as fully human) he can be depicted in images. They further argued that denying the possibility that Christ can be depicted in images is tantamount to the denial of the incarnation (Parry 1996, 70; Schönborn 1994, 230). The iconophiles valued the material world. Since God took on material form for the sake of human salvation, it is essential that material images of the incarnate God are produced because they serve as physical proof of the incarnation (Parry 1996, 72–74; Schönborn 1994, 194–96).

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The iconophiles also argued that visual images of biblical figures and stories have equal standing to the Gospel narrative as confirmation of the incarnation (Mansi, vol. 13, 377C; Sahas 1988, 178–79). They described the veneration of icons and the cross as direct physical contact: “We kiss and offer the veneration of honor to the divine form of the cross and to the venerable icons, because we are moved by a desire and affection to reach the prototypes” (Mansi, vol. 13, 284B; translated in Sahas 1988, 109). Furthermore, iconophile texts suggest that visual representations are indispensable for religious devotion: For the more these [i.e., icons] are kept in view through their iconographic representation, the more those who look at them are lifted up to remember and have an earnest desire for the prototypes. Also [we declare] that one may render to them the veneration of honor: not the true worship of our faith, which is due only to the divine nature, but the same kind of veneration as is offered to the form of the precious and life-giving cross, to the holy gospels, and to other holy dedicated items (Mansi, vol. 13, 377D-E; translated in Sahas 1988, 179).

Iconophile arguments emphasize the role of vision in religious devotion. The belief in the particular efficacy of vision was based on Byzantine optical theory, which understood the process of seeing as extramission, when the eye actively sends out rays to touch and grasp the objects of vision to return with their essential features to the eye and the mind. There is a tactile quality to the Byzantine understanding of vision, which parallels the active physical engagement with objects of devotion. Seeing, touching, comprehending, and belief are closely interwoven in this system (Nelson 2000; James 2004; Pentcheva 2010a, 5–7).

D Liturgy, Church Decoration, and Theosis I Liturgical Interpretation Byzantine liturgical commentaries assign symbolic meaning to the liturgy as well as the church building, its furnishings and liturgical equipment (Maximus 1982; Maximus Confessor 1985; St. Germanus 1984; Nicholas Cabasilas 2010). For example, the Historia Ecclesiastica (ca. 730) attributed to Patriarch Germanos presents the altar table as follows: The holy altar stands for the place where Christ was laid in the grave, on which the true and heavenly bread, the mystical and bloodless sacrifice, lies, His flesh and blood offered to the faithful as the food of eternal life. It is also the throne of God on which the incarnate God reposes … and like the table at which He was in the midst of His disciples at His mystical supper … prefigured in the table of the Old Law where the manna was, which is Christ, come down from heaven (translated in Taft 1980–81, 73; Germanus 1984, 59).

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Germanos’s rich passage links into “dynamic unity” multiple layers of meaning that traverse historical, liturgical, and eschatological time and space and demonstrate the principles of the economy of salvation (Taft 1980–81, 73). Sources also attest that the faithful perceived icons of saints and Christ in church interiors as actual holy companions and viewed images of biblical narratives as emotionally charged sacred events unfolding in front of their very eyes confirming historical and spiritual truths (Mathews 1988). The close association between Byzantine church buildings, their decoration schemes, and the religious rituals taking place inside them has not gone unnoticed by modern scholars (e.g., Taft 1992, 18; Mathews 1980; 1988; Safran, ed., 1998).

II The Early Byzantine Rite and the Church Building (fourth-eighth c.) The early Byzantine rite was characterized by frequent liturgical processions that zigzagged through Constantinople and traversed through its churches. The urban processions addressed practical concerns, such as averting natural disasters or enemy attacks and offering an orthodox alternative to the ritual activities of heretics. Processions also marked the dedications of new churches, the transfer of relics, imperial funerals and the commemoration of deliverance from major calamities (Baldovin 1987; Taft 1992, 30–34). The early Byzantine rite unfolding inside churches was also strongly processional in nature. The liturgy divided into two main sections, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, was a lively affair comprised of a series of entrances coursing through the body of the church. The First Entrance was a true arrival of everyone: the already vested clergy gathered in the narthex while the faithful waited in the atrium. The formal entry into the church was led by the Gospel heralded by candles and incense and followed by the celebrant, other clerics, and the faithful. After the catechumens were sent away (a moribund practice after the seventh century), the Liturgy of the Eucharist began with another impressive procession, the Great Entrance, which transferred the bread, wine and liturgical equipment from the skeuophylakion (treasury) located in a separate building to the altar (Mathews 1980, 111–15; 138–76; Taft 1980–81; Taft 1992; Mainstone 2001, 219–35; Taft 2004). The primary liturgical formulary till the late tenth century was the Liturgy of St. Basil (Taft 1992, 55; Brightman, ed., 1896). Typical Early Byzantine churches take the shape of large, longitudinal basilicas with grand atria providing ample space and clear direction for liturgical processions. The areas of the clergy and the laity were segregated. An ambo (pulpit) and a solea (a fenced in barrier) were located in the second half of the

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nave reiterating the central processional axis and reserving a section of it for clerical use. The ambo provided an elevated area for readings while the solea offered an uninterrupted pathway between the ambo and the sanctuary (Xydis 1947; Mainstone 2001, 222–23). Paul the Silentiary (sixth c.) in his Descriptio Ambonis compares the ambo and the solea of Justinian’s Hagia Sophia (dedicated in 537) to a strip of land in the midst of crashing waves: Here [i.e., in the solea] the priest who brings the good tidings passes along on his return from the ambo, holding aloft the golden book; and while the crowd strives in honor of the immaculate God to touch the sacred book with their lips and hands, the countless waves of the surging people break around. Thus, like an isthmus beaten by waves on either side, does this space stretch out, and it leads the priest who descends from the lofty crags of this vantage point [i.e., the ambo] to the shrine of the holy table (translated Mango 1993, 95–96).

This text offers a vivid impression of the dual nature of the solea, which is both a distinct space reserved for the clergy and a meeting point between clerics and the laity, and indicates that the faithful were active participants seeking physical contact with the realm of the holy. The solea led to the templon (a chancel barrier with low parapet walls and narrow columns carrying a beam), which marked the boundary of the sanctuary in the shape of Π. The sanctuary, which spread into the nave, accommodated the altar and a synthronon (semi-circular, tiered seating area) for the clergy. Many scholars agree that the chancel barrier allowed the faithful full visual access to the liturgy and served the purposes of crowd control (Xydis 1947; Mathews 1980; Taft 2006). Yet Urs Peschlow has drawn attention to barriers dividing the nave and the aisles in several early Byzantine churches, which plainly impeded visibility in the aisles. It is, however, unclear why they were used; the segregation of the sexes or the demonstration of the beneficence of local patrons have been suggested as possible motivations (Peschlow 2006). In Constantinopolitan churches women likely attended services in the galleries and the aisles while men most likely stood in the nave, yet Taft notes that no evidence suggests that women were expressly forbidden from other parts of the church building, except for the sanctuary (Taft 1998; Gerstel and Talbot 2006, 84). Although no examples of interior decoration schemes survive from Constantinople or its vicinity from the early period, extant monuments from Greece, Italy, and the Sinai Peninsula (territories under Byzantine control at various times in this period) indicate that an impressive, monumental mosaic panel in the apse drew the faithful to the area of the altar (e.g., St. Catherine monastery, Sinai, sixth c.), while representations of figures lined up for procession or narrative scenes (e.g., S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, sixth c.) along the upper walls of the nave could emphasize the processional quality of the early Byzantine church building (Kitzinger 1980, Fig. 106–07, 177; Mathews 1993, 92–121, 142–76). Justi-

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nian’s Hagia Sophia (completed in 537), a domed basilica of exceptional scale and unprecedented luxury, remained a unicum in Byzantine architecture, although it clearly had an impact both on liturgical developments and the eventual spread of domed churches (Mainstone 2001).

III The Middle and Late Byzantine Rites and the Church Building (843–1453) The fundamental changes introduced into the Byzantine rite after the liquidation of Iconoclasm have been attributed to monastic influence. It no longer included a procession of the laity, and the entrances of the clergy were abbreviated into “appearances” and remained strictly within the confines of the building (Taft 1992, 72–74; Taft 2004; Marinis 2010; Ousterhout 1998; Gerstel and Talbot 2006). The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom became the chief Eucharistic formulary by ca. 1000, while the Liturgy of St. Basil was used on a handful of feast days (Taft 1992, 55; Brightman, ed., 1896). Liturgical books survive in greater numbers in this period (Synaxarium 1902; Euchologion 1960; Le Typicon 1962–1966; Patterson Ševčenko 1998). The First (or Little) Entrance now comprised the Gospel traveling from the altar to the nave and back in the company of the clergy, while during the Great Entrance the bread and wine were transferred from the northern apse to the altar via the nave. However, when the patriarch celebrated the Eucharist in Hagia Sophia, the First Entrance remained a full procession entering from the narthex till the twelfth century (ODB, vol. 2, 1238). The grand processions traversing Constantinople as part of the elaborate stational liturgy of the early Byzantine period were mostly eliminated, although some urban processions continued into the middle and late Byzantine periods (Marinis 2010, 285–86; Pentcheva 2006, 129–43; 165–87). The role of the laity was reduced to observers and the clergy’s actions were mostly confined to the sanctuary. Following the termination of Iconoclasm, the small, centralized church building became popular whose interior was dominated by a dome placed over the nave with the rest of the edifice organized in a cruciform layout. The cross-insquare design was prevalent, although other variations such as the domedoctagon and the cross-domed building had also appeared. These new churches were no longer preceded by an atrium, their aisles atrophied into small spatial extensions abutting the nave, and no synthronon, solea, and ambo were installed. The sanctuary receded into the area of the apse, yet its width was extended with subsidiary chambers on the northern and southern sides; this tri-partite scheme accommodated the altar in the central apse (bema), the preparation of the Eucharist in the northern apse (prothesis), and the sacristy (diakonikon) in the

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southern apse (Taft 1992, 61; Mathews 1980; Krautheimer 1986; Ousterhout 1998; 2008; Marinis 2010). The more decisive separation of the laity and clergy in this period was underscored by the expansion of the templon which gradually became more opaque and eventually grew into the iconostasis which obscured the visibility of the area of the altar; the mechanisms and dating of this process are still debated (Woodfin 2012, 51–52; Ševčenko 2006, 133; Gerstel, ed., 2006; Belting 1994, 225–60; Walter 1993; Epstein 1981). The architectural design of middle Byzantine churches continued to be used in the late Byzantine era (1261–1453), although now subsidiary spaces began to proliferate around the core of the building (Marinis 2010, 291; Ousterhout 1987, 91–96). The Middle Byzantine church building received a decoration scheme that reflects changes in liturgy and reveals the impact of the theology of images developed during the iconoclastic period (Taft 1992, 67–72; Mathews 1988). This decoration system is comprised of three zones arranged in a vertical hierarchy. The imagery at the uppermost areas (dome and conch of the apse) portrays the apex of the heavenly hierarchy, namely, Christ in the dome and his mother in the apse; the representations in the middle zone (squinches, pendentives, and upper regions of vaults) show narrative scenes from the life of Christ, often termed the Feast Cycle; while the tier closest to the faithful (lower vaults and walls) accommodates an array of individual saints, the sanctoral cycle. The decoration scheme unfolds along multiple axes: in addition to the vertical hierarchy, the central horizontal axis leads toward the image of the primary intercessor, the Mother of God in the apse, while the arrangement of the saints and Christological narratives encourages a centripetal path around the building (Demus 1948; Mathews 1988; 1990; Belting 1994, 164–83; Kitzinger 1988). Otto Demus’s brilliant analysis of the middle Byzantine decoration system is still pertinent, although recent scholarship has challenged several of his conclusions. Demus argued that the primary goal of this decoration scheme was the visual expression of Christological dogma and suggested that the narrative cycle was a visual embodiment of the calendar of liturgical feasts (Demus 1948). Thomas Mathews proposed a more participatory, psychological interpretation arguing that the visual imagery of middle Byzantine churches is an embodiment of the definition of faith propounded at Nicaea II in 787. In his view, the sanctoral cycle offers direct physical contact with the saints and allows the faithful to commune with them, while the narrative cycle serves as a teaching tool and a visual proof of the truth of the incarnation, and finally the image of Christ in the dome overseeing the faithful from above facilitates theosis (deification), the ultimate goal of the liturgy (Mathews 1988; 1990). Hans Belting also associated this decoration system with the defeat of Iconoclasm and ascribed a decisive role to the imperial court in the development of the newly emerging pictorial scheme. He suggested that it functioned as “an applied theory of

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images,” where images were presented to the faithful in a carefully regulated manner and with specifically assigned roles related to the liturgical calendar to prevent their inappropriate use (1994, 164–83). Scholars have also noted that after the termination of Iconoclasm religious images began to be labeled clearly and consistently in an effort to ascertain their identities and promote their proper functioning (Maguire 1996, 37–40; 137–45). Artists continued to produce church decoration schemes rooted in this system in the late Byzantine period, although the number and compositional complexity of images expanded considerably inside church buildings (Ćurčić 2004, 69).

IV Theosis A fundamental conviction of Greek orthodox belief is the possibility that man can achieve theōsis (for other aspects of Byzantine theology: Arabatzis 2010; Cunningham and Theokritoff, ed., 2008; Meyendorff 1983; Pelikan 1974). Maximus Confessor (seventh c.) emphasizes that likeness between man and the incarnate God makes deification possible: “By holy communion of the spotless and life-giving mysteries we are given fellowship and identity with him by participation in likeness, by which man is deemed worthy from man to become God” (Maximus Confessor 1985, 207). Maximus and later theologians emphasize deification as a central salvific concept, often linked with the potency of the Eucharist, “… which transforms into itself and renders similar to the causal good by grace and participation those who worthily share in it … . [S]o that they also can be and be called gods by adoption through grace because all of God entirely fills them and leaves no part of them empty of his presence” (Maximus Confessor 1985, 203; Perl 1998, 54–55). John Meyendorff asserts that in “Byzantine theology … man’s nature is not a static, ‘closed,’ autonomous entity, but a dynamic reality, determined in its very existence by its relationship to God” (Meyendorff 1983, 2). This relationship is understood as the process of theōsis, which is both a capacity granted to mankind and a goal to attain (Meyendorff 1983, 2–4, 163–64; Parry 1996, 114–24). In the lavishly decorated churches of Byzantium the liturgy, the spatial organization, and the decoration scheme cooperated in creating an all-embracing transformative space where theosis could occur.

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V Sensual Characteristics of the Byzantine Church and Rite A vivid example of how the splendor of the Byzantine rite and church building can impact its beholders is offered by the Russian Primary Chronicle. It reports that when Vladimir (r. 980–1015) sent a delegation to investigate the religious practices of the Bulgarians, Germans, Jews, and Greeks in order to decide which religion to adopt, his envoys reported about their visit to Hagia Sophia as follows: “… we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and that their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty” (The Russian Primary Chronicle 1953, 111). The chronicle relates how this awesome impression was prepared: … the Emperor sent a message to the Patriarch to inform him that a Russian delegation had arrived to examine the Greek faith, and directed him to prepare the church and the clergy, and to array himself in his sacerdotal robes, so that the Russes might behold the glory of the God of the Greeks. When the Patriarch received these commands, he bade the clergy [to] assemble, and they performed the customary rites. They burned incense, and the choirs sang hymns. The Emperor accompanied the Russes to the church, and placed them in a wide space, calling their attention to the beauty of the edifice, the chanting, and the pontifical services and the ministry of the deacons, while he explained to them the worship of his God (110–11).

The spiritual and sensual splendor of Hagia Sophia and the spectacle of the liturgical performance were irresistible: the State of Rus converted to Christianity. Recent scholarship has given increasing attention to the sensory aspects of Byzantine religious worship. These studies have drawn attention to the fundamental importance of the senses in contributing to an experience of the divine and the attainment of theosis. The role of natural and artificial lighting (Nesbitt 2012; Theis 2001; Bouras and Parani 2008) has been examined along with the sensual potential of materials and colors (Pentcheva 2010a; James 2003; 1996), the role of sound (Pentcheva 2010a), the impact of fragrances (Caseau 2007), and the process of vision and role of the other senses (Nelson 2000; James 2004). To offer a holistic analysis of sacred spaces, including their sensual traits, Alexei Lidov advocates a new field of study, hierotopy based on the Greek words for sacred and place/space/notion: … we should recognize that the material forms were just a part, and not always the most important one, of a spatial whole which was in permanent movement. Performativity, dramatic changes, the lack of strict fixation shaped a vivid, spiritually intensive, and concretely influential environment (Lidov 2009, 39).

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Hierotopy’s methodology embraces an all-inclusive examination of spatial, temporal, material, ritualistic, theological, artistic, sensory, and participatory aspects of the Byzantine sacred space and studies the interaction as well as the mutability of these various aspects to offer a more complete understanding of the Byzantine church building as a transformative space.

E Closing Remarks This essay offers a selective survey of major themes from the history of the Greek Orthodox Church within the Byzantine Empire. It presents a mosaic of various facets of the life of this institution, starting from a broad view and moving increasingly inward, paralleling both the contraction of the empire and the more pronounced inward focus of the liturgy in the middle and late Byzantine periods. However, this trajectory is not intended to suggest the false impression of isolation, after all both the Church and state had extensive and sustained contacts with outsiders (either within or outside the empire’s borders) in the middle and late Byzantine periods that included cultural, diplomatic, economic, and military engagements as well as religious deliberations and proselytizing. The role of the Byzantine Church underwent notable changes in this period in tandem with the fluctuating fortune of the state. Yet, although the Byzantines could not conceive a separation between Church and state, ultimately the Church proved to be more resilient: the Patriarch of Constantinople/Istanbul still presides over a large flock while the last Byzantine emperor perished over five hundred years ago.

Select Bibliography Angold, Michael, The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge and New York 2006). Herrin, Judith, The Formation of Christendom, rev. paperback ed. (1987; Princeton, NJ, 1989). Kolbaba, Tia M., The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins (Urbana, IL, and Chicago 2000). Louth, Andrew and Augustine Casiday, ed., Byzantine Orthodoxies, Papers from the Thirty-sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Durham, 23–25 March, 2002 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2006). Meyendorff, John, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (1974; New York 1983). Safran, Linda, ed., Heaven on Earth, Art and the Church in Byzantium (University Park, PA, 1998). Stephenson, Paul, ed., The Byzantine World (London and New York 2010). Taft, Robert F., S. J., The Byzantine Rite, A Short History (Collegeville, MN, 1992).

Eileen Gardiner

Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven A Definitions During the European Middle Ages, a period of approximately 1000 years extending roughly from 450 until 1450, the otherworld and its distinct precincts were hardly fixed locations or clearly defined spaces. Each place was characterized broadly by certain distinct features, qualities, and purposes, but among these there was the widest possible latitude for representing hell, purgatory, and heaven. While the English-language names for all the otherworld spaces—heaven, paradise, hell, limbo, and purgatory—mask a complicated history of assumptions and translations that do not always map back to earlier or original concepts, contemporary assumptions about the otherworld, while often maintaining skepticism about their actual ontological existence, define these regions with great certainty. According to our modern understanding, hell is a place or state of eternal punishment after death for those guilty of grievous or mortal sin, a place of separation from God and the dwelling place of the devil and his followers. It is always associated with an underworld or being underground. The fires of hell are unlike earthly fires, because, although they burn at an unimaginable intensity, they never consume their fuel. Purgatory is a temporary and transitional place, a concept of later origin than heaven and hell, in which the dead, through punishments similar to those in hell, are purged of lesser sins before release into paradise and heaven. Purgatory is sometimes described as a connecting space between heaven and hell, but its topographical relationship to the Earth is consequently a problem, since it would then seem to exist in the same space as the living. Heaven is a place or state of eternal reward for the blameless dead, the dwelling place of God and the blessed. It is above the earth, in fact, in the heavens. Often depicted as an enclosed city, it is a place of community where the righteous gather in the presence of the Almighty. While medieval theologians worked toward establishing this orthodox view of the afterlife, two additional spaces were appended to the otherworld: paradise and limbo, the first on the periphery of heaven and the latter on the periphery of hell. Although the medieval otherworld paradise often is and was confused with the Earthly Paradise or Garden of Eden located at the edges of this world, it was located just outside heaven’s walls and served as a stage in the journey of the soul from purgatory to heaven. It might also function as a final otherworld destination

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to accommodate those who, based on earthly performance, did not deserve to join the communion of the saints in heaven and yet did not meriting punishment and complete separation in hell at the end of time after the dissolution of purgatory at the Last Judgment. Paradise is a pleasant place, a locus amoenus for the innocent enjoyment of natural things. Although paradise does figure prominently in medieval literature of the otherworld, it probably did so without much theological sanction and does not survive into modern times as a separate place in the otherworld. The limbo of the Old Testament patriarchs and of unbaptized children was imagined as an everlasting dwelling in hell, but one without any punishment other than separation from the Almighty. The separation of the patriarchs came into conflict with the Harrowing of Hell narrative, which became a motif in medieval English literature, probably through the influence of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. In this Jesus, after his death but before the Resurrection, released the patriarchs from hell. Despite belief in Christ’s Harrowing of Hell, the idea of the separation of the patriarchs from the elect continued to flourish in the Middle Ages. Dante Aligheri (ca. 1265–1321) located limbo in the first circle of the inferno, just inside the gate of hell, but this space was not sufficiently distinguished and delineated in other medieval literature, art, or theology. Before entering further into these realms however, it is important to reiterate that in the hands and minds of the medieval architects of the otherworld, the plan and map were not so immovable. While hell is now considered a permanent place of eternal punishment, in the Middle Ages sinners progressed through hell and passed beyond the world of punishment. Sometimes they were only punished in hell on certain days or in certain seasons. Sometimes they were rescued from hell through the prayers and good deeds of their living friends and relatives. With the rise of purgatory as a fixed space in the twelfth century (Le Goff 1984, 12–13), the parameters of hell would solidify, and the possibility of purgation and release would no longer be part of that realm, which became a place set apart exclusively for the eternal punishment of the unredeemable, as we now understand it. On the other side of purgatory, the same fluidity was in evidence. Paradise is often described as a park or enclosed garden outside the walls of heaven, but at other times, paradise is conflated with heaven, as it is in the Divine Comedy. Yet paradise usually has a distinct identity as a place of sensual pleasure—an open, out-ofdoors place of air, light, color, beauty—as opposed to an architecturally constructed space of transcendent joy. Sometimes this otherworld paradise is even explicitly identified with the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden of Genesis 1. The medieval Christian otherworld also represented a system of retributive justice in which everyone would be treated equally (McDannell and Lang 2001, 76–77). Yet there was often a great divergence in the degrees of pain and joy

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among and within medieval texts on and images of heaven and hell. Punishments might range from the most severe physical torture to simple separation from the Divine, and joys from pure non-suffering to the ultimate joy in the vision of God, which was not necessarily granted to all who escaped hell. Even the equal treatment of all independent of hierarchy, rank, status, or social position did not translate into a non-hierarchical construct. All may have been treated equally, on the face of it, but ultimately some deserved greater reward or more severe punishment than others based on their actions alone. Matthew’s Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (20:1–6) did not gain traction among the creators of the medieval otherworld. There was not to be an equal payment for all. Even in the Summa Theologica (Aquinas 1947, 1:12.6), Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) specifically links the individual’s merit, indeed the individual’s intellect—not even his or her actions—with the degree of beatific knowledge the person would enjoy in the afterlife. The greater the intellect, the greater the degree of beatitude.

B Sources A rich body of material informs our understanding of medieval otherworld ideas. Beyond the official teachings confirmed by church councils, which provided little sensational or graphic information, the writings, paintings, and sculpture of the period contribute multitudinous details and tell a rich and imaginative story. Chronicles, letters, manuscript illuminations, church portals, and frescoes record a multi-dimensional otherworld with elements created or borrowed from a variety of sources. While it can be intriguing to attempt to examine the influences upon these Christian otherworld concepts by other cultures and religions, or the development of otherworld concepts through interaction with these belief systems, the evidence supports only overlapping coincidences. Egyptian, ancient Near Eastern, Hindu, Buddhist, Greek and Roman, and Zoroastrian otherworlds all share similarities, but the documents do not exist to establish patterns of transmissions or influence. There are certainly traces of ideas from Rome and Greece, Persia, Egypt, and Ethiopia, and cultural patterns of belief also traveled the trade routes between East and West throughout the Middle Ages. In apostolic times, some of the Jewish proto-Christians of the Jesus Movement may have retained traditional Jewish beliefs in a life after death in a gray underworld, called Sheol, not unlike the Hades of the Greeks or the netherworld of the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Sumerians of the ancient Near East. However, other Jewish notions, including apocalyptic and millennial ones, no doubt equally impacted developing Christian ideas.

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Jewish and Islamic ideas of the afterlife and otherworld places during the Middle Ages are related and certainly have considerable bearing on Western Christian beliefs (Himmelfarb 1983, 1–2), which are the focus here. Pagan notions, which survived well into the late Middle Ages in Scandinavia, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, are also not unrelated to the contemporaneous Christian thought that coexisted and no doubt intersected with them. Recognizing the interrelatedness of these ideas without positing lines of influence is in itself crucial, because this supports, if not confirms, the proposition that none of these ideas were specially inspired or the sole contribution of a single religious individual or group. The Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, where many might seek the foundational ideas regarding the Christian otherworld, actually has very little to say about hell (Bremmer 2002, 64) or heaven (Russell 1997, 40–41). There is no mention at all of any place equivalent to purgatory in the Bible. References to an otherworld or afterlife are vague, inconsistent, and sometimes contradictory. The notions of eternal punishment and reward that are found in the New Testament relate primarily to the state of the wicked and the good—if not to whole nations and peoples—at the end of time following the Apocalypse and Last Judgment (for example in Matt 25:31–46) (Bernstein 1993, 228). Some readers, however, think they find in the Bible the basis for later—non-dogmatic—ideas about the afterlife, sometimes taking Greek or Hebrew words and giving them more significance or a different meaning than they originally had. Only the parable of Dives and Lazarus from the New Testament’s Gospel of Luke (16:19–31) describes judgment immediately after death, followed by punishment in hell or reward in heaven, an idea that would become intrinsic to Christian concepts of the afterlife. Since the Gospels began to take form almost three decades after the death of Christ, tying any words or ideas directly to him can certainly be problematic. In fact, this story of Dives and Lazarus is probably based on an Egyptian folktale that may have been known in Palestine during the life of Christ, but was certainly known there by the end of the first century C.E. and was recounted in later Talmudic literature (Fitzmyer 2007, 1124–36). It presents the notion of an individual’s punishment in the afterlife before the Last Judgment: immediately after his death, Dives, the rich man, has his eye turned on a door hinge as punishment for his treatment of the poor man, Lazarus. There is no fire in this hell, nor any indication that it is eternal. Here we find the sole example in the Bible of anything that might come close to corresponding to our ideas of individual eternal punishment or reward after death, which is the essence of later medieval notions of heaven, purgatory, and hell. A medieval manuscript illumination in the Codex Aureus Epternacensis updates this story, showing in the top register the feasting Dives inside a dining and the poor man, Lazarus, on his doorstep. The second register shows the death of Lazarus and his deliverance to

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heaven, while the third register shows the death of Dives and his delivery to a fiery medieval hell (see Fig. 1). From reading the Christian creeds, it is clear that a belief in heaven was firmly established in the first centuries of the church. The original Nicene Creed of 325 does not mention either hell or purgatory but does mention heaven in the context of the deity’s act of creation and as the place to which Christ ascended upon his death and from which he will descend to judge the living and the dead. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 reasserts these beliefs and adds Christ’s initial descent from heaven to be incarnated. It also adds the element of eternity to the idea of the “kingdom of heaven,” as well as the important eschatological concepts of a “resurrection of the dead” and a “world to come,” both of which have a considerable bearing on the developing medieval notions of the otherworld. The Apostles’ Creed or Symbolum Apostolorum, which post-dates the apostolic period and is probably no earlier than the second half of the fifth century, repeats these previous ideas and adds that Christ “descendit ad inferos,” the word “inferos” meaning the “underworld.” That phrase was translated and interpreted as “descended to the dead” or “descended into hell,” from which derives the Christian “harrowing of hell” meme. In addition, this creed introduces the idea of a bodily resurrection of the dead, followed by the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Unfortunately this text is not specific as to whether the forgiveness of sins and eternal life will be extended to a select few, all Christians, or humanity as a whole. Only the Athanasian Creed or Quicumque Vult, of the late fifth or early sixth century, specifically includes the notion of an afterlife punishment, claiming that those who do evil will descend “in ignem aeternum” (into eternal fire). While doctrine, creed, and teaching maintained a cautious reticence on the details of the spaces of the afterlife, they provided a canvas on which the fertile imaginations of the medieval period could construct tableaux of punishment and pain or delight and transcendence. These expressions of faith did not match necessarily the conversation about heaven, hell, and purgatory taking place among those Fathers of the Church and later theologians, who choose to explore these ideas. Consequently the medieval landscape of the otherworld is rich, imaginative, complex, and paradoxical.

C Hell The word “hell,” which is now exclusively associated with a place of punishment, formerly meant simply “underworld.” This English word is used to translate a variety of terms: infernus, inferus, Hades, Tartarus, and Gehenna, all of which had

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meanings that do not exactly match the current concept. For instance, like the original meaning of “hell,” infernus and inferus both meant simply an “underworld,” a place beneath or below the surface of the earth; and “Hades” was the name both of the land of the dead and the god of the dead. “Tartarus” was a legendary place of punishment designated for the chthonic gods, the Titans, who defied the rulers on Olympus. It was an even lower underworld, a world below Hades. The word “Gehenna” in the Bible, which is very often translated as “hell,” is a prime example of the way misread biblical texts have contributed to a Christian otherworld picture. “Gehenna” is the Hebrew name of the valley just southwest of the ancient city of Jerusalem. Rabbi David Kimhi (1160–1235) of Narbonne, in his commentary on Psalm 27, made a connection between Gehenna and a garbage dump, but this has never been supported by any archaeological evidence (Bailey 1986, 187–91). The valley is associated in the Bible with the god Moleck and sacrifice, particularly child sacrifice, and was long considered and condemned as a place of evil. The fire of Gehenna was connected to hell, possibly because Gehenna was also a burial place connected with the chthonic gods (Barkay 2005, 22–35, 122–26), but Gehenna itself was never equated with hell except in later Talmudic literature and in later translations from the original biblical languages, which, instead of leaving the word “Gehenna” untranslated, as in earlier practice, translated it as “hell.” Over time the idea of punishment and of complex, varied individual punishment designed for specific sins, attached itself to the word “hell.” Two major questions about hell concerned medieval thinkers and their predecessors: the location of the place and the nature of its fire, whether it was the same as, or different from, earthly fire. The earliest form of punishment associated with hell was fire, and there was lively speculation about this fire and how it might be different from earthly fire, since hell fire was everlasting and did not consume what it burned, whereas for earthly fire the opposite is true. Even those who believed it was the same as earthly fire, credited it with a special nature in the otherworld, which led to the perception that it was everlasting and did not consume, but this special nature was attributed to the otherworld environment and not the nature of the fire itself. Tertullian (160–220 C.E.), particularly in his Treatise on the Soul and Five Books against Marcion makes note of hell’s darkness, thirst as punishment, and a hell mouth, as illustrated in a medieval capital in Fig. 2, but the essence of hell remained a focus on punishment by a fire that does not consume but burns eternally. Origen (ca. 145–ca. 254) in his On First Principles proposed a punishing fire that does not pre-exist in the underworld, but that is tied to the individual: a selfgenerating fire fueled by one’s own sins. This fire punishes without destroying or

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Fig. 2: Mouth of Hell, capital, St.-Guilhem-le-Désert Cloister (Languedoc-Roussilon, France), late twelfth century. Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

harming the resurrected body. Augustine (354–430) argues that the bodies of the damned will certainly be punished eternally but not consumed by fire. He also says that the worm will torment the body in hell, although he resists defining the nature of the worm (Augustine 1988, 21 [City of God]; and 1.19–21 [On Christian Doctrine]). Later Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) shared the same concerns as Augustine. In questions 97–99 of the Summa Theologica, he examined the nature of the fire in hell, but he did not maintain that fire was the only source of punishment there. He acknowledged the punishment inflicted by the worm, although he also asserted that the worm is immaterial. While the Fathers and Doctors of the Church debated philosophical questions, the literature of the apocalypses painted vivid pictures of an infernal otherworld. The earliest apocalypses date from as early as ca. 100 B.C.E. to the third and fourth centuries C.E. and include the pseudepigraphic, and perhaps Jewish,

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Apocalypse of Zephaniah, the Book of Enoch, both the Greek and Syriac versions of the pseudepigraphic, Jewish Apocalypse of Baruch, and the various versions of the closely related Christian and Jewish apocalypses, revelations or visions of Esdras, Ezra, and Sedrach. Others, such as the Apocalypse of St. Peter and the Apocalypse of St. Paul from the second through fourth centuries, come into Latin from Greek and Ethiopic texts, as did the later Apocalypse of the Virgin. The vague hints found in the New Testament, compiled by the second generation of Jesus’ followers (ca. 65–85 C.E.), about an otherworld of punishment and fire paled in comparison with the descriptions in the apocalypses with their graphic reports of a dark underworld with hell mouths, lakes and rivers of fire, and pits filled with mire, blood, gore, and filth. In these realms sinners are punished for specific sins by being attacked by beasts, snakes, and worms or hung by parts of the body responsible for the sins committed. The damned were also thrown off cliffs, beaten with rods and stones, and dismembered by a variety of sharp instruments from razors to grappling hooks. There is always fire, and its effects were detailed as sinners were burned and roasted alive. In St. Paul’s Apocalypse (ch. 40), from the late fourth century, after witnessing a series of similar punishments, just before Paul reached the pit of hell, he “saw men and women clothed with rags full of pitch and fiery sulfur, and dragons were coiled about their necks and shoulders and feet, and [evil] angels with fiery horns restrained them and smote them and closed their nostrils” (Elliott, ed., 2005, 636). While these works detail specifically the fate of the wicked at the Last Judgment, their ideas became inextricably bound up with speculations about the fate of the wicked immediately after death. The texts themselves describing the Last Judgment do not equate the two different situations; they do not even consider the occasion of the Particular Judgment, which occurs on an individual basis at the time of death. Even in the New Testament, when the wicked are consigned to eternal and everlasting fire and punishment (for example, Matt 25:41–46), it is not clear how this apocalyptic fate is tied to the destiny of sinful souls at death. And yet, the fundamental medieval ideas about hell derive from these apocalypses. In comparison with the apocalypses, however, the earliest medieval vision literature presents a less impassioned picture. Unlike these apocalypses, which present the visions experienced by holy men and women of the punishments in store at the end of days—visions of the future—with Gregory the Great (540–604) a new type of vision of the otherworld emerged. He put a more human face on the infernal otherworld by introducing individuals who found themselves as witnesses there. As in the tales from the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome, Gregory’s characters accidentally or incidentally descend into the underworld and return to tell their contemporaries what they have seen occurring there in the

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present time. Gregory’s influential visions of Peter, Stephen, and a soldier (Gregory the Great 2007, 4.27) from the end of the sixth century, depict a place of smoky rivers, perilous bridges, and intolerable fire and filth. Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Angelorum (Bede 1968, 3.13, 5.12 and 5.14) similarly described a series of visions that portray hell to some degree. Furseus saw consuming fires, Drythelm saw a dark pit filled with souls suffering from flames and an insufferable stench, and the monk of Bernicia saw a place of eternal doom filled with avenging flames. Between the visions recorded by Gregory and Bede on the one hand and the Divine Comedy of Dante Aligheri (ca. 1265–1321) on the other, visions of the otherworld described the infernal regions in increasingly vivid terms and at increasing longer length as dark and layered underground places full of suffering souls. These visions were included within histories, letters, and chronicles and were circulated widely. The Vision of the Monk of Eynsham from 1196, versions of which were included in Roger of Wendover’s Flores Historiarum, Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, and Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum, presents a somewhat typical description of hell. The monk and his guide arrived at a large plain situated low down in the bosom of the earth, which seemed inaccessible to all except to torturing devils and tortured spirits. The surface of that plain was covered by great and horrible chaos, mixed with a sulfurous smoke and a cloud of intolerable stench with a flame of a pitchy blackness. Rising from all directions, this was diffused in a dreadful way through the whole of that empty space. The surface of the place was as full of a great number of vipers as courtyards of houses are covered with rushes. Dreadful beyond belief, monstrously large and deformed, with dreadful gaping jaws, exhaling execrable fire from their nostrils, these lacerated the crowds of wretched beings with a voracity they could not escape …. The devils, running in all directions, raging like mad creatures, took the wretched beings and first cut them up piece by piece with their fiery prongs, and then they tore their flesh off to the bone; and finally they threw them into the fire, melted them like metals, and restored them in the shape of burning flame … (Gardiner, ed., 1989, 209).

The mouth or gates of hell and the pit of hell, although without any biblical or doctrinal basis, were significant features of this underworld landscape. The mouth and gates were particularly suited to plastic representation and repeatedly appeared within the program of judgment tympani on medieval cathedrals, such as the typanum at St. Foy Cathedral at Conques (Fig. 3), where both the mouth and gate motifs are displayed together. They were not neglected in literary works either. The theme appears as early as the Vision of Laisren (Irish, late ninth or early tenth century). Outside the gate of hell Laisren has an opportunity to warn the souls he sees to repent and save themselves from entering there. Clearly the gates are the official entranceway to hell, and souls could be found lingering in

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Fig. 3: Mouth and Gate of Hell, West Tympanum, Conques (Aveyron, France), early twelfth century, after 1107.

the undefined space before them. This space would later become identified as purgatory. The pit, on the other hand, is found in the lowest depths of hell and is often described as the location of Satan himself. His minions might wander through hell inflicting punishment, but in the pit, Satan both inflicts and endures punishment. The Vision of Orm (Yorkshire, 1126) describes how Orm’s guide led him to the deepest and most shadowy valley, stinking full with smoke and fog, in which was seen to be a pit of unspeakable depth, absorbing and emitting burning flames continuously. The region of everything in the circuit of the pit was truly horrid and full of the densest smoke, and intolerable fetor, and fog of shadows, which came from the pit of the underworld. In truth, one of the accomplices of Satan, blacker than soot, stood upon the mouth of the pit, burning and stinking, with a terrible look and horrendous aspect. (Analecta Bollandiana 75 (1957): 79–80, my translation)

With Dante’s Inferno this tradition was summed up and presented in one of the world’s finest literary works, which laid out hell as nine concentric circles, each with a different punishment for different sins: from Limbo in Circle 1, where good pagans suffered, through circles for punishing, broadly speaking, lust (2), gluttony (3) avarice (4), wrath (5), heresy (6), violence (7), fraud (8), and treachery (9). Visions continued to be written during the Middle Ages following Dante’s master-

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work, but his was the culmination of the form and to a large extent made further literary exploration of the subject redundant. Throughout the Middle Ages, hell remained an important subject for visual artists as well. They explored its monstrous possibilities in fresco, sculpture— particularly on capitals and the tympana of cathedral facades—and manuscript illumination.

D Purgatory There is no biblical evidence for purgatory, nor does it appear in any place in the early creeds of the Church. The rise or “birth” of purgatory has been linked to the naming of St. Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg in County Donegal in the Northwest of Ireland in the late twelfth century, but the concept of purgatory clearly pre-exists the name (Le Goff 1984, 96–97). Two Alexandrine Fathers of the Church prepared the way for the Christian idea of purgatory. Although his notions of purgation lack clear specificity (Moreira 2010, 27–28), Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 215) introduced into the ongoing conversation about developing Christian tenets, punishments that would prepare souls for redemption (Clement 1954, 1.8). His pupil Origen envisaged a long-term program of education and purification after death that also would make souls worthy of everlasting life (Origen 1966, 2.10.4). Augustine (Augustine 1988, 21.13 [On Christian Doctrine]) allows for purgation after death and before the Last Judgment, although even he also does not specify a separate space from hell. While earlier writers failed to make any distinction between the space of hell and the space of purgatory, once it began to take on a distinct identity, the location of purgatory was almost consistently placed above hell, before the gates or mouth, or between hell and paradise or heaven. Dante’s presentation is a notable exception, for he locates the pit of hell in the center of the earth and purgatory as an unknown mountain in the southern hemisphere, which Dante and Virgil ascend after climbing down the furry body of Satan. The mountain itself includes two ante-purgatories for the excommunicated and for late penitents, respectively, and seven terraces, each assigned to one of the seven deadly sins in ascending order: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Pursuing Dante’s lead, some attempted to identify purgatory with a place on the earth, for instance a volcano, but geological features such as volcanoes—Sicily’s Mt. Etna, for instance—or lakes—like Lago Averno north of Naples or Lough Derg in Donegal—have been generally considered entryways to the infernal otherworld, not the locations of any one particular section of the otherworld (Le Goff 1984, 203–07).

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The naming of a space as “purgatory” has been designated as the pivotal point in the development of the idea of purgatory (Le Goff 1984, 33). The word’s early appearance in the twelfth-century Latin as “purgatorium” is most closely associated with the Latin work, entitled the Tractatus de purgatorio Sancti Patricii, written ca. 1184 by a Cistercian monk, H. of Saltrey, from Huntingdonshire in the English East Midlands. The word apparently is recorded as in regular occurrence in the British Isles from ca. 1150. Before it became a name and became linked first to a site in Donegal and then to a space in the otherworld, the earliest documented appearances of the root appear to be in the ninth-century “purgativus,” a word that meant “cleansing.” The name “purgatorium”—for which no further evidence has yet come to light—may originally have designated some sort of bath, evolving in Latin following on the model for naming for cold, hot and tepid baths— frigidarium, caldarium and tepidarium—or on the model of refrigerium, a place of refreshment in the otherworld, often synonymous with the bosom of Abraham (Le Goff 1984, 46–48). The medieval texts associated with this real geographical place called a purgatorium are actually quite silent on the otherworld purgatory. In the medieval mind, this place of retreat in northwest Ireland provided pilgrims with an opportunity to purify themselves in this world. There is some indication that the location might have long served as a place where one went to purge maladies, physical or spiritual. It is possible that this famous “cave” on Station Island in Lough Derg, which has become known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory, was originally a hot-air bath, or sweat house, a structure not uncommon in the North of Ireland used for restoring health through cleansing (Lucas 1952, 180–81; Lucas 1965, 109–10). As a Christian site, the focus was on spiritual maladies, and the program involved penance, fasting and prayer, and particularly sleep and nourishment deprivation, with a night locked in a dark cave on a lonely, isolated island. Legends arose that some pilgrims discovered in that cave an entry to the otherworld, but even that otherworld, as described in the Latin Tractatus de purgatorio sancti Patricii included only heaven and hell. The Tractatus makes clear that St. Patrick’s Purgatory is a “round cave, dark within,” and as the Lord tells St. Patrick, when introducing him to this cave: Whomever in true repentance and constancy of faith enters this cave for one day and one night will be purified there from all the sins they have committed against God during their lives and will also not only see there the torments of the wicked, but if they persevere steadfastly in the love of God, they will also witness the joys of the blessed.

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After Patrick is shown the cave, he constructed an oratory on the spot, and enclosing the cave that is in the cemetery in front of the church, placed a door there so that no one could enter without his permission. He … gave the key to the prior with orders that whoever came to the prior with a license from the bishop of the district would be allowed to enter the purgatory. (Gardiner, ed., 1989, 136)

This purgatory on Lough Derg is thus a real physical place in this world, not a region of the otherworld. As a discrete otherworld place separated from both heaven and hell, the rise of purgatory remains somewhat elusive. Although some texts make a distinction between hell and this unnamed place of temporary punishment, in numerous texts hell, as well as being a place of eternal punishment for the very wicked, is also, in fact, a place through which souls pass from one punishment to the next. In the Vision of Drythelm, which Bede, who wrote in 731, dated to the end of the seventh century, the visionary is led through a wide valley where souls are punished on one side by flames and heat and on the other side by hail and snow. Drythelm also finds himself in a field of delightful sweetness full of happy assemblies. He believes the one place to be hell and the other heaven, but his guide corrects him. Both are places where souls, not yet worthy of heaven, dwell before the Last Judgment. The former place is for the wicked who repent late, and although they suffer in this place, before the Last Judgment, they are “aided by the prayers, alms, and fasting of the living, and more especially by Masses.” The latter place is for those who did good works on earth but did not attain the perfection necessary for immediate entry into heaven. These places, particularly the one that includes physical punishment, are not called “purgatory,” but both do function as a places of temporary location in the otherworld for a soul not yet ready to experience the presence of God. The Vision of the Monk of Wenlock presents another clear example of the double function of the infernal otherworld before the isolation of purgatory as a separate place. In a letter of 716 C.E. to Eadberga, abbess of Thanet, St. Boniface describes how the monk saw, as it were in the bowels of the earth, many fiery pits vomiting forth terrible flames and, as the foul flame arose, the souls of wretched men in the likeness of black birds sat upon the margin of the pits clinging there for a while wailing and howling and shrieking with human cries, mourning their past deeds and their present suffering; then they fell screaming back into the pits. And one of the angels said: “This brief respite shows that Almighty God will give to these souls in the judgment day relief from their punishment and rest eternal.” But beneath these pits in the lowest depths, as it were in a lower hell, he heard a horrible, tremendous, and unspeakable groaning and weeping of souls in distress. And the angel said

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to him: “The murmuring and crying which you hear down there comes from those souls to which the loving kindness of the Lord shall never come, but an undying flame shall torture them forever.” (Emerton, ed., 1940, 27–28)

The Vision of Charles the Fat is dated to around the time of Charles’ death in 888. Its first surviving version is preserved in the Chronicon centulense of Hariulf (ca. 1160–1143). In the otherworld, Charles meets his father, Louis the German, who is immersed up to his thighs in a cask of boiling water. Louis explains that, like his brother Lothair and his son Louis, he will be released from punishment eventually, and he asks Charles to speed the process by offering Masses, prayers, psalms, alms, and vigils. Both the Vision of Drythelm and the Vision of Charles the Fat indicate that the temporary suffering is necessary and hint that in itself it might be purgative but is not explicit on this point. Fully one third of Dante’s Commedia (1302–1321) is devoted to this third place in the otherworld as is the entire Middle English vision of 1422, the Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Woman, which details the three fires of purgatory and ways to aid the souls therein. The preamble of the late fourteenth-century Middle English translation of the Visio Tnugdali claims that the visionary will visit both purgatory and hell but then follows the text of the Latin original from 1149, which makes no specific mention of purgatory. However, even in the twelfth-century Latin Vision of Tundale, souls in the upper reaches of hell, above the gates of hell, have not been finally judged, which indicates that this region is an intermediary place from which release is possible. In this work, such release results from the intervention of divine mercy. In fact, the Vision of Tundale was particularly tenacious about the role of divine mercy in the process of redemption. Tundale’s guides reinforces this point numerous times throughout their otherworld journey (Gardiner, ed., 1989, 154; 161; 167–68; 176). Those on earth are not designated a role in effecting outcomes in the otherworld through their prayers, good works, or almsgiving. Souls might also be delivered from punishment onto the doorstep of paradise through their own suffering. Presumably their punishment played a critical part in their eventual release. Purgatorial fires would purge them of their sins and make them ready for salvation. In fact, otherworld fire could be probative, punitive, or purgative, and while probative fire is most closely associated with judgment, fire in hell, once it is distinct from purgatory, is clearly punitive, and fire in purgatory may be both punitive and purgative (Le Goff 1984, 43–44). Fire could cleanse the soul of its sins so that it might proceed toward paradise. Sometimes souls in hell receive a respite from their torment and are punished only on certain days, indicating that they do not merit the full force of hellfire and holding out a promise of future release.

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Unlike the redemption in the Vision of Tundale, the process of releasing souls, but not damned souls, from suffering and punishment after death could be accelerated by the living, as we have already seen in the Vision of Charles the Fat. Souls could move through punishment toward paradise, being rescued by an array of devotional activities performed by the living including prayers, Masses, intercessions, and good works (Moreira 2010, 107–12). It is hard not to connect these activities back to various practices associated with cults of the dead from Egyptian to Jewish and even to Buddhist practice, where living relatives are obligated to provide offerings to ease the transition of souls in the otherworld. The role of the living in easing and eliminating purgatorial punishment eventually involved monetary contributions, a practice culminating in the buying and selling of indulgences, which was to become a matter of great controversy and was possibly the most volatile spark to ignite the Protestant Reformation. It is not surprising then that Protestantism generally rejected the notion of Purgatory, given this fundamental disagreement over the trafficking in indulgences by which one could reduce time spent in purgatory, either for the purchaser or for another. It was not until 1439 and the Council of Florence that the Roman Church reached an agreement on the doctrine of purgatory (Le Goff 1984, 52), so the medieval evidence for the third otherworld place reveals a long birth, which probably started in the British Isles. It is worth acknowledging, however, a certain similarity between Christian purgatory and the hell of religions that teach reincarnation or metempsychosis, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism, where the punishments of the otherworld prepare the soul not for salvation but for rebirth. On their path to nirvana, sinners may suffer for countless eons on account of sins committed in this life before they can be reborn again, often into a lower form. This third place in the otherworld thus has a complicated history, particularly in the Middle Ages, and is connected with many critical developments within and around the Church.

E Heaven The English word “heaven” is less problematic than “hell” or “purgatory” but combines many ideas, including the firmaments of stars and planets above the earth, the dwelling place of the gods, a paradise, and a celestial city. The Greek word used in the Bible is either “Ouranos” or “paradesios”; the Latin words are “caelum” or “paradisus.” A Hebrew equivalent for the latter word signifies “fruit garden” or “orchard,” and indeed “paradise” is most often equated with a garden and particularly the Garden of Eden from the book of Genesis. The Greek “Our-

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anos” is the name of the Greek sky god; as the Latin name “caelum” is from Caelus or Caelum, the name of the Roman sky god, paralleling the word “Hades” as both the underworld and the god of the underworld. The English word “heaven” appears in about 1159 as “heven” and has Germanic roots. “Heaven” also meant “sky” but came to have Christianized associations as the dwelling place of God, the saints, and the blessed dead. English is unusual in having two distinct words for the upper regions: “heaven” and “sky.” The latter also has Germanic roots, but originally meant “cloud” and is never associated with an otherworld, although clouds are often iconographic of heaven. In the Middle Ages, the otherworld abode of the blessed was represented as either paradise—an enclosed garden or field full of the saints and the saved—or as heaven, described as a celestial city, the Heavenly Jerusalem, the city as the prototype for the space of Christian salvation. Sometimes the place of salvation includes both paradise and heaven, with the former as a space outside the walls that enclosed the dwelling place of the saints. Although not always consistent throughout the long period under discussion, paradise was often located in the upper reaches of purgatory where the “good, but not good enough,” spent their days without punishment, but also without the communion of the saints. It might be a temporary space from which all the souls upon the Last Judgment would finally be released into heaven, or it might be a permanent space on the outskirts of heaven for those who do not deserve any better. Most often, in medieval descriptions of the otherworld, paradise is located on the periphery of heaven, just outside its gates. Dante’s choice of the title Paradiso is slightly misleading, since the space of his “paradise” is not a garden but the nine heavenly spheres—the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, the Primum Mobile (prime mover or ultimate cause)—and finally, the Empyrean, or the dwelling place of God. It is interesting that as a political exile from one of the largest and most powerful city-states in Italy— Florence—Dante chose not to embrace the “city” as a metaphor for heaven, and although he uses the word “paradise,” his heaven is also not, strictly speaking, a garden. The language he uses is not one that evokes the natural world. He speaks in terms of light, splendor, transcendence, precious materials, and heavenly bodies, rather than words that signify a garden or locus amoenus—a pleasant, fertile, and fragrant place—the well-watered landscapes one would normally associate with paradise. His Paradiso is in heaven and not a separate garden. Thus in Paradiso 3.88–90, he writes: Then it was clear to me that every where Of heaven is Paradise, though there the light Of Grace Supreme does not shine equally (Dante 1984, 3:35).

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Other works follow the “paradise” model more literally. The Tractatus de purgatorio Sancti Patricii tells of “most delightful meadows, adorned with different flowers and fruits of many kinds of herbs and trees,” where the odors are sweet and darkness never descends (Roger of Wendover 1968, 1:518). The Vision of Thurkill from the early thirteenth century describes this paradise, which is outside the gate of heaven, as “a most pleasant place, beautiful in the variety of its herbs and flowers, and filled with the sweet smell of herbs and trees .… A very clear spring…sent forth four streams of different coloured water; over this fountain there was a beautiful tree of wonderful size and immense height, which abounded in all kinds of fruits and in the sweet smell of spices” (Gardiner, ed., 1989, 234). This idea of paradise seemed to be firmly rooted in earthly geography (Delumeau 1995, 39–55). Augustine declared it to be both corporeal and a spiritual place, and afterward maps of this world would seek an appropriate location for situating the garden—a physical place that was perennially temperate, where “fruit and flowers never faded or failed and the harvest was plentiful all year around” (Scafi 2006, 165). Wherever it might be represented on maps of this world, in the otherworld it was to be found outside the walls of the heavenly city. Usually once the topic is clearly focused on heaven, as opposed to paradise, the descriptions change. The late fourth-century Apocalypse of St. Paul describes heaven as the City of Christ or the Heavenly Jerusalem: “It was all of gold, and twelve walls encircled it, and twelve interior towers, and there was a stade between each of the encircling walls … . There were twelve gates in the circuit of the city, of great beauty, and four rivers which encircled it” (Elliott, ed., 2005, 630). In the middle of the city was a very high altar, and there Paul finds David, and the city is identified as the city of Jerusalem. The Middle Irish Fís Adamnáin (early tenth and eleventh centuries) also follows this model of the Heavenly Jerusalem in its description of heaven, where the throne of the Lord is situated in a city where “seven crystal walls of various hue surround it, each wall higher than the wall before it. The floor … of that city is fair crystal, with the sun’s countenance upon it, shot with blue and purple and green and every hue beside.” Those who will not attain heaven until the Last Judgment find “a restless and unstable habitation … on the heights and hilltops and in marshy places” (Boswell 1908, 33; 35). In the Vision of the Monk of Eynsham (1196), the visionary and his guide find “endless thousands of men or spirits, who, after passing through their punishments, were enjoying the happy rest of the blessed” (Roger of Wendover 1968, 2:160). They pass from there to Upper Jerusalem, and on to a place where they encounter a wall of crystal “so high that no one could look over it and to the extent of which there was no end” (Roger of Wendover 1968, 2:162). There a gate opens and closes admitting select souls, including eventually the monk and his

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guide. Inside the gate the monk is overwhelmed by the inconceivable brightness, which sharpened the eyesight rather than blinding it. He describes how souls ascend a stairway toward the Lord “in human form,” but the monk, who would return to this life, was not to proceed far as the “heaven of heavens where the Lord of Lords will appear in Sion” [a synonym for Jerusalem]. This heavenly city was characterized by richly built architecture. Usually a throne was located in the center of an open-aired building that was often described as an enormous church with bright pillars encrusted in all sorts of precious stones. In layout, the space resembled closely a great cathedral with room for enormous crowds to circulate while elaborate liturgies are performed. Although shining brilliance was intrinsic to the place, as were the sweet sounds of music, it was not characterized so much by its elements as by those who would share the space of heaven: the Trinity, the Apostles, the martyrs and virgins, and the congregation of the saints. In short, while hell and purgatory were places of sensation and isolation, heaven was a place where any sense experience would be strictly secondary to a sense of solidarity and community. A soul in the lower places of the otherworld would be alone in suffering, in the upper ones, joined in companionship. Yet even this experience of communion paled by comparison with the essential experience of heaven, the Beatific Vision, the soul’s experience of absolute encounter with God (Russell 1997, 5). In assuring medieval Christians of the possibility of seeing God face to face, Aquinas (Summa Theologica 1.12) refers to biblical authority: “We shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2) and “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12). In the fourteenth century a significant controversy arose when Pope John XXII (1316–1334) opined that souls would not enjoy the Beatific Vision until after the Last Judgment. John’s views were not supported by the College of Cardinals, and his successor Benedict XII (1334–1342) issued the constitution Benedictus Deus (1336), which asserted that the experience was not reserved until after Judgment Day. Indeed, medieval visionaries sometimes describe glimpsing the beatific experience during their time in the otherworld, but each is barred from it, often quite emphatically, before they are returned to their earthly lives. They clearly indicate, however, that the blessed souls they encounter in heaven are admitted to the presence of the divine and the experience of God, face to face. In addition to the Beatific Vision, according the some medieval mystics like Mechthild of Magdeburg (ca. 1207–1282), heaven was also the place of another type of experience of the divine: the beatific or mystical union. Those who look to participate in a mystical union with God prepare throughout their lives on earth. Although they might briefly experience in this life the union that they seek, in the next life they will participate fully in the divine. Mechthild explains in her Flowing

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Light of the Godhead how this union, described in unabashedly erotic language, is reserved for the purest of virgins, of which she is one (McDannell and Lang 2001, 100–02; Classen 2010). The tension between an anthropocentric and a theocentric heaven existed even in medieval Christianity (McDannell and Lang 2001, 78). Augustine himself modified his views on this subject over the course of his long and varied life. Initially presenting a view in the City of God that our human relations would play no part in our heavenly experiences, which would be focused exclusively on a knowledge of God, he later, in his letters and his Retractions, allowed for resurrected bodies united with their souls who would recognize and enjoy the shared experience of heaven with friends and relations. St. Ambrose (ca. 340–397), bishop of Milan, in On the Decease of His Brother Satyrus, certainly expressed the hope for reunion with his family in the afterlife. The Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) and the Augustinian philosopher Giles of Rome (ca. 1242–1316) were firm believers in friendship in heaven and even a social aspect to existence there. Aquinas, however, maintained that God alone was the source of heavenly bliss, although even he mitigated this position, acknowledging that one could join in the enjoyment of others participating in the Beatific Vision. In contrast to such theologians, the otherworld visions themselves are, on the whole, unconcerned with souls being reunited with their earthly associates. In the Vision of Charles the Fat, the meeting of relatives is intrinsic to the story, which involves the fate of ancestors and succession to the throne. In others, the visionary may recognize a famous king or bishop, as Tundale does, but these are seldom presented as personally rewarding reunions. The evidence indicates that knowledge of God and the promise of his love were the essential elements of the eternal city.

F Conclusion The variety of surviving material—textual and visual—over the long period of the Middle Ages presents a complex, sometimes contradictory, picture of the otherworld. Although sculptural and fresco cycles have always been assumed to embrace the Last Judgment as the grand Christian subject, suitable for monumental cathedral decoration, it is possible to hazard the conclusion based on a wide variety of textual sources, that in the Middle Ages concern focused instead on the fate of the individual after Particular Judgment at the moment of death. Where did it travel, how did it endure punishment in an infernal region, how was it rewarded in a paradisiacal or heavenly realm, whom did it encounter, what would be its fate over time? There appears to be little concern about the larger Christian

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community or even about smaller, individual religious communities. The otherworld system of justice, with its degrees of punishment and reward, were focused on the individual and its earthly record. The truly bad would receive the full impact of punishment, the truly blessed would enjoy the Beatific Vision, and those who ranked between these two were given time—time in the afterlife—to progress toward salvation. Questions regarding the nature of the soul and the resurrected body, the nature of fire and the location of the otherworld were all aspects of the concern for the fate of the individual, rather than the political concerns that were paramount in Jewish and earlier Christian thinking about the otherworld. Except for noteworthy apocalyptic prophets, such as Ekkehard of Aura (d. 1126), Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–1202), and Jacopone da Todi (ca. 1230– 1306), the end of time, the Last Judgment, and the fate of the Christian community received little attention. The reward or punishment of individual Christians after death in a multi-dimensional otherworld seems to have monopolized the attention of medieval culture.

Select Bibliography Bernstein, Alan E., The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca, NY, 1993). Le Goff, Jacques, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Paris 1981; Chicago 1984). McDannell, Colleen and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT, 2001). Moreira, Isabel, Heaven’s Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford 2010). Scafi, Alessandro, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago 2006).

Cynthia Jenéy

Horses and Equitation A The Horse in Medieval Society Horses were once so common in everyday life that people in all walks of life, all across Eurasia were familiar with them. The English language teems with figurative expressions, metaphors, and truisms that reference humankind’s close association with the horse. “Rein in your desires,” “get up on your high horse, “get off on the wrong foot,” “hold your horses,” “champ at the bit,” “rarin’ to go,” and so on—all are centuries-old references to horse handling and riding which carry images and experience-driven perceptions very much alive in horse-mounted cultures. Horses made possible the swift transport of humans, goods, and messages over long distances and rough terrain. Although teams of oxen were reliable for moving heavy loads at a steady pace, over time they were relegated to pulling large heavy carts called plaustra for short distances and local hauls, while horses would leap, plunge, swim, gallop, climb, and trot willingly through all but the most extreme conditions. Horses moved migratory civilizations across continents, charged into battles, swept so-called barbarians both away from and into the middle of Rome’s marching legions. In the Middle Ages most of the city-states of Europe and the Middle East had some equivalent of heavy or light cavalry elite troops, either natively trained and equipped, or hired as mercenaries. Horses were employed in agriculture for harrowing, plowing, carting, riding, packing, and even milking. Horses were used for sport in the hunt, racing, and of course, the wildly popular tournaments. The archeological record regarding variety in size, color, and build (usually referred to as “conformation”) must be relied upon more heavily than artistic representations, for with few exceptions, those surviving representational works of art depicting the horse (i.e., the Gallen Psalter, the Bayeux Tapestry, and Luttrell Psalter) are disproportionate and ill-designed, especially when compared with the exquisite artistry of the classical period (cf. the Parthenon friezes, the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Campidoglio, Rome) and the early modern artistry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Seidel 1988). A certain amount of experience with equines is best for the study of the history of the horse (the animal’s basic nature and physiology remain the same today as in centuries past), it is also true that modern equestrians can benefit from knowledge of horses in the historical record. It is common to claim that horses in the Middle Ages were smaller than modern horses because of articulated remains found in burial sites. However,

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such claims are not necessarily informed by the full picture of the working horse in most cultures. Twenty-first century horses are primarily kept for competitive sport and recreation, and often the horses appearing in the popular media of developed countries are those bred for racing, jumping, and three-day eventing: sports that feature ground-covering power and sweeping strides. Horses used in modern farming are often visually depicted as the massive Belgian and Shire draft horses developed in the early modern period, and widely in use through the nineteenth century. But a look beyond this surface exposure in technologically post-equine cultures reveals that the working animals throughout the world, with the exception of draft and cavalry horses developed during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, are mostly of unassuming size. Consider, too, the thousands of ponies and donkeys used in the mines of Wales, some standing barely ten hands at the withers, most never seeing daylight until retirement. Some were born, raised, and trained underground, working their whole lives there, never seeing a pasture or the sun. If the average height of most humans during the Middle Ages was shorter than modern people, the height of the average utility horse would, appropriately, be shorter as well, if only to facilitate ease of mounting, dismounting, and overall handling. The modern Icelandic Horse and Norwegian Fjord are typical smooth-gaited animals of moderate stature (averaging fourteen to fourteen and a half hands; one hand equals four inches), with gentle personalities and great stamina; historians seem to currently assess these breeds as paradigmatic of the medieval palfrey, a term used in reference to high-value riding horses. In the Middle Ages attitudes toward the horse ranged along a continuum, from bonds of affection between humans and the “noble beast” at one extreme, to a mechanistic utilitarianism regarding the “beast of burden” or even meat-on-thehoof at the other end. Then as now, people whose lives were closely entwined with the horse—as messengers, hunters, breeders, stud marshals, farriers, trainers, farmers, cart drivers, knights, squires, and caretakers—understood that the phrase “to go on horseback” was a phrase that implied a substantial amount of infrastructure and resource management. At least 1,050 terms related to horses and horsemanship were collected in the 1930’s and 1940’s among Bedouin Arab tribes in Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Transjordania, and the provinces of Hejaz, Nejd, and Qasīm (Raswan 1945, 97–129). In his thirteenth-century Book of Knighthood and Chivalry (ca. 1275), the soldier and scholar Ramon Llull declared that God, having created the knight as the best among men, had then provided for him the cheval (Fr. “horse”) making him the chevalier, or knight. “Thus the most noble man is given the most noble beast” (Llull 2009, 16). From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries animals in general gradually moved from loose management in the forests, where horses and pigs often roamed, to the more structured life of the farm, and from there to the city markets (and

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sometimes slaughterhouses) as urban development grew, and the horse became a regular form of urban transport. One thing that is certain about horses in the Middle Ages is that the nature, physiology, common size range, and dietary needs were identical to the horse of the twenty-first century. Initially a difficult asset to maintain outside of military use, the horse became a part of everyday life, plowing, harrowing, carrying packs over rough terrain, and pulling carts in and out of town (Pascua 2011, 81–82). By Chaucer’s time, cities such as London realized that as populations of people became concentrated, so, too, had concentrations of civilization’s byproducts, not the least of which was manure. Between 1372 and 1382, twelve carts (bought and assigned for use by London’s City rakers in carting away rubbish in ten of the City’s wards) had two horses each. The carts and horses were purchased at rather substantial total cost of £48 6s. 8d. (Clark 2004a, 10).

B Early Domestication Equus Caballus, the horse, shared with the dog and cat its early domestication for purposes other than food long before its arrival in Europe. Horses had already been domesticated through selective breeding by nomadic tribes in the mountains and steppes of central Eurasia for use in mounted warfare, hunting, packing, and pulling (Bendrey, et. al. 2009, 1332). Equus ferus, the wild progenitor of the domestic horse, was hunted by humans for food throughout Europe and Asia approximately 160,000 years ago, but is now extinct (Warmuth, et. al. 2012, 8202). Until recent genetic research, it was assumed that variety in the size, color, and conformation of horses was primarily developed through selective breeding by humans. Yet recent studies of mitochondrial DNA indicate early (predomestication) diversity of haplotypes. Thus, the great variety of genotypes and phenotypes in horses of the Middle Ages was brought about not, as was once thought, by the breeding practices of ancient tribes such as the Scythians, but genetic evidence indicates that the horse already had diversified in size, conformation, bone structure, and color before 5500 B.C.E. (Cieslak, et. al. 2010). Genetic research and reconstruction also shows that breeding practices of the early equestrian steppe cultures incorporated frequent replenishment from wild herds. Domestic stock were often replenished from herds of wild mares, though high levels of diversity in mitochondrial DNA combined with lower variance in the Y-chromosomal features indicate that the pool of stallions used for herd development was much smaller, for unknown reasons, than that of females (Warmuth, et. al. 2012, 8204). Thus, the variations in genetic alleles actually diminished as a result of domestication. Eventually these early equestrians of the western steppe regions were replaced by the Xiongnu, Wusun, and Sarmatians around 200 B.C.E., and disap-

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peared altogether. However, their rich, nomadic, horse-mounted culture has left behind evidence of their advances in horsemanship in the kurgans, or frozen burial mounds found in the Altai Mountain range which spreads across China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and the Russian Federation (Matsuura 2012, 9). The domesticated horse, then, most probably was ridden into Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East sometime between 3500 and 1200 B.C.E., probably under saddle, most definitely already tamed. About 1700 B.C.E. the Hyksos, or “Shepherd Kings,” overran the Egyptian empire in the Nile Valley, with their version of the shock and awe weapon of terror: the two-horse chariot. Eventually the Egyptians mastered this same weapon, and with the rise of their New Empire (ca. 1500 B.C.E.) the chariot corps became their military élites of the regular army (Brereton 1976, 13).

C The Horse in the Classical World: Macedonia, Greece, and Rome Included among the writings of the famed Athenian historian, soldier, and statesman Xenophon (fourth century B.C.E.) were two equestrian treatises: On Horsemanship (Περὶ ἱππικῆς) and The Cavalry Commander (Ἱππαρχικὸς). The treatise on horsemanship provides timeless advice on the selection, purchase, training, and riding of excellent horses, while the cavalry treatise focuses upon the qualities and skills necessary to command units of cavalry, both in wartime, and in times of peace and pageantry. Xenophon’s work remained by far the most influential text on horses and horsemanship in the Classical world, and then later in the medieval world; manuscripts from the thirteenth century existed in Italy, and it was translated into Latin in the early sixteenth century (Davis 1989, 110). Xenophon’s advice was and is invaluable and humane. First, even before the horses for one’s army have been selected and purchased, it is imperative that sufficient amounts and good quality feed will be made available, for cavalry horses are hard-working animals. Then the commander may proceed to find the best animals for the job. Modern readers might find it surprising that the paramount requirement in the selection of young war horses is obedience: “You must see that they are docile, because disobedient animals assist the enemy more than their own side” (Xenophon 1971b, 235). Both treatises cover technical information on the rider’s ability to handle his horse on the ground and on his back. Xenophon insists that visual as well as auditory signals must be learned so that riders can cue lead changes, gait changes, halts, and rehearsed patterns under any conditions, and on all kinds of footing. The rider must be aware that a young horse who

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obeys calmly on the practice ground may react differently in conflict situations, which is why “sham fights” and other practice maneuvers must be held with some regularity (Xenophon 1971b, 265–69). Quite possibly the most famous horse known to history is Bucephalus (Βουκέφαλος), the legendary chosen mount of Alexander the Great. Alexander, born a year or two before the death of Xenophon (in either Corinth or Athens), notoriously rode Bucephalus throughout many of his campaigns. According to ancient accounts by Arrian and Plutarch (second century C.E.), Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, refused to buy the spirited horse even at a bargain price, because the horse kept rearing and refused to be ridden. An adolescent Alexander, however, struck a bargain with his father to buy the horse for him if he could ride Bucephalus. Turning the horse into the sun, for he had noticed the horse seemed to be afraid of his shadow dancing in front of him, Alexander led the horse about until he calmed down, then leapt upon his back and rode him at a gallop for a good distance, as the king and his men looked on. Wheeling about, he rode his new horse back again, whereupon Philip proclaimed his own kingdom too small for this young warrior in the making. Bucephalus is said to have died at the ripe old age of 30 of strain and heat exhaustion after the battle of the Hydaspes river, against Porus (326 B.C.E.) (Arrian 1814, 38; Plutarch 1906, 75). Roman military tradition did not at first incorporate large numbers of mounted cavalry. The Romans did, however, employ dispatch riders who wore paths along the softer edges of the famous paved Roman roads. Couriers were strategically placed and supplied with remounts, which was not a novel idea: the Assyrians and Persians had developed such systems, and Augustus imitated these systems, establishing a postal service for Rome (Hyland 1990, 251). Faced with highly skilled “barbarian” enemies who attacked on horseback, however, Roman commanders realized the value of mounted archers and organized cavalry. One of the often referenced victories of European mounted warfare is the defeat of Roman infantry legions by Gothic mounted troops at Adrianople in C.E. 378. Well-bred mules were prized by Romans, and a good riding mule could set the owner back the price of a house (Hyland 1990, 240). In Roman culture horses were not commonly used for food except in extreme instances of famine or unforeseen hardship; however, byproducts included horse hair used for rope or helmet crests, hides for leather goods, and the hooves as sturdy, small receptacles such as might be found in a medicine kit (Hyland, 1990, 249). There is little archeological evidence that horses were consumed as meat in Roman Britain; in London only 1% or less of identifiable bones from the Roman period are from horses (Rackham 1995, 20). Evidence from archeological digs in Wales from the fifth to eighth centuries indicates that beef, pork, and mutton were commonly

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consumed, wildfowl less often, and venison occasionally; but the horse was not eaten (Alcock 1987, 33). Slaughtering and tanning horses within the city walls of fourteenth-century London was prohibited by law, though complaints were made against tanners who seemed to be violating the statutes (Rackham 1995, 20).

D The Horse in the Middle Ages Archeological burial sites in Anglo-Saxon England dated from the sixth century contain both human and articulated (whole) harnessed horse skeletons. Such sites appear influenced by the same practice which appears to have been much more common on the Continent. In Anglo-Saxon burial sites from the early seventh-century horse and human are buried separately (Fern 2005, 43–44). Such graves or barrows show evidence of martial burial rites, with horse and human buried either together or separately, the harness later found in human burial sites without horse skeletons, possibly to indicate equestrian martial expertise or status. Equestrian burial sites from the sixth and seventh centuries indicate the cheek-ring snaffle bit as the most common in use during the Roman and AngloSaxon periods (Fern 2005, 47). The small number of sacrificed horses in England would seem to indicate that the number of prized riding horses was limited and precious, and the island’s people hesitant to waste such a valuable resource on burial rites, even for revered persons. By the end of the Middle Ages the horse was such a common element of both rural and urban life that even members of the lowliest economic strata of society were familiar with at least the basics of horse-handling. Unlike automobiles, which can be simply parked in a designated space and left unattended, horses must be tended both before and after a ride. An animal ridden to a heavy sweat (or “lather”), much like human athletes, will “tie up,” experiencing severe muscle cramping if simply left to stand. A strong gallop, whether for sport or on urgent business, would necessitate handing off one’s horse to a page, servant, or simply an entrepreneurial freelancer, who would lead the animal to the “park,” an enclosed holding area designated for the purpose. The animal would be lightly watered, walked until cooled out, groomed, and fed if necessary. Should the owner be merely stopping in for a brief span of minutes or hours, the horse would be walked about, watered, and held at the ready. Frequent instances of six-penny tips for horse-holding, and more importantly horse-walking, appear in household accounts of such powerful families as the Cecils at Hatfield (ca. 1608) who upheld a maxim of curat de minimis: “caring for the least” (Dent 1987, 2). Then as now, the privileged would operate upon varying levels of care and responsibility for their own livestock, often tossing coins to members of the less privileged social

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groups to serve the needs of expensive and perhaps finicky beasts. However, as good horses are difficult to replace, being raised, trained, and maintained rather than manufactured, it would always be in the rider’s best interest to provide sensible care, and the infrastructure supporting the horse within medieval European cultures evolved to occupy a rather large space in many of its economies. Obviously, minimal standards of breeding, feed, care, and training varied from region to region, from culture to culture, and even from individual to individual. But the overall general rule of thumb would prevail throughout the horsed world, from early horse-keeping Scythian tribes of Southern Siberia in the late ninth century B.C.E. (Parzinger 2012, 19), to the modern, twenty-first century elite, high-tech worlds of racing and other equestrian sports: “No legs, no horse.” The more informed and meticulous the animal’s care, the more one can rely upon the animal to perform physical tasks within human spheres of endeavor. Where horses were cheap and plentiful, their labor might be exploited and treated as expendable; however, this is rarely the case in Europe of the Middle Ages. For even in regions where horse breeding became a major endeavor, there was still a substantial difference between the tough, technically feral animals running about free in forests, glens, and hills, and the good-sized horses endowed with the potential of providing plow, harrow, cart, coach, and riding traction. In addition, requirements of soundness, wind, and training would add to, or detract from, the value of any given horse. While today’s historian may find the intricacies of horses and horsemanship a daunting body of knowledge, it should be kept in mind that the average person from any level in society—perhaps not all, but a substantial percentage of the population—would at least have an enculturated, rudimentary knowledge of the basics, such as where to stand in relation to a horse, how to halter, lead, tack, and groom, and at least in the case of the privileged landowners and knighted nobility, how to ride different kinds of highly schooled horses for different purposes.

E Horse Types Documents from the middle ages classify horses into “types” which are listed below. It is important, however, to understand that these “types” are not breeds, nor do they indicate phenotypes or genotypes within the species equus caballus. Rather, they are terms used for purposes of accounting, appraisal, bookkeeping, taxation, and reimbursements (such as the restauro equorum implemented by Edward III of England, ca. 1282) (Prince 1940, 337). Naturally a typical freeholder or tenant farmer would wish a horse appraisal to be lowballed when taxes were

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calculated, and high-ended when suing for replacement of, or reimbursement for, a lost animal. Thus it should not confuse the reader to encounter the appearance of such terms as caballus, a generic Latin term for “horse” and runcinus (“rouncey”), an equally general term for a typical all-purpose equine. It is certain that many horses performed multiple tasks, depending upon their training and overall conformation, temperament, size, and soundness. While a destrier—the grandly schooled military stallion ridden by armed and armored knights—might be a specialty animal costing easily the price of an entire farm or manor house, a common working family would have little or no use for such a beast. Likewise it is not surprising that such “lowly” animals as cart horses, plow horses, and the versatile rounceys would receive little or no mention in epic and romance poetry of the high Middle Ages, except to reflect the bucolic or common status of its rider. In the heroic and idealized world of chivalric adventures, ladies and well-heeled clerics would ride elegant palfreys or mules, while a knight would be depicted (unrealistically) always traveling, if not fully armored, at least mounted on his warhorse and carrying his sword. The practical realities of pre-industrial, equestrian powered societies are not so sleek and clear cut as the romances and chronicles would have us envision them to be. Even the complexities of taxation, adjudication and bookkeeping shown in the accounts and rolls of meticulous clerks in medieval England cannot paint a satisfactory picture of the daily roles filled by thousands of horses in medieval Europe. For purposes of sorting through the business of horsemanship and equine management, it is helpful to be familiar with categories used in documents: Affrus, affra, afrus, afra, etc., anglicized as “affer,” Stottus, “stott,” is a demesne or peasant work-horse, especially during the period from 1250 to 1400. It could be either a male or female animal; sometimes interpreted as a term applicable to oxen and donkeys as well. However, there is apparently little evidence to indicate that they were anything other than horses. Toward the end of the fifteenth century “stottus” came to mean oxen or steers. Animal is a term usually used in Domesday (ca. 1286) to refer to non-working livestock including, but not limited to, horses. Averium refers to livestock in general, commonly used in reference to heriot (a kind of tribute paid to the demesne lord upon the death of a tenant). Averus, avera, averius, averia, avrus, avra, etc., anglicized as “aver”—probably a grammatical forerunner of the term affrus (or affra); because of the similarity to the term “averium” (general livestock) before 1250 the term sometimes caused confusion in the identification of animals in documents. After 1250 the term “affer” may have come into use to eliminate the confusion.

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Caballus was a term in classical Latin used in reference to an inferior class of riding or pack-horse, although in the medieval period it seems to have had the more general meaning of work-horse. Carectarius, carretarius is a cart horse; often seen in documents less ambiguously as equus carectarius. It is impossible to overestimate the value of this unassuming creature. Cart horses, along with oxen, moved the goods, services, treasures, grains, and fertilizers of most Eurasian civilizations, either in short, connected stages or routes, or for extended journeys. Hercatorius, hercarius, hercharius, occatorius, occator “hercator” is a harrowing horse, often less ambiguously given as equus hercatorius or equus occarius. For centuries teams of stout, low-built oxen were tasked with plowing dense, clay-packed earth, while a harrow, pulled by a single horse or team of horses followed behind, breaking up the clumps and forming rows to be seeded. Jumentum (pl. jumenta)—usually mares serving as combination breeding- and working-stock. Runcinus—a rouncey, the common term for horses found in the Domesday survey. While some historians quibble, it seems safe to assume that the rouncey was primarily an all-around, modestly sized, hardy working horse, used for riding, harrowing, plowing, packing, and cart pulling. After Domesday, runcini are infrequently found among demesne or peasant stock listings, and gradually they seem to have come to represent a class of riding animals only. Often references to early mounted archers refer to their small-sized horses as rounceys, but it is likely this classification refers not to their size, speed or breeding, but to their basic level of training in comparison to the highly schooled destrier. Summarius, “sumpter” refers to a pack-horse, and is frequently listed in documents recording the stock servicing a noble or ecclesiastic household. Courser, or hunter, a swift and agile horse used for the hunt, racing, dispatches, and in some cases harrying and foraging, even formal mounted raids (chevauchée). Palefridus or “palfrey,” was usually a very fine and extremely expensive riding horse, bred for a smooth-gaited way of going that anybody could sit on. Destrier, dextrarius, grant chival, or “great horse,” often called “steed,” or simply “horse” refers to the warhorse, a horse trained and ridden for battle, and is also used to refer to jousting horses; gradually as the tournaments evolved from chaotic mêlée to the hastiludes featuring the one-on-one jousting contests, the jousting-horse became separate from the horse ridden into actual battle.

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Mules are an F1 hybrid produced by mating a female horse with a male donkey. The mule was a valuable, intelligent, and versatile animal, capable of taking on many, if (arguably) not all of the above roles. (Davis 1989, 135–38; Langdon 1986, 293–97) Other horses, such as the hobyn or “hobby” horse, and Spanish jennet (riding horse), are less familiar general categories into which modern footnotes classify what was, in actuality, a huge variety of equine breeds, cross-breeds, types, and “grade” horses (animals produced with no real breeding plan in mind). The work of equine historian Ann Hyland (1990; 1994; 1997; 1999; 2003) documents and narrates the depth, complexity, and breadth of the history of horses and horsekeeping among civilizations in the West, the Middle East, and the Far East.

F Work Horses Unlike the military-style burial sites in which war-clad human skeletons are buried with or near only one or a small number of horses, a large number of mysterious sixth and seventh-century mass burials of cremated horses unearthed in England suggest non-ceremonial status, containing little or no evidence of harness or riding tack (Fern 2005, 46). While this may be an indicator of the more humble status of these horses as plow or cart animals, these animals would be no less valued by their non-military, less wealthy owners, and would hardly have been subject to mass killing unless part of a pillaging spree or large-scale death by disease such as an outbreak of “murrain,” a catch-all term for any and all deadly livestock diseases, such as anthrax, glanders, and strangles. One indication of the relative costs of keeping oxen versus horses for plowing and hauling is the effect of famine on the purchase price. The price of oxen rose steeply in 1315–1316, while the price of plow and cart horses, animals harder to keep without sufficient stores of grain and fodder, plunged dramatically (Kershaw 1976, 92). Because ownership of the horse requires a commitment of steady resources, in poor economic times the horse becomes less attractive as a commodity. Messenger horses were a common expense of noble and royal households. In fourteenth-century England messengers were equipped with spurs, letter pouches, and baskets for carrying small packages, but were responsible for providing their own horses. While the king could choose to provide a replacement mount to a messenger upon the loss or injury of a horse, the distinction was noted as a “gift” in the household accounts—not as an ongoing privilege of the courier’s position. Even the miserly Edward I (r. 1272–1307) was willing to replace horses

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lost or killed in service (Hill 1961, 39; 41). A messenger, while not as high-ranking as an envoy, would occupy “a position of comfortable mediocrity among the king’s servants” (Hill 1961, 21). While modern film and American romanticized images of the “pony express” style of mounted couriers prefer to conjure images of spirited horses sweeping across wild landscapes at breakneck speeds, the typical royal or noble messenger would trot briskly from the household on his fresh horse, but soon settle into a sensible walk for routine deliveries, either for local or medium distances. Lodging for courier and horse would be either billed to the lord’s household accounts, or if not, the messenger would be reimbursed upon his return to the court or manor of his employ. Some records indicate that on routine trips the messenger might be accompanied by his groom. Rarely would a king’s messenger ride at night, except in cases of extreme urgency. Should a message require speed, the courier would be “riding post”—not relying on his own horse, but either hiring additional horses en route, or switching mounts at posting stations maintained by the crown for the purpose along the way (Hill 1961, 108–09). Accounts in the thirteenth century indicate that six or seven grooms were shared by a dozen or so messengers, and that grooms working for archers, officials, and messengers were entitled to receive clothing and food (Hill 1961, 43–45). Pack horses, or sumpters, despite the Roman history of legislating the weights and workdays, were throughout history abused and often over-laden. Horses belonging to Henry II’s household (r. 1154–1189), for example, were often made to wait, standing for hours under heavy loads, as the king failed to adhere to scheduled departure times (Gladitz 1997, 156). Unlike the riding horse, whose rider would generally dismount for periods of rest and refreshment, the pack animals would often bear their loads for most if not all of the traveling time. Good sumpters were valuable animals, sure-footed, docile, moving at smooth, calm paces, and halting quietly should their loads shift or even slide off to one side, waiting for a handler to adjust and re-balance the packs. Often such a halt would require that other animals in the train understand and halt as well, waiting patiently until girths were tightened and loads redistributed. Obviously, less weight could be carried on the backs of horses than could be hauled by cartload. However, crumbling roads, bad weather, and swollen waterways are better handled by hooves than by wheels. Horses bred for riding included hunters, coursers, palfreys, hobbies, rounceys, and amblers. Some horses were trained to bear horse-litters, a rig with a chair or lounge unit, held by a pair of poles with a horse in front and one behind, both horses led by careful handlers. For the best and smoothest ride an “ambling” palfrey, or gaited horse, would be preferred. Traditional breeds such as the Icelandic Horse and the Fjord would be strong, sturdy, short but stocky mounts with a smooth, rapid trotting gait that is comfortable to sit on, easy for the horse

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to maintain for long stretches of time, and relatively swift and ground-covering. While some women are pictured riding in side-facing saddle “chairs,” these would have been used specifically for transporting the well-dressed lady, and the horse, preferably an elegant Spanish jennet, was led by a groom or squire. Typically when riding, however, women in the Middle Ages rode astride, and it was not unheard of for noblewomen to ride into battle (McLaughlin 1990, 196 ff.). The most famous exception, a woman riding like a man into battle, was, of course, Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–1431)  

G Horse Breeding and Development By the eighth and ninth centuries, Frankish records show that stud management was a concern. Already it was broadly understood that agriculture in general, and specifically crop management, had a direct bearing on the ability of a landowner to produce the proper amount of herbiage and wealth to purchase, manage, and maintain proper mounts for military use (Hyland 1994, 62). Management of breeding facilities was in the hands of professional stablemen who were paid in land and status, as well as salaries, sometimes in the form of pigs (the most popular food animals in medieval Europe). Such men were tasked with selecting building sites for stables, deciding on the number and types of horses to be kept and bred, purchasing feed and equipment, and supervision of grooms and other workers. Many of these managers had to know when and how to rotate herds, how to manage grazing areas across the seasons, and perhaps most critically, strategies for controlling and preventing outbreaks of horse ailments and parasites (Hyland 1994, 62–63). In Britain, the breeding of war horses became a royal concern. Stallions of high quality were moved from stud to stud, to cover choice mares in hopes of producing the size, temperament, talent, and fire required of the destrier, or war horse, suitable for a noble to ride into battle or in the hastiludes (tournaments). In 1326 royal mares were covered by stallions brought in from Merton in Surrey, and from Tutbury in Staffordshire, according to a program devised apparently by Edward I (Dent 1987, 116). Detailed records maintained by John de Neusom, one of Edward III’s horse keepers, shows that the annual budget, including hay, oats, bread, grass (bought and cut), litter, carting, shoeing, fuel, candles, tallow, powder, medicine, reins, harness, cloth, wages (of Neusom, shoers, provisor, and 31 boys), and robes for Neusom and others totaled £328 1s. 4 ½ d.—a substantial fortune. Records kept by horse keepers also allow insights into early veterinary practices. Medicinal supplies in the horse keeping accounts include ‘turmentyn’ (turpentine), honey, lard,

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tallow, incense, olive oil, galantyn powders, plasters, ginger, and alabaster ointments. The recroigne was a hospital maintained for old and worn-out horses; a special roll of honor was kept for horses dead in the king’s service (Neilson 1940, 440). Neusom’s keepers and stud marshals were commonly handling (and being billed for) substantial sums of money. Mares, foals, and stallions were moved from place to place, apparently at some point in an attempt to remove healthy animals during outbreaks of deadly murrain (Neilson 1940, 437–43).

H Care and Feeding Working horses held in domestic circumstances must be provided with grains and fodder in addition to baled hay or even rich spring grasses. Their bodies are not as efficient as those of oxen, and in order to replenish the calories expended in hauling, packing, plowing or carrying a rider additional protein and supplemental nutrition is a must. Clover, both in meadows for free grazing and cut, dried, and baled as hay was and is considered a high quality basic for the horse’s diet. Meadows for grazing were either in drier upland areas or low-lying wetter ground along river banks (Thirsk 1990, 33). Feed grain, in many regions easy to obtain at reasonable prices (except in times of draught or other climatically disastrous conditions) was sold in weights and measures no longer familiar to us, and indeed, often such amounts as “gallons,” “stones,” “bushels,” and “quarters” varied from region to region, as did monetary values and standards; These measures also changed over time. Horses were fed oats, as well as peas and beans (dried and crushed), rye, and barley, either loose or baked in various combinations into loaves of “horsebread” by the “brownbaker” (Dent 1987, 162). Horses could be relied upon to travel for some distance, for days at a time in reasonable weather with minimal water and only surrounding grasses and browse for nutrition, but not for periods exceeding a few days. Traveling long distances on horseback would necessitate either packing grains or purchasing sufficient feed from towns and farms along the way. Large groups traveling along less-populated roadways would need to plan for sufficient caloric replacement and clean water. Small groups or individuals such as couriers and messengers could stop at inns or posts along the way, and although this seems a great hardship, with the exception of large armies, which moved through farmlands and villages like locust, foraging, purchasing, and pillaging along the way, most relatively stable communities were, barring famine or plague, well provisioned for regular equestrian care and lodging. The roadside “travis,” a structure used by farriers to hold horses while shoeing, was a necessity that all would recognize, for to neglect the hoof is to lose the horse. Archeological finds in and around Roman London indicate

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horses were shod in a manner identical to modern horseshoeing (Clark 2004b, 75–101).

I Horse Thegns and the Marshalcy The management and maintenance of noble and royal horses was from early post-Roman times and all through the Middle Ages a task that would tend to carry with it rank, privilege, money, and power. Four principle officers of the AngloSaxon court were the bed thegn (later the chamberlain), the disc thegn (steward), the butler (“bottler,” or supervisor of the cup-bearers), and the horse thegn, who supervised the stables. Bede’s chronicle in 730 notes that these were the ministry regis, men of wisdom and experience who advised the king and themselves held positions of trust and responsibility in their own districts (Reese 1976, 22). The horse thegn, not merely a stable-manager but a trusted warrior and counselor, would be responsible for developing studs and for eventually overseeing the agricultural and technological infrastructure necessary to keep mounted warriors in the field. In the ninth century armed horsemen had become vital to the defense of England against Viking invaders. Alfred the Great’s (C.E. 871–899) laws held that the theft of a stud horse was equal to theft of gold; during the rule of Athelstan (C.E. 924–939) law prohibited the sale of native horses overseas so as not to deplete the stock. For Anglo Saxon England, the horse was mandated as a necessity for almost every walk of life, and those who owned or had access to horses were required to join musters forming posses to search for criminals (Reese 1976, 25). With the Norman court in England came the office of the maréchal, a traditional Frankish term for the farrier-veterinarian. This office was an early forerunner of what was often referred to as the “Marshalsea,” and persists up until the modern royal Master of the Horse, a title created in the fourteenth century (Reese 1976, 34). The rolls of the late thirteenth century contain multiple entries naming Ellis of Rochester, the King’s Farrier, or Sergeant, or Keeper, and lastly, Master of the King’s Horses, whose job included purchasing and selling royal horses, procuring harness, buying saddles, securing equipment and accommodations for royal horses, and arranging payments for chargers and palfreys for an Easter festival, outfitting horses for the king’s son, and hiring smiths for the king’s horses to be shod while away from the court (Reese 1976, 46). During the fourteenth century the Marshalsea was an administrative office responsible for arranging accommodations for the king’s own horses, no easy job when the retinue was on the move. The chief clerk of the marshalsea was tasked with payment of wages, accounts of hay, oats, litter, harness, carts and most other necessities of horsekeeping, including livery (Johnson 1940, 212). When kings and

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large households took the show on the road, so to speak, the marshals were working around the clock to coordinate both horses and the staff required to tend them in sometimes staggering numbers.

J Knighthood and the Warhorse It is difficult to recount in any accurate manner the tactics of medieval mounted warfare. Chronicles tend to exaggerate numbers, with regard to both the size of armies engaged in combat, and the numbers of casualties. Battle poetry tends to focus on individual feats of bravery, often painting a chaotic picture of separate man-to-man encounters on the battlefield (cf. thirteenth-century manuscript Y Gododdin’s “Battle of Catraeth”; most clashes in Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth century Morte D’Arthur). Any sense of organized fighting strategy, mounted or otherwise, is less than complete, and often implied or colored with vague language (Alcock 1987, 306). In Germany the Latin sources of the Hohenstaufen Age (1000–1200 C.E.) give the name ministeriales to knights. This term referred not only to a military role, but also a social status, primarily of mounted fighting men. Lords could impose fines upon families of this status. Sometimes these were heriots left unpaid by the deceased, sometimes reliefs owed by the heir. The bishops of Bamburg, for example, would only require payment, typically a hauberk or a horse, when fiefs were inherited by indirect heirs. Few of these ministeriales were wealthy, and finding suitable equipment, clothing, and horses was often a financial struggle. Their lives were violent, often brutally so. These men lived in conditions far from the image presented of courtly finery and manners depicted in famed European romances; therefore a Count such as the legendary Dietrich would, as a practical matter, task his young warriors’ fathers with provision of equipage and a horse, with the lord often providing food for the young knight and fodder for his war horse throughout the winter. When a family’s “best horse” was claimed as heriot (death-tax), the family could ceremonially present the horse to bishop or lord, then buy back the animal for a half-mark or an agreed-upon sum; in some cases the cash alone would suffice (Arnold 1985, 24; 67; 84–85; 99). There can be no doubt that the system of chivalry and knighthood that served to fuse warrior status with social hierarchies in the Middle Ages had its origins in Roman culture, where military accomplishments were often rewarded with land, titles, political power, and wealth. As the Roman Empire shrank and gave way to the various permutations and configurations of feudalism, the knight became a more common fixture in European societies. However, rigidly defining his role can be less than useful. The term “knight” derives from the Old English cniht, a

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term unhesitatingly applied to the fighting men who accompanied William I of Normandy in the 1066 invasion of England. But “knights” in post-conquest England were not necessarily all endowed with the same economic resources or social status. Some were obviously rewarded with land and sufficient expenses to maintain the weaponry, equipment, armor, and horses needed to fulfill the role successfully—both at court and in military service. Others were not so well looked after by their lords or their king. An eleventh-century knight in Britain may have been paid as little as 30 s. to £2 in a year: a sum that might support his equipage but just barely. And it would require that ongoing care and upkeep of horses needed on a military campaign be covered by his ruling lord (Harvey 1976, 133–73). By the late twelfth century, knights were, at least on occasion, set up with particular fractions or percentages of income from sectors of land owned by a lord or by the other substantive landholder of the Middle Ages: the church (Harvey 1976, 166). As the knight’s armor and weaponry increased in mass and weight toward the end of the twelfth century, stronger, more heavily built horses were needed to wear the heavy set of plate-armor—referred to in its entirety as “barding.” A war horse in full, late fifteenth-century barding would wear a chanfron (chamfron, or shaffron), which protected the front of his face; a crineier (crinet), made up of segmented plates that fit along the crest, protecting the top of the horse’s neck; the crupper (croupiere) which attached to the back of the saddle, rested along the top of the horse’s hindquarters and was held in place by a loop under the tail; and the peytral, or chest-guard. Some horses were further protected with mail which protected areas not covered by the metal plate armor (for example, the lower half of the neck, or spaces between peytral and saddle). Finally, and primarily for show during processions or demonstrations, the entire warhorse might be draped in an elaborately embroidered and emblazoned fabric caparison, typically decorated with any or all of the knight’s hereditary heraldic emblems. Such elaborate equipment would need to be regularly cleaned and repaired, the horses looked after, their care supervised, and their condition kept good through regular schooling and exercise—a job best suited for a page or squire. Full barding, added to the knight’s own armor, would also require several sumpters, or pack horses, to carry it when the knight was on the move, whether joining a muster for battle or on his way to a tournament. Typically he would need at least five horses to set out with when called to war or en route to competition. The thirteenth-century Règle de l’Ordre du Temple (ca. 1257–1268), a manual created by and for the Knights Templar, describes management hierarchies that, for less well-heeled knights whose primary ambition was the warrior life, must have been a relief. Horses were bought and distributed by the Marshals, whose duties were laid forth in detail in the Régle; horses were assigned to knights; a knight could not request a specific horse (if he did so, he would be given one of

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the worst animals in the stables); the Marshal could be asked to replace a horse that was a puller, a stopper, or a thrower; squires were organized and supervised by a Confanonier (the standard-bearer); a knight who was assigned three horses would need only one squire, or two squires if the Marshal saw fit to assign him four horses. The Régle even establishes the specific pieces of clothing provided for the knights (Upton-Ward 2008, 53; Bennet 1989, 7–20). Discussion of medieval mounted warfare and jousting must always consider the etymology of the common term for its elite horse: the destrier. From the Latin dextrarius, the term can best be translated “adroit,” or “skilful”—a possible reference to the ability of such horses to execute flying lead changes, sliding halts, pirouettes, and half-passes on command. These were high-performance horses in the best sense, equal to those of any modern equestrian sport. Able and willing to pick up subtle cues from the rider’s aids—the hands, legs, and seat—the destrier was bred to be submissive to his rider, while at the same time ferociously athletic and seemingly fearless in carrying out commands during the racket and din of battle. Highly skilled, practiced, and maneuverable horses would bear all the traits desired by William the Bastard and his mounted warriors whose harrying tactics worked in such campaigns as those in the Domfront campaign of 1051. Offensive strategies of mounted warfare frequently avoided pitched engagements, instead implementing repeated patterns of shadowing and harassing, which required “rapid movement, often with fairly small forces; it involved sudden attacks and equally swift retreats” (Gillingham 1989, 154). While the lighter, faster courser would be employed as a swift and ground-covering mount for reconnaissance, the power and specialized maneuvers of the destrier would serve in the more common war tactics of the medieval knight: raiding, harrying, pillaging, ravaging, and foraging while ravaging (Gillingham 1989, 148). Such an exquisite animal would require a high degree of intelligence, a consistent training program, and regular exercise under a skilled rider. Squires and grooms who had received sufficient instruction on the backs of appropriate schoolmasters would be entrusted with the war horse’s daily care. Such an animal at the height of training and fitness would be closely guarded and greatly valued. His ability to balance onto his haunches for quick turns, sliding stops, lateral movements, and sudden impact would separate him from ordinary horses, who typically carry themselves heavily on the forehand. His willingness to charge directly at another horse is a distinct trait of the stallion. Mares and geldings are certainly capable of lashing out; however, their nature favors flight rather than fight. But the stallion’s natural tendency to bite, kick, and strike when pressed, makes him an ally, not merely a conveyance; in modern terminology, the destrier was a knight’s “smart weapon.”

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Late in the twelfth century creditors were permitted to attach the various belongings and “chattels” of indebted knights, save that an active knight would not be divested of his arms or his horses. Even knights of modest means, holding rank but not necessarily participating in active service, were still to be left with at least one horse, “and it must be a trained horse, lest he who is entitled by his rank to ride, should be compelled to go on foot,” according to the twelfth century British Dialogue of the Exchequer (Harvey 1976, 164). Although much glamour and praise is lavished upon the destrier, it should be equally noted that the hobelars, or light-horsemen, whose mounts are often described as ponies, were used in tactically brilliant ways. Robert the Bruce (r. 1306–1329), for example, used such horses for successful raids and harrying campaigns (Prince 1940, 338).

K The Tournament The tournaments, or “hastiludes,” held throughout England and the continent, along with their sometimes unnerving levels of attendant mayhem, gambling, and disorder could be justified by their sponsors and organizers as appropriate pursuits for knights, whose fitness and skills should be kept sharp through regular practice in times of peace. Initially, the tournament was laid out in the form of a mock-battle, or melee. Teams were formed into “armies,” sometimes numbering in the hundreds or more. The charge would be sounded and, especially in the case of poorly trained or unstructured units of both infantry and cavalry, chaotic violence ensued. Horses and men not claimed for “ransom” often littered the ground, sometimes seriously wounded, or even killed in the fray. As the competition became more structured, focusing upon singular tests of skill and strength such as the joust, the most valuable prize awarded in the tournament remained the same: the horse. By the mid-fourteenth century, the tournament horse had become distinct from the horse ridden into war (Barker 1986, 174). The training of horses specifically for the joust had the effect of lowering risks for both riders and mounts. In a sport which requires riders to strike each other solidly at full-gallop, a number of accidents caused by inexperienced or frightened horses would be unavoidable. The invention of the jousting barrier, or “tilt” surely saved many horses from impact and resulting injury. Today’s competition jousting, influenced by twentieth-century humane laws, requires disqualification of the competitor for even slight contact with a horse. In the Middle Ages, killing or wounding a tournament horse was also considered a serious error on the part of the competitor. Accidents inevitably happened, however, so the care of injured horses was a financial

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consideration for those entering the lists; protective jousting equipment was sometimes provided for horses as well as for riders. For his Windsor Park tournament in 1278 Edward I provided thirty-eight leather horses’ head protectors, and thirty-eight leather cruppers (Barker 1986, 173–75). By the fourteenth century, peripatetic lifestyles often ensured that knights participated in a significant number of tournaments for various reasons, not the least of which was the possibility of monetary gain. Warfare having changed a great deal in the previous four hundred years, it would have been understood that the working knight would have kept separate, specialized horses for tournament, in addition to the coursers and destriers he rode into serious conflicts (Ayton 1994, 36).

L Equipment and Saddlery In the first century Roman cavalry rode in padded saddles without stirrups but with knobbed prongs, two in front (pommel) and two in back (cantle), against which the rider’s thighs and seat could be securely braced. It is frequently noted that the development of the stirrup singularly changed the shape of mounted warfare, but recent discussions call this into question, particularly as the changes in methods of wielding spears, swords, lances, battle axes and maces from horseback were probably followed by shifts and redesigns in saddlery, rather than coinciding precisely. Metal stirrups from the tenth century forward are found in London digs, however there is no way for archeology to prove or disprove the existence of leather or rope stirrups in use as early as the fourth century in Europe or the Middle East. One thing is certain: the development of high pommels (the front structure) and cantles (the rear structure) of many saddles allowed riders to absorb the lion’s share of a weaponry impact, to twist, lean, and shift upper body weight without being unseated. During the late fourteenth century, money wages among the London saddlers rose as much as 200 to 300 per cent, from £2 and 5 marks to over £6 or even in some cases as high as £10 (a mark equaled 13s 4d, or 2/3 of one pound). Saddlers’ servants were so well organized that in 1362, 1380, and 1396 the mayor and aldermen, in response to the masters’ complaints, ordered the servants’ fraternity dissolved. The saddlers retained a level of power within the city in part by controlling the numbers of skilled laborers. Primarily they did so by limiting the number of apprentices the masters might enroll (Thrupp 1948, 113). Bits and bitting were as sophisticated in the Roman and Medieval periods in England as they are today. Metals were somewhat different, manufacture was different, but the shapes, designs, and functionalities were, with few exceptions, similar to modern equipment. The most common bits were broken snaffle bits, a

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mild rig with side rings allowing direct yet smooth and somewhat yielding rein contact with the horse’s mouth. Shank bits, too, are found by archeologists, which allow leverage for more control, and often have a solid, curb bit. Doublebitting for more advanced riding was possible (Clark et al. 2004, 43–45). Possibly the most important innovation in equipment was the eighth century development of the padded metal horse-collar for pulling. This replaced the chest strap, which had a tendency to slip and break, or simply to choke a straining horse. The padded collar placed the weight for hauling directly on the strongest point of the horse’s shoulder; today’s collar is basically identical. The engineering of this one piece allowed horses to pull much greater loads than in previous centuries (Gans 2004, 180–81).

M Literature Full treatises on horse training, or “breaking” as some would call it, from the middle ages are rare, incomplete, and primarily imitative of Xenophon (Davis 1989, 100). However, by the thirteenth century the importance of applying a certain amount of science, rather than blindly following Aristotle’s De Animalibus became clear to the likes of Emperor Frederick II, who inspired his miles in marestala (‛knight in the marshalcy’), Jordanus Ruffus of Calabria, to write an important, observation-based treatise titled De Medicina Equorum (ca. 1250). Because Jordanus was a trained veterinarian working in the royal marshalcy, his work opened up possibilities for others employed in the marshalcy to write observationally, rather than merely passing on conventional wisdom based in authority (e.g., Aristotle, Vegetius, and the fifth century sources of the Hippiatrica) (Davis 1989, 100–03; McCabe 2007, 1–3). As time progressed, veterinary marshals, such as the anonymous fifteenthcentury English author of The Boke of Marchalsi, found themselves moved to put down not only remedies for horse ailments, but also explanations for breeding preferences in the conformation of an acceptable noble mount. For these baseline qualities of style and soundness, according to the author, one should try to obtain Spanish horses, because horses bred in “þe cuntre of Spayne are the beste, for þei be folid in an heyʒe cuntre and in hard lond” [the country of Spain are the best, for they be foaled in a high country, and in hard (rocky) land] (Boke of Marchalsi 1973, 15–16). These Spanish horses, the forerunners of today’s flashy Andalusian, Lipizzan, PRE (Pura Raza Espñola) and Lusitano breeds, were for centuries considered the finest obtainable horses throughout Europe. In the opening of Chrétien de Troye’s Arthurian romance Erec and Enide, Arthur and his courtiers ride on a hunt for the white stag, the high king mounted on a Spanish horse:

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“Devant aus toz chaçoit li tois sor un chaceor espanois” (On a Spanish hunter, the king was leading them all in the chase; Chrétien, ll. 123–24, ed. Foerster 1890, 5; trans. Owen 1993, 2). Beautiful, good sized, versatile, and graceful, with higharching necks, tapering heads, large, soulful eyes, small ears, high-held tails, flared nostrils, and dainty feet, these horses resemble many of those in the illustrations and statuary depicting knights at their best of form in sophisticated artwork from the Middle Ages, such as the famous 1436 Ucello funerary monument to Sir John Hawkwood. By far the most entertaining and engaging work on horsemanship and riding is Dom Duarte of Portugal’s 1438 treatise Livro Da Encinança De Cavalgar Toda Sela (The Art of Riding on Every Saddle), in which those who are noble (or aspiring to nobility) are advised to learn well the different arts of equitation, including warfare, jousting, parade riding, and hunting. The tradition of the medieval romance features knights, ladies, squires, and various wandering characters, all cantering, ambling, and galloping across Europe. Even the author of the oldest existing poem in Old English, Beowulf, revels in a description of warriors hurrying from the countryside all around, to celebrate the hero’s triumph over Grendel. They ride their “shining horses,” leaping and galloping méarum rídan / beornas on blancum … hléapan léton / on geflit faran fealwe méaras (Beowulf 1977, ll. 854–55; 864–65). The wildly popular twelfthcentury La Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) features swiftly galloping horses with names such as Veillantif and Gramimund charging directly at each other while the warriors flash their weapons. The twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes densely populates his Arthurian romances with horses of all kinds, paying unusually close attention to the details of horsemanship. His knights ride all over the British and French countryside with many ladies and courtiers riding alongside. In Marie de France’s late twelfth-century lai Lanval, the title character is revealed as a spoiled young prince initially through his carelessness, in overriding his horse until it trembles. The anonymous fourteenth-century epic romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes the elaborate armor and trappings of Gawain’s famous horse Gringalet. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, while not particularly detailed or focused upon horses, is populated with them throughout, utilizing the warhorse’s power and ferocity in battle alongside the gentle reliability of the palfrey and gaited mule in support of the work’s overall concern with the glory and pain of civil strife. Malory’s work features several sad and desolate scenes of battle and its aftermath, showing among the carnage many a wounded or dead animal. In one instance Lancelot’s mortally wounded horse tries to follow him to Meleagant’s castle. Horses in these tales of adventure, love, and war are often painted with an admiring hand, and with a sense of heroic status that elevates the animal along-

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side its noble rider. The poet who penned the Lament of the Nibelungen (Div Chlage; ca. 1200), a mournful poem written in response to the bloody and disastrous events chronicled in the Nibelungenlied (also dated ca. 1200), places the war horse of the noble Rüedeger in the hands of pages who travel with envoys who are tasked with bringing the sad news to the slain knight’s family and retainers: Ruedeger’s horse Bohemond then trotted in sadly as a page held it [in-hand]. When it did not see its master, this horse tended to break free of its bridle and run off down the road. But now, unfortunately, the man who had ridden this horse and often fought from its back, as one would expect of a noble knight, had fallen in combat. [Rüedeger’s] daughter began to observe the behavior of the pages and, in truth, she sighed deeply. (The Lament of the Nibelungen, 136–37)

As the envoys and pages ride slowly up the road toward the castle, Rüedeger’s daughter is certain that her father is dead. The people note that the pages slump over their horse’s necks, the men are not singing as they do when returning home victorious, and even the headstrong Bohemond has no spirit to resist being handled by mere servants. Horses serve to illustrate the station, wealth, and personal character of each pilgrim in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The poet deftly places the materialistic Monk on an expensively-bred horse, the Wife of Bath on a posh ambler, the Squire on a fine horse, the threadbare Clerk on a rake-thin animal, the Merchant on his high horse, and the unassuming Plowman on a mare. If one “reads” the horses in the General Prologue, it is clear that Chaucer is interested not only in estate satire, but in targeting clerical excesses and a need for reform (Brown Campbell 2012, 182). The romances and epics of the Middle Ages acknowledge the power and necessity of the horse, although, as with most realms of medieval skill and art, poets paint the highest levels of equestrian expertise with sweeping, broad strokes, and little detail; often they provide only a delicate smattering of the dayto-day business of arranging for fodder, grazing, grooming, watering, and other practical demands of mounted travel. But throughout the Middle Ages, court poets and singers maintain in their works a sense of duty, valued service, and grace when the horse moves through their stories (Brown Campbell 2012; Rogers 2013). Even the lowliest courtiers were aware of the intensive and complex layers of expense, labor, and infrastructure required to keep such animals in the field, in service, in motion, and literally providing the traction that moved civilizations forward, from the lowliest carter to the highest born popes and kings. And while later centuries were to breed and valorize horses for speed and for sport, the medieval horse was relied upon to serve with quiet and steady strength:

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I have three very fine palfreys— no king nor count ever had a better one: one is sorrel, one dapple-gray, and one has white stockings. In all truth, among a hundred, there is none better than the gray: the birds that fly through the air go no more quickly than that palfrey, No one ever saw it bolt or rear: a child can ride it. … whoever rides it does not suffer, but rather goes more easily and gently than if he were on a ship. (Chrétien de Troyes Erec and Enide 1987, 61)

Select Bibliography Ayton, Andrew, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III (Woodbridge 1994). Barker, Juliet R. V., The Tournament in England 1100–1400 (Woodbridge and Wolfeboro, NH, 1986). Clark, John, ed., The Medieval Horse and its Equipment: c. 1150–c. 1450, rev. 2nd ed. (1995; Woodbridge 2004). Duarte, Dom, The Royal Book of Jousting, Horsemanship, and Knightly Combat: A Translation into English of King Dom Duarte’s 1438 Treatise Da Encinança De Cavalgar Toda Sela “The Art of Riding on Every Saddle,” trans. Antonio F. Perto (Highland Village, TX, 2005). Gladitz, Charles, Horse Breeding in the Medieval World (Dublin and Portland, OR, 1997). Hyland, Ann, The Medieval Warhorse From Byzantium to the Crusades (Conshohocken, PA, 1994). Hyland, Ann, Equus: The Horse in the Roman World (New Haven, CT, 1990). Langdon, John, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066 to 1500 (New York 1986). Xenophon, “On the Art of Horsemanship,” Xenophon VII: Scripta Minora, ed. E. H. Warmington, trans. E. C. Marchant (1925; Cambridge, MA, 1971), 297–363. [= Xenophon 1971a]