Wounds and Repair in Medieval Culture 9789004292796, 9789004306455

Citation preview



Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_001

i

ii

Explorations in Medieval Culture General Editor Larissa Tracy (Longwood University) Editorial Board Tina Boyer (Wake Forest University) Kelly DeVries (Loyola Maryland) Carol Dover (Georgetown (Emerita)) David F. Johnson (Florida State University) Jeff Massey (Molloy College) Asa Simon Mittman (CSU, Chico) Thea Tomaini (USC, Los Angeles) Wendy Turner (Georgia Regents University) David Wacks (University of Oregon)

VOLUME 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/emc





Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture Edited by

Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries

LEIDEN | BOSTON

iii

iv



Cover illustration: Folio 53v. from Anathomia by Claudius (Pseudo) Galen, WMS 290, Slide no. 8801/ L0022470. Wellcome Library, London.

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2352-0299 isbn 978-90-04-29279-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30645-5 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Contents

v

Contents

Acknowledgements ix List of Figures and Tables xi List of Abbreviations xiii List of Contributors xvi xxiv



Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds 1 Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries

Part 1 The Physicality of Wounds Section 1 Archeology and Material Culture 1 2 3 4 5

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor 27 Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries “And to describe the shapes of the dead”: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence 57 M.R. Geldof Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE 81 Patricia Skinner Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c.1403 102 Iain A. MacInnes “…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zů der brust”: The Placement and Consequences of Sword-blows in Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual 128 Rachel E. Kellett

Section 2 Surgery 6

The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery? 153 Debby Banham and Christine Voth

vi 7 8 9

Law 10 11

Contents

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices 175 Timothy May The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine 194 Ilana Krug “The Depth of Six Inches”: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury 215 Michael Livingston

Section 3 Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early-Fifteenth Century 233 Carmel Ferragud The Mutilation of Derbforgaill 252 Charlene M. Eska

Part 2 The Spirituality of Wounds Section 4 Stigmata 12 13 14 15

“The Wounded Surgeon”: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England 269 Virginia Langum “Scarce anyone survives a heart wound”: The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry 291 Salvador Ryan Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space 313 Vibeke Olson Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body in Imitatio Christi 340 Elina Gertsman

vii

Contents

Section 5 Passionate Wounds 16 17 18

19

Ascetic Blood: Ethics, Suffering and Community in Late-Medieval Culture 369 Joshua S. Easterling Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250) 389 Alicia Spencer-Hall Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind 417 Albrecht Classen In the Bursting of an Eye: Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography 448 Máire Johnson

Part 3 The Literature of Wounds 20 The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature 473 William Sayers 21 “Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur 496 Larissa Tracy 22 “They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …”: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur 519 Stephen Atkinson 23 Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair 544 Barbara A. Goodman

Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds 572 Wendy J. Turner

Bibliography Index 635 645

581

viii Contents Contents v Contents v Acknowledgements ix Acknowledgements ix xi List of Figures and Tables List of Figures and Tables xi Figures Tables List of Abbreviations xiii List of Abbreviations xiii List of Contributors xvi List of Contributors xvi Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds 1 Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries Tracy and DeVries 1 The Medieval Body Historiography The Physicality of Wounds 8 Surgery 10 Law 14 Spiritual Wounds 16 Literature 19 part 1 23 The Physicality of Wounds 23 ∵ 23 section 1 25 Archae0logy and Medieval Culture 25 ∵ 25 Chapter 1 Woosnam-Savage and DeVries 27 Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor 27 Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries 27 Chapter 2 57 “And describe the shapes of the dead”: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence 57 M.R. Geldof 57 Chapter 3 81 Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE 81 Patricia Skinner 81 Chapter 4 102 Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403 102 Iain A. MacInnes 102 Chapter 5 128 “…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zů der brust”: The Placement and Consequences of Sword-blows in Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual Rachel E. Kellett 128 section 2 151 Surgery 151 ∵ 151 Chapter 6 153 The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery? Debby Banham and Christine Voth Banham and Voth 153 Surgical Treatments in the Old English Medical Corpus 155 Why is There so Little Surgery in the Old English Medical Texts? 158 Surgical Practice in Anglo-Saxon England 159 Professional Boundaries 165 Disciplinary Boundaries 168 Explicit and ‘Tacit’ Knowledge 169 Conclusions 173 Chapter 7 175 Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices 175 Timothy May 175 Chapter 8 194 The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine 194 Ilana Krug 194 Chapter 9 215 “The Depth of Six Inches”: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury 215 Michael Livingston 215 Nature of the Wound 216 Treatment of the Wound 224 Ramifications of the Wound 227 section 3 231 Law 231 * ∵ 231 Chapter 10 233 Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early Fifteenth Century Carmel Ferragud 233 A Conservative Attitude to Risk 235 Amputations and Medical Expertise in the Criminal Court of Justice of Valencia 241 Amputation in Late Medieval Surgical Texts 247 Conclusions 250 Chapter 11 252 The Mutilation of Derbforgaill 252 Charlene M. Eska 252 part 2 265 The Spirituality of Wounds 265 ∵ 265 section 4 267 Stimata 267 ∵ 267 Chapter 12 269 “The Wounded Surgeon”: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England 269 Virginia Langum 269 Chapter 13 291 “Scarce Anyone Survives a Heart Wound”: The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry 291 Salvador Ryan 291 Chapter 14 313 Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space 313 Vibeke Olson 313 Chapter 15 340 Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body in Imitatio Christi 340 Elina Gertsman 340 section 5 367 Passionate Wounds 367 ∵ 367 Chapter 16 369 Ascetic Blood: Ethics, Suffering, and Community in Late-Medieval Culture 369 Joshua S. Easterling 369 Chapter 17 389 Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250) 389 Alicia Spencer-Hall* 389 Chapter 18 417 Wounding the Body a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind 417 Albrecht Classen 417 Chapter 19 448 In the Bursting of an Eye: Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography 448 Máire Johnson 448 part 3 471 The Literature of Wounds 471 ∵ 471 Chapter 20 473 The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature 473 William Sayers 473 Chapter 21 496 “Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur Larissa Tracy 496 Chapter 22 519 “They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …”: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur Stephen Atkinson 519 Chapter 23 544 Women’s Wounds An Exploration a Society in Disrepair 544 Barbara A. Goodman 544 Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds 572 Wendy J. Turner 572 Physical Wounds 573 Healing Wounds 574 Disabling Wounds 575 Sacred Wounds 577 A Conclusion 579 Bibliography 581 Bibliography 581 Manuscripts Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index 630 Index 630

Contents xi xii

2 4

128

153

233

and

Freeing

the

Spirit:

Dorothea

von

Montau’s

Bloody

Quest

for

Christ,

496 519

of

581 581 595

in

Middle Defilement,

English Disfigurement,

Romances: and

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

ix

Acknowledgements Julian Deahl, editor extraordinaire at Brill for more than three decades, is responsible for this project. Years ago in discussing projects for future publication at one of the many conferences we both attended, Julian asked me (Kelly) what was known about medieval military surgery and if anyone was currently working on it. Having written on the subject at the beginning of my career – an article, “Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry,” had appeared in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 7 (1990): 131–46 – I responded that I did not know of anyone. From then on I began to run down sources, primary and secondary; there were not many of them, and in fairly inaccessible locations, although they were nicely ferreted out by the Interlibrary Loans department of the Loyola-Notre Dame Library. In between that first discussion and the publication of this book, much has happened. The chance discovery in 1996 of bodies killed at the battle of Towton (1461) led to much more scientific examination of medieval battlefield casualties than previously undertaken, including of the wounds these remains carried – both those that killed these soldiers and others from earlier wars that had healed. And, most recently, the famous excavation of one of perhaps England’s most infamous kings, Richard III, has sparked a greater interest in medieval wounds and wound repair for a growing number of people, inside and outside of academia. It long surpassed my capabilities of writing on the subject. Thus was born the current group of articles – far from covering the entire field, it nevertheless shows how vast that field is and represents a good “surgical slice” of what is out there. It is a nice result of what Julian and I talked about so long ago. It is also a fitting, but sad, memorial to Julian Deahl’s editorial skill and friendship. For, as this volume was being written, Julian retired from Brill after many years of wonderful service to the Press and its many authors. Of course, we are not pleased to lose Julian as a guide, mentor, or conference dinner companion. But, we wish him well in his future endeavors – which, evidently, include beekeeping. Hopefully, when the bee stings become too much to handle, he will reference this book and remember that, by and large, premodern people shook off the small “bee stings” and even some of the greater “hive swarms” to continue on to the next day.

x

Acknowledgements

Julian Deahl is also responsible for creating the series Explorations in Medieval Culture, in which this collection is the inaugural volume, and we are especially grateful to him for entrusting this series to us. This project is the culmination of many long and interesting conversations with friends and colleagues. As such, there are numerous people to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for their contributions, their patience, and their support. We would especially like to thank Tina Boyer, Carol Dover, Jay Paul Gates, Thomas Herron, David F. Johnson, Jeff Massey, Nicole Marafioti, Asa Simon Mittman, Daniel O’Sullivan, Thea Tomaini, Wendy Turner, David Wacks, and Kevin Whetter for their input at various stages of this project, especially Wendy and Asa. We are extremely grateful to Shannon Ambrose for her tireless and keen proofreading eye. This project would not have been possible without the encouragement and guidance of Marcella Mulder and Julian Deahl at Brill, the Board of Explorations in Medieval Culture, and the insightful comments and suggestions of their reader.

List of Figures and Tables List of Figures and Tables

xi

List of Figures and Tables 1.1

Figures

“The Wound Man” (c. 1420) from Thuringia (London, Wellcome Library MS 49, fol. 35r) 51 14.1 Hans Memling. German/Flemish c. 1430/40–1494. The Man of Sorrows in the arms of the Virgin 1475 or 1479, Oil and gold leaf on wood panel, 27.4 × 19.9 cm 314 14.2 Christ displaying his wound to a nun, Initial D, Hours of the Passion, 1275–1300. Illuminated manuscript, 115 × 80 mm. The British Library, London (MS. Egerton 945 col. 237v) 317 14.3 Attributed to Jean le Noir, Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg. Folio 328r. Crucifixion with Bonne and Jean, Duke of Normandy kneeling before the cross. Before 1349. Tempera, grisaille, ink, and gold leaf on vellum, 4 15/16 × 3 9/16 in. (12.6 × 9 cm). The Cloisters Collection, 1969 (69.86) 318 14.4 Arma Christi, c. 1360–75. Illuminated manuscript, 455 × 310 mm. The British Library, London (MS. Royal 6 E VI f.15) 321 14.5 Attributed to Jean le Noir, Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg. Folio 331r. Holy Wound of Christ flanked by the “arma Christi”. Before 1349. Tempera, grisaille, ink, and gold leaf on vellum, 4 15/16 × 3 9/16 in. (12.6 × 9 cm) 322 14.6 The Wounds of Christ with the Symbols of the Passion, c. 1490. Woodcut, hand-colored in vermilion, green, and yellow; mounted on sheet that covers manuscript on verso. Overall: 12 × 8.1 cm (4 3/4 × 3 3/16 in.) overall (external frame dimensions): 39.4 × 31.8 cm (15 1/2 × 12 1/2 in.) 326 14.7 The Five Wounds of Christ, The Loftie Hours, mid-fifteenth century (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum MS. W.165, fol. 110v) 328 14.8 The Coventry Ring inscribed with the Man of Sorrows and the Five Wounds of Christ, Gold, late fifteenth-century (London, British Museum, AF.897) 331 14.9 Ecce Homo, c. 1450, Woodcut, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge CUL MS Additional 5944 (11) 332 14.10 The Blood of Christ from a Devotional Book, c. 1480–90. Illuminated manuscript, 120 × 90 mm. The British Library, London (MS. Egerton 1821, fold 6v−7) 355 14.11 Sacred Heart Pierced by the Holy Lance, 1460. Woodcut, 95 × 73 mm. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 692, fol. 73v 338 15.1 Jesus Claims the Heart of the Faithful, Ulm, 1490s, colored woodcut, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection 1943.3.853 341 15.2 Christ and the Loving Soul. BSM Einbl. 111, 52f, early – mid 1500s 342

xii

List Of Figures And Tables

15.3 15.4

Love Bearing the Cross, Bavaria, second half of the 15th c., GNM H61 344 Christ and the Loving Soul, Constance, ca. 1490, Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 710 [322], fol. 1r 346 15.5 The Fetternear Banner, detail, ca. 1520, Scotland 348 15.6 Hans Multscher and workshop, the Carrying of the Cross from the Wurzach Altar (detail), Ulm, 1437, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 348 15.7 “Der Jüden Ehrbarkeit,” 1571, BSM Res/4 Polem. 2290 h#Beibd.1 350 15.8 René d’Anjou, Le Livre du Cœur d’Amour épris (detail: Heart Plucked from the Dreamer), 1457–70, Vienna, ONB, Codex Vindobonensis 2597 355 15.9 Michael Wolgemut and Workshop, pub. by Anton Koberger, Christ on Mount of Olives, page 52 from the Treasury (Schatzbehalter), 1491. Woodcut on cream laid paper with letterpress on verso 
245 × 175 mm (image/block/sheet) 356 15.10 Christ’s wounds, detail of The Man of Sorrows between the Virgin and Saint John (Schr. 996), German, 15th century, hand-colored Woodcut, Dimensions: sheet: 6 1/8 × 3 7/8 in. (15.5 × 9.8 cm) 358 15.11 Workshop of Bernt Notke, Christ as the Man of Sorrows and St. Elisabeth of Thüringia, first view of the Holy Spirit altarpiece, 1483. Church of the Holy Spirit, Tallinn, Estonia 360



Tables

6.1 6.2 6.3

Laws of King Æthelberht 160 Laws of King Alfred 162 Scale of information types based on levels of assumed familiarity 172

List of Abbreviations List of Abbreviations

xiii

List of Abbreviations Aeth. AL Alliterative ARV AU BLB

Bruce [Duncan] Chron. Bower Chron. Fordun

Chron. Lanercost [Maxwell] Chron. Lanercost [Stevenson] Chron. Wyntoun CIH DIAS Dresden manuscript

EETS, o.s. EETS, e.s. ELH

Laws of Aethelberht of Kent, ed. Lisi Oliver at http://www. earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/laws/texts/abt/ Ancient Laws of Ireland, eds. and trans. W.N. Hancock, et al., 6 vols. (Dublin: A Thom, 1865–1901). Alliterative Morte Arthure. Morte Arthure, ed. Edmund Brock, EETS o.s. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1871, rptd. 1961). Archivo del Reino de Valencia Annals of Ulster Bald’s Leechbook, London, British Library, Royal MS 12 D. xvii (s.xi). T.O. Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols (London: Rolls Series, 1864–6). John Barbour, The Bruce, ed. A.A.M. Duncan (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997). Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. Donald E.R. Watt, et al. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987–98). Johannis de Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871), 1:335; translation in John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872). The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272–1346, ed. Herbert E. Maxwell (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1913). Chronicon de Lanercost, ed. Joseph Stevenson (Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1839), 268. Andrew of Wyntoun, The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1872–9). Corpus Iuris Hibernici, ed. D.A. Binchy, 6 vols. (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1978). Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies Sigmund Ringeck, fencing manual. Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Codex Mscr. Dresd. C 487. Martin Wierschin, Meister Johann Liechtenauers Kunst des Fechtens, MTU 13 (Munich: Beck, 1965). Early English Text Society, Original Series Early English Text Society, Extra Series English Literary History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press).

xiv GEIL

List Of Abbreviations

Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, Early Irish Law Series 3 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988). Glasgow manuscript Sigmund Ringeck, fencing manual. Glasgow Museums, R.L. Scott Collection MS E.1939.65.341. GT Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri Historiarum X, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS Rer. Merov. 1.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1951). ITS Irish Texts Society LA Lex Alamannorum, ed. J. Merkel, in MGH LL III, ed. G. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1868). LBA Angela of Foligno, Ludger Thier, and Abele Calufetti, Il Libro Della Beata Angela Da Foligno: Edizione Critica (Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Quas, 1985). LBai Lex Baiwariorum, ed. J. Merkel, in MGH LL III, ed. G. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1868). LFris. Lex Frisionum, ed. K. de Richthofen, in MGH LL III, ed. G. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1863). LL Leges Langobardorum, ed. F. Bluhme in MGH LL IV, ed. G.H. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1868). Med. Margaret of Oingt, “Pagina Meditationum,” in Oeuvres De Marguerite d’Oyngt, ed. Philipon, 1–33. MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica PA Pactus Alamannorum, ed. J. Merkel, in MGH LL III, ed. G. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1868). PLS Pactus Legis Salicae, ed. K.A. Eckhardt, in MGH LL Nat. Germ. IV.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1962). Raoul Raoul de Cambrai, ed. and trans. S. Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). RD/Karimi Rashid al-Din, Jami’at al-Tawarikh, ed. B. Karimi (Teheran: Iqbal, 1983). RD/Thackston Rashiduddin Fazullah, Jami’u’t-Tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). Scalacronica [Maxwell] Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, ed. Herbert E. Maxwell (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1907). SCF Studia Celtica Fennica SEENET Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts SHM The Secret History of the Mongols, trans. and ed. Igor de Rachewiltz (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Stanzaic Stanzaic Morte Arthur. Le Morte D’Arthur: A Critical Edition, ed. P.F. Hissiger (Paris: Mouton, 1975).

List of Abbreviations TEAMS

TNA VAS

VBN

VIH

VMY

VSH YSCY

xv

Consortium for Teaching Medieval Studies, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press). London, The National Archives Anon, “De B. Aleyde Scharembekana, Sanctimoniali Ordinis Cisterciensis, Camerae iuxta Bruxellam,” in Acta Sanctorum, ed. Godfrey Henschen (Paris: Société des Bollandistes, 19021970), June, 2: 477–83. Anon and Roger de Ganck, The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth: 1200–1268 [parallel Latin and English edition], trans. John Baptist Hasbrouck and Roger De Ganck (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991). Hugh of Floreffe, “De B. Ivetta, sive Iutta, vidua reclusa, Hvi in Belgio,” in Acta Sanctorum, ed. Godfrey Henschen, January (Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970), 1:863–87. Thomas of Cantimpré, “Vita Margarete de Ypris,” ed. G.G. Meerseman, in Archivum fratrum praedicatorum 18 (1948): 106–130. Charles Plummer, Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (1910; repr. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997). Yin-Shan Cheng-yao (The Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink). In A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui’s Yin-Shan Cheng-Yao: Introduction; Translation; Commentary and Chinese Text, ed. and trans. Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson (London: Kegan Paul, 2000).

xvi

List of Contributors

List Of Contributors

List of Contributors Stephen Atkinson (PhD, English Language and Literature, Indiana University) is an Associate Professor of English at Park University. His publications on Malory go back to 1981, and he has presented many conference papers on the author’s work. An article on the May passages is forthcoming in Arthuriana. He is currently at work on a book analyzing the Morte Darthur’s early reception history. Debby Banham (PhD, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, Cambridge) is an Anglo-Saxon historian who teaches at the Universities of Cambridge and London (Birkbeck College). She has published Monasteriales indicia: the Old English Sign Language (AngloSaxon Books, 1990), Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England (Tempus, 2004), and articles on medicine, diet, and food production in early medieval England. Her latest publication is Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming (Oxford University Press, 2014) with Rosamond Faith. Albrecht Classen (PhD, German, University of Virginia) is University Distinguished Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona, focusing on high to late medieval German and European literature. He has published more than seventy volumes, including monographs, collections of articles, translations, textbooks, and editions. He is the editor of the Handbook of Medieval Studies (3 vols., 2010) and is currently preparing a new Handbook of Medieval Culture (2–3 vols., 2015). His interest concerns women’s literature, xenology, history of mentality, mysticism, and, most recently, ecocriticism. Much of his work is interdisciplinary and comparative. Kelly DeVries (PhD, Medieval Studies, University of Toronto) is professor of history at Loyola University Maryland and Honorary Historical Consultant for the Royal Armouries, UK. He has published and edited numerous books, articles and bibliographies on military history, medieval history and the history of technology for academic and popular historical audiences, including Battle of Crécy: A Casebook (with Michael Livingston) (Liverpool University Press, 2015), Medieval Military Technology (2nd ed., University of Toronto Press, 2013), Rhodes Besieged (History Press, 2011); Medieval Weapons (ABC-CLIO, 2007), The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1363–1477 (Boydell, 2005); Joan of Arc: A Military

List of Contributors

xvii

Leader (Sutton 1999); The Norwegian Invasion of England in 1066 (Boydell, 1999); and Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century (Boydell, 1995), among others, and has appeared on more than 30 shows for PBS, History, History International, Military History, and National Geographic Channels. He travels and lectures throughout the world, crossing the Atlantic 26 times in one 24-month period. He is the grandfather of Ian, Emmaline, and Lucas. Joshua S. Easterling (PhD, Medieval Studies, Department of English, The Ohio State University) is adjunct instructor in English at Murray State University.  He has published articles on ascetic, solitary (eremitic and anchoritic), and monastic culture in late-medieval England. Currently, he is completing a book-length study of latemedieval anchoritic texts. Charlene M. Eska (PhD, Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University) is Associate Professor in the English Department at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on medieval law codes from the British Isles, particularly Ireland. She is the author of Cáin Lánamna: An Old Irish Tract on Marriage and Divorce Law (Brill, 2010) and articles dealing with issues in early Irish law, such as slavery, swine values, Sunday laws, and marriage. She is currently editing the medieval Irish legal texts Recholl Breth, Di Thúaslucud Rudrad, and Anfuigell. Carmel Ferragud (PhD, Geography and History, Universitat de València, 2002) is an assistant professor of history of science in the Universitat de València and member of Instituto de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia López Piñero (Spain). He has published some books and articles about the medical practitioners and the practice of medicine during the Middle Ages, and has edited some volumes about medieval documents. He is author of: Medicina i promoció social a la Baixa Edat Mitjana (Corona d’Aragó, 1350–1410) (CSIC, 2005); La cura dels animals: menescals i menescalia a la València medieval (Afers, 2009); Medicina per a un nou regne: el paper de la medicina i els seus practicants en la construcció del regne de València (s. XIII) (Bromera, 2009); “The role of doctors in the slave trade during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries within the kingdom of  Valencia (Crown of Aragon),” Bull Hist Med 87/2 (2013): 143–169. 

xviii

List Of Contributors

M.R. Geldof (PhD researcher, History, Merton College, University of Oxford) His current research studies the social contexts of violence and its performance by English elites and gentry. Elina Gertsman (PhD, Boston University) is associate professor of medieval art at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of Worlds Within: Opening the Shrine Madonna  and  The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (the winner of the John Nicholas Brown prize from Medieval Academy of America, 2014); the editor of Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts and Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History; and co-editor of Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces. Her articles have appeared in numerous peer-reviewed collections and journals such as  Gesta, Studies in Iconography, Art History, Religion and the Arts, and Mediaevalia. She is a recipient of several prestigious awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the College Art Association, and the Kress Foundation. Barbara A. Goodman (PhD, English, University of London) is professor of English at Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia. Her primary research interests focus on the deformities and the deterioration that women’s bodies incur in Middle English romances. Articles include “Fostering medieval studies within ‘sondry’ General Education curriculums,” SMART; “Linguistic Audacity: Shakespeare’s Language and Student Writing,” English Journal; and “City of Ladies; Ladies of Cities,” Medieval Feminist Forum. Máire Johnson (PhD, Medieval Studies, University of Toronto) is an Assistant Professor of Ancient and Medieval World History at Emporia State University in Kansas. She has published a number of articles and essays concerning Ireland’s saints, and her work often focuses on the intersection of medieval Irish law and hagiography. She is in the process of revising her book, The Law and the Life: The Saint in Medieval Ireland, and is also in the midst of three other projects: an analysis of snark and sarcasm in the Lives of Ireland’s saints; a study of the association between grief and gender in the literature of early Ireland; and an assessment of the representation of verbal assault and its punishment in Ireland’s hagiography.

List of Contributors

xix

Rachel E. Kellett (PhD, Modern/Medieval Languages, King’s College London) is a graduate of Jesus College, Oxford and King’s College, London. Her doctoral thesis on depictions of single combat and battle in the works of the Middle High German author Der Stricker was published as a monograph in 2008. Since then she has worked as an independent researcher, and has published articles on the depiction of injuries and the role of armour in medieval literary works, as well as on the earliest European fencing manual, Royal Armouries MS I.33. She is also a contributor to the Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies for medieval German literature. Ilana Krug (PhD, Medieval Studies, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto) is an Associate Professor at York College of Pennsylvania where she teaches ancient, medieval and early modern European history, and specializes in late medieval England, specifically fourteenth-century English military, economic, political and social history. She has published articles on the social and economic effects of war logistics in the opening years of the Hundred Years’ War, and is presently working on a book dealing with military supplying in late medieval England. Virginia Langum (PhD, English, Cambridge University) is Pro Futura research fellow at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. She has published numerous articles on medieval medicine, literature and religion. She is currently completing a monograph on medicine and the seven deadly sins in late medieval culture. Michael Livingston (PhD, English, University of Rochester) holds degrees in English, Medieval Studies, and History. He currently serves as an associate professor of English at The Citadel. While he has is published widely across the Middle Ages, his most recent book was Owain Glyndwr: A Casebook (with John Bollard, Liverpool, 2013). He is currently at work with Kelly DeVries on The Battle of Crécy: A Casebook (Liverpool, 2015). Iain A. MacInnes (PhD, History, University of Aberdeen) is a lecturer in Scottish History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He has published several articles and essays on the military aspects of the Scottish Wars of Independence, with

xx

List Of Contributors

particular focus on the second phase of this conflict between 1332 and 1357. His first monograph, providing a detailed examination of this period of warfare with particular focus on conduct in war and chivalry, will be published in 2015. Timothy May (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor of Central Eurasian History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Letters at the University of North Georgia. He is also the 2014 North Georgia Alumni Distinguished Professor. He has published several books and articles including The Mongol Art of War (Pen & Sword, 2007) and The Mongol Conquests in World History (Reaktion Books, 2012). Currently is writing a survey of the Mongol Empire (Edinburgh University Press) and is the editor of the The Encyclopedia of the Mongol Empire (ABC-CLIO). Vibeke Olson (PhD, University of California Santa Barbara) is associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.  Her research and publication interests include the production process of medieval architectural sculpture (ed., Working With Limestone, Ashgate, 2011) and the reception of images by medieval audiences (including “‘Woman, Why Weepest Thou?’: Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary and the Transformative Power of Holy Tears in Late Medieval Devotional Painting,” in Mary Magdalene (Brill 2012), and “Movement, Metaphor and Memory: The Interactions Between Pilgrims and Portal Programs,” in Push Me, Pull You (Brill, 2011). Salvador Ryan (PhD, National University of Ireland, Maynooth) is professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Pontifical University, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He has published widely on the devotional worlds of late medieval and early modern Ireland. He is co-editor (with Rachel Moss and Colmán Ó Clabaigh) of Art and Devotion in late medieval Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006); (with Henning Laugerud) of Devotional cultures of European Christianity, 1790–1960 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2012); and (with Brendan Leahy) of Treasures of Irish Christianity, volumes 1 and 2 (Dublin: Veritas, 2012 and 2013). His most recent volume, The materiality of devotion in late medieval northern Europe (with Henning Laugerud and Laura Katrine Skinnebach), will be published by Four Courts Press later this year.

List of Contributors

xxi

William Sayers (PhD, Romance Languages & Literatures, the University of California at Berkeley) is an adjunct Full Professor in the Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University. He writes primarily on Old Norse, Old Irish, French, Norman and Anglo-French languages and literatures, and has English etymology as a sideline.  Recent studies of relevance to the present contribution are “Extraordinary Weapons, Heroic Ethics, and Royal Justice in Early Irish Literature,” Preternature 2.1 (2013); “Fantastic Technology in Early Irish Literature,” Études Celtiques 40 (2014): 85-98, and “Qualitative and Quantitative Criteria for Prosperous Royal Rule: Notes on Audacht Morainn and a Vedic Indian Analogue,” Studia Celtica 48 (2014): 93-106. Patricia Skinner (PhD, History, University of Birmingham, UK) is Reader in Medieval History at the University of Winchester. She is currently completing a project on responses to disfigurement in early medieval Europe, supported by the Wellcome Trust, and has published an article on gender and nasal disfigurement in Journal of Women’s History 26 (2014). She has numerous publications in medieval Italian, gender and medical history, most recently Medieval Amalfi and its Diaspora, 800–1200 (Oxford UP, 2013) and has co-edited (with Elisabeth van Houts) Medieval Writings on Secular Women (London, Penguin, 2011). Alicia Spencer-Hall (PhD, French, University College London) is the recipient of a Modern Humanities Research Association Research Scholarship (2015–16), funding to enable the revision of her PhD thesis into a monograph. In her research, she analyses the biographies of thirteenth-century female religious from Liège in concert with modern visual theories and paradigms. She has also published on other notable religious women, including a study of Birgitta of Sweden’s symbolic capital, and how this was used by Walter Bower for Scottish nationalist aims in the fifteenth century (Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume, 2013: 107–19). She teaches undergraduates literary analysis skills at University College London, and runs a course on medieval female authorship at Queen Mary University of London. Larissa Tracy (PhD, Medieval Literature, Trinity College, Dublin) is currently an Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University, Farmville, VA. She is the author of Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (D.S. Brewer, 2012) and Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of

xxii

List Of Contributors

Middle English Saints’ Lives (D.S. Brewer, 2003). She co-edited with Jeff Massey, Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination (Brill, 2012), and edited Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (D.S. Brewer, 2013). She has published articles on violence, fabliaux, comedy, gender, hagiography, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and teaches a variety of courses, including studies abroad, on various aspects of medieval literature. She is also the series editor for Explorations in Medieval Culture (Brill), and the editor of Eolas: The Journal for the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies. Wendy J. Turner (PhD, History, University of California Los Angeles) is a professor of history at Georgia Regents University. She is the author of Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Brepols, 2013). She has edited several books, including Trauma in Medieval Life, with C. Lee (Brill, forthcoming), Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages, with S. Butler (Brill, 2014), Madness in Medieval Law and Custom (Brill, 2010), and The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe, with T.V. Pearman (Mellen, 2010). She has written numerous articles and given lectures on mental health, disabilities, law, medicine, early science, and the Savoyards in England – the topic of her latest research. Christine Voth (PhD, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, Cambridge) is a lecturer in Medieval Studies at the University of Göttingen (Seminar für Englische Philologie). She completed her PhD in Medieval History at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. Her PhD, “An analysis of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii,” is an indepth examination of the earliest extant vernacular medical manuscript in Anglo-Saxon England. Robert C. Woosnam-Savage read Art History at the University of Manchester (1978–81) and gained a PostGraduate Diploma in Art Gallery and Museum Studies (1982). He has worked at the Royal Armouries Museum since 1997 and been Senior Curator of European Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries since 2001. In 2015 he was made Visiting Research Fellow, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds. Since September 2012, he has been heavily involved with the University of Leicester “Search for Richard III” archaeological project, as Project Weapons Expert. He has been studying the  skeleton of Richard III since its discovery and was employed to help identify and examine the weapons trauma on the

List of Contributors

xxiii

skeleton and attempt to suggest the various types of medieval weapons that may have been used to make them. He is one of only a handful of experts to have studied the remains at first hand and his co-authored article regarding the trauma was published in the leading medical journal The Lancet in September 2014. This was followed by the co-authored book The Bones of a King: Richard III Rediscovered (Wiley Blackwell, 2015). He also made numerous radio and TV appearances including, most recently, the three Channel 4 documentaries about Richard III (2013 and 2014).

xxiv

List Of Contributors

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

1

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries Tracy and DeVries The human body is a container held together by a carefully constructed network of blood vessels, nerves, and ligaments, intertwined with a skele­tal framework designed to shape and protect the delicate organs within, all wrapped neatly in a casing of skin. Any breaking of the skin through blunt or sharp-force trauma, any puncture or slash, laceration or abrasion, threatens the interior systems of the body. Wounds pierce and penetrate, permeate, and infect. Wounds allow access to the internal elements of the human body, revealing its vulnerabilities but also its strength and, in some cases, miraculous capacity to heal from even the most violent of injuries. Flesh can be wounded and knit back together by unguents, ointments, honey, sutures, plasters, bandages, and suppurations. A wound can indict, convict, acquit; wounds are legal entities, inflicted in the course of justice and injustice. They are adjudicated, measured, treated, compensated, and bound. They can also inspire, especially when a deity is defined in part by wounds carried after “death” to prove eternal life; when followers acquire those same wounds, they are deemed especially devout and holy. In the medieval world, wounds could be fatal or salvific; they represented the sacrifice of love – divine and earthly. They could be mutilating, proof of shame or valor. They could be the cause of lifelong admiration or endless poverty. They could bring temporary pain, quickly relieved by rest or alcohol, or lingering agony that ended only with death. They could be caused by all sorts of weapons – swung, thrust, or shot. They could be prevented by armor and treated by surgeons. They could end life or immortalize it. Wounds were not simply injuries to the body; rather, they were often signifiers of class or status, and many were dealt with and compensated based on social standing. Holy wounds (divine manifestations, self-inflicted, or barbaric punishment) opened the sanctified body up to interpretation as well as infiltration by the Holy Spirit. Wounds occurred in a variety of ways and in a variety of venues. Not all were inflicted with malice. Some were the product of chivalric jousting, dueling, or trials by combat. Writing about the spectacle of wounding in medieval images, Mitchell Merback explains: “Once a wound appears before our eyes, it is as if a fault line has opened up across the body’s topography, one that threatens to tear open ever wider expanses of the body’s hidden interior.”1 Witnessing the wounded body in art and in punitive 1 Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 113.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_002

2

Tracy And Devries

spectacle “delivers an inchoate shock, and causes such sympathetic perceptions of pain, because the wounded body of our vision somehow ceases to be that body and becomes, in an uncanny way, our body as well.”2 Outside of artistic or judicial spectacles, medieval people were exposed to real, literal, wounds in multiple ways, often (but not always) responding to them and treating them with a certain level of calm and coherence. Healing wounds was just as significant a part of medieval practice as inflicting them or punishing the infliction. Surgical treatises offer clinical assessments of wounds and treatments, while battlefield accounts and fencing manuals describe how armor and technique were meant to prevent serious injury. Wounds feature heavily in chivalric literature and form the centerpiece of medieval conceptions of heroism and masculinity. Wounds were a function of fragmentation, the body separated into parts, penetrated and revealed. Wounds manifest anxieties about dislocation and dismemberment that figure into debates about the dichotomy of the body and the soul, and the resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment prevalent after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).3 Wounding the body was often thought to wound the soul.

The Medieval Body

A wounded body, especially one that was tortured or dismembered, may sever the connection with the soul or tear it apart. There is a profound relationship between pain and suffering and the body-soul union.4 Wounding the body through penal practice, punishment, interrogatory torture, and even in the course of battle, endangers the integrity of the physical container and, thus, the soul. Caroline Walker Bynum attributes the increasing fascination with brutality and dismemberment to a shift in ethos despite cultural fears about fragmentation, permitting division of the body that was practiced on an increasing scale in the thirteenth century. The evolution of surgical procedure at the same time is part of this development; the first examples of autopsy to determine the cause of death in legal cases appear in the thirteenth century, and “the first official dissections were carried out in medical schools in the

2 Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 113. 3 See: Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 270–1. 4 Donald Mowbray, Pain and Suffering in Medieval Theology: Academic Debates at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2009), 16.

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

3

years around 1300, for purposes of teaching as well as diagnosis.”5 The clinical approach to the body as an entity that can be dissected or disarticulated mirrors the callous application of torture in judicial proceedings which relies on seeing the body as an entity unconnected from the consciousness or as means of controlling the conscious response. Bynum draws a connection between the rise of surgical procedure, the revival of torture as a judicial practice, the significant increase in the use of mutilation and dismemberment to punish capital crimes, and the dissemination of saints’ relics based on miraculous hagiographical accounts. In many of these cases, the spectacle of the wounded body is designed to affect a visceral audience response. Those who see an injury will respond to injuries and to wounds “as an imaginary wound in an imaginary body, despite the fact that that imaginary body is itself made up of thousands of real human bodies, and thus composed of actual (hence woundable) human tissue.”6 The suffering engendered by wounds is not always a facet of medieval narratives. Very often, the pain that accompanies the wound is neither evident nor expressed; in hagiography, withstanding the wound and experiencing only solace is part of the sanctifying aspect of injury. Either way, wounds are a way of articulating and vivifying – investing with life – the “idea of strategic vulnerability.”7 That was because wounds could be so severe, life changing, both physically and mentally. Soldiers understood physical wounds, especially that they needed to be treated in some haste; wounds could be patched up, although not always successfully, as Richard the Lionheart discovered after being shot just below the neck in the left shoulder by a low-born, inexperienced crossbowman – a man whom the king eventually pardoned. Battle wounds should have been easily and successfully treated but, instead, many turned

5 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 270–2. See also: Larissa Tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 51 n. 76. 6 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 71. 7 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 71. Several excellent studies analyze the nature of wounding and the effects on the body in more theoretical terms. See: Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006); Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), among others.

4

Tracy And Devries

gangrenous, agonizing, and, eventually, fatal.8 But the psychological wounds that often accompanied the physical ones – what we might call “Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD)” today, “battle exhaustion” in World War II, “shell shock” in World War I, and “cowardice” for most of the world’s history – were not understood. In medieval sources where they are infrequently identified, these manifest in a variety of ways from melancholy and religious reflection to machismo and ostentatious displays of masculinity.9

Historiography

The world has been excited by the discovery of the skeletal remains of King Richard III in August 2012 – with good cause. His death was immortalized in Shakespeare’s line: “a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,”10 but his body had been lost since the battle of Bosworth, fought on 22 August 1485, when he was slain in the decisive usurpation of Henry Tudor. There was a persistent belief that his remains had been deposited without fanfare at Greyfriars in Leicester, the city closest to the battlefield; ironically the battlefield was also lost until recently.11 The Reformation of Henry VIII, son of the Bosworth victor, was not kind to medieval Catholic churches and monasteries, and Greyfriars (dissolved in 1538), was among those that fell into ruin. Hence, when Richard’s body was eventually uncovered, along with the remains of the abbey itself, it lay rather ignobly under a parking lot. This was a remarkable find, but what happened afterwards was unprecedented. Gathering a team of experts from all applicable fields, Richard’s bones were extensively studied. All modern technologies were used to determine first that it was Richard’s body – matched by DNA to two descendants of his sister – and then, among several other things, how he was killed. Contemporary sources only indicated that he had been dragged from his horse and killed. 8 9

10 11

Jean Flori, Richard the Lionheart: Knight and King, trans. Jean Birrell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 233–54. The most excessive of the latter perhaps displayed by the famous fifteenth-century Italian condottiere, Federico III da Montefeltro, who appears to have surgically removed the top part of his nose after a wound to his right eye impeded his sight during fighting. Henri P.J. Winters, “Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1422–82): The Story of His Missing Nasal Bridge,” British Journal of Plastic Surgery 35 (1982): 247–50. William Shakespeare, Richard the Third, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Arden, 2009), 5.4.7. Glenn Foard and Anne Curry, Bosworth, 1485:A Battlefield Rediscovered (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013).

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

5

How he was killed, by what weapons, and why his armor did not protect him remained a mystery until after the exhumation. Several wounds were revealed in the skeletal study, three of which might have been the coup de grace; those studying the body have also suggested what weapons caused his wounds, that his helmet may have been stripped off, leaving his head (where most of the perimortal wounds were) unprotected. Questions remain, like the order in which the wounds occurred, for example; however, the revelations relating to this anomalous artifact have advanced investigations, into not only Richard III and his death, but also into many other facets of medieval studies.12 Research into medieval wounds and wound repair has advanced very far and in a relatively short time.13 Since the early twentieth century, many sites have been excavated, some with bodies, but the causes of death, for even those who died violently, were rarely studied.14 This changed in 1905 with the chance 12

13

14

See: Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” in this volume, 27–56; and Jo Appleby, Guy N. Rutty, Sarah V. Hainsworth, Robert C. Woosnam-Savage, Bruno Morgan, Alison Brough, Richard W. Earp, Claire Robinson, Turi E. King, Mathew Morris, and Richard Buckley, “Perimortem Trauma in King Richard III: A Skeletal Analysis,” The Lancet 385.9964 (17–23 September 2014): 253–59. Richard III is a particularly unique case because the historical contexts regarding his death – first-hand (and not-so-first-hand) accounts of the battle – can aid in possible interpretations of it, in conjunction with the newly discovered remains. According to Woosnam-Savage, the team examining Richard’s skeleton has been terribly aware of “speculation” and has only made suggestions regarding possible (though plausible) interpretations of his wounds (not flights of speculative fantasy) using historical accounts with the physical evidence, something that can be done very rarely. Anything is possible on the battlefield. However, Richard is arguably the exception that proves the rule because it would appear that some of the science can help inform history and some of the history can help inform science (Personal communication 30 Nov. 2014). Medieval archaeology has been a field of research for many centuries, perhaps seriously begun in 1653 when the extremely rich tomb of the Frankish King Childeric I (died in 481 or 482) was uncovered in Tournai. Childeric’s remains were not among the finds, however, and interest was paid mostly to the gold and jewels – almost all of which were unfortunately lost when they were stolen from Paris in 1831 and melted down. Twentieth-century excavations revealed a large number of horses buried with Childeric, but no human skeletons. A clear introduction to the tomb’s items, shown in drawings made at the time, can be found in Patrick Geary, ed., Readings in Medieval History, vol. 1: The Early Middle Ages, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 113–21. Examples of these skeletal exhumations are numerous and include individuals such as Charlemagne, Haakon V of Norway, St. Cuthbert, and at least three other English kings, John, Edward I and Edward IV. For a further discussion of the importance of disinterment and reburial, see: Thea Tomaini, Death Fascination and Disinterment in England 1700–1900, forthcoming.

6

Tracy And Devries

find of burial pits on the Visby battlefield by soldiers from the Gotland Artillery Regiment who were building an arbor for their officers. Excavations conducted at the time, and in 1912, 1928–30, and 1939, eventually revealed the remains of 1185 bodies from the battle fought there in 1361, almost all of which exhibited evidence of wounds. Bo E. Ingelmark, in a position which would come to be called Forensic Archaeologist or Forensic Osteoarchaeologist, assembled extensive data from these wounds. He published his findings in 1939 with Bengt Thordeman’s archaeological report on the artefacts found in the graves; they might have been forgotten had they not appeared in a simultaneous English translation under the oddly titled Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361.15 And just like that, a new field of medieval research was (if one might pardon the pun) unearthed. But the study of wounds caused by medieval warfare had to be put on hold while a more modern war, World War II, engulfed the European continent. This conflict, combined with its counterpart theater in Asia and the Pacific, and later conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, as well as numerous colonial wars, greatly increased expertise in military medicine.16 Doctors and surgeons returning from those wars were interested in what they had achieved and what preceded it. They wrote scores of articles on the history of wound repair that appeared in medical journals as diverse as the Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Societies and the British Journal of Plastic Surgery.17 While several of these studies have been superseded by later work applying more careful original historical research skills, they hold an important place in the historiography of military surgery when few others were being written. The past three decades have seen advancement in both osteoarchaeological research and the history of wound repair. There have been more, and more careful, excavations and examinations of medieval human remains that suffered violent trauma, and earlier exhumed bodies have been re-examined. The 15 16

17

Bengt Thordeman, Poul Nörlund, Brian R. Price, and Bo. E. Ingelmark, Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksells Boktryckeri, 1939). Richard A Getz and Karen S. Metz, A History of Military Medicine: From the Renaissance through Modern Times, vol. 2 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992) is not a great survey of the period, but does note how much was learned from these modern conflicts. See, among others: Cyril B. Courville and Harold Kade, “Split Fractures of the Skull Produced by Edged Weapons and their Accompanying Brain Wounds,” Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Societies 29 (1964): 32–39; Cyril B. Courville, “War Wounds of the Cranium in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Societies 30 (1965): 27–44; and Winters, “Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1422–82).” Included in this list should be the excellent historical studies by World War I veteran surgeon George Gask, which are gathered in Essays in the History of Medicine (London: Butterworth, 1950).

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

7

study of more than 300 sets of remains from late Antiquity through the end of the fifteenth century, covering conflicts from the Fall of Rome through the Crusades to the Wars of the Roses, have built on the foundation laid by the Visby work of Bo E. Ingelmark.18 The studies by Piers D. Mitchell, whose background as an orthopedic surgeon provided a unique insight into examining excavated remains from various crusading and medieval English sites, have been especially influential. His culminating monograph, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds, and the Medieval Surgeon (2004), is a brilliant example of what the melding of scientific and historical research can achieve.19 Studies of bodies excavated from the battlefield of Towton in 1461 conducted by archaeologists, forensic scientists, and historians during the 1990s have also been important in setting a standard of research leading up to, and perhaps exceeded only by, the recent research undertaken on the remains of Richard III.20 In their recent collection Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages (2014),21 Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler identify the need for an interdisciplinary approach to researching medieval medicine. Their invaluable study looks at the intersections of medical practice and law throughout medieval Europe in regards to mental health, monetary compensation for injury, childbirth, forensic evidence, surgical regulations, and medical licensing. Done largely from the perspective of historians investigating a wealth of diverse sources, Medicine and Law marks the beginning of a new wave of research into the significance of medicine in the medieval world. Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr’s volume Wounds in the Middle Ages (2014) includes ten pieces that begin a conversation 18 19

20 21

For a catalogue of these excavations, see: Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare,” in this volume, 27–56. Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds, and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Mitchell’s articles include: “Pathology in the Crusader Period: Human Skeletal Remains from Tel Jezreel,” Levant 26 (1994): 67–71; “The Integration of the Palaeopathology and Medical History of the Crusades,” Inter­ national Journal of Osteoarchaeology 9 (1999): 333–43; “The Palaeopathology of Skulls Recovered from a Medieval Cave Cemetery near Safed, Israel (Thirteenth to Seventeenth Century),” Levant 36 (2004): 243–250; (with Y. Nagar, and R. Ellenblum), “Weapon Injuries in the Twelfth-Century Crusader Garrison of Vadum Iacob Castle, Galilee,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16 (2006): 145–55; and “The Torture of Military Captives to the Medieval Middle East,” in Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, ed. Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 97–118. Veronica Fiorato, Anthea Boylston, and Christopher Knüsel, Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton, AD 1461 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000). Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler, eds., Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

8

Tracy And Devries

about the importance of wounds in medieval society.22 The product of a symposium held at the University of Manchester in 2011, Kirkham and Warr’s collection considers aspects of wounding in medieval culture through the lens of modern medical practice largely in terms of military and religious conceptions of wounding and makes several valuable contributions to a growing body of scholarship. But there is much that remains to be done.23 The Physicality of Wounds Recent advancements in technology, as well as the discovery of identifiable remains, have opened numerous possibilities for investigating the form and frequency of wounding, primarily on medieval battlefields. Arranged the­ma­ tically by the kinds of wounds – physical, spiritual, and literary – and chronologically within each set of themes, our collection begins with the physical evidence of wounds and wound treatment, from catalogues of trauma on skeletal remains to case-studies on medical procedures for healing that trauma. Robert Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries open this volume with a description of how medieval warfare frequently led to wounded soldiers who survived and how the written and archaeological evidence can determine what weapons made these wounds. They include a catalogue of several excavations of bodies that suffered violent sharp-force, blunt-force, or penetration trauma, which serves as a foundation for several of the following contributions. They provide evidence of a startling survival rate among wounded soldiers, even those who received wounds that one might expect to have been fatal, attributing this to the care of military surgeons and the protective capabilities of

22

23

Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr, eds., Wounds in the Middle Ages (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). Unfortunately Kirkham and Warr’s volume appeared after the articles for our collection were written, and it was unavailable to most of our contributors. Several studies have been done on the spectacle of medieval violence, many of which consider wounds in that context but they do not place the same focus on the wounds themselves or their healing. See, for example: Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel; Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2005); Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk, eds., ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973); Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Scarry, The Body in Pain.

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

9

medieval armor.24 M.R. Geldof follows, explaining the significance of new techniques in studying and interpreting excavated remains; but he cautions that it is “necessary to evaluate how the archaeology of violence is interpreted, how it is studied for its social and cultural meaning, and where the limits to interpretation give way to speculation.”25 Challenging modern misconceptions about what “truth” can actually be reconstructed from skeletal remains, ultimately, Geldof concludes that, while bone-evidence is important for forensic archaeologists, it is only one piece in the osteoarcheological puzzle and can only tell us so much about the consequences of medieval martial violence. In her contribution, Patricia Skinner engages with Geldof’s proposition by considering the real life implications of wearing wounds in terms of social stigma (or honor) in a variety of contexts. She examines textual evidence regarding wounds from early medieval Europe, focusing her attention on variety of head wounds sustained in warfare and their social significance as well as the legal implications of wounds, scars, and the effect they had on individual status within a community. Skinner concludes that “that face wounds were a delicate subject (at least at the level of the elite) and/or that they were so commonplace that they, and the care received, merited little comment.”26 Wounds were most often inflicted in warfare by those trained to use weapons for just such a purpose. But not every medieval battlefield wound was fatal. Like Skinner, Iain A. MacInnes investigates the existing corpus of records regarding injuries, but his focus is on Anglo-Scottish warfare from the late-thirteenth to the early-fifteenth centuries, and he is duly cautious of chronicle accounts that were exaggerated or simply implausible. Taken as a whole, the sources indicate that certain Scottish lords provided field doctors for their men wounded in battle, so that while injury was a high probability on the Scottish battlefield, so was surviving those injuries.27 Rachel E. Kellett goes further in dispelling the common misconception that medieval warfare was only about killing. Turning to the German fencing manuals, which were meant to prepare swordsmen for battle as well as for sport, rather than chronicle accounts of battle, Kellett looks closely at the anatomical placement of blows which suggest that while fencing was often a form of entertainment, the fencers were 24 25 26 27

Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare,” 47. M.R. Geldof, “‘And to describe the shapes of the dead’: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence,” in this volume, 57-80, at 59. Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval European Sources to 1000 CE,” in this volume, 81–101, at 101. Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403,” in this volume, 102–27.

10

Tracy And Devries

also being trained to inflict wounds – even severe wounds.28 Fencing was practiced with dulled weapons (usually, but not always), but fencers learned vital skills for inflicting wounds on the battlefield with sharpened blades. Surgery From modes of inflicting and surviving wounds in war or sport, the volume moves into specific methods of treating wounds. As the previous selections suggest, inflicting wounds was only one facet of medieval life and warfare. As Woosnam-Savage and DeVries point out in their catalogue of physical remains, many people survived their wounds in the Middle Ages, and so several of the following contributions deal with the textual evidence of wounds and their repair, using one of the richest, and most obvious, sources – surgical texts. Many modern misconceptions about the Middle Ages suggest that medieval society was medically stunted, backwards, or primitive, and that treatments bordered on the ludicrous or downright dangerous. But numerous surgical texts circulated throughout medieval Europe and some offered more useful (and successful) treatments than others. Medieval surgery evolved from a complex system of text, practice, belief, transmission, science, and folklore.29 The first major medical center was twelfth-century Salerno, Sicily, where Christian and Muslim communities lived side by side. Many medieval medical and surgical texts and treatments reflect Muslim influence and, in some cases, origins. There was an “efflorescence” of medicine and surgery in twelfth century Salerno, possibly because of Salerno’s fortuitous position as a melting pot of Mediterranean cultures.30 The medical “school” of Salerno – an informal community of masters and pupils who developed more or less formal methods of instruction and investigation31 – became the center from which a large portion 28

29

30

31

Rachel E. Kellett, “‘…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zuo der brust’: The Placement and Consequences of Sword-blows in Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-century Fencing Manual,” in this volume, 128–50, at 131. Several excellent studies have been done on the development and practice of medieval surgery. See: Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Piers Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Tony Hunt, The Medieval Surgery (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992). Monica H. Green, ed. and trans., introduction to The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); 1–63, at 3–4. Green, introduction, 9–10.

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

11

of medieval medical knowledge and practice emanated. Europeans travelled hundreds of miles to seek the medical knowledge of the physicians in Salerno like Gariopontus. Frustrated by the disorganized, indecipherable texts available, he compiled the Passionarius that became a popular resource for practitioners throughout medieval Europe.32 Gariopontus initiated a tradition of compiling and translating medical texts that would be carried on by successive generations of scholars: Alfanus translated Nemesius of Emesa’s Greek On the Nature of Man into Latin (c. 1050); Constantine the African († before 1098/99) rendered more than twenty Arabic texts into Latin, including the Viaticum (the Latin title) of Abū Jar far Ahmad b. Ibrāhīm b. Abī Khālid al-Jazzār († 979).33 Most medieval medicine had its roots in the work of Galen, which is itself grounded in Hippocrates’ theories about bodily humors. The rise of universities in Italy, Spain, France, and England,34 and the continued production of works in Latin and vernaculars, led to the development of learned medicine. Works by Avicenna, Rhazes (al–Razi), Albucasis, and Galen, all translated by Gerard of Cermona, created a “richer terminology for learned medicine in Latin and provided Galenic medicine with a logical backbone.”35 The dissemination of medical knowledge included the treatment of all manner of ailments – including wounds. However, the emergence of surgery as a separate discipline led to more sophisticated wound treatment. Probably the earliest surviving surgical compilation from medieval Europe is the Chirurgia (c. 1180) of Roger Frugard, which was translated into French and among the earliest manuals to reach England.36 Lanfranc of Milan (c. 1250–1306) wrote 32 33 34 35

36

Green, introduction, 10. Green, introduction, 10–11. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 113. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 108–9. While many of these manuals give bad advice by modern standards, in their own time they offered logical remedies and diagnoses. Modern medicine has debunked much of what these manuals say, but in some cases, the efficacy of their techniques and treatments are being reconsidered. The Latin text is edited by Karl Sudhoff, “Die Chirugie von Roger Frugardi von Salern,” in his Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chirurgie im Mittelalter, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1918), 148–236, and discussed comprehensively in Helen Valls, “Studies on Roger Frugardi’s Chirurgia” (PhD dissertation: University of Toronto, 1995). See: Tony Hunt, Anglo-Norman Medicine, vol. 1, Roger Frugard’s Chirurgia and the Practica brevis of Platearius (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 5–8, for the French. See also: Roger Frugard, Surgery, trans. Michael R. McVaugh, in Sourcebook in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 795–96 (no. 112). Frugard is known variously as Roger Frugardi, Ruggero Frugardo, and Roger of Salerno, but in the interests of consistency, all the articles in this volume refer to him as Roger Frugard.

12

Tracy And Devries

another early treatise on surgical practice, Chirurgia magna (Grand Surgery), but it was Henri de Mondeville (c. 1260–1320), in his unfinished Cyrurgia (started in 1306), who dealt more thoroughly with wound treatment.37 Mondeville opposed the Hippocratic view that advocated for suppuration – pus formation – preferring dry healing instead; that is, the simple bathing of wounds, immediate closure by suture, and dry dressings with minimal loss of flesh or skin.38 His disciple Theoderic (1205–96) supported his assertion in his own Chirurgia that pus formation was unnecessary. These surgical innovations in wound treatment were met with some opposition from the Salernitan School; but they provided a logical foundation for the surgeons of later generations. Guy de Chauliac (1298–1368) shows surgery as a learned art in his Chirurgia magna, which covers anatomy, inflammation, wounds, ulcers, fractures, dislocations, and miscellaneous diseases requiring surgery, and includes no fewer than 3299 references to other works, 890 of which are from Galen.39 Guy de Chauliac’s work was translated into several languages and disseminated throughout medieval Europe, laying a medical foundation for the surgical treatment of wounds. As Woosnam-Savage and DeVries explain, one example of wound repair that strikes a visual cord with modern audiences is the often-reproduced image of “The Wound Man.” There are several late-medieval and early modern examples of this medical aid still extant, but one of the best known and most detailed is “The Wound Man” (c. 1420) from Thuringia that survives in London, Wellcome Library MS 49, fol. 35r (Figure 1.1). This color image depicts a man riddled with wounds from daggers to the thigh and torso, arrow and quarrels to the legs, lacerations, bee and scorpion stings, spider and snakebites, and a variety of head wounds. As Bettina Bildhauer points out, it is an image of a “porous, permeated and leaking body,” vulnerable and under threat but also “about to be treated and hopefully healed.”40 Treating wounds was as significant a part of medieval life as inflicting them and the bulk of surviving medical manuals offer a range of remedies and surgical procedures for wound repair. Not all medical texts deal overtly with surgical practice, but Debby Banham and Christine Voth argue that there is evidence in works like Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica (731) that surgery and the treatment of wounds was a common occurrence. They examine Old English texts like Bald’s Leechbook, London, 37 38 39 40

Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 116–17. Pierre Huard and Mirko Drazen Grmek, Mille ans de chirurgie en occident: Ve-XVe siècles (Paris: R. Dacosta, 1966), 40. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 117. Bildhauer, Medieval Blood, 27.

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

13

British Library, Royal MS 12 D. xvii (s.xi) (BLB)41 and two in Leechbook III (73 chapters, in the same manuscript),42 which suggest that there was a medical culture that included surgical practices of some kind in Anglo-Saxon England. Analyzing the paucity of direct evidence regarding surgical treatments in Old English sources, Banham and Voth conclude that anatomical and surgical knowledge was drawn on in composing the law codes and that most “mechanical processes, whether surgical or pharmacological, were excluded from the medical texts because they were too familiar to need writing down, being part of the body of knowledge transmitted by non-textual means.”43 Timothy May investigates the detailed textual accounts of practical medicine among the Mongols, with particular attention to the wounds sustained by Chinggis Khan in 1201 and the ways in which those wounds were treated. Far from using primitive, unsuccessful, or dubious medical treatments, May posits that the Mongols employed techniques for preventing shock, cleaning wounds, and halting blood loss not unlike modern methods. In fact, modern medicine has recently rediscovered the beneficial properties of honey as a disinfectant and anti-microbial agent, of which medieval people were well aware.44 Ilana Krug presents compelling evidence that honey was kept in large stores in some medieval castles specifically for its medical properties and that it was a vital resource during siege warfare. The use of honey provides evidence of how the expertise of medieval military surgeons has been underappreciated. Krug concludes: “The fact that many, if not most, of those wounds healed without infection highlights the importance of honey in medieval military medicine and the need to keep some handy.”45 Using some of the same material as Krug, Michael Livingston provides a detailed case study of this surgical expertise, especially the benefits of honey, in his examination of Prince Hal’s face wound, received during the battle of Shrewsbury (21 July 1403). The future King Henry V was severely wounded by an arrow, which buried itself six inches into his 41 42 43

44 45

T.O. Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1864–6), 2:2–298. Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:300–60. Debby Banham and Christine Voth, “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon surgery?” in this volume, 153–74, at 173. See also: Debby Banham, “A Millennium in Medicine? New Medical Texts and Ideas in England in the Eleventh Century,” in Anglo-Saxons: Studies Presented to Cyril Roy Hart, ed. Simon Keynes and Alfred P. Smyth (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 230–42. Timothy May, “Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices,” in this volume, 175–93. Ilana Krug, “The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine,” in this volume, 194–214, at 214.

14

Tracy And Devries

face, and was subsequently (and successfully) treated by the London surgeon John Bradmore, who kept a detailed account of his treatment and his patient’s progress during the procedures used to heal the wound. Livingston goes through each of the sources regarding this famous wound, sketching a clear picture of how these wounds were treated, the effects of penetrating facial wounds, and the implications this injury had for the prince once he became king. For Prince Hal, his wound may have marked him in more ways than one; indeed, the memory of his injury may have been imprinted on more than just his face.46 Law Wounds like Prince Hal’s could have legal consequences. Certain wounds might be used to exclude men from a line of succession or to disinherit them.47 Those who were wounded and survived with evidence of their wounding inscribed on their bodies often had legal recourse depending on the nature of their wounds. In medieval law, wounds often required compensation; they could be adjudicated, weighed, measured, and compensated. Wounds were also inflicted in the course of administering justice. As Bildhauer explains, “the integrity of the body was at stake: once an offender had pierced the body and thereby called into question its inviolability, his or hers had to be pierced in return.”48 The body of the criminal was wounded to reflect his crimes; it became a canvas “for the public inscription of punishment.”49 According to Allie Terry-Fritsch, “The criminal’s wounds served as material traces of wrongs that had been righted through the cleansing ritual of the government, edifying the public through a reinscription of communal values and educating the public in behavioral and societal norms.”50

46 47

48 49

50

Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” in this volume, 215–30. This is particularly true of genital wounds, regardless of how those wounds were sustained. See: Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Larissa Tracy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012). Bildhauer, Medieval Blood, 64. Allie Terry-Fritsch, “Proof in Pierced Flesh: Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas and the Beholders of Wounds in Early Modern Europe, in Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Terry-Fritsch and Erin Felicia Labbie (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 15–37, at 18. Terry-Fritsch, “Proof in Pierced Flesh,” 21.

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

15

The inherent brutality of medieval jurisprudence is a contested issue that has met with serious challenge, especially regarding the use of torture in the Middle Ages.51 Wounds were inflicted in medieval jurisprudence and when they healed they remained a signifiers of crime and criminality for both the criminal and the victim. Jay Paul Gates and Nicole Marafioti provide an extended discussion of criminal penalties in Anglo-Saxon England that resulted in serious wounding and mutilation.52 However, the principle focus in this volume is not penal wounds inflicted as payment for a crime, but the legal ramifications of wounds and the role that physicians played in their adjudication.53 In the legal arena of medieval Valencia, physicians were called upon as medical witnesses in cases where amputation was deemed necessary. In a practice seemingly unique to Valencia, Carmel Ferragud examines instances in which physicians were summoned by judges to testify about the necessity of an amputation desired by the patient. Amputations were dangerous because of the risk of infection and blood loss, not to mention the potential for loss of livelihood, and yet there are occasions when patients requested that a wounded limb that would not heal be removed. For that, a judge had to agree and, in a legal society adverse to risk, a physician was required to testify.54 Ferragud traces the evidence of this practice and its ramifications for medical culture in medieval Valencia, while Charlene Eska analyzes the legal implications of literary wounds in medieval Ireland. In her analysis of Aided Derbforgaill (The Violent Death of Derbforgaill), Eska argues that the mutilation enacted upon Derbforgaill by the Ulster women is “calculated not only to destroy her beauty in a distinctly gendered way, but also to destroy her social existence by rendering her appearance a source of public shame in terms of Irish cultural norms.”55 She applies the Irish law codes regarding adultery to the literary text, explain-

51

52 53

54 55

See: Tracy, Torture and Brutality; and Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey, eds., Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2012), among others. Jay Paul Gates and Nicole Marafioti, eds., Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014). For a detailed historical analysis on the intersection of medicine and law, including the use of medical professionals as legal witnesses, see: Turner and Butler, eds., Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages. Several articles in this volume compliment their research and supplement their findings. Carmel Ferrgaud, “Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early-Fifteenth Century,” in this volume, 233–51. Charlene M. Eska, “The Mutilation of Derbforgaill,” in this volume, 252–64, at 253.

16

Tracy And Devries

ing how this kind of wounding may have been received – and potentially condemned – within Irish society. Spiritual Wounds The wounds of Christ, the stigmata, are one of the foundational aspects of medieval Christian belief. Devotional art, literature, and material culture depict graphic scenes of torture and execution, evoking a sympathetic response to the blood-soaked, wounded figures of Christ and his saints. So much so that, as Caroline Walker Bynum has argued, by the later Middle Ages, these forms of religious iconography “seem awash with blood.”56 She writes that by the late fourteenth century, “devotions to the five wounds; to the side wound, and to the wounded heart were proliferating; the faithful were urged to count Christ’s lesions and the number of blood drops he shed, using such number to calculate the prayers they owed for their own sins or those of their loved ones suffering in purgatory.”57 In depictions of the Passion the wounds of Christ are symbols of both his divinity and his corporeality; without the physical wounds, medieval and early modern Christians could not experience Christ’s sacrifice. These wounds are proof that serves “both as traces of violence and as representations of higher ideals.”58 The wounded body functions as “proof” not only in the context of Christian devotion but in the practice of justice – a discourse in which the crucifixion, as a punishment for a criminal in the eyes of Rome, participates. Wounding is a social and physical purgative. In the section on spiritual wounds, Virginia Langum probes depictions of Christus medicus (Christ the Physician) as compassionate, arguing that the crucifixion wound becomes a surgical wound “when Christ adopts the role of a surgeon to attach the faithful to it.”59 Langum applies the technical medical discussion of medieval surgery, echoing the earlier chapters in this volume, to visions of Christ’s Passion and Christ as both physician and surgeon. The wounds of Christ, imagined in a multitude of ways in the Middle Ages, become the locus of Christian devotion and adoration, which Langum suggests, is presented in medical terms. In Irish bardic poetry, the wounds of Christ are juxtaposed with those of Gaelic chieftains wounded in battle. Following a 56 57 58 59

Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 1–2. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 3. Terry-Fritsch, “Proof in Pierced Flesh,” 17. Virginia Langum, “‘The Wounded Surgeon’: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England,” in this volume, 269–90, at 270.

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

17

similar line of inquiry as Langum, Salvador Ryan analyzes the relationship of poet and patron in the corpus of bardic poetry where Christ’s heroism in the face of violent wounding is a metaphor for the physical, temporal wounds of the secular chieftain.60 While the use of religious imagery as an aid to devotion is relatively rare in bardic poetry, it was a common occurrence in religious art, in which the wounds of Christ and the saints were a popular visual stimulant for faith. Vibeke Olson applies an art historical lens to the wounded Christ, considering artistic representations of the stigmata, like Hans Memling’s late fifteenth-century painting, Man of Sorrows, and the performative space offered by graphic depictions of the crucifixion and Christ’s wounds. In her analysis of several works of art, Olson discusses the shift in focus from all five wounds of the stigmata to a particular emphasis on Christ’s side wound, even to the point of abstracting it from the body itself.61 The wound and the blood it produces become the locus for salvation and devotion, inviting direct and intimate participation from the faithful. Similarly, Elina Gertsman investigates the wandering side-wound of Christ in a late fifteenth-century German woodcut printed in Ulm, a representation that takes on political significance in the face of Jewish expulsions and clerical transgressions. Gertsman draws compelling parallels between Christ’s wounded body and the urban body politic, arguing that the wounded Christ was endowed with both political and religious significance, especially in anti-Judaic propaganda.62 In their attempts at imitatio Christi, some saints wounded themselves or experienced the mystical wounds of the crucifixion. While early Christian saints had the capacity and the opportunity to suffer violent and horrible wounding at the hands of Roman persecutors, late-medieval saints had to celebrate the destruction and denigration of their bodies for the faith in other ways. Since the crown of martyrdom was unavailable to them, late-medieval saints experienced salvific wounds through a variety of afflictions, including penitential self-mutilation, leprosy, and blindness.63 As Esther Cohen argues, these saints embraced pain as a way to dominate it. She writes that rather than 60 61 62 63

Salvador Ryan, “‘Scarce anyone survives a heart wound’: The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry,” in this volume, 291–312. Vibeke Olson, “Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space,” in this volume, 313–39. Elina Gertsman, “Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body in Imitatio Christi,” in this volume, 340–65. On the differences in early versus later “martyrdom”, see: Clare Stancliffe, “Red, White and Blue martyrdom,” in Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe: Studies  in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, and David Dumville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

18

Tracy And Devries

being enslaved “by a ferocious force that could dehumanize people, ascetics and self-inflictors became masters of pain, embracing it freely and using their sensations to reach new levels of spirituality.”64 Wilbirg of St. Florian (†1289), Christina the Astonishing (†1224), and the Cistercian nun Lutgard of Aywières (†1246) all inflicted grievous wounds on themselves as a means of achieving spiritual gratification, as Joshua Easterling explains.65 Easterling considers how saints wounded themselves to achieve a form of imatatio Christi and the community response to their physical sacrifice. Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250) – known as Alice the Leper – relished the suppurating wounds that erupted on her flesh as a mark of God’s love. According to Alicia Spencer-Hall, Alice saw her disease as a way of glorifying God; her decaying skin and oozing wounds became a testament to her faith.66 In her analysis, Spencer-Hall focuses on the hagiographical appropriation of leprous wounds as a form of ascetic suffering, while Albrecht Classen interrogates the life-long (self-inflicted) suffering of Prussian mystic Dorothea von Montau (1347–1394). Like many of the mystics discussed by Easterling, Dorothea von Montau assaulted her own body as “a metaphor and catalyst for the transformation of the material existence into a basis for spiritual, mystical experiences.”67 Classen explores the layers of meaning exposed by Dorothea’s extreme behavior, concluding that she saw the wounding of her body as a means of preparing her flesh to be God’s parchment upon which his presence could be written. In the hagiography of Ireland, saints not only experienced salvific wounds themselves but were able to inflict wounds – often to the eyes – as a measure of their spiritual power. Máire Johnson turns the conversation to the agency of Irish saints, not only in healing wounds but also in creating them to punish others and themselves. Like Gertsman, Johnson considers the political implications of sanctity, but, similar to Eska, she uses legal terms to investigate the social ramification of hagiographical wounding. As Johnson illustrates, saints like Ciarán of Saigir and Mochutu curse those who challenge their authority so that their eyes burst in their sockets, one eye is plucked out and left dangling on the offender’s cheek, or the guilty party is simply left blind. Johnson places these punitive blindings, and the occasions where female Irish saints like Brigit restore sight, in a legal 64 65 66 67

Cohen, The Modulated Scream, 28. Joshua S. Easterling, “Ascetic Blood: Ethics, Suffering and Community in Late-Medieval Culture,” in this volume, 369–88. Alicia Spencer-Hall, “Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250),” in this volume, 389–416. Albrecht Classen, “Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind,” in this volume, 417–47, at 419.

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

19

context, arguing that an “Irish saint thus defines the line between those who are participants in and those excluded from the Irish body Christian, through the media of both maledictory eye wounds and their merciful remission.”68 Literature Religious literature is populated by wounded saints whose suffering (or lack thereof) is a signifier of their holiness and a testament to their devotion. But wounds in secular literature take on an entirely different meaning, especially in the context of medieval romance. In The Knight’s Tale, Chaucer’s Knight describes the shafts of spears shivering to pieces on thick shields, the ‘helmes they tohewen and toshrede;/ Out brest the blood with stierne stremes rede;/ With myghty maces the bones they tobreste’ (lines 2609–11).69 Yet, for all this bloodshed, no one dies and the only malice and hatred is between the two rivals (Arcite and Palamon) who hunt each other down and with ‘jelous strokes on hir helmes byte;/ Out rennet blood on bothe hir sydes rede’ (lines 2634–5). Even in the final tally after Arcite’s fall, ‘Al were they soore yhurt, and namely oon, that with a spere was thirled his brest boon’ (lines 2709–10); some have broken bones, some apply salves and medicines, and some drink sage to save their limbs. The Knight’s description of Arcite’s injuries is far more graphic than the scenes of battle. When Arcite falls, he lies as if dead, ‘His brest tobrosten with his sadel-bowe./ As blak he lay as any cole or crowe,/ So was the blood yronned in his face’ (lines 2691–3). The clotted blood, despite the efforts of leechcraft, decays and cannot be drained through any medical techniques, and the poison cannot be expelled: ‘The pipes of his longes gonne to swelle,/ And every lacerte in his brest adoun/ Is shent with venym and corrupcioun’ (lines 2752–4). It is a gruesome and painful death, fraught with lurid detail lacking in the earlier scenes of battle. Chaucer’s description of these battle wounds, which possibly reflected his own experience with combat, are a literary template for understanding the significance of wounds in secular texts. In the heroic narratives of early medieval Ireland, like those in the Ulster Cycle, wounds signify battle prowess, glory, and honor. Using some of the same sources as Eska but from a literary angle, William Sayers explains that in Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel) the “contrast between white wounds (créchda bána) and red, 68 69

Máire Johnson, “In the Bursting of an Eye: Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography,” in this volume, 448–70, at 451. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Lines numbers are given in parentheses.

20

Tracy And Devries

between the dormant scars that are the heritage of combat and the immediate, living, bleeding wounds of battle, goes to the heart of the early Irish conception of the human body as an incarnation of heroic honor.”70 As in Skinner’s analysis of the potential shaming aspects of head and facial wounds, Sayers pays particular attention to the effect that scars had on social status and a warrior’s position in society as well as the scarring effect of battle on the landscape. In medieval Irish society, wounds that healed into scars could often provide fodder for harsh satire, but, ultimately, scars could shape the narratives of honor and dishonor. Sayers argues that wounds are the very “makings of epic literature,”71 a statement that holds true for much of medieval romance, concerned as it is with chivalric combat and its consequences. The corpus of medieval Arthuriana, particularly in England, includes a litany of wounds with varying degrees of severity. Within the literary tradition surrounding King Arthur and his Round table knights, wounds reflect actual chivalric practice, as Stephen Atkinson argues about Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, but they can also serve as a metaphor for the body politic. Larissa Tracy draws a connection to the succession of head wounds in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the political instability of late-fourteenth century England. In this version of Arthur’s death, Lancelot, Gawain, and Arthur all receive blows to the head that incapacitate and eventually kill (except Lancelot), leaving Arthur’s kingdom headless, weak, and debilitated by internal strife similar to that of Richard II and his rebellious barons.72 Even in the romance context, battle wounds have lasting and far-reaching consequences beyond the point of impact. Atkinson argues that Malory was intent on realism in his descriptions of battle wounds, which, like Chaucer, he may have witnessed first-hand.73 In a reflection of Eska’s earlier piece on the gendered mutilation of Derbforgaill, Barbara Goodman analyzes the collateral damage of warfare in romances. The wounds of women in texts like Malory, The Siege of Jerusalem, and the Alliterative Morte Arthur are not presented as valorous or excusable costs of war but rather reveal the fractures in the social fabric and fissures in the heroic and chivalric ideals.74 In many respects, wounds defy easy categorization because each instance of wounding held its own significance; those who were wounded internalized 70 71 72 73 74

William Sayers, “The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature,” in this volume, 473–95, at 474. Sayers, “The Laconic Scar,” 494. Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” in this volume, 496–518. Stephen Atkinson, “They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …”: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in this volume, 519–43. Barbara A. Goodman, “Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair,” in this volume, 544–70.

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

21

them in respect to their suffering or the lack of suffering. Wounds could mean honor and chivalry, or they could mean dishonor and criminality. A wound could involve the removal of a limb (Ferragud) or an eye (Johnson), the lacerations inflicted in battle, incisions made during medical treatment, or ulcers caused by disease like leprosy (Spencer-Hall). This volume considers wounding from the multitude of perspectives available from medieval sources: archaeology, art, chronicle, literature, and law, from a range of geographical settings throughout the medieval world. Overall, the intent is to construct a nuanced and textured view of medieval wounds, their consequences, their symbolism, their effect on the body in society, and their place in understanding human nature, resilience, and devotion. In her summation on the complexity of wounding and healing in the Middle Ages, Wendy Turner offers a final analysis of the pieces in this volume. Turner draws upon the thesis of Carlo Ginzburg, who advocates historical investigation from a multitude of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.75 As Turner explains, that has been the primary goal of this project since its inception. Within this volume archaeologists look at literary records as well as the archaeological record; historians and weapons experts consider physical evidence and literary sources; art historians sharpen their creative vision through political and social texts; and literary historians use surgical manuals, chronicle accounts, and legal precedent to illuminate the textured readings of wounds in the Middle Ages. We draw upon many of the same sources and so we have compiled a complete bibliography at the end to aid in further collaborative, interdisciplinary endeavors. Wounds abound in the medieval world in images, discussions, representations, and cultural interest not because there was a greater delight in bloodshed or violence but because wounds open the body to investigation and inquiry; they test the boundaries of mortality, and they were something that people lived with and from which they often died. Medical advancements (and retreats) were a major facet of medieval society. The Church was deeply concerned about the integrity of the body, its wholeness and corruptibility, and battle and war were inscribed on the flesh of those who survived it. Considering the fragility and resilience of the human form, wounds are a way of measuring the human experience. This volume seeks to contribute a greater understanding of that experience in the medieval world so that we might better understand the significance of wounds – their infliction, treatment, stigmatization and lasting consequences – in modern society. 75

Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John ­ edeschi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 55 and 70 qtd. in Wendy J. Turner, T “Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds,” in this volume, 572–80.

22

Tracy And Devries

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

part 1 The Physicality of Wounds

∵

23

24

Tracy And Devries

Introduction: Penetrating Medieval Wounds

section 1 Archae0logy and Medieval Culture

∵

25

26

Tracy And Devries

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

27

Chapter 1 Woosnam-Savage and DeVries

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries1

The Battle of Campaldino, fought on 11 July 1289 between the Ghibelline forces (those ostensibly loyal to the Holy Roman Empire, largely drawn from the Italian city of Arezzo), and the Guelphs (those loyal to the Papacy, drawn primarily from Florence, Pistoia, Lucca, Siena, and Prato), might not be as well remembered had Dante Alighieri, Florence’s already renowned poet, not been on the field that day. What is certain is that what he saw there completely changed his life. In Canto V of his Purgatorio, Dante meets Buonconte da Montefeltro, a Ghibelline who fought against him: Another spoke: “So may the Lord Divine fulfill the wish that draws you up the mountain, for sweet compassion, lend your air to mine. I am Buonconte, once of Montefeltro. Because Giovanna and the rest forget me, I go among these souls with head bowed low.” And I: “What force or chance led you to stray so far from Campaldino that your grave remains to be discovered to this day?” And he: “There flows below the Casentino a stream, the Archiana, which arises above the hermitage in Appennino. There where its name ends in the Arno’s flood I came, my throat pierced through, fleeing on foot and staining all my course with my life’s blood. There my sight failed. There with a final moan which was the name of Mary, speech went from me 1 The authors wish to express their appreciation to Michael Livingston and Larissa Tracy for reading previous drafts of this article and offering suggestions to improve it. Kelly DeVries wishes also to thank Niccolò Capponi for taking him to Poppi Castle, from where we were able to see the battlefield, observe the distance Buonconte would have traveled between receiving his wound and his death, and discuss what Dante would have observed that unfortunate day.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_003

28

Woosnam-savage And Devries

I fell, and there my body lay alone. … The saturated air changed into rain and down it crashed, flooding the rivulets with what the sodden earth could not retain; the rills merged into torrents, and a flood swept irresistibly to the royal river. The Archiana, raging froth and mud, found my remains in their last frozen rest just at its mouth, swept them into the Arno, and broke the cross I had formed upon my breast in the last agony of pain and guilt. Along its banks and down its bed it rolled me, and then it bound and buried me in silt.” (ll. 88–108, 121–135)2 Dante was on the victorious side. Buonconte da Montefeltro was on the losing side. Although not one of the highest of Ghibelline leaders he led a contingent of cavalry into the middle of the battle where he became one of its casualties, pierced through the neck, probably by a crossbow bolt.3 Dante is not more specific, which may mean that he did not see the actual wounding, but he does seem to have followed the trail of blood – “staining all my course with my life’s blood,” are the words he put in Buonconte’s mouth. The distance between the battlefield and the convergence of the two rivers where Buonconte fell is about a kilometer. Obviously fleeing for his life – he was running in the direction of his home – it took one kilometer for him to exsanguinate, to “bleed out.” There he fell into the river and was swept away; his corpse was never discovered. Exsanguination was the fate of most killed on the medieval battlefield. In the premodern world, the main weapons used were sharp- or blunt-edged, and wielded or thrown by hand, or shot, ball or lead from a mechanical device, by a bow, crossbow, sling or gun. Battlefield victims could suffer sharp-force trauma wounds from being cut or stabbed; penetration-force trauma wounds 2 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, trans. John Ciardi (New York: The New American Library, 1957), 68–69. 3 Both Giovanni Villani and Dino Compagni, in their excellent accounts of the battle, indicate that the Ghibelline cavalry were struck by a hail of crossbow bolts. See: Villani, Croniche di Giovanni, Matteo e Filippo Villani, 2 vols. (Trieste: Sezione letterario-artistica del Lloyd autriaco, 1857–1858), 2:161–62; and Compagni, La cronaca fiorentina, ed. Domenico Carbone, 8th ed. (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1905), 8–12. However, it is difficult to say for certain whether these were the cause of Buonconte’s wound. It could also have been a dagger wound, a sword, or hafted weapon not able to “pierce through,” as Dante describes the wound.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

29

from being shot by projectile weapons, such as arrows, bolts, or balls; or bluntforce trauma wounds from being bashed or smashed.4 Sometimes these wounds were fatal immediately (if a vital organ or the brain were hit) or almost immediately (if one of the major arteries were hit or an organ ruptured). At other times, if stabbed or cut, and the blood flow not quickly and completely stanched, those wounded would linger until too much of their blood had been spilled for them to survive: exsanguination. Bashed soldiers, again, if there was no brain damage or internal bleeding, generally survived their wounds, although not without resulting fractures, tears, or bruises. Simply put, all weapons used during the Middle Ages caused wounds. The blade of a sword, axe, staff weapon, or dagger could slash; all of those, except the axe, could also stab. An arrow from a bow, a bolt from a crossbow, a shot from a sling, or a ball from a small-caliber gunpowder weapon could also stab, with the velocity of entry also frequently causing blunt-force trauma. And a weighted head of a staff weapon (including maces and hammers) or a ball from a larger-caliber gunpowder weapon could bash, although a piece of that ball (usually stone in the fourteenth and fifteenth century) – or a shard of what had been hit by that ball – could also stab or slash. In response to the ferocity of these weapons, medieval soldiers covered themselves with armor made of leather, padded felt or other cloth, cuir-bouilli (hardened rawhide),5 iron rings, small- and medium-sized metal plates, and, ultimately, full-metal plate harnesses. Those who wore armor were more likely to survive medieval weapon attacks than those who did not. The better the armor, the more protection it provided against wounding. Thesauruses are replete with words describing violence, and every one of these accurately describes the experience of premodern warfare. Literary sources describing medieval warfare, such as this from Egil’s Saga on the battle of Brunanburh in 937, are often considered exaggerations:

4 The terms used here – sharp-force trauma wounds; penetration-force trauma wounds; bluntforce trauma wounds – are redundant by osteoarchaeological definitions. All wounds are trauma (although not all trauma are necessarily wounds). For non-osteoarchaeologists, trauma generally means an emotional rather than a physical wound, therefore, we have chosen to use the redundant phrase for definitional purposes here. In the catalogue of osteoarchaeological excavations of wounded bodies below, we use the correct osteoarchaeological terminology “trauma” alone. 5 Eddie Cheshire proved conclusively that cuir-bouilli was not simply hardened leather, as has been traditionally thought, but hardened rawhide. “Non-metallic Armour” (PhD thesis, University of Reading, History and Engineering, 2010).

30

Woosnam-savage And Devries

Thorolf then fought so fiercely that he cast his shield over his back and took his halberd in two hands. He leaped forward and hewed and thrust to either side. Men sprang away in both directions but he slew many. He cleared a path to Earl Hring’s standard and nothing could stand against him. He slew the man who bore King [sic] Hring’s standard and hewed down the standard pole. Then he thrust his spearhead into the earl’s breast, through his mail and his body so that it came out between his shoulders, and he lifted him up over his own head upon the great halberd and drove the other end into the earth.6 Exaggerated though they might be, such accounts surely cannot be dismissed as complete fiction; they differ surprisingly little from the experiences of medieval combat related by reliable eyewitnesses. Jean de Joinville, for instance, who fought on the Seventh Crusade in Egypt with (Saint) Louis IX of France, describes combat he participated in as not too distant from Thorolf’s killing of Hring at Brunanburh: Then suddenly a Turk came from the direction of the King’s division which was in our rear and struck my Lord Peter of Neuville from behind with a mace. The weight of the blow forced him down on the neck of his horse, and the Turk dashed over the bridge and rejoined his men … they brought up another foot-soldier, who three times threw Greek fire at them. On one occasion William of Boon caught the fire-bomb on his buckler; had the fire set light to any part of his clothing he would have been burnt alive. We were covered with arrows that missed the men-atarms. Fortunately I found a Saracen’s padded jerkin, stuffed with wadding. I turned the open side towards me and made a shield of the jerkin; it served me well, for I was wounded by the arrows in only five places, while my horse was in fifteen.7 6 Egil’s Saga, in The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook, ed. Michael Livingston (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011), 76–77. 7 Jean de Joinville, The Life of St. Louis, trans. Rene Hague, ed. Natalis de Wailly (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 84. The men-at-arms Joinville refers to are infantry, while he and the other nobles were cavalry. The Greek fire of thirteenth-century Egypt was an incendiary made of naphtha and other flammable liquid. It could be placed in a ceramic grenade and thrown, which was clearly what was used here. See: P. Pentz, “A Medieval Workshop for Producing ‘Greek Fire’ Grenades,” Antiquity 62 (1988): 88–93 which describes the archaeological excavation of a laboratory in Cairo of the same period as the Crusade. A padded jerkin was a cloth armor used to cover the torso; from this description it appears to have been thickened with other cloth.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

31

Medieval battles were intense. According to participants, the possibility of dealing out death brought about an adrenaline-filled rush, a machismo that hid the fear of facing death dealt out by an opponent, as Jean de Joinville suggests: “Every time we saw that the men-at-arms were pressed we charged the Turks and drove them off. While we were there the good Count of Soissons was joking with me and saying, ‘Seneschal, let these curs howl; by God’s bonnet [his favourite oath] you and I shall yet talk in ladies’ chambers of this day’s work.’”8 Medieval battles were also confusing. No matter how well-drilled an army was or how well-ordered an attack may have begun, the actual interaction between combatants soon became chaotic and disordered. Jean le Bel describes the French cavalry attack at the battle of Crécy in 1346 as such: they charged, all in chaos and entangled without any order, so that they closed in on the professional soldiers and Genoese between themselves and the English; because there was nothing those men could do, falling under the horses’ hooves, they stormed and fell one over another as lots of pigs. And the other side’s archers shot so marvelously that the horses, feeling the barbed arrows, which did marvels, did not want to advance: some rode against others as if deranged, others bucked dreadfully, others turned their backs to their enemies, despite their masters, because of the arrows that they felt, and others let their masters fall, because they were unable to do anything else. And the English lords standing on foot advanced and fell upon the men who were not able to deal with their horses.9 Even the most brave soon faltered and “turned their backs” – so frequent a phrase that it becomes a narrative motif for “fled.” Flight generally heralded victory for the opposing side. After all, the object of medieval battles was not so much to kill one’s opponents as to make them run away. Battles were generally over quickly; the defeat of one side tended to be recognizable soon after the conflict began. Only the most loyal, the most foolhardy, or the most suicidal continued to fight after defeat was apparent. Exemplifying the last was Johann, the king of Bohemia, who had gone blind during his years of warfare throughout Europe and was fighting with the French against the English at Crécy. The Rimini chronicler, Marco Battagli, records what he asked his companions to do: 8 Jean de Joinville, The Life of St. Louis, 85. 9 Jean le Bel, Chronique, ed. Jules Viard and Eugène Déprez (Paris: Libraire Renouard, 1904–05), 2:103. Translation by Kelly DeVries.

32

Woosnam-savage And Devries

His own soldiers, his guards, realizing that the army of the king of France could not win the battle against the English, carefully took the bravely fighting king of Bohemia from the battle. But the king, feeling no fear of war, said to them, “Where are we? Do I not hear the crash of weapons striking?” They said, “Lord, already this battle for our side is thoroughly lost; we wish to deliver you out of the hands of your enemies.” Then King John furiously shouted these words: “In my youth I never avoided the face of enemies; now, when I am old and blind, I do not want my strong name to be wiped out in my old age. It is better to die bravely with honor, than with shame and worthlessness; as a man consumes his life you would have him wither away, and you would make him worthless and ashamed in front of others. I beseech you to lead me into the fight, that I will be buried with a sword in my hand.”10 His desire to die on the battlefield was granted; unfortunately, his “suicide” also took the lives of the two soldiers to whom he was tied and many more who loyally followed him. When the outcome was not so quickly determined, a medieval battle could go on for hours. Eyewitnesses often recorded heroism. Mary Dupuis participated in the final attack of the Ottoman Turks on the walls of Rhodes in 1480 and wrote what she saw, when even the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Pierre d’Aubusson, was involved in the hand-to-hand combat: The Grand Master, who was not far away [from where the Turks had broken through the walls], accompanied by many knights and other soldiers, came to one of the stairs and was the first to climb. With great courage and marvellous feats of arms he climbed to the top; but in climbing he received great and awful blows, but he gave as good as he got. And he was thrown two or three times from the stairs to the ground. But he was valiantly aided and helped by the other knights who were with him, all of whom carried themselves so well and so valiantly that by force and in spite of all the Turks they climbed onto the walls, and there the Grand Master was wounded in two places.11 Yet, the eyewitness chronicler of the Annales Gandenses who observed at the battle of Mons-en-Pévèle in August 1304, recorded fatigue: 10 11

Marco Battagli, Marcha di Marco Battagli da Rimini [1212–1354], ed. Aldo Francesco Massèra (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1900), 49­–50. Translation by Michael Livingston. Mary Dupuis, quoted in Robert Douglas Smith and Kelly DeVries, Rhodes Besieged: A New History (Stroud: The History Press, 2011), 59. Translation by Kelly DeVries.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

33

Fighting … had continued for the better part of a day between two long opposing lines [the French and the Flemings] … and between them lay great numbers of men and horses who had been killed, and also, on both sides, many who had been suffocated, though unwounded, through the weight of their armour and the summer heat … Many of the Flemings, especially those from Ypres, Courtrai and Ghent, tired out by the summer heat, thirst, and the individual combats already mentioned, lacerated by wounds, and in some cases trembling at heart, as looking about they saw the field everywhere open to the retreating hosts of the enemy, fled towards Lille.12 The least fatigued army might eventually claim success. But both armies might also simply retreat to carry on fighting the following day. The continuation of warfare was frequent in sieges but much rarer in battle – the battle of Bannockburn in 1314 is a notable exception.13 Usually, during the night, one of the sides would account their losses too high to continue another day and slip away from the battlefield under the cover of darkness, giving victory to those who remain.14 Mostly, though, medieval battles were bloody. It is not surprising that in almost all narratives recording the fighting of medieval battles and sieges, soldiers’ wounds are noted. The violence of battle is confirmed by the excavation of numerous bodies of men killed throughout Europe during the Middle Ages that have been studied forensically. Some of these wounds led to death, while some were not life threatening and show signs of being completely healed or healing at the time of death. Only those found on or near a battlefield (Visby, Aljubarrota, Towton, or Dornach) or at a siege site (Lincoln, Jacob’s Ford, and Stirling Castles) can be linked to warfare,15 but they all provide examples of the physical trauma that could be caused by weapons of the time. 12 13

14

15

Annales Gandenses/Annals of Ghent, ed. and trans. Hilda Johnstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 70. For a short account of Bannockburn, see: Kelly DeVries, Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century: Discipline, Tactics, and Technology (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996), 66–85. Cf. Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403,” in this volume, 102–27. Examples include the battles of the Catalaunian Fields in 451 and Mons-en-Pévèle in 1304. In the first, Attila chose to withdraw his Huns rather than to face another day of battle against the Romano-Visigothic troops; and in the former, the Flemings chose to retreat rather than fighting against the French the following day. It is likely, however, that only a small percentage of injuries were received in non-warfare related violent activities. For a more general look at medieval violence, see: Warren C.

34

Woosnam-savage And Devries

Unfortunately, the ability to access factual information about wounds is limited. There are the narrative sources, in addition to the occasional surgical account (such as the description of the wounding of Prince Hal), or indirect sources of information (like the stocking of medicinal honey for campaigns).16 There are also visual sources (like the Wound Men illustrations of the fif­ teenth century). But beyond these records that, in one way or another, can be considered susceptible to exaggeration or misinterpretation, there is the archaeological record. Simple soft-tissue wounds leave little trace, but deeper wounds may leave their marks and scars on the bones. Skeletal excavations may thus be the most reliable source for the trauma of wounds received in military actions. What follows is a chronological catalogue of the numerous excavations of bodies that display sharp-force, blunt-force, or penetrative-force wounds. Some of these remains and their wounds have been studied thoroughly and reported in great detail. Others have been studied only cursorily where the wounds are only mentioned as part of the larger study of the medieval corpses. The reports for some of these excavations have not been published at all, and their entries are based almost solely on what can be observed through display or photographs. – The earliest excavations of wounded bodies, found in England, date to the Roman occupation or slightly afterwards. Fourteen bodies have been excavated from six cemeteries (Snell’s Corner, Hampshire; Dunstable, Bedfordshire; Cirencester, Gloucestershire; Ancaster, Lincolnshire; Baddock, Hertfordshire; and Poundberry, Dorset). All had sharp-force trauma; one also suffered a blunt-force trauma. Eight of these were caused by swords (one body had two sword wounds), two by daggers, and one by a lance or arrow; the cause of two wounds could not be determined. In two cases, the wounded remains were female, and may not be from battle (although they could certainly have been received them in non-battlefield military violence). Eight of the wounds were healed or in the process of healing.17

16

17

Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011). For a detailed account of the treatment of Prince Hal’s wound, see: Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” in this volume, 215–30; and for a discussion honey stores in sieges, see: Ilana Krug, “The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine,” in this volume, 194–214. Anthea Boylston, “Evidence for Weapon-related Trauma in British Archaeological Samples,” in Human Osteology in Archaeology and Forensic Medicine, ed. M. Cox and S. Mays (London: Greenwich Medical Media, 2000), 366–68.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

35

– Among the 228 bodies dating between the fifth and tenth centuries excavated from three church graveyards in Maastricht, seven showed violent wounds; three were perimortal and the cause of death; six had blows to the skull (one also had blows to the torso and hand) and one to the tibia – all were from sharp-edged weapons, most likely swords.18 – A single male body from Maiden Castle, once thought to be prehistoric, but now firmly carbon-dated to roughly 635 CE, suffered eight wounds to the skull, including two deep sharp-force trauma, as well as several other sharp-force wounds to the upper limbs and wrists (these have been deemed to be attempts to cut off the man’s arms or hands).19 – Three Lombard-Avar skeletons excavated from the Campochiaro cemetery in Molise (among 234 graves opened that date from between the sixth and eighth centuries) had significant weapon-related injuries. One, a male, more than 55 years of age, was likely an Avar – the skull shows “characteristics of Mongolic type” – and was almost certainly a horse archer, as shown by “the deep and strongly imprinted” muscular insertion areas on the humerus and femur.20 His military experience appears to have been lengthy: a previously received blunt-edged wound that made an extremely wide hole in the skull to the dura mater and arachnoid membrane of the brain was already healing, although it remained an open hole in the skull at the time of death. This wound was probably made by a blow delivered from above (possibly by an opponent on horseback) with an axe or mace. The perimortal wound was a penetration of the cranium delivered by an arrow near to the ante-mortem wound. The second body was male, aged 50–55 years. Also a soldier, he, too, had an ante-mortem sharp-force trauma to the skull. This wound, possibly from an axe, fractured the bone but did not penetrate it. The cause of death could not be determined, but it appears not to have been related to his wound that had begun to heal. The third set of remains also belonged to a male over fifty years old. His wound was a laceration (10.2 cm long and 2 mm wide) that descended the left side of the face from the forehead to the top of the left eye orbital socket. This wound shows no healing and, 18 19

20

Raphael G.A.M. Panhuysen, “Het scherp van de snede: Sporen van geweld in vroegmiddeleeuws Maastricht,” Archeologie in Limburg 92 (Dec 2002): 2–7. Boylston, “Evidence for Weapons-related Trauma,” 371; and D. Brothwell, “Forensic Aspects of the So-called Neolithic Skeleton Q1 from Maiden Castle, Dorset,” World Archaeology 3 (1971): 233–41. For later Steppe medicine, especially the treatment of arrow wounds, see: Timothy May, “Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices,” in this volume, 175–93

36

Woosnam-savage And Devries

despite its minor fracture, may have been the cause of his death. Although, the man also had leprosy, so it is possible that it was only coincidental with death and not the cause of it. Campochiaro was located near a fortified Byzantine outpost, and, thus, it is assumed by the archaeologists who studied the bodies (correctly no doubt) that all three injuries were the result of military actions.21 – Thirty skulls, dating from between the sixth and eighth centuries, found in several medieval cemeteries in southern Germany, exhibit cranial fractures that might be the result of sharp-edged or blunt-force weapons. However, twenty-three of these skulls show healing, indicating an impressive rate of survival from such wounds.22 – Six wounded bodies from the seventh century, all but one (aged between 20 and 35), were excavated from a church graveyard at Eccles, Kent (from among 176 bodies). Two suffered multiple wounds; all had at least one cranial wound, which was the cause of their death. One wound, 96 mm long sharp-force to the posterior part of the occipital bone, was determined by those studying the skeletons to be from a very sharp sword wielded by someone fighting on the same level as the wounded man. Four of the other men were also struck by swords, and one by an undetermined sharp-edged weapon.23 – Nithard, grandson of Charlemagne, counselor to and chronicler of his cousin, Charles the Bald, and abbot of the Saint-Riquier monastery, was said to have been killed in 844 during a battle against Pepin II, king of Aquitaine, or in 859 against the Vikings; the former date is most accepted. All sources indicate that he was struck down by a blow to the head. Buried at Saint-Riquier, and reburied twice before the end of the ninth century, his corpse remained undisturbed until 1989 when it was excavated and studied. Unfortunately, no archaeological report of this excavation has been published, although photos taken of his skull during the examination reveal that a sharp-edged or blunt-force weapon (likely a sword, axe, 21

22

23

Mauro Rubini and Paola Zaio, “Warriors from the East: Skeletal Evidence of Warfare from a Lombard-Avar Cemetery in Central Italy (Campochiaro, Molise, 6th–8th Century AD),” Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 1551–59. J. Weber and A. Czarnetzki, “Neurotraumatological Aspects of Head Injuries Resulting from Sharp and Blunt Force in the Early Medieval Period of Southwestern Germany,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 114 (2001): 352–56; and Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds, and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 112. Boylston, “Evidence for Weapons-related Trauma,” 369.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

37

or club) did indeed cave in the lower left side of his skull, killing the warrior-abbot.24 – Twenty-nine male bodies with wounds dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries have been excavated from the St. Andrew’s cemetery at Fishergate in York (out of 152 corpses). Taken together, these corpses reveal wounds on nearly every part of the body, though they are concentrated on the head, torso, hips, and legs, there are multiple wounds to multiple body parts. Nineteen, an unusually high number in comparison with other excavations, had sharp-force trauma to the ribs, and several had wounds to the back. At least one suffered a penetrative-force wound to the left pelvis; all other skeletal wounds were apparently made by sharp-edged weapons. Because the battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge (both 1066) were fought nearby, as were skirmishes of William the Conqueror’s harrying of the north (of 1069 and 1070), archaeologists who have studied these bodies have connected them to this warfare. But there is no conclusive link between them.25 – Two mass graves of Vikings have been excavated in England. The first, at Oxford was unearthed in 2008. It contained the skeletons of at least 35 Viking men, 27 of whom had received cranial injuries. All had suffered sharp-and penetrative force trauma to the head, pelvis and ribs and at least one had been decapitated. A number of the dead also bore signs of healed ante-mortem trauma, indicating that these were likely veterans of previous military conflicts. Radiocarbon dating placed the bones to between 893 to 978. The second mass grave was discovered on Ridgeway Hill in Dorset in 2009. It contained the bodies of some 50 executed Vikings. All were male and had been killed by decapitation (probably by sword) with their heads placed in the southern part of the grave.  Apart from obvious evidence of trauma to the neck vertebra and skulls (76% of the skulls bore evidence of sharp-force trauma), some victims also appear to have attempted to ward off blows with their forearms and hands, as injuries were sustained to a number of fingers too. These remains have

24 25

Discussion of the excavation and photos of Nithard’s skull are found in Cahier spécial Saint-Riquier (Jun 25, 2014), I and VII-VIII. Boylston, “Evidence for Weapons-related Trauma,” 371; G. Stroud and R.I. Kemp, Cemetaries of the Church and Priory of St. Andrews, Fishergate, The Archaeology of York 12: The Medieval Cemeteries 2 (York: Council of British Archaeology, 1993); and G. McKinnon, “‘Where Swords Seek to Shatter …’: A Study of Deliberate Trauma in the Medieval Cemeteries of St. Andrew, Fishergate” (PhD dissertation, University of Bradford, 1998).

38

Woosnam-savage And Devries

been dated to between 972 and 1025 and may have been associated with Viking attacks on the South Coast of England in 982–1016.26 – A body excavated in Cox Lane, Ipswich, dating to the late-Anglo-Sax­on / early-Anglo-Norman period, suffered a sword cut that vertically transected the cranium, indicating that it may have been delivered from horseback to a man standing, as well as another sword cut to the left femur, the amputation of the right wrist (possibly by a sword), and other sharp-force wounds to the right eighth and ninth ribs. These wounds could only have been delivered by other assailants on foot. Although C. Wells, who studied the skeleton, has posited that this could have been a murder, it seems more likely that these wounds were received in military action.27 – Twenty-four other bodies suffering wounds to the head have been excavated from thirteen other Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. All were male, except for two females and one of indeterminate gender; two males were in their early twenties; half of the others were between 25 and 35 years, and half over 45 years of age. Nineteen were wounded by swords, one by an axe, two by arrows, one by an unspecified blunt-force weapon, and one suffered several wounds by indeterminate weapons. However, only ten of these wounds were fatal.28 – At Lincoln Castle, the bodies of fourteen men and two women were excavated. One of the males suffered numerous, significant wounds, including a wide and long wound on the occipital bone, delivered possibly by an axe, and an arrow wound to the cranium. It is difficult to determine which of these was the cause of death, although Anthea Boylston credits the arrow penetration without explanation. Other wounds had begun to heal, indicating that the conflict in which this man perished, c. 1140 during the civil war between Stephen and Matilda, was hardly the first in which he had fought.29 26

27

28 29

Ceri Falys, “A Late Saxon Mass Grave: The Human Bone,” in The Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre with Medieval and Later Occupation at St. John’s College, Oxford, ed. Sean Wallis (Oxford: Thames Valley Archaeological Services, 2014), 41–130, and Louise Loe, Angela Boyle, Helen Webb, and David Score, “Given to the Ground”: A Viking Age Mass Grave on Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth (Oxford: Oxford Archaeology, 2014). Boylston, “Evidence for Weapons-related Trauma,” 370; and C. Wells, “The Human Skeleton from Cox Lane, Ipswich,” Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 29 (1963): 329–33. Boylston, “Evidence for Weapons-related Trauma,” 370. Boylston also cites where more extensive reports of these excavations can be found. Boylston, “Evidence for Weapons-related Trauma,” 373.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

39

– Five members of the Crusader garrison of Vadum Jacob (Jacob’s Ford), killed during the capture of the fortress by Saladin in 1179, have been excavated. All, aged 20 to 40 years, have been judged by Piers Mitchell, Yossi Nagar, and Ronnie Ellenblum, who led the excavation, to have been killed either in the attack on the fortification or in the execution of prisoners afterwards: one had an arrow lodged in the left iliac bone; one had an arrow in the left humerus, although it did not penetrate the bone; one had three arrows in his vertebrae; one had a sword cut to the left elbow, which had sliced the bone in two (only the upper part of the arm was found with the body); one had a deep and fatal sword cut to the left shoulder; and one had no visible wounds, though, because he was buried with the others, he was thought to have died from soft tissue damage.30 – Other Crusaders’ bodies have been excavated at Le Petit Guerin, a twelfth-century Templar fortified site, and a “cave cemetery” outside Safed, Israel. In the former, among the thirty-four young adult and six adult individual remains were one adult male, in his twenties (buried in the Christian graveyard) with two sharp-force wounds to his left shoulder, probably from a sword, although both had begun to heal and, thus, were not immediately fatal blows, allowing the man to live at least a week after they were inflicted. Another, buried in the Muslim graveyard, had a wound to the head caused by a sword or axe that had healed completely.31 Two young adult males and one adult male with wounds were excavated from the Safed cave cemetery. The first young adult had a blunt-force trauma to the left side of his head, inflicted by a mace or sling shot, resulting in death. The second young adult survived for a number of years after being stuck through the top of his skull by an arrow or crossbow bolt. The adult had been wounded twice in the front of his head: the first was a sword slash 2 cm round, indicating perhaps a glancing blow that had shaved off a part of the head near the coronal suture, and the second was 1 cm square, from a lance or arrow, on the lower part of the forehead near the sinus. Neither was fatal.32 30

31

32

Piers D. Mitchell, Yossi Nagar, and Ronnie Ellenblum, “Weapon Injuries in the TwelfthCentury Crusader Garrison of Vadum Iacob Castle, Galilee,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16 (2006): 145–55; and Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 119–22. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 118; and Piers D. Mitchell, “The Integration of the Palaeopathology and Medical History of the Crusades,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 9 (1999): 333–43. Piers D. Mitchell, “The Palaeopathology of Skulls Recovered from a Medieval Cave Cemetery near Safed, Israel (Thirteenth to Seventeenth Century),” Levant 36 (2004): 243–250.

40

Woosnam-savage And Devries

– Nine Knights of the Order of St. Benedict of Aviz, dating to the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, have been excavated. One set of remains had a perimortal sharp-force trauma to the front of the chest, and three more suffered other, non-fatal wounds.33 – Nine bodies with wounds were excavated in 1997 from within Stirling Castle. There are seven males, one female, and one of indeterminate gender. Two or possibly three are teenagers, while the rest range in age between 24 and 60. Unusually, in comparison with other osteoarchaeological finds, only three of these suffered wounds from sharp-edged weapons: one a cut to the skull, probably from a sword; one, a hole near the central incisors in the mouth (an arrow found also buried in the grave may have been the weapon), as well as an antemortem sharp-force trauma that had healed; and one, a stab wound to the back, perhaps from a dagger, although the body also suffered blunt-force trauma to nearly every part of the body (right humerus, right scapula, ribs, cranial base, both temples, and back). The other six all suffered blunt-force trauma of various sizes and numbers. Despite initial dating of the bodies to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, finding so many blunt-force trauma has led Jo Buckberry to the preliminary suggestion that the deaths might be connected to the sieges of Scottish Wars of Independence, perhaps to Edward I’s siege of 1304 in which twelve large stone-throwing trebuchets were used against the walls and parapets of the castle, including the enormous Warwolf, a machine so large that it took thirty wagons to carry the materials to construct it. Being hit by trebuchet projectiles or, at least by stones from walls dislodged or fractured by a blow from one of these projectiles, might explain the high proportion of blunt-force trauma, as well as the female bodies.34 – At least twenty-four other bodies displaying wounds to the cranium have been excavated from ten other medieval English sites. Not many have been studied forensically: only twelve specify gender (nine male and three female); and only eight specify age. Thirteen suffered sharpforce trauma (four from swords, the others undetermined), three

33

34

Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 112; and L. Santos, C. Umbelino, A. Goncalves, and F.D. Pereira, “Mortal Combat during the Medieval Christian Reconquest in Evora, Portugal,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 8 (1998): 454–56. Jo Buckberry, “Brutal and Bloody: Evidence of Trauma from the Scottish Wars of Independence” (unpublished paper, International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 7 July 2014). Dr. Buckberry assures me that an official report of this excavation is forthcoming.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

41

blunt-force trauma, and two penetrative-force wounds; and six wounds were undetermined. More than half the wounds show healing.35 – Among the 10,000 bodies excavated from the medieval cemetery of St. Mary-without-Bishopgate, Spitalfields, London, was one male, aged 33–45 years old and pin-pointed by site and carbon-dating to 1310–1320, who had received three sharp-force trauma to the right side of his cranium but survived all three. These wounds range in length from 33 to 67 mm with a width of 15 to 27 mm. No external beveling fractures around the wounds could be seen, indicating that all three were the result of sharp-edged weapons, most likely a sword or dagger. The direction of the wounds suggests they were delivered by an assailant standing behind the man. A criminal attack has been suggested as a possible cause of these wounds as well as military activity.36 – Nine bodies excavated from a well near Corinth, Greece, are thought to have been victims of the military massacre of townspeople by soldiers from the Catalan Company in 1312. All bear sharp-force trauma to the skull, backs of the legs, and forearms.37 – In 1980, Emmanuel Vlček, a Czech anthropologist, studied the body of Johann of Bohemia, the king who died as an ally of King Philip VI at the battle of Crécy (mentioned above). Bones and some mummified soft tissues remain. The wound that felled the king during his suicidal entry into the fighting was a deep stab into the rear of left shoulder, likely delivered by a sword, lance, or staff weapon. However, the fatal wound was probably the dagger thrust through the left eye. Several other injuries were also found, indicating the fierceness of fighting at Crécy; however, three that nearly severed the right hand at the wrist were possibly made post-mortem, perhaps to remove the sword or something else on the hand.38 – Three excavations were undertaken on the Gotland battlefield of Visby in 1905, 1912, and 1928–30. The last uncovered the remains of 1185 soldiers from the battle, fought in 1361 between the inhabitants of Gotland – 35 36 37

38

Boylston, “Evidence for Weapons-related Trauma,” 372. N. Powers, “Cranial Trauma and Treatment: A Case Study from the Medieval Cemetery of St. Mary Spital, London,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 15 (2005): 1–14. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 112; C.K. Williams, E. Barnes and L.M. Snyder, “Frankish Corinth: 1996,” Hesperia 66 (1997): 7–47; and E. Barnes, “The Dead Do Tell Tales,” in Corinth: The Centenary, 1896–1996, ed. C.K. Williams and N. Bookidis (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens), 435–43. Emmanuel Vlček, Jak zemreli: Významné osobnosti ceských dejin z pohledu antropologie a lékarství (Prague: Academia, 1993), 97–104. My thanks to Vaclav Zurek and Jan Biedermann for this reference and an English summary of Vlćek’s findings.

42

Woosnam-savage And Devries

without the citizens of Visby who seemed to have stayed behind their walls while the battle was fought outside – and invading Danes. From these excavations, it is clear that the bodies were buried quickly; several were still wearing their cloth-covered armor, mail coifs, and other difficult-to-remove armors. Because the fighting took place on the lands of a Cistercian nunnery, Solberga Abbey, the battlefield itself was considered “consecrated ground.” Most of these bodies showed visible wounds made by a diverse range of weapons: swords, axes, crossbow bolts, staff weapons, maces, lances, and possibly hammers. The largest number of wounds was from sharp-edged weapons (swords or axes), with 126 bodies suffering penetrations (from bolts or the points of staff weapons), and sixty with both sharp-force and penetrative trauma. Cranial wounds were frequent (most of which would have probably caused instant death) although the majority of wounds were to the arms and legs and would not have been immediately fatal. Those not slain instantly most likely died more slowly by exsanguination, for all those found in the gravemounds at Solberga had died during the battle.39 – The second largest excavation of demonstrable military-related remains, much less well known than Visby, was carried out at the battlefield of Aljubarrota in Portugal. The battle, fought on 14 August 1385 between King João I of Portugal and King Juan I of Castile – the former army assisted by English troops and the latter by Aragonese, Italian, and French troops – was a lengthy and very bloody engagement between soldiers wielding all the weapons of the period as well as a number of gunpowder artillery pieces. Ultimately, the Portuguese won. Although as many as 5,000 Castilian soldiers may have been massacred by Portuguese non-combatants as they tried to flee, it is likely that the more than 400 bodies found by Afonso do Paço during his excavations of the battlefield in 1958 were among the 4,000–5,000 warriors killed during the battle. Sharp-force trauma, the result of wounds made by swords and axes, was numerous, as was penetrative trauma; wounds made by lances and arrows. Several sharp-force cuts were to the head, some quite deep and likely fatal, and there were many arrow and bolt wounds to the frontal 39

Bengt Thordeman, Poul Nörlund, Brian R. Price, and Bo. E. Ingelmark, Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksells Boktryckeri, 1939; rpt. Union City: Chivalry Bookshelf, 2001), 149–209. Despite the title of this book, which focuses on the cloth-covered armor that remained on the body (and the use of an antiquated spelling of town’s name) the analysis of weapon-related injuries, by Bo E. Ingelmark, is extremely detailed and analytical.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

43

and parietal bones of the cranium, suggesting that bows and crossbows shot these projectiles from in front, with a relatively steep arc. Many wounds were also to the limbs, only three of which showed complete amputation, confirming that limb-loss during battle was comparatively rare and that, when it did happen, even such a significant trauma could perhaps be survived. One Aljubarrota soldier was fighting on the healed stump of a leg that, because of the roughness of the cut, was likely the result of an earlier battlefield wound. Several other bodies also showed previous wounds that had healed or begun to heal.40 – One of the four late medieval bodies excavated at Lepenski Vir, in Serbia, displayed sharp-force trauma to the left parietal bone of the skull, 29 mm long and 9 mm wide. Because of its size, the wound was probably delivered by an axe. But it was not fatal because it had begun to heal. The remains were of a mature male, and, thus, may have been wounded in fighting one of the numerous wars in the Balkans during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.41 – Three among forty-three late medieval male bodies excavated from Vajunga, Serbia, had blunt-force trauma, which may have been received in similar warfare as the Lepenski Vir remains.42 – In 1996, in the town of Towton, a gravepit was excavated containing the bodies of forty-three men killed at the battle fought outside what was then a village in 1461. This battle, one of many fought during the Wars of the Roses, has the unfortunate distinction of being the bloodiest battle fought on English soil, with an estimated 9,000–28,000 casualties. Wounds could not be found on thirteen of the bodies, although this does not necessarily mean that these men did not suffer wounds, only that their wounds failed to impact the bones. Of the remaining thirty bodies, only three had single wounds (one sharp-force, one blunt-force, and one penetrative-force), while all others had multiple wounds. One man received eight sharp-force trauma; one man had nine sharp-force and two penetrative-force wounds; and another suffered ten sharp-force and three blunt-force trauma. Twenty-seven out of twenty-eight crania found (two 40 41

42

Eugénia Cunha and Ana Maria Silva, “War Lesions from the Famous Portuguese Medieval Battle of Aljubarrota,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 7 (1998): 595–99. M. Roksandic, C. Wood, and D. Vlak, “Death in the Line of Duty: Late Medieval Burials at the Site of Lepenski Vir, Serbia,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 17 (2007): 635– 642. S. Živanović, “Communication sur les squelettes humains de la Necropole I et II Vajunga,” in Cahiers des Portes de Fer (Belgrade: Institut archéologique de Belgrade, 1986), 228–36.

44

Woosnam-savage And Devries

skeletons did not include crania, while another had a cranium too damaged for study) displayed wounds: Seventy-three were sharp-force (fifty-one of which penetrated the skull); twenty-eight were blunt-force (eighteen of which penetrated); and twelve were penetrative-force (all of which penetrated). Any of these had the potential to cause death. Ten bodies showed wounds to the neck, three to the shoulders, twelve to the arms, twenty to the hands and wrists, and seven to the legs and feet. Weapons potentially causing these wounds included swords, daggers, maces, war hammers, staff weapons, longbow arrows, and possibly crossbow bolts. What is almost unique among excavated bodies exhibiting violent trauma is how many of these wounds were made to the rear and back of the skull by men wielding their weapons from above. Initially, this led to the conclusion that the men were prisoners who were executed while kneeling by standing soldiers; however, absent written evidence that this happened at Towton, it is more likely that they were Lancastrian soldiers fleeing on foot from the battlefield who were ridden down and killed by Yorkist horsemen.43 In 2005, four more bodies were excavated from beneath the dining room of Towton Hall, all exhibiting similar wounds to those studied previously, but a detailed report of these bodies has not yet been published.44 – A skull said to have been found on the battlefield of Murten (fought in 1476) and currently on display in the Murten Historisches Museum has two, very long sharp-force trauma to the occipital bone (7 and 10 cm, both 3–4 mm wide), which are thought to have been delivered by a halberd, a staff weapon bearing an axe-like blade, favored by the Swiss during the Swiss-Burgundian Wars.45 – Perhaps the most famous skeleton of someone known to have died in combat is that of King Richard III, excavated in August 2012 in Leicester, England. Buried at what was then Greyfriars Church following his death at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, the body was positively proven to be that of the last Yorkist king not only from the burial site, the curved spine (from scoliosis) that Richard was reputed to have, but by DNA from two 43 44

45

Veronica Fiorato, Anthea Boylston, and Christopher Knüsel, Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton, AD 1461 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000). Tim Sutherland, chief archaeologist of the 2005 dig, presented these findings at a conference held 4 October 2006 at Yorkshire Museum in York. A detailed study of these remains is forthcoming. John Waldman, Hafted Weapons in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: The Evolution of European Staff Weapons between 1200 and 1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 102.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

45

descendants of his sister, Anne. The skeleton bore the traces of at least eleven perimortem wounds, nine of which were probably received at the time of his death and two probably subsequent to it, thus confirming the sources from the battle that suggest the king was attacked by a number of assailants, that he died in the thickest press of his enemies, and that his body was insulted after death. It has been suggested that daggers and knives made three of the perimortal wounds (to the top of the cranium, jaw, and cheekbone) and the two post-mortem wounds (to the right tenth rib and right pelvis). It is unlikely that any of these killed the king, although it is possible that, if Richard received the trauma to the pelvis while alive, he could have exsanguinated because his bowel would have been perforated. However, this trauma can be interpreted as one of the unspecified insults that the body was recorded as having received, particularly since sources indicate that the body was slung over the back of a horse after the battle, the legs dangling on one side and the arms on the other, thus, providing an opportunistic target for an assailant. More likely, death came from either the axe-blade of a staff weapon, such as a bill or halberd (then favored by English soldiers), which sliced through the base of his skull, creating a 6 × 5 cm wound; and/or a sword tip or the point of a staff weapon that penetrated 10 cms into the skull, also from the underside. Interestingly, the large slicing wound fits with the one account that names the weapon used to kill Richard, a halberd. The massive trauma to Richard’s skull indicates that he was probably both helmetless and lying prone, face down. Sword blades appear to have caused the remaining four wounds to the skull and atlas vertebra.46 – At least fifteen skulls were excavated from the Swiss battlefield of Dornach (fought in 1499) that show large angled sharp-force trauma. All blows penetrated the skull and sliced off a significant part of the bone and scalp, several centimeters in length and width, and were immediately fatal. In many cases, the skulls bear more than one such trauma, indicating significant “overkill,” whether due to “bloodlust” or tactics – one blow is delivered by an opponent who carries on moving forward leaving the remaining blows (ensuring the enemy is dead) to be delivered

46

Jo Appleby, Guy N. Rutty, Sarah V. Hainsworth, Robert C. Woosnam-Savage, Bruno ­ organ, Alison Brough, Richard W. Earp, Claire Robinson, Turi E. King, Mathew Morris, M and ­Richard Buckley, “Perimortem Trauma in King Richard III: A Skeletal Analysis,” The Lancet 385.9964 (17–23 September 2014): 253–59.

46

Woosnam-savage And Devries

by those following – is not yet clear. This trauma was likely caused by halberds, although some might have also been the result of swords.47 Of course, after reading this catalogue of wounds, it is easy to conclude that medieval warfare was violent and bloody. Many of the victims would no doubt have been killed instantly and, considering the number of others that would have led to slow exsanguination before dying, those who died immediately might be the lucky ones. Yet, the men who fought medieval battles could be surprisingly hardy. Take, for example, the tale of Pero Niño, the count of Buelna in Castile, found in his biographical chronicle written by his retainer Gutierre Diez de Games. In the battle of Ponteverdra (1397), Pero first had to face a “famous footsoldier,” Gomez Domao, with whom he traded blows: “they … gave each other such sword blows upon the head, that Pero Niño averred that sparks flew from his eyes.”48 Ultimately, he bested Gomez and moved on to fight others, “as a wolf does among the sheep when there is no shepherd to defend them,” when “it befell that an arrow struck him in the neck … the arrow had knit together his gorget and his neck; but such was his will to bring to a finish the enterprise that he had entered upon that he felt not his wound, or hardly at all; only it hindered him much in the movement of the upper part of his body” (37). The wound actually slowed him less than the stumps of opponents’ lances anchored in his shield, writes Diez de Games. Pero was then hit by a crossbow bolt, “piercing his nostrils through most painfully, whereat he was dazed” (37). But he soon recovered from that blow too and continued to fight: “There he did receive many sword blows on head and shoulders … [he] cut himself a path and found himself so pressed against his enemies that sometimes they hit the bolt embedded in his nose, which made him suffer great pain. It happened even that one of them, seeking to cover himself, hit a great blow with his shield and drove it further into his head” (37–8). Nevertheless, he survived. Returning to camp, he found his shield shattered, his armor broken, his sword hilt broken, and its blade “toothed like a saw and dyed in blood” (38). Only then did he seek surgical attention, not just for the arrow in his neck and the bolt in his nose but 47

48

Waldman, Hafted Weapons in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 100–02. For a discussion of the skeletal remains and the weapons that probably caused the trauma, see also: C. Cooper, “Forensisch-anthropologische und traumatologische Untersuchungen an den menschlichen Skeletten aus der spätmittelalterlichen Schlacht von Dornach (1499 n. Chr.)” (PhD thesis, Gutenberg University, 2009). Gutierre Diaz de Gamez, The Unconquered Knight: A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Niño, trans. Joan Evans (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), 36. Hereafter, page numbers will be given in parentheses.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

47

for the many flesh wounds he had received from swords and lances. He would live for another fifty-six years, taking part in numerous other military engagements before dying at 75. Even those with gunshot wounds could, and did, survive. In April 1422, Michael Bouyer, esquire, was “gravely ill and mutilated in one of his legs by a cannon shot,” but was alive and imprisoned in Meaux.49 In 1451, Bernard of Bearn, a lower-level French leader at the siege of Bayonne, was hit in the leg by handheld gunshot, “the ball [becoming] lodged between the two bones of his leg.”50 It was removed by a surgeon and Bernard survived. In 1465 at the battle of Montlhéry, a French archer was wounded in the thigh (also by handheld gunshot), and he too survived once attended to by a surgeon.51 These accounts are confirmed by the excavations catalogued above. What is surprising is how many of those who suffered wounds survived even very serious ones, some for many years afterwards. The 76% survival rate from wounds found by archaeologists in their excavations of thirty early medieval bodies in southern Germany is far higher than other excavations have proven, but almost all of these excavations have unearthed bodies with healed or healing wounds. Sometimes these are quite dramatic, such as the 55 year-old Avar who lived for quite a while with a large hole in his skull, or the 50-year-old soldier who received a massive gash down the side of his face that had healed long before he met his death at the battle of Towton, or the soldier at Visby who fought with a fractured limb that had reset at a shortened length, or his fellow Swedish soldier who fought with a knee-joint fixed at a 55° flexion, or the soldier at Aljubarrota who was fighting with a healed amputated leg. Perhaps not all of these were wounds sustained in previous warfare, but the fact that they did not limit the future military participation of these men and others is remarkable. There were two principal reasons for the survival of wounded soldiers in the Middle Ages, although both are largely neglected in modern studies of medieval warfare: the effectiveness of military surgery and armor.52 Of course, 49

50 51 52

L. Douet d’Arcq, ed., Choix de pièces inédites relatives au règne de Charles VI, 2 vols. (Paris: J. Renouard, 1864), 2:86. On these types of wounds see: Kelly DeVries, “Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 7 (1990): 131–46. Gilles le Bouvier, Chronique, in Histoire de Charles VII, ed. Denis Godfrey (Paris, 1661), 465. Jean de Haynin, Mémoires, 1465–77, ed. D.D. Brouwers, 2 vols. (Liège: Société des Bibliophiles Liégeois, 1905), 1:67. Those which fail to discuss medieval military surgery include: Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael Jones (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Helen Nicholson, Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe, 300–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Maurice Keen, ed., Medieval Warfare: A History (Oxford: Oxford

48

Woosnam-savage And Devries

medieval military surgeons were not the first such medical officials. Most ancient armies had military surgeons and, by the time of the Roman Empire, military surgery had progressed so far that, unless severely wounded, most soldiers survived.53 Nor were these surgical techniques lost with the fall of Rome. The Byzantines followed the Roman military system and organization, including having surgeons in their armies. Military treatises written by or for Emperor Maurice (582–602), the Strategikon, and Emperor Leo VI (886–912), the Tactika, decreed that each unit of 300–400 cavalry or infantry have two physicians (a general practitioner and a surgeon) and eight to ten orderlies.54 Surgeons travelled with the barbarian armies invading the Empire, although little other than their existence can be gleaned from the sources, which are not as detailed as those of the Byzantines. However, it does appear that, as Ammianus Marcellinus complains in the fourth century, neither the Romans nor the barbarians had enough trained surgeons to care for the larger numbers of wounded soldiers that their increased warfare produced.55 A tradition of military medicine that valued soldiers’ lives equally appears in Islamic armies. By the turn of the first millennium, Islamic military surgeons may also have been better than their European counterparts, at least if one accepts the account of the twelfth-century Arab Usāmah ibn-Munqidh. In an oft-cited passage, Usāmah describes the experience of his uncle, who sent a Syrian surgeon “to treat certain sick persons” among the Christians.56 However, at the point of successfully healing some of these, this surgeon was pushed aside by a Crusader surgeon whose crude techniques not only killed his patients but increased their pain exponentially in the process.

53 54

55 56

University Press, 1999); John France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000–1300 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Sean McGlynn, By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare (London: Phoenix, 2009), and Michael Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Guido Guido Majno, The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). On the Byzantine military system, including the aspects of military surgery and care for the wounded and aging veterans, see: John Haldon, Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204 (London: UCL Press, 1999); and Warren Treadgold, Byzantium and Its Army, 284–1081 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum, 19, 215. Usāmah ibn-Munqidh, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoires of Usāmah ibn Munqidh, trans. Philip K. Hitti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 162. For a study of this passage see: David C. Nicolle, “Wounds, Military Surgery and the Reality of Crusading Warfare: The Evidence of Usamah’s Memoires,” Journal of Oriental and African Studies 5 (1993): 33–46.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

49

Usāmah’s judgment of Crusader surgical skills is, perhaps understandably, biased.57 There is no doubt, however, that Europeans benefitted from exposure to Islamic surgical practice during the Crusades, and there is also no doubt that Islamic surgeons benefitted from exposure to European methods.58 In particular, around 1110, the monastic military order known as the Knights of St. John, or the Hospitallers, was established to have a concern for the health of soldiers and pilgrims; only later did it evolve into a fighting organization, although it never gave up its initial mission.59 This cross-cultural education also produced the most widely influential European surgical manual of Middle Ages. The Chirurgia, written in 1180 and attributed to Roger Frugard of Salerno, survives in more than twenty manuscripts in England and France alone. Several of them are illustrated, and more than fifteen translations were made before the sixteenth century. Roger’s manual is a compilation of numerous other texts (many now lost), and it was influenced by Byzantine and Islamic, as well as European, traditions. While the Chirurgia was not specifically written for military surgeons, they certainly used it.60 A number of surgical manuals followed, written in the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries, including those by Gilbertus, Roger de Barone, Lanfranc, Arnald of Villanova, Anselm of Genoa, Guy de Vigevano, Jan Yperman, Bernard de Gordon, Jean Pitart, Jean de Prouville, Pierre Fromont, Henri de Mondeville, Guy de Chauliac, Thomas Scellinck, John of Arderne, and

57

58

59

60

See: Kelly DeVries, “Medieval Warfare and the Value of a Human Life,” in Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, ed. Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 27–55, where it is suggested that too much credibility is given to Usāmah’s story. Mitchell’s Medicine in the Crusades is the recognized authority on surgical practice during the Crusades. Carmel Ferragud discusses the intersection of Arabic and Western medical and surgical practice on the Iberian Peninsula. See: “Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in this volume, 233–51. There are several histories of the military monastic orders and several different histories of the Hospitaller order. One could do no better than to start with Helen Nicholson, The Knights Hospitaller (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001) and Jonathan Riley-Smith, Hospitallers: The History of the Order of St. John (London: Hambledon Press, 1999). For the later history of the order see: H.J.A. Sire, The Knights of Malta (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Linda M. Paterson, “Military Surgery: Knights, Sergeants, and Raimon of Avignon’s Version of the Chirurgia of Roger of Salerno (1180–1209),” in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood II, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge, 1988): 117–46.

50

Woosnam-savage And Devries

John de Gaddesdens.61 Most of these were surgeons associated with royal or noble courts, and many also served as military surgeons.62 Guy de Vigevano served as a surgeon to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, during his early fourteenth-century campaigns in Italy.63 John of Arderne served as a military surgeon on the English king Edward III’s opening campaign of the Hundred Years War.64 Others may not have served as battlefield surgeons but their writings include instructions on how to treat wounds received in warfare. Henri de Mondeville’s Cyrurgia, for example, directs the surgeon to cleanse the wound, removing all detritus, especially “strange metals,” and then to bandage the wound, to allow suppuration, or to suture it. If the material inside the wound proved too difficult to be removed by fingers or probes, Mondeville instructs the surgeon to use a crossbow to assist in its removal – by cocking the crossbow string, attaching the string to the object in question, and then discharging the weapon. The detritus would be jerked out of the wound with such a speed that it would minimize the pain to the victim.65 One curious appearance in late medieval surgical manuals is “The Wound Man” (Figure 1.1). This illumination colorfully illustrates the many types of wounds that a military surgeon might treat. The Wound Man in the Wellcome Library, London MS 49, Apocalypse, f. 35r (c. 1420–30) is a striking example: the head is pierced by a dagger and bashed by a club; there are gashes, contusions, and other apparent trauma. An arrow penetrates the left arm and both arms are cut and lacerated. A knife cuts into the left shoulder. Swords are stuck quite deeply into the right breast and left ribcage. A long arrow/javelin pierces the 61

62 63 64

65

Several contributions to this volume discuss these surgical manuals and procedures. See: Krug, “The Wounded Soldier,” 194–214; Ferragud, “Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures,” 233–51; Elina Gertsman, “Wandering Wounds: the Urban Body in Imitatio Christi,” 340–65; Virginia Langum, “‘The Wounded Surgeon’: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England,” 269–90; Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches,’” 215–30; Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 496–518. Pierre Huard and Mirko Drazen Grmek, Mille ans de chirurgie en occident: Ve-XVe siècles (Paris: R. Dacosta, 1966), 32–53. Huard and Grmek, Mille ans de chirurgie, 35–36. Huard and Grmek, Mille ans de chirurgie, 51–52; and Jeremy J. Citrome,“Bodies that Splatter: Surgery, Chivalry, and the Body in the Practica of John Arderne,” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 137–72. Huard and Grmek, Mille ans de chirurgie, 40. Mondeville’s treatise, in Latin, is badly in need of a modern critical edition. On the use of the crossbow as a surgical tool see: Robert Ignatius Burns, “The Medieval Crossbow as Surgical Instrument: An Illustrated Case History,” in Essays and Notes on the History of Medicine, ed. Saul Jarcho (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), 64–70.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

Figure 1.1

The Wound Man” (c. 1420) from Thuringia that survives in London, Wellcome Library MS 49, fol. 35r.

51

52

Woosnam-savage And Devries

stomach. The legs show wounds by an arrow, a sword, a crossbow bolt, and a spear, with sundry other gashes and cuts; a spider and worm crawl along the left leg, representing bites that such creatures might give to a soldier. Finally, a caltrop penetrates one foot while the other is pierced by an arrowhead, possibly one spent after flight but still harmful to the soft leather boots of those who might tread over it. A rodent, snake, and a scorpion-type of insect also wound the feet.66 By the end of the Middle Ages, the constant warfare demanded skilled medical personnel to treat the wounds of soldiers and almost all surgeons of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw military action. Medical practitioners also encountered wounds made by gunpowder weapons, which required new surgical techniques. Initially, it seems, they treated these wounds using Mondeville’s direction: cleansing the wound, removing the detritus, and then suppurating or suturing. However, some surgeons considered wounds caused by gunpowder weapons to be poisoned, suggesting that cauterization was the means of removing that poison. This practice continued into the sixteenth century.67 A second reason for the survival of so many wounded soldiers was the protective capabilities of the armor they wore. As with military surgery, armor had been worn before the Middle Ages; metal armor (bronze) appeared in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The lorica hamata (mail armor) became the dominant type of armor worn by Romans from the mid-third century. Mail was made from small, open-ended iron rings, with the two ends of each ring overlapped, flattened and pierced with a tiny hole. Each ring was then interlinked through four others and fastened by a tiny rivet inserted through the holes in the ends. Mail was flexible, but the wearer bore most of its weight on the shoulders; so a padded garment, the aketon, was worn under the mail to make it more comfortable and to act as a shock absorber. The barbarian invaders of the Empire also wore mail, although it is unclear if it was of their own construction or was learned, bought, or looted from the Romans.68 Emperor Charlemagne, recognizing that his military conquests depended on the security of his soldiers, whose expertise at fighting wars could not be easily replaced, standardized all the military equipment of his army, requiring by law that all his soldiers must own, and be trained in wearing, a shirt of mail 66 67 68

Another illumination is found in London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library, MS 49, at f. 35r (1420–1430) in a German manuscript. DeVries, “Military Surgical Practice,” 131–46. Pat Southern and Karen R. Dixon, The Late Roman Army (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 96–97;

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

53

armor (called a byrnie), a helmet, and a shield.69 Byrnies were cuirasses of interlaced rings, which were draped from the shoulders but also covered the thighs and upper arms, with bibs and coifs that could be attached by laces to the requisite helmet.70 Furthermore, he refused to allow Carolingian byrnies to be sold to foreign soldiers or armies; soldiers were forbidden, on pain of death, to give a byrnie to any merchant to be resold, even within the Empire. However, graveyards from this period and later show that, despite these restrictions, byrnies were acquired by outsiders. More importantly, they began to be copied by everyone: mail became the standard armor until the end of the Middle Ages. By the early fourteenth century, plates began to be attached to vulnerable parts of the coats of mail and then, in the early fifteenth century, to be formed into complete metal suits.71 Plate armor could vary in quality, ranging from that made from a low carbon iron to high quality steel, which may or may not have been hardened. The latter was obviously more effective in defending its wearer from attack. It was made up of specially-shaped sheet iron, or mild steel, forged at furnaces and bloomeries. These billets were pounded into flat sheets, which were quenched in water or oil to harden the surface of the armor; further reheating, or tempering, toughened it even more. After shaping, the exterior of the plate could be burnished bright, and the whole armor assembled to ensure it worked effectively.72 Yet, plate armor was extremely expensive, which limited its ownership to only the most elite, wealthy soldiers. Cheaper types of armor included the brigandine, a canvas jacket onto which hundreds of small overlapping tinned iron plates had been riveted, and jacks, thickly padded, thigh length, jackets made from as many as thirty layers of linen or canvas that could be lined with small rectangular iron or horn plates or discs stitched together.73 The head was also covered. Helmets worn by the barbarians, spangenhelms, were made by attaching iron plates to iron strips fitted around and over the top of the head. By the eleventh century, spangenhelms had acquired a more 69 70 71 72 73

Simon Coupland, “Carolingian Arms and Armor in the Ninth Century,” Viator 21 (1990): 29–50, at 30. Kelly DeVries and Robert Douglas Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 61–62. DeVries and Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 64–75; and Claude Blair, European Armour: circa 1066 to circa 1700 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1958), 19–36. DeVries and Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 75–85; and Blair, European Armour, 37–111. DeVries and Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 85–86; and Ian Eaves, “On the Remains of a Jack of Plate Excavated from Beeston Castle in Cheshire,” Journal of the Arms and Armour Society 13 (1989–91): 81–154.

54

Woosnam-savage And Devries

distinct conical shape with a nasal guard attached to the brim, descending to protect the nose and face. These so-called “nasal helms” were used into the thirteenth century, although, increasingly, they were made from a single plate of metal. From these developed the bascinet, a simple, rounded skull-shaped helmet. It could be fitted with a visor, to guard the face, and an aventail (mail) or gorget or bevor (plates) to protect the neck. The great helm appeared about the same time, around 1200. When fully developed, these helmets had a cylindrical form and a flat top, with sight and openings for breathing cut into its front. It could be worn atop a mail coif but also required a padded arming cap on top of the head and a chin-strap under the helmet to hold it on firmly, as it was both heavy and uncomfortable to wear. But it was very protective. The great helm was the cavalry soldiers’ helmet until around 1350 and was used in jousts into the sixteenth century. Three further late medieval helmet designs evolved from the bascinet. The first was the barbuta that consisted of a visored helmet made from a single piece of metal. The second was the armet, a single-metal skullcap, reaching only to the tops of the ears, except in the rear where it extended to the neck. The third was the sallet, made either from one piece with the sight cut into the front or with a broad open face, over which a visor could be fixed. All were worn with a gorget or bevor.74 Contemporary documents, narrative sources, literature, art works, and excavations, confirm that, for most of the Middle Ages, armor was worn by nearly all soldiers, infantry, or cavalry. By the fourteenth century, even urban militias were outfitted with armor; the excavations at Visby, Aljubarrota, and Towton suggest that this was also true of rural militias. Never in military history have armies been so well (and so effectively) armored. The catalogue of wounds above shows how protective armor was in the Middle Ages; wounds to the limbs and head were most common but could be survived, while those to the head were, of course, the fatal ones. Only those killed in what are clearly recorded as massacres of unarmored individuals, as at Corinth, or possibly massacres, as at Ridgeway Hill show wounds to the torso. Experiments carried out by the Royal Armouries in England and elsewhere have confirmed how difficult it was to penetrate a moving target covered by mail or plate armor, especially if the soldier was also wearing some clothing under this armor; even

74

DeVries and Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 53–93 (in passim). See also: T.P.D. Blackburn, D.A. Edge, A.R. Williams, C.B.T. Adams, “Head Protection in England before the First World War,” Neurosurgery 47.6 (December 2000): 1261–1286.

Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare

55

a thick felt would provide extra protection, but a quilted or leather aketon was ideal.75 But the puzzling aspect of these finds is why there were so many excavated bodies with head wounds. The helmet, made of the same thickness of armor, if not thicker, should have offered the same amount of protection to the medieval soldier as his armor did. No doubt it did, but the number of head wounds shows how frequently soldiers needed to open their visor, like Henry V did at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, or lower their bevor, as Cornelius, the Grand Bastard of Burgundy (illegitimate son of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy), did at the battle of Rupelmonde in 1452, probably in order to more easily speak or breathe.76 Or, perhaps, they were fleeing from the battlefield and either discarded their helmets because of the weight or they were knocked off their heads, as it seems happened to the soldiers at Towton.77 Some, maybe because they did not expect to be in hand-to-hand combat, such as archers and crossbowmen, wore no helmets because they impeded their sight. Johann of Bohemia had to be stabbed through the eye-slit of his helmet and Richard III of England’s helmet chin-straps were probably cut before the fatal blows could be struck, which confirms that medieval helmets, like medieval armor, provided good protection to those soldiers who wore them.78 Simply put, if it was not effective it would not have been worn. Wars were fought continuously throughout the Middle Ages, sometimes without good reason. Most soldiers fighting those wars had little to gain and probably less understanding of why they were being fought. But these were the men who fought the many battles and sieges that defined these wars. It 75

76 77 78

About twelve years ago, members of the Royal Armouries staff carried out a number of experiments using different medieval weapons against a free moving dummy to approximate human movement and dressed it in mail armor, varying the garments under the mail – leather, quilted fabric, thick felt, etc. In all cases, the armor with all the undergarments protected its user almost completely against all weapon attacks: hand-held, cast, and shot. These experiments have not yet been published. The Spike TV show, Deadliest Warrior: Knight vs. Pirate (broadcast in May 2009), on which one of the authors of this article, Kelly DeVries, was a consultant, duplicated these experiments with similar results. Other experiments have proven the weapons to be more successful, but these were carried out against staid targets without various layers of undergarments. See, for example: Peter N. Jones, “The Metallography and Relative Effectiveness of Arrowheads and Armor during the Middle Ages,” Materials Characterization 29 (1992): 111–117. Olivier de la Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont (Paris: Librairie, 1883–88), 2:269–70. Fiorato, Boylston, and Knüsel, Blood Red Roses, 186. Cf. M.R. Geldof, “‘And to describe the shapes of the dead’: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence,” in this volume, 57–80.

56

Woosnam-savage And Devries

mattered little whether those battles were long or short: men were swinging, thrusting, or shooting sharp-edged, blunt-edged or projectile weapons at each other, wounding their opponents while, simultaneously, hoping their own skills and armor might keep them from being wounded themselves. When that happened, they still had the possibility of being saved by skilled military surgeons. Sometimes they survived; sometimes they did not.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

57

Chapter 2

“And describe the shapes of the dead”: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence1 M.R. Geldof

… I would like to describe that here And to describe the shapes of the dead; Some trampled by horses, Others with open breast and head Others that it was pitiful to see, With bare entrails and brains.2

⸪ Few artifacts from Europe’s long Middle Ages evoke the kind of visceral response that comes from viewing the skeletal remains of the victims of violence. As Joanna Sofaer puts it, “Bodies intrigue us because they promise windows into the past that other archaeological finds cannot.”3 These are powerful and evocative objects. Upon seeing the mass graves, excavated between 1905 and 1930 before the city walls of Visby on the Island of Gotland, filled with the dead from the 1361 battle between townsfolk and forces of the Danish King, E.G. Folcker did far more than just describe their shapes. He found them “[i]n poses which in the living would denote hatred or tenderness, pain or hilarity, 1 The central argument of this paper was developed in the author’s conference presentation, “It’s Not Over Until it’s Overkill: Mixed Messages from the Archaeology of Violence,” 47th International Congress of Medieval Studies (University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo MI., May 2012), for a session hosted by De Re Militari: The Society for the Study of Medieval Warfare and Technology. The present paper has benefited from the insight of conference participants and the careful reading of early drafts by Zena Charowsky and Dr. Steven Gunn. 2 Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533–94), La Araucana, quoted in Y.N. Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 74–5. 3 Joanna R. Sofaer, The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_004

58

Geldof

despair or ecstasy,” but they were now “hallowed by the passive majesty of death,” transformed into something else.4 Folcker, an art historian deeply moved by Gunnar Hallström’s 1905 charcoal drawing of one of the open graves, could not restrain his imagination: Straining all their muscles, and expending all the strength of their bodies, these men attacked each other, the blood spurting, limbs being crushed, and the flesh being cut from the bones in ribbons. When one has looked at the fallen men who have been flung into the huge grave, one almost believes the words of the saying that on this day, the third after St. James, in the year 1361, the blood flowed in streams through the gates of Wisby and ran down the hillocks right to the sea.5 The mass graves that so affected Folcker have supplied the stock images, in skeletal form, of medieval warfare for almost a century. Those same bones regularly appear in popular works of medieval history or in television documentaries and online journalism, often without much commentary or detailed analysis. Explanations seem redundant. Sofaer explains public reaction in emotional terms: “We instinctively recognise their bodies as we recognise our own; they are essentially us.”6 The bones are left to speak for themselves. The 1996 excavation of a mass grave associated with the 1461 battle of Towton in Yorkshire, often considered the bloodiest battle of the Wars of the Roses (c. 1450–1485), has introduced new images of medieval violence and wounding through the reconstructed face of one of its victims. The face of the skeleton, catalogued as Towton 16, was reconstructed in sculptor’s clay. The science of forensics and the artist’s skill has made the face of Towton 16 as familiar to students and scholars of medieval warfare as any celebrity of pop culture.7 Viewers are drawn to the face of the middle-aged soldier, not because it is particularly handsome or aesthetically curious, but for the deep scar that runs 4 E.G. Folcker, Hic sepulti, quoted in Bengt Thordeman, Poul Nörlund, Brian R. Price, and Bo. E. Ingelmark, Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361 (Stockholm: Vitterherts Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 1939), 1:52–53. 5 Folcker, Hic sepulti, 1:52–53. 6 Sofaer, Body as Material Culture, 1. 7 Caroline Wilkinson and Richard Neave, “The Reconstruction of a Face Showing a Healed Wound,” Journal of Archaeological Science 30 (2003): 1343–48. Towton 16 was a 40–50 year-old male, who exhibited skeletal traits commonly associated with experienced archers: S.A. Novak, “Case Studies,” in Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton AD 1461, ed. Veronic Fiorato, Anthea Boylston, and Christoper Knüsel (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000), 246–7.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

59

from his chin, along his jawline, almost to his left ear. It is an old wound, perhaps received in battle, when the man was still young. He was in his late forties or early fifties when he died at Towton, felled by an abundance of blows to the head. But Towton 16 is more than just a striking face from history; indeed, he is a physical manifestation of the face of battle. The cultural turn in military history has moved the archaeology of armed violence closer to the core of both scholarly and public interest. It is necessary to evaluate how the archaeology of violence is interpreted, how it is studied for its social and cultural meaning, and where the limits of interpretation give way to speculation. Christopher Knüsel and Anthea Boylston, two of the principal researchers involved in the Towton project, voice their own concern over the broader historical relevance of this material and its potential value for those investigating broader historical questions. They write, “[f]or some, the hard-won archaeological insights are little more than window dressing for the historical texts. … For others, archaeological remains reveal an unprejudiced account of past events, largely free from the panegyrics, apologies and political coloring that influence the chroniclers’ accounts and the records upon which historians base their research.”8 Anthropologists, archaeologists, and other specialists in the social sciences such as Philip Walker, John Carman, and those authors appearing in the collections edited by Ton Otto, Henrik Thrane, and Helle Vandkilde have argued from various perspectives for a greater integration of the archaeology of violence with a wider academic community.9 Incorporating various approaches drawn from the social sciences, anthropology, forensics, and interdisciplinary approaches to the history of weapons, materials, medicine, and modern studies of human physicality, interpersonal violence, and armed conflict, can make the archaeology of violence a compelling addition to the traditional sources of history. For those who study the history of armed violence in the medieval period, particularly skilled violence in warfare, the tournament, and elite, interpersonal violence, the evidence of skeletal weapon 8 Christoper Knüsel and Anthea Boylston, “How has the Towton Project Contributed to our Knowledge of Medieval and Later Warfare?” in Blood Red Roses, ed. Fiorato, Boylston, and Knüsel, 169–88, at 169. 9 Phillip L. Walker, “A Bioarchaeological Perspective on the History of Violence,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 573–96, John Carman, “Giving Archaeology a Moral Voice,” in Material Harm: Archaeological Studies of War and Violence, ed. John Carman (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1997), 220–39; Ton Otto, Henrik Thrane, and Helle Vandkilde, “Warfare and Society: Archaeological and Social Anthropological Perspectives,” in Warfare and Society: Archaeological and Social Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Ton Otto, Henrik Thrane, and Helle Vandkilde (Aarhus: University of Aarhus, 2005), 9–22.

60

Geldof

trauma offers an opportunity to fill in, at least in part, the gaps in the textual sources. But there are hazards for the unwary researcher. Much of the interpretive work with skeletal trauma is based on the pre-historic record in which the bones are the only source anthropologists have for study of human conflict. Using this same methodological process for the later medieval and early-modern period is problematic, but many specialists in fields of archaeology and anthropology are anxious to do so. Phillip Walker has argued that the study of archaeological remains and their interpretation should lead to reconstruction, and, where the archaeological sources record violence from human agency, such reconstructions can be methodologically sound.10 Further, Walker argues that this is the most effective way for specialists in archaeology, anthropology, and human osteology to make their work relevant to other disciplines.11 In contrast, Jennifer Wakely and Pip Patrick have both expressed reservations about the value of reconstruction and the degree to which other specialists are prepared to build interpretations of their evidence into areas of speculation.12 Wakely and Patrick mention that the further interpretations move towards detailed reconstructions of past events, there is a corresponding increase in the number of possible explanations, each of equal value to any other. This problem becomes acute in cases of skeletal trauma that could be the result of human agency or accident.13 Trauma caused by weapons is more safely identified as deliberate and the result of human actions, but even with the elimination of other causes, there is a limit to what forensic sciences can and cannot say about the nature and cause of injuries. This means that there is a threshold between the conclusions safely drawn from the evidence and the subjective interpretation of that evidence. This threshold is often difficult to find in studies of skeletal trauma. The risk is that the skeletal evidence of armed violence can, and often is, over-interpreted in such a way that the results are no more than speculation that re-enforces a common stereotype of medieval violence or simplifies a complex event into something easily understood and dramatized. Too often, the appeal of a compelling scenario to account for skeletal trauma ignores important, but often immeasurable, cultural, social, material, and psychological factors that 10 11 12

13

Walker, “Bioarchaeological Perspective,” 573. Walker, “Bioarchaeological Perspective,” 573. Jennifer Wakely, “Limits to Interpretation of Skeletal Trauma – Two Case Studies From Medieval Abingdon, England,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 6 (1996): 76–83; P. Patrick, “Approaches to Violent Death: a Case Study from Early Medieval Cambridge,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16 (2006): 347–54. Wakely, “Limits to Interpretation of Skeletal Trauma,” 76–7; and, Patrick, “Approaches to Violent Death,” 352.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

61

play out in interpersonal violence. Skeletal trauma is an important source for the study of violence but it cannot answer most of the questions that are put to it. Knowing the limits of interpretation is, arguably, the greatest potential this material has for enlarging the historical understanding of violence. These problems of interpretation appear most clearly in the studies of violence as a performance of skill in arms. Any performance is difficult to study from a chronological distance. Violence has come into its own as a historical discipline, and important studies of violence in different forms have added detail and depth to questions about cruelty, torture, crime, punishment, and the place of violence in the family, the state, and the law.14 However, those who study the use of weapons and the performance of interpersonal violence at its most intimate level have struggled to make progress. The nature of the problem was made explicit in Sydney Anglo’s study of the various accounts of the 1467 combat between Anthony Woodville and the Bastard of Burgundy. This combat was recorded by four eye-witnesses but, as Anglo laments, “it is impossible to reconstruct the fighting. Indeed, some of the discrepancies between the accounts are so extraordinary that they defy understanding.”15 Steven Muhlberger, reflecting on Anglo’s observations, writes that “if the people who were there could not agree about what had happened in a closely scrutinized combat, about what blows were struck, about what weapons or armor were effective, about what was fair conduct and what was cheating, what can we do?”16 Skeletal trauma offers a way in which armed violence could be reconstructed in a way that it cannot be in the textual sources. While the narrative sources will remain a false friend to those who study the skilled performance 14

15

16

Important studies include Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Conjunctions of Religion & Power in the Medieval Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Larissa Tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 1; Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Mental-Historical Investigations of Basic Human Problems and Social Responses, ed. Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012); Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of Florida, 2002). Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2000), 18–19. See also: S. Anglo, “Anglo-Burgundian Feats of Arms: Smithfield, June 1467,” Guildhall Miscellany 2 (1965): 271–83. Steven Muhlberger, “Chivalry and Military Biography in the Later Middle Ages: The Chonicle of the Good Duke Louis of Bourbon,” The Journal of Medieval Military History 10 (2012): 114–31, at 115.

62

Geldof

of violence, the overlooked literature of martial instruction – the fight-texts and combat manuals of the later Middle-Ages – have recently enjoyed new scholarly interest.17 These texts have their own limitations; they tend to focus on certain weapons and circumstances, their contents are not easily applied to questions about skeletal trauma, and they have only recently come to the attention of specialists who study the archaeology of violence.18 Even with these new sources and the insight they provide into the vast complexity and variety of martial skill as a performance, attempts to reconstruct combat, based on the wounds left behind in the archaeological record, frequently go beyond what the evidence can support into speculation. The various textual accounts of the Smithfield tournament may be irreconcilable, but they cannot all be correct and, in a similar way, it is possible to construct several equally plausible scenarios to account for skeletal trauma, any one of which could be right, but ultimately, no more plausible than any other. Bones, like texts, must be read with care and readers may approach skeletal trauma with questions that simply cannot be answered with the evidence at hand. As Anglo and Muhlberger acknowledge, the historical accounts of violence and the use of arms become more and more confused and unreliable as they approach the level of the individual combat. The inverse applies to skeletal trauma: as questions move outward from the point of contact between weapon and bone, the less there is upon which to base conclusions. It may be possible to narrow the 17

18

Sydney Anglo, “How to Win at Tournaments: The Technique of Chivalric Combat,” The Antiquaries Journal 68 (1988): 248–64; Jeffrey Singman [Forgeng], “The Medieval Swordsman: A 13th Century German Fencing Manuscript,” Royal Armouries Yearbook 2 (1998): 129–36; The Medieval Art of Swordsmanship: A Facsimile & Translation of Europe’s Oldest Personal Combat Treatise, Royal Armouries MS. I.33, ed. J.L. Forgeng (Leeds: Chivalry Bookshelf and The Royal Armouries, 2003); and Franck Cinato and Andre Surprenant, Le Livre de L’Art du Combat: Liber de Arte Dimicatoria (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2009). In this volume see: Rachel E. Kellett, “‘…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zů der brust’: The Placement and Consequences of Sword-blows in Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual,” in this volume, 128–49. John Waller, “Combat Techniques,” in Blood Red Roses, 148–54. See also the studies of various weapons and their performance in B. Molloy, “Martial Arts and Materiality: A Combat Archaeology Perspective on Aegean Swords of the Fifteenth and Fourteenth Centuries BC,” World Archaeology 40 (2008): 116–134; Antony Karasulas, “Zaimokuza Reconsidered: The Forensic Evidence, and Classical Japanese Swordsmanship,” World Archeology 36 (2004): 507–518; Derek Allsop and Glenn Foard, “Case Shot: An Interim Report on Experimental Firing and Analysis to Interpret Early Modern Battlefield Assemblages,” Journal of Combat Archaeology 3 (2007): 111–146; and Paul Bourke and David Whetham, “A Report of the Findings of the Defence Academy Warbow Trials Part 1 Summer 2005,” Arms & Armour 4 (2007): 53–75.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

63

space between the textual and the material evidence, between the texts and the bones, but this may not meet the expectations of those keen to reconstruct medieval violence. This leads to over-interpretation of the skeletal evidence resulting in conclusions that may appear intuitively sound but are little more than speculation by the interpreter. One significant problem with the skeletal evidence is that the trauma itself appears in the archaeological record largely devoid of historical contexts. However, many studies discussed here assume or assert that it is possible to identify the historical contexts of violence from the wounds themselves. This is based on the premise that certain historical circumstances will produce certain wounds and that it is possible to distinguish those different wounds with some certainty. “Physical evidence of wounds, fatal or healed,” Knüsel writes, “is the sine qua non of warfare and its results.”19 And these wounds are peculiar to certain contexts. According to T.L. Sutherland, “[h]uman remains can provide evidence for the ferocity of battles, the types of weapons used, and the way prisoners were treated, supply information on either disrespect by mutilation, or by careful treatment, dignity and respect.”20 It is true that current forensic sciences can identify the cause of wounds to a high degree of detail, particularly in the case of sharp-force trauma caused by swords, axes, and other bladed weapons.21 However, it is less clear that wounds themselves hold evidence for much of what Sutherland describes. Medieval warfare was clearly brutal, but Sutherland assumes that it is possible to quantitatively measure brutality and that such a difference would be reflected in the distribution, number, and type of wounds found in a given collection. This also assumes that an orderly or disorderly battle would produce orderly or disorderly wounds. It assumes that certain kinds of wounds will identify prisoners or unarmed victims and that it is possible to differentiate opportunistic wounding from disrespect, deliberate action from accident. Each of these assumptions about the nature of warfare and the meaning of wounds appear in the following examples. They also show just how little evidence there is, from the archaeological record, to support their conclusions. What follows are examples 19

20 21

C.J. Knüsel, “The Physical Evidence of Warfare – Subtle Stigmata?” in Warfare, Violence and Slavery in Prehistory, ed. M. Parker Pearson and I.J.N. Thorpe (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), 49–65, at 49. T.L. Sutherland and Malin Holst, Battlefield Archaeology – A Guide to the Archaeology of Conflict (Bradford: British Archaeological Jobs Resource, 2005), 28. Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries give a detailed account of which weapons create which wounds, including a case study, based on first-hand examination, of the skeletal remains of Richard III. See: “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” in this volume, 27–56.

64

Geldof

of over-interpretation of skeletal evidence, and they are indicative of the sort of problems that commonly appear when the search for answers about the cause and meaning of skeletal trauma forgets the limits of the evidence. David Mason’s work on skeletons associated with the seventh-century battle of Chester, excavated in 2004, is an example of over-interpretation based on limited evidence because of a desire to give the evidence historical meaning. During an investigation of Roman and later features at Heronbridge, Chestershire, a mass grave was partially excavated, revealing an orderly, if cramped, row of skeletons with clearly recognizable signs of sharp-force trauma. Two skeletons were removed for detailed analysis by Malin Holst who identified multiple wounds on their bones, indicative of a violent death from cutting weapons. Given the geographical location of the grave, the likely date of the skeletons, and the deaths from weapon trauma, Mason felt it was likely that these were victims of the battle fought in 616 CE, between the forces of Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria, and Britons from the kingdoms of Wales and surrounding areas.22 The skeletons of these two men, one young adult in his twenties, the other in his early forties, showed that they died from wounds likely caused by sharp, straight-bladed weapons, probably swords. There were other non-fatal wounds marking the skeletons, and Mason was particularly interested in a set of shallow cut marks near the mastoid process; a part of the skull just below the ear canal, on one of the skeletons. Mason interpreted these marks as evidence of the deliberate mutilation of this individual by someone who collected the severed ear as a trophy. Forensically, there is little evidence to support this interpretation as the wound itself is little more than a single slice of bone removed by a sharp cutting edge in one movement, leaving a smooth impression of the blade edge from its pass through the bone.23 Mason’s contention that this is evidence of deliberate post-mortem mutilation is based, not on the evidence from the skeletons, but from the pre-existing opinion that Anglo-Saxon warfare was particularly brutal and a recognized form of brutality is the mutilation of dead enemies.24 Mason has chosen the interpretation that 22 23

24

T.M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 344–5. See the analysis of skeleton 2, which exhibited this wound, in Malin Holst, Osteological Analysis: Heronbridge Chester Cheshire, no. 1404 (York: York Osteoarchaeology, 2004), 9. Less ambiguous examples of deliberate post-mortem mutilation with bladed weapons or tools would normally exhibit marks indicative of repetitive, cutting, or scraping actions. For the basic forensic foundations of skeletal analysis and weapon trauma, see: The Archaeology of Disease, ed. Charlotte A. Roberts and Keith Manchester, 3rd ed. (Stroud: The History Press, 2010), 84–131. D. Mason, “AD 616: The Battle of Chester,” Current Archaeology 202 (2006): 517–24.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

65

holds the most potential for his questions, or his pre-conceptions, about warfare. But Holst, aware of the ambiguity of the wound itself, notes that there is nothing intrinsic in the wound to identify its causes beyond the use of a sharp edged blade. A sword, swung at a head, that misses, could leave the same wound as a sword aimed deliberately at the ear. If the blow was deliberately aimed at that part of the head, the lack of any other contexts makes it no less uncertain that the blow was intended to mutilate or simply wound. Perhaps at that moment, in that context, that ear was the only ready target for the sword. What Mason has done with the skeletons from Heronbridge is, as Soafer recognizes, a common problem in osteoarchaeology: “The skeletal body is employed as a means of underpinning interpretations rather than as a source for generating them.”25 Mason is still right about the nature of Anglo-Saxon warfare as a place where there was little mercy for the defeated, but he is wrong to point to the Heronbridge skeletons as supporting evidence. What Mason has not done is acknowledge where forensic interpretation ended and where his speculations began. In this case, Mason’s speculation is understandable, even forgivable, but it is still a distortion of the evidence. Researchers must be clearer about the limits of the evidence and the basis for their interpretations. The risk of over-interpretation is that leaps in reasoning are not always clear to audiences. This gives the false impression that reconstructions of violence are closely based on the forensic analysis of remains when, in reality, the evidence supports only a small part of the resulting interpretation. Each attempt at reconstructing causal events contains a host of un-stated assumptions and speculation that serve to bridge the safe, but limited, conclusions supported by the sciences and the claims to its historical meaning. This is a persistent and frustrating feature of studies that try and reconstruct historical violence, blowby-blow, from skeletal trauma. The early investigators of the Visby mass graves focused on quantitative analysis of wounds, but there was an attempt to use those wounds to reconstruct, in a general way, some of the techniques and tactics of armed combat. However, Bo Ingelmark’s 1939 essay on the wounds and their causes was based on pre-existing conceptions of medieval weapon skills that were, by current standards, cartoonish in its simplicity.26 Ingelmark enlisted Nils Hellstrom, an Olympic fencer and major in the Swedish armed forces, to make some sense of

25 26

Sofear, Body as Material Culture, 2. Bo E. Ingelmark, “The Skeletons,” in Bengt Thordeman, Poul Nörlund, Brian R. Price, and Bo. E. Ingelmark, Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361 (Stockholm: Vitterherts Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 1939), 1:149–209.

66

Geldof

the statistical distribution of the various wounds.27 Hellstrom, more familiar with the sportive techniques of post-medieval fencing and his own contemporary training in military sabre, could see little skill or technique behind the wounds and he described a system of combat based on three blows with little variation, between two opponents in face-to-face orientation. Wounds that were not easily accounted for in this scenario were classed as executions or excessive violence.28 Hellstrom had even less to say about wounds caused by weapons other than swords, having little familiarity with medieval techniques for hafted weapons. Ingelmark was also fixated on the predominance of the flail and morning-star in this battle, attributing the majority of blunt-force trauma and penetrating injuries, which did not match the characteristics of projectiles, to these weapons. That such weapons were far from common in this period and region or that other hafted weapons, particularly halberds and lances, typical of the times, could account for the same injuries, did not concern him. It was the novelty of the wounds, and their possible causes, that seemed to guide interpretations. Of course, it is easy to criticize Ingelmark and Hellstrom given the current knowledge of medieval combat and the access researchers have to manuscripts and artifacts that were unknown or little known at the time. Late Victorian fencing enthusiasts and antiquarians produced a useful body of research that could have added some nuance to Ingelmark and Hellstrom’s work, but it is unclear if they consulted any of that material.29 More damaging 27

28

29

Ingelmark, “The Skeletons,” 1:165–8. Hellstrom won the bronze medal at the 1924 Paris games. Nick Evangelista, The Encyclopedia of the Sword (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 430. A similar description of medieval combat, more detailed than Hellstrom but no less simplistic, argued independently of the Visby material and based instead on the visual representation of combatants in medieval illustrations, can be found in Harald Kleinschmidt, “The Military and Dancing: Changing Norms and Behaviour, 15th to 18th Century,” Ethnologia Europaea 25 (1995): 157–76. The preliminary work on the skeletons from Visby was published in E. Clason, “Om i Korsbetningsraven vid Visby Funna Skelett,” Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademiens Handlingar 3 (1925): 255–297; while Clason appears to have worked from historical chronicles and accounts of combat as a basis for his interpretations, these do not appear in Ingelmark’s work. Studies which were current or still in circulation at the time of the Visby excavations include: Egerton Castle, Schools and Masters of Fence, from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century; with a Sketch of the Development of the Art of Fencing with the Rapier and the Small Sword, and a Bibliography of the Fencing Art During that Period (London: G. Bell and sons, 1885): Alfred Hutton, Old Sword-Play: The Systems of Fence in Vogue During the XVIth, XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (London: Grevel, 1892); and Alfred Hutton, The Sword and the Centuries or Old Sword Play and Old Sword Ways (London:

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

67

for later readers of the Visby research was Ingelmark’s handling of violence as a quantitative quality of warfare. The “almost incomprehensible” wounds that he found in these mass graves could not be understood in terms of skill or technique. These wounds were the result of a “berserker rage which overcame the warriors in the heat of battle.”30 Here, Ingelmark re-enforces the image of medieval warfare as formalized murder, devoid of skill or measured action. Few modern researchers are likely to take Ingelmark’s interpretations about technique without a grain of salt; however, his work remains influential and is regularly cited in the studies discussed below. Ingelmark was content to speak of combat through generalizations based on the statistical distribution of wounds, but other researchers have tried to go further and reconstruct individual acts of violence; nevertheless, the problem remains that now, as in Ingelmark’s time, the conclusions are often the ones that researchers have picked from a host of available choices, each as likely as the others. If there is a spectrum of interpretation, from the most subjective and speculative scenarios that account for wounds to the least committal and most cautious interpretations, Calvin Wells’ 1963 study of a late medieval male skeleton from Ipswich stands at the furthest reaches of over-interpretation.31 Wells analyzes the skeleton of a male in his early thirties with six injuries from sharp-force trauma. A long cutting wound penetrating the skull was certainly fatal. The other injuries, distributed among the chest, right arm, shoulder, pelvis, and right leg lacked signs of healing, suggesting that these all occurred at, or close to, the time of death. Wells also identified a healed fracture in the legs and a bony formation near the knees usually associated with riding, concluding that the man was an experienced horseman.32 Wells was confident that “he could deduce the probable sequence of events leading to the man’s death,” and he proceeded to construct a complex scenario to account for each of the

30 31

32

Grant Richards, 1901). Less concerned with technique and more with the history of martial instruction and its pedagogical and artistic elements are: Karl Wassmannsdorff, Sechs Fechtschulen der Marxbrüder und Federfechter aus den Jahren 1573 bis 1614 (Heidelberg: Karl Groos, 1870), and the facsimiles of Hans Talhoffer’s fight-texts: H. Talhoffer, Talhoffers Fechtbuch aus dem Jahre 1467, ed. Gustav Hergsell (Prague: Ottomar Beyer, 1887). Ingelmark, “The Skeletons,” 1:164–5. C. Wells, “The Human Skeleton from Cox Lane, Ipswich,” Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 29 (1963): 329–33. The following analysis is based on the synopsis and discussion of Wells’ theory in A. Kieth Knowles, “Acute Traumatic Lesions,” in Disease in Ancient Man: An International Symposium, ed. G.D. Hart (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1983), 61–83. Knowles, “Acute Traumatic Lesions,” 75–6.

68

Geldof

wounds and their causes.33 This began with the victim mounted on horseback where he is first wounded in the thigh and pelvis by two different assailants. A third attacker pulled the victim from the saddle and the victim was struck twice in the wrist and shoulder with a sword while kneeling on the ground. Doubled over, he was struck again, with the same sword, in the head. A final thrust with a dagger to the upper back finishes the deed, leaving a cut mark on a rib.34 The physical evidence of trauma does not contradict this scenario but neither does it support it.35 Wells’ sequence of wounds is arbitrary because there is no indication in the skeletal trauma of which wound occurred first or how much time passed between blows. The sequence in which wounds occur can be identified where cut marks or fractures intersect the same bones. Fractures caused by the first wound will interrupt fractures caused by succeeding wounds, but there are no intersecting wounds in the Ipswich skeleton. Wells could have ordered the wounds in several different sequences without contradicting the evidence. The penetrating wound to the back, that Wells attributes to a dagger but which could have been any weapon with a sharp point, could have come first, or last, or at any point in-between. The blows to the arm could precede the wounds to the leg and pelvis or all four injuries could be re-ordered in different ways. There is no way to order the wounds based on their forensic characteristics. Only the mortal blow to the head has a strong case for placement near the end of the event. Wells’ decision to place the victim on horseback, partly based on the physiological evidence of riding, was also based on the angle at which a sharp edge cut into his thigh. The blade struck bone angled upward, relative to the victim’s head. Objections that Well’s reconstruction is not supported by much of the forensic evidence appears before he even begins. Wells asserts that all the wounds occurred during a single violent encounter and while that is a safe assumption when dealing with a 33 34 35

Knowles, “Acute Traumatic Lesions,” 75. Knowles, “Acute Traumatic Lesions,” 76–82. The injuries, as far as they can be studied from the illustrations in Knowles, (77–82), are consistent with this interpretation for sharp-force trauma, based on the criteria for their identification in Hugh E. Berryman and Susan Jones Huan, “Applying Forensic Techniques to Interpret Cranial Fracture Patterns in an Archaeological Specimen,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 6 (1996): 2–9; Anthea Boylston, “Evidence for Weapon-Related Trauma in British Archaeological Samples,” in Human Osteology in Archaeology and Forensic Science, ed. Margaret Cox and Simon Mays (London: Greenwich Medical Media, 2000), 357–80; and Donald J. Ortner, “Trauma,” in Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal Remains, ed. Donald J. Ortner (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2003), 118–77. These are the general principles of identification and interpretation that will guide the criticism of later examples.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

69

mass grave with many victims of violence, a skeleton found in an urban cemetery lacks even this basic historical context. It can take several days before re-modeling of living bone advances to the point that it will be safely preserved in the archaeological context. Wounds defined as peri-mortem – received at or near the time of death – can include wounds received several days before death as well as wounds to the body after death. The only common trait is the lack of healing. Wells’ Ipswich horseman could have received any number of his wounds hours or days before the final and fatal head wound, a prospect that only adds to the possible circumstances where violence occurred. Human bone will continue to act under violence as if it were still living bone for weeks or months after death which makes the identification of post-mortem injuries that are not demonstrably the result of mutilation, dismemberment, or other human and natural causes, all the more challenging in the absence of other sources for context.36 Finally, Wells does not acknowledge the possibility that the Ipswich horseman had other wounds that did not leave marks on bone, and for which his scenario cannot account. Wells makes more elementary assumptions without support from the skeletal evidence. There is no way to know if the Ipswich horseman was armed and actively defended himself in pitched combat. Wells could have chosen any number of other possible scenarios for the wounds because each choice was as unsupported as the last. Wells’ error is not in his specific scenario, but in his belief that it was possible to create such a scenario in the first place. The evidence itself does not support such an exercise. Wells is an extreme case of an over indulgent imagination; more subtle but no less flawed interpretations appear in many other studies of the archaeology of violence. S.J. Wenham’s work with skeletons from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Eccles, Kent, shows a far more conservative approach to the evidence than Wells, and Wenham was careful to keep his attention focused on specific aspects of weapon trauma as an indication of martial practice. Like Wells, however, he stretched the evidence further than it he should have.37 Wenham wanted to understand some of the conditions that produced the weapon trauma in the Eccles skeletons and, in particular, he hoped to identify the types 36

37

This behavior of bone and its associated problems for interpretation are discussed in: Susana Dale Spencer, “Detecting Violence in the Archaeological Record: Clarifying the Timing of Trauma and Manner of Death in cases of Cranial Blunt Force Trauma among Pre-Columbian Amerindians of West-Central Illinois,” International Journal of Paleopathology 2 (2012): 112–22. S.J. Wenham, “Anatomical Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Weapon Injuries,” in Weapons and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Sonia Chadwick Hawkes (Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1989), 123–139.

70

Geldof

of weapons involved. Wenham thought different edged weapons, namely axes and swords, made wounds in characteristic ways and if these characteristics could be identified, he could better understand the contexts of violent trauma. To test the theory, Wenham reproduced sharp-force trauma with replica swords and axes on actual human cadavers. The results did suggest that swords and axes tend to produce certain kinds of wounds but that the differences were partly due to the way the weapons were used, rather than from differences in the weapons themselves. Axes tend to produce more fracturing in the test skulls than the swords, but this depends on the way the weapons were used, not on the physical characteristics of the weapons. Sharp edges that connected with the skulls in a chopping motion, where the force of the blow traveled in a linear way, perpendicular to the target, create wounds with characteristic fractures. Edges that connect through a slicing or cutting motion produce less fracturing. Wenham concluded that it was possible to differentiate sword wounds from axe wounds but that it was an unreliable process.38 The significance of swords and axes as tools of armed violence was, for Wenham, the difference between an ambiguous wound caused by a sharp weapon and a wound that could be attributed to warfare, crime, or petty violence.39 Based on the literary and archaeological sources, he felt that wounds from swords indicated elite violence while wounds from axes did not. Wenham also believed that the placement of the wounds on the body was indicative of specific martial techniques contingent on certain historical contexts. Wenham writes that the techniques peculiar to the context of armed combat “influences the areas of the body which are injured.”40 This is a perfectly sensible statement that Wenham draws from the work of Ingelmark and the Visby finds, but Wenham goes on to argue that “by considering the positions of the Eccles injuries” it is possible “to gain insight into the kind of conflict which resulted in the death of these individuals.”41 In other words, Wenham argues that certain wounds appear only in certain contexts, and that acts of criminal violence can be differentiated from pitched battle by the wound evidence alone. 38

39 40 41

Wenham, “Anatomical Interpretations,” 131–37. More recent studies have tried to reduce this ambiguity to some degree. See: Jason E. Lewis, “Identifying Sword Marks on Bone: Criteria for Distinguishing Between Cut Marks Made by Different Classes of Bladed Weapons,” Journal of Archaeological Science 35 (2008): 2001–8; and B.K. Tucker, et al., “Microscopic Characteristics of Hacking Trauma,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 46 (2001): 234–40. Wenham, “Anatomical Interpretations,” 124–6. Wenham, “Anatomical Interpretations,” 137. Wenham, “Anatomical Interpretations,” 137.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

71

While this is a reasonable approach, Wenham applies this method with little historical or forensic support. In many ways, Wenham’s conception of armed combat is no more complex than Ingelmark’s and Hellstrom’s. Face-toface combat between swordsmen will only cause certain kinds of wounds. Right-handed swordsmen will strike the left side of an opponent’s head, rarely the right side, with downward blows travelling at an inward angle towards the body of the target. Any wound that falls outside that narrow angle of attack is the result of some other orientation of attacker and victim. Wenham, thus, interprets the wounds found on Eccles skeleton V, a young man “aged 25–35 years” who had a single sharp-force injury to the skull “13cm long, to the left frontal and parietal bones” which made contact “at 45° to the horizontal,” as a typical example of a face-to-face confrontation with a right-handed attacker. Eccles VI, another young man, had a similar wound, “a single linear cranial injury, 12cm long, to the frontal and parietal bones just left of the midline. The plane of the injury is almost vertical.”42 This wound was also identified by Wenham as the product of a right-handed assailant facing the victim, but, because of the placement of the wound (slightly closer to the center of the skull, and further towards the back than the wound on Eccles V), he suggests that the attacker was mounted on horseback.43 Eccles III suffered a deep cut wound to the back of the head, towards his right side. It struck the skull with a downward aspect, towards the shoulders. This wound falls outside the narrow parameters of face-to-face combat and, thus, Wenham believes that this wound was the result of “disorganized fighting.”44 While this very narrow reading of the skeletal evidence does fit with some studies of Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian accounts of combat, notably the work of Hilda Ellis Davidson, it is far from definitive.45 The weakness in this approach is easy to demonstrate because there are so many plausible scenarios which can cause the same wounds, none of them any more or less supportable from the skeletal evidence. Any one of the three Eccles victims described here could have received their wounds in face-to-face combat with their attackers. Nothing about the wounds restricts interpretation to that degree. The same blow that struck Eccles V (a right-handed blow to the head) would have landed in the same place as the wound on Eccles VI if his head was lowered a few degrees towards the blow. Likewise, a rotation of the head and shoulders could allow that same blow to 42 43 44 45

Wenham, “Anatomical Interpretations,” 127. Wenham, “Anatomical Interpretations,” 127. Wenham, “Anatomical Interpretations,” 138. Hilda Ellis Davidson, The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England: Its Archaeology and Literature, rev. ed. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1994).

72

Geldof

strike the back of the head the same way a sword struck Eccles III. Wenham does not account for these subtle but numerous possible variations in the orientation of victim and attacker that would still count as face-to-face combat. Wound placement is far less diagnostic for the orientation of attacker and victim than Wenham believes since the variety of possible angles of attack relative to the target are vast, even assuming that these wounds were produced during a conflict between individuals. Multiply the number of participants in the violent performance and the possible orientations increase dramatically. The result is that the placement of wounds like these says little (or nothing at all) about the circumstances that created them. If Wells made the mistake of producing an overly specific scenario to explain his finds, and Wenham over-generalized from his findings, B. Marfat and his co-authors’ represent something close to a safer compromise between the two. They studied the skeletal remains of a fourteenth-century male killed by sharpforce trauma to the skull and buried after his heart was removed, likely by his companions or relatives, for burial elsewhere.46 The skeleton has several wounds from sharp weapons, and the placement of some wounds make it possible to identify the order in which they occurred. A blow from a sword or other long cutting weapon struck the victim’s left elbow, and the way that the weapon transited the elbow joint shows that the arm was bent, or flexed, at the time it was struck. Another sword-blow landed on the left shoulder in such a way that it would have severed muscles that elevated and flexed the arm. This means that the blow to the elbow had to have landed first, before the blow to the shoulder. No other sequence to those injuries is possible. Unfortunately, the rest of the wounds on the skeleton lack any indication of their order, and while Marfat, et al. suggest one scenario to account for the wounds, they are content to write in generalities instead of specifics. It may not satisfy the curiosity of some readers, but it is good practice. Better to acknowledge the limitations of the evidence, and the variables that are at work in the performance of violence, than to construct attractive but unsupported dramatizations of that violence. Studies of the literature of combat, particularly the manuscript fight-texts of the fifteenth century, have given researchers a much more complex and nuanced image of armed violence, one that is more plausible than that given by Ingelmark and Davidson. The manuscripts commissioned for the elite 46

B. Mafart, J.P. Pelletier, and M. Fixot, “Post-Mortem Ablation of the Heart: A Medieval Funerary Practice. A Case Observed at the Cemetery of Ganagobie Priory in the French Department of Alpes de Haute Provence,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 14 (2004): 67–73.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

73

students of Johannes Talhoffer, Fiore dei Liberi, Phillipo Vadi, and Paulas Kal, while limited by artistic and textual constraints, depict dynamic, complex, and varied techniques.47 It is tempting, therefore, to dismiss Wells, Wenham, and other less convincing case studies, as ill-informed attempts at reconstruction and try again with better sources. But even with these manuscripts and the scholarship of martial instruction, there is a perilous gulf between the forensics and blow-by-blow reconstructions of combat. It is tempting to try it when the opportunity appears, but it is little more than an exercise in historical fiction. If there is little chance of reconstructing violence at the level of the individual victim, there is still the possibility that skeletal trauma can provide more general insight into violence as a performance by comparing finds between periods or across historical contexts and looking at other variables that influence the type of wounds weapons produce. The 1996 excavations of the Towton mass grave gave modern scholars an opportunity to study the physicality of warfare using techniques and methodologies that were a substantial improvement over those available to the researchers at Visby. Special attention was given to the history of armed combat and its interpretation from both textual and archaeological sources. John Waller’s analysis of the Towton skeletal trauma was a vast improvement over the studies of Ingelmark and Hellstrom.48 While forensic techniques have become more sophisticated and more accurate in identifying the mechanical causes of injuries, the trajectories of weapons at points of contact, Waller cautions that “it is essential to include in such analyses an understanding of the dynamics and techniques of battle, without which there is no context for the injuries received.”49 Waller resists the temptation to push his interpretations further, and chooses not to try and untangle the complex collections of injuries at Towton into reconstructed events. Instead, Waller argues that close combat naturally confuses individual 47

48 49

For a comprehensive survey of the historical literature, see: Anglo, Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe. On the issue of illustration and the problem of representing techniques, see: Sydney Anglo, “Sword and Pen: Fencing Masters and Artists,” in The Noble Art of the Sword, ed. Tobias Capwell (London: The Wallace Collection, 2012), 150–62. For an analysis of one of the more complex, but still comprehensible, systems of instruction, see: Robert N. Charrette, Fiore dei Liberi’s Armizare: The Chivalric Martial Arts System of Il Fior Di Battaglia (Wheaton, IL: Freelance Academy Press, 2011). Charrett’s work is unparalleled in its attention to the historical problems in such an exercise and in its coherence in explaining, and supporting, this particular interpretation. See also: Ken Mondschein, The Knightly Art of Battle (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011). Waller, “Combat Techniques,” 149–54. Waller, “Combat Techniques,” 154.

74

Geldof

actions of combatants in such a way that wounds can and will appear on targets in rapid succession and in an order that makes reconstructing individual actions difficult or impossible.50 In this respect, combat creates inherently disorganized wounds independent of any tactical discipline or disorder. Waller was also cautious against drawing conclusions about techniques or tactics based on the trauma, only hazarding hypothetical scenarios that could account for the trauma that the archaeologists found. Waller concludes his analysis with the admirable understatement that “understanding the way men fought and died in the past is a complex exercise.”51 Waller represents the other end of the interpretive spectrum that began with Wells. His work may appear overly conservative but it is ultimately the most constructive combination of interdisciplinary methods and the archaeology of violence. While this suggests that there is little chance of reconstructing violence at the individual level of attacker and victim or the soldier in the shield-wall, other approaches to the archaeology of violence risk over interpretation that distorts the historical reality of armed violence. This conservative approach conflicts with interpretations of skeletal trauma influenced by anthropological methods because those interpretations draw on generalizations about the social and cultural meaning of wounds rather than historically contingent variables, such as wounds to the face. Waller’s focus on the chaos inherent in even the most disciplined military violence makes an important point about the limits of interpretation. The surplus of wounds to the skull found on many of the Towton skeletons, a feature that Waller would have considered ambiguous, was interpreted by Knüsel and Boylston as evidence that these men were likely victims of deliberate execution.52 This interpretation is based on the premise that deliberate wounding of the face is necessarily emotionally loaded, not practical or utilitarian. Deliberate wounding of the face does appear in other contexts in this way, but it seems inappropriate to apply this same reading to wounds produced in the context of warfare.53 This approach to wounding, as having emotional or cultural signifi50 51 52

53

Waller, “Combat Techniques,” 149–50. Waller, “Combat Techniques,” 154. Knüsel and Boylston, “How has the Towton Project Contributed to our Knowledge of Medieval Warfare?,” 182–83, at 186. Knüsel repeats this argument, with reference to prehistoric sources, in “The Physical Evidence of Warfare.” For studies of this behaviour see: Carmen Lange, “Violence and the Face,” in Material Harm, ed. Carman, 169–73; Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 2004). In this volume see: Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval European Sources to 1000 CE,” 81–101; Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

75

cance based on location on the body, is further complicated by the fact that militarized violence is much harder to differentiate from non-militarized, or criminal violence, because there is little difference between the weapons of war or crime; comparison across various finds suggests that these weapons were used in much the same way, regardless of context. An example of this continuity comes from the late thirteenth-century cemetery at Jewbury, York. The skeleton of a young woman killed by sharp-force trauma to the head and torso, and very likely the victim of non-combat violence, exhibits a distribution of wounds that would not look out of place in the mass graves at Towton or Visby. Whatever the motives and feelings of her killer, the weapon that caused her wounds was used without obvious consideration for her social, cultural, political, or interpersonal contexts.54 Examples like this one show that there is a significant consistency in the distribution of wounds, regardless of the known or suspected historical, social, or cultural context of the wounding. Wounds from sharp-edged weapons are found in a consistent pattern: a statistically high proportion appearing on the front and left-hand side of the head, and distributed evenly to the rest of the skull, with a lesser frequency of wounds to the limbs and torso. The only exception to this distribution, and one that is demonstrably an act of organized violence against unarmed victims, is the mass grave found within the grounds of St. John’s College, Oxford in 2007. This grave contained men, women, and children dating from the late tenth century CE.55 Here, the wounds were distributed differently than in other mass graves. There were very few wounds to the cranium and those were clustered at the

54

55

Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” 215–30; William Sayers, “The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature,” 473–95; and Charlene M. Eska, “The Mutilation of Derbforgaill,” 252–64. G. Stroud and R.L. Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate (York: York Archaeological Trust, 1993); J.M. Lilley, et al., The Jewish Burial Ground at Jewbury (York: York Archaeological Trust, 1994). S. Wallis, Former Queen Elizabeth House (Kendrew Quadrangle) St John’s College, Blackhall Road, Oxford (Reading: Thames Valley Archaeology Services, 2010). The victims were tentatively identified with the “St. Brides massacre” of 1002, but the historical reality of this event is contested. See: Jay Paul Gates, “Imagining Justice in the Anglo-Saxon Past: Eadric Streona, Kingship, and the Search for Community,” Haskins Society Journal 25 (2013): 125–46. A similar deposit of pre-Norman executions is that at Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth, Dorset. See: Anthea Boylston, “Death on the Dorset Ridgeway: A Viking Murder Mystery,” ed. by Laura L. Gathagan and William North, Haskins Society Journal 25 (2015, forthcoming) and the detailed excavation report: Louise Loe, Angela Boyle, Helen Webb, and David Score, “Given to the Ground”: A Viking Age Mass Grave on Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth (Oxford: Oxford Archaeology, 2014). Cf. Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare,” 37–8.

76

Geldof

front of victim’s skulls. Most wounds were penetrating, sharp-force injuries from projectiles and spear points. The implication is that outside this sort of deliberate violence against unarmed and unprotected victims, contexts do not dictate where and in what number wounds are going to appear on victims. The placement of wounds alone does not signify intent, unless there is some other source of evidence for such an interpretation. Wounds to the face are often interpreted through similar anthropological comparisons, and, again, examples from Towton show how this is ultimately counter-productive for historians of medieval violence. The skeleton recorded as Towton 12 has several sharp-force wounds to the forehead and face, one of which would have severed his nose, while another cut away several front teeth.56 This could be read as deliberate and malicious targeting of the face, much in the same way that Mason read the wounds from the Chester grave as trophy taking. Deliberate injury to the face was part of the medieval language of violence and punishment, but most of the documentation of such behavior describes victims who survive to exhibit the meaningful wounds.57 Waller’s survey of the evidence provides a less culturally loaded but much more likely reason for the high number of these sorts of wounds as a logical result of combat. The wounds to the face of Towton 12 probably were deliberate, not for emotional reasons, but because his face was the only available target for his attacker. These various anthropological approaches combine with the archaeology of violence elsewhere in complex and, ultimately, unhistorical ways. The number and severity of wounds are often treated as quantitative measures of violent motivation. The forensics of modern crime provide much of the context for these interpretations because it is possible to compare physical trauma with the social, material, and emotional contexts of their creation. Studies of contemporary violence are too readily applied to medieval contexts, and the result is just as historically unstable as the reconstructions and interpretations of individual combats. Mario Šlaus, et al., in their study of a fifteenth-century cemetery, once part of the Ottoman Empire, used modern studies of criminal violence as a means of interpreting skeletal trauma. Among the twenty-two victims of weapon trauma at Čepin, Croatia, researchers found two female victims whose wounds exhibited an “element of gratuitous violence.”58 There is 56 57 58

Novak, “Case Studies,” 244–5. A similar example is Towton 34/38 (259). Lange, “Violence and the Face,” in Material Harm, ed. Carman, 169–73; Groebner, Defaced, 67–85. Mario Šlaus et al., “The Harsh Life on the 15th Century Croatia-Ottoman Empire Military Border: Analyzing and Indentifying the Reasons for the Massacre in Čepin,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 141 (2010): 358–72, at 368.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

77

ample historical evidence that non-combatants were regularly victims of organized armed violence in this area, but what Šlaus and his co-authors saw in these two skeletons was an emotionally charged violence, proof of the ruthlessness and brutality of the attackers. Support for this interpretation was taken from modern studies of criminal behavior, specifically “an analysis of homicides committed by 18 psychopathic and 20 nonpsychopathic modern Canadian offenders,” mostly convicted sex offenders.59 The analogy between modern examples of sexual violence and late medieval border warfare takes a historically contingent set of events and turns them into a profile of fifteenthcentury sadists in military service. This is not to claim that there were no emotional elements in the violence at Čepin, but the problem is that this interpretation ignores other possible variables that could have influenced the way these victims were killed. Modern studies can make claims about the degree of emotional intensity from the number and type of wounds found on victims because there are far fewer variables for which to account. In modern cases of interpersonal violence, injuries to the face are often indicative of anger or hatred directed towards the victim by the attacker. Likewise, knife violence is commonly associated with certain social demographics and contexts. These contexts are not analogous to the medieval period in which knives were as common as modern house keys. A penetrating stab wound to the cranium of an urban North-American youth is not comparable to the same wound in a medieval skeleton.60 Excessive violence is a recurring theme in the study of skeletal trauma, and it is no more obvious than in the identification of that excess in cases of multiple, fatal injuries to the skull. Taking the lessons from the dramatizations of Wells, Wenham, and others, along with the more cautious handling of weapon trauma by Weller, it is possible to explain this excess of violence in terms that are more historical, and probably more useful for historians of armed conflict, without resorting to interpretations that rely on a subjective reading of emotional intent from wounds. It is easy to forget how durable the human body can 59

60

Šlaus et al., “The Harsh Life,” 368. The study cited by Šlaus is S. Porter, et al., “Characteristics of Sexual Homicide Committed by Psychopathic and Nonpsychopathic Offenders,” Law and Human Behaviour 27 (2003): 459–70. These questions and their relationship to forensic sciences are discussed in: Martin Bauer and Dieter Patzelt, “Intercranial Stab Injuries: Case Report and Case Study,” Forensic Science International 129 (2002): 122–27; Iain R. Brennan and Simon C. Moore, “Weapons and Violence: A Review of Theory and Research,” Aggression and Violent Behaviour 14 (2009): 215–25; Roberto Catanesi et al., “Psychopathology and Weapon Choice: A Study of 103 Perpetrators of Homicide or Attempted Homicide,” Forensic Science International 209 (2011): 149–53.

78

Geldof

be. On 2 November 1271 John Bretteville’s wife, Emma, brought a charge of assault and maiming against Simon, son of Roger Cainhoe before the coroner’s court at Barford, Bedfordshire.61 On 10 October that year, Emma and John were attacked, unprovoked, in the streets of Barford by Simon, who struck John in the head and left hand with a sword, and robbed him of some coin and a purse. The indictment is particularly detailed in its description of John’s injuries. Simon first struck John “with a certain sword on the top of his head on the left side between the parting of the hair and the ear” and “inflicted upon him a big wound which was five inches long, three inches wide, and which extended downward as far as the brain, so that thirteen pieces of bone were extracted from the wound.”62 This description is trustworthy because the Coroner viewed the wounded John himself. That head wound seems to have cost John his hearing, but not, at this stage, his life. Emma clearly describes her husband as very much alive but unfit to appear in court, and the language of the case implies that there is no certainty about whether he would succumb to the wounds. John Bretteville’s durability is not that surprising given how many modern analogies there are from emergency medicine and criminal forensics; there is ample archaeological evidence of victims of armed violence who survive serious wounds of the type commonly found amongst the fatal trauma of the mass graves.63 In contexts in which the attacker is intent on killing his victim quickly and with total certainty, one or two blows may not seem like enough. The order in all the chaos of battle is that the measure of what constitutes excessive violence is radically different from that which is normally applied to modern examples of violence and, by extension, the medieval examples. Waller’s describes combat as fast, complex, crowded, an environment in which a multitude of weapons are in motion at once, seeking targets of opportunity, often without knowing where and how they may land. In all of this confusion, things can happen in fractions of a second and, knowing this, and knowing the durability of the human body, there is a great incentive to strike any available target 61

62 63

London, The National Archives, JUST 2/46 memb. 5, recto. The quotations are adapted from Charles Gross, Select Cases from the Coroners’ Rolls AD 1265–1413 with a Brief Account of the History of the Office of Coroner, Selden Society (Bernard Quaritch: London, 1896), 9:21–22. Gross, Select Cases, 22. Examples include the fascinating case studies in Richard Swinney and Scott Crawford, “Medical Reality of Historical Wounds,” in Spada II, ed. Stephen Hand (Highland Village, TX: Chivalry Bookshelf, 2005): 5–21. An example from the archaeological record, which shows a healed wound very similar to the one that John Bretteville suffered, appears in T. Anderson and I. Hodgins, “Healed Cranial Weapon Injury from Medieval Coventry, England,” Neurosurgery 50 (2002): 870–873.

Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

79

with as much force, as often as possible. If a target is hit, even fatally, that blow is of no value to its creator if the target continues to fight, even for just a few seconds. That is enough time to exchange blow for blow. Thus in combat, the fight is not over until it is overkill.64 What constitutes excess, and by extension some emotional or cultural significance to that excess, is measured by entirely different standards in the martial performance of violence. Most, if not all, of the examples of over-interpretation listed above make an appearance in the discourse following the much-publicized identification of the skeleton or Richard III, the last Yorkist king of England, in early 2013. Richard, killed during the battle of Bosworth Field, 22 August 1485, was the victim of armed violence and the reading of his well-preserved bones has followed many of the same tangled paths as the cases described here.65 Given his historical and cultural significance, it is no surprise that his wounds have been read with a particular bias towards the emotional. However, in Richard’s case we have some historical documentation that gives his wounds context and that material can be read with a degree of critical sensitivity, familiar to historians and textual scholars. Thus, the reading of Richard’s wounds is more certain than if his skeleton was entirely anonymous; it is, nevertheless, subject to many of the interpretive problems described here.66 Richard’s wounds may 64

65 66

Lest this claim also attract accusations of subjective over-interpretation, there is significant support for this reasoning from the perspective of modern medicine. See: B. Karger, J. Niemeyer, and B. Brinkmann, “Physical Activity Following Fatal Injury From Sharp Pointed Weapons,” International Journal of Legal Medicine 112 (1999): 188–91; S.Ø. Thoresen and T.O. Rognum, “Survival Time and Acting Capability After Fatal Injury by Sharp Weapons,” Forensic Science International 31 (1986): 181–87; S. Chattopadhyay and C. Tripathi, “Skull Fracture and Haemorrhage Pattern Among Fatal and Nonfatal Head Injury Assault Victims – A Critical Analysis,” Injury & Violence 2 (2010): 99–103; Robert R. Martin, Jon F. Graham, and Thomas P. Perone, “Machete Wounds to the Head: Report of Three Cases,” Neurosurgery 20 (1987): 270–272; Martin Bauer and Dieter Patzelt, “Intercranial Stab Injuries: Case Report and Case Study,” Forensic Science International 129.2 (2002): 122–127; and the curious, if morbid, W. French Anderson, Forensic Analysis of the April 11, 1986, FBI Firefight (Los Angeles: W. French Anderson, 1996). The axiom that “it is not over until it is overkill” was coined by reader Zena Charowsky, in response to early drafts of this research. See: Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare,” 44–5. As Woosnam-Savage points out, some of the few historical accounts relating to this wellknown individual compliment the science of the archaeology, in particular the specific reference to damage to his head and to the use of a halberd. Additionally, there is specific reference to his body being stripped and “treated inhumanely,” which is thought to explain one wound in particular. He writes: “the team has been terribly aware of ‘speculation’ and only suggests these as  possible (though plausible) interpretations. And even

80

Geldof

appear to more conservative viewers as largely indistinguishable from those typically found on other, nameless, victims of warfare, but his identity is inseparable from interpretations and the debate may center on the meaning of the extant textual sources, rather than the forensics.67 To forensic archaeologists, the bones of the dead are supposed to speak for themselves, but it is an unfortunate reality that bones speak with a very limited vocabulary and those wounds, and the weapons that produce them, rarely speak in a way that communicates the kind of messages for which students of historical violence are looking. Swords, axes, and all the other weapons seem to speak without differentiation of place, time, or the relationship of victim and attacker; they are poor communicators of the intentions, goals, or feelings of their users or their victims. There is only so much that these wounds can tell us, and the threshold between the language of violence and our subjective interpretations begins somewhere just beyond the point where weapon contacts bone.

67

then we are careful to say what we can definitely say; for instance we can offer no sequence for the blows, we just try to make a possible narrative within the boundaries of the evidence provided” (Personal communication with the editors, 30 Nov. 2014). Cf. Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries, introduction to this volume, “Penetrating Medieval Wounds,” 1–21, at 5 n. 12. At the time of writing the material for the basis of this criticism was limited to press releases from University of Leicester. See: “Osteoarchaeologist Dr Jo Appleby gives key evidence on the skeletal analysis – University of Leicester”: (accessed 20 April 2013); and “Evidence from Archaeological Dig – University of Leicester,” (accessed 20 April 2013). The findings have now been published: Jo Appleby, Guy N. Rutty, Sarah V Hainsworth, Robert C. WoosnamSavage, Bruno ­Morgan, Alison Brough, Richard W. Earp, Claire Robinson, Turi E. King, Mathew Morris, and ­Richard Buckley, “Perimortem Trauma in King Richard III: A Skeletal Analysis,” The Lancet 385.9964 (17–23 September 2014): 253–59.

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

81

Chapter 3

Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE Patricia Skinner

The violence of the Middle Ages (and its social regulation) has already attracted the attention of historians, giving rise to something of an industry in studying this theme. Head and facial trauma, arguably, were the most serious of injuries in early medieval society due to their very visibility. Wounds in this area, and their scars, were often closely scrutinized and commented upon by contemporaries, who seem to have had a clear sense of their potential for shame and dishonor. Such scrutiny was, however, only applied to acquired injuries and was not connected with the ancient pseudo-science of physiognomy, which concerned itself with deducing character from facial and other physical features and would enjoy some popularity later in the Middle Ages in the West.1 Injury to the head might also often result in injury to the brain, offering a further perspective on wounds, their care, and their aftermath. Injuries to the face and head could occur through combat, accident, or judicial punishment.2 The latter might take the form of mutilation, branding of the facial features, or of complete removal of nose and ears. Such punishments are known from the early medieval period, but their public display and increas1 See the useful discussions in Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, ed. Simon Swain (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2007). 2 Combat and its aftermath: Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, ed. Neil Christie and M. Yazigi (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Sean McGlynn, By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008); John Gillingham, “Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles from the Late 12th to the Early 14th century,” in Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114–134. Judicial punishment: Nicole Gonthier, Le châtiment du crime au moyen age (XIIe-XVIe siecles) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1998); Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 1999); Celia Chazelle, “Crime and Punishment: Penalising without Prisons,” in Why the Middle Ages Matter, ed. Celia Chazelle et al. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 15–28, points out the positive aspects of restorative and retributive justice in reconciling the offender with her/his community, in contrast to her/his social isolation behind “modern” prison walls.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_005

82

Skinner

ingly detailed descriptions thereof, served early on to reinforce the image of the later medieval period as, in Piero Camporesi’s words, a “horrible, indescribable and sadistic age.”3 Less clear, however, is whether these detailed accounts reflect a continuation of earlier violence or its intensification.4 Individual studies suggest that the late Middle Ages did see an increase in cruelty and atrocity,5 which so appalled Johan Huizinga, Norbert Elias, Marc Bloch, and Michel Foucault, and led to their now classic statements of the uncontrolled, emotive violence of medieval people.6 The injuries inflicted through judicial mutilation in the early Middle Ages, however, will not be considered in detail here for the simple reason that reading them was unambiguous: the person had offended and been punished in the most visible way.7 While it is difficult to quantify how many men and women suffered such punishment (as opposed to the number of legal codes that sanctioned it), that people must have known of these penalties does inform discussion of other wounds to the face and head. Hagiographic texts, too, are largely excluded from the following discussion – while they have offered rich evidence for sickness as punishment

3 Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Body Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. T. Croft-Murray and H. Elson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 225. 4 The essays in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. R.W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000) vary in their view of whether the period was any more violent than modern times, but do not consider whether the early and later medieval periods experienced different levels or types of violent behaviour. 5 Gillingham, “Killing;” P. Freedman, “Atrocities and the Executions of Peasant Rebel Leaders in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Medievalia et Humanistica 31 (2005): 101–113. Medieval literature, too, reflected and often condemned this brutality: Larissa Tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012). 6 Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Michigan: E. Arnold, 1924); N. Elias, The Civilising Process, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939, rptd. 1978); Marc Bloch, La société féodale (Paris: Michel Albin, 1939), 116–117. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 47–48, describes medieval punishment as a ritual display of the sovereign’s “vengeance” on the criminal. The spectacle of violence is further discussed in Valentin Groebner, Defaced: the Visual Culture of Violence in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Zone, 2004). 7 Such punishments, however, had to be clearly justified: Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, “‘Just Anger’ or ‘Vengeful Anger’? The Punishment of Blinding in the Early Medieval West,” in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 75–91.

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

83

inflicted by God and/or the saint/s, their generic nature and moralizing purpose render them less reliable as historical evidence.8 Earlier texts are not short of graphic descriptions of this and other types of violence – one has only to read Gregory of Tours’ account of the horrors of treason and civil war in Merovingian Francia9 – but while the endemic warfare of the early Middle Ages placed a premium on the status of warrior, with boys of the aristocratic elite trained from an early age in martial skills (and those from lower social classes called up to fight with whatever weapons they could muster), the overwhelming impression gained from written sources prior to the end of the first millennium is that violence was codified, controlled, and needed ample justification.10 The influence of gender studies, too, has resulted in more nuanced studies of the aggressive masculinity of warrior culture and the management of anger and its performance both in battle and in rituals such as judicial combat, hand-to-hand fighting, and the hunt.11 Although the historiography of medieval violence is now well-established, however, rather less attention has been paid to the fate of the wounded man in early medieval culture, particularly one suffering facial or head wounds of a disfiguring or disabling nature. Early medieval law codes, medical texts, and written narratives (both historical and imaginary) provide some clues as to how the facially-wounded were treated, and an increasing body of archaeological evidence can assist in determining what wounds were inflicted and how survivable they were. There was a fine line dividing prestigious battle scars (whose potential to convey honor can be contested) and facial injuries so disfiguring (or disabling) that they engendered horror and rejection, rather than admiration, in the viewer. There is some evidence that medical assistance was 8

9

10

11

Maire Johnson examines the frequency of blinding and eye-bursting as a hagiographical motif in Irish sources, juxtaposed against Irish law codes. “In the Bursting of an Eye: Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography,” in this volume, 448–70. Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri Historiarum X, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS Rer. Merov. 1.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1951), e.g. the regular removal of noses and ears (5.18, 8.29, 9.38, 10.15); the punishment of branding to the face (9.38) [hereafter GT]. E.g. Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, ed. Guy Halsall (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998). Halsall’s introduction states that: “Violent relationships can often be seen as a discourse structured around shared norms” (16). Rosenwein, Anger’s Past, 59–74, 75–91 and 191–202. On warrior culture in the early medieval West, see: Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D.M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999). On the literary depictions of women’s wounds, see: Barbara Goodman, “Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair,” 544–71, in this volume.

84

Skinner

available, but whether it could mitigate the long-term effects of head and face injuries is open to question. From a legal perspective, there is abundant evidence that deliberate wounding of the face – particularly, but not exclusively, in times of peace – carried with it substantial financial penalties for the perpetrator in early medieval law codes. These, of course, were normative texts, and their primary purpose was a rhetorical statement of kingly power and authority. But contemporary evidence from other sources, such as chronicles, reveals an apparently high concern for personal appearance, with descriptions of injuries and other facial flaws.12 This suggests, at the very least, that face and head wounds required care to ensure that they healed cleanly and with the minimum of lasting damage: the law codes assume the existence of doctors to attend to injuries inflicted illegally (the perpetrator being ordered to pick up the bill for medical assistance), but provide little evidence of their practice and competence. The intervention of a competent surgeon could have a significant effect on the victim’s chances of surviving quite serious trauma,13 and prompt surgical intervention could potentially reduce the scarring and permanent damage of a head or face wound.14 The availability of practical – that is, surgical – wound care in early medieval Europe has hardly been addressed by scholars.15 The 12

13

14

15

See: Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in AngloScottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” and William Sayers, “The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature,” in this volume, 102–27 and 473–95, respectively. For further discussion on the treatment and significance of head wounds see: Debby ­Banham and Christine Voth, “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?” and Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte ­Arthur,” in this volume, 153–74 and 496–518, respectively. As evidenced by the two versions of the forensic reconstruction of King Philip of Macedon’s face, one before and one after the reconstruction team had learnt of a report that he had received skilled treatment on the battlefield for his traumatic arrow injury to the forehead and eye: John Prag and Richard Neave, Making Faces: Using Forensic and Archaeological Evidence (London: British Museum, 1997), 65–86 with illustrative photographs. The difference between the two was based on the assumed difference in levels of care to the traumatic flesh wound, which would not have been recoverable from the archaeological remains alone. The key question here, of course, must be whether the skills of the surgeon Kritoboulos were lost in the early Middle Ages, along with other medical knowledge from antiquity. Peregrine Horden, “Medieval Medicine,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, ed. Mark Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–2, comments that our knowledge of medical practice pre-1200 is “all mutability;” that is, there is no overarching scheme to mirror later scholastic medicine, but early medieval medicine “is, to some

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

85

field of early medieval osteoarchaeology, however, is beginning to suggest quite sophisticated levels of response to serious head trauma manifested in skull remains, although it is less useful for judging the effects of flesh wounds.16 Assuming that the victim survived his injuries, the issue of social response to the wounded and/or maimed individual is difficult to determine: a battlescarred or disfigured face might be viewed with ambivalence by contemporaries. Were scars a sign of honor or did they stigmatize the individual and lower his status within the group? These last questions are by far the hardest to answer since early medieval texts rarely give insight into the responses of peers or the psychological outcome for the victim. Evidence gathered from contemporary and later literary portrayals of the warrior offer an insight into contemporary attitudes towards the maimed man through their portrayals of individual combat and associated codes of honor. Drawing examples from often terse reports in early medieval sources, wounds seem to have resulted from illegal, interpersonal violence (whether using weapons or not); from warfare (both hand-to-hand combat and wounds acquired through missiles, such as arrows, spears, and stones); from accidents arising from weapons practice; and from other accidents such as falls and collision with moving objects. Narrative sources also provide something of a filter in that most of the wounds recorded are serious (exceptional?) enough to threaten life – a glancing blow with the fist or nick to the skin with a bladed weapon, for all that it might break a nose or cause a scar, were mentioned only if they had effects beyond the health of the recipient. These less serious injuries are precisely the ones that the archaeological record, concerned with mainly skeletal remains, cannot easily pick up. Moreover, the lack of concern by medieval artists to render a naturalistic or detailed likeness of their subject much before 1200 means that there is little likelihood of finding iconographic representations of scarred or disfigured people.17 Early medieval law codes, issued by kings in the nascent states of Western Europe after the fall of Rome, are by far the most detailed in their accounts of

16

17

extent, ancient medicine (e.g. Dioscurides) continued by other means.” When doctors (medici) do appear in the narrative sources, it is all too often in the context of a rejection of their skills in favor of God’s help, e.g. GT, 3.36 and 8.31. See: M.R. Geldof, “‘And to describe the shapes of the dead’: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence” and Robert Woosam Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” in this volume 57–80 and 27–56, respectively. Herbert Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (New York: Broadview, 2004), 139.

86

Skinner

face and head wounds, but they are also the most problematic to interpret.18 Patrick Wormald has suggested that the lengthy lists of compensation payments for injuries to the head and body contained in most of the codes issued from the sixth to ninth centuries across Western Europe were more concerned with providing a memorable reminder of the king’s authority over his people than with the injuries per se.19 Taking this cautionary note into account, it is nevertheless interesting to explore the form that “injury” took in these collections of clauses. On the head, attention was focused on breaking the skull (and degrees of exposure of the brain),20 striking out or damaging eyes and eyelids,21 cutting off or maiming the nose,22 cutting off or maiming ears,23 and causing wounds to other facial features such as the chin and the lips.24 Almost all early medieval codifications of law in the West contain such lists of injuries: in all cases, the perpetrator of the injury was fined rather than physically punished. The early ninth-century Lex Frisionum, “given” by the Carolingians to the Frisians soon after Charlemagne’s imperial coronation, is a positive panoply of personal injury, with the head and face covered by nearly thirty individual – but possibly not original – chapters.25 It is distinct in breaking down the separate areas of the face into even more specific parts, such as wrinkles of the 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

Law codes discussed here include the laws of Aethelberht of Kent, ed. L. Oliver at [hereafter Aeth.] (accessed 5 June 2014); Pactus Legis Salicae, ed. K.A. Eckhardt, in MGH LL Nat. Germ. IV.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1962) [hereafter PLS]; the Lex Baiwariorum, Pactus Alamannorum and Lex Alamannorum, ed. J. Merkel, in MGH LL III, ed. G. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1868) [hereafter LBai, PA and LA]; the Leges Langobardorum, ed. F. Bluhme in MGH LL IV, ed. G.H. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1868) [hereafter LL followed by the name of the king to whom the laws are attributed]. The purpose of the laws is discussed in Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: From Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 46 and 124. Wormald explicitly updated his earlier essays on the subject in his book and in his collection Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience (London: Hambledon, 1999). E.g. Aeth. 36 and 36.1; PLS 17.4–5; LL Rothari cc.47, 79 and 103; LBai 4.4–6, 5.3–5, 6.3–5; PA Fragmentum Primum 1; LA 59.3–7. E.g. Aeth. 42–43; PLS 29.1; LL Rothari cc. 48, 81 and 105; LBai 4.9 and 15, 5.6, 6.6 and 9; PA Fragmentum Secondum 1–2; LA 60.4–7. E.g. Aeth. 44, 45, 46; PLS 29.13; LL Rothari cc. 49, 55, 82 and 106; LBai 4.13 and 6.8; LA 60.8–10. E.g. Aeth. 39–41; PLS 29. 1 and 14; LL Rothari cc. 53, 83 and 107; LBai 4.14, 6.9 and 11; PA Fragmentum Secondum 3–4; LA 60.1–3. E.g. chin: Aeth. 47; lips/mouth: LL Rothari cc. 50, 84 and 108; LBai 4.15 and 6.9; LA 60.11–12. See: Rolf Bremmer, “The Children He Never Had, the Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law,” in Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Larissa Tracy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), 108–130, on a later version of this code.

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

87

forehead cut by an assailant, nose components, and areas of the cheek and jaw, detailing a penalty of twelve shillings for leaving a “sunken scar which is called a sipido.”26 Many other “injuries” listed in the codes, however – such as cutting and pulling of hair27 or damage to the teeth28 – might literally be termed superficial. It is clear from other provisions that what is at stake is not the health of the victim but her/his (usually his) honor, and that of the king whose peace is being breached by violent episodes of this type. Honor in the codes was explicitly linked to unblemished personal appearance, and damage to this carried with it a penalty to be paid to avoid reprisal (the Lombard King Rothari’s Edict, LL Rothari, c. 19, “Si quis pro iniuria sua vindicanda …” [whoever in order to avenge his injury …], makes the threat of revenge explicit). The Alamannic law code of the seventh century punished any facial injury that could not be covered with hair or beard (LA 60.21, similar to LL Rothari c. 46) while Lex Frisionum Additio Sapientum, by far the most explicit on this matter, included a clause (3.16) punishing with a fine of 4 solidi any mutilation of the face that was visible at a specific distance: “Si ex percussione deformitas faciei illata fuerit, quae de 12 pedum longitudine posit agnosci … ” [If through the blow a deformity of the face is caused which can be seen from 12 feet away]. Such concerns were echoed outside the Frankish world: the Irish laws imposed a fine for a lasting blemish or disability and demanded further payments from the perpetrator 26

27

28

Lex Frisionum, ed. K. de Richthofen, in MGH LL III, ed. G. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1863), 673–691 [hereafter LFris.]. Sunken scar: LFris., Additiones Sapientum III, 34. The remarkable similarity of some head-related clauses from the Frisian lawcode, dating to the early ninth century, to others in earlier compilations of the Alamans and Lombards suggests also that the Carolingian jurists borrowed older laws when compiling their newer codes. Pulling: Aeth. 33; Pactus Legis Salicae Capitula Addita 3.104; Rothari’s Edict c. 383; Lex Frisionem 22.65, LFris. Additio Sapientum III, 39–40; Laws of Hywel Dda (The Book of Blegywryd), trans. Melville Richards (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1954), 64. Cutting: PLS 24.2–3; Laws of Hywel Dda, 64. Shaving: Lombard Laws, Liutprand 80 (dated 726) and 141 (734) and Aistulf 4 (dated 750). Not just hair, but beards, moustaches and even eyebrows were featured – damage to which incurred a penalty: Rothari’s Edict, c. 383 (beard); LFris. 22.17 (moustache); LFris. 22.14 (eyebrows). See, on these issues: Robert Bartlett, “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6.4 (1994): 43–64; and Paul Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of the Dark Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Aeth. 48.1–3 (canine teeth, teeth next to canines, back teeth); LL Rothari, c. 85 (front teeth); LFris. 22.19 (front teeth) and 21 (back teeth). There were six classes of teeth in early Irish law the Bretha Déin Chécht: cited in F. Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988), 132.

88

Skinner

every time the victim had to attend a public assembly.29 The tenth-century compilation of Welsh laws made under Hywel Dda, similarly, was concerned with compensation for the “conspicuous scar” to the face, which is one that would elicit inquiry as to what had happened.30 Healing to a scar is recognized in Lombard laws about ear and nose injuries – while the healing (resolidare) is clearly a positive outcome, compensation was still required because the injury remained visible.31 Indeed, the laws do not seem to consider how serious a wound might be in medical terms. In Ireland, the disfiguring blemish took on a supernatural significance, disqualifying kings as taboo if they were even accidentally injured.32 The Frankish group of laws levied similar fines whether an injury was superficial and medically more serious – fines for cutting off noses and ears, gouging eyes, or hitting the head so hard that skull and brain were exposed and/or broken were at similar levels to the “superficial” group, such as knocking out a tooth. This suggests that the actual affront – and potential for revenge – contained in an action was at the core of legislators’ priorities rather than the medical after-effects of specific injuries on the victim.33 Laws, therefore, sought to keep the peace: the potential head and facial injuries listed there seem to be envisaged as the result of inappropriate, interpersonal insult, and violence. They do not, however, exhaust the types of wound that might be suffered to the face and head, especially in battle situations.34 In his study of early Carolingian warfare, Bernard S. Bachrach discusses the main types of weaponry that a soldier might use and face in combat. Basing his discussion on the treatise De Procinctu Romanae Militiae of Rabanus Maurus (d.856), Bachrach suggests that infantry soldiers were trained to jab short swords and cause puncture injuries, first at the head and face of the 29

30 31 32 33

34

Bretha Crolige, c. 42 for the blemish, Bretha Déin Checht c. 31 for the repeated payments: cited in Kelly, Guide to Early Irish Law, 129 and 132 respectively. See: Charlene M. Eska, “The Mutilation of Derbforgaill,” in this volume, 252–64, and Eska, “‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources,” in Castration and Culture, ed. Tracy, 149–173. The Laws of Hywel Dda, 64. LL Rothari cc. 55 and 56. Kelly, Guide to Early Irish Law, 19–20. Exceptions here are the gradation of injury to specific parts of the face that involve sensory loss e.g. ears, eyes and nose. I disagree, however, with Lisi Oliver’s assessment (examining the Anglo-Saxon laws) that such fine-tuning was linked to medical knowledge: Lisi Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 100. Woosnam-Savage and DeVries analyze the battle-wounds inflicted on the recently discovered skeleton of Richard III in “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare,” in this volume, 44–5.

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

89

enemy, and then at other parts of his body. This, he argues, was a more effective means of disabling and killing than using a slashing motion with the sword, which risked hitting only bone and shield and possibly one’s own comrades.35 Archaeological studies, too, seem to concur that the “primary target on the body” in close combat was the head that, if the individual was lacking or had lost his helmet, was the least protected part of his body.36 A blow to the head would also temporarily incapacitate an opponent, leaving him vulnerable to a kill stroke. However, Bachrach seems to take Rabanus’s idealized view on trust when he states that (Roman-style) short swords were the preferred weapon of the Carolingian phalanx, despite substantial archaeological evidence that spears were also used. Dismissing the idea of a row of spearmen, Bachrach remarks: “Such a melange of armaments [spears, broken shafts, some swords used once the spear was thrown] seems less effective than ranks of men armed uniformly with short swords that ostensibly are unbreakable.”37 Here, the ideal is mistaken for the reality of warfare: archaeological remains quite commonly display blunt-weapon injury to the skull (such as might have been made by staves or spear shafts) alongside blade injuries, and it seems that the elite commanders of such ranks might have used double-edged, longer swords, whose primary aim was to slash down or across an enemy’s face and body.38 Another type of head wound that does show up in the evidence is a direct hit by a projectile, whether an arrow in the face, often in the eye area, or missiles such as stones either thrown from above or shot by machine.39 Arrow wounds were particularly difficult to treat and those recorded in the written evidence 35 36

37 38

39

Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 89. Quote from E.T. Brødholt and P. Holck, “Skeletal Trauma in the Burials from the Royal Church of St. Mary in Medieval Oslo,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 22.2 (2012): 201–208, at 213; vulnerability: Piers Mitchell et al., “Weapon Injuries in the Twelfth Century Crusader Garrison of Vadum Iacob Castle, Galilee,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16.2 (2006): 493–505, at 153. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, 95. Nicholas Brooks, “Weapons and Armour,” in The Battle of Maldon, AD 991, ed. D. Scragg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell in Association with The Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies, 1991), 208–219, at 212. In a moralizing tale of an impious man named Constantine who threw a stone at an icon of the Virgin, Theophanes reports that he was killed at the siege of Nicaea in 725/6 by a stone which broke his head and face: The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD284–813, ed. and trans. C. Mango and R. Scott, with the assistance of R. Greatrex (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), AM6218, 559–60.

90

Skinner

were usually fatal, compounded, in many cases, by the difficulty of removing an arrowhead that might be barbed or poisoned.40 The potential for bruising and superficial cuts and lacerations was greater than is revealed by the archaeological evidence, which mainly picks up the blows that hit home to the bone in a fatal, or near-fatal, manner.41 Earlier sources rarely describe these injuries in much detail,42 but the later poets make much of such glancing blows, emphasizing the dangers of hand-to-hand combat. The epic Raoul de Cambrai (hereafter Raoul), as Sarah Kay has demonstrated in her edition, was written in two main parts in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, but the oral tradition underpinning the poem seems to extend back to the anarchic period in Flanders following the collapse of Carolingian power in the late ninth and early tenth centuries.43 It is a rich source of detail for potential injuries, including glancing blows (here mitigated by the recipient’s helmet): “Del cercle d’or li a molt recolpé, et del nazel qan q’en a encontré, et el visaige l’a un petit navré … A icest colp fu l’enfes estouné” [… he has cut off a great section of the gold circlet and all the noseguard that lay in the path of his blow, wounding him slightly in the face … The boy was stunned by the blow] (194, 3906–7, 246–7). This is echoed by a scene in the slightly earlier Song of Roland (again harking back to the Carolingian period), in which Thierry is injured on his forehead and cheek before defeating his opponent Pinabel (laisse 292, ll. 3919–20). While the elaborate set-pieces of combat contained in the poem clearly belong to its later textual community (such scenes, for example, are not found in the earlier Anglo-Saxon poem 40

41

42

43

Poison: LBai. 4IV.21. But the later development of streamlined mail-piercing arrowheads, ironically, may have made them easier to remove, even by the victim himself: Mitchell et al., “Weapon injuries,” 152. Michael Livingston gives a detailed account of the treatment of the facial wound Prince Hal (later Henry V) received as a young man when he was shot with an arrow. “Prince Hal’s Wound,” in this volume, 215–30. See, e.g.: P. Patrick, “Approaches to Violent Death: A Case Study from Early Medieval Cambridge,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16.4 (2006): 347–354, who comments that the individual under scrutiny, who had suffered three weapons injuries from sword blows to the cranium, did not long survive the attack. Contrast, however, the cases from early medieval Maastricht (NL) discussed by Raphael Panhuysen, “Het scherp van de snede: sporen van geweld in vroegsmiddeleuwse Maastricht,” Archeologie in Limburg 92 (2002): 2–7, where two cases of blade injuries to the skull showed signs of healing. (I thank Professor Panhuysen for assisting me in gaining access to his valuable article.) The ninth-century Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, however, highlights the spear injury picked up by Emperor Heraclius in a battle against the Persians in AM6118 (625/6CE): The Chronicle of Theophanes, 449. Raoul de Cambrai, ed. and trans. S. Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Chapter, line, and page numbers are given in parentheses in the text.

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

91

The Battle of Maldon), their accounts of wounding echo the themes met already in earlier material of individual honor and combat, targeted at the head. Raoul is also useful for its emphasis on how an enemy might be killed – the numerous references to espandue cervele “brains dashed” (49, 841, 66–7), or en iert mainte froide cervele “many brains lying cold” (57, 1022, 76–7), or sa cervele desor ces oils gesir “brains spilling over his eyes” (158, 3010–3012, 194–5) again suggest that the head was a major target in close combat, and that removal of, or damage to, a helmet was key to many deaths. Early medieval Welsh poetry, such as the ninth-century Llywarch Hen Saga, includes similar scenes: “Briwyt rac Pyll penngloc ffer” [A brave man’s skull was smashed before Pyll… .]44 The apparent vulnerability of the face and head in early medieval culture raises a question about protection. The laws of the Lombard King Aistulf include a clause dating to 750 (LL Aistulf c. 2) that deals with the arms that men of different status were required to have. While armor (lorica) and weapons are mentioned, there is no reference to headgear. Nicholas Brooks uses evidence of Anglo-Saxon heriot payments to suggest that helmets may not have been a regular piece of equipment, even at higher social levels, prior to the eleventh century in England.45 The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf does feature descriptions of helmets, however, with facemasks, decorative boars, and protective bands of silver.46 Perhaps head protection was so self-evidently necessary that it simply does not feature as a special requirement. However the wound was acquired, it might or might not require medical attention: several early medieval laws draw a distinction between a wound that could or could not be staunched, and recommended that the latter should be cared for by a doctor.47 The length of time that a wound might take to heal was uppermost in these texts, and both Saxon and Irish laws made provision 44

45 46 47

The Welsh appears in Canu Llywarch Hen, ed. Ifor Williams, 2nd ed. (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 1953), section 1, verse 35, l.1; the translation is from The Earliest Welsh Poetry, trans. Joseph P. Clancy (London: Macmillan, 1970), 71. [Our thanks to Joe Eska for providing the Welsh reference.] Brooks, “Weapons and Armour,” 216–217. Beowulf, trans. M. Alexander (London: Penguin, 1973), e.g. ll. 335 and 2487 (masks), 1030 and 1448–54 (rims/bands and boars). Line numbers are given in parentheses in the text. PLS 17.7; Lex Salica Carolina, ed. K.A. Eckhardt, MGH LL Nat. Germ. IV.2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1969), 22.4. Doctors’ fees are mentioned in LL Rothari cc. 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 103, 106, 107. LL Rothari c. 128 states that “he who struck the blow should seek the doctor; if he has neglected to do this, the man struck or his lord should find the doctor [and the perpetrator pays the bill].” A head wound down to the brain was one of only three injuries for which the court physician was able to receive payment for his services in early Welsh law: The Laws of Hywel Dda, 41.

92

Skinner

for the incapacitated victim to receive financial remuneration from her/his assailant.48 The actual availability of care may have varied by region. Chief among the obstacles to reaching early medieval surgeons in Christian Europe is that they have left no written record of their practice outside. Surgery was, after all, conceived as a separate branch of medicine in antiquity,49 a distinction that is visible in texts from the Muslim world. The Egyptian physician Ibn Ridwan (d.1068) commented: I divide the teaching of medicine into two parts: one is theory, which is to be studied either from the books of Hippocrates or those of Galen… The other is practice, by which I mean the study of bone-setting, the restoration of dislocations, incision, suturing, cautery, lancing, eye remedies and all other manual procedures.50 Put simply, then, surgery was the care of the external body, a response to trauma, wounding, or the visible lesions caused by disease. In the eyes of “rational” western writers such as Theoderic of Bologna, active in the mid-thirteenth century, surgical intervention was a last resort after diet, regime, and medicines had been tried, and even then, its practitioners needed, in Theoderic’s words, to be “well-read”; that is, to be able to link their treatments of the wound to knowledge of the internal workings of the body.51 Influenced by such texts, medical historians have tended to dismiss earlier practice, which in Stanley Rubin’s opinion was “based more upon empirical and traditional ideas than on pathological knowledge.”52 Yet empirical skills were precisely 48

49

50

51 52

The victim in Irish law was eligible for sick maintenance by his/her assailant if s/he did not recover quickly: Kelly, Guide, 130. On early Anglo-Saxon provision, see: Lisi Oliver, “Sick Maintenance in Anglo-Saxon Law,” Journal of English and German Philology 107.3 (2008): 303–326. The preface to Celsus, De Medicina states that medicine is made up of regimen (rictu), remedies (medicamenta), and operations (manu): cited in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 3:Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), 100. Ibn Ridwan, Useful Book, 103, 5–9, trans. A.Z. Iskandar, “An Attempted Reconstruction of the Late Alexandrian Medical Curriculum,” Medical History, 20 (1976): 235–58, at 243, quoted in Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 84. The Surgery of Theoderic, c. AD 1267, trans. E. Campbell and J. Cotton (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1955), 4 and 5. Stanley Rubin, Medieval English Medicine (London: David and Charles, 1974), 57. See also: Michael McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006).

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

93

what were required in treating wounds and their after-effects; Clare Pilsworth’s work on the apparent prestige of medical experts in Lombard Italy suggests that competent practitioners existed long before the advent of the “rational” surgical profession in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.53 The existence of surgical procedures in the Anglo-Saxon Leechbook, copied in the tenth and eleventh centuries, supports this view.54 In the absence of early medieval surgical texts per se, the search for ideas about wounds must trawl a little more widely. In fact, early medieval literature is full of metaphorical uses of wounds and wounding, be it Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard reflecting on whether the wound of his wife’s death will ever heal over to a scar with the medicine of consolation,55 or Fulbert of Chartres (c. 970–c. 1030) envisaging a more robust surgical intervention to bring Bishop Hubert of Angers, whom he had excommunicated, to penitence. Fulbert refers to falce discretionis “the scalpel of prudence” to cut away the bishop’s sins, instructing him to Deinde amputationis illius vulnera recentia, ne aliquam aliam passionem generent, penalis cauterio timoris ustulabis; quam usturam ne frigus impietatis tangat, caritatis ardore et oleo fovebis misericordiae … Post hoc autem has virtutis speties, humilitatem, pacientiam, et obedientiam, in unum melle divinorum eloquiorum confities, et in buxtala tuae mentis hoc antidotum diligenter recondes. [cauterize the raw wounds … with the hot iron of holy fear so as to prevent their fostering some other disorder; and keep the places you have cauterized warm with the fire of charity and the oil of mercy that they may not be chilled by the touch of impiety. … Then take the virtues of humility, patience and obedience, and mix them with the honey of the 53

54

55

Clare Pilsworth, “Could you just sign this for me John?: Doctors, Charters and Professional Identity in Early Medieval Northern and Central Italy,” Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009): 363–388. Exemplified by the procedure in Leechbook I for hare lip correction: “For hair lip: pound mastic very small, add the white of an egg and mingle as thou dust vermilion, cut with a knife the false edges of the lip, sew fast with silk, then smear without and within the salve, ere the silk rot. If it draw together, arrange it with the hand; anoint again soon.” Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, ed. O. Cockayne, 3 vols. (London: Longmans and Green, 1864–6), 2:59. The Leechbooks are also concerned with facial appearance, to judge by the number of remedies for the head: Leechbook I, 19–26 (17 recipes); eyes, 27–38; facial blotches, 53–4; pustules and blotches, 77–81; and hair loss or excess hair, 155. Einhard, Letter to Lupus 836, in MGH Epistolae Merovingici et Karolingici Aevi, IV (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925), 10.

94

Skinner

divine word, and carefully store this remedy in the cupboard of your mind … .]56 A metaphor, certainly, but it hints at some very simple wound management open to those less well-educated than Fulbert and his circle: cutting away bad flesh, cauterizing but then applying emollients to the wound, before adding honey, which both protected and healed with its antiseptic qualities.57 So who might undertake such tasks? At the highest social level, kings were clearly attended by physicians, who might treat even their most superficial injuries. For example, when a fragile wooden arcade collapsed on Emperor Louis the Pious and his attendants in 817, the king’s wounds – a bruised chest, an injury to the back of his right ear, and an injury to his groin from a piece of flying wood – were quickly dealt with “through the diligence of his physicians (medicorum),” and he was able to go hunting less than three weeks later.58 Louis’s eponymous son, Louis the German, also met with misfortune, falling from a second story; not giving his physicians enough time to heal him, however, he then had to have rotting flesh cut out from his (unspecified) wounds and remained laid up at Aachen.59 Beyond the court, however, personal surgeons were rare. Given the access to culinary ingredients, knives, and needles mentioned in texts about wounds, however, it may not be too far-fetched to suggest that the healers for most cuts and abrasions were the wives and daughters of injured men, but even they might not have tackled more serious head and facial injuries.60 The German chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg (d.1018) commented, for example, that he was made permanently “ridiculous” by his childhood broken nose and the damage caused by a fistula on his cheek.61 56

57 58 59

60 61

The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. and trans. F. Behrends (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), Letter 71. Such metaphors predate the medieval period of course: Foucault, Care of the Self, 55, quotes Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius 64.8, outlining much the same scalpel and soothing procedure. For a detailed discussion on the use of honey in healing wounds, see: Ilana Krug, “The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine,” in this volume, 194–214. Annales Regni Francorum, for the year 817: MGH SS rer. Ger. VI, ed. G.H. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1895). Annales Bertiniani, for the year 870, MGH SS I: Annales et Chronica Aevi Carolini, ed. G.H. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1826): “minus necessario curari a medicis sustinens, computrescentem carnem ab eisdem medicis secari fecit.” Discussing a much later period, Camporesi attributes surgical skills to tailors and furriers, but he does not explore the gender dimension (Incorruptible Flesh, 152). Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, IV.75, in Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, trans. D.A. Warner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 203–4.

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

95

Where surgical expertise was required, however, was with more serious cranial injuries. The Leechbooks feature several recipes for a broken head, mainly consisting of applied remedies, but there is also concern to remove bone fragments, suggesting some confidence that a patient might be saved.62 Other evidence supports the idea that such injuries, often caused by blows with blunt instruments or the impact of thrown stones, were considered treatable. Turning to the early medieval law codes again, the Alamannic code of the seventh century assumes that a physician will be called to treat the injury and, more pertinently in a legal context, to testify to its severity. The law continues that if the brain is exposed “ut medicus cum pinna aut cum fanone cervella tetigit” [so that the medic touches/treats it with a cloth”],63 the fine is heavier, and that if brains are spilt “ut medicus cum medicamentum aut sirico stupavit et postea sanavit, et hoc probatum est” [so that the medic plugs it with medicines and silk and afterwards it heals and this is proven] (LA, 60.6–7), a still heavier fine will ensue. The apparent “care” of the wound here is tantalizing. The high-value cloth used by the medic to bind the head may indicate the severity of the wound (and the price for mending it), or the use of “silk” might imply suturing. Either way, the incredulity that might greet survival is underlined by the “if this is proven” at the end of the clause. Surviving such a serious wound, undergoing treatment, and being capable, thereafter, of bringing a case for assault was probably so rare as to arouse both wonder and suspicion. Early archaeological evidence suggests, however, that even serious head wounds were survivable, and that some must have been treated. Literary sources, too, portray survivors, such as Wulf Wonreding in Beowulf, who, though injured by a “keen wound” from a sword to his head through his helmet, was, nevertheless, “bound up” and recovered from it (ll. 2973–6). Exploring the later world of Crusader surgeons, Piers Mitchell cites a survey of cemetery evidence from early medieval Germany, in which approximately thirty of the deceased had cranial fractures and three-quarters of these had healed, indicating survival. Similarly, two warrior burials recently found in central Italy showed severe, but partly healed, head traumas.64 Had these men received 62 63

64

Leechbook I, 38, at 91; Leechbook II, 33, at 327. Also see: Banham and Voth, “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds,” in this volume. Pinna and fanone are both translated by the editor of the laws as “cloth” (pinna being read as panna), but Leechbook II, 33, does include application of a salve to a shoulder wound using a feather, and a skull injury might, therefore, be treated just as delicately. In Chirurgia (c. 1180), Roger Frugard recommends just such a procedure for treating skull fractures. See Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste,’” 509–10. Piers Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 112; M. Rubini and P. Zaio, “Warriors from

96

Skinner

care from a surgeon? Certainly there would have been a need to remove splinters of skull, and in the German cases, there was some evidence of additional trepanation (drilling, lifting, or scraping of surrounding bone to remove impacted fragments), which appears in other early medieval contexts.65As Mitchell comments, further work on archaeological sites can only expand the sample of remains to inform our knowledge of the survivability of head injuries sustained in warfare. The geographical distribution of the archaeological samples, however, does point to the availability of surgery across a wide area. But how was a survivor treated? Ironically, a healed hole in the skull was probably the least noticeable injury: the scalp would, eventually, cover the site, and provided that the trauma had not affected the brain (one of the major reasons why trepanation took place was precisely to relieve the pressure of depressed fractures on the cerebrum), the victim might not appear permanently disfigured. However, facial injuries and other visible wounds, such as maimed or missing ears, seem to have attracted the comment of writers who then felt compelled to provide the rationale for the victim’s appearance. This is clearly linked to the judicial punishments mentioned earlier. A mutilated ear, whether accidental, acquired in battle, or removed as penalty, offered the potential for misinterpretation. The Bavarian code of the early seventh century, for example, discusses several injuries to the ear which, if maimed, would exinde turpis appareat “appear shameful” (LBai 4.14). This particular sign of shame extended beyond the western European kingdoms. The ninth-century Byzantine chronicler Theophanes reproduces a story relating to the fifth-century patrician Illos, whose right ear was cut off in an assassination attempt: “ἰαθεὶς δὲ τὴν πληγὴν ἐφόρει καμελαύκιν. καὶ ᾐτήσατο τὸν βασιλέα ἐπὶ τὴν ἀνατολὴν ἀπελθεῖν διὰ τὸ τοὺς ἀέρας ἀλλάξαι, ὅτι ἠσθένη ἐκ τῆς πληγῆς”66 [When he was cured of the wound, he used to wear a cap. He asked the emperor to send him to the East so that he could enjoy a change of air because he was weak from the wound].67 This story is told as a prelude to a later rebellion by the same man.

65

66 67

the East: Skeletal Evidence of Warfare from a Lombard-Avar Cemetery in Central Italy (Campochiaro, Molise, 6th-8th century AD),” Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 1551–1559. Stuart Mays, “A Possible Case of Surgical Treatment of Cranial Blunt Force Injury from Medieval England,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16.2 (2006): 95–103, reports a case from the site of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire from the tenth/eleventh century, in which the skull surrounding the injury hole had clearly been scraped to permit lifting of the damaged bone. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae: Theophanes volumen I, ed. B.G. Niebuhr (Bonn: Weber, 1839), 198. The Chronicle of Theophanes, AM5972 (479/80CE).

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

97

It seems pretty clear that Illos was dishonored by his wound (and the circumstances in which it was acquired) and actually withdrew, not for health reasons, but to render his lack of ear, which he tried to hide with a cap, even less visible. Already without honor, the text implies, and, thus, precisely the sort of man who would betray the emperor. That this potential association persisted in Western as well as Eastern thought is suggested by a passage from Thietmar of Merseburg’s Chronicon, in which he comments that Bishop Michael of Regensburg had lost an ear in battle, but “his mutilation brought him no shame but great honor.”68 The bishop’s lack of an ear would have been apparent (unless, of course, he wore his hair long, unlikely in a cleric). But since he acquired the injury in battle, it may have been important to emphasize this. Raoul attests to the continued power of the lack of ear to signal shame. Deprived of his ear by Gautier, Bernier exclaims: “Dex vrais peres, qe ferai qant sor mon droit l’orelle perdu ai? Se ne me venge, ja mais lies ne serai!” [Oh God our true father what shall I do now that I have lost my ear even though I am in the right? If I don’t avenge myself I’ll never be happy again!] (232, 4832–4, 298–9). This episode might be played out in the late-twelfth century section of the text, but the equation of loss of ears with loss of honor had a long history, which may explain why the apparently minor injury to Louis the Pious’ ear was, nevertheless, mentioned and explained. While the link with possible criminality might be a reason to conceal some head and face wounds, the key to understanding seems to be the implied loss of dignity, honor, and masculinity. Being beaten or disfigured suggested a humiliating inability to defend oneself. Mutilating defeated enemies – such as Cnut’s apparent cruelty to his Anglo-Saxon hostages in 1014 – was simply an extreme end of the continuum, and, in this case, interpreted as the unjust action of a foreigner against defenseless men.69 At the other end, losing a fight was just as shameful. In the words of Law 41 of the Lombard King Rothari: if a man who was essentially minding his own business (literally, “standing or walking along”) was seized and beaten up without the king’s permission, a fine of half what would have been paid had he been killed was payable, since “in turpe et inde risiculum ipsius eum male tractavit” [he drags that man evilly into shame and derision].70 That is, a man with visible signs of being beaten 68

69

70

Thietmar, Chronicon, 2.27, in Ottonian Germany, 112. “...et fuit eiusdem mutilation non ad dedecus, sed ad honorem magis,” MGH SSRG n.s. IX, ed. Robert Holtzmann (Berlin: ­Weidman, 1935), 72. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tr. G.N. Garmonsway (London: Dent, 1972), s.a. 1014 (E), 145. The E version says Cnut cut off the hands and noses of his hostages, the C and D versions that he took their ears as well. MGH LL IV: Leges Langobardorum, Edictus 41, 20.

98

Skinner

would suffer humiliation, which required a hefty monetary compensation to prove that the attack was not the result of some fault of his. Raoul underscores the need for restoration or retribution in its presentation of Raoul’s treatment of Bernier: “Il a saisi un grant tronçon d’espié … par maltalent l’a contremont drecié – fiert Berneçon qant il l’ot aproichié, par tel vertu le chief li a brisié, sanglant en ot son ermine delgié” [Raoul seized a big spear shaft … angrily raised it up high and hit young Bernier as he approached, fetching his head such a powerful crack that his delicate ermine was showered with blood] (84, 1535–40). Bernier, desperate to avenge this assault with a blunt weapon, “… d’un siglaton a la teste bendee. Il vest l’auberc don’t la maille est feree, et lace l’elme, si a çainte l’espee” [bandaged his head with a piece of fine cloth. He puts on his coat of iron mail, then laces on his helmet and girds his sword] (88, 1620–22), and with de la face … le sanc raier “the blood pouring from his face” (89, 1665–7) tells his father what happened: “‘Me geri il d’un baston de poumier/Tous sui sanglans desq’al neu del baier’” [“Raoul hit me with a stick of apple-wood, I am all bloody down to the clasp on my belt”] (89, 1680–1). Ultimately, Bernier’s injury leaves him with a recognizable scar, an important plot device in a later romantic interlude (299, 6921), but his impetuous refusal of his father’s advice (91, 1760–1) to rest and receive medical care for the injury (echoing Louis the German’s impatience) may offer further insight into a medieval mentality in which even temporary incapacity and inability to perform as a warrior was to be feared. It is, therefore, not surprising to read ambivalence about cases of disfigurement also in historical narratives, with a need to recount its circumstances. For example, the Annals of St. Bertin record for the year 864: Carolus iuvenis … noctu rediens de venatione in silva Cotia iocari cum aliis iuvenibus et coaevis suis putans, operante diabolo ab Albuino iuvene in capite spatha percutitur pene usque ad cerebrum; quae plaga a tempore sinistro usque ad malam dextrae maxillae pervenit. [Young Charles … while he only meant to enjoy some horseplay with other young men of his own age … was struck in the head with a sword by a youth named Albuin. The blow penetrated almost as far as the brain, reaching from his left temple to his right cheekbone and jaw…]71 71

Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 864, in MGH SS 1: Annales et Chronica Aevi Carolini, ed. G.H. Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1826), 462. English translation in The Annals of St Bertin, tr. J.L. Nelson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 111–112.

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

99

Charles was the grandson of Louis the Pious, but despite the account recording the injury (and its after-effects: Charles was said to have suffered a “disturbance of the brain” and to have had epileptic fits for the remaining two years of his life), it has nothing at all to say about the care he received. However, two elements of the report need to be highlighted: first, that the major injury Charles received was presented as accidental – there was no hint in the source that his assailants intended to injure him (and, thus, no reference in the annals to compensation being demanded); and second, Charles appears not to have been dishonored by his injury – in fact his father made provision for him to receive an honorable position, as sub-king of Aquitaine, for the two remaining years of his life. Yet contemporaries disagreed on this: while the St. Bertin annals present the injury as accidental and remain silent on the issue of honor, Ado of Vienne (d. 870) reports that Charles was molestatus et dehonestatus “troubled and dishonored” by his injury.72 Moreover, Regino of Prum (d. 915) tells a rather different story of the incident, saying that Charles provoked Albuin’s attack “out of the levity of youth” and that his assailant struck him on the head with his sword, leaving him half-dead with a vultu deformatus “deformed face.”73 Young warriors were, it seems, expected to practice their skills even in peace time – The Song of Roland mentions young warriors practicing their swordplay in passing (laisse 8.113) – but the results of over-exuberance (as in Charles’s case) or perhaps of inexperience in feinting blows meant that this could be as dangerous as real warfare. Raoul features another scene of practice/horseplay with fatal results: Cil chevalier commencent a jouer a l’escremie por lor cors deporter. Tant i joerent a mal l’estut torner – apres lor giu lor covint aïrer : les fix Ernaut i covint mort jeter, cel de Doai qi tant fist a loer. [The knights started a round of fencing to amuse themselves. They played so eagerly things were bound to go wrong – their fun inevitably turned to sorrow. The sons of Ernault, the praiseworthy lord of Douai, were fated to meet their deaths there] (27, 370–375).

72 73

Ex Adonis Archiepiscopi Viennensis Chronico, ed. I. de Arx, MGH SS II (Hanover: Hahn, 1829), 323. Reginonis Abbatis Prumiensis Chronicon s.a. 870, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SS rer. Germ, vol. 50 (Hanover: Hahn, 1890), 101.

100

Skinner

Accidents, however, always had repercussions, as William Ian Miller has illustrated using examples from Icelandic sagas.74 It is clear that accidents could be misinterpreted as intentional acts, and that even if they were not, they still damaged honor. According to the evidence, many wounds to the head and face injuries seem to have been a source of shame or humiliation, and they demand a different way of looking at battle scars, which are traditionally associated with heroic behavior.75 The latent or open reciprocity of masculine violence in early medieval European society meant that, far from being markers of a warrior’s prowess, scars bore testimony to being hit or failing to defend oneself. And the younger a man was, the longer he would have to bear the stigma of his wounds.76 The only way out of such disgrace was to be able to point to the worse fate (preferably death) of the victim’s assailant – “you think this is bad? You should see the other guy!” Hence, Charles’s dishonor at the hands of Albuin may have been compounded by the fact that his assailant (according to Regino) fled, well aware of what he had done. Emperor Heraclius, caught on the lip by a Persian spear, dispatched his opponent, thereby maintaining (in Theophanes’ text, at least) his heroic reputation. The fictional Thierry, nicked on the cheek and forehead, killed his opponent, Pinabel. And the life (and honor) of Wulf Wonreding, seriously wounded and, thus, unable to kill his attacker, was saved by his brother Eofor. Despite the best efforts of legislators to encourage or impose financial compensation, physical revenge was still, it seems, a preferable marker of the man.77 74

75

76

77

William I. Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 51–68. Rachel Kellett examines the lethal potential for arranged duels in medieval fencing manuals. See: “‘…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zuo der brust’: The Placement and Consequences of Swordblows in Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-century Fencing Manual,” 128–49, in this volume. R. Sowerby, “The Wounded Man: Battle Scars and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England” (paper presented at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, 2009), came to a similar conclusion. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe (London: Routledge, 2006), 31, makes the parallel point about the greater negative impact of physical impairment on the young. Gregory of Tours recounts an episode of violence between a father, Waddo, and his son, as the son tries to persuade his father not to pursue a feud. Waddo, “calling him soft and cowardly, threw his axe and nearly struck his brain, but he partly parried the blow and escaped injury”: GT 9.35. What would have happened had Waddo inflicted a scarring but not fatal blow? But it was not entirely driven by uncontrolled, irrational emotion, as the essays in Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud, ed. S.A. Throop and P.R. Hyams (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), illustrate.

Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe

101

Early medieval sources are certainly not lacking in references to serious and superficial head and facial wounds, but their concern is less with the medical after-effects than with the social responses that such wounds might elicit. Legal texts in the West are remarkably consistent in their view of the wounded man – he was shamed and would want revenge unless compensated financially. Moreover, his shame was often linked to his social status – the higher a man’s social standing, the more damaging (and costly) an injury to him would be. Narrative sources, too, take care to explain visible blemishes and disfigurements, both to dissociate such injuries from similar, contemporary judicial punishments, and to save the face – literally – of the victim. Many of the examples in such sources feature rulers and clerics, groups for whom physical blemishes could provoke a challenge to their authority (and who were most likely to have access to “professional” medical care). What is conspicuously absent from the sample discussed here is any sense of the battle-scarred hero – neither Beowulf nor The Battle of Maldon include this motif, nor do later epic poems such as Roland or Raoul. It is unclear why this should be, given the prestige that bearing scars conveyed in later, masculine cultures such as the dueling culture of early modern Europe. Since head (and particularly facial) injuries were survivable, there must have been a significant number of scarred men living in medieval communities – the archaeology supports this view. The reticence of early medieval writers on the subject, and the concomitant lack of written evidence for surgical intervention, suggests either that face wounds were a delicate subject (at least at the level of the elite) and/or that they were so commonplace that they, and the care they received, merited little comment.78 78

Research for this paper was supported by the Wellcome Trust, grant no 097469.

102

Macinnes

Chapter 4

Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403 Iain A. MacInnes

Fourteenth-century Scotland was dominated by war. Although far from constant across the whole kingdom, conflict nonetheless became largely endemic during the Anglo-Scottish wars (1296–1403). The Scottish Wars of Independence have, therefore, provided fertile ground for discussion of medieval Scottish warfare that continues to have both academic and popular appeal. For all that has been written about this period, little, however, has been produced regarding the realities of war, the impact that it had on the individual soldier, or the wounds suffered by those who engaged in these conflicts.1 Similarly, little has been considered in relation to the possibility of wounded warriors recovering from their injuries, and the wider theme of lethality in Anglo-Scottish warfare more generally. This lacuna is based in part on a lack of archaeological evidence; only one (late) medieval Anglo-Scottish battlefield has been examined in any detail (Flodden, 1513).2 Scottish written sources are also largely devoid of the kind of evidence provided in comparative English administrative evidence.3 Historians of medieval England have access to, for example, records of 1 For a recent consideration of such themes, see: Alastair J. Macdonald, “Courage, Fear and the Experience of the Later Medieval Scottish Soldier,” Scottish Historical Review 92.2 (2013): 179–206. 2 Tony Pollard and Neil Oliver, Two Men in a Trench: Battlefield Archaeology – The Key to Unlocking the Past (London, 2002), 118–82. Recent archaeological work at Stirling Castle has uncovered a number of bodies, dated to around the time of the Wars of Independence, which display apparent weapon injuries. More detailed analysis of this evidence is yet to be published. See: Jo Buckberry, Janet Montgomery, and Julia Lee-Thorp, “Death During the Scottish Wars of Independence: An Osteological and Isotopic Analysis of Medieval Individuals from Stirling Castle, Scotland,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 153.558 (2014): 86. 3 Some archaeological and historical analysis has been possible in Scotland in relation to medieval hospitals. See: Sharp Practice 2: The Second Report on Researches into the Medieval Hospital at Soutra, Lothian Region, Scotland, ed. Brian Moffat and Joy Fulton (Edinburgh: Soutra Hospital Archaeoethnopharmacological Research Project, 1988); John Durkan, “Care of the Poor: Pre-Reformation Hospitals,” Innes Review 10.2 (1959): 268–280; David Hamilton, The Healers: A History of Medicine in Scotland (Edinburgh: Pelican, 1981), 19–21.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_006

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

103

crown physicians and of hospital patients, as well as records of pensions paid to both doctors and those injured on the battlefield. Even here, studies of such records have focused predominantly on individual doctors’ careers and the development of contemporary medicine.4 Less work has been undertaken on the relationship between fourteenth-century Anglo-Scottish warfare and the subsequent treatment of its casualties.5 While a general lack of bureaucratic evidence for medieval Scotland is an issue, there are other sources that can fill the void in the historiographical narrative. Literary sources in particular provide at times quite extraordinarily detailed descriptions of battlefield injury, but these chronicles have until now received little attention. This may be due in part to the status of the texts themselves. John Barbour’s Bruce, for example, written between around 1372 and 1390, is more romance than chronicle and was written to entertain a courtly audience rather than accurately record events.6 While recognizing the deficiencies and problems inherent in such sources, they remain, however, invaluable contemporary accounts of the more practical elements of medieval warfare.7 It is, therefore, contemporary Scottish and English narrative sources that form the basis of this investigation into the types of injuries sustained by fourteenth-century warriors. Through such evidence, it is apparent that missile-weapon injuries were a common occurrence, although these were likely survivable in a majority of cases. Wounds inflicted by bladed weapons, as well as by spears and lances, appear to have been less common, but resulted in 4 Charles H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England (London: Oldbourne, 1967); Stanley Rubin, Medieval English Medicine (New York: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1974); Edward J. Kealey, Medieval Medicus: A Social History of Anglo-Norman Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Faye M. Getz, Healing and Society in Medieval England: A Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1991); Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud: Sutton, 1997). 5 See: Macdonald, “Courage,” 199–202. For consideration of a different theatre of war and the treatment of wartime casualties, see: Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds, and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapters 3 and 5. 6 John Barbour, The Bruce, ed. A.A.M. Duncan (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997), 2–8. Hereafter, Bruce [Duncan]. For discussion of Barbour and his audience, see: L.A. Ebin, “John Barbour’s Bruce: Poetry, History, and Propaganda,” Studies in Scottish Literature 9 (1972): 218–47; Sonja Cameron, “Keeping the Customer Satisfied: Barbour’s Bruce and a Phantom Division at Bannockburn,” in The Polar Twins, ed. Edward J. Cowan and Douglas Gifford (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1999), 61–74, at 70–1. 7 Kelly DeVries, “The Use of Chronicles in Recreating Medieval Military History,” in Journal of Medieval Military History 2 (2004): 1–15.

104

Macinnes

greater numbers of fatalities. In spite of examples of battlefield casualties, however, it is also clear that medical treatment was available to such men. The evidence of medical practice and practitioners suggests that Scottish doctors were employed on the battlefield, and some lords even provided doctors to aid the recovery of their own troops. In the sources themselves, it is clear that the perspective offered by medieval chroniclers on contemporary combat is problematic. Chronicles often provide detailed descriptions of warfare, but these were usually written by men who were not themselves warriors or even eye-witnesses to the events described. Some works were written to please a specific audience, leading to flattering depictions of patrons and their families. A major element of such narratives of war is the specific depiction of the chivalric hero that focuses on heroic deeds, and it is unsurprising that in this literary environment heroic deaths were also recorded in detail. 8 These accounts of warrior deaths, invariably including the injuries that led to them, have not, however, been the focus of much historical analysis, although they are the focus of a great deal of this volume. In part, this is a result of historians’ fears of chronicle exaggeration. As Kelly DeVries suggests, “warfare … is a dramatic event. In order to reflect that, the chroniclers often write dramatically.”9 Chroniclers are also accused of focusing solely on the elite to the detriment of the “common man” and of exaggerating losses amongst the opposition while moderating the losses of their own side.10 Such “dramatization” does not, however, mean that chronicle accounts of combat and resultant injuries should be discounted. Indeed, chronicle descriptions are often resonant of the cut and thrust of battle and include the sort of detail that would have appealed to warriors themselves. They provide a realistic alternative to the more flowery depictions of conflict in contemporary romance, many of which are seriously unrealistic, and they do not recoil from sanguinary accounts of the realities of medieval warfare. Literary accounts also stress the physicality of warfare, for even if a soldier was not himself wounded in battle, he would have felt the exertion of his efforts. An account of the physical exhaustion of battle is provided by the Scottish chronicler, John of Fordun, who, in describing the battle of Roslin (1302), writes that:

8 9 10

Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: A&C Black, 2004), 99–111. DeVries, “Use of Chronicles,” 10. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 108, 139.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

105

utriusque exercitus post dira lancearum vulnera, sæva flagella, et clavarum ictus durissimos, numero centeni quadrageni, et viceni, alternis vicibus, pro lassitudine confusi pugnæ diurnæ, ad montes, vel alia apta loca, de acie se retraherent, et ventis oppositi, et galeis reversis ex aere refrigerati, remotis equis vulneratis, et aliis recentibus ascensis, contra inimicorum insultus redderentur fortiores (Chronica Gentis Scotorum, 335). [some of either host, after awful spear-thrusts, savage flail-strokes, and hard cudgeling, withdrew from the ranks, by hundreds, forties, and twenties, to the hills, time after time, fagged out and dazed by the day’s fighting. There they would throw back their helmets, and let the winds blow upon them; and after having been thus cooled by the breeze, they would put away their wounded horses, and, mounting other fresh ones, would thus be made stronger against the onslaughts of the foe] (Chron. Fordun, 327–8).11 Considering that this particular incident occurred after a second successive English assault on the Scottish lines, it is unsurprising that fatigue had started to take its toll. Describing the same engagement, the chronicler Walter Bower includes additional reasons for the Scottish soldiers’ exhaustion: et tum pro fatigacione itineris et vigiliarum necnon et cibi defectu multipliciter lassati, tum pro continuis pugnandi laboribus calefacti, amotis cassidibus ad exponendum se ventis secedentes, tum pro ictuum tunsionibus et vulnerum vehementer afflicti tedere ceperunt, et ultra quam credi potest animo pervere, et fugam capere se paraverunt [greatly worn out by the fatigue of their journey, lack of sleep and also by lack of food, and overheated by the continual toil of battle, they had removed their helmets and gone apart to expose themselves to the fresh air; grievously affected by bruises from blows which they had received

11

Johannis de Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871), 1:335; translation in John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872) [hereafter Chron. Fordun], 327–8. Relevant page numbers are given for each in parentheses in the text.

106

Macinnes

and by their wounds, they began to falter, lose heart more than one would credit, and make ready to flee] (Chron. Bower, 6:294–5).12 Having faced two English attacks, the soldiers involved would likely have welcomed the opportunity to rest and attend to their wounds.13 Bower builds on Fordun’s earlier account, but his addition of detail regarding the injuries suffered by the Scots is a crucial element that suggests a more rigorous attempt to reflect the realities of combat experience. Chronicle and literary accounts emphasize the close-quarter aspect of fighting and the injuries sustained in the melee. In these depictions, it would appear that chroniclers attempted to recreate as realistically as possible the battlefield environment. John Barbour writes of the battle of Loudon Hill (1307) that: Quhar men mycht her sic a breking Off speris that to-fruschyt war And the woundyt sa cry and rar That it anoyus wes to her For thai that fyrst assemblyt were Fwyngyt and faucht full sturdely … with speris that scharply schar Thai stekit men and stedis baith Till rede blud ran off woundis raith. [There men could hear such a breaking of spears that were smashed, and the wounded shouting and bawling so [loud] that it was horrible to hear, for those who were at the battle-face thrust and fought very sturdily … they impaled both men and horses with spears that sheared sharply, till red blood soon ran from the wounds] (Bruce [Duncan], 306–7). Similarly, the suffering of the injured is recreated through descriptions that “hydwysly begouth the cry / For thai that fellyt or stekyt war / Hidwysly gan cry 12

13

Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. Donald E.R. Watt, et al. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987–98), 6:294–5. Hereafter, Chron. Bower. For further description of this battle, see: Andrew of Wyntoun, The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1872–9), 2:355–8. Hereafter, Chron. Wyntoun. Modern scientific study has suggested that the weight of a warrior’s armor affected his breathing which, when engaged in a physical struggle, would potentially have fatigued soldiers more quickly, and would explain the need to rest and remove their helmets to breathe better. See: Graham N. Askew, Federico Formenti, and Alberto E. Minetti, “Limitations Imposed by Wearing Armor on Medieval Soldiers’ Locomotor Performance,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, Biological Sciences 279 (2012): 640–4, at 642.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

107

and rar” [cries arose hideously, for those who were struck down or wounded shouted and bellowed with great roaring] (Bruce [Duncan], 394–5). Far from a romanticized vision of war, Barbour captures the frenzy of combat and the cacophony of sound in the battle. Moralistic monastic writers may have deliberately sought to project such an image of war in an attempt to dissuade warriors from fighting at all. Scottish writers, although they were themselves mainly religious men, appear instead to have utilized a more secular style of writing that focused on creating a realistic image of war. Often they used details acquired through discussions with warriors who had themselves been present at the action described, or based their works on other written sources such as family histories.14 The use of other literary material is made explicit in Bower’s inclusion of a poem in his chronicle, written after Bannockburn by an English poet who went north with Edward II to immortalize the battle. Finding himself forced to write a rather different account of a Scottish victory, he provides a distinctly bloody description of the fighting he appears to have witnessed: Imbre sagittali minuatur ab inguine sanguis! Turbine letali stimulet joculator ut anguis! Hasta teres fodiat proceres, spargenda cruorem, missilibus cum pernicibus renovando dolorem! Timba securi pectora cruri scindere curet. Tela vibravit; sic superabit si bene duret. Murco patet; nil posse latet pro marte valere. [Let blood be drawn from the groin by an arrowy shower! Let the spearmen sting like a snake with a lethal tornado! Let the smooth-shafted spear pierce the leaders, spilling gore, renewing anguish with deadly missiles! Let the billman use his axe with care to sever trunk from leg. He will brandish shafts; so he will overcome if he stoutly perseveres. The sword-point is conspicuous; it is not perceived that nothing avails for the combat] (Chron. Bower, 6:370–1). This lurid description of the types of injuries sustained by those involved at Bannockburn once again points to a determination, even in poetic works, to provide an account that was realistic in tone and image. Writer and audience expectation that such injuries were an inevitable consequence of combat explains, in part, the astonishment exhibited by Scottish writers at the fate of 14

Bruce [Duncan], 14–16.

108

Macinnes

those Bruce Scots who died at Dupplin Moor (1332). Here “multo plures ex collisione corporum, confricacione armorum, et prostracione equorum se invicem opprimencium, sine vulnere ceciderunt, quam qui telo vel gladio jugulati sunt” [many more died without a wound in the collision of bodies, the friction of armor, and the stumbling of horses as they were crushed against each other, than were killed by a missile or sword] (Chron. Bower, 7:78–9). Little wonder that chroniclers from both sides perceived the hand of God at work in these events as either “a miracle of God” to the English or as “divine revenge” to the Scots.15 In spite of the realistic portrayal of combat offered by contemporary writers, it is without doubt that they also reveled in the heroism of their protagonists and that this could lead to more overtly dramatized accounts of events. The ability to both give and receive vicious blows was demonstrative of masculine strength, knightly skill, and bravery, and was a topos used often by writers.16 Barbour’s description of James Douglas’s attack on Edward III’s camp during the Weardale Campaign (1327) describes the Scots being met by “ane with a club in hand / And sua gret a rout till him raucht / That had nocht bene his mekill maucht / And his rycht soverane manheid / Intill that place he had bene dede” [a man with a club in his hand [who] came and struck [Douglas] such mighty blows that, if it had not been for his great strength and his supreme manliness, he would have died in that place] (Bruce [Duncan], 728–9). Other Scottish writers used similar imagery in their accounts. Bower constructs a scene in his Scotichronicon in which an English herald argues in front of Edward II and his knights that Robert I should be considered one of the preeminent warriors of his day: Vidistis, ut estimo, prout ego vidi … huius animosissimi regis Roberti non semel sed sepius in bellis ferocissimis scutum divulsum, galiam conquassatam, ruptam lanceam, ebetem ensem, loricam perforatam et faciem vulneratam, cedentis nichilominus et insequentis, fugantis et persequentis, occidentis inimicos suos et comprehendentis, et donec deficerent, non revertentis. 15 16

Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, ed. Herbert E. Maxwell (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1907), 91; Chron. Bower, 7:77–9. Stephen Atkinson analyzes Malory’s catalogues of wounds in the Morte Darthur in this volume. See: “‘They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …’: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” 519–43. For a discussion of head wounds delivered in battle in Malory’s source, the Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur, see in this volume: Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 496–518.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

109

[You have seen, I reckon, as I have seen … the shield of this most spirited King Robert shattered not once but often in the fiercest of battles, together with his helmet smashed, his lance broken, his sword blunted, his coat of mail pierced, and his face wounded, as he nevertheless kept on killing and following up his enemies, routing and pursuing them, striking them down and making them prisoner, and not turning back until they surrendered] (Chron. Bower, 7:52–5). The king’s ability to continue to fight, in spite of the manifest injuries he had suffered and the damage sustained to his weapons and armor, exemplified strength and courage in combat. Bower was equally complimentary to figures other than the king. Describing a border skirmish at Carham (c. 1377), Bower writes of the heroic actions of John Gordon of Gordon who “diversis vulneribus sauciatus, et quinque quasi vicibus in illo conflictu devictus” [had been afflicted with various wounds, [and] was beaten about five times in that conflict] (Chron. Bower, 7:370–1). In spite of sustaining such injuries, his continued bravery and refusal to submit inspired his men to rally and defeat their English opponents. In their desire to emphasize the heroism of their protagonists, contemporary writers did, on occasion, describe extraordinary and even wholly unbelievable acts of physical exertion on the battlefield. In such instances, these sources ascribe to the tropes of medieval romance, which were often at pains to describe in detail the full extent of blood spilled in the midst of combat.17 The same is true of chroniclers of events in Scotland, where writers also incorporated romance-like descriptions of superhuman strength and violence in their narratives. Recounting a skirmish at Edinburgh in 1335 when the count of Namur was ambushed by John Randolph and his men, Bower described the actions of one Scottish knight, David Annan, following an injury: Qui viso suo proprio cruore, acriori propterea ira succensus, vires suas collegit et equester stans strepis erectus bipennem grandem tamquam alter Corineus rotando circumduxit, et se vulnerantem tam violento ictu percussit ut armum eius ab humero et per scapulos equi usque non solum bases vel ungulas eius sed usque ad resistenciam duri silicis per medium dissecuit, sicut vestigium eius patet adhuc in petra. 17

George F. Jones, “The Treatment of Bloodshed in Medieval and Modern Literature,” Studia Neophilologica 70.1 (1998): 83–88, at 84–5. In this volume, see: Barbara Goodman, “Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair,” 544–71.

110

Macinnes

[Seeing his own blood, and inflamed on this account by bitter anger, he gathered his strength, and standing upright on horseback in his stirrups, he swung round a great battle-axe like another Corynaeus, and struck the man who had wounded him with such a violent blow that he cut his upper arm from his shoulder, and cut down through the middle of the shoulder-blades of the horse not only to its feet or hooves, but until he struck the hard rock, as the trace of this still remains in the stone] (Chron. Bower, 7:112–3). The assertion that the mark made in the stone by Annan’s axe was still visible almost a century later may be an attempt to add a sense of veracity to Bower’s tale. The notion of a man cutting through both rider and horse with one blow, however, is beyond reasonable belief, although the incident is resonant of the extraordinary feats of strength performed by heroes of chivalric romance. In a similar fashion, Barbour’s Bruce depicts the titular hero fighting and winning a series of engagements single-handedly against multiple foes. In these episodes, the catalogue of injuries inflicted by Robert I on his enemies is extensive, including: cutting off one man’s arm and shoulder; splitting three men’s skulls to their brains; shooting a man in the eye with a crossbow bolt; decapitating two separate opponents; cutting off a man’s ear and cheek, as well as part of his shoulder; cutting another man’s arm off; and, finally, attacking an opponent “on sic wys / That he the bak strak evyn in twa” [in such a way that he split his back precisely in two] (Bruce [Duncan], 280–1).18 These descriptions portrayed the narrative hero in a particularly strong and brave light, but as with the Annan episode, the superhuman strength required to exact such injury should not be taken as a realistic depiction of medieval combat at all times. Still, archaeological evidence does suggest that amputation as a result of a weapon blow was at least possible, in spite of the various layers of protection worn by combatants.19 Such evidence suggests that the accounts of men such as Barbour and Bower may at least have been based on actual occurrences that were manipulated and exaggerated by the authors in such instances for dra18 19

Also Chron. Bower, 6:116–8, 220–2, 254. M.R. Geldof considers the archaeological evidence found in a mass grave from the battle of Towton (1461), in relation to other skeletal remains that show signs of healed wounds in addition to the wounds that ultimately resulted in death, and Robert C. WoosnamSavage and Kelly DeVries examine the wounds found on the recently discovered remains of King Richard III. See: Geldof, “‘And describe the shapes of the dead’: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence,” 57–80, and Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” 27–56, in this volume.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

111

matic effect.20 It is in examples such as these that chronicles can be perceived as more romance than history. Such instances should not, however, be allowed to overwhelm the far more realistic view of medieval combat depicted in a greater number of episodes, many of which provide important detail on injuries sustained by contemporaries. Missile fire was amongst the greatest cause of battlefield injury. The head in particular was a prominent target in combat, and one particularly susceptible to injury as a result of archery fire.21 Various historical examples reflect the danger posed to the face by arrows.22 During the Scottish capture of Roxburgh Castle (1314), the castellan, Guillemin de Fiennes, was described as being “impeded” by volleys of Scottish archery and wounded “sa felly in the face / That he wes dredand off his lyff” [so badly in the face that he feared for his life] (Bruce [Duncan], 384–5).23 In a similar position, Roger Horsley, English constable of Berwick Castle, lost an eye to an arrow during the Scottish attacks that led to its eventual submission (1318).24 In this period when English archers dominated the medieval battlefield, it was invariably the Scots who suffered particularly from English archery fire. At the battle of Dupplin Moor (1332), “victi sunt Scotti maxime per sagittarios Anglicorum, qui primam aciem Scottorum ita excæcaverunt et vulneraverunt in facie continuis ictibus sagittarum quod non poterant se juvare” (Chron. Lanercost [Stevenson], 268) [the Scots were defeated chiefly by the English archers, who so blinded and wounded the faces of the first division of the Scots by an incessant discharge of arrows, that they could not support each other] (Chron. Lanercost [Maxwell], 20

21

22

23

24

See for example: Piers D. Mitchell, Yossi Nagar, and Ronnie Ellenblum, “Weapon Injuries in the 12th Century Crusader Garrison of Vadum Iacob Castle, Galilee,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16 (2006): 145–155, at 147–8; Eugénia N. Cunha and Ana Maria Silva, “War Lesions from the Famous Portuguese Medieval Battle of Aljubarrota,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 7 (1997): 595–599, at 597–8; Simon A. Mays, “Healed Limb Amputations in Human Osteoarchaeology and their Causes: a Case Study from Ipswich, UK,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 6 (1996): 101–113, at 110. For discussion of the treatment of arrow wounds generally, and the changes in treatment over time, see: Bernd Karger, Hubert Sudhues, and Bernd Brinkmann, “Arrow Wounds: Major Stimulus in the History of Surgery,” World Journal of Surgery 25 (2001): 1550–1555. Michael Livingston gives a detailed account of the treatment of Prince Hal’s head wound, caused by an arrow to the face, in this volume. See: “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” 215–30. Barbour describes Fiennes dying of his wounds after the castle’s surrender (Bruce [Duncan], 384–5). Thomas Gray writes instead that Fiennes was killed during the assault, “slain by an arrow as he was defending the great tower” (Scalacronica [Maxwell], 51). Scalacronica [Maxwell], 58.

112

Macinnes

270).25 Similar injuries were suffered less than twelve months later when at Halidon Hill (1333) the Scots “in prima acie venientes ita fuerunt a multitudine sagittariorum Angliæ vulnerati in facie et excæcati in hoc bello … quod se ipsos adjuvare non poterant, et ideo cito faciem sagittarum ictibus avertere et cadere inceperunt” (Chron. Lanercost [Stevenson], 273–4) [were so grievously wounded in the face and blinded by the host of English archery … that they were helpless, and quickly began to turn away their faces from the arrow flights and to fall] (Chron. Lanercost [Maxwell], 279). At Neville’s Cross (1346), the Scots appear to have learned from past experience and lowered their heads so that the missile fire met their steel helmets. Despite this provision, it is clear that archery fire remained a potent threat in this battle.26 No lesser figure than King David II himself suffered two arrow wounds to the face in the Scottish defeat. English surgeons were able to remove one arrowhead embedded in his skull, but the other supposedly remained and caused the king notable pain for many years after (Chron. Bower, 7:259–61).27 Other examples from Scottish sources detail ocular injuries as a result of English archery fire. David Lindsay, earl of Crawford, was described as having lost an eye at Otterburn (1388) (Chron. Bower, 8:19). Archibald Douglas, fourth earl of Douglas, was similarly blinded in one eye at Homildon Hill (1402) (Chron. Bower, 8:49). These injuries were not, however, fatal. All three men named above went on to fight – and in Douglas’s case die – in future engagements.28 Such examples suggest that arrows were more often an impediment than they were lethal, and the evidence appears to bear this out.29 Describing the battle of Ben Cruachan (1308), Barbour writes that James Douglas and his men weakened their enemies “with arowis fast” [with swift arrows] and then “with 25

26

27 28 29

Chronicon de Lanercost, ed. Joseph Stevenson (Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1839), 268; translation in The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272–1346, ed. Herbert E. Maxwell (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1913), 270. Chronicon Galfridus le Baker de Swynebroke, ed. Edward M. Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1889), 88; Alexander Grant, “Disaster at Neville’s Cross: The Scottish Point of View,” in The Battle of Neville’s Cross 1346, ed. David Rollason and Michael Prestwich (Donington: Shaun Tyas/Paul Watkins, 1998), 15–35, at 29. For discussion of the importance of the English archery fire at Neville’s Cross, see: Robert Hardy, “The Military Archery at Neville’s Cross, 1346,” in The Battle of Neville’s Cross 1346, ed. Rollason and Prestwich, 112–31. Chron. Bower, 7:259–61; Michael Penman, David II (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2004), 138–9. Douglas would go on to lose a testicle at the battle of Shrewsbury (1403) before dying in battle at Verneuil (1424) (Chron. Bower, 8:59, 125). Twelfth-century archaeological evidence from the Latin East provides the example of a warrior suffering multiple, though not immediately fatal, arrow wounds to the neck (Mitchell, Nagar and Ellenblum, “Weapon Injuries,” 152, 150).

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

113

thar swerdis at the last / Thai ruschyt amang thaim hardely, / For thai of Lorn full manlely / Gret and apert defens gan ma” [with swords finally they rushed among them boldly because the men of Lorn put up stubborn and bold defense like men] (Bruce [Duncan], 364–5). Similarly, at Bannockburn, the Scots suffered from the “hidwys schour” [horrible shower] of steady English archery fire, the impact of which “left efter thaim taknyng / That sall ned as I trow leching” [left tokens behind them that needed medical treatment] (Bruce [Duncan], 482–3). While capable of inflicting injury, the chronicles suggest arrows were not the primary cause of death on the battlefield. This surely reflects the quality of armored equipment that protected medieval warriors, which is corroborated in part by Bower’s comment about the Scots at Homildon Hill. Under withering English archery fire, the Scots were described as being “ipsos sagittis consuerunt et ad modum erinacii hispidos reddiderunt” [smothered … with arrows [which] made them bristly like a hedgehog] (Chron. Bower, 8:46– 7). So great was the volume of English arrows that “manus et lacertos propriis Scotorum lanceis confixerunt” [they transfix[ed] the hands and arms of the Scots to their own lances] (Chron. Bower, 8:46–7). While not fatal for many, the archery fire did, however, provoke the Scots into flight when they could suffer the sustained archery attack no longer. Chroniclers recognized the effectiveness of contemporary armor to protect those suitably equipped from missile attack. Barbour writes on one occasion of Robert I fighting against numerous opponents that “Sen he we warnyst of armyng / That thar arowys thurth nocht dreid” [since [he] was protected in armor he did not need to fear their arrows] (Bruce [Duncan], 230–1). Similarly when facing three traitors, “Ne war the armyng that he had / He had bene dede foroutyn wer” [but for the armor that he wore, he would have been dead, without a doubt] (Bruce [Duncan], 268–9). In another example, however, events were more precarious. Facing three men armed with bows, the king “that dred in gret maner / Thar arowys, for he nakyt was” [had a great fear of their arrows because he was without armor] (Bruce [Duncan], 278–9). Insufficient protection led to fatalities, such as the Englishman at the battle of Glen Trool (1307) who was shot in the neck by an arrow “Till thropill and wesand yeid in twa / And doun till the erd gan ga” [until his windpipe and gullet split in two, and he fell to the ground] (Bruce [Duncan], 286). Crossbows were a particularly dangerous weapon, and although not apparently common in Anglo-Scottish combat, still claimed notable victims. William Douglas of Liddesdale “cum telo albalastri femore graviter vulneraverunt” [was seriously wounded … in the thigh with a bolt from a crossbow] (Chron. Bower, 7:142–3) during the siege of

114

Macinnes

Perth (1339), a potentially fatal injury which he was lucky to survive.30 Less fortunate was the Scottish knight William Lundie, who sustained a crossbow bolt to the face at Otterburn and died as a result of his injury (Chron. Bower, 7:419). Missile weapon wounds do appear to have been recorded most often by contemporary chroniclers, but other injuries are also at times depicted. Spear and lance wounds are represented on occasion by more general descriptions that infer the use of such weapons. There is, therefore, a recurring image along the lines of “blood burst out of … mail-coats” which was used regularly to refer to injuries sustained in the midst of the melee and which were likely caused by the spears that constituted the primary weapon of infantry forces (Bruce [Duncan], 98). Similarly, at the battle of Roslin (1302), Bower states that “quorum congressus tam ingens erat et ferox ut multi armis perforatis viva privarentur” [the English attack was so heavy and savage that many had their armor pierced and were deprived of their lives] (Chron. Bower, 6:294–5). More specific cases are also in evidence. The Scottish knight, John Stewart, who fought at the battle of Connor (1315), “Wes woundyt throu the body thar / With a sper that scharply schar” [was wounded in the body there by a spear which pierced right sharply] (Bruce [Duncan], 554–5). William Douglas of Liddesdale was injured in a skirmish with Edward III’s forces at Crichton (c. 1337) “ubi per corpus translanceatus … sed cito et feliciter convaluit” [where his body [was] transfixed with a lance … but fortunately he recovered quickly] (Chron. Bower, 7:138–9).31 Such injuries could also, however, be fatal. The Scottish knight Laurence Preston lost his life during skirmishing that occurred around the siege of Dunbar (1338). He “per os in cerebrum lancea terebratus, paulisper declinavit ad sepem, et ingnorantibus suis commilitonibus appodians sepi expiravit” [was pierced by a lance through his mouth to his brain. For a little while he bent down on to a hedge; then while leaning on this hedge he died] (Chron. Bower, 7:126–7).32 A similar result ensued when two knights fought during the skirmish of John Randolph and the count of Namur at Edinburgh (1335). Bower writes that “sese corpora lanceis transfixerunt, et sic letifero vulnere ad terram mortui ceciderunt” [they each transfixed the body of the other 30

31

32

Bower went on to say of this occurrence that “ob cuius ingentem livorem obsidentes commoti sunt” [the besiegers were upset by the great degree of malice in this action], although it is unclear why this particular action was filled with more malice than any other (Chron. Bower, 7:142–3). The translation of Wyntoun words things slightly differently, stating that “Dowglas wes strykyn throw the body; / Bot he lywyd efftyr in gud hele” [Douglas was struck through the body; / But he lived afterwards in good health] (Chron. Wyntoun, 2:448). See also: Chron. Wyntoun, 2:432–3.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

115

with their lances, and thus with a mortal wound fell dead to the ground] (Chron. Bower, 7:112–3). A particularly bizarre incident of death by lance involved William Keith at the siege of Stirling Castle (1337). Andrew Wyntoun describes Keith climbing the castle wall only to be struck by a stone thrown from the battlements. As he fell, Keith’s lance appears to have struck the ground before his body “and stekyd hym on his awyn spere: / And off that wounde sone deyde he” [and impaled him on his own spear: / And of that wound soon died he] (Chron. Wyntoun, 2:455–6).33 Tournaments were also quite prominent scenes of such injuries, primarily from lances. Patrick Ramsay and Richard Talbot fought a series of tilts on the border in the 1340s. According to Bower, Talbot “transfossus lancea domini Patricii spiritum confessus exalavit” [was run through by Sir Patrick’s lance, and after confession breathed his last] (Chron. Bower, 7:138–9). Wyntoun’s more detailed account of the same tourney describes two tilts. In the first, Talbot was struck by Graham’s lance that pierced a double layer of plate and penetrated an inch or more into Talbot’s breast. In spite of this injury, the two clashed again the following day, and, on this occasion, Talbot was killed when run through by Graham’s lance (Chron. Wyntoun, 2:444–5). The Scottish knight, William Ramsay, also perished as a result of wounds sustained in a border tournament against Henry of Lancaster, earl of Derby (c. 1342). His injury occurred when he “hasta per galiam et cerebrum transfixus” [was pierced by a lance through his helmet and brain] (Chron. Bower, 7:136–7).34 William Douglas of Liddesdale had been injured in a similar tourney with Lancaster in the previous year. In the first tilt, Douglas “brak his spere; / And a sclys off the schafft, that brak, / In till his hand a wounde can mak” [broke his spear; / And a slice of the shaft, that broke, / In to his hand a wound made] (Chron. Wyntoun, 2:44). Derby called a halt to proceedings thereafter, likely because Douglas’s injury precluded him fighting to his full potential. Rather like spears and lances, wounds caused by edged weapons (swords, daggers, and axes) are less apparent in the narrative accounts of fourteenthcentury Scottish warfare. In part, this is because some injuries are described in a more general style, hinting at a blade injury but not confirming it as being such. Additionally, the already-discussed use of armor ensured that blows from such weapons could be deflected by contemporary defensive equipment. For example, there is the case of Robert I who, during a fight, was “sery … dun espey hu pice, mais armez estoit qe ne ly greua” [struck … with a sword in the breast, but he being in armor, was not wounded] (Scalacronica [Maxwell], 33 34

See also: Chron. Bower, 7:438; Chron. Fordun, 354; Chron. Bower, 7:131. See also: Chron. Wyntoun, 2:443–4.

116

Macinnes

30).35 Examples of bladed weapon injuries that are written about may relate more to literary hyperbole than to specific injury, as Larissa Tracy explains elsewhere in this volume.36 Barbour’s description of the battle of Bannockburn, for example, relates that the Scots “with axis sic duschys gave / That thai helmys and hedis clave” [gave such blows with axes that they split heads and helmets] (Bruce [Duncan], 486–7). Barbour writes similarly of James Douglas: “For he sa fele off harnys sched / That nane that lyvys thaim can tell” [he cleft the skulls of so many that none alive can tell of them] (Bruce [Duncan], 60–1). That the hyperbolic nature of these examples may be based on some sort of reality can be suggested by comparing the above examples with the famous case of Robert I’s slaying of Henry Bohun at Bannockburn. Bohun was apparently killed by an axe-blow from Robert I: “With sua gret mayne raucht him a dynt / That nother hat na helm mycht stynt / The hevy dusche that he him gave / That ner the heid till the harnys cleve” [struck him a blow with such great force that neither hat nor helmet could stop the heavy clout that he gave him, so that he cleaved the head to his brains] (Bruce [Duncan], 450–1). The precise details of this incident are somewhat problematic. Barbour’s chivalric tale of two men meeting in a joust-like encounter on the battlefield is questioned by English chronicle description of an ambush in which Bohun was cut off and killed while trying to escape.37 Whichever story is closer to the truth, it is known that Bohun was killed on the first day of fighting at Bannockburn, and the depiction of his death resulting from an axe-blow to the head may well be correct. Other examples of bladed weapon injury include an incident from the battle of Glen Brerachan (1392). Here David Lindsay of Glen Esk, who was on horseback, was injured by a sword stroke that cut through his stirrup and boot into his foot and “straik the Lyndesay to the bane” [struck Lindsay to the bone] (Chron. Wyntoun, 3:59–60). Evidence from the Visby battlefield indicates that injuries similar to Lindsay’s were quite common, and it has been suggested that such blows were intended “to bring the opponent to the ground before finishing him off.”38 Injuries to the leg were certainly more likely to occur when a mounted warrior, such as Lindsay, fought against foot soldiers.39 In a very dif35 36 37 38

39

Scalacronica [Stevenson], 130; translation in Scalacronica [Maxwell], 30. Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste,’” 497. David Cornell, Bannockburn: The Triumph of Robert the Bruce (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 170–1. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 111. See also: Armour from the Battle of Visby, 1361, ed. Bengt Thordman, Poul Nørlund, and Bo Eric Ingelmark (Stockholm: Vitterherts Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 1939), 1:171–8. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 117.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

117

ferent example, there is the account of the Scottish capture of Roxburgh Castle (1314), in which the first Scotsman over the castle walls fought with a watchman who he “gat him be the nek but baid / And stekyt him upwart with a knyff / Quhill in his hand he left the lyff” [got … swiftly by the neck, and stabbed him upwards with a knife, until, in his hand, he gave up his life] (Bruce [Duncan], 382–3). Such close-quarter fighting, including the use of the dagger, which was itself a close-quarter combat weapon, was common in the types of sieges the Scots were involved in during this period. Considering that the majority of fortifications that fell to the Scots did so as a result of surprise attacks on unsuspecting garrisons, such injuries and fatalities were the inevitable consequence of this type of combat. Further use of archaeological evidence provides additional evidence regarding the extent of bladed weapon injuries around this period to add to the written record. Many of the bodies excavated from the Visby battlefield, for example, suffered blade injuries to the head.40 In cases of head injury, it was the depth of the wound that often dictated whether the injured would survive or not. Even those with non-fatal head wounds could succumb to post-injury infection.41 Additional archaeological examples do, however, provide numerous examples of men who exhibit healed cranial injuries, demonstrating that even quite serious head trauma was survivable.42 The longer-term consequences of such injuries, particularly to the head, ensured that those who were wounded in battle likely carried outward physical signs of their injuries. The prominent scarring and physical disability caused by such injury would have affected the warrior for the remainder of his 40

41

42

Battle of Visby, 1:160–92; Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 110. The head was perhaps at greatest risk during the flight when victorious forces mounted their horses and rode after the fleeing enemy. In such circumstances, the head was at risk from numerous blows from above. For discussion of possible evidence of this, see: Anna Kjellström, “A SixteenthCentury Warrior Grave from Uppsala, Sweden: the Battle of Good Friday,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 15 (2005): 23–50. Mirjana Roksandic, Caroline Wood, and Dejana Vlak, “Death in the Line of Duty: Late Medieval Burials at the Site of Lepenski Vir, Serbia,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 17 (2007): 635–642, at 639. See also: Piers D. Mitchell, “The Integration of the Palaeopathology and Medical History of the Crusades,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 9 (1999): 333–343, at 335–7; Natasha Powers, “Cranial Trauma and Treatment: A Case Study from the Medieval Cemetery of St. Mary Spital, London,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 15 (2005): 1–14, at 10. See: Powers, “Cranial Trauma,” 12; Caroline Wilkinson and Richard Neave, “The Reconstruction of a Face Showing a Healed Wound,” Journal of Archaeological Science 30 (2003): 1343–48; Cunha and Silva, “War Lesions,” 598; Piers D. Mitchell, “The Palaeopathology of Skulls Recovered from a Medieval Cave Cemetery near Safed, Israel (Thirteenth to Seventeenth Century),” Levant 36 (2004): 243–250, at 245.

118

Macinnes

life, although it may also have spoken paradoxically to his status as a warrior and of his experience in battle. Barbour provides an interesting discussion of the scars of battle in his account of James Douglas’s time on crusade in Spain: Amang thai strangeris was a knycht That wes haldyn sa worthi and wicht That for ane of the gud wes he Prissyt off the Cristianté, Sa fast till-hewyn was his face That it our-all ner wemmyt was. Or he the lord Douglas had sene He wend his face had wemmyt bene Bot never a hurt tharin had he. Quhen he unwemmyt gan it se He said that he had gret ferly That swilk a knycht and sa worthi And prissyt of sa gret bounté Mycht in the face unemmyt be, And said, ‘Love God, all tym had I Handis my hed for to wer.’ Quha wald tak kep to this answer Suld se in it understanding That, and he that maid asking Had handis to wer, hys face That for faute of defence sa was To-fruschyt intill placis ser Suld have may-fall left hale and fer. [Among those foreigners there was a knight who was thought so remarkably brave that he was esteemed as one of the good [fighting men] in Christendom. His face was so very badly cut that it was disfigured almost all over. Before he had seen the lord Douglas he thought that [Douglas’s] face had been scarred but [Douglas] had never been wounded there. When he saw it unscarred, he said that he was astonished that such a worthy knight, famous for his great bounty, could be unscarred on his face. [Douglas] answered him gently, and said, “Praise God, I always had hands to protect my head.” Whoever pays attention to this answer will see comprehension in it that, if he who had asked had had hands for defense, his face, which was so disfigured in many places through lack of defense, would perhaps have remained sound and hail] (Bruce [Duncan], 760–3).

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

119

This warrior parable praises the bravery of the foreign knight and recognizes that his manifold experience of combat led to serious, though not fatal injury, to his face. Such injuries were a very obvious physical marker of his experience of combat and of victories won. That the foreign knight questions Douglas’s reputation as a result of the Scottish knight’s lack of obvious scarring reinforces this perception. Barbour, however, inverts the image of the battlehardened and battle-scarred warrior, emphasizing his own hero’s superior bravery and skill in warfare.43 While the foreign knight wears his scars like a badge of honor and expresses his belief that “worthy” knights would also be scarred, Douglas subverts the foreign knight’s arrogance by asserting that he is so great a warrior he has also been able to protect his face while in battle.44 With this exchange, Barbour acknowledges the physical consequences of combat and the associations of experience and bravery that such scarring carried. He, nonetheless, eschews any suggestion that in the case of Douglas, his lack of scarring is demonstrative of a lack of military skill. Douglas had no need of the scars of battle to demonstrate his military prowess. It was rather self-evident in his actions, and in the words written by Barbour by which Douglas was memorialized for future audiences. Other forms of injury are less easily quantifiable in terms of weapon used or indeed injury sustained. Some may be considered under the heading of “blunt force trauma.” The head was particularly exposed to such injury, and may well have been deliberately targeted in battle as a means of incapacitating an enemy quickly.45 Barbour’s account of the battle of Methven (1306) describes Philip Mowbray being struck by Christopher Seton with a blow “That thocht he wes of mekill maucht / He gert him galay disyly” [that caused him to reel dizzily, although he was [a man] of great strength] (Bruce [Duncan], 102–3). He was only able to remain on horseback as a result of his saddle, and any knight knocked from his horse would have been vulnerable to attack while helpless on the ground. Mowbray suffered a similar injury fighting for the Scots at the battle of Faughart (1318). Barbour writes that Mowbray “had bene dosnyt into the fycht” [had been knocked senseless in the fight] (Bruce [Duncan], 672–3) and was dragged off the battlefield by two enemies, but recovered 43 44

45

Sonja Väthjunker, “A Study of the Career of Sir James Douglas – The historical record versus Barbour’s Bruce” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1992), 209. Scars received in battle were often interpreted as marks of honor, but in some circumstances, they could be interpreted as marks of shame. See: William Sayers, “The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature,” 473–95, and Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101, in this volume. Powers, “Cranial Trauma,” 10; Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 117.

120

Macinnes

consciousness and was able to escape his captors. Sieges too provided a dangerous environment, especially for the besiegers. During the English siege of Berwick (1319), the Scottish defenders “with stanys sa fast thai dang / Thar fayis that fele thar left liand / Sum dede sum hurt and sum swonand” [struck their foes so hard with stones that they left many lying [there], some dead, some hurt, some passed out] (Bruce [Duncan], 648–9). Similarly, at the siege of Dunbar (1338), the English attackers who had brought a sow to the castle walls were killed by a stone that “capita multorum deintus conquassavit” [dashed the heads of many inside to pieces] (Chron. Bower, 7:128–9). In a different example of a crushing or impact injury John Dunbar, earl of Moray, died from wounds received at an English tournament (c. 1390). He suffered broken ribs as a result of being unhorsed and died from the injury on his return journey towards Scotland.46 Other, more minor injuries are often written about briefly, with little comment on the weapon utilized and little detail on the wound itself. Such injuries were likely so common as to be largely unworthy of comment, unless it related to particularly notable individuals. So there is the famous story of John Coupland who lost two teeth during his attempts to capture David II at Neville’s Cross. A similar injury was sustained by the English knight Peter Courtenay who lost two teeth during a tournament fight with David Lindsay, earl of Crawford (Chron. Bower, 8:19). William Keith, who accompanied James Douglas to Spain in 1330, was forced to remain in his quarters while his fellows fought “For his arme brokyn wes in twa” [because his arm was broken in two] (Bruce [Duncan], 766–7). And at the border skirmish at Dornock (1332), the English knight, Anthony Lucy, was injured in the hand and foot, as well as in the eye, but was said to have recovered well from all his wounds (Chron. Lanercost [Maxwell], 278). These examples of warriors whose injuries were treatable and survivable provide clear evidence that some, although not all, were able to survive the injuries they sustained. In part, this was because battlefield and post-combat medicine and surgery were more advanced than is usually recognized. DeVries has written of medieval battlefield surgery that: The constant warfare of the age demanded skilled men who could dress wounds of soldiers, and almost all surgeons of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had seen military action. On these expeditions the 46

The Brut or Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W.D. Brie, EETS os 131, 136 (London: Oxford University Press, 1906–8), 348. While the fall from his horse may well have broken his ribs, it is also possible that the horse fell with him, as suggested in the chronicle account, and crushed the knight under its weight.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

121

surgeons gained knowledge and experience in treating all forms of wounds and injuries. They served as physicians and apothecaries as well as surgeons. They experimented with various kinds of powders, plasters, and fomentations for closing wounds. They invented tools for extracting arrows and bolts; they learned techniques for knitting fractured limbs, and amputating diseased ones.47 Written evidence is complimented by archaeological examples of warriors exhibiting evidence of old healed wounds.48 The treatments involved could take various forms depending on the type of wound involved, and doctors could refer to various treatises produced to guide them through their work.49 Evidence of wound treatment in fourteenth-century Scotland is however quite limited. Scotland’s kings had access to surgeons and doctors when required. Robert I utilized the skills of various physicians, including the Gaelic doctor Patrick MacBeth/Beaton and the Italian Maino de Maineri.50 David II similarly required treatment during his reign, not least when he suffered arrow-wounds to the face at Neville’s Cross. For treatment of these and possibly other injuries during his English captivity, a Scottish doctor was granted repeated safe conducts to visit the wounded king.51 Successive Stewart monarchs were also patrons of medical men and granted lands and monies to Ferchar, described as Farchardo Leche, for medical services rendered to the crown.52 There are, how47 48 49

50

51

52

Kelly R. DeVries, “Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 7 (1990): 131–46, at 134. Cunha and Silva, “War Lesions,” 598; Mitchell, “Palaeopathology of Skulls,” 245; Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 111. DeVries, “Military Surgical Practice,” 136. For examples of medical treatises, see: Tony Hunt, The Medieval Surgery (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992); Michael R. McVaugh, “Arnald of Villanova’s Regimen Almarie (Regimen Castra Sequentium) and Medieval Military Medicine,” Viator 23 (1992): 201–13; Linda M. Paterson, “Military Surgery: Knights, Sergeants, and Raimon of Avignon’s Version of the Chirurgia of Roger of Salerno (1180–1209),” in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood II, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988), 117–46. John Bannerman, The Beatons: A Medical Kindred in the Classical Gaelic Tradition (Edinburgh; John Donald, 1986), 11; Caroline Proctor, “Physician to The Bruce: Maino De Maineri in Scotland,” Scottish Historical Review 86 (2007): 16–26. Bannerman, Beatons, 59; Rotuli Scotiae in Turri Londinensi et in Domo Capitulari Westmonasteriensi Asservati, ed. D. Macpherson et al. (London: Record Commission, 1814–19), 1:724, 729, 731, 755, 797. Bannerman argues that the doctor involved was actually present at Neville’s Cross (Bannerman, Beatons, 59). Bannerman, Beatons, 62–3; The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, ed. J. Stuart et al. (Edinburgh, 1878–1908), 3:74, 137.

122

Macinnes

ever, additional chronicle references that demonstrate the practice of medicinal knowledge in Scotland more widely and the treatment of men other than kings, particularly in post-combat situations. Walter Bower describes the events in 1306 in which Robert I was involved in the murder of his political rival, John Comyn. In the fight that ensued, Comyn was said to have declared that he would live “Si medicum haberem, possum” [if I have a doctor] (Chron. Bower, 6:311–4). Bower constructs this narrative to transfer the blame for Comyn’s death away from Robert I. His suggestion that the king’s blow had not killed Comyn, and that he would have survived if not slain by another member of the Bruce affinity, absolves the king of some blame. It does also suggest that, in Bower’s mind at least, treatment of Comyn’s injuries was a believable possibility. Elsewhere, Barbour writes that, following one particular engagement, James Douglas provided medical treatment for his men: “Thaim that war woundyt gert he ly / Intill hiddillis all prevely, / And gert gud lechis till thaim bring / Quhill that thai war intill helyng” [He had those who were wounded lie secretly in hiding places and had good leeches brought to them while they were convalescing] (Bruce [Duncan], 212–3). Similarly, during the English siege of Scottish-held Berwick (1319), the fighting was fierce and those of the defenders “that had woundis sar / Had gud lechys forsuth Ik hycht / That helpyt thaim as thai best mycht” [who were badly wounded, had good leeches, I know to help them as best they could] (Bruce [Duncan], 640–1). Treatment of combat injuries was also provided to those Scots who sustained injuries at the battle of Nisbet Moor (1402). Although various men died of their injuries, “alii arte medicorum relevati tandem convaluerunt” [others were helped by the skill of doctors and recovered in time] (Chron. Bower, 8:44–5). Such doctors may have been of the class of barber-surgeons whose training was based largely on experience alongside a period of apprenticeship.53 Some Scottish nobles may, however, have been able to access medical aid similar to that of the king. Barbour writes that John Stewart, injured at the battle of Connor, “to Monpeller went he syne / And lay thar lang intill helyne / And at the last helyt wes he” [went to Montpelier and was recovering there for a long time but eventually he was healed] (Bruce [Duncan], 554–5).54 53

54

Vern L. Bullough, “Training of the Nonuniversity-Educated Medical Practitioners in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 14 (1959): 446–58, at 452–6. In his notes to his edition of The Bruce, Duncan argues that it is unlikely that a wounded knight would travel all the way to France for treatment, and that Barbour misread or misinterpreted an account of Stewart being treated by a Montpellier-trained physician (Bruce [Duncan], 554, n. 80–85). For more on Montpellier as a source of learning for English doctors, see: Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England, 56–63.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

123

Evidence of the presence of doctors in post-combat situations does not, however, elucidate the forms that such treatment took. Still, those who suffered injury in combat were often able to survive their injuries. Although some wounds could at times heal on their own without recourse to medical treatment, the availability of medical treatment that was successful in its application afforded injured warriors a much greater likelihood of recovery.55 Barbour’s description of the battle of Dalry (1306) lists both James Douglas and Gilbert Hay being wounded in the encounter. Both would go on to have long careers in the service of Robert I (Bruce [Duncan], 112). Less fortunate were the king’s brothers, Alexander and Thomas Bruce. Both men survived defeat at the hands of the forces of Dougal McDowell (1307), even though “graviter in captione vulneratos cum lanceis et fagittis” (Chron. Lanercost [Stevenson], 205) [they had been severely wounded in their capture by lances and arrows] (Chron. Lanercost [Maxwell], 179–80). Their survival was short-lived, however, for they were rapidly executed by the English soon after. Describing an attack by James Douglas on several notable Scots fighting on the English side in 1308, Barbour writes that Alexander Stewart was “Woundyt in a place or twa” [wounded in one or two places] (Bruce [Duncan], 356–7).56 At the battle of Glen Brerachan, Wyntoun suggests that David Lindsay of Glen Esk would have died from the wounds he had sustained in combat “Had nocht his men had hym away / Agane his wil out of that pres” [Had not his men taken him away / Against his will out of that fight] (Chron. Wyntoun, 3:59–60). Injuries in other instances resulted in fatalities. Andrew Murray appears to have died from the wounds he suffered at the battle of Stirling Bridge (1297).57 According to Thomas Barry’s poem about the battle of Otterburn, the Scottish knight, John Towers, was killed by a spear wound he received in the fighting (Chron. Bower, 7:439). During the Scottish siege of Carrickfergus Castle (1315– 16), the Anglo-Irish garrison sallied out and attacked the besiegers during an agreed period of truce. Neil Fleming and his men were all killed in the attack, although Barbour has Fleming survive long enough to be found and mourned by his commander, Edward Bruce (Bruce [Duncan], 560–2). Although Barbour’s description of Fleming’s lingering death is constructed to depict his lord’s grief, it remains likely that warriors could survive for some time with quite extensive injuries. Bower writes that Earl Patrick of Dunbar and his army, while riding 55

56 57

Nicolò N. Aldini, Milena Fini, and Roberto Giardino, “From Hippocrates to Tissue Engineering: Surgical Strategies in Wound Treatment,” World Journal of Surgery 32 (2008): 2114–2121, at 2115. Bruce [Duncan], 356–7. Chron. Fordun, 322; Chron. Bower, 6:87.

124

Macinnes

towards Dupplin Moor in the aftermath of the battle, “obvium habuit unum amrigerum letaliter vulneratum, tenentem manibus propriis intestina et viscera a sella dependencia” [met a man-at-arms who was mortally wounded and holding in his hands his intestines and internal organs which were hanging down from the saddle] (Chron. Bower, 7:78–9). Archaeological evidence reinforces the ability of men to carry on in spite of severe injury, even if for a relatively short while before succumbing to death. Excavations in the Holy Land have revealed the remains of a crusader, killed when Saladin’s forces overran Jacob’s Ford Castle, who suffered three arrow wounds to the neck. Despite such injuries, he was able to fight on, and was only killed eventually as a result of a devastating combination of injuries that included having his skull cloven in two, his lower arm amputated, and his jaw sheared off.58 Such evidence demonstrates the physical effort required to kill an armored man in battle. For those who suffered grievous injury, death was seldom instantaneous. Even those warriors who received some form of medical treatment for their wounds may not always have survived the procedure. The Scottish knight, William Ramsay, was mortally wounded in a tournament when a lance pierced his helmet and entered his brain. Thereafter, “facta prius confessione et deinde extracto ligno spiritum in armis reddidit” [after he first made his confession and the wood had been extracted, he yielded up his spirit while still in arms] (Chron. Bower, 7:136–7).59 In a similar environment, John Dunbar, earl of Moray, may have died from wounds received at an English tournament (c. 1390). The Brut chronicle describes how he “was cast both hors and man, and of his rybbis brokyn with (th)e ffalle; and so he was born out of Smythfelde, hom yn-to his Inne; and with-ynne a litil while afterward he was caried homwarde yn a liter; (and) atte York he deied” (Brut, 348). Both of these examples suggest some form of treatment that was in each case unsuccessful, although the extent of the injuries sustained may have made it unlikely to succeed in any case. Another example of a warrior living on for a time before succumbing to injury is that of the previously-discussed William Lundie. Injured in the face by a crossbow bolt at Otterburn (August, 1388), he is said by Bower to have survived 58 59

Mitchell, Nagar and Ellenblum, “Weapon Injuries,” 152. See also: Chron. Wyntoun, 2:443–4. Injuries to the head were treatable by the removal of foreign objects and the relief of pressure on the brain caused by fractures. Such treatment may have been available to more than just the elite. See: Simon A. Mays, “A Possible Case of Surgical Treatment of Cranial Blunt Force Injury from Medieval England,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16 (2006): 95–103, at 101; and Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste,’” 509–10.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

125

until All Souls’ Day (1 November). The period of over two months between injury and death suggests that Lundie died as a result of infection rather than the wound itself, emphasizing the additional problem of post-injury complications and the dangers that such issues posed even after treatment.60 The dangers of infection were high considering the possible lengthy delay between injury and basic treatment, depending on whether surgeons travelled with contemporary armies or not. Treatment itself may also at times have contributed to subsequent infection and death. Although wine was recognized during this period as a useful antibacterial agent with which a wound should be washed and honey was similarly employed,61 one of the main trends in medieval medicine was the employment of the pus laudabile theory. This medicinal strategy conjectured that wound suppuration – the deliberate stimulation of pus in the wound – was a requirement for the wound to heal when in fact the opposite was the case.62 Treatments improved over time, and the development of pharmacological responses to infection offered the possibility of survival to those who had suffered even quite severe injury.63 Nonetheless, as Linda Paterson has argued, “the prospect of putting oneself into the hands of a surgeon must have been terrifying. That people did so testifies to the fortitude and desperation of medieval patients.”64 The evidence provided here emphasizes that narrative and literary works are incredibly useful sources of evidence in relation to medieval warfare more generally, but also to the investigation of wounds and injury more specifically. Although contemporary chroniclers are not without their faults, they often wrote for an audience that appreciated the realistic depictions of medieval combat that are to be found in works such as The Bruce. Detailed accounts of injuries sustained, by what weapon and what occurred as a result, are prominent in various chronicles of this period. Furthermore, chroniclers utilized their works to commemorate war and those who participated in it. To have undergone the trial of battle and survived was praiseworthy within warrior culture, as demonstrated in the exchange between Douglas and his foreign 60

61

62 63 64

Chron. Bower, 7:419. For the dangers and difficulties of removing crossbow bolts, see: ­ obert I. Burns, “The Medieval Crossbow as Surgical Instrument: An Illustrated Case HisR tory,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 48.8 (1972): 983–9, at 987–8. On the uses of honey for treating wounds in the Middle Ages, and evidence of it being stored in large quantities for such a purpose, see: Ilana Krug, “The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine,” 194–214, in this volume. Aldini, Fini, and Giardino, “Surgical Strategies,” 2115–7. For developments in and availability of medicine in medieval England in this period, see: Getz, Healing and Society, xviii–xx. Paterson, “Military Surgery,” 146.

126

Macinnes

detractor.65 Chroniclers equally provided comment on what could be perceived as negative elements. Unpreparedness when going into combat was something that could lead to death, and this was a weakness that chroniclers were at pains to illustrate as a means of warning other warriors not to make the same mistake. Chroniclers also judged the nature of the warrior’s death. While various literary examples describe heroic or unfortunate deaths, other men could be castigated for perceived deficiencies and for “want of skill.”66 This function of chronicles as arbiters of warrior reputations emphasizes the practical role of such works and importance of what contemporary writers had to say to the warriors themselves. It should come as little surprise, then, that against such a background medieval chronicles are replete with descriptions of the blood and guts of warfare, and the impact of such on the individual warrior. These sources also speak to the lethality of contemporary warfare. Andy King writes of the northern English experience of war against the Scots that “military service … was not actually very risky at all.”67 King’s argument is, however, based on an analysis that largely compares examples of those who survived their experience of combat with those who did not. The evidence presented here emphasizes the extent to which medieval warfare included outcomes other than the simple binary of life or death. While combat was certainly not lethal for all warriors who took part in it, the nature of injuries sustained by Scots in arms in this period ensured that they at least had the scars to show for their experience. Injury was an unavoidable peril of the battlefield experience. On those occasions in which combat injury resulted in death, it occurred as a result of various factors. Misfortune and bad luck played a part in cases where armor failed in its protective function, or weak spots were found by a chance blow. Wounds could lead to death as a result of the nature of the injury suffered or the repercussions resulting from infection. For the warrior elite, however, death may not have been a likely outcome from war. As the chronicles illustrate, the use of medical practitioners in the aftermath of combat did occur and these men were best-placed to be able to afford the services of such men. Still, the description of James Douglas providing doctors to his troops is portrayed as an act of good lordship and leadership, something to 65 66 67

Ruth M. Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 20–1. Chron. Fordun, 344; Chron. Bower, 7:35. Andy King, “‘According to the Custom used in French and Scottish Wars’: Prisoners and Casualties on the Scottish Marches in the Fourteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002): 263–290, at 287.

Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403

127

be expected of those commanders who recognized and appreciated the efforts of their troops. So, while not exactly “risk-free,” the fourteenth-century Scottish experience of combat was not unlike that of contemporary soldiers elsewhere. It was dangerous; it could result in disabling and disfiguring injury; but it was survivable, and it was this latter fact that allowed warriors to march into battle with some confidence in their ability to live through it.

128

Kellett

Chapter 5

“…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zů der brust”: The Placement and Consequences of Sword-blows in Sigmund Ringeck’s FifteenthCentury Fencing Manual Rachel E. Kellett

The medieval fencing manual is a valuable if little-studied source of information on the injuries likely to be caused in medieval combat since it provides instruction on techniques to be used with a wide variety of weapons, including the sword, as well as in unarmed combat. The majority of such texts date to the early fifteenth century and later, and (with one exception) the earliest extant fencing manuals of medieval Europe all come from the German-speaking region.1 Of these German manuals, all but one draw directly or indirectly on the fourteenth-century teachings of Johannes Liechtenauer.2 Although no direct written record of Liechtenauer’s fencing system exists, his influence on the development of medieval German fencing cannot be overstated;3 his 1 See: Jeffrey Forgeng and Alex Kiermayer, “‘The Chivalric Art’: German Martial Arts Treatises of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” in The Cutting Edge: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Combat, ed. Barry Molloy (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), 153–67; see in particular 153. The exception is a Middle English manuscript (London, British Museum, Harleian Manuscript 3542, ff. 82– 85), dating to the fifteenth century. 2 No details about Liechtenauer’s life are currently known other than that he was probably active during the fourteenth century. The earliest manuscript containing his teachings, Nuremberg, Germanisches Museum MS 3227a, implies that Liechtenauer was still alive at the time of writing. The manuscript, a commonplace book, also contains a calendar for the year 1389, but this is not necessarily the year in which the book was written. See: Christian Tobler, In Saint George’s Name: An Anthology of Medieval German Fighting Arts (Wheaton, IL: Freelance Academy Press, 2010), 6. The only early German fencing manual without any obvious link to Liechtenauer and his followers is Leeds, Royal Armouries MS I.33. This is also the earliest European fencing manual known, dating approximately to between 1270 and 1310. The manual depicts lessons in sword-and-buckler combat without armor; the fencing master is portrayed as a tonsured cleric and one student, unusually, is female. 3 Hans-Peter Hils, Meister Johann Liechtenauers Kunst des langen Schwertes (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985), 7; Mark Rector, Medieval Combat: A Fifteenth-Century Illustrated Manual of Swordfighting and Close-Quarter Combat (London: Greenhill, 2000), 11–12; Dierk Hagedorn,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_007

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

129

teachings survive in over sixty manuals written by his students and their successors. His instructions are deliberately obscure, written in rhyming couplets that may have been designed as mnemonics for use during training,4 and each of the manuals authored by his disciples provides glosses explaining and augmenting his original instructions. Liechtenauer’s earliest followers include Paulus Kal, whose work (Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 1507) is dated to c. 1470; Peter von Danzig, whose sur­ viving text is dated to 1452; and a third fencing master most commonly known as Sigmund Ringeck. The manuals authored by Kal and Ringeck each provide reasonably complete records of Liechtenauer’s verses, together with detailed glosses.5 Extra light on the theory behind Liechtenauer’s system is shed by a fragmentary fourteenth-century treatise contained in Nuremberg, Germanisches Museum, MS 3227a, in which an anonymous follower of Liechtenauer discusses the theoretical basis for his techniques in contrast with those of other contemporary fencing instructors.6 Versions of Sigmund Ringeck’s fencing manual survive in Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Codex Mscr. Dresd. C 487, and in Glasgow Museums, R.L. Scott Collection MS E.1939.65.341.7 The Glasgow manuscript dates to 1508, while the Dresden manuscript was originally thought to belong to the early 1400s but has recently

4 5

6

7

Peter von Danzig: Transkription und Übersetzung der Handschrift 44 A 8 (Herne: VS Books, 2008), xv. See also: Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 23. See: Forgeng and Kiermayer, “The Chivalric Art,” 155. To date, only one version of Ringeck’s manual (Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Codex Mscr. Dresd. C 487) has been published in the form of a critical edition: Martin Wierschin, Meister Johann Liechtenauers Kunst des Fechtens, MTU 13 (Munich: Beck, 1965). Other works providing transcriptions or translations of Liechtenauer’s teachings include the following: David Lindholm and Peter Svärd, Sigmund Ringeck’s Knightly Art of the Longsword (Boulder, CO: Paladin, 2003), includes a translation of part of Ringeck’s text; Hagedorn, Peter von Danzig, who gives a transcription and translation of Rome, Bibl. Dell’Academia Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana, Cod. 1449, 44 A 8 (Codex Danzig), including the work of Peter von Danzig; and Grzegorz Zabinski, The Longsword Teachings of Master Liechtenauer – The Early Sixteenth Century Swordsmanship Comments in the “Goliath” Manuscript (Torun: Marszalek, 2010). A further invaluable resource is the Wiktenauer website, including online transcriptions of manuscripts in the Liechtenauer tradition by Dierk Hagedorn among others. See: (accessed 15 June 2014). English translations are provided in places, as well as translations into other languages, although the quality is inconsistent. This theoretical discussion is often erroneously attributed to Pfaffe Hanko Döbringer, another of Liechtenauer’s students (see: Hils, Meister Johann Liechtenauer, 104–10; see also: Forgeng and Kiermayer, “The Chivalric Art,” 155). Henceforth referred to as “the Dresden manuscript” and “the Glasgow manuscript.”

130

Kellett

been dated to the beginning of the sixteenth century.8 In addition, a version of Ringeck’s text appears in Hans Medel’s Salzburg fencing manual from 1539 (Augsburg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod.I.6.2º.5). We know almost as little about Sigmund Ringeck as we do of Liechtenauer himself. In the introduction to the Dresden manuscript, the writer refers to him as “maister Sigmund ain Ringeck,” while in the Glasgow manuscript he appears as “Maister Sigmund Amring.” He is named by other authors as “Sigmund Einring” or “Sigmund Schining,” and is described as having been a fencing master at the court of Albrecht, Count Palatine of the Rhine and Duke in Bavaria, at the time of writing.9 Ringeck’s manual depicts 119 separate instances of what can be described as a “successful” action with the sword; that is, a thrust or blow that makes contact with the opponent. Many of these are aimed at specific parts of the head, torso, or limbs of the opponent, but Ringeck also follows Liechtenauer in referring to blöß, or openings that his students must aim to strike. The definition of these openings and the other targets of the various blows and thrusts differ according to the type of combat being taught: combat without armor using the two-handed longsword, or armored combat.10 In each type of combat, however, the emphasis is on accuracy, and the fencing system requires a high level of technical skill. The complexity and precision of Liechtenauer’s system indicates that medieval fencing was very different from the depiction of medieval combat in modern theatre and film as nothing but hacking and slashing.11 Given the paucity of extant information about Ringeck and Liechtenauer as individuals, and the fact that Ringeck’s manual does not explain the context in which his instructions are to be used in any detail, any discussion of the purpose of Ringeck’s manual – and the kind of wounds likely to result from the use of it – is speculative. However, despite the terse style of the manual, Ringeck 8

9

10

11

See: Wierschin, Meister Johann Liechtenauer, 43 and Hils, Meister Johann Liechtenauer, 54; also Werner J. Hoffmann, Die deutschsprachigen mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Sächsischen Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) Dresden. Vorläufige Beschreibungen:  (accessed 15 June 2014). Ringeck’s patron could have been Albrecht I (1353–1404), Albrecht III (1438–1460), or Albrecht IV (1460–1508). A “Sigmund Amring” is mentioned in Paulus Kal’s list of Liechtenauer’s students; if this is the same individual, he must have been active before 1470. The manual also includes instructions on combat with lances and javelins, and a detailed section on wrestling techniques, which can be used in the armed combat (see, for example, Wierschin, Meister Johann Liechtenauer, 119, 735–40). A further section treats sword and buckler combat, and is discussed below. See: Rector, Medieval Combat, 12.

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

131

and Liechtenauer both provide a number of clues to their intentions as well as to the audience for whom they were writing. Liechtenauer’s introductory text is addressed to a junck ritter or “young knight.”12 Ringeck’s position as fencingmaster in a ducal court suggests that his students would also be of knightly standing. Slightly later, Ringeck adds the following detail: Vnnd wenn du die ding recht verstest, so magstu mitt kunst wol arbaitten vnd dich darmitt wören; vnd fürbaß lernen fürsten und herren, das sy mitt der selbigen kunst wol mügen besten jn schinpff vnd in ernst (100.199–202). [And if you understand these things correctly, you may well work with art and defend yourself with it; and moreover, princes and lords/gentlemen learn [this] so that they may be victorious with this same art in play and in earnest].13 The reference to combat “in play” and “in earnest” suggests that Ringeck’s techniques are designed to be used not only in serious combat, where death or injury would be very likely to occur, but also in combat for entertainment, possibly even for display – in which injury or death might be expected to occur much less frequently.14 The manual, therefore, serves two very different purposes, as well as treating two different styles of combat. A closer examination of the techniques used in each section, and the injuries they could potentially cause, provides further clarification. The classification of Ringeck’s section on armored combat is fairly straightforward since he himself describes combat in armor as “combat in earnest” (145.1450). He also notes that the instructions are for a combat of a particular type; vechten im harnasch zů kampff “fencing in armor to be undertaken in the judicial combat” (146.1451–52). Ringeck’s work is one of several medieval fencing manuals to offer instruction in fighting a judicial combat. Perhaps the most well known manual discussing this form of trial by combat is that written by Hans Talhoffer, another influential fifteenth-century fencing master. Talhoffer’s illustrations depict the preparations for and techniques to be employed in 12 13 14

Wierschin, Meister Johann Liechtenauer, 97, line 124. All translations into English are mine. Some medieval German fencing instructors known as leychmeistere seem to have specialized in show-fighting. The term leych or leich is used most frequently to refer to a melody or dance, and it seems clear that leychmeistere were instructors who taught fencing solely as a form of entertainment.

132

Kellett

different forms of judicial combat using a range of different weapons, with or without armor depending on the social class of the participants.15 Ringeck however, following Liechtenauer, focuses specifically on the knightly form of the combat, fought in full armor. The techniques Ringeck recommends for armored combat are also clearly designed for serious use. Ringeck instructs his students to aim specifically at those areas of the opponent made vulnerable by the design of the plate armor – the joints between the separate plates or the parts of the body left unprotected for reasons of mobility or vision. In this, he follows Liechtenauer’s instruction, “Leder vnnd handschuch vnnd den augen: die blöß recht suoch” [Leather and glove and the eyes, search correctly for these openings] (150.1560). Ringeck’s gloss lists the openings in more detail, noting that his student should aim to strike primarily at the face, under the armpit, in the palm of the hand or in the back of the glove, behind the knee or in the groin, or wherever there are joints in the armor (150.1562–65). Liechtenauer reiterates the importance of precision: “Item, aller were: den ort gegen der blöß kere” [Item, [in] all guards turn your point against the openings] (151.1608), and Ringeck notes that no good will come of aiming attacks against any other target (151.1610–12). The great majority of the attacks Ringeck recommends to these openings are thrusts with the point, and many should be delivered using a technique known as “half-swording,” in which the hilt of the sword is held in the right hand as normal, and the left hand grasps the blade roughly at the mid-point of its length. The combatant forces the point of the sword through the gaps in the opponent’s armor or into the joints between the individual plates. The hilt and the cross can also be used to strike or to hook the limbs or other parts of the body. The two-handed longsword could be used for this purpose, but Ringeck frequently refers to the sword employed in armored combat as a kurtzes schwert or “short sword,” most likely an arming sword; a double-edged sword with a hilt designed for a single-handed grip, widely used in medieval Europe.16 The successful thrusts depicted in the techniques for armored combat follow the pattern set out in his general instructions: of the twenty attacks depicted as striking home, nine are to the face. These are also the techniques Ringeck chooses to list first, giving them particular prominence. Ringeck appears to envisage his students and their opponents wearing open-faced hel15 16

Rector, Medieval Combat, 10, also notes that Talhoffer’s judicial combat techniques are designed for a combat to the death. On the development of the later medieval sword, see: Kelly DeVries and Robert D. Smith, Medieval Weapons: An Illustrated History of their Impact (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2007), 184–85.

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

133

mets or fighting with their visors raised. In comparison, the illustrations depicting an armored judicial combat in Talhoffer’s 1467 manuscript show the combatants with raised visors,17 leaving the upper part of their faces exposed. Presumably, the benefits of a wider field of vision outweighed the danger of injury. Two attacks are aimed at the palm of the hand and one to the opponent’s arm in his gauntlet; the armored protection for the hand, covering the back of the wrist, hand, and fingers but leaving the palm free. A leather glove would be worn beneath the plate.18 This instruction is not particularly clear, but it seems that Ringeck intends his student to place his sword-point in the gauntlet where it meets the armor of the forearm. This attack appears to be intended less to cause significant injury to the opponent than to aid the student in maneuvering; Ringeck notes that if the point catches, the student should advance quickly to reach the opponent’s side and gain the advantage (156.1734–36). A possible interpretation of this technique is that the student, having pushed his opponent’s sword across his body with his point, can then step in beside his opponent into an ideal position from which to seize his arm, shoulder, or neck from behind, or to hook his opponent with the cross of his sword, in order to wrestle with him.19 As alternatives to thrusts to the palm of the hand or to the back of the hand or arm, the fencer should aim two thrusts over the opponent’s advanced hand: “Oder stich im über sin vorgesetzten hand durch mitt din schwert” [Or thrust him through above his foremost hand with your sword] (153.1661–62). The use of the phrase stechen durch, “to thrust through,” implies a thrust passing over the hand and under the arm to the opening in the armpit. This phrase frequently appears in literary descriptions of mounted combat with the lance to describe the impaling of an opponent,20 and it is clear that this is a thrust designed to cause serious injury. In the second reference to this attack, Ringeck adds further instructions: “Oder stich im dürch über sin vorgesatzten hand vnd druck din schwert von oben nider, vnd setz din gehültz an din brust, vnd setz im an” [Or thrust him through over his foremost hand and press your sword down from above, and set your hilt against your breast, and press your attack] 17 18 19 20

See: Rector, Medieval Combat, plates 68–73. Ringeck uses the term handtschůch (glove) to describe the armor covering the hand (see: 150, 1564; 156, 1734). See: Rector, Medieval Combat, plate 58, which depicts a combatant hooking his opponent in this manner. See, for example, the death of Vivianz in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century epic Willehalm. See: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, ed. by Karl Lachmann, trans. by Dieter Kartschoke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 25.16–25.

134

Kellett

(156.1736–37). By setting the hilt against his own chest, the student uses his body weight to force his point into his opponent’s armpit and into the chest cavity. A deep penetrating injury to the chest can have a number of potentially fatal results. It can create a pathway for air to leak into the chest as it expands with each inhalation, building up pressure outside the lung and causing a traumatic pneumothorax, or collapsed lung. Damage to blood vessels within the chest can result in blood pooling in the cavity and compressing the lung in a similar manner (a hemothorax), as well as the other consequences of rapid blood loss.21 A particularly deep thrust could penetrate the mediastinum or central area of the chest, containing the spinal column, heart, major blood vessels, major bronchi, esophagus, and trachea, with potentially fatal consequences.22 An injury to the heart or surrounding tissues could cause a cardiac tamponade, when blood collecting in the pericardial sac compresses the heart, preventing it from beating. There might also be damage to the upper abdominal organs, depending on the direction of the thrust.23 Even a thrust that penetrated only the armpit could be dangerous since it could easily damage the axillary artery that supplies the arm, causing rapid loss of blood. A wound to the armpit could also damage the local lymph nodes and nerves; an injury to the cervical spinal nerves could greatly impair the use of the arm or shoulder. Ringeck prescribes two thrusts to the torso of an armored opponent – to the genitals (149.1552–54 and 152–53.1637–41).24 Like the chest and armpit, the genital or pelvic region contains major blood vessels (the common iliac arteries divide to form the external iliac arteries which then become the femoral arteries supplying the legs and the internal iliac artery supplying the genitalia), which, if damaged, would again cause rapid blood loss. In his discussion of 21 22

23

24

Sarah Fellows and Bob Fellows, Paramedics: From Street to Emergency Department Case Book (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2012), 70–71. “Penetrating wounds that traverse the mediastinum have a particularly high potential for life-threatening injury because of the vital cardiovascular and tracheobronchial structures within this area.” Basic Trauma Life Support for Paramedics and Other Advanced Providers, ed. John Emory Campbell (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Health, 2000), 78. “Any patient with a penetrating thoracic wound at the level of the nipples … or lower should be assumed to have an abdominal injury as well as a thoracic injury” (Campbell, Basic Trauma, 78). The term Ringeck uses here, gemächt, can refer either to the testicles or to the genital region more generally. In this case, the target may be the general genital area; in the instructions on wrestling, Ringeck twice refers to strikes with the knee or knees delivered to the hoden, a reference to the testicles specifically (135, 1175–78; 136, 1206–08).

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

135

wounds caused in warfare, William Flack Stevenson notes that damage to structures within the pelvis, such as the small intestines, pelvic colon, rectum, and bladder are all liable to endanger life, to say nothing of the disabling pain and shock associated with injuries to the genital organs themselves.25 Like the thrust into the armpit, the thrust to the genitals could cause a quickly disabling and possibly fatal injury.26 Only in two cases does Ringeck recommend that his students deliver a blow with the edge of the sword against their armored opponent rather than a thrust. Both of these instances occur during his instruction on mounted combat, and both are alternatives suggested in case the primary attack – a thrust to the face delivered while charging at one’s opponent, right side to right side, much in the manner of a thrust with the lance (see 162–63.1897–1904) – fails. In the first instance, if the opponent can set the thrust aside, Ringeck instructs his student to strike a blow downwards against the opponent’s reins or to his left hand, presumably with the intention either of injuring the opponent or of cutting his reins to prevent him from controlling his horse.27 Ringeck then adds that if the student finds his horse carries him past his opponent too quickly, he should instead aim a blow at his right leg in dem hinrennen “as he rides away.” In this instance, the target of the blow would appear to be the back of the leg, although it seems unlikely that a blow struck in haste at a moving target would be precise enough to cause actual harm.28 In two last instances, Ringeck gives instructions on how to use the pommel to strike the opponent on his foremost hand or arm and on his foremost foot. The student holds the sword above his head in his right hand, point forward, as 25 26

27

28

William Flack Stevenson, Wounds in War: The Mechanism of their Production and their Treatment (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897), 377, 383. Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), refers to Albert of Aachen’s description of how King Baldwin I was transfixed through the thigh and kidneys by a Saracen lance. Mitchell notes the king’s pallor, faintness, and dizziness as signs of lack of blood supply to the brain, and speculates that Baldwin suffered a “laceration to an artery, large vein or vascular organ such as the liver or spleen” (60). Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm contains an episode during battle in which a Saracen nobleman loses control of his horse after the bridle is cut; he is carried into the mass of Christian knights and killed (Willehalm, ll. 412, 2–30). From the early fifteenth century onwards, the back of the leg would also have been fully protected by plates; see: Alan Williams, “The Metallurgy of Medieval Arms and Armour,” in A Companion to Medieval Arms and Armour, ed. David Nicolle (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), 45–54, at 51; see also: DeVries and Smith, Medieval Weapons, 175. Interestingly, Talhoffer depicts a similar blow delivered against a mounted combatant wearing no armor (Rector, Medieval Combat, plate 253).

136

Kellett

if he intends to thrust at the opponent’s face, then throws the sword forward out of the right hand, catching it by the middle of the blade in the left hand and bringing it down in an arc on the opponent’s hand or foot (157–58.1772–89). The motion described would allow the student to deliver a powerful blow; and it should be noted that both the foot and the hand would be particularly vulnerable to such an attack, given the fragility of their small bones. Ringeck instructs his student to aim for the fuoß or “foot,” but in discussing how to avoid a similar blow, he suggests that the opponent might strike at the student’s foremost knee instead (158.1780–83). A blow to the knee, in addition potentially to breaking bones, could damage the moving plates covering the joint, hampering its movement. Ringeck’s instructions on combat in armor conform largely to the general expectations aroused by the description of armored combat as combat “in earnest.” In many cases, the swordsman should use considerable force to drive the point between the plates and deeply into the torso. The thrusts aimed at the face could cause severe or fatal injury by penetrating either the oral cavity or the eye-sockets. Blows may also be struck with the pommel against the hand or foot in an attempt to disable. In short, Ringeck’s instructions on armored combat are designed to inflict disabling or fatal injury on the opponent with precision and at speed; precisely as one would expect of techniques designed for the judicial combat.29 If the purpose for which Ringeck’s instructions on armored combat were written seems fairly clear, the same cannot be said for his section on combat without armor. Neither Ringeck nor Liechtenauer link these techniques to the judicial combat, but they do not provide any alternative context for the longsword section.30 They do not even state explicitly that the techniques to be used without armor are intended for use “in play,” although this seems to be the most likely explanation. Nevertheless, Ringeck’s instructions on combat with the longsword, following Liechtenauer’s verses, make up the longest section not only of this part but of the entire manual, and are treated in the greatest detail, which suggests that they are of particular importance to Liechtenauer’s system.31 29

30

31

Cf. Stephen Atkinson, “‘They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …’: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in this volume, 519–43. See: Forgeng and Kiermayer, “The Chivalric Art,” 160: “The contexts for unarmoured longsword combat remain to be fully understood. In battle, most users of the longsword would have been armoured, and the armoured techniques are fundamentally different from those used without armour.” This is also true of Talhoffer’s system. See: Rector, Medieval Combat, 15.

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

137

The longsword techniques are based on the concept of the five “masterblows”: the zornhaw, or “blow of wrath;” the krumphaw, “crooked blow;” the zwerhaw or zwerchhaw, “thwart blow;” the schiller, or “squinting blow;” and the schaytler, or “parting blow.” Despite the fact that the each is described as a haw or “blow,” well over a third of the successful attacks Ringeck describes (as in the armored combat) are, in fact, thrusts with the point of the sword. The longsword section contains eighty-seven such attacks, including blows, thrusts, and attacks with the pommel: Type of attack Blow with long edge Blow with short edge Thrust Blow with pommel

Frequency 41 11 34 1

Blows delivered with the long edge of the sword are the most frequently depicted and are likely to be the heaviest blows struck.32 The terms Ringeck chooses most commonly to describe these blows also imply considerable force: haw, related to the English “hew,” and schlach, meaning “blow” or “slash.” The terms schnitt or schnyden – “cut” or “to cut” – also appear, implying lighter strikes. The distinction between these two types of blow is clearer in relation to their placing. Ringeck lists far fewer blows delivered with the short edge of the sword (eleven in total), and these are often given as alternatives to blows with the long edge, performed if the opponent should counter or prevent the use of the initial technique.33 In most cases, the student aims these attacks at specific parts of the body, such as the head, the face, the arm or arms, or the chest, but as in the section on armored combat, Liechtenauer and Ringeck also describe specific “openings” as targets for attack. These openings, however, differ considerably from those described above. Here Liechtenauer refers to die vier blöß, “the four openings,” which Ringeck explains as follows: “Die erst bloß ist die recht seytt, 32

33

When a sword is held in one or both hands, pointing forward, the long edge of the blade is the downward edge, roughly in line with the knuckles of the dominant hand. The short edge is the upward edge, in line with the gap between the thumb and the index finger of the dominant hand. A blow struck with the downward edge uses the full force of the dominant arm. However, one of the master-blows, the zwerhaw, or “crooked blow,” is struck with the short edge (107, 395–400).

138

Kellett

die ander ist die link seytt oberhalben der girtel deß manß. Die ander zwuo sind och die recht vnd die linck seytten vnderhalben der girtel” [The first opening is the right side, the second is the left side above the man’s belt. The other two are likewise the right and the left sides below the belt] (104. 304–06). Although the target areas for blows and thrusts are considerably larger in this section of the manual than in the instructions on armored combat, Ringeck enjoins his students again to take care in aiming their attacks: “Mitt welcher er sich gegen dir enblösse, der selbigen reme küntlichen on far” [With whichever [opening] he reveals to you, aim at it carefully without danger] (104.307). In Nuremberg, Germanisches Museum, MS 3227a, the anonymous author also insists that a fencer should aim at all times for the nearest opening or the one that can be most easily and quickly reached.34 In general, the attacks are aimed more often at the head and the upper body than at the lower body, and there is a marked absence of any attacks to the legs. Seventeen of the 41 blows delivered with the long edge of the sword are aimed at the head of the opponent. This is unsurprising, given the importance of the head as a target, as noted by James Hester “…a cut or thrust to the head is, frankly, the most effective way of killing or at least incapacitating an opponent.”35 However, a fatal result from a blow to the head was not certain; Piers D. Mitchell records an example from a Muslim adult male burial at Tel Jezreel, Israel, in which the left parietal bone of the skull showed a 3 centimeter lesion, probably caused by a blow from a sword or axe blade. The injury to the bone had healed, indicating that the individual had survived for a considerable time after receiving it.36 As might be expected, Ringeck describes these blows most frequently as a haw or a schlach, implying heavy blows. In nine cases, the blows aimed at the head are described as downward blows: “Item, wann er dir von oben zů hawt, laß er sein schwert mitt dem haw nider gen zů der erden, so rayß im nach mitt ainem haw oben ein zů dem kopfe, ee er mitt dem schwert vff kumpt” [Item, if he strikes a blow at you from above, [and] lets his sword go down to the ground with the blow, then follow him with a blow from above into his head, before he can come up with his sword] (115.620– 22).37 Blows are also aimed at the side of the head, but these are generally used 34 35 36 37

Nuremberg, Germanisches Museum, MS 3227a, 14v. James Hester, “Home-Grown Fighting: A Response to the Argument for a Byzantine Influence on MS I.33,” Arms & Armour 9 (2012): 76–84, at 81. Piers D. Mitchell, “The Integration of the Palaeopathology and the Medical History of the Crusades,” International Journal of Osteoarcheology 9 (1999): 333–343, at 336. Blows of this kind are frequently to be found in medieval literary depictions of battle. One particularly interesting example is the fatal injury to the warrior bishop Turpin in der Stricker’s thirteenth-century Karl der Grosse. See: Stefanie Weber, Strickers Karl der Grosse:

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

139

in cases where a previous technique has been unsuccessful (107.410–13). Four blows with the long edge of the sword are aimed at the opponent’s mouth and one against the opponent’s throat. A cut to the throat would certainly be effective in causing serious, potentially fatal injury, but, at first glance, the mouth is a much less obvious target for attack. Nevertheless, attacks to the side of the face (the cheek and the side of the mouth) are not found solely in Liechtenauer’s teachings. The anonymous sword-and-buckler manual Royal Armouries MS I.33 contains eleven instances of a cut to the face, and this, together with cuts to the arms and enclosing moves leading to grappling, seems to be a core technique of the system.38 There are good physiological reasons for choosing the mouth as a target for a cutting action. The bones of the skull and of the face offer effective protection to the brain and other organs, interrupted by the eye-sockets, the nasal cavity, and the oral cavity, which is formed by the gap between the upper and lower mandible. A horizontal cut to the cheek or the corner of the mouth could easily slice through the tissue of the cheek into the oral cavity, causing extensive and disfiguring injury, as well as bleeding into the airways, or damage the muscles supporting the temporomandibular joint.39 A deeper or heavier cut might potentially damage the teeth, injure the tongue, or even penetrate the soft palate, which is situated directly in front of the spinal cord. Ringeck’s instructions definitely indicate some penetration of the oral cavity since he refers to cutting durch das maul or durchs maul “through the mouth”; however, he uses the term schnitt in all but one instance, indicating that the blow is not particularly heavy.

38 39

Analyse der Überlieferungsgeschichte und Edition des Textes auf Grundlage von C (Hamburg: Kovac, 2010), lines 7265–7930; see also: Rachel E. Kellett, “Guts, Gore and Glory: Representations of Wounds Inflicted in War in Medieval German Literature,” in Battles and Bloodshed: The Medieval World at War, ed. Lorna Bleach and Keira Borrill (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 161–76, papers from a conference held at Sheffield University, 13–14 June 2009. In this volume, see: Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 496–518, which discusses the profusion of headwounds delivered through the text. Cuts to the face are also found in Talhoffer. See: Rector, Medieval Combat, plates 20 and 24. By way of comparison, in December 2012, a man was found guilty of a knife attack against four police officers in October 2011 in northwest London, UK. The man used a 10-inch knife to slash one officer across the left cheek, causing a wound that cut completely through his cheek into his mouth. See: (accessed 15 June 2014).

140

Kellett

Even if a cut missed the mouth or oral cavity, soft-tissue injuries to the head or face should not be underestimated. Scalp wounds notoriously produce heavy bleeding, which could impair vision,40 and Mitchell discusses an episode in the twelfth-century memoir of Usama ibn Munqidh in which a Muslim soldier is struck on the face by a sword that cuts through his eyebrow, eyelid, cheek, nose, and upper lip, “making the whole side of his face hang down upon his chest,” adding that “the anatomy of much of the forehead, face and cheeks means that if a sufficiently large wound is made then the skin can easily be peeled away from the bones and deeper tissues.”41 Hester briefly discusses the archaeological evidence for the effect of cuts to the face, specifically cranial injuries noted in finds from the mass grave at Uppsala, Sweden, concluding that such cuts could cause considerable damage. Of four instances of cuts to the facial bones, he notes that “one extends across the maxilla just below the nasal and penetrated into the cranial vault. Two of the cuts left surface gouges on the left side of the mandible. The third left a surface gouge extending from the left side of the maxilla to just left of the zygomatic, in other words from the side of the nose to the cheek.”42 In addition, damage to facial musculature and nerves could lead to impaired mobility. A cut to the face or mouth would certainly cause a very noticeable wound, which might then leave a scar – an indelible reminder of the combat.43 40 41 42

43

Campbell, Basic Trauma Life Support, 117. Mitchell, Medicine, 152. Hester, “Home-Grown Fighting,” 76–84. In this volume, see: Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” 27–56. Cuts to the face or scalp played an important role in academic or “Mensur” fencing, in eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth-century Germany and Eastern Europe. Members of student fencing societies were required to undertake at least one duel during their studies, and scars were used as evidence that a student had complied. An account in Strand magazine in 1897 indicates that scars were also considered badges of honor. “Duelling in German Universities: By An English Student,” Strand (February 1897): 148–53. See also: J. Christoph Amberger, “Killing Arts or Upper-Class Leisure Activity?: Aspects of European Combatives in Image and Literature,” in The Cutting Edge: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Combat, ed. Barry Molloy (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), 177–87, esp. 183–84, and Victor G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of the Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 272: “…opponents hacked at each other with sabres and acquired scars as though winning medals.” Several chapters in this volume deal with the lasting consequences, good and bad, of facial scarring. See: Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” 215–30; Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in AngloScottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” 102–27; William Sayers, “The Laconic Scar in Early Irish

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

141

Many blows with the short edge of the sword are likewise aimed at the head. Ringeck uses the term schlach, implying a heavy blow, but not the term haw, although in one instance he directs his student to perform a haw against the opponent’s sword-blade before striking at his head (106.360–63). Blows may also be directed at the throat, but in one case at least, the primary intention does not appear to be to cause injury: “…so leg jm die kurtzen schnyden zů seiner rechten sytten an den halß vnd spring mit dem rechten fuoß hinder seinen lincken; vnd rucke jn mit dem schwert dariber” […so lay the short edge on his right side against his throat and spring with the right foot behind his left and with the sword push him over] (108.416–18). In this instance, the pressure of the student’s sword-blade against the throat is used in conjunction with pressure from the student’s foot to throw the opponent, and the use of the verb legen, “to lay,” implies a pushing rather than a cutting action. Ringeck also instructs the student to lay the short edge of his sword against his opponent’s throat a few lines later (108.420–22); the situation is very similar to the one previously described, and it is possible that the instruction to perform a similar throw is implicitly repeated. Fifteen thrusts with the point of the sword are aimed at the opponent’s face, and one at the opponent’s throat. These attacks are almost always delivered as part of a more complex technique, and the thrust usually comes after the opponent’s strike has been countered, or his sword moved aside in order to create the appropriate opportunity to strike. The zornhaw, or “blow of wrath,” one of the five “master-blows,” is an example of such a technique: … wann dir ainer von siner rechten sytten oben ein hawet, so haw ainen zorn haw mitt der langen schniden och von diner rechten achslen mitt im starck ein. Ist der dann waich am schwert, so schüß jm den ort für sich lang ein zů dem gesicht (101.237–40). [If one strikes from his right side from above, so strike a zornhaw with the long edge also from your right shoulder strongly together with him. If he is weak with his sword, so push the point forwards extended into his face].44

44

Literature,” 473–95; and Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101. Ringeck’s techniques often vary according to how the opponent is holding his sword, either “weakly” (i.e. such that the sword-blade can easily be moved by pressure from the opposing blade) or “strongly” (using the strength of the arms and shoulders to ensure the blade cannot be moved from its position).

142

Kellett

Ringeck often refers to hengen or winden, “hanging” or “winding,” the point into the opponent’s face, implying that the sword-blade is “hung” downwards or “wound” in a circular fashion, the student’s hands turning the grip as it moves forwards. Other terms used include stechen, “to stab,” and setzen, “to place or set.” In one instance, the student is advised to adopt a half-sword position in order to place his point appropriately: Wen dü im von deyner rechten achseln oben ein hawst, wilt dü denn bald mit jm enden, so mörck: wen er versetzt, so schlach bald vmb mit der zwer. Vnd begriff din schwert mit der lincken hand mitten jn der klingen, vnd setz jm den ort in das gesycht. [When you strike at him above from your right shoulder, if you wish to finish with him quickly, so note this: if he sets [you] aside, strike quickly around with the zwerhaw. And grip the sword with the left hand in the middle of the blade, and set the point in his face] (114.599–602). Ringeck adds in this instance that his student could alternatively thrust at whichever of the four openings he can most easily reach. Should the opponent set aside the thrust to the face, he recommends that the student strike him with the pommel of his sword on the side of the head instead (114.605–07) or use the pommel to assist him in throwing the opponent. The reference to “finishing with” the opponent quickly might simply indicate that Ringeck intends this to be the end of the combat. Alternatively, it could mean that he expects the result of the thrust to the face to incapacitate the opponent, or even kill him outright. As suggested earlier, the most likely targets for a thrust to the face would be the eye-sockets or oral cavity, and a serious penetrating injury to either of these could cause considerable damage. A thrust into the eye-socket would likely damage or destroy the eye itself or the optic nerve behind it, causing partial or complete blindness, and could also injure the brain or the internal carotid artery.45 Such injuries would not necessarily prove fatal, but they would certainly impair the opponent’s ability to continue the combat. The torso is the target of nine blows with the long edge of the sword; either the upper opening (four blows), the lower opening (two blows), an unspecified 45

See: Stuart Gray, Life and Death on the Streets: A Paramedic’s Diary (London: Monday, 2007), 109–10, who describes a case of a man stabbed in the eye. The knife penetrated the eye-socket below the eye itself, but the blade was angled upwards such that it then pierced the eyeball. Gray notes that it was not clear if the eye could be saved.

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

143

opening (one blow), or specifically the left or right flank (one blow to each). These blows, as with the blows to the head, are generally described as powerful, using the terms haw and schlach. In addition, the student is often directed to wrench his sword around from one side to the other or to feint a blow from above, then strike below, which gives the sword extra momentum. In the case of the strikes to the flanks, Ringeck instructs the student to strike while stepping back (125.902, 906); the action of moving the body while striking again adds momentum to the blow. Lastly, the student directs a single blow with the short edge of the sword at the torso (the shoulder), in a counter-strike cutting against the opponent’s sword as he strikes in order both to halt the opponent’s blow and potentially to cause injury (110.489–92; 111.516–17). In contrast, a total of sixteen thrusts with the point are aimed at the torso, eight of which are to the brust, “chest,” and four to the upper openings. The possible effects of injury to the thorax have been discussed, but it is noteworthy that Ringeck does not use the phrase stechen durch, “to thrust through,” in any of the instances of a thrust to the chest with the longsword. In fact, the terms he uses in these cases (“to his chest,” “in to his chest,” “on his chest”) do not suggest any significant penetration of the chest cavity at all. In four cases, Ringeck advises his student to “set” his point on his opponent’s chest, as with the thrusts to the face noted above. This contrasts clearly with the instructions on thrusting into the armpit in the section on armored combat, which suggests that the longsword thrusts are not designed to cause the same degree of injury. Ringeck also directs his student on two occasions to thrust into the lower openings (103.280–81; 115.630–33), in other words, to the lower torso. The abdomen would seem, at first glance, to be a more suitable target for a thrust than the chest, for the reasons set out by the Scottish fencing master Sir William Hope in his 1707 treatise: “… I am altogether … against Planting or Thrusting too high … where a Man must of necessity pierce either Bones, or very hard Cartilages, before he can dangerously wound his Adversary.”46 Nevertheless, John Emory Campbell notes that, in his experience, patients are unlikely to suffer immediate ill consequences from a stab wound to the abdomen unless the blade pierces a major organ or blood vessel. A penetrating thrust to the chest, though more difficult to perform successfully than a thrust to the abdomen, might incapacitate an opponent more swiftly.47

46

47

Sir William Hope, A New, Short and Easy Method of Fencing (Edinburgh: Watson, 1707), 167. Hope’s treatise discusses the use of the eighteenth-century backsword and smallsword, but his views on anatomy and penetrating injuries may be applied to any pointed weapon. Campbell, Basic Trauma Life Support, 176.

144

Kellett

A total of ten blows with the long edge of the sword, and one with the short edge, are delivered to the arm or arms of the opponent. In most of these, the term used for the blow is schnitt, “a cut,” or the associated verb schnyden, which implies a lighter and possibly more precise action than that suggested by the terms haw and schlach. Many of these cuts to the arm or arms involve using the sword as a lever to push the opponent’s arms in one or other direction. In these cases, the suggestion is that the sword-blade is simply being placed against the opponent’s arm or arms; Ringeck uses the verb setzen, “to set,” again, and it is unclear if he intends the cut also to cause injury or not. In some instances, however, the student delivers the cut to the arms against an opponent who is either rushing in or striking the student using strength and momentum, and the counter-cut therefore would be likely to cause damage (e.g. 120.775–79). In three instances, Ringeck advises his student to “fall” on his opponent’s arms, using a downwards cut which could deliver considerable force, as discussed above. In general, though, the cuts to the arm or arms seem to be light blows, designed to counter an attack or to force the opponent to change position rather than to cause serious injury. One blow with the short edge is aimed at the opponent’s hands. In this instance, Ringeck recommends that his student deliver a heavy counter-strike against his opponent’s sword so that the student’s sword-point strikes his hands (105.340–41). The instructions on sword and buckler combat are introduced rather laconically: “Hernach stond geschriben die stuck mitt dem buckler” [Hereafter are written the techniques with the buckler] (127.976), and it is clear that Wierschin believes them to belong to Ringeck’s work. More recent research into the Dresden manuscript, however, suggests that the section from 54r to 55v is actually a version of a short manual on sword and buckler combat by another fencing-master, Andre Liegniczer, active during the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries.48 The section highlights a fundamental difference between combat with the two-handed longsword and combat using a single sword and buckler, and on the resulting pattern of injuries. The section contains only six techniques, during the course of which Liegniczer depicts ten successful attacks with the sword, a mixture of blows and thrusts – including a thrust to the genitals (128.996). Liegniczer’s instructions differ most clearly from Ringeck’s longsword techniques when he advises his student to strike at his opponent’s legs. Attacks to the legs do not feature in the longsword techniques at all; the lowest target mentioned is the torso below the belt. There are good 48

Liegniczer’s short text on sword and buckler combat appears in a number of manuscripts. Transcriptions of the various versions can be found on the following webpage: (accessed 15 June 2014).

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

145

reasons for the lack of attacks to the leg with the longsword. The anonymous author in Nuremberg, Germanisches Museum, MS 3227a states a fundamental principle of fencing: it is faster and easier to strike a higher target on the opponent’s body than a lower because the lower targets are further away. A strike to the legs obliges the fencer to lean or bend forwards, bringing his head forward and making it an easier target for his opponent to strike. It is a particularly dangerous tactic for a fencer using the longsword, who has no defense other than his sword itself. However, a fencer using sword and buckler is able to defend his head with the buckler in his left hand while simultaneously striking with the sword in his right, and hence has greater freedom to strike at lower targets such as his opponent’s legs.49 Leaving aside Liegniczer’s instructions, however, the techniques Ringeck prescribes in his longsword section are designed to deliver a wide range of blows and thrusts, of varying strength, and having a variety of possible effects. Heavy blows to the head could produce open (penetrating) or closed injuries, and cause concussion or damage to the brain from intracranial bleeding, and thrusts into the face or throat could easily cause severe, even fatal, damage. These would appear to be the kind of techniques that would belong to combat of the most “earnest” kind,50 if performed with full intent and strength. 51 In other cases, most notably the cuts to the arms, the likelihood of significant injury does not seem very high. Ringeck also instructs his student to “lay” the blade against his opponent’s throat, and to “set” his point “on” his opponent’s chest, rather than to thrust him through. It is conceivable that Ringeck’s longsword techniques are designed to be carried out using a rebated (blunted) weapon, which would significantly decrease (though not eliminate) the risk of injury to the combatants. There is 49

50

51

In comparison, Talhoffer’s techniques for use with the sword and buckler include cuts to the head and arm and thrusts to the torso; no attacks are aimed at the legs (Rector, Medieval Combat, plates 231–39). This is certainly the view of Forgeng and Kiermayer, “The Chivalric Art,” 163: “Liechtenauer’s system shows all the hallmarks of a martial art that is designed to kill the opponent … Although Liechtenauer’s commentators claim that his method is also suitable for sport, they give no actual examples. All the techniques serve for the swiftest possible conclusion of the combat.” Amberger opines on the other hand, that “…modern interpreters often go too far in ascribing antagonistic or even just offensive intent to the techniques depicted in manuals and treatises” (“Killing Arts,” 181). It is possible that these blows and thrusts could be “pulled” (i.e. delivered slowly, or halted just before contact) to minimize their effects, as is often the case in modern stage fighting. However, we should note that Ringeck specifically instructs his students to use full intent at all times (98.157–58).

146

Kellett

evidence that blunted swords were used in medieval combat training: von Danzig’s 1452 manual contains an image depicting a seated fencing-master holding a baton in his left hand and a rebated sword in his right (Codex Danzig, f.2r). From the dimensions of the hilt, it is a longsword simulator.52 A similar image in the Glasgow manuscript also depicts a seated master, this time holding a longsword.53 Unfortunately, the figure is not particularly clearly drawn, but the blade might again be rebated. The illustrations accompanying the techniques in the Glasgow manuscript, on the other hand, depict the combatants using what appear to be sharp longswords, and there is no mention in Ringeck’s manual of the use of rebated weapons. In addition, the references to cutting “through” the opponent’s mouth do suggest that a sharp weapon would have been used. Nevertheless, the use of rebated weapons cannot be ruled out altogether. There is further evidence that the section on longsword combat was indeed designed for use “in play.” Ringeck refers occasionally to the kind of opponents that his students are likely to find themselves facing, and to the different techniques that they should employ against them. The krump haw, or “crooked blow,” for instance, is to be used against ainen maister “a master” (105.354). Similarly, in his explanation of the schiller or schilhaw, the “squinting strike,” he notes that it is designed to break the blows or thrusts of combatants he describes as buffel who “assume mastery by force” (110.488–89).54 The early New High German term buffel or büffel can mean either “a buffalo” or “a rough and uncouth person” – the translation “ruffian” seems apt. The references to the “masters” or “ruffians” that Ringeck’s students may find themselves facing brings to mind the competitive prize-plays of later fencing schools, in which students would be required to fight a set number of masters in order to advance in the rankings themselves.55 It is also important, when considering the question of fencing for sport or entertainment in the Middle Ages, not to be overly influenced by modern preconceptions of an acceptable level of risk. Evidence from medieval literature suggests that casual fencing bouts could all too easily lead to the wounding or even death of the combatants; writing in the late thirteenth century, Konrad 52

53 54 55

Blunt longsword simulators known as federschwerter, or “feather-swords” are depicted in sixteenth-century German treatises on fencing and sport such as the Opus Amplissimus de Arte Athletica, by Paulus Hector Mair (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. icon.393). See: the Glasgow manuscript, f.35r. Liechtenauer also refers to bufler (Wierschin, Meister Johann Liechtenauer, 110, 484). See: Anglo, Martial Arts, 9–11, for a brief discussion of examination processes used in ­fencing schools across Europe during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

147

von Würzburg includes two such instances in his works. In his Trojanerkrieg, he depicts a friendly fencing match between the brothers Hector and Paris that nearly takes a fatal turn when Paris accidentally strikes his brother too hard. Hector is furious at this breach of decorum and is about to thrust Paris through in response before an onlooker intervenes.56 A similar friendly contest in Konrad’s Partonopier und Meliur leads to the death of one of the combatants; while in a fencing match in the epic Kudrun (mid-thirteenth century), the hero Wate presses the Irish fencing-master so hard that the master fears for his life.57 Later texts also demonstrate that the line between fencing for entertainment and fencing in earnest could sometimes be blurred. Johannes Pauli notes a grimly comic example in his 1522 work Schimpf und Ernst, in which a fencing master punishes an overconfident student for his arrogance by beheading him in a single combat.58 Despite the fact that the combatants explicitly agree to fight to the death, Pauli still describes this as an instance of Schimpff – “play.”59 Hester also notes that the distinction between fencing in play and fencing in earnest can be very slight: “The transition from appearing to fight, or fighting without intending to strike your opponent, to earnest combat is only a matter of minor adjustments to mindset and physicality. Useful principles for serious fighting could still be extracted from a text intended for sporting use.”60 Indeed, the anonymous author in Nuremberg, Germanisches Museum, MS 3227a criticizes those fencing masters (leychmeistere) who teach ineffective techniques suitable only for entertainment or show: Vnd das sy weit vm~efechten vnd paryrn irdenken vnd oft vör eyne~ haw czwene ader dreye tue~ nür durch wolstehens wille do von sy von den unvorstendige~ gelobt wolle~ werden … vnd das gehört doch nicht czu

56

57

58 59

60

Konrad von Würzburg, Der trojanische Krieg, ed. Adalbert von Keller (Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein, 1858), 5012–5109. Hector and Paris are not aware of each other’s identity at this point in the text. Konrads von Würzburg Partonopier und Meliur, Turnei von Nantheiz, Sant Nicolaus, Lieder und Sprüche, ed. Karl Bartsch (Vienna: Braunmüller, 1871), 19043–110. See also: Kudrun, ed. Karl Bartsch, 5th edn., ed. Karl Stackmann (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1965), 356, 2–3. Johannes Pauli: Schimpf und Ernst. Teil 1, ed. Johannes Bolte (Berlin: Stubenrauch, 1924), 193. See also Amberger, who notes the “sanguine” nature of late medieval fencing competitions, and discusses a seventeenth-century account of the fatal injury to a manservant sustained in a friendly bout in a Dresden fencing school (“Killing Arts,” 183, 184). Hester, “Home-Grown Fighting,” 82.

148

Kellett

ernstem fechte~ zonder czu schulfechten durch vbunge vnd gebraw­ chu~ge wille mochte is wol eczwas gut seyn [And that they think to fence wide around and parry, and often perform two or three blows instead of one, just for the sake of good repute, because they want to be praised by those without understanding … And this does not belong to fencing in earnest, but it may be some good for fencing in the school for practice and training].61 In comparison, the author states that Liechtenauer’s system of fencing relies on the correct principles. It is also strongly implied that Liechtenauer’s system is designed for use both in earnest and in play.62 Against this background, the fact that Ringeck’s section on longsword combat (combat “in play”) includes techniques that could result in serious injury seems considerably less perplexing. If Liechtenauer’s system was designed to teach his students how to fight in an effective manner and to strike telling blows regardless of the context, then it is hardly surprising that Ringeck should follow suit. In conclusion, the fencing manual composed by Sigmund Ringeck in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century provides a wealth of information on the techniques recommended for use in medieval fencing and on the wounds that could be inflicted. In the first instance, it dispels the myth that medieval combat was a matter of indiscriminate hacking and slashing. Instead, the manual demonstrates clearly that Ringeck’s system encourages the skilled manipulation of the sword to strike at target areas (often very small targets) with considerable precision. Ringeck’s work also demonstrates that there was more than one form of medieval fencing, and that the kinds of wounds likely to be inflicted depended greatly on the type of combat being undertaken. The majority of the techniques described in the section on armored combat would result in incapacitating, even fatal injuries: thrusts into the chest cavity through the armpit using body-weight, thrusts into the groin, and into the unprotected face. Ringeck’s instructions on armored combat may be brief, but they are unabashedly brutal. The techniques for the two-handed longsword, on the other hand, are considerably more disparate, and could cause a much greater range of potential injuries. Heavy blows to the head, the torso, and flanks are noted as well as thrusts to the face and throat, which could inflict significant damage to soft tissues and bone, but Ringeck also recommends more delicate 61 62

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum MS 3227a, 14r-14v; see: (accessed 15 June 2014). Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, MS 3227a, 15v.

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

149

actions, such as the “setting” of the sword-point against the opponent’s chest, or of the blade against the arms or throat, which seem to be designed less to injure the opponent than to force him to change position. Of particular interest, given their appearance in other fencing traditions, is the focus in the longsword section on cuts to the face and to the mouth, which could cause potentially disfiguring injury. The difference between the likely effects of the two types of combat – armored and unarmored – can be attributed to the distinction that Ringeck draws in the manual between combat “in earnest” and combat “in play.” The brutality of the armored combat demonstrates conclusively that this is combat in earnest, as does the fact that this section is explicitly noted as preparation for the judicial combat (145.1450). The purpose of the longsword techniques is never explicitly stated, but, on balance, it seems most likely that Liechtenauer and his follower Ringeck intended the system of longsword fencing principally for entertainment, while still adhering to certain basic principles that could be applied to serious combat. In this, they are a contrast to fencing masters who specialized in ineffective techniques designed for show only. It is also evident from medieval literary descriptions of fencing that the likelihood of injury to the participants was high, even in friendly bouts, and that fatal injury could not be ruled out. With this in mind, the injuries that could be caused by Ringeck’s longsword techniques could well be within the boundaries of what medieval fencers considered an acceptable risk. Further research into the manuals written by Liechtenauer’s other students, such as Paulus Kal and Peter von Danzig, could indicate whether Ringeck’s manual accurately reflects the state of fencing in late medieval Germany and the injuries that could be caused to those who took part. Nevertheless, it appears clear that medieval fencing, even when undertaken for entertainment, was most definitely a bloody affair from which neither participant would be likely to emerge unwounded.

150

Kellett

Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual

section 2 Surgery

∵

151

152

Kellett

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

153

Chapter 6

The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery? Debby Banham and Christine Voth Banham and Voth

medicus Cynifrid qui et morienti illi, et eleuatae de tumulo adfuit … referre erat solitus, quod illa infirmata habuerit tumorem maximum sub maxilla; “Iusserunt me,” inquit, “incidere tumorem illum, ut efflueret noxius umor, qui inerat … monstrauerunt mihi etiam uulnus incisurae, quod feceram, curatam; ita ut mirum in modum pro aperto et hiante uulnere, cum quo sepulta erat, tenuissima tunc cicatricis uestigia parerent.” [the physician Cynefrith, who was present both when she [St. Æthelthryth] was dying, and when she was raised from the tomb … used to recount that, when she was ill, she had a very large swelling under her jaw; “They told me,” he said, “to cut into that swelling, so that the harmful fluid inside would flow out … [and at her translation in 695 or 6] they showed me too the wound of the incision that I had made, healed up, so that, wonderfully, instead of the open and gaping wound with which she had been buried, the slightest traces of a scar were then visible”] (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica IV.19).1

⸪

Bede’s story of the medicus Cynefrith cutting open (incidere) St. Æthelthryth’s swelling in order to aid its healing provides a rare glimpse into the treatment of illness or injury by surgical means in the Anglo-Saxon period. Whether one follows The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition as “the treatment of injuries, deformities or other disorders by manual operation or instrumental appliances,”2 or that given by Charlotte Roberts in the most recent published survey of the discipline in Anglo-Saxon England: “the branch of medicine concerned with treating diseases or injuries by means of manual or operative 1 Charles Plummer, ed., Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896), 245–6. 2 Oxford English Dictionary (accessed 15 March 2014).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_008

154

Banham And Voth

procedures, especially by incision into the body;”3 we do not find much evidence for surgical treatments in Anglo-Saxon written sources. Early medieval England was a dangerous environment with a high risk of physical harm, which could result from warfare, day-to-day lawlessness, or accidents in the home or the workplace.4 Anglo-Saxon physicians must have encountered many instances of wounds that called for surgical attention, and one might thus expect to find numerous references to procedures like that undertaken by Cynefrith in the extant medical texts. But medical collections in Old English are dominated by potions and salves of one kind or another, to the almost complete exclusion of techniques involving “the knife.” “There are very few references in Anglo-Saxon sources to surgical operations apart from bloodletting,” wrote M.L. Cameron at the beginning of his chapter on surgery, which is less than five pages long, including extensive translations.5 Cameron is right to point out the rarity of surgical techniques in medical texts compiled in early medieval England: manual and instrumental operations (even generously defined) total only eight in the 155 chapters of Bald’s Leechbook, London, British Library, Royal MS 12 D. xvii (s.xi) (BLB)6 and two in Leechbook III (73 chapters, in the same manuscript).7 Even bloodletting itself is found only eighteen times in BLB and once in Leechbook III.8 The Lacnunga, London, British Library, Harley MS 585 (s.xex–xi1),9 features only two instances of scarification, one set 3 Charlotte Roberts, “Surgery,” in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes, and Donald Scragg, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 445–7. This article deals almost entirely with archaeological evidence. 4 For further discussion of this, with some literary examples, see: Anne Russcher and Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., “‘For a broken limb’: Fracture Treatment in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Secular Learning in Anglo-Saxon England: Exploring the Vernacular, ed. László Sándor Chardonnens and Bryan Carella (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 145–75. esp. 145–7. 5 M.L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 169. The chapter extends to p. 173, with over a page taken up by translations from the sources. 6 We are still reliant for this text on the edition of T.O. Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols (London: Rolls Series, 1864–6), 2:2–298. 7 Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:300–60. 8 Cameron’s chapter on “The Humours and Bloodletting” is only nine pages long (159–68) and does not offer any examples of therapeutic bloodletting. Lists of lucky and (mostly) unlucky days for bloodletting are now discussed with other prognostics by L.S. Chardonnens, AngloSaxon Prognostics, 900–1100: Study and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 2007), and Roy Liuzza, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Translation of Texts from London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. iii (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011). 9 Edward Pettit, ed., Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms and Prayers from British Library MS Harley 585: The Lacnunga, 2 vols (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

155

of rules of for bloodletting (the “Egyptian days”), and no surgical procedures. The Old English Herbarium consists entirely of pharmaceutical prescriptions with only the occasional charm or amulet.10 It seems implausible that no mechanical treatments were being carried out in England at this time,11 so some other explanation is needed for this apparent defect in the medical collections. An exploration of non-medical evidence for surgical practice in early medieval England is called for to set the texts against a background of contemporary practice and attitudes, as far as this can be discerned, as well as an analysis of the way the texts themselves work, which might suggest other reasons for the compilers’ lack of attention to surgical techniques. The Anglo-Saxon texts also need to be seen in the context of the developing place of surgery in European medical literature. Only then will it be possible to decide whether there was such an entity as “Anglo-Saxon surgery.” Surgical Treatments in the Old English Medical Corpus Even strictly interpreted, as mechanical treatments using the practitioner’s hands or equipment of some kind, surgical procedures are not entirely absent from the Old English medical texts. In fact, there is quite a large range including amputation, cautery, lancing, ligatures, sutures, and some less familiar techniques. One instance to which Cameron draws attention is the “syringe” used in BLB to treat a liver condition.12 Although the pipa used to bathe the wound here is probably not a syringe,13 the treatment is clearly surgical, involving the lancing of what would probably called an abscess in the present day, recalling Cynefrth’s incisura, followed by the controlled draining of fluid.14 The whole procedure is described in considerable detail, with elucidation of unfamiliar terms. Corresponding passages are found in the Passionarius Galieni, the 10 11 12 13 14

Hubert Jan de Vriend, ed., The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, EETS o.s. 286 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). The physical evidence for setting of fractures is discussed by Russcher and Bremmer, “‘For a broken limb’,” 167–72. BLB, 2.22, in Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:208–10, discussed by Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 171–3. Another pipa appears in a treatment for digestive problems at BLB 2:28d, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:224. For a detailed reassessment of this passage, see: Debby Banham and Conan T. Doyle, “An Instrument of Confusion: The Mystery of the Anglo-Saxon Syringe,” in Recipes for Disaster, ed. Jennifer Rampling, Debby Banham, and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Whipple Museum, 2010), 27–38.

156

Banham And Voth

Practica Petrocelli, and the pseudo-Galenic Liber tertius, from one of which it has presumably been excerpted or translated by Bald’s compiler.15 Cameron also discusses another long passage in the Leechbook in which gangrenous flesh is cut away and cauterized to prevent the spread of infection, again a description that is clearly related to Latin compilations.16 There are a few more instances of surgical techniques in BLB: gums are lanced to relieve a specific type of toothache,17 rules are given for amputations,18 a wound is cauterized,19 the extremities are ligatured to revive someone fainting with hunger,20 and a medicine is “injected” to relieve digestive problems.21 A manual procedure, squeezing the hands and feet, is employed for someone suffering severe intestinal bloating.22 In Leechbook III, in a passage relating to the situation in which the gut has come out of the body (it is not clear how), the organs are replaced manually, and a suture is used to keep them in place.23 There is also a rather alarming procedure for someone whose cranium is twisted(?), involving stakes driven under the armpits and a board across the feet being struck with a sledgehammer.24 Nonetheless, these procedures, although interesting and varied, represent a tiny proportion of the total medical material in Old English. The business of surgeons has historically been largely with wounds and injuries, and if surgery is defined not solely by its techniques but also by the conditions treated, plenty of wound treatments can be found in Old English medicine. The majority of these are in the two books of BLB, which includes approximately 77 prescriptions explicitly or implicitly for treating wounds. Its companion volume or appendix, Leechbook III, has a further eight, while the Old English Herbarium and the Lacnunga have 68 and one, respectively.25 In 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

For discussion of the sources of this passage, see: Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 171–3; and Banham and Doyle, “An Instrument of Confusion.” BLB, 1:35, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:82–6, discussed by Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 170–1, and, for the sources, 43. BLB, 1:6, 7b, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:52. BLB, 1:35h, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:84. This is the end of the chapter on the “blackened and deadened body” discussed by Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 170–1. BLB, 1:38, 8c, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:96, part of a long chapter on the treatment of wounds. BLB, 2:16, 2b, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:196. BLB, 2:28d, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:224. The medicine may, in fact, be forced down the throat. BLB, 2:5, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:182. Leechbook III, 73, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:358. Leechbook III, 55, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:342. Counts can only be approximate as the definition of a wound is hardly unambiguous. Mammal bites are counted here, including those of mad dogs, but not snake or insect bites.

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

157

BLB, wound treatments constitute about 15% of the whole collection; the proportion in the Herbarium is similar.26 The overwhelming majority of these treatments (in all the texts) are general-purpose wound salves or poultices, most of them quite simply prepared with only one or two ingredients. Dry applications also occur, as well as some medicines that are to be taken internally. BLB has a long chapter on wound treatments, of which only one is mechanical, the cautery mentioned above.27 There are also chapters on burns and joint problems, including leaking synovial fluid, said to affect manegum men “many people,” and both of these are entirely pharmacological.28 There are a few specific treatments for defined types of injury, ranging from missing nails to serious head-wounds, again nearly all external applications.29 Instrumental treatments for wounds are confined to cautery, suturing, and amputation in BLB (see above), and possibly the replacement of the gut and the straightening of the twisted(?) cranium in Leechbook III, depending on how the gut and cranium have become displaced. The following four examples represent about half the total number of prescriptions for specific injuries, excluding those for bites by various animals, mostly dogs:30 Gif nægl sie of hande … nim hwæte corn meng wið hunig lege on þone finger. [If the nail is off a hand … take grains of wheat, mix with honey, apply to the finger] (BLB 1:34, 1a).31 Gif men sie lim of aslegen. finger oððe fot oððe hand gif þæt mearh ute sie. genim sceapes mearh gesoden lege on þæt oþer mearh. awriþ swiðe wel neahterne. 26 27 28 29

30 31

This is impossible to calculate with greater precision, as the number of recipes in a chapter varies widely, and even what constitutes a single recipe is not always clear. BLB, 1:38, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:90–8 BLB, 1:60–1, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:130–4. The assertion about the prevalence of leaking synovial fluid is in recipe 61e, at 132. For a detailed discussion of the treatment of head-wounds, surgical and non-surgical, see: Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” in this volume, 81–101, and Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 496–518. The Medicina de quadrupedibus has one prescription for a bite by an ape or human (bull’s gall used as a lotion): chapter 12, item 7, in Herbarium, 268. Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:80. The same treatment is found in the Lacnunga, item 140, in Pettit, Anglo-Saxon Remedies, 1:98.

158

Banham And Voth

[If a limb is struck off someone, finger or foot or hand, if the marrow is coming out, take boiled sheep’s marrow, put it on the other marrow, bind it up well overnight] (BLB 1:38, 8a).32 Gif mon sie ufan on heafod wund 7 sie ban gebrocen nim sigelhweorfan 7 hwit clæfran wisan 7 wudurofan do on god butran aseoh þurh clað 7 lacna siþþan. [If there is a wound on top of someone’s head, and the bone is broken, take marigold and white clover plant and woodruff, put it in good butter, strain through a cloth, and treat at once] (Leechbook III 33, 1).33 Gif sio eaxl upstige nim þa sealfe do hwon wearme mid feþere him bið sona sel. [If the shoulder is dislocated, take the salve, put some on warm with a feather, he’ll soon be better] (Leechbook III 33, 2a).34 Why is There so Little Surgery in the Old English Medical Texts? Even when all these treatments for wounds and injuries are taken into account, there remains a remarkable deficit of surgical procedures among the extant Anglo-Saxon material. It is possible that it really was unusual for wounds to be treated by surgical methods in early medieval England, but the few examples that do exist, coupled with the general paucity of surgery in the medical collections, suggest that the explanation for the absence of surgery is not specific to wound treatments and that evidence for surgical techniques may be found elsewhere. Looking at the Anglo-Saxon medical corpus as a whole, there are numerous possible reasons for the rarity of surgical techniques. In the first place, such treatments might have been genuinely rare in Anglo-Saxon practice. Alternatively, the medical texts may have been of purely academic interest, bearing little relationship to what was going on around them. Literate physicians may have felt it beneath them to practice the “manual labor” of surgery, they may have been fastidious about getting blood on their hands, or they 32 33 34

Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:94–6. This is part of the long chapter of wound treatments. Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:327. Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:327.

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

159

might simply have seen mechanical operations as outside their remit. Again, sections might, hypothetically, have been deleted or lost from the extant texts, or they may have been lost in transmission. Or, indeed, it might simply be that the compilers or translators of the Old English collections found no such material in their Latin sources. Surgical Practice in Anglo-Saxon England To begin with practice, there is little support for the idea that nothing that would count as surgery in modern terms was taking place in Anglo-Saxon England. Charlotte Roberts lists archaeological evidence for a range of procedures, from trepanation to amputation, and the setting of fractured bones.35 A substantial body of evidence for wounds, their evaluation, and the available treatment in England at this time is also provided by the corpus of AngloSaxon royal legislation.36 From the beginning, Anglo-Saxon law prescribed a wergild, or “man price,” for members of each social status, as well as a series of compensation payments and fines (bot, “remedy,” and wite, “punishment”)37 for various injuries to and attacks on another person. These injury tariffs are a feature of “feud-centered” law, which sought to provide compensation as an alternative to retribution by the kin or associates of the injured party. The motivation behind this “compensation culture” was twofold: the king had an interest as ruler in maintaining peace and social stability in his kingdom, and as recipient of the fines he also had a financial interest in the system of payments.38 The legislation concerning injury appears to be based in a good understanding of anatomy, as well as a realistic evaluation of the extent to which an injury might cause physical handicap or disfigurement or prevent a person from fulfilling their daily activities. The very first Anglo-Saxon law code, that of King Æthelberht of Kent (c. 560 to 616) lists an ascending series of compensations for a wound to the abdomen, based on the degree of the injury and whether attention is required (Table 6.1). 35 36

37 38

Roberts, “Surgery,” 446. Nevertheless, she concludes that, “the practice appeared to be infrequent.” The law codes are edited by F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle: Niemeyer, 1903). The standard work on Anglo-Saxon law is: Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. I: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). On the body in early medieval law more widely, see: Lisi Oliver, The Body Legal in Barbarian Law (Toronto: Toronto Unversity Press, 2011). Wormald defines wite as “a fine [paid] to the king,” Making of English Law, 103. Wormald, Making of English Law, 105.

160

Banham And Voth

Table 6.1 Chapter 61 Chapter 61.1 Chapter 62 Chapter 63

Laws of King Æthelberht39 Gif hrifwund weorðeþ, xii scill’ gebete. If the belly is wounded, 12 shillings is to be paid as compensation. Gif he þurhðirel weorðeþ, xx scill’ If it is pierced through, 20 shillings is gebete. to be paid as compensation. Gif man gegemed weorðeþ, xxx scill’ If someone is cared for [for the gebete. injury], 30 shillings is to be paid as compensation. Gif man cearwund sie, xxx scill’ If someone is sorely wounded, 30 gebete. shillings is to be paid as compensation.

Chapter 62 states if a person is looked after (gegemed) for the wound, 40 the compensation is to be thirty shillings, equivalent to the sum for a serious wound (cearwund). To judge by the previous chapter, this would have been a wound in which the weapon had gone right through the belly (þurhðirel), in which case the appropriate care would certainly have included mechanical methods such as suturing, in addition to salves, poultices, or similar applications. The extra compensation in this case might be partly to pay for the treatment and care of the victim. In the laws of King Alfred of Wessex (871–99), one of the largest sums of compensation, 100 shillings, is levied upon anyone who has so injured a man’s neck as to cause loss of control (geweald) (possibly some sort of paralysis), and if the man lives, the witan could award a more just and greater (ryhtre 7 mare) compensation.41 An earlier chapter of Alfred’s law code provides that if an injury to the shoulder is so great that liðseaw utflowe (the synovial fluid flows 39

39 40

41

Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 1:6. Reading gegemed, from gieman, “care, correct, notice, observe,” as “look after” uel sim. However, at Leechbook III, 65, gegymed clearly indicates the condition requiring treatment, lacnian. Cockayne translates it as “overlooked,” Leechdoms II, 353, and the “evil eye” might also be an aggravating factor in law. “Gif mon oðrum ða geweald forslea uppe on þam sweoran 7 forwundie to þam swiðe, þæt he nage þære geweald, 7 hwæðre lifie swa gescended, geselle him mon C scill. to bote, buton him witan ryhtre 7 mare gereccan” [If somebody so greatly injures the tendons on another’s neck and wounds him so that he has no strength there, and if he lives so wounded, 100 shilling is to be paid to him as compensation; but the witan may extend to him a more just and greater compensation] (Alf. 77, ed. Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 1:88).

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

161

out) then the injured party will receive 30 shillings as compensation.42 This chapter indicates an anatomical and physiological knowledge one might not expect outside a medical context: that loss of synovial fluid, which prevents friction between the articulation surfaces of the bones, could lead to permanent damage to the joint or long-term pain. This situation is the subject of a substantial series of prescriptions in book one of BLB.43 The implication is that kings composing their law codes had expert help in determining the extent of compensation, and that the medical texts are more firmly situated in their contemporary social context than is sometimes allowed. There are further instances of both anatomical knowledge and surgical procedures in the laws of King Alfred, good evidence that this king was interested in the treatment of bodily ills. He suffered from some form of digestive disorder, and is reported to have consulted multiple physicians in his search for relief.44 The earliest Anglo-Saxon manuscript of medical treatises, the BLB manuscript, has a chapter of remedies sent from Elias III, Patriarch of Jerusalem (879–907), to King Alfred, the inclusion of which has led some scholars to believe the exemplar of the extant text was either compiled or at least present at the West Saxon court in Alfred’s reign.45 The account of Alfred’s medical condition and the attempts at diagnosis and treatment, together with the remedies sent from the East, raise the possibility that the king had an established medical community from which he might have gathered knowledge about the extent of certain injuries. Table 6.2 shows the laws of King Alfred that imply a wound may have required surgery: Chapters 70 and 70.1 deal with injury to the ribs, where the second part apparently involves a fracture that perforates the skin, risking internal damage. Removal of the broken bone is presumably part of the treatment rather than the original injury. A similar process is described in Chapter 74. In both cases, 42

43 44

45

“Gif mon bið on eaxle wund, þæt þæt liðseaw utflowe, gebete mid XXX scill” [If somebody is wounded in the shoulder, so that the synovial fluid flows out, compensate at 30 shillings] (Alf. 53, ed. Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 1:80). Cockayne, Leechdoms 2:132–4. “quando vero et aetate erat provectior et incessabilius die noctuque, immo omnibus istius insulae medicis incognitis infirmitatibus ... occupatus, immo etiam perturbatus” [For when he was older and more incessantly preoccupied by day and night with – or rather harassed by – all kinds of illnesses unknown to the physicians of this island] (Asser, Vita Ælfredi regis, 25). Asser’s Life of King Alfred Together with the Annals of St Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, ed. W.H. Stevenson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 21; and Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (London: Penguin, 1983), 76. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 34.

162

Banham And Voth

Table 6.2 Laws of King Alfred46 Chapter 70

Chapter 70.1 Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Gif mon oþrum rib forslea binnan gehaldre hyde, geselle × scill to bote.

If someone breaks another’s rib without breaking the skin, 10 shilling shall be given as compensation. Gif sio hyd sie tobrocen, 7 mon ban If the skin is broken and bone is ofado, geselle xv scill to bote. removed, 15 shillings shall be given as compensation. Gif hie mon inbeslea 7 mon ban ofado, If anyone hacks into it [the shoulder, geselle mon ðæs to bote mid xv scill. the subject of Chapter 73], and bone is removed, 15 shillings shall be given as compensation for it [in addition to the 20 shillings for the shoulder damage]. Gif mon ða greatan sinwa forslea, gif If the large sinew is damaged, if it hie mon gelacnian mæge, þæt hio hal can be treated medically so that it sie, geselle xii scill to bote. heals, 12 shillings shall be given as compensation.

specialist attention would no doubt be needed; removal of bone is better not undertaken by anyone inexperienced in such procedures. In chapter 75, too, treatment is required before compensation is determined. If this chapter does not also deal with the shoulder, ða greatan sinwa might be a tendon in the leg, such as the Achilles tendon or the hamstring, which would require repair to prevent permanent disability. Leechbook III has a treatment for such an eventuality, using a poultice (or possibly a dry application) of pounded earthworms. 47 Sinew repair also appears in a bloodletting context in BLB, this time by means of a salve containing wax and pitch.48 This evidence suggests that anatomical and surgical knowledge was drawn on in composing the law codes,49 and it would certainly be necessary for treating wounds in accordance with their tariffs. This knowledge can be traced as far back as the earliest Anglo-Saxon law codes, written down shortly after the 46

46 47 48 49

Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 1:86. BLB Chapter 34b, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:328. Book 1, chapter 72f, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:148. There was a similar relationship between medical practice and law in medieval Ireland and Spain. See: Charlene M. Eska, “The Mutilation of Derbforgaill,” and Carmel Ferragud, “Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early-Fifteenth Century,” in this volume, 252–64 and 233–51, respectively.

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

163

arrival of St. Augustine in AD 597 and the conversion of the King Æthelberht . It is likely that penalties for injuries existed even before the codification of the laws in writing,50 and this tradition of injury tariffs in Anglo-Saxon legislation can be traced through to the reign of King Alfred. Later Anglo-Saxon kings added no further laws penalizing injuries, but it is unlikely that no such compensation was necessary. The existing legislation may simply have remained in force through the turbulent (and less turbulent) reigns of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Edward the Elder (899–924) decreed that the laws of his father Alfred would still be upheld in his reign, “7 hit on ðære dombec stande” [as it stands in the law book],51 and subsequent kings may have pursued the same policy. The idea that surgery was not practiced in Anglo-Saxon England therefore seems increasingly implausible, and the correspondences between the medical literature and legal provisions also make it unlikely that the medical texts were purely intellectual exercises, divorced from the practical reality of their surroundings. Indeed, there is a specific connection between Anglo-Saxon law codes and the medical texts, as both were disseminated in the vernacular, and one code, the Alfred–Ine domboc, was copied into a manuscript that also included medical remedies.52 It has been suggested that medical texts were translated into Old English because practitioners would not have been trained to read Latin,53 that is, they might have fallen into the group, envisaged by King Alfred, who would be trained to read and write in the vernacular, but not educated in the language of the Church.54 Anglo-Saxon law codes were written in the vernacular from the beginning which would have made them more acces50 51 52

53 54

Wormald, Making of English Law, 96. I Edward 1, Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 2:138–40. London, British Library, Cotton Otho MS B. xi. The remedies were lost at some time before the Ashburnham House fire in 1731, but they survive in an early modern transcript by Lawrence Nowell: London, British Library, Additional MS 43703, 261r –64v. See for instance: Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 19. King Alfred’s preface to his translation of Pope Gregory’s Regula pastoralis implies a twotiered system of learning: “ðæt eall sio gioguð ðe nu is on angelcynne friora monna ðara ðe ða speda hæbben ðæt hie ðæm befeolan mægen sien to liornunga oðfædte, ... oð ðone first ðe hie wel cunnen Englisc gewrit arædan: lære mon siððan furður on lædengeðiode ðe ða mon furðor læran wille 7 to hieran hade don wille” (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20) [that all the free-born young men now in England who have the means to apply themselves to it, may be set to learning, … until the time that they can read English writings properly. Thereafter one may instruct in Latin those whom one wishes to teach further and wishes to advance to holy orders] (Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 126).

164

Banham And Voth

sible if they were read aloud; indeed, reading the law books in order to dispense justice correctly was Alfred’s reason for having thegns, reeves, and ealdormen trained to read in English.55 This emphasis on the vernacular is justified in the preface to Alfred’s law code, in which he associates his own program of translation with the Greeks and Romans who had rendered “divine law” in their own native language.56 Whether such lofty explanations apply to the medical texts, however, is less clear. Even a physician au fait with Latin would find it easier to navigate and work from a recipe collection in a language familiar from childhood, and the same would also apply to someone using the law codes to dispense justice. It seems likely that both law codes and medical texts originate in a milieu producing texts in English for practical use. The laws reveal some of the social contexts in which wounds were treated in Anglo-Saxon England and the likelihood that surgical techniques were involved. Alfred’s educational campaigns also provide a context for medical texts in the vernacular and link them with the social contexts of treatment. This makes it implausible that the texts lack surgery because they were mere academic exercises, and it is likewise unlikely that surgery has simply been lost from our texts. There are indeed sections missing from BLB, but this is obvious from the table of contents; if specific surgical sections were missing, that would 55

56

“ita ut mirum in modum illiterati ab infantia comites pene omnes, praepositi ac ministri literatoriae arti studerent, malentes insuetam disciplinam quam laboriose discere, quam potestatum ministeria dimittere” (Asser, VÆR, 106, ed. Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 94) [As a result nearly all the ealdormen and reeves and thegns (who were illiterate from childhood) applied themselves in an amazing way to learning how to read, preferring rather to learn this unfamiliar discipline (no matter how laborious) than to relinquish their offices of power] (Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 110). “Ða gemunde ic hu sio æ wæs ærest on Ebriscgeðiode funden, ond eft, ða ða hie Creacas geliornodon, ða wendon hie hie on heora agen geðiode ealle, ond eac ealle oðre bec. Ond eft Lædenware swæ same, siððan hie hie geliornodon, hie hie wendon ealla ðurh wise wealhstodas on hiora agen geðiode. Ond eac ealla oðræ Cristnæ ðioda sumne dæl hiora on hiora agen geðiode wendon. For ðy me ðycnð betre, gif iow swæ ðyncð, ðæt we eac sumæ bec, ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, ðæt we ða on ðæt geðiode wenden ðe we ealle gecnawan mægen, ond gedon, swæ we swiðe eaðe magon mid Godes fultume ...” (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton MS 20) [Then I remembered also how the divine law was first composed in the Hebrew language, and afterwards, when the Greeks learnt it, they turned it all into their own language, and also all other books. And the Romans likewise, when they had learnt them, turned them all through learned interpreters into their own language. Therefore it seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we also should turn into the language that we can all understand some books, which may be most necessary for all men to know; and bring it to pass, as we can very easily with God’s help ...] (Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 126).

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

165

be obvious too.57 Leechbook III and most of the Old English Herbarium manuscripts also have capitula, so it is clear that they are (at least on their own terms) complete. The Lacnunga does not, but its contents have clearly been assembled in different ways and at different times (and no doubt by different people),58 so it is hard to say what should be included other than what is. In any case, it is implausible that a particular class of material should have been lost differentially from all the extant collections, unless there had been a concerted campaign to excise it. Leaving aside the possible reasons for such a campaign, it is not clear by what authority it might be conducted. Nor does it seem likely that the absence of surgical techniques is simply due to the dependence, direct or indirect, of Anglo-Saxon medicine on classical or sub-classical models from outside England, notably the pseudo-Apuleian Herbarium complex, which themselves are largely pharmaceutical. The exploration above of the “syringe” passage shows that some surgical content, if not a wide range or a substantial amount, was available to the compilers and translators, possibly from multiple sources. As Linda Voigts showed over forty years ago, the contents of the Old English collections, with the exception of the Herbarium, have been selected and adapted, not merely copied, from their sources.59 If particular biases are detected in the Old English collections, these can be attributed to their compilers’ own preferences, and, thus, we must conclude that they had their own reasons for largely excluding surgical techniques. Professional Boundaries We now need to consider what those reasons might have been, whether AngloSaxon physicians considered “manual labor” beneath them or simply outside their remit. If that was the case, it is not clear who is envisaged by the law codes as removing the splintered bone, suturing the wounds, or binding the damaged ligaments. If it was not the same physician whom the written medical sources direct to apply salves or poultices to wounds, perhaps surgical treatment in Anglo-Saxon England was performed by people other than physicians, possibly field surgeons, whose training may have been practical rather than 57 58 59

This was noticed by Cockayne, who inserted material from Harley MS 55 to make up some of the losses, Leechdoms, 2:280–8. On compilation, see: Pettit’s “Introduction” to his Anglo-Saxon Remedies, 1: esp. li–liv. Linda Ehrsam Voigts, “Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies and the Anglo-Saxons,” Isis 70 (1979): 250–68.

166

Banham And Voth

text-based.60 There must have been local “informal” practitioners in early medieval England, and such people could have treated the mishaps of their neighbors, with both drugs and mechanical methods, without any claim to specialist status.61 Wound treatment in the Classical period could be undertaken by a trained physician and there was no separate category for surgeon: indeed, the first medicus in Rome is said to have been a wound specialist (vulnerarius).62 Galen saw surgery as one of three areas of therapeutics, along with pharmacology and dietetics, that fell within the remit of the iatros,63 and he himself gained his experience partly by treating injured gladiators.64 In early medieval Europe, Valerie Flint’s work has revealed a wider range of healers – physicians, saints, and “enchanters” – but surgeons are still nowhere to be seen.65 Surgeons, as a self-conscious and clearly defined body of practitioners, only emerged from a long struggle with university-educated physicians and licensing authorities.66 In the later Middle Ages, surgeons did not even have surgery to themselves: barbers might serve as battlefield surgeons as well as undertaking

60

61 62 63 64 65 66

The training of physicians in early medieval England was probably much more like an apprenticeship than the theoretical education provided by the later universities. For what little is known of Anglo-Saxon medical training, see: Anne van Arsdall, “Medical Training in Anglo-Saxon England: An Evaluation of the Evidence,” in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence, ed. Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, and Maria Amalia D’Aronco (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 415–34. For a survey of late Anglo-Saxon medical practice, see: Audrey Meaney, “Medical Practice in England about the Year 1000,” Social History of Medicine 13.2 (2000): 221–37. G. Majno, “The Medicus,” in his The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 339–94, at 339–40. Philip J. van der Eijk, “Therapeutics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galen, ed. R.J. Hankinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 283–303, at 284. Julius Rocca, “Anatomy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galen, ed. Hankinson, 242–62, at 244–5. V.J. Flint, “The Early Medieval Medicus, the Saint – and the Enchanter,” Social History of Medicine 2.2 (1989): 127–45. For universities, see: Michael McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006). For the late medieval “medical marketplace” in England, see Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995), and, for surgeons, 125–47; and also Robert Ralley, “Medical Economies in Fifteenth-Century England,” in Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850, ed. Mark S.R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 24–46.

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

167

routine procedures like bleeding and tooth pulling.67 The development of surgery as a professional practice between antiquity and the end of the Middle Ages can, thus, be seen as part of a process of increasing fragmentation, from a single unified medical profession (although Galen’s formulation may not be free from polemical intent) to an arena of intense competition, with different groups fighting for control of what each saw as their own traditional sphere of activity. Exactly how early medieval England fits into this development is hard to determine; if the medical texts were the property of trained physicians (whatever their training may have comprised), anything omitted may have belonged to other groups. But the multiplicity of pharmaceutical treatments for wounds in the medical compilations shows that wounds could be treated by the people who used these books, and Flint’s continental evidence suggests that competitors employed supernatural, rather than mechanical, methods. There is further evidence from the Anglo-Saxon laws that wound treatment fell within the purview of the læce. The preface to Alfred’s law code includes a passage from Exodus (21:18–19), which, in both the original Latin of the Vulgate and the translation, requires the offending party to obtain the services of a doctor. The Vulgate law reads: si rixati fuerint viri et percusserit alter proximum suum lapide vel pugno et ille mortuus non fuerit sed lacuerit in lectulo si surrexerit et ambulaverit foris super baculum suum innocens erit qui percussit ita tamen ut operas eius et inpensas in medicos restituat. [if men have quarreled and one has struck his neighbor with a stone or with a fist, and he does not die but has lain in bed, if he has got up and walked outside on his staff, the one who struck the blow is not guilty, except that he should reimburse him for his work and the doctors’ charges]. The Old English translation is slightly different: “Gif hwa slea his ðone nehstan mid stane oððe mid fyste, 7 he þeah utgongan mæge bi stafe, begite him læce 7 wyrce his weorc ða hwile þe he self ne mæge” [If anyone strikes his neighbor with a stone or with a fist, and he [the neighbor] can still walk out with a staff, let him get a doctor and perform his [neighbor’s] work while he himself is unable to].68 The translation provides evidence that vernacular translators 67 68

For the “barber-surgeon,” see: Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8–9. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 173, fols. 35v/36r; transcription CBV, translation DB.

168

Banham And Voth

used the term læce as equivalent to medicus. But perhaps more importantly, the translation changes the Vulgate’s context of medical care following injury, suggesting that, in Anglo-Saxon England, someone who had hurt a neighbor in a quarrel might be able to call upon a medical professional but that money might not change hands. Even by Alfred’s time, this passage suggests, England had only a partly monetized economy, in which the perpetrator would have to do the victim’s work himself rather than pay a third party to do it. The læce would presumably have to be fed and housed while treatment was in progress, but there is no mention of a fee. What the translator does not change, however, is the assumption that such specialists were normally available, and that the treatment of injuries was part of their job. Disciplinary Boundaries Thus, it was not a question of separate “professions” of physician and surgeon, then, as would be the case in later medieval England.69 Nor was it a matter of separate texts: there are no Anglo-Saxon surgical writings, either in Latin or the vernacular, to place alongside the physica of BLB, Leechbook III, the Old English Herbarium, and the Lacnunga. The Chirurgia of Roger Frugard was probably the earliest surgical compilation from medieval Europe (c. 1180), and also, in a French version, the earliest to reach England.70 There is no evidence that this new material provoked unease about “manual labor” among early medieval physicians or fear of losing their educated or genteel status. The earliest illustrated manuscript of the French Chirurgia was prefaced with scenes of consultation ex cathedra and at the bedside, and with the preparation of

69 70

Rawcliffe, Medicine & Society, 105–47. The Latin text is edited by Karl Sudhoff, “Die Chirugie von Roger Frugardi von Salern,” in his Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chirurgie im Mittelalter, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1918), 148–236, and discussed comprehensively in Helen Valls, “Studies on Roger Frugardi’s Chirurgia,” (D.Phil thesis, University of Toronto, 1995). See: Tony Hunt, AngloNorman Medicine, vol. 1, Roger Frugard’s Chirurgia and the Practica brevis of Platearius (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 5–8, for the French. For the reception of surgical texts and ideas in later medieval England, see: Peter Jones, “John of Arderne and the Mediterranean tradition of scholastic surgery,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Lius García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 289–321. Cf. Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries, introduction to this volume, “Penetrating Medieval Wounds,” 1–21, at 11; and Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste,”’ 509.

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

169

drugs,71 but this is a way of fitting a new discipline (surgery) into a category (medicine) already familiar to readers. The manual procedures that the text describes are illustrated later in the manuscript, so the prefatory miniatures cannot constitute an attempt to conceal the true nature of the text. There is no reason to suppose that anxieties about loss of status, characteristic of the later medieval “medical marketplace,” were an issue in early medieval England. Explicit and ‘Tacit’ Knowledge Thus, none of the suggested explanations for the absence of surgery from the Old English medical texts receives much support from the other evidence. On the contrary, it looks increasingly likely that wounds were, in fact, treated by surgical means in Anglo-Saxon England, and that trained physicians carried out this work and had no qualms about doing so. Nothing appears to have been lost from the texts, and the compilers, who seem to have been in touch with the realities around them, could have included surgical material had they so chosen. The “syringe” passage discussed above represents a rare example in the Old English medical corpus of detailed instructions for any kind of mechanical procedure. Far more typical is a direction to simply “make a drink,” or a salve, the assumption being that the reader or practitioner knows how this is to be done. Occasionally, we are told this explicitly: swa læcas cunnon “as physicians know how” (BLB II, 20b and 28d),72 or even swa coccas cunnan “as cooks know how” for a pottage (BLB II, 26a).73 What the practitioner needs to be told is what ingredients to use, and what conditions the preparation is good for. Only when a procedure is unfamiliar, as in the case of draining the liver swelling, is it necessary to explain in any detail how to do it. Treatments for wounds, as the laws illustrate, were commonplace, widely available, and no doubt taught by practice. There was no need, therefore, for instructions in books, which are, in any case, unlikely to have been handy in an emergency, or on the battlefield. Most of the time, it must have been abundantly clear what kind of treatment was needed (to stop the bleeding, for example),74 and the experienced practitioner would know how to carry it out. Only when a new treatment, such as draining a swelling, was introduced, did it need to be described 71 72 73 74

Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.1.20 (s. xiiimed), folio 240r, reproduced by Tony Hunt, The Medieval Surgery (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992), frontispiece. Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:202 and 224–6. Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:220. BLB 2:72b–e, Cockayne, Leechdoms, 2:148.

170

Banham And Voth

Anne van Arsdall has argued convincingly that the Old English medical texts, with their emphasis on what the practitioner needs to do, rather than how to do it, must have been used by a group of people who constituted a “thought collective,” in that they shared a body of “tacit knowledge” necessary to fill out the explicit knowledge conveyed by the texts.75 In this respect, the Old English texts did not differ significantly from the Latin medical literature upon which they drew: that too required a good deal of tacit knowledge from a reader wanting to use it for practical instruction. It has been argued that the “thought collective,” or textual community, creating and using the Old English medical texts was a fairly small one, a group of people, teachers and pupils, who all knew each other, at least indirectly,76 but this cannot have been true of the creators and users of the Latin medical literature, who, to judge by the surviving manuscripts, were spread across western Europe, and even further afield.77 The reason such a large and scattered group of people were able to share a body of tacit knowledge must be that they shared a similar training, during which they acquired a technical vocabulary, a set of shared assumptions about what certain words meant in a medical context.78 Conan T. Doyle has argued that Old English, too, possessed a technical medical vocabulary,79 and the existence of a textual community that shared tacit assumptions about 75

76 77

78

79

Anne van Arsdall, “The Transmission of Knowledge in Early Medieval Medical Texts: An Exploration,” in Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. F. Eliza Glaze and Brian K. Nance, Micrologus Library 39 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 201–15. Debby Banham, “Dun, Oxa, and Pliny the Great Physician: Attribution and Authority in Old English Medical Texts,” Social History of Medicine 24 (2011): 57–73. For the manuscripts and their provenance, see: Augusto Beccaria, I codici di medicina del periodo presalernitano (secoli IX, X e XI), Storia e letteratura 53 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1956). For training, see: Isabella Andorlini, “Teaching Medicine in Late Antiquity: Method, Texts and Contexts,” in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence, ed. Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, and Maria Amalia D’Aronco (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 401–14; and for technical language, D.R. Langslow, Medical Latin in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially chapter 1. C.T. Doyle, “Anglo-Saxon Medicine and Disease: A Semantic Approach” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, forthcoming). For vernacular textual communities in preConquest England, see: Elaine Treharne, “Textual Communities (Vernacular),” in A Social History of England 900–1200, ed. Julia Crick and Elisabeth van Houts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 341–51, although the definition given by Teresa Webber, “Textual Communities (Latin),” in the same volume, 330–40, at 330, suits our purposes better.

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

171

the specialized meanings of Old English words in a medical context would certainly help to explain the absence from our texts of detailed practical instructions. At the level of the individual recipe, explicit and “tacit” information can interact in a fairly intricate manner in Old English medical texts. The typical format of remedies in the Anglo-Saxon medical corpus is to first establish the disease or disorder being treated, e.g. wiþ fotece “for foot-ache” (BLB 1:37, 3), immediately followed by a list of ingredients, “genim ellenes leaf 7 wegbrædan 7 mucgwyrt” [take elder leaf and plantain and mugwort] and minimal instructions as to the preparation and use of the concoction “gecnuwa. lege on 7 gebind on” [pound, apply, and tie on].80 The packaging of this information assumes a high level of knowledge on the part of the intended reader (the medically trained individual), providing very little new information in the way of number, amount, or measurements of ingredients. Preparation instructions are also minimal (“grind”). These linguistic elements present what is known as “old information” or information that is assumed to be known previously to the reader and, thus, “contributes the least to the development of a communication.”81 In her 1981 study of the basic divisions of information, Eileen Prince developed a scale of information types based on levels of “assumed familiarity”82 on the part of the reader. When information is introduced as new, it is assumed to be unfamiliar to the reader and thus codified linguistically so as to guide the reader’s understanding. When information is assumed to be familiar to the reader, it is presented in a way that expects that the reader can draw the extra information needed from something either previously learned (“situationally evoked,” frequently extra-textual) or previously read (“textually evoked”).83 The Anglo-Saxon medical remedies like that presented above would fall under Prince’s category of “most assumed familiarity/situationally evoked” as the information assumes (1) previous diagnosis of the problem to be treated, (2) knowledge of materia medica, (3) understanding of appropriate amounts and proportions of the ingredients for a single dose or a drink to be stored for repeated use, (4) detailed experience of preparation techniques, and 5) familiarity with exact means of application. 80 81

82 83

Cockayne, Leechdoms 2:68. William Vande Kopple, “Something Old, Something New: Functional Sentence Perspective,” in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Richard Graves (Upper Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1984), 172–85. This is a technical term in this field; see Table 6.3. Eileen Prince, “Towards a Taxonomy of Given–New Information,” in Radical Pragmatics, ed. P. Cole (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 223–55.

172

Banham And Voth

Table 6.3 Scale of information types based on levels of assumed familiarity No assumed familiarity Brand-new Brand-new Inferrable anchored

Most assumed familiarity Containing Unused inferrable

Textually evoked

Situationally evoked

The following example of wound treatment in BLB also falls into the category of “situationally evoked” information: “Æfter þon lacnige mon þa dolh swa þu þone dæl þe þonne git hwilce hwega gefelnesse hæbbe. 7 eallunga deade ne synd” [After that, one should treat the wound as you would that part which still has feeling and is not entirely dead] (BLB 2:35.6). This section of the chapter follows instructions to cut away the deadened flesh after an infection; so much of the extra information has already been supplied. Yet it still relies on the reader having the requisite understanding of this type of medical situation: “treat the wound as you would … .” This is one of the few sections that specify the surgical removal of flesh by cutting (asniþan), and it is followed by the instructions for amputation mentioned above: Gif þu wille lim aceorfan oððe asniðan of lichoman þonne gesceawa þu hwilc sio stow sie. 7 þære stowe mægen. forþonðe þara stowa sum raþe rotaþ gif hire mon gimeleaslice tilað. sume lator felað þara læcedoma sume raþor. gif þu scyle aceorfan oððe asniþan unhal lim of halum lice þonne ceorf þu þæt on þam gemære þæs halan lices. ac micle swiþor snið oððe ceorf on þæt hale 7 þæt cwice lic swa þu hit sel 7 raþor gelacnost. [If you want to cut or amputate a limb from the body, then examine the place, and the strength of the place; because if they are carelessly treated, some places quickly putrefy; some feel the treatment later, some sooner. If you have to cut or amputate an unhealthy limb from a healthy body then you cut at the limit of the healthy body, but cut or amputate much more in the healthy and living body, so that you heal it better and sooner] (BLB 1:35h).84 84

Cockayne, Leechdoms, 1:84.

Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

173

In this case, the writer has established that the reader is capable of performing an amputation (“textually evoked” information) but is aware that a limb becoming putrid (“situationally evoked”) is a negative result of amputation. The phrase “some feel the treatment later, some sooner” may refer to the perceived pain level of the patient or the response of the limb to healing, but it suggests that the reader knows which it is. Perhaps the only section of this paragraph that does not rely entirely on previously assumed knowledge is the last sentence. While the writer has established a situational familiarity on the reader’s part with the expectation that the physician can perform an amputation, the recommendation to cut into the healthy part of the body is considered “unused” information: it is new to the discourse but deemed to be familiar to the reader. In short, while it is assumed that the reader is familiar with surgical procedures (the cutting of the flesh, the sawing of bone, tying off of vessels, etc.), and the writer relies on the reader’s ability to tell healthy from unhealthy flesh, it is not assumed that s/he already knows where in relation to “the healthy body” the cut should be made. Conclusions Most mechanical processes, whether surgical or pharmacological, were excluded from the medical texts because they were too familiar to need writing down, being part of the body of knowledge transmitted by non-textual means. The læce called in to evaluate injuries resulting from an assault would know not only what procedures were appropriate for treatment, but also how to carry them out if necessary. The appropriate treatment might very well include surgical techniques, but only if they were very obscure would the practitioner need to consult a book for instructions. A practitioner who could rely on practical experience, without having to refer to a text, would be able to operate more quickly and efficiently and probably inspire confidence in the patient.85 If a salve or potion was called for, on the other hand, the ingredients might have to be looked up, even if the method of preparation was familiar. Few practitioners would be able to keep more than a handful of recipes in their head, but mechanical procedures would be fairly few in number, and general experience in their use would be helpful even in unfamiliar situations. The paucity of surgery in the medical texts, even among wound treatments, should not be allowed to create the impression that salves and potions were the only, or even 85

The experience of modern patients is ambivalent on the question of whether the use of reference works increases or undermines confidence in a medical professional.

174

Banham And Voth

the main, means of caring for wounds and injuries in Anglo-Saxon England. The evidence shows that surgical techniques were also of major importance, even though they lay outside the purview of the surviving texts.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

175

Chapter 7

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices1 Timothy May In 1201, during a battle along the Onon River in northern Mongolia, Chinggis Khan suffered a neck wound, presumably from an arrow. Jelme, one of his subordinates, saved his khan by sucking the wound, thereby preventing blood clots and possible embolism from occurring. When Chinggis Khan awoke, he glanced around and noticed that he was surrounded by blood splatter. His reaction is both laconic and exasperated: “What is this? Could you have spat farther away?”2 But for the presence of one of his servitors, Temüjin (the man who became Chinggis Khan and established the largest contiguous empire in history) would have died from a neck wound in a battle that is even now forgotten in history and would have been of even less consequence in world history with his death. Although a number of studies on Mongol warfare have been written, much less attention has been given to the medical care associated with the wounds sustained through warfare.3 While the incident between Jelme and Chinggis Khan demonstrates that the Mongols possessed a more sophisticated understanding of trauma medical care than one might suspect, other incidents 1 My thanks go to Scott Jacobs for funding part of the research for this article. 2 The Secret History of the Mongols, §145. Henceforth, SHM. The best translation is Igor de Rachewiltz, trans. and ed., The Secret History of the Mongols (Leiden: Brill, 2004). For this work, I have also consulted Frances W. Cleaves, trans. and ed., The Secret History of the Mongols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1982); Urgunge Onon, trans. and ed., The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan (London: Routledge Curzon, 2001); and Mongoliin Nuuts Tovchoo, ed. Sh. Gadambaa (Ulaanbaatar: Bükh erkh khamgaaladsan, 2012). Hereafter, Section numbers are given in parentheses in the text. 3 A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui’s Yin-Shan Cheng-Yao: Introduction; Translation; Commentary and Chinese Text, ed. and trans. Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson (London: Kegan Paul, 2000); F.W. Cleaves, “A Medical Practice of the Mongols in the Thirteenth Century,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17 (1954): 428–44; Sophia C. Kaszuba, “Wounds in Medieval Mongol Warfare: Their Nature and Treatment in The Secret History, with Some Notes on Mongolian Military Medicine and Hygiene,” Mongolian Studies 19 (1996): 59–68; R.C. Rudolph, “Medical Matters in an Early Fourteenth Century Chinese Diary,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2 (1947): 209–306. The latter does not directly deal with military medical practices, yet still offers some useful information from the period.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_009

176

May

reveal that the Mongols incorporated not only native Mongolian practices but also other medical techniques as the empire expanded. The battle itself took place after Temüjin and his suzerain, Toghril (d. 1203), Khan of the Kereit, fought a confederation of nomads led by Jamuqa (d. 1205– 6), who challenged Toghril’s domination of Central Mongolia in 1201. Toghril and Temüjin defeated Jamuqa’s confederation, which promptly fell apart. As the various components of the confederation fled the battlefield, Toghril and Temüjin took the opportunity to finish matters. Toghril pursued Jamuqa, his former war leader and servitor, or nökör. Temüjin chased the Tayichi’ut, another branch of the Mongols and rivals for the leadership of the Mongols (SHM, §142–144). A’uchu Ba’atur, the leader of the Tayichi’ut rallied his forces at Ülengüt Turas along the Onon River, keeping the river between Temüjin’s army and the Tayichi’ut. The river proved to be an insufficient barrier, however, and Temüjin’s Borjigin Mongols forced a crossing. The resulting battle ranged widely and throughout the day, ceasing only with nightfall. Under the cover of darkness, both sides retired to their camps. Due to Temüjin’s successful efforts to cross the river, both camps were hastily formed and near each other. Furthermore, due to the far-flung battle and the fact that fighting ended with only nightfall, for those left on the battlefield – the wounded, stragglers, and even people displaced by the attack from the Tayichi’ut camp – it was not clear which camp belonged to whom (SHM, §144).4 At some point late in the battle, Chinggis Khan received an arrow wound in the neck. He attempted to staunch the bleeding but failed to do so. The Secret History of the Mongols says: “He waited until sundown, then he pitched camp just there where the two armies had encamped right next to each other” (SHM, §145).5 Although the source indicates that he was in a weakened condition, it still says that he made a camp there. Regardless of the camp situation, Chinggis Khan’s wound continued to bleed. Jelme sucked the wound, spat out the blood, and continued to watch him. The sources indicate that they were not alone: “Still, Jelme, not trusting other people, stayed there and looked after him” (SHM, §145). There are several 4 The pell-mell situation of the camps is further evinced in §145. After Chinggis Khan awakes in the middle of the night, he tells Jelme he is thirsty. Jelme then sets off to find kumiss (fermented mare’s milk) for Chinggis Khan to drink. He entered the nearby camp of the enemy and finds a bucket of fermenting cheese curds. The camp was largely deserted and the anonymous author of The Secret History notes that the people had fled, thus, allowing Jelme to complete his mission unobserved. 5 There is some question about the veracity of this statement. If it was a formal camp, complete with a fire, it is doubtful that either side would have ignored it although, in the post-battle chaos, perhaps Chinggis Khan’s and Jelme’s camp blended in with everyone else.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

177

reasons for this. Jelme’s own background as Chinggis Khan’s nökör made him beholden to Chinggis Khan, although a nökör (pl. nököd) could traditionally enter the service of another liege. Because Jelme entered Chinggis Khan’s service as a household servant, given by his own father to satisfy a debt to Chinggis Khan’s father, Yesügei, Jelme did not have a high status (SHM, § 97).6 Indeed, Jelme came from the Uriangqai, a people who had been historically subordinate to the Borjigin Mongols for at least three generations. Because of this, it was unlikely that he could enter the service of another member of the aristocracy or, at least, not in the same capacity that he enjoyed with Chinggis Khan. Beyond practical concerns, Jelme’s loyalty and devotion to Chinggis Khan served him well later in his career; he became one of the most esteemed commanders among the Mongols.7 Furthermore, he also understood the threat of a wound to the neck. Any neck wound could be serious because of the proximity of major arteries and veins, not to mention the potential for damage to the esophagus and trachea. Judging from Jelme’s treatment, it was also a fairly common wound and, indeed, it was one of the most vulnerable areas for a nomadic warrior. While a popular image of the Mongols is that of unarmored warriors, the Mongols did wear body armor into battle, although it was of lesser weight than that of European knights, Japanese samurai, or mamlūks. More often than not, it was lamellar armor made with overlapping segments of lacquered leather or pieces of metal sewn together with leather thongs. Each plate was only a few inches long and wide. It not only allowed for easy, though tedious, manufacture but also provided excellent protection against arrows by distributing the force of the arrow’s impact through plates and thongs. Also, the overlapping plates prevented many wounds and provided better protection against arrows, the primary concern of the Mongols who eschewed close combat until the last moment, although this also meant that the armpit was exposed when the archer raised his bow.8 John of Plano Carpini, the Franciscan friar/espionage 6 Jelme was presented to Temüjin with the instructions, “Now let Jelme put on your saddle, open your door.” Clearly, this demonstrated that Jelme was to be Temüjin’s servant, if not slave. 7 Jelme became one of the dörbön noqai or Four Hounds of Chinggis Khan, a commander of an elite regiment. His younger and better-known brother, Sübedei, also held this title. See: Timothy May, The Mongol Art of War (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2007), 127. In addition to this, because he saved Chinggis Khan’s life at Ülengüt Turas, Jelme received the “Nines,” or received pardon from nine punishable crimes. 8 David Nicolle, Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era (London: Greenhill Books, 1999), 18; David Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book: Christian Europe and its Neighbors (London: Arms and Armour, 1997), 136.

178

May

agent, sent to the Mongol court by Pope Innocent IV in the 1240s, describes the manufacture of the Mongol lamellar armor in exquisite detail: … they make a number of thin plates of the metal, a finger’s breadth wide and a hand’s breadth in length, piercing eight little holes in each plate; as a foundation they put three strong narrow straps; they then place the plates one on top of the other so that they overlap, and they tie them to the straps by narrow thongs which they then laced through the aforementioned holes; at the top they attach a thong, so that the metal plates hold together firmly and well. They make a strap out of these plates and then join them together to make sections of armor as has been described above. They make these into armour for horses as well as men and they make them shine so brightly that one can see one’s reflection in them.9 An additional benefit of lamellar armor was that it was not only fairly simple to create but easier to repair. Often, only one piece of metal or leather was needed, or perhaps new thongs to fasten the armor. Failure to maintain the armor’s condition, such as ensuring the thongs were knotted tightly, however, meant that the pieces could loosen or weaken and allow a blade or arrow to slip between them and cause injury. The potential penetrability of lamellar armor may have inspired the popular myth that the Mongols wore tightly woven silk shirts as added protection, partly because it made it easier to withdraw an arrow from the wound when the silk wrapped around the arrow head.10 Although a few of the Chinese sources mention the Mongols wearing silk shirts, there is no indication in any of the primary sources that silk was worn for protective purposes. Arrows shot with Mongol bows were known to pierce mail easily; it is difficult to imagine a silk shirt preventing further damage even after most of the arrow’s energy had been dispersed by penetrating the armor. Indeed, John of Plano Carpini recommended that European knights wear two layers of mail since one coat 9 10

John of Plano Carpini, “History of the Mongols,” trans. A Nun from Stanbrook Abbey, in Mission to Asia, ed. Christopher Dawson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 34. James Chambers, The Devil’s Horsemen: the Mongol Invasion of Europe (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 55–56; Thomas J. Craughwell, The Rise and Fall of the Second Largest Empire in History (Beverly, MA: Fair Winds, 2010), 145; Richard A. Gabriel, Genghis Khan’s Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 32. If it is a book intended for a popular audience, this myth will appear. Chambers, to the best of my knowledge, is the first to write it. I have not found any reference, primary or secondary, prior to 1975.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

179

was insufficient protection.11 Most likely, the Mongols wore silk garments because they earned them as tribute or received them as loot from the conquest of the Jin Empire. The silk shirts also must have been more comfortable than felt shirts, and served as a barrier between the coarser felt or armor and the skin, which could have been easily irritated. While silk shirts may have been worn for comfort rather than as a supplement to armor, Mongols wore helmets for practical, protective purposes. The helmet, made of iron, usually had a leather skirt, or aventail, attached to it. While the helmet gave adequate head protection, the aventail also shielded against glancing blows that would otherwise wound the face, neck, or shoulder.12 Furthermore, the aventail could also be fastened in the front to serve as a mask – much needed by those at the end of a galloping Mongol column. Although it did not serve as filter against dust, it at least mitigated some of it. Nonetheless, the aventail did not offer complete protection to the neck, which remained vulnerable and often exposed, as was the entire face below the forehead, necessitating the knowledge of medical care for such wounds. His neck exposed, Chinggis Khan was wounded, but it appears that he did not go into shock. This can be ascertained by the treatment he received, which did not include the normal Mongol practice for treating shock; namely, killing an ox or a similar large livestock and inserting the patient into the animal. Francis W. Cleaves found several examples of this procedure, demonstrating that it was common practice among the Mongols. It appears in the Yuan Shi for Guo Baoyu, who suffered from a chest wound from an arrow; for Li Ting, who was struck twice from bolts shot by ballista while attacking the Song city of Shayang in 1274; and for Muhan,13 who underwent this procedure after being shot with three arrows while scaling a wall at the siege of Xijing in Xi Xia.14 In all instances, an ox was found, killed, and its intestines removed. 15 The patient 11 12 13 14 15

John of Plano Carpini, “History of the Mongols,” 46. John of Plano Carpini, “History of the Mongols,” 34. Yuan Shi, 169. Francis W. Cleaves, “A Medical Practice of the Mongols,” 433–441. Cleaves, “A Medical Practice of the Mongols,” 441–442. Note that the intestines were removed for this procedure. Although the sources only mention the intestines, it appears that all or most of the internal organs were removed as well. As one might expect, it was to make room for an adult male body. Furthermore, they were removed so that the intestines were not accidentally damaged and leak into the animal, contaminating the “healing chamber.” Although perforation of intestines is, unfortunately, common enough in modern day operating rooms, the Mongols did have significant experience in removing them from the slaughtering of animals. They also had the benefit of doing so while not also trying to repair damage within the body. Other organs were removed as well, but they

180

May

was then stripped and inserted into the carcass naked and left in it for an undetermined amount of time. In all three instances, the men recovered. Perhaps most interestingly, the commanders are the ones who ordered this procedure. For Muhan and Guo Baoyu, Chinggis Khan not only ordered it, but also performed the procedure, while in the case of Li Ting, the great general Bayan performed it. Muhan was so grateful he devoted his life to Chinggis Khan and placed himself in the forefront of the army. If the sources can be trusted on the matter, and if the generals and Chinggis Khan himself performed it, this medical knowledge was probably not specialized but rather considered basic first aid. The size of the wound and the part of the body that needed to be healed dictated the animal’s size. For instance, in the case of a wounded hand, a sheep would suffice. In some cases, one did not have to be inserted into the animal, but the skin of a freshly slaughtered animal could be applied to the affected area. Indeed, it appears that this was still a common idea in the early twentieth century and used among Kazakhs for frostbite.16 The method of slaughtering the animal also played a key role in in this medical technique. The typical method for killing an animal involved restraining the animal on its back, making a small incision so that a hand could be slipped into the chest of the animal to either still the heart by squeezing it, or by ripping the aorta.17 In the former instance, minimal blood loss occurred, thus keeping most of the blood in the vessels. If the aorta was ripped, the blood then filled the body cavity and flowed out when the animal was eviscerated. The preferable course was to maintain the blood for the healing process. When the wounded person was inserted in the body, the ox blood may have also assisted in the coagulation of the wounds.18 The pressure provided by the ox carcass was also important in staunching the wound as well as preventing shock by forcing blood flow. Also key to this was the position of the body as it was placed inside the ox. While ox or water buffalo can be tremendously large animals, it would be difficult to place a full-grown human male into one. Supposing the average Mongol was around five and a half feet tall, they still could not fit into the torso of an ox while fully prone. It seems likely that the

16

17 18

were not simply refuse. Pulling the cud, or masticated grass, from the stomach, the Mongols applied it as a poultice for wounds. Cleaves, “A Medical Practice of the Mongols,” 441–44. Cleaves cites a letter from Antoine Mostaert commenting on the Mongolian belief of the healing properties of a freshly killed animal. The best discussion of this practice is found in Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Anne Hauet, M.D., telephone interview by author, 14 April 2013.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

181

wounded was inserted into the abdominal cavity in a fetal position, which had the additional benefit of generating pressure with the folding of the legs. Folding the legs also kept the blood circulating and assisted in reducing shock. Similar techniques are used by modern militaries and Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) through the use of pressure trousers, or Medical Anti-Shock Trousers (MAST), that place pressure on the legs and keep the blood circulating in the wounded and injured who are at risk of going into shock. 19 MAST have been used to treat gun-shot wounds, fractures, stab wounds, and internal bleeding and ruptured livers, in addition to preventing shock and increasing blood flow throughout the body. 20 Indeed, the application of MAST appear most beneficial when used for “blunt or penetrating trauma to the abdomen which results in bleeding in the abdominal and retroperitoneal regions” in addition to stabilizing compound fractures in the femur and/or pelvis.21 Furthermore, they assist in reducing blood loss. In short, MAST are used for the same reasons the Mongols used the oxen minus the gunshot wounds, although this might have occurred in the fourteenth century.22 Judging from medical studies, however, using MAST is, perhaps, not as foolproof as stuffing an injured person into an ox or water buffalo. Admittedly, the sample pool for the Mongols was much smaller, and the procedure was not used for every Temür, Daritai, and Qorqudagh. Of course, the patient could only remain in the ox for a set period of time. In the first hour after death, the body (human or animal) temperature drops 1.5– 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit and then continues to decrease by 1.0 to 1.5 degrees per hour for every hour until approximately twelve hours elapse. The method of killing the ox, stilling the heart or ripping the aorta, had no effect on the rate

19

20 21 22

Fatimah Lateef and Tan Kelvin, “Military Anti-Shock Garment: Historical Relic or a Device with Unrealized Potential?” Journal of Emergencies, Trauma, and Shock 1.2 (2008): 63–69; P. Randall, J. Banks, and R.A. Little, “Medical (military) Anti-Shock Trousers: A Short Review,” Archives of Emergency Medicine 1 (1984): 39–51; Caroline Bunker Rosdahl, Textbook of Basic Nursing, 9th ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williamson & Wilkens, 2008), 473. Originally this device was known as Military Anti-Shock Trousers (MAST), but they have become increasingly ubiquitous for emergency and trauma medical care. This practice began for the American military during the Vietnam War and then with the first civilian use in 1973. Randall et al., “Medical (Military) Anti-shock Trousers,” 40–42. Lateef and Kelvin, “Military Anti-Shock Garment,” 65. Lateef and Kelvin, “Military Anti-Shock Garment,” 65–66; Randall et al., “Medical (Military) Anti-Shock Trousers,” 46–48.

182

May

of temperature loss because blood does not serve as an insulator.23 Also, after some time, the ox would have begun putrefying, thus risking infection for the patient. While the Mongols may not have understood the exact reasons for less than favorable results by keeping the patient in the carcass for a long duration, they did apparently determine the right time length for the process to be beneficial to the wounded individual. While the Mongols understood that the pressure and warmth of the interior of the animal had curative attributes (preventing shock), they also concluded that blood carried healing properties and could serve as a cure for other ailments. Indeed, the taboo nature of blood may have also played a role in this concept.24 The insertion of the foot or leg into a body cavity was considered a method of curing gout. The best known example of which comes from the sixteenth century when Altan Khan, the ruler of the Tümed Mongols, suffered from gout which his medical professionals treated by having him place or soak his foot in the chest of a horse or slave.25 Yet, pre-sixteenth century examples of this exist as well. Francis W. Cleaves notes one in the History of the Nation of Archers.26 Here, however, an animal is not used but a boy with red hair. In 1251, a Mongol commander named Xul (Khul) contracted gout, which may have been a fairly common ailment due to the Mongols diet of alcohol and meat, leading to build-up of uric acid, particularly if the meat contained purines.27 As a treatment, a Jewish doctor prescribed that Xul soak his foot in the belly of a red-haired boy. The Mongols then raided the Armenian villages for red-haired boys. After thirty sessions (each one needing a freshly killed boy), Xul still was not healed, thus, he ordered that the physician be disemboweled.28 Not long afterwards, Xul died as well. While there is no evidence of gout killing him, his case appears to have been severe and must have lasted almost a month (assuming one child a day). He most

23 24 25

26 27 28

Prof. Joseph Morgan, University of North Georgia, telephone interview by author, 15 April 2013. Kaszuba, “Wounds in Medieval Mongol Warfare,” 64. Cleaves, “A Medical Practice of the Mongols,” 431. According to conversion narratives, this failed to cure him, but a Buddhist monk happened to be present and cured him, after which Altan Khan renounced shamanism and converted to Buddhism. Cleaves, “A Medical Practice of the Mongols,” 429. WebMD, “Gout – Cause” (accessed 12 April 2013). Robert F. Blake and Richard N. Frye, trans., “History of the Nation of Archers,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12 (1949): 329–331.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

183

likely died from a heart attack since many of the same factors that lead to gout also factor in heart disease.29 So, Chinggis Khan did not go into shock, but the question remains, why did Jelme “spit blood”? Most scholars have suggested that Jelme’s procedure was meant to suck out any poison.30 It is not clear if poisoned arrows were used – it is possible, but there is no mention of it in The Secret History of the Mongols.31 Nonetheless, it was not unusual for the nomads of the Mongolian plateau to use poisoned arrows. Still, Jelme admits that he also swallowed the blood, which, if poisoned, carried great personal risk for himself as well as Chinggis Khan (SHM, §145). If Jelme perished while operating on Chinggis Khan, the Mongol leader could have died on the table, so to speak. Hence, it is doubtful that the wound was poisoned or that Jelme was concerned about poison. Rather, he sucked the wound because it was a learned practice from the nomads’ centuries of experience with wounds. The continued sucking of the coagulated blood potentially removed poison and perhaps any debris, but it also prevented an embolism from reaching the brain and causing a stroke.32 Just as a surgeon in a modern operating room requires suction to prevent air bubbles from forming in the blood stream, Jelme’s action served the same purpose. Sophia Kaszuba concludes that, “Although the medieval Mongols could not have known the theory behind the practice of sucking wounds, it was an established treatment with them, probably based on sound observation of more frequent recovery when wounds were occluded in this way.”33 After Jelme cleaned the wound, it was most likely cauterized, a procedure suggested in accounts of similar wounds, like that of Chinggis Khan’s son, Ögödei. In a later battle, Ögödei suffered a neck wound while fighting the Kereit at Qalaqaljit Sands in 1203 after Toghril became worried about Temüjin’s success. Another nökör, Boroqul, followed the same procedure with Ögödei by sucking the wound and spitting blood (SHM, §173, 214).34 Boroqul stayed the 29 30 31

32 33 34

Anne Hauet, M.D., telephone interview by author, 14 April 2013. SHM, 528–529. Rachewiltz summarizes the literature on this matter. Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy, trans. Thomas Nivison Haining (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 63. Ratchnevsky simply mentions: “The nomads were in the habit of using poisoned arrows… .” There is no further discussion of the use of arrows or evidence that they did. I have not found any other evidence that the Mongols or other nomads in the Mongolian steppes used poisoned arrows. Anne Hauet, M.D., e-mail correspondence with author, 9 and 10 April 2013. Kaszuba, “Wounds in Medieval Mongol Warfare,” 64. The battle occurred because Toghril attempted to assassinate Chinggis Khan with a ruse. Chinggis Khan had requested Toghril’s daughter, ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Ch’aur Beki, as a bride for his son, Jochi. To many Kereit, this was an affront and a sign that Chinggis Khan was placing himself as

184

May

night with Ögödei, which is why they did not appear at the rendez-vous point after the battle. Despite Boroqul’s efforts, the wound did not cease bleeding. Nonetheless, Boroqul assessed the situation and determined that Ögödei had to be moved, even if he could not ride a horse. Thus, they both rode Boroqul’s horse, Ögödei in the front and Boroqul clutching him from behind, continuing to perform suction on Ögödei’s wound. It is only after they returned to camp that Ögödei’s wound was cauterized (SHM, §173). Although it is not mentioned, it is likely that Jelme cauterized Chinggis Khan’s wound, including the blood vessels and skin, in the same way. Unless the jugular vein or the carotid artery was cut (in which case both Ögödei and Chinggis Khan would have died), there are sufficient smaller blood vessels that allowed for cauterization without adversely affecting blood circulation in the neck.35 Staunching the flow of blood was crucial, but there were also other concerns. Although, not recorded in The Secret History, the Persian historian Rashid al-Din, who mined much of his data from senior Mongol officials in the Ilkhanid court as well as other documents, recorded that, as a youth, Chinggis Khan was wounded in a skirmish with the Tayichi’ut. This time, he was saved by another nökör, Borghochi. Instead of sucking the wound to remove the clotted blood, Borghochi heated a stone and poured water over it. He then held Chinggis Khan’s mouth open so the steam entered and loosened the clots.36 While it is not certain that this event took place, what is important is the description of the treatment, which provides an alternate method and appears to be most concerned with preventing the patient from choking on blood. Furthermore, if the event took place, it further illustrates that the neck was extremely vulnerable to wounds. While neck and other battlefield wounds occurred, the Mongols also dealt with repetitive stress injuries that affected battlefield performance. Warfare and the training involved for the military classes takes a toll on the human

35 36

Toghril’s equal. They responded by promising Ch’aur to Jochi, hoping that he would come to them. By tradition, the wedding party would come unarmed, thus making them easy targets. Fortunately for the Mongols, Chinggis Khan was warned of Toghril’s perfidy. Even so, the Mongols suffered a set-back (in which Ögödei received his wound), but rallied and defeated the Kereit a few days later. Anne Hauet, MD, telephone interview by author, 14 April 2013. Rashid al-Din, Jami’at al-Tawarikh, ed. B. Karimi (Teheran: Iqbal, 1983), 169; Rashiduddin Fazullah, Jami’u’t-Tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 64. Borghochi is the Bo’orchi in SHM. Henceforth RD/Karimi and RD/Thackston respectively.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

185

body in any era.37 Injuries result not only from violence but also through the constant and prolonged use of repetitive motions of muscle groups, tendons, ligaments, and even bones. The Mongols primarily fought as horse-archers, so most injuries undoubtedly came from repetitive stress injuries related to archery and associated with riding. The Mongol composite bow was an impressive weapon, possessing an average pull of 130 pounds, or 59 kilograms. With it, the Mongol could shoot arrows over 300 meters; some instances of almost 500 meters have been recorded, 38 although most warfare took place at a much closer range and harassing attacks occurred at the outer limits of the bow’s range. Drawing such a bow required a great deal of upper body strength. In order to achieve this, Mongols began their archery training as small children using smaller and less powerful bows. Much as a body builder gradually increases the weight he lifts, the Mongols gradually increased the pull of the bow as they trained.39 After reaching adulthood, the Mongol warrior was capable of wielding the war bow. Constant use of the bow in warfare, training, and hunting ensured that the warrior maintained his conditioning. Despite a warrior’s best efforts, however, some deterioration in ability and injury occurred through the years. The Secret History of the Mongols, in the sections prior to the birth of Chinggis Khan, mentions an archery-related injury. In an effort to secure peace, the Mongol leader Ambakhai Khaghan arranged a marriage between the Tatars and his daughter. When he accompanied her to the wedding, the Tatars violated tradition and took Ambakhai captive. The Tatars then turned him over to the Jin Empire in northern China (1125–1234) where he was later executed at 37

38

39

See, in this volume: M.R. Geldof, “And describe the shapes of the dead”: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence,” 57–80; Rachel E. Kellett, “…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zů der brust”: The Placement and Consequences of Swordblows in Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual,” 128–49; Michael Living­ ston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” 215–30; Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in AngloScottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” 102–27; William Sayers, “The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature,” 473–95; Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101; and Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” 27–56. Hok-Lan Chan, “Siting by Bowshot: A Mongolian Custom and Its Sociopolitical and Cultural Implications,” Asia Major 4.2 (1991): 53–78, at 61. It should be noted that normal range of Mongols bows came with a pull of 100 to 160 lb. pull, with the latter being rare, yet still recorded. J.D. Lathem and W.F. Paterson, Saracen Archery: An English Version and Exposition of a Mameluke Work on Archery (London: New Holland Publishing, 1970), xxv.

186

May

the orders of the Jin Emperor, Hailing Wang (r. 1150–1161). Ambakhai successfully relayed a message to a person sympathetic to him, telling the Mongols of the Tatars’ treachery and demanding that the Mongols avenge him: “Until the nails of your five fingers Are ground down Until your ten fingers are worn away Strive to revenge me!” (SHM, §53) Albeit melodramatic, his plea illustrates a reality. Over the lifetime of a steppe nomad, injuries to the hands could occur, including where the fingernails are torn out or damaged beyond natural repair, often from drawing the Mongol bow. In some instances, even the fingers could atrophy or suffer lacerations, leading to amputation at the first joint. Another common injury experienced by Mongols resulted from horse riding, or, more precisely, falling from the horse. Even though the nomads began riding as children, even the most proficient rider was susceptible to injury. The most notable example also comes from the Secret History of the Mongols. In 1226, Chinggis Khan returned to Xi Xia (modern Gansu and Ningxia Provinces of the People’s Republic of China) to quell a rebellion. In the winter of 1227 (January or February), while hunting wild asses near Arbuqa, a sudden rush of the animals startled Chinggis Khan’s horse, Josotu Boro, causing it to rear and throw him (SHM, §265).40 The injuries to the Mongol leader were sufficient for him to camp at Cho’orqat instead of pressing the campaign. Here, his generals and sons attempted to persuade him to rest and not continue his attack. Chinggis Khan disagreed, urging his army to lay siege to the Tangut capital despite being wracked by fever.41 Chinggis Khan continued to campaign from his bed, even summering at Chasatu Mountain. He ultimately died as a result of the fall from his horse, but he encouraged his army to destroy the enemy. Even on his deathbed, Chinggis Khan remained the strategist. When the Tangut ruler, Iluqu Burkhan, paid homage to Chinggis Khan as he laid siege to Uraqai, the Mongol ruler did not admit Iluqu Burkhan into his presence, forcing the Tangut to perform obeisance outside his yurt in an act of revulsion before having him executed (SHM, §267). In this manner, Chinggis Khan continued to hide his injury while using it as a political stratagem. Furthermore, he ordered 40 41

Rachewiltz discusses the possible location of Arbuqa but concludes that no one is certain. See: SHM, at 966–967. The Tangut were the ruling element of Xi Xia. Xi Xia itself was comprised of Han Chinese, Turkic and Mongolian nomads, along with the Tangut, who were of Tibetan origins.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

187

his generals and sons to not relent in their attacks saying, “While I take my meals you must talk about the killing and destruction of the Tang’ut and say, ‘Maimed and tamed, they are no more’” (SHM, §268). It is impossible to know the exact nature of Chinggis Khan’s injuries, although scholars have speculated. To be sure, injuries from falling from a horse can be severe and range from a few bruises, to broken bones and internal damage to the organs, and even death. While normally excellent horsemen, even the most experienced nomad was subject to accidents as in the case of Chinggis Khan or the modern herder, Bat-Ochir Oldov, who, in January 2012, suffered severe injuries when his horse slipped on a snowy slope while attempting to round up stray horses. Although Bat-Ochir clung to his horse as it slid down the hill, he ultimately fell with his foot stuck in the stirrup, was dragged and kicked in the head once. He suffered a broken hip and broken right leg in addition to contusions. Ultimately, his feet were amputated due to frostbite after spending six days in -36 C weather during the Mongolian winter.42 Though sustained while tending his herds, Bat-Ochir’s injuries are identical to injuries Mongol warriors could suffer on the battlefield. In addition to trauma from the battle, mounted warriors had additional risks. Simply toppling out of the saddle could lead to contusions and broken bones. Once on the ground, the risk of being trampled was omnipresent, not to mention being more vulnerable to attack.43 Of course, falling from the saddle entailed other risks, such as being dragged, as in the case of Bat-Ochir. Another possibility was that the shift of the rider’s body could also bring the horse down with them. While the steppe horses tended to be smaller than sedentary grain-fed horses, 900 pounds can still crush a human. As illustrated by Chinggis Khan’s accident, the Mongols (as with any horsebased army), of course, carried additional risks of injury. The Mongols not only had to be concerned about injury to themselves but to their horses. The smaller steppe horses still provided a large target for archers, some of whom used narrow armor-piercing arrows44 that could puncture armor and drive deep into the body, killing when they penetrated organs. Exsanguination was unlikely because the shaft was larger than the point, thus limiting blood flow.45 Other 42 43

44 45

Mongolia Today, “Six Winter Days Alone with Death”: (accessed 15 June 2014). Cf. Stephen Atkinson, “‘They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …’: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in this volume, 519–43, at 529. John of Plano Carpini, “History of the Mongols,” 46. This has been demonstrated in simulations. See: Deadliest Warrior, “Genghis Khan vs. Hannibal,” August 10, 2011(Los Angeles, CA: 44 Blue Productions, 2011).

188

May

arrows included more traditional double-bladed, and sometimes triple-bladed or tri-lobed, heads. Yet of equal interest are the flat and rounded, yet sharpened arrowheads.46 These appear to have been primarily intended to wound by slicing and cutting, rather than penetrating the enemy – perhaps severing bowstrings or blood vessels. Larger arrowheads were also used and appear to have been intended, not for use against people as anti-personnel weapons, but rather against horses.47 While the Mongols did use barding on some horses, particularly those of the heavy cavalry and officers, the vast majority of Mongol horses were unarmored to avoid diminishing their mobility. In addition, the armor worn by the Mongols may have also assisted in mitigating the severity of wounds sustained by falling from a horse, but it certainly did not provide complete protection from falls. A startled or wounded horse could rear or fall, possibly throwing its rider, leading to broken bones and internal injuries. The Mongol horse, however, was less likely to rear suddenly. Unlike many societies, the Mongols’ war horses were not truly war horses but simply horses used in war and trained to be docile.48 The Song emissary Zhao Hong noted, When their horses are only one or two years old they ride them harshly in the steppe and train them. They then maintain them for three years and after that mount and ride them again. Thus they train them early and for that reason they do not kick or bite. Thousands and hundreds form herds but they are silent and are without neighing or calling. When they dismount they do not rein them in and tether them, but they do not stray. Their temperament is very good.49 Treating the injuries sustained from riding horses as well as similar injuries caused by concussive force required (and still requires) different techniques than injuries sustained from arrows and sabres. The Mongols were expert bonesetters. Even modern nomads learn the basics because the loneliness of the steppe requires a modicum of basic medical knowledge. However, internal injuries, particularly in the medieval era, were more confounding. While bro46

47 48 49

Yu. C. Khudyakov, Vooruzhenie Tsentral’no-Aziatikikh Kochyevnikov v Epokhu Rannyego I Razvitogo Spegnyeveko’ya (Novosibirsk: Academy of Sciences, 1991), 118–119. Cf. Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches,’” for a discussion of European arrow wounds. John of Plano Carpini, “History of the Mongols,” 35. May, The Mongol Art of War, 56. Zhao Hong, Meng-Da Bei-Lu: Polnoe Opisanie Mongolo-Tatar, Russian trans. Nikolai Ts. Munkyev (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1975), 68–69. This English translation by the author.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

189

ken ribs could be bound, organs perforated by them or ruptured by a mace or hoof blow had no treatment, so they had to come up with other practices. In addition to their own traditional methods, the Mongols adopted many other forms of medical knowledge. The Mongols favored Islamic medicine in all of its forms, including medicine that entered the Mongol world in distinctly non-Islamic forms, such as that found in the Chinese medical text Huihui yaofang (HHYF) or Muslim Medicinal Recipes, which consisted of lists of methods and recipes for a wide variety of conditions. As Paul D. Buell explains, The text describes procedures for such things as setting broken bones, including cranial features with surgical indications, treating wounds and cauterization. It also contains theoretical discussions, many of them oriented to dietary therapy. Nearly all the Arabic script entrees explain the original names and terms appearing in Chinese transcription, often in grammatically Persian phrases. Sometimes a brief commentary is added. The majority of the simples and recipes and a good deal of the text go back to Greek medical tradition. Greek forms are also at the root of many Arabic forms, although these are not distinguished in the examples given. Others stem from the ancient Near East. Also present specifically are a number of simples an recipes labeled as Indian, although much Indian medicine had already been assimilated to Arabic by the time that the HHYF was written.50 Though influenced by Ibn Sina’s Qanūn fī al-tibb, it not a direct translation and includes many synthesized treatments combining “Muslim” (meaning Islamic and Galenic medicine) with Chinese medicine. Some cures clearly came from the Mongols themselves, such as using powdered cheese on a wound to prevent bleeding and assist in healing.51 It is difficult to pinpoint when the Mongols began to use these treatments, though they did use them. Although China and Persia are the usual suspects for cultural exchange and borrowing by the Mongols, Islamic or “Muslim” medicine did not always come directly from Muslim or Middle Eastern sources. Tibet played a surprising role in influencing medical practices in the Mongol empire. In addition to introducing Buddhist influences, Tibet also served as an intermediary for Indian 50

51

Paul D. Buell, “Tibetans, Mongols and the Fusion of Eurasian Cultures,” in Islam and Tibet – Interactions Along the Musk Routes, ed. Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, and Ronit YoeliTlalim (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 201–202. Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Andersen, Huihui Yaofang: Translation and Interpretation (forthcoming).

190

May

medicine as well as non-Indian medical knowledge, such as techniques that fell into the category of “Muslim” medicine or that which came from the Levant and whose true origins may have been Greek.52 “Muslim” medicine also included texts in Arabic, Persian, Nestorian Syriac, as well as Turkic.53 During the period of the Mongol World Empire, “Muslim” medicine became more widespread and was practiced throughout the Mongol Empire, even gaining popularity in China, particularly in the Mongol court of the Yuan.54 The practitioners of “Muslim” medicine included many Uyghurs, who submitted to the Mongols in 1209. The Uyghurs were in the perfect location to receive the various influences that comprised “Muslim” medicine. Located in Central Asia, they sat astride trade routes connecting them with the Islamic World as well as Chinese influences. Missionaries from the Church of the East (Nestorians) had been active in the region for centuries as well. The Uyghurs had contact with Tibet via Buddhism. As Buell suggests, the Tibetans’ own role in synthesizing medical knowledge should not be ignored.55 Although the Mongols benefitted from the enormous store of medical knowledge in their empire, that knowledge was not confined to the Mongol military or the court. Indeed, it disseminated throughout the empire: thus Islamic medical techniques from Syria could find their way to Korea.56 The Mongols not only valued Islamic medicine but used Chinese medicine early on, and it continued to have influence throughout the existence of the empire. Chinese medical texts offered many remedies for internal injuries. While there is some question about how effective they were, the fact that medical texts from the Yuan court exist suggests that they were found at least somewhat useful. Chinggis Khan’s death due to internal injury explains why the Mongols sought more effective ways of treating these kinds of wounds, including acupuncture, moxibustion, herbal, and dietary medicine.57 One text, Yin-Shan Cheng-yao (YSCY) or The Proper and Essential Things for the 52 53

54 55 56 57

Buell, “Tibetans, Mongols,” 191–92. For a discussion of Muslim medical knowledge and practice on the Iberian Peninsula, see: Carmel Ferragud, “Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early-Fifteenth Century,” 233–51, in this volume. Buell, “Tibetans, Mongols,” 192. Buell, “Tibetans, Mongols,” 192. Michael J. Seth, A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic Period through the Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 110. Buell and Andersen, Soup for the Qan, 139. Moxibustion consisted of the “burning of an artemsia extract on or near the skin largely at the same meridian points used in acupuncture.” Here I have stayed with the Wade Giles transliterations for the benefit of those who may consult the text and are not versed in the pinyin spellings.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

191

Emperor’s Food and Drink was written by Hu Szu-hui, the imperial physician in the early 1300s who also specialized in dietary medicine.58 Thus, while the Mongols may have viewed food as a meal, their physician used meals as a form of treatment and as preventative medicine. Furthermore, as Hu Szu-hui may have served in the keshig or imperial bodyguard, he may have been familiar with not only treating wounds but also the long-term recovery.59 Although very little of the YSCY has anything directly dealing with battlefield wounds, some of the recipes may have aided recovery from those wounds. Regardless, it is an impressive amalgamation of the various influences that formed the fabric of the Mongol Empire – a Chinese medical text that lists a variety of foods using ingredients from throughout the empire that also includes Arab, Persian, Chinese, Turkic, and Mongolian dishes. As Buell and Eugene N. Andersen note, “There also appears to have been a conscious effort to use traditional Mongolian foods with their medicinal values in mind, judging from the uses to which these foods are put today, and from a few suggestions in the sources indicating that present conceptions of medicinal value of foods may have a high antiquity among the Mongols.”60 Furthermore, herbal medicine is incorporated into in the recipes that also focus on balancing the qi.61 Returning to the application of medicine in the treatment of wounds, the YSCY clearly incorporates ideas of sympathetic magic, perhaps originating from the Mongols’ own practice of shamanism. The recipes are sympathetic in that eating a wolf’s leg provides benefits to the patient’s leg; eating ox lungs help cures the lungs.62 The implications for treating and, perhaps, rehabilitating wounded limbs are obvious. Even internal injuries, hypothetically, could be cured by devouring internal organs, such as sheep liver, for the same injured organ. An example is Chinese quince soup that cures “pain of loin and knee, and evil foot [qi] insensitivity.”63 The major ingredient, despite the name, is a sheep’s leg. Another remedy for evil foot qi was Bear Soup, which uses two bear legs.64 In the YSCY, there are also recipes for targeted cures designed to directly heal the wound or affliction. Turtle soup was a given to patients with a “wounded center,” meaning the torso. Although the name was turtle soup, the Mongolian 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Buell and Andersen, Soup for the Qan, 4. Buell and Andersen, Soup for the Qan, 22. Buell and Andersen, Soup for the Qan, 91–92. Buell and Andersen, Soup for the Qan, 134, 140–142. Buell and Andersen, Soup for the Qan, 134, 140–142. Yin-shan cheng-yao, in A Soup for the Qan (see note 2), 279. Henceforth YSCY. YSCY, 294.

192

May

version used mutton.65 Considering that the recipes were for the Mongol court, it is not surprising that the major component was mutton with various spices. Another recipe, which is clearly Mongolian, miqan-u könlesün involves a sheep’s rear leg and treats seven kinds of wounds, as does Chinese Matrimony Vine Fruit, Sheep’s Kidney Congee, and Chinese Yam T’o.66 Unfortunately, the seven wounds appear to concern pathological agents, such as illnesses, and not actual battle injuries. Other recipes are prescribed for injuries to the bones and to the organs such as Sprouting Chinese Foxglove Chicken, Sheep Entrail Gruel, and Sheep’s Spine Gruel.67 A white sheep’s head is needed for Sheep’s Head Hash, one of several cures for debility of hand and foot.68 There are also recipes for “bleeding that will not stop” such as Wild Pig Meat Broth and Otter Liver Gruel.69 Consuming the meat of a red rooster also stops bleeding.70 Elephant tusk was used to remove objects from wounds. A piece was shaved off the tusk, ground into powder, and then mixed with water. Ostensibly, this would make the object come out, but how is uncertain; nor is it clear if the mixture was a thick paste or watery.71 Naturally, there are a number of recipes for easing various pains as well as treating poison. In addition to remedies, the YSCY also contains warnings against certain foods. In the case of wound treatment, the most significant is that pork should not be eaten, or eaten moderately, as it was believed to weaken joints and bones. Furthermore, “It is even worse for those suffering from wounds caused by metal weapons.”72 Considering that the fourteenth-century Mongol court in China was Buddhist, it is unlikely that this prohibition had anything to do with Islam, but as stated earlier, medical practices from the Islamic world did influence medical practices in the Mongol Empire on a wide scale, so it cannot be ruled out. Another prescription for headaches may have also been applied to ailments resulting from battle. Although blows to the head were common in warfare, specific recipes for concussions treating concussions are non-existent. However, one possible recommendation was to wrap the tanned skin of a wolf’s throat around the head which would cure a headache.73 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

YSCY, 291. YSCY, 318, 416, 418. YSCY, 413–415. YSCY, 431. Other cures are listed on 429 and 430. Many of these recipes also appear to deal with symptoms related to a stroke. YSCY, 431–432. YSCY, 552. YSCY, 536. YSCY, 541. YSCY, 545–546.

Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

193

Hu Szu-hui’s attendance at court is evidence of an ongoing concern by the Mongols for their general health. In the instance of Xul in Armenia, the appearance of the Jewish doctor may simply be an issue of religious rivalry, but the reference to the Jewish doctor also indicates that the Mongols quickly adopted medical practitioners from throughout their empire. The Ilkhan Öljeitu’s (r.1304–1316) court contained a contingent of Jewish doctors.74 Ögödei (r. 1229–1240), the second khan, also had a court physician.75 Chinggis Khan, of course, had the aged Daoist sage traverse from China to Mongolia to Afghanistan to make a house call in an effort to secure his own immortality. The sage replied that he could not prolong life, but he could counsel him on protecting his life. Oddly enough, one piece of wisdom was to stop hunting, which was given after Chinggis Khan’s horse stumbled and threw the Khan while hunting boars.76 While Chinggis Khan avoided internal injury as well as harm from the boar itself, his later disregard for the sage’s advice led to internal injuries and his death. Although Chinggis Khan ignored some crucial medical advice, it is clear that the Mongols adopted new medical techniques as they expanded and even promoted the spread of medical knowledge throughout their empire. Nonetheless, their own medical knowledge base was by no means limited. Mongolian practices and methods were still used even as Chinese and Islamic medical practices were incorporated, and despite the “superior” knowledge of the civilized world they conquered, it appears that when all else failed, nothing helped the wounded as much as basic first aid, such as sucking wounds or placing a person in an ox. 74 75 76

Denise Aigle, Le Fārs sous la domination Mongole: Politique et Fiscalité (Paris: Association Pour L’avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2006), 88. RD/Karimi, 638; RD/Thackston, 234. Li Chih-Ch’ang, The Travels of an Alchemist, trans. Arthur Waley (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 118.

194

Krug

Chapter 8

The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine Ilana Krug

Contained within the British National Archives’ numerous Exchequer accounts detailing the provisioning of late medieval castles is the curious detail that honey was important to have on hand. In fact, Hugh Despenser the Younger, acting as keeper for the castle and town of Bristol during the reign of Edward II, recorded the purveyance and subsequent sale of provisions in 1320; all items but honey were sold.1 Later that century, in 1394, two men received as wages portions of the honey, which was all that remained of the stores when the castle of Cherbourg was returned to the king of Navarre earlier.2 Clearly, it was essential to maintain supplies of honey in castle stores, even when other foodstuffs were depleted or sold. Honey, which keeps indefinitely, would not be prone to the same spoilage that prompted purveyors, keepers of castles, and receivers of goods to sell off rotting food or reluctantly acknowledge a loss in the documents.3 However, this raises the question of the explicit purpose of honey in a military context, and why it would have been one of, if not the last, items to remain in a castle’s supplies. The most compelling explanation for the use of honey in the context of military provisioning is medical. Castles acted as mustering points, defensive bases, and storage depots for the supplies needed for military operations. The defensive as well as offensive role of strategic castles in late medieval England meant that the welfare of those manning the castles had to be safeguarded. Thus, castles had to maintain the materials for ensuring the health of those protecting the castle or marching off on campaign. One of those materials was honey, which was a crucial element in medieval military medicine, particularly for the treatment of wounds, and appears to have been kept on hand in the stores of a number of castle garrisons. 1 London, The National Archives [TNA], E 101/15/32. 2 TNA, E 101/41/25. 3 Such was the case in provisioning accounts of Jacob of Dalileye, receiver of victuals at Carlisle in the first years of the fourteenth century, in which Jacob carefully noted that some of the herring and dried beans had rotted. TNA, E 101/11/19.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_010

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

195

There were, of course, other uses for honey in the Middle Ages. Perhaps the most obvious purpose for it was as a sweetening agent. Before sugar made its widespread appearance in Europe, fruit and honey were the only common sweeteners available to medieval cooks.4 Naturally, the majority of such rich fare was reserved for those segments of society that could afford it. Kathy Pearson notes that the difficulty confronting medieval beekeepers in extracting honey from the hives would “probably limit its consumption to the elite.”5 Records of military provisioning nearly universally delineate the collection of basic foodstuffs, however, and are largely silent about elaborate flavoring or sweetening.6 Although it is possible that the honey reported as collected for, or present in, castle stores was maintained for such a function, as Michael Prestwich claims in his investigation of wardrobe documents detailing garrison requirements for the castles of Edinburgh, Berwick, and Dirleton in 1300,7 the fact that honey often appears in castle accounts as the last remaining item

4 A perusal of available medieval cookbooks indicates that people certainly had some sort of sweet tooth, though perhaps not as extreme as today, and creative cooks were able to accommodate them. Recipes for tarts, fried doughs, and even candy, indicate that foods were often sweetened with honey, such as a sort of pudding made with figs, raisins, wine, and almond milk, or the saffron-infused custard tarts that were served during the third course of Henry IV’s coronation feast in 1399. Honey was even added to savory dishes for a depth of flavor; a recipe for “whyte wortes,” a pottage made with leafy greens or herbs, almond milk, and rice flour, specified that only a small amount of honey should be added lest the dish be too sweet. Thomas Austin, ed., Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, EETS o.s. 91 (London: Oxford University Press, 1888), 6, 27, 50, 57. 5 Kathy Pearson, “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet,” Speculum 72.1 (1997): 1–32, at 14.That honey was an expensive item can be seen in provisioning accounts. The particulars of the account of William of Redness, receiver at Calais in the latter part of Edward III’s reign, indicate that a pipe of honey cost 60 shillings; the somewhat more than forty-two pipes of honey cost over £121. TNA, E 101/178/15. 6 The standard foods purveyed or otherwise collected for military use were grain, flour, peas and beans, dried fish, salted meat, wine, salt, occasional dairy products, and live animals. Herring or salt-cured fish was much less commonly acquired for military use but does occasionally also appear in purveyance accounts. A typical purveyance account from the period is that of Richard of Abingdon, receiver of victuals at Carlisle, dated to 1298. Richard lists wheat, wheat flour, bran, oats, wheat malt, oat malt, wine, beef carcasses, bacons, dried fish, herring, cheese, and salt as the foodstuffs received at the castle. TNA, E 101/7/20. 7 Michael Prestwich, “Victualling Estimates for English Garrisons in Scotland During the Early Fourteenth Century,” English Historical Review 82 (July 1967): 536–43, at 537.

196

Krug

seems to challenge the notion that honey was strictly used in a pleasing but ultimately extraneous manner.8 Similarly, another use for honey in the Middle Ages was as the basic component of the alcoholic beverage mead, a fermented honey beverage that was enjoyed long before the age of the Vikings. Yet mead was only very occasionally specified in purveyance and other accounts of military provisions, in which wine was the most commonly demanded beverage, with ale coming second, and cider a distant third.9 However, malt of all sorts and barley were frequently kept on hand, both for garrison stores and collections for armies on the move. Thus, the majority of ale consumed in a military context was not requisitioned in its finished form; only the ingredients were collected. This was not practical for mead, particularly when it was needed for an expeditionary force. If kept in sufficient quantities, honey could easily be made into mead by the castle garrisons, though the process was lengthy.10 However, honey was rarely stockpiled in the vast amounts needed to produce enough mead to meet the continual beverage requirements of armies on the move, even if a modest garrison might not have found the smaller yield or the long fermentation period of mead problematic.11 Honey may have been used to make mead, but documents of 8

9 10

11

This is certainly an issue that depends on the composition of the castle’s population. If one were simply looking at accounts that indicated provisioning of a lord’s household, one might expect to see food reflecting the more diverse and sumptuous tastes of the wealthy. In the context of preparing a castle for war, on the other hand – particularly these castles – the stockpiled goods would be more utilitarian, as the documents do suggest. Many fewer provisioning orders and accounts contain an itemization for cider, and, when specified, the amounts are generally modest. See: TNA, E 101/7/10 and E 101/24/16. According to a fourteenth-century recipe, mead would need to ferment for at least two weeks before it was potable, although the author recommends that it would be best if consumed somewhere between six and eight weeks after creation. By comparison, most ale was drunk very shortly after brewing because there was a constant concern of souring. Indeed, in the mid-fifteenth century, ale brewers in Worcestershire were forbidden from selling ale over four days old. Therefore ale, not mead, was procured for army consumption on a regular basis, and often in huge quantities. For example, Edward I provided his soldiers with a gallon of ale per person per day, a fairly typical daily intake. Ein Buch von Guter Spise, ed. Alia Atlas (1993): (accessed 20 May 2013); Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17, 19. An indenture from 1299 documenting a transfer of provisions from Berwick to Edinburgh by way of Stirling notes the existence of one barrel of honey, which contained thirty-four gallons. The amount at first sounds significant, but, in reality, was probably inadequate for providing sufficient mead for the castle’s garrison. Each gallon of honey, weighing approximately twelve pounds, would be enough for four gallons of mead. Hence, that barrel

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

197

garrison supplies in Scotland under Edward I suggest the strong preference for wine instead.12 Moreover, while enormous quantities of food and drink were repeatedly purveyed in England for the provisioning of the city of Calais after its capture in 1347, none of the collections included honey; indeed, documents indicate that only small amounts of honey were purchased more locally but infrequently.13 This erratic nature of small-scale honey collection for castle stores also points to an alternate use. The more likely explanation is that garrisons and other military personnel kept the honey primarily for medical purposes. Using honey for a variety of medical purposes, particularly in the treatment of wounds, has been undergoing a renaissance in the modern era. Nurses and other medical practitioners and experts have noted the efficacy of honey in addressing several common problems of wound treatment; for example, honey successfully reduces inflammation and edema, removes infected and dead tissue, encourages regrowth of skin and tissue, and provides an antimicrobial environment for healing, as well as reducing or eliminating the odor of the wound entirely.14 Indeed, such positive results have been noted for burns, infected wounds, leg ulcers, and other sorts of injuries. Honey works by creating a barrier against bacteria penetration and proliferation in the wound, creating a sterile environment in which the wound may heal. Honey is fairly acidic, with a pH of 3.5, which is too acidic for microbes to grow.15 Additionally, the small amount of hydrogen peroxide in the honey provides a continuous antibacterial function, which is largely responsible for eliminating wound odor.16

12

13 14 15 16

could only produce roughly 136 gallons of mead. A possible exception is an account from 1303 that details existing supplies in three of Edward I’s Welsh border castles. The castle at Ruthlan was noted to have 180 gallons of honey, which might point to mead making; roughly 600–1000 gallons of mead could be produced from the castle’s honey stores. TNA, C 47/22/8/4, E 101/12/3. Although six tuns of honey were reported present in Edinburgh castle, there were simultaneously one hundred tuns of wine. This would be roughly 6,050 gallons of mead versus 25,000 gallons of wine. TNA, E 101/13/34/35. Quoted in Prestwich, “Victualling Estimates,” 543. TNA, E 101/178/15. Cheryl Dunford, “The Use of Honey-derived Dressings to Promote Effective Wound Management,” Professional Nurse 20.8 (April, 2005): 35–38, at 35. Honey: A Modern Wound Management Product, ed. Richard White, Rose Cooper, and Peter Molan (Aberdeen: Wounds UK, 2005), 1. Cheryl Dunford, “The Use of Honey in Wound Management,” Nursing Standard 15.11 (Nov. 2000): 63–68, at 63–4.

198

Krug

Honey has been used since antiquity for a variety of medical applications and treatments, such as skin diseases, heart conditions, and liver disorders. Indeed, it is one of several ancient remedies, including the use of maggots (or, in medical jargon, “larval therapy”) and leeches that has attracted recent attention.17 The ancient Egyptians used honey as a binder in most medicines and as a preservative agent in their embalming substance. The ancient Greek Hippocrates wrote about honey’s properties, noting that it “causes heat, cleans sores and ulcers, softens hard ulcers of the lips, heals carbuncles and running sores.”18 The Roman physicians Galen, Marcellus, and Pliny believed that honey could be instrumental in improving or even restoring sight. The healing properties of honey were also promoted in the Islamic world. The Qur’an indicates that honey had diuretic and laxative qualities,19 and the great Muslim doctor Avicenna promoted its use for treating tuberculosis, as well as fighting aging, and recognized its value in treating wounds.20 The medieval west inherited a vast and long-lived precedent for using honey for medical purposes. There are numerous medieval accounts of honey being part of medical treatment.21 Not all of these involve wounds, but it seems clear that medieval medical practitioners were well aware of the healing properties of honey and used it often, particularly when dealing with wounds. Evidence suggests that by the high and late Middle Ages, honey had a diverse array of 17 18 19 20

21

Dunford, “The Use of Honey,” 63. Hippocrates, On Ulcers: (accessed 23 April 2011). Qur’an, 16:68–69, 47:15: and (accessed 10 March 2013). Avicenna, The Canon of Medicine, trans. O. Cameron Gruner (London: 1930; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1970), passim. An unpublished paper by Shima Sepehr entitled, “The Most Important Medicinal Uses of Honey, and Its Side Effects in the Book of the Canon by Avicenna, and in the Modern Medical Literature: A Comparative Study,” presented at the 2nd International Conference on the Medicinal Use of Honey (Kota Bharu, Malaysia, 2010) concluded that much of Avicenna’s recommendations have been corroborated by modern science. In this volume, see also: Carmel Ferragud, “Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early-Fifteenth Century,” 233–51; and Timothy May, “Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices,” 175–93. Once sugar was introduced to medieval Europe it was also used as an ingredient in a variety of medical syrups and electuaries. Unlike honey, it could not be used as a binder, however, and honey was believed to have a greater versatility than sugar when it came to medical uses. G.E. Trease, “The Spicers and Apothecaries of the Royal Household in the Reigns of Henry III, Edward I and Edward II,” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies 3 (1959): 19–52, at 22; Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 48–50.

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

199

uses in popular medicine, particularly as part of a remedy or as a binding agent.22 Tony Hunt, in his examination of Anglo-Norman medical receipts and other texts, has gathered perhaps one of the largest collections of popular medical knowledge. One thirteenth-century text known as the Physique rimee, containing versified receipts and preserved in a large manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.1.20, instructs the reader to use honey to combat vertigo, gout, or kidney stones, to clean ears, to stop vomiting, for hoarseness, and to treat tumors.23 That text, as well as several receipts, instructs the user to include honey when making ointments or plasters for wounds.24 One such recipe, specifically for healing a wound fast, includes honey.25 The fourteenthcentury Breviarium Bartholomei, by the English priest John Mirfield, even contains a short discourse on the advantages of honey over sugar in syrups used for a variety of medical uses, such as better digestion.26 His text was not designed for the medical specialist, but rather the common layman, and so it stresses the responsibility of each reader for the health of his entire household and contains encyclopedic knowledge of practical and simple, but diverse, remedies.27 More formal writings, like those done by professional physicians and surgeons, provide the clearest evidence for the use of honey in treating wounds. Fortunately, there are several surviving treatises on medieval surgery, such as 22

23 24 25 26 27

The long list of medical supplies purchased for the treatment of Queen Isabella’s burns in 1313 was supplemented by a large quantity of honey to be used as a binder. See: J.S. Hamilton, “Some Notes on ‘Royal’ Medicine in the Reign of Edward II,” in Fourteenth Century England II, ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 33–44, at 36–7, 39–40. The royal spicer, Peter de Paris, also purchased honey in bulk – one gallon – in 1301 for the medical needs of the pregnant queen Margaret on her journey from Lincoln to Hailes. Trease, “The Spicers and Apothecaries,” 35, 43. There are records of honey being used in wound treatment in Anglo-Saxon texts and in Carolingian France. In this volume, see: Debby Banham and Christine Voth, “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?” 153–74; and Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101. Hunt, Popular Medicine, 145–203. Hunt, Popular Medicine, 179–81, 306, 322. Hunt, Popular Medicine, 323. Hunt, Popular Medicine, 48–9; Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 49–53. Getz, Medicine, 51–2; Faye Getz, “John Mirfield and the Breviarium Bartholomei: the Medical Writings of a Clerk at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in the Later Fourteenth Century,” The Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 37 (Dec 1985): 24–26, at 24–6; C.H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England (London: Oldbourne, 1967), 200–1.

200

Krug

Roger Frugard’s twelfth-century Chirurgia, Henri de Mondeville’s early-fourteenth-century Cyrurgia, and the fourteenth-century Inventarium of Guy de Chauliac that was translated into Middle English in the fifteenth century as the complete Inventorye and the partial Chirurgie.28 Shorter texts also survive, such as an English document from 1392 written by an anonymous London surgeon that describes ulcers and other wounds, specifically advocating ointments comprising honey, among other ingredients, for the promotion of healing.29 Much of what has come to be recognized by modern medical practitioners about honey’s value when treating wounds was also understood and encouraged in such medieval texts. Both Guy de Chauliac and Henri de Mondeville promoted the use of honey, particularly for small facial wounds, because it helped reduce the visibility of scars.30 Additionally, Mondeville recognizes the value of honey in reducing inflammation, which made it particularly useful as an ingredient in ointments and poultices and as a topical wash for cleansing wounds.31 Even more serious wounds could benefit from honey’s properties. William of Saliceto, the thirteenth-century teacher of Lanfranc, promoted the use of honey when dealing with scalp wounds in order to minimize the risk of infection. Lanfranc followed his teacher’s lead and used honey for head wounds, even in the presence of a skull fracture, applying the ointment directly onto the dura.32 Guy de Chauliac prescribed honey when treating clean, deep wounds, but not for those that were festering; rather, he stated that hot compresses should be applied to those wounds to encourage draining, after which honey could be used. Although many of the principles and directions listed in such works could certainly be applied in military contexts, substantially fewer detailed treatises dealing specifically with military medicine or military wounds survive. Some of these writings, such as Raimon of Avignon’s Occitan adaptation of Frugard’s work, which emphasizes and augments details relevant to military medicine, and the writings of the fourteenth-century English surgeon John Arderne, 28

29 30 31 32

Tony Hunt, Anglo-Norman Medicine, vol. 1 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), passim; The Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac, vol. 1, EETS o.s. 265 (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1971), v-vi. On Frugard, cf. Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 496–518, in this volume. I.L. Naylor, “Ulcer Care in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Wound Care 8.4 (1999): 208–12. Alain Mounier-Kuhn, Chirurgie de Guerre: Le cas du Moyen Age (Paris: Economica, 2006), 179, 190. Mounier-Kuhn, Chirurgie de Guerre, 187–8. Mounier-Kuhn, Chirurgie de Guerre, 227, 247, 250. For a thorough discussion of head wounds and their treatment, see: Skinner, “Visible Prowess?,” 91–92; and Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’,” in this volume.

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

201

include directions for handling battle injuries.33 Other texts, including versified receipts, also recommend materials and methods for dealing with, for example, the removal of arrows and crossbow bolts or bandaging wounds; in both cases, honey is recommended as a component of the treatment.34 There are also brief allusions to military medical care in chronicles and literature, such as Froissart’s great chronicle, the history of Fulk Fitz-Warin, and even the Arthurian tale of Lancelot,35 but they are mainly limited to comments of washing, dressing, or sewing up wounds, and rarely indicate specific materials that were used for such purposes. Fortunately, indentures with medical staff and other Exchequer records sometimes supply those particular details. Hence, we know that Henry V, aside from ensuring that sufficient numbers of surgeons were present for his campaign, also provided an allowance for the acquisition of necessary medicines and medical supplies, including forty pounds each of verdigris and sal armoniac, both used for treating open wounds.36 Henry V’s decision to stock medical supplies may have been influenced by his own experience as a young man when he was wounded in the left cheek by an arrow at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. The account, which has been frequently translated and repeated, comes from the surgical text Philomena

33

34 35

36

Linda Paterson, “Military Surgery: Knights, Sergeants, and Raimon of Avignon’s Version of the Chirurgia of Roger of Salerno (1180–1209),” The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood II, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 117–46. Hunt, Popular Medicine, 232, 315 n. 5. Clifford Rogers, “The Middle Ages,” in Soldiers’ Lives Through History, ed. Dennis Showalter (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 234–5, n. 59. The French Lancelot romances are slightly different from the version of Lancelot’s wounding and healing in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, in which Lancelot, disguised, is stabbed with a spear that breaks off leaving the tip in his side. Lancelot’s companion, Lavayne, later removes the point, causing terrible bleeding. Malory has Lancelot seek medical care at a hermitage where the hermit staunches the blood and gives Lancelot wine to drink. Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales, ed. P.J.C. Field (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2008), 20–4. For a detailed discussion of wounds in Arthurian texts, including Malory, see in this volume: Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’,” 496–518; Stephen Atkinson, “‘They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …’: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” 519–43; and Barbara Goodman, “Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair,” 544–71. Leslie Matthews, The Royal Apothecaries (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1967), 42.

202

Krug

written by John Bradmore, royal surgeon to Henry IV.37 According to this unusually detailed account, an arrow lodged itself so deeply into the cheekbone that, after the shaft had been removed, the arrowhead remained imbedded to a depth of six inches. In this volume, Michael Livingston provides a thorough analysis of the surgical records surrounding the treatment of Prince Hal’s wound, including the use of honey.38 Of significance here, is the fact that Bradmore used wooden dowels, covered with linen and soaked in honey, which unquestionably maintained a sterile environment in what was a very delicate and dangerous operation. After the surgery, the wound was washed with wine, and then, as the wound was healing, was kept open with pads of flax soaked in an ointment of breadcrumbs, barley flour, honey, and oil. The honey in the ointment was largely responsible for preventing necrosis or infection from occurring. Ultimately, Bradmore stated, the wound was completely cleansed within twenty days, when the flesh and skin were able to regenerate properly.39 Despite what Guy de Chauliac and Henri de Mondeville indicate about honey’s ability to reduce the visibility of scars, it appears that Henry V bore a significant scar for the rest of his life, even if his later royal portrait shows no indication.40 However, Bradmore was clearly successful in healing the prince’s wound, and it is likely that other late medieval surgeons were similarly skilled and aware of honey’s healing properties.

37

38 39

40

The texts in Latin and Middle English respectively of London, British Library MS Sloane 2272 and London, British Library MS Harley 1736 have been reproduced in S.J. Lang, “John Bradmore and His Book Philomena,” Social History of Medicine 5 (1992): 121–30, at 128–30. Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” in this volume, 215–30. “Tunc Recipe farine ordei et mellis quod sufficit et omnia bulliantur super lentum ignem donec spissetur et postea addatur terebentina quod sufficit et fiat unguentum mundificativum. Et dictas stupas in dicto unguento intinctas de 2o die in 2 diem abbreuiaui et sic infra 20 dies vulnus fuit perfecte et bene mundificatum. Et postea carnem regeneraui cum unguento fusco” [Then take a sufficient quantity of barley flour and honey and simmer over a gentle heat until it thickens, and afterward add enough turpentine oil and the cleansing ointment is done. And from the second day, I shortened the said wads [of linen], soaked in the aforementioned ointment, every two days, and thus within twenty days the wound was completely and well cleansed. Afterward, I regenerated the flesh with a dark ointment]. Lang, “John Bradmore,” 121–30; M. Strickland and R. Hardy, The Great Warbow (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2005), 284–5. Livingston argues that Bradmore’s account, in describing Prince Henry’s wound on the left side of the head, really means Bradmore’s left, not the prince’s left. If that is the case, then Henry V’s portrait, showing the king in profile, was a deliberate attempt to conceal the scarred right side of his face. See: Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches,’” X.

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

203

Based primarily on the evidence from chronicles and other written sources, puncture wounds caused by arrows and crossbow bolts, like that suffered by Henry V, appear to have been a common type of battle injury. Indeed, Piers Mitchell paints a vivid picture of medieval soldiers, having sustained multiple arrow injuries during a single battle, resembling hedgehogs.41 Amusing as the mental image may be, it reflects the reality of battle described by chroniclers during which waves of arrows rained down upon the soldiers; Froissart wrote that the arrows at the battle of Crécy fell like snow, and, according to Giovanni Villani, the arrows seemed to form a cloud in the sky.42 Passing remarks underscore this characteristic. For example, one of Edward III’s allies at the battle of Crécy, Johann von Schönfeld, indicated in a letter that two weeks after the battle, an inch-long arrow remained imbedded in the right side of his face.43 In that same battle, the chronicler Jean le Bel describes the power of the English volleys loosed at the French cavalry; he states that “the horses were riddled by the dreadful barbed arrows,” which were notoriously difficult to remove.44 However, despite the frequency of first-hand accounts of injuries sustained in war in medieval sources, they tend to lack specifics about materials or methods, particularly surgery, which would be most helpful for the study of medieval

41

42

43

44

Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds, and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 177. In this volume, see: Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” 102–27. Jean Froissart, Chroniques de J. Froissart, ed. Siméon Luce, vol. 3 (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1872), 176; Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, bk.13, ch. 67, in Nuova Cronica di Giovanni Villani, edizione critica a cura di Giovanni Porta, vol. 3 (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1991), 454. The Latin sagitta was used in the text of Schönfeld’s letter, rather than quarella, which creates ambiguity because the French only used crossbows. An arrow, rather than a crossbow bolt, would have had to come from the English side. Andrew Ayton, “The English Army at Crécy,” in The Battle of Crécy, 1346, ed. Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 159–251, at 174; Ayton, “Crécy and the Chroniclers,” in The Battle of Crécy, 287–350, at 295 n. 37. The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel, trans. Nigel Bryant (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 180. Raimon of Avignon dedicated a section in his Chirurgia to the treatment of such barbed arrowheads, indicating the difficulty of their removal. Paterson, “Military Surgery,” 132–5. The surgeon Henri de Mondeville even warns against the attempted extraction of arrows or bolts unless the patient had confessed, drawn up a will for the dispensing of his belongings, and, in front of witnesses, indicated his desire for the medical procedure. Quoted in Carol Rawcliffe, Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995), 76.

204

Krug

medical practice. Thus, the literary details must be paired with other available evidence, both textual and physical. Besides textual material, one of the best sources for information about the most prevalent types of late medieval battlefield injuries is archaeological evidence, even if soft tissue wounds, including perhaps the majority of puncture wounds, left no mark on the remaining bones. For western warfare, much of the evidence derives from mass graves dug after the battles of Visby in Sweden (1361) and Towton in England (1461).45 Often cited in reference to armor and weapon data, the mass graves of these two battles are very illustrative of not only the grisly manner of the soldiers’ demise but also wounds the men sustained in earlier combat which healed prior to death. Several bones with healed or partially-healed incised wounds found during excavations of the battlefield of Aljubarrota in Portugal (1385) also reflect successful medical attention. Forensic evidence, therefore, may shed light on both the most frequent injuries characteristic of late medieval warfare and the extent to which medical staff could deal effectively with those very injuries.46 Although it is impossible to prove decisively that honey was used for treating these earlier ante mortem injuries, the evidence of wounds healing without infection certainly reflects a function of honey and suggests that, even though it was not recorded, honey was part of the healing process. The early twentieth-century excavations at Visby uncovered the remains of nearly 1200 individuals in three separate common graves.47 In the last, 37% of the remains were youths under the age of twenty, supporting the popular notion that this battle represented a desperate people making a last stand against a better-prepared invading force.48 A large proportion of the visible injuries were to the legs, particularly in the third grave. However, there were also some significant head wounds, especially in the second grave, which had 45

46

47

48

M.R. Geldof discusses some of the difficulties and benefits of assessing osteoarchaeological evidence found at sites like Towton. See: “‘And to describe the shapes of the dead’: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence,” 57–80, in this volume. For a comprehensive analysis of archaeological evidence of healed wounds, specifically in relation to the recently discovered skeletal remains of Richard III, see: Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” 27–56, in this volume. Common Grave 4, which was discovered and uncovered in 1930, was not subsequently excavated or studied. Bengt Thordeman, Poul Nörlund, Brian R. Price, and Bo. E. ­Ingelmark, Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361 (Stockholm: Vitterherts Historie och ­Antikvitets Akademien, 1939; rptd. Union City, CA: Chivalry Bookshelf, 2001), 67. Thordeman, et al., Armour, 24, 80; Bo Ingelmark, “The Skeletons,” in Thordeman, Nörlund, Price, and Ingelmark, Armour From the Battle of Wisby, 1361, 149–97, at 159.

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

205

the highest number of armed and armored fighters.49 While edged weapons, such as swords and axes, likely account for the majority of the wounds, puncture wounds caused by crossbow bolts, lances, or morning stars were also abundant.50 Reflecting Mitchell’s earlier characterization of medieval battle in which individuals could be struck by numerous arrows, a significant number of skeletons from Visby have multiple puncture wounds; indeed, one cranium exhibited seven distinct arrow wounds.51 Several of the victims had sustained earlier injuries, although most were probably not the result of prior combat. Most common were fractures typical of people who stand or walk considerable amounts particularly while carrying heavy loads; generally, these previous injuries had not healed properly, a sure sign of poor medical care. Alternatively, one victim had sustained, likely during a previous battle, a deep depression wound on the top of his head, which had healed fully by the time of his death.52 The contrasting realities of past medical care are palpable and may reflect the opportunities available to farmers on the one hand and to soldiers on the other. The mass grave at Towton contained significantly fewer individuals than Visby, which contained only about forty skeletons, but the skeletons have been examined in more detail.53 Unlike Visby, the majority of the victims at Towton exhibited cranial wounds, many of which were likely the fatal blows. Disturbingly, several of these were delivered to the back of the head, which, coupled with the remote location of the excavated grave, has led some to hypothesize that the victims were killed while retreating.54 The wounds represent both blunt force and sharp force injuries; soft tissue wounds are not be traceable in the surviving bone, which may explain the very few identifiable puncture wounds, such as those caused by arrows. Only two of the more than one hundred wounds were unquestionably caused by arrows, contrasting

49 50 51 52 53

54

Thordeman, et al., Armour, 81. Ingelmark, “Skeletons,” 160. Cyril Courville, “War Wounds of the Cranium in the Middle Ages I,” Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Society 30 (March 1965): 27–33, at 29, 32. Thordeman, et al., Armour, 24; Ingelmark, “Skeletons,” 195–6. Since the publication of the initial excavation report and analysis of the mass grave, the skeletons of several additional individuals have been found under the dining room of Towton Hall: four unearthed in 2006 displayed similar kinds of injuries as sustained by those in the mass grave. C. Knüsel and A. Boylston, “How has the Towton Project Contributed to Our Knowledge of Medieval and Later Warfare?” in Blood Red Roses, ed. V. Fiorato, A. Boylston, and C. Knüsel (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007), 186.

206

Krug

greatly with the proportion of puncture wounds found at Visby.55 Approximately a third of the victims also exhibited previous injuries that had healed completely without infection, some of which were quite significant. For example, one seasoned soldier killed at Towton experienced an earlier deep gash along his left jaw that sliced out a section of bone between his molars and fractured the jaw just left of the chin.56 Another man of perhaps thirty years old had sometime before sustained a large cut on the top of his head, but it had healed completely by the time of his death.57 Several others sustained blunt force head injuries that, likewise, had healed.58 The excavated bones from the ossuary at the site of the battle of Aljubarrota, a conflict between Castilian and Portuguese forces, represent at least four hundred men. Though lacking the full information about bodily wounds sustained in battle, the evidence can nevertheless shed light on significant ante mortem injuries.59 Many of the bones from this battle show evidence of healing or partial healing at the time of death, indicating that the soldiers did receive medical care. Unfortunately, the majority of bones are long bone fragments, such as from legs or arms, with only a small number of skulls. Thus, the common cranial injuries appearing on bones at other battle sites are more difficult to assess here, though many of the existing skulls do exhibit significant trauma consistent with findings elsewhere. E. Cunha and A.M. Silva concluded from the visible skull trauma that, “a large part of the army of defence was probably not provided with strong head protection.”60 Bones show healing from sharp force trauma, including amputations and other edged weapon cuts, as evidenced by lesions on the bone. In the midst of the bone indicators of fatal wounds, there is the unequivocal evidence of old, significant wounds treated carefully and without infection, perhaps suggesting the use of a healing substance like honey. Although most textual accounts of battle injuries discuss simply the wounding itself rather than the care received, there are exceptions. An interesting 55 56 57 58 59

60

Shannon Novak, “Battle-related Trauma,” in Blood Red Roses, ed. Fiorato, Boylston, and Knüsel, 90–102, at 98. Novak, “Battle-related Trauma,” 94–5. Knüsel and Boylston, “Towton Project,” 173; Shannon Novak, “Case studies,” in Blood Red Roses, ed. Fiorato, Boylston, and Knüsel, 240–68, at 262–3. Towton 22, Towton 25, Towton 34/38, Towton 36/37, Towton 40, Towton 41, Towton 44. Novak, “Case studies,” 251, 254, 259, 260, 261, 262–3, 265. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 111; E. Cunha and A.M. Silva, “War Lesions From the Famous Portuguese Medieval Battle of Aljubarrota,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 7 (1997): 595–99, at 595–9. Cunha and Silva, “War Lesions,” 598.

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

207

case is the Muslim writer Usāmah Ibn Munqiḏh, a twelfth century courtier and writer during the Crusades, who described not only gruesome wounds in minute detail but also the medical procedures that often resulted in successful recovery. Usāmah describes a ghastly wound his uncle sustained in which a lance blow to his eye severed the entire eyelid; a surgeon was able to sew the eyelid so that “the stabbed eye could not be distinguished from the other one.”61 Another horrific injury left a man with a face so terribly gashed that part hung loose; again, the skill of a surgeon ensured that the man survived.62 Late medieval military generals followed the lead of ancient rulers in Egypt, Greece, and Rome who all understood the need to care for those wounded in combat and ensured that proper medical staff accompanied their armies.63 The Romans, particularly, professionalized the military medical corps, assigning physicians to each cohort and legion and establishing both static and traveling field hospitals.64 Vegetius, an “armchair general” of the late Roman Empire, recognized the importance of maintaining a corps of doctors as well as enforcing diet and exercise regulations geared toward preserving the strength and health of the army. He explicitly made recommendations about such in his practical manual for the art of waging war, De re militari, an extremely influential source in the Middle Ages.65 The lessons provided in his treatise served as a foundation for medieval military leaders, such as the Angevin kings, who also had at their disposal the growing body of both 61

62

63

64 65

David Nicholle, “Wounds, Military Surgery and the Reality of Crusading Warfare: The Evidence of Usāmah’s Memoires,” Journal of Oriental and African Studies 5 (2002): 33–46. Reprinted in Medieval Warfare 1000–1300, ed. John France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 599–612, at 600–1. Nicholle, “Wounds, Military Surgery,” 602. Mitchell has examined the probability of this particular incident, and, based on medical realities of skin and tissue, accepted the veracity of Munqiḏh’s statement. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 152. Ian McCulloch, “Battlefield Medicine – The Middle Ages SD 500–1450,” Osprey Military Journal 4.2 (2002): 14–17, at 14–17. Also see: Christine Salazar, The Treatment of War Wounds in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2000); and Yann Le Bohec, The Imperial Roman Army, trans. Raphael Bate (London: Routledge, 1994). For a brief overview of the medical elements present in Byzantine and early medieval armies, see: Kelly DeVries, “Medieval Warfare and the Value of a Human Life,” in Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, ed. Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 43–45. McCulloch, “Battlefield Medicine,” 17. Medieval sources, such as the brief early-fourteenth-century Regimen Almarie by Arnald of Villanova, clearly display their indebtedness to Vegetius’ text. Vegetius, Military Institutions of the Romans, trans. John Clark (Harrisburg: Military Service Publishing Company, 1944), 70–1; Michael McVaugh, “Arnald of Villanova’s Regimen Almarie (Regimen Castra Sequentium) and Medieval Military Medicine,” Viator 23 (1992): 201–14.

208

Krug

medical knowledge and professional and semi-professional medical personnel. Medical staff was necessary for treating the wounded, as well as seeing to the overall health of the army – no small feat given the frequency with which armies were afflicted with disease and infection. In the early years of Henry III’s reign, the chief justice of the court of Common Pleas suggested that a physician named Master Thomas accompany the king’s army in order to provide medical support during sieges; later in Henry’s reign, Master Thomas de Weseham ultimately served Henry as chief surgeon for two decades, in part treating the army during campaigns in France.66 Over a century later, Edward III began a trend in which English kings enlisted cohorts of doctors for their foreign campaigns. In the case of the Crécy campaign, Edward had with him both his personal physician and surgeon; two other surgeons accompanied Edward’s Welsh contingent and were expected to care for the wounded soldiers.67 Andrew Ayton has surmised that these men included Jordan of Canterbury, royal physician under Edward III, and Roger Heyton, royal surgeon who was later also on the payroll of the Black Prince.68 Although there is a tantalizing reference that Thomas Crewe remembered having escorted his brother to the hospital tent for treatment, only Giovanni Villani, in his Nuova Cronica, makes any comment about the actual details of medical care at Crécy, and he is quite brief.69 He says only that in the aftermath of the battle, Edward ordered the wounded to be retrieved from among the dead, cared for, and even, in some cases, provided with pensions and released from future service. In light of such scanty evidence, George Gask not only questions who was responsible for dressing the wounds of the injured soldiers but also later pessimistically remarks that, “we must come to the conclusion that at this time medical arrangements for the wounded did not exist.”70 In Henry V’s 1415 campaign, which included the famous battle at Agincourt, two important surgeons, Thomas Morstede and William Bradwardine, and additional surgeons and physicians were attached to the army by indenture. 66

67 68

69 70

Getz, Medicine, 32; C.H. Talbot and E.A. Hammond, The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England: A Biographical Register (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1965), 83; George Gask, Essays in the History of Medicine (London: Butterworth, 1950), 59. Gask, Essays, 66. Ayton, “The English Army,” 174. Gask was less willing to place Roger at Crécy, choosing instead to remain undecided about Roger’s presence at the battle in light of indefinite documentation that could only insinuate Roger’s intent to be part of the expedition. Gask, Essays, 82. Ayton, “The English Army,” 174; Villani, Nuova Cronica, 458. Gask, Essays, 66, 80.

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

209

The indenture for Morstede indicates that he was responsible for bringing with him a dozen other medical staff and that he received a stipend for purchasing medical stores and the means for carting them.71 Similarly, Bradwardine had with him nine other surgeons.72 Henry V, of course, also retained a personal physician. The following year, Morstede and Bradwardine were commanded to conscript an unspecified number of additional surgeons as well as artisans whose job it was to make and repair the surgical equipment needed for the king’s campaign to France.73 Later in the century, Edward IV also arranged for a sizeable team of surgeons to accompany his army on his expedition to France in 1475.74 Often, surgeons were also the ones tasked with amassing the required medical supplies and tools. This is seen with Stephen of Paris, one of Edward II’s surgeons, who was in charge of procuring and providing materials to the king’s army in Scotland.75 Clearly, the surgeon was indispensible in a military context, especially as his primary duties were to remove arrows or other missiles from the wounded and perform whatever surgery was necessary. Surgeons were not the only medical practitioners engaged in the army. Given how commonplace arrow wounds and other superficial flesh wounds were on the medieval battlefield, undoubtedly practical medical knowledge, such as washing and dressing a wound, was widespread enough to enable soldiers to deal with the expected occupational hazards.76 Besides being a main component in many plasters and electuaries, honey was important for first aid, and, thus, was probably used widely. There likely were camp followers who were also somewhat skilled in the healing arts; the Old French Chanson de Jérusalem describes, for example, Godfrey of Bouillon’s desire that certain camp women help tend to the injured: “Li dus sona le cor, si laisent l’asillie./ Illuec vinrent les dames, cascune rebracie./ Celui qui soit avoit ont la boche moillie,/ Cascun ont abevré – ço fu molt grans aïe./ Se les dames ne fusent molt 71 72 73 74 75

76

Talbot and Hammond, The Medical Practitioners, 351–2. The translated indenture is reproduced in C. Allmand, Society at War (NY: Barnes and Noble Books, 1973), 64–5. Gask, Essays, 68–70. Talbot and Hammond, The Medical Practitioners, 351; Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae et cuiusunque Generis Acta Publica, ed. T. Rymer, 20 vols. (The Hague, 1704–35), 9:363. Rawcliffe, Medicine & Society, 140; Rymer, Foedera, 5.3.58. Getz, Medicine, 27. Joseph Bain, ed., Calendar of Documents Related to Scotland, vol. 3, A.D. 1307–57 (Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1887), 142. An extended study of the full list of medicaments purchased by Stephen is discussed in Hamilton, “Some Notes,” 37, 41–3. Although Hamilton notes that the list does not contain honey, this item might have been procured separately in one of the purveyances that year for the sustenance of the army and munitioning of northern castles, or it may already have been on hand. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 178–9.

210

Krug

fust l’ost malballie” [The duke blew the horn, and they left the battle. Ladies came there, and each one was ready to help all who were thirsty. They gave all of them something to drink, and that was a great help. If the ladies had not been there, the army would have been in a bad way].77 Other women might also be on hand, as in the case of the wife of Flemish surgeon Lupin de Nayere, who, during the war between the Flemish Count Guy de Dampière and the Zeelanders in 1302, prepared bandages and assisted her husband during surgeries.78 Additionally, George Gask suggests that one of the duties of a squire was to tend to his knight’s minor injuries as well as carry first aid supplies.79 This certainly seemed to be the case during the battle of Poitiers, in which, according to Froissart, Sir John Audley was carried off the field after being seriously injured and his wounds dressed by his four squires; 80 for this service they were later handsomely rewarded:81 […] Jame d’Audelée, de qui nous avons parlé chi dessus, qui fu des premiers assallans, si com il avoit voé, et liquels avoit ja fait tant d’armes, parmi l’ayde de ses quatre escuiers, que on le doit bien tenir et recommender pour preu; car il, tout dis comme bons chevaliers, estoit entrés ou plus fort des batailles et combatus si vaillamment que il y fu durement navrés ou corps et ou chief et ou viaire; et tant que aiainne et force li peurent durer, il se combati et ala toutdis avant, et tant que il fu moult essannés. Adone, sus le fin de la bataille, le present li quatre escuier qui le gardoint, et le amenèrent moult foible et fort navré au dehors des batailles, dales une haie, pour li un petit refroider et esventer, et le desarmèrent au plus doucement qu’il peurent, et entendirent à ses plaies bender et loüer, et rekeudre les plus perilleuses.82 [The lord James Audley, [whom we have already discussed,] with the assistance of his four squires, was always engaged in the heat of the battle [and fought valiantly.] He was severely wounded in the body, head and 77

78 79 80 81 82

La Chanson de Jérusalem, ed. Nigel Thorp, vol. 6, The Old French Crusade Cycle (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 112; Mounier-Kuhn, Chirurgie de Guerre, 90. Translation by Daniel O’Sullivan, personal communication to author, 2 August, 2014. I am grateful to Dr. O’Sullivan for providing a translation. Mounier-Kuhn, Chirurgie de Guerre, 132. Gask, Essays, 67. Froissart, 5:46; Gask, Essays, 67. Audley gifted to his four squires the five hundred marks annual revenues that the king had initially granted to him. Froissart, 5:62. Froissart, 5:46.

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

211

face; and as long as his strength and breath permitted him, he maintained the fight, and advanced forward: he continued to do so until he was covered with blood. Then, towards the close of the engagement, his four squires, who were as his body-guard, took him, and led him out of the engagement, very weak and wounded, towards a hedge, that he might cool and take breath. They disarmed him as gently as they could, [tended to his wounds,] dress[ed] them, and sew[ed] up the most dangerous].83 However, the presence of professional medical staff on hand meant that more severe injuries could be treated successfully. Somewhat surprisingly, the most obvious place for treating battle wounded, a field hospital, was not a European reality even if it had existed in the Levant from the time shortly before the Third Crusade. In fact, field hospitals were not recorded in Western Europe until the very end of the fifteenth century in Spain. During the battle for Granada, the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, provided tents and medical staff for the care of the sick and wounded, which were referred to as the Queen’s Hospital.84 Before the development of bona fide field hospitals, normal practice was to cart the wounded off the battlefield to nearby safe places, indoors when possible, to be treated a safe distance from persistent danger. As noted earlier, some French wounded during the battle of Crécy were taken to a nearby monastery for medical treatment, which, by the late Middle Ages, was considerably less regular a practice than it was centuries before. More commonly, the wounded were doctored at the military camps, or, after combat ceased, even on the battlefield itself. This is where professional medics, or, barring those, camp followers or even the soldiers themselves with rudimentary knowledge of wound repair, would have been able to tend to the injuries using readily available materials, such as honey. For example, in 1297, Jean Yperman, a student of Lanfranc and a surgeon of the hospital of Ypres, was contracted to accompany the city’s troops on campaign, to treat the wounded on the battlefield, and to ensure their safe removal by cart to the city.85 According to the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker, English wounded during the battle of Poitiers were moved for safety under thickets or hedges, out of the line of combat, and that once hostilities had ceased, the attention of the whole 83 84 85

Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and Adjoining Countries by Sir John Froissart, trans. Thomas Johnes, vol. 1 (London: William Smith, 1839), 221. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 59; Gask, Essays, 97; Mounier-Kuhn, Chirurgie de Guerre, 137. Mounier-Kuhn, Chirurgie de Guerre, 115.

212

Krug

army turned toward caring for the injured.86 In a study of the locations where injured soldiers were treated across the high and late Middle Ages, Alain Mounier-Kuhn discovered that while the battlefield and the military camps remained some of the primary sites, there was a significant rise in the tending to soldiers at civil hospitals. Civil hospitals in France and the Low Countries, such as the hospital of St. John in St. Omer, the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, and SaintGervais in Soissons, were all ordered to receive war wounded during the fifteenth century. Furthermore, the chronicler Monstrelet indicates that some of the French injured at the battle of Agincourt might have reached hospitals for care. However, given Henry V’s orders to execute the French prisoners of war, as well as the general defeat and rout of both the French army and the smaller force that attacked the English baggage train at the rear, the number of French who may have reached the safety of hospitals was probably very small indeed.87 Although Mounier-Kuhn’s data are silent on the instances of wounded men treated at castles by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it is clear that castles may have played an important role in providing sanctuary and safety for the conducting of substantial medical procedures.88 This is true during sieges, which represented a significant proportion of medieval warfare and for which stockpiled goods, such as honey, would have been readily available. Thus, Prince Henry, wounded in 1403, was taken to Kenilworth Castle for treatment, where he was possibly still convalescing several weeks after the battle of Shewsbury.89 John Bradmore may have been able to use honey from the castle’s stores for his ministrations of the prince. The presence of honey in these specific castle stores is neither surprising nor truly puzzling when one investigates the timing of the particular accounts; indeed, a half dozen or so accounts from the fourteenth century detailing honey all date to times when the castles were either targets for enemy attacks or the mustering location for offensive action. As such, the medical needs of the garrisons or soldiers especially would have been a consideration. In response to an ominous situation in Scotland in which the Scots took English 86 87

88

89

Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinebrook, trans. David Preest (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 129, 132. Enguérrand de Monstrelet, La Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, ed. L. Douët-D’Arcq, vol. 3 (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1859), 122. For a summary of the discussion about the French defeat and Henry V’s order to kill the prisoners, see: Anne Curry, Agincourt: A New History (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), 250–64. The majority of Mounier-Kuhn’s examples of castles serving as locations for medical care are recorded in twelfth and thirteenth century romances and chansons de geste. MounierKuhn, Chirurgie de Guerre, 169–70. Christopher Allmand, Henry V (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 26.

Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

213

castles such as Caerlaverock and threatened others, most notably Stirling, Edward I decided to launch a winter campaign in 1299. It is in the context of Edward’s hopes of relieving Stirling and bolstering Edinburgh that his late December writ ordering provisions, including honey, be moved north from Berwick can be understood.90 Edward’s equally bellicose grandson, Edward III, often had to protect the hard-won English prize of Calais. Around Christmas 1349, news reached the king of potential treachery and a French attempt to recapture the city, and he sprang into action. He issued hasty provisioning orders that would enable the English garrison to resist both internal betrayal and external attack, which were later recorded in the receiver’s account.91 The well-planned campaign of 1359, which ultimately led to the treaty of Brétigny, began with the munitioning and provisioning of Calais. As the peace disintegrated in 1369, fears over the loss of Calais persuaded Edward to reinforce the English presence in the city; the extensive accounts from 1369–71 reflect this more defensive approach and, again, record the acquisition of honey. During this time, the garrison numbered over a thousand men.92 Richard II, Edward III’s hapless heir, was also forced into the position of strengthening defenses; in 1384 the French landed troops in Scotland, and Richard, determined not to let any English-held castles fall to the Scots or French, issued orders to replenish the stores in advance of an ill-fated expedition north. One such writ records the acquisition of honey for Roxburgh Castle.93 Richard’s mounting expenses for supporting fortifications without much income may have been the impetus for ending an agreement with the king of Navarre that ultimately led to Cherbourg’s return in 1393, through which Richard, as custodian of the castle, had gained control of the strategically important location but at high cost. The return of Cherbourg to the King of Navarre meant a liquidation of the castle’s remaining stores, such as the honey.94 In all of these circumstances, providing for the security and welfare of fighting men, either within castles or outside, included a consideration for their medical needs. Therefore, to ensure that at least the most basic of wounds could be treated, stores of honey had to be maintained. 90 91 92 93 94

Michael Prestwich, Edward I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 483; TNA, C 47/22/8/4. Mark Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 325–7; TNA, E 101/168/1. Ormrod, Edward III, 399–400, 502–6; Susan Rose, Calais: An English Town in France, 1347– 1558 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 35; TNA, E 101/173/13, E 101/178/15. Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 143–5; TNA, E 101/41/25. Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War III: Divided Houses (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 322–4, 811; TNA, E 101/41/25, E 30/316.

214

Krug

Stockpiling honey in castle stores in small amounts, added to sporadically, made little sense if it were to be used by the king’s armies for mead or for sweetening food. On the other hand, maintaining such quantities of honey for medical purposes offers a more logical explanation for such stores; honey could be retained until needed, or alternatively, shipped to armies in Scotland or France as part of the medical supplies of the baggage train. Perhaps the irregular appearance of honey in provisioning documents and accounts of castle stores is not simply an accident of record survival; rather, it reflects a likewise irregular usage that is explained satisfactorily only as part of military medical needs, not of systematic food and beverage requirements. Furthermore, forensic and documentary evidence indicate successful medical treatment on or near the battlefields; the number of wounds healing, or partially healing, prior to death certainly suggests that access to appropriate remedies was available widely. The fact that many, if not most, of those wounds healed without infection highlights the importance of honey in medieval military medicine and the need to keep some handy.

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

215

Chapter 9

“The Depth of Six Inches”: Prince Hal’s HeadWound at the Battle of Shrewsbury Michael Livingston

“No shot took flight but a God guided it.”

– Statius, Thebaid 9.770–71 (trans. Joyce, 252)

⸪ Toward the end of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part I, the curtains at last rise on the climactic action sequence of the play: the historical Battle of Shrewsbury, which was fought on 21 July 1403. The unfolding of this engagement, an intensely bloody three-hour affair according to its contemporary chroniclers, lasts for much of Act V in Shakespeare’s dramatization, culminating in the death of Hotspur, Henry Percy, at the hands of an increasingly noble Prince Hal, the future Henry V. Easily missed among the speeches and martial actions of this exciting sequence – but rather pertinent to the topic at hand – is the fact that the young Prince Hal is wounded amid the fighting. Or, more precisely said, he is wounded off-stage during a scene break, so that King Henry IV’s opening lines of Act V, Scene IV are to tender his worry for his son’s injury:  KING. I prithee, Harry, withdraw thyself; thou bleedest too much. Lord John of Lancaster, go you with him. LANCASTER. Not I, my lord, unless I did bleed too. PRINCE. I [do] beseech Your Majesty, make up, Lest your retirement do amaze your friends. KING. I will do so. My lord of Wesmorland, lead him to his tent. WESTMORLAND. Come, my lord, I’ll lead you to your tent. PRINCE. Lead me, my lord? I do not need your help; And God forbid a shallow scratch should drive The Prince of Wales from such a field as this, Where stained nobility lies trodden on,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_011

216

Livingston

And rebels’ arms triumph in massacres!1 The wound that the Prince of Wales has received is not specified by Shakespeare, and Hal’s self-diagnosed “shallow scratch” certainly does little enough to slow him down in the Bard’s hands. He will, as noted, go on to defeat the warrior-like Hotspur, after having already fought off the Earl of Douglas to save his father.  Indeed, a great many performances of the play – Orson Welles’ famed 1965 film adaptation Chimes of Midnight among them – simply cut the lines, along with any sense that the prince is wounded.2 Nature of the Wound The wounding of the prince at Shrewsbury is, however, an unquestionable historical fact. Time and again in primary sources regarding this “herd and a stronge bataille” [hard and fierce battle], it is reported that the sixteen-yearold prince, the future King Henry V, “wasse hurte in the face with an arrowe.”3 And while many of the contemporary chronicles are similarly brief in their reference to the injury, it is clear that Prince Hal did not suffer a mere “shallow scratch,” as it is later described by Shakespeare. Quite to the contrary, the arrow struck Prince Hal directly in the face, penetrating his head and embedding itself, according to the surgeon’s report, “in posteriori parte ossis capiti secundum mensuram 6 uncharum” [in the posterior part of the skull at a depth of six inches].4 The medieval inch was legislatively defined “as the length of 3 barleycorns,” but, as Ronald Edward Zupko notes, “the actual standard in fact was a particular rod of metal, usually a yard-bar, on which inches were marked.”5 Though time has meant the disappearance of “the original iron measure […] it is unlikely that it differed from the present standard by more than 0.04 BI inches (1 millimeter).”6 Even if we equate the medieval inch with the modern 1 Shakespeare, I Henry IV, ed. Gordon McMullan, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 5.4.1–14. 2 Chimes of Midnight, DVD, directed by Orson Welles (1965). 3 An English Chronicle 1377–1461: A New Edition, ed. William Marx (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 23–24. 4 This and all subsequent references to Bradmore’s account follow the transcriptions of the text provided by S.J. Lang, “John Bradmore and His Book Philomena,” Social History of Medicine 5 (1992): 128–30. Translations of these and other texts, unless otherwise attributed, are mine. 5 Ronald Edward Zupko, British Weights & Measures: A History from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 21 n. 9, 21. 6 Zupko, British Weights & Measures, 21 n. 9, 21.

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

217

inch, of course, it is impossible to say how accurate Bradmore’s measurement of six inches was, nor can we be certain of the size of Hal’s skull relative to such a length. Even accounting for the unaccountable, though, it is clear that “six inches” was – then as it is now – a formidable depth for a head wound. By any reckoning, the injury must have been a horrifying sight and incredibly painful. Study of this wound is about more than mere morbid fascination, however: the prince’s wound reveals much about late-medieval medicine and may even provide insight into the prince’s later actions as Henry V. While it is doubtful that the real Prince Hal at Shrewsbury (or later at Agincourt) was quite so eloquent in his speeches and swashbuckling with his sword as Shakespeare would have him – especially given that the young man had an arrow lodged in his skull in 1403 – his wounding was nevertheless the sort of scene from which national memories are wrought. By the sixteenth century, the Lancastrian Henry V had become “an irresistible model of past greatness” for the Tudor dynasty, a “paragon of piety and patriotism.”7 The resulting adulation for the earlier king is seen quite clearly in the 1513–14 completion and subsequent publication of A First English Life of Henry V. Dedicated to Henry VIII, this rather loose translation of Tito Livio Frulovisi’s Vita Henrici Quinti (c. 1438) firmly established Henry V’s reputation for future generations of writers, including Shakespeare.8 In the anonymous author’s hands, Hal’s wounding has become more drama than trauma as the sixteen-year-old prince – displaying a military bravery in the face of death that he would need again, as king, some twelve years later on Saint Crispin’s Day at Agincourt – supposedly refused to leave the field until his father’s victory was secured: the Kinge in his person, and this younge Henrie the Prince, wth a right greate power of armed men went against them [the Percys] to Shrews­ burie, where they encountered and mett wth a right great armed power of those seditious people, against whome both the Kinge, the father, and the Prince had a right cruell and longe battaile; wherein the courage and strenght of the younge Prince Henrie appeared maruelouslie excellent; for in the same battaile, as he with a feruent mynde fought (peraduenture vnwarelie) amongest the rebbelles, he was wounded in the face wth an arrowe, so sore that they that were present wth him were in dispaire of his life, wherefore they pained them to with drawe him from the battaile. But that noble Prince perceauinge theire intent gaue to them this aunswere: “With what stomacke,” saide he, “shall our people fight, when they see me 7 Keith Dockray, Henry V (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 46. 8 Dockray, Henry V, 47.

218

Livingston

theire Prince and the Kings sonn withdrawe my selfe, and recoile for feare. Bringe me therefore wounded as I ame amongest the first and the formost of our partie, that not only by words but also by deeds I may enforce the courage of our men, as it becommeth a Prince for to doe.” That when he was thus brought into the fronte of the battaile, he made vppon his enemies a greater assaulte than before.9 The popular power of such imagery, no doubt, lay directly behind the fact that Shakespeare apparently felt the need to mention the wound at the opening of his scene at Shrewsbury, even if for his purposes he required Hal to shake it off and conveniently forget that it ever occurred for the rest of the play.  Reality was not so, which should hardly come as a surprise. Surgeon after surgeon was summoned to aid the stricken boy, until finally one doctor from London, John Bradmore, known to have “been connected with the royal household since at least 1399,” reached the prince at Kenilworth Castle.10 Upon his arrival, Bradmore managed what Allan Chapman has called one of the most “breathtaking pieces of medieval military surgery”: he removed the iron arrowpoint from Prince Hal’s head.11 In large part because of the fame of his patient – and his astonishingly successful subsequent recovery – Bradmore left a detailed Latin account of the wound and its treatment in his book Philomena, which in 1992 was located by S.J. Lang in London, British Library, Sloane MS 2272. Combined with the chronicle accounts, this eyewitness documentation in the Sloane MS (fol. 137r) provides an intimate glimpse not only into the horrific nature of medieval warfare but also into the cutting-edge treatment of a potentially fatal facial injury in the early years of the fifteenth century. Bradmore’s Latin account refers to Hal’s wound coming from a sagitta, a term typically translated into English as an “arrow.” This certainly appears to be the meaning accepted by at least one near-contemporary of Bradmore’s, the individual (thought by some to be the famed physician Thomas Morstede) 9 10

11

First English Life of Henry V, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 9. S.J. Lang, “Bradmore, John (d. 1412),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online ed., Jan 2008: (accessed 22 May 2013). In this year, Bradmore attended to William Wyncelowe, the master of the king’s pavilions, after he suffered a significant abdominal wound in a failed (thanks to Bradmore) suicide attempt. Allan Chapman, “Medical and Surgical Therapeutics: Scientific Advances in the Tudor Era,” paper presented at the Tudor Health Reform Symposium, Gresham College, London, 22 June 2011; transcript (accessed 22 May 2013).

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

219

who translated Bradmore’s Philomena into the vernacular in 1446.12 This Middle English version, slightly abbreviated from the Latin original, is preserved in London, British Library, MS Harley 1736, and it consistently translates Bradmore’s sagitta with “arow” (fol. 48r). Independently of Bradmore’s account, the chroniclers likewise refer to the penetrating object as an arrow, which would mean that what struck the young man was a shaft of wood, perhaps wrought of ash, birch, or even alder, poplar, or oak. What fired this missile is less clear, however. While for most people the word arrow conjures up the image of a bow (itself an image quickly problematized by the question of “short” versus “long” designs), the quarrel or bolt fired by a crossbow could, perhaps less commonly, be termed an arrow in the Middle Ages. The Promptorium parvulorum, an English-Latin bilingual dictionary completed around 1440, translates Latin quadrellum [a four-pointed crossbow bolt] as “quarel, arowe.”13 The Middle English translation of Bradmore’s account calls the arrowhead left behind a “bod,” referring no doubt to a bodkin point – essentially a minimally-flanged, squared metal spike. The Latin account is not so specific, terming it only the “head” of the arrow, but the commonality of bodkin-type points and the further description of Bradmore’s treatment also imply a bodkin rather than a broadhead. It is little enough in terms of proof, but excavations by Tony Pollard and Neil Oliver uncovered a number of bodkin points upon the presumed battlefield at Shrewsbury.14 All of this suggests that the device that launched this fateful (though surprisingly not fatal) shot was in fact a longbow rather than a crossbow. To some degree it doesn’t matter, of course. What matters is only that something sent the missile hurtling through the July air, and that it smashed – probably quite unbeknownst to the man who fired it – into the face of the crown-prince of England. It hit him, according to Bradmore’s vividly clinical report, “iuxta nasum ex sinistra parte” [beside the nose on the left side]. After 12 13

14

The identification with Morstede was almost universally accepted until S.J. Lang dismantled much of its supporting rationale. See: Lang, “John Bradmore,” 121–23. Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum: lexico anglo-latinus princeps, ed. Albert Way, Camden Society 25, 54, 89 (London: Camden Society, 1843–65), 419. For a discussion on arrows of varying kinds used in battle and their wounding potential, see: Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” 102–27; Timothy May, “Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices,” 175–93; Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” 27–56, in this volume. Tony Pollard and Neil Oliver, Two Men in a Trench: Battlefield Archaeology – The Key to Unlocking the Past (London: Michael Joseph, 2002), 54–55.

220

Livingston

the initial blow, the arrow’s path continued “ex transverso” [diagonally or across] into his body. This suggests that the arrow entered the left side of his face at some kind of angle, thus crossing over to the right side of the prince’s face as it moved through his flesh. While Thomas H. McKinnell and others have wondered if the arrow struck the prince at an extreme angle, perhaps perpendicular enough to be considered into the side of his head, such a reimagining could only be possible – and even then just barely so – if we favor the fifteenth-century Middle English translation of Bradmore’s account, which describes how Hal “was smetyn in the face be syd the nose on the lefte syd with an arow the wyche sayd arow entryd overwharte.”15 Bradmore’s original Latin does less to allow such a sideways blow, since its ex transverso, as opposed to the Middle English “entryd overwharte,” clearly describes the course of the arrow rather than its entrance point. Indeed, a close reading of Bradmore’s Latin, along with a basic understanding of human anatomy, makes the angle and location of the wound more diagnosable than scholars have often assumed. Pollard and Oliver, for instance, only vaguely describe the arrow as “burying itself deep into his cheekbone and reaching as far as the bone behind the nose.”16 But the surgeon’s description is far more specific. To begin with, at no point does Bradmore say anything of concern about the prince’s eyesight, so the entrance wound must have been below the inferior orbital rim of the skull. Anything above that, and the bone would have deflected the arrow into the eye-socket itself, blinding the prince if it did not kill him by plunging into his brain through the soft tissues of the eye and the relatively thin bone of the orbit behind it. As it happens, it was just such a shot that no doubt killed Harold Godwinson upon the field at Hastings in 1066. At the same time, the doctor does not refer to the jaw or mouth, and he makes clear that he ultimately had to retrieve the arrowhead through the original wound. It was a penetrating wound, not a perforating one. That is, it had an entrance into the body but no exit. It does not appear that the arrowhead pierced the roof of the mouth in any way. Additionally, the surgeon reports nothing about bone fragments or fractures, or anything else related with severe damage to underlying facial structures. It seems unlikely, therefore, that Hal’s wound should be imagined crushing through the maxilla, the bone that makes up the front of the human face. As a result, some scholars have suggested that the arrow more specifically struck the intraorbital foramen of the maxilla, a 15

16

Thomas H. McKinnell, Iain S. Whitaker, Rhian Johns, Charles S. Brown, and John S. ­ cKinnell, “The Management of Maxillofacial Trauma in the Renaissance: A Mini-case M Series,” Annals of Plastic Surgery 59.4 (2007): 372–74. Pollard and Oliver, Two Men in a Trench, 45.

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

221

small opening in the skull through which passes the infraorbital artery, vein, and nerve. Though statistically improbable given the size of the foramen, it is this skeletal breech that appears to be the most commonly accepted theory of the wound, probably lying behind Pollard and Oliver’s vague description or Matthew Strickland’s statement that the arrow “lodged in the bone below his eye.”17 An intraorbital foramen penetration is certainly the presentation of the wound utilized in the 2003 television documentary Royal Deaths and Diseases.18 Similarly, the arrowhead could have broken through the seam between the maxilla and the zygomatic bone (more commonly called the cheekbone), but in either of these cases, the passage of even the thinnest of bodkin arrowheads through the face would have meant substantial fracturing and bone displacement. On balance, therefore, it seems probable that the prince’s wound was not, as Pollard and Oliver and others would have it, “deep into his cheekbone.” To the contrary, it was probably received through the left side of the nasal cavity, at best only glancing off the edge of the maxilla. When Bradmore speaks of the wound being “iuxta nasum ex sinistra parte” [beside the nose on the left side], he appears to mean directly beside the nose, if not partially through it. At some point, long before Bradmore’s arrival and quite possibly upon the battlefield itself, an attempt was made to pull the arrow from Hal’s head. In many cases, such efforts as these “would be made by the soldier himself or his colleagues,” though it is impossible to know who grasped the shaft in this instance.19 At any rate, the wooden shaft of the arrow itself came free from Hal’s face, but the head of the arrow did not. While some medieval arrowheads appear to be riveted or otherwise firmly attached, many times it seems that the heads were intended to come free like this and were only attached with wax or even tightened down on spit-lubricated ends of the shafts. There is no question that in the present case the arrowhead indeed came free and remained lodged, “in posteriori parte ossis capiti secundum mensuram 6 uncharum” [in the posterior part of the skull at a depth of six inches]. Though at times medieval doctors had no choice but to leave the arrowhead in place within the body – as happened, for instance, with one of the two arrow wounds King David II of Scotland received to the face at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346 – it had been known since at least the sixth-century writings of Paulus of Aegina that an arrowhead “deeply embedded in bone” was 17 18 19

Strickland and Robert Hardy, The Great Warbow: From Hastings to the Mary Rose (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), 265. “Living by the Sword,” Royal Deaths and Diseases, Lion Television (UK: Channel 4, 2003). Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 179.

222

Livingston

profoundly dangerous, and that “extraction had to be performed at any cost.”20 Indeed, so well known was this fact that Chaucer’s Franklin makes the very same observation in The Canterbury Tales: And wel ye knowe that of a sursanure In surgerye is perilous the cure, But men myghte touche the arwe or come therby.21 [And you well know that a superficially healed wound / is hardly cured in surgery / unless men can touch or get to the arrow (i.e., withdraw it).] Removing the arrowhead from the body was clearly the preferred solution. Standard practice was to remove arrowheads whenever possible by expulsion – that is, by pushing the arrow through the body and out the other side – and battle surgeons would have had several devices to aid them in this task: essentially forged metal probes that could trace the wound, seat in the socket of the arrowhead (in cases where the arrowhead had a “female” fitting) or, less commonly, around the thorn of the arrowhead (in cases where the arrowhead had a “male” fitting). In Hal’s case, however, expulsion was not in the cards. The embedded nature of the arrowhead meant that removal could only be done by extraction, by pulling rather than pushing it out of the patient. Extraction was almost always the more difficult process given that even the slightest of barbs or flanges on the back of the point could catch on surrounding tissues and bone, but in the present case the effort was complicated even further by the location of the arrowhead so deep in the prince’s head. The path of the arrow and its final location can be approximated by measuring a line roughly six inches deep through the nasal cavity, moving from one side of the skull to the other, ending in bone – preferably, in fact, ending “in posteriori parte ossis capiti” [in the posterior part of the skull], to return to Bradmore’s description – and yet somehow not resulting in rapid or instant death. These constraints strongly indicate that the wound was almost directly into the prince’s head, hitting him nearly straight on. It entered on one side of his nose, smashing through the harder cartilage and carving through the softer tissues before it buried itself in bone somewhere between the opposite 20

21

Bernd Karger, Hubert Sudhues, and Bernd Brinkmann, “Arrow Wounds: Major Stimulus in the History of Surgery,” World Journal of Surgery 25 (2001): 1550–55, at 1552. Cf. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” 112. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), V[F]1113–15.

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

223

sphenoidal sinus (if the arrow entered on a slightly upward trajectory) and the opposite side of the first cervical vertebrae (if the arrow entered at a slightly more downward trajectory). The difference between these potential angles is perhaps twenty degrees, meaning that the arrow that struck Hal entered at a more or less level trajectory relative to his head. This does not mean that the trajectory itself was level: Hal might well have glanced upward to the sky – perhaps quickly lifting his visor for a gasp of needed air – in the instant before he was hit.22 He saw it coming, even if only for a moment. In any case, a nonlethal six-inch depth is essentially impossible to achieve without such a dead-on direct path into the center of the skull. Though speaking less specifically on the matter, Hector Cole and Tig Lang rightly note: “It is just possible for an arrow to enter beside the nose and lodge at the back of the head without causing immediate death or lasting disability, but the margin of error either way is extremely small.”23 Regardless of the particular bone that was ultimately impacted, it is clear that the prince’s wound was a danger not only in terms of infection, blood-loss, and other typical worries of a penetrating wound in the Middle Ages – not that those were not bad enough – but also in the fact the arrowhead was embedded in bone bordering the sixteen-year-old’s brain.24 Without a forensic examination of Henry V’s bones, it would be impossible to know which part of the brain was most likely affected, from the frontal lobe to the temporal lobe, the hypothalmus, down to the brain stem and the top of the spinal column. Any of these points would threaten temporary seizures and even permanent neurological damage. The former certainly fits with the fact that, although he says nothing 22

23 24

The fact that the victim’s body would have a high degree of variability regarding its position relative to the strike, while seemingly obvious, is often forgotten by historians; see, for instance, Piers D. Mitchell’s otherwise excellent study in which he observes that a partially healed arrow wound in the top of a skull excavated at Safed “shows that the arrow was not fired directly at the man, but high into the air to fall on him almost vertically.” Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 113. Hector Cole and Tig Lang, “The Treating of Prince Henry’s Arrow Wound, 1403,” Journal of the Society of Archer Antiquaries (2003): 95–101, at 96. The terrible danger of any head wound during the Middle Ages is likely borne out by the fact that, as Mitchell observes, “penetrating head injuries in the Crimean war and American Civil War were associated with a mortality rate of over 70 per cent” (Medicine in the Crusades, 163). In this volume see: Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101, and Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 496–518.

224

Livingston

of bone fragments and fractures, Bradmore states his chief concern during the prince’s treatment was “propter timorem spasmi qui meus maximus fuit timor” [because of the fear of the spasm, which was my greatest fear].25 Treatment of the Wound Bradmore does not seem to have been present at Shrewsbury when Hal received this wound. In his account, Bradmore reports that “diuersi periti medici” [various medical experts] preceded him in trying to get the arrowhead out of the prince’s head, offering to do so by means of “pocionibus et aliis curis” [potions and other cures]. Pollard and Oliver state that “for five days after the battle” these ineffective (albeit traditional) methods were attempted before Bradmore’s arrival, though the primary source of their precise chronology is unknown: such specific detail of the timing is in neither Bradmore’s account nor the medieval chronicles I have examined.26 Some time certainly did pass, however, given not only Bradmore’s apparent absence but also the distance between the battle site and Kenilworth Castle, where Bradmore makes clear that his own care of the crown-prince took place. The distance between the two locations is over fifty miles as the crow flies, a no doubt horrifyingly bumpy ride for the gravely wounded sixteen-year-old young man. Whether Bradmore himself made one or more attempts to cure Hal before the successful one that he describes, is unknown. What is clear, however, is that Bradmore’s final solution was remarkably adept. The surgeon’s first problem was the swelling of tissues within the wound: he simply could not reach the arrowhead in order to extract it. To remedy this, Bradmore used “tentas paruas” [small tents] fashioned from the pith of old elder wood that had been dried and sewn into clean linen cloth. These were dipped in honey – Chapman suggests this was for “lubrication,” but it is almost certain that this was for medicinal purposes27 – and then he placed them in the wound in increasing sizes, enlarging the wound both in width and depth. 25

26 27

Bradmore might also have been concerned with tremors brought on by infection, a danger discussed by the physician Theodorich Borgognoni in 1498 (Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 164). Pollard and Oliver, Two Men in a Trench, 45. In this collection, Ilana Krug suggests that stores of honey were specifically kept to deal with wounds incurred during a siege. See: “The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine,” 194–214. For additional studies, see: A. Simon, K. Traynor, K. Santos, G. Blaser, U. Bode, and P. Molan, “Medical Honey for Wound Care – Still the ‘Latest Resort’?” Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 6.2 (2009): 165–73, and

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

225

Bradmore mentions his need to reach the bottom of the wound, which was presumably difficult due to the days of clotting and soft tissue self-repair that had likely begun to enclose the embedded arrowhead. With the wound eventually thus opened, Bradmore fashioned a special device that he describes as “tenaculas” [tongs], and of which he helpfully provides an illustration in the manuscript. These tongs were fashioned to be the same thickness of the removed arrow, with a screw down the middle of it that, when tightened, would push outward on the semi-circular jaws, which from his drawing appear to have teeth on the outside. The surgeon inserted this device through the gaping wound in the sixteen-year-old’s face, pushing it in until it seated in the vacant cap of the arrowhead. Turning the screw pressed the jaws of the tongs outward until they firmly gripped the inside of the arrowhead’s cap, where the shaft had once been set, “and then moving it back and forth, bit by bit, with God’s aid,” Bradmore reports, “I extracted the arrowhead.” There were witnesses to the surgeon’s work since the patient was the crown prince of England, and the gathering knew little about the need for modernstyle operating room disinfectant procedures. Bradmore notes that “diverse nobles” were present, along with “the servants” of Hal (nothing is said of the presence of the King Henry IV, Hal’s father).28 All rejoiced and “gave thanks to God.” With the arrowhead removed, Bradmore commenced the equally important work of cleansing the deep wound, an elaborate effort that very much puts a lie to the popular notion of medieval barber butchery – at least, that is, when it came to royal patients! Bradmore began by acquiring a “squirtillo,” essentially a kind of basting syringe which he filled with white wine, squirting it directly into the open wound. If the sixteen-year-old boy was not already passed out from his ordeal, this would have stung to say the least. Next, Bradmore filled the wound with, as he describes it, nouas tentas de stupis lini inposui intincte in mundificativo quod sic fit. Item recipe micam panis albi et bulliantur in aqua bene et stringantur

28

Rose Cooper, “Using Honey to Inhibit Wound Pathogens,” Nursing Times 104.3 (2008): 46–49. As far as I am aware, the only surviving reference Henry IV himself makes about this whole affair is an indirect one, in a letter written twenty days after the battle, in which he notes that the young prince “is not able” to re-engage against the rebels in Wales. W.G.D. Fletcher, “Some Documents Relative to the Battle of Shrewsbury,” Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 2.10 [1898]: 233.

226

Livingston

per pannum. Tune recipe farine ordei et mellis quod sufficit et omnia bulliantur super lentum ignem donee spissetur et postea addatur terebentina quod sufficit et fiat unguentum mundificativum. [new tents, made of flax tows soaked in a mundificative. This is made thus: take white breadcrumbs and boil it in clean water and strain it through a cloth. Then take barley flour and a sufficient amount of honey and boil it all over a gentle fire until it thickens, and then afterwards add a sufficient amount of turpentine oil, and the mundificative ointment is made.] Bradmore was nothing if not patient in caring for the young prince. He kept these two fibers in place for two days, then replaced them with slightly shorter ones for another two days. For twenty days he repeated this process, the fibers slowly cleansing the wound outward and allowing the tissues to form up from the inside out. He then, in his words, “regenerated flesh,” by which he surely means the skin itself, by applying Unguentum Fuscum [Dark Ointment], for which he provides a recipe elsewhere in the Philomena, describing it as a mixture of resin and gums (fol. 194r).29 The surgeon then writes: Et nota quidem in principio cure et usque ad finem cure mee cotidie inunxi eum mane et sero in collo cum unguento neruale et desuper emplastrum calidum inposui propter timorem spasmi qui meus maximus fuit timor et sic gratias deo agente perfecte curatus fuit. [And note that from the beginning until the very end of my treatment I anointed him on the neck daily, morning and night, with Unguentum Nervale [Nerve Ointment], and I placed a hot plaster over this, because of the fear of spasm, which was my greatest fear. And thus, thanks be to God, he was perfectly cured.] This concern for seizures was, as already noted, understandable no matter where the point ultimately embedded in the sixteen-year-old’s head. Bradmore’s recipe for the Unguentum Nervale states that it aids “chilled nerves and sinews” (fol. 338v), and that it is made, as Cole and Lang summarize it, “of

29

Cole and Lang posit that while this compound “may not have regenerated flesh [it] would have at least had a mildly antiseptic effect while the natural process of healing took place” (“Treating of Prince Henry’s Wound,” 97).

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

227

more than 20 herbs, wax, butter and some resins.”30 Cole and Lang suggest that Bradmore’s concern was for tetanus-induced spasms, which might well be true. Beyond that fact, however, the placement of the ointment and hot plaster upon the neck might well indicate that it was indeed at the base of the skull that the point had become lodged. The arrow struck at a slightly downward trajectory in this case: although we do not know the exact position of Hal’s head at the time of the wound, a downward angle is at least statistically the most probable given typical flight patterns and human actions upon a hotly contested field of battle. Ramifications of the Wound And so Prince Hal, the crown prince of England, was saved. Bradmore, through ingenuity and no doubt a fair bit of sheer luck, managed a feat that would have been difficult even today. The crown did not forget its debt: Bradmore lived out his remaining days until his death in 1412 with a substantial annuity of 10 marks, plus additional revenues from the crown.31 For Hal’s part it was no quick recovery, of course. Bradmore spent at least three weeks in cleansing efforts alone, and it is hard to imagine the agony of the ordeal for the young patient. As Juliet Barker observes, his pain must have been “unimaginable: basic anaesthesia, based on plasters of opium, henbane, laudanum or hemlock, was understood and practised in medieval times but it was unpredictable and inefficient.”32 After Shrewsbury, the prince is noticeably absent from many of his previous duties for more than a year, including the pursuit and persecution of the rebel Owain Glyndŵr in Wales, and recovery from his wound was no doubt at least partially to blame.33 Whether his presence there would have meant a swifter end to that revolt (which lingered on until 1412 at least) cannot be known, though he was integral to dealing Owain his most significant setbacks once the prince was healed enough to take command once more.34 30 31 32 33 34

Cole and Lang, “Treating of Prince Henry’s Wound,” 97. Lang, “Bradmore, John.” Juliet Barker, Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle that Made England (New York: Back Bay, 2005), 32. Christopher Allmand, Henry V (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 26–27. Prince Hal seems to have been particularly integral in placing the English in a position to win a resounding victory over the Welsh forces at the Battle of Grosmont, an engagement that he himself describes in detail in a letter to the king dated 11 March; see: Owain Glyndŵr: A Casebook, ed. Michael Livingston and John K. Bollard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 116–17.

228

Livingston

The wound had other ramifications in history, too. It is surely no leap of logic to suppose that his experience under Bradmore’s care led directly to Hal’s decision when, now ruling as Henry V, he brought a substantial medical corps on his famed French campaign.35 Beyond this, at least one amateur scholar has argued that, contra Bradmore and scholars like Chapman, Hal did not, in fact, make “a full recovery,” and that the wound he sustained at Shrewsbury led to the personality change that Hal so memorably displays in, for instance, Shakespeare’s plays and several other later chronicles. This change has more often been tied to Hal’s coronation as Henry V, an event that saw him leave behind a life “inclined greatly to riot and drew to wild company,” as the Brut reports, in order to become a pious “man zealous for honesty, modesty, and gravity,” as Thomas Walsingham describes him.36 Shakespeare, for his part, interprets the change to be part of Hal’s greater plan to, like the sun coming out from the clouds, seem more glorious for having been inglorious (I Henry IV 1.2.168–90). Kevin Goodman instead argues that the personality change – if it was real – is akin to that experienced most famously by Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who in 1848 had an iron spike driven through his head and thereafter experienced significant personality and behavioral changes.37 In Hal’s case, Goodman suggests that the arrowhead passed through or otherwise damaged Hal’s left temporal lobe. In addition to immediate personality changes, he argues that lesions associated with the injury could have led to later changes more in line with a coronation chronology. Perhaps this is so, and without examining of the king’s bones it is impossible know the truth. But there is at least one interesting point to Goodman’s theory that must be addressed: if the angle of the penetrating arrow’s trajectory was high enough, rather than downward (which is what evidence from Bradmore appears to suggest rather strongly), Goodman is correct that it would most likely have been young Hal’s left temporal lobe that would have been affected, instead of his right. Goodman comes to this left lobe assumption because Hal’s supposed changes in behavior would typically be of the kind associated with left temporal lobe injuries in clinical histories. Yet how such a scenario fits with Bradmore’s report of a “transverso” missile path and Goodman’s own 35

36 37

For a brief discussion of the main figures in this medical corps, and Henry V’s clear interest in their importance to his success, see: Barker, Agincourt, 137–40; see also: George E. Gask, “The Medical Services of Henry the Fifth’s Campaign of the Somme in 1414,” in Essays in the History of Medicine (London: Butterworth, 1950), 94–102. These and other reports of Hal’s change are quoted in Dockray, Henry V, 96. Goodman, “Another Arrow Which Changed History,” Bows, Blades, and Battles (accessed 22 May 2013).

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

229

assumption, shared by almost every scholar who has discussed the injury, that the arrow penetrated the left side of Hal’s face, Goodman does not say. But, in point of fact, Goodman may be more right than he knows, even while he is wrong in the details: the arrow very likely penetrated Hal’s right side, and thus could have passed “transverso” to the left side, affecting the temporal lobe on that side when it glanced across or became embedded in or even struck through the bone surrounding the brain. When Bradmore writes of the wound being on the left side of the prince’s nose, everyone has assumed that this has meant Hal’s left – yet far more probably it means Bradmore’s left, the left side of Hal’s face from the treating doctor’s point of view. The best confirmation of this comes from the fifteenth-century portrait of Henry V hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. Almost every other royal portrait we have is face-front or three-quarter-face, yet Henry V’s is quite strikingly different – a simple profile of the left side of his face, completely hiding his right. What better cause could there be but this: unlike the portrayals of him by handsome actors like Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, Henry V carried with him to the end of his days the profound scars and disfigurations of his wound at the age of sixteen upon the field of Shrewsbury. John Matusiak has observed that the visible reminder of the wound may even have had positive consequences: that same scarring must also have had much broader consequences, since ambassadors, magnates, men-at-arms and ordinary soldiers alike will now have been immediately struck – and deeply impressed – by such an authentic symbol of the young man’s prowess. Not only was it the strongest possible token of his bravery and endurance, it would also become in due course a powerful talisman to convince his followers of victory against any foe at any odds.38 It is not hard to imagine that this would be so, though to be fair not one of Henry V’s contemporaries mentions any such scarring, much less any inspiration derived from it. This silence of our sources regarding any lasting disfigurement on the king’s face, however, may in fact point us toward one more long-term ramification of the Shrewsbury wound, one easily forgotten but nearly impossible to deny. It is perhaps too much to speculate, as Goodman does, about the direct physical effects to the king’s brain as a result of his injuries, but given the experience of the wound, its difficult treatment, and the highly probable disfigurations that 38

John Matusiak, Henry V (New York: Routledge, 2013), 58. Cf. Skinner, “Visible Prowess?”.

230

Livingston

were visible to all and were so bothersome to him personally that his royal portrait was designed to hide them, is it not easily within the realm of probability to wonder about the life-long psychological trauma that he suffered?39 And if this is so, if Henry V suffered from what we might today diagnose as a kind of PTSD, then the prince’s wound at Shrewsbury may have wrought far more than a fascinating first-hand account of the practice of late-medieval medicine. 39

Gauging the contemporary cultural response to these scars is difficult if not impossible to achieve, but it is at least worth noting that the current Veteran Disability Code of the United States of America designates facial scarring as providing up to an 80% disability rating – even before consideration of the psychological trauma for which such scars can serve as a daily reminder (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 38, Section 4.118).

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

section 3 Law

∵

231

232

Livingston

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

233

Chapter 10

Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early Fifteenth Century* Carmel Ferragud

In the late medieval period, medical practice and the status of practitioners underwent a far-reaching transformation. It was at the end of the thirteenth century that medicine came to be considered a scientia, and a position was claimed for it comparable to that of the other liberal arts. The physicians armed with a substantial number of medical texts, unknown until the thirteenth century, could explain the workings of the human body and interpret the concepts of health and illness in rational terms. Health was increasingly valued and, consequently, became a prime objective for rulers and a matter of growing concern to society as a whole. This kind of medicine, taught in and disseminated from the universities, was held in increasing esteem and its practitioners were well regarded, to the point that they acquired the status of an ideal professional model for those wishing to practice it.1 The physicians attended to internal illness, while the surgeons treated fractures, wounds, abscesses, and external complaints, though there was confusion between their spheres of competence. From the last decades of the thirteenth century, this science slowly but surely permeated deep into many spheres, a phenomenon known as the “medicalization” of society.2 One of the domains in which this phenomenon was experienced with great intensity was the court of law, because doctors *

This study has been carried out as part of research projects FFI2011–29117-C02–01 (2012–2015) and FFI2014–53050-C5–3-P (2015–2018) of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) of Spanish government, financed with FEDER funds of the European Union. I am grateful to Jon Arrizabalaga, Lluís Cifuentes i Comamala, Ferran Garcia-Oliver, Juan Vicente García Marsilla, María Luz López Terrada, Michael R. McVaugh and Àlvar Martínez Vidal for their comments. Translated by Charles Davis. 1 Luis García Ballester, “‘Artifex factivus sanitatis’: Health and Medical Care in Medieval Latin Galenism,” in Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions, ed. Don Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 127–150. 2 On the Catalan-Aragonese area, the following works can be consulted: Lluís Garcia Ballester, La medicina a la València medieval. Medicina i societat en un país medieval mediterrani (Valencia: Alfons el Magnànim, 1988); Michael R. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague: Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1245–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_012

234

Ferragud

were called in as expert witnesses to testify in certain cases about medical evidence. A case in point is the criminal court of justice in the city of Valencia, where the expert knowledge of doctors was sought on a wide range of issues. This court was founded in 1321 on the basis of letters patent granted by James II of Aragon, which stipulated that the two areas of jurisdiction, civil and criminal, should be controlled by two different judges. The one exercising criminal jurisdiction was responsible for safeguarding the city and for capturing malefactors and those carrying prohibited weapons; this judge applied punishments for drawing one’s sword, for gambling, or for being out at night without a light, and judged cases of slander, wounding, or mutilations and homicides, as well as any other criminal act, including offences committed at sea up to a hundred miles from the coast. He also imposed fines and corporal punishments on those convicted.3 Jurists soon realized what a great help it would be to draw on the experience of physicians and surgeons in order to clarify a large number of complex issues for judges. But it was the furs, or legal code, of King Alfonso the Benign, in 1329–30, that established the principles upon which the practice of medicine in the Kingdom of Valencia was founded.4 Among other topics, these laws established the basis for courts of law to take advice from medical practitioners.5

University Press, 1993); and Carmel Ferragud, Medicina i promoció social a la Baixa Edat Mitjana (Corona d’Aragó, 1350–1410) (Madrid: CSIC, 2005). 3 Rafael Narbona, “El Justicia Criminal. Una corte medieval valenciana, un procedimiento judicial,” Estudis Castellonencs 3 (1986): 287–310. 4 The furs or legal code of Valencia, compiled over the course of four centuries, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, constitute the main corpus of Valencian legislation and the basic instrument, together with letters patent, for knowledge and study of law in the Kingdom of Valencia. These compilations of laws contain, in principle, the precepts agreed at the corts or legislative assemblies of the kingdom between the three classic branches or estates of society (ecclesiastical, military, and royal) and the king. Depending on whether or not they were agreed unanimously, they were called furs (which were universally applicable) or actes de cort (“acts of the assembly”), whose validity was restricted to members of those branches that had agreed to them. However, the furs of Valencia also include some letters patent (issued by the king without the consent of the assembly), a very common type of legislative instrument during the early years following the conquest of the kingdom. The furs of Valencia took shape in 1261, when James I swore to uphold the Customs of the city of Valencia with the name of furs, valid throughout the kingdom. 5 Valencian legislative documentation on medicine can be found in Furs de València, ed. Germà Colón and Arcadi Garcia, vol. 8 (Barcelona: Barcino, 1999), 133–141. For a study of this medical legislation, see: Garcia Ballester, La medicina, 53–57.

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

235

The most common expert action, and the primary reason for doctors appearing in the courts, was dessospitació,6 that is, a pronouncement by a surgeon, generally of high professional standing, on the health of an injured person and the prognosis for the loss of an organ, mutilation, or dysfunction due exclusively to the injury. Expert opinion could also be brought to bear in cases of sexual violence, poisoning, or in determining cause of death, natural or violent, by visual inspection or by cutting the body open. Physicians or surgeons were also asked to provide a valuation of the costs of treatment dispensed to the wounded, including medicines and food.7 Traces of all these expert activities have survived in the archives of various European kingdoms. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the only survey that was contemplated in furs were wounds, and it was logical that surgeons, who habitually treated the wounds, be the professionals in charge of making a prognosis about its development. In the circumstances that a patient wanted an amputation because of a wound, doctors were called in to judge the necessity of the procedure, and then a judge was called in to question the doctors and hear their evidence, a legal process that seems particular to Valencia. A Conservative Attitude to Risk There is evidence of amputees in different European countries during the Middle Ages, including some individuals who suffered amputations or had 6 Dessospitació or Dessospitar, from the Latin desuspitatio or desospitare, literally means “remove from suspicion” (pronounced to be out of danger), but as is sometimes pointed out, it is not equivalent to peritar (give an expert opinion), since dessospitació was only performed on wounded persons. On the other hand, physicians and surgeons carried out many other expert tasks for the courts. McVaugh, Medicine Before the Plague, 207–217. For examples of dessospitació see: Carmel Ferragud, “El coneixement expert dels cirurgians en la cort del justícia criminal de la ciutat de València durant els segles XIV i XV: la pràctica de la dessospitació,” in Expertise et valeur des choses, ed. Laurent Fallard and Antoni Furió (Madrid: La Casa de Velázquez), in press. For Dessospitació in other places of the Kingdom of Valencia, see: Carmel Ferragud, “Expert Examinations of Wounds in the Criminal Court or Justice in Cocentaina (Kingdom of Valencia) during the Late Middle Ages,” in Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 108–132. 7 “Legislation,” in Furs de València, ed. Germà Colón and Arcadi Garcia, vol. 7 (Barcelona: Barcino, 1999), 79. For a case study, see: Carmel Ferragud, “El metge sota sospita. Actuació mèdica en els testimonis pericials a ferits davant la cort del justícia criminal de la ciutat de València (1396),” Recerques 62 (2011): 69–94, at 74–75.

236

Ferragud

been mutilated and managed to survive. Certain manuscript illuminations, scenes in altarpieces, and anthroponomy exhibit traces of the reality of life after the loss of a limb.8 It seems that, for a whole range of reasons, a large number of people survived in medieval society missing part of their body. The fact is that street violence, war, innumerable accidents in the home and at work, as well as corporal punishments of the period that involved mutilation of hands, feet, ears, or nose were conducive to injuries requiring surgery and sometimes amputation.9 And there is evidence of amputations in medieval Valencia. This can be deduced, for example, by the fact that the Valencian preacher Vincent Ferrer used amputation as an example in three of his surviving sermons and sermon collections, but with different emphasis. Ferrer gave a Catalan sermon in Valencia during Lent 1413, in which he declared that Purgatory could be regarded as a bad place for Christians after death, but that it was necessary in order to avoid Hell, which would always be much worse. He compared it to amputating a cancerous foot, a painful experience, but the only way to save life: “Si ací és hun hom qui haje càncer en lo peu, que és malaltia incurable, segons dien los metges, e per ço no y ha millor sinó tallar lo peu; ara di: ¿no és mala cosa tallar hun membre del cors? Sí és. Vet absolute. Mas comparative és bo, car més val tallar hun membre que perdre tot lo cors e la vida” 8 The altarpiece of Saints Abdon and Senen, painted by Jaume Huguet for the church of Saint Peter in Terrassa (Catalonia), contains a scene depicting a miracle performed by the physician saints Cosmas and Damian. It shows how they managed to replace a man’s amputated leg by grafting on the leg of a dead Negro slave. The miracle indicates a certain familiarity with amputations and the terrible uncertainty of the outcome for the patient. See: Joaquín Yarza, “Jaume Huguet i el retaule dels sants Abdó i Senén,” Terme 9 (1994): 26–37, at 35. Bosch includes scenes showing disabled persons and amputees in some of his drawings, preserved in the Bibliothèque Royale Albert I, Cabinet des Estampes (Brussels) and in the Albertina (Vienna). On anthroponomy, see: Irina Metzler, “What’s in a Name? Considering the Onomastics of Disability in the Middle Ages,” in The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe: Examining Disability in the Historical, Legal, Literary, Medical, and Religious Discourses of the Middle Ages, ed. Wendy Turner and Tory Vandeventer Pearman (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 15–50, at 30, 45. Simple wooden prostheses had also been used for centuries before the Middle Ages to replace a leg amputated below the knee, and some of them have survived down to the present day. See: Leonard F. Peltier, Orthopedics: A History and Iconography (San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1993), 10. 9 On judicial mutilations in the Crown of Aragon, see: Lluís Comenge i Ferrer, “Perdrà lo puny,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 1 (1902): 66–71. Rafael Narbona has devoted the most studies to the subject of violence and criminality in the city of Valencia. Particularly noteworthy is his Malhechores, violencia y justicia ciudadana en la Valencia Bajomedieval (1360–1399) (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 1990).

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

237

[If you have a man here who suffers from cancer in the foot, which is an incurable disease, as doctors say, so there is no choice but to amputate that foot. Tell me, is not a bad thing to cut a part of the body? Yes, it is. It’s true. But in comparison it is good, because it is better to cut one member than death].10 In a sermon in Castilian, however, he spoke of the pain when a member is cut off – though without direct reference to surgical amputation – as a result of the soul fleeing (estriñe) from the part that is gone.11 Ferrer was always alert to society around him and was willing to use any element as an explanatory vehicle for his theological message. In this sense, healthy and diseased bodies and medicine were further sources from which to draw his magnificent arsenal of examples for preaching.12 If the preacher used amputation as a metaphor in sermons, it must have been because it was not an exceptional event for people.13 Although sermons and documents such as trial records show that the practice of amputation did exist in Valencia in the medieval period, it is impossible to determine how frequently this surgical operation was carried out, and in how many cases people applied to the courts to obtain authorization. It 10

11

12

13

St. Vicent Ferrer, Sermons, ed. Gret Schib, vol. 4 (Barcelona: Barcino, 1977), 213. It is striking that treatises on surgery also display a very cautious approach to cancer, especially because of the negative (and often fatal) results of therapeutic surgical operations. Luke Demaitre, “Medieval Notions for Cancer: Malignancy and Metaphor,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72 (1998): 609–637, at 631–632. “Sy a un omne cortan un poco del dedo, ¿por qué le duele? Porque la ánima está en cada parte e en todo lugar del cuerpo; pues quando cortan alguna cosa del cuerpo, la ánima se arriedra e se estriñe de aquel logar, e en aquel estriñimiento es el dolor, ca pártese la ánima de aquel lugar. Pues piensa que a la muerte la ánima se parte de todo el cuerpo.” Pedro Mª Cátedra, Sermón, sociedad y literatura en la Edad Media: san Vicente Ferrer en Castilla (1411–1412) (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1994), 330. On the interrelationship between theology and medicine and the use of scientific and medical material by preachers, see: Joseph Ziegler, Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 176–213. These references in Ferrer’s sermons are also consistent with the absence of religious opposition to mutilation. Indeed, manipulating and dismembering the body for judicial or religious purposes was considered permissible within the context of Christianity, albeit subject to certain controls. Belief in the divine miracle of the complete resurrection of the body, with its immaterial part or soul, helped to obviate objections to dismemberment before or after death. Roger French, Medicine before Science: The Business of Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 8–10. However, there were a lot of anxieties about this, particularly in the prohibi­tion against clerics shedding blood in either interrogatory torture or surgery. Darrel W. ­Amundsen, Medicine, Society and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 222–247, at 224–229.

238

Ferragud

seems obvious that doctors did not wish to take the risk of prescribing or performing an operation that would have such dramatic consequences for people’s lives, and even put their lives at risk, without the approval of a judge. It is safe to say that for any craftsman, the loss of a hand or an arm would make it impossible to perform complex tasks, and, thus, to make a living. This would probably lead inevitably to destitution and reliance on the support of neighbors and municipal charity.14 It was understandable, therefore, that judges only gave their consent for an amputation when it was the only way of preventing death (and this had to be confirmed by the experts). The reality of life in Valencia shows that in this, and other delicate cases – serious injuries, causes of death, poisonings, etc. – the presence of a group of between four and six professionals was required.15 There was all the more reason for this in the case of amputations, in which various people were needed to support the patient carefully.16 In addition, most of those who took part in these procedures were members of the city’s medical elite. Many of them were university trained, regularly undertook expert activities, and, in short, enjoyed considerable social prestige. They were the most experienced healers and those in whom the courts placed the greatest confidence. All these cautions are related to the warning of Henri de Mondeville, author of one of the most important surgical treatises, that the mistakes surgeons made were always perceptible to sight and touch, and they bore sole responsibility for the consequences of their operations, whereas the actions of physicians were not perceptible and the patient’s powers of recovery could be left to nature. In short, he recommends “ideo necesse est cyrurgicum cum majore deliberatione et cautius operare” [that surgeons should always proceed

14

15

16

Iatrogenic illnesses during the Middle Ages have been studied in Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 94–110. Mondeville himself stressed that surgeons must take care with certain operations to avoid causing disabilities, with the familiar consequences this would entail. In the case of Domingo Vinyoles’ wound, five surgeons were involved as experts. Ferragud, “El metge sota sospita,” 80. I have been able to confirm that the same is true in other unpublished cases in the same judicial documentation. This can be observed in some manuscripts. See: Hans von Gerssdorff, Feldtbuch der Wundartzney, 1517: (accessed 8 June 2014); Or the Emperor Frederick III’s amputation (1493). Albertina (Vienna), no. 22475_original Hans Seyffs MS. WLB Stuttgart Cod.med.et phys. f. 8–f. 71r.

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

239

with the utmost caution and circumspection].17 The fear of failure and loss of prestige were always present behind these recommendations. Although Mondeville has been regarded as unorthodox because of the novelty of some of his surgical proposals – for example, his concern about aesthetic and the procedures to avoid disfiguring a patient – it is also true that he himself warned less experienced practitioners about using techniques they had not fully mastered, and states that he had been severely criticized, personally, by his colleagues for some of his ideas.18 Caution and a clear conservative attitude gradually became the norm among authors of late medieval surgical texts, although the motivation for this trend is not clear. However, there is evidence that Valencian surgeons did venture to practice amputation, having obtained the appropriate judicial guarantees beforehand. It is possible that surgeons were liable to face some kind of legal action or reprisal as a result of malpractice. Although examples of legal action being taken for dissatisfaction with a medical treatment do not seem to have been very common in the Crown of Aragon, including the Kingdom of Valencia, some patients who were not satisfied did file a complaint, especially in cases of surgery. The signing of a notarial contract between doctor and patient to fix the specific terms of a treatment, or the approval of a judge for the performance of a medical action, as in the cases analyzed here, have been adduced as reasons to explain this scarcity of complaints.19 However, the signing of notarial contracts of a medical nature was presumably not a frequent event, bearing in mind that it represented an additional cost. It seems that a more influential factor may have been the fact that Valencian legislation was not punitive with regard to possible medical negligence and liability claims. Although laws to this effect did exist in the Castilian area, as in the Partidas,

17 18

19

Marie-Christine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie a l’apogée du Moyen-Age (París: Flammarion, 1983), 93–99. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague, 183. Mondeville accepts that modern surgeons may develop new techniques for dealing with old problems. The general truths expressed by past medical authorities always need to be adapted to particular situations. Michael R. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages (Firenze: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006), 80–81, 124–125. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague, 184–187. Complaints prompted by patient dissatisfaction most often tended to be directed essentially toward those practicing without a license and suspected of not possessing the requisite training, or toward Jewish and Muslim medical practitioners and those of low status who lacked prestige and the protection of socially powerful patrons. See also: Ilana Krug, “The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine,” 194–214; and Timothy May, “Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices,” 175–193, in this volume.

240

Ferragud

there is nothing on this issue in the Valencian furs.20 Curiously enough, documentary reality shows that while there are important surviving trial records in which a menescal “horse doctor” was sued for negligence, this was not the case with human medicine.21 Indeed, this point is corroborated by literary evidence, albeit much later. In the Portacuentos, written in 1564 by the Valencian author Joan de Timoneda, a menescal says that he has become a doctor: “because they make me pay for killing beasts, but not people.”22 Nevertheless, it is fair to say that in a case of possible negligence, or simply a high-risk operation, a surgeon could find himself confronted by the patient’s relatives and friends, and the latter sometimes took forceful action, even to the point that the surgeon feared for his own life. In order to avoid these reprisals, the signing of contracts between doctor and patient provided a certain “guarantee,” since such contracts made it possible to ensure payment for medical services and absolve the healer of any blame.23 A particularly interesting case is that of Sisto Fort, a surgeon of Italian origin who worked in Barcelona and Valencia. In 1374, he carried out a somewhat risky operation, in which he had to open the abdominal cavity of the Governor of the Castle of Castellvell, Guillem Arnau. He requested in advance: que de la dita cura l’aguessen per scusat, com per cert lo dit Guillem Arnau anava a perill de mort si l’obria e lo tayllava, e que del dit fet requeria la dita cort e prohòmens e lo dit notari que li·n fessen carta pública a conservació dels seus drets, en tal manera que per null temps lo dit mestre Sisto no·n fos reptat ne représ en nenguna part del món on fos per la dita cort ne per altres persones ne per parents ne per amics del dit Guyem Arnau

20

21 22 23

Furs de València, 8: 133-141. On Castile, see: Aníbal Ruiz Moreno, La medicina en la legislación medioeval española (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1946), cited here in the facsimile edition (Alcalá del Real: Formación Alcalá, 2009), 49–52. In the Anglo-Norman world in the early-thirteenth century, doctors who caused the death of a patient by their lack of skill were considered guilty of homicide, with particular emphasis placed on amputations. In such cases, legal action could be taken. Metzler, Disabilities, 95–96. Carmel Ferragud, La cura dels animals: menescals i menescalia a la València medieval (Catarroja: Afers, 2009), 23–29, 75–82. Lluís Cerveró, La medicina en la literatura valenciana del segle XVI (Valencia: Eliseu ­Climent, 1987), 236–237. There are some examples from Valencia in Carmel Ferragud, “La práctica de la medicina en una frontera: el establecimiento de un sistema asistencial en Alcoi y Cocentaina (Reino de Valencia) durante los siglos XIII y XIV,” Mediterranean Chronicle 2 (2012): 117–133, at 128.

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

241

[that they should declare that he was absolved of responsibility for the said treatment and that the said Guillem Arnau was certainly in danger of dying if he opened his body and cut him, and he demanded that the said court and dignitaries and the said notary should issue him with a public instrument certifying this, to protect his rights, such that at no time would the said master Sisto be indicted or blamed in any part of the world whatever by the said court or by relatives or friends of the said Guillem Arnau.]24 Even so, the angry reaction of Arnau’s companions led to a confrontation with the surgeon. All things considered, given the risks entailed in amputation, it was obviously advisable to involve a judge. The latter, in turn, protected the interests of a wounded person by calling for the opinion of a notable group of experts. Amputations and Medical Expertise in the Criminal Court of Justice of Valencia On 28 June 1401, Manuel Salvador, a converted Jew formerly known as Maymó Xuxen, the son of another converso of the same name previously called Samuel, was wounded “de I colp de spaa en lo braç squerre enmig de la juntura” [by a blow from a sword on the left arm, in the middle of the joint].25 The attack was the work of one Galceran de Vic and his squire. The wounded man demanded that his arm be cut off since this was the only way to escape death. Indeed, the reference to the “mortification” of the arm suggests gangrene.26 The judge then 24

25 26

Ricard Carreras Valls, “Introducció a la història de la cirurgia a Catalunya: Bernat Serra i altres cirurgians catalans il·lustres del segle XIV,” in  Tres treballs premiats en el concurs d’homenatge a Gimbernat, ed. Ricard Carreras Valls, Jaume Pi-Sunyer Bayo, & Antoni Cardoner Planas (Barcelona: Societat de Cirurgia de Catalunya & Laboratoris del Nord d’Espanya, 1936), 1–63, at 29. Pere Gabarró i Garcia, “Sixtus Fort, un cirurgià barceloní del segle XIV,” in I congrés internacional d’història de la medicina catalana (Barcelona-Montpeller, de l’1 al 7 de juny de 1970): llibre d’actes (Barcelona: Scientia, 1971), 4: 213–214. Archivo del Reino de Valencia (ARV), Justicia Criminal, no. 15, mano 6, ff. 20r-v. A few years later, the Bolognese surgeon Pietro d’Argellata (d. 1423) devoted a chapter of his book on surgery – translated into Catalan by Narcís Solà and printed in the early sixteenth century – to wounds to the elbow with swords or similar weapons, emphasizing that they were highly dangerous owing to the presence of veins, arteries, and sinews in this area. Pietro d’Argellata, “De naffres fetes en lo colze ab spasa o coses semblants,” in Cirurgia (Perpiñán: Joan Rosenbach, 1503), Chapter 10, f. 259v. Argellata also cited

242

Ferragud

asked five medical professionals, physicians and surgeons, for their opinion. They declared that the arm should be cut off at least at the level of the elbow, but as high as they might consider appropriate in their professional judgment, since otherwise the wounded man would die: “deu ésser levat a tant del braç, aytant com és del colze avall, e aytant com serà vist d’allí amunt mortificat, et segons que apparia per ells, dits metges, segons que llur discreció jutgarà com en altra manera ell, dit en Manuel, stant axí no puga scapar de mort en neguna manera” [he must amputate the arm from the elbow down, and as much as look up from there mortified, and according with the opinions and discretion of these doctors, as otherwise he, aforementioned Manuel, being in that way cannot avoid death]. The healers who took part in the expert examination were Jaume d’Avinyó, Domingo Ros, Guillem Ivorra, Llorenç de Soler, and Manuel de Vilafranca. There are several striking points about this group of experts. The first is the professional standing and social prestige of the first two. Indeed, Jaume d’Avinyó regularly appeared as an expert witness in the civil and criminal courts of justice. He was from a prominent family of surgeons, resident in Valencia since the thirteenth century, who maintained close relations with the royal household and practiced surgery on a hereditary basis for generations. Avinyó enjoyed the favor of the monarch on many occasions, although he was a character surrounded by controversy. Indeed, he was accused on more than one occasion of giving biased testimony in favor of one of the parties involved in the trials in which the judge asked for his opinion.27 The young physician Domingo Ros, was the nephew of a well-known doctor in the royal household named Pere Ros de Ursins, and he also had a very promising future ahead of him. He was a royal physician to Martin the Younger and his wife Blanche of Navarre (from at least 1404 until the king’s death in 1409), Ferdinand of Antequera (died 1416), and to the latter’s son, Alfonso the Magnanimous, until 1437. For these services, he received various privileges and a seigneurial estate in 1432, as payment for the salary owed to him. In addition, he acted as an examiner of doctors from 1417 to 1433, and was entrusted, together with another royal physician, with inspecting various areas of Valencia allotted for rice

27

Albucasis and Borgognoni in his chapter on gangrenous members and their amputation, but not his master Chauliac. His proposal for life-saving amputation is very clear and, in this case, fully justified. On Jaume d’Avinyó, see: Carmel Ferragud, “The Role of Doctors in the Slave Trade during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries within the Kingdom of Valencia (Crown of Aragon),”Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87.2 (2013): 143–169, at 153–155. Ferragud, “El metge sota sospita,” 84–88.

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

243

planting in order to determine whether the location was suitable from the point of view of health and economic profitability.28 Another of the participants in this report, the converso doctor Llorenç de Soler, was a very different case from these two. There are hardly any documentary records for this character, beyond fleeting appearances where he acted as a legal representative for other conversos, and even fewer that offer details of his Jewish past. Surely, he was chosen because he enjoyed the confidence of a former co-religionist who had also recently converted to Christianity. After the 1391 pogrom and the attack on the Jewish quarter, many Jews, including some doctors, decided to convert to avoid pressure and further assaults.29 This did not prevent them from continuing to pursue their medical practice as they had done before their conversion. The presence of a barber-surgeon named Guillem Ivorra, who took part in another expert report in 1396, is also striking.30 This highlights the professional kinship that existed between barbers and surgeons, whose functions were often confused. Barber-surgeons constituted the healthcare umbrella of late-medieval Valencia. Their numbers constantly increased and their presence in the city was crucial to the provision of medical assistance for an ever-growing population.31 Their increasing professional prestige, based on improved training and reflected in their possession of books containing basic medical and surgical information, was clearly evident throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and resulted, among other things, in this expression of confidence in their expertise by the authorities.32 Finally, the group of experts who took part in the case included one completely unknown 28

29

30

31 32

José Rodrigo Pertegás, Recuerdo apologético del maestro en medicina Domingo Ros de Ursins, archiatro de los reyes de Aragón (Valencia: Imprenta de M. Alufre, 1902), 11–21. Josep M. Roca, La medicina catalana en temps del rey Martí (Barcelona: F. Giró, 1919), 99–102. José Hinojosa, “Médicos judíos en la ciudad de Valencia durante la baja Edad Media (siglos XIII y XIV),” in Estudos em homenagem ao Professor Doutor José Marques (Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidad do Porto, 2006), 2: 415–436, at 436. Ferragud, “El metge sota sospita,” 92. In Valencia, it is impossible to distinguish barbers from surgeons; both of them work in hygiene (hair, beard) and medicine (surgery, pulling teeth, phlebotomy). The college of surgeons during sixteenth century had rules about shaving. The differences are based on the training and prestige of everyone. Carmel Ferragud, “Els barbers de la ciutat de València durant el segle XV a través dels llibres del justícia criminal,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 41.1 (2011): 31–57. Lluís Cifuentes i Comamala, “La promoció intel·lectual i social dels barbers-cirurgians a la Barcelona medieval: l’obrador, la biblioteca i els béns de Joan Vicenç (fl. 1421–1464),” Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 19 (2000): 429–479.

244

Ferragud

figure, mestre Manuel de Vilafranca, to whom there are no other references, either in relation to his being a physician or surgeon. This may be due to the lack of surviving documentation, but it most likely indicates that he was less socially and professionally significant since prestigious professionals generally leave a substantial documentary trail.33 Faced with the unanimous opinion of these healers, the judge gave his consent to proceed with the amputation: dóna licència als dits metges que poguesen tallar lo dit membre o braç en la manera per los dits metges acordada a llur bona discreció, segons damunt dit és. Jatsia que per lo dit tallament del damunt dit membre és fora de perill de mort, però segons los doctors de medecina sia via pus spedient a estalviar e salvar-lo. [he gave the doctors permission to cut off the member or arm in whichever way they agreed was best in their opinion, since by the amputation of that member the patient would no longer be in danger of dying, and according to the medical experts it was the best option for saving his life].34 The high level of risk always involved in such an operation was confirmed – Manuel died at home six days after the amputation. The court clerk recorded the fact in the book of the court: “Fon atrobat mort dins sa casa o habitació en Manuel Salvador, òlim apellat Maymó Xuxen […] lo qual dit mort tenia tolt lo braç tro enmig del brahó, lo qual se dehie que metges li havien tallat, e açò per rahó de huna coltellada” [Manuel Salvador, formerly called Maymó Xuxen, was found dead in his house […] having had his arm cut off in the middle of 

33

34

Although it has retained a very high volume of notarial and other important sources for the study of medicine and its practitioners, such as court files, the fact is that the number of notaries in Valencia (610) was very high and many did not keep any documents (just 81 notaries). Antoni Furió, “‘Car la retòrica més se pertany a notaris que a cavallers.’ Escriptura, orgull de classe i autoria del Tirant,” EHumanista 4 (2013): 150–164, at 151. A leading historian of Valencian medicine, José Rodrigo Pertegás (1854–1930), worked for 25 years with medieval sources. His work provides data for many practitioners of the late Middle Ages, mainly individuals with high reputation in Valencia. There appears to be no data about Manuel de Vilafranca. José L. Fresquet, Mª Luz López, Jesús Catalá & Juan Micó, Archivo Rodrigo Pertegás, CD Rom (Universitat de València-Fundación Marcelino Botín, 2002). ARV, Justicia Criminal, no. 15, mano 6, f. 20v.

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

245

the biceps, and it was said that the doctors had cut it off because of a stab wound].35 Six years after these events, on 10 August 1407, the presiding judge of the criminal court in the city of Valencia at the time, Ponç Despon, accompanied by Blai de Roures, the notary and clerk of the court, visited the house of a student named Pere Gil.36 The latter had the judge called because he wanted him to address the need to cut off Gil’s left hand, as suggested by his attending physicians, because the wound had become infected by “St. Anthony’s fire.”37 Gil asked the judge to authorize the doctors to cut off his hand in whichever way they saw fit, since this was his only possibility of survival. Et ésser e stants los dits justícia e scrivà de aquell denant lo dit Pere Gill, ladonchs lo dit Pere Gill dix de paraula, en presència dels testimonis e notari dejús scrit, que plagués a ell, dit justícia, de voler donar licència a·n Pere Balester e a·n Loís Gill, a·n Vicent Balester e a·n Guillem Metge, metges de la ciutat de València, que aquells pusguessen levar, tóler e tallar lo seu puny o mà squerra, la qual per occasió de nafra que li ere stada feta lo y havien a levar e taller los dits metges, per ço com s·i serie mesclat foch, e que per ço com elegiren via e manera de tallar-lo-y lo dit puny e mà squerra ere via de alargar sos dies e de no morir, e si no li ere tolt e tallat que vendrie en fort breus dies a punt de morir, e que y morie. [When the judge and his clerk were in the presence of Pere Gil, the latter asked him before witnesses and the aforementioned notary to grant Pere Ballester, Lluís Gil, Vicent Ballester, and Guillem Metge, all doctors of the city of Valencia, permission to cut off his left hand, which had become infected with fire by reason of a wound he had sustained, and to choose how to cut off the hand in such a way as to prolong his life and prevent

35 36 37

ARV, Justicia Criminal, no. 15, mano 6, ff. 31v–32. ARV, Justicia Criminal, no. 18, mano 8, s. f. “com aquell li agués tramés a dir per algunes persones qu·ell, dit Pere Gill, volie, requerie e fer fer alguns actes denant ell, dit justícia, sobre lo toliment e levament del seu puny squerre qu·ell, dit Pere Gill, se volie fer levar e tallar als metges qui tenien en cura per ço com s’i serie mesclat foch de sent Anthoni en la nafra que lli era stada feta a ell, dit Pere Gill” [as he would have sent some people to tell that him, aforementioned Pere Gil, wanted to do some acts before him, aforementioned judge, of the amputation of his left fist that him, aforementioned Pere Gil, wanted to have amputated by the doctors who were curing him, for the reason that he had mixed St Anthony’s fire in the wound that something had made him] (ARV, Justicia Criminal, no. 18, mano 8, s. f.).

246

Ferragud

him from dying, since if they did not cut it off he would die in a matter of days].38 The judge interrogated each of the doctors present at the time, asking them for their opinion on the presence of “fire” in the hand and whether cutting off the wounded man’s hand would be the best option to help him and ensure his survival. All of them answered in the affirmative, saying that if they did not cut off the hand, he would die. Amputation was, therefore, the best solution, and, as the record attests, with God’s help, they believed he would survive. Having heard their expert opinions, the judge authorized the operation and exonerated the doctors from any negative consequences that might result from it. According to the document, the judge went out into the city to attend to his duties and did not stay to watch the amputation. It sounds as though he preferred to get away from what was presumably going to be a complex and unpleasant procedure. All four who took part in this expert procedure were doctors of the city.39 Although there is very little information about their biographies and medical activities, all signs are that they enjoyed a certain level of social and professional prestige. Pere Ballester, for example, was a Bachelor of Medicine called upon to act as an expert for the criminal court on other occasions.40 He was an examiner of surgeons in 1430, 1431, and 1433, and a member of the city council of Valencia in 1435, and there is evidence of his activities as a moneylender. All that can be said of Vicent Ballester, perhaps related to Pere, is that he was a Bachelor of Arts and Medicine. Lluís Gil was a surgeon, and he was an examiner in 1429 and 1437. In 1429, he was elected to the city council as a representative of his parish. As a moneylender, he collected ground rents from mortgages in a municipality called Vila-real. There is not a single piece of biographical information on Guillem Metge. This select group had to assess the evolution of the wound and give a prognosis. The wounded left hand had indeed been affected by the so-called “St. Anthony’s fire”: “sobre lo toliment e levament del seu puny squerre qu·ell, dit Pere Gill, se volie fer levar e tallar als metges qui·l tenien en cura, per ço com s’i serie mesclat foch de sent Anthoni en la nafra que lli era stada feta” [on the 38 39 40

ARV, Justicia Criminal, no. 13, mano 8, s. f. Information on these doctors comes from Fresquet, López, Catalá & Micó, Archivo Rodrigo Pertegás. In January 1422, he carried out an expert examination on a woman named Pasquala, who lay wounded in her house as a result of a blow to the head. Ferragud, “El coneixement expert,” in press.

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

247

amputation of his left hand, he, the aforementioned Pere Gil, wanted doctors who healed him cut off, for the reason that St Anthony’s fire was mixed with the wound]. Using St. Anthony’s fire in reference to a wound reflects that idea that, during the late medieval period, the term “fire” covered a wide range of inflammatory and gangrenous diseases of the extremities, caused either by infections or by accidents.41 This very familiar effect of fire on the body seems to have become a way of referring specifically to gangrene in the city of Valencia. A condition that must have arisen frequently as a result of infection following trauma could have come to be described by locals this particular way.42 There are no other fifteenth-century cases in the judicial sources apart from the two examined here. This is probably due to the lack of surviving documentation, since, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, requesting permission from the judicial authorities before proceeding with an amputation was well established in the city of Valencia. In that sense, following Mondeville, a surgeon’s experience was crucial to choosing the best therapeutic strategy, always, of course, based on a thorough mastery of the doctrinal knowledge of medicine and surgery provided by ancient writers.43 Understanding the tradition and the opinion about amputation in the medieval surgical texts is crucial to interpreting their influence in practicing this surgical treatment. Amputation in Late Medieval Surgical Texts The oldest extant precedents on amputation, Hippocratic and later Galenic writings, both favored using cauterization for gangrene, only resorting to 41

42 43

Wolfram Aichinguer, El fuego de San Antón y los hospitales antonianos en España (Berlín: Verlag Turia & Kant, 2009), 47. Macià Tomàs i Salvà’s case study on Majorca serves to confirm this point. El foc de Sant Antoni a Mallorca. Medicina, història i societat (Palma de Mallorca: El Tall Editorial, 1996), 132–135. For a more recent study, see: Alessandra Foscati, Ignis sacer: una storia culturale del “fuoco sacro” dall’antichità al Settecento (Tavarnuzze, Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2013). I have referred elsewhere to this particularity of local Valencian ways of discussing a specific illness. See: Ferragud, “The Role of Doctors,” 165. McVaugh, who has studied several families of surgeons from Valencia and other Catalan cities, affirms: “the fusion of medical learning with surgery was lenging a formerly empirical craft a new social prestige.” Michael R. McVaugh, “Royal Surgeons and the Value of Medical Learning: The Crown of Aragon, 1300–1350,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis García Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 211–236, at 236.

248

Ferragud

amputation in extreme cases.44 This tradition was taken up and extended by Aulus Cornelius Celsus (first century AD), Archigenes (second century AD), and Oribasius of Pergamon (fourth century AD), who were still conscious of the serious risks involved. Celsus, for example, warned of the danger inherent in amputating a gangrenous member – the patient might die during the operation, subsequently bleed to death, or suffer a fatal syncope. Nevertheless, he explains the method for amputation in these circumstances. And although he also discusses the risk of gangrene in various fractures, Celsus never mentions the advisability of amputation in such cases.45 Muslim medicine shows some interest in amputation. Abu-l-Qàsim Khalaf ibn al-Abbàs al-Zahrawi (Albucasis), along with Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), and Alī Ibn ‘Al-Abbās al-Magūsī (Haly Abbas), was one of the few advocates for resorting to amputation in cases of superfluous fingers, gangrene, and to prevent a poison from spreading.46 Even so, Albucasis stresses his reluctance when faced with a patient who begged him to cut off his hand because of the pain he was suffering, knowing that the gangrene was spreading and he was failing to cure him. The great Andalusian physician feared for the life of his patient, who ended up mutilating himself. In the presence of gangrene, which, in his view, consumes an organ the way dry wood is consumed, Albucasis (like Avicenna) opted for treating it with cauterization, as a hemostatic agent, or by applying caustic substances, combined with other medicines.47 This modest, but real, interest in the subject seems to vanish in late-medieval European surgical works. Amputation of upper or lower extremities of  the body was a surgical technique scarcely mentioned in medieval surgical

44

45

46 47

Owen H. Wangensteen and Sarah D. Wangensteen, The Rise of Surgery: From Empiric Craft to Scientific Discipline (Folkestone: Dawson, 1978), 16–18. Amputation was carried out on dead tissue to avoid hemorrhage. “Sed id quoque cum periculo summo fit: nam saepe in ipso opere vel profusione sanguinis vel animae defectione moriuntur.” Celsus, De medicina, liber 7, cap. 33 (accessed 8 June 2014). On fractures and their treatment, see: liber 8. Archigenes, for his part, gave a more specific and radical description of amputation than Celsus. John Kirkup, A History of Limb Amputation (London: Springer, 2007), 57. Martin S. Spink and G.L. Lewis, Albucasis on Surgery and Instruments (London: Wellcome Institute, 1973), 576–580. Spink and Lewis, Albucasis on Surgery, 154. This procedure had also been defended by Paul of Aegina in the seventh century (Wangensteen and Wangensteen, The Rise of Surgery, 21).

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

249

treatises.48 Indeed, none of the key treatises of this new school of surgery that were translated and circulated in the Catalan-speaking world – those of Roger Frugard (c. 1180), Bruno Longobucco (died c. 1286), Teodorico Borgognoni (1205–1298), Guglielmo de Saliceto (fl. 1210–1285), Lanfranc of Milan (c. 1240- c. 1306) and Henri de Mondeville (c. 1260-c. 1320) – contain references to amputation.49 Guy de Chauliac, author of the encyclopedic Inventarium sive collectorium in parte chirurgicali medicine (or Chirurgia magna), the outstanding late medieval work on surgery (1363), devotes only a few lines to the subject in his lengthy treatise. First, he discusses the advisability of amputating sixth fingers, superfluous according to the view of Galen and the recommendations of Haly Abbas and Avicenna (Regimen digiti aut articuli superficiali). He also deals with the amputation of gangrenous members (Regimen in abscindendo membrum mortificatum), again following the advice of the Muslim physicians, Avicenna and Albucasis. They recommend that if it is not possible to treat the member with medicines, and there is no alternative for the patient faced with imminent danger of death, then one should amputate in order to prevent the putrefaction (gangrene) from spreading.50 Chauliac also explains the procedure and the narcotics that could be used as anesthetics, citing Teodorico Borgognoni. However, as Chauliac himself reveals, he did not perform amputations as such, but rather avoided cutting off the limb, preferring to bind it and let it disintegrate in situ.51 The French doctor Jacques Despars (c. 1380–1458) was one of those who explicitly articulated the conservative attitude of his contemporaries toward amputation. He writes that some surgeons had indeed abandoned the practice, in line with Chauliac’s recommendation. Despars underlined the words that this great author used to justify the abandonment of the practice: it was more honorable for the doctor, since, as well as sparing the patient great suffering, it avoided the suspicion that the amputated limb could 48

49 50

51

In McVaugh’s exhaustive study of late medieval surgery in Latin authors, the thematic index does not even contain an entry for the term “amputation” (The Rational Surgery, 281). Like McVaugh’s work, The Rational Surgery, there are no references in Kirkup, A History of Limb Amputation, nor in Wangensteen and Wangensteen, The Rise of Surgery. Albucasis also discusses the need to amputate in cases where there was a risk of a poison spreading following an insect or reptile bite. Cited in Kirkup, A History of Limb Amputation, 57. Guigonis de Caulhiaco, Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna, vol. I, ed. Michael R. McVaugh (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 306–307: “ligo ipsum et preparo suo modo, […] et sic eum retineo quousque iunctura sit eliquata et membrum per se cadat, quia honestius est medico quod cadat per se quam si incideretur. Semper enim quando inciditur remanet rancor et cogitacio in paciente quod posset remanere.”  

250

Ferragud

ultimately have been saved.52 This conservative position was apparently encouraged by a strategy of mutual benefit, for the patient and for the physician. So, the main authors opted for a cautious approach during the Middle Ages when addressing this procedure that could have dangerous and profound consequences. The practice of amputation also raises the complex question of the relationship between medical theory and practice. After all, if the principal surgical texts on which Valencian surgeons based their knowledge did not consider the advisability of this practice, how did they come to the conclusion that it could and should be undertaken? Perhaps this may be related to the early translation and dissemination of the fifth book of Albucasis’ monumental work Kitab altasrif, devoted to surgery. Although no manuscripts have survived, it was translated into Catalan in 1313 by the Jewish doctor Jafudà Bonsenyor at the request of James II of Aragon, and it also circulated in an Occitan version.53 These vernacular translations confirm how popular this text became among both medical and non-medical readers. Albucasis and Haly Abbas were two of the few surgeons who favored routine use of amputation in cases of superfluous fingers, gangrene, and poisoning.54 Perhaps, given the profound imprint of the Islamic past and its influence in Valencia, this text circulated more widely among Valencian surgeons. Conclusions Amputations were practiced in the city of Valencia in the early fifteenth century. Medical, surgical, social, and legal conditions were such as to enable surgeons to practice amputations under the physician’s supervision. The Alfonsine furs provided a legislative framework that made it possible for surgeons to act as expert witnesses in the courts. However, many of the activities that were carried out by experts, such as the case of judicial authorizations to amputate, were not regularized. Practical needs compelled judges to demand consultations for doctors. Thus, an injured person whose death was predicted 52

53

54

“Semper enim quando inciditur remanet rancor et cogitacio in paciente quod posset remanere.” Inventarium, 307. Danielle Jacquart, La Médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 94–95. Lluís Cifuentes, La ciència en català a l’Edat Mitjana i el Renaixement, 2nd ed (Barcelona & Palma: Universitat de Barcelona & Universitat de les Illes Balears, 2006), 63. Abu l-Qasim Halaf ibn Abbas az-Zahrawi detto Albucasis, La chirurgia: versione occitanica della prima metà del Trecento, ed. Mahmoud Salem Elsheikh (Florence: Malesci, 1992). Spink and Lewis, Albucasis on Surgery, 576–580.

Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia

251

if the limb was not amputated, requested a judge’s permission for a surgeon to perform the surgery. The judge assembled a panel of expert physicians and surgeons, requested information, and decided if he must authorize the amputation. Finally, doctors were exonerated from any responsibility. The system of examinations and issuing of licenses by a court created in the city, and the control of the medical profession that this entailed, had also been established in the same furs in 1329. This ensured that medical practitioners were properly trained at university and by examination and licensing (although this never amounted to more than an aspiration, since most practitioners did not have an academic degree) and to avoid the involvement of individuals who might harm their patients by their actions. This also allowed a monopoly control of the medical market. Confidence in doctors (whether physicians or surgeons) trained in the Galenist paradigm was so high that residents of Valencia and the judges relied on their opinions and expertise. Despite, on the one hand, the fear of pain, of suffering, as well as a serious risk of dying, and on the other, the prospect of a future without a limb, the difficulties of continuing with the same activity as before, not to mention suffering the stigma of possible social rejection, everyone accepted the expert’s opinion. The opinions of physicians and surgeons, the patient’s trust, and judge’s sanction were sufficient to agree to amputation. Perhaps this is why no kind of measure was put in place against possible medical negligence. How could a professional be held responsible if he had acted correctly, even if the outcome was not what one had hoped for? But it is also very important to emphasize that although the furs only mentions surgeons as possible court experts, physicians also acted in this capacity. A factor in this was certainly their higher social and professional prestige and their training, in most cases, at university. Nevertheless, it is also fair to say that the availability of surgical treatises translated into Catalan, together with the empirical knowledge of surgeons and their experience of expert procedures, could have encouraged them to undertake what was in principle a high-risk practice.

252

Eska

Chapter 11

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill Charlene M. Eska  Aided Derbforgaill (The Violent Death of Derbforgaill) is one of the most tragic and disturbing of all the extant medieval Irish tales.1 It is a tale of love from afar, jealousy, rage, mutilation, and, ultimately, revenge. Although relatively short in length, the story is tightly woven with a number of themes and motifs found in early Irish literature. Unique, however, to this tale is the mutilation and eventual death of the maiden Derbforgaill at the hands of the jealous women of Ulster who destroy her for her beauty and the threat they believe she poses to them. Aided Derbforgaill is extant in three manuscripts, namely The Book of Leinster, Trinity College, Dublin MS 1337 (formerly known by the shelf mark H.3.18), and the Royal Irish Academy MS Stowe D IV. The text’s first editor, Carl Marstrander,2 dated the text on linguistic grounds to the early tenth century. The text, including the poetic laments which Marstrander did not translate as part of his edition, has been retranslated by Ann Dooley in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing.3 More recently, all of the material has been freshly edited and translated by Kikki Ingridsdotter.4 While the scene of Derbforgaill’s mutilation has been analyzed from a literary standpoint in the

1 A version of this paper was read at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Celtic Studies Association of North America, April 18–21, 2013, at the University of Toronto. I should like to thank the conference participants, particularly Ann Dooley, Alain Stoclet, Máire Johnson, and Joseph Nagy, for their many helpful comments and suggestions. Any errors are, of course, my own. 2 Carl Marstrander, “The Deaths of Lugaid and Derbforgaill,” Ériu 5 (1911): 201–18. 3 Ann Dooley, “The Deaths of Lugaid and Derbforgaill,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Angela Bourke, et al., vol. 4 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 204–6. Dooley has analyzed this tale, particularly the urinating contest, in light of the way the gender roles are presented. She argues that the text presents a reversal of gender roles, that is, the women having their own version of what is essentially a male pissing contest, in other words, behaving like men. 4 Kikki Ingridsdotter, “Aided Derbforgaill ‘The Violent Death of Derbforgaill’: A Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation and Textual Notes,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Uppsala University, 2009). Ingridsdotter’s edition and translation have been used throughout. Page numbers are given in parentheses.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_013

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

253

scholarly literature,5 not much attention has been given to the legal interpretation of this scene and the wounds she receives. The mutilation enacted upon Derbforgaill by the Ulster women is calculated not only to destroy her beauty in a distinctly gendered way, but also to destroy her social existence by rendering her appearance a source of public shame in terms of Irish cultural norms. The tale begins with the journey of the Otherworldly woman, Derbforgaill, daughter of the King of Lochlann,6 and her maid to find Cú Chulainn, the medieval Irish literary hero of the Ulster Cycle group of tales and the Táin Bó Cúailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley). She falls in love with Cú Chulainn through the wondrous tales she heard about him. She and a maidservant set out to find him in the form of two swans linked by a golden chain. They arrive at Loch Cuan where Cú Chulainn and Lugaid Riab nDerg “Lugaid of the Red Stripes”7 (his foster-son) happen to be. Cú Chulainn throws a stone at the birds, hitting Derbforgaill in such a way that it passes through her ribs and lodges in her womb. Derbforgaill and her maid change back into their human forms, and Derbforgaill rebukes Cú Chulainn since he was the person she was seeking. Cú Chulainn then sucks the stone from out of her side (and a gush of blood comes with it), but refuses to sleep with her on the grounds that, since he tasted her blood, it is now impossible for him to do so.8 Derbforgaill then settles, by way 5

6

7 8

Dooley, Field Day, 204; and Dooley, “The Invention of Women in the Táin,” in Ulidia: Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales, Belfast and Emain Macha, 8–12 April 1994, ed. J.P. Mallory and G. Stockman (Belfast: December Publications, 1994), 123–34. See also: Charles Bowen, “Great-Bladdered Medb; Mythology and Invention in the Táin Bó Cuailgne,” Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 10 (1975): 14–34, at 28; and Lisa M. Bitel, Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 162–3. Ingridsdotter notes that the earliest version of the text does not state that the women went up to the mound after the men, thus questioning whether the women were, in fact, imitating the men at all, as suggested by Dooley (26–7). Although Lochlann can refer to Norway, or even parts of Scandinavia in general, or parts of Scotland, here we are most likely to understand the word more in terms of the mythological landscape, as it is also used for the land of the Fomorians in the Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), and Derbforgaill, after all, does shapeshift, so there are Otherworldly connections. See: Colmán Etchingham, “The Location of Historical Laithlinn/Lochla(i)nn: Scotland or Scandinavia?,” in Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica, ed. M. Ó Flaithearta (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2007), 11–31. For a discussion of the character Lugaid, son of the three Find Emna, or Lugaid Riab nDerg (Lugaid of the Red Stripes) as he is sometimes referred to, see: Ingridsdotter, 16–18. As argued by Ingridsdotter, although Cú Chulainn does not elaborate on the significance of his having tasted Derbforgaill’s blood, based on blood-drinking scenes in other texts where it appears as a way to form a blood-covenant, it is possible that the issue here

254

Eska

of a compromise, to be the wife of Lugaid, which allows her to still be close to Cú Chulainn. All is well and good until one winter’s day the men make large mounds of snow and the women take turns in what is essentially a pissing contest to see who can melt the mound of snow the most, a demonstration of who has the greatest sexual potency and, hence, may be most desired by the men. None of the Ulster women succeed in melting the snow all the way. But when they call a very reluctant Derbforgaill to participate in their game she succeeds where the others fail, making her an instant threat in the sexual realm, even more so because of her status as an outsider. To eliminate this threat, the women, in what can only be described as an act of mob violence, mutilate her by gouging out her eyes, cutting off her nose, both her ears, and her hair.9 She is returned to her house and locks herself inside. When Lugaid and Cú Chulainn realize that something is amiss from the snow on her house,10 they rush towards the house, but she will not let them in for shame of her condition. When they do finally enter the house, Derbforgaill is dead (the text is unclear whether she dies from the injuries she sustained, shame, or perhaps her own hand). Lugaid dies of grief at the sight of her. In revenge, Cú Chulainn destroys the house of the women, sparing none. The actions of the Ulster women are horrific, unjustified, and, in many ways, puzzling. The answer to the question of why Derbforgaill was mutilated in the specific manner that she was may lie more in literary depictions of ideal beauty rather than the realm of punishment for potential sexual transgression. At the beginning of Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel), a head to toe description is given of the fairy woman, Étaín, who deliberately places herself by the well in order to seduce King Eochaid.11 The description pays particular attention to her hair, eyes, mouth, the whiteness of her skin,

9

10 11

reflects a taboo against incest. If he has tasted her blood and, thus, formed a blood-covenant, albeit an accidental one, then he cannot marry her on the grounds of consanguinity. For a discussion of blood drinking in this tale and elsewhere in early Irish literature, see: Ingridsdotter, 21–3; Doris Edel, Helden auf Freiersfüssen, “Tochmarc Emire” und “Mal y kavas Kulhwch Olwen:” Studien zur frühen inselkeltischen Erzähltradition (Amsterdam: New Holland Publishing, 1980), 58; and J.C. Hodges, “The Blood Covenant among the Celts,” Revue Celtique 44 (1927): 107–56. This is the reading in the Book of Leinster. The versions in Trinity College, Dublin, MS 1337 (formerly known by the shelf mark H.3.18) and Royal Irish Academy Stowe D iv include the removal of the flesh from her buttocks, but not her ears. See: Ingridsdotter, 96 for a discussion of the manuscript variants of this passage. No explanation is given in the text as to the significance of snow being on her house. For a discussion of the significance of scars in these same texts, see: William Sayers, “The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature,” 473–95, in this volume.

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

255

and the slender symmetry of her limbs. No mention is made of the nose or ears in the description: Is and buí oc taithbiuch a fuilt dia folcud 7 a dá láim tria derc a sedlaig immach. Batar gilithir sneachta n-oenaichde na dí dóit 7 batar maethchóiri 7 batar dergithir sían slébe na dá grúad nglanáilli. Badar duibithir druimne daeil na dá malaich. Batar inand 7 frais do némannaib a déta ina cind. Batar glasithir buga na dí ṡúil. Batar dergithir partaing na beóil. Batar forarda míne maethgela na dá gúalaind. Batar gelglana sithḟota na méra. Batar fota na láma. Ba gilithir úan tuindi in taeb seṅg fota tláith mín maeth amal olaind. Batar teithbláithi sleamongeala na dí ṡlíasait. Batar cruindbega caladgela na dí glún. Batar gerrgela indildírgi na dé lurgain. Batar coirdírgi íaráildi na dá ṡáil. Cid ríagail fo-certa forsna traigthib is ing má ’d-chotad égoir n-indib acht ci tórmaisead feóil ná fortche foraib. Solusruidiud inn éscae ina saeragaid. Urthócbáil úailli ina mínmailgib. Ruithen suirghe ceachtar a dá rígrosc. Tibri ániusa ceachtar a dá grúad, co n-amlud indtibsen do ballaib bithchorcra co ndeirgi fola laíg, 7 araill eile co solusgili sneachta. Bocmaerdachd banamail ina glór. Cém fosud n-inmálla acci. Tochim ríghnaidi lé. Ba sí trá as caemeam 7 as áildeam 7 as córam ad-connarcadar súili doíne de mnáib domain. Ba dóig leó bed a sídaib dí. Ba fria as-breth: cruth cách co hÉtaín. Caem cách co hÉtaín.12 [At the well, the woman loosened her hair in order to wash it, and her hands appeared through the opening of the neck of her dress. As white as the snow of a single night her wrists; as tender and even and red as foxglove her clear, lovely cheeks. As black as a beetle’s back her brows; a shower of matched pearls her teeth. Hyacinth blue her eyes; Parthian red her lips. Straight, smooth, soft and white her shoulders; pure white and tapering her fingers; long her arms. As white as sea foam her side, slender, long, smooth, yielding, soft as wool. Warm and smooth, sleek and white her thighs; round and small, firm and white her knees. Short and white and straight her shins; fine and straight and lovely her heels. If a rule were put against her feet, scarcely a fault would be found save for a plentitude of flesh or skin. The blushing light of the moon in her noble face; an uplifting of pride in her smooth brows; a gleam of courting each of her two royal eyes. Dimples of pleasure each of her cheeks, where spots red as the blood of a calf alternated with spots the whiteness of shining snow. 12

Togail Bruidne Da Derga, ed. Eleanor Knott (Dublin: DIAS, 1975), ll. 18–44.

256

Eska

A gentle, womanly dignity in her voice; a steady, stately step, the walk of a queen. She was the fairest and most perfect and most beautiful of all the women in the world; men thought she was of the Síde,13 and they said of her: “Lovely anyone until Étaín. Beautiful anyone until Étaín”].14 This passage outlines the ideal image of Irish female beauty, lingering on the features of the head and neck, parts of the body that would have been publically visible. The loss or damage to any of these visible features carried heavy fines under Irish law for the amount of shame associated with their loss or damage.15 The women who mutilate Derbforgaill do so in contravention of accepted legal practice, and each wound they inflict on her has serious legal ramifications. Dooley has observed an interesting parallel in the mutilation of Derbforgaill to Boniface’s letter to King Ethelbald of Mercia.16 The letter dates to 746–747, when Boniface was conducting his missionary work amongst the Germanic tribes, and it castigates Ethelbald for such things as fornicating with nuns, stealing from the church, and imposing forced labor upon clerics.17 The portion of the letter that relates to the Irish material deals with Boniface’s praise of the high regard in which the pagan tribes hold the bonds of matrimony: Quod non solum a christianis, sed etiam a paganis in obprobrium et verecundiam deputatur. Quia ipsi pagani verum Deum ignorantes naturaliter, quae legis sunt et quod ab initio Deus constituit, custodiunt in hac re, quia propriis uxoribus matrimonii faedera servantes fornicatores et adulteros puniunt. Nam in antiqua Saxonia, si virgo paternam domum cum adulterio maculaverit vel si mulier maritata perdito foedere matrimonii adulterium perpetraverit, aliquando cogunt eam propria manu 13 14 15

16 17

That is, men thought she was from the Otherworld. “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel,” in Early Irish Myths and Sagas, trans. Jeffrey Gantz (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 61–106, at 62–3. For more on the implications of facial scarring, see: Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” 215–30; Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” 102–27; Sayers, “The Laconic Scar;” and Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101. For a detailed discussion of gendered wounds in English texts, see: Barbara Goodman, “Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair,” 544–71, in this volume. Dooley, Field Day, 204. Boniface’s tone throughout the letter is (understandably and) decidedly cranky.

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

257

per laqueum suspensam vitam finire et super bustum illius incense et concrematae corruptorem eius suspendunt. Aliquando congregato exercitu femineo flagellatam eam mulieres per pagos circumquaque ducunt virgis cedentes et vestimenta eius abscidentes iuxta cingulum et cultellis suis totum corpus eius secantes et pungentes minutis vulneribus cruentatam et laceratam de villa ad villam mittunt; et occurrunt semper novae flagellatrices zelo pudicitiae adductae, usque dum eam aut mortuam aut vix vivam derelinquunt, ut cetere timorem adulterandi et luxoriandi habeant.18 [For the pagans themselves, although ignorant of the True God, keep in this matter the substance of the law and the ordinance of God from the beginning, inasmuch as they respect their wives with the bond of matrimony and punish fornicators and adulterers. In Old Saxony, if a virgin disgraces her father’s house by adultery or if a married woman breaks the bond of wedlock and commits adultery, they sometimes compel her to hang herself with her own hand and then hang the seducer above the pyre on which she has been burned. Sometimes a troop of women get together and flog her through the towns, beating her with rods and stripping her to the waist, cutting her whole body with knives, pricking her with wounds, and sending her on bleeding and torn from town to town; fresh scourges join in with new zeal for purity, until finally they leave her dead or almost dead, that other women may be made to fear adultery and evil conduct].19 The parallels between Boniface’s description and the Irish text are striking. Despite the fact that Boniface’s letters were not known in Ireland at the time of the text’s compilation,20 they indicate a wider medieval European attitude towards adultery that seems to pervade western legal traditions.21 A number of literary sources, from a variety of geographical regions, discuss mutilation and grievous punishment for adultery. Texts like the twelfth-century Bisclavret by Marie de France, warn of the dangers inherent in both adultery and betrayal, and the guilty parties are each subjected to mutilation – albeit at the jaws of a 18 19 20 21

Die Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. Michael Tangl, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weid­mann­ sche Buchhandlung, 1916), letter 73. The Letters of Boniface, trans. Ephraim Emerton (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), 127–28. I am grateful to Alain Stoclet for this information. See: Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. by Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

258

Eska

werewolf.22 The fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin  Arthur and Gorlagon condemns unfaithful wives to gruesome punishment.23 There are accounts of women being punished for adultery, whose noses are cut off in a variant of castration – though this is relatively rare. Violence against a woman for a sexual transgression seems to be a practice that crosses cultures and times. Boniface, in fact, seems to have gotten this description from Tacitus with some important variations:24 Paucissima in tam numerosa gente adulteria, quorum poena praesens et maritis permissa: abscisis crinibus nudatam coram propinquis expellit domo maritus ac per omnem vicum verbere agit; publicatae enim pudicitiae nulla venia: non forma, non aetate, non opibus maritum invenerit.25 [For a nation so populous, adultery is rare in the extreme, and its punishment is summary and left to the husband. In the presence of kinsmen he shaves her hair and strips her, thrusts her from his house and flogs her throughout the village. There is no pardon for a woman who prostitutes her chastity; neither by beauty nor youth nor wealth can she find a husband.]26 Dooley and Ingridsdotter are quite correct that the tale is concerned with issues of sexuality and jealousy, amongst other themes, but the specific way in which Derbforgaill is mutilated by the other women can also be interpreted within the framework of the early Irish laws surrounding adultery and wounding. Losing her eyes, nose, ears, hair, and flesh has serious legal implications for both the injured party and the perpetrator. The mutilation of Derbforgaill is unjustified, and the redactor condemns the excessive brutality of these women for their illegitimate action. Boniface, following Tacitus, reflects a greater cultural tendency in medieval culture, but one that may not have been uniformly shared by Irish law. The majority of the early Irish law codes date to between 650 and 800 ce, overall a fairly narrow window, but most survive in varying states of completeness in manuscripts of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.27 The 22 23 24 25 26 27

Larissa Tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 157, 163. Tracy, Torture and Brutality, 166. As identified by Tangl, 1:150 n.1. Cornelii Tacitii, Opera minora, ed. J.G.C. Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900; rpt. 1970) Germania c. 19, ll. 9–14. Tacitus, Agricola and Germania, trans. Harold Mattingly (London: Penguin Classics, 1948; rpt. 2009), 44. Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: DIAS, 1988), 1; hereafter GEIL.

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

259

medieval Irish legal system was based on compensation. Thus, for almost every crime, there was a fine or fines to be paid to the parties concerned; the fines were based on the type and severity of the crime and the social status of the person wronged. In many ways, it is similar to the system found in the AngloSaxon, Germanic, and medieval Welsh laws. Like the Anglo-Saxon laws, the secular Irish laws were written in the vernacular. Laws concerning adultery are found scattered across several texts, including the Heptads and Gúbretha Caratniad (The False Judgments of Caratnia). The texts, however, mainly frame adultery in terms of the legally recognized reasons for a couple to divorce. For example, a heptad quoted as a gloss on section 44 of Gúbretha Caratniad lists adultery, inducing an abortion, bringing shame on her husband’s honor, and smothering her child as some of the grounds for which a husband can divorce his wife.28 Heptads 329 and 5230 list the circum28

29

30

GEIL, 75; and Corpus Iuris Hibernici, ed. D.A. Binchy, 6 vols. (Dublin: DIAS, 1978), 2198.24– 26, hereafter CIH: “It he .uii. lanfogla etarscartha inna mna : brath a cele, comnaidi i taide, togluasacht neich beres, rucca fora enech, muchad clainne, disce ṅgalair, belletus cach reta” [There are seven offences that give a man full right to divorce his wife: the betrayal of her husband, persisting in a forbidden relationship, abortion of that which she bears, bringing disgrace upon his honour, infanticide, barrenness because of disease, spoiling everything [in her domestic work]]. Trans. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Divorce (c. 700),” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 4, ed. Angela Bourke, et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 28. Ó Corráin’s translation differs from that proposed by Rudolf Thurneysen, “Aus dem irischen Recht III [4. Die falschen Urteilssprüche Caratnia’s; 5. Zur Überlieferung und zur Ausgabe der Texte über das Unfrei-Lehen und das FreiLehen],” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 15 (1925): 302–76, at 356 ff. CIH, 1823.12–1824.4, 1883.16–1884.7, and 4.33–5.32. The relevant section is: “Ata morseiser a tuaith aruscuille coir nurnadma. Toich tinntat a mna uaduib a lanamnus 7 is diless ni thidnacar doib. Fer dibreithe. Fer diarm. Fear graid. Fear eagalsa. Fer coirthe. Fear rochollach. Fer forinnit coemdai. Ar ni cindtir o nach dibreithe, ni (nach) [assae] seitche nach diairm, ni coir mac for rot, ni husa cuindliged fri heclais, ni tualuing tuille nach rocollach, ni coir fo brataib fer forinnet coemdai” [There are seven men in the community whom the rule of marriage excludes and their wives turn from them out of marriage, and what they [the wives] have received is forfeit to them [the wives]: an infertile husband, an impotent husband, a husband in holy orders, a husband who is a churchman, a husband without assets, an obese husband, a husband who talks about the marriage bed. For an infertile husband has no offspring, an impotent husband cannot have a wife, it is not right that a son should be on the roadside, it is impossible to have equal right with the church, an obese husband is not capable of the sexual act, a man who talks about the marriage bed should not be under the sheets]. Trans. Ó Corráin, “Divorce (c. 700),” 28. I have arranged the order of some of the Irish to match the order given in the translation, which is a conflation of the three versions. CIH, 47.21–48.26. The relevant section is: “Tait .uii. mna la Féniu cia ronasaither for mac 7 raith it meise imscar a lanamnus cibe la bes maith leo 7 is dilis cia tartaigtar doib ina

260

Eska

stances under which a wife can divorce her husband and still retain control of her coibche “bride-price.” These include adultery, failure to support her, spreading a false story about her or talking about intimate details of their relationship, satirizing her, or tricking her into marriage by means of sorcery. Furthermore, the texts state that homosexuality and impotence are also valid grounds for separation.31 Cáin Lánamna (The Law of Couples), which details the variety of sexual unions recognized under Irish law (legal or illegal), does not delve into valid grounds for divorce, but the text does concern itself with the provisions for the division of a couple’s property in the event that they do divorce. According to this text, if one spouse has valid legal grounds for a separation from the other, compensation is paid to the offended party by means of the way their joint property and marital profits are divided.32 None of the secular legal texts proscribe any form of judicial mutilation for deviant sexual behavior,33 not even in cases of rape where, again, it is a matter of paying compensation.34 The texts, however, do list a series of fines for the loss of various parts of the body. For example, according to Bretha Éitgid (Judgments of Inadvertence), if a man is deprived of his hand, foot, eye, or tongue, he is to be paid his full or half

31 32 33 34

coibce. Bean o toimsi a ceile guscel. Ben fora fuirme a celi tinchur naire co mbi namat fuirre. Bean fora fuirmither ainim coisc. Bean doberar freithach 7 leicter ar bein. Bean doguidter caemda combi ferr lais feis la gilliu mana be deithbir do. Bean dia tabair a ceile upta oca guide co mbeir for druis. Bean nad eta a toiscid a comaig lanamnais. Ar dligid cach bean aranascar la Féniu a toiscid … ” [There are seven women in Irish law who, though their marriage contract is bound by enforcing surety and paying surety, are entitled to leave their marriage any time they like and what is given to them in their bridewealth is theirs: a woman whose husband spreads slander about her, a woman whose husband inflicts humiliation upon her so that she becomes an object of derision, a woman on whom is inflicted the mark of a beating, a woman who is repudiated and abandoned for another woman, a woman whose bed is spurned and whose husband prefers to sleep with boys unless he have cause, a wife to whom her husband gives charms while wooing her and excites her to fornicate, a woman who does not receive her needs in the marriage partnership, for every woman who is married in Irish law is entitled to her needs…]. Trans. Ó Corráin, “Divorce (c. 700),” 28. GEIL, 73–4; CIH 48.5–6 and 5.9, respectively; and Fergus Kelly, Marriage Disputes: A Fragmentary Old Irish Law-Text (Dublin: DIAS, 2014), 4–6. Charlene M. Eska, Cáin Lánamna: An Old Irish Tract on Marriage and Divorce Law (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 138–41 and 154–5. GEIL, 221. GEIL, 134–6; Eska, Cáin Lánamna, 282–91; and Lisi Oliver, “Forced and Unforced Rape in Early Irish Law,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 13 (1993): 93–105.

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

261

his éraic fine,35 which is the body-fine fixed for homicide; the fine is fixed at seven cumals36 – the value of a female slave.37 Furthermore, additional fines are added if the maiming was intentional. The same text also lists loss of an ear at the same rate of compensation.38 The fine for cutting a person’s hair is given as the same for the previously mentioned limbs and appendages.39 Cutting off the hair was compensated for at the same rate as the loss of an eye because the loss of any part of the body visible to others is a matter of shame to the person so injured and such public shame must therefore be compensated. Bretha Éitgid also provides details for damage or loss to teeth, fingers, toes, the male member,40 and all the other limbs. Furthermore, the law code Bretha Crólige (Judgments of Blood-Lying) states that there are no liabilities for injury done to persons who are guilty of a variety of anti-social behaviors, including the man who steals, who refuses hospitality, or who is false to his honor.41 The legal circumstances are the same for the woman who sleeps with a lot of men, who is a thief, or who is considered to be a sorceress.42 Thus, within the system, there are classes of people who by their deviant behavior have placed themselves outside the protective compensatory 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42

The textual commentary discusses the fact that there are differences in opinion on the exact fine to be levied. See: Liam Breatnach, A Companion to the Corpus Iuris Hibernici (Dublin: DIAS, 2005), 176–82. No complete copy of the text survives. A translation, under the erroneous title Lebor Aicle “Book of Acaill” can be found in Ancient Laws of Ireland, ed. and trans. W.N. Hancock, et al., 6 vols. (Dublin: A Thom, 1865–1901), 3:82–547 and appendix at 3:550–61; hereafter AL. The editorial method and translations found in the Ancient Laws of Ireland are highly problematic. See: Thomas Charles-Edwards, “Review Article: The Corpus Iuris Hibernici,” Studia Celtica 20 (1980): 141–62. For personal injury in general, see: GEIL, 129–34. The passage from Bretha Éitgid can be found in AL 3:348 and CIH 303.1–9. GEIL, 126. For an overview of the Irish system for units of value as found in the laws, see: Fergus Kelly, Early Irish Farming (Dublin: DIAS, 1998), 587–99. AL 3:351; CIH 303.13–16. AL 3:352; CIH 303.36–7. For shaving the head, see: AL 3:354 and CIH 304.8–15. See: Brónagh Ní Chonaill, “Impotence, Disclosure and Outcome: Some Medieval Irish Legal Comment,” online at (accessed 2 July 2013); Charlene M. Eska, “Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources,” in Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Larissa Tracy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), 149–73, at 167–9; and cf. Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. “The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Frisian Law,” in Castration and Culture, ed. Tracy, 108–30, at 126. Breatnach, Companion, 303; GEIL, 134; CIH 2298.1–3; D.A. Binchy, “Bretha Crólige,” Ériu 12 (1938): 1–77, at §43. GEIL, 134; CIH 2298.8–10; and Bretha Crólige, §44.

262

Eska

system of the laws. Derbforgaill’s status as an outsider with Otherworldly associations makes her vulnerable within the legal system, and even more so if she is viewed as a possible sexual rival by the Ulster women. The Ulster women remove their potential rival by rendering her metaphorically sexually impotent by destroying her physical appearance. The specific way Derbforgaill is mutilated – the loss of her eyes, nose, ears, hair, and flesh from the buttocks – are all injuries that would have been publically visible and shameful, not to mention debilitating in the extreme. Not only is she rendered unattractive, but grotesque in such a way as to cause her continual public shame and disfiguring her to the point of being unable to participate in daily life. The loss of any one of these body parts was compensated for with hefty fines. The punishment for adultery, a deviant sexual behavior, would not have been punished by any of these means according to secular Irish law, thus making the behavior of the Ulster women not a punishment for sexual transgression but a response to their own fear and jealousy, and, in effect, rendering the behavior of the Ulster women transgressive. Cú Chulainn’s violent act of revenge has some justification according to the early Irish legal system. Not only are Derbforgaill’s kin physically absent, her only other legal guardian, her husband, is dead. Lugaid dies after seeing the terrible deeds enacted upon his wife, and since he is Cú Chulainn’s foster-son, Cú Chulainn stands in the same legal position as a kinsman to Lugaid, and, by extension, to Derbforgaill.43 Under Irish law, a dead man’s kinsmen were obligated to carry out a blood-feud to exact vengeance on behalf of the victim if the killer was still at large and had not paid the necessary compensation, and, thus, it is Cú Chulainn’s duty to seek compensation for these wounds; however, he chooses to exact vengeance instead.44 Returning to the custom described by Tacitus and Boniface, in the Germanic laws mutilation existed as a source of legal punishment. For example, in Frisia a thief could lose his hand for theft, although he has the option of buying off the judgment by paying a hefty fine instead.45 There is a similar provision where loss of a limb can be avoided by paying an extra fine in the Irish Cáin Adomnáin (Adomnán’s Law). For example, according to this promulgated law code, the fine for killing a woman involved cutting off the murderer’s right hand and left foot before he is killed. Furthermore, the murderer’s kin are 43 44 45

I should like to thank Máire Johnson for bringing this point to my attention. GEIL, 127. For discussion on amputation as punishment in Germanic law, see: Lisi Oliver, The Body Legal in Barbarian Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 172–4; and Lex Frisionum, ed. Karl von Richthofen, in MGH, Legum, vol. 3 (Hannover: Hahn, 1898), 631–711, §3.8.

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

263

required to pay a fine of seven cumals and the price of seven years’ penance. If the perpetrator is well enough off financially, he has the option of paying for fourteen years’ worth of penance and a further fourteen cumals in lieu of being mutilated and then put to death.46 Judicial mutilation is not a feature of the secular Irish codes, but it is certainly a feature of the ecclesiastical laws and the Irish canons.47 Across the Germanic codes, the hand can be amputated for theft,48 perjury,49 or forgery.50 An eye can also be subject to removal for the crime of theft,51 treason,52 or selling a freeman.53 In Frisia an adulterer can be killed without penalty;54 the same provisions are found in the Laws of Wessex in which a man is allowed to fight without incurring a vendetta if he finds his wife, mother, sister, or daughter with a man other than her spouse.55 If Derbforgaill had actually committed any illegal act, the Ulster women’s rage would have been understandable, although it would still be illegal according to Irish law. The sympathy lies entirely with Derbforgaill, and the wounds that she suffers are wounds to the social fabric of early medieval Irish society. Although both the Irish and Germanic laws (including the Anglo-Saxon laws) are primarily based on compensation rather than punishment per se, some striking differences do exist between the two systems such that not much weight can be put on the similarities between Boniface’s account of mob justice against an adulteress and the description of the mutilation of Derbforgaill (noting that in Tacitus the husband is solely responsible for his wife’s 46

47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

A translation of the text can be found in Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, “The Law of Adomnán: A Translation,” in Adomnán at Birr, ad 697, ed. Thomas O’Loughlin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 53–68, at §33. GEIL, 221. Oliver, The Body Legal, 172; and Lex Francorum Chamavorum, ed. Rudolf Sohm, in MGH, Legum, vol. 5 (Hannover: Hahn, 1875–1889), 103–42, §45. Leges Saxonum, ed. Karl von Richthofen and Karl Friedrich von Richthofen, in MGH, Legum, vol. 5 (Hannover: Hahn, 1875–1889), 1–102, §21; and Lex Francorum Chamavorum, ed. Sohm, §23. Leges Burgundionum, ed. Friedrich Bluhme, in MGH, Legum, vol. 3 (Hannover: Hahn, 1898), 497–630, at §6.10. Oliver, The Body Legal, 172–3; and Wörter und Sachen in Lichte der Bezeichnungsdorschung, ed. Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 38. Leges Visigothorum. Leges nationum Germanicarum, ed. Karl Zeumer, vol. 1 (Hannover: Hahn, 1902), §II, 1, vi. Leges Baiuwariorum, ed. Johann Merkel, in MGH, Legum, vol. 3 (Hannover: Hahn, 1898), 183–496, §9.4. Oliver, The Body Legal, 183–4; Lex Frisionum, ed. Karl von Richthofen, §5.1. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Felix Liebermann, vol. 1 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1897), 16–89, §42.7.

264

Eska

punishment). For one, judicial mutilation does not exist in the secular Irish system of laws, whereas it does to a certain extant in the Anglo-Saxon laws and abundantly enough in the Continental Germanic codes, thus rendering comparisons between the different systems as simply observations. What can be compared, however, is the cultural practice of dealing with a sexual (or perceived) sexual transgression by an act of violence and gender-specific wounding, calculated to render the victim a social outcast and sexually undesirable. Klaus van Eickels has argued in his survey of castration and blinding as punishment for treason that historical records show a correlation between castration and cutting off a woman’s nose. For example, when Duke Magnus of Denmark was castrated and blinded by Kind Waldemar, Magnus’ wife’s nose was cut off at the same time. In 1165 when the Welsh princes broke the peace they had sworn to Henry II, he castrated and blinded his male hostages and cut off the ears and noses of the female hostages. Based on this evidence, van Eickels has suggested that disfiguring a woman’s face was tantamount to castrating her since a woman presumably would rely on her good looks to get a husband and thus children.56 The depiction of Derbforgaill’s mutilation crosses both legal and literary realms. On the one hand, Derbforgaill’s loss of her nose, eyes, hair, and ears are all represented in the legal system as parts of the body for which heavy fines would be paid due to the public and shameful nature of their very visible loss. On the other hand, hair, eyes, and graceful limbs are all part of the depiction of ideal female beauty. Following van Eickels’ interpretation of the symbolism of cutting off a woman’s nose and/or ears and generally disfiguring her face, one can overlie all of this with a symbolic castration of Derbforgaill, thereby removing her as a potential sexual threat to the Ulster women by rendering her sexually impotent. 56

Klaus van Eickels, “Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England,” Gender & History 16 (2004): 588–602, at 598 n. 5; Paul Latimer, “Henry II’s Campaign Against the Welsh in 1165,” The Welsh Historical Review 14 (1989): 523–53; Lizabeth Johnson, “Mutilation as Cultural Commerce and Criticism: The Transmission, Practice, and Meaning of Castration and Blinding in Medieval Wales,” Istoria 1 (2008): 1–23; and Eska, “Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources,” 158.

265

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

part 2 The Spirituality of Wounds

∵

266

Eska

267

The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

section 4 Stigmata

∵

268

Eska

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

269

Chapter 12

“The Wounded Surgeon”: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England Virginia Langum

In the second of the Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot draws upon a millennium and a half of Christus medicus “Christ the physician” imagery:1 The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.2 The pain and compassion of surgeon and patient are here reciprocal. The “wounded” surgeon operates with “bleeding hands,” and the patient “feels” “the sharp compassion” as though it were a material scalpel incising flesh. This interior practice, whether understood as physical dissection or penetrative empathy, parses the external and more abstract “fever chart.” Eliot extends the image of physician into a more specific image of surgery. Surgery, with its unique concurrence of harming and healing, opening and sealing, punishing and curing, generates particular imaginative possibilities as a metaphor in medieval texts, beyond the trope of Christus medicus and general analogies of spiritual and medical healing. In addressing the rise of surgical imagery in Middle English poetry, such as the Siege of Jerusalem and the Pearl-Poet’s Cleanness, Jeremy Citrome argues that surgery is more spiritu-

1 John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 44–50; John T. McNeill, “Medicine for Sin as Prescribed in the Penitentials,” Church History 1 (1932): 14–26; and Rudolph Arbesmann, “The Concept of Christus Medicus in St. Augustine,” Traditio 10 (1954): 1–28. See also: Shelley Annette Reid, “‘The First Dispensation of Christ is Medicinal’: Augustine and Roman Medical Culture,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2008). 2 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 18.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_014

270

Langum

ally dextrous than medicine as surgery can be both punitive and restorative.3 Surgical incision and amputation by the surgeon-priest appear in confessional texts from medieval England.4 However, during this same period, the late fourteenth century and fifteenth century, Christus chirurgus “Christ the surgeon” also emerges in religious texts. Rather than the punitive, surgical model of corrosive purging and excommunicative severing charted by Citrome and others, Christ the surgeon is compassionate. Christ the surgeon incorporates the more traditional and popular meditative aide, Christ’s wound, inviting the faithful to meditate on His wound as though their own. Although attained through torture rather than medical intervention, His crucifixion wound becomes a surgical wound when Christ adopts the role of a surgeon to attach the faithful to it. Likewise, the surgical wound of the circumcision serves as a location for compassionate healing by spurring reflection upon the pain and humanity shared by the infant Christ. Placing images of Christ the wounded surgical patient and Christ the surgeon, compactly phrased as Eliot’s “wounded surgeon,” in dialogue, reveals how surgery generates unique opportunities for compassion in pastoral and devotional texts of late medieval England. Surgery provides a medical understanding of compassion, how the pain of the wound may be felt within another body part, and even felt by another person. These passages – in sermons such as the fifteenth-century Oxford sermon collection Bodley 649 and the fifteenth-century cycle edited as Lollard Sermons, devotional texts such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and Speculum devotorum, and mystical visions such as the Middle English translation of Bridget of Sweden’s Liber celestis and Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love – align Christ’s wounds suffered at the circumcision or the crucifixion with the human wounds of sin, offering a metaphorical and physiological treatment of compassion. 3 Jeremy Citrome, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Cf. Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” 215–30; Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” 102–27; Carmel Ferragud, “Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early-Fifteenth Century,” 233–51; and Timothy May, “Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices,” 175–93; Debby Banham and Christine Voth, “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?”, 153–74; and Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 496–518, in this volume. 4 Virginia Langum, “Discerning Skin: Complexion, Surgery, and Language in Medieval Confession,” in Reading Skin in Medieval Culture, ed. Katie L. Walter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 141–160.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

271

Christ the Physician derives from the material and spiritual instances of healing found in the New Testament. In various miracles, Christ heals blood disease, blindness, leprosy, demonic possession, and paralysis. Christ Himself relates the role of medical healer to the spiritual sickness of sinners. In Mark 2:17: “Non necesse habent sani medico, sed qui male habent : non enim veni vocare justos, sed peccatores” [hole men han no nede to a leche: but þei þat han euele forsoþe I cam not to clepe iust men: but synneres].”5 This image proved highly effective throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in the mandatory confession codified by the reforms of the Third and Fourth Lateran councils. Indeed, the twenty-first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) preserves one of the most paradigmatic and influential comparisons of  priest to doctor who pours wine and oil over the vulneribus “wounds” of the penitent.6 Medicine and, specifically, surgery is part of the “discourse community” of later medieval England. Linguists working on the corpus of Middle English medical manuscripts have adopted the concept of “discourse community” in the absence of the precise provenance and lineage of every manuscript and their relationship to other manuscripts. Understood as a group of “people who participate in a set of discourse practices not only by reading and writing, but also by listening,” “discourse community” provides a model for how medical texts and concepts might infiltrate other discourses, such as pastoral and devotional works.7 The concept of “discourse community” seeks to “explain and define people connected by texts, either as part of their relationships within a particular type of community, or solely by the texts themselves.”8 The idea of a “discourse community,” whose members might have varying levels of access 5 Latin Vulgate cited from Clementine Vulgate Project: (accessed 8 June 2014); the Middle English is from the Wycliffite version of the Bible. Although the Bible might not have been circulated in all religious contexts, Middle English passages from the Bible were commonly found interspersed in vernacular sermons. The Earlier Version of the Wycliffite Bible, ed. Conrad Lindberg (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1994). See: James H. Morey, Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 6 Original Latin text found in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. I Nicaea I to Lateran V, ed. and trans. Norman P. Tanner (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990), 245; translation from Pastors and Care of Souls in Medieval England, ed. John Shinners and William J. Dohar (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 170. 7 Claire Jones, “Discourse Communities and Medical Texts,” in Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, ed. Païvi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 23–36, at 24. 8 Jones, “Discourse Communities,” 24.

272

Langum

to medical knowledge and imagery, liberates texts from a “readership” which is largely anachronistic in this period, and allows for a more dynamic understanding of how knowledge is appropriated by broader culture.9 There are historical reasons for the growth of more specialized medical imagery in religious contexts. Firstly, the Church subjected the practice of medicine and surgery to growing regulation during this period. After the fourteenth century, penitential manuals place physicians and surgeons under greater scrutiny, listing particular sins attendant to their professions, such as ignorance and rashness, as well as moral quandaries, such as responsibility for death.10 While the Fourth Lateran Council explicitly prohibited clergy from practicing incision and cauterization, historians of medicine have argued that the prohibition applied only to secular clergy in major orders and did not exclude surgical operations related to wounds and fractures.11 Clerics undoubtedly practiced various forms of medicine in this period. Physicians were often clerics as part of their university education consisted of theology in addition to medicine, and simple parish priests provided a variety of medical services. Carole Rawcliffe’s studies reveal that the hospitals of Norfolk were staffed by nuns and priests rather than trained physicians.12 Furthermore, Claire Jones’s analysis of medieval East Anglian medical manuscripts (mostly from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries) demonstrates that priests owned, and appear to have used, medical texts.13 Beyond practice and regulation, clerics were involved in the transmission of medical knowledge, translating and copying medical texts for charity and compassion.14 For example, in the early fifteenth-century, a clerk named Austin compiled a medical and surgical compendium in the vernacular “nou3t to clerkys but to myn 9

10

11 12

13 14

Jones, “Discourse Communities,” 24. On the general influence of medicine in religious culture in the Middle Ages, see: Joseph Ziegler, Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Darrel W. Amundsen, “Casuistry and the Professional Obligations: the Regulation of Physicians by the Court of Conscience in the Late Middle Ages,” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 3 (1981): 22–37. Darrel W. Amundsen, “Medieval Canon Law on Medical and Surgical Practice by the Clergy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 22–44. Carole Rawcliffe, The Hospitals of Medieval Norwich (Norwich: Centre of East Anglian Studies, 1995); Medicine for the Soul: The Life, Death and Resurrection of an England ­Medieval Hospital, St. Giles, Norwich, c. 1249–1550 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999). M. Claire Jones, “Vernacular Literacy in Late-Medieval England: the Example of East Anglian Medical Manuscripts,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Glasgow, 2000). Faye Marie Getz, “Charity, Translation and the Language of Medieval Learning in ­Medieval England,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1990): 1–17.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

273

dere gossip thomas plawdon, citiseyn & barbour of london” in a “tyme of lakkyng of wise fysicians.”15 Such clerical translation was part of a larger translation phenomenon of medical and surgical texts into Middle English in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The electronic database Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English documents a rise from 200 items in the fourteenth century to 8,000 items in the fifteenth century, which includes both original compositions and translations, many of which are surgical.16 Among the native English surgical writers who produced texts are Gilbertus Anglicus (c. 1250), John of Gaddesden (d. 1348), John Arderne (d. 1392) and Thomas Morstede (d. 1450). Gilbertus Anglicus, John of Gaddesden, and John Arderne wrote in Latin, but their texts were translated into Middle English in the late-fourteenth century and fifteenth century.17 In addition, many works by continental surgeons circulated in Latin in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and were translated into Middle English in the late-fourteenth century and fifteenth century. These include works by Roger Frugard of Salerno (d. 1195), William of Saliceto (d. 1277), Lanfranc of Milan (d. 1306), Henri de Mondeville (d. 1316), and Guy de Chauliac (d. 1368).18 Most of the translations date from the fifteenth century; however, Guy de Chauliac’s first translation into English dates from shortly 15

16

17

18

Voigts and McVaugh conjecture that Austin is a clerk, either a cleric or a university man, based on the scholastic vocabulary of the rest of the manuscript. Linda E. Voigts and Michael R. McVaugh, “A Latin Technical Phlebotomy and Its Middle English Translation,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74 (1984): 1–69, at 15. Païvi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen, “Vernacularisation of Scientific and Medical Writing in Its Sociohistorical Context,” in Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–18, at 11. For the electronic database on CDROM, see: Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, SEENET, ed. Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Getz lists 15 manuscripts dating from the fifteenth century that contain Gilbertus Anglicus’s pharmacology. Faye Marie Getz, Healing and Society in Medieval England: A Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), xii. Robbins lists 11 copies of John Arderne’s Practica in Middle English (of which there are four separate translations), the first dating from the late fourteenth century. Rossell Hope Robbins, “Medical Manuscripts in Middle English,” Speculum 45 (1970): 393–415, at 406. Peter Murray Jones, “Four Middle English Translations of John of Arderne,” in Latin and Vernacular Studies in Late Medieval Manuscripts, ed. A J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989), 61–89. Among the most popular surgical texts translated into Middle English are those by Guy de Chauliac, Lanfranc of Milan, and John Arderne. Robbins lists eight extant copies of ­Lanfranc’s surgical manual and seven copies of Guy de Chauliac (of which there are two

274

Langum

after his death in the fourteenth century.19 In addition, numerous, unnamed original and translated texts on particular aspects of surgery, such as bloodletting, were produced in this period.20 Although little is known about the translation and production of medical texts in the vernacular, there is evidence of the parallel production of surgical and devotional texts in Middle English beyond the clerical context. Irma Taavitsainen has argued, for example, for the existence of a fifteenth-century scriptorium in the East Midlands that specialized in surgical tracts, including translations of Guy de Chauliac’s Chirurgia magna, and religious and devotional treatises.21 The audience for these texts is not always clear. Many Latin texts were bequeathed to university faculties, leaving records of ownership.22 It is tempting to attribute Middle English copies to non-university educated owners. As is to be expected, some vernacular translations were owned and written for barber-surgeons, such as Plawdon.23 However, others appear to have been owned by university-trained physicians. Indeed, Middle English texts are often interleaved with Latin texts in many medical manuscripts.24 Furthermore, ownership alone does not guarantee that owners could read and understand the medical text.25

19

20 21 22 23

24

25

complete separate translations and two incomplete translations). Robbins, “Medical Manuscripts,” 406. See: Keiser, George R., A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500 Works of Science and Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); The Middle English Translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Anatomy, ed. Björn Wallner (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1964), viii. Voigts and McVaugh, “A Latin Technical Phlebotomy,” 21–25. Irma Taavitsainen, “Scriptorial ‘House Styles’ and Discourse Communities,” in Medical and Scientific Writing, ed. Tavitsaininen and Pahta, 209–240. Vern L. Bullough, “Duke Humphrey and His Medical Collections,” Renaissance News 14 (1961): 87–91. Peter Murray Jones, “Four Middle English Translations of John of Arderne,” in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A.J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989), 61–89, at 61–62. See also: Claire Jones, “An Assortment of Doctors: the Readers of Medical Books in Late Medieval England,” Journal of the Early Book Society 3 (2000): 136–151. Voigts notes that medical writings are more likely to appear in a mixture of Latin and English than in a single language. Many also contain Anglo-Norman texts. See: Linda Ehrsam Voigts, “Scientific and Medical Books,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 345–402. Monica H. Green, “Books as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages,” Dynamis 20 (2000): 331–69, at 334.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

275

Nevertheless, historians of medicine have noted that vernacularization facilitated “popular consumption” of medical knowledge beyond the monasteries and universities.26 Although there is uncertainty surrounding ownership, audience, and use, there appears to be some general familiarity of surgical and medical practice. Although surgeons such as John Arderne boasted incredibly wealthy clients in his surgical manual, less wealthy Londoners would have been exposed to barber-surgeons, tradespeople who performed a variety of services, such as dentistry, bloodletting, and amputation. By some estimates, there were 1,700 barber surgeons active in England between 1340 and 1511.27 Furthermore, surgical procedures, such as bloodletting, would have been performed by other part-time practitioners as well.28 Whether or not devotional writers would have access to particular surgical texts, the use of surgery as a metaphor for spiritual practice parallels the vernacularization of learned medicine in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Middle English Dictionary includes references only from the very late fourteenth century and the fifteenth century where “cirurgien” refers figuratively to “one who heals or cures souls, a healer” in contrast to more pragmatic, literal designations of surgical practitioners.29 The introduction of the term “surgeon” as spiritual metaphor in English implies that surgery entered the broader discourse community of medieval England. Furthermore, the availability of texts in Latin and Middle English suggests a wider possibility of dissemination of specific surgical knowledge. Therefore, the relationship of clergy to practice and translation, as well as the concurrent circulation of devotional texts and surgical texts, establishes a particularly English context for what Joseph Ziegler, among others, has identified as the emergence of medicine as a “significant cultural agent.”30 Christ as a surgeon is a potent image given the ambiguous position of the surgeon in medieval society and the extremity and pain of surgical treatment itself. As Patricia Skinner explains in this volume, during the later Middle Ages, 26

27 28 29 30

Getz, Healing and Society, xvi; Peter Murray Jones, “Medicine and Science,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 433. Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 24. Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7–12; Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 24. The Middle English Dictionary (accessed 14 November 2013). Ziegler, Medicine and Religion, 177.

276

Langum

surgery emerged as a separate craft from medicine, at least in theory.31 While surgery was practiced in Europe throughout the ancient world and the Middle Ages, it did not achieve “institutional stability” until the thirteenth century. The factors involved in this transition include the translation and circulation of Arabic texts and the greater concentration of populations into urban centers, which fostered universities and apprenticeship structures.32 Surgery occupied a particularly debased position in England. In contrast to the Continent, surgery was not studied at all at Oxford or Cambridge, where medicine itself was a minor subject.33 Instead, surgery was institutionalized in guilds in England (the earliest established in 1368), which required a university education and provided apprenticeship for practical experience.34 After a number of years, surgeons took an exam in order to become masters of surgery. Bryon Grigsby, however, has demonstrated a sharp rise in the number of untrained surgical practitioners between 1350 and 1450.35 Hence, educated surgeons, such as Thomas Morstede, along with physicians, petitioned the king in 1421 to forbid the uneducated from practicing medicine. They were particularly concerned about untrained surgical practitioners, such as barbers.36 However, beyond practical fears of ignorant practitioners, surgery was deemed intrinsically inferior to medicine due to its tactility. Whereas medicine tended to the theoretical, surgery was more practical, more craft than art. As Guy de Chauliac’s surgical manual explains, surgery is a science involving operationes manuum “hande werkes.”37 When put into English, many surgical texts, such as the fifteenth-century translation of Lanfranc of Milan, provide an etymology of the craft founded on touch, hands, and manual labour: “In 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” in this volume, 81–101. This background is described in the entry on “Surgery,” in Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas F. Glick, Steven John Livesey, and Faith Wallis (London: Routledge, 2005), 464–467. Knowledge and practice overlapped in the various divisions of medical practitioners, but notions of hierarchical social status are documented by Vern L. Bullough, “Status and Medieval Medicine,” Journal of Health and Human Behavior 2 (1961): 204–210 and Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance ­Medicine, 179. Voigts and McVaugh, “A Latin Technical Phlebotomy,” 13. Bryon Grigsby, “The Social Position of the Surgeon in London, 1350–1450,” Essays in ­Medieval Studies 13 (1996): 71–80, at 75. Grigsby, “The Social Position of the Surgeon,” 75. Grigsby, “The Social Position of the Surgeon,” 77. The Middle English Translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Anatomy, ed. Björn Wallner (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1964), 7, 154. Hereafter, page numbers for the Latin text and the Middle English translation are given in parentheses.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

277

e­ nglisch siros is an hand, & gyros gru, þat is worchinge in englisch / For þe ende & þe profite of syurgie is of hand-wyrchynge.”38 Given the perception of surgeons as inferior to physicians, Christ’s role as surgeon is implicitly humble. However, this same cause of social inferiority – the manual aspect of surgery – that allowed penetration into hidden depths of the body and potential cures inaccessible to university medicine, had particular utility for confession. The three “operationes cyrurgicorum … soluere continuum. Iungere separatum extirpare superfluum” [operacions of cirurgiens … forto lovse continuale, fforto ioyne separate, and for to cutte a-way superflue] (Anatomy, 8, 155) were applied to the confessor. Surgeons physically accessed the innermost parts of another human being in order to heal, just as confessors delved into the depths of the human soul to offer absolution. When Christ is the surgeon, He is both wounded and healer of wounds. As Langland writes in Piers Plowman, “though he were wounded with his enemy, to warisshen [heal] hymselue/ And dide hym assaie his surgerie on hem þat sike were.”39 Seeking out the “sike and synfulle” (16.109) for treatment while He himself is wounded, makes Christ the surgeon co-passionate, co-suffering with sinners. Christ’s wounds were aligned with particular human sins in sermons; e.g., the crown of thorns with pride.40 However, used as an image of compassion – of shared vulnerability, woundedness – rather than confession, surgery also contains the idea of “ioyning” or stitching together a wound in finishing the surgical operation inside the interior. In essence, a wound is “solucion continuitatis recens sanguinolenta sine putrefaccione in partibus mollibus facta” [solucion [break] of continuite, recent, sanguinolent, without putrefaccioun, made in softe partie3] (Anatomy, 5, 57) that surgeons must repair through vnicione “onyng” (Anatomy, 81, 85). As a devotional image, then, Christ the surgeon restores “continuite” by knitting together the faithful’s wound (caused by original sin and their particular sins) to His own wounded body. The “operacions of cirurgiens” are present in the fifteenth-century Middle English translation of Bridget of Sweden’s Liber celestis, in which Christ operates upon the faithful and Himself in one body. In distinction from the Latin text, which was produced for the canonization 38 39 40

Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirurgie,” ed. Robert von Fleischhacker, EETS o.s. 102 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894), 7. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1995), 16.105–106. Holly Johnson, “A Fifteenth-Century Sermon Enacts the Seven Deadly Sins,” in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. Richard Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), 107–131, at 108.

278

Langum

process in 1377, the Middle English translation specifically identifies Christ as surgeon. In a vision, Christ demonstrates how he “cuttes away rotyn fleshe and transform[e]s” the faithful “vnto hymselfe.” The metaphor elaborates upon the corporate body of Christ: My frendes are as my arme, in þe whilke are fyfe þinges. þe first is þe skyn, þan fleshe, blode, bone and mergh [marrow]. Bot I do as a surgen þat cuttes away all þat is dede. So I take away fro my frendes þe worldly coueytise and lustes of fleshe, and I putt to þame helpe of my myght, as it were mergh, for ryght as wythouten mergh is no strengh in þe arme, right so wythouten my might is mannes might no3t. And þis mergh is in þe bone þat is sade. So sall my frendes knaw my myght and besy þam to wirke þe gude wyth a lastyng will. þe third is þe blode, þat bytokens a gude will; and þe fleshe paciens, þat is softe of þe selfe; and þe skyn bytokens lufe, in token þat þai suld lufe noþinge so mykyll as me. And þan I knyt þam fulli to myselfe, and hase þame all in me.41 Here, the text draws upon the conventional image of the corporate body of Christ and the incisive penetration of the word of God which “vivus est enim sermo Dei, et efficax et penetrabilior omni gladio ancipiti : et pertingens usque ad divisionem animæ ac spiritus : compagum quoque ac medullarum, et discretor cogitationum et intentionum cordis” [forsoþe þe wrd of god is quik & spedi in wirking & more able to persen þan alle twei eggid swerd & entrende til to departing of soule & sperit & ioyntures & Merewis & departere of tho3tis & intenciouns of hertes].42 While Bridget’s Latin text portrays an almost identical image of the Middle English, Christ is simply medicus not chirurgus.43 The alteration of Christ from medicus in the fourteenth-century Latin text to “surgen” in the fifteenth-century Middle English text suggests a growing familiarity with surgery in medieval England, thus inviting comparison with contemporary surgical practice. What might the operation described, the 41

42 43

The Liber Celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden, ed. R. Ellis, EETS o.s. 291 (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), 334. The Latin is found at (accessed 14 November 2013), Bk. 4, 90. Where relevant, page numbers will be given in parentheses. Hebrews 4:12. Latin at (accessed 14 November 2013) and Middle English from The Earlier Version of the Wycliffite Bible, vol. 8. The Swedish text, which was translated from the Latin, does not refer to Jesus as “surgeon” but as “läkiare” [doctor]; however, He does performs a surgical procedure, cutting off what is unhealthy from the body. Professor Jonas Carlquist has suggested to me that there was not a distinct word for “surgeon” in Old Swedish. Heliga Birgittas Uppenbarelser, ed. G.E. Klemming (Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt and Sons, 1860), Bk. 2.175.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

279

removal of dead flesh and the infusion of marrow, mean in surgical terms? In general, medieval medicine thought marrow strengthened and moistened bones and “virtutem animalis nutrit et conseruat” [fediþ, norischiþ, and saueþ þe vertue of felinge].44 Given this critical importance for the body, many surgical texts expressly warn surgeons against making deep incisions lest they allow the marrow to escape and their patients die. Speaking of such a wound, Guy de Chauliac warns of great incisions where “exeat medulla est periculosa & vt plurimum mortificans membrum” [þe merowe go out … is perilous & oftentyme3 mortifying þe membre].45 In surgical terms, Christ performs a perilous operation on Himself to strengthen mankind. Furthermore, the two properties of marrow – moistening and “felinge” – are significant to medieval understandings of compassion. “Felinge,” also called the spiritus animalis “the vital spirit,” described the substance in the brain and nervous system responsible for movement and perception (3. 22). Furthermore, “the moystnes of pyte” or “moysture of charyte” that softens the heart towards others or God is a common metaphor in medieval sermons and pastoral texts, creating a physiology for compassion.46 Just as certain natural dispositions inclined people to particular sins, others inclined to particular virtues.47 Dryness, which was thought to occur as the body aged, facilitated the opposing vices of compassion and pity: envy and greed. For example, the homilist of a late-fifteenth century sermon cycle compares the decline of man with the decline of “pite and compassion,” a physiologically sound argument in terms of the natural drying of the body with age.48 Women, however, were associated 44

45

46

47 48

Latin text from Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Köln: Johan Koelhoff, 1483), 5.58. Middle English from Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum: A Critical Text, ed. M.C. Seymour et al., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975–88), 1: Bk. 5, 58. Hereafter, book and page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. The Middle English Translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Treatise on Wounds, ed. Björn Wallner (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1976), English in Part 1,90; Latin in Part 2.88. Hereafter, part and page numbers are given in parentheses. The first quotation is from A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, vol. 1, ed. Stephen Morrison, EETS o.s. 337, 338 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 61–2. The second is from The Middle English Mirror, ed. Kathleen Marie Blumreich (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 103. See also: Ziegler, Medicine and Religion, 294. Joseph Ziegler, “The Biology of the Virtues,” in Im Korsett der Tugenden, ed. Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio and Andrea Bettels (Hildesheim: Olms, 2013), 3–23, at 8. Dominical Sermon Cycle, 63. For the drying of the body with age, see: Shulamith Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages: “Winter Clothes Us in Shadow and Pain” (London: Routledge, 1997), 70. De proprietatibus rerum, chaps. 4, 3.

280

Langum

with moisture. Scholars have examined how female writers reinscribe the excess moisture and other physiological attributes disparaged by moralists as a quality that enables their receptivity and compassion. If dryness kept the body closed and intact, the bodily instability inherent in moistness in a devotional context enabled the believer to join Christ.49 Surgical knowledge provides another dimension to this devotional physiology. Paradoxically, the moistness both caused a natural lack of “continuite” and allowed healing. According to Guy de Chauliac: “in infantibus autem & mulieribus vidi consolidari arteriam propter humiditatem & molliciem corporis” [in enfante3, forsoþ, & in wymmen y haue sene an arterie consolded for moistne3 & softnes of þe body] (Treatise on Wounds 1.18; 2.62). Christ’s operation, as described in the Middle English translation of Bridget, bolsters the spiritual and physical health of the open wound. However, Christ is not merely the surgeon; He is also the surgical patient here. As “wounded surgeon,” he embodies compassion, suffering together. Compassion is both a meditative aid and a medical principle in the later Middle Ages. Bridget connects the suffering of one part of the body with another by a medical, and, in the Middle English version, specifically surgical metaphor. In the Bible, Paul develops bodily metaphors of suffering and compassion. For example, in 1 Corinthians 12:26–7: “et si quid patitur unum membrum, compatiuntur omnia membra: sive gloriatur unum membrum, congaudent omnia membra. Vos autem estis corpus Christi, et membra de membro” [if o membre suffre eny thing: alle membris suffrin þerwiþ eiþer if o membre glorieþ: alle membris io3en togidere. Forsoþe 3ee ben þe bodi o crist and membris of membris].50 In patristic theology, the faithful become members of the body of the Church and of Christ by participating in the sacraments. Wounded limbs or members threaten the corporate body and must be healed or amputated.51 In this tradition, pastoral texts invoke the wounded limb to 49

50 51

See: Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical View of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Lisa Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 142–167. Latin Vulgate (accessed 14 Nov. 2013) and The Earlier Version of the Wycliffite Bible. See for example: Augustine, De doctrina christiana, CCSL 32, I.xvi.15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), ed. Joseph Martin, as well as those examples cited from Augustine, see those by John Chrysostom and Jerome in Leanne Groeneveld, “Salvation, Damnation, and the Wounded (Corporate) Body of Christ in Late Medieval Culture,” Florilegium 22 (2005): 86–90.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

281

urge correction and punishment. While these analogies derive from an old tradition, the association of physical with emotional pain, specifically the compassion felt for wounds by other parts of the body and other bodies entirely, reflects newer medical knowledge, or at least the circulation thereof in the later Middle Ages. “Compaciens” or compassion as understood by medieval medicine referred to how parts of the body felt pain or suffered with other parts of the body. As Bartholomaeus Anglicus writes in his influential encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum (c. 1240–1250), that was translated into English by John Trevisa in the late fourteenth century and exists in numerous copies, the members of the body mutuo compatiuntur “haþ compaciens of oþir” because of their inuicem colligantiam “þe byndinge and knettinge togedres” (5.1). Therefore, “unde memborum minus patiens condolet amplius patienti” [þe membre lesse igreued haþ compaciens of þe membre þat is more igreued] (5.1). Bartholomaeus describes this compassion as the movement of humors from other parts of the body to the locus doloris “þe sore place” (5.1). Surgical texts also consider parts of the body that have colligantiam magnam “grete colligance” with each other, such as the womb with the brain, heart, liver and stomach, and the bladder with the anus, meaning that when one part suffers, those other parts se compatiuntur or “bene þame selfe compacientez togidre” (Anatomy 138, 201). Likewise, in his treatise on wounds, Guy de Chauliac discusses cerebri compassionis “spasme3 … of þe brayne compassioun” and spasmi … compassiui “spasme compassiue” when the brain responds to wounds in other parts of the body (Treatise on Wounds 1.40, 42; 2.69–70). This physical understanding of compassion was not simply copied from the Latin but was re-iterated in original and influential contexts. For example, the Middle English translation of surgeon Gilbertus Anglicus’s pharmacology, preserved in at least fifteen fifteenth-century copies, inserts a description of the “compassion” felt by the heart for pains in the stomach that is not found in the Latin exemplar.52 Scholastic discussions of the soul’s sensation of pain reinforced the somatic understanding of compassion found in surgical and medical texts. As Esther Cohen discusses in her seminal work on pain in the Middle Ages, later medieval thought developed an understanding of pain attendant upon “interior sensation, rather than an exterior trauma.”53 In discussing the surgical procedure of cauterization, the theologian Duns Scots, for example, argued that the 52 53

Getz, Healing and Society, 144, 301 n. 144/3. Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 258.

282

Langum

thought of the procedure was enough to induce the sensation of pain in the body.54 Thus, imagining physical pain is a way of experiencing physical pain. Furthermore, as a similar example of the compassio and colligantia described above in Guy de Chauliac, the surgeon Henri de Mondeville, whose surgical works were circulated in the original Latin and translated into Middle English, also explains how “syncope” or “swooning” can occur in healthy men who see surgical operations.55 This medical context for compassionate pain enriches readings of devotional descriptions of Christ’s wounds. The late fourteenth-century Julian of Norwich, for example, begins her Revelation of Love, the earliest manuscript of which dates from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, with a desire for bodily affliction “for I would that his peynes were my peynes with compassion.”56 Specifically, she petitions Christ for three graces: “mende of his passion … bodily sekenese … iii wounds” (2). The three wounds she explains are the wounds of contrition, “the wounde of kinde compassion,” and the wound of longing for God (3). Julian explicitly links wounds and compassion at the outset of her text in her desire for spiritual stigmata.57 She is ultimately granted these petitions through her own experience of illness and suffering. As one modern reader notes that “although it may be felt as a wounding it is, in fact, a healing surgery.”58 While it is uncertain what specific surgical knowledge Julian would have accessed, she would have likely been familiar with bloodletting at the very least. Bloodletting was part of the regimen in the monasteries and anchorholds.59 54 55

56 57

58 59

Cohen, The Modulated Scream, 107. Latin text cited by Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Polity, 1990), 115. Middle English version found in Richard Grothé, “Le MS. Wellcome 564 Deux Traites de Chirurgie en Moyen-Anglais,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Montreal, 1982). Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1993), 5. Hereafter, page numbers are given in parentheses. While there were occurrences of stigmatics on the continent during the period, this sort of compassionate wounding appears to have been solely metaphorical in medieval England. Most examples of contemporary stigmatics are Italian women. See: Gábor ­Klaniczay, “On the Stigmatization of Saint Margaret of Hungary,” in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. Miri Rubin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 265–73; and Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006). Marion Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith (London: Longman, 1993), 216. Ancrene Wisse, for example, provides guidelines for bloodletting. Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Work, ed. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 204. M.K.K. Yearl, “Medieval Monastic Customaries on Minuti and

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

283

In Julian’s account of her illness and simultaneous vision of the crucified Christ, her own pain and blood mingle with Christ’s bloody wounds so they are indistinguishable. They are co-passionate in material and symbolic terms. Ultimately, Julian’s vision of compassionate suffering expands even beyond herself and Christ. She takes a conventional image meant to spur private confession – Christ’s side wound – and expands it so it is “large enow for al mankynd” (35).60 Looking into His side wound, Christ “beheld enioyande; and with his swete lokyng he led forth the understondyng of his creature by the same wound into his syde withinne” (35). In this passage, “enioyand” assonates with “joining” and the sense of closing a wound in surgical practice, so that the faithful are “joined” or sewn to His wound, flesh to flesh. The side wound found in the Middle English translation of Bridget of Sweden’s Liber celestis further breaks down discrete identities in the crucifixion scene. From Mary’s point of view, “right as þat þinge þat is halfe within and halfe withoute, if þe part withoute be prikked, als mikill paine felis þe parte þat is within, right so when mi son was scourged and prikked, it was to me as mine awen hert had bene scourged and prikked” (63).61 A string of dependent clauses makes it difficult to distinguish between Mary and Jesus. For example, in the phrase “when he loked fro þe crosse to me and I to him, þan went þe teres oute of mi eyn as blode oute of vainnes,” it is unclear whether Christ’s blood is running out of His veins at the same time “as” tears run out of Mary’s eyes, or if Mary’s tears are pouring out of her eyes figuratively as blood flows out of veins (63).62 The passage progresses with syntactical torture: “when he saw me in þat sorowe, it encresid so his sorowe þat þe sorowe of his awen woundes were noght allmoste felid, for þe paine he had of þe sorowe he saw in me” (63). However, the passage resolves itself with Mary speaking “plainli” in “his sorowe was mi sorowe, for his hert was mi hert” (63). This reversion back

60

61 62

Infirmi,” in The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, ed. Barbara S. Bowers (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 175–194. In this exemplum type, Christ appears to unconfessed sinners and invites them to touch His side wound. Afterwards, the sinners’ hands are stained with blood until confessed. Printed exempla of this theme are catalogued by Frederic C. Tubach, Index exemplorum: a Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suamalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969), 191. For a contemporary Middle English example, see: The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney J.H. Herrtage, EETS e.s. 33 (London: Oxford University Press, 1879), 393. The Middle English follows the Latin closely, which is found at (accessed 14 November 2014) Bk. 1, 35. The Latin quasi does not convey the same ambiguity, suggesting only a resemblance, not a simultaneous event.

284

Langum

to “plain” speech and grammar emphasizes the complexity and indivisibility of their relationship. This vision of compassion, wherein Mary feels Christ’s “membres were to me as mine awen membres, and as my own hert” where the pain of Christ’s “woundes” is deferred to Mary’s heart evokes the “compassion” felt by the heart in medical contexts (Liber celestis 63). Jesus and Mary are copassionate bodies through Christ’s wounds. Implicit in Julian and Bridget’s accounts of Christ’s wounds, however, is that the reader will also experience compassion. Circumcision narratives make the connection between the imagination of Christ’s wounds and pain with the compassion of the reader more explicit. In circumcision narratives, Christ functions as “wounded surgeon,” healing through His own wound. Although established in the mid-sixth century, the feast of the circumcision became a popular subject of vernacular narratives and imagery in the late fourteenth century and fifteenth century.63 Leo Steinberg has argued that this surge in interest in the circumcision is likely due to its inclusion in two widely circulated texts of the later Middle Ages.64 As recapitulated in numerous sermons and devotional passages, the circumcision is the initial wound which Christ suffers for human health, which prefigures all the other wounds He will suffer later. It is also the only surgical wound as such that He suffers, and these texts generate compassion through reflection upon the infant’s wound as both material and symbolic. A late medieval English audience would not have been familiar with the surgical procedure. As part of the Old Law, circumcision was considered superfluous and sinful for Christians. Theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, claimed circumcision to be a mortal sin, and the Council of Florence (1442) declared circumcision a barrier to salvation.65 Furthermore, the Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and not readmitted until 1656. Surgical writers offer little judg63 64

65

The feast was officially removed from the church calendar in 1960 in the Second Vatican Council. These texts are the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditations on the Life of Christ, translated by Nicholas Love as The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ in Middle English, and Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea (1255–1266), both used by homilists and devotional writers in their compilations and translated in 1438 as the Gilte Legende in Middle English. See: Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 50, 56–7; Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2004); Gilte Legende, ed. Richard Hamer, EETS o.s. 327, 328 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinctions: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 54–55.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

285

ment or description of the issue. Guy de Chauliac includes a rare but perfunctory explanation in the antidotary to his surgical manual: circuncisio secundum legemsit iudeis & saracensis & aliis que multi est vtilis; propterea quod non congregantur sordities in radice balani & calefacerent ipsum. Et tunc cum vnguibus trahatur preputium quam tum erit possibile & cauendo de balano incidatur. & post cum pulueribus ru. aut cum cauterio sanguis restringatur & more aliorum vlcerum sanetur.66 [circumcicioun is made after þe lawe to Iewes and Sarasenes, and to many oþere it were able, for þat filþes schulde be gadrede togidre in þe rote of þe knoppe of þe 3erde [penis] and schulde chaufe it. And þan be it drawen with þi nayles as mykel as it is possible, and in eschewynge of þe knoppe, kytte it. And afterwarde be þe blode restreyned with þe rede powdre or with a cauterie, and hele it in þe maner of oþer woundes].67 Likewise, the operation itself is rarely discussed in vernacular descriptions of Christ’s circumcision. A rare example occurs in a fifteenth-century collection of Lollard sermons which explains the context and practice as “a ryte and a religioun in Old Lawe, comaundid to þe chyldren of Israel, þat in þe eyteþe dai aftur þat a chyld were born þei shulden kutte away a lytel garland round aboute of þe vttermure part of þe skyn of his 3erde.”68 However, most writers do not detail the material operation. Instead, writers emphasize the pain of the experience. While for centuries, theologians such as Ambrose and Bede had prefigured the crucifixion in the circumcision, details about His pain surfaced in the fourteenth century in continental texts and appear with frequency in texts from the fifteenth century in medieval England.69 As with Christ’s crucifixion, the pain described in circumcision accounts would seem to contrast with the greater majority of iconographic representations of a smiling or expressionless Christ.70 In 66 67 68 69 70

Guidonis de Cauliaco, Chyrurgia Guidonis de Cauliaco (Lugduni: Vincentius de Porto­ nariis, 1537), f. 259r. Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac, ed. Margaret Ogden, EETS o.s. 265 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 528–529. Lollard Sermons, ed. Gloria Cigman, EETS o.s. 294 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 66. See: Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, 156; Cohen, Modulated Scream, 223. Depictions, all late medieval, of a distressed Christ-child are mentioned by Henry Abramson and Carrie Hannon in “Depicting the Ambiguous Wound,” in The Covenant of

286

Langum

medieval England, the circumcision was a rare choice for visual representation. Devotional texts, however, articulate how the pain of the event affirms Christ’s full humanity. For example, Speculum devotorum, a meditative prose life of Christ dating from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, writes that “he hadde perfitely taken mankynde, in no wyse leuynge þe kynde of God, in þe whiche he is euermore euen to þe fadre.”71 Thus, “he sufferede full myche payne in our kynde, þe whiche is impassible in his owne, and so he suffered in his circumcisioun full mykell payne and haue pite and compassioun of hym” (102). The writer accentuates the “full grete peyne” “done in a ful tendere place of a mannes body with a knyfe” (Speculum devotorum 102). Furthermore, the pain felt by Jesus is enhanced by His physiology and age. Medieval medicine held that the more balanced a person’s complexion, the more highly developed the senses. Thus, theologians such as Alexander of Hales argued that Jesus, with His perfect complexion, felt pain more acutely.72 So whereas Bridget’s Christ as surgeon supplies healing moisture from His own body, at the Crucifixion He suffers: “he toke mi fleshe þe clenneste bodi and best complexiond” which causes “an vntrowabill sorowe and passion” (21). Further details related to Christ’s body, particularly His age and young flesh, help the faithful to imagine and suffer his pain co-passionately. Thus, Speculum devotorum urges “haueth pyte and compassioun to se þat feyre tender childe and youre louely Lorde yputte to so grete peyne so yonge. And also yhe may thenke þat for peyne of þat kyttynge he wepeth and cryeth, as þe maner of children is” (102). The soft and tender skin corresponds with the unhardened body of the infant as described in medical texts (De proprietatibus rerum 6.4). In Mirror of the Blessed Life, Nicholas Love takes the detail to reaffirm Christ’s humanity and pain, his tendere flesh was kut, with a sharp stonen knife, & so þat 3onge child Jesus kyndly wept for þe sorow þat he felt þerþorh in his flesh. For

71

72

Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite, ed. Elizabeth Wyner Mark (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 98–113, 107–109. Representations in England, however, are expressionless. Visual representations of the circumcision from medieval England are noted by Linda Bates: The East window at St. Peter Mancroft, a gold triptych found in Campion Hall, Oxford and roof bosses found in Norwich Cathedral, and in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Salle. Bates, “Christ’s Birth and Infancy in Middle English” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 2011) 98. “Myrror to Devout People (Speculum devotorum): an Edition with Commentary,” ed. Paul J. Patterson (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2006), 102. Page numbers are given in parentheses. Cohen, Modulated Scream, 205.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

287

without doute he hade verrey flesh & kyndly suffrable as haue oþer children. Shold we þan not haue compassion of him (42). Love intermingles the reader’s thoughts with the details of the scene, encouraging compassion. In her treatment of Love’s crucifixion passage, Sarah McNamer argues that his use of the word “beholde” functions “as a mechanism for generating sensory perception itself: for generating a specific way of seeing … that had the potential for producing – in the body, as well as in the mind – an impulse toward a particular form of compassion: the protective and ameliorative action of holding.”73 Although the word “beholde” does not occur in the circumcision passage, the passage describing the weeping child evokes this idea. Where Mary holds the child in her “barme,” she ultimately receives comfort from Him: when she sey hir louely sone wepe: she mi3t not withhold wepyng, & þan mowe we ymagine & þenk how þat litel babe in his modere barme seynge hir wepe, put his litel hande to hire face, als he wold þat she shold not wepe, & she a3eynward inwardly stired & hauyng compassion of þe sorowe & þe wepyng of hir dere son, with kissyng & spekyng, comforted him as she mi3t, for she vndurstode wele by þe inspiracion of þe holi gost þat was in hire þe wille of his son, þouh he speke not to hir (42). Mary, in turn, asks Him to cease His weeping, as it is the cause of hers: “so þorh þe compassion of þe modere, þe child sesed of sobbyng & wepyng” (42). Their mutual physical and emotional suffering enables silent communication, facilitated by the proximity of their bodies and their pain. The faithful, who “ymagine & þenk” of the mother and the child’s pain, are also folded into this process. Reflection upon the material surgical event and its attendant physical and emotional pain invariably leads to an exegetical treatment of the surgical event as metaphor in which Christ’s wound becomes an occasion for the faithful to consider their own wounds. Christ’s surgery becomes an invitation for the faithful to undergo their own surgery. As Love explains, “we sholen haue gostly circumcision, þat is kuttyng awey fro vs al superflue þinges þat disposen to synne, & haldyng with vs as in affection oneliche þat is nedfull to vertues lyuyng” (43). To this end, the faithful must exercise “gostly circumcision” on their five senses, and take care to remove what is most superfluous, in particu-

73

Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 135.

288

Langum

lar, speech, echoing Augustine’s famous injunction for God to circumcise his lips (43). Given the location of Christ’s wound, other sermons, such as that found in the fifteenth-century Lollard collection, focus on sins of “lecherie” deriving from “þat membre in whiche men fynden most stirynge to þat synne” (Lollard Sermons, 70). Christ’s circumcision is taken as an example of “clannesse and chastite” to encourage believers to refrain from “al maner of lecher in þou3t, word, and dede” (70). Speculum devotorum admonishes “circmcideth yourselfe for his loue, bothe bodily and gostely” (103). The terms “bodily” or “outwarde circumcisioun” signify habit, deeds, and words rather than surgical circumcision. By “inwarde” circumcision, the author refers to thought, affection, and intention (103). Likewise, the author of the fifteenth-century Speculum sacerdotale emphasizes the metaphorical utility of Christ’s operation: “Crist was not cicumcised for eny nede but for signyficacion, for that circumcision is no3t symple ne meene. And ry3t as he was cicumcised bodily, rightso he commaundeth and wold vsto be circumcised fleschely and spiritually.”74 It is untenable that this writer would have advocated surgical circumcision; however, he does not explicitly state what he means to be circumcised “fleschely.” Nevertheless, the emphasis upon “bodily,” “outward,” and “fleschely” circumcision suggest reflection upon physical pain and the possibility for mutual suffering. At its most metaphorical, circumcision represents the sacrament of confession, thus the incision is not preventative as above but curative. Just as Jews “weren bounden to bodili circumcision in þe Olde Lawe … a peyneful kuttynge awei of here flesch … so cristen men [beþ bounde] to gostli circumcisision in þe Newe Lawe … a peyneful kuttynge awei of al maner of synne þoru verrei penance doynge. …” (Lollard Sermons, 72–3). Just as the rite of circumcision is administered on the eighth day after birth, “gostli circumcision” is to be performed on the eighth “gostli dai” of preparation for the sacrament of confession. The homilist then enumerates “days” or steps for this preparation: sorrow for sin, abomination of sin, the will never to turn again to sin, true confession of sin, holy fasting, devout prayer, and charitable alms. Only after accomplishing these tasks is the sinner capable of being “circumcidid gostli – þat is, to be clansed of alle maner of synne” (73). Ultimately, circumcision is a prefiguration for the ultimate pain of the crucifixion, and, therefore, an initial treatment for the wound of sin: “here he [schedde] firste his preciouse blode for þe helthe of mankynde” (Speculum devotorum, 103). Many sermons emphasize the shedding of Christ’s blood as a 74

Speculum sacerdotale, ed. Edward H. Weatherly, EETS o.s. 200 (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 16.

Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

289

continuous healing process. Christ is thought to have shed his blood for man five times in the course of his life: “the blode of Criste was schede be effucion. For that [day] … he schede firste hys sakerd bloode for vs.” The circumcision marks the first time, “the begynnyng of owre redempcion” (Dominical Sermon Cycle, 37). “Effucion” serves a dual purpose, referring both to Christ’s bloodshed in its primary meaning but also to the application of a liquid or the bathing of a wound. In Guy de Chauliac’s surgery: “et fortasse inscicioni succedunt dolor & punctura quare opportet vt administretur effusio olei anetini aut camomillini” [and peraunetour to incision come-to aking & puncture, wherfor it bihoueþ þat þer be minstered effusioun of olei anetini or camomille vp-on þe puncture] (Treatise on Wounds 1.90; 2.111). Thus, in this secondary surgical sense, Christ, with His own physical wound, ministers to the metaphorical wounds of the faithful. Likewise, Love frames the bleeding wound of the infant Christ as punishment for sin: “þis day oure lord Jesus began to shede his preciouse blode for oure sake. He began betyme to suffre for vs, & he þat neuer did synne. began þis day to bere payne in his swete tendire body for oure synne” (Mirror of the Blessed Life, 42). Noting that the circumcision marks when Christ “began” to shed His blood, the text foreshadows the greater bloodshed of the crucifixion. Attendant within all discussions of the sacrifice and pain of the circumcision is that it is not enough to heal the wounds of humanity. As the fifteenth-century Tretyse of Loue explains, “ þe blode that he lefte thanne of his tender bodi in the cyrcumcysion ne were we not yette enterli helede, for we hadde the meselry [leprosy] of synne, whereof we were so ful of synne & inpostumys [abscesses] that our sowle was all full of hedowys matyr & venymous.”75 Thus, a more radical surgical operation is described in a sermon found in a macaronic (with Latin and English blending into each other) sermon preserved in the fifteenth-century Oxford sermon collection Bodley 649.76 Here, an extended surgical metaphor describes how the crucified Christ cures the heritage of Adam’s sinfulness. Christ is both surgeon and surgical patient in the sermon. First, He takes the pulse and diagnoses the ailment of mankind. Then, He prescribes a diet of spiritual food. Finally, He makes an ointment by crushing His own body against the wood of the cross and laying it against the wound of sin: “his senues and his ioyntis burstoun a too, and fro þe hede to þe fote was no hol pece on him” (Macaronic Sermon, 448). Despite His open wounds, He continues His practice: “þis floure he temprid with þe blode and þe water þat 75 76

The Tretyse of Loue, ed. John H. Fisher, EETS o.s. 223 (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 34. A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England: Oxford Bodley 649, ed. and trans. Patrick J. Horner (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006).

290

Langum

ran out de latere suo [of his side], and pariter in igne passionis sue. [as well as in the fire of his passion]. þis emplastre he laide lateri humano pro vlcere peccati. [on the human side for the ulcer of sin]” (448). Here, Christ’s body is physically ripped apart for finali sanacione “complete healing” (448). This breaking asunder, this annihilating of the body’s “continuite,” is a drastic image, as, indeed, surgery was also explained as a drastic and last option in professional texts. It is the third or last option of treatment, after dietare et farmacare “diete and farmacye;” name sine istis non perficitur cyrurgia “withouten þise is no3t cirurgie parfourmed” (Anatomy, 25–26, 161). However, Christ makes His own medicine by breaking His own body so that material dissolution might heal moral dissolution. In devotional images and in surgical texts, wounds and surgery both cause the discontinuity and repair the integrity of the sinner’s body while leaving the body of Christ “open” for continuous meditation and compassion: “soþely in þe wondes of Jesu, 3ee þe wondes not closed, bot opun & wide to entre inn” (Mirror of the Blessed Life, 12). By providing an affective metaphorical and physiological framework for compassion, surgery serves a function in the “invention of compassion” discussed recently in the history of emotions.77 Through His experience of pain, Christ teaches, or induces, “felinge” in His followers. The excruciating pain of wounding and separating experienced before healing and joining is elegantly expressed in the late medieval conception of Christ “the wounded surgeon.” 77

McNamer, Affective Meditation, 14.

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

291

Chapter 13

“Scarce anyone survives a heart wound”: The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry Salvador Ryan

The late medieval religious world was fascinated by the abject suffering humanity of Christ and, as noted many years ago by Émile Mâle, his passion became the “great preoccupation of souls.”1 This manifested itself in ever more graphic depictions of Christ’s wounded, bloody, and broken body in devotional works, artistic representations, and popular prayers. Over time, this interest evolved into a plethora of devotional cults: the Five Wounds of Christ; the arma Christi (the various instruments which caused them or were associated with the larger story of Christ’s passion); cults associated with Christ’s holy blood, as specifically celebrated in a number of important shrines across Europe; and devotions that centred on the precise number of Christ’s wounds and their respective sizes.2 This was, indeed, a devotional world in which Christ’s blood was ubiquitous. A facile reading of the Middle Ages might posit a discernible shift of emphasis from a victorious and kingly crucified Christ in the early medieval period to the victim-figure and image of pity of the later Middle Ages; yet, as Celia Chazelle has argued, contemplation of Christ’s suffering was much valued in its own right during this earlier period, which was not devoid of its share of depictions of Christ’s wounds and blood loss.3 Neither was the suffering Christ-figure of the later Middle Ages allowed to eclipse the motif of Christus triumphans entirely. Rather, the paradox of the victor-victim 1 Émile Mâle, L’art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en france, 7th ed. (Paris: A. Colin, 1995), 87. 2 It should be noted, of course, that the style and intensity of representations of Christ’s sufferings varied widely across Europe in the later Middle Ages, with northern Europe becoming particularly well known for their graphic nature. See especially: Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 3 Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 23. See also: Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For a recent collection of very fine essays on the crucified Christ in early medieval Ireland, see: Envisioning Christ on the Cross: Ireland and the Early Medieval West, ed. Juliet Mullins, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh, and Richard Hawtree (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_015

292

Ryan

was perpetuated through the various sets of newly-emerging devotions that were a feature of late medieval passion piety. In an Irish context, the late medieval fascination with Christ’s wounds can best be explored by examining a source that is, even yet, insufficiently known in medieval scholarship. It is a corpus of poetry composed by families of professional poets in Gaelic Ireland over a period of some four hundred years, from the thirteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries.4 Of some 2,000 poems that survive, roughly 20% are of a religious nature. They were composed at the behest of chieftains of the native Irish aristocracy or, in the case of some religious poems, commissioned by important ecclesiastical figures or foundations. Some religious poems were composed towards the end of a poet’s life, when he (and it was, invariably, a “he”) might retire to a monastery and use his compositions as payment for bed and board. At other times, it seems, professional poets composed works simply as exercises in the complex metres for which bardic poetry was renowned. It is clear, however, that in most instances, the poems were designed to respond directly to the wishes and particular tastes of the patron. Where poems and poets are dateable, this can serve as a valuable indicator of the evolution of devotional fashions, as patrons routinely wished to demonstrate their familiarity with the very latest important cults emerging in continental Europe. Devotion to the wounds of Christ is a very useful example of this, and the development of the cult can be traced through an increasingly elaborate set of images utilized in bardic compositions over time. However, it should be remembered that the majority of poems composed by these professional versifiers were addressed to earthly and not heavenly patrons. It is hardly surprising, then, that a poet’s depiction of the perfect Gaelic chieftain or secular lord should influence the portrayal of his heavenly ruler, Christ. But this also worked in the other direction; when a motif associated with Christ became well established, it could then be utilized as part of an encomium composed for a secular patron. This dynamic is evidenced in the treatment of the wounds of Christ and those of Gaelic chieftains whose battle exploits were routinely celebrated by the professional poets whom they employed. Late medieval devotion to the Passion and death of Christ, which provides the context for the preoccupation with his individual wounds, was the heir to 4 See especially: Katharine Simms, “Bardic Poetry as a Historical Source,” in The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. Tom Dunne (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987), 58–75; Salvador Ryan, “A Slighted Source: Rehabilitating Irish Bardic Religious Poetry in Historical Discourse,” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 48.4 (2004): 75–99; Michelle O’Riordan, Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007).

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

293

a number of different metaphors and models of redemption. Some of these could trace their roots directly to the New Testament; others developed during the patristic period of early Christian writing, and still more only fully blossomed in the central Middle Ages.5 This meant that there was a multiplicity of ways in which Christ’s death on Calvary could be understood. One of these, popular among some early Church Fathers, suggested that the human race had sold itself into the slavery of the devil (in the Garden of Eden) and that, therefore, the devil now possessed certain “rights” and authority over humanity, which was now legitimately its property. Christ is then forced to make a payment or “ransom” to the devil in his own blood to redeem (or “buy back”) what was originally his own possession. This model fell out of favour with high medieval theologians, such as Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109), who were uncomfortable with the idea of Christ having to make any payment to the devil. Although less popular in this later period, bardic poets continued to refer to this model right up to the sixteenth century. An alternative motif was that of Christ entering into battle with the devil and the powers of darkness on the cross and achieving a stunning victory, crushing his foe and emptying the dungeon of Hell of its many captives. Perhaps best exemplified in the West in Latin hymns such as Vexilla Regis and Pange Lingua by sixth-century Merovingian court poet, Venantius Fortunatus, the image of Christ as the heroic victor was adapted over the centuries to accord with the prevailing military trappings of the day and this, too, continued to exert influence on the late medieval period and the work of bardic poets. With a developing interest in the physicality of Christ’s suffering and the extent of his wounds, these more graphic descriptions underlined the ferocity of the battle that Christ underwent before achieving victory. Other models of redemption switched the focus from Christ’s relations with the devil to Christ’s relations with humanity. Focusing on the enmity which remained between the human race and God from the time of the Fall, Christ’s death on the cross was understood to effect reconciliation between hostile parties. He becomes “the peace between us … restoring peace through the cross” (Eph 2:13–18). In this instance, the hostility is not primarily between Christ and the devil but between God and his human creation. Here, too, the wounds of 5 The literature in this area is vast. However, for a good point of entry see the essays in: Stephen T. Davis et al., The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts, from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gerald O’Collins, Jesus Our Redeemer: A Christian Approach to Sal­ vation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

294

Ryan

Christ assumed a special role in the peace process. Other important models of redemption include the notion of Christ substituting himself to be punished in place of mankind or, alternatively, making satisfaction for mankind’s sin, as promoted by Anselm. Peter Abelard’s (1079–1142) emphasis on love as the key to understanding the redemption also played a prominent role in the religious works of bardic poets and, once again, the wounds of Christ were used to full effect in developing this model. Lastly, redemption was often conceived of as a recreation or reconstitution of the created order, and thus the fecundity of the cross, the “tree” of Christ’s passion, was emphasized. Here, Christ’s wounds and his copious shedding of blood could be quite easily employed by bardic poets who wished to elaborate on this theme. The metaphor also had an added advantage as it mirrored the signs that one would expect to become visible on the landscape governed by a just ruler – the flourishing of nature and an abundance of harvest. These various models of redemption (and there were others, too) were, of course, not mutually exclusive and there are echoes of a number of them sometimes within a single poem. A bardic poet’s approach to the passion of Christ was multi-layered, drawing from a rich store of tradition, some of it recent and more of it many centuries old.6 A short survey of some of the imagery used in the poems bears this out. The early thirteenth-century poem Lóchrann Soillse ag Síol Ádhaimh (Adam’s Race Hath a Torch of Flame), attributed to Donnchadh Mór Ó Dálaigh (c. 1175–1244),7 is a good example to begin with. The poet, who is concerned with the prospect of the Last Judgment, speaks of the lasting effects of Christ’s wounding and its consequences: A-tá créachta ar a chíogh ndeis nach faghthar liaigh a leighis 6 See: Salvador Ryan, “‘Reaping a Rich Harvest of Humanity’: Images of Redemption in Bardic Religious Poetry,” in Having Life in His Name: Living, Thinking and Communicating the Christian Life of Faith, ed. Brendan Leahy and Séamus O’Connell (Dublin: Veritas, 2011), 239–51. 7 Ó Dálaigh is one of the most celebrated of the early bardic poets and some 160 compositions are attributed to him, many of them dubiously. He was married in his earlier years and one of his sons predeceased him. In his latter days, he became a monk and is buried in the Cistercian abbey of Boyle, County Roscommon. Ó Dálaigh is described by the seventeenth-century Annals of the Four Masters as “a poet who never was and never will be surpassed.” Aidan Breen, “Ó Dálaigh (O’Daly), Donnchadh Mór,” Dictionary of Irish Biography online: (accessed 18 June 2013). Dán Dé: The Poems of Donnchadh Mór Ó Dálaigh and the Religious Poems in the Duaniare of the Yellow Book of Lecan, ed. Lambert McKenna (Dublin: The Educational Company of Ireland, 1922). Unless otherwise stated, translations are all by Lambert McKenna. Poem and stanza numbers are given in parentheses in the text.

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

295

i leith fheirge is eadh a-tá nach dearga an cneadh an chéad-lá [Still on his shapely breast are the wounds which no leech can cure; owing to His wrath they are as red today as on the first day] (Dán Dé 28.7). The poet recounts how Christ’s wounds shall flow again on the last day and that he will hold his red (bloodied) cross in his hand, his demand for vengeance appalling even his mother, Mary (Dán Dé 28.19). In a subsequent verse, Ó Dálaigh addresses the cross itself as a chros chréachtach “O wounded cross” and asks it not to blame him for the cross’s wounds. In the very same verse, the poet appeals to the cross to protect him from the wrath arising from this wounding (Dán Dé 28.21). In this early example of bardic religious poetry, the wounding of Christ and the predominant instrument of his passion, the cross, are conceived of as working for humanity’s weal while also standing in condemnation over it for Christ’s death. This paradox is frequently found throughout the period in which the bardic corpus was composed and is the key to understanding how devotions such as the Five Wounds of Christ and the arma Christi worked: simultaneously as emblems of salvation and harbingers of condemnation. The distinction between the two was literally in the eye (or perhaps, better, the heart) of the beholder, who was expected to respond to these symbols with repentance and sorrow for sin.8 The final stanza takes the form of an appeal from the poet to a local saint, St. Ruadhan of Lorrha, to save him specifically from the spear wound (or the debt incurred for its infliction) (Dán Dé 28.46). There are many examples of Ó Dálaigh paying particular attention to the wounds of Christ in his poetry. In the poem Éisdidh re Marbhnaidh Meic Dhé (Listen to the Elegy on God’s Son), he remarks on how pitiful it is that the men of earth have wounded their king’s breast: “A lucht an talmhan is truagh / bhar n-amhladh ar ucht bhar ríogh” [Pitiful, ye men of earth, the marks ye put on your King’s breast] (Dán Dé 26.4), proceeding to note how: Ionnsa treaghdadh a thaoibh ghil ionnsa daoibh a dheargadh sein 8 See: Salvador Ryan, “Reign of Blood: Devotion to the Wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Ireland,” in Irish History: A Research Yearbook, ed. Joost Augusteijn and Mary Ann Lyons (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), 137–49; Ryan, “The arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland,” in The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, ed. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 243–72.

296

Ryan

[mór] gcneadh ar Mac Moire a-muigh brat d’fhuil a chroidhe fá chneidh (Dán Dé 26.5). [Grievous to you His fair body’s piercing and reddening; many the wounds on Mary’s Son, a cloak of His heart’s blood over that wounding.] The poet’s emphasis on the large number of wounds and, indeed, his reference to wounds upon wounds (which may suggest the blood from Christ’s heartwound flowing down over the rest of his wounded body) should be read in the context of a growing interest in the sheer volume of blood lost by Christ. Bardic poetry of the fifteenth century records an actual number for the wounds that Christ suffered, influenced as it was by devotions such as that associated with the story of the revelation of Christ’s wounds to St. Bridget of Sweden (1303– 1373), which was prefaced to the set of prayers known as the “Fifteen Oes” in fifteenth-century England.9 Ó Dálaigh goes on, in the same poem, to speak of the pain of Christ’s foot on the cold nail which tortured him, his hand on the sharp spike and of the redness of his hand and foot into which nails were driven (Dán Dé 26.6–7). Some stanzas later, Ó Dálaigh speaks of “cuanna ar n-a leadradh a lámh” [fair is his hand all torn] (Dán Dé 26.21), and he offers his poetry in atonement for his part in this wounding. In the same stanza, he refers to “cuanna ar n-a threaghdhadh a thaobh / ag cealgadh craobh uadha d’fhíon” [fair his pierced side, drawing forth from him streams of wine] (Dán Dé 26.21). This is given a Eucharistic interpretation, as Ó Dálaigh follows directly with a vow to drink Christ’s “wineblood” worthily. Here, once again, the quaffing of Christ’s Eucharistic blood could at once be a pledge of salvation or a sign of perdition, depending on 9 See: Andrew Breeze, “The Number of Christ’s Wounds,” The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 32 (1985): 84–91. Stories of Christ revealing the number and extent of his wounds to female religious were relatively common. Among those reported to have received these revelations were St. Mechtild of Hackeborn (1241–99), St. Gertrude the Great (1256–1301/2), and St. Frances of Rome (1384–1440). Douglas Gray calls this development a “grotesquely statistical turn.” See: Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (New York: Routledge, 1972), 133. In this volume, Vibeke Olson discusses the 5,475 wounds of Christ and the 547,500 drops blood shed during his Passion in relation to artistic renderings of his wounds. See: “Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space,” 313–39. For the influence of the mystical tradition on late medieval Irish devotional literature see: Salvador Ryan, “Christ the Wounded Lover and Affective Piety in Late Medieval Ireland and Beyond”, in The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe: Images, Objects and Practices, ed. Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan and Laura Katrine Skinnebach (Dublin: Four Courts Press, forthcoming, 2015).

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

297

one’s disposition, something Ó Dálaigh would doubtless have known from Paul’s warning against “eating and drinking God’s judgment” (1 Corinthians 11:29). Donnchadh Mór was not alone in his evocative references to Christ’s wounded body. His contemporary and possible kinsman, Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh (c. 1180–1250),10 if the poem Déana mo Theagosg a Thríonóid (Instruct me, O Trinity) is, in fact, his, presents a stark image of the state of Christ’s body when he recounts how “Ro ba criathar toll gar dtearmonn / do thaobh gléigeal do ghlac shoirbh” [To save us, Thy white body and generous hand were as a pierced sieve] (Aithdioghluim Dána 70.25).11 Returning to the verse of Donnchadh Mór, in Mairg nach Tathaigh na Trátha (Woe to Him who Keeps not the Hours), the wounds of Christ are invoked in a much more positive manner. Ó Dálaigh speaks of Christ’s wounded foot keeping him from hell, his wounded hand driving demons away, and his wounded side saving him from muinntir ndiabhail “devil’s folk” (Dán Dé 24.13–14). Ó Dálaigh, who by this time has entered monastic life, contemplates Christ’s wounds in Éisdidh re Marbhnaidh Mheic Dé (Listen to the Elegy on God’s Son) while saying his Hours before Christ’s image “re chruth nDé ar ndéanamh mo thráth” (Dán Dé 26.10). References to the use of religious imagery as an aid to devotion are relatively rare in bardic poetry, and are, thus, all the more revealing when they appear. Fifteenth-century poet, Tadhg Óg Ó hUiginn (†1448),12 in a poem which encourages its audience to contemplate the fifteen sorrows of Christ’s passion, Slán ar n-a Mharbhadh Mac Dé (Alive again after Death is God’s Son), admonishes his audience in the following words: “Íomháigh Críosd ar bhur gcomhair / is follus go bhfacabhair / ní cumhuin libh clí an chéasaidh …” [Ye have surely seen before your eyes the image of Christ [yet] ye remember not the tortured body] (Aithdioghluim Dána 78.33). Ó hUiginn’s poetry represents a good example of the increasing emphasis on affective devotion in late medieval Ireland. This was the century in which a number of translations of devotional works 10 11 12

Aidan Breen, “Ó Dálaigh, Muireadhach Albanach,” Dictionary of Irish Biography online: (accessed 19 June 2013). Aithdioghluim Dána, ed. Lambert McKenna, 2 vols (London: ITS, 1939–40). Poem and stanza numbers are given in parentheses in the text. Ó hUiginn belonged to a celebrated family of professional poets in Connacht. His considerable skill was clearly in demand as he is known to have composed for many of the most prominent aristocratic Gaelic families of the day, among them the O’Neills of Tyrone, O’Donnells of Tyrconnell, O’Carrolls of Ely, and Maguires of Fermanagh, in addition to many powerful Anglo-Norman families such as the Butlers of Ormond and MacWilliam Burkes of Mayo. He died in Kinconla, Galway, and is buried in the Dominican priory of Strade in County Mayo. See: Marc Caball, “Ó hUiginn, Tadhg Óg,” Dictionary of Irish Biography online: (accessed 19 June 2013).

298

Ryan

from Latin into Irish were undertaken, including texts such as Meditationes Vitae Christi, the Liber de Passione Christi, and the Vita Rhythmica. Ó hUiginn encourages his audience to recall the fifteen sorrows suffered by Christ during his passion. The third of these sorrows concerns “ceithre luit na dtrí dtairnge” [the four wounds of the three nails] (Aithdioghluim Dána 78.13), namely the wounds in his feet and hands (omitting mention of the side wound, which is referenced in stanza 16). Having described Christ’s giving up of the spirit on the cross, Ó hUiginn notes that: ní frioth ’n-a dhiaidh déar fhola i gcorp Críosd gér chomhrogha Mac Dé gan anam gan fhuil sé ’s a chalann ’n-a chréachtuibh. [Thereafter not a drop of blood was to be found in the body of Christ, the Son of God, lifeless and bloodless, and His flesh all wounded – though ‘twas His own choice] (Aithdioghluim Dána 78. 22). Here, Ó hUiginn takes contemplation of the volume of Christ’s blood lost to the point of exsanguination – his total emptying of blood, which was a feature of mystical writing of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.13 Caroline Walker Bynum, in her work on northern Germany, makes the association between this idea of Christ’s shedding all of his blood and the devotional emphasis on the volume of blood lost by Christ, which came to be expressed in the enumeration of Christ’s wounds and his drops of blood and even their measurement, what she terms “soteriological book-keeping.”14 This fifteenth-century bardic poem supports Bynum’s link that she draws between the two. Ó hUiginn becomes ever more graphic in his description of Christ’s torture as the poem progresses: Doimhne a chneadh do badh cás te sgoltadh compair a chroidhe Sgoltadh learg mbán a dá bhonn agus clár ndearg a dhearnonn. Nír áirmheamar sin go se a chneadha ón choróin spíne 13 14

Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 166. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 176.

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

299

Dar chuir cumhgach ar a cheann rer mhuidh cumhdach a chuisleann. Sé gona ’s a deich ar Dhia sé céad lot ar Mhac Maria Sé line do bhean a broid sé mhíle cneadh ar chaogaid. [A burning affliction was the depth of his wounds, the bursting of His breast, the splitting of His feet’s white skin and His hand’s reddened palms. And as yet I have said naught of His wounding by the thorny crown which compressed His head and by which the covering of His veins was burst. On God, Mary’s Son, were sixteen wounds and six hundreds and fifty-six thousand; they saved the Six Generations from ruin] (Aithdioghluim Dána 78.24–6). Towards the end of the poem, Ó hUiginn mentions the side or heart-wound of Christ, highlighting its accusatory role: “A-tá fúinn cneadh an chroidhe / nach iadhann tre fhíochmhuire / ’s an fhuil dhearg tar a doras / fa bhfuil fearg is faltonas” [Before us is the wound in His heart, kept open through (God’s) wrath, and the red blood welling up over its edge [literally “door”]; (God’s) anger and vengeance is stirred at the sight of that blood] (Aithdioghluim Dána 78.37). In the poem Beag nar Dhearmadas mo Dhúthaigh (“I Have Almost Forgotten my Native Land”), also by Ó hUiginn, the poet asks Christ to hide the red cross of accusation from him on the Day of Judgment and to dún an taobh toll “close thy gaping side” (Dán Dé 16.17). For humanity as a whole, this was dangerous blood, perpetually flowing from Christ as a reminder of mankind’s complicity in his rejection, torture, and crucifixion. Such images were designed to strike terror into the heart of the hearer or reader, a fear that would drive the individual to heart-felt repentance for his or her sin. The work of the friar-poet Pilib (Philip) Bocht Ó hUiginn (†1478)15 displays many similarities with that of his name-sake, Tadhg Óg, quite likely a kinsman, 15

Described by the Annals of Ulster in his obituary (1487) as the most prolific composer of bardic verse “in recent times,” this poet was a Franciscan friar whose poems (chiefly religious) became renowned as exemplars of the craft and were frequently cited. We know virtually nothing, however, of his background except that his father was Conn Crosach. Eoin Mac Cárthaigh, “Ó hUiginn, Pilib Bocht,” Dictionary of Irish Biography online: (accessed 20 June 2013).

300

Ryan

in its graphic descriptions of Christ’s torture. In one poem, Buailfidh Dia a Bhuille Bháire (God will Strike His Stroke in the Game), Philip Bocht recalls how “do clos gár ghéire galor [féidhe] na mbos gá mblodhadh, leim gach ailt as a ionadh” [the bursting of His sinews could be heard, the dislocation of His limbs”] (Philip Bocht Ó hUiginn 3.15).16 But he also captures something significant regarding the dual-function (salvific and condemnatory) of Christ’s wounds and his shedding of blood. In the poem Mó iná a Teist Trócuire Dé (Greater than Thought is God’s Mercy), Philip Bocht observes that “súgh th’ochta an uair do shilis / do chóir dhúinn do dhíslighis / gach re sreabh do chrú an chroidhe / do fhear tú ’s don trócoire” [shedding thy breast blood thou didst abandon thy claims against me – every second drop of thy blood thou didst shed in mercy] (Philip Bocht Ó hUiginn 17.15). Here, Philip Bocht makes a christological statement, emphasizing the hypostatic union of human and divine natures in Christ which had implications for how satisfaction was conceived to operate. Irish bardic poets often spoke of humanity owing God the éiric (the “blood-price,” a compensation that a perpetrator of illegal killing owed to the victim’s family in early Irish law).17 Here, Philip Bocht suggests that only Christ’s divine nature will claim compensation (as his human nature will be pleading on humanity’s behalf). In this way, only half of the blood shed by Christ will accuse humanity, the other half working, instead, for its salvation. Here, then, God’s justice and his mercy converge in the person of Christ. The poetry of Philip’s kinsman, Tadhg Óg Ó hUiginn is significant for another reason: it contains the earliest occurrences of the “Charter of Christ” image in Irish bardic poetry. This is a fourteenth-century English allegory that presents Christ as granting a charter to humanity (some examples depict this as a land grant, i.e. Heaven; others see it as granting peace terms and bringing an end to the hostility between God and his creation).18 This charter is granted on the cross and is written, not on parchment, but on Christ’s skin.19 The writing implements are the lance and nails which pierce Christ’s body and the ink his blood (his heart or side-wound serving as the ink-well into which the pen16 17 18

19

Philip Bocht Ó hUiginn, ed. Lambert McKenna (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1931). Poem and stanza numbers are given in parentheses in the text. See: Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: DIAS, 1988), 126. In this volume, see: Charlene M. Eska, “The Mutilation of Derbforgaill,” 252–64. Andrew Breeze, “The Charter of Christ in Medieval English, Welsh and Irish,” Celtica 19 (1987): 111–20. For a more recent close reading of some English examples, see: Cristina Maria Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 85–105. On the use of the image of skin in the Middle Ages, see the various essays in Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. Katie Walter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

301

lance is dipped). In preparing the “parchment” for writing, Christ’s body is stretched on the frame of the cross. Lastly, Christ’s wounds comprise the very words of this peace document, his heart-wound is conceived of as its seal. In the poem Cairt a Síodhchána ag Síol Ádhaimh (The Peace-Charter given Adam’s Race), Tadhg Óg Ó hUiginn presents God as being in a state of war against humanity’s sins (something he terms the “War of the Apple-Tree”) before Christ sealed peace between the two parties through the side-wound: “is é séala a cairte an créacht” [that wound is the seal of their charter] (Dán Dé 3. 4–5, 11, 13). This poem, which places special emphasis on the object of the “true cross,” relating the story of its finding by St. Helena, goes on to present the cross itself as the charter; moreover, it is a fruitful tree, overcoming the Tree of Knowledge in Eden that crushed humanity with guilt. It is also termed cronn na gcóig síodh “Tree of the five peace-gifts,” denoting Christ’s five wounds. Ó hUiginn asks that the cross place him under the protection of its rider (Christ) (Dán Dé 3.6–10). A number of ways of speaking about redemption coalesce here: it is reconciliation between hostile parties, written in Christ’s blood on his skin as on a document. It is also new life – the fruitful cross highlights Christ’s death as life-giving and infers that it ushers in a new creation. Finally, redemption is a victory over one’s enemies: the reference to Christ riding the cross (as if it were a horse) evokes the heroic battle imagery of Christ charging and overcoming his foes (the powers of darkness) on Calvary. But here it is perhaps more properly the ride of a peace-maker into the midst of a conflict. A sixteenth-century poet, Tadhg Óg Ó Dálaigh (fl.1520), captures this well in the poem Ní Cluain Gabhála Grás Dé (No Appropriated Field is God’s Grace) when he remarks that: Áladh ag anacal cháigh minic fuair fear an eadráin Táinig ribh cách do chabhair do ghnáth fhir an anaghail. [Many the peacemaker who was wounded when saving another man; Thou didst save the world – but at the cost which the peace-maker pays] (Aithdioghluim Dána 71.20) Another poet, Brian Caoch Ó Dálaigh, simply states of Christ that “ar shíodh gontar na rígh riamh” [’tis in striving for peace that kings get wounded].20 Here, 20

“Our Salvation,” ed. Lambert McKenna, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 38 (1949): stanza 35.

302

Ryan

the kingly Christ suffers his passion-wounds while on a peace mission (to effect reconciliation between God and the human race). A number of other poems refer to the “Charter of Christ,” the authors of some of which remain unidentified. One of these is Braon re nDubhadh Diomdha Dé (God’s Anger is the Drop before the Dark Storm), found in a poembook (or duanaire), which was written in 1473. Here, the question of Anselmian satisfaction for Christ’s death is raised once again in a verse that outlines how difficult this is to achieve. Ultimately, the satisfaction rendered to God will need to come from Christ, who offers it on humanity’s behalf: A chomhall ní budh eol uain gémadh cóir comhall do rígh Síodh ar a n-antoir madh áil do sgríobh dháibh i gcartaigh cígh. [Though justice demands that a King be satisfied, we can not satisfy him; (but) on His breast, as on a document, He has written peace-terms for men with which they may well be content] (Aithdioghluim Dána 84.5) The poem proceeds to speak of a number of different kinds of wounding: the poet likens mankind’s repeated sinfulness to a child who continues to hurt himself: “meinic do ghon leanb a láimh” [a child cuts his hand so often] (Aithdioghluim Dána 84.17), and asks God not to withhold his pardon on this account. In a later verse, he argues that Christ’s reluctance to call the poet to account (literally, to seize his assets) for the wounds he inflicted (through sin) has facilitated him in his fresh wounding of his Lord (Aithdioghluim Dána 84.23). Mankind’s inability to pay the compensation (éiric) owed for the killing of Christ, which was at the centre of Anselm’s question Cur Deus homo?, is raised in a poem entitled Droichead na bPeacthach Páis Dé (The Sinner’s Bridge is God’s Passion), which is found in manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but which cannot be more precisely dated. The poet asks: Éaraic páise Mhic Muire cia ionnmhus ré n-íocfuidhe muna díol créachta do chuirp i síodh an éachta ordhuirc?21

21

“The Bridge of Salvation,” ed. Lambert McKenna, Irish Monthly 58 (1930): stanza 30.

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

303

[With what wealth could be paid the éiric of Christ’s passion, except the value of thy bodily wounds found in the pardoning power of that great achievement?] Christ’s passion is presented as the bridge to be used by all sinners, a public road with five streams (the five wounds). The soteriology here is remarkably positive; even when the poet remarks that only one in a hundred find the crossing easy, understood in the context of the poem as a whole, the fault is shown to lie not with God’s lack of generosity but with the sinner’s unwillingness to repent.22 Bardic poets had already been using a rich store of imagery to describe the wounds of Christ, but this expands and develops rapidly from the second half of the fifteenth century and through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Part of this can be attributed to the proliferation of cults that were already beginning to mature, such as the Five Wounds and the arma Christi, in church furnishings, wall paintings, tomb figure sculpture, devotional texts, and woodcuts.23 In addition, the new impetus which accompanied the Observant reform movement among mendicant orders also accelerated the pace of devotional growth.24 In the sixteenth century in particular, poets used a dizzying array of ever more elaborate images to speak of the wounds of Christ and their implications for the salvation of the individual and of humanity as a whole. One of the most effective bardic depictions of Christ’s passion is that which presents him as a heroic Gaelic chieftain riding into battle against his foes and suffering many wounds, yet emerging victorious. The idea of a warrior Christ (or Christus miles), of course, was prominent earlier in the Middle Ages and can be found, perhaps most famously, in the Old English Dream of the Rood. This image of Christ bearing the weapons of crucifixion in battle, discussed in a well-known study by Rosemary Woolf, underwent a make-over in the age of the amour courtois, transforming Christ into a lover-knight.25 With the increasing emphasis on the extent of Christ’s wounds, however, the very arms he bears 22 23 24

25

“The Bridge of Salvation,” stanzas 31–32. See: Elina Gertsman, “Wandering Wounds: the Urban Body in Imitatio Christi,” in this volume, 340–65. See especially: Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland, ed. Rachel Moss, Colmán Ó Clabaigh, and Salvador Ryan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006); Colmán Ó Clabaigh, The Friars in Ireland, 1224–1540 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012); Salvador Ryan, “Reign of Blood,” 137–49; Ryan, “The arma Christi,” 243–72. Rosemary Woolf, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature,” in Art and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval Literature, ed. Heather O’Donoghue (London: The Hambledon Press, 1986), 99–118.

304

Ryan

become increasingly turned against himself, rendering him into the abject Image of Pity of late medieval art. As the hero-Christ evolves, the motivation for his riding into battle also changes: it becomes an act of love. Likewise, the ostentatio vulnerum, Christ’s display of his wounds to the devotee, is expected to elicit love and pity in return but, most crucially, sorrow for sin and heart-felt repentance. Many of these images are frequently found in bardic religious poetry, especially in the sixteenth century. In a number of poems, a sixteenth-century poet, Diarmuid Ó Cobhthaigh,26 speaks of Christ as a “leanb re luadh oidhreachta” [a young prince set on asserting his right to his inheritance] (Aithdioghluim Dána 65.26) who rides a steed (the cross) “gan fhéachoin dá oighidh” [paying no heed to death] (64.15). Mixing the traditional battle imagery with the idea of Christ as Lover of the Soul, Ó Cobhthaigh speaks of him carrying a sgiath an ghráidh “shield of love” in his hands for protection, yet is still wounded (Aithdioghluim Dána 64.17). This makes him all the more determined, and he advances upon the enemy fort even as his wounds become increasingly inflamed (64.21). The paradox is, of course, that Christ’s most deadly wound (the heart or side-wound) proves to be the decisive one in his attaining victory; it is his death-wound and, yet, it is on account of Christ’s death that he defeats his enemies. In Ó Cobhthaigh’s poem Deacair Aighneas Éarca Ríogh (Terrible to Hear the King’s Éiric Claimed), he states that “rí an bheatha do tholl a thaobh / dá dhruim go ndeachaidh i dtréan” [The world’s Lord had his side pierced and thus entered on His power] (Aithdioghluim Dána 63.7). The bardic poet Muirchertach Ó Cionga (c. 1562– 1639),27 who also worked in Offaly, also refers to the passion and death of Christ as a war in his poem Beart Cáis Cogadh Tighearna (A Sad Affair was the Lord’s War), stating that it was brought to an end by the Lord’s breast (Aithdioghluim Dána 60.1). In this poem, Ó Cionga imagines the breast-wound as a shield in battle, blunting the spear-point of God’s wrath when it threatens humanity 26

27

From a bardic family of Westmeath origin, Ó Cobhthaigh (fl. 1563) is most associated with Offaly and may have been employed as a poet by the O’Connors. Six long poems from Ó Cobhthaigh survive, five of which are religious. Darren McGettigan, “Ó Cobhthaigh, ­Diarmaid,” Dictionary of Irish Biography online: (accessed 20 June 2013). Member of a learned family of scribes and poets from “Fox’s Country” in the barony of Kilcoursey in County Offaly, he would later teach Irish to William Bedell, provost of Trinity College Dublin and afterwards Bishop of Kilmore (1629). Ó Cionga converted to Protestantism and was ordained as a priest in 1633. He undertook a translation of the Old Testament into Irish at Bedell’s request. Bernadette Cunningham, “King, Murtagh (Ó Cionga, Muirchertach),” Dictionary of Irish Biography online: (accessed 20 June 2013).

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

305

(60.39). Here, of course, the battle is between the forces of God’s wrath and a cowering and guilty humanity shielded by the wounded Christ. In the poem Do Ní Éanmhac Ionad Cloinne (One Son takes the Place of All),28 Maolmhuire, son of Cairbre Ó hUiginn,29 provides a vivid description of the crucified Christ riding into battle: Is í an chrochsoin a each iomchair ’n-a fhior luit an lá do bhí Nír iognadh each fa fhear ngonta dá mbeath nar chneadh ochta í. [The cross was his steed when he was wounded; there would be nothing strange in a wounded man riding a steed were it not that he was wounded in the heart] (Aithdioghluim Dána 77.35). Ó hUiginn further emphasizes the significance of Christ’s bearing a heart wound when he notes that: Ní thiocfadh mar tháinig uadha áladh cígh gibé ar a mbiadh Annamh théagar ó chneidh chroidhe do b’eagal sin roimhe riamh. [No man wounded in the heart could have recovered as Christ did; scarce anyone survives a heart wound. It was always dreaded] (Aithdioghluim Dána 77.37). This was the marvel that set the heroic Christ above the greatest of Gaelic Irish chieftains for the bardic poets: the paradox of Christ winning a stunning victory precisely at the moment when he receives what was considered to be a death-wound. In spite of the preoccupation with Christ’s physical suffering 28 29

Aithdioghluim Dána, poem 77. There is only one poem ascribed to this individual. If the “mac Cairbre” or “son of Cairbre” is a scribal error this may be Maolmhuire Ó hUIginn (†1590), brother of the more famous poet Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn. Maolmhuire Ó hUiginn was born in the territory of Leyney in County Sligo and later studied for the priesthood on the Continent, becoming a Franciscan and later archbishop of Tuam. He died in Antwerp in 1590 and was buried in the city’s cathedral. Darren McGettigan, “Ó hUiginn, Maol Muire,” Dictionary of Irish Biography online: (accessed 20 June 2013).

306

Ryan

and abject humiliation in late medieval devotional literature, the figure of Christus triumphans had not left the stage. Bardic poets were accustomed to describing the martial exploits of their secular patrons. After all, the greater part of a poet’s oeuvre was praise poetry written for the Gaelic aristocracy. Not surprisingly, the poets’ treatment of the wounds of their earthly subjects often closely resembled the treatment that they gave the wounds of Christ. A late thirteenth-century poem dedicated to Brian Mág Shamhradháin of Tullyhaw, County Cavan, D’uaislibh Taoiseach Banbha Brian (Brian is one of Banbha’s Chiefs) speaks of him as one who deargas crann, that is, one who is a “reddener of spear,” and also a “giolla óg anas re lot” [a young warrior who shirks no wounding]; and yet he is also a peacemaker: “… sidh gan onchoin tar a fich / breth De do chennaig dho chach / in trath do chengail se in sith” [(he) checks his rage and keeps peace; when he binds a peace he purchases God’s will for all] (Book of Magauran 2.4, 23, 21).30 A later poem entitled Ramhuch Táinig Tásg Fearghail (All too Soon has Come the News of Fearghal) composed on the death of Brian’s son, Fearghal, in 1322 contains the following stanza relating to his wounding: “Ma da bi in druim gonta od ghuin / is tre luing thochta a Feraguil” [if thy back was marked by a wound, it was a wound that came through the cavity of thy breast, O Fearghal] (Book of Magauran 5.28). This suggests that Fearghal never turned his back on his foes, bravely facing them instead. The portrayal of Christ’s suffering a breast-wound in the religious poetry must also have brought to mind the image of a courageous warrior who would never think of fleeing from conflict. An early-fourteenth-century poem by Raghnall Ó hUiginn entitled Brian a-nois do-Ním do Mhaghnus (Another Brian I Consider Maghnus), celebrating Maghnus Mág Shamradháin, portrays its subject as marching forth when his foe is strongest, of leading forth his cavalry, and rushing on in fierce charge, riding his young and graceful steed, and never thinking of all his previous wounds (Book of Magauran 11.4, 6 and 9). This imagery could just as easily be found in a sixteenth-century bardic poem on Christ’s passion. The resonances are further strengthened when the poet remarks how: Maghnus nocho meinic [adhmhas] airm bhiodhbhadh do bhéin re ucht Ní feas go huair sguir na sgainnre a bhfuair tuir Aidhne dá hulc.

30

The Book of Magauran: Leabhar Méig Shamhradháin, ed. Lambert McKenna (Dublin: DIAS, 1947). Poem and stanza numbers are given in parentheses in the text.

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

307

[Not often does Maghnus, Lord of Aighne, mind a foe’s spear striking his chest; folk know not till after the fight how much hardship the fight caused him] (Book of Magauran 11.18) But it is further on in the poem that the comparisons between the wounded Maghnus and the wounded Christ become clearer still: Liaidh duini i ndeaghaidh a uthrais aichnidh do a ndeanand gach guin Ar meth chnead ar o Ruairc remi cuairt ba er cnedhi do chuir. [His wounding makes him a leech, for he knows the effects of each wound; because Ruairc’s scion has been wounded himself he now visits his wounded men] (Book of Magauran 11.39). Again, this image of Maghnus could just as easily be applicable to Christ, further exemplifying the frequent elision between earthly Gaelic Irish lords and the Lord Christ in bardic imagery. It was common for poets to refer to the wounds of Christ (and also the cross itself) as herbs to heal the human race; concomitantly, the epithet of liaigh or “physician” was used of Christ from the thirteenth-century bardic poetry of Donnchadh Mór Ó Dálaigh onwards.31 In the sixteenth-century poem Deacair Aighneas Éarca Ríogh, Diarmuid Ó Cobhthaigh uses the image in the following way: Fiu an liaigh do leigheas a ghaol nach [biadh] a leigheas gan luagh Do fhóir leanb ar gcneadha ar chlár lámh gach leagha dearg as dual. [The leech who cured His race deserves not that His cure of it go not unpaid; the Son hanging on the Cross cured our wounds; a leech’s hand is naturally blood-stained] (Aithdioghluim Dána 63.31). Elsewhere, the same poet refers to each of the wounds as a soothing herb for Eve’s race and the heart-wound as an herb “grown in the warm weather of

31

In this volume, see: Virginia Langum, “‘The Wounded Surgeon’: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England,” 269–90.

308

Ryan

love.”32 The heart-wound was widely considered to be the locus par excellence of Christ’s mercy and was frequently invoked as a refuge for sinners. Some poets chose to reverse the role of physician and patient, however, when they attempted to respond in some way to the image of the tortured Christ. In the poem Dlighidh Iasacht a Iodhlacudh re Athtarbha (It is Incumbent upon Me to Restore with Interest the Loan Given to Me), found in a late fourteenth-century manuscript, Gofraidh Ó Cléirigh, who seems to be considering embarking on a pilgrimage of penance to Rome or Jerusalem, makes the following petition: Lossa i lot Críst go gcuireann as ar [gcroidhteachaibh] mac seang dar siair go mbeam ’n-ar liaigh dá [loiteachaibh] [May I find herbs in my heart and place them in Christ’s wounds; may I be a leech for the wounds of the gracious Son of my sister] (Aithdioghluim Dána 61.10). While Christ offers humanity his wounds as herbs to cure its sinfulness, individuals offer their virtue and good works to cure Christ; on this basis, Ó Cleirigh asks “go ndeach mo dhéarc / is-teach i gcréacht a chollasan” [let my charity sink into Christ’s wound] (Aithdioghluim Dána 61.11). Thus, descriptions of the wounds of Gaelic chieftains and those of Christ often influenced each other, in some instances presenting the wounded Christ as a courageous secular lord who was worthy of respect, but in others exalting the secular lord to almost Christ-like status.33 Two late sixteenth-century poems dedicated to Cormac O’Hara of Sligo – Sona Sin a Chlanda Cuind (‘Tis Well for You O children of Conn) and Ceanglam re Chéile, a Chormaic (O Cormac, let us Form a Pact with Each Other) – are good examples of this. In the first, Cormac is depicted as the shepherd of the wide plain who makes a dashing raid “tre dheargdhoire chruaidh caoilshleadh” [through the hard blood-red forest of sharp spears] (Book of O’Hara 9.22, 24) and often shedding his red blood in defence of the territory of 32 33

Aithdioghluim Dána, poem 64, stanza 23; Aithdioghluim Dána, poem 67, stanza 7. This is partly attributable to the conservative nature of the bardic order itself. Poets had few qualms about re-using a store of stock motifs, which were continuously employed over a number of centuries. But it also highlights something important about ideas concerning patronage in the Middle Ages, namely that the dividing line between earthly and heavenly lordship was not always very clear.

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

309

Luighne.34 In the second, the poet states that because the territory of Luighne was now under Cormac’s rule, she (the territory is personified as a woman) has a leech or physician (liaigh) to cure her wounds. That leech is Cormac who provides her with a healing herb (Book of O’Hara 12.16). The motivation for the warrior Christ’s riding into battle on the cross, his steed, developed over time. Poets such as Diarmuid Ó Cobhthaigh and others in the sixteenth century emphasize Christ’s love for the human race as his primary motivation and the force that drove him to the cross and to his wounding. The rejection of his sacrifice by sinful humanity was simply regarded as resulting in his fresh wounding. Only an appeal to Christ’s offer of mercy could close his gaping wounds; when this was spurned, the wounds remained fresh and bleeding. Often poets pitted Christ’s love for humanity against his desire for justice. In Deacair Aighneas Éarca Ríogh (Terrible to Hear the King’s Éiric Claimed), Ó Cobhthaigh speaks of Christ’s passion on the cross as a desperate hunt for humanity: fear ar seilge fuair ar bhfaill cruaidh a fheirge nó gur fhill gual oinigh ler cheannaigh chloinn ag boing theallaigh troighigh thinn. [When hunting us He found us at His mercy, but the (burning) coal of the love that urged Him to redeem His children was bursting the furnace of His wounded feet, and bent the steel of His anger] (Aithdioghluim Dána 63.32). His very death is attributed to his excess of love in another of Ó Cobhthaigh’s poems. Christ died because he could not keep within his heart his love for his race; in other words, his heart was drained of its contents, another instance of the significance placed on kenotic exsanguination (Aithdioghluim Dána 64.1). His heart cavity now empty, the human race has an opportunity to seek shelter there. Tadhg Óg Ó Dálaigh (fl.1520), in the final stanza of the poem Ní Cluain Gabhála Grás Dé (No Appropriated Field is God’s Grace), refers to this when he mentions the invitation of Christ to enter in to his wound: Ar mbeith a-muigh nír mhian lais crann an chígh ar gcraobh eolais 34

The Book of O’Hara: Leabhar Í Eadhra, ed. Lambert McKenna (Dublin: DIAS, 1952). Poem and stanza numbers are given in parentheses in the text.

310

Ryan

Nír hacradh cách ó chridhe gér gnáth athchar ainbhfine. [God wished not us to be kept out of His heart; the spear in His breast points the way in for us; no man was excluded from it, though men have ever wished to keep a foe at a distance] (Aithdioghluim Dána 71.35). If individuals were not prepared to enter willingly into Christ’s heart-wound, they would need to be gathered in some other way. In the poem Daingean Connradh fa Chairt Ríogh (Strong is a Contract Drawn up on a Royal Document), Brian Caoch Ó Dálaigh, whose work appears in a duanaire or poem-book compiled for William Nugent of Delvin, Westmeath in 1577 (where the poems of Diarmuid Ó Cobhthaigh can also be found), spoke of a red net of breast-blood spread across the stream flowing from his side wound and of a hidden Christ fishing for the human race, another instance of Christ actively hunting humanity.35 The early seventeenth-century poet, Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird (late 1540s’–c. 1618),36 in the poem Mairg nach Doirteann a Dhéara (Woe to Him who Sheds Not Tears) juxtaposes the draining of Christ’s heart of blood with what was judged to be the appropriate response of the individual contemplating the passion: the shedding of tears of sorrow.37 Here too, Mac an Bhaird speaks of Christ’s total exsanguination: Ar ndáil a fhola uile dia hAoine dar n-ionghuire Ní raibhe ann aon-bhraon d’fhuil an taobh-ghaol thall do thiormuigh.38 [“After shedding all his blood on Friday to save us, no drop was left in him, His heart-love had dried it up”] 35 36

37 38

“Our Salvation,” stanzas 9, 11. Mac an Bhaird was poet to the O’Donnells of Tyrconnell. He spent some time in Scotland in the 1580s, receiving £100 for a poem he composed for James VI. He spent some time on the Continent, namely at St. Anthony’s College, Louvain, where he addressed two poems to its Irish Franciscan founder, Florence Conry. No record of him survives for the period after 1618. Marc Caball, “Mac an Bhaird, Fearghal Óg,” Dictionary of Irish Biography online: (accessed 20 June 2013). “Sorrow for sin,” ed. Lambert McKenna, The Irish Monthly 56 (1928), stanza 19. “Sorrow for sin,” stanza 20.

The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

311

And then, in two separate stanzas closely following, Mac an Bhaird says that one drop of blood would have sufficed to redeem the world.39 Yet, this claim of the sufficiency of one drop of Christ’s blood to effect mankind’s salvation did not make redundant much of the prevailing devotion of the mid-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which was often fixated on the volume of Christ’s blood loss and the number of his wounds. This can be seen in some vividly colored passion illustrations found in an Irish manuscript produced for Seán mac Oliverus Burke, chieftain of the MacWilliam Burkes of Mayo in the 1570s.40 Both the scene of Christ’s scourging and the Ecce Homo present Christ’s body as entirely speckled by red dots, representing his multiple wounds.41 When such images were familiar in 1570s’ Mayo, it is little wonder to find one of the O’Hara’s, namely Cormac, in nearby Sligo being presented as a Christ-like figure in secular bardic verse in 1584. In the poem Ciondus Frith Fearand Luighne? (How was the Land of Luighne Got?), Tadhg, son of Giolla Brighde Meic Bhruideagha, claims that “gan fhoil a chneis do choigil” [without sparing his blood] (Book of O’Hara 6.35), Cormac exalted the fortunes both of himself and his territory. But it is the stanza following that copper-fastens the comparison: Ó chéibh mbuig go bonn ttaisgeal Ní fhoill ball dá bhallaibhsion – ní ró teasmholta ar thuir mBreadh – Nach phfuil treasghonta ad thimcheal. [From his soft hair to his smooth bright foot, there is no spot on him which has not been wounded for thy [the territory of Luighne’s] sake – this is no exaggerated praise of the Lord of Breagha] (Book of O’Hara 6.36). Cormac O’Hara is presented as a veritable alter Christus, speckled with innumerable wounds, which he has suffered for the sake of his people. Of O’Hara, therefore, it could also be said “Ecce Homo!” The elision between secular and sacred is complete.

39

40 41

“Sorrow for sin,” stanzas 20, 22; Pope Clement VI made this claim in the bull Unigenitus in 1343, but it had already long been attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 176. Bernadette Cunningham, “Illustrations of the Passion of Christ in the Seanchas Búrcach Manuscript,” in Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland, 16–32. Cunningham, “Illustrations of the Passion of Christ,” 21.

312

Ryan

Bardic religious poetry of the sixteenth century is notable for an explosion of metaphors relating to the wounds of Christ. Waves of Christ’s blood lift the foundering ship of humanity from certain wreckage, depositing it on dry land (or in the sheltered harbor of the breast-wound, which itself is sometimes presented as the sail of humanity’s ship). The five wounds of Christ are referred to as passports for the road and ploughed fields for the reception of the seed of salvation; the rain necessary for the seed’s growth is also provided by these wounds, which comprise a shower of blood-rain. The breast-wound is called a “mother of many children” who are born anew from its depths as the harvest springing from that rain. In another poem, Christ’s heart is the locus for a board-game in which Christ sets about winning the whole board (that is, each member of the human race who is set across the board as an individual piece). Christ’s wounds are also said to shed fíon-fhuil “wine-blood,” another category that is transferable across religious and secular compositions. The breastwound, as the primary dispenser of this wine-like blood, is transformed, in one poem, into the host at the heavenly banquet, performing the duties of “meet and greet” in welcoming all of the Six Generations to paradise.42 In other instances, poets use more familiar imagery still, conceiving of Christ’s wounds as a poet’s attendants, entrusting the breast-wound specifically with the duty of reacaire or reciter of the poet’s verse. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, is evidence that devotional cults associated with the wounded Christ that were popular across the European continent and, indeed, in England, Scotland, and Wales, could be successfully assimilated and re-presented at the heart of native Irish aristocratic society through a medium (bardic poetry) that was renowned for its innate conservatism. 42

For more detailed discussion of these images, see: Salvador Ryan, “Reign of Blood,” 137–49; Ryan, “‘Reaping a Rich Harvest of Humanity,’” 239–51.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

313

Chapter 14

Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space Vibeke Olson

In Hans Memling’s late fifteenth-century painting, Man of Sorrows (Figure 14.1) the beholder is presented with a characteristic late medieval devotional motif: an image of the suffering Christ (Christus patiens) supported by his sorrowing mother and surrounded by the instruments of his torture. Cut and bleeding, he displays the wounds in his hands and side, and the blood that flows from them, in a literal interpretation of the opening lines of the Salve plaga lateris, a prayer to the Holy Side Wound: “Salve plaga lateris nostri redemptoris / ex te enim profluit fons rosei coloris” [Hail wound in our savior’s side / a fountain of rosy color flows forth from you].1 With one pierced hand, Christ supports and draws attention to the gaping hole in his chest as he turns his other hand palm up to catch the river of blood flowing from the deep dark void. The Virgin weeps behind her son, and nails, whip, spear, sponge, and tormentors flank the central figures, engaging the beholder in a meditative Passion dialogue. Although the sorrowing Virgin and the instruments of torture depicted in this painting are integral components in the overall devotion to Christ’s Passion, emphasis on the side wound in particular, and multivalent audience response to it, emerged as a powerful new component of late medieval devotional practice that increasingly sought a more direct and emotional involvement for the believer.2 The wound was first and foremost the source of Christ’s redemptive 1 Cited and translated in John B. Friedman, Northern English Books, Owners, and Makers in the Late Middle Ages (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 161. 2 This desire grew, in part, out of the fourteenth-century devotio moderna that encouraged devotees to take part in sacred events as active participants. Scholarship on the devotio moderna is vast. Noteworthy studies include: John H. van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The ‘Devotio Moderna’ and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Wybren Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries: The ‘Modern Devotion,’ the Canonesses of Windesheim and Their Writings, trans. David F. Johnson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004); A.G. Weiler, “Recent Historiography on the Modern Devotion: Some Debated Questions,” Archief voor de gescheidenis van de Katholieke Kerk in Nederland 27 (1985): 161–175; R.R. Post, The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 1968).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_016

314

Olson

Figure 14.1 Hans Memling. German/Flemish c.1430/40–1494. The Man of Sorrows in the arms of the Virgin 1475 or 1479, Oil and gold leaf on wood panel, 27.4 × 19.9 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1924

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

315

blood, but at the same time it was also an intrinsic object that could exist on its own, a liminal threshold or gateway that signified the transition between secular space (the here and now of the beholder) and sacred space (salvation and life-everlasting). It was also a performative space3 that simultaneously performed for the believer (it bled) or was acted upon through tactile interaction (touching or kissing), thereby inviting participation on the part of the devotee. While Christ’s side wound was traditionally included as part of the larger Passion contemplation, in the later Middle Ages, art and devotion increasingly focus on the wound alone, even to the point of abstracting it from the body itself. Devotion to the wounds and blood of Christ reached a crescendo in the late medieval period, which is evidenced in the abundance of blood relics, the many sermons, prayers, and poems devoted to Christ’s wounds, the numerous affective visions in which the visionary beheld, partook of, or penetrated the wound, not to mention the multitude of images depicting the gaping wound in Christ’s side and the blood that issued forth from it.4 Moreover, in 3 Erika Fischer-Lichte has defined a performative space is one that opens up possibilities for relations between actors (or in our case images) and audience. See: Aesthetik des Performative (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 187. 4 There is no lack of scholarship on Christ’s wounds and blood. Among the more significant contributions to the discussion are: Eleanor McCullough, “‘Loke in: How Weet A Wounde is Heere!’: The Wounds of Christ as a Sacred Space in English Devotional Literature,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, ed. Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010), 25–37; Nancy Thebaut, “Bleeding Pages, Bleeding Bodies: A Gendered Reading of British Library MS Egerton 1821,” Medieval Feminist Forum 45.2 (2009): 175–200; Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2007); David S. Areford, “The Passion Measured: A Late-Medieval Diagram of the Body of Christ,” in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. A.A. MacDonald, H.N.B. Ridderbos, and R.M. Schlusemann (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), 211–38; Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and John A. Schulz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 180–200; Flora Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Jane H.M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 204–229; to cite but a few. In this volume, see: Salvador Ryan, “‘Scarce Anyone Survives a Heart Wound’: The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry,” 291–312, Virginia Langum, “‘The Wounded Surgeon’: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England,” 269–90, and Albrecht Classen, “Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind,” 417–47.

316

Olson

late medieval visual representations, the wound itself appears to have taken on a new life, so to speak, as it translocated from its contextual position on Christ’s body onto the manuscript page or broadsheet, allowing for a new affective, non-narrative mode of devotional experience for the believer.5 That the side wound in particular was to be understood as an object for contemplation is signaled in Memling’s painting through Christ’s gesture: he offers his wound to the beholder, framing it in his hand between thumb and fingers, while he holds his other hand palm-up to catch for the spectator the rivulets of blood flowing forth from the wound. This idea of presenting the wound as an object for devotional contemplation is further elucidated in scenes such as folio 237v of the late-thirteenth century Hours of the Passion (Figure 14.2) in which Christ opens his tunic to reveal his side wound to a nun who kneels in veneration of it, or folio 329 from the Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, painted before 1349 (Figure 14.3) in which two figures (likely Bonne and her husband John) kneel in prayer before an animate Christ on the cross who gestures to the wound in his side, his finger graphically penetrating the lesion.6 In each of these images, the wounded Christ appears corporeally before the devotees as an “active image,”7 one that was intended to focus the devotee’s attention on the wound, thereby stimulating an emotional and somatic response through affective contemplation of Christ’s suffering and wounds. Images like these visually and directly echo medieval textual sen5 Elina Gertsman examines this kind of translocation in a late fifteenth-century German woodcut printed in Ulm. See: “Wandering Wounds: the Urban Body in Imitatio Christi,” in this ­volume, 340–65. 6 On the images from this manuscript, see: Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side,” 211–212; Annette Lermack, “Pilgrimage in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg,” in The Art, Science and Technology of Medieval Travel, ed. Robert Bork and Andrea Kann (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 104–109; Florens Deuchler, “Looking at Bonne of Luxembourg’s Prayer Book,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 29.6 (February, 1971): 267–278. 7 An active image or imago agens is one that stimulates memory and has the capacity to move the viewer. See: Jill Bennett, “Stigmata and Sense Memory: St. Francis and the Affective Image,” Art History 24.1 (2001): 1–16, at 3. Cicero in his Rhetorica Ad Herennium (the most important text of its kind in the Middle Ages) states: “Imagines igitur nus in eo genere constituere oportebit quod genus in memoria diutissime potest haerere. Id accidet si quam maxime notates similitudines constituemus; si non multas nec vagas, sed aliquid agentes imagines ponemus …” [We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but active…]. Cicero, Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), trans Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3.22.37, 220–221, cited in Peter Parshall, “The Art of Memory and the Passion,” The Art Bulletin 81.3 (September 1999): 465–472, at 457. Italicized for emphasis.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

317

Figure 14.2 Christ displaying his wound to a nun, Initial D, Hours of the Passion, 1275-1300. Illuminated manuscript, 115 × 80 mm. The British Library, London (MS. Egerton 945 col. 237v) © The British Library Board.

timents, such as those expressed by Peter of Limoges (†1306): “Forame quod nos attente debem frequeter aspicere est latus Christi proferatu in cruce […] Intret igit unusquis domus sciete sue mentis oculo Christi vulnera contemplet ut christo passo suo modelo formes” [The opening which all of us should pay attention to and look at frequently is Christ’s side pierced on the cross. […] Let

318

Olson

Figure 14.3 Attributed to Jean le Noir, Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg. Folio 328r. Crucifixion with Bonne and Jean, Duke of Normandy kneeling before the cross. Before 1349. Tempera, grisaille, ink, and gold leaf on vellum, 4 15/16 × 3 9/16 in. (12.6 × 9 cm). The Cloisters Collection, 1969 (69.86). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

319

each and every person enter the house of his conscious and consider Christ’s wounds with the eyes of his mind, so that in his own small measure he might conform himself to the suffering Christ].8 At the same time, images such as these served as heuristic devices triggering memories of the events of the Passion for the devotee.9 That images were clearly understood to have the power to evoke memory and elicit affective devotional responses is explored in numerous medieval texts. Among those who commented on the efficacy of images, Bonaventure (1221–1274) noted that “omnes creaturae istius sensibilis mundi” [all created things of the sensible world] (i.e. images), though simulacra et spectacula “likenesses and images” were “nobis ad contuendum Deum proposita et signa divinitus data” [divinely given signs set before us for the purpose of seeing God].10 Further, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote that images, should be used “ad excitandum devotionis affectum qui ex visis efficacius incitatur quam ex auditis” [in order to excite the feeling of devotion, which is more effectively excited by what it sees than by what is heard].11 Echoing Aquinas, the Dominican priest John of Genoa († c. 1298) noted in his Catholicon (c. 1286) that the function of images was threefold: Prima as instructionem rudium, qui eis quasi quidbusdam libris edoceri videntur. Secunda ut incarnationis mysterium et sanctorum exempla magis in memoria nostra essent dum quotidie oculis nostris representantur. Tertia ad exitandum devotionis affectum, qui ex visis efficacius exitatur quam ex auditis.

8

9

10

11

Peter of Limoges, De oculo morali, 7.A.7. English translation in Peter of Limoges, The Moral Treatise on the Eye, trans. Richard Newhauser (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2012), 59–60. On memory in the Middle Ages, see: Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). On memory and the Passion, see: Parshall, “The Art of Memory and the Passion.” Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, 2.11, cited in David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 165. Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super libros Sententiarum: Commentaria in librum III, dist.9, art. 2, qu. 2, sol. 2. English translation in Susan K. Hagen, Allegorical Remembrance: A Study of “The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man” as a Medieval Treatise on Seeing and Remembering (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 103.

320

Olson

[First for the instruction of simple people, because they are instructed by them as if by books. Second, so that the mystery of the incarnation and the examples of the Saints may be the more active in our memory through being presented daily to our eyes. Third to excite the feelings of devotion, these being more effectively aroused by things seen than by things heard].12 Moreover, by removing the image of the wounded Christ from its traditional narrative and temporal setting, time and space are collapsed and the beholder is free to interact with the scene in a non-linear, non-narrative fashion and to tailor the scene according to his or her own needs and desires. This makes the devotional experience more interactive by being direct, unscripted, and individualized. In other words, Christ was neither far away in time and place, nor fixed within a particular moment of an historical event, but present before the beholder in his or her own time and his or her own place. A fourteenth-century manuscript page depicting the so-called arma Christi beautifully demonstrates that the wound was to be understood both as one of the integral components of the meditation on the Passion and as a devotional object in and of itself (Figure 14.4). The page is divided into thirty-eight compartments and a visual referent to an instrument of the Passion or some other emblematic part of the Passion story appears in each one; for instance, the hammer, the nails, the whips, the crown of thorns, and, toward the bottom, the side wound, which stands alone, a-corporeal as an object for contemplation and devotion. The wound is thus removed from its chronological and narrative context as well as from its physical context on Christ’s body.13 Seeing a wound presented as a distinct object, existing apart from a body, likely would have raised few, if any, eyebrows for the medieval beholder. Nor would a medieval beholder have been concerned with the seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of two wounds, the wound as a singular object alongside the wounded body of Christ represented just two frames away. This duality of wounds visually reinforced the idea that Christ could be present in multiple locations simultaneously, as in every communion wafer while at the same time residing bodily 12

13

Italics mine. John of Genoa (Joannes Balbus), Catholicon (Venice: 1497), V. vr. Cited and translated in Michael Baxendall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 41 and 161. Also cited by Bennett, “Stigmata and Sense Memory,” 2. It appears this way in numerous examples, one being at the bottom of a folio in the fourteenth-century Bohun Hours (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS, Auct. D.4.4), where it is the largest of the 11 compartmentalized images, a solitary red gash that dwarfs the other images on the page, bodies included.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

321

Figure 14.4 Arma Christi, c. 1360-75. Illuminated manuscript, 455 × 310 mm. The British Library, London (MS. Royal 6 E VI f.15) © The British Library Board.

322

Olson

Figure 14.5 Attributed to Jean le Noir, Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg. Folio 331r. Holy Wound of Christ flanked by the “arma Christi”. Before 1349. Tempera, grisaille, ink, and gold leaf on vellum, 4 15/16 × 3 9/16 in. (12.6 × 9 cm). The Cloisters Collection, 1969 (69.86). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

323

in heaven.14 The centrality of Christ’s wound became increasingly paramount in personal devotion, and this is visually confirmed further on in folio 331 of the Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg (Figure 14.5) where the prominent and gaping red wound hovers, this time with no bodily counterpart, between the instruments of the Passion. In these examples, the supporting narrative elements of the story, the depiction of Christ’s physical body and the instruments of the Passion, are further detached from the wound. It is the wound itself that increasingly becomes the main focus of the devotional image. Without a doubt, one of the crucial turning points that led to this increased focus on Christ’s wound was the Council of Constance (1414–18), at which time the communion cup was denied to the laity.15 Denial of the cup and its contents to the devout likely fueled the desire for alternative means of experiencing the miracle of Christ’s blood, and the image of the wound, the source of Christ’s salvific blood, was the ideal agent for sensory interaction. The wound was part of Christ’s body as well as an object that existed apart from it. Singular and removed from its corporeal context, as an object, the wound could be visualized, venerated, touched, partaken of, and even penetrated by the faithful in an infinite variety of fluid scenarios involving the senses and that were freed from the constraints of biblical narrative and time. The desire on the part of the devout for direct and intimate contact with Christ’s blood and wounds is clearly demonstrated in numerous medieval devotional strategies that sought to make the religious experience more intensely personal by way of the senses. In his Life of St. Edmund, the English Benedictine monk, Matthew Paris (c. 1200–1259), recounts the interaction of St. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury (1175–1240) with a crucifix on his deathbed: Ipso igitur sacramento venerabiliter ut decuit celebrato, vir sanctus ex manu ministrantis crucem arripiens, mira devocione loca clavorum sanguineo colore rubricata ori et oculus imprimens, frequenter et morose deosculabatur et lacrimis uberrimis irrigavit. Maxime tamen vulnus lateris lanceati diu suggens et lambens hiatum vulneris, suspiriis sermonem prorumpentibus […] Cuius devocio et devocionis modus sensibus 14

15

See: Karmen MacKendrick, “The Multipliable Body,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1.1–2 (2010): 108–114; and Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992) for more on this idea of multi-location and fragmentation. See: Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 63–82.

324

Olson

astancium non minimam de novitate generarunt, nam merito generare poterant, admiracionem.16 [Then, when the sacrament had been administered with due reverence, the holy man seized the cross from the hand of the minister, and with wonderful devotion pressed the places of the nails, which were colored blood-red, to his mouth and eyes, constantly and sorrowfully kissing them and moistening them with copious tears. Above all, for a long time he sucked and licked the gaping wound in the side of the figure. […] The manner of his devotion produced no little astonishment in the bystanders, not least on account of its novelty].17 St. Edmund’s behavior may have caused wonder and astonishment in his audience, but embracing and licking representations of Christ’s wounds became fairly common. The fourteenth-century Middle English treatise, A Talkyng of þe Loue of God confirms: I souke of his feet […] i cluppe and I cusse as I wood wore. I walewe and i souke i not whuche while and whon I haue al don ȝit me luste more. Þenne fele I þat blood in þouȝt of my Mynde as hit weore bodilich warm on my lippe and þe fleach on his feet bi fore and beo hynde so softe ans so swete to cusse […] [I suck the blood from his feet […] I embrace and I kiss, as if I was mad. I roll and I suck I do not know how long. And when I am sated, I want yet more. Then I feel that blood in my imagination as it were bodily on my lips and the flesh on his feet in front and behind so soft and so sweet to kiss].18 In these textual examples, the desire for somatic interaction with Christ and his wounds and, moreover, the longing to taste and partake of his salvific blood is a fundamental part of the devotees’ interactions with the object of the cruci16 17 18

Vita Sancti Edmundi Auctore Matthaeo Parisiensi, in C.H. Lawrence, St. Edmund of Abingdon: A Study in Hagiography and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 269. English translation in Matthew Paris, The Life of St. Edmund, trans. and ed. C.H. Lawrence (Oxford: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1996), 155. A Talkyng of þe Loue of God Edited from MS Vernon, Bodleian 3938, and Collated with MS Simeon Brit. Mus. Add. 22283, ed. and trans. M. Salvina Westra (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1950), 61, cited in Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 2.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

325

fix.19 In each case, the protagonist embraces, kisses, licks, and sucks the bleeding holes in Christ’s body, and the longed-for reward for this physical performance is intimate contact with the divine and the hope of salvation. The performative focus found in texts like these is further encouraged in images of Christ’s wound presented to the beholder as a devotional object that was meant to be touched and to be kissed. One such example is an indulgenced20 fifteenth-century German woodcut (Figure 14.6), which instructs the devotee to kiss the wound: “Das is die leng und weite der wünden Cristi die Im sein h. Seiten gestochen wart an dem Creitz wer die mit reü und laid aüch mit andacht küsset als oft er das thüet hat er 7 jar ablas von dem pabst INNOCENTO” [This is the length and width of Christ’s wound which was pierced in his side on the cross. Whoever kisses the wound with remorse and sorrow, also with devotion, will have as often as he does this, seven years indulgence from Pope Innocent].21 In this print, wound and body conflate so that wound is body, signified by the flanking pierced hands and feet, the sudarium22 head and the little cross in the center of the wound, which, “40 mals gemessen macht die leng Cristi in seiner Menschait wer das mit andacht küsset der ist den tag beheit vor dem gächen tott und vor eim schlag” [measured forty times makes the length of Christ in his humanity whoever kisses it with devotion shall be protected from sudden death or misfortune].23 The wound, and by extension the body, is a tactile object to be touched and kissed by the devotee who was invited to physically participate and interact with it. The reference to the true measure reinforces the idea that this is Christ’s wound and Christ’s body, not merely an abstracted representation.24 Touching or kissing this image is, to the believer, the same as touching or kissing the real thing. 19

20

21 22

23 24

Such behavior may in some ways be seen as an offshoot of what was known as “blooddrinking”; the ritual act of drinking wine which had come in contact with a relic or reliquary. See: Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Church History 71.4 (2002): 685–714, at 691 and 702. An indulgence is the remission of a period of time spent in purgatory granted by the pope. In the case of this print, an indulgence is granted for following the directive on the print, which is seven years for each remorseful kiss placed on the image of Christ’s wound. Areford, “The Passion Measured,” 233. Sudarium refers to one of several relics of Christ’s true image, or Holy Face, miraculously transferred to cloth. Of these, the Veronica is in the Vatican collection. For more on images of the Holy Face, see: The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996, ed. Herbert Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Florence: Electa, 2000). Areford, “The Passion Measured,” 223. It was not uncommon for images of the wound to be presented as the “true measure” that lent them certain veracity, see: Areford, “The Passion Measured.” Also, according to

326

Figure 14.6 The Wounds of Christ with the Symbols of the Passion, c. 1490. Woodcut, hand-colored in vermilion, green, and yellow; mounted on sheet that covers manuscript on verso. Overall: 12 × 8.1 cm (4 3/4 × 3 3/16 in.) overall (external frame dimensions): 39.4 × 31.8 cm (15 1/2 × 12 1/2 in.) Rosenwald Collection 1943.3.831. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Washington.

Olson

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

327

The act of kissing or touching was an essential part of the affective devotional experience, as prescribed in such devotional treatises as Aelred of Rivaulx’s (1110–1167) Rule of Life for a Recluse (c. 1160–1162), in which he instructs his reader to behold, to follow, to weep, to hide, and to kiss.25 Likewise, the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ invites the reader to imagine him or herself as a participant in the events of Christ’s life – to be present, to see, to touch, to hold, and to speak with the holy personages as if he or she were there. Similarly, images of Christ’s wounds invite the beholder’s participation, urging them to be present with, and to somatically experience, the real presence of Christ’s flesh and blood. Some, like the woodcut, directly instruct the devotee on the manner of interaction with the image before them, while others, such as folio 110v of the mid-fifteenth-century Loftie Hours (Figure 14.7), simply present the image without specific instructions for engagement, so the beholder is free to formulate his or her own mode of interaction with it. In this particular example, the depiction of the wounds prefaces a prayer to the five wounds of Christ, a devotion that gained popularity in the later Middle Ages.26 All references to biblical narrative through the representation of Christ’s physical body and the instruments of his Passion have disappeared, and the focus is solely on the bleeding wounds floating a-corporeally – visual signifiers of suffering on the page. Red gashes streaming with blood drops, they show evidence of having been touched by the lips or fingers of the devotee (note in particular the abrasion of the pigment in the lower two wounds) as he or she recited the prayer to the five wounds on the page opposite.27 The wounds become the stage upon which a devotional act takes place. Presenting the wound out of corporeal context required the beholder to engage his or her imagination and senses and to respond affectively, performatively, and intimately. The non- narrative, a-corporeal depiction of the wound encouraged the development of individualized responses unique to each devotee who might build upon

25

26 27

Bynum, “If made to the dimensions supposedly given in a vision or brought from the Holy Land, an image of the wound was Christ.” Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 30 (Spring 2002): 3–36, at 20. Aelred of Rivaulx, De Institutione Inclusarum MS Bodley 423, in Aelred of Rivaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum: Two English Versions, ed., John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, EETS o.s. 287 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapters 14–16, 17–25. Douglas Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord,” Notes and Queries 208 (1963): 50–1, 82–9, 126–34, 163–8. Martina Bagnoli of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, in which this manuscript is housed, pointed out the abrasion in “The Role of Touch in Medieval Devotion. Really?” (paper presented at the College Art Association annual conference, New York, NY, February, 2013).

328

Figure 14.7 The Five Wounds of Christ, The Loftie Hours, mid-fifteenth century (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum MS. W.165, fol. 110v)

Olson

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

329

contemporary devotions to the wounds and the Holy Blood, memories of the events of the Passion, biblical texts, or visionary experiences in creating their own personal narratives and dialogues. Devotion to the visual object of the wound is, thus, fully a part of the performative zeitgeist of late medieval piety and its emphasis on imaginative, emotional, and physical interaction. Through the act of kissing the wound, the devotee’s lips touched and tasted the blood of the savior, responding perhaps to Aelred’s instructions to drink from Christ’s bleeding wounds;28 the words of the Psalm: “Taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Psalm 34:8);29 or imitating the mystics who drank from the bleeding wound in Christ’s side as did the fourteenth-century Sister Eite of Kirchberg who experienced “such exceptionally high grace that she was given to drink from our Lord’s living wounds.”30 Among the most renowned of the mystics who drank from Christ’s side was Catherine of Siena (1347–80). In her vision, Christ drew her to his side: Applicansque dextram ad collum virgineum, et ipsam ad lateris proprii vulnus approximans. Bibe, inquit,filia, de latere meo potum, quo anima tua tanta suavitate replebitur, quod etiam in corpus, quod propter me contempsisti, mirabiliter redundabit. At illa cernens se positam ad fistulam fontis vitae, sacratissimo vulneri os applicans corporis, sed longe amphus os mentis, ineffabilem et inexplicabilem potum hausit per non parvae morae spatium, tam avide quam abunde.31 [With that he tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her toward the wound in his side. ‘Drink, daughter, from my side,’ he said, ‘and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight that your very body […] shall be inundated with its overflowing good-

28 29

30

31

De Institutione Inclusarum, 14, 22. For more on this subject, see: Rachel Fulton, “‘Taste and See That the Lord is Sweet’ (Ps 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West,” The Journal of Religion 86.2 (April 2006): 169–204. Gertrude Jaron Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany, Studies and Texts 125 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1996): 131. Albrecht Classen examines the experiential devotion to wounds in in the work of Dorothea von Montau. See in this volume: “Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit,” 417–47. Raimundo Capuano, “Vita S. Catharinae Senensis,” in Acta Sanctorum, 30 April (Paris: V. Palme, 1866), part 2, chap. 4, 3.903.

330

Olson

ness.’ Drawn close […] to the outlet of the Fountain of Life, she fastened her lips upon that sacred wound […] and there she slaked her thirst.]32 Other visionaries, like Mechthild of Hackeborn (†1298/99), “sucked the sweetest fruit from the sweetest heart of Christ, which she […] put in her mouth,”33 as did Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246) who also “sucked such sweetness”34 from Christ’s bloody wound. The Blessed Aldobrandesca of Siena (c. 1249– c. 1309), focusing on an image of the crucifix, “saw a single drop of blood issue from the image’s side. She received it on her lips and tasted its extraordinary delicacy and sweetness.”35 In each of these instances, contact with the wound drew forth Christ’s blood and his blessing, constructing the wound as a kind of fountain or well that offered the believer knowledge, fulfillment, and salvation through partaking of the blood that issued forth. The Great Cross (the remaining parts known today as the Well of Moses, 1395–1403) from the Chartreuse de Champmol was a life-sized, three dimensional representation of this idea. Christ crucified hung from the cross above 32 33

34

35

The Life of Catherine of Siena by Raymond of Capua, trans. and ed. Conleth Kearns (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1980), 155–56. “Ibi etiam de corde Christi suavissimo e suxit dulcissimum fructum, quem assumens de corde dei in os suum posuit.” Liber gratiae spiritualis visionum et revelationum beatae Mecthildis virginis devotissimae, ad fidelium instructionem, Liber II, cap. 16, (Venice, 1558), 150, trans. Bernard McGinn in The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350 (New York: Crossroads, 1998), 279; and cited in Fulton, “Taste and See That the Lord is Sweet,” 179. “In ipso ostio ecclesiae ei Christus cruci affixus cruentatus occurrit: deponensque brachium cruci affixum, amplexatus est occurrentem, et os ejus vulneri dextri lateris applicavit. Ubi tantum dulcedinis hausit, quod semper ex tunc in Dei servitio robustior et alacrior fuit.” Thomas Cantimpratensis, “Vita piae Lutgardis,” in Acta Sanctorum, 16 June (Paris: V. Palme, 1867), vol.1, chap. 1:13, 3.193. English translation in Thomas of Cantimpré, Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives. Abbot John of Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres and Lutgard of Aywières, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 229. “Dumque in eo atque in imagine Crucifixi haeret defixa, gratiam istam a jesu et maria flagitans, guttam unam sanguinis et latere imaginis suae conspexit prorumpere: quam labiis colligens, ineffabilem suavitatem in ore sensit: atque in hujus beneficii memoriam pingi fecit virginem matrem, depositi e cruce filii corpus inter brachia tenentem, ipsique lateris vulneri applicantem os suum.” “Vita de B. Alda Seu Aldobrandesca, Vidua Senensi Terth Ord. Humiliatorum,” in Acta Sanctorum, 26 April (Paris: V, Palme, 1866), chap. 2:21, 3.474. English translation from Chiara Frugioni, “Female Mystics, Visions, and Iconography,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Robert Rusconi, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 137.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space



331

Figure 14.8 The Coventry Ring inscribed with the Man of Sorrows and the Five Wounds of Christ, Gold, late fifteenth-century (London, British Museum, AF.897) © The Trustees of the British Museum.

the well, his side pierced and the blood, painted red, symbolically dripping into the well below, from which the faithful drank.36 In this example, the body of Christ literally functioned as the fountain, his side issuing forth blood and water (John 19:34), his blood (the water in the well) the source of salvation for the believer. Prayers to the Holy Side Wound further reinforce this relationship between wound and well as in the Salve plaga lateris prayer cited above or the variation as follows: “Salve plaga sancta nostri redemptoris/ Nam ex te fluxit fons rosei coloris” [Hail holy wound of our Redeemer / From you flowed a rosy fountain].37 In a more functional example, this connection between wound and well is clearly synthesized in the late fifteenth-century Coventry Ring (Figure 14.8) inscribed with bleeding a-corporeal representations of the five wounds juxtaposed with the Man of Sorrows standing in a sarcophagus-cumwell surrounded by the instruments of the Passion and the following text: “The well of pitty, the well of merci, the well of confort, the well of gracy, the well of ewerlastingh lyffe” [The well of pity, the well of mercy, the well of comfort, the well of grace, the well of everlasting life].38 Meditating on an image of the bleeding wound hovering on a page or represented on a thaumaturgical 36

37 38

See: Donna L. Sadler, “The Well of Moses and Barthes’s ‘Punctum’ of Piety,” in Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative and Emotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, vol. 1, ed. Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 385–414; and Sherry Lindquist, Agency, Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). Prayer cited in Gray, “The Five Wounds,” 129. Gray, “The Five Wounds,” 164–65.

332

Figure 14.9 Ecce Homo, c. 1450, Woodcut, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge CUL MS Additional 5944 (11).

Olson

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

333

amulet,39 devotees could imagine themselves recipients of Christ’s salvific blood, which might be sucked directly from the wound by the lips of the believer or spilled upon them as it gushed forth, often in torrents, from Christ’s lesions. Representations of Christ’s wounded, crucified body disgorging a cascade of blood were commonplace in the later Middle Ages even though, as Caroline Walker Bynum has noted, crucifixion was not a bloody death.40 A hand-painted woodcut of about 1450 (Figure 14.9) presents a striking and bloody image of the crucifixion.41 Christ’s body is all but obscured behind the outpouring of blood emanating from the wounds inflicted all over his body, with particular emphasis on the side wound that pours forth both blood and water in a visual reference to John’s text. Images such as this recall the experiences of visionaries who, praying before a crucifix, received Christ’s blessing in the form of his blood. For example, a twelfth-century monk from Evesham abbey spoke of a vision he experienced before a crucifix: The mene while as y lift vppe my nyes that were sore of weping to the face of the crucifyxe y felte some dropys fallyng don to me. I putte ther to my fyngerys and y wele perceyued and knewe by the rednes that hit was blode. Alfo y behylde the right fyde of the ymage of oure lordis body and hit wellid oute of blode […] Trewly than y toke in my hopynne hand : y wote nere how mony dropis of that precious blode and there with diligently y anoyntid my nyes. my neris and my nofe thrillys And at the laste y put one drope of yat bleffyd blode in to my lippys and of- the grete defyre and deuocyon of myne herte. y fwelowd hyt doone And whether y offendyd god in that poynt or no y wote nere The remnand ther of y hild in my hand purpofyng to haue kept hit.42 [While I was kneeling before the image and was kissing it on the mouth and eyes, I felt some drops falling gently on my forehead. When I removed my fingers, I discovered from their color that it was blood. I also saw 39

40 41 42

In addition to rings such as the Coventry Ring, wounds, or the measure of the wound, could be worn as amulets, see: W. Sparrow Simpson, “On the Measure of the Wound in the Side of the Redeemer Worn Anciently as a Charm,” The Journal of the British Archaeological Association 30 (1874): 375–74. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 1–2. An inscription notes that an indulgence of 80,000 years would be granted to a devotee who read the prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus printed on this woodcut. Edward Arber, ed., The Revelation to the Monk of Evesham 1196 (London: English Reprints, 1869), 31–32.

334

Olson

blood flowing from the side of the image on the cross […] I do not know how many drops I caught in my hand as they fell. With the blood I devoutly anointed my eyes, ears and nostrils. Afterward – if I sinned I do not know – in my zeal I swallowed one drop of it, but the rest, which I caught in my hand, I was determined to keep.]43 Blessed Giacomo Bianconi of Bevagna (1220–1301) prayed before an image of the crucifix and hoped for a sign of salvation. As he did so, a voice from the crucifix spoke: “Sanguis iste sit tibi in signum et certitudo” [Let this blood be a sign and a certitude for you] and blood flowed from the wound in Christ’s side covering Giacomo’s face and his clothes.44 The Carthusian nun, Marguerite d’Oingt (†1310) also imagined blood bursting from the veins of Christ in droplets that fell one by one.45 In light of such texts, it is easy to imagine a devotee, in the hope of experiencing a similar ecstatic vision, touching, kissing, or tasting the drops of blood graphically represented on eight consecutive blood-infused pages in a little devotional book dating c. 1490 (Figure 14.10). The devotee may have envisioned being drenched by Christ’s salvific blood while reciting the prayers to the 5,475 wounds of Christ or the 547,500 drops blood shed during his Passion,46 fingers, lips, or tongue grazing each raised droplet of blood on the page. In gazing at, kissing or stroking these pages, the beholder is wholly in the wound of Christ. There is nothing but blood on the page; all external referents have been eliminated. The lack of narrative cues meant the 43

44

45 46

Modern English translation from “The Monk of Evesham’s Vision,” in Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante, ed. Eileen Gardiner (New York: Italica, 1989), 202–203. Also cited in Bynum, “The Blood of Christ in the Late Middle Ages,” 704. The monk’s vision parallels the Benedictine Peter Damian’s (c. 1007–1072/73) who wrote of a visionary experience he had meditating on the Passion (likely with a crucifix before him) in which the crucified appeared and “with my mouth I eagerly tried to catch the dripping blood.” Peter Damian, The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation. The Letters of Peter Damian, trans. and ed., Owen J. Blum (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 3.129–30. “Vita De B. Jacopo Mevanate, ex Ordine Fratrum Praedicatorum, Mevaniae in Umbria,” in Acta Sanctorum, 23 August (Paris: V. Palme, 1868), chap. 2:29, 3.732, cited in Frugioni, “Female Mystics,” 133. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 160. For the tradition of the 5,475 wounds or the 547,500 drops blood and other calculations, see: Andrew Breeze, “The Number of Christ’s Wounds,” The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 32 (1985): 84–91. Further, an entry from the Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes (1430-c. 1505) states: “The nombre of thes dropes all / I wyll reherse in generall: / VC ml for to tell, / and xlvi ml. weel / vc also gret and small. / Here is the nombre of hem alle.” The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle: An Edition of Tanner MS 407, ed. Cameron Louis (New York: Garland, 1980), 152; cited in Rubin, Corpus Christi, 305–306.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

335

Figure 14.10 The Blood of Christ from a Devotional Book, c.1480-90. Illuminated manuscript, 120 × 90 mm. The British Library, London (MS. Egerton 1821, fold 6v−7). © The British Library Board

devotee was free to interact with blood and wound by means of a devotional freedom that would otherwise not have been possible. Abstracting the image of the wound further to its essential components, just color and texture, invited the devotee to structure events or dialogues of his or her own imagining and to physically engage with it via the senses. The affective devotional interactions with an image such as this were seemingly limitless. For instance, it might be approached as an aid to salvation through an imagined consumption of the blood drops, or even a performative one by way of licking them, as practiced by St. Edmund with his crucifix. The image could likewise function as an affirmation of belief, a tangible manifestation of Christ’s physical presence via the tactility of the blood drops represented on the page that could be felt, stroked, and counted. Moreover, the vastness and abstraction of the form may have allowed it to function as an open gateway, a point of departure that invited a devotee to enter into Christ’s wound and seek spiritual refuge. In touching a representation of the wound, the devotee’s fingers imaginatively penetrated the threshold of Christ’s flesh in haptic imitation of Thomas the apostle: “Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand, and put it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27).

336

Olson

The wound acts as an entry, a metaphorical gateway to belief and salvation: “I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved: and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures” (John 10:9). The text of a hymn to the side wound, which refers to it as a porta patens et profunda “a deep and open gateway”47 supports this idea. It was a place of spiritual refuge where the faithful would find comfort and eternal life, as attested to by William of St. Thierry (c. 1075/80–1148): “ut in latus ejus non jam digitum mittamus, aut manum, sicut Thomas, sed in apertum ostium toti intremus usque ad cor tuum Jesu, certam sedem misericordiae […]”48 [Now we may not only thrust our fingers or hand into his side, like Thomas, but through that open door may enter whole, even into your heart, the sure seat of your mercy…].49 Likewise, St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) instructed: Accede ergo tu, o famula, pedibus affectionum tuarum ad Iesum uulneratum, ad Iesum spinis coronatum, ad Iesum patibulo crucis affixum, et cum beato Thoma Apostolo non solum intuere in manibus eius fixuram clauorum, non solum mitte digitum tuum in locum clauorum, non solum mitte manum tuam in latus eius [Ioan.20,25.27], sed totaliter per ostium lateris ingredere usque ad cor ipsius Iesu […]50 [Draw near, O handmaid, with loving steps to Jesus wounded for you, to Jesus nailed to the gibbet of the Cross. Gaze with the Blessed Apostle St. Thomas, not merely on the print of the nails in Christ’s hands; be not satisfied with putting your fingers in the holes made by the nails in His hands; neither let it be sufficient to put your hand into the wound in His side, but enter bodily by the door in His side and go straight up to the very Heart of Jesus […]51 47 48 49

50 51

Guido Maria Dreves, Clemens Blume, eds., Analecta hymnica medii aevi (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1907, rpt. Frankfurt: Minerva, 1961) cited in Friedman, Northern English Books, 164. William of St. Thierry, Meditativae Oritationes, in Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Latina (Paris: Garnier frères, 1902), 180, cols. 225D-226A. English translation from William of St. Thierry, The Works of William of St. Thierry: On Contemplating God, Prayer, Meditations, trans. Sister Penelope, Cistercian Fathers Series 3 (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1970), 131, cited in Caroline Walker Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” The Harvard Theological Review 70.3–4 (1977): 257–284, at 265. St. Bonaventure, De Perfectione Vitae ad Sorores, in Bonaventura, Opera Omnia, 10 vols (Quaracchi: College of St. Bonaventura, 1882–1902), 8:120. Holiness of Life, Being St. Bonaventure’s Treatise De Perfectione Vitae ad Sorores, trans. Laurence Costello (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1928), 63; also in Bennett, “Stigmata and Sense Memory,” 10–11.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

337

Aelred directed his recluse to, “Crepe in-to that blessed side where that blood and water came forthe, and hyde the ther […] wel likynge the dropes of his blood, til that thy lippes be maad like to a reed scarlet hood”52 [Creep into the wound in that blessed side, from which the blood and water came forth, and hide yourself there […] licking the drops of his blood, until your lips become like a red scarlet hood].53 While Gertrude of Helfta (1256 –ca. 1302) was drawn into the wound of Christ through a golden tube and there she “felt, saw, heard, tasted and touched” things known only to her and to Christ.54 Through affective meditation on an image, a devotee could likewise penetrate the sanctuary of Christ’s wound in imitation of Thomas and the mystics. In some instances, however, as in a hand-colored woodcut representation of the Sacred Heart c. 1460 (Figure 14.11), penetration became physical. The wound in this woodcut, depicted as a black void in the midst of a blood-red heart, has been pierced (allegedly by a relic of the Spear of Longinus).55 A narrow slit has been made through the paper allowing the devotee, should he or she desire, to 52

53

54

55

This is the mid-fifteenth-century Middle English translation of Aelred’s text found in MS Bodley 423, chapter 14, lines 863–866, and transcribed in Aelred, De Institutione Inclusarum, 22. The original Latin text, written by Aelred c. 1160–62 reads: “Facta sunt tibi in petra flumina, in membris eius uulnera, et in maceria corporis eius cauerna, in quibus instar columbae latitans et deosculans singula ex sangiune eius fiant sicut uitta coccina labia tua, et eloquium tuum dulce.” See: Aelredi Rievallensis, Opera Omnia, vol. 1, ed A. Hoste O.S.B and C.H. Talbot (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 671. The Middle English version is cited here as this text is contemporary with the works of art and devotional practices being discussed. Modern English translation in Anne Clark Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1995), 126. “Inter horum suavissimam delectationem illa sensit se inaestimabiliter mirabili modo per eamdem saepius dictam fistulam Cordi Dominico intrahi; et sic invenit se feliciter in intimis Sponsi et Domini Dei sui. Ubi quid senserit, quid viderit, quid audierit, quid gustaverit, quidve contrectaverit, ipsi soli notum est, ac illi qui eam tam superexcellenter sublimen admittere dignatus est sui unionem.” Gertrude of Helfta, Legatus divinae pietatis, 3:26, 3:126, cited in Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 247 and 398 n. 161. English translation in The Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed., Margaret Winkworth (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 3.190. This is one of several such examples of contact relics made through the touch of the spear of Longinus. See: David S. Aerford, “Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-Century Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation,” in The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. Peter Parshall, Studies in the History of Art, 75, Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Symposium Papers 52 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 119–153, at 141–147.

338

Olson

Figure 14.11 Sacred Heart Pierced by the Holy Lance, 1460. Woodcut, 95 × 73 mm. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 692, fol. 73v. Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München

insert a finger into the wound in a mimetic reenactment of Thomas’s performance. Moreover, the wound bleeds, as David Aerford has pointed out; the red pigment of the heart has soaked through the paper staining the opposite side.56 This image then performs; it is the bleeding wound of Christ and it invites the beholder to perform along with it by physically and imaginatively penetrating the void. The wound, whether a graphic image or imagined vision, functioned as a kind of performative space, a locus sanctus, which was at once a fountain, a refuge, and a bestower of salvation. It was also a gateway, a liminal divide 56

Aerford, “Multiplying the Sacred,” 141–147.

the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

339

marking the threshold between sin and salvation, belief and doubt, sacred and secular. For the devotee, an image of the wound represented a means of access to Christ’s salvific blood. Thus, through an unparalleled metamorphosis of form into a singular and stand-alone object, the wound became the fundamental stage upon which and through which devotional performance occurred. Presented as an a-temporal, a-corporeal, and non-narrative object, the wound invited beholders to formulate their own multivalent devotional strategies which included somatic experiences of seeing, touching, and tasting as well as performative interactions that included stroking, kissing, and even penetration. The ecstatic possibilities were limited only by the imagination of the beholder. It was the wound, visually transmogrified through the process of abstraction and decontextualization into a visual signifier for the body and blood of Christ, which excited the emotions of the devotee and encouraged their affective participation. This kind of interaction, although inherently unstructured, gained greater efficacy through the participant’s recollections of contextualized images such as Memling’s Man of Sorrows, memories of the Passion, and the desire to experience a sensual mystical encounter with the divine.

340

Gertsman

Chapter 15

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body in Imitatio Christi Elina Gertsman

A dramatic scene unfolds on a late fifteenth-century German woodcut printed in Ulm: a devout tonsured Christian, stripped down to a loincloth, proffers his heart to the bleeding Jesus bound to the cross and the Flagellation column (Figure 15.1).1 In exchange, Christ holds out a scourge, while simultaneously tugging at the rope tied around the tonsured figure’s waist. Between them stands a small demon who seems to mock Christ’s gestures: he, too, holds a scourge in his left hand, but in lieu of the cross, he is tethered to a money bag, and another such bag is held in his extended right hand. A small angel in the upper right corner carries a scroll inscribed with a warning: “Gedenck der / lestē zÿt so / sündest du / nÿmmer” [Think of the last days; then you will never sin]. Xylographic texts in two other speech scrolls read: “‘Sun gib mir din hercz / den ich lieb hab ∙ Dem läß ich sträff nit ab ∙’” and “‘O herr das will ich ∙ das / beger ich darumbe / so soltu ziehē mich’” [“Son, give me your heart. I do not remit the punishment of the one that I hold dear” and “Oh Lord, this I want, I desire it, for this reason thus you pull me”]. The iconography of the print, explicated by two other speech scrolls, seems fairly straightforward: this is a version of “Christ and the Loving Soul,” an espèce of an imitatio Christi in which the pious Christian soul shares in Jesus’s suffering while trouncing all manner of temptation.

1 Schr. 1838; Theodor Oswald Weigel and August Christian Adolf Zestermann, Die anfänge der druckerkunst in bild und schrift. An deren frühesten erzeugnissen in der Weigel’schen sammlung, 2 vols. (Leipzig: T.O. Weigel, 1866), 1:350, no. 217/2; Holzschnitte im Königl. Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, second series, ed. Paul Kristeller (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1915), 19, no. 86, pl. 40; Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-century Woodcuts and their Public, ed. Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch, with David S. Areford, Richard S. Field, and Peter Schmidt (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2005), 282–4, no. 88. On this general theme, see: Romuald Banz, Christus und die minnende Seele. Zwei spätmittelhochdeutsche mystische Gedichte. Im Anhang ein Prosadisput verwandten Inhaltes. Untersuchungen und Texte (Breslau: M. & H. Marcus, 1908); Frank Olaf Büttner, Imitatio pietatis. Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle zur Verähnlichung (Berlin: Mann 1983).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_017

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

341

Figure 15.1 Jesus Claims the Heart of the Faithful, Ulm, 1490s, colored woodcut, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection 1943.3.853. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Yet, a series of mirror inversions and displacements troubles this print, the most important of which is the dislocation of Christ’s wounds from his bleeding body to the rocky outcropping on the far left, which bears a dry tree prominently hung with the Ulm coat of arms. Other telltale details – the money bags held by the demon, the unusual figuration of the soul as a male and a cleric, and the visual echoing between the design of the coat of arms and the form of the heart held forth by the tonsured figure – shed light on the meanings of this dislocation, suggesting the wounded outcropping as the social body of the city in the wake of Jewish expulsions and clerical transgressions, the city that, contrite and repentant, collectively shares in Christ’s Passion. The transposition of Christ’s wounds on this urban body, which predicates both devotional and political arguments made in the woodcut, sharply differentiates the Ulm print from other, contemporary representations of Christ and the Living Soul. This theme was a popular one, especially in the fifteenth century, and is commonly seen as illustrative of late medieval bridal mysticism inspired by the Song of Songs. Its most complete set is in the famous Munich series of twenty vignettes, which allegorize the Soul’s encounters with Christ, from a playful game of hide-and-seek to the gruesome imitation of his

342

Figure 15.2 Christ and the Loving Soul. BSM Einbl. 111, 52f, early – mid 1500s.

Gertsman

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

343

crucifixion (Figure 15.2).2 The set is accompanied by rhyming couplets, some uttered by Christ, some by the Soul, figured here as a young woman. In one of the vignettes, the Soul holds in her right hand a rope tied around Christ’s waist. This kind of image stands alone in another woodcut, dated from the second part of the fifteenth century, which similarly features Christ bound to the Soul: here the trope of imitation comes to the fore as the Soul, represented as a nun, is led by Christ and bears a cross identical to the one that Christ is holding (Figure 15.3). This image, too, is accompanied by a conversation between Christ and the Soul, although here the courtly delicacy of brief couplets is replaced by a compassionate and humorous dialogue.3 The configurations of the two woodcuts, although markedly different, share important features: they are explicated by a fairly lengthy text; they represent the Soul as a woman; and they isolate Christ and his bride in a non-site-specific setting. These similarities foreground the differences between the Ulm woodcut and the two other prints: it is neither a simple devotional interpretation of amorous dialogues of the Canticle, nor a straightforward representation of the Christ and the Loving Soul theme. For one, the Soul is here figured as a disrobed, tonsured man, whose imitation of Christ seems to be limited to his state of undress. Conversely, a small devil who preens before the cleric, physically blocking his way to salvation, is a much better doppelganger of Christ. He stands in a similar pose: right leg forward, left to the side; left hand carrying the scourge, the right extended. This, however, is a mocking rather than a pious imitation, an inversion of sorts that ridicules the very idea of imitatio Christi. Instead of the rope that Christ grasps in his right hand, the devil holds a money bag; instead of the cross tied to Christ’s torso, the devil sports another money bag secured around his neck, in a contemptuous echo of the position of the patibulum. In place of the cruciform halo are horns; in place of the loincloth wrapped around Christ’s hips and billowing behind him – tufts of fur on the thighs and a thick billowing tail; in place of crimson drops of blood – two crimson pools that mark the money bags. Not precisely the Antichrist, this devil is 2 For bibliography on this and related fragmentary print, see: Origins of European Printmaking, 277–80, no. 86 3 Schr. 929. Most recently, see: Sabine Griese, “Gebrauchsformen und Gebrauchsräume von Einblattdrucken des 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Einblattdrucke des 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhunderts. Probleme, Perspektiven, Fallstudien, ed. Volker Honemann, et. al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 185–6, no. 22; Volker Honemann, “‘Die Kreuztragende Minne’: zur Dialogizität eines spätmittelhochdeutschen geistlichen Gedichts,” in Sprachspiel und Bedeutung. Festschrift für Franz Hundsnurscher zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Susanne Beckmann, et. al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 473–75; Origins of European Printmaking, 280–82, no. 87 with further bibliography.

344

Figure 15.3 Love Bearing the Cross, Bavaria, second half of the 15th c., GNM H61.

Gertsman

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

345

mostly certainly an anti-Christ who interferes with the Soul’s quest for salvation. The bleeding Christ, the Soul, and the devil are bound together in the inverted triangle that comprehends the gestures and the objects: the demon’s scourge is raised towards the Soul; the Soul’s arms extend the meaty heart towards Christ, and the rope tied around his waist is grasped in Christ’s right hand; finally, another rope that binds Christ’s waist to the patibulum draws attention to the heavy crossbeam whose diagonal sweep returns the viewer’s gaze to the little devil. And while the tonsured man gazes longingly at Christ, the heavy-lidded Christ looks down at the equally heavy-lidded devil, who stares directly at the cleric’s nether parts, his left arm raised as if making to tickle him there with the scourge. The presence of this little devil, so out of place in the encounter between Christ and the Christian Soul, is striking. His anthropomorphic form is very different from that of an animalistic, furry demon climbing on the Soul’s cross and poised to whisper its poisonous words into the young woman’s ear in another image of Christ and the Loving Soul, which prefaces a manuscript copy of Henry Suso’s Schriften (Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 710 [322], fol. 1r, Figure 15.4).4 Indeed, the telltale money bags the Ulm creature holds, his distorted physiognomy, and his mocking inversion of Christ’s marks of the Passion – his wounds – suggest he is none other than a figure of the Jew, an avaricious satanic surrogate found frequently in later medieval imagery. Sara Lipton has identified the late twelfth century as a starting point for the significant development of anti-Jewish iconography that both demonized the Jews and drew binding connections between money lending and the Jewish population. Indeed, along with many scholars, Lipton demonstrates that the two terms, “the Jew” and “the usurer,” became synonymous in both theological and secular writings.5 The money bags have, thus, been used as indices for 4

5

On the manuscript, see especially exhibition catalogues published in Einsiedeln by Odo Lang: Miniaturen aus acht Jahrhunderten in Einsiedler Handschriften (Einsiedeln: Stiftsbibliothek, 1990), 13; Zimelien des 15. Jahrhunderts (Einsiedeln: Stiftsbibliothek, 1999), 26f; and Im Kreuz ist Heil! Das Kreuz als Zeichen des Heils in Handschriften unbd Drucken der Stiftsbibliothek Einsiedeln (Einsiedeln: Stiftsbibliothek, 2000), 12f. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2, 17–22, 147 n. 9. See also: Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Eric Zafran, “The Iconography of AntiSemitism: A Study Of The Representation Of The Jews In The Visual Arts Of Europe 1400– 1600” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, rpt. Ann Arbor, 1973); and Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 140–43.

346

Gertsman

Figure 15.4 Christ and the Loving Soul, Constance, ca. 1490, Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 710 [322], fol. 1r.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

347

identifying Jews in late medieval visual culture, from the twelfth-century French Bibles moralisées replete with images of Jews carrying the bags to the sixteenth-century Scottish Fetternear banner that includes – among the instruments of Christ’s Passion, no less – busts of two Jews, one of whom has a money bag hanging around his neck. This, of course, is Judas, whose act of betrayal in exchange for money, as Debra Strickland points out, “tied in neatly to the issue of usury, an ugly point of comparison that supposedly proved the malicious intentions of Jewish moneylenders, who loved money more than anything, as demonstrated by the one who sold out Christ.”6 Another Jew embroidered on the banner is shown spitting: his physiognomy, with its grotesquely upturned bulbous nose, heavy eyes, and parted lips serves as a striking visual counterpart of the facial features of the Ulm devil (Figure 15.5). This same type, indeed, appears among Christ’s Jewish tormentors in the Wurzach Altar Panels completed by the Hans Multscher workshop in Ulm in 1437: the monstrous man looks particularly demonic, his mad gaze upturned, his shaven chin jutting forward (Figure 15.6).7 Devils and Jews were so frequently conflated in medieval visual and theological discourses that it was commonly presumed that Jews themselves had horns.8 The elision of the Jew and the Devil is found as early as patristic literature: according to John Chrysostom, not only synagogues, but also the very souls of the Jews, were the places where demons dwelled.9 The devil was often represented with perceived Semitic characteristics: an exaggerated hooked 6 Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews, 142. 7 On the late medieval Ulmer art, see: Maris Margaret Doris Armfield, “Art and Society in Ulm 1377–1530” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 2012), on the altarpiece in particular, 123–4; Ulrich Söding, “Hans Multschers Wurzacher Altar,” MJBK 42 (1991): 69–116; and Manfred Tripps, Hans Multscher: Seine Ulmer Schaffenszeit 1427–1467 (Weißenhorn: Verlag, 1969), 86–125. Not many primary documents remain from late medieval Ulm; one of the most valuable extant first-hand descriptions of the city comes from the Dominican monk Felix Fabri, Tractatus de civitate ulmensi: de eius origine, ordine, regimine, de civibus eius et statu, ed. Gustav Veesenmeyer (Tübingen: Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart, 1889). 8 Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 44–52, and Ruth Mellinkoff, The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 135–36. 9 John Chrysostom, Homiliae Adversus Judaeos 1.4, PG 48, cols. 846–49, trans. in Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era, ed. Wayne A. Meeks and Robert L. Wilken (Missoula, MN: Scholars Press for the Society of Biblical Literature, 1978), 92; see further on the iconographic connection between the two in Petra Schöner, Judenbilder im deutschen Einblattdruck der Renaissance: ein Beitrag zur Imagologie (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 2002), 249–58.

348

Gertsman





Figure 15.6 Hans Multscher and workshop, the Carrying of the Cross from the Wurzach Altar (detail), Ulm, 1437, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

Figure 15.5 The Fetternear Banner, detail, ca. 1520, Scotland. Photo courtesy Mats Larsson.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

349

nose, for instance, such as that found on the image of the Fallen Angel in the Besserer Chapel of the Ulm Münster, executed by Hans Acker and workshop in 1430–31.10 Just as the Devil turned into the Jew, so the Jew turned into the Devil, and the demonic protagonist of the Ulm woodcut is nothing but an early manifestation of what became common currency in German art of the sixteenth century: for example, “Der Jüden Ehrbarkeit,” a loathsome anti-Semitic cartoon, features Jews – identifiable by their circular badges, or rouelles – as sow-riding, bagpipe-playing, horned and hoofed devils (Figure 15.7).11 The mockery and semantic inversion of Christ’s gestures by the demon in the Ulm woodcut, moreover, suggest his implicit connection to – albeit not direct figuration of – the Antichrist, a creature to be born, according to one tradition, of the incestuous union between the Jews from the tribe of Dan, and, according to another, from intercourse between a Jewish woman and the devil himself.12 One of the defining traits of the Antichrist is his methodical impersonation of Christ and the perversion of his deeds; he is often pictured in his iteration as the horned Beast.13 The place of the Jewish devil in the Ulmer woodcut is, thus, rife with connotations. As elsewhere in Europe, a wave of anti-Semitic sentiment washed over Ulm in the wake of the plague. The Jews, accused of poisoning wells, were attacked by Christian inhabitants of Ulm, and the city council did nothing to stop them. When the property of victims of the pogroms was appropriated by 10

11 12

13

Armfield, “Art and Society,” 150–152, who compares the Wurzach panels with Besserer windows, and provides a substantial bibliography on the latter, reproducing the Fallen Angel window in Figure 222. Published in 1571, BSB Res/4 Polem. 2290 h; see: Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur: ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Albert Langen, 1921), 176. See: Richard Kenneth Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apo­ calypticism, Art, and Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); and Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Ages, 1200–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), esp. Chapter 5, 101–103 and 112–20. The literature on the Antichrist in medieval culture is broad. See especially the work of Emmerson, who has been unraveling the complex and multivalent meanings of the images of the Antichrist for three decades, from the foundational Antichrist in the Middle Ages to his latest work, which discusses the Berry Apocalypse in terms of papal schism, “On the Threshold of the Last Days: Negotiating Image and Word in the Apocalypse of Jean de Berry,” in Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces, ed. Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012); see also: Rosemary Muir Wright, Art and Antichrist in Medieval Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); on the connection, see: Debra Strickland “Antichrist and the Jews in Medieval Christian Art and Protestant Propaganda,” Studies in Iconography 32 (2011): 1–50, and Lipton, Images of Intolerance, 38–43 and 113–22.

350

Gertsman

Figure 15.7 “Der Jüden Ehrbarkeit,” 1571, BSM Res/4 Polem. 2290 h#Beibd.1. Published with permission of the Bavarian State Library, Munich.

the city, the authorities claimed to have discovered a letter written by Jerusalem Jews to their Ulm brethren, notifying them that Christ’s crucifixion had successfully taken place (the earliest evidence of Jewish population in Ulm dates from the thirteenth century).14 Tensions mounted: in 1361, the council decreed the legal status of the city’s Jews to be entirely dependent on its whim; in 1428, the Ulm Jews were accused of blood libel in the murder of a small boy, Ludwig 14

See the palpably anti-Semitic publication: Eugen Nübling, Die Judengemeinden des Mittelalters: insbesondere die Judengemeinde der Reichsstadt Ulm: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Städte- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Ulm: Gebr. Nübling, 1896), 300.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

351

of Bruck; and in 1499, following years of discussions with Emperor Maximillian I, the city succeeded in receiving a Freiheitsbrief securing permission to throw the Jews out of the city.15 Their privileges annulled, the Jews were given a devastatingly brief time to sell or otherwise get rid of their movable property; and because their real estate went directly to the prefect of Geislingen, one Wolf of Asch, the expulsion cost the city of Ulm 5,000 gulden as they had to consequently purchase from the emperor the city synagogue, the Jewish hospital and cemetery, bath, and eleven houses belonging to Jewish families.16 Yet, expropriation and expulsion did not end contact between the Jewish population and Ulm’s citizens: because the outcasts were allowed to stay in the small towns around Ulm, Ulmers continued – in an age-old venerable tradition – both borrowing money from the Jews and throwing rocks through their windows. By 1530, Ulm decided it would be best for the Jews to leave the Empire en masse, and charged its envoys to the Diet of Augsburg to bring this possibility to the table.17 That the devil in the Ulm woodcut interferes with the salvation of the penitent Christian Soul marked by tonsure is significant. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Ulm clergy were implicated in a series of scandals. When Johannes Capistrano, the Observant Francsican and a fiery preacher, visited the city in 1454, he was compelled to preach against “vanities” and to point out that the clergy was not setting the best moral example for their parishioners.18 The texts of his Ulm sermons are no longer extant, but their main themes may be extrapolated from other surviving homilies.19 Famous for inciting Jewish persecutions in southern Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, especially in the years 1453–54, Capistrano likely elaborated on the explicit connection between clerical transgressions and the perceived wrongdoings of the Jews; indeed, one of his special missions as a papal legate to Germany was to bring to 15

16 17 18

19

Alte Einungs Ordung 1448–1641 (SU), Bl. 12ff, in Theodor Victor Brodek, “Society and Politics of Late Medieval Ulm: 1250–1550” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1972), 195. See also: Hassler, Friedrich Pressel, Geschischte der Juden in Ulm (Ulm: Gebr. Nübling, 1873); and “Ulm” in the Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906, now available at (accessed 28 May 2014) Herman Dicker, Die Geschichte der Juden in Ulm; ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters (Rottweil: M. Rothschild, 1937), 70ff. Brodek, “Society and Politics,” 195–97. Brodek, “Society and Politics,” 457 n. 3: Anon., “Ulmische Chronik” (SU), G1, 1650–2, Bl. 89. On Capistrano, see: Johannes Hofer, Johannes Kapistran. Ein Leben im Kampf um die Reform der Kirche (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1964–65). For the text of sermons, see: Lucianus Luszczki, De Sermonibus S. Ioannis a Capistrano, SA16 (Rome: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1961).

352

Gertsman

justice “the disbelieving Jews,” as per the resolutions of the Council of Basel (1431–43).20 The middle and the end of the fifteenth century marked notable declines in fortunes and in the population of several south German cities, including Ulm.21 Preachers, Capistrano among them, attributed the decline to the sins of the social body and the attendant punishment by God. For example, in 1452, the legate preached before the Duke of Saxony, Wilhelm III, in Jena; the sermon, typical of Capistrano’s south German homilies, evidently focused on the need to reform the body of citizenry, and prompted the Duke to issue an ordinance that addressed the people’s morals: It is apparent that our lands […] long have been harshly plagued by God with rising prices, poor harvests, death, turmoil, and other burdens [that] have their chief cause in the breaking of God’s commandments, and in other misdeeds all too common in the world. [Capistrano] chastised us […] telling us that it is our duty to reform ourselves, and everyone. Having been powerfully moved through this preaching, we have determined to act among our subjects […] to see […] that these weaknesses are corrected and transformed.22 One of Wilhelm’s new prohibitions concerned usury; guilty parties were to be executed and their goods confiscated. It is notable that German pamphlets (Flugschriften) published during the early years of the reformation, including those in Ulm, explicitly compared the clerics and the Jews, attacking both for “usury, sloth, seducing women, and for being demonic minions of the Antichrist.”23 And while reformatory literature was still a couple of decades in 20

21 22

23

“John of Capistrano,” Jewish Encyclopedia: (accessed 28 May 2014); Heidemarie Petersen, “Die Predigttätigkeit des Giovanni di Capistrano in Breslau und Krakau 1453/54 und ihre Auswirkungen auf die dortigen Judengemeinden in Polen und Schlesien,” in In Breslau zu Hause?: Juden in einer mitteleuropäischen Metropole der Neuzeit, ed. Manfred Hettling, Andreas Reinke, and Norbert Conrads (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2003), 22–29; Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 120–26. Brodek, “Society and Politics,” 170. Diplomataria et Scriptores Historiae Germanicae Medii Aevii, ed. Christian Schoettgen and Georg Kreysig, vol. 1 (Altenburg 1753), 527–8, trans. in Robert James Bast, Honor Your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, C. 1400–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 179. Robert Po Chia-Hsia, “Anticlerialism in German Reformation Pamphlets: A Response,” in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter A. Dykema and Heiko

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

353

the future, accusations leveled against local clergy in Ulm – which similarly ranged from moral corruption to financial abuse – pointed to the tensions already inherent in the very fabric of its late medieval social body. Analyzing late medieval German poetry in terms of anticlerical discourse, Albrecht Classen has pointed out that “the clerical estate as a whole received most criticism because of its official claim to moral and ethical superiority over the rest of the population.”24 When they failed to model proper behavior, clerics came under fire from secular authorities; the Ulm woodcut is a visual witness to this failure. Several secular mandates issued in Ulm, which specifically concerned clerical concubinage and accusations of homosexuality, suggest that the demon’s inappropriate behavior – he stares directly at the tonsured man’s genitals, gesturing as if to touch them with his scourge – is far from coincidental.25 Financial corruption was also at the heart of clerical misbehavior: when the city council turned to the Bishop of Constance for help in dealing with unruly clerics, it cited speculation as one of the clerical misdeeds.26 The money bags around the demon’s neck point quite clearly to this particular accusation. But the Ulm clerics, it seems, did not heed the dire warnings or the city’s mandates: the 1460s and 1470s were marked by all manner of behavioral problems, so much so that in 1466 one of the priests, Leonhard Brunwart, resigned from his Fraternity, unable to handle the extreme corruption, while in 1470, a fight among members of the same Fraternity ended in bloodshed.27 Because parochial clergy took pastoral responsibility for laymen’s souls, their transgressions marked the rest of their parish, which fell under an interdict that excluded the pious from participating in all manner of rites, including the reception of sacraments. The tonsured man in the Ulm print stands not simply as a figuration of the individual soul who models private pious exercises for the viewer – as is clearly the case with, for example, the Munich broadsheet (Figure 15.2) – but as a representative of the civic body, whose heart

24 25

26

27

Augustinus Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 496. Albrecht Classen, “Anticlericalism in Late Medieval German Verse,” in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 102–103. See: Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 33 n. 94 for documents and bibliography. Regesta Episcoporum Constantiensium: Regesten zur Geschichte der Bischöfe von Canstanz von Bubulcus bis Thomas Berlower, 517–1496, ed. Badischen Historischen Commission (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1886–1931), no. 12725; discussed in Theodor Keim, Die Reformation der Reichsstadt Ulm: ein Beitrag zur schwäbischen und deutschen Reformationsgeschichte (Stuttgart: C. Belser, 1851), 111ff., and Brodek, “Society and Politics,” 458. Brodek, “Society and Politics,” 457–59; Armfield, “Art and Society in Ulm,” 86–87.

354

Gertsman

he holds in his hands. This connection is made explicit in the visual echoing between the shapes of the heart and of the coat of arms of Ulm. Both, too, are half-shaded and half-clear, the comparison brought to the fore by the compositional placement of the coat of arms behind the cleric and directly across from the heart he holds. The heart is suspended from a dry tree that rises from a barren two-peaked outcropping whose formal features are doubled by the cleric’s body: for example, the hatching on the side of the smaller hill echoes the hatching on the man’s thighs, while the sloping hillsides nearly parallel the descending diagonal of his right leg. The heart as a mobile, multivalent device was a supremely visible sign in later medieval culture; it appears in secular lyric, such as King Rene’s Le Livre du Cuer d’Amour Espris – where the heart is plucked from the sleeping Lover’s chest and subsequently personified by a valiant knight (Figure 15.8) – as well as in devotional literature that promulgated the cult of the Sacred Heart and shaped the heart as the dwelling place for Christ.28 The latter concept, which stems ultimately from the Augustinian exhortation to carry Christ in one’s heart, finds particularly clear resonance in the imitatio Christi literature: Thomas à Kempis, for instance, uses the heart metaphor liberally throughout his treatise, instructing the pious to “prepare [their] heart[s] with all diligence, and receive [their] Beloved unto [them],” and to withdraw the heart “from all created things […] and give [their] heart[s] altogether unto God.”29 The Ulm woodcut appears to literalize this act: the symbolic heart of the city, given by the contrite cleric to Christ despite the devil’s advances, expresses hope that God is to be reborn in the heart of the repentant, remorseful urban body. That the coat of arms hangs from the dry tree, which, in turn, grows from a desolate ground, indexes the hope of rebirth most clearly: taking its inspiration from Ezekiel 17:24 (“The Lord […] have caused the dry tree to flourish”) and the legend of the Holy Cross, the dry tree appears frequently in late medieval 28

29

René d’Anjou, Le livre du coeur d’amour épris, ed. and trans. Florence Bouchet (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2003); on the heart as a dwelling place, see: Jeffrey F. ­Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 137–75. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, ed. and trans. Leo Sherley-Price, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2005), section 4 in chapter 12. For the original formulation, see: Augustine, Sermon 189:3, PL 38, col. 10006. For the general development of this theme, see: Alois ­Müller, Ecclesia-Maria, die Einheit Marias und der Kirche, 2nd ed. (Freiburg, Schweiz: Universitätsverlag, 1955), 196–206. On this and other patristic sources for the metaphor, see: Hugo Rahner, Symbole der Kirche: die Ekklesiologie der Väter (Salzburg: Müller, 1964), 11–87. German mystical writings, such as those of Meister Eckhart, enrich and complicate this metaphor.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

Figure 15.8 René d’Anjou, Le Livre du Cœur d’Amour épris (detail: Heart Plucked from the Dreamer), 1457-70, Vienna, ONB, Codex Vindobonensis 2597.

355

356

Gertsman



Figure 15.9 Michael Wolgemut and Workshop, pub. by Anton Koberger, Christ on Mount of Olives, page 52 from the Treasury (Schatzbehalter), 1491
Woodcut on cream laid paper with letterpress on verso 
245 × 175 mm (image/ block/sheet). Photo: Art Institute of Chicago.

art, pointing to Christ’s death and so also visualizing hope for redemption.30 Although the contemporary Liber Chronicarum is replete with images of cities (Ulm being one of them) that include bare-branched trees in the townscapes, the pairing of the dry branches and Christ’s emaciated body across the expanse of the woodcut is telling. Late medieval German examples of such pairing are plentiful. The dried up tree behind Christ in Michael Wolgemut’s woodcut 30

Another famous example appears in Guillaume de Deguileville, Pèlerinage de l’âme, where the figure of Justice is placed between the dry and verdant trees, the latter holding Mary (BN Ms Fr. 823, fol. 133v); see: Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 145–218. On the dry tree as the symbol of renewal and redemption, see: Gerhart B. Ladner, “Vegetation symbolism and the concept of Renaissance,” in De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (New York: University Press, 1961), rpt. in Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies in History and Art (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1983), 1:726, 63, esp. 740ff.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

357

(1491) has already begun to leaf (Figure 15.9); dry and verdant trees compete for space against a thundery sky in Lucas Cranach’s 1503 Crucifixion; and the coat of arms of Ulm hangs heavily from a dry tree, whose verdancy is incipient, expected through the acts of penitence, contrition, and Christic imitation. This, precisely, is the kind of discipline that Christ offers when he says to the Soul: “I do not remit the punishment of the one that I hold dear.” The reeds extended to the Soul indicate clearly what kind of penitence the city must perform: an imitative kind, the pain that Christ himself bore. The heart-shaped coat of arms, the dry tree from which it hangs, and the stark outcropping from which the dry tree grows collectively stand for the urban body of Ulm – the body from which the cleric emerges, and toward which both Christ and the devil turn. It is indeed this body that carries the visual manifestation of imitatio Christi – the five wounds. The flesh of the bleeding Christ who turns towards the cleric is curiously devoid of wounds, nor does he wear a crown of thorns: sanguine drops appear nearly incongruous on his unblemished body. Instead, it is the Ulmer body that is wounded: the outcropping bears the tree as if a thorny crown, and, dotting the hill, are five black circular marks splashed in red – a common visual formula for depicting Christ’s wounds in late medieval German woodcuts (see, e.g. Figure 15.10). Dislocated from Christ’s body, the wounds become imprinted into the body of the city. The urban body thus transforms into a landscape of stigmata, a topographical map of Christ’s pain. The body as the medium for wounding and the body as the image for the wounds, enacted two centuries prior by St. Francis, and performed henceforth by the numerous devout who used their flesh to reembody Christ, are here refigured as the body of the city.31 Indeed, late medieval cities were often metaphorized as somatic entities, their spaces – seen as macrocosms of human bodies – frequently gendered and described in terms of the body “politic.”32 Bodies, in turn, became cities: 31

32

See: Hans Belting, “Saint Francis and the Body as Image: An Anthropological Approach,” on St. Francis’s stigmatization as an “iconization of the body as well as the incorporation of the image,” in Looking Beyond: Images, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of Christian Art, 2010), 3–14; Carolyn Muessig, “Performance of the Passion: The Enactment of Devotion in the Later Middle Ages,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. Elina Gertsman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 129–42. On the urban body as a civic body, see: Keith D. Lilley, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2009); Elina Gertsman and Elina Räsänen, “Locating the Body in Medieval Reval,” in Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, ed. Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih (London: Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, King’s College London, 2012), 137–58; Michael Camille, “Signs of the

358

Gertsman

Figure 15.10 Christ’s wounds, detail of The Man of Sorrows between the Virgin and Saint John (Schr. 996), German, 15th century, hand-colored Woodcut, Dimensions: sheet: 6 1/8 × 3 7/8 in. (15.5 × 9.8 cm).

Henry of Lancaster, for example, compares a Christian body beleaguered by sin to a besieged town in his Livre des saintes médecines, while Henri de Mondeville’s Chirurgie draws explicit parallels between urban and bodily structures.33 The relationship and intersection of Christ’s body with the body of the city is articulated as early as the late twelfth century by a monk named Lucian, who imposes, in his De Laude Cestrie, the crucified body onto the city of Chester, whose main streets are laid out (and adjusted by Lucian’s imagination) so as to form a cross.34 The language of Lucian’s description is fraught: he has the streets “meeting and crossing themselves,” and so, to borrow from Keith

33

34

City,” in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1–36. E.J. Arnould, Étude sur le Livre des saintes médecines du duc Henri de Lancastre: accompagnée d’extraits du texte (Paris : M. Didier, 1948), 51–54; Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 125–59. Liber Luciani se Laude Cestrie, ed. M.V. Taylor, Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society 64 (1912); excerpt cited in D.M. Palliser, Chester: Contemporary Descriptions by Residents and Visitors (Chester: Council of the City of Chester, 1980), 6–7, and cited and discussed in Lilley, City and Cosmos, 24ff.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

359

Lilley, suggests “the whole city [...] imitating the Christian act of marking the body with the sign of Christ’s passion, the cross, thus mapping his body onto the ‘body’ of the city as a whole, and the bodies of those of its inhabitants.”35 This kind of relationship became especially palpable during Corpus Christi processions, which, as Lilley suggests, “connected the urban ‘body’ with the Body of Christ” and “had the ‘body’ of the city performing as a whole, as well as its individual parts, or members.”36 The mapping of this sacred body on the urban insignia is visualized strikingly in another late fifteenth-century German image, this one produced by the workshop of Bernt Notke and imported to the Livonian city of Reval. There, the coat of arms of Reval, positioned directly below the Man of Sorrows, is nailed to the cross and pierced by arma Christi (Figure 15.11).37 The body of the city not only elides with Christ’s own, but is also made to suffer the torments suffered by Christ: his betrayal, his flagellation, his humiliation, his crucifixion, and his denial by Peter. The crimson ground of the coat of arms takes on a macabre expiatory significance, as it seems drenched in blood, its red a visual echo of the bloody drops that cover the entirety of Christ’s flesh.38 The Ulm woodcut figures the city in the throes of imitatio Christi in a less complex but no less effective way. Indeed, its very topographic nudity – the stark hills, the black tree, and the small insignia that semantically identifies them – is visually linked to the nudity of the Soul. The cleric and his city stand naked before their God; this notion of the bared soul, which first appears in Jerome’s “Nudus nudum Christi sequi,” is one of the central tenets of Thomas à Kempis’s treatise that exhorts the pious to “be stripped clean of all selfishness, 35 36 37

38

Lilley, City and Cosmos, 132 Lilley, City and Cosmos, 158; on the feast, see first and foremost: Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist, and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi. On arma Christi see: Rudolph Berliner, “Arma Christi,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 6 (1955): 35–152 and Robert Suckale, “Arma Christi: Überlegungen zur Zeichenhaftigkeit mittelalterlicher Andachtsbilder,” Städel–Jahrbuch 6 (1977): 177–208. Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1971–72), 192, and Kathryn Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2003), 175–77 discuss the shield as Christ’s body in this and other illuminations. In this volume see: Salvador Ryan, “‘Scarce anyone survives a heart wound’: The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry,” 291–312; Vibeke Olson, “Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space,” 313–39; and Virginia Langum, “‘The Wounded Surgeon’: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England,” 269–90. For an in-depth discussion of this image in its original context, see: Gertsman and Räsänen, “Locating the Body,” 139–40.

360

Gertsman

Figure 15.11

Workshop of Bernt Notke, Christ as the Man of Sorrows and St Elisabeth of Thüringia, first view of the Holy Spirit altarpiece, 1483. Church of the Holy Spirit, Tallinn, Estonia. Photo by the kind permission of Gustav Piir, Church of the Holy Spirit, Tallinn.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

361

and naked follow the naked Jesus.”39 On the empty hills, the wounds stand out all the more, their red echoed in the money bags the devil holds, the sides of the speech scrolls, Christ’s blood and the cruciform in his halo, and the angel’s wings. The color moves across the print, highlighting the key elements presented by the woodcut: corruption offered by the demon, contrition offered by the Soul, the Passion offered by Christ, and the stern advice offered by the angel. This advice bears repeating: “Think of the last days, then you will never sin.” Ostensibly a comment on the sins of Ulm, the angel’s counsel, of course, is directed at the viewers. The angel is alone in acknowledging beholders who are effectively barred from what appears to be an intensely intimate encounter between the Soul of the anthropomorphized city and its Savior as well as its demon. The woodcut is staged as a didactic tableau of sorts, an individual urban plight made public: particular to its time and place, it is nonetheless a spectacle to contemplate, and from which to learn. On the surface, its lesson is straightforward: the city is offered a choice between Christ who extends punishment as the promise of salvation, and the devil, whose promises are of a carnal, emphatically terrestrial nature. In turn, the heart that the Soul proffers, the wounds that the city assumes, and the severe discipline of Christic imitation that the Soul accepts on behalf of Ulm’s inhabitants, predicate the choice that Christ will make on Judgment Day when separating the saved from the damned. But it is necessary to put some pressure on the meaning of this imitation, and particularly on the meaning of the wounds. On the one hand, if the Soul in the Ulm woodcut is meant to be a model for the viewer, it is a fraught model indeed, sinful through and through, corrupted by carnal and pecuniary transgressions, if ultimately contrite. On the other, the print clearly warns against literal imitation, which is here construed as a dangerous, mocking act. It is the devil who copies Christ precisely in his gestures, in his posture, even in the reeds he holds – while the cleric, who, along with Christ, provides a kind of parenthesis for the figure of the demon, embodies corrective difference: his stance is just sufficiently different from Christ’s, as is the position of his arms. Paradoxically, the print that literalizes the give-your-heart-unto-God trope seems to warn precisely against physical, direct imitation, suggesting that 39

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book 3, Chapter 37; discussed vis-à-vis Jan van Eyck’s Dresden Triptych in Craig Harbison, Jan van Eyck (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 148–49. On Nudus nudum Christum sequi, see: Matthäus Bernards, “Nudus nudum Christum sequi,” Wissenschaft und Weisheit 14 (1951): 148–51, and Giles Constable, “Nudus nudum Christum sequi and Parallel Formulas in the Twelfth Century: A Supplementary Dossier,” in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History: Festschrift George Huntston Williams, ed. F. Forrester Church and Timothy George (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 83–91.

362

Gertsman

imitatio Christi is a spiritual, metaphorical act that must always be figurative. Such a warning against the mindless aping of Christ’s pain resonates throughout the late medieval literature written at a time when bodily imitations of the Passion became somewhat de rigeur in devotional cultures throughout Europe. After all, as Giles Constable has suggested, “If Christ was a real man who suffered real wounds, and if the object of Christians was to imitate him literally,” then they could “bear his precise wounds.”40 But such imitations, exemplified in the acts of the mystic Dorothy of Montau who stood against a wall for hours in the position of Christ crucified, to extend the duration of her behavior, erased the border between the allegorical and the literal forms of imitation.41 The erasure was dangerous: in relating an exemplum about a Liège layman’s attempt to crucify himself on a Good Friday – he was narrowly saved by the shepherds who happened to spot his tormented body hanging on the cross high up on a hill – Jacques of Vitry is quick to point out that the layman’s suicidal act was done at the urging of the devil.42 A narrative of a less lucky monk who succeeded in auto-crucifixion, also demonically instigated, is recorded in a Provencal miscellany (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale ms. Fr 25415), which, as Kathryn Smith has convincingly argued, cautions against the extremes of direct Christic imitation that in its literalness constitutes “the perversion of the ideal of imitatio Christi.”43 When Venturino de Bergamo sent scourges to Katharina von Gueberschwihr, the abbess of Unterlinden, to be used on the bodies of her nuns Augustina, Christina, and Anna in memory of Christ’s wounds, he nonetheless advised that they should not go overboard and compete with Christ, as to do so would be vain.44 As 40

41

42 43

44

Giles Constable, “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” in Three Studies in Medieval Religions and Social Thought: The Interpretation of Mary and Martha, the Ideal of the Imitation of Christ, the Orders of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 194–5. For more on the imitative wounds of Dorothea von Montau, see: Albrecht Classen, “Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind,” in this volume, 417–47. Jacque de Vitry, Exemplum 44, in Die exempla aus den Sermones feriales et communes des Jakob von Vitry, ed. Joseph Greven (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1914), 31–2. Kathryn Smith, “The Monk Who Crucified Himself,” in Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces, ed. Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 44–72, at 52. See: Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Liber Miraculorum of Unterlinden: An Icon in Its Convent Setting,” in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 279–316, at 303; and Hamburger, “Overkill, Or History That Hurts,” Common Knowledge 13. 2–3 (Spring 2007): 404–28, at 416.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

363

Jeffrey Hamburger has argued, one of the clearest examples of the renunciation of literal imitation in favor of the spiritual is found in Henry Suso’s Exemplar, which “describes all manner of self-inflicted suffering” and in due course “constructs a spiritual pattern, in following which the protagonist ultimately abandons the most literal understanding of the imitatio Christi in favor of an inward, spiritualized likeness.”45 Visual vocabulary for suggesting the rejection of direct Christic imitation must, per force, operate by disjunction from established imagery, and the Ulm woodcut achieves just that. In addition to the figures of the devil (who literally, and therefore inappropriately, imitates Christ) and the figure of the cleric (whose imitation is suggested but not absolutely embodied), it is the wounds – their shape and their displacement – that forcefully and explicitly articulate the necessity to imitate, rather than ape, Christ’s suffering. All five wounds imprinted on Ulm’s body are rendered identical: instead of one elongated perforation and four round ones, all the wounds conform to the same shape. Like the Soul that imitates Christ (but not quite) so the wounds sustained by the city are like Christ’s wounds (but not quite). Literalness slips here, refusing and resisting pure, absolute imitation. That the side wound – the one that formed the focus of such sustained devotion in the Middle Ages – is the one to be transformed is hardly an accident: its potential for devotional and imaginative ingress, which characterizes later medieval piety, would have been out of place in the rhetoric of the penitent, disciplinary imitation offered by the city.46 The very placement of the wounds upon the body of Ulm, moreover, contravenes one of the most commonly leveled charges against improper imitatio Christi: that it is solitary, and as such both prone to error and socially useless. In discussing the Provencal drawing, Smith points out that the monk attempting auto-crucifixion is alone in his cell, in direct contrast to those mystics “whose spiritual practices and performances were, like the Crucifixion of Jesus itself, disseminated by biographers and witnessed by many.”47 It is significant that the wounds that slip from Christ’s body do not find themselves imprinted on 45 46

47

Hamburger, “Overkill,” 416. For the extensive bibliography on different approaches to side wound, see: Martha Easton, “The Wound of Christ, the Mouth of Hell: Appropriations and Inversions of Female Anatomy in the Later Middle Ages,” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture, ed. Susan L’Engle and Gerald B. Guest (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2006), 395–414, and Silke Tammen, “Blick und Wunde – Blick und Form: zur Deutungsproblematik der Seitenwunde Christi in der Spätmittelalterlichen Buchmalerei,” in Bild und Körper im Mittelalter in Bild und Körper im Mittelalter, ed. Kristin Marek et al. (Munich: Fink, 2006), 85–114. Smith, “The Monk,” 68.

364

Gertsman

the heart that the cleric offers. Although the imagery of the bleeding, wounded heart was common currency in late medieval imagery – the kind that, for example, reveled in depicting St. Catherine with the bloody, dripping organ ripped right out of her chest – here the heart held by the Soul remains unblemished, and it is the collective body of the city that suffers the wounding. The importance of constructing the imitation of Christ as a communal event with a direct social objective is nowhere more clearly articulated than in the words of Walter Hilton, a late fourteenth-century Augustinian mystic, who rejected the practice of Passion devotion if it was self-serving rather than shared. As Smith reminds us, in voicing this condemnation, Hilton “utilized the longestablished metaphor of Christ’s body as the Christian community in order to make his point.”48 The body of Ulm is figured in the woodcut as just such a Christian community, which opens its admission of sin, as well as its contrition and corrective imitation, to the beholding body at large, as an example to follow but not to replicate. The image of the wounds, then, functions as a nexus of meanings articulated in the print, predicating visual and semantic inversions and echoes that converge on the wounded hillside. The wounds identify the city of Ulm as a body in need of collective and imitative contrition for transgressions; they serve as expiatory marks, offered by this contrite body; and they point to the necessity of the metaphorical, rather than literal, Christic behavior. In doing so, they guide the viewer’s gaze from one protagonist of the woodcut to another, from Christ as a model for proper imitation, to the Soul that properly submits itself to this imitation, to the quasi-Jewish demon whose physical aping of Christ’s body not only indexes him as an anti-Christ but also implies the dangers in the profound misunderstanding of proper imitatio Christi and the seductive ease with which such misunderstanding can lead one astray. Grounded as it is in specific events that took place in Ulm at the close of the fifteenth century – clerical scandals, anti-Semitic acts, fiery sermons preached to the anxious populace – the woodcut nonetheless aspires to a universal message that goes beyond the Nudus nudum Christi sequi precept. Despite the host of worldly dangers articulated in the print, dangers that surround a good Christian citizen in the form of satanic unbelievers, corrupt Church officials, and the seductions of easy and thus erroneous theology, this message is one of hope. After all, unlike later accusations leveled against the clergy for being “as 48

Smith, “The Monk,” 69; and R.N. Swanson, “Passion and Practice: The Social and Ecclesiastical Implications of Passion Devotion in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. A.A. MacDonald, Bernhard Ridderbos, and R.M. Schlusemann (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), 1–30, at 14–15.

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

365

blind as the Jews” – this particular one published in Ein Gespräch mit einem frommen Altmütterlein, and penned by Heinrich von Kettenbach, who preached in Ulm’s Franciscan cloister in the 1520s – the woodcut ultimately implies divine forgiveness, at least to those who, not only individually but also communally, follow the angel’s admonition to “think of the last days.”49 49

In Flugschriften gegen die Reformation (1525–1530), ed. Adolf Laube, 2 vols (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 1:211.

366

Gertsman

Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body

section 5 Passionate Wounds

∵

367

368

Gertsman

369

Ascetic Blood

Chapter 16

Ascetic Blood: Ethics, Suffering, and Community in Late-Medieval Culture Joshua S. Easterling

Do not say, I will repay evil; wait for the Lord, and He will rescue you. – Prov. 20:22

⸪ The body’s fundamental vulnerability supported monastic communities whose members took ascetic disciplines to violent extremes. Subjects given to penitential self-wounding, like lashing the skin with rods, explored this vulnerability even while they were often encouraged to set limits to what might, after all, become a danger to the life of the ascetic. This encouragement came as a result of the shifts and destabilizations inherent to limits: committed ascetics routinely sought out ever more extreme disciplines. The self-inflicted wound – the torn flesh, the superficial or deep laceration that was not allowed to heal (or was miraculously healed) – suggests an ascetic’s fascination with the boundary or limit (the skin) separating the self from the world. Yet the wound also remade that world. In their making and healing, opening and closing, wounds identified the cutaneous border as a site of radical alterations that occurred elsewhere, both within and beyond the confines of the flesh, and that enacted the ascetic’s re-conceptualizations of self and the community. Within the medieval context, numerous thirteenth-century biographies reveal an enduring preoccupation with the ever-wounded, ever-healing body. These texts are also themselves the products of dynamic movements across cultural and communal localities. With the exception of the recluse Wilbirg of St. Florian (†1289), all of the ascetics discussed below are of northern extraction – all hail from the Low Countries. Thomas of Cantimpré, described by Barbara Newman as “a tireless promoter of religious women,” authored the vitae of Christina the Astonishing (†1224) and the Cistercian nun Lutgard of Aywières (†1246).1 Strong religious affiliations (Cistercian against Benedictine, 1 Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman and trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 7; and Vita S. Christinae Mirabilis, in

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_018

370

Easterling

for instance) and even the border between secular and religious culture are frequently suppressed in these works. This comes in large part because, for Thomas, who wrote for “a broadly conceived network of spiritual friends,” these deeply embodied forms of spirituality served, if not as recruitment, at least as powerful living exempla to offset the rising cultural power of secular, and specifically commercial, establishments in the region.2 The lives of these three women intersect at several points. Christina’s life represents a bewildering series of twists and turns, including her miraculous death and resurrection, aimless wandering, and begging – behaviors interspersed with accounts of wounds generated by fire, brambles, scalding water, and whatever else her imagination conjured. Lutgard, a beguine turned Cistercian prioress, repeatedly afflicted herself with penitential wounds, but also suffered passively as a ruptured vein drenched her clothing in blood. The body of the anchoress Wilbirg, who was outdone in self-wounding only by her fourteenth-century counterpart Dorothea of Montau, was rarely free of deep scratches from whips, and pus-filled wounds generated by iron belts.3 Wilbirg also survives a stab-wound obtained when trying to defend herself against a would-be rapist. Partly through such suffering, these women sought to share the punishments of those suffering in purgatory, but they all also prophesied, again with the edification of their communities in mind. Wounds thereby helped sustain the bond between heroic distinction and collaboration in the salvation of others. At the same time, as Newman suggests, the unusually extreme self-wounding depicted in the Life of Arnulf of Villers (†1228) was intended to encourage the Cistercian community at Villers not to imitate Arnulf but to accept more rigorous discipline.4 By heroically self-wounding, ascetics adopted behaviors Acta Sanctorum, ed. J. Pinius, July 4 (Antwerp: Société des Bollandistes, 1727), 637–60; Vita S. Lutgardis, in Acta Sanctorum, ed. J. Carnandet, June 16 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 187–210. In all cases, the English translations to the Latin vitae have not been altered. 2 Newman, Thomas of Cantimpré, 19. 3 The Life of Dorothea von Montau, a Fourteenth-Century Recluse, trans. Ute Stargardt (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1997). In this volume, see: Albrecht Classen, “Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind,” 417–47. On another self-sounding mystic, see: Alicia Spencer-Hall, “Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250),” 389–416, in this volume. 4 Barbara Newman, Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramee, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, trans. Martinus Cawley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 16–17; Goswin of Bossut, Vita Arnulfi, in Acta Sanctorum, ed. D. Papebroeck, June 7 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 558–89.

Ascetic Blood

371

of detaching themselves from their communities even while inhabiting them. Like Lutgard, the abbess-turned-anchoress Juliana of Cornillon (†1258) separated herself from her community partly through self-imposed “labor, dolor, et adversitatum multiplex afflictio” [hardship, suffering, and every kind of affliction] (Vita, 468.31; Life, 272).5 But this practice also extended efforts in the vitae of both women to reaffirm orthodoxies, particularly Eucharistic piety, against Cathar influence.6 When Juliana’s biographer notes that doubting Thomas touched Christ’s open wound to acknowledge his “real” presence, her orthodox commitment to the body of Christ at once distinguishes her sharply from heretics and recalls the links between belief and the body, thereby affirming clerical power alongside the powers of the body. Like the Life of Wilbirg, who maintained close ties with what were probably the early readers of the work (regular canons and local Cistercians), these works were born as much from the personal devotion of biographers as from broader cultural, theological, and political influences.7 These and likeminded ascetics unsettle what self-inflicted wounds can be thought to have “said,” both in their making and healing.8 The wound referred those who witnessed (the effects of) its making to the ways in which it remade both the body and the subject’s relations with others. Marking the cutaneous boundary signaled – indeed, depended on – the making, unmaking, and remaking of other boundaries, especially the border between ascetic subjects and their environment, pleasure and pain, the self and others. Wounding shifts and relocates boundaries, refracting them in multiple directions. As whips, belts, bands, and other wound-inflicting devices opened the body, the 5 Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and trans. Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011); and Vita Iulianae Corneliensis, in Acta Sanctorum, ed. J. Carnandet, April 5 (Paris: Palmé, 1866), 435–76. 6 Newman, Thomas of Cantimpré, 11–16. 7 Die Vita Wilbirgis des Einwik Weizlan, ed. Lukas Sainitzer (Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, 1999), 16. All English translations of Wilbirg’s vita are my own. As Sainitzer notes, the personal attachment to Wilbirg by her biographer, Einwik Weizlan, was instrumental in the composition of the vita, although the text was doubtless also a means of further enhancing the prestige that her gravesite at St. Florian had already brought the church of the regular canons at St. Florian. For brief notes on Wilbrig, see: Gabriela Signori, “Anchorites in Germanspeaking regions,” in Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 55–56. 8 On extreme ascetic routines and for a catalogue of the late-medieval ascetics like Beatrice of Nazareth, Beatrice of Ornacieux, and others who practiced self-wounding, see: Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics (New York: Routledge, 2005), esp. 17–36, 98, 146–64.

372

Easterling

oft-repeated demand for acting responsibly towards self and others within a monastic community comes alongside indications that the distinction between responsible and irresponsible, as between individual body and communal body, was complicated by those same ascetic practices. This complication was also evidenced by “openings” at the boundary between absence and presence. Just as the wound exposed what was inside the body to its outside, ascetics are routinely described as at once reliant on, and resistant to, the presence of others who might witness the wounding (or its signs). The interplay between contraries – absence and presence, responsible and irresponsible – lends ascetic self-wounding the intricate set of energies that sustains it. Theoretical and historicist analyses by, among others, Caroline Walker Bynum, Sarah Kay, and Miri Rubin have addressed the intersection between medieval religious experience and the body.9 Medieval narratives of self-wounding are often witness to a paradoxical condition imposed by ascetic violence on its practitioners and their community: while responsible conduct toward others presupposes their presence – either in the form of oversight by or direct accountability to another – or at least a shared sense of what constitutes justifiable behavior, being responsible toward and for others also requires the other’s absence and therefore the absence of accountability. Whether or not the ascetic shows awareness of their effects, wounds affirm and remake communal bonds by enabling destabilizations of responsibility, presence, and identity. By healing and refusing to heal, wounds mark the ascetic body with a wider cultural ambivalence towards bloody disciplines – an ambivalence that is replicated at the level of agency. In these vitae, wounds bear comparison with the devotion of late-medieval women to the Eucharist. Just as illnesses are wondrously caused and cured by the Eucharist, once Wilbirg of St. Florian demonstrates that she is unwilling to allow her wounds to heal properly, healing miraculously comes to her.10 The iron belt causes the wound to rupture – of course, divina voluntate “by the will of God” – just as the skin ruptured, and the instrument that creates the bodily trauma is also made into an instrument that allows for healing (Vita, 196.44). At issue here and elsewhere is a refusal of the 9

10

See, for example: Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University press, 1994), esp. 1–7; more recently, The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); and, among her other studies, Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992). On the Eucharistic miracles, see: Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 131.

Ascetic Blood

373

oppositional logic that would position wounding against healing and approval of Wilirg’s practice against disapproval. The will to inflict the self with wounds also seeks a form of self-dominance that grants the sufferer new agency.11 Yet while it is possible to figure agency as an individual matter, it is also fragmented, dispersed, and occasionally given over to inanimate objects. Thus, before the iron belt she had acquired set about destroying her flesh, Wilbirg fears that any impulse she might have to loosen the instrument and relieve her pain might be motivated “non ex necessitate, sed ex levitate” [not on account of necessity, but through laxness] (Vita, 195.43). She therefore determined to fasten it in such a way that she would not be able to remove the belt even if she desired to do so. Her wounds and their healing emerge, however, not merely through divine and insentient agents, for in addition to giving herself fifty lashes with a barbed whip at each hour of the day, and one hundred extra morning-hour lashes (just for good measure?), she also offers an untold number of beatings “pro suis specialibus amicis et aliis suis necessitatibus” [for her special friends and other needs of her own] (Vita, 187.28). Even a visit by friends to her cell elicits changes in the routine. When spending the night with “hospiti religioso … et dilecto” [a pious and dear guest], she entirely abstains from the discipline, or will lash herself only once “quia devocionem talem maxime propter sonitum plagarum perficere non poterat” [since it was mostly due to the sound of the blows that she could not perform such devotion] (Life, 187–88.28). In such instances, the ambivalence expressed through attempts to conceal self-wounding activities is at one with the concealment that comes with miraculous healing. Healing, hiding, covering – these modes of occluding the wound are the paths traveled by the indeterminacy at the heart of ascetic wounding. Goswin records the “divine” and nearly complete disappearance of wounds that mark so much of Arnulf of Viller’s body. Et cum talibus corpus suum stimulis immisericorditer perforaret, tanta sanguinis abundantia de foraminibus effluebat, ut manus eius superficietenus tingeretur … Die sequenti se curatum divinitus reperiebat, excepto quod quaedam nigredinis maculae ex vibicibus et foraminibus in carne eius apparebant. 11

See especially: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 52–54; Scarry identifies agency as “the phenomenon common to both power and pain” (56). On the sadist, see: Karmen MacKendrick Counterpleasures (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); and L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, ­Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 66–75.

374

Easterling

[Such merciless perforating of his body, such multiple jabbing, made each gash bleed enough to splash his entire hand and to coat it all bloodred …When the next day came around, he would nonetheless find his body healed, divinely healed, with barely a few spots showing blackish on the flesh, where the stripes and puncturing had been] (Vita, 561.15; Life, 136–37).12 To adapt Bynum’s elegant phrase, this is certainly “wonderful blood.”13 Having been healed, the wounds “show” only their traces, though Arnulf is the sole witness to this disappearance. In this way, the hiding of wounds via clothing or healing motivates, and even compels, investigations focused specifically on the wounds and the motivations that fashion such a body. Earlier in his Life, visual access to Arnulf’s wounds is frustrated by his own clothing, the bloody imprints on which nonetheless undermine the very purpose of concealment. Once, while administering the discipline, Arnulf was visited by a monk and, unwilling to display himself, put on his clothing and came out of his room to welcome the visitor. Witnessing the blood seeping through Arnulf’s tunic and running down his legs, the monk exclaims, “Tactus sum dolore cordis intrinsecus, attendens mirabile martyrium. Et quare, carissime, interficis temetipsum?” [I am pained and touched to the quick to behold such martyrdom! But why, dearest friend, why put yourself to such a death?] (Vita, 561.13; Life, 134). These wounds have been given no time to heal, and yet the tunic “covers” the wounds much like healing would, allowing “spots” to show through the cloth. Imperfectly occluded by the clothing as by the healing, the wounds become highly visible 12

13

In his excess, Arnulf recalls Dominicus Loricatus. See: Peter Damian, Letter 109, esp. 218– 26, in The Letters of Peter Damian, trans. Owen J. Blum, Fathers of the Church Medieval Continuation, 6 vols. (Washington,DC: Catholic University Press, 1989–2005). However, as Newman notes, a literal reading of some Lives should probably be avoided, particularly in the case of Arnulf (Send Me God, xli). Goswin records, for instance, “Quadam iterum vice, cum intra cellam suam se more solito caederet, wir quidam stetit foris secur parietem, bato viro hoc ignorante, ut verberum eius modum exploraret, et mille nongentos ictus eum carni suae dedisse, eosdem ictus numerando, agnovit, antequam a verberibus cessaret” [Another time he was in his cell for his customary whipping, unaware of a man standing at the wall outside and taking stock of his manner and measure of beating himself. This man tallied the number of strokes Arnulf gave himself: nineteen hundred of them, before ever he stopped] (Vita, 561.14; Life, 132). While the emphasis of Caroline Walker Bynum’s study is on blood symbolism and blood cults, this work is not irrelevant to the clear fascination with blood on the part of violent ascetics. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Ascetic Blood

375

markers of ascetic excess. Showing is figured through concealment. Healing and wounding are not opposed; they are mutual forms taken by the power of wounds to destabilize. This power is manifested at the level of subjectivity as well. Arnulf and his visitor function alike as spectators of the open wound – except that in both cases, direct access to this opening is withheld either through the clothing that conceals the body or through the miracle that heals it. Yet here too, inaccessibility and accessibility, while the one determines the other, also collaborate. As is well understood, wounds pay debts to others by passing identification and suffering between bodies. For many who selfwounded, the practice was an act of responsibility toward fellow Christians who were bound to the ascetic through a request for sacrifice, or “suffrages.”14 Here too Arnulf takes the lead, turning the conventional core of this practice to characteristic extremes. Memor fratrum et familiarium suorum, tamquam sibi ipsi confabulando, dicebat, “Agendum est mihi fortiter, agendum viriliter; viriliter, inquam, agendum quia valde necessarium est amicis meis.” Adjiciebatque, “Ictus istos et istos, pro illis et pro illis, infero mihi, in nomine Domini.” Et tunc valide se flagellando, nominatim commemorabat aliquos fratrum suorum, nunc vero aliquos amicorum, nunc vero religiosas mulieres dilectas sibi in Christo. [When beating himself with a scourge, Arnulf had in mind particular brethren or familiar friends, and he could be heard muttering away to himself. “Got to be braver; got to be manly; manly I’ve got to be; friends need it badly; this stroke for this one; that stroke for that one; take that in the name of God.” As the flogging went on and on, he kept remembering and naming now this particular brother, now those various friends, and now these devout women, much beloved to him in Christ] (Vita 565.34; Life, 147–48). Likewise, the female body suffered through sacrificial giving to others, even when the brutality did not lead to bloodbaths of Arnulfian proportions.15 After receiving a vision of Christ’s wounds, Lutgard of Aywières “mirabili se pro illo 14 15

See: Russell, “Peter Damian’s Whip,” 20–24. See: Jo Ann McNamara, “The Need to Give: Suffering and Female Sanctity in the Middle Ages,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 199–221.

376

Easterling

… afflixit supplicio” [afflicted herself with wondrous pain], not on her own account but because, in a separate vision, she saw the deceased Pope Innocent III, her most illustrious client, tormented in purgatorial flames: “Illa autem ut vidi apparentem, maxima flamma circumdatum: quis sic esset, interrogat; et ille: Ego sum, inquit, Innocentius Papa” [When she saw that the apparition was surrounded by an enormous flame, she asked who it was and he said, “I am Pope Innocent”] (Vita 197.7; Life, 244).16 Observing that his torment would last until Judgment Day, Innocent asks for her suffrages, which, however “wondrous,” seem not to have been considered excessive.17 In Lutgard’s case, wounding does not evoke an ambivalent response here or elsewhere. Ascetic sacrifice, however, does not inevitably result in praise from others. Here praise and blame, approval and disapproval, are caught up together as when Goswin voices his support of Arnulf’s disciplines against those who “ridicule” him. Labors that appear self-destructive persist, as does the praise for heroic asceticism, despite the occasionally stern warnings against the practice given by spiritual advisors.18 There is an overlap here between the call for moderate self-wounding and the (miraculous) healing of wounds that signal the natural processes by which the body mitigates the damage. These bodily processes are, of course, obstructed to the extent that the ascetic feels encouraged towards enhanced forms of brutality. Age quod agis, operare quod operaris, famule Christi! Non sit tibi curae siquis te subsannet et irrideat, siquis mirabiles actus tuus vitio hypocrisis simulationis obnubilans, ore vipereo mordeat et dilaniet [Go ahead, manservant of Christ, go ahead! Do what you are doing, perform what you are performing. Take no notice if anyone sneers or ridicules you, or if any viper-mouthed critic tries to bite and tear you apart, or to cloud over your wondrous deeds by insinuating the vice of hypocritical simulation] (Vita, 564.32; Life, 146).

16

17

18

Thomas of Cantimpré, “The Life of Lutgard of Aywières,” in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman and trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 207–96. See also: McNamara, “The Need to Give,” 214. Thomas of Cantimpré is also silent on her practice of “performing mortifications and fasts” for another client, a deceased friend and abbot of Foigny (Life, 242). Later, in connection with excessive fasting, Thomas does counsel moderation (Life, 254). In Arnulf’s Life (132), these warnings come early and often.

Ascetic Blood

377

In other vitae, the healing of wounds or the refusal of healing may figure hardly at all, yet the explicit or implicit criticism of violent asceticism remains consistent across texts and forms part of the same structure that generates sacrificial wounding. Juliana of Cornillon is recorded as having frequently scourged herself, partly in an effort to free others, even enemies, from struggles with temptation, partly in remembrance of Christ’s passion (Life, 205, 220). She makes a habit of praying that God would not punish others, but would “imminentium flagellorum ictus sibi infligeret” [let the blows of the imminent scourging fall on her] (Vita, 469.36; Life, 278). Beyond articulating once again that responsibility for self-wounding might be displaced onto other agents, sentient or insentient, the request for suffering implies that external reproaches can be readily internalized. If the criticism and disapproval of God’s selfdestructive “agent” is uttered by those on whose behalf she scourges herself, then Juliana also marks opponents as (unwillingly) complicit in these behaviors. To oppose the ascetic’s violent practices establishes an oppositional, antagonistic relationship between members of a community, and this relationship is violently negotiated through the body. Criticism of the ascetic may give rise to further self-wounding so as to mitigate the punishment that those critics will inevitably suffer for their unjust detractions. The circular pattern need have no endpoint so long as the body’s seemingly infinite capacity for healing generates new opportunities for self-wounding. This connection is traceable once again through the interplay between revelation and concealment. At one point, seizing the devil “manibus tenens caedebat toto conamine” [in her hands and striking him with all her might], Juliana reveals that much more is at stake than her ability to triumph over an enemy by disciplining the flesh (Vita, 454.40; Life, 223). This particular event takes place while Juliana is isolated within her cell. The routine self-wounding was not meant to be communicated to her sisters who, nonetheless, were eavesdropping the entire time just outside of her door. The physical barrier between Juliana and her sisters extends and reinforces the verbal barriers between them, serving as a reminder that she has chosen not only to selfwound but to speak with the devil (about it) rather than to identify as a member of the monastic community. Her willingness to identify with her sisters comes at the instigation of the devil.19 As he points out to her, the eavesdroppers “te 19

Demonic attempts to distract virtuous ascetics from their exercises should be seen within the wider cultural field of thirteenth-century female spirituality; thus, conversing with the devil, whether directly or through the mediation of demonic possession, was not necessarily cause for reproach. See: Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 73 (1998): 733–70.

378

Easterling

super hoc, quod celari desideras, accusabunt” [will blame you for this affair that you want to hide] (Vita, 454.40; Life, 223). That is to say, Juliana knew that she might possibly rouse – or had always intended to rouse – the attention of others who would be drawn by the sounds coming from her cell. The audience is at once desired and necessary. Yet the members of the audience are precisely those who will “blame” her for the self-wounding. Those who resented or adored the ascetic resided just beyond the walls of her cell (some were perhaps clients for whom she performed these suffrages). As Juliana’s biographer observed about a scene following her turn to ascetic violence, “In dicta siquidem Domo fuerunt duo genera personarum, quae Christi sponsam curiosius explorabant: unum ad invidendum, aliud ad imitandum. Quod et usque adhuc in omni choro adolescentularum, ni fallor, poterit inveniri” [In that house there were two kinds of people who curiously investigated Christ’s bride: one group to envy her and the other group to imitate her. Unless I am mistaken, the same factions could be found to this day in every community of girls] (Vita, 654.40; Life, 223). At the same time, objections to ascetic wounds need not have been obscured behind the (thin) veil of their disappearance, either through seclusion or healing of the body; it can be far more deliberate, open and fraught with aggression. For one thing, the effort to compel or coerce ascetics to cease or moderate their disciplines may have had violent and bloody consequences. The relatives and friends of Christina the Astonishing were “greatly embarrassed” by her various self-violent practices. It is surely no coincidence that she makes herself at once so visible – as she hung from gallows and trees, for instance – and so invisible: after she enters into searing ovens and boiling cauldrons, she emerges – wonder of wonders! – without “mutilation of any sort” on her body. The marvelous disappearance of these mutilations is familiar enough now, yet Christina’s behavior results in persecution by those same relatives. This persecution carries historical significance. Her relatives’ active and continuous rejection of the wounds speaks to their endurance throughout the life of the community and of the ascetic. But if “persecution” and trauma are at the center of the (communal) body, it is because that body remembers the suffering, or persecution, of early Christian bodies within their communities. The persecutory seizing and binding tie her as well to late-antique martyrs as the boundary between Christina, Christian, and Christ becomes ever more obscure. As Thomas of Cantimpré relates, Nec sic tamen sorores et amici eius ab ipsius persecutione cessarunt: nam ubi eam reversam comprehendere potuerunt, in scapulo quodam ligneo vinculis eam fortiter ligaverunt. Pacebaturque instar canis pane

Ascetic Blood

379

modico et aquam tantum … Duritia ergo ligni nates eius attritae et humeri computrescebant, horumque dolore tabescens panem suum manducare non poterat. [Nevertheless her sisters and friends never stopped their persecution, for after she had returned to a place where they could seize her, they bound her fast with a heavy wooden yoke and fed her like a dog with only a little bread and water … The hardness of the wooden yoke crushed her shoulders and caused festering wounds, and she was so wasted by these pains that she could not eat her bread] (Vita, 654.19; Life, 138). In their opposition, the praise for and hostility against the ascetic suggest that communities reached a traumatic impasse: a morality that never appeared entirely virtuous or entirely perverse rendered identification all the more imperative. What linked the experience of contempt for the body or criticism of the ascetic was the possibility of holding others responsible for hostility; aggressions are shared throughout the community. Wounds therefore inscribe the impossibility of isolating one individual from another since this connectedness lies at the heart of sacrificial reciprocation. The virtuous act aligned with the vicious, the responsible with the irresponsible, as ascetics inevitably cross the limit of endurance or reasonability and take self-wounding “too far.” The act thereby positions ascetics at the point of transgression where they are determined to query the boundary between victim and perpetrator, between (masochistic) enjoyment of and resistance to the body.20 The complex dilemmas of agency and responsibility are reflected in the admiration and criticism presented within the vitae. Contemporary criticisms were launched in opposition to self-wounding in large part because the desire underwriting this violence was also recognized as a direct challenge to monastic culture’s models of rationality. The question posed by Aranye Fradenburg – “what economy of pleasures or goods, what conception of an organism (self-)regulated for maximum pleasure by means of access to the most reliable goods, can explain the spectacles of human (self-) destructivity?”21 – becomes particularly relevant once the monastic doctrine of moderation is offset by the rival demand for greater sacrifice, not for restraint. Sacrificial desires have a way of making short work of monastic

20 21

Bynum notes that violent asceticism represents “not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it” (Fragmentation and Redemption, 182). Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 17.

380

Easterling

discretio, to say nothing of subordinate virtues.22 Yet, if they achieved nothing else, the warnings, questions, and reproaches that emerge within the context of ascetic violence argue that the desires at play in self-wounding are unsettling in part because they do not implicate the ascetic alone. This explains the effort to sanctify the willing submission to violence by comparison of the ascetic body with that of Christ, “the injured body” that suffered for others.23 The wounds that are endured as suffrages for others, and which, thereby, signal the interchangeability of the self with others, also give ascetics a special privilege, an exceptional and exclusive status that links them to Christ as the very image of exclusivity and the exchangeable object of brutality. The phenomenon of miraculous healing, as well as the multiple negative responses to the self-inflicted violence, imply that the inevitable result of viewing the self-wounded body was bewilderment and the concomitant effort to replace uncertainty over the practice’s justifiability with certainty about its meaning. The wounds must finally mean something if they are to warrant approval. Yet ethicizing ascetic violence can also become a means of disclaiming responsibility for desire’s unpredictable paths as it passes from one subject to the next and implicates everyone. Texts often declare violent asceticism to be, at some level, wrong (whether shameful, ostentatious, or whatever). Yet this attitude identifies desire as strictly someone else’s problem, as if asceticism and the criticism it generated were not deeply interconnected. At a fundamental level, self-wounding and criticism are responses, and, as such, they underscore the inadequacies of all efforts to dissociate oneself from a wider community. A major participant in self-wounding is the shame experienced by both ascetics and those who knew about their practices. Criticism, especially as the symptom of a contagious shame, could therefore never simply isolate deviance 22

23

Candace Vogler, Reasonably Vicious (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 26–73. Discretion is figured by monastic writers at least since John Cassian as mater omnium virtutum. See: Collationes XXIIII, ed. Michael Petschenig, CSEL 13, repr. Gottfried Kreuz (Vienna: VÖAW, 2004), 2:4. See also: Giles Constable, “Moderation and Restraint in Ascetic Practices,” in From Athens to Chartres: Neoplatonism and Medieval Thought, ed. Haijo Jan Westra (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 315–27. Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 91. On the moral stakes of these tensions, see: Vogler, Reasonably Vicious, esp. 74–96. For a clinical appreciation of the transformation of pain, see: Kroll and Bachrach, Mystic Mind, 37–74. Especially relevant to the medieval material is the work by Virginia Burrus in The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 53–90. See also: Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, esp. 151–238.

Ascetic Blood

381

from normativity, error from virtue. The two were bound together, so much so that desire and shame ultimately rendered unsuccessful all attempts by neighbors to refuse responsibility for the ascetic even while communities fostered self-wounding. Excessive self-wounding strongly suggested that irresponsible behavior was inevitable, that responsibility was shifted elsewhere once efforts were made to act responsibly by taking on “purgatory” for others’ souls. This is because responsibility was, on the one hand, individual, secret, and, hence, a “dissident and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine.”24 Indeed, few denied this dissident character of self-wounding. On the other hand, like identity, responsibility is nowhere fixed. As Jacques Derrida argues, “we must continually remind ourselves that some part of irresponsibility insinuates itself wherever one demands responsibility ... that is to say everywhere.”25 Even as those who were transfixed by this spectacle stood, by definition, at some distance from it, the wounded body called back for – even demanded – a response that in turn guaranteed the other’s irresponsibility.26 Here too spectacularity reproduces its bonds since onlookers sought to explain violent ascesis, to justify it, and to make someone “responsible” for it. Ascetic wounding indicated with particular vividness that each member of the communal body acted ir/responsibly. That ascetics fashioned the self as at once defiant and submissive is explained in part by the experience of shame that is triumphantly intensified by the violence marked on the bodies of ascetics and martyrs alike.27 As Virginia Burrus has recently argued, humans “are always already marked” and linked through their sense of shame (which includes as well the body’s vulnerability), and this effect was nowhere more vividly represented in the Christian west than among the visibly and textually exposed martyrs and ascetics of late antiquity.28 Those with every reason to feel ashamed at humankind’s “sinful nature” nonetheless actively pursued that shame through exposure of the self. This marking also represents shame’s dependence on an isolating exposure to 24 25 26

27 28

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29. Derrida, Gift of Death, 27. This enhancement of ocularity ranks the self-wounded body among devotional images and religious objects as “premodern fetishes.” See: Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1–32. See: Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press, 2008). Burrus, Saving Shame, xii.

382

Easterling

the other’s gaze; shame functions as an individual and shared experience.29 Shame doubles the self by turning the self into its own spectator. As the arresting visibility of wounds covering the ascetic body suggests, asceticism was a performance and a spectacle – regardless of the intensity of its violence – so much so that even when the ascetic withdrew from others, performance remained fundamental to the experience.30 Withdrawal and absence formed ascetic wounding every bit as much as the real or imagined interactions generated through performance. Shame’s links to performance sustain connections between ascetics who self-wound and the communities from which they so often withdraw.31 Shame and self-wounding, both of which harbored the potential for inner transformation, presented the subject with the knowledge that what was transformed through experience was an understanding of the self’s boundaries, particularly through a sense of their impermanence. Once shame bound him to the other (spectator), at once isolating and shattering the self, It’s me they’re looking at was inseparable from It’s me I’m looking at. Just as withdrawal does nothing to impede performance within a theater of violence, that very theater served in many cases to rupture a sense of totality, wholeness or selfidentity, to ease the spot-light isolation of the self and to assert the self’s otherness, its strangeness to itself.32 The subject who wounds and the subject who is wounded are difficult to distinguish in part because “suffrages” are undertaken for others’ sins as well as for one’s own. Sacrifice of the body, as Jacques Lacan observes, “belongs to the other as much as it belongs to me.”33 Hence the seductiveness of subjection, of losing the sense of a determinate self through sacrifice, is also a seductiveness that once again shows ascetic agency in all its complex dispersal throughout the group.

29 30 31

32

33

Burrus, Saving Shame, 2. See: Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone, 2007), 13–31; and Burrus, Saving Shame, 10–43. At the heart of these behaviors lies, of course, the performance of various gender norms, for instance, affective devotion and feminine vulnerability. On gender and its performance, see: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). See: Karmen MacKendrick, Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of the Flesh (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 14–15. On strangeness, see also: Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See also: Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 160–229. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (New York: Norton, 1992), 186.

Ascetic Blood

383

As already noted, cultural imperatives regarding responsible behavior – that is, acting responsibly toward oneself and others – worked at crosscurrents with the widespread fostering or condoning of ascetic extremes for the simple reason that those extremes seemed to exceed the limits of responsibility. Thus shame, like the healing of wounds, records cultural resistance to ascetic destructivity. However, the association routinely made by hagiographers between the ascetic and the martyr was designed at once to dignify self-inflicted violence and limit the intrusion of strangeness. To divest the selfwounded spectacle of its uncanny power to survive such brutality, the image of the martyr was used by Peter Damian, who links the wounds of Christ to the martyrs, arguing that the novelty of self-wounding was an illusion (the martyrs are simply moderni now, not antiqui) and that what seemed objectionable was, in fact, instituted by Christ himself.34 The privilege of agency seems of course to distinguish the passive martyr from ascetics who wound, scar, and lacerate themselves. Yet like martyrs, ascetics are redeemed by wounds.35 In this way, acknowledgment of the ascetic as a “problem” was forestalled by communal identifications, for despite the historical distance, martyrs were, after all, “one of us.”36 On the other hand, ethicizing the torture or “martyring” of others as a virtuous sacrifice leaves a host of difficulties in its wake, not least because it structures the ascetic and his/her community through a strict and inflexible division – between “us” and “them” – and its concomitant refusal of the proxi34 35 36

Peter Damian, Letter 45, 247; see also: Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2005), 156–76. Kenneth C. Russell, “Peter Damian’s Whip,” American Benedictine Review 41.1 (1990): 20–35, at 21. See also: Largier, In Praise of the Whip, 52–54. For Peter Damian, an outspoken supporter of penitential self-wounding, “a thousand strokes of the discipline were considered the equivalent of a year’s penance.” See: Russell, “Peter Damian’s Whip,” 24. As Peter (Letter 109) says of his prized ascetic Dominic Loricatus: “Now a hundred years of penance, as I learned from Dominic himself, is performed in this way. While three thousand blows regularly count as one year of penance here, chanting ten psalms accounts for a thousand blows, as we have often proven. Since we know that the psalter contains one hundred and fifty psalms, five years of penance, if we count correctly, are contained in disciplining oneself throughout one psalter. Now if you multiply five by twenty or twenty by five, you arrive at a hundred. And so, when one has chanted twenty psalters while taking the discipline, one is sure that he has performed a hundred years of penance” (215). See also: Letter 66, 64–66; Letter 106, 181; and finally Letter 45: “why should we marvel if a man in punishment for his sins becomes his own torturer, and to avoid judgment, appoints himself to be his own judge?” (246).

384

Easterling

mate other.37 The implicitly defensive gesture of defining asceticism as spiritual martyrdom – a “martyrdom defense” – thereby locating responsibility with the other who inflicts pain, recognizes the torturer’s demand for (self-)domination but safely relocates this particular quality of spectacular torture in a Roman past, thus serving as a disavowal of one’s participation in, and therefore one’s responsibility for, the spectacle. The purpose of identifying the ascetic as a martyr was surely in part to dissociate the medieval community from the Roman audience who, with no such ambivalence, desired the bloodshed. When displaced onto an age of martyrdom, the medieval spectator might hope to identify with the late-antique Christian community, not with spectators’ bloodlust.38 The disciplines, and by extension the wounds, that mark the ascetic body depend in part on a capacity for identifying both with the self that suffered and with the self that inflicted suffering. The thirteenth century, in particular, witnessed numerous ascetics who, by violently afflicting their own flesh with wounds, closed the gap that separated torturer and victim. The ascetic’s decision to self-wound is limited by devices impossible to loosen from the body (as in Wilbirg’s case), but the martyr analogy also suggests that ascetics were not responsible for their behavior, that they were the objects of brutality. These patterns cast in vivid terms how discipline functions generally, how it produces “our constitutive vacillations between sentience and insentience, subjectivity and objectivity.”39 The sublime figure of the ascetic-cum-martyr detached and estranged itself from others within the group, only then to insist on an intimacy with the thoroughly disciplined (monastic) Christian. The ascetic’s wounds subsumed aversion to corporeal violence and argued for the supposed beauty of violent sacrifice on behalf of the earliest communities. Here too, indeterminacy complicates the production of identities. In circulation is the complexity of agency itself – which community and which spectator is responsible for the brutality? The rhetorical identification of self-wounding as 37

38

39

As Amy Hollywood has shown, Georges Bataille’s Atheological Summa (in its response to Angela of Foligno’s Book) responds to this tension; see: Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 60–87. She notes the duality of his understanding of suffering as history: “on the one hand, [history] refers to those narratives that give meaning and direction to human action; but on the other, it names that which remains unassimilable to such narratives” (83). For discussion within the context of orthodox responses to heresy, see: Larissa Tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 31–69. Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 24.

Ascetic Blood

385

“martyrdom” represented one of the most alluring effects of ascesis – namely, the return of the past.40 This return made itself all the more convincing through its repeated inscription on the body and its repeated narration throughout the community. In an erotic return to the martyr’s arena, the Christian body “longed to incorporate” its self-violent members since the extremeness of that violence invited exclusion, disavowal, and reproach.41 All such responses complicated the desire to approve of what, after all, seemed so worthy of approval. The community’s accommodation of an utterly distressing violence brought both paralyzing stasis – like the rapt gaze of a horrified spectator – and transformation. Most remarkably, the martyrdom defense did not simply exclude or include any more than it was merely a defense against the interminable relocation of meaning. Rather, it reproduced the “aporia of responsibility.”42 It successfully identified a language and a history that matched the body’s vibration between the responsible and irresponsible, passivity and agency, shame and triumph. Self-wounding ascetics were “suspended” within their communities for the same reason that the martyr was suspended within the imagination: both were elevated and dignified by suffering, thereby becoming static ideals that were as admirable as they were inaccessible. If the martyr was “viewed” from a historical distance unbridgeable by language, so too were ascetics like Juliana and Wilbirg unable to simultaneously self-wound and communicate intelligibly with those nearby. Thus, for those who had to endure their role as onlookers, the fantasy that located the acetic within the Roman arena might provide consolation. Juliana’s hagiographer writes, Sed ipsi laureate nec rosae nec lilia deerunt; rosae ob insigne martyrii, lilia propter privilegium candoris virginei. Nec me poenitet, Christi Virgo, Martyrem te dixisse. Cur enim Martyrum choris te dubitaverim aggregandam? Quia martyrium, quod illi habuerunt in opera, tu habuisti in voluntate … Porro memini quempiam Sanctorum in suis scriptis famosissimis reliquisse, genus esse martyrii, mortificare membra sua quae sunt super terram. Illo quidem, ut dicit, quo membra caeduntur ferro, horror mitius, sed diuturnitate molestius. [But neither roses nor lilies will be missing from your laurels: roses as a sign of martyrdom, lilies for the privilege of virginal brightness. I do not 40 41 42

On the past and ascesis, see also: Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love. On melancholic incorporation, see: Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 243–58. Derrida, Gift of Death, 62.

386

Easterling

repent, virgin of Christ, that I have called you a martyr. For why should I doubt that you will be added to the choirs of martyrs? The martyrdom that was theirs in act was yours in desire … I recall now that one of the saints left us a reminder in his celebrated writings that it is a kind of martyrdom to mortify one’s limbs on earth. To be sure, he says, it is less horrible than the kind in which they are pierced by iron, but more tiresome because of its long duration] (Vita, 472.46; Life, 287–88). The roses, lilies, and shining spheres struggle to displace the frightful sight of a wounded body. In this way, they participate within a larger struggle, at the level of individual and communal desires, as the hagiographer works to assimilate Juliana into the body of believers and exclude her from it, to set her at a (safe) distance from her thirteenth-century fellows.43 In brief, the martyrdom defense articulates the perception that self-inflicted wounds required a defense, that this discipline presented itself as a form of both responsibility and irresponsibility. Being responsible for, or responsive to, others is rooted in desire and its relocations.44 So too, being responsible to a moral principle, or indeed to God, “involves responsiveness not only to what is present but also to what is absent.”45 In this sense as well, ascetic desire is always a matter of what the absent Other knows about the ascetic, about the shameful evil that ascetic subjects desire, even need, to mark on the body. On the one hand, medieval condemnations of or warnings against violent ascesis derived, at least in part, from the shame that attached to the exposed body, only then to spread like a contagion to the spectators themselves. On the other, an interrogation of shame, which would seem fundamental to an ethics of selfwounding, was nevertheless discouraged by shame itself, by this very spreading throughout the community. Late-medieval religious cultures understood ascetic self-wounding to be, among other things, a new arena of martyrdom, and the resulting compound of fascination and repulsion poured shame into the witnesses of this “martyrdom.” What holds human spectacles and spectators alike in its grip generates an almost involuntary avoidance on the part of 43

44 45

The deployment of floral imagery to sustain a sense of the brutality’s justifiability is even more common in Wilbirg’s Life which makes note of “rosarum et diversorum florum” [roses and diverse flowers] (Vita, 238.101); earlier “liilis et aliis floribus” [lilies and other flowers] (Vita, 196.44) are specifically connected with her iron belt. On religion, responsibility, and the complications that attend their intimacy, see: Derrida, The Gift of Death, 3–35. L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Making, Mourning, and the Love of Idols,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy ­Dimmick et. al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25–42, at 26.

Ascetic Blood

387

advisors and hagiographers. Naked, wounded, and willing to confess the most shameful desires (whether sinful or ascetic), the Christian who has committed to violently disciplining the body has taken responsibilities seriously. Yet marking the body with penitential blood also encountered the demand to moderate or to hide acts otherwise thought morally exemplary.46 Self-wounding sustained a preoccupation with agency that made boundaries – those between individual and community, pleasure and pain – impossible to sustain and impossible to dissolve.47 To choose moderation against ascetic bloodshed is to sacrifice one community (the heavenly “choirs of martyrs”) for a separate earthly one. Yet this dilemma operates as well within local communities wherein one’s responsibility toward one group is sacrificed in the interests of another. Derrida writes, “Whether I want to or not, I will never be able to justify the fact that I prefer or sacrifice any one to the other.”48 Ascetic wounding frequently attempted precisely this mode of justification. The fragility of the “border where identities (subject/object etc.) do not exist or only barely so” helps identify a community’s unacknowledged investment in selfwounding.49 Destruction must therefore be made beautiful. The wounds exert a seductive power, a power of irreducible multiplicity that matches the tendency of ecstatic experience/language to accelerate the rupturing within identity, agency, and responsibility. “Every invitation, insofar as it invites us out of ourselves, insofar as it draws us beyond the given present […] is an invitation to destruction.”50 Significantly, an invitation to destruction is not destruction itself. Fascination with the destruction of the (communal) body closes the distance between medieval modernity and the age of Roman persecution. Yet the community was still a medieval one, and the desire to move beyond the boundaries of the self, to identify with the one who self-wounded, was the closest that the community came to entertaining the possibilities and potential outcomes of its own destructive desires. Like many other late-medieval depictions of religious suffering, these texts suggest that “agony is ecstasy, part is whole, torture is redemption.”51 To the 46

47 48 49 50 51

On the link between shame and confessional desires, see: Burrus, Saving Shame, 110–47. Like many others, one of Arnulf’s contemporaries, Abundus, self-flagellated in secret “lest any of the monks notice him;” see: Send Me God, 220. Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 30; MacKendrick, Counterpleasures, 79–84. Derrida, Gift of Death, 71. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 207. MacKendrick, Word Made Skin, 168. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 30 (2002): 3–36, at 25.

388

Easterling

extent that bloody and penitential sacrifice made itself a law with established boundaries, it became for the ascetic essentially paradoxical since in his case “adherence to the law is as fervently desired as disobedience.”52 The hagiographer might well desire redemption and wholeness, and this desire called for nothing less than a fully present and fully constituted body. Such a demand, which expressed itself both through unmitigated celebration or condemnation of the ascetic, displayed ruptures at the site of the community that were already apparent on the ascetic’s body. Ascetic vulnerability expressed itself through this totalizing, at the surface of communal rupturing. The “multiple and elaborate processes that evolve in producing [pain]” represent precisely what is at stake in violent asceticism – responsibility, shame, and the wounds themselves.53 Responsibility and agency change their character and locality every bit as much as a body that, by opening and closing, healing and being wounded, could be relied on to satisfy everyone’s desire and no one’s. The (self-)destructive impulses of responsibility had limits, of course, but those limits changed with the body and were as paradoxically irresponsible as the self-interested generosity that at once breathed life and death into the ascetically wounded body. To the extent that self-wounding operated through secrecy and absence, but also always on behalf of others, it puts on display its powers of binding contraries; remembering and forgetting, loving and destroying, making and unmaking became impossible to distinguish. And why bother with the distinction, after all? For all stood in amazement – and foremost the ascetics themselves – when self-violence carved itself on the flesh of the heart, and, therefore, in a place the ascetic could never fully be and by an agent never wholly recognized. 52 53

Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 51. Scarry, Body in Pain, 52.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

389

Chapter 17

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250) Alicia Spencer-Hall*

From the earliest age, Alice of Schaerbeek was a shining example of Christian devotion.1 Like Esther in the Old Testament (Esther 2:15), she was beloved by all and thought highly beautiful, despite her lack of care for her outward appearance (VAS 1:2.477). Aged seven, she left her parents’ home to forge a life of extreme piety in the Cistercian monastery of La Cambre. Some years later, perhaps around 1240 (aged around 20), Alice was struck with leprosy and her beautiful appearance horrifically disfigured.2 This event, and its physical and spiritual ramifications, dominates the short vita that records Alice’s tale, written approximately ten to twenty-five years after her death in 1250 by an unknown author.3 Two thirds of the text is devoted to leprous Alice’s tribu* My thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for PhD funding which made the preparation of this paper and my postgraduate studies possible. For her continuous wise counsel and support, I owe a debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Jane Gilbert (UCL). A version of this paper was presented as “Shedding Skin/Shedding Sin: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250)” at the 55th Annual Society for French Studies Conference, University of Aberdeen, 1 July 2014. I am grateful to the audience for valuable suggestions, in particular Prof. Peggy McCracken. 1 Anon, “De B. Aleyde Scharembekana, sanctimoniali Ordinis Cisterciensis, Camerae iuxta Bruxellam,” in Acta Sanctorum, ed. Godfrey Henschen, June (Paris: Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970), 2:477–83. Referred to as VAS. Throughout, references to primary sources are given for part, chapter, paragraph, and page numbers in parentheses. Subsequent English translations of the text are taken from Life of St. Alice of Schaerbeek, trans. Martinus Cawley O.C.S.O. (Lafayette, OR: Our Lady of Gaudalupe Abbey, 2000). 2 Martinus Cawley O.C.S.O., introduction to Life of St. Alice of Schaerbeek, ed. Martinus Cawley O.C.S.O (Lafayette, OR: Our Lady of Gaudalupe Abbey, 2000), v–xxx, at xiii. The vita provides only a death date for Alice, and several references to specific time spans in her life. We are told, for example, that she spends four years in her first hut: 2.12.479. Cawley has extrapolated the plausible date of the onset of Alice’s leprosy from various textual calculations. Cawley’s introduction is an adaptation of his earlier essay: “The ‘Life of Alice’ and the Silver Age at Villers,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 31.1 (1996): 51–74. 3 Eleanor Campion O.C.S.O., “Bernard and Alice the Leper: An Odor of Life for Some,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 39.2 (2004): 127–139, at 127.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_019

390

Spencer-hall

lations (VAS 2–3:479–83).4 In recent critical scholarship, Alice of Schaerbeek bears the moniker Alice the Leper, so significant is the illness to her identity. The holy woman’s malady is portrayed not as a terrible burden but a glorious gift from God, revealing a medieval perception of the positivity of a deleterious affliction at odds with the modern understanding of pain and suffering.5 On the contrary, Alice – shown to be in great pain – glories in her suffering as her leprous body withers, oozes, and decays. If she could be cured, she is certain that she would refuse, even if a return to full health entailed similar spiritual benefits (VAS 2:10.479). Central to the “pleasantness” of Alice’s affliction is its utility as a means of spiritual elevation, a tenet of medieval religion that Esther Cohen terms “philopassianism.”6 Rather than annihilating her personhood, in the vita, leprosy allows an efflorescence of Alice’s devotion, in which her leprous body becomes a stand-in for Christ’s tortured body on the cross. Interrogation of the representation of leprosy in Alice’s biography, contextualized with a study of the polyvalent signification of the malady in the period, suggests that leprous wounds become, at times, synonymous with Christ’s lacerations. The preoccupation with the usefulness of illness in medieval devotional practice appears to be particularly female, or at least occurs more frequently in 4 Cawley, introduction, viii–ix. 5 Recent scholarship has focused on a contextualized understanding of pain, and its different conception, in the Middle Ages. On pain generally, see in particular: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Cohen, “Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages,” Science in Context 8 (1995): 47–74; “The Animated Pain of the Body,” The American Historical Review 105.1 (2000): 36–68; Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Donald Mowbray, Pain and Suffering in Medieval Theology: Academic Debates at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009). On pain in the context of punishment, see: Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reaktion, 1999); Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion, 2005). Several studies have also been undertaken analyzing pain and its signification in specific religious texts, for example: Marleen Cré, “The Literary Significance of Ilness in Julian of Norwich’s ‘A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman’,” Poetica 72 (2009): 43–57; Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, “Mysticism and Medicine: Holy Communion in the Vita of Marie d’Oignies and the Book of Margery Kempe,” Poetica 72 (2009): 109–118. 6 Cohen, “Towards a History,” 54; Modulated Scream, 25–51. Robert Mills offers a critique of philopassianism, which Cohen declares is not about pleasure, but utility. By contrast, Mills shows the space for pleasure within philopassianistic narratives: Suspended Animation, 149, referring to Cohen, “Towards a History,” 52.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

391

biographies of holy women than holy men. Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell explain that, although fewer than twenty per cent of individuals canonized or venerated as saints between 1000 and 1700 were female, fifty three per cent of these female saints experienced mystical suffering or illness as a significant part of their devotion.7 Alice is certainly not the only holy woman to embrace her illness.8 In this volume, for example, Albrecht Classen examines the self-inflicted wounds of female mystic Dorothea von Montau in her search for holiness,9 and Joshua Eastering analyzes the effect of such wounds on the community. Beatrice of Nazareth (†1268) glories in her painful illness and urges God to bless her with more suffering (VBN 3.1:189–91.218–23).10 After all, “corporalis infirmitas anime delectatio” [[her] body’s sickness was [her] soul’s delight] (3.1:191.222–23). Similarly, Margaret of Ypres (†1237) begs to be struck down by the Lord with another more devastating malady on her sickbed (VMY 41.125).11 Caroline Walker Bynum in particular argues forcefully for an understanding of the theological utility of pain for medieval women.12 Pain allowed medieval mystical women to absolve the female body, long associated with sin. Moreover, female religious could associate themselves with Christ’s body 7

8 9

10

11 12

Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints & Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 234–35. Cited by Caroline Walker Bynum in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 60, 188. This is in part because torture and martyrdom were not an option for these contemporary medieval saints as they were for the saints of the early Christian centuries, for example in the vita of Elizabeth of Hungary. See: Larissa Tracy, Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints Lives (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), 109. For similar examples, see: Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 132. Albrecht Classen, “Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind,” 417– 47; and Joshua S. Easterling, “Ascetic Blood: Ethics, Suffering and Community in LateMedieval Culture,” 369-88, in this volume. Anon and Roger de Ganck, The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth: 1200–1268 [parallel Latin and English edition], trans. John Baptist Hasbrouck and Roger De Ganck (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991). Hereafter, VBN. Thomas of Cantimpré, “Vita Margarete de Ypris,” ed. G.G. Meerseman, in Archivum fratrum praedicatorum 18 (1948): 106–130. Referred to as VMY. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women,” Representations 11 (1985): 1–25, at 14; Fragmentation and Redemption, 151–238. See also: Shawn Madison Krahmer, “Redemptive Suffering: The Life of Alice of Schaerbeek in a Contemporary Context,” in Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, ed. Juanita Ruys and Louise D’Arcens (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2004), 267–239, at 285–86.

392

Spencer-hall

within a theological framework that posited Christ’s body as paradoxically female.13 As the Virgin Mary is both the “source and container” of Christ’s form, He is born without human male influence – and thereby into uniquely female flesh.14 An elegant summary of this viewpoint is provided in the writings of English anchoress and mystic Julian of Norwich (†1416):15 Thus our Lady is our Moder in whome we are all beclosid and of hir borne in Christe, for she that is moder of our Savior, is moder of all that shall be savid in our Savior. And our Savior is our very moder in whom we be endlesly borne and never shall come out of Him. (Shewings 3.7:2371– 2374) [So our Lady is our Mother, in whom we are all enclosed and born of her in Christ, for she who is mother of our saviour is mother of all who are saved in our saviour; and our saviour is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come] (Showings 57.292).

13 14 15

Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 171–175. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 172. Julian of Norwich, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1994). Available online as a TEAMS edition:  (accessed 21 April 2014). References are to the online edition, identified as Shewings. Part and chapter are followed by line numbers. For further references to Jesus as mother, see: 2.52:2074–2075, 3.54–63:2287–2260, 3.83:3355–3356. Translations from Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. and ed. Edmund Colledge O.S.A. and James Walsh S.J. (Mawah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978). Hereafter, Showings, with chapter number and page number in parentheses. Cited passage discussed in Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 267; Grace M. Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2000), 120–121; Brant Pelphrey, “Leaving the Womb of Christ: Love, Doomsday and Space/Time in Julian Norwich and Eastern Orthodox Mysticism,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1998), 291–320, at 312–315. On Julian’s notion of Christ as mother, see in particular: Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 163–164; Jantzen, Julian, 115–126; Eleanor McCullough, “‘Loke in: How Weet a Wounde is Heere!’: The Wounds of Christ as a Sacred Space in English Devotional Literature,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, ed. Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), 25–52, at 28; Colleen Carpenter Cullinan, Redeeming the Story: Women, Suffering, and Christ (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 45–46.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

393

Christ’s feminized flesh is maternal, nurturing and life-giving, and, thus, a potent example for the redemption of female flesh. Being characterized as flesh, women were actively associated not just with Mary’s body, free from original sin, but also with Christ’s humanity. Women, then, could break free of the taint of Eve by aligning themselves with Mary. This maneuver is well illustrated in a sermon of vaunted preacher and eminent cleric Jacques of Vitry, written between 1229 and 1240:16 Formata muliere de uiro perditus est mundus; nato Cristo ex muliere est redemtus. Per mulierem dampnacio, per mulierem saluacio. Per malum angelum annunciacio dampnacionis, per bonum angelum annunciacio salutis. Sicut autem Eua terra fuit inanis et uacua (Gen. 1.2) que caput serpentis in sinu nutriuit, ita Maria terra benedicta, fertilis et fecunda que caput serpentis contriuit (25.4, 161). [Woman having been made from man, the world was lost; Christ being born from woman, the world was redeemed. Through women there was damnation, through woman there was salvation. Through the evil angel is the annunciation of damnation, through the good angel is the annunciation of salvation. On the one hand, Eve was just as the earth, void and empty (Gen. 1,2), she who nurtured the head of the serpent in her lap; on the other hand, Mary was the blessed earth, fertile and fecund, she who crushed the head of the serpent] (25.4, 31). Pain in the lives of such women had a “referential content,” it was both for and of something.17 Pain was a particularly apt means of redeeming the female body, as it was intrinsically linked with woman. The penalty for Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden was the introduction of pain to humanity, and it was through a holy woman’s pain that sins could be cleansed.18 Much has been made of the relationship of female mystics and holy women with the body.19 Female spirituality is interpreted as inherently somatic, as 16

17 18 19

Jacques of Vitry, The Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques of Vitry, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing Company, 1999). On the Sermones feriales et communes, a collection of twenty five non-liturgical sermons dealing with the first three chapters of Genesis, from which this example is drawn, see in particular: The Faces of Women, 39–45. Hereafter, the sermon number, section and page in Muessgig, Faces, are given in parentheses in the text. Scarry, Body in Pain, 5. Cohen, “Towards a History,” 53; Mowbray, Pain and Suffering, 43–60. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, passim.

394

Spencer-hall

testified by episodes of asceticism and ravishment in hagiographies. Bynum pinpoints the emergence and increase in female narratives featuring corporeal paramystical phenomena to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.20 Such scholarship suggests that holy women’s relationship to the body was more intense, more graphic than male religious, revealing an “authentic” female spiritual praxis. Without doubt, instances of often bizarre physical expression of piety circulate within the corpus, and women were more linked with the body, and sin, than men in the medieval era. However, as Amy Hollywood notes, such accounts of somatization do not frequently appear in femaleauthored spiritual works before the fourteenth century.21 Male-authored hagiographies such as Alice’s text offer a “highly mediated” perspective on female religious experience, often for specific purposes.22 There is relatively little scholarship on Alice and her vita; most of what is available was authored from within the contemporary Cistercian community.23 Describing his own introduction to Alice’s biography as a Cistercian novice in the 1950s, Chrysogone Waddell comments that Alice was an obscure figure, not widely known even in ecclesiastical circles.24 Margot H. King and Ludo Jongen have identified two thirteenth-century and two fifteenth-century extant Latin manuscripts of the vita, alongside one Middle Dutch manuscript dating from the fifteenth century, testifying to a modest but relatively long lasting audience for Alice’s tale.25 What is clear is the affective power of the text, and its capacity for theological insight. For Shawn Madison Krahmer, the text’s 20 21

22 23

24 25

Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 194. Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 27–39. See also: Krahmer, “Redemptive Suffering,” 286–87. Hollywood, Soul, 38. Campion, “Bernard and Alice”; Cawley, introduction; Krahmer, “Redemptive Suffering”; Edmund Mikkers O.C.S.O., “Meditations on the ‘Life’ of Alice of Schaerbeek,” in Hidden Springs: Cistercian Monastic Women, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank O.C.S.O. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 395–415; Edith Scholl O.C.S.O., “The Golden Cross: Aleydis of Schaerbeek,” in Hidden Springs: Cistercian Monastic Women, ed. Nichols and Shank (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 377–393; Chrysogone Waddell O.C.S.O., “Alice de la Cambre: regards sur sa vie,” Collectanea Cisterciensia 66 (2004): 83–96. Waddell, “Alice,” 85. Margot H. King and Ludo Jongen, “The Holy Women of Liège: A Bibliography”  (accessed 29 April 2013). The thirteenth-century Latin MSS are: Bruxelles, Bibliothèque Royale MS 4459–70 (3161), ff. 48–57 and MS 8609–20 (3206), ff. 139–146. For the fifteenth-century Latin MSS, see: Bruxelles, Bibliothèque Royale, MS IV. 778, 11 ff; Vienna, Österreichische

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

395

model of “redemptive suffering” offers some comfort in her navigation of a deeply unhappy abusive marriage.26 The vita struck Waddell as beautifully exemplifying Cistercian spirituality, particularly that which focuses on the supreme divinity of a suffering Christ (Deus crucifixus). Central to such appreciation of Alice’s biography is an appreciation of the holy woman as an example to follow in the religious lifestyle, with obvious pertinence to periods of extended suffering. Thus, Alice’s leprosy, and the wounds it produces, is an educative instrument for readers. The narrative is not necessarily an account of how one specific woman did behave, but an archetype of how one should behave in the face of overwhelming adversity. Alongside the text’s utility as a source of spiritual teaching, Alice offers a model of obedience to the Cistercian Rule. Twentieth-century Trappist monk Thomas Merton, for example, declares that Alice’s book should be given to every Cistercian brother, because it functions as a “practical and concise treatise of Cistercian asceticism.”27 Analyzing the precise nature of the blueprint for Cistercian observance found in the vita, Martinus Cawley suggests that the monks of Villers were the text’s intended audience.28 He proposes that Arnulf II of Ghistelles, abbot of Villers from 1270 to 1276, is the likely author of the work, 29 instead of an unknown chaplain from La Cambre as is historically argued.30 Alongside similarities in style and the fact that the abbot of Villers held paternity of La Cambre, Cawley maintains that the model of austerity offered by Alice suited Arnulf’s need to encourage monks to be more frugal in his attempt to deal with debts. Eleanor Campion offers a strong rebuttal of Cawley’s proposition, including pointing out the dangers of attempting to identify a unifying style for a single unknown author. 31 Notwithstanding Campion’s important note of caution, Cawley’s analysis remains useful by emphasizing the constructed-ness of Alice’s biography as a vehicle for specific

26 27

28 29 30 31

Nationalbibliothek MS 12706–12707, ff. 248–252v. The fifteenth-century Middle Dutch MS is: ’s-Gravenhage, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 71 H 7, ff. 1–8v. Krahmer, “Redemptive Suffering,” 284. Thomas Merton O.C.S.O., Modern Biographical Sketches of Cistercian Blessed and Saints (Abbaye de Gethsemani: Cistercian Studies 1954). Cited in Waddell, “Alice,” 96. The Merton text was never publically disseminated, and is available only for the community at the Abbey of Gethsemane. Cawley, introduction, xiii–xv. Cawley, introduction, v–xxii. See, for example: Simone Roisin, L’Hagiographie cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au Xiii siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947), 49–50. Campion, “Bernard and Alice,” 137–39.

396

Spencer-hall

concerns rather than an objective chronicle of her lifetime, a key characteristic of all hagiography. As such, the construction of leprosy in the vita is an expression of Alice’s immense spirituality. Throughout the text, leprosy is shown to be useful spiritually in different ways and for different people. There are certainly moments when Alice’s female flesh is vindicated, cleansed at least partially from the gendered blemish of sin. However, other perspectives are also thrown up that subvert such empowerment. Alice’s leprosy is a boon for her community, and a means for them to expurgate sin: She bears their spiritual wounds in somatized form, and there is little space for Alice’s own experiences. Alice is a gap – or wound – in the tissue of her community, rather than a subject proper. Diagnosis with leprosy in the Middle Ages was, as Saul Nathaniel Brody puts it, “a prediction of lifelong suffering and isolation.”32 Although analgesia existed in the period, there was no known cure for leprosy: it was a death sentence.33 The Third Lateran Council of 1179 promulgated a decree for the segregation of lepers from the rest of the community initiated by a ritualized ceremony (separatio leprosorum).34 This ceremony, bearing many hallmarks of the office of the dead, solidified the connection between leprosy and death, social and physical.35 However, in practice, separation of the leprous from the community was not necessarily enforced,36 unless putrefying lacerations were detected. The patient’s suffering was exacerbated by the historical association of leprosy with sin and heresy. The leprous body was a “social text,” which laid 32 33

34

35

36

Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul; Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 73. On medieval pain alleviation, see in particular: Cohen, Modulated Scream, 87–112. Various plants, for example, could be used for alleviating pain, with knowledge sourced from classical and Arab medical treatises (“Towards a History,” 66.) Cohen cites the contents of thirteenth-century texts from Vincent of Beauvais and Bartholomaeus Anglicus: Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Naturale (Douai: C. Beller, 1624), 624; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De rerum proprietatibus (1601; repr., Frankfurt: Minerva, 1964), 227–365. Brody, Disease of the Soul, 64; Susan Zimmerman, “Leprosy in the Medieval Imagination,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38.3 (2008): 559–587, at 560. The overarching logic of the segregation ritual was indebted to pronouncements in Leviticus. Leviticus 13:46, for example, preaches that separation of lepers from the community is divinely ordained (Brody, Disease of the Soul, 62). Brody, Disease of the Soul, 65; Zimmerman, “Leprosy,” 560. For an overview of sequestration ceremonies, see: Brody, Disease of the Soul, 66–69. English translations of regulations from a variety of leper hospitals, and a sequestration ceremony, can be found in: Peter Richards, The Medieval Leper and His Northern Heirs (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1977), 123– 43. Brody, Disease of the Soul, 93.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

397

bare the internal moral degradation of the afflicted.37 However, leprosy could also be viewed positively, as a religiously affirmative affliction ordained by God Himself.38 Through suffering hellish torments in life, the leper could enter the kingdom of heaven directly, without the stain of sin. At the end of her life, Alice of Schaerbeek’s leprous body is little more than a patchwork of suppurating wounds sutured together by withering flesh: Manus suae ad modicum usum errant sibi necessariae: nam ex nimia infirmitate per longa tempora fuerant contractae; quarum cutis, ad modum cortices alicujus arboris, variis distincta vulneribus, similitudinem ejus gerere videbatur. […] Cutis quoque pectoris, capitis, & brachiorum, similis erat cortici arboris, varias rimas ex nimia ariditate continentis, Crura ejus, vitulo excoriato errant simillima, & ipsa una cum pedibus fuerunt inflate. De corpore ipsius carnes & sanies abundanter effluebant (VAS 3:31.482). [Her hands, so needed for even her restricted uses, were long since all shrunken from the illness. Their skin was fissured with multiple wounds, like the bark of a tree. […] The skin of her chest, head and arms, likewise resembled tree bark, scored unevenly and cracked from the excessive dryness. Her legs closely resembled a calf that has been skinned. They were also swollen, as were her feet. From her body there oozed loose flesh and abundant pus] (3.31:31. 27–8). Leprosy enacts the gradual disintegration of the body.39 The leprosy bacterium (mycobacterium leprae) causes nerve damage, limits the supply of nutrients 37 38

39

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), 58. For a detailed study of leprosy specifically as a route to the divine, see: Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 104–54. See, in particular, her notes on the biblical grounding of a spiritually beneficial leprosy in the story of Lazarus (Luke 16:20–31; not to be confused with the resurrected Lazarus of Bethany): Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 114–15. Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin. Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago: University of Chigago Press, 2000), 26; Brody, Disease of the Soul, 24–33; Richards, Medieval Lepers, xv–xvi; John Maurice, “Leprosy: Liberation from the Colonies,” New Scientist 121.1650 (4 February 1989): 48–52, at 50. For an overview of the changing medical understanding of leprosy, see: Brody, Disease of the Soul, 21–59; Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine. A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). For an in-depth study, from a modern medical perspective, see: Leprosy: A Practical Guide, ed. Enrico Nunzi and Cesare Massone (Milan: Springer-Verlag Italia, 2012).

398

Spencer-hall

and blood to the skin, which scars and withers. The body is opened up to debilitating secondary infections. As the malady progresses, tissue damage worsens; fingers, toes, chunks of nasal skin drop away; the hands and feet turn into claws; nasal passages and vocal chords are mutilated; facial features and limbs become misshapen; the body emits a foul odor. The leprous body becomes a patchwork of putrefying fissures, a vivid illustration of decomposition and fragmentation. It is precisely this element of leprosy, a “living death,”40 that Bynum suggests proved most threatening about the malady in this period.41 Indeed, in Job 18:13, the illness is identified as “the firstborn death.”42 The connection between leprosy and death is made graphically explicit in a description of Alice in the last days of her life: “Fuit itaque ab officio, corporis scilicet & membrorum, tota destituta, & more cadaveris in terra putrescentis, in lectulo suo tradita, quasi putredine extitit consummanda” (VAS 3:31.482) [Wholly deprived of the use of her body and of any of its members, she was committed to her bed just as a rotting corpse is committed to the earth, as if to let the rotting itself finish her off] (3.31: 31. 27). Alice’s biographer figures the saint as a monstrum horribilis, a “horrible monster.” All who see her are shocked and awestruck by her monstrosity; she is no longer a human to them, but a terrifying creatura “creature.” Despite her renown for piety within her community, she is afforded no special favors: as is fitting for all lepers, she must live sequestered from society to protect against contagion (2:12.479),43 and she cannot receive the sacramental wafer (2:15.480). Nevertheless, Alice welcomes each worsening affliction as a gift from God, a gain in spirituality (3:31.482). Although she certainly endures extreme pain due to her leprosy, Alice also feels pain because of a desire for the Lord. For example, once at Mass, her yearning for God’s presence provokes such physical anguish that “totius venae corporis pati violentiam & dirumpi videbantur” (2:11.479) [every vein in her body seemed to be suffering violence to the breaking point] (2.10:11.11). In another episode, 40

41 42 43

Allen, Wages of Sin, 25–40; Sylvia Huot, Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 138; Richards, Medieval Leper, 68. See also: Brody, Disease of the Soul, 60–106. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 276. See also: Zimmerman, “Leprosy,” 579. Zimmerman, “Leprosy,” 560. After diagnosis, Alice lives in isolation, spending four years in her first hut and the rest of her life in her second hut. Although the vita does not detail Alice’s sequestration ceremony, it is likely that Abbot William of Villers performed the rite (Cawley, introduction, xxiv). It is noteworthy, however, that it is absent from the text, given that this rite was central to the social experience of the leper. Based on this absence, Martinus Cawley asserts that the vita’s author is not necessarily interested in leprosy per se, but Alice’s own struggle with “social isolation” and “moral stigma” (Cawley, introduction, xxiii).

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

399

Alice’s desire for the Lord leads her to feel sauciata quomodo (1:3.478), “almost wounded” (1.3:3.4). Physical discomfort, for Alice, is inexorably linked to an experience of religion. Though she may appear corpse-like, her physical decay is a source of eternal salvation for others, as her illness is cast as having divine origin and characterized as a proxy for Christ’s Passion. While the leprous Alice appears to be a monster from the outside, she is in the epitome of spiritual health.44 This is fully revealed upon Alice’s death. A girl sees Alice in a vision after the saint’s death. Rather than the monstrous body of the leper, however, Alice now inhabits the beautiful body of a little child, illuminated by divine rays (VAS 3:34.482). The Alice-child is carried directly to heaven by angels: her earthbound suffering allows her to go directly to God’s embrace in heaven after death without suffering purgatory. Another vision shows Christ and the Virgin Mary at the head of a procession meeting Alice at the gates to heaven, signaling her immense piety (3:33.482). Seeing Christ as a child in the Eucharistic wafer was commonplace by the thirteenth century, and often features in vitae.45 Christ appearing in the sacrament is detailed, for example, in the vitae of Beatrice of Ornacieux and Ida of Nivelles.46 Alice as a soul-child, then, implicitly links her to Christ and His holiness. An episode in which a voice from heaven explains the unity of the sacraments shows Alice’s seemingly fragmenting body as, paradoxically, eternally whole. Deeply saddened by being prohibited from ingesting the Lord’s blood during the Eucharist, an interdiction levied on all lepers, Alice is almost inconsolable. A voice speaks to her, reassuring her that if she has taken the wafer, she has also tasted Christ’s blood: “quia ubi pars, ibi totum; nec pars potest dici, sed 44

45

46

Alicia Spencer-Hall, “The Post-Mortem Projections: Medieval Mystical Resurrection and the Return of Tupac Shakur,” MDCCCXXVI Opticon1826 13 (2012): 56–71, at 63 (accessed 21 April 2013). Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 130, 132, 174; Elina Gertsman, “Signs of Death: The Sacrificial Christ Child in Late Medieval Art,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha Es Et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 66–91, at 69–75; Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, “Holy Laywomen and Their Biographers in the Thirteenth Century,” in Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century. The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy, Juliana of Cornillon, Inventor of the Corpus Christi Feast, Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, ed. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 1–42, at 13. Margaret of Oingt, “The Life of the Virgin Saint Beatrice of Ornacieux,” in The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic, ed. and trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 47–62, at 6.55; “Li Via Seiti Biatrix, Virgina De Ornaciu,” in Oeuvres De Marguerite d’Oyngt, ed. E. Philipon (Lyon: N. Scheuring, 1827), 49–76, at 6.62–64; Goswin of Bossut, “Vita Beatae Idea de Niuella Sanctimonialis in Monasterio de Rameya,” in Quinque Prudentes Virgines, ed. Chrysostomo Henriques (Antwerp: Joannem Cnobbaert, 1630), 199–300, at 21: 250–53.

400

Spencer-hall

totum debet reputari” (VAS 2:15.480) [Since where the part is, there is also the whole. Nor should it even be called a part; it must rather be considered simply the whole] (2.14:15.15). This pronouncement resonates with the depiction of Alice: though outwardly corporally disintegrating, she remains paradoxically whole due to her religiosity – shown by her soul’s appearance after death as an unblemished child.47 The grisly wounds that crisscross her flesh are generative, allowing Alice to birth her spiritual self. Just as the wounds on Alice’s flesh are legible, so too is the skin – the animal skin – upon which her story is written. In recent scholarship, Sarah Kay discusses the ramifications of reading texts written on animal skins.48 She maintains that “wounds in [a manuscript’s] parchment may have been seen as a graphic realization of the text’s content, an uncanny precipitate of its ideas in concrete form.”49 A manuscript’s “sublime appearance” (i.e. silky smooth texture and flawlessness) can also serve as “a token of the immortality” of textual protagonists. There is a dearth of images featuring Alice in extant manuscripts of her tale: the reader must imagine the saint’s bodily breakdown, emphasizing the role of the manuscript’s material form as proxy for her flesh. A fifteenthcentury copy of Alice’s biography (produced by Johannes Gielemans ca. 1470–1486 and once owned by Augustinian canons in Rooklooster, Brussels), now housed in Vienna’s Österreichische Nationalbibliothek as MS. 12706–1207 (ff. 248–252v), is no different.50 Analysis of this manuscript suggests the way in 47

48

49 50

On corporeal disintegration of religious women as a sign of spirituality and connection to Christ, see in particular: Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, passim; Miri Rubin, “The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily ‘Order,’” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 100– 122, esp. at 113–115; Michelle M. Sauer, “Divine Orgasm and Self-Blazoning: The Fragmented Body of the Female Medieval Visionary,” in Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Marla Segol (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 123–143, passim. Sarah Kay, “Original Skin: Flaying, Reading and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.1 (2006): 35–74; “Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 13–32. On the signifying potential of medieval texts inscribed on animal skin(s), see also: Kay, “Flayed Skin as objet a: Representation of Materiality in Guillaume de Delguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine,” in Medieval Fabrication: Dress, Textiles, Cloth Work, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 193–205; Katie L. Walter, ed. Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Kay, “Original Skin,” 36. Available to view online via the library’s digital reading room: (accessed 25 May 2014).

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

401

which the material form of Alice’s text might have privileged a specific interpretation of the saint’s leprosy as a means to spiritual wholeness. Specifically, this manuscript foregrounds the notion of sharing skin productively, and the generative nature of physical degradation. The five folia on which Alice’s biography is found advocate an interpretation of the manuscript itself as an “illustration” of Alice’s body. Following standard practice, scribes have scored the parchment into lines and columns, “wounding” the parchment, and enabling the writer to organize the text and “make sense” of her life, while allowing the reader to similarly “read” (literally and metaphorically) Alice’s vita. Similarly, Alice’s leprous wounds are organized, classified as a means of understanding God’s authenticity and the ramifications of sin and suffering in the mortal world. Chapter headings and the start of sentences are highlighted in red ink, like blood oozing from the saint’s wounds, guiding the diegetic onlooker to specific meanings of her suffering. The parchment is of middling quality – not flawless per se, but not particularly “tortured” either; uneven edges are the main marker of mediocre parchment. However the last folio is marked by two small repairs, holes in the parchment carefully sutured together to maintain “bodily” integrity. On the recto, this coincides with the section that details the horrific nature of Alice’s physical degradation on her deathbed (VAS 3.31.482). On the verso, the stitching coincides with the passage detailing Alice’s death and the definitive shedding of her mortal skin, ascending to heaven in the spiritual “second skin” she puts on once she disposes of her leprous body: “Exuit enim tunicam mortalitatis & miseriae, & induit tunicam immortalitatis & gloriae, plenam felicitatis & laetititiae” (3.32.482) [Thus did she doff the robe of mortality and wretchedness, and don that of immortality and glory, a happy robe, full of gladness] (3.32.32.29). The manuscript is neither breaking down fully nor perfectly whole – like Alice’s body. The central motif of Alice’s life, wholeness dependent on breakdown, is concretized in the manuscript form. Without the ruptures in her skin, the force of Alice’s text and her suffering would be almost entirely lost. Without her wounds, the holy woman would be nothing. The fecundity of Alice’s wounds render them uterine, leading to a further parallel with Christ’s lacerations. Karma Lochrie describes the “polysemy” of Christ’s wound, functioning in medieval texts and images both as a literal image of bodily rupture and as a “vulva/vagina.” 51 The link between wound and 51

Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James Alfred Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 180–200, at 189. Michael Camille also discusses Christ’s wounds as “vagina-like” with specific reference to illustrations in fourtheenth-century Books of Hours: “The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed.

402

Spencer-hall

female genitalia is further supported by the similarity of the Latin words vulnus “wound” and vulva “vagina” or “vulva”.52 Lochrie draws substantially from the Stimulus amoris, a manual for Passion meditations composed by Franciscan James of Milan in the late thirteenth-century, in which the spiritual union of worshipper to Christ is posited as “as a joining of wounds in a mystical act of copulation.”53 Christ, with female genitalia, is penetrated by mystical desire. Prioress and mystic Margaret of Oingt (†1310) explicitly addresses Christ as her mother, birthing not just herself but the entire world (Med. 33–43.13–16).54 For Margaret, the blood pouring from Christ’s wounds on the cross equates to the sweat pouring from a mother’s body during labor. As sweat becomes blood, and Christ becomes mother, a positive form of female bloody discharge saves all of humanity.55 Julian of Norwich’s Christ-mother’s bloody liquefactions are figured as even more fortifying than breast milk, leading to magnificent spiritual transcendence:56 The moder may leyn the child tenderly to her brest, but our tender Moder Jesus, He may homely leden us into His blissid brest be His swete open

52 53

54

55

56

Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 62–99, at 77. On Christ’s wounds as womb, see: Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 278. McCullough, “‘Loke in,” 26. Lochrie, “Mystical Acts,” 189; James of Milan, Stimulus amoris fr. Jacobi Mediolanensis. Bibliotheca franciscana ascetica medii aevi, 4. (Quaracchi: ex typographia Collegii s. Bonaventurae, 1905), 71–76 Margaret of Oingt, “Pagina Meditationum,” in Oeuvres De Marguerite d’Oyngt, ed. Philipon, 1–33. Hereafter, Med. Subsequent English translations from “A Page of Meditations,” in The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, ed. and trans. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, 25–54. Bynum refers to this passage, but cites incorrect page numbers in the original: Fragmentation and Redemption, 97 n.43. On medieval maternal representations of Jesus, see in particular: Jenny Bledsoe, “Feminine Images of Jesus: Later Medieval Christology and the Devaluation of the Feminine,” Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 3.1 (2011): 33–58 (accessed 21 April 2014); Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 93–117; Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110– 169; Cullinan, Redeeming the Story, 44–46. On Christ’s wounds as breasts, see: Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 269–276, esp. 273; Frank Graziano, Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 205–15.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

403

syde and shewyn therin party of the Godhede and the joyes of Hevyn with gostly sekirnes of endless bliss (Shewings, 3.60:2508–2511). [The mother can lay her child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us easily into his blessed breast through his sweet open side, and show us there a part of the godhead and the joys of heaven, with inner certainty of endless bliss] (Showings, 60:298). Similarly, in Alice’s text a cross-gendered form of divine vaginal blood flow is salvific. In times of particular anguish, the leper drinks directly from Christ’s wounds, with the blood miraculously healing her own wounds: “[…] more parvuli causa sugendi matris ubera, ad pectus Christi convolavit & ad vulnera; quorum liquore membra sauciata sanitati concito sensit restituta” (VAS 2:10.479) [Yes, she would wing her way to the bosom of Christ, even as a little one to suck its mother’s breasts. And how promptly she would feel her bruised members restored to soundness, thanks to the beverage from those wounds!] (2.9:10.11).57 As Christ’s “menses” nourish Alice, her own leprous exsanguination is a form of life-giving effluent for herself and her community. 57

Krahmer, “Redemptive Suffering,” 276–77. Various female religious are shown drinking from Christ’s wounds in the Middle Ages, including Angela of Foligno (†1309), Gertrud of Helfta († c. 1302), Ida of Louvain († c. 1261), Julian of Norwich († c. 1416), and Lutgard of Awyières (†1246). Angela of Foligno, Ludger Thier, and Abele Calufetti, Il Libro Della Beata Angela Da Foligno: Edizione Critica (Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Quas, 1985), 1.14.141–143; Gertrude of Helfta, Oeuvres spirituelles, vol. 3, ed. Pierre Doyere (Paris: Cerf, 1968), 3.45.2–3; Anon, “De vener. Ida Lovaniensi, Ord. Cisterc. in Brabantia prope Mechliniam,” in Acta Sanctorum, ed. Daniel Papebroeck (Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970), April, 2:157–189, at 2.3.11.173; Thomas of Cantimpré, “De S. Lutgarde virgine, sanctimoniali Ordinis Cisterciensis, Aquiriae in Brabantia,” in Acta Sanctorum, ed. Godfrey Henschen, June (Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970), 3:234–263 at 1.1.13.239–1.2.14.240, 2.1.6.244–245; Julian of Norwich, Shewings, 74:863–865, cf. 1.12:473–497. Angela of Foligno’s Libro will henceforth be referred to as LBA. On these women, see: Alexandra Barratt, “‘The Woman Who Shares the King’s Bed’: The Innocent Eroticism of Gertrud the Great of Helfta,” in Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 107–119, at 114–117; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 160–165; Holy Feast and Holy Fast, passim; Jesus as Mother, 192–193; Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 41–42; Melissa L. Meyer, Thicker Than Water: The Origins of Blood as Symbol and Ritual (New York: Routledge, 2005), 199. For an overview of medieval interpretations of Christ’s blood and other blood, see: Bettina Bildhauer, “Medieval European Conceptions of Blood: Truth and Human Integrity,” Journal of the Royal Anthropoligcal Insitute 19.S1 (2013): 57–76. Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve,

404

Spencer-hall

The biblical figure of Lazarus (Luke 16:22–25) underpins the association of leprosy as a divinely mandated and spiritually positive illness.58 Although scourged by leprosy during his lifetime, Lazarus is comforted in his afterlife and embraced in Abraham’s bosom – unlike the rich man, who leads a physically agreeable life, but is tormented after death. The leprous body could also be viewed as Christ Himself, in reference to Isaiah 53:4: “Surely [Christ] hath borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows: and we have thought him as it were a leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted.”59 The connection of Christ with the disease gained significant currency and stories featuring Christ appearing to the pious as a leper were frequently featured in sermons.60 Christ’s leprous appearance could also be directly linked to his countenance during the Crucifixion. For example, in her Meditations, Margaret of Oingt addresses Christ: O preciosissimum & nobilissimum corpus, quam pium erat respicere te tempore Passionis tue, quando proditores injusti screaverant in facie tua pulchra quam tu, qui eras super omnia pulcher, videbaris essee leprosus (Med. 30.12) [My emphasis]. [Oh, most precious and noble body, how blessed it was to contemplate you at the time of your Passion, when the unjust traitors had spat at your beautiful face, so that you, who was beautiful above all else, seemed to be a leper] (30.30) [My emphasis]. Elsewhere, Margaret details how Jews tormented Christ’s body “tant que il fenblevet eftre mefeuz” (1:4.37) [until He looked like a leper] (1:4.42).61 Margaret capitalizes on the notion of the leper as lowest of the low, clearly portraying Christ’s degradation, but is careful to avoid equating the two: Christ is not a leper here. Crucially, heretical enemies are the vectors of Christ’s

58 59 60

61

the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Brody, Disease of the Soul, 101–03. Brody, Disease of the Soul, 103–04; Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible. See, for example: Jacques of Vitry and Thomas Frederick Crane, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques of Vitry (London: D. Nutt, 1890), sermons 94–5, 43–45. These and other relevant sermons are discussed in Brody, Disease of the Soul, 104. Margaret of Oingt, “Speculum Sancte Margarete Virginis,” in Oeuvres De Marguerite d’Oyngt, ed. Philipon, 35–48. English translation from “Mirror,” in The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, ed. and trans. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, 41–47.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

405

quasi-infection, characterizing the traitors as almost bio-hazardous artifacts, dangerous transmitters of sin to all those with whom they come into contact. In comparison, the vita of Angela of Foligno (†1309) explicitly characterizes leprous flesh as the flesh of Christ, in the form of the Eucharistic wafer (LBA¸“Third Supplementary Step,” 243). 62 After Angela washes the feet of lepers, she drinks the dirty water and accidentally ingests a diseased scab. She interprets the chunk of diseased flesh lodged in her throat as a sacrament (mi reprendeva la consienzia come se io avese comunicato), and swallows it whole. Such configurations of the leper as Christ-like are evident in Alice’s vita, in which her illness is portrayed as a form of imitatio Christi.63 According to her biographer, Alice’s leprosy is divinely ordained. It is because God loves Alice so much, and recognizes her virtues, that he sees fit to afflict her with the disease. Her biographer explains that God “[…] morbo incurabili paucis desiderabili, lepra videlicet, ipsam graviter percussit” (2:9.479) [[…]struck her a heavy blow, struck her down with a disease, an incurable disease, a disease few could wish for: leprosy itself!] (2.7:9.9). This declaration syntactically evokes the five sacred wounds of Christ, the injuries on His hands, feet, and side endured during His Passion.64 Alice is (1) struck down (2) with a disease, which is (3) incurable and (4) particularly undesirable, that is (5) leprosy. Her illness is, thus, a form of stigmata; she bears the marks of Christ’s crucifixion across her body. Unlike the typical stigmatic, whose wounds correspond identically in placement with those of Christ,65 Alice carries the sacred wounds diffuse across her leprous body in the form of myriad seeping lesions. Rather than the foul stench traditionally emanating from the leprous body, 62

63 64

65

David Aers, “The Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Orthodox Late Medieval Representations,” in The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture, ed. Aers and Lynn Staley (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 15–42, at 33; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 144, 209; Molly Morrison, “Ingesting Bodily Filth: Defilement in the Spirituality of Angela of Foligno,” Romance Quarterly 50.3 (2003): 204–216. See also the later mystics Catherine of Genoa (†1510) who ate lice, drank pus, and rubbed her nose in rotting wounds and Catherine of Siena (†1380) who drank pus from the breast of a dying woman. For further information on wounds as a form of imitatio Christi, see: Easterling, “Ascetic Blood,” passim. J. Aumann, “Mystical Phenomena,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 2003), 105–109, at 108; Frederick G. Holweck, “Wounds, The Five Sacred,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912), 714–15, at 714–15. Augustin Poulain, “Stigmata, Mystical,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912), 294–296, at 294–295. Cf. note 64.

406

Spencer-hall

Alice gives off a refreshing divine fragrance (VAS 2:10.479). The beautiful odor emphasizes the God-given nature of this illness, and how spiritually refreshing it is, because it allows her to suffer and, thus, become closer to God. Moreover, the pleasant fragrance directly parallels a characteristic of some stigmatic wounds, which almost exclusively do not smell of putrefaction and, in some cases, are also finely scented.66 Further, Alice’s experience is directly connected with the Lord’s presence even further, as a description of the delectable aroma from the Lord that permeates the saint’s cell precedes details of Alice’s own sweet scent. The verb cruciare “to torment,” unequivocally linked to the cross and crux “torment” of Christ’s Passion, repeats throughout the vita, referring to the sufferings of purgatory and Alice’s physical ordeals that liberate souls from such anguish (VAS 2:20.480; 3:25–26.481; 3:29.481).67 Such formulations explicitly couple Alice’s experience with Christ’s Passion, and her illness thus equates to a form of imitatio Christi. In a vision to Alice on Good Friday, the verb focuses the reader’s attention on a depiction of Christ suffering. She sees the Lord “cruentatis manibus & clavitis pedibus, persossoque latere” (3:30.482) [with his hands all bleeding, his feet nailed, and his side pierced open] (3.30:30.27). In another vision, before Alice contracts leprosy, the holy woman finds herself before an altar as a golden cross descends from the heavens towards her on a rope (1:8.478–79).68 The biographer glosses this episode as follows: Cujus cruces visio similiter & transmissio, non indebite passionem Domini, quam more Sponsae ut fasciculum myrrhae inter ubera deportabat, nobis demonstrate; & quod cordis corporisque afflicitone martyrio in se consummato, Martyrem se Deo praesentaret (1:8.479). [For us, what this points to – this vision, this letting down of the Cross is the Lord’s Passion. And deservedly so, for that passion is what Lady Alice, like the Bride, used to bear as a bundle of myrrh between her breasts (Cant 66

67 68

Poulain, “Stigmata,” 296. As evidence, Poulain cites the sweet fragrance issuing from the stigmatic wounds of Blessed Lucy of Narni (†1544) and Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (†1695). The foul stench emanating from St. Rita of Cassia’s (†1465) mystical head wound is the only example known to Poulain of a “typical” smell of putrefaction in connection to stigmata. On pleasant aromas from a holy individual’s body as a charismatic mystical phenomenon, see also: Aumann, “Mystical Phenomena,” 109. Life of St. Alice, 11–12 n. 61, 18 n. 92; Krahmer, “Redemptive Suffering,” 276. For a discussion of this vision in depth, see: Scholl, “Golden Cross.” Eleanor Campion also offers insight into the link between this vision and St. Bernard’s Sermon 43 on the Canticle: “Bernard and Alice,” 132.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

407

1.12). This vision and bestowal of the Cross also point to the fact that her heart and her body were going to be afflicted, even to a full-scale martyrdom, enabling her to present herself before God as a martyr] (1.6: 8.8–9). Alice embraces the cross – the Lord’s Passion – and literally incorporates it in her body, so that every moment of her leprous life is one in which she is joined with Christ on the Cross. Her martyrdom via leprosy is arguably a superior form of imitatio Christi, inasmuch as it is never-ending: She does not get moments of rehabilitation or pause as ascetics may, but instead her suffering deepens every day as her disease progresses and her flesh steadily disintegrates, leaving her little more than a suppurating wound. Alice’s never-ending corporeal deterioration is unlike stories of many other female martyrs, particularly those from early Christian history, who miraculously remain whole despite annihilating tortures at the hands of pagan tormentors. For example, after a horrific double mastectomy Saint Agatha of Sicily (†251) is returned to full health, with her breasts mystically returned to her chest.69 In such tales, the saint’s physical incorruptibility is a telltale sign of God’s grace; the opposite is true in Alice’s life. The persistence of suffering inherent to the symptomology of leprosy makes the illness an ideal form of stigmata. As Augustin Poulain underlines, such ongoing and debilitating suffering is the “essential part” of visible stigmata that unites the stigmatic with Christ in His Passion.70 If there were no physical torment, the lacerations would be “empty symbol[s]” and “unworthy” of God. Alice’s wounds are fulsome, in the double-sense of both disgustingly excessive and abundant in symbolic value. It is precisely because her leprous lesions are gross and worthy of revulsion that they are symbolically charged as evidence of extreme, offensive suffering. What is more, the incurability of leprous wounds renders them eternal – allowing for an experience of eternal suffering coterminous with that of the crucified Christ Himself. In the Middle Ages, pain (spiritual or corporeal) circulates from one body to another.71 Central to the understanding of such collective pain experience is the narrative of Christ’s suffering on the cross, the foundational element of 69 70 71

Jacobus de Voragine, “De sancta Agatha virgine,” in Legenda aurea, ed. Th. Graesse (Leipzig: Librariae Arnoldianae, 1701), 171–174, at 171–72. Poulain, “Stigmata,” 294. Mills, Suspended Animation, 148, 62. See also: Mary Sudyam’s discussion of the transformative effects of visionary performance on audiences from “Women’s Texts and Performances in the Medieval Southern Low Countries,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance. Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. Elina Gertsman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 143– 159, at 149–55.

408

Spencer-hall

Christian faith.72 By dying on the cross, Christ absorbed humanity’s sin (spiritual disease). One sufferer’s pain, spiritual or otherwise, may be alleviated by its transfer to the body of another individual. Alice’s suffering, like that of Christ the healer Himself, is a means of saving souls from purgatory and cleansing sin from the souls of the still living (VAS 2:21–22.480–81; 3:25–26.481). For example, she saves the soul of a sinful and negligent nobleman from the horrible torments of hell via a year-long suffrage (VAS 2:20.479; cf. 3:29.481–82). Her ability to expurgate others’ sins is related to her incredible care for all humanity and the caritatis violentiam “violent charity” (2:21.480) that inhabits her body. As elsewhere in the vita, the physically annihilating (violence) is rendered spiritually productive (charity). Furthermore, Alice sacrifices particular bodily parts so that others may enjoy specific blessings associated with the metaphysical qualities of a given organ.73 Her ocular impairment is involuntary, not a result of ascetic practices, yet she embraces the opportunity these events present. Instead of praying to God for a cure to restore her sight, she voluntarily dedicates her organs to the betterment of those in need of religious succor. She dedicates her failing right eye to Count Willem II of Holland (†1256) as he lays siege to Aix in May 1248. Alice asks God to confer on Willem the “vera cognitionis & intelligentiae oculo” (2:23.481) [eye of true knowledge and understanding] (3.23:21) of the Supreme Good, and ultimately lead him to defend the Church from her enemies.74 Approximately a month before her death, Alice loses the use of her left eye too, leaving her completely blind. She sacrifices this eye for the King of France (Louis IX †1270), who set sail for Egypt on crusade in 1248, so that he might have “oculo diviniae claritatis illuminatus” (3:27.481) [an eye divinely bright to enlighten him] (3.27:24) to guide him securely in his mission to fight off the pagan enemies threatening the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In these examples, Alice redefines her corporeal losses as others’ spiritual gains. As her sister, Lady Ida, witnesses the holy woman struck by particularly severe pain, Alice offers the following consoling reply: “Dulcissima soror, noli sic affliginon autem me putes pro peccatis meis hujusmodi exponi tormentis, sed pro defunctis in locis poenalibus diu cruciandis & pro peccatoribus mundi, a laqueis venantiam jam jam miserabiliter irretitis, & sine sine seducendis […]” (3:26.481). 72 73 74

Cohen, “Towards a History,” 53–54. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 121; Waddell, “Alice,” 94. Máire Johnson explores the sanctifying aspects of ocular wounds and blinding in Irish hagiography in “In the Bursting of an Eye: Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography,” in this volume, 448–72.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

409

[“Sweetest Sister, be not so afflicted! Do not imagine that it is for sins of my own that I am prey to these torments. Rather it is for the deceased, subject to long, excruciating detention in regions of penalty, and for the sinners of the world, already miserably trapped in the fowlers’ snares [Ps 90:3; 123.7] and apt to be endlessly seduced”] (3.26:23–4). Alice’s emphasis on the fact that she bears the pain of others’ sins underscores that she has not been struck down by leprosy for any moral fault of her own.75 Further, this analogy allows Alice to form a significant bond with her community, from which she is physically separated and in which she can no longer physically participate.76 The excruciating torment of Alice’s intolerabili passion (2:26.481) “intolerable suffering,” (2.26:26.23) which provokes groans, wails and floods of tears, is rendered tolerable because it serves a higher spiritual purpose. Though her leprosy may be sic consume “rapidly consuming” her body, it is actually a “constructive” experience of Christian charity.77 Instead of being “an exemplum, an emblem of decay,” as with the sinful leper, Alice’s leprous body is recast as a route to spiritual refreshment and eternal life in paradise.78 Alice’s body becomes analogous to Christ’s suffering body on the cross – a body in pain that offers spiritual redemption to humanity. Additionally, Alice’s suffering on the part of others is a process of “analogical verification,” a procedure in which the insistent realness and “presentness” of a body in pain lends presence to an intangible/ineffable otherness.79 Her body testifies to the reality of purgatory and hell, and, thus, the necessity of devotion to God during a believer’s lifetime on earth. The vita attests that Alice endures excruciatingly painful visits to hell or purgatory three or four times a day, screaming out “‘[m]odo crucior in inferno, modo in purgatorio’” (3:25.481) [“It’s Hell that’s torturing me!” or “It’s Purgatory!”] (3.25:25.23). Similarly, she announces her return to the mortal world with “‘[m]odo de locis purgatorii, modo revertor de infernalibus’” [“Now I’m back; back from Purgatory!” or “Now I’m back from Hell!”]. The certainty of her pronouncements, and their location “there,” a location from which she is now “back,” inscribes the reality of purgatory and hell on her very body. Her wounds form a somatized roadmap of the landscape of the afterlife. That her suffering successfully saves souls, illustrated in the vita, shows that the doctrine of Christ’s redemption of humanity is authentic. 75 76 77 78 79

Life of St. Alice, 24 n. 109. Madison, “Redemptive Suffering,” 279–81. Moscoso, Pain, 32–33. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 58. Scarry, Body in Pain, 9, 13–14. Emphases in original.

410

Spencer-hall

A treatise on the figurative signification of Scripture (Allegoriae in novum testamentum),80 probably written ca. 1167–1171, interprets the leprous body of the unnamed man in Matthew 8:1–4,81 cured by Christ’s touch, as a proxy for humanity, corrupted by sin: Leprosus iste est genus humanum, quod, qunadiu fuit leprosum, a Deo fuit et a civitate Dei, ide est Hierusalem (quae sursum est mater nostra) separatum et longe remotum. […] Sed Dominus […] leprosum curavit et civem suae civitatis fecit. Hoc idem Dominus quoque miraculum per suam gratiam, quotidie facere non dedignatur. Sunt etenim multi intra ambitum sanctae Ecclesiae vitiorum lepra foedi et peccatorum contagi, quasi lepra polluti (2.26: 790). [This leper is the human race, which, while it was leprous, was separated and far distant from God and the City of God, that is to say Jerusalem (which on high is our mother). But the Lord […] has healed the leper, and made him a citizen of his city. Nor does the Lord disdain to perform this miracle every day through His grace. For there are, indeed, many within the body of Holy Church who are befouled by the leprosy of vice and polluted by the contagion of sins, as by leprosy].82 80

81

82

Hugh of St. Victor, “Allegoriae in Novum Testamentum,” in Opera Omnia, ed. J.P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 175 (Paris: Migne, 1854), cols. 791–924. Although the treatise is contained in the works of Hugh of St. Victor, the editors classify it as presumptively, not definitively, Hugh’s work. Over the years, the text has also been attributed to Richard of St. Victor, Peter Comestor, Peter of Poitiers and Peter the Chanter. Philip S. Moore, “The Authorship of the Allegoriae Super Vetus Et Novum Testamentum,” The New Scholasticism 9.3 (1935): 209–225, at 209. There still remain conflicting views over authorship. Rawcliffe, for example, maintains it is by Hugh of St. Victor (Leprosy, 112 n. 29.) However, many believe the work to be by Richard of St. Victor (see for example: Bjarne Andberg, “Le Paysage Marin Dans La Crypte De La Cathedrale D”anagni,” Acta Ad Archaelogiam Et Artivm Historiam Pertinentia 2 (1965): 195–203, at 200; Brody, Disease of the Soul, 127; John Chamberlin, Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Places in Langland‘s Poetics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2000), 135). It is believed to be from Richard’s Liber exceptionum: Richard of St. Victor and Jean Châtillon, Liber Exceptionum (Paris: J. Vrin, 1958), bk 2, chs. 1–9, 11–14. This episode appears again in Mark 1:40–45 and Luke 5:12–16. Christ healing lepers also occurs in Luke 17:11–19. In 2 Kings 5, a leprous soldier is cured by dipping himself seven times into the river Jordan. As Brody points out, however, the 2 Kings event is more likely related to scabies, which could be cured by bathing in hot springs (Brody, Disease of the Soul, 73 n. 32). Translation from Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 112.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

411

Like the oozing lesions that mark the leprous body, sinful individuals corrupt the body of the Church. Though these morally degraded people may not outwardly show the signs of leprosy, they are, nevertheless, afflicted in a spiritual sense. The impious, though not physically sequestered from the community like Alice and her fellow sufferers, are isolated from the flock of righteous Christians and God Himself. Over a hundred manuscripts of the treatise are extant, testifying to its popularity in the period that reached its zenith in the thirteenth century.83 Most likely used as a theological textbook, 84 the work illustrates the currency of leprosy as a metaphor within ecclesiastical circles. Furthermore, it provides another means of reading Alice’s body as Christ-like. Alice carries on her body the physical marks of the spiritual leprosy with which humanity is tainted. Her suffering body, like Christ’s, allows for the cleansing of this moral corruption. Though leprous externally, she is clearly intimately connected with God and lives almost perpetually in His embrace (VAS 2:10,12.479).85 Upon her initial segregation, Alice is so grieved about her separation from the community that her heart is almost literally broken, “tam gravi cordis vulnere est collisa” (2:9.479) [her heart was so severely crushed and bruised] (2.7:9.9), and her shock provokes a fainting spell. However, she is almost immediately consoled by a visit from the Lord, who showers her with His grace. From this moment, she prefers God as her only visitor and glories in her time with Him alone in her hut (VAS 2:10.479).86 When she moves to a new abode, Christ welcomes her warmly, figuring her hut as a tabernaculum in which He will tends to her every need (2:12.479). Rather than a desolate space of hopeless seclusion, her leper hut is where she is eternally embraced by the divine; it is a quasiJerusalem. Though her personal space is limited, her spiritual mission overflows the boundaries of her cell and affects all those around her.87 Regardless of the favorable illustration of leprosy in Alice’s vita, the older perception of the malady as a symptom of moral corruption continued, and ultimately triumphed.88 Clerics used leprosy both as a metaphor for spiritual corruption and a vehicle for spiritual elevation.89 Jacques of Vitry linked the 83 84 85 86

87 88 89

Andberg, “Paysage Marin,” 200; Chamberlin, Medieval Arts Doctrines, 136; Moore, “Authorship of the Allegoriae,” 209. Moore, “Authorship of the Allegoriae,” 209. Waddell, “Alice,” 91–92. See also a similar episode on the eve of the Feast of the Eleven Thousand Virgins (also known as the Feast of St. Ursula), in which Christ consoles Alice with his company after she feels sadness at being separated from her religious colleagues: VAS 2:16.480. Waddell, “Alice,” 94. Brody, Disease of the Soul, 104–05. Brody, Disease of the Soul, 61.

412

Spencer-hall

incidence of leprosy to the existence of Original sin.90 On the other hand, Walter, bishop of Tournai, pronounced leprosy a divine boon in 1239.91 As Saul Nathaniel Brody comments, “[t]he leper was seen as sinful and meritorious, as punished by God and as given special grace by Him.”92 To engage with lepers, symbols of the basest moral corruption, publicly signaled a commitment to living penitence and thus operated as a socially recognizable form of religious service.93 At the age of twenty three, for example, Yvette of Huy (†1228) joined the leprosarium outside the walls of her town where she nursed the afflicted for ten years (VIH 10:480).94 Such is her devotion to the Lord that she wishes to become miseriam omnibus miseriis (10:34.870) “the most thoroughly miserable of all the miserable” (10:34.94). Her scheme to ensure that she contracts the illness involves a regimen of contamination: Eating and drinking amongst the lepers, washing in their dirty bath water, and mixing her own blood with theirs (VIH 11:36.870). It is now known that it is relatively difficult to contract leprosy.95 Although the disease’s precise pathogenesis remains unclear, ninetyfive per cent of the population is immune to the bacterium and only one per cent of individuals will contract the disease after exposure. However, leprosy was believed to be highly contagious in the Middle Ages.96 It is noteworthy that 90 91 92 93 94

95 96

Muessig, Faces, 5.2, 160. Timothy S. Miller and Rachel Smith-Savage, “Medieval Leprosy Reconsidered,” International Social Science Review 81.1–2 (2006): 16–28, at 19. Brody, Disease of the Soul, 61. Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200– 1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 76. Hugh of Floreffe, “De B. Ivetta, sive Iutta, vidua reclusa, Hvi in Belgio,” in Acta Sanctorum, ed. Godfrey Henschen, January (Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970), 1:863–87. Hereafter, VIH. Chapter, paragraph, and page numbers are given in parentheses. English translations from “The Life of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy, by Hugh of Floreffe,” trans. Jo Ann McNamara, in Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century: The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy, Juliana of Cornillon, Inventor of the Corpus Christi Feast, Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 47–141. See also: Marie of Oignies (†1213) and Juliana of Mont-Cornillon (†1258) who similarly cared for lepers: Anon, “De B. Iulianae virgine priorissa Montis-Cornelii,” in Acta Sanctorum, April, vol. 1, ed. Godfrey Henschen (Paris: Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970), 443–77, at 2.1–2.457– 58; Jaques de Vitry, “De B. Maria Oigniacensi in Namurcensis Belgii dioecesi,” in Acta Sanctorum, June, vol. 4, ed. Daniel Papebroeck (Paris: Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970), 636–66, at 1.1.13–14.640; Michel Lauwers, “‘Noli Me Tangere’  : Marie Madeleine, Marie d’Oignies Et Les Pénitentes Du Xiiie Siècle,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome. Moyen âge, temps modernes 104.1 (1992): 209–268, at 216; Simons, Cities of Ladies, 76–80. Nunzi and Massone, Leprosy, 39–42. On fear of contagion, see: Zimmerman, “Leprosy,” in particular 579 n. 4.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

413

Yvette’s actions are understood as those of a “heroine of faith” instead of as those of a “frightening model of harmful behaviors.”97 Within the theological framework underpinning medieval attitudes to leprosy, voluntary contraction of the illness marks Yvette out as an overwhelmingly pious woman, enthusiastically giving herself up to the worst illness possible to become closer to Christ. As Annette B. Mulder-Bakker points out, Yvette’s enterprise at the leprosarium (later known as the hospital of Grandes Malades) is not motivated by “compassion.”98 The vita’s author neglects to mention her love for the diseased. Instead, what is useful for Yvette is their lowly status as living embodiments of moral degradation, which is emphasized again and again. Serving the lepers makes her vilius (VIH 10:33.870) “more vile” (10:33.93), an exercise in the practice of humility that shows her devotion to God. The lepers themselves are a means to an end. After Yvette leaves for enclosure as an anchoress in 1191 (14:42.871), having extracted the spiritual experience of humiliation and abnegation from her time with the lepers, they are not mentioned again. Yvette’s eleven years in the leprosarium are rapidly recounted in just two short chapters comprised of three paragraphs each, and then the text turns to the private piety of Yvette as a visionary recluse (10–11:870).99 Contact with the lepers is functional for Yvette, a stepping-stone in her personal journey to spiritual perfection. This is highlighted in the following aside from her biographer: “[…] sufficit in eo quod leprosis cohabitabit, abundant in eo quod seruiebat, superabundant in eo quod vt leprosa & ipsa efficeretur optabat” (11:36.870) [It suffices that she lived with the lepers; it abounds that she served them; it superabounds that she prayed to become leprous] (11: 36.95). It would have been enough for Yvette to live with the sinful afflicted, and her actions of caregiving and willful attempts at contamination are over and above what is required to prove her Christian charity and faith. Although Yvette of Huy never reached her impossible goal of catching leprosy, she accurately prophesies that a local woman will catch the disease (VIH 28:879).100 In this episode, leprosy figures as a divine judgment levied against a sinful individual, a woman of unnamed wicked excesses. Certainly, it is an extreme penalty, terribilem & asperam nimis, but it also an act of charity. The experience of leprosy

97 98 99 100

Krahmer, “Redemptive Suffering,” 293. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 65 Simons, Cities of Ladies, 39. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 52–53.

414

Spencer-hall

Purgatoria ei peccatorum suorum effecta fit poena, vt sancta mente & corpore transiret de hoc mundo ad Patrem, consumptis peccatis omnibus per correptionem & poenam, quae praecessit, corporis (28: 86.879). […] acted as a purgatory, punishing her sins so that she could pass from this world to the Father, holy in mind and body, all the corporal sins she had committed before consumed through pain and correction] (28: 86.121). Though both Alice and the unnamed woman from Huy are burdened by God with the same disease, the signification of the illness differs for each woman. What differentiates the pair is the underlying rationale of their illnesses. Female models of suffering produce polyvalent significations: As Shawn Madison Krahmer asserts “context is everything” with this material.101 The pious Alice is untainted by sin, and, thus, her suffering can be used to redeem the souls of the living and dead: she functions as a physical mediatrix. The wounds on her body do not “belong” to her, as it were, but instead are impressions of others’ moral blemishes. Her leprosy is an opportunity for sacrifice that benefits her whole community. The woman from Huy, on the other hand, is weighed down by her own sins, and must live in penance as a leper to atone. In the thirteenth century, preachers and theologians forged a connection between confession and medical phenomena. The expulsion of infected bodily matter, bloodletting, and inflicting wounds, or even forcibly opening existing lesions, were all conceptualized as akin to the act of confession.102 Thus, the physical realities of leprosy, including expurgation of infected fluids and the incidence of multiple festering wounds, function as a form of daily bodily confession for the leper of Huy. Despite the framework for the positive interpretation of suffering in the vitae of thirteenth-century holy women, the insistence in Alice’s vita on the productive nature of her own affliction highlights the possibility for more negative judgments towards her illness. Indeed, the text’s prologue suggests her community’s potentially mixed reaction to her affliction.103 New and here101 102

103

Krahmer, “Redemptive Suffering,” 287; see also: 287–91. Lauwers, “‘Noli Me Tangere,’” 254. Nicole Bériou, “La Confession Dans Les Écrits Théologiques Et Pastoraux Du Xiiie Siècle: Médication De L’âme Ou Démarche Judiciaire?” in L’aveu. Antiquité Et Moyen Âge. Actes De La Table Ronde De Rome (28–30 Mars 1984), ed. Ecole Française de Rome (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1986), 261–282, at 269–73. Campion, “Bernard and Alice,” 135.

Christ’s Suppurating Wounds

415

tofore unheard of events, the reader is told, are judged in many ways and the reader should not fear the inevitable reaction of reprehensible slanderers (detrahentium formidantes) to Alice’s tale (prol.1.477). Alice will be odor vitae “an odor of life” for the pious who recognize her exemplary holiness and imitate her devotion to God. However, for those who despise Alice, seeing her only as a sinful leper, she will be solely odor mortis “an odor of death.” Physical phenomena of pain and disease are less “medical fact[s]” and more social and cultural constructions, based on the interpretations of both witnesses and authors.104 Physical suffering is an individualized subjective experience, perceived and understood differently by all according to personal circumstance and socio-cultural inculcation. An almost limitless spectrum of signification is possible. Alice’s leprosy is miraculous stigmata to some, an expression of moral corruption to others, and/or simply a bundle of medical symptoms to a modern reader. Apart from leprosy, other illnesses in the text are not depicted in an affirmative light: the meaning of sickness and pain more generally is shown to be fluid. Alice’s sister, Lady Ida, is struck down with an acute malady so severe that she is presumed to be on the brink of death (VAS 2:17.480). Instead of welcoming this event with happiness, Alice shows great sorrow. Suffering often offered many female religious opportunities to become closer to God, but it is clear that not all pain was embraced as a means to spiritual elevation. As Bynum points out, many miracles performed by holy women involve the alleviation of pain and illness – thus, there was a medieval understanding of corporeal pain as unwanted and avoidable even within texts foregrounding the religious.105 Such is Alice’s grief at the thought of losing her helpmate and sibling that she apostrophizes God: “Domini mi, noscas pro certo, si possibile cum potestare mihi foret attributum, ut aequali jaculo, quo me de morte soreri meae jam imminenti inconsolabiliter vulnerasti, laedere te valerem minimi mihi attemptarem” (2:17.480) [“Lord, get this clear! This unsoothable gash you’re wounding me with in my sister’s pending death – if I had it in my power to jab you back with a hurt to match yours, I wouldn’t hold off for a moment!”] (2.16:17.16).

104 105

Cohen, “Towards a History,” 50. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 188–89.

416

Spencer-hall

Strikingly, Alice characterizes her sister’s affliction not as a wounding of Ida’s body but her own. The pains wracking Ida are transliterated into Alice’s inconsolable affective agony. Suffering circulates between individuals: those emotionally touched by bodies in pain share that same pain. Although the Lord replies to Alice’s tearful outburst, His reply is more dismissive than consoling. He characterizes her affective pain as vano dolore “ineffectual grief,” and states that Ida will not die of this ailment. Alice, He decrees, will enter heaven first, followed by Ida. The potential succor provided by this statement, suggesting a blissful reunion between sisters in the hereafter, is largely undercut by the inclusion of the subordinate clause si beatem duxerit vitam “if, of course, she lives a blessed enough life.” The vita’s author ends the passage with the ambiguous pronouncement sicut rei probavit eventus “[a]nd events were to prove this true.” Though the leper certainly dies before her sister, this sheds little light on whether Ida eventually reunites with Alice in heaven, leaving the text’s audience with a lingering sense of unease. Cohen maintains that pain dangerously threatens a community’s cohesion: “unless it is tamed, socialized, provided with a vocabulary of expressive gestures, and made intelligible in verbs, it can be a dangerous tear in the fabric of any society.”106 Alice’s vita takes up the challenge of “socializing” the holy woman’s dread disease, and, at almost every turn, provides a rhetoric of martyrdom through illness which neutralizes the negative connotations of leprosy. Instead of a morally bankrupt individual in their midst, and one with such a heretofore-pious record to boot, the community of La Cambre is faced with a woman of extraordinary spirituality who expurgates their own sins. Alice’s leprosy, after all, is useful for them too. The text emphasizes that she is an exemplary patient (VAS 1:6.478). During her immensely painful lifetime, she does not burden others with her affliction (nulli fuit onerosa) but behaves extraordinarily graciously to all (singulis & omnibus fuit gratiosa). She focuses herself on prayer, work, and meditation (1:5.478). Her deportment in every sphere of activity and every location, including in the refectory, cloister, church, dormitory, and colloquium, is faultless (1:6.478). Alice obeys all practical behaviors that govern her community: she is well behaved, and she does not disturb, literally or figuratively. Alice the Leper, transformed into little more than a weeping lesion thanks to her leprosy, bears the wounds of Christ dispersed across her being. Bearing such wounds, however, requires the construction of a web of supporting commentary to ensure that her glorious wounds are not mistaken for what they may initially seem to be, putrefying markers of sin and degradation. 106

Cohen, “Animated Pain,” 40.

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

417

Chapter 18

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind Albrecht Classen

The early history of the Christian Church is very much determined by the phenomenon of martyrdom, as the vast corpus of hagiographical literature confirms, and which later legendary and hagiographical literature such as the Legenda aurea by Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1230–ca. 1298) illustrates most impressively.1 In the eternal struggle between body and mind or, better, spirit/ soul, Christian ideals have commonly aimed at overcoming the constraints of physical limitations either by submitting under external forces, or by fighting against the body – causing wounds, and occasionally but unintentionally, bringing about death. In this regard, there are startling but poignant parallels between Christian martyrs from the second and third centuries and those individuals burnt at the stake for their heretical views during the Middle Ages, or for witchcraft in the early modern age, regardless of huge cultural-historical differences or official justifications for their deaths.2 By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there is a strong emergence of mysticism at large; many women, above all, sought religious inspiration through visions and revelations.3 In these visions, mystics could escape their physical 1 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2 See: Christian Martyrdom in Late Antiquity (300–450 AD): History and Discourse, Tradition and Religious Identity, ed. Peter Gemeinhardt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012); and Candida R. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 3 There is a huge body of modern scholarship on female saints and mysticism, far too many to enumerate here. See, for example: Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden, eds., Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100–c. 1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); Nancy Bradley Warren, Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380–1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih, eds., Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (New York:

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_020

418

Classen

existence and achieve a kind of metaphysical union with the Godhead in this life. Some of them also resorted to rather radical images of their bodies being wounded or killed, most dramatically in the case of the anonymous Christus und die minnende Seele (Christ and the Loving Soul), which dates from the early fourteenth century.4 In that text, both the soul and Christ are literally portrayed as stabbing, hanging, and wounding each other to death. The next step in the history of self-mutilation and self-laceration for religious reasons was reached with the fourteenth-century Prussian mystic Dorothea von Montau (1347– 1394), whose account is filled with horrendous descriptions of self-inflicted wounds, as she subjected her body to constant pain. Scott Pincikowski’s insightful monograph examining the phenomenology and exegesis of wounds and the pained body in secular courtly literature (mostly Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich)5 has now been followed by Larissa Tracy’s study on torture and brutality in medieval literature (both seen as ideological strategies of Othering the “barbarians” and constructing a sense of national identity).6 Caroline Walker Bynum has done fundamental work on the spiritual transformation of the body in much of medieval mystical literature.7 But the work on Prussian mystic Dorothea von Montau, deeply

4

5 6

7

Routledge, 2002); Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001); Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of LateMedieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999); and Renate BlumenfeldKosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), to name only a few, but Dorothea has received little scholarly attention to date. Romuald Banz, Christus und die minnende Seele: Untersuchungen und Texte (Breslau: M.&H. Marcus, 1908; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1977). See also: the excellent study by Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, My Secret is Mine: Studies on Religion and Eros in the German Middle Ages (Leuven: Peeters, 2000). Scott E. Pincikowski, Bodies of Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue (New York: Routledge, 2002). Larissa Tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012); see also: Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). Many of Bynum’s publications deal extensively with the body, sanctity, gender and the intersections of faith. See: Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages,” The Irish Theological Quarterly 78 (2013): 3–18; Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

419

determined by her desire to wound her own body as a religious ritual, has not yet attracted sufficient attention, despite a good critical edition of the original text and a solid English translation.8 This seems rather surprising considering the great influence that she exerted on her contemporaries, including the English mystic Margery Kempe, and the entire literature of the Order of the Teutonic Knights.9 The discussion of wounds and their spiritual significance in Dorothea’s work, contextualized with perspectives on contemporary texts and situated in a larger historical context of hagiographical literature, offers a new epistemological reading of wounds as significant symbols in the mystical discourse and for religious epistemology. Wounds meant very specific things in spiritual terms in the Middle Ages, and Dorothea utilized the laceration of the physical body as a metaphor and catalyst for the transformation of the material existence into a basis for spiritual, mystical experiences. Hurting the body, or accepting its wounding by others, emerges as a startling, if not horrifying, but also catalytic, phenomenon of great significance in medieval mentality. This is reflected both in secular and in religious literature from the entire time period, whether we think of Marie de France’s lai Eliduc, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec, or Dante’s masterpiece, Divina Commedia. The famous Grail motif (Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval; Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival) was as much predicated on the spiritual quest beyond the physical, bodily limitations as the vast body of mystical texts. Books, 1992); and Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 8 Johannes Marienwerder, “Das Leben der heiligen Dorothea,” ed. Max Toeppen, in Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum: Die Geschichtsquellen der preussischen Vorzeit bis zum Untergang der Ordensherrschaft, ed. Theodor Hirsch, Max Töppen, and Ernst Strehlke, vol. 2 (1863; rptd. Frankfurt a. M.: Minerva GmbH, 1965), 179–350. For the English translation, see below (Stargardt). For a precise, though short, introduction to Dorothea, see: Dyan Elliott, “Dorothea of Montau,” Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis, vol.1: A-J (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 258–60. In Resurrection of the Body, Bynum mentions Dorothea in passing with regard to her mystical pregnancy (224). Bynum goes into more details about aspects of Dorothea’s life in Fragmentation and Redemption, specifically her appropriation of male dress (38), taking her family on pilgrimage and fighting with her confessor for access to the eucharist (42), her mystical pregnancy (pp. 44, 146, 173); her frantic desire for the sacrament (62); and her use of physical and mental anguish as a mode of salvation (188). But while Dorothea is perhaps the “best documented holy woman of the fourteenth century” (62), her mystical wounding has received less scholarly attention than other aspects of her life and devotion. 9 David Wallace, Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory, 1347–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapters 1 and 2.

420

Classen

The phenomenon of wounds has always played a significant role both in philosophy and in religion, apart from its mundane relevance in medical terms,10 because it is the result of a concrete attack on the healthy body, creating holes, allowing blood and other bodily fluids to stream out, and ultimately (in the worst case scenario), causing the individual’s death. In essence, we are dealing with the motif of sacrifice, which has had universal relevance throughout time. In most cultures past and present, blood holds the greatest symbolic importance, as does the wound from which it flowed.11 The most famous example of wounds symbolizing the ultimate sacrifice is certainly Christ’s Passion, which was, after the early thirteenth century, imitated or copied through the stigmata as first experienced by Saint Francis of Assisi,12 and many times thereafter in Italy and in the rest of the world.13 Even today (or perhaps again), in close parallel to medieval culture, wounds are recognized as powerful signifiers in public displays, in movies, and other media.14 But the discussion about the meaning of wounds goes much further back to antiquity, particularly in the religious context. The wounds of Christ were intensely debated by the Church Fathers. Ambrose (ca. 330–397), for instance, characterized the remaining wound scars as the price a Christian had to pay for freedom from the devil’s temptations since they allowed him to meditate on Christ’s Passion. Augustine (354–430) appealed to the faithful to reflect upon the beauty of the crucified Christ. Later, the Venerable Bede (ca. 672/673–735) specified that the wounds of Christ were 10

11

12

13

14

But in the Middle Ages, healing a body never proceeded just by physical means; a spiritual, religious dimension was always considered an essential component. See: Wolfgang Ernst, Beschwörung und Segen: Angewandte Psychotherapie im Mittelalter (Cologne: Böhlau, 2011), esp. 309–12. Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006); Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood. See also: Blood in History and Blood Histories, ed. Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio (Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2005). See, for instance: Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Nitza Yarom, Body, Blood, and Sexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of St. Francis’ Stigmata and Their Historical Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1992); see also: Stigmata: Poetiken der Körperinschrift, ed. Bettine Menke and Barbara Vinken (Paderborn: Fink, 2004). Ian Wilson, Stigmata: An Investigation Into the Mysterious Appearance of Christ’s Wounds in Hundreds of People from Medieval Italy to Modern America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989). To cover all ground, we would also have to study, above all, different aspects of the Hindu religion and others in the Asian and African world, but the focus here rests on some late medieval European examples. Pamela Jaye Smith, Symbols + Images + Codes: The Secret Language of Meaning in Film, TV, Games and Visual Media (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2010).

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

421

safeguards against the symbolic wound of doubt and disbelief; focusing on the wounds of the crucified would strengthen the Christian’s faith and hope. Rupert of Deutz (ca. 1075–1129) considered the wounds as signals that Christ had accepted for Himself, as reminders for God the Father, the suffering of mankind. Moreover, as Rupert argued, the wounds represented the true Christian.15 However, all life depends on the self-protection of the body, both in physical and in metaphysical terms. Wounds cause bleeding and pain, wherefore the body, through its own self-defense mechanism, strives hard to close up any open wound as fast as possible, first by means of the blood platelets,16 then by covering the wound with a scab and healing it by means of developing a new skin. But as humans, as material beings, we are constantly subject to wounds and, hence, to dying. History rebounds with stories of heroes, if not gods, suffering from horrible wounds that threaten not only the well-being of the victim, but of society at large, and of heroes who cause wounds and kill in their efforts to protect their community. Some of the best examples are Beowulf in the eponymous Old English epic poem (ca. 1000; if not ca. 700, as most recent scholarship has argued), King Anfortas in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1210), and countless knights in courtly romances. In Christian iconography, Saint George pierces the dragon (the devil) through the throat with his lance, while Saint Michael, in other images, uses a sword and kills the dragon by stabbing it into its heart, bringing about salvation, so to speak. The entire history of late antique and early medieval martyrs is filled with accounts of individuals who die for their faith, defying the wounds which are inflicted on them through horrible torture, until they are decapitated. There is a veritable flood of equally symbolic episodes, motifs, and images predicated on wounding and killing throughout time, whether in the genre of heroic epics (Chanson de Roland) or in hagiographical texts (Legenda aurea).17 However, voluntarily receiving a fatal wound in order to escape from this life as early as possible, without being threatened by an outside force, was not accepted theologically, irrespective of the religious idealism as the major motif 15

16

17

W. Eckermann, “Wunden Christi,” Lexikon des Mittelalters 9.2 (1998): 350–51; Bettina Bildhauer, “Blood,” Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow, vol. 1 (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 106–09. Platelets, ed. D. Michelson, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Academic Press/Elsevier, 2007); see also the well-researched article online at: (accessed on 22 Aug. 2012). Jaye Smith, Symbols, 97–100.

422

Classen

behind it, because it amounted to suicide.18 The classical case in this regard is Hartmann von Aue’s verse novella, Der arme Heinrich (ca. 1200), in which the anonymous peasant girl wants to sacrifice herself for her lord Heinrich (Henry) so that he can recover his health and overcome his leprosy. Just shortly before the surgeon is about to stab her to death and extricate her heart and blood for Henry’s healing, the protagonist has a surprise opportunity to gaze into the operation room where he observes her utter beauty, innocence, and chastity, and suddenly realizes that she is the most delightful, virtually divine creature he has ever seen. In that moment, he finally grasps that true beauty rests on the inside, in the heart that she possesses, and that the ugly exterior, which he possesses as the disgusting leper, can never substitute for the spiritual. Hence, he stops the imminent operation, rescues the girl and, ultimately, himself because God has recognized the deep transformation of his heart and heals his leprosy. At the end, Henry marries the girl and leads a happy life until his death because body (Heinrich) and soul (girl) have unified again, according to this narrative. More importantly, however, no real wound has been inflicted, a fact which allows the continuation of life, but now on a higher level, supported by a spiritual enlightenment.19 Hartmann’s contemporary, Wolfram von Eschenbach, presents most startling images of wounding in his fragmentary Titurel (ca. 1218), which was predicated on some loose narrative strands in his Parzival (ca. 1205). The final episode, above all, focuses on the symbolic meaning of wounds and shedding 18 19

Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, Vol. 2: The Curse on Self-Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Hartmann von Aue, Der arme Heinrich, ed. Hermann Paul, 16th ed. by Kurt Gärtner (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1882; rptd. 1996); see also the English translation Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. with commentary by Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). For recent studies on Hartmann, see: A Companion to the Works of Hartmann von Aue, ed. Francis G. Gentry (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2005). For an excellent commentary, see: Hartmann von Aue, Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich, ed. and trans. Volker Mertens (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2004). I have developed the interpretation as outlined above in my study, Albrecht Classen, “Herz und Seele in Hartmanns von Aue ‘Der arme Heinrich’: Der mittelalterliche Dichter als Psychologe?,” ‘Mediaevistik 14 (2003): 7–30; see also Classen, “Utopian Space in the Countryside: Love and Marriage Between a Knight and a Peasant Girl in Medieval German Literature. Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich, Anonymous, ‘Dis ist von dem Heselin,’ Walther von der Vogelweide, Oswald von Wolkenstein, and Late-Medieval Popular Poetry,” in Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies, ed. Albrecht Classen, with the collaboration of Christopher R. Clason (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 251−79.

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

423

of blood.20 Two young lovers, Sigune and Schionatulander spend time together in a forest clearing, when a mysterious dog suddenly appears, dragging a long and fabulous leash studded with gems inscribed with another story of various lovers and their deaths. When she reads the text, Sigune finds the account so intriguing that she hastily opens the knot with which the dog is attached to the tent pole, allowing the dog to escape. Desperately, Sigune tries to hold onto the leash, but to no avail, and in that process the gemstone letters tear her hands and make them bleed. Schionatulander runs after the dog, yet fails to catch it, returning to the camp, with his naked legs and feet (he had been fishing in a creek) bloodied, lacerated by the brambles and tree stumps. Sigune sends her lover out to regain the dog, at which point the narrative breaks off. However, from Parzival, we know that the young man will die in his attempt to regain the dog from another knight, Orilus, leaving Sigune to mourn her dead lover for the rest of her life as a recluse, or anchoress. The wounds on the bodies of these two young people in Titurel prophecy their own demise and serve as a dire warning, but one that they do not know how to read properly: “The palms of her hands were grey, as though covered with hoarfrost, like the hand of a jouster whose lance slips back through his hand upon impact and scrapes across the bare skin” (Titurel 161.1–3). Wolfram projects here a kind of palimpsest; the lovers’ skin is the medium upon which destiny writes its words. The bloody skin conveys an ominous message, although neither protagonist can read the mysterious signs properly or even recognize their symbolic meaning. Tragedy awaits them because they disregard the most powerful letters, written on their own bodies,21 although 20

21

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Titurel and the Songs, ed. Marion E. Gibbs and Sidney M. Johnson (New York: Garland, 1988). I will quote from this translation, but for further comments and a critical edition, see: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Titurel, ed. and trans. Helmut Brackert and Stephan Fuchs-Jolie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003). I have developed this reading at much greater length in my book Utopie und Logos. Vier Studien zu Wolframs von Eschenbach “Titurel” Fragmenten (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1990). For a discussion focusing on another scene dealing with drops of blood in snow elucidated by Wolfram in his Parzival, which puts reading into a larger philosophical and religious context, see: Joachim Bumke, Die Blutstropfen im Schnee: Über Wahrnehmung und Erkenntnis im “Parzival” Wolframs von Eschenbach (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001); Alexander Sager, “Geheimnis und Subjekt in Wolframs ‘Titurel’,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 125.2 (2003): 267–91; and his monograph, Minne von mæren: on Wolfram’s >Titurel< (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2006). For a view critical of Sager’s, see: Petrus W. Tax, “Tragische Spiegelungen: Herrschaft und Sukzession, Rang und Stand in Wolframs ‘Titurel’,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 140.1 (2011): 38–57. For the epistemological function of reading in the Middle Ages,

424

Classen

those wounds speak a clear language. In the pan-European narrative of Amis and Amiloun (with many different spellings), one friend can only be healed of leprosy by means of the blood of the other friend’s children, but sometimes they are not killed, and sometimes they recover immediately through God’s grace.22 Shedding blood, in other words, carries deep symbolic meaning throughout the entire Middle Ages and well beyond. Blood bonds people, sustains friendship and love, and also offers the critical medium for spiritual salvation. Mystics, however, generally assumed quite a different, perhaps more radical, attitude toward the body and, hence, also to wounds. The account provided by Johannes von Marienwerder about the Danzig (modern Gdańsk) mystic Dorothea von Montau is an important example of the significance of mystical wounds. Wounding or hurting oneself for religious reasons, as part of the via purgativa, has not been received well by modern scholars who tend to suspect Dorothea of mental problems. Ulrike Wiethaus, for instance, goes so far as to accuse medieval mystics of practicing a ritual that was “undeniably misogynist, anti-Judaic, militaristic, homophobic and xenophobic […].”23 But mystics throughout the ages, like all spiritual individuals, have rejected the body in favor of the spirit that desires its liberation from the material prison.24 Both negative (sleep depravation, chastity, poverty, obedience, etc.) and positive (self-inflicted physical injuries, flagellation, whipping, extending genuflection, etc.) asceticism were common practices both in medieval monasteries and in anchorite cells.25

22 23

24

25

see: The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Garland, 1999). This is a broad theme and beyond the scope of the argument here. Ulrike Wiethaus, “Thieves and Carnivals: Gender in German Dominican Literature of the Fourteenth Century,” The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 209–38, at 211–12. For a contrasting perspective, see: Ute Stargardt, “Dorothy of Montau,” in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100– 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 475–96. Even when bodily wounds were not involved, mystics regularly engaged with the body and the need to overcome its limitations in order to achieve mystical epiphany; for a case from the seventeenth century, see: Katheleen Foley-Beining, The Body and Eucharistic Devotion in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s “Meditations” (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997). Giles Constable, “Attitudes Toward Self-Inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages,” in The Ninth Stephen J. Brademas, Sr., Lecture (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1982), 5–27, at 10. See also: E. Ross, “‘She Wept and Crid Right Loud for Sorrow and for Pain’: Suffering, the Spiritual Journey, and Women’s Experience in Late Medieval Mysticism,” in Maps of

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

425

Hartmann von Aue subscribed to this anti-body ideal in his verse narrative Der arme Heinrich, insofar as Henry regains his health only once he has abandoned his body and submitted completely to God’s will. He also formulated very similar ideas in his later religious tale, Gregorius (ca. 1190/1200) where the protagonist castigates his own body to the extreme and can, thus, regain God’s grace after seventeen years on a forlorn island, when he is chosen as the new pope.26 But mystical authors were the strongest advocates of physical self-sacrifice and wounding in order to achieve spirituality, best illustrated by the efforts undertaken by Catherine of Siena who never even shrank from caring for moribund breast-cancer patients. As David F. Tinsley elucidates: “In danger of being overcome, Catherine presses her very mouth and nose onto the awful sore and keeps it there until the Devil is vanquished. Here Catherine’s willingness to endure something utterly disgusting serves the same purpose assumed by the thorns for St. Benedict: to resist the attack of the Devil.”27 In Hildegard Keller’s words from her monograph Christus und die minnende Seele, “The literal relinquishing of the world culminates in the gallows on which the divine bridegroom hangs his bride in the ninth section.”28 The mystical experiences by Dorothea of Montau, as reported by her confessor and scribe, Johannes von Marienwerder,29 provide a good understanding of the symbolic meaning of wounds in medieval discourse. She was born as Dorothea Swarze in 1347 at Montau (now Montowy, Poland). At sixteen, she married a swordsmith called Albrecht and moved with him to his hometown of Danzig. During her life, she bore nine children, just as her own mother had done, but she lost eight of them. When she was thirty-eight, she went on a

26 27 28 29

Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 45–59; David F. Tinsley, “The Spirituality of Suffering in the Revelations of Elspeth von Oye,” Mystics Quarterly 21 (1995): 121–47; Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 28; David F. Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross: Ascetic Mentalities of the Later Middle Ages (Leeuven: Peeters, 2010), 5–9, et passim; Medieval English Prose for Women: Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group, ed. and trans. Bella Millet and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 136; and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Chaste Bodies: Frames and Experiences,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 24–42, at 33. Hartmann von Aue, Gregorius, ed. Hermann Paul. 16th ed. newly rev. by Burghart ­Wachinger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011). Tinsley, The Scourge, 82. Keller, My Secret, 209. Catherine M. Mooney, Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

426

Classen

pilgrimage to Aachen (west of Cologne) with her husband. The following year, her husband sold his possessions and tried to resettle in Aachen, but they returned to Gdańsk because of many external problems. In 1389, Dorothea traveled to Rome by herself and returned the following year, but her husband had died in the meantime. Consequently, she entered the convent of Marienwerder, sixty miles south of Danzig, submitting herself under the confessor Johannes, a Dominican canon.30 On 2 May 1393, Dorothea became an anchoress, letting herself be walled in and living from then on in a tiny cell located in the church. But the coldness of the following year and the harshness of that miserable existence in the little cell killed her on June 25, 1394.31 Johannes promoted her canonization through a number of Latin texts, and then, in 1405 through a German vita, Das Leben der Heiligen Dorothea, first printed in 1492. The German text is an amalgamation of the Latin version compiled for the members of the Teutonic Knights and the German lay population in Prussia, but despite its great success as a mystical account, Dorothea was never granted sainthood.32 She was deeply influenced by the Swedish mystic Birgitta of Sweden, and she, in turn, had a great impact on the English mystic Margery Kempe, who not only travelled to the three main pilgrimage sites of Christianity – Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela – but also made her way to Danzig, where her son had married a German woman.33 Pain by itself, inflicted not by another person as a form of punishment but as a medium of self-mortification with the goal of rejecting the body as a prison 30

31 32

33

Ariane Westphälinger, Der Mann hinter der Heiligen: die Beichtväter der Elisabeth von Schönau, der Elisabeth von Thüringen und der Dorothea von Montau (Krems: Medium Aevum Quotidianum, 2007). See also: Annette Volfing, “‘Du bist selben eyn himmel’: Textualization and Transformation in the ‘Life’ of Dorothea von Montau,” Oxford German Studies 39.2 (2010): 147–59, at 154–58. Petra Hörner, Dorothea von Montau: Überlieferung – Interpretation. Dorothea und die osteuropäische Mystik (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1993). Ute Stargardt, introduction to The Life of Dorothea von Montau, A Fourteenth-Century Recluse by Johannes von Marienwerder (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 1–3; Stargardt, “Male Clerical Authority in the Spiritual (Auto)biographies of Medieval Holy Women,” in Women as Protagonists and Poets in the German Middle Ages: An Anthology of Feminist Approaches to Middle High German Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1991), 209–38. Regarding Johannes’s efforts to get Dorothea canonized, see: Cordelia Heß, Heilige machen im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum: die Kanonisationspro­ zesse von Birgitta von Schweden, Nikolaus von Linköping und Dorothea von Montau (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008). Ute Stargardt, “The Influence of Dorothea von Montau on the Mysticism of Margery Kempe” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1981); see also: David ­Wallace, Strong Women, 84–86, et passim.

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

427

and looking for the liberation of the soul from its material constraints, commonly astonishes, if not repels, all outsiders, both past and present. Her confessor, Johannes of Marienwerder, articulates this revulsion in the prologue to Dorothea’s account: Wer hat y gehort oder gelesen, das eyn mensche ym selben mit guten willen y hot also manchveldig manchirley groz bitter und lang liden gemachet, als sy ir gemachet hot an ire synlichkeit? Ir liden ist ouch nicht alleyne von ir selben steticlich gemacht, sundir sie hot ouch zcu pflege vil und manchirley liden und marter geduldiclich enphangen von der werlt, von dem bosen geiste, von irre eygen synnekeit und sundirlich von unsirm herren, der sie vil gemartirt hot, und ir groz liden in lybe gemachit hot in manchirley vorwundunge geistlich und lyplich mit grozer swere ynwendiger erbeit, mit groser vorlangunge, senunge und sochunge noch ym, noch syme heiligen wirdigen lichnam und noch dem ewigen leben, dovon vil und doch vil mynre geschribin ist, wen is gewest ist.34 [Who has ever heard or read of human beings deliberately inflicting upon themselves such a variety of very bitter and lengthy sufferings as she inflicted upon herself? And such suffering was not only constantly inflicted upon her by her own hand; frequently she also patiently received many and varied injuries and torments from the world, the evil spirit, her own carnal nature, and especially from Our Lord, who tormented her often and prepared great suffering for her in love through a variety of spiritual and physical wounds as well as extremely hard internal exertion; through great desire, yearning, and pursuit of him, his holy, praiseworthy body, and eternal life, of which much and yet much less is written than actually took place.]35 The ultimate purpose of those horrible-sounding flagellations and other measures to hurt the body might be to prepare the anchoress for her future existence in the afterlife: “Du salt nicht uzsagen noch uf dem ertriche lozsen 34

35

Johannes Marienwerder, “Das Leben der heiligen Dorothea,” ed. Max Toeppen, in Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum: Die Geschichtsquellen der preussischen Vorzeit bis zum Untergang der Ordensherrschaft, ed. Theodor Hirsch, Max Töppen, and Ernst Strehlke, vol. 2 (1863; rptd. Frankfurt a. M.: Minerva GmbH, 1965), 197. Hereafter, page numbers will be given in parentheses. Stargardt’s English translation, The Life of Dorothea von Montau, 27–28. Hereafter, page numbers are given in parentheses in the text.

428

Classen

dine grozste discipline und castygunge, mit der du mich host gewunnen, sunder du salt sie beholden und mit dir nemen in daz ewige leben” (197–98) [You shall not reveal nor leave behind on Earth your greatest spiritual exercises and self-castigations through which you have won me. You shall keep them to yourself and take them with you into eternal life] (28). Wounding the body and allowing blood to flow out promised spiritual uplifting and was regarded as a means to eternal life. Johannes himself expressed great astonishment and admiration because he was obviously not strong enough to follow the model provided by Dorothea himself. But Johannes wanted her to serve as an ideal for all readers, to whom he appealed: “sich an di frucht, di doruz komen ist; nym undirwisunge und gezcugnis von den, di si recht gekant han, di wile sie hy mit uns was, und von redelichen menschen, den der herr gnade getan hat noch irme tode durch sie!“ (198) [Observe the fruit that has sprung from this. Accept the instruction and testimony of those who knew her well while she dwelled here with us and of those truthful people to whom God showed mercy on her account after her death] (29). After all, Christ’s Passion was already predicated on His willingness and ability to sacrifice the body and to let the soul free, in a way, or to transcend all material limitations, which the mystic then tried to achieve herself. As the table of contents reveals, Dorothea’s entire life appears to have been one of suffering from her early childhood on. She turned to vigils, then to spiritual exercises, fasting, working hard, loving the poor, castigation, wounding herself, struggling against the evil spirit, holy exercises, spiritual ailments, and the like. Johannes tried, at the same time, to contextualize everything in an autobiographical framework in order to illustrate that she was really an ordinary woman and had to cope with the same issues as most other women of her time: a husband, children, work, the household, etc. Nevertheless, Dorothea emerged as an extraordinary individual, as a true mystic, and, hence, as a vessel for God’s graces because she inflicted wounds upon herself. Bleeding and tearing at her own flesh helped her to rip away, literally, the external veil and to gaze into the interior both of her own existence and, thus, ultimately, of the divine world. While Dante in the Divina Commedia has to traverse Inferno, Purgatorio, and finally enters Paradiso where he experiences the ultimate epiphany with the help of his beloved Beatrice, shedding his own body in symbolic terms and allowing the soul to come free, Dorothea physically attacks her own body and struggles to free the soul from the physical imprisonment. Many late-medieval mystical accounts are characterized by the intriguing blending of the authors’ ordinary lives and their transmutation through visions. Margery Kempe regularly referred to her own existence both at home with her husband and while traveling, discussing food, cooking, running a business,

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

429

visiting her son and his wife in Poland, or even having sex with her husband. The same is true in Dorothea’s case; she is often presented as an individual who tries to obey her husband’s commands but then is caught in new visions that lift her out of the material existence. This subsequently causes marital strife: Dorumme gar selden mochte sie volbringen, was sy waz geheysen. Zcu stunden, wen sy ging in das egenante huselyn adir in eyn andir gemach, so satzte sie sich hyndir dy tor, adir in eynen winkil, und zcuhant wart sy ensuckt. Wenne sy denne der man vant also sitzen, so slug her sy underwilen, zcu stunden styz her sy, zcu stunden kegn vil menschin beclait her sy, und sprach, das sy treg und slefferig were, und was begernde, daz sy in uszirn dingen vlysig gewest were und gescheftig … (248). [Therefore, she seldom accomplished what she was supposed to. Some­ times when she entered the aforementioned little house or some other dwelling, she seated herself behind the door or in a corner and immediately was enraptured. When her husband found her sitting there, he often beat her, sometimes he pushed her, and at times he complained to many people about her, accusing her of being idle and incompetent for he wanted her to be busy and efficient in taking care of daily affairs …] (100). In his anger, perhaps understandable to his contemporaries and possibly even welcomed by the mystic because of the resulting wounds on her body, he started hitting her so badly that she began to bleed: und wolde sy rislich bereiten, do quam der man von groser ungedolt, und slug sy so swerlich an iren munt, das di obersten lippen vil noch von den zcenen worn durchwunt, und der munt zcuswal ir schoytzlich, und daz vorstalte sy sere (249) [As she was busy trying to get them [fish] ready quickly, her husband came, and, very impatient, beat her so severely on the mouth that her upper lip was cut badly by the teeth. Her mouth was swelled shut hideously, which disfigured her greatly] (100–01). However, instead of getting angry with him, Dorothea patiently embraced her physical suffering and even kept smiling at her husband, which was shocking and incomprehensible to many people. Two priests even severely reprimanded the husband for his brutal behavior, especially after he hit her in her chest, causing her to bleed extensively four days in a row (101). But then she took care

430

Classen

of him in his severe sickness, similar to the way in which Margery Kempe responded to her husband, although she was mostly bothered by his persistent sexual desires. For Dorothea, her husband’s physical violence characterizes her very difficult marriage. Apart from the physical wounds inflicted upon her by her husband, Dorothea experiences much worse treatment from God Himself, which she receives with the greatest pleasure: “do vorwunte zcuhant der here sy mit vil phyln der libe und enczunte sy mit bornden libe” (249) [the Lord immediately wounded her with many arrows of love and ignited her with hot, burning love] (102). In chapters fourteen and fifteen of the first book, Johannes describes her deliberate strategies to keep the joys of this world away from her and how she prepared herself for this kind of elevated suffering (i.e., suffering on a spiritual level of significantly higher intensity than the physical suffering). Still a young woman and subject first to parental, and then, marital authority and control, Dorothea formally obeys. But then she begins to torture herself secretly, ultimately making it impossible for her to participate, for instance, in a dance: do sy zcur e quam, und gebunden was zcu den geboten irs ewirtis, so sie dirfur zcukumftige wirtschafte der hochzciten, und sich des besorgete, sie worde dozcu geladen, so zustach und zcuswelte sie ire vuze mit eyner nolden als merklichin, das sy mit offen zceichin ir unmacht bewisen mochte, das sy dorzcu nicht enqueme und redeliche entschuldunge hette kegin erim emanne und ouch kegin den hochzcitluten, di wenten, is were von vroste odir andirn sachen zcukommen (208). [After she was married and bound to obey the orders of her husband and found out about upcoming festivities and worried about being invited, she jabbed her feet with needles until they festered to have visible proof of her inability to attend and thus a reasonable excuse to present to her husband as well as the revellers who believed her injuries were due to frostbite or some other cause] (43–44). Dorothea treated her knees and thighs the same way, creating immeasurable pain for herself in order to protect herself from worldly temptations. Unable to refuse the general pressure to join the dance, she complies, but the result is drastic and vivid: “und so sie mit yn tantzen moste, so bluten ire wunden von der goen dirwegunge so mildiclich, daz ir schu vol blutis worden” (208) [But when she had to dance on them, the vigorous movement made her wounds bleed so severely that her shoes were filled with blood] (44). Even worse, in the winter she wore straw clogs and the straw stuck to her scabs; by moving her

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

431

feet, either in walking or dancing, those scabs were torn off, making her wounds bleed again. “der ir mit dem vroste, der doryn slug, nue pyn und smertzen worchte, als ouch somerczit di hitze tat, das ere tantzvreude wol vorglicht wart von froste, hitze, wunden und smertzen” (209) [Aggravated by frostbite, these wounds produced even more new pain, similar to the agony they caused her in the heat of the summer. Thus her delight with dancing was counterbalanced by cold, heat, wounds and pain] (44). The narrator still assumes that she enjoyed dancing, despite all her efforts to make it impossible for herself. In other words, causing herself pain was the only method she could think of to kill all remaining longing for the world from which she could not escape since she was not a nun. These self-inflicted wounds not only challenged the allure of the temporal life, they also undermined the power of the external authorities who could not cause her any pain or threaten her effectively because she punished herself far more than both her parents and her husband. The mystic, like all spiritual people, constantly felt the pull of the outside world, but pain from her wounds erected stronger walls against the material existence. Johannes emphasizes very deliberately how much she grew in inner strength, toward the Godhead, the more she physically hurt herself: “daz sie vortme keyn abenemunge, sundir ein stete zcunemen furte eyns tuguntlichin lebins” (209) [from that time forward she never experienced a waning but a steady waxing of her virtuous life] (44). Surprisingly, Dorothea is never specifically identified as creating her own wounds and her own pain. Instead, as in chapter fourteen, the voice of the Godhead makes itself heard, taking responsibility for her injuries and conveying to her how much her pain and wounds are spiritual signifiers connecting her with the divine: Betrachte, wi ich dine wundin offen hilt, dirvullet mit bittern smertzen, in den zcu stundin di rofe stymete als gnagende wurme, ab sie ir vol weren. Czu stunden worin in yn so tovende schusse, ab sie vol weren scharfir phile” (210) [Consider how I kept your wounds open, brimful of bitter pain, whose scabs sometimes itched as though they were working alive with gnawing worms. At other times they delivered such sharp jabs as if they were shot crammed full by sharp arrows] (45). The pain itself suddenly is the critical instrument for taking the mystic out of the realm of the material existence and bringing her closer to the Godhead, the one being beyond all worldly beings: “Du schontist ny dyner durch miner lybe willen, wenne du zcu mir hattist ein wol getruen. Dorumme so wold ouch ich

432

Classen

dich mit flise enthalden” (210) [Yet because of my love for you, you never spared yourself, for you trusted me steadfastly. For this reason I wanted to sustain you diligently] (46). In Christus und die minnende Seele the Bridegroom goes even one step further and hangs His bride upon the gallows in order to liberate the soul from the body. As Keller explains: “The literal relinquishing of the world culminates in the gallows on which the divine bridegroom hangs his bride in the ninth section. What appears on the level of the pictures to be a punishment by the gallows is in fact a hanging which models itself on the act of the Crucifixion.”36 However, what makes Dorothea perhaps stand out more than other mystics is the extent to which she attacks her own body, creating countless wounds, which modern psychologists might identify, though certainly anachronistically and out of ignorance regarding her mystical message, as a form of masochism: Czu stunden mit sedinder vettikeit vorserete und wute sy sich an manchirley gledin als an scholdirn, armen, huften, dyen, lendin, knyn, waden und vusin, und machte mit den vorgenanten gezcoyen eyne wunde bi der andirn von den scholdirn bis da di ermil wantin, und von der huf ufwert, als is di kleyder bedackten … Solche castyunge mit sulchin gezcogen hub sy an in irre jogunt bi in di e, di sie ubete tag und nacht ofte und vil bis zcu grosir vorwundunge und milde vorgyssunge des blutys, mit geyslyn, die do knoten hatten stifte, und di rissen ir kuschis reyne fleisch zcu stunden so unbarmhertziclich, daz is in die lenge vorwunt wart, reacht ab iz geert wer, und daz an stiften blebin etliche stuckelyn eres fleisches hangende (210). [At times she injured and wounded various parts of her body with boiling hot oil, mainly her shoulders, arms, hips, sides, loins, knees, calves and feet. With such devices she inflicted one wound beside the other from her shoulders down to the hems of her sleeves and from the hips upward as far as her clothes covered her body… She often mortified her flesh with knotted scourges studded with iron nails until she suffered great injury and the blood flowed freely. These nails at times tore her lean, chaste flesh so mercilessly that it was wounded in strips like fissures and pieces of her flesh stuck to them] (46).

36

Keller, My Secret is Mine, 209.

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

433

The mystic suffers real pain but does not enjoy it, as one might assume from a modern perspective: “Das liden was ir gar bittir, wen die knywunden heiltin nicht gar schire, noch di gebrant werden” (211) [Such torment was most painful to her for neither the wounds on her knees nor the burns healed quickly] (46). Moreover, she inflicts those horrible wounds while still a child, fighting at that early age against the material prison of her soul. Intriguingly, in Hartmann von Aue’s secular narrative Der arme Heinrich, the peasant’s daughter endeavors to pursue a similar strategy, but she is prevented from dying at the last moment because the male protagonist realizes that sacrificing her for his own health is wrong and would not achieve the desired goal because it would take him even further into his own physical limitations. Dorothea, however, succeeds in creating truly ghastly wounds on her own body, thus, replicating, in a way, Christ’s Passion: Sy phlag, das grusam zcu horin ist, und noch vil grusamir zcu liden, zcu stosen in ire wunden nesseln, herte strumpet von besemen und spitze notzschaln, bittir crutecht adir andir herbe ding, uf das ire wunden vornuwet wurden und offin gehaldin, und ir liden und lon von gote worde gemeret (211). [She was accustomed to pricking her wounds with nettles, hard, coarse broom twigs and jagged nutshells, stinging herbs, and other hard instruments, which is gruesome to hear but even more gruesome to endure. She did this so her wounds would be kept open and fresh, and that, therefore, God would increase her suffering and its rewards] (47). As his expressions of horror indicate, Johannes does not exhort his audience to imitate this young woman in her effort to make herself into a martyr, but he presents Dorothea as a saintly figure whose inner strength, based on her faith and her visions, makes it possible for her to torture her own body incessantly. Instead of simply condemning her for this self-abuse, it is important to remember that medieval women had much less access to intellectual studies and were regularly denied formal training in Latin and advanced studies. Thus, they had to regularly search for alternative ways to gain access to spiritual uplifting. Causing the most painful wounds allowed some women to deal with their bodies and to gain an individualized, self-transforming experience of the Godhead. Dorothea’s wounds, thus, empower her to develop a new language, her body’s language, crying out in pain, but enabling a deeper voice behind the

434

Classen

body to come to the surface.37 Her wounding can actually be identified as a form of performance, utilizing the vulnerable body to speak up to the Godhead by means of pain and blood.38 Many other mystics, such as Serafina of San Gimignano, Villana de’ Botti, Margaret of Ypres, Gertrud of Helfta, and Alpaïs of Cudot tried hard to use their own bodies as a way of making the vision they experienced speak in public, or to prepare their bodies for the onset of such visions.39 As Caroline Walker Bynum has astutely observed, “There is reason to believe that conditions that both we and medieval people would see as ‘illnesses’ were given different meanings depending on whether they occurred in male or female bodies. Illness was more likely to be described as something ‘to be endured’ when it happened to women.”40 Johannes may have exaggerated somewhat and fantasized about the most gruesome self-torment that Dorothea imposed on herself. It seems almost impossible to imagine how she could have survived the following procedure: “Also saz sie ouch etwen under eyner rynnentrofe winterzcit, bis das sie gar oder des meystin teilis begossen wart, das frost halebn ire kleyder clebtin an der erden” (211) [During the winter, she occasionally seated herself beneath a waterspout until she was partially or totally splashed with the cold water and her clothes froze to the ground] (48). Would her parents not have stopped her from such truly dangerous methods to hurt her body? Would she not have died from infection? And would it have been possible for her to sustain so much pain and suffering over such a long period of time? The author points out that: “Der castyunge begonde sy am eilftin jore und trieb is sechs und swenczig jor vil und ofte” (211–12) [These castigations she began when she was eleven years old and continued them for twenty-six years] (48). In other words, Dorothea tried everything possible, at least as Johannes presents it, to make her own 37

38

39 40

Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8–9. However, she is not familiar with Dorothea of Montau. For performance and mysticism, see: Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), but again, there is no mention of Dorothea. See also: Joshua S. Easterling, “Ascetic Blood: Ethics, Suffering and Community in LateMedieval Culture,” 369–88, in this volume. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 189. However, Bynum does not address Dorothea’s specific forms of self-torture. Even in her more recent monograph, Wonderful Blood, she only addresses the religious symbolism of blood as manifested at a pilgrimage site, not the specific mystical functions of wounds on a human body in concrete terms (for instance, 161–72); but those issues are dealt with more specifically in her previous work, such as Fragmentation and Redemption.

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

435

bodily presence disappear and, thus, to lay the foundation for the Godhead to appear physically somehow. Her excessive vigils (including sleep deprivation that lasted a whole week) could have driven her into insanity, as Johannes suggests himself, but her inner strength, superseding even that of a man, helps her to survive: “O wi gar wundirbar ist dis wibes sterke! Wene ist bi unsirn gezciten gehort, daz eyn sulch menlich hertz ewer in eyns wibes lichnam?” (212) [Oh, how miraculous is this woman’s strength! When has it been heard in our time that such a manful heart was in a woman’s body?] (48).41 Among the male mystics who imposed similarly harsh physical wounding on his own body, Heinrich Seuse (Henry Suso) (ca. 1295–1366) inflicted such pain and abuse that it caused him to experience another vision in which he was informed that he had suffered enough: “there appeared to him in a vision one Pentecost a heavenly gathering that announced to him that God no longer wanted this of him.”42 Wounding was, after all, a central method by which all medieval mystics could imitate Christ’s Passion, extinguish the bodily desires, and mute, if not destroy, all interests in the worldly existence. But the physical side of wounds is only one aspect.43 Seuse underscored, for instance: “A person in suffering should see this and be happy that through suffering God has made him equal to his very dearest friends […]. Let us keep our spirits up and suffer in patience, because after this there follows joy in the beautiful kingdom of heaven” (341). In his autobiography, Seuse goes so far as to explain: “Sometimes God ordains grievous suffering for a man although is not to blame. In such trials God either intends to test, to see how firmly he stands, or what strength he has in himself, as we often read in the Old Testament” (132)44 And: “But the noblest and best suffering is a Christlike suffering. I mean that which our 41

42 43

44

Previous research has mostly ignored this aspect of mysticism, where the mystics violate their own bodies in order to prepare themselves to welcome the Godhead in a mystical fashion. See, for instance: Peter Dinzelbacher, “Einführung,” Mittelalterliche Visionsliteratur: Eine Anthologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 1–35. In this volume, see: Easterling, “Ascetic Blood;” and Alicia Spencer-Hall, “Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250),” 389–416. Dorothea continues to receive less scholarly attention; see, for instance: Steven Fanning, Mystics of the Christian Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2001). Henry Suso, The Examplar, with Two German Sermons, trans. and ed. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 88. Hereafter, page numbers are given in parentheses. Cf., for instance: Alois M. Haas, “Sinn und Tragweite von Heinrich Seuses Passionsmystik,” Die Passion Christi in Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters, ed. Walter Haug and Burghard Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 94–114. Henry Suso, The Life of the Servant, trans. James M. Clark (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1952; rptd. 1982), 130. Hereafter, page numbers are given in parentheses.

436

Classen

heavenly Father gave to His only-begotten Son, and also to His dear Friends” (132). As Dorothea illustrates rather quickly, once she experienced the suffering of her body, the true, spiritual suffering began within her soul, really transforming her into a mystic, as in the account of Christus und die minnende Seele. The fundamental ideology underlying all religious martyrdom is that the inner strength to sustain all that physical pain – inflicted by an outsider or by oneself – is really the result of God’s working within the martyr/mystic. The individual’s suffering serves a number of purposes, to be “allir menschin herzcen zcu wundirnde syne umbegrifliche vorichtkeyt, in eyme swachin wibisname sulche werk zcu tun und zcu bewisen der werlde, di woralt ist in dem sundin, vornuwet in der bosheit, vorkeldit in gots libe, of daz noch der werlde libhabir segin das fuer gottlichir libe burnen,von dme sie ir vorkalten herzcen dirwermin mochtin und dirwerbin gots holde!” (212) [… an incentive, to the hearts of all people as a marvel of [H]is unfathomable providence. He performed such works in a weak woman to prove to a world grown old in sin, rejuvenated in wickedness, grown cold in love of God that even the lovers of the world may see the fire of divine love burn to warm their cold hearts and gain God’s favor] (48–49). In other words, Dorothea was fully aware of the potential for wounds to be signs conveying the epiphanic message that she could transmit by means of her lacerated body. But there was a method behind her “madness,” which suddenly reveals not madness at all, but rather a powerful strategy to prepare her own body to be a sounding board for God’s words here in this world, similar to the intriguing concept of stigmatization, as first revealed upon St. Francis of Assisi’s body. As David Wallace has recently argued, Dorothea’s endless efforts to hurt herself, to create wounds, and to suffer on a voluntary basis strangely fits into the entire cultural context of her time: “Ambivalences projected onto bodies at one extreme territorial frontier […] here lay out at another. Dorothea’s physical action is truly ambivalent, in that she is both the plougher and the ploughed; both kultour and field.”45 We need to go some steps further, however, especially since Dorothea, like many other contemporary mystics, submitted her “zertlichin lichnam so mechteclich dem geiste mit sogetaner castyunge uundirtenig gemachte” [… tender body so fiercely to her spirit through such self-castigations] that “do wolde ouch der libe here Jhesus, ir brutegam, an sy druckin syn gemerke zcu eyme zceichin eynir unscheydelichin libe zcwischin 45

David Wallace, Strong Women, 29–30. However, if we study his further arguments, we discover no satisfying critical examination of what all that voluntary suffering really implies and how it would have to be analyzed in epistemological terms.

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

437

yn, und vorwunte sy ouch an irn scholdirn, an armen, an der brust und uf dem rucke, achsiln, dyen, wadin, und knyn” (212) [… the dear Lord Jesus Christ, her bridegroom, also wished to impress his own marks on her as symbols of their inseparable love and therefore also wounded her on her shoulders, arms, chest and back; on her shoulder blades, sides, calves, and knees] (49). In other words, the mystic translated her body into a kind of parchment upon which the Godhead was asked to write Himself. The protective skin suddenly acts as a skein that threatens to suffocate the soul, which desires to be free and have complete access to the Godhead: Is geschach ouch zcu stunden, sundir seldin, das sie von gote wunden enphing in sulcher wise, das an etlichir stat irs libes gar goende eyne swulst wart, die gonde zcu hant hitzen und wuten und hoh uf zcu dynsin, das di strebe hut ufreys, und wart eyne wunde (212–13). [It also happened at times, though seldom, that she received wounds from God in such a way that suddenly at some part of her body a swelling appeared which started to burn, rage, and swell until the tightly-stretched skin ruptured and an open wound appeared] (49). Healing appears as a threat to her endless efforts to experience a spiritual transformation through her body, and Johannes comments with horror (but also with admiration) on how much she succeeds in keeping those wounds open over many years during her youth. It proved difficult for her to hide them from her family members, but she achieved her goal until God Himself wanted the evidence of her suffering to come to light. The ultimate purpose of having wounds, of inflicting the pain onto her body by herself, and the constant effort to keep blood flowing out of herself was self-evident, as Johannes explains, because she wanted to live in direct imitation of Christ’s Passion and extricate herself from the worldly temptations and seductions: “wen ist nicht lichte und jo unmoglich ist in diser werlde noch des libes lust zcu leben und un dem hymle gotliche lustbarkeit zcu dirwerden, als us lust in lust zcu komende?” (214) [For is it not only not easy but truly impossible to live in this world according to the pleasures of the body and gain divine joy in heaven, that is, to go from joy to joy?] (50). The pain resulting from her wounds made it possible for Dorothea to return to the Godhead whenever she desired; the laceration of the body opened her up to visions and allowed her to reach out for the spiritual experience: “und do bynnen hatte sie ouch von gotlicher kegenwortikeit in sundirlichir wyse eynen sundirn trost, der ire sele so durchging, daz ir merklich des lichnams lydunge

438

Classen

dovon wart geringet” (214) [Yet in the midst of this God’s presence provided a special comfort which so saturated her soul that her body’s suffering was notably reduced] (51). The drive for the spiritual dimension overruled everything and made the pain and the wounds appear, despite their horrible properties, insignificant because they were simply important for her to achieve mystical status. Such violent methods rarely occur in secular literature but even there, the desire to overcome the material existence in order to find true love is also present, such as in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan (ca. 1210), in which Tristan and Isolde retire at the end into the magical love cave where they are suddenly free from the need to eat and drink and can completely dedicate themselves to their mutual love. Their bodies are still beautiful, but now irrelevant, because the outflow from their hearts determines the whole space of the cave.46 While spending time in that remote space, their physical existence fades away, giving room to their profound love for each other. Since they are privileged to experience that love, there is no need for them to wound themselves and, thus, to subjugate their bodies. Amazingly, as Johannes remarks, Dorothea always appeared outwardly unharmed, unblemished, and free of pain because the love of God shone through her despite (or rather because of) the countless wounds: “mit den sie ufstunt von krankheitin wol frisch und gesunt, unworwandelt an varbe, so sie sochinge lag, als so sie ufstunt vom suchtbette, roselecht an iren wangen und an antlitze wel geschaffen” (214) [With those she rose cured from disease, fresh and restored, unchanged in color, for whether she lay ill or rose from her sickbed, she was always rosy-cheeked and beautiful of face] (51–52). If Johannes is a credible narrator concerning the incredible wounds that she inflicted upon herself, then from a modern medical point of view, she may have been somewhat immune to pain. Her body may have been highly infused with a chemical known as 1- (1-phenylcyclohexyl) piperidine, or Phencyclidine, or PCP. When present in large enough quantities, “[t]he relative immunity to pain is likely produced by indirect interaction with the endogenous endorphin and enkephalin system, as has been suggested by studies involving rats,” and it might have “side effects, such as hallucinations, mania, delirium, and disorientation.”47 Most disturbingly, included in the portfolio of behavioral 46

47

See: Haiko Wandhoff, “How to Find Love in Literature: Reading Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and His Cave of Lovers,” in Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde, ed. Jutta Eming, Ann Marie Rasmussen, and Kathryn Starkey (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 41–64. (accessed 30 Aug. 2012).

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

439

disturbances are acts of self-injury including suicide, and attacks on others or destruction of property. The analgesic properties of the drug can cause users to feel less pain, and persist in violent or injurious acts as a result. Recreational doses of the drug can also induce a psychotic state that resembles schizophrenic episodes that can last for months at a time with toxic doses. Users generally report they feel detached from reality, or that one’s consciousness seems somewhat disconnected from reality.48 Perhaps this is a scientific explanation for Dorothea’s strange and abnormal behavior, but it does not do justice to her experiences recorded in Johannes’s account. She may have also suffered from congenital disorder that prevented her from feeling pain, anhidrosis (CIPA) which disrupts the nerves, but again, such explanations completely miss the mystic’s and the author’s point, and misleadingly confuse a mystical account with the report of a modern-day psychiatrist (confessor) or drug user (mystic). After all, the ultimate purpose of the confessor-author was to project the mystic as a local saint and to appeal to his listeners to accept her as a divinely inspired individual, ultimately to attract pilgrims and others to Marienwerder in Prussia/Poland. This would create considerable profit for the Teutonic Knights and provide them, above all, with a religious aura derived from this enigmatic mystic. Shedding blood in the name of God, either on the battlefield or in the privacy of an enclosed room or in the anchoress’s cell, constituted one and the same approach in the battle for Christian control over the eastern lands, just from different angles of pursuit.49 However, Dorothea’s wounds may not have been entirely the result of her own actions. She may have stabbed herself or applied boiling water or oil, scratched or torn her wounds; but her biographer asserts they may have opened by themselves, somatically induced, on particular days, such as Easter: Wundir was is, das am ostirtage ere wunden ufbrochin und so mildeclich bluten, ab sy ir von nuwens wurdin werin, dorumme sy sich ouch bergin muste zcu hus zcu bliben in eynir kamern, das der milde blutvlos ere wunden icht vormelte (215).

48

49

(accessed 30 Aug. 2012). See also: Cynthia Kuhn, Scott Swartzwelder, Wilkie Wilson, with Leigh Heather Wilson, and Jeremy Foster, Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). There is much more chemical research on this substance than could be cited here, but this is beyond the scope of this paper Wallace, Strong Women, 37–39.

440

Classen

[It was a miracle that on Easter day her wounds burst open and bled so profusely as though they were being formed anew, and because of this, she had to hide at home in one of the storerooms so the ample flow of blood would not betray the presence of her wounds] (53). Holy days, church days, or feast days always seemed to trigger the opening up of her wounds, which, thus, served as mouthpieces of the Godhead: Und glichir wyse als in andi ynniger menschin herzcen sich di vreude merit kegin der kirchen hochzcitin, als merete sich di lydunge an der usdirweltin vrundynne gotis Dorothee von vornuvunge der wunden und ire wetat kegin den hohen viertagen und je neyr, je grosir di smertze wart (215–16). [And in the same manner as in other people of devout heart joy is increased in anticipation of the high festivals of the Church, in Dorothea, the elected friend of God, suffering increased through renewal of her wounds and their pain as the high feast days drew near] (53). Indeed, her wounds speak their own language, coming from deep within her body, uncontrollable, life-threatening, and spiritually independent: Was adir dorynne di synlichkeit leit an lybis not, so vorgas nicht got allir betrubitin trostir synir getruen dirnen, wen sy jo ouch uf sulche zeit sundirlich vorteil hatte vor vil andirn ynnigen menschin an geitlichim vorsmacke hymlicher vreude, und zcuvor in erm follin aldir, so bi den und an den heiligin hochzciten der cristenheit besundir wise kunt wart die vreude der heiligin und des ewigin lebins (216). [Whatever her sensual nature suffered in bodily discomforts, though, God, the comforter of all those in distress, did not forget his faithful maiden since she, especially after having reached maturity, on such occasions enjoyed a special advantage over many other devout people in spiritual foretastes of heavenly bliss, for before and during the holy feast days of Christendom of joy of the saints and of eternal life were revealed to her in a special way] (53). It is also possible that, rather than being divinely propagated or inspired, the horrible lacerations and all the physical suffering may have been a product of suicidal tendencies or a desire to stamp out any sexual feelings. At least in

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

441

Johannes’s words, Dorothea, like most other devout medieval Christians, abhorred the sexual temptations that resulted from the devil’s influence. Sexuality always emerges as a deep danger, and causing wounds helped Dorothea (as it had so many other religious figures) to quench the bodily appetite for lustful experiences: “Thus her flesh did not incline toward sensuality because of the extreme pain to which she subjected it.”50 Arising with puberty, the experience of sexual desire was (as Johannes suggests) squashed by way of the physical pain. The more she inflicted that pain upon herself, the more the wounds reduced sexual lust even throughout her adult years: “Ouch hatte sie zcu der beweldegunge sundirliche holfe vom hymle, dorumme sie ir fleisch nicht zcu beschuldgen um di anevechtunge vom sebinden jore bis an das nun und driczgiste, in dem ir hertze usgeruckt und vornuet wart” (217) [For this conquest she also had extraordinary help from heaven because of which her flesh is not to be blamed for the temptation from the seventh to the thirty-ninth year when her heart was torn from her body and renewed] (56). In essence, Dorothea pursued very similar religious goals to most other Christians of her time, identifying the devil as the greatest tempter against whom she had to resort to all kinds of precautions, such as prayer, confession, and attending mass. But she took the extra step, attacking the very body upon which the devil tried (as she saw it and as Johannes reconfirmed), to write his evil deeds, which also required that she take away all physical pleasures, if not the body itself, to diminish the devil’s power and influence upon her: “so tat der nydische geist ir sulche ynsproche: Was loufistu umme und suchis manchirley stete als eyne torynne?” (217) [the envious spirit spoke to her thus: “Why are you going about and search out various places like a fool?”] (56). But her deliberate strategy to inflict wounds on her body and, thus, dare to challenge the devil himself required extreme measures because of the devil’s extraordinary power: Wen wider dine liplichin vinde hettistu in tegelichim stryte lichteglicher gesegit, wen wider solche vinde hettistu vrunde hulfe gehat … Dorbi ist ufzcunemen eyne offinbar bewerunge der heilikeit der seligen Dorotheee, der der bose gesit dorumbe vind gewesin ist, daz sie seynen bosin willen widerstrebit hat (218). 50

April D. DeConick, Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter (New York: Continuum, 2011). For the larger topic on how the Church viewed sexuality, see the seminal study: James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

442

Classen

[For against your bodily enemies you would have been victorious more easily because against such foes you would have had the aid of friends … Here is to be discerned an open affirmation of the blessed Dorothea’s saintliness whose enemy the evil spirit became because she resisted his wicked intention] (56). For Johannes, this meant that once Dorothea had fully overcome the limitations of her body, she was finally empowered to reach her own soul, to perceive her spiritual being, and to recognize the impact of external actions and thoughts on her inner being: Is geschach vil, das sy ire sele selbin durchsach, gleih ap sy eyne lautire cristal adder glas hette durchseen, und mochte dirkennen alle dy sunden und befleckunge, dy do worn in der sele, wy clein sy worn. Sy sach och dicke, das dy cleynen sunden, wy das gestop in der sonnen rerten uff dy sele, und mochte is nicht weren gantz, wywol sy sere weynte und hitczige czere vorgos (340). [It happened often that she could see into her own soul as she might see through a clear crystal or glass, to see all sins and stains in her soul, no matter how small. She often observed how even the tiniest sins and stains settled on her soul like dust motes dancing on a sunbeam without her being able to prevent it, no matter how hard she wept and shed hot tears] (227). For Dorothea, creating wounds in the physical sense was a critical steppingstone to preparing herself (and her body) for the real wounds that God would finally inflict on her. She firmly believed that after the torture of her own flesh came the pleasure of the religious epiphany, the true motivation and justification of the constant laceration of her body since childhood: Her qwam ir mit grosir gesuntheit, domitte her vortrep ire kranckheyt, und mit eyner lustigen heylunge, domitte her heylte ires hertczin unde irer zelin vorwundunge. Sy flute dicke, das dy kreffte unsirs herren durchgingen alle ire glit an leybe und an sele; dy dy starcke crafft gotis irfrichste und irfroyte (342). [He came to her with abundant good health to drive out her ailments and with a joyous remedy to heal the wounds of her heart and soul. She often felt the strength of Our Lord surging through all her limbs, through body

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

443

and soul, and how they were refreshed and gladdened by his power] (232). All her efforts were directed at reaching out to the Godhead, which required the brutal mistreatment of the body, the vessel that kept her bound to the earth: “was do vorwunt was, geystlich geheylet, also lustiglich gleych ap dy vorwuntin dinge wern gesalbet mit eyner gar gutten heylsamen salbe” (342) [What had been wounded was healed spiritually and made so joyful as though her wounds had been anointed with an excellent healing ointment] (232). In other words, this mystic was not simply a masochist – an anachronistic term for this phenomenon in the first place – who hoped to achieve physical pleasure through bodily pain. Instead, as a true mystic, she hoped for, and then actually experienced, as far as we can tell on the basis of Johannes’s account, the substitution of her material body through a spiritual body in which the Godhead would reside together with her: noch groszem hunger und dorste des geystes quam her mit grosir satunge, domitte her setigte ire sele und leyp vil lustiglicher und bas, wen ap sy were wol gespeyset gewest öbir eynem gar reichen tische” (342) [After she had suffered extreme hunger and thirst of spirit, he brought her profound satisfaction to gratify her body and soul far better and far more joyously than if she had feasted at a sumptuous table] (232). Johannes hastens to explain: “Hy ist czu merckin, das dy satunge des leybis quam aus der öbirflut grosir sussikeit und wollust, dy do wart gegossin in dy zele in solcher folle, das sy sich irgos in den leip” (343) [Here is to be noted that the gratification of the body resulted from the deluge of sweetness and passion which were poured into her soul in such abundance that they spilled over into her body] (232). All her physical limitations were superseded and compensated by the gifts granted to her by God who basically filled her with His presence and, thus, made all previous suffering and her torturous efforts from her childhood on, worthwhile. There was no pleasure for Dorothea in inflicting wounds on herself, but hurting her own body helped her to transform, metaphorically speaking into a manuscript when “und tötte und treip aus von ir untogunt” [God killed and drove out vice], bringing to her “gehorsame demütikeyt, andacht, innikeyt, stercke wolczuthun, dy vorsmehunge czeitlicher dinge, geistlicher und hymmelischer dinge grose begerunge, vornichtung wertlicher ere, begerung, das sy worde vorsmet und vil lide durch got und durch

444

Classen

gerechtikeit wille, grose gedult, getrauen, hoffenunge” (343) [obedient humility, adoration, devotion, the strength to perform good deeds, contempt of worldly goods, intense longing for spiritual and heavenly treasures, destruction of worldly renown, a desire for worldly disdain and painful suffering for God’s sake and for the sake of justice; immense patience, trust, and hope] (233). There was, after all, meaning to her lifelong physical suffering because it created a pathway both for herself toward the Godhead and for the latter toward her soul, preparing both for the classical unio mystica: “In der quam ir der here alszo mit grosin froydin, das alle ire glyt wordin bewegit, dy sy von grosin fröyden nicht mochte stille haldin” (343) [Here the Lord came to her with such abundant joy that all her limbs were set into motion and she could not keep them still because of her great bliss] (233). In other words, as horrifying and scary as they seem, self-inflicted wounds suddenly emerge as powerful signs of blood on the own body, upon which God can write Himself. Of course, Dorothea only followed a long-term practice both within the Christian Church and in many other denominations, in which there was a call for the mortification of the flesh.51 Late-antique martyrdom was specifically predicated on the model provided by Christ.52 Nevertheless, her testimony is still fascinating and remarkable because she combines her own lacerations and pain with deep experiences of love of the Godhead, transforming her human being mystically into spiritual one, ready for the encounter with the divine: Dy öbirflut der zussikeyt irgos sich dicke in alle glidt; ir munt flos vol züsses trones, ir gantczir leip wart irlustig, und brant alzo sere, das sy switczte also mildiglich, gleych ap sy in einem heisin bade sese. Is geschach, das sy dauchte, das sy itczt welde vorgeen von grosir libe, fröyde und wollust, wen dy wollusten des geystes worn dicke also öbirs wesentlich gros, das sy dauchte, das sy ire börde nicht lange mochte tragin, noch werten sy czu stunden lange (343). 51

52

Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray, Latin texts trans. Helen Elsom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also the good survey online: (accessed 1 Sept. 2012). Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York: Routledge, 1995); Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); Candida R. Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

445

[Then her mouth was filled with a sweet nectar; her entire body was rejuvenated but burned so fiercely that she sweated as though she was sitting in a steaming hot bath. At times she was convinced she would melt through the intensity of love, joy, and desire, for the passion of the spirit often was so excessive that she thought herself incapable of carrying this burden any longer, even though these joys generally did not last long] (233). While older research argued (certainly with good reasons in many different cases), that this is an example of Verweigerung – denial/rejection of the worldly demands on women at large53 – we can now agree with Peter Ulrich and, following him, David Tinsley, who argues that wounding and bleeding constitute a uniquely late-medieval way which leads “per Christum hominem ad Christum Deum” [man through Christ to Christ the God].54 Ulrich also underscores, focusing on the testimony by Seuse, that suffering could also assume a pedagogical character: “Dies wird darin deutlich, daß das Leid den Leib züchtigt, die nach Ewigkeit strebende Seele aber speist. Leiden wird als Zuchtrute Gottes und als Schlag seiner väterlichen Hand bezeichnet” [This become apparent in that the suffering castigates the body but nourishes the soul which aspires for eternity. Suffering is identified as God’s punishing rod and as the hitting of His paternal hand].55 On the one hand, for Dorothea this implies the complete transformation of herself into a spiritual being that would no longer be in need of any material nourishment and could feast on God’s love – perhaps parallel to the quasi divine love experienced by Tristan and Isolde in the love cave.56 On the other,

53 54

55 56

See, for instance: Peter Dinzelbacher, Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992), 38–46, who offers many important and impressive examples. Peter Ulrich, “Zur Bedeutung des Leidens in der Konzeption des philosophia spiritualis Heinrich Seuses,” in Heinrich Seuses Philosophia spiritualis: Quellen, Konzept, Formen und Rezeption: Tagung Eichstätt 2.-4. Oktober 1991, ed. Rüdiger Blumrich and Philipp Kaiser (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert, 1994), 124–38, at 133. The quote is taken from Tinsley, The Scourge, 131–32. He continues: “for many nuns in the Order, the way to enlightenment meant ‘becoming the crucified’ […] . Ritual self-mortification in some form was expected of all friars and nuns, unless precluded by their physical condition” (132). Ulrich, “Zur Bedeutung des Leidens,” 133. In another study, I have suggested that Hildegard of Bingen might have influenced Gottfried in writing his Tristan romance: Albrecht Classen, “Religious Utopia in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan: Was Gottfried Influenced by Mystics such as Hildegard von Bingen?,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 68 (2011): 143−67.

446

Classen

she strongly felt that a new love relationship with the Godhead elevated her out of her mundane existence and lifted her into a new spiritual dimension: In der quam ir der here mit eyner grosin wirtschafft, dy her machte in irer zelin. In der wirtschafft gebrauchte sy der himmelischen züssikeyt, und as das vette kalp, das ist unsern hern Jhesum Cristum, der durch der zundir wille ist an dem czrewcze getötit deme vorlornen zone von dem geheysze des allirgüttigsten vatirs“ (343) [In this manner the Lord came to her with a great banquet in her soul. During this banquet she feasted on heavenly sweetness and ate the fattened calf, that is Our Lord Jesus Christ, who at the behest of the most gracious Father has been killed on the cross for the sake of the prodigal son to atone for our sins] (233). Significantly, casting the entire phenomenon of wounds in a larger context, Dorothea no longer resorted to the old strategy of hurting herself in order to mortify her flesh when she reached an older age. The transformation had happened and she no longer felt she had to undergo the horrendous self-torture to kill the old self and liberate the soul from the bodily prison, with all of its sexual desires and lust for physical gratification. Now the time arrived in which “In der quam der here ir öbirswentlich tröstlich und alszo reychlich mit reichem gute, das ire begerung czu stunden etlichir mose wart gesetiget, wart gefridit und gestillet, das sy denne nicht me begerte” (343) [the Lord came to her with overflowing consolation and such abundance of wealth that her desires were stilled, satisfied, and killed immediately and she desired nothing more] (234). In a way, the unio mystica had been achieved, the mortification helped Dorothea gain the new stage, and her body was finally susceptible to God’s appearance; He could finally write Himself onto it and, thus, merge with the mystic’s soul. When the theme of suffering reappears in her text, it pertains to her desire to make other people abstain from sinning. “In der quam der here mit grosir ynneweniger erbeyt und och mit ausweniger, das ist mit weynen, switczin, betin, knien, etwan ouch mit leibis disciplinen, casteyungen und ubungen” (344) [In this the Lord came with excruciating internal and external labor: that is with weeping, sweating, praying, kneeling as well as physical disciplines, self-castigations, and spiritual exercises] (236). She also experienced unquench­ able hunger and thirst for eternal life, and when she was graced with divine visions of the heavens, new forms of pain grew in her, which the Lord explained to her: “I grössir hunger, dorst und begerunge host noch mir, e wen du mich

Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit

447

entfeest ye grosser hunger und dorst und senung wirstu haben noch dem ewigen leben, wen du mich entfangen host” (345) [The more you suffer hunger, thirst, and yearn for me before receiving me, the more hunger, thirst, and desire you will feel for eternal life after having received me] (236). Suffering and pain continued, of course, since, as a human being, she aspired to her own transfiguration into Christ’s bride, as all other mystics hoped; however, at this late stage, she no longer needed to mortify or to lacerate her flesh and could simply allow the divine light flow into her, as Mechthild von Magdeburg described it about 130 years before her in the mystical visions entitled The Flowing Light of the Godhead.57 But only now, at the end of the Middle Ages, did the interest in truly fighting the physical existence, the individual body in its material manifestation, gain the intensity of cases like Dorothea’s. She was certainly not unique in this regard, but her willingness to inflict wounds on herself for religious, mystical purposes, placed her in a new category of women’s experiences of the Godhead.58 In a way, once Dorothea had gained the long-desired status, she no longer felt real pain, as much as her tears still threatened to burn her because she spent them in the love of God (242). After all, she was no longer completely herself, but had become part and parcel of the Godhead who was reborn with and through her. In the twenty-ninth way, or chapter, of mystical vision she experienced a “spiritual pregnancy during which the Lord gave birth to himself in her soul. Sometimes he enlarged her womb. Then she felt a lovely child moving about his way and that, kicking merrily as though it enjoyed great affection and delight” (238). This quote truly captures, in the purest form, the mystical experience in its maternal essence: “qwam her ir mit eyner geystlichyn gebort, mit der her sich gebor in irer selin” [He came to her through a spiritual birth, through which He was born in her soul] (345). Wounding her body in the most brutal manner in order to achieve the mystical vision was part of the same process, transcending the physical barriers to reach the grace of receiving divine revelations. Making her body bleed, Dorothea prepared her skin to be God’s parchment. 57 58

Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. and intro. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1998). Christine Pleuser, Die Benennungen und der Begriff des Leides bei J. Tauler (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1967), 54–59. She exemplifies this phenomenon in light of the reflections offered by the mystic Johannes Tauler, a student of Meister Eckhart.

448

Johnson

Chapter 19

In the Bursting of an Eye: Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography Máire Johnson

Of prime concern to a saint’s identity as sanctified is the ability to maintain and protect the community of which he or she has pastoral care. In Ireland’s medieval hagiography, which encompasses Latin, vernacular, and macaronic texts, blinding and blindness constitute prominent themes in which the imposition of sightlessness and its opposite, the restoration of vision, define the limits of Christian society. This boundary can be navigated by exploring when, how, and why Irish saints either cause or cure visual impairment in the Latin (vitae) and vernacular (bethada; sg. bethu/betha) works, or Lives, which commemorate them.1 Although the removal of sight for either punitive or protective 1 On the range and dating of the vitae and bethada see, for example: Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and the more updated assessments of Pádraig Ó Riain in A Dictionary of Irish Saints (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011). The medieval corpus of Lives as a whole dates to between the seventh and the fourteenth centuries. The vitae are largely found in three great compilations: the late-thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century Salamanca, the mid-fourteenth-century Dublin, and the Oxford of the later 1300s. See: Pádraig Ó Riain, Beatha Bharra: St. Finbarr of Cork – The Complete Life (London: ITS, 1994), 94–8, 109–12; Ó Riain, “Codex Salmanticensis: A Provenance inter Anglos or inter Hibernos?” in “A Miracle of Learning”: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning, ed. Toby Barnard, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, and Katharine Simms (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 91–100; Caoimhín Breatnach, “The significance of the orthography of Irish proper names in the Codex Salmanticensis,” Ériu 55 (2005): 85–101; and Ó Riain, Dictionary. See further: Pádraig Ó Riain, “The O’Donohue Lives of the Salamanca Codex: The Earliest Collection of Irish Saints’ Lives?” in Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley, ed. Sarah Sheehan, Joanne Findon, and Westley Follett (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 38–52 for additional work on the dating of a subset of the Salamanca vitae. The Salamanca texts (Sal) have been edited by William W. Heist, Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae ex Codice olim Salmanticensi nunc Bruxellensi (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1965). The Dublin vitae (Dub) have been edited by Charles Plummer, Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (VSH) (1910; repr. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997). Plummer also includes those Oxford texts (Oxf) he deemed as most original in this two volume collection; those which he viewed as merely derivative can be gleaned as yet only from his apparatus criticus. Bethada, by contrast, are often found singly rather than in large collections; one prime medieval exception is the manuscript known as the Book of Lismore (Lis) of roughly the early fifteenth century, ed. and trans. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_021

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

449

purposes, particularly by violent wounding, may seem a startling element in a text about a saint, it portrays Ireland’s holy men and women as individuals who police the line between those able to participate in and those to be excluded from the community of Ireland’s faithful. As such, their hagiographers assert, Irish saints are not guilty of unwarranted vindictiveness, but instead emerge as both religious and secular leaders of the Irish body Christian. Of the more than four hundred ways in which saintly punishment manifests in the Lives, the deliberate deprivation of sight is the second most numerous form; sudden onset blindness is in itself a type of wounding, but only a small subsection of these episodes of vengeance by blinding are particularly violent.2 In one such anecdote, a miller’s servant secretly hoards food against the command of Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise that the food be shared by the whole community. Ciarán curses him for his defiance and dishonesty, in fulfillment of which a pet crane plucks out the servant’s eye so that it lies on the lad’s cheek.3 Though so heavy a penalty seems an extreme action for a saint to take, there are several biblical precedents upon which it is likely based. Disobedience in any form challenges the saint’s authority as granted by the divinely-bestowed grace of sanctity. Deceit, as a contravention of one of the Ten Commandments, only augments this wrong (Exod. 20:14; Deut. 5:20). According to Mosaic Law, those who break the Lord’s commandments will, among other things, be blinded; even more drastically, the Prophet Zechariah delivers a stinging forecast that the eyes (among other body parts) of the enemies of Jerusalem will rot out of their sockets.4 Jesus himself also declares that if one’s eye offends, it must be removed to prevent its pollution from dragging the whole soul to hell (Matt. 5:29–30). Such biblical models reinforce Ciarán’s punitive pronounceWhitley Stokes, The Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1890). Throughout this essay, I refer to exclusively Latin texts as vitae, macaronic or vernacular works as bethada, and hagiographical dossiers containing both as Lives. When these works are directly cited, chapter or line numbers are provided in the text in parentheses; the edition is indicated with the use of the three-letter abbreviations given here. 2 For more on vengeance in the Lives see: Máire Johnson, “‘Vengeance is mine’: Saintly Retribution in Medieval Ireland,” in Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion, and the Discourse of Violent Conflict, ed. Susanna Throop and Paul Hyams (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 13–63; and “Medicine and Miracle: Law Enforcement in the Lives of Irish Saints,” in Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Wendy Turner and Sara Butler (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 288–316. 3 Betha Ciarain Clúana mac Nois (Lis), ll. 4181–90, at 124–5, 270. Line numbers of subsequent references are provided in the text in parentheses. 4 Lev. 26:14–41; Deut. 8:19, 28:15, 28:44; Zech. 14:12–13.

450

Johnson

ment as an agent of the Lord, and firmly situate the saint’s actions, and the saint himself, in a lengthy prophetic tradition extending from the Gospels back to Moses himself. Yet there is still more to the story. The servant’s act of rebellion, in part, declares that he is unable to “see” the saint’s holy identity; the grotesquery of his punishment essentially manifests the physical reality of his inability to perceive or accept either Saint Ciarán’s prestige or the spiritual enlightenment Ciarán brings. The drastic sign of his dangling eyeball also separates the guilty fellow from the rest of the community of believers, designating him clearly as a sinner. The loss of his eye compels the afflicted youth to cease committing his infractions and to acknowledge the nature of his wrongs. Indeed, as soon as he properly humbles himself before Saint Ciarán and his master, and as soon as his master the miller offers the mill and its land to Ciarán, the saint places his palm against the eyeball and replaces it. Ciarán’s sign of the cross over the resituated eye then fully restores its function (Betha Ciarain [Lis] 4187–90). The servant’s renewed physical integrity thus serves to reunite not only his eye with his face but also the boy himself with the rest of the community; in the same way that the removal of his eye had marked him as a sinner, so his healing equally signifies that he has fulfilled his penance and fully recognizes the saint’s status and authority. As a result, both his body and the Irish body Christian are again whole. The penitentials and canon law of early Ireland appear to support the interpretation of punitive blindness in the Lives as a means of setting the guilty apart from other believers. The eighth-century Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, for example, decrees excommunication and expulsion from the community for any who resist a priest’s orders, something of which the lad in Saint Ciarán’s betha is most certainly guilty.5 The Penitential of Cummean mandates that a deceiver must make full restitution to the individual he or she has tricked; Saint Ciarán’s apparent reluctance to act until the miller offers his mill and lands may thus in part reflect the saint’s rightful expectation of restitution for the lad’s falseness.6 The servant also hides his sin from his confessor, Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, which a vernacular penitential declares must double the boy’s

5 Collectio 2.12, ed. Hermann Wasserschleben, Die Irische Kanonensammlung (1885; repr. Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1966), 15. On the collection’s date see: Liam Breatnach, “Canon Law and Secular Law in Early Ireland: The Significance of Bretha Nemed,” Peritia 3 (1984): 439–59. 6 Penitential of Cummean §§3.16–18, ed. and trans. Ludwig Bieler, The Irish Penitentials (Dublin: DIAS, 1963), 124. The more base motivation of ecclesiastical property acquisition legitimated by hagiographical claim cannot be discarded as an influence on this scene either.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

451

penance once the omission is discovered.7 A strong ecclesiastical condemnation of clandestine defiance might well underlie the severity of the retaliatory suffering he endures as well; in such a case, his plucked-out eyeball becomes less an extreme or cruel act of saintly vindictiveness and more a punitive correction in line with medieval Ireland’s religious prescriptions. The punishments laid out in penitential texts and the crane-facilitated punitive episode in the betha of Ciarán of Clonmacnoise together suggest that the infliction of blindness essentially functions as a separation from the community akin to excommunication, in which the subject’s demarcation as “apart from” the congregation is meant to force contrition. This separation may then be reversed if both penance and the demands of restitution can be satisfied. Indeed, in another case of retaliatory blinding in the same betha, Saint Ciarán’s curse causes a second disobedient youth’s eye to burst in its socket. No restitution or submission to the saint ensues, nor is there any commentary that suggests the youth is healed (Betha Ciarain [Lis] 4399–4401). It would seem that without the proper demonstration of humility before the saint, the wrongdoer remains in some sense extra communitatem christianam, marked as an unrepentant sinner outside the Christian coumminty. The Irish saint thus defines the line between those who are participants in and those excluded from the Irish body Christian, through the media of both maledictory eye wounds and their merciful remission. Punitive sight loss also defines this boundary between faithful living and its opposite in much stronger terms, turning from chastisement for deceit and disobedience to retaliation against criminal activities. Here, the threshold along which the saint strides lies not only between membership in and exclusion from full involvement in Christian observance but also between the lawful and the lawless. In such instances, the saint is depicted as a leader whose spiritual authority includes the power to function as arbiter and enforcer of secular law, duties normally presumed to belong to the local chieftain or king. The vitae of Saints Ciarán of Saigir and Mochutu of Lismore include episodes in this genre, though here the wounding is less drastic than that of the crane-plucked servant; rather than the literal removal of eyeballs, the saints’ punishments strip away sight through miraculous consequences described using terms such as the Latin verb excaecare “to blind.” In the vita of Ciarán of Saigir, King Aengus contradicts and rebukes the saint in public, for which act of blasphemia “blasphemy” Aengus promptly becomes blind.8 A pagan priest 7 “An Irish Penitential,” ed. and trans. E.J. Gwynn, Ériu 7 (1914): §3.20, at 158–9. 8 Vita S Ciarani Episcopi Saigirensis (Sal) 8, at 349; Vita S Ciarani Episcopi de Saigir (Dub) 13, VSH 1, at 222. It is the vita itself that refers to Aengus’ deed as blasphemy. Chapter numbers and editions are henceforth given in the parentheses in the text.

452

Johnson

(magus) insults Saint Mochutu, compelling the sanctified man to produce fruit from a withered twig to prove his holiness in a narrative that evokes the confrontation in the Book of Acts between the Apostle Paul and the magus Elymas, who disrupts the Apostle’s attempts to convert a Roman official to Christianity (Acts 13:11–12). When the magus interfering with Saint Mochutu remains obdurate even after several additional saintly miracles, he is deprived of his sight.9 In these vitae, both king and magus have not only challenged the saints’ authority but they have also committed what Irish vernacular law defined as verbal assault. Blasphemy and verbal taunting both specifically constituted forms of illegal satire, which Ireland’s legal tracts describe as a verbal pronouncement that accused someone of wrongdoing of which he or she was not actually guilty. At the very least, such attacks entitled the insulted saints to the payment of their full honor-prices.10 Honor-price, a form of compensation due to an individual for injury to person, property, or rights, was defined by the individual’s gender and status.11 As holy persons, clerics, and – at least in the Lives – nobility, saints were members of the highest social echelon and were accorded honor-prices equivalent to those of kings.12 The sudden descent of darkness upon King Aengus and the magus certainly brands both men as unbelievers incapable of or unwilling to receive the “light” of the saints’ teachings. At the same time, it does so without exacting the saints’ honor-prices for verbal assault, normally made in cattle or silver. Yet in both episodes, the saints show mercy upon the punitively blinded. Ciarán of Saigir prays for Aengus’ restoration to sight and to the community at the behest of the king’s monastic kinsman (Vita S Ciarani [Sal] 8, [Dub] 13). Saint Mochutu, 9

10

11 12

Vita S Carthachi seu Mochuda Episcopi Lismorensis (Sal) 5, 335–6; Vita S Carthagi sive Mochutu Episcopi de Less Mor (Dub) 21, VSH 1, at 178. Chapter numbers and editions are given in parentheses in the text for subsequent references. Críth Gablach §21, ed. Daniel Binchy (1941; repr. Dublin: DIAS, 1970), 12–13. This eighthcentury legal tract has been translated by Eóin MacNeill, “The Law of Status or Franchise,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 36C (1923): 265–316; see §§100–101, at 295–6. For more, consult Binchy, Críth Gablach, 69 (áer, “satirizing”), and 84–6 (enech, “honor, face”), as well as Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: DIAS, 1988), 137–8. Charlene M. Eska analyzes the legal ramifications of other forms of wounding in Irish literature in “The Mutilation of Derbforgaill,” in this volume, 252–64. In the law tracts and canon texts, consult: Bretha Déin Chécht, ed. and trans. Daniel Binchy, Ériu 20 (1966): §§1–2, at 22–3; Críth Gablach (the entirety of which pertains to the privileges and duties of each social grade) and “Law of status,” 265–316; Bretha Nemed Toísech, ed. and trans. Liam Breatnach, “The First Third of the Bretha Nemed Toísech,” Ériu 40 (1989): §§13–15, at14–15; and Collectio Lib. V–VIII, at 3–26. See further: Binchy, Críth Gablach, 84–6 (enech), Riitta Latvio, “Status and Exchange in Early Irish Laws,” SCF 2 (2005): 67–96; and Kelly, Early Irish Law, 9.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

453

for his part, only rescinds the sightlessness of the magus when the latter, after spending a year blind, performs such a pitiful and penitent obeisance to the saint that Mochutu is moved to forgive him and restore his sight (Vita S Carthachi [Sal] 5, [Dub] 21). As these two stories make explicit, punitive blinding in response to verbal assault serves many functions. It protects the community of believers by halting the disruptive activities of those who might wish it harm. It marks the wrongdoers as lacking the perception of either the Christian message or the saint’s position, and it compels a response from those it affects. Importantly, blindness also acts as a form of disfigurement that could, according to vernacular laws such as Bretha Déin Chécht and Bechbretha, disqualify rulers from kingship.13 For Aengus, then, the return of his vision also restores him to his throne, and the monk who sought Saint Ciarán’s healing of the king stands as guarantor that Aengus has learned his lesson and fully comprehends the proper relationship between Ireland’s spiritual and secular authorities. The argumentative magus, on the other hand, has no intermediary. His year of imposed darkness instead acts as a penitential period that forces him to see the proverbial light, and his debased condition after that year convinces Saint Mochutu that full repentance has been achieved.14 Curing King Aengus restores him to the Irish community of Christ and to his royal sovereignty; curing the pagan magus, on the other hand, grants him full entry into the world of the Christian revelation. Other forms of assault also feature in anecdotes of inflicted blindness; where that assault is committed by brigands, narratives once again depict drastic forms of wounding as the malefactors’ punishment. Termed variously as latrones, latrunculi, or díberga, brigands feature prominently as targets for legal censure in Ireland’s canon and vernacular law. As individuals who lived along the edges of society, brigands were threats to the order and safety of the settled community. Worse, they apparently often assailed church establishments and their personnel.15 13

14

15

Bretha Déin Chécht §§30, 31, 34, at 16–17, 18–19, 40–41, 44–5 (and notes 63); Bechbretha, ed. and trans. Thomas Charles-Edwards and Fergus Kelly (Dublin: DIAS, 1983), §§31–2, at 68–9. A year was a common duration decreed for a variety of wrongs, including lying, theft, and accidental homicide. See for instance “An Irish penititential,” §§3.2, 3.13–14, 5.10–11, at 154–5, 156–7, 168–9. See also my commentary in “Preserving the Body Christian: The Motif of ‘Recapitation’ in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography,” The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 10 (2007), available online at: (accessed on 20 June 2014).

454

Johnson

Despite the inherent dangers of brigandage, most texts addressing the issue were intent upon both the correction of the sinners and the recompense of the wronged. Victims of theft or reaving were due their honor-price at the very least; if the victim was a king, a bishop, or a scribe, an additional fine augmented that price, as did the imposition of seven years’ hard penance.16 If a thief returned all stolen goods plus a penalty amount – five bulls restored for each bull driven away, for instance – he might avoid more serious punishment, but if he could not do so, canon law permitted the thief to be sold into slavery.17 Higher-status brigands lost their legal privileges and were reduced to the grade of commoners. They were also barred from dealing with the church or entering its congregation, and could be assessed anywhere from six months to seven years or more of stiff penance.18 Given the array of legal armament directed against the activities of brigands, it is little surprise to discover that Ireland’s hagiographers use punitive blindness against reavers too. In one of the best examples, a brigand raids Saint Cainnech’s home and tries to set it on fire; he only halts when his eyes burst.19 This episode parallels a story concerning the Apostle Andrew as depicted in his apocryphal acta, in which two pagans angrily try to burn Andrew’s house and murder the Apostle because their son has converted to the Christian faith Andrew promulgates; they fail because God blinds them.20 Such an illustrious connection places the Irish saint in the company of Jesus’ own disciples and paints Cainnech’s miracula as part of the gift of apostolic miracle-working granted to the disciples by Christ (Matt. 10:1–2, 8).21 The saint’s eye-wounding 16 17 18

19 20

21

Críth Gablach §§11, 12, 15, 16, at 5, 6, 8–9, and “Law of Status” §§83, 84, 89, 90 (4.312), at 289–90, 291–2. Canones Hibernenses 4.9, Bieler, Penitentials, 171. Collectio 29.3, at 99, 100; “Irish penitential,” §3, at 154. Bretha Crólige, ed. and trans. Daniel Binchy, Ériu 12 (1938): §51, at 40–41; Bretha Nemed Toísech §22, at 16–17; Synodus Episcoporum 15, Bieler, Penitentials, 56–7; Penitential of Columbanus B.19, Bieler, Penitentials, 170; Tres Canones Hibernici 1, Bieler, Penitentials, 182; “The Old-Irish Table of Penitential Commutations,” ed. and trans. Daniel Binchy, Ériu 19 (1962): §5, at 58–9; subsequent references provide the section numbers in parentheses in the text. Vita S Cainnechi Abbatis de Achad Bó Chainnich (Sal) 33, at 190–191. Chapter numbers are given in parentheses in the text. Acts of Andrew (Gregory of Tours epitome) in The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. J.K. Elliott, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 12.275. The apocryphon was known in Ireland from at least the eighth century when it was used in the composition of the Hiberno-Latin Liber de Ortu et Obitu Patrum; see: Martin McNamara, The Apocrypha in the Irish Church (Dublin: DIAS, 1975), 83–92. See also: Mark 6:7, Luke 9:1–2.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

455

miracle is, thus, not a deed of unwarranted vindictiveness but a penalty modeled on scriptural precedent. Though the would-be arsonists of the apocryphon regain their sight after displaying the proper contrition and intent to convert, the brigand whose eyeballs explode in Saint Cainnech’s vita is not so fortunate.22 Certainly the episode casts the man’s blindness, in part, as a potent penalty for thievery and raiding, as defined in both canon and vernacular law. The text also depicts his imposed deprivation as a means of compelling him to repentance. Yet, although the brigand submits to the saint completely and enters into his service, remaining in the saint’s community thereafter, there is no indication that the now-penitent reaver regains his eyes (Vita S Cainnechi [Sal] 33). It seems that here penance is an ongoing process. The fact that the brigand remains without his eyes, despite having confessed to his guilt and become a member of the monastic community, is in keeping with the decrees of the Old Irish Table of Penitential Commutations. The Table declares that brigandage ranks among those crimes for which no remission of penitential sentence can be permitted no matter how long the guilty would be severed from God’s table (Table 5). Confession and forgiveness start the journey, but this raider’s empty eye sockets thrust him into a lifelong state of subjection that prevents him from ever returning to his old ways. That same subjection also forces him to live under the command and protection of the very saint whom he wronged, reminding him on a daily basis of the cost of his crimes and the penalty he will apparently pay until his demise. It is property disputes, however, that provide the most frequent cause for punitive sight loss in the Lives of Ireland’s saints; these narratives include both instances of gory wounding and of blinding by less vivid miracles. Several such episodes center around the initiation of land claims through the grazing of livestock on someone else’s plot. According to early Irish law, the process of legal land claim, or tellach, began with the pasturing of one’s animals on the desired meadow. If the animals were driven off, the claim was deemed null; if they were left unmolested overnight, the land was considered to have changed hands.23 22

23

It is worth noting in passing, however, that while the parents of the boy in the Acts of Andrew do receive their sight back for acknowledging the divinity of Andrew’s God, they still refuse to convert and even curse their son for remaining with the Apostle. The two die suddenly fifty days later. Thomas Charles-Edwards, “Boundaries in Irish Law,” in Medieval Settlement: Continuity and Change, ed. P.H. Sawyer (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1976), 83–7. See also: Kelly, Early Irish Law, 109–10 and Early Irish Farming (Dublin: DIAS, 1997), 432–3.

456

Johnson

This procedure explains an episode of blinding by outright wounding found in the vita of Saint Ailbe. Here, a landowner arises in the morning to discover that the saint’s two plough oxen are cropping the grass in his field, having been guided there by the grace of God and – according to the hagiographer – without the saint’s knowledge. The landowner becomes enraged and seizes a branch with which he beats the animals in an attempt to drive them off his pasturage. Naturally, such abuse of a saint’s livestock cannot be permitted; the limb breaks in the man’s hand and a splinter of its wood destroys his eye. Thus compelled to acknowledge that the saint’s claim has precedent both legally and spiritually over his own, the stricken landowner offers the field to Saint Ailbe.24 It seemingly does not pay to challenge even the inadvertent tellach of a saint. A second narrative with property conflict at its core is particularly illustrative of the use of punitive blinding to define the proper relationship between religious and secular authorities in early Ireland. King Failbe Flann begins this dispute with an unwarranted act of tellach when he orders his horses to be pastured on the hay in Saint Mochoemóg’s monastic field.25 The exasperated saint chases them off, handling them roughly in the process. Angered at the saint’s mistreatment of his fine animals, Failbe tries to manipulate the chieftain (dux) and people of Mochoemóg’s region, Ely, into expelling the saint from the territory. Mochoemóg and Failbe’s disagreement escalates into an astounding verbal altercation in which the king mocks both Mochoemóg’s stature and his tonsure, calling him a calve parve “bald little man” (Vita S Mochoemog [Dub] 19). Mochoemóg responds, “Si ego sum calvus, tu eris luscus” [If I am bald, then you will be one-eyed] (Vita S Mochoemog [Dub] 19). Instantly Failbe suffers intolerable, bitter [acris] pains in and loses the vision of his left eye (Vita S Mochoemog [Dub] 19). The king’s friends manage to successfully beg Mochoemóg to ease Failbe’s pain, which the saint accomplishes by washing the ruler and his eye in holy water. The saint refuses to relieve Failbe’s partial blindness, however, declaring that because he had removed Failbe’s pain, he could not also return the king’s sight (Vita S Mochoemog [Dub] 19).26 24 25 26

Vita S Albei Episcopi in Imlech (Sal) 40, at 127–8; Vita S Albei Archiepiscopi de Imlech (Dub) 34, VSH 1, at 59. Vita S Mochoemog Abbatis de Liath Mochoemog (Dub) 19, VSH 2, at 174. Further references are provided by chapter number in parentheses in the text. Indeed, it is Saint Mochutu of Lismore who eventually restores Failbe’s eye to health, as recounted in Vita S Carthagi sive Mochutu (Dub) 51, VSH 1, at 194–5. Mochutu’s act of healing suggests some competition between the foundations of Liath Mochoemóg and Lismore, but a full exploration of this issue requires more space than the current essay permits.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

457

Saint Mochoemóg’s miraculously inflicted wounding of King Failbe functions as both a spiritual and a legal corrective. As observed concerning the act of verbal assault committed by King Aengus against Saint Ciarán of Saigir, loss of sight in one or both eyes could deprive a ruler of his candidacy for the throne.27 Such a diminution in Failbe’s status not only declares that the king is subject to the saint (rather than the other way around), it also underscores the rejection of the land claim Failbe initiated by grazing his horses on Mochoemóg’s pasturage. The painful loss of Failbe’s eye and sight to Mochoemóg’s malediction draws a clear property line between that which is held by the king and that which is held by the saint. King Failbe’s wrongs go beyond his attempted tellach. In trying to engineer Mochoemóg’s expulsion, Failbe threatens to kill the hostages he received from Ely if the saint is not driven out (Vita S Mochoemog [Dub] 19). Hostages were individuals, often of high status, who were given by a social subordinate like the chieftain of Ely to a superior like King Failbe. The giving and receiving of hostages was meant to guarantee the good behavior of the two parties involved and to reinforce the social contract between them. While hostages could be chained or killed if the subordinate party broke the contract, to other­wise harm or slay them was a violation both of the trust and agreement displayed in their initial surrender and of the protection given to them by their recipient.28 Failbe’s cavalier attitude toward the lives of the hostages under his protection is a serious offense, made all the worse because they are also under their patron saint’s protection, or snádud. Any individual of high standing could grant snádud to someone of equal or lower status; as a member of the social elite and head of the church to which the hostages belonged, Saint Mochoemóg is certainly their protector.29 The violation of this snádud constituted a legal offense known as díguin and, in addition to any penalties owed to the wounded or to the families of any slain, the perpetrator of díguin also was

27

28

29

Bretha Déin Chécht §§30, 31, 34, at 16–17, 18–19, 40–41, 44–5 (and notes 63); Bechbretha §§31–2, at 68–9. See also: Vita S Ciarani Episcopi Saigirensis (Sal) 8, at 349; Vita S Ciarani Episcopi de Saigir (Dub) 13, VSH 1, at 222. Críth Gablach §§32, 46, at 18, 23, and 95–6 (gíall, “hostage”); “Law of Status,” §§117, 134, at 300–301. See also: Robin Chapman Stacey, The Road to Judgment: From Custom to Court in Medieval Ireland and Wales (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 107–9. Críth Gablach §§6, 7, 15, at 2, 8; “Law of status,” §§66, 69, 82, 90, at 283, 284, 288, 291. See also: Binchy, Críth Gablach, 106–7 (snádud) and Kelly, Early Irish Law, 140.

458

Johnson

expected to tender the full honor-price of the individual whose snádud was transgressed.30 Yet Failbe’s catalogue of offenses does not end with his arrogant tellach or his threatened mistreatment of protected hostages and, thus, the abrogation both of his contract with Mochoemóg’s people and of Mochoemóg’s snádud. Indeed, he adds to this list of crimes an act of verbal assault committed in his mockery of Mochoemóg’s height and hairlessness. Such mockery also entitles Mochoemóg to the full payment of his honor-price.31 In the face of such wrongdoing, King Failbe’s shaming disfigurement – and its concomitant potential to strip Failbe of his sovereignty and reduce him to the status of a commoner – begins to emerge as a means of penalizing Failbe for numerous legal wrongs committed against Saint Mochoemóg.32 In essence, Saint Mochoemóg’s invocation of instantaneous punitive eye loss marks King Failbe as dishonorable and unfit to rule. It rejects Failbe’s attempt to nibble away at Mochoemóg’s ecclesiastical lands. It also manifests upon the king’s body both Failbe’s unwillingness to acknowledge Mochoemóg’s saintly authority and the proof of that authority’s power; after all, Failbe only calls attention to what already exists, while Mochoemóg summons into being what does not. The curse further penalizes Failbe several times over by ripping from Failbe half his sight and all of his royal prestige, leaving him publicly humiliated – all without payment of fees.33 This single narrative and its central punishment of miraculous ocular wounding both defines the line between 30 31 32

33

Críth Gablach §§6, 11, 12, at 2, 5; also 82–3 (díguin). For translation see: “Law of Status,” §§66, 83, 84, at 283, 288. Kelly, Early Irish Law, 141 is also instructive here. Kelly, Early Irish Law, 137–8 and note 91. Bretha Déin Chécht §§30, 31, 34, at 16–17, 18–19, 40–41, 44–5 and notes, 63, details the legal compensation due to an innocent victim of such debasement. On the loss of sovereignty due to blindness, see: Bechbretha §§31–2, at 68–9. This shame is made explicit in Vita S Carthagi sive Mochutu (Dub) 51, VSH 1, at 194–5, in which Saint Mochutu of Lismore restores to Failbe the vision that Mochoemóg had refused to grant. According to this vita, Mochutu’s cure of Failbe’s one-eyed state erases the king’s shame and unwillingness to be seen in public. For more on wounds and scars as marks of shame or honor, see: Eska, “The Mutilation of Derbforgaill;” Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” 215–30; Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” 102–27; William Sayers, “The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature,” 473–95; and Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101. For a detailed discussion of gendered wounds in English texts, see: Barbara Goodman, “Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair,” 544–71, in this volume.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

459

saintly prerogative and secular power, between full involvement in the Christian community and removal to its periphery, and firmly establishes the saint as the agent of that definition. In company with the other hagiographical episodes in which blinding serves as correction and retaliation for refusing a saint’s authority, then, King Failbe’s painful unilateral eye damage at Saint Mochoemóg’s curse suggests an ecclesiastical view that the Irish saint stood above secular authority in the society of medieval Ireland. Punishment is not the only reason for the infliction of saintly blinding, however. In several significant anecdotes, the removal of sight is accomplished for protective purposes. In nearly every instance, the saint who imposes the loss of vision is also its recipient, a narrative pattern that first appears in the eighthcentury Vita I S Brigitae.34 In this text, Saint Brigit, unable to stem the flow of suitors courting her, prays for a disfigurement that will make her ineligible for marriage, choosing “magis … oculum perdere corporis quam oculum animae” [to lose her corporal eye rather than the eye of her soul] and to love “plus … pulchritudinem animae quam corporis” [the beauty of the soul more than that 34

The date of this text has been debated for generations. Scholars generally are divided into those who view the Vita I – so called due to its position in the Acta Sanctorum collection of Brigit’s Lives and not necessarily to any textual or chronological superiority – as the oldest vita produced in Ireland and the predecessor of the firmly-dated seventh-century Vita S Brigitae of Cogitosus, and those who accord that primacy to Cogitosus. For a very small sampling of relatively recent opinion, the former camp includes David Howlett, “Vita I Sanctae Brigitae,” Peritia 12 (1998): 1–23; Daniel McCarthy, “The chronology of St. Brigit of Kildare,” Peritia 14 (2000): 255–81; and McCarthy, “Topographical Characteristics of the Vita Prima and Vita Cogitosi S Brigidae,” Studia Celtica 35 (2001): 245–70. In the latter camp, where the Vita I is dated to various points in the 700s, see for instance: Kim McCone, “Brigit in the Seventh Century: A Saint with Three Lives?” Peritia 1 (1982): 107–45; Karina Hochegger, ed. and trans., “Untersuchungen zu den Ältesten Vitae Sanctae Brigidae” (M.Phil. thesis, Universität Wien, 2009), 89–98, online at (accessed 1 June 2014 ); and Ó Riain, “Brighid of Kildare,” in Dictionary, at 123. While elements of the Vita I may well have origins in the 600s, these components seem most likely to have been absorbed from a prior lost vita of Saint Brigit, while the extant Vita I would then fall no earlier than the middle of the eighth century. See also: Máire Johnson, “Vita I S Brigitae and De Duodecim Abusiuis Saeculi,” SCF 9 (2012): 22–35 for a discussion of additional aspects of the Vita I’s homiletic tone, which does not appear to agree with the general tenor of Ireland’s seventh-century vitae but is consonant with the hagiography of much of the eighth and subsequent centuries. Subsequent references to the Vita I S Brigitae are given according to the book and chapter numbers of the Hochegger edition; Seán Connolly’s translation of his own unpublished edition, “Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae: Background and Historical Value”, JRSAI 119 (1989): 5–49, is given in the footnotes.

460

Johnson

of the body] (Vita I 3.12).35 Her eye immediately bursts in her head, convincing her father to permit her to become a nun. This eye is subsequently healed the moment the veil touches her head at her consecration (Vita I 3.12).36 Women in early Ireland were expected to be wed, either to a man or to the Church, around age fourteen; as individuals deemed legally dependent, they would then pass from the guardianship of their male relatives to that of either their new husbands or of God.37 That Brigit’s earthly guardian – her father, in this text – initially denies her entry into the religious life shows his inability to either perceive or acknowledge her holiness. That the saint’s prayer for disfigurement is granted with a burst eye, however, is proof not only that she eschews the material world and its concern for physical beauty but also that the only guardian she truly has is not on earth but in heaven, and his permission has already been granted. Once again, Ireland’s hagiography asserts that the elevation of a human of extraordinary faith to the status of saint confers a degree of standing no secular authority or law can gainsay. Interestingly, the vernacular Life that closely parallels the Vita I, the Bethu Brigte of the ninth century, alters the narrative, giving the agency in Brigit’s blinding to the saint herself. When Brigit’s brother, Bacéne, informs her that she and her beautiful eye will be betrothed despite her own wishes, Brigit plucks out the offending orb with one finger and offers it to her brother.38 She then curses Bacéne, causing both of his eyes to explode, because he refuses her request and shows concern only for the loss of her bride-price if she enters the convent.39 The Bethu thus makes explicit the fulfillment of the gospel tenet that if an eye encourages sin it must be removed to prevent the entire soul from damnation. It also makes of Brigit’s actions a kind of declaration that the only penetration her body will experience is that of her own finger poking out her eye (Matt. 5:29–30). The text juxtaposes Brigit’s spiritual concerns with the worldly, monetary focus of Bacéne, and the life of the soul wins out. Once she receives permission to enter the religious life, Brigit places her palm against

35 36 37 38

39

Connolly, ch. 19, at 18. Connolly, ch. 19, at 18. “An Old-Irish Tract on the Privileges and Responsibilities of Poets,” ed. E.J. Gwynn, Ériu 13 (1942): ll 17–18, at 22; Kelly, Early Irish Law, 81–3. In the late-medieval Lismore text, Betha Bhrighdi ll 1332–40, 40, 188, the narrator observes that Brigit’s eye – like that of the crane-plucked lad in the bethu of Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, also from the Book of Lismore – is removed so that it lies on Brigit’s cheek. Bethu Brigte ed. and trans. Donncha Ó hAodha (Dublin: DIAS, 1978), 14, 15, at 4–5, 23. Also: Betha Bhrighdi (Lismore) ll 1332–40, at 40, 188.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

461

her eye and it is healed.40 Brigit’s curative act, by extension, also restores the metaphorical virginity the saint so graphically violated, allowing her to take her vows as a nun with both body and soul intact. This same narrative pattern is repeated in two additional Lives, both of which likely draw on the example of Brigit of Kildare as one of Ireland’s three premiere saints, and the only sanctified Irish woman to achieve widespread veneration in the Middle Ages. In one, Saint Cranat, resolved to remain unmarried and take no lover, ensures her perpetual virginity by digging out both of her eyes and giving them to her handmaidens. As with Brigit’s demonstration that such a deed marks the only penetration Cranat will ever experience, once Cranat’s sanctity is no longer questioned, she heals herself completely. At Cranat’s behest, the saint’s two handmaidens recover the eyeballs she had entrusted to their care and replace the orbs in their sockets, whereupon Cranat’s vision is returned through the grace of her holiness. This healing act restores Cranat to a physical integrity that aligns with the purity of her soul.41 The other saint who self-mutilates by blinding is a male saint named Cuanna.42 One day, Cuanna’s mother tells the saint that he is handsome [pulcer] and that he possesses particularly lovely eyes (Vita S Cuannathei [Sal] 7). Determined to avoid temptation, Cuanna gouges out both of his eyes with his fingers and flings them far from himself, whereupon two crows instantly [statim] fly away with them (Vita S Cuannathei [Sal] 7). Saint Cuanna’s violent self-wounding prevents him from risking both his bodily purity and the sinlessness of his soul; without eyes he can neither fall prey to vanity nor pursue the dictates of lust. Cuanna thus inflicts one heinous, but temporary, suffering upon himself to avoid the risk of the eternal agony of damnation. Unlike the self-restoration the women enact, however, Cuanna regains his vision through God’s mercy with no human agency involved. Despite the avian seizure of his

40 41

42

This detail is not explicit in the earlier Bethu Brigte but is stated in the Lismore Betha Bhrighdi; see ll. 1339–40, at 40, 188. Betha Cranatan 1.1, 1.4, ed. and trans. Charles Plummer, Miscellanea Hagiographica Hibernica (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1925), 160–162, 165–6. The narrative observes that once Cranat’s eyes are restored, one eye retains a red hue to its vision as a result of having been carried by the saint’s handmaiden in her cleavage. The other eye, for its part, has a fierce expression due to bits of bark stuck to it; this debris is a consequence of the eyeball having spent its time away from the saint’s eye socket stowed in the crook of a tree. These oddities of Cranat’s gaze thus stand as proof to the Betha’s audience that the enucleation occurred and that it was reversed through the saint’s grace and God’s favor. Vita S Cuannathei seu Cuannae Abbatis Lismorensis (Sal) 7, at 408. Subsequent references are given by chapter number and edition in parentheses in the text.

462

Johnson

eyeballs, Saint Cuanna wakes from the swoon caused by his ocular mutilation to find that his eyes are back in their sockets (Vita S Cuannathei [Sal] 7). These three saints fulfill Jesus’ command to protect the health of the soul above the health of the body, facilitating the ejection of the ocular threats to their spiritual purity. They violate one part of their own bodies to prevent the violation of others, a common trope in hagiography; they disfigure themselves to avoid debasement. The irony and the beauty of these stories is that selfblinding protects these saints by maintaining one type of physical integrity (virginity) through the forfeiture of another (sight). In direct opposition to the way punitive blinding distances the newly unsighted from full participation in the Christian community, protective, self-inflicted blinding brings these saints closer to God. The final restoration of their eyes, then, becomes not just the hagiographical demonstration of their election as saints and a reward for their faithfulness and humility, but also the outward bodily manifestation of their spiritual wholeness. Saints not only strip away senses, they also restore them. In addition to instances of restoration in which a sinner’s penitence compels a merciful saint to return vision to those from whom it has been taken, there are also numerous curative accounts in which those who have some form of sight impairment through accident of birth, illness, or injury receive the gift of fully functional eyes. Unlike the retaliatory miracles that tend more often to depict the saints in the image of their apostolic and prophetic forebears, episodes in which the sanctified heal blindness bring the Irish saint into closer alignment with the gospel Christ, who returns light to the darkened at least six times.43 The remediation of the “wound” of lost sight, then, is a part of the wider tradition of imitatio Christi, and the saint’s merciful curative deeds announce his or her status as among the elect of God by virtue of their similarity to the works of God’s son.44 Both Saint Brigit and Saint Patrick open the eyes of people blind from birth. According to the New Testament, those born without vision are guiltless and exist in order to demonstrate God’s power at work (John 9:1–4). Brigit commands the mother of a congenitally sightless child to wash the little one’s face 43 44

Matt. 9:28–30, 15:31, 20:29–34 (Mark 10:46–52, Luke 18:35–43), 21:14, Mark 8:22–4, John 9:1–4. For more on the common hagiographical motif of imitatio Christi and wounding, see: Albrecht Classen, “Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind,” 417– 47; Joshua S. Easterling, “Ascetic Blood: Ethics, Suffering and Community in Late-Medieval Culture,” 369–88; Alicia Spencer-Hall, “Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250),” 389–416, in this volume.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

463

in a nearby source of water, whereupon the lad is given normal sight and eyes that remain free of ailment his entire life (Vita I 16.98).45 In the Life of Patrick, the sightless individual is an adult rather than a child, namely the holy priest who baptizes the infant saint. When a miraculous spring wells up at the priest’s sign, the priest washes his face; he gains both his sight and the ability to read the baptismal rite even though previously he had never read a word.46 This tendency to cure blindness with water appears in a number of other Lives. The visionless priest who baptizes the baby Saint Comgall echoes the Patrician episode as the former regains his sight after bathing his face and eyes in the water he has just used to baptize the holy child.47 Saint Berach heals three men of their sensory deprivation by blessing water and washing their faces.48 Mochoemóg cures the sightlessness of a nun using prayer, a benediction on her eyes, and consecrated water he commands her to use as a facial rinse (Vita S Mochoemog [Dub] 34). The consistent depiction of water as a means of bringing light to the blind evokes not only the deeds of Jesus in the Gospels but also the power of baptism to give the illumination of Christ’s message to the doubter or the unbeliever.49 Yet these are individuals who are already full believers; their facial baths do not indicate that they are in some way sinners who are only now made welcome into the body Christian. Instead, the bestowal of light upon their physical eyes manifests the outward recognition of their inward commitment to the faith. Such episodes thus echo the words spoken by Jesus to the Apostle Thomas, who doubted the identity of the resurrected Christ until it was proven through examination of the wounds of crucifixion: “Quia vidisti me credidisti beati qui non viderunt et crediderunt” [You have believed because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed] (John 20:27– 9). In their blind belief, these innocent faithful are given a physical integrity that signifies their spiritual devotion. The Lives of female saints, however, tend to differently depict the means by which their subjects use water to confer vision. Although Ireland’s holy women still provide sight to the blind according to the motif of imitatio Christi, the 45 46

47 48 49

Connolly, ch. 100, at 44. Vita II / Vita IV S Patricii, ed. Ludwig Bieler, Four Latin Lives of Patrick: Colgan’s Vita Secunda, Quarta, Tertia and Quinta (Dublin: DIAS, 1971), ch. 3, at 52; Francis Byrne and Pádraig Frances, trans., “Two Lives of Saint Patrick: Vita Secunda and Vita Quarta,” JRSAI 124 (1996): 21. Vita S Comgalli (Sal) 2, at 332; (Dub) 6, VSH 2, at 5. Vita S Berachi Abbatis de Cluain Coirpthe (Oxf) 16, VSH 1, at 81. Jesus and his teachings are identified as “light” (lux) in a number of places, including e.g. John 8:12 and 9:5.

464

Johnson

ways in which these women follow Jesus’ steps often do not exactly replicate the original gospel stories; in particular, there is a dearth of the sight-bestowing facial washes so common to the Lives of the men. This lack supports the interpretation of such washes as a form of baptism, as the Church prohibited women from performing the baptismal sacrament. Other slight emendations to Christ’s model also suggest a gendered view of saintly cures for blindness. Saint Brigit cures blindness at least four times, but in most instances her miracles only resemble, rather than precisely imitate, the deeds of Christ. In the example in which Brigit commands a mother to lave her child’s face, Brigit’s act approaches those of the holy men, as seen for instance in Mochoemóg’s healing of the sightless nun (Vita S Mochoemog [Dub] 34). This story similarly repeats aspects of Jesus’ healing of a blind man in the Book of John, but where Christ first applies a paste of mud mixed with his own saliva to the man’s eyes and then commands that his charge wash his face in a nearby pond, Brigit omits the paste and passes directly to having the mother cleanse her child’s visage (John 9: 6–7). She also gives sight by cleansing the feet of a blind nun, just as Jesus bathed the apostles’ feet; Jesus’s deed, however, conferred spiritual rather than physical sight, his act of humility declaring that those whose feet he washed had accepted his revelation and thus belonged among his followers (John 13:1–17).50 In essence, the holy Irish women who cure the blind using blessed waters follow the example of Jesus in a number of ways but only occasionally approach the metaphorical version of baptism Christ performs in the Book of John. Sanctified Irish men, however, were the abbots and bishops who daily would have performed baptismal rites and the other sacraments of the faith and, as such, they display a distinct predilection for bringing sight through facial rinsing in consecrated water. Where the treatment of the “wound” of blindness using water is concerned, then, Ireland’s saints adhere to the ecclesiastical expectations of their gender. The women of the Lives still reveal the proper pattern of holiness as an imitation of the life and miracles of Christ, but they do so through variations on the theme of the Gospels rather than stepping precisely in Jesus’ footprints as do their male colleagues. Other hagiographical echoes of Jesus’ gospel cures for blindness do not involve the use of significant amounts of holy water. These episodes also lack both the distinctions in gender role and the sacramental links apparent in episodes of sacred baths. Christ returns vision by blessing those who lack it, for

50

Bethu Brigte 36, at 13, 30. In the biblical text, Jesus tells Peter, “si non lavero te non habes partem mecum” [If I do not wash you[r feet], you will have no part with me].

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

465

instance.51 Saint Brigit similarly grants sight to the elderly eyes of Saint Íta through benediction; in an interesting inversion of stories in which blinding punishes but penance returns the light, Íta requests the return of her sensory deprivation because the distraction of seeing the material world separates her too much from God (Vita I 17.119).52 Saint Coemgen returns a stonemason to health who is injured while working for the saint. When an airborne shard of rock pulverizes the mason’s eye, Coemgen repairs it by placing his hand over the damaged socket and offering a prayer of blessing.53 Some cures commingle miracle and contamination in an effective new physic and, in so doing, demonstrate that what pollutes elsewhere is pure if associated with saints. In another reflection of the Messiah, who uses his saliva both alone and mixed with clay to bring sight, Saint Comgall restores the light (lumen) to a blind man when he daubs his spittle onto the man’s eyelids (Mark 8:22–4, John 9:1–7).54 In a sense, then, the moisture from either Jesus’ or an Irish holy man’s mouth stands in for the sanctified waters of baptism. When Saint Buite heals a man’s vision by directing him to bathe his face in the dirty water collected from the wheel ruts of Buite’s chariot, his actions follow the pattern both of the baptismal-style cure and of the use of components that would otherwise contaminate to restore what has been lost.55 As seen with the saliva of both saint and Savior, the befouled waters off the muddy road do not defile; they are as pure as if drawn from a holy font. Saint Cainnech, for his part, is responsible for restoring sight through a drop of his blood (Vita S Cainnechi [Sal] 25, [Dub] 20). Cainnech’s miracle summons the imagery both of the blood of the canonical Christ spilled to cleanse the world of sin, and of Jesus in the apocryphal Life of Longinus that remedies the damaged eye of the eponymous spear-bearer, who pierces the crucified man’s side (Matt. 26:28; Mark 14:24).56 51 52

53 54 55 56

Matt. 9:28–30, 15:31, 20:29–34 (Mark 10:46–52, Luke 18:35–43), Matt. 21:14. Connolly, ch. 121, at 47. Saint Íta is here called Daria, a latinized version of the Dar-Íta variant of her name. This lack of caring for physical form because of its ability to distance the individual soul from God is consonant with the overall tone of the Vita I, as seen in, for instance, the episode of Brigit’s prayer-induced self-blinding. Vita S Coemgeni Abbatis de Glenn da Loch (Dub) 14, VSH 1, at 241. Vita S Comgalli (Dub) 10, VSH 2, at 6. Vita S Boecii de Mainistir Buite (Oxf) 15, VSH 1, at 91. Life of Longinus, ed. John Carey and trans. Ann Dooley, “The Gospel of Nicodemus in Ireland,” in The Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe, ed. Zbigniew Izydorczyk (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 366–8, 381–3. The story of Longinus was certainly known in Ireland by the eighth century, when it was absorbed into two Marian poems of Blathmac son of Cú

466

Johnson

One additional episode in which blindness is reversed by saintly miracula merits attention. Here, two blind Britons (Britones, probably meaning men from Wales) come to Saint Brigit to be healed.57 Brigit suggests that the men rest and refresh themselves in the community’s guesthouse while she and the nuns pray for the men’s cure, but this offer is not sufficient for the Britons. They indignantly accuse the saint of reserving her most rapidly efficacious miracles for her Irish compatriots. Stung, Brigit asperses the men with blessed water, and they instantly receive their sight (Vita I 3.23).58 The allegation the Britons level at Brigit constitutes a form of legal satire, unlike the illegal forms – blasphemy and verbal taunting – discussed earlier. Satire was deemed just if the verbal declamation was true and the target actually guilty of the accused wrongdoing. Such pronouncements were intended to compel the defendant to make the proper restitution on pain of losing his or her honor-price and social status.59 The Britons charge Brigit with being stingy with her cures if the petitioners are not Irish and declare that, in so doing, she fails to obey Christ’s injunction that to welcome strangers is to welcome Jesus himself (Matt. 25:34–40). There is no challenge made to Brigit’s sanctity; indeed, the assertion these Britons make fully recognizes her saintly authority but argues that she has misused it. In acceding to the Britons’ demands with-

57

58

59

Brettan; see: “Gospel,” 366–73. For the poems see: verses 55–8 in James Carney, ed. and trans., The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cú Brettan Together with the Irish Gospel of Thomas and a Poem on the Virgin Mary (Dublin: ITS, 1994), at 20–21. Interestingly, it depends upon which variant of either the Life of Longinus or Gospel of Nicodemus is consulted; in later Irish versions, Longinus is said to have no eyes at all and to gain two clear grey eyes upon rubbing his blood-and-water-splashed hands upon his face. In earlier texts, however, he possesses one functioning and one badly wounded eye. See: “The Gospel of Nicodemus in Ireland,” 382. Huw Pryce, “British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales,” The English Historical Review 116 (Sept. 2001): 775–801, discusses this distinction in the use of Britones. His analysis shows that Britones was used by Latin writers in Wales to refer to their Welsh compatriots until the twelfth century, when growing nationalism in the face of increasing Norman incursions led to the adoption of Wallenses for the Welsh. Given the close ties between Wales and Ireland in the Middle Ages, it is reasonable to interpret Britones as “Welshmen” in the eighth-century Vita I S Brigitae as well. For more on the transmarine contacts between Ireland and Wales in the early medieval period ee also Thomas CharlesEdwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75, 183–4. Connolly, ch. 26, at 29. The tale is also found in later vernacular components of the saint’s dossier, including Bethu Brigte 27, at 9, 26 and Betha Bhrighdi (Lismore) ll. 1372–6, at 41, 189. Críth Gablach §21, at 12–13; “Law of status,” §§100–101, at 295–6. See again: 69 (áer, ‘satirizing’) and 84–6 (enech, ‘honor, face’), and Kelly, Early Irish Law, 137–8.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

467

out penalty, Brigit tacitly acknowledges the rightness of their claim, makes restitution, and preserves her honor. That Brigit accepts their criticism as valid further suggests a degree of intercultural friction between the Irish and Welsh, who crossed the Irish Sea in both directions with considerable regularity throughout the medieval period. Indeed, the conversion of Ireland to Christianity owed much to the activities of Britons, including the famed example of Saint Patrick himself, while a number of Irish communities were established in Wales in the early Middle Ages.60 There are records of Welsh religious becoming abbots in Irish monasteries, such as Colmán na m-Bretan, Colmán “of the Britons,” an abbot of Sláine who died in 751.61 Saint Brigit’s cult also spread from Ireland to Wales during the seventh century, the same era in which Brigit became the dominant saint in southeast Ireland and the era immediately preceding the compilation in Ireland of the second extant medieval text commemorating the saint, the Vita I S Brigitae.62 It seems likely that the anonymous hagiographer of the Vita I felt that Welsh devotees of Saint Brigit received less attention from Ireland’s ecclesiastical figures than did their Irish peers. Such a view raises the possibility that the compiler of the Vita I, or the author of one of its constituent texts, was himself of Welsh descent. If so, it seems he felt it necessary to use the motif of easing the “wound” of blindness to insert a quiet comment on the inequity he observed between the status of Welsh and Irish members of the cult of Saint Brigit.63 From the punishment of disobedience or verbal assault to the restoration of a lost sense, blinding and blindness add considerable color to the tapestry of 60 61 62

63

Thomas Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 158–72, 185–6. See also: Ó Riain, “O’Donohue Lives,” 45–6. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, eds. and trans., Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131) (Dublin: DIAS, 1983), 206–7. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 237–9. This interaction between Brigit of Kildare and the Britones in the Vita I challenges Pádraig Ó Riain’s assertion that the text shows no symptom of the links between Brigit and Wales, in “O’Donohue Lives,” 45. I do not think, however, that the omission of Vita I S Brigitae 3.23 undermines Ó Riain’s argument concerning the dating of the O’Donohue texts because the remaining evidence he presents is more than convincing; further, this single chapter in the Vita I may be a later interpolation. The Annals of Ulster mention in AU 703 that there was a significant battle between the forces of Ulster and the Britons – again likely meaning an incursion of Welsh warriors – in which the Ulstermen defeated their foreign rivals. Another conflict between Britons and Irish forces is registered in AU 709. Perhaps this also contributes to some of the friction expressed in the Vita I S Brigitae? See: Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, Annals of Ulster, 162–33, 166–7.

468

Johnson

sanctity in the Lives of Irish saints. The infliction and cure of sightlessness define the boundary between believers and unbelievers, between those permitted to participate in the life of the Christian community and those who are not. Wounding sinners by stripping their vision declares the blinded to be in some way unable or unwilling to either perceive the gospel revelation or to live by its tenets. The restoration of sight conversely both heals the physical lack of light and removes the distance between the individual’s soul and the full force of Christ’s message. At the same time, individuals who lack functional eyes but are otherwise blameless are given the gift of vision as a sign of God’s power and grace; the opening of their physical eyes manifests outwardly the depth and purity of their interior devotion. The link between sightlessness and sin in the narratives of punitive hagiographical eye wounds draws on a precedent visible throughout the canonical and apocryphal scriptures. A particularly explicit example found in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas underlines the point. Here, the child Messiah of the apocryphon both blinds those who wrong him and then cures them once they acknowledge his identity as Savior. As the lad Jesus restores the vision of those whom he has punished, he declares that he is releasing the judged because they are now able to see both physically and spiritually and have transitioned from the cursed to the saved.64 In much the same fashion, those who wrong an Irish saint choose not to see the status and authority bestowed by the grace of sanctity upon the holy man or woman whom they defy, and they suffer sometimes agonizing injuries to their eyes as penalty for such hubris and sin; when they have humbled themselves before the saint and before God, however, they are restored to physical integrity and to the community of the faithful. Their blinding marks them as arrogant sinners who broke the commandments of God and God’s agents. In the same manner, the return of their vision openly signifies the successful cleansing of their souls through penance. Punitive blinding and the return of vision to the penitent wrongdoer also summon forth the message delivered by the New Testament Jesus, and, thus, firmly align the saint whose miracles wound or cure eyes with the model of imitatio Christi. Declaring himself and his teachings to be the light that disperses the darkness of paganism, superstition, and heterodox practice, Jesus demonstrates that identity by literally illuminating the lightless eye even as he

64

Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Greek A epitome) 8, ed. Elliott, 78. This text has a long life in Ireland; an Irish version was composed around 700 CE from older Latin texts already in circulation on the island. See McNamara, Apocrypha, 1 and 8.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

469

brightens the shadowed mind with his words.65 Christ’s message and associated miracles also fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah that blind eyes will be penetrated by a new teaching, augmenting Jesus’ cures of the blind with further proof that he is the foretold Messiah.66 These teachings are echoed and reprised throughout the canonical and apocryphal texts concerning Jesus and the apostles. Irish saints are often accused of not following a realized vision of imitatio Christi, particularly in their more flamboyant punitive miracles, and very few Irish saints are martyrs in the way of saints on the Continent. In narratives concerning blinding and blindness, the Irish saints act in accordance with the model of Jesus Christ, demonstrating the descent of his or her own sanctity from the Lord himself. The authority the saint wields in the eye-wound episodes of the Lives thus creates the saint not as an individual whose deeds exceed the limits of acceptable Christian behavior but as one who corrects the wrongdoer and restores the wounded in the image of the faith’s progenitor. The Irish saint who strips away the vision of the guilty declares these malefactors to be outside the bounds of the Christian community. Marked as lacking the spiritual comprehension both of the saint’s identity as God’s agent and of the enlightening gospel news, retaliatory blinding in the Lives is the por­tion served to sinners just as it is delivered upon those who defy Moses, the apo­ cryphal Christ, or the apostles of the New Testament and beyond. That hagiographical blinding often highlights the holy person’s function as law enforcer enhances the parallel between the Irish saint and the Hebrew prophet who delivered God’s law to the Israelites. The use of Ireland’s canon and vernacular law treatises to bolster saintly authority also makes the saint a leader whose jurisdiction extends beyond the ecclesiastical and spiritual to include the exaction of legal penalty according to a specifically Irish definition of social order even without the use of the usual secular penalties, and suggests an ecclesiastical vision of the Church as, in a sense, providing the services of the absent centralized state. Yet the deprived are also often restored; the participation in the Christian community lost with the function of one or both eyes can be given as well as taken. Healing former wrongdoers welcomes them back into the fold, ends their separation from God, and signifies the completion of a proper penance and the punishment of legal infractions, while the blessing of vision upon the pagan sightless declares physically their spiritual reception of the New Testament revelation. The innocent blind demonstrate God’s power; they believe in Jesus though they cannot see or read his words, and thus obtain the blessing of their sight as a manifestation of the fervency of their faith. Here, 65 66

John 8:12, 9:5 for instance. Isa. 29:18, 35:5, 42:18.

470

Johnson

too, saints who dig out their own eyes prove that in the bodies of believers sightlessness unites the blind with God. The restoration of the orbs of these devout individuals declares beyond question their union with the body Christian as saints. Sightlessness and sight are signifiers; the absence or presence of vision identifies the individual’s position in relation to the community of Christ. Between these two opposites the Irish saint moves, his or her actions defining the line that either separates one from God or accords one admission into the world of the faith. The guilty are removed according to the dictates of both spiritual and legal strictures, while the innocent are united – and the penitent reunited – with the congregation, all through the medium of eye wounds. The cause or cure of blindness thus establishes the saint of the Lives as the ecclesiastical and secular head of the Irish body Christian whose miracles defend and define that body’s contours and signify the border between spiritual darkness and the illumination of faith in medieval Ireland.

Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

part 3 The Literature of Wounds

∵

471

472

Johnson

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

473

Chapter 20

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature William Sayers The medieval Irish Ulster Cycle of epic tales, with roots in the seventh century, is a vast repository of stories dealing, according to the taxonomy of the times, with births, wooings and elopements, feasts, cattle-raids, battles, violent deaths, and destructions. Among these texts, which are fundamental to an understanding of the early Irish heroic ethos and conceptions of the kingship, is Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel). The setting for the central part of the tale is a hostel (Irish bruiden), the hall of a hosteller (briugu) who provides food, drink, and lodging to kings on royal circuits and other notables. The hostel may have been conceived of as a place of refuge beyond the bloody, active politics of the time, but in the world of storytelling it is invariably the scene of contention, leading some to believe that the hostel was an entry point to either the Otherworld or the Land of the Dead.1 The hostels of storytelling are showcases for martial prowess, the pursuit of glory and honor, and, inevitably, physical injury. In the closing scene, after the death of King Conaire as a consequence of injustice in the form of partiality toward his kinsmen, his champion, Conall Cernach, returns home and is confronted by his father: “Scéla lat na Bruigne Dá Derge? An beó do thigerna?” “Nochon beó imorro,” for Conall. “Tonga do dia tongthi mo thúath, is midlachdo dond fir do-deachaid a mbeathaid as íar fácbáil a thigernai lia a námtiu i mbás.” “Nídat bána mo chréchda ém, a senlaích,” for Conall. Tadbaid a láim scéith. Trí .l. créchta imorro is ed ad-comaicc furri. In scíath imarro imarro-dídnestair ind lám sin is ed rus-anacht. Ind lám des imorro imorobrad for suidiu co rrice a dí chutramai. Ro cirrad imorro ⁊ ro hathchumad ⁊ ro créchdnaiged ⁊ ro chríathrad acht congaibset na féthe frisin corp cen 1 Otherworld is a conventional term in Irish studies and subsumes such earlier formulations as the Land of Faery, the Land of Youth, and the Land of Promise. It was inhabited by the Túatha dé Danann, tribes of the goddes Danu, skilled sorcerers who had been defeated and relegated to the underworld by a succeeding race of invaders, the Sons of Mil or Gaels. See: William Sayers, “Netherworld and Otherworld in Early Irish Literature,” Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie 59 (2012): 201–30.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_022

474

Sayers

a etarscarad innát raba in scíath oca himdedail. “Ro fích ind lám sin indnocht for cách, a maccáin, ⁊ ro fiched furri,” ol Amairgin. “Fír són, a senlaích,” ol Conall Cernach. “Is sochuide dia tarad deoga tondaig anocht ar dorus mBruidni.”2 [“Have you news of Da Derga’s hostel? Does your lord live?” asked his father. “He does not,” Conall replied. “I swear by the god my people swear by, it is a coward who would come away alive and leave his lord with the enemy,” said the father. “My wounds are not white, old warrior,” said Conall. His showed his father his shield arm and the three fifties of wounds [150 wounds] that had been inflicted upon it. His shield had protected that hand, but it had not protected his right hand. That had been attacked over two thirds of its length; it had been hacked and cut and wounded and riddled, but the sinews had not permitted it to fall off. “That hand injured many tonight, and it was much injured,” said Amorgen. “True, old warrior,” sad Conall Cernach. “There are many to whom it served drinks of death at the entrance to the hostel tonight.”]3 The depiction of this homecoming after battle is carefully constructed in binary pairs: the opening and closing references to the hostel, to the life and death of the king; the opposition of bravery and cowardice, the explicit judgment based on community values and its reference to gods and men; the deictic references in the quantification of wounds to the shield arm, and in the variety and sequence of the wounding actions to the sword arm; and, in general, injuries given and received. Lastly, the usual function of such hostels, to provide hospitality to travelers, royal or otherwise, is reversed in this literary depiction, where art violates the conventions of life and the drinks served are of death. Conall’s implicit contrast between white wounds (créchda bána) and red, between the dormant scars that are the heritage of combat and the immediate, living, bleeding wounds of battle, goes to the heart of the early Irish conception of the human body as an incarnation of heroic honor.4 2 Togail Bruidne Da Derga, ed. Eleanor Knott (Dublin: DIAS, 1936), 45–46. Line numbers will be given in parentheses. 3 The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, in Early Irish Myths and Sagas, trans. Jeffey Gantz (London: Penguin, 1982), 105–06. Page numbers will be given in parentheses where relevant. Cf. Charlene M. Eska, “The Mutilation of Derbforgaill,” 252–64; and Salvador Ryan, “Scarce Anyone Survives a Heart Wound”: The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry,” 291– 312, in this volume. 4 For a discussion of this distinction in hagiography, see: Clare Stancliffe, “Red, White and Blue martyrdom,” In Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

475

Bodily injury was a major preoccupation among the early Irish, as it doubtless was elsewhere in societies marked by chronic warfare, or at least raiding and retribution, and by the vagaries of personal health and safety in an internally regulated society with relatively weak executive power. The extensive Irish law tracts, these too with their origins in the seventh century and a fuller flowering over subsequent centuries up to their commitment to the written record (now preserved only from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), are almost encyclopedic in their attention to the human body and the violation of its integrity.5 The prism through which injury was viewed was one with several hierarchies. Parts of the body were ranked by their essentiality and functionality, so that gravity of injury was equated with its attendant loss of function, e.g., a blow to the eye with partial loss of vision was, thus, a serious matter, a jammed little finger on the other hand resulted only in an awkward performance of one’s duties, personal and public.6 On another coordinate, the hierarchy of body parts was matched by a hierarchy in social station. In fact, the human body was a microcosm of society and, at a greater remove, of the cosmos. Society had its head, long arms of punishment and reward, and body politic. Head injuries were often conceived as wounds to the head of state, as Larissa Tracy argues in this volume.7 Thus, an injury and its appropriate fine were situated on a grid organized by the parameters of the importance of the body part affected and the social rank and worth of the individual victim. The register of fines shows sophistication in its recognition of both corporal and psychic trauma. Payments are intended to cover “the fear of death, the gravity of the [accompanying] sickness and the extent of the blemish.”8 As Fergus Kelly illustrates in his invaluable Guide to Early Irish Law, “For a small facial wound, the highest grade of lord is entitled to a milch cow. For the same injury, the inol (apprentice?) receives only one fleece.”9 According to Tecosca Cormaic (The Instructions of Cormac): ísel cach ithech “every commoner is low.”10 5

6

7 8 9 10

See: Corpus Iuris Hibernici, ed. D.A. Binchy, 6 vols. (Dublin: DIAS, 1978); Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: DIAS, 1988); and Liam Breatnach, A Companion to the Corpus Iuris Hibernici (Dublin: DIAS, 2005). For a discussion of the legal ramifications of eye wounds, particularly in reference to miraculous blinding and healing in Irish saints’ lives, see: Máire Johnson, “In the Bursting of an Eye: Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography,” in this volume, 448–70. Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Wounded Bodies and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” in this volume, 496–518. Corpus Iuris Hibernici, 2307, ll. 24–26. Kelly, Guide to Early Irish Law, 8. Tecosca Cormaic, ed. and trans. Kuno Meyer (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, & Co., 1909), par. 15, l. 15.

476

Sayers

The impression from the law texts and the authoritative Dictionary of the Irish Language is that early Irish had little in the way of a discrete vocabulary for scars, as distinct from wounds and injuries.11 Crécht and guin are the common words for “wound” and also “scar,” while other terms such as álad, cned, cnía, gáel, oenach, and tregmad have less precise semantic contours but focus on wounding; that is, the action, not its long-term consequences, among which include a possibly persistent sign. Mairc and mersce as “sore, gall, scar” may reflect Latin marca, a loan dating from the conversion to Christianity in the fifth century. Yet it could well be that scars were still viewed in the community, in which memory counted for so much, as no less vital, significant, and signifying than the original wounds.12 The wounds of semi-formal battle were, however, less amenable to restitution than the injuries of legally contained, intra- and inter-community contention. Epic literature is predictably filled with novel ways to describe swordplay and the resulting injuries. But these are not clinical descriptions or the assumptions of forensic technicians on television. Rather than sharpening the focus on the specificity of the wound – which muscle, cut to what depth – the description moves from objective observation toward impression, and in this exercise, the simile is a chief stylistic device among early Irish writers. A tripartite example illustrates the practice, while also exhibiting the typical misogyny of early Irish writers. Medb, the Queen of Connacht, who is not above appearing on the battlefield herself, exclaims of the expected onslaught of the Ulster heroes Lóegaire Búadach, Conall Cernach, and Cú Chulainn in the tale Fled Bricrend (Bricriu’s Feast): “… más co m-baraind debtha totháet Loegaire Buadach cucund, amal bentair foltchib fri lár talman … mal sladar iasc mbrec for licc derg áin co sústaib iarind, bidsi sin mini na hesorgni dobéra Conall Cernach forni … canaid cóir coscrach cridemail frisin Coinculaind comchosmail. Cutanméla mulend múadmraich.”13 11 12

13

Dictionary of the Irish Language, ed. E.G. Quin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1913–76). For further discussion on the implications of facial scarring, see: Michael Livingston, “‘The Depth of Six Inches’: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury,” 215–30; Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296-c. 1403,” 102–27; and Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess? Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101. For a detailed discussion of gendered wounds in English texts, see: Barbara Goodman, “Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair,” 544–71, in this volume. Fled Bricrend, ed. and trans. George Henderson (Dublin: ITS, 1899), 56–62.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

477

[“… [Lóegaire’s] sharp blade will cut us to the ground like leeks … we will be sliced up the way speckled fish are sliced by iron flails against bright red stones – those are the small pieces Conall Cernach will cut us into … we will be ground into the earth and gravel the way a mill stone grinds very hard malt … unless [Cú Chulainn’s] anger and fury are diminished”].14 Medb draws her images from the domestic sphere and largely from women’s work. She thus, however consciously, dishonors and disparages her own troops, in an imagined context distinct from their eventual martial performance. Yet the resulting wounds are still not effectively visualized, as if the loss of honor far outweighed the deleterious effect of the wound on the body. In the paramount Irish epic tale Táin bó Cúailgne (The Cattleraid of Cooley), the complex of homologies and hierarchies that inform early Irish jurisprudence on personal injury and the descriptions of combat scenes are referred back to cosmogonic myth, when the warrior chieftain Fergus mac Roích vows to dismember an enemy host: “Tongu et reliqua mebsaitis lim-sa glaini fer dia mbráigde, bráigde fear la ndóite, dóite fer la n-uille, uille fer la rigthe, rigthe fer la ndorndaib, dornna fer la méra, méra fer la n-ingne, ingne fer la forcléthi, forcléthi fer la medón, médon fer la slíasta, slíasta fer la nglúne, glúne fer la colptha, colpthai fer la traigthe, traigthi fer la méra, méra fer la n-ingne. Doruchtfaid a méderad na háeru feib dodrimsired beach i lló áinle.” Is and sin asbert Ailill re araid: “Domiced in claideb cuilleis toind.” [Then Fergus swore this oath: “I swear by my people’s oath, that I would strike men’s jawbones from their necks, men’s necks from their shoulders, men’s shoulders from elbows, men’s elbows from forearms, men’s forearms and their fists, men’s fists and their fingers, men‘s fingers and their nails, men’s nails and the crowns of their heads, men’s crowns and their trunks, men’s trunks and their thighs, men’s thighs and their knees, men’s knees and their calves, men’s calves and their feet, men’s feet and their toes, men’s toes and their nails. Their headless necks would sound in the air like a bee flying to and fro on a day of fine weather.” Then Ailill said to his charioteer: “Bring me the sword that cuts flesh”] (4010–18).15 14 15

Bricriu’s Feast, in Gantz, Early Irish Myths and Sagas, 235–37. Táin bó Cúailgne: Recension I, ed. and trans. Cecille O’Rahilly (Dublin: DIAS, 1976). Line numbers are given in parentheses in the text.

478

Sayers

Fergus’s oath offers a fairly comprehensive head-to-toes list of external body parts used metonymically in Irish as elsewhere as units of measure, legal terms, and so on. One of the most revealing is glún “knee,” which also meant “generation, degree of consanguinity.” Most of the body parts listed are categorized in legal texts such as Bretha Déin Chécht (The Judgments of Déin Cécht).16 As a taxonomy, the enumeration consists of externally visible bodily parts marked off by the articulations of the skeleton; there are, for example, no organs, viscera, or references to non-material life forces such as soul, spirit, or courage. The human body is seen exclusively from a warrior perspective as the agent and target of martial activity.17 Much of somatic human life is omitted as the care of battle wounds is prioritized over other medical concerns. Fergus’s oath, however consonant with the martial context of the Táin, is more than a rhetorical flourish. The emphasis is not on killing and death as a terminal act and state. The conscious, comprehensive ordering and naming, thus re-creation, of body parts in an oath sworn by a tribal tutelary figure or culture hero is a litany suggestive of a ritual dismemberment of a sacrificial human victim with “the sword that cuts men’s flesh.”18 As such, it has specific cosmogonic overtones. Classical writers such as Posidonius have testified to the practice of human sacrifice among the Continental Celts. This Irish evidence for ritual dismemberment, even if admitted only on the conceptual level and not as an actual practice, is matched by a complementary vision of the reassembly of the human body. Indian and Norse traditions, as found in the Rigveda and Eddas, offer striking parallels to the Irish account. As well as echoing societal origins, wounds may be the object of prophecy and promise. In Bruiden Da Choca (Da Choca’s Hostel) a maiden, perhaps a figure of territorial sovereignty who has turned her attentions away from the would-be king, Cormac Con Loinges, predicts ominously: “‘Rachaidh cirrad for do cnes, / ní fétfa líaigh do leiges’” [“Your flesh will be mangled, / no physician will be able to heal you.”]19 Another kind of hypothetical wound is that 16 17

18 19

Cited in Kelly, Guide to Early Irish Law, 131. Georges Dumézil’s theories of an original tripartite division of Indo-European society have lost much of their appeal today, but the study of tripartitition, literary formulation in triads, and homological extensions across other categories of society remain a profitable heuristic approach to the early Irish literary corpus. For an exploration of wounds from this perspective, see: William Sayers, “The Three Wounds: Tripartition as Narrrative Tool in Ireland and Iceland,” Incognita: International Journal for Cognitive Studies in the Humanities 1 (1990): 50–90. Fuller discussion in William Sayers, “Fergus and the Cosmogonic Sword,” History of Religions 25 (1985): 30–56. Bruiden Da Choca, ed. and trans. Gregory Toner (Dublin: ITS, 2007), 112–13.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

479

adumbrated in the threats of individual warriors, one to another. A triad of future wounds and counter-wounds is set out in the tale Táin bó Regamna (The Cattleraid of Regamna), in which the war goddess, the Mórrígan, who in this context is ill-disposed toward Cú Chulainn for his rejection of her overtures, threatens to come against him while he is engaged in battle with others at a ford (a typical site for single combat, both symbolically liminal and often a territorial boundary marker), in order to give his opponents the advantage.20 The verbal exchange shows how early Irish writers could inform almost any literary situation with overtones of the Celtic conception of a tripartite cosmos, made up of the heavens or sky, the habitable earth’s surface, and the underearth and undersea.21 The war goddess promises to attack him as an eel, a she-wolf, and in a herd of red-eared heifers and, respectively, entangle his feet, weaken (through a bite, one must assume) his upper body and arms, and lead a stampede into the ford to cause a chaos that will end in his defeat and decapitation. The hero retorts that he will bruise the eel with a stone from the river-bed, put out one of the wolf’s eyes with a spear thrust, and sling a stone to break one of the lead heifer’s legs. Animals with red ears are associated with the preternatural world and the heifers then correspond to the aerial dimension of the cosmos, while the wolf and eel are more readily assigned to the earthly and aquatic realms. A rigorous application of the formula would have entailed that the aerial sling cast put out the eye of the heifer’s head and the spear shatter the wolf’s leg, but such displacements are common in the Irish story-telling tradition and are usually introduced in the interests of plausibility. The threats and counter-threats are reiterated and realized in Táin bó Cúailgne, when the Mórrígan appears in guise of a beautiful young woman, whose advances Cú Chulainn again rejects, with the added feature that later the goddess, in the guise of an old woman, tricks the hero into healing these same three injuries (1845–74, 2038–53). Anticipated wounds are a source of heroic anxiety. In Fled Bricrend (Bricriu’s Feast), the three paramount Ulster heroes, who have contested the champion’s portion from the communal cooking-pot at a feast, are sent out from the hall to face tests of courage by a third party. This is realized through the mutual beheading motif, played out three times in all. The heroes’ first judge is a preternatural being and shape-shifter, Úath mac Imomain. The name, “Terror, son of Fear,” is constructed on a conventional Irish model of name and patronym. 20 21

Táin bó Regamna: eine Vorerzählung zur Táin bó Cúailnge, ed. Johan Corthals (Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1987). Cf. Medb’s three domestic similes, based on malt (air-dried in lofts), terrestrial leek, aquatic fish.

480

Sayers

He represents the warrior’s essential threat, the fear of fear itself, that the fighter will break and run, panic before the onset of combat, and thus suffer shame and dishonor. Only Cú Chulainn beheads the arbiter and is then willing to appear the following day to have his own head taken. But, in recognition of his courage, the axe blade is reversed and he receives only a light tap on the nape of the neck from the blunt head of the axe. In the Middle English adaptation of the motif, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain’s behavior at the castle of the Green Knight has been less than ideal, marred by his nearly involuntary erotic response to the chatelaine’s flirtations – so that he receives a nick on the neck, one which will leave an all but imperceptible, but never forgotten, scar.22 Most battle scenes focus on the exchange of blows that result in injuries to the muscles and bones. There are few instances of evisceration, and these are given a kind of moral coloring, as if a blow to the belly were an affront to the dignity of both the warrior and his opponent, and were even unacceptable according to the conventions of warfare. In Táin bó Cúailgne, Cú Chulainn, in single combat against his blood brother Fer Diad, has recourse to the gáe bolga (perhaps “bag-spear” or “death-dealing spear”), a weapon whose use is known only to him. It is cast through the water, enters the anus of its victim, and then opens into multiple disemboweling barbs. Fer Diad reproaches Cú Chulainn as much for the weapon as for defeating him. The incident violates the conception of the heroic body as bone and muscle. Since the paramount hero is always exceptional, it may be Cú Chulainn’s semi-divine status (his father is the god Lug) that authorizes him to act outside societal norms. Self-inflicted wounds are rare in early Irish literature and generally function as portents. On the day of Cú Chulainn’s death, worn out with fighting, he is again roused to battle and, in his haste, drops a brooch that pierces his foot. He is forewarned and little surprised when he is soon obliged by the laws of hospitality to eat the flesh of his namesake, the dog (Irish cú), and, thus, violate one of his personal taboos, with a resulting partial paralysis of his left side (Aided Con Culainn – The Violent Death of Cú Chulainn).23 In the literary tradition, heroes are not impervious to treachery and deceit, and it will be such a combi-

22

23

See, recently, Larissa Tracy, “‘So he smote of hir hede by myssefortune’: The Real Price of the Beheading Game in SGGK and Malory,” in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, ed. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 207–34. Aided Con Culainn, in Compert Con Culain and Other Stories, ed. A.G. van Hamel (Dublin: DIAS, 1933), 69–133.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

481

nation that brings down Cú Chulainn, accomplishing what mere weapons and conventional wounds could not. Psychic wounds were also recognized in early Ireland. In a scene without equivalent in medieval Irish literature or elsewhere in the traditions of Western Europe, the hero Cú Chulainn is put under a spell by Otherworldly women, whom he had pursued when they had taken on the guise of water fowl (Serglige Con Chulaind – The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn).24 After the fruitless fowling, the hero falls asleep and two richly dressed bird women, now in human form, approach and begin to strike the prostrate warrior with horsewhips. In a variety of symbolic ways this is extremely demeaning, and only the preternatural dimension of the beating saves the hero from total disgrace. As it is, he is confined to his bed with what the Irish text calls a serglige “wasting sickness.” But this is an elaborate ruse to induce Cú Chulainn to visit the Otherworld, to satisfy Fand, an Otherworldly woman who has fallen in love with his reputation, and to aid her king in battle. A counterpart to the debility through enchantment and the symbolic beating occurs at the conclusion of the story, in which Cú Chulainn, now enamored of his fairy mistress, must be force-fed a drink of oblivion, so that he can forget Fand and return with full vigor to Ulster and his wife Emer. He thereby escapes the entanglement with the Otherworld with no permanent scar, psychic or physical. In the case of King Suibhne mac Colmáin, psychic injury is more permanent. Suibhne offends St. Rónán and even challenges the cleric’s claim to land intended to be used for church purposes (Buile Shuibhne – The Frenzy of Suibhne). The killing of the saint’s servant aggravates the situation. Rónán condemns Suibhne to a bird-like life of constant flight. The realization of Ronan’s curse is described in an overwrought vocabulary but portrays startlingly modern emotions: Ó rochomhracsiot iarom na catha cechtarrdha robhúirset an damhradh dermháir adíu ⁊ anall amail dámha damhghoire co ttuargaibhset trí tromghaire ós aird. Ó’dchúala thrá Suibhne na gáire móra sin ⁊ a fhuamanna ⁊ a freagartha i néllaibh nimhe ⁊ i fraightibh na firmaminnte rofhéch Suibhne suas iarum co rolíon nemhain ⁊ dobhar ⁊ dásacht ⁊ fáoinnel ⁊ fúalang ⁊ folúamain ⁊ udmhaille, anbsaidhe ⁊ anfhoistine, miosgais gach ionaid ina mbíodh ⁊ serc gach ionaidh noco roichedh; romheirbhlighset a meóir, rocriothnaighsiot a chosa, roluathadh a chroidhe, roclódhadh a chédfadha, rosaobadh a radharc, rotuitset a airm 24

Serglige Con Culainn, ed. Myles Dillon (Dublin: DIAS, 1953), pars. 7–8.

482

Sayers

urnocht asa lámhuibh co ndeachaidh la bréithir Rónáin ar gealtacht ⁊ ar geinidecht amail gach n-ethaid n-aéerdha. [Thereafter, when both battle-hosts had met, the vast army on both sides roared in the manner of a herd of stags so that they raised on high three mighty shouts. Now, when Suibhne heard these great cries together with their sounds and reverberations in the clouds of Heaven and in the vault of the firmament, he looked up, whereupon turbulence (?), and darkness, and fury, and giddiness, and frenzy, and flight, unsteadiness, restlessness, and unquiet filled him, likewise disgust with every place in which he used to be and desire for every place which he had not reached. His fingers were palsied, his feet trembled, his heart beat quick, his senses were overcome, his sight was distorted, his weapons fell naked from his hands, so that through Ronan’s curse he went, like any bird of the air, in madness and imbecility].25 The recognition of, and place accorded to, battlefield panic figures less prominently in the epic literature of other European cultures and thus lends Irish story-telling a near unique perspective into the mental and emotional workings of the hero. It is not so much that the hero is portrayed three-dimensionally as that the constant preoccupation with honor and performance is seen to have tangible external results in behavior. Women, too, may be subject to blows in early Ireland. Ingénues may be struck by a sorcerer’s wand and turned into extravagant bee-like insects (Tochmarc Étaine – The Wooing of Étain); women warriors, with more than a touch of the preternatural, may trade blows with men but invariably treat for peace under threat of death (Tochmarc Emire – The Wooing of Emer).26 Some few sorceresses, in the guise of aged women (or hags, as an era less sensitive than ours would have it), are killed, often by non-martial means, such as being hurled off a cliff. This is because the hero can win glory only in a conventional battle with conventional weapons between peers. A disparity in sex, age, or social status puts the hero at risk of gaining nothing but losing a great deal. An old woman’s satire cannot be effectively deflected, except by going out and heroically doing what has to be done. This same absence of conspecificity

25 26

Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne): Being the Adventures of Suibhne Geilt. A MiddleIrish Romance, ed. and trans. James G. O’Keeffe (Dublin: ITS, 1904), 188–202. Tochmarc Étaine, ed. Osborn Bergin and R.I. Best, Ériu 12 (1938): 137–96; Tochmarc Emire, in Compert Con Culain and Other Stories, 16–68.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

483

legitimates the hero’s use of unconventional means in killing giants and monsters. Armed conflict between peers articulates the epic discourse of early Irish literature. Questions of honor both precede and follow combat. Glory and booty follow one combatant from the field, dishonor and injury the other. Since the consequences of battle determine future social status as well as simple physical viability, the care of wounds is given considerable prominence in the literate record. According to the legal tradition that is the backdrop to the tales, physicians received part of the fines for personal injury and thus further exteriorized the event of wounding and placed it in the communal record.27 The tale Cath Maige Tuired presents a generational conflict as informing the medical care of wounds. When King Núadu of the Túatha dé Danann suffers the loss of a forearm and hand in the first battle at Mag Tuired against the Fir Bolg (a preternatural foreign people), his physician, Dían Cécht, fits a silver prosthesis that allows full hand and finger functions. But his son Míach rejects this mechanical cure, favoring the re-attachment of the severed arm and an organic healing process “ault fri halt di & féith fri féth” [joint to joint and sinew to sinew].28 The senior physician ends by killing his son over this difference of professional opinion. Dían Cécht also appears in the tale Tochmarc Étaine, in which he restores an eye that has been gouged out. The few preserved remarks about the care of wounds in early Ireland also prioritize treatment over a description of the specific nature of the wounds, which would appear to have been so ubiquitous as to need no further detailing. In Cú Chulainn’s single combat with Fer Diad in Táin bó Cúailgne, the account of medical care provided after a day of fighting reads as follows: Táncatar fiallach ícci & leigis dá fethium & dá fégad & dá forcomét in n-aidchi sin, dáig ní ní aile ra chumgetar dóib ra hacbéile a cned & a créchta, a n-álta & a n-ilgona acht iptha & éle & arthana do chur riu do thairmesc a fola & a fulliugu & a ngae cró. [Physicians and doctors came to examine and watch them and to attend on them that night, for, because of the dreadfulness of their wounds and gashes, of their cuts and many stabs, all they could do for them was to

27 28

Kelly, Guide to Early Irish Law, 132. Cath Maige Tuired – The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, ed. and trans. Elizabeth A. Gray (Dublin: ITS, 1982), 32–33.

484

Sayers

apply spells and incantations and charms to them to staunch the bleeding and haemorrhage and to keep the dressings in place] (3165–69).29 We should not expect any effort to suppress infection, but the description, however fanciful, is noteworthy for the physicians’ reliance as much on magic as on efforts to stop bleeding and promote blood clotting. Other procedures to enhance healing are washing wounds and the application of straw pads and herbs (2142–44). But in the absence of effective sutures or any procedure remotely like modern skin grafts, scarring would have been inevitable. Since scars are ambiguous and a sickbed may be dishonoring, a hero may accept wounds but prefer not to live with their consequences. One of the episodes of the latter part of Táin bó Cúailgne, when the full forces of Ulster and Connacht have joined battle, involves the aged warrior Cethern (3161–327). He has been badly wounded in battle and returns naked to the Ulster camp in his chariot. He demands physicians but repeatedly rejects their dire prognoses concerning his possible recovery – by killing them on the spot. The close examination of his many injuries by the king’s personal physician does not result in a clinical analysis but, instead, allows his fellow warriors to identify the opponents he has faced. Thus, the wounds themselves speak, as later will, in more muted fashion, their scars. Some of the wounds and their brief descriptions go well beyond the realistic: “Imruidbiset ém … féithi do chridi indit co n-imreith do chridi indit amail ceirtli a fásbolg” [Indeed they (the three warriors) have severed the sinews of your heart within you so that it rolls about in you like a ball of thread in an empty bag] (3249–51). The simile is again drawn from the female sphere of activity and thus has a light deprecatory effect. Cethern is offered a choice: to lie sick for a year but survive, or to regain his fighting strength for three days and nights only, via a medical procedure. He chooses the latter. He is placed in a marrow-mash, cooked on ox-bones, until he has absorbed its strength.30 His torso is then is fitted with the body frame of a chariot as a kind of exoskeleton. He re-enters battle and is killed after further heroics. 29

30

Táin bó Cúalgne from the Book of Leinster, ed. and trans. Cecile O’Rahilly (Dublin: DIAS, 1967), ll. 3165–69. In Serglige Con Culainn a multi-stanzaic poem (12–13) is devoted to a listing of the efforts the hero would make to provide medical attention to his fellows afflicted with various battle-related trauma, including coma. Cf. the comparable bath in Táin bó Froich; Die Romanze von Froech und Findabair: Táin bó Froich, ed. Wolfgang Meid (Innsbruck: Institut für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1970), par. 19. Note, too, Irish cauldrons of rebirth and other miraculous healing in tales with Otherworld settings, e.g., Lug’s magical healing of Cú Chulainn in Táin bó Cúailgne, ll. 2114–15.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

485

Since attempted cures had no guarantee of success, they might be deferred or rejected. King Conchobar of Ulster is a case in point. Heads were taken as trophies in early Ireland and elsewhere in the Celtic world. Literary conventions have it that cranial matter was also mixed with lime to produce “brain balls,” which, since the head was the seat of the human spirit, provided a means to preserve and draw on the essential powers of a celebrated, defeated opponent.31 Such a brain-ball is slung at King Conchobar and lodges in his forehead.32 It is judged too dangerous to remove but obviously would have constituted a severe impediment, real and symbolic, to a lesser ruler (Aided Chonchobuir – The Violent Death of Conchobar). Conchobar elects to live with the ball imbedded in his head and, indeed, there is nothing inherently shameful in such a wound, the result of a missile cast from a distance. It is only when the king learns of the death of Jesus at the hands of the Jews (as it is told) that he becomes furious and the internal pressure results in the ball being dislodged, killing him instantly. The story is also illustrative of the vast program of the early Irish literati to incorporate Irish history into world history from both before and after the Incarnation. In Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Elders) a group of superannuated heroes from the era of the chieftain Finn mac Cumaill is discovered by the missionary and future saint, Patrick. The work is largely concerned with tales told by one of the foremost of these, Caílte, father of Oisín. Towards the end of the work, Caílte is seen suffering from the accumulated injuries of a long life of battle, in particular a poisoned wound in his calf. Since Caílte is in control of the historical discourse, he experiences no shame in making this disclosure. He is offered the health and longevity of the “fairy-folk,” the Túatha Dé Danann, but declines “to take on the shape of druidry,” preferring to wait for his conversion to the new faith.33 As a kind of compromise, the pain, stiffness, and scar tissue are drawn off through his leg by the sorcerers. Unlike the heroic, concrete, upper-body prosthesis used on Núadu, this fluid, lower-body procedure is appropriate to the infected wound, to the subterranean-dwelling healers, and perhaps to the negative association of poison and battle. The cure permits Caílte to live on, in readiness for the coming of Patrick, at which time, and after 31

32 33

See the brief description of the preparation of such brain-balls in: “The Death of Conchobar,” in Ancient Irish Tales, trans. Tom Peete Cross and Clark Harris Slover, 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Barnes and Noble, 1969), 343–46. Aided Chonchobuir, in The Death-Tales of the Ulster Heroes, ed. and trans. Kuno Meyer (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy Dublin, 1906), 2–21. Tales of the Elders of Ireland, trans. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 197. The Irish phrase is “deilbe druidechta”; Acallam na Senórach, ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes, Irische Texte 4 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1900), ll. 7039–40.

486

Sayers

a quick conversion to Christianity, he can deposit into Patrick’s written record the vast cultural capital (in which the Otherworld also figures) that he has amassed in the service of Finn and Ireland. In a sense, Caílte is close to sharing the Túatha Dé Danann curse – long life and total recall – but from the vantage point of his conversion he can also mediate between the Otherworld dwellers and the saint. Readers witness the invention of nostalgia, as the Acallam narrativizes a significant part of the huge Irish antiquarian project, which was also being advanced in other genres such as legendary history, saints’ lives, and superficially Christianized cosmological commentary. Thus, Ireland’s scars are liberated by the Christian mission from their laconism but also “disinfected,” cleansed by the passage of time and through historical perspective of their political animus, violence, and pagan underpinnings, so that the full story of every significant battle, its site and its outcome, information so vital to Irish history, toponomy, and topography, can be preserved. Kim McCone has recently expanded on his earlier studies of the Irish and purportedly Indo-European institution of the Männerbund or band of young warriors (Irish fían) living on the periphery of society, before full integration as propertied and married young men. From the iconography, literary motifs, and observations of classical ethnographers such as Polybius and Posidonius associated with the warbands McCone concludes, inter alia: Warfare was an essential part of these sodalities’ raison d’être, particular distinction attaching to certain serious but often non-fatal wounds liable to be sustained in battle, notably loss of a foot or leg, of a hand or arm and, above all, of an eye. These deficiencies, particularly blindness in one eye or cyclopism, were accorded magical, ritual and mythical significance as martial emblems.34 These mutilations would be of little advantage when the warrior passed to the next social stage of farming and stock-raising. It may be preferable to think that, while such injuries may have generated admiration, it was the warrior’s readiness to seek and bear them that was most important (cf. nineteenth-century German students’ dueling scars). Battle fury may have been thought proof against weapons, as with the Norse berserks, making the warrior invulnerable. Thus, reckless courage on the part of lightly armed and lightly clothed warriors was certainly prized, but the loss of a hand may have been more an ideal than 34

Kim McCone, “The Celtic and Indo-European Origins of the fían,” in The Gaelic Finn Tradition, ed. Sharon Arbuthnot and Geraldine A. Parsons (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012), 14–30, at 30.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

487

a sought-for reality.35 It is noteworthy that the line of young men depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron, awaiting ritual rebirth before riding off as mature members of the community, shows no evidence of the loss of arms or legs among the initiates. While many mature warriors must have had visible traces of martial activity, scars and stumps are only rarely mentioned as such, except in the heightened medium of dialogue. Even in this capsule description by a scout of a party of guests at the hostel where Conall Cernach later receives his wounds, such potentially distinctive markings are not listed: “At-chonnarc and imdae ⁊ triar indi, trí donnfir móra. Trí dondbertae foraib. Buind cholbtha remra leó. Remithin medón fir cach ball doib. Trí donfuilt chasa fornaib co rremur cind. Teóra lenna brecderga impu. Trí dubscéith co stúagmílaib óir. Teóra slega cúicrindi úasaib ⁊ cloidib dét i lláim cach fir dib.” (Togail 935–41) [“I saw an apartment with three men in it … three huge, dark men. They wore dark garments and heavy ankle bracelets, and each of their limbs was as thick as a man’s waist. Their heads were broad and covered with dark, curly hair, and they wore cloaks of speckled red. Dark shields they had with curved animal clasps of gold, and five-pointed javelins and ivory-hilted swords”] (Da Derga’s Hostel, 87). Some lasting or recurrent disfigurements of early Irish heroes constituted a kind of insignia. But these tend to be involuntary blemishes, not the result of cowardice or defeat on the battlefield. Cúscraid Mend Machae stammers; Conall Cernach has a twisted neck, the result of a childhood injury; Cú Chulainn temporarily experiences a facial distortion when angry so that one eye is drawn into his head, while the other swells and protrudes.36 These minor impairments are so closely associated with the heroes that their female admirers (like modern sport fans), imitate them, with stammering, wry-necks, and real or feigned blinding of one eye. Some traces of battle could be borne and exhibited as credentials, but true maiming and more serious impairment could have far-reaching social consequences. In a less formally martial context, the early Irish laws allowed for payments each time the injured party (injured in both senses) appeared in public and 35 36

Were the early Celts aware that sending lightly armed young warriors into battle could function as a grim pre-Malthusian means of population control? Serglige Con Chulaind, par. 5.

488

Sayers

thus suffered the embarrassment of disfigurement.37 In early Irish, enech meant both “face” and “reputation” and modern English face reflects this widespread figurative extension. A candidate for the kingship could be disqualified by a head-related disfigurement and deposed kings were, according not only to literary texts but also to the historical annals, often blinded or forcibly tonsured.38 The popularity of Conchobar allowed him to rise above this circumstance. Satire, also covered in Irish law, could raise blemishes on the face of its target, wounding words that left a record that persisted beyond the auditory perception – and enjoyment – of the original public criticism. Conversely, facial blemishes could be interpreted as their bearer having been the object of satire. Scars, like the mythicized, dismembering blows dealt by Fergus, are both the results of past actions and dynamic agents in the present and future. From the legal perspective, social status determined the consideration of wounds. Wounds and scars, in turn, had implications for honor and integrity, which, with inevitable circularity, were conjoined with status in the life of the community. In fact, in the imagined heroic world of story, the correlation between wounds and honor was more important than the sequential link between wounding, and reparation or healing. The epic Irish tale Scéla Mucce mac Dathó (The Tale of Mac Dathó’s Pig) vividly illustrates the persistently active links among wound, scar, and reputation. The scene is again a hostel. Invited to Mac Dathó’s hostel are the kings of Ulster and Connacht, and their elite warriors, each troop invited to feast off a mammoth pig, in ignorance of the invitation extended to the other. Meat is boiled in a giant cauldron from which each diner is to receive a cut of meat matching his social rank and reputation. Prime among these and an object of contention is the curad mír or “champion’s portion.” In an uneasy truce, the warriors of Ulster and Connacht take their places in the banquet hall. The two kings’ initial discussion of how the pig should be carved is a brief exercise in one-upsmanship and stimulates individual heroes on both sides to lay claim to the right to carve the pig, with reference to their cross-border raids to steal cattle and engage in single combat. Finally, Cet mac Mágach of Connacht appears to dominate the assembly. He hangs his weapons higher than the others’, takes out his knife, and prepares to carve the pig, then gives the Ulstermen a last chance: “‘Fogabar do feraib Hérenn trá,” olse, “oínfer 37 38

Kelly, Guide to Early Irish Law, 132. The epic Irish texts are set in a pre-Christian Ireland and forced tonsure is not accompanied by the frequent European motif and practice of the removal of deposed kings or pretenders to a monastery.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

489

tairisme comrama frim-sa, no lécud na-mmucce do rainn dam!’” [“Find among the men of Ireland,” he said, “one to match me in the contest – or let me have the division of the pig!”].39 Each warrior who subsequently faces Cet is described in succinct epic terms – “a tall fair warrior,” “a large, grey, very ugly warrior,” and so on – and most make a brief remark to the effect that it is not right for Cet to carve the pig before their very eyes. Cet, however, is each time allowed by his public and the author a much fuller response, which gives him a decisive rhetorical advantage and allows him to maintain his claim. The first Ulsterman to protest is Lóegaire, usually known as “the Victorious.” Cet relates that Lóegaire had crossed the Connacht border on his initiatory foray as a warrior, but had to abandon horses, chariot, and charioteer before Cet and flee with the latter’s spear through him. “‘Is·toirchi in muicc fon indassin?’” [“Is that how you propose to take the pig?”]. This initial retort then refers to the events that launch the adult warrior’s life: the first cross-border raid. Cet’s subsequent remarks will focus on mature stages of the warrior biography and the telltale scars that accompany them. Óengus mac Láme Gábaid of Ulster is next put down by Cet, who recalls that his father got the name Lám Gabuid “Hand-Wail” when Cet hurled his spear back at him and struck off his hand. This is the first of a number of bodyspecific references. Here the insult pre-dates the warrior‘s entry on the martial scene. The son of a man with such a nickname cannot possibly challenge Cet. The third Ulsterman contesting Cet’s claim is Éogan mac Durthacht. Cet met him earlier on a cattleraid and had thrown back his spear, putting out one of Éogan’s eyes, a variant on the spear-and-hand motif. Again, the injury and insult are compounded by the use of the warrior’s own weapon. Now Muinremur (one of the trio of dark men seen in Togail Bruidne Da Derga) tries to challenge Cet’s possession of the pig but is reminded that less than a week earlier, Cet had taken four Connacht heads, including that of Muinremur’s first-born son. Incidents have escalated to the death of a family member, progeny now replacing parts of the body and its scarification. The continuance of a family line is at stake. The next encounter involves both family and the lasting evidence of wounds: “In comram beus!” ol Cet. “Rot-bia són,” ol Mend mac Sálchada. “Cía so?” ol Cet. “Mend,” ol cach. “Cid ane,” ol Cet, “meic na mbachlach cusna lesanmannaib do chomram cucum? Ar ba mese ba sacart oc baistiud ind

39

Scéla Mucce Mac Dathó, ed. Rudolf Thurneysen (Dublin: DIAS, 1935), par. 8, ll. 4–6.

490

Sayers

anma-sin for a athair, messe thall a sáil de co claidiub conna-ruc acht oínchois úaim. Cid do-bérad mac ind oínchoisseda cucumsa?”40 [“On with the contest!” said Cet. “You will have that,” said Mend son of Salchad. “Who is this?”, asked Cet. “Mend son of Salchad,” said everyone. “What next!” said Cet. “Now sons of herdsmen with nicknames are challenging me. I am the priest who baptized your father with that name, for I struck his heel with my sword so that he took but one foot away. What could bring the son of a one-footed man to challenge me?”]41 In this episode, after the formulaic challenge and response, Mend scarcely has the opportunity to establish himself verbally. Cet cuts off his name as given by onlookers and now for the first time makes a socially demeaning reference – to a herdsman father with a dishonorable nickname. Then he ironically moves to the other end of the social scale and identifies himself as the priest at this (anachronistic) baptism. Another sobriquet is named, a new weapon is mentioned, and Cet continues his catalogue of parts of the body. There is the further vignette of Mend’s father retreating on one foot from Cet, the foot wound itself suggesting an attempt at flight. The entire scene is summarized in the last four Irish words, “‘mac ind oínchoisseda cucumsa?’” [“son of a onefooter against me?”]. The grey and ugly Celtchair mac Uithechair is the next Ulster champion. He, too, had exchanged spear thrusts with Cet, who had pierced his thighs and testicles, thus depriving him of further sons and daughters, a variation on the earlier motif of a son killed, and leaving him incontinent like an aged man. Celtchair has been unmanned by Cet. Cet’s penultimate contestant is Cúscraid Mend Macha, son of King Conchobar, marking a social escalation. But he, too, had been maimed by Cet’s spear, which pierced his throat, leaving him with a speech defect (mend “stammerer”). Thus, the sequence of refutations appears to end appropriately with Cet besting an opponent who cannot even compete verbally. This physical blemish – a head wound – would also disqualify Cúscraid from any future claim on the kingship, although sons did not normally succeed royal fathers in early Ireland. These seven confrontations between Cet and the Ulstermen move on ideological spectra from active warrior initiation to impotent old age, from base social condition to the kingship, from foot to head, from wound to stump and scar. Here, too, the tripartite cosmos is imminent, in the discrete eye (head), arm (upper body), and leg (lower body) references. Their 40 41

Scéla Mucce Mac Dathó, par. 12. The Tale of Macc Dá Tho’s Pig, in Early Irish Myths and Sagas, 179–187, at 184.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

491

sum is the complete human body, in the form of both the warrior and his progeny – or lack thereof. The contention in the Irish tale concludes with the appearance of the Ulster hero Conall Cernach, a late arrival in the hall. This dialogic match-up is structured more elaborately than earlier face-offs and opens with ironically menacing compliments instead of insults. Unlike the preceding examples of flyting or the ritual pre-battle exchange of insults, Cet and Conall do not recall the past, earlier wounds suffered or scars and disfigurements now borne, but create a different tension in the tale by looking to the future and the heat of battle, not to its further outcomes. After each warrior’s brief statement on the other’s prowess, Conall’s prediction to Cet, in the obscurantist poetic style called rosc, is as follows: “Bid menn innar n-imchomruc-ni ón,” ol Conall, “ocus bid menn inar n-imscarad; bid airscéla la fer mbrot, bid fíadnaise la fer manath; ar ar·cichset airg loman londgliaid na da err eblait écht ar écht, regaid fer dar fer is”taig-seo innocht.” 42 [“That (the right to the champion’s portion) will become clear at our meeting,” said Conall, “and it will be clear at our parting. It will be a famous tale for the man of goads, it will be a testimony for the man of (incised) pegs. The two chariot fighters will advance to difficulty, harsh battle of spear-shafts. They will perform violent deed for violent deed, man will go over man, in this house tonight.”]43 The “man of goads” may be a reference to the charioteers who drove heroes to staged battles or may mean “man of incitations,” thus someone who goads a warrior to battle, whether through praise or satirical comment. Similarly, the “man of pegs” may reflect the story-telling convention of deeds of battle being recorded on wooden rods or tablets. In either case, the important dimension of communal memory, deeds of the past living on in both casual gossip and literarily finished tales, is singled out as central to the warrior’s reputation, as scars would be. The exchange concludes with Cet prepared to cede the pig to Conall as the better man, yet he regrets that his brother Anlúan is not there to contest the issue. But he is, retorts Conall, and throws Anlúan’s severed head down on the 42 43

Scéla Mucce Mac Dathó, par. 15. The author’s translation; see William Sayers, “Conall’s Welcome to Cet in Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó,” Florilegium 4 (1982): 100‑08.

492

Sayers

table. Stumps and scars, slurs and memories are forgotten in the immediacy of the bloodied severed head. The multiple reversals in this section of the tale – eulogy instead of scorn, Conall and Ulster dominating Cet and Connacht, the reference to the better brother and his shocking appearance on the scene – mark the climax of the story, since the preceding episodes are much of a kind and thus only cumulative in effect.44 In the hostel, Conall now carves the pig, shares out the pieces (in miserly fashion to the Connachtmen), and the expected general mêlée follows to wind up the story. Ulster comes off best in the conflict, but Mac Dathó’s prized war-dog, which had been the real object of contention before the pig, is killed and King Conchobar himself is humiliated. Thus, despite the outcome of the series of verbal confrontations focused on wounds and severed body parts, the events are, in the larger political context, inconclusive. The Ulster heroes who suffer ignominy at Cet’s hands are not permanently diminished in the larger epic corpus, as shown by references in other tales. Cet’s recollections, like the scars borne by the targets of his scorn, simply point to the fact that few warriors are constant winners. In a heroic society, honor is at stake in every social interaction, including single combat, and the individual’s relative status in society is constantly being renegotiated – tonight’s top dog is tomorrow’s cur. A rather similar situation, illustrative of how sensitive was the issue of battlefield performance and its consequences, is found in one of the anecdotes about Finn mac Cumaill preserved in Acallam na Senórach. Finn has been obliged by the conventions of hospitality to accept an intoxicating drink of mead: Ocus ba geis do Fhind fled d’ obu. Ocus ro gab Find in cuach & at-ibestar digh as, & iar n-ól na dighi dó ro mesc-buaidred h-é annsin, & tucastar a aighed ar in Féin, & cach olcc & cach ainim & cach lén catha do fhitir ar cach fer don Fhéind ro thubh ina aghaid leisin meisce tuc in ingen fair (Acallam, 4961–65). [Immediately he went mad. He turned to the fían and anything he knew of crime, fault or lapse in battle concerning every man in the fían, he

44

For a fuller discussion of such serial defamations, see: William Sayers, “Serial Defamation in Two Medieval Tales: Icelandic Ölkofra þáttr and Irish Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó,” Oral Tradition 6 (1991): 35–57. On the satirical content of the repartee, see further: Ailís Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, “Satirical Narrative in Early Irish Literature” (Ph.D. dissertation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2007).

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

493

flung in their faces, what with the drunkenness that the woman had brought upon him.]45 Predictably, the men desert Finn. Revivifying the scars of the past through speech and attempting to overwhelm denial and willful memory loss is a risky business. Fatal wounds easily become the stuff of storytelling, but in Ireland they played an important role in the organization of topography, the fallen giving their names to the sites of battle, injury-generating toponymy. In the tale Bruiden Da Choca (Da Choca’s Hostel), the concluding battle about the hostel includes this item, one of many: Di-cer Dub ⁊ Coibden Cuindsclech, dá mac Lámfhata, dá bráthair di Loiníach, la Dubthach occus la Illann mac Fergusa hi Crúaich Duib, conid úaide ráiter Duibthír occus Tír Coibden. [Dub and Coibden Cuinnsclech, the two sons of Lámfhata, two brothers of Loiníach, fell by Dubthach and Illann son of Fergus at Crúach Dub, and it is from this that Duibthír and Tír Coibden are named. [t(h)ír = “land”)].46 Landscape could bear scars of its own, from floods and loch eruptions during the “formative” period of the legendary history of the very land of Ireland, which was always closely aligned with the history of its people.47 Recalling the sorcerer Úath mac Imomain, “Terror, son of Fear,” we might entertain the collocation Crécht mac Gene, “Scar, son of Wound.” With the exception of the special situation created in Scéla Mucce Mac Dathó, scars are much less the matter of literature than wounds, as events and bodily injuries in real time always trump their later but continuing corporeal record. In the warrior culture of the early Middle Ages, real-life wounds would have been ubiquitous and thus banal, pain only personal and thus inconsequential. If a provisional distinction is made in English vocabulary between generalized injuries and the wounds of battle, the trauma of literature and storytelling – physical or psychological, real, symbolic, or threatened, transient, disfiguring, or fatal – are suffered only by the warrior. Such literary wounds and their 45 46 47

Joseph Falaky Nagy, “Keeping the Acallam Together,” in The Gaelic Finn Tradition, 111–21, at 114. Bruiden Da Choca, 116–117. Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland, ed. and trans. R.A. Stewart Macalister, 4 vols. (Dublin: ITS, 1938–56).

494

Sayers

epidermal traces, less real but more fraught, always signify, yet signify ambiguously. While the gash on the buttocks invites a different third-party explanation than the slash on the cheek, only story can create aesthetically satisfying and quasi-logical significance. Each wound bears witness, as seen in the verbal contention between Cet and the Ulstermen, and subsequently has a history that may be preserved in the archive of communal memory or in praise poems with a propagandistic agenda, even in satirical verse recalled with relish. But stories age and are transformed, just as wounds heal into scars and these scars become even more unreliable narrators of past events. Still, the visible scar is always a prompt to memory, and wounds and their consequences are always seen through the prism of honor. Their originating circumstances are always relevant and pertinent: who dealt the blow, when and why, and to which part of the body? Wounds generate artful stories and poems but art also creates wounds, such as the telltale, self-condemnatory facial blemishes raised by satire. In the final analysis, pre-battle panic and post-battle dishonor are more to be feared than the mere physical wounds that battle may bring. In a society where a majority of people bore the traces of accident, disease, injury, maltreatment, or malnourishment, the notion of disability, as conceived in today’s discourse of public policy, could not have been an operative category. Nor would the demographic slice of the impaired have been sufficiently narrow for stigmatization to occur. Compared to battle wounds, simple physical incapacitation might have been borne socially much more easily and, consequently, does not figure in literature. On the asset, not deficit, side of the scale, post-traumatic competencies would have varied and been recognized in terms of longer-term outcomes. The one-legged warrior might just succeed as a well-married, propertied farmer. Yet for the warrior of epic tales and members of other privileged classes, such as kings, poets, and historians, the social dimension of the wound as a determinant of honor and physical integrity, crucial for effective royal rule and professional function, was paramount. Deconstructive in real life, wounds are the very makings of epic literature, and scars are their close-mouthed, echoic voices. In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach singles out Ulysses’s boyhood scar, recognized by his old nurse, as an exemplary detail of realistic narrative.48 But, if the scar assures recognition in the Odyssey, in early Irish literature, it may also betray a past that the hero would prefer to forget but cannot slough off. Anticipating Shem of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, who writes his story on his own skin, the warrior’s body is a parchment stretched before his opponents, awaiting the inscription of their 48

Erich Auerbach, “Die Narbe des Odysseus,” in Mimesis; dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 3rd ed. (Bern: Francke, 1946), ch. 1, 5–27.

The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

495

combat history and his. Wounds have a life coincident with heroic glory: “For not one man of three of the men of Ireland escaped without his thigh-bone or the side of his head or one eye being broken or without being marked for life.”49 49

“Ar nír érno in tres fer do feraib Hérend cen chnáim lessi nó lethchind nó lethsúil do brisiud nó cen bithanim tria bithu betha;” these are the effects of Cú Chulainn’s rampage in the section of Táin bó Cúailgne called “Breslech Mór Maige Muirthemne,” Táin bó Cúailgne, ll. 2330–32.

496

Tracy

Chapter 21

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur Larissa Tracy Terrible wounds are not uncommon in the corpus of Arthurian literature. Knights are frequently run-through, hacked to pieces, and bashed about the head and shoulders, often with little or no consequence, but some wounds have grave consequences for knights and the realm they defend. Beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie (c. 1138), head wounds emphasize the strength and prowess of the warrior who delivers the blow and the gravity of the wound for the knight who receives it.1 Joseph Sullivan argues that head trauma is one of the most “prevalent loci of physical violence” in medieval literature and that in Arthurian romance specifically it advances the plot, “heightens the emotional atmosphere and helps establish the identity” of the characters.2 Throughout the corpus, Gawain is almost always killed by a series of head wounds, but Lancelot and Arthur usually do not suffer such a wound. They are most often wounded in the side, evoking a comparison with the final spear wound of Christ during the crucifixion. However, the poet of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur (c. 1400) frequently inflicts head wounds with varying degrees of severity on his knights as they duel, battle or joust, deviating from his French source and English analogues. In the Stanzaic Morte (Stanzaic), several of the wounds are head wounds delivered through the helmet into the skull. However, few are fatal (or even debilitating) until the very end, when they simply seem to catalogue carnage. Despite the profusion of non-lethal head wounds in the Stanzaic, the three consequential head wounds – those of Lancelot (who recovers after a long convalescence that drives the entire plot), 1 See: Siân Echard, “‘But here Geoffrey falls silent’: Death, Arthur and the Historia regum Britannie,” in The Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and K.S. Whetter, Arthurian Studies 74 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), 17–32. 2 Joseph Sullivan, “Smashing Pumpkins: Violence to the Head in Selected Middle High German, Old French, Scandinavian, Middle Dutch and Middle English Arthurian Romances” (paper delivered at the 23rd Congress of the International Arthurian Society, University of Bristol, 25–30 July 2011). I am grateful to Dr. Sullivan for sending me his talk, and I am deeply indebted to Jeff Massey and Kevin Whetter for their comments on early drafts of this essay.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_023

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

497

Gawain (who dies because of repeated blows to the same spot on his head), and Arthur (whose fatal head wound is delivered by Mordred) – foreshadow the destruction of Arthur’s realm. The way these three wounds mark the increasing destabilization and debilitation of Arthur’s kingship has both historical as well as literary contexts. Written at the end of the fourteenth century, the Stanzaic condemns the rash violence among those sworn to be loyal to one another by locating that violence at the seat of superbia (Pride),3 the core of reason, and the symbol of political rule – the head. By striking at the head – the king and his most trusted knights – the poet criticizes the kingship of Richard II (1377–1399) weakened by the rebellion of barons, warning against tyranny in a poignant reflection of late fourteenth-century political turmoil that ultimately ended in usurpation. The Stanzaic,4 a condensed version of the French prose La Mort Artu (Mort), the final work in the thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail Cycle,5 recounts the fall of the Round Table, the dissolution of Arthur’s fellowship, and all the events leading up to those cataclysmic events in a “lean and rapid narrative” that “gains force” because of its more obvious focus upon the actions of Arthur’s knights rather than their psychological abstractions.6 It is often juxtaposed with the Middle English Alliterative Morte Arthur (Alliterative), though the alliterative text more closely follows the Arthurian chronicle tradition based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, rather than the later romances. Both poems are usually dated around 1400, though there is no certainty in either case. Nevertheless, the questions of kingship in the Stanzaic reflect concerns of the second half of the fourteenth century, and the poem may well have been written in the later years of Richard II’s reign. The Stanzaic only survives in London, British Library, Harley MS 2252 (fols. 86a–133b), which is listed in the British Library catalogue as an alchemical text and is known to scholars as John 3 Sullivan, “Smashing Pumpkins,” 3. See also: Joannes Norman, Metamorphoses of an Allegory: The Iconography of the Psychomachia in Medieval Art (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988). 4 All textual citations of the Stanzaic are from Le Morte D’Arthur: A Critical Edition, ed. P.F. Hissiger (Paris: Mouton, 1975). Line numbers are given in parentheses. Citations of the Alliterative are from Morte Arthure, ed. Edmund Brock, EETS os 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1871, rptd. 1961). 5 La Mort le Roi Artu: Roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean Frappier (Paris: Droz, 1936, rptd. 1996). Paragraph and line numbers are given in parentheses. A full English translation is available in From Camelot to Joyous Guard: The Old French La Mort Roi Artu, trans. J. Neale Carman, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1974). 6 Larry D. Benson, ed., introduction to King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, rev. Edward E. Foster, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1994), 1–7, at 2.

498

Tracy

Colyns’ “Boke” or the “Commonplace Book of John Colyns” after its owner and compiler.7 The manuscript is an interesting collection of political and medical texts centered around the Stanzaic and another romance, Ipomydon B. The two romances are older than the rest of the early sixteenth-century manuscript, having been copied sometime in the late fifteenth century.8 Carole Weinberg explains that the poem subtly critiques Lancelot and Arthurian chivalry, celebrating the chivalric ideals of love and loyalty while simultaneously presenting them as divisive and destructive forces.9 The Stanzaic is often neglected and dismissed by critics as simple and populist,10 but the sophisticated stanzaic form where groups of stanzas are paralleled or contrasted with others later in the poem creates an intertextuality that gives the poem greater depth.11 The Stanzaic-poet places his narrative “within a recognizable chivalric world, while manipulating the conventional diction in such a way as to scrutinize the chivalric ideals it normally conveys.”12 The poem captures the essence of English identity in its adaptation of French romance. The Arthur of the Stanzaic is a sympathetic figure, brought low by human failings, his own mistakes, and the treachery of those closest to him. As Edward Donald Kennedy points out, the construction of Arthur in the Stanzaic is “considerably different” from that of the French source; the changes the “English author made in his character reflect a different attitude toward Arthur in England than an author would be likely to consider in adapting a French romance.”13 The Arthur of the English tradition is flawed, and is weakened by the vengeance and rebellion of his knights, but he is not as weak a king as the Arthur of the French tradition.14 The Arthur of the Mort blindly pursues 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

14

See: Carol M. Meale, “London, British Library, Harley MS 2252, John Colyns’ ‘Boke’: Structure and Content,” in Tudor Manuscripts 1485–1603, ed. A.S.G. Edwards (London: The British Library, 2009), 65–122; and (accessed 9 Jan. 2013). See: Carole Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” in The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature, ed. W.R.J. Barron (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001 rptd. 2011), 100–11. Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 100. Benson, Introduction, 4. Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 101. Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 101. Edward Donald Kennedy, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur: The Adaptation of a French Romance for an English Audience,” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 91–112, at 91. Kennedy, “The Stanzaic,” 91.

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

499

personal vengeance – outraged and irrational – with no thought for the damage done to his realm. But the Arthur in the Stanzaic is “keenly aware of the danger to the realm when personal and political imperatives collide,”15 and tries to avoid conflict whenever possible. He places his concerns for his kingdom above his personal desires. The changes the Stanzaic author makes in Arthur’s character may have been shaped by contemporary political theory, particularly in Arthur’s reliance upon counsel which could be a reflection of the poet’s “concern with both speculum regis literature and late fourteenth century politics.”16 As such, the Stanzaic may serve as kingly instruction, a mirror for princes, a warning against foreign wars and family feuds that ultimately destroy an otherwise honorable king. Kennedy writes that the Stanzaic-poet makes Arthur into a better king, retaining “most of the favorable traits of Arthur’s character in the French Mort (commitment to justice, love for Lancelot, regret concerning the war against him) and removes many of the unfavorable ones.”17 By presenting Arthur as a king who takes advice from his nobles, consistent with medieval kings who followed the speculum regis literature like the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum, Aegidius Romanus’ De Regimine Principum, the Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee (the last two written specifically for Richard II), the poet argues that Arthur acts as “one might expect an English king to act.”18 In this way, the poet removes some of the responsibility for the final tragedy and the fall of the kingdom from Arthur19 and places it more squarely on the ambitions of family members who subvert the king’s trust and orchestrate his overthrow. While it is impossible to know exactly when and under what circumstances the Stanzaic was written, the emphasis on heroic tragedy, the paradoxes of just warfare that leads to utter destruction, and the seemingly desperate desire to maintain the values of kingship through betrayal and vengeance echo the political instability of the later fourteenth century. These aspects of the English text clearly had an effect on later audiences and authors who saw the same cycle of foreign warfare and civil war repeated in the fifteenth century. In this context, several critics have analyzed the political aspects of Thomas Malory’s

15 16 17 18 19

Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 107. Kennedy, “The Stanzaic,” 93. Kennedy, “The Stanzaic,” 97. Kennedy, “The Stanzaic,” 98–9. Cf. Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 106, 110. Kennedy, “The Stanzaic,” 98–9.

500

Tracy

Morte Darthur (c. 1471).20 Lisa Robeson writes that the episodes of civil war in Malory that culminate in the “mutual destruction of Arthur and his son Mordred reveal an abnormal picture of kingship as well as a flawed father-son relationship.”21 K.S. Whetter cautions against reading too many direct historical allusions in Malory’s work, but draws parallels between the complexity of warfare in the Morte Darthur and in Malory’s time, especially as it concerned Malory himself, “valens miles as well as knight, thief, prisoner, prison-breaker, and author.”22 Much of what critics say regarding the political points in Malory can also be applied to the Stanzaic, one of his sources for the last part of his Morte Darthur. Karen Cherewatuk and Whetter draw comparisons between the political agenda of Malory and his source material. They write that Malory, and quite possibly the author of the Stanzaic, follow the greater tragic emphasis of the French Post-Vulgate cycle by “highlighting human error and basic mischance as well as fortune in securing Arthur’s fall,” rather than stressing Arthur’s sins and the incest that produces Mordred which is a major component of the French Arthurian tradition, including the Post-Vulgate cycle.23 The English texts such as the Stanzaic, the Alliterative, and Malory cast the Middle English Arthur as a “strong king and proficient warrior, even if those qualities are not, in the end, sufficient to prevent his death.”24 In fact, the poet’s changes in the Stanzaic to the final scenes of Arthur’s death give “the impression that much that happens is due to the more chaotic force of chance or accident.”25 But as Beverly Kennedy points out regarding Malory, Arthur and his best knights certainly bear some of the responsibility for the dissolution of the fellowship and the fall of the kingdom: “If the reader examines the actions of Arthur, Gawain and Lancelot solely within the worldly context of politics and governance and solely from the pragmatic and rationalist point of view, then it becomes apparent that Arthur’s reign ended in catastrophe because of a judi-

20

21 22

23 24 25

References to Malory’s text are from The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3rd edition, rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford: Clarendon 1990). Volume, book, page and line numbers are given in parentheses. Lisa Robeson, “Malory and the Death of Kings: The Politics of Regicide at Salisbury Plain,” in The Arthurian Way of Death, ed. Cherewatuk and Whetter, 136–150, at 137. K.S. Whetter, “Warfare and Combat in Le Morte Darthur,” in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 169–86, at 183. Karen Cherewatuk and K.S. Whetter, introduction to The Arthurian Way of Death, ed. Cherewatuk and Whetter, 1–14, at 6. Cherewatuk and Whetter, Introduction, 5–6. Kennedy, “The Stanzaic,” 100.

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

501

cial crisis for which all three men are partly to blame.”26 The Stanzaic-poet makes a similar argument reinforced by the repeated motif of head wounds and their increasing severity. The wound that Lancelot receives in “play” is juxtaposed with Gawain’s multiple wounds inflicted by Lancelot in earnest that do not have time to heal properly, and Arthur’s one fatal wound that does not receive treatment in time to prevent his death. The story is well known. The Stanzaic records the common events of Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere, her spite, his dismissal from court, the love and death of the fair Maid of Astolat, the accusation of murder leveled against Guinevere, her trial, Lancelot’s rescue, the revelation of their adultery, and the fractured bonds of fellowship as Gawain seeks revenge for the death of his brothers. In adapting the French source, however, the Stanzaic-poet makes certain additions, not only rehabilitating Arthur’s character, but situating the poem within an English context and speaking directly to the concerns of English justice and good governance.27 Most obviously, the poet uses head wounds as a metaphor for debilitated rule – when Lancelot and Gawain are incapacitated by their head wounds, the kingdom is weakened and Arthur’s rule is destabilized; when Arthur suffers a head wound, he dies and the kingdom is destroyed.28 Significantly, the first consequential head wound – one that merits more than a mere mention before the action moves on – is inflicted upon Lancelot whose loyalty to the king never wavers on the field, but is compromised by his affair with Guinevere. This wound does not kill Lancelot, but it is severe enough to require several months convalescence. While he is Arthur’s greatest knight (second perhaps to Gawain in the English tradition), his love for the Queen precipitates the destruction of the kingdom. Whetter argues that the Stanzaicpoet emphasizes various types of love between the central characters in this tragedy. He writes that the poet uses love “in all its guises,” emphasizing “the 26

27

28

Beverly Kennedy, “Gawain and Heroic Knighthood in Malory,” in Gawain: A Casebook, ed. Raymond H. Thompson and Keith Busby (New York: Routledge, 2006), 287–95, at 292. Cf. Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992), 277. According to Richard W. Kaeuper, Matter of England romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries “show a consistent fascination with political arrangements and a concern for good royal governance grounded in law.” Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, rptd. 2001), 114. For further information on the head as metaphor for the body politic in the Middle Ages see: Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey, eds., Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2012), and Catrien Santing, Barbara Baert, and Anita Traninger, eds. Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

502

Tracy

essential nobility of Arthurian heroes and the bond that exists between not merely Lancelot and Guinevere, but Lancelot and Arthur, Arthur and Guinevere, and, perhaps most trenchantly, between Lancelot and Gawain.”29 Love leads to death through a series of head wounds that get successively worse as the narrative progresses, each of which delivers a lasting blow to the realm. At the very beginning of the Stanzaic, Guinevere warns Arthur that the honor of the court is waning, proposing a tournament which will spark a series of events – and inflict a series of wounds – that cut deeply into the flesh of Arthurian kingship. In the French text, the tournament is Arthur’s idea (3.38– 42), but the Stanzaic-poet changes it so that Guinevere’s concern reflects her love for her husband, but also “her platonic love of the knightly fellowship as a whole.”30 Of course, Guinevere will become one of the primary reasons for the fall of the Round Table, but, at the beginning, she is interested in preserving the renown and reputation of her husband’s kingdom, urging him to assert himself as king and as a commander (21–8). As a display of royal and marital prowess, tournaments were a recognizable feature of fourteenth-century life. At varying times in English history, tournaments were outlawed. In the twelfth century, both Henry I and Henry II banned them, but Henry II’s son, Richard I, brought them back so that English knights could practice and train to be more effective warriors.31 Edward III made them a regular fixture during his reign (1327– 1377).32 Malory reflects this tradition in his adaptation where there are many bloody tournaments among friends.33 The tournament, proposed for altruistic reasons, sets the pieces of destruction in motion. With the progression of each severe head wound – Lancelot, Gawain, and Arthur – the poet admonishes 29

30 31 32 33

K.S. Whetter, “Love and Death in Arthurian Romance,” in The Arthurian Way of Death, ed. Cherewatuk and Whetter, 94–114, at 106–7. Weinberg further argues that in their “destructive effect upon the social and political cohesion of the realm, the actions of individuals of good faith are undifferentiated from those perpetrated by individuals of bad faith” (“The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 109). Those who act honorably and those who act treacherously are equally responsible for the destruction of the realm. Whetter, “Love and Death,” 104. Helen Nicholson, Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe 300–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 118. Richard Barber, Edward III and the Triumph of England (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 149. Whetter, “Warfare and Combat,” 169. Similarly, the Stanzaic-poet turns the Grail Quest into “a successful earthly adventure” at the beginning of the poem, rather than the spiritual failure it is in the French Mort Artu (Whetter, “Love and Death,” 108). As a result, Arthur and his knights are portrayed as victims of circumstance, caught up in human error and their own failings, rather than malicious or deliberate tyranny.

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

503

weakness, but does not condemn the king for malice or evil; he is simply a good man brought down by innate weakness, human frailty, and the treachery of others. Having left the court at Guinevere’s urging in order to avoid the trap set for them by Agravain, Lancelot fights in Arthur’s tournament in disguise. Arthur inquires about the knight’s identity to Ewain, and the poet makes a damning pronouncement on the entire idea of fighting in disguise as a prelude to Ewain’s answer: “That ay is hende is not to hyde” (110). Whatever is genteel should not be hidden, according to the Stanzaic-poet, suggesting that Lancelot’s behavior is duplicitous at best and that it will precipitate the tragic events that destroy Arthur’s kingdom. While Arthur praises Lancelot, whom he recognizes by his sword-stroke as the best knight in all the world, “Off biaute and of bounte, / And sithe is none so moche of myght, / At every dede beste is he” (125–7), the poet criticizes Lancelot’s desire to remain anonymous. Arthur and Ewain respect his wish and say nothing, while Lancelot joins the company of the Lord of Ascolot. He maintains his ruse: “His name ganne he hele and hyde, / And sayd he was a strange knight” (143–4). While Lancelot is still portrayed in a generally positive light, the tone of the Stanzaic is often reproachful. Edward Donald Kennedy argues that the particular emphasis on the treasonous nature of the Guinevere/Lancelot affair in the Stanzaic, rather than on its immorality, suggests that in addition to contemporary political views, the poet was influenced by the “politically motivated chronicles which stress Mordred and Guinevere’s treason against Arthur.”34 Their affair, like Mordred’s betrayal, strike at the heart of Arthur’s kingship, but it is the damage done by the head wounds that will sever it. In short, Lancelot fights on behalf of Lord Ascolot’s son, in the novice armor of his other son who has fallen ill, having enraptured (unintentionally) the lord’s daughter in the process. He tries to be courteous to her, entreating her not to make herself sick for his sake, since his heart belongs to another. She is mollified only by his promise to wear her sleeve in the tournament, which he has never done for any woman before (except one). During the tournament, Lancelot decides to help Galahad’s men in any way he can, striking Ewain “with mekill mayne” (269), unhorsing him “so was he woundyd wondyr sare” (272), though not enough to describe in further detail, or do him any lasting damage. Bors attacks Lancelot for this, and Lancelot “hytte hym on the hode; / The nexte way to ground he chese” (277–8). Sir Lionel is next: “Launcelott hitte hym, as I wene, / Throughe the helme into þe crowne” (286–7), so that both man and horse go down. The knights are astonished at the prowess of this 34

Kennedy, “The Stanzaic,” 92. Cf. Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 108–9.

504

Tracy

unknown knight, arguing that if it were not for the lady’s sleeve upon his crest, they would think it were Lancelot. Ector senses a charade because “‘Off Ascolot he nevyr was / That thus welle beris hym today” (297–8). He gallops into the fray and meets Lancelot, smiting him through “helme into his hede it yode / That nighe loste he all his pride” (305–6). Lancelot returns the blow in like manner, hitting him “on the hood / That his hors felle and he besyde” (309–10). This head wound is original to the Stanzaic; in the Mort, Lancelot is pierced through the side (19.26–30),35 paralleling Arthur’s fatal wound at the end. Ector falls, but there is no mention of whether he actually suffers any injury. While this sequence of heads wounds delivered through the helmet and into the skull seem dire, only Lancelot’s has lasting consequence and causes serious harm – not only physical injury to Lancelot himself, but political injury to Arthur that will bring down his kingdom. The first indication of the seriousness of Lancelot’s wound is the effusion of blood, which blinds Lancelot enough that “Oute of the feld full faste gan ride” (312). None of the other head wounds appear to have drawn blood, though medically speaking they would have. But the poet omits any mention of that bloodshed, minimizing the effects of those wounds. Only Lancelot bleeds profusely. He and the Lord of Ascolot’s son ride into the forest where they evaluate the severity of Lancelot’s wound: Off his helme he takis thore. “Sir,” he sayd, “me is full woo; I drede that ye be hurte full sore.” “Nay,” [Lancelot] sayd, “it is not so, But fayne at rest I wold we were.” (316–20) Protesting that it is only a flesh wound, Lancelot nevertheless agrees to be treated by the boy’s aunt: “‘She wolle us helpe with all hyr might, / And send for lechis this ylke tyde, / Youre woundis for to hele and dight’” (324–6). The poet takes time from the martial action of the narrative to emphasize 35

“einz le fiert si durement de toute sa force d’un glaive et fort et roide qu’il li perce l’escu et le hauberk, et li met el costé destre le fer de son glaive, et si li fet plaie grant et parfonde” (19.26–30) [instead, he struck him so hard and mightily with a strong stiff spear that he pierced shield and hauberk, and put his spear tip into his right side, and made a great, deep wound there] (Carman, From Camelot, 12). In Malory, Lancelot is also wounded in the side, though Malory’s version of Arthur’s death follows the Stanzaic – he is killed by a blow to the head into his brain. Mordred smote him “upon the syde of the hede, that the swerde perced the helmet and the tay of the brayne” (3.1237.20–1).

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

505

the grievousness of Lancelot’s wound and the medical care that he receives. The aunt sends for doctors from near and far, but Lancelot takes a turn for the worse: But by the morow that it was day, In bed he might hymself not wend, So sore woundyd there he lay That well nighe had he sought his end. (333–6) In Malory’s account of politics and knighthood in the Morte Darthur, Lancelot is “most responsible for the stability of Arthur’s governance.”36 This is also largely true for the Stanzaic. In the Stanzaic, when Lancelot is incapacitated by the head wound that nearly kills him (delivered by his fellow who does not recognize him), and requires a long convalescence during which no one knows where he is, Arthur’s fellowship is threatened and the stability of the realm begins to fragment as knights go search for him. The Stanzaic-poet focuses on the medical procedure for treating Lancelot’s wound, highlighting the possibility for very real injury in tournaments and the proud foolishness of knights who insist on competing even when they are not fit to do so. While Lancelot is unconscious and recuperating, Arthur sends word through “Yngland for to fare” (347) that he will hold another tournament in a month, but he acknowledges the physical cost to this particular knight: “‘This knight wolle be here nere besyde, / For he is woundyd bitterlye’” (343–4). One of the heralds ends up at the castle where Lancelot is convalescing and Lancelot insists upon getting up and joining the fray. The doctor, quite correctly, attempts to put his foot down: “Syr, what have ye thought? All the crafte that I have done, I wene it wille you helpe right noght. There is no man undir the mone, By Hym þat all this world hath wroght, Might save youre lyffe to that tyme come That ye upon your stede were brought.” (369–75) Because Lancelot is so severely wounded, when he insists on leaving against the doctor’s advice (a rather foolish decision), his wound opens, the blood 36

Beverly Kennedy, “Gawain,” 293. Kennedy categorizes Lancelot as a “True” knight, in contrast to Gawain’s portrayal as a “Heroic” knight (Knighthood, 98–147).

506

Tracy

flows freely, and he faints three times (382–3). His collapse foreshadows the three times Arthur swoons from his fatal head wound at the end (3399). This wound is deeper than Lancelot realizes because it penetrates to the very dura mater of Arthurian – and English – kingship. The doctor has left in protest, but is recalled by Lord Ascolot’s son who offers him “yiftis good” (388) to stay and treat Lancelot. The skilled physician starts over: “Craftely than staunchid he his blode / And of good comforte bad hym be” (390–1). The Stanzaic-poet exhibits a serious concern for the proper medical treatment of these wounds – healing the body of the best knight of the realm in an attempt to heal the rifts in the kingdom that his wounding has begun to open before they can expand. This fearful wounding and Lancelot’s incapacity to recover from it immediately (as all the other knights seem to do) weaken the knight but strengthen the brotherhood, at least for a time. The herald returns to Arthur’s court and reports on this “folyd knight” (402) who “in his bed lay woundid sore. / He myght not heve his hede upright” (403–4), and how, out of anguish that he could not ride, tried to rise and “alle his woundis scryved were” (407). Ewain, who earlier had realized that this knight is Lancelot, laments that the knight is not well and whole to fight in the tournament and urges Arthur to call the whole thing off. Arthur does, and all the other knights scatter “his owne way hym chese” (419), foreshadowing the dissolution of the knightly fellowship that is to come with the progression of debilitating, even fatal, head wounds. During his long recovery, the maid of Ascolot falls more deeply in love with Lancelot, which will lead to her death and Guinevere’s dismissal of Lancelot. When Bors and Lionel are reunited with Lancelot at Ascolot’s castle, the poet pauses, turning his attention again to Lancelot’s head wound. The wound is a means of discovery because it marks Lancelot as the disguised knight who fought so well in the tournament. Bors, the wound preying on his mind, inquires where Lancelot received such a blow (466–7). Lancelot responds, swearing that it will be dearly bought, not realizing that he has just sworn vengeance against Ector (470–1). These impetuous oaths foreshadow the breaking of bonds between Lancelot and Gawain when Gawain receives the first two of his three head wounds at Lancelot’s hands – even though it is not Lancelot’s blow that ultimately kills him. Ector “ne liked that no wight, / The wordis that he herd there; / For sorow he loste both strength and might” (472–4). Lancelot realizes that it is Ector who wounded him, though Ector answers innocently that he did not know it was Lancelot when he returned the blow. Lionel, realizing that Lancelot had also wounded him exclaims, “‘myne wolle sene be evyrmore’” (487). This notion of the bodily echo of wounds parallels Gawain’s remark in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that he will bear the “bende of þis

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

507

blame” [blazon of the blemish] (2506)37 on his neck forever, as well as the medieval belief that wounds were inscribed on the body even after death.38 This verbal comparison of wounds – a wound exchange of sorts – reassures these knights that there is no cowardice in being wounded, no shame in taking a potentially lethal blow from a fellow knight, as long as it is a knight of great reputation. But Bors, a knight “wise was undir wede” (489) recognizes the gravity of these wounds and the potentially deadly consequences. He remarks that “I hope þat none of us was quite; I had oon þat to ground I yede. Sir, your brodyr shall ye not wite. Now knowes either others dede; Now know ye how Ector can smyte, To helpe you whan ye have nede.” (490–5) Lancelot’s response is to laugh and assure Ector that he will be “bothe hole and quite” (499) and though Ector wounded him sorely, he will never blame him for it but value him more, knowing how strong he is and capable of delivering such a blow. However, his wound leaves a lasting impression on the fellowship of the Round Table. This wound that marks Lancelot is the catalyst that drives the narrative into the final cataclysm. The Stanzaic-poet emphasizes the deadly potential of chivalric violence, arguing that knights who seek unnecessary battle, and kings like Arthur who perpetuate these meaningless spectacles of combat prowess, will lose either their fellowship and perhaps their life, or else their men and their throne. While kings had to be successful in warfare in order to retain their throne,39 there were limits to how much warfare a populace was willing to take. Arthurian stories held a certain realism for medieval audiences who did not see them as entirely or necessarily fictional.40 Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–c. 1480), the early-fifteenth century jurist and author of the 37

38

39 40

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, 2nd ed. rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967). Line numbers are given in parentheses. The modern English translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl: Verse Translations, trans. Marie Borroff (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001). Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 308. On shameful wounds, see: Patricia ­Skinner, “Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” 81–101, in this volume. Nicholson, Medieval Warfare, 2. Nicholson, Medieval Warfare, 10.

508

Tracy

De Laudibus Legum Angliae, wrote that “a kynges office stondith in ii thynges, on[e] to defende his reume ayen þair enemyes outwards bi the swerde; an other that he defende his peple ayenst wronge doers inward bi justice.”41 Richard W. Kaeuper notes that while the kings of England and France had been known for their “innovative justice and their vigorous warfare across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,” in the fourteenth century their image as “dispenser of justice” more or less yielded to that of warrior.42 Even though the chivalric ethos was “capable of sustaining an acknowledgment of war’s brutal realities without any sense of incompatibility with chivalry’s highly idealized vision of its own practices,”43 the Stanzaic may well be admonishing the needless brutality of wars that are fought for vengeance rather than just causes. Patricia DeMarco argues that the dramatic and graphic depictions of war’s casualties in chivalric narrative are “regularly rendered without the slightest indication of a critical tone, and laments over the horror of war often coexist comfortably with strident defenses of the necessity and righteousness of war.”44 The Alliterative, however, is openly critical of Arthur’s wars as wrong, creating the impression of “excessive war,” even though they are cast as a kind of crusade.45 According to Andrew Lynch, the Alliterative represents war as “an accountable and potentially culpable policy.”46 Malory, for his part, focuses as much on the consequences of combat – weeping, wounds, and blood – as he does on the combats themselves, recognizing that warfare has both beneficent and destructive consequences.47 But the Stanzaic, like the Alliterative, offers no glory or righteousness in its depictions of war,48 nor in the seemingly fool41

42 43

44 45 46 47

48

John Fortescue, The Governance of England: Otherwise called The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, by Sir John Fortescue, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 116 (accessed 3 Feb. 2013). Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 384. Patricia DeMarco, “Inscribing the Body with Meaning: Chivalric Culture and the Norms of Violence in The Vows of the Heron,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 27–53, at 31. DeMarco, “Inscribing the Body with Meaning,” 29. Andrew Lynch, “‘Peace is Good after War’: The Narrative Seasons of English Arthurian Tradition,” in Writing War, ed. Saunders, Le Saux, and Thomas, 127–46, at 142. Lynch, “‘Peace is Good after War,’” 145. Whetter, “Warfare and Combat,” 170–1. In this volume, see: Stephen Atkinson, “‘They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …’: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” 519–43. Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 109.

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

509

ish tournament exchanges than can do such lasting damage among friends and family. Lancelot’s wound and recovery are initially more prominent in the narrative than the fatal head wounds of Gawain and Arthur, and they reveal the fractures in the fellowship of knights and the potential feud that can erupt even among the closest companions. Just as decapitation as a method of execution “mirrored the damage done by treason to the body politic,”49 these literary head wounds that debilitate, disable, and ultimately kill, reflect damage done to the ruling body. For medieval audiences these kinds of wounds inspired not only bodily fear but spiritual fear as well. Michael W. Twomey writes: “The belief that the wholeness of the body was essential to personal identity inspired horror at the thought of losing a leg, an arm, a head.”50 Head wounds were particularly tricky to treat in the Middle Ages, but they were not necessarily fatal. Beginning in the twelfth century, texts on the treatment of wounds, including surgical techniques, were produced in the medical centers of medieval Europe, specifically in Salerno. From the “Salernitan” milieu sprang a tradition of comprehensive and detailed Latin treatises that would transform the practice of surgery.51 Many of these medical manuals dealt with the specific treatment of head wounds, and were widely read by the fourteenth century. Perhaps the most influential of these, the Chirurgia of Roger Frugard (c. 1180), describes the several kinds of head injuries, how best to assess the extent of the damage to the skull, and how to insure that the wound heals fully. In the section titled “On Injuries to the Head,” Frugard explains the significance of skull fracture: When the fracture of the skull is considerable and obvious, with a broad, long wound, as if made with a sword or something similar, and bone has to be withdrawn (unless there would be a great gush of blood, or unless something else interferes), the bone to be withdrawn is removed and a very fine linen cloth is carefully introduced as it were obliquely between the skull and the dura mater, using a feather. At the opening of the fracture, a linen or silk cloth, preferably long enough for both ends to pass under the head, will prevent corrupt matter from flowing from the outside onto the dura mater, which would bring about still greater harm to 49

50 51

Michael W. Twomey, “‘Hadet with an aluisch mon’ and ‘britned to no3t’: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Death and the Devil,” in The Arthurian Way of Death, ed. Cherewatuk and Whetter, 73–93, at 81 n. 30. Twomey, “‘Hadet with an aluisch mon,’” 85. Faith Wallis, ed. Medieval Medicine: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 181.

510

Tracy

the brain. A clean, dry marine sponge is also used, for this thirstily soaks up the corruption deriving from the surface. The external wound should be carefully packed with linen soaked in egg-white and slightly pressed out, a little feather placed on top [for drainage], and the whole bound up carefully, following the contour of the head.52 Frugard goes on to instruct the surgeon on changing the dressing (the frequency of which changes depending on the season), and how the patient should lie head downward for drainage until the wound fully heals.53 The procedure changes depending on the nature of the wound; for each possible case, Frugard gives his detailed instructions. By the fourteenth century, Frugard’s texts had been translated into French and several other vernacular languages, and more sophisticated surgical manuals followed.54 Of course, the effective treatment of head wounds depended on a variety of factors. According to Nancy Siraisi, physical realities of the patient and technical limitations of the surgeon “governed not only the range of conditions that could be surgically treated but also the range of possible procedures.”55 In the case of depressed skull fractures which required the removal of bone fragments and protecting the dura mater as much as possible, the tasks themselves “were imposed by the situation, and options for varying techniques were few,” so simple techniques would be developed independently at different times and places.56 In 1308, practitioner and professor of medicine and surgery Dino del Garbo explained “in choosing appropriate treatment in individual cases of skull fracture the surgeon should take into consideration the risks inherent in each of two possible procedures, the patient’s general health, and the precise nature of the injury.”57 He also argues against attempting to cure skull fractures with plasters alone, making a sound case for employing surgical pro-

52

53 54 55 56 57

Roger Frugard, Surgery, trans. Michael R. McVaugh, in Sourcebook in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 795–96 (no. 112); reproduced in Medieval Medicine, ed. Wallis, 181–85, at 183. In this volume see also: Debby ­Banham and Christine Voth, “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?,” 153–74, and Patricia Skinner, “Visible Prowess?,” 84. Frugard, Surgery, 183. Wallis, Medieval Medicine, 181. Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 154. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 155. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 158.

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

511

cures.58 Obviously, romance authors exaggerate the severity of the wounds to enhance the dynamic action of the narrative, but as occurs in the Stanzaic it was not impossible to inflict such a wound “throw the helme into the hede” (2818). The multiple wounds found on the recently excavated skull of Richard III, discussed from first-hand analysis by Robert Woosnam-Savage in this volume, are evidence of this. According to Woosnam-Savage, Curator of European Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries, Leeds, while it would require “an immense blow from a weapon with a strengthened edge” for someone to cut through a helm (at its crown, the thickest part of the armor), “it is quite apparent that metal armor and helmets did and could fail […] and possibly a wound to the skull could be delivered,” though it would be extremely rare.59 The Stanzaic-poet, more than simply exaggerating the effects of battlefield violence, changes aspects of his French source and specifically makes all the serious wounds to Lancelot, Gawain, and Arthur head wounds, thereby signifying the damage internal rebellion does to the head of family, the head of government, and the head of the kingdom. The violence done to each of these men by their own kin or by a close friend and chivalric companion reflects the disastrous effect of courtly rivalries. Arthur is killed by his nephew/son to whom he had entrusted his realm, the ultimate betrayal that serves as a political warning to royal families. In the late-fourteenth century, this was particularly relevant in the context of Richard II’s troubled reign, undermined by family ambitions and his own rash temperament. Mordred’s betrayal of Arthur in the text inverts the historical situation of Richard II’s fraught relationship with his uncles, a relationship that likewise destabilized the kingdom and likewise ends with the removal of the head of state, foreshadowed by Mordred’s killing blow. Lancelot’s near-fatal head wound temporarily severs him from Arthur’s court because of Guinevere’s misplaced jealousy and Gawain’s (unintentionally) false report that Lancelot had given his heart to another (635–47), foreshadowing the more violent rift that will come. Once the wheels of destruction are set in motion, the narrative hurtles towards the climatic battles that eventually tear the Arthurian fellowship to shreds. Guinevere and Lancelot are reunited after he saves her from the fire and “To bede he gothe with the quene, / And there he thoughte to dwelle alle nyght” (1806–7), but Agravain and Modred burst in with twelve knights. Lancelot escapes, killing one knight for his armor 58 59

Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 159. Robert C. Woosnam-Savage, Curator of European Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries, Leeds, personal correspondence to the author, 31 Jan. 2013. In this volume see: Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” 27–56.

512

Tracy

and then killing almost all the others, including Agravain; only Modred escapes. Guienvere is tried for adultery and treason. Consulting the other knights over Guinevere’s punishment removes from Arthur “the responsibility for making those bad decisions on his own.”60 He acts on the advice of his knights, accepting counsel as all kings should. He acts according to law rather than personal vengeance,61 upholding the English system of justice regarding treason, however contrary it may be to his personal interests. Lancelot rescues her but at great cost: he kills Gareth and Gaheret, Gawain’s younger brothers. It is their deaths that will galvanize Arthur to gather throughout “Yngland by iche a syde, / To erle, baroun, and to knyght” (2090–1). He musters his forces “Off Ynglonde and Yreland also, / Off Walys and Scottis that beste were, / Launcelot and hys folkys to slo / With hertis breme as any bore” (2097–2101). Civil war erupts between Arthur and his loyal companion, who was not loyal enough to temper his passions and his lust. As a consequence, Arthur loses two more of his nephews and the fellowship falls apart. Gawain, as good counsel, takes a beating. During the course of Arthur’s attacks on Lancelot’s stronghold Benwick, Gawain is wounded repeatedly, but unlike Lancelot, he will not have adequate time to recover. Each wound he receives, “[t]hrow the helme into the hede” (2818), is delivered by Lancelot who fears Gawain’s waxing strength as the hour approaches noon. The first, “a wond wyde” (2815), so deep the “blode all coveryd his coloure / And he felle downe upon hys syde” (2816–7), lays him out for a fortnight: “Full passynge seke and unsonde / There Syr Gawayne on lechynge laye / Or he were hole all of hys wounde” (2859–61). When he is well enough, he stands before Lancelot’s castle and demands justice for his brothers’ death and for the treason Lancelot has committed: “Come forthe Launcelot and prove thy mayne. Thou traytor that hast treson wroght, My thre brethren thou haste slayn And falsly theym to grounde brought. Whyle me lastethe myght or mayne, Thys qarell leve wyll I noght, Ne pees shall ther nevir be sayne, Or thy sydes be throw sought.” (2866–73)

60 61

Kennedy, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 99. Weinberg, “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 108.

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

513

There is no mention of Guinevere and Gawain’s grievance is valid, seeking redress only for the death of his kin, which, in his mind, is the greater treason than their adultery. Lancelot regrets having to fight him, especially before Gawain’s strength increases at noon. As that hour approaches, and Lancelot and Gawain are locked in battle, Lancelot once again aims for the head since Gawain will not cease his onslaught: The helme that was ryche and rownde, the noble swerde rove that rease. He hyt hym apon the olde wounde, That over the sadyll downe he wente, And grysley gronyd upon the ground, And there was good Gawayne shent. (2908–13) Gawain is strong enough to taunt Lancelot, as he had been after the first blow, but Lancelot will not fight the weakened Gawain. This time it takes two months for Gawain to heal enough to ride or stand (2938–41); he is preparing for a third encounter when Arthur gets the news that while he has been engaged in a foreign war, his throne has been usurped by Mordred, who forges a letter proclaiming Arthur’s death. Arthur “Full moche mornyd he in hys mode, / That suche treson in Ynglond shuld be wroght / That he moste nedys over the flode” (2949–51). The treachery of Mordred, “the kynges soster sone he was, / And eke hys owne sonne, as I rede” (2955–6) strikes deeper at Arthur’s heart than Lancelot’s, even though Mordred has designs on Guinevere as well. Mordred has stolen the throne, but has done so legally and with the (misguided) assent of parliament and the people (2978–81).62 The question of legitimacy, legality, misguided counsel, and bad parliament reflects poorly on contemporary Ricardian kingship and politics. This revolt may be a warning to English kings who insist on fighting wars abroad in France rather than tending to their kingdoms as home. Despite his grandfather Edward III’s enduring campaign, Richard II did not have the stomach for a sustained war with France. During Richard’s reign, there was a definite faction of nobles opposed to continuing the fight for the French crown. Richard attempted to wage peace, signing treaties with the French king that brought him scorn from those who wished to see England’s interests furthered abroad, and earned him praise from those who had enough of war. 62

Weinberg remarks on the frequency with which characters act upon knowledge or information that the narrative shows to be limited and misleading (“The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 106). The characters usually act in good conscience but on bad intelligence.

514

Tracy

Richard was a contradictory figure. Prone to anger – real, palpable anger rather than staged political wrath used as a weapon of diplomacy – Richard provoked his nobles, many of whom were his immediate family.63 Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, was a particular target of Richard’s rage. On two occasions, Richard physically attacked Arundel: once in 1386 and again in 1394 at the funeral of Richard II’s wife, Anne of Bohemia. On that occasion, Richard was so incensed by what he felt was Arundel’s disrespect for the deceased queen, he grabbed a cane from an attendant and stuck Arundel on the head, dealing such a blow that the wound bled and Arundel was knocked unconscious.64 As Nigel Saul writes: “Richard emerges from the sources as a ruler unforgiving to his enemies, obsessed with his own security, concerned for his own interests above the common good, and determined to secure the obedience of his subjects by a regime of bonds and oaths.”65 While some critics have painted Richard II in a more forgiving light,66 many others have argued that the charges of tyranny leveled against him were more or less justified, and cannot simply be dismissed as Lancastrian propaganda.67 How a king should govern his people was “intensively debated in the new vernacular literature” of this age.68 Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and other poets warn against exercising tyrannical authority. Even in his minority Richard II was called upon by authors to govern well. In Vox Clamantis (1378–81), Gower urges the king to be guided by “sound counsel,” further appealing to Richard in Confessio Amantis (1390) to heal political divisions,69 advice Richard seems to have ignored. Literary texts, including anonymous verses, are evidence of “lively debate on the expectations and shortcomings of kingly rule.”70 There is manuscript evidence that Richard (or at least his advisors) were concerned with questions of kingship. Compiled specifically for Richard II, MS Bodley 581 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Chris Given-Wilson, “The Earl of Arundel, the War with France, and the Anger of King Richard II,” in The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R.F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 27–38, at 33–6. Given-Wilson, “The Earl of Arundel,” 27. Nigel Saul, “Terry Jones’s Richard II,” in The Medieval Python, ed. Yeager and Takamiya, 39–54, at 49–50. Terry Jones, “Was Richard II a Tyrant? Richard’s Use of the Books of Rules for Princes,” in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. Nigel Saul (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 130–60. Saul, “Terry Jones’s Richard II,” 49. See also: James Sherborne, War, Politics and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. Anthony Tuck (London: Hambledon Press, 1994). Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6. Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 6–7. Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 7.

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

515

contains Latin texts about governing well and exercising justice and law: De Quadripartita Regis Specie Libellum; Phisionomia Aristotelis; Sompniale Danielis; Liber Judiciorum; Flores Questionum et ludiciorum Veritatis Artis Geomancie; Rosarium Regis Ricardi; and Tabula Regni Planetarum Singulis Horis Diei et Noctis.71 It is unclear whether Richard ever read the book or took its advice; considering his end, perhaps not. What is clear is that good counsel, and the lack of it, propel the narrative events of the Stanzaic. Gawain, often Arthur’s most trusted advisor, moves from counseling restraint to pursuing unchecked vengeance. Any medieval king (real or fictional) relied on counsel from advisors who represented a “variety of the realm’s interest groups,” and from that potentially contradictory advice should be able to “develop a single policy that would benefit the commonweal.”72 This was the “central act of the king’s authority in the political theory of late medieval England,” and relying too much on a single counselor who exercised undue influence over the king’s decisions and policy threatened the king’s ability to administer justice and to act prudently, marking the “potential death for sound polity.”73 In the interests of justice, Richard had to follow the dictates of English law; though his role as judge “with power over life and limb” set him above both law and subjects in order to enforce it, he still had to conform to it in his own acts.74 Like Arthur, Richard had to act as a just and impartial arbiter – a role that grew more difficult as tensions between his barons increased and the Lords Appellant rebelled against his rule. Significantly, because of this new treason, Gawain will not die at Lancelot’s hands, though Lancelot’s deliberately aimed blows have taken their toll on Arthur’s closest ally. Once Arthur’s troops land on English shores at Dover, Mordred’s men engage them in battle. Gawain stands ready to fight (though he has not yet recovered fully) without a helmet, his head bare: Allas, to longe hys hede was bare, He was seke and sore unsond; Hys woundis grevyd hym full sare. One hytte hym upon the olde wounde, With a tronchon of an ore; There is good Gawayne gone to grounde, 71 72 73 74

John Scattergood, Reading the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Dublin: Four Courts, 1996), 126. Robeson, “Malory and the Death of Kings,” 138. Robeson, “Malory and the Death of Kings,” 138. Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 7.

516

Tracy

That speche spake he nevyr more. (3067–3) Unlike Lancelot, Gawain does not have time of peace in which to recover fully and, driven by vengeance and the urgency of war, he must fight before the head wound has healed properly. Arthurs fights valiantly, unaware of Gawain’s death, hewing many men through their bright helmets (3084–5; 3106–9) until their breasts run with blood. Dozens of men – Englishmen – receive head wounds at the hands of their rightful king whom they have (unwittingly) betrayed. The Stanzaic-poet glosses over the severity and sheer number of wounds but emphasizes the quantity of blood that Arthur spills, juxtaposing the non-fatal tournament wounds from the first half of the poem with the fatal blows delivered in those final battles. As Arthur’s nephew and closest companion, the repeated blows Gawain receives to his head stand out among all those dealt by Arthur, foreshadowing the final fatal head wound that will decapitate the state with Arthur’s death. The final battle scene in the Stanzaic is gruesome and bloody, a grimmer reflection of the earlier battles and the tournament action.75 Arthur deals “woundys wykke and wyde” (3365), and many “a knyghtis helme they brake, / Ryche helmes they roffe and rente” (3371–2). The head wounds are now fatal as though each one Arthur strikes brings him closer to his own. One hundred thousand fighting men are reduced to four at the end of the battle: Arthur, Lucan de Botteler that “bled at many a balefull wound” (3385), his brother Bedivere, and Mordred. Arthur charges Mordred, hitting him amydde the breste And oute at the bakke bone hym bare. There hathe Mordred hys lyffe loste. (3392–4) But as he dies kenely up hys arme he caste And yaff Arthur a wounde sare Into the hede, throw the helme and creste, That thre tymes he swownyd thare. (3396–9) The Stanzaic-poet repeats the triad motif with Arthur’s swoons. The final of the three head wounds results in Arthur’s loss of consciousness three times 75

See: Sherron Knopp, “Artistic Design in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” ELH 45 (1978): 563–82, who also notes the diptych of tournaments vs. civil war in the poem’s structure.

“Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”

517

(like Lancelot at the beginning [382–3]), just as Bedivere will take three tries to throw Excalibur into the Lake (3454–3493). Mordred, who struck at the heart of Arthur’s kingdom – a traitor to kin and country – is killed with a piercing blow through the heart. But in dying, Mordred strikes at the head of the realm, just as he had done in rebellion. Arthur’s head wound is not instantly fatal, but there will be no recuperation, no recovery. The king whose anger and pride have left his kingdom vulnerable, falls at the hands of his steward, nephew, and son. By the end of the Stanzaic, order has broken down and society is in shambles. As the king lies bleeding in a chapel where he took refuge with Lucan and Bedivere, hoping for a miraculous cure Lucan sees people looting the corpses on the field: “Bold barons of bone and blode / They refte theym of besaunt, broche, and bee” (3418–9).76 The king is too sorely wounded, and, bleeding freely (3434), he asks Lucan to lift him up. The king swoons and Lucan holds him tightly until his own heart bursts and he “lay dede and fomyd in the blode” (3441). Arthur regains consciousness long enough to instruct Bedivere to throw Excalibur into the water, which, in another of the poem’s triads, requires three attempts. But Bedivere has waited too long and when the ship with the three ladies arrives Morgan le Fay laments that Arthur “‘Fro lechyng hastow be to longe. / I wote that gretely grevyth me, / For thy paynes ar full stronge’” (3507– 8). In the repetition of the triad reflected in the progression of head trauma, the Stanzaic-poet highlights the significance of the wounds the three men receive. Each one brings the Arthurian realm and its ideal of kingship closer to death. The poet emphasizes the fact that Bedivere, in his hesitation to dispose of Excalibur, has withheld medical treatment as well as magical intervention from Arthur.77 There is a momentary hope that like Lancelot and Gawain’s previous head wounds, Arthur’s can also be healed. He reassures Bedivere that he will go into Avalon “Awhyle to hele me of my wounde” (3517).78 But rather than end the poem there, on the promise of Arthur’s return, the poet dashes all hope of recovery. Bedivere stumbles upon a chapel where a hermit sits vigil beside a 76 77

78

Malory includes this image, though he takes it one step farther and says that the wounded are then killed for their riches. See: Whetter, “Warfare and Combat,” 179. The fact that healing cannot be done until the sword is discarded, potentially inverts the trope of a weapon being able to both harm and heal. I appreciate Kevin Whetter bringing this observation to my attention. In the Alliterative, which has far more detailed descriptions of a variety of deadly wounds than in the Stanzaic, Arthur goes to Avalon to have his wounds cured by skilled surgeons from Salerno, though he recognizes he is dying, proclaims an heir, and orders Mordred’s children slain (4309–4322). The poem ends with his burial (4330–42).

518

Tracy

fresh tomb. The hermit tells him that about midnight three ladies brought in a body and “beryed it with woundys sore” (3541). Bedivere tells the hermit that the tomb is Arthur’s and asks to join him as a hermit. Upon hearing the news, Guinevere takes five of her ladies with her and joins a convent at Almesbury (3566–73), while Lancelot, who was ready to come to Arthur’s aid with his own army, seeks her out. When he finds her, she confesses her sin and acknowledges her responsibility in this sad affair to the abbess and urges him to take a wife and live in joy (3638–77). He refuses, protesting that he will join her in holy orders (3678–93). As he leaves Guinevere urges him to think “on thys world how there is noght / But warre and stryffe and batayle sore” (3720–1), a poignant statement on England in the fourteenth century. The proliferation of head wounds throughout the text marks the progression of the narrative towards its disastrous end. The tournament wounds at the beginning appear inconsequential – they have no lasting effect – even Lancelot’s will heal given time and peace. But his wound ignites the events that lead to Gawain’s three-fold head wound, which will have neither the time nor the peace to heal properly, and from which he will ingloriously die. Gawain’s death foreshadows the final killing blow inflicted on Arthur by his own kin – that final, fatal head wound from which there is no return. Embedded in this progression of wounds is a poignant criticism of unstable kingship and the effects of decapitating the State. While Richard II may have governed badly, the Stanzaic-poet potentially questions the methods for removing him that inflict such a lasting wound upon the nation. The final words of the poem return to Arthur, buried at Glastonbury with Guinevere. There is no sense of return; there is no final recovery, only a prayer that refocuses the narrative on the fatal wounds of the head of state, “‘Jesu that suffred woundes sore / Graunt us all the blysse of heven!’” (3968–9).

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

519

Chapter 22

“They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys …”: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur Stephen Atkinson It seems unlikely that any substantial Middle English narrative contains a higher ratio of wounds per page than Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Wounds are simply the cost of doing business, whether the business is that of a fifteenth-century aristocrat or member of the gentry, or that of a Round Table knight. As Andrew Lynch puts it, “Blood is the basic currency of fights and quests.”1 Indeed, Malory’s depiction of the Arthurian world depends heavily on the lived experience of his own time. He is not writing fantasy, a category that does not yet exist in the minds of readers. His work is undeniably nostalgic and longs for a lost English polity that appears, for much of his narrative, to embody ideals of governance and chivalry only too clearly lost in his own time. Nor does he express the sort of doubts as to the historicity of Arthur’s Britain reflected, though disowned, in Caxton’s 1485 “Preface.”2 But though Malory presents a largely glorified picture of “tho dayes,” it is one which is glorified: chivalric combat in the Morte represents an exaggerated and enhanced version of the combats with which Malory and his first readers were familiar from experience.3 If Malory’s Arthurian world is more glamorous than the fifteenth century, the wounds and the techniques used to inflict them are those under1 Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 60. 2 “Caxton’s Preface,” xiii-xiv. References to Malory’s text are from The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3rd edition, rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford: Clarendon 1990). Volume, page, and line numbers are given in parentheses. Both Caxton’s terminology, contrasting “fables” and “cronycles,” and the evidence he adduces for a historical Arthur, one of the Nine Worthies, testify to the absence of distinct modern categories, such as history, legend, or myth. Though the voice of the preface may well be read as disingenuous in some regards, it is clear that distinctions we would make today between, say, the Battle of Roncesvalle and Le Chanson de Roland, have not solidified. On the other hand, postmodernist thought has now questioned the solidity of the modern distinctions. 3 An exception might be noted at this point: historical jousts and single combats in the later Middle Ages were sometimes fought with deliberately diminished weapons: spears lighter than those which would be used in earnest, rebated swords. Needless to say, such practices

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_024

520

Atkinson

stood and practiced by Malory and his first readers. The causes behind them, though, are not, for instance, a petty rivalry between local “affinities” or even a larger encounter between Yorkist and Lancastrian partisans but, rather, chivalric ideals and the specific provisions of the Round Table Oath (1.120.17–24). The Morte has never been out of print since Caxton’s first edition appeared in 1485. For more than 560 years, the text has been consistently adapted to the contemporaneous knowledge, interests, and values of its readers. The Morte has a reception history stretching across four and a half centuries, and that history has characterized the text in a host of ways, each appropriate to the time and the reader. Ultimately, the meaning of any text is the history of its reception. Nonetheless, it is clearly important, in a discussion of wounds and combat, to attempt to read the Morte as its first readers did – the only readers its author could have imagined. The work attributed to Sir Thomas Malory was completed in 1469; it is preserved in a single manuscript, London, British Library Additional MS 59678, the so-called Winchester MS because it was discovered (accidentally) in 1934 in the library of Winchester College. Nothing beyond speculation suggests anything about its provenance or history, except that it appears to have been in William Caxton’s printing shop in the 1480s.4 What relationship it bears to Caxton’s 1485 printing of Le Morte Darthur (the title is Caxton’s) remains a matter of debate. Information about the author is equally obscure. The meticulous research of P.J.C. Field has convinced most scholars that the author is an obscure knight from Newbold Revel in Warwickshire; however, there are other available candidates.5 The Warwickshire knight led an interesting life, including long stretches in prison. While this enforced leisure may have given him the time to compose a work that runs to nearly 1000 manuscript pages, it does little to explain how he came to have access to the copious French manuscripts of the Vulgate cycle as well as the French post-Vulgate and English sources upon which he drew. This Thomas Malory also saw a good deal of combat (when not incarcerated), including service in France and England, as well as such local exploits as conducting an armed ambush of the Duke of Buckingham never occur in the world of Malory’s narrative. Every combat begins, at least, as one potentially a outrance, though far from all result in a death. 4 Lotte Hellinga, “The Malory Manuscript and Caxton,” in Aspects of Malory, ed. Toshi Takamiya and Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986), 127–38. 5 P.J.C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), 1–25. The best-developed case for another candidate is in William Matthews, The Ill-Framed Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

521

and performing a daring escape from a castle where he was imprisoned, which entailed leaping from the parapet and swimming the moat. He certainly brought lived experience to issues of combat and wounds – though the same might be said of the other candidates and, indeed, of most of the original audience.6 No fifteenth-century man among the English gentry could have avoided armed combat. Though many may have been wounded in battle, especially during the intermittent encounters of the Wars of the Roses, many would have been familiar – or have suffered – wounds while engaged in tournaments or individual jousts. Malory’s readers would have been familiar with both the types of wounds experienced and the sorts of treatment that were available to the victim. In terms of injuries, a knight simply unhorsed typically suffers no “wound” at all. Though we can imagine substantial bruising from a fall from a horse, as the padding provided incomplete protection for tissue suddenly impacted by rigid armor and hard ground, Malory does not consider anything a wound that does not produce visible blood. 6 There are certain assumptions underlying this discussion and its emphasis on Malory’s early readers, which should be announced, at least; they will be defended in forthcoming work. One is the indisputable assumption that the vast majority of Malory’s readers before 1585 (the 100th anniversary of Caxton’s printed edition) would have read Caxton or a printed publication by one of his successors. To them, the object in front of them would be seen as a book, printed pages bound between two covers. They would generally read it sequentially, though without the expectations of coherence and consistency only available after the emergence of the novel. Hence, this discussion will range freely across Malory’s work, and its examples will be drawn from various parts of the text as they seem suited to the purpose. We should remember, though, that Malory’s very earliest audience may have had quite different experiences. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the Winchester MS is the only manuscript made of Malory’s work. If it were, the exemplar the Winchester scribes used was Malory’s holograph. My speculative assumption, then, is that during the sixteen years between the completion of the work (according to Caxton) and Caxton’s publication, other manuscripts were produced, quite possibly – considering the length of time – ten or twelve. Further, it is entirely possible that manuscripts containing early work by the author were produced and circulated even as he continued writing later portions (as is clearly the case with The Canterbury Tales, though testimony for such work-in-progress manuscripts rests on later ones which must have had work-in-progress exemplars). In addition, manuscripts may have been commissioned containing only desired portions of the work even after it was complete. I raise these points now because we should bear in mind that a body of the earliest readers may not have read all the material discussed here, but – more important for this discussion – that Malory may have had a substantial audience before his work was printed, an audience more narrowly drawn from groups for whom combat wounds were an immediate experience. Later sixteenth-century readers, whether approving ones like Philip Sidney or disparaging ones like Roger Ascham, would have read it quite differently (in many respects) from those alive in 1469.

522

Atkinson

Malory’s treatment of wounds represents part of a larger feature of Malory’s narrative technique that is often overlooked – for good reason: it is invisible, and its absence makes it hard to recognize. Malory’s narrative supplies virtually no detail not immediately required for the action depicted. The publication history of Malory’s work is also a history of notable illustrations accompanying the text, but these – whether early woodcuts, the exquisite work of Aubrey Beardsley, or the sometimes amateurish illustrations in contemporary popular editions7 – are testimony to the power of Malory’s narrative to engage the visual imagination of the reader, embodied in the work of the illustrator. It has seemed to many over the centuries that Malory’s world is visually rich and exciting. And so it is, but the richness and the excitement come from the reader, who fills with detail what are almost empty spaces on the page. Indeed, it may be the very absence of detail that calls the reader’s imagination into action, as Malory is strikingly indifferent to the appeal of detail for its own sake. Architecture is limited to a generic castle, a generic hermitage, a generic chapel; landscape, to a predictable assortment of forests, valleys, and marshes. The Great Hall is the same wherever Arthur is holding court. For Malory, then, wounds are seldom more than a brief event, to be treated in terms of a standard vocabulary, and always in the interest of the larger demands of storytelling. Yes, there is extravagant loss of blood in many instances, but it is generally the same loss described in the same terms. It may testify to the extreme nature of a particular combat, but rarely does the language openly prompt an affective response regarding the particular pain of a particular sufferer. The story moves ahead apace. At the same time, Malory’s early audience may not need prompting; they have potentially witnessed and suffered wounds themselves, and do not – like Malory’s later illustrators – have to call on their “imaginary forces,” just their memories. Consider the brief account of Sir Griflet. In Malory’s chivalric world, of course, wounds always occur in a narrative context, usually the quest of a knight errant, and the pace of Malory’s narrative leaves little time for elaboration. The first quest is a pattern in miniature for all the rest. Sir Griflet is the pioneer. The fundamental pattern for any quest is provided by the subtitle of Tolkien’s The Hobbit: “There and Back Again.” The Great Hall provides the starting point for the quest, and return to the Hall marks its conclusion. The first element here is the setting of a feast “that lasted eyght dayes” (1.46.15). The next 7 I don’t presume to prejudge issues of taste, and few scholars are likely to use such editions. One recent illustrator, however, notably proclaims: “The illustrator also has a role as storyteller, often saying what the author does not.” Anna-Marie Ferguson, “The Illustration of Malory,” in Le Morte D’Arthur, ed. John Matthews (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), vi.

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

523

is an unexpected arrival – here of a squire escorting a dying knight, the loser in a combat with a nearby knight errant. The squire asks that the knight’s death be avenged. Then comes Griflet’s desire to be knighted by Arthur and Arthur’s requiring him to take up the squire’s mission. There is an odd proviso: Griflet is apparently to return promptly after the first fall of the joust. What Griflet encounters is also prototypical, a pas d’armes in which the anonymous knight has hung a shield as a challenge to all comers. Thus, the revenge sought by the squire is not an instance of an unjust killing or a matter of avenging the death of a family member or a question of honor. This is a joust, not a duel. Sir Griflet’s prototype quest, though, is hardly a success. The first fall is Griflet’s; the opposing knight is unusually sympathetic; and Griflet returns wounded. The story ends happily, though: “But thorow good lechis he was heled and saved” (1.48.14). Though the quest is abbreviated, the description of the wound itself is more detailed than most, which demonstrates how succinct is the norm: “And therewithall he smote Gryfflet thorow the shelde and the lyffte syde, and brake the spere, that the truncheon stake in hys body, and horse and man felle downe to the erthe” (1.48.2–5). To Malory’s early readers, this brief description is still enough to create in their minds the whole scene, completed with information they would supply themselves. The piercing of the shield suggests Griflet’s novice ineptitude; instead of using the shield to deflect the lance, he tries to block it, and the shield fails. The resulting wound “thorow … the lyffte syde” would be the result of the spear’s point finding the gap at the edge of the breastplate (unless it too failed, which is less likely; knights were trained to aim at the gaps, especially, on horseback, at the shoulder and the neck). Here, Griflet would be protected only by mail, and it is precisely those gaps where a knight in fifteenth-century armor is vulnerable. Mail by itself is effective against a strike with the edge of a sword. The impact of a blow by an edge is spread across many links of the chain; the impact of a sharp point enters the empty center of a single link, bursts it and the neighboring links apart, penetrates the undergarment – cloth padding or leather – and enters the body. It may sound at first as if this would injure only the joint of the shoulder, but the shoulder is protected by a plate of its own attached to the breastplate.8 The knight’s spear must have penetrated lower, around the second, third, or fourth ribs. What makes this especially dangerous – why the knight thinks he has killed Griflet – is that the two horses are passing in opposite directions, thus, giving the spearhead a lateral, back-to-front action that could slide between ribs, threat8 For information on archaeological evidence of combat wounds, including healed battle wounds, see: Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” in this volume, 27–56.

524

Atkinson

ening the left lung, the aorta, and the heart. It is the momentum that causes the twist and then breaks the lance off as the knight passes Griflet, “that the truncheon stake in hys body” (1.48.4). This seems to be a great deal of information to glean from a single sentence, but many of Malory’s readers had these details as part of their technical knowledge of jousting. They knew where the heart and lungs were; only the term “aorta” would have been unfamiliar to them; it would be simply bundled into the idea of “heart,” though, in fact, offering yet another, more extensive target. A majority of these earliest readers knew how to fight, how to inflict wounds, and what it meant to suffer them. They were also likely to be avid audience members at actual combats, especially enthusiastic onlookers at tournaments and publicized pas d’armes. Lynch discusses the importance of audiences and witnesses within the Morte: “fights are not necessarily for anything, other than the pleasure of witnessing to great deeds themselves.... [G]reater personages gather together at the end of the day, comparing and ranking others in terms of their prowess.”9 Lynch’s emphasis on onlookers is particularly important, though it needs to be qualified in one respect. In stressing the rubrication of the Winchester MS, Lynch’s observation on the readers of Winchester, rather than an assembled audience who would have listened to the text read out loud, sounds reasonable. Looking at the manuscript gives a modern reader something of the sense of internet “links” inserted in a piece of contemporary prose. While this may seem an anachronistic response, it is possible to see the rubrications, as Lynch does, “as a key index to the text, or as its major concern, what the text is for.”10 As noted above, though, Winchester is unlikely to have been the only manuscript available to Malory’s earliest readers, so the effect of the rubrication would have been limited to those who saw it. The design is unlikely to have originated with the scribes (since it entailed laborious additional time) but with the person who commissioned the manuscript. It might have had a readership (as opposed to listening audiences) of one or two. Acute as Lynch’s observation is here, it could be pushed further in two directions. First, there is another entire body of witnesses generally overlooked because they are effectively invisible in the words of the text. Just as fifteenth century readers can fill in other descriptive gaps, they can supply (from their own experience) figures that they know to be present at knightly encounters but who are only very rarely mentioned: the retinue of the knight errant. In the Malorian world of knight errantry, there is an abundance, for instance, of spears; spears are frequently shattered, but new ones are always found in the 9 10

Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, 29. Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, 4 (Lynch’s emphasis).

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

525

knight’s hands, either for another round of mounted jousting or at least for the next encounter. Someone carries them, keeping them ready as needed. Someone pitches the pavilions where knights take shelter in the absence of a permanent structure. Someone regularly polishes plate armor, cooks food, and fetches water. Clearly, a knight on a quest only appears to be alone because only the knight is important. Any fifteenth-century knight among Malory’s readers, however, would take for granted that the quest was an expedition, requiring complex logistical support. Thus, it is not only battles and tournaments which have onlookers, not only the knight’s own report on his return that bears witness to his achievements. Every “single combat” in which two knights engage takes place before witnesses – witnesses the original readers would take for granted but that the text never mentions unless the witness rises to the level of explicit notice: another knight or occasionally a squire. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the anonymous author goes out of his way to show that Gawain is truly alone in his journey to the Green Chapel by explicitly picturing him, for instance, polishing his own armor and sleeping (in it), unprotected from the weather. This insistence on the part of the Gawain-poet must occur because he expects the audience to imagine the norm – a knight accompanied by a substantial body of servants – and wants to emphasize the entirely solitary nature of Gawain’s journey and the specific hardships he endures without the expected retinue. Second, Lynch focuses on acts of witness within Malory’s narrative but does not follow through on his own observation of Malory’s characterization of his readers. These “jantyllmen that beryth olde armys” (1.375.23),11 whom he imagines reading his literary work, were also careful and discriminating audience members for, as well as participants in, real combat. Malory’s accounts, then, are not only abbreviated as a matter of narrative style but also in the sense that any technical discourse is abbreviated. Indeed, technical language arises largely in order to abbreviate expression, relying on the knowledge of members of expert communities to expand or elaborate the meaning. These abbreviated accounts of wounds, then, are somewhat different in their effect on Malory’s early readers from his characteristic lack of detail in other areas. A generic Great Hall summons the reader to fill in visual detail from his own experience, but those experiences and, hence, the details supplied on their basis may vary from reader to reader: the aristocratic reader is familiar with his own Great Hall; the gentry, with their lord’s. Both will see that hall everywhere – at Camelot, Carlion, Carlisle. In dealing with combat and resulting wounds, Malory depends less on the general experience of readers 11

Cf. Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms, 10.

526

Atkinson

than on their specific technical knowledge. If we consider Malory’s early (not earliest) readers to include those living in Elizabethan times, we have a much wider audience than Malory specifies, his “jantyllmen that beryth olde armys” (1.232.15). Readers in the next century could fill in experience of a Great Hall or a rural chapel, but many of them would have little or no experience with the sort of combat Malory depicts – and certainly not the expertise of late-fifteenth century aristocrats, knights, and members of the propertied gentry class. Certainly Malory did not anticipate a reader such as Roger Ascham, who could, in Toxophilus, dismiss works like Malory’s as among those read “[i]n our fathers’ time … wherein a man by reading should be led to no other end but manslaughter and bawdry.”12 There is, of course, much overt nostalgia in the Morte, if the term is understood as a longing for better, nobler times. The narrative voice intervenes at memorable moments, to contrast, always unfavorably, the current times with “tho dayes.” The first three-quarters of a century of modern Malory criticism (starting with Kittredge and his contemporaries) essentially “fell for” Malory’s sense of nostalgia concerning the Arthurian world and concluded that the depiction of chivalric encounters – and their risks – had no contemporary reference; that the age of knight errantry, if it existed at all, fell in and around the time of Chrétien de Troyes, that while not taking place around the dates Malory gives from the first millennium, these were practices recalled from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.13 More recent scholarship, largely beginning with Larry Benson’s 1976 Malory’s Morte Darthur,14 and then elaborated (and often modified) by later writers, shows conclusively that the jousts and tournaments Malory describes are, in fact, occurring at the time in which his work was composed and first read. Thus, Benson can write that “[c]hivalry in the Morte

12 13

14

Roger Ascham, Toxophilus (STC 837, 1545), repr. in The Renaissance in England, ed. Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1954), 816. See, for example: R.W. Chambers’ comment, “The world to which the Morte Darthur belonged had passed away before the book was finished.” Qtd. in Larry D.Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 176. See also: 176 nn. 4, 6, 8. Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur. The chapters covering this material (137–203) are extensively detailed, though later scholars have expanded and at times corrected Benson’s discussion. It should be remembered that Benson’s book was an attempt on several fronts, of which this material is only one, to put to rest the then-raging debate over the “unity” and “originality” of Malory’s work, to situate Malory firmly in the fifteenth century and see him as not merely a translator and compiler of earlier French romances that he often barely grasped.

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

527

Darthur is … neither nostalgia nor escape,”15 in the sense that the particulars of knightly combat do not contrast with those with which the reader is familiar. Only if the term chivalry is taken to mean a code of conduct and not a body of occasions for combat and a set of weapons, equipment, and techniques in current use, is the Morte nostalgic. Nonetheless, the overlap between art and life was extraordinarily complex and recursive. At the same time that contemporaneous events were shaping the understanding that Malory’s readers brought to combat in the Morte, the events themselves were often modeled on episodes, characters, and narrative patterns from romance – from Malory’s sources, from other works available, from work contemporary with his own, possibly even from the Morte itself.16 Thus, Malory reports the results of Arthurian combats to readers already familiar with jousts and tournaments, informal combats, and, perhaps, judicial duels. What is most important to this audience is who won and how conclusively. What appear to be formulas in a literary sense, then, are, in fact, the result of a limited set of possible actions and a limited lexicon with which to designate them. The rules of jousting on horseback and swordplay on foot, even in the least formal setting, limit the possible events: a knight will never stop his horse at the outset of its charge, dismount, jam the butt of the spear in the ground, and hope to impale the oncoming horse. The descriptions are not only limited by the general “rules” observed in combat but their early audience must have had the expertise to recognize the implications of particular details. Also of real interest to the audience is how the fight was won. Thus, the sense that these passages are formulaic overlooks the minor (to us) variations that would have carried major significance for Malory’s earliest audience. With names removed, here is a typical account: … and sir [blank] smote downe sir [blank]. … And than they dressed their shyldis and swerdys … [a]nd there was daysshynge and foynynge with swerdis … and [blank] gaff sir [blank] many grete woundis uppon hed and breste and uppon shuldirs. And as he mygh[t] ever amonge he gaff sad strokis agayne (2.472.17–26). This passage seems a virtual repetition of wordings that could be found anywhere; however, viewed as reporting, it sums up the event clearly and distinctly 15 16

Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur, 198. Galeot of Mantua sent captives from his adventures to Joan of Padua, as Lancelot does to Guinevere (Joan released them, as Guinevere does). See: Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur, 179.

528

Atkinson

and gives the reader meaningful terminology (“daysshynge” is a general strike by the sword, which could take a variety of forms; “foynynge,” a strike specifically with the point, the only means of inflicting serious injury); details about where the one knight was wounded; and the fact that he fought on regardless, though clearly on the defensive throughout: “And as he mygh[t] ever amonge. …” He counterattacks when he gets the chance, despite his “many greate woundis.” The general sword blows are less likely the slashing blow of current imagination or edge-to-edge clashes of blades than a manipulation of the sword to entangle or unbalance the opponent, maneuvers which might be designed to make him fall or at least open an opportunity for a thrust at one of the weak points – “upon shuldirs,” as in the case of Griflet. The wounds to breast and head would not be understood as the edge of the blade slicing open the plate armor or helmet (an impossibility) but as the point piercing it locally and delivering a shallow puncture wound, into which would be driven the jagged edges of the armor. A scalp wound delivered in this manner would probably not puncture the skull but would bleed copiously;17 hence, the second knight can be said to have “many great woundis,” visible in the localized damage to his armor and his obvious bleeding, and yet be able to fight on. Jacques de Lalaing was involved in such an actual combat with Diego de Guzman in February 1448. Richard Barber and Juliet Barker offer a detailed account of the fight, reporting that: “every blow of Lalaing’s axe inflicted a wound on Guzman’s forehead until he was almost blinded by the bleeding.”18 In Guzman’s case, though, he is able to turn the tide in typical fifteenth-century fashion: he throws his axe aside and resorts to wrestling. The fight is stopped when Guzman seizes Lalaing’s throat and is about to throw him to the ground, at which point he could easily have recovered his discarded axe (or Lalaing’s) and killed him. In judicial duels or battlefield combat, killing was, of course, the point.19 In a regulated tournament (and Malory’s are much like their fifteenth-century counterparts, enhanced only along predictable lines, including the numbers of 17

18

19

For a detailed discussion on head wounds in romance, specifically in one of Malory’s English sources, see: Larissa Tracy, “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” in this volume, 496–518. Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry, and Pageants in the Middle Ages (New York: Weidenfeld, 1989), 130. It is important here to remember that the battleaxe was not an oversized hatchet; also called a poleaxe, its head combined an edge, a hook (useful for pulling an enemy, mounted or on foot, to the ground), and a point. It is the point that Lalaing is using to inflict wounds. Though this was not always the case, as Woosnam-Savage and DeVries point out: “the object of medieval battles was not so much to kill one’s opponents as to make them run away.” “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare,” 31.

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

529

combatants and the level of individual prowess), or a regulated joust such as the one just described, the fatal end at which the whole activity is aiming is often preempted by the surrender of one of the parties and the acceptance of that surrender. In actual combats, such as Guzman and Lalaing’s, the action is stopped by the presiding authority; in Malory, it ceases according to the stipulation of the Round Table Oath: “to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy…” (1.120.18). But the characteristic ending of the encounter – intervention or surrender – is achievable only by the possibility of death. There is no points system. In fifteenth-century England, of course, violence was common outside the tourney grounds or lists. Malory’s planned ambush of Buckingham resulted in no recorded combat at all and may have been a dangerous bluff, but irregular combat in private quarrels was widespread,20 and the techniques developed and taught had only one purpose. Indeed, Anthony Kemp describes fifteenthcentury combat as “counterintuitive” to the modern reader: “The purpose was not to clank blades together, but to kill. For instance, the early rapier manuals advise never to parry blade with blade (which ‘loses the point,’ the ability to attack) but to use only your hand, with an arming glove (mail or heavy leather) or bare, ‘for it is better to take a hurt in the hand than be run through the body.’”21 Lancelot follows this advice precisely in dispatching Melyagaunt (3.1139.33–1140.1–2). The fatal thrust may, of course, be made against a standing opponent; an alternative, and easier, approach is to get the opponent on the ground, where the fatal thrust can be administered more easily, especially with the opponent’s helmet removed or visor lifted, though the gaps in the visor itself then become easy targets. As a result, and Malory’s text bears this out, most serious wounds are puncture wounds; the most immediately fatal injuries are decapitations. Slashing cuts are virtually unknown. The sword, then, is used for two purposes: thrusting (Malory’s “foyning”), and as an implement in what would otherwise be much like augmented wresting, with the aim of throwing the opponent off-balance and bringing him to the ground. A widespread image of combat between armored knights in the late Middle Ages, emerging out of modern illustrations and fights performed on stage or screen, shows them exchanging blows with heavy swords, most of which are met by the opponent’s sword, edge to edge. In fact, common sense suggests 20 21

Field, Life and Times, 28–29. Anthony Kemp, University of Southern California, personal correspondence with the author, 12 Nov 2013. I am indebted to Professor Kemp not only for this information, but for also directing me to a number of sources on late medieval combat rarely consulted by Malorians.

530

Atkinson

that this activity would have been a largely futile exercise except as a test of the knights’ stamina (and a full-employment program for armorers attempting to restore the edges of mutilated blades). The average broadsword, for instance, still pictured as a heavy, cumbersome instrument, actually weighed around two pounds, somewhat heavier than a tennis racket but, with its exquisite balance, equally maneuverable.22 Imagine, as a single example, a knight fighting on foot holding his sword in two hands – one on the pommel, one near the end of the blade – and using it to pull or push his opponent to the ground. Unimaginable in a contemporary film, the technique is often described and pictured in fifteenth-century manuals.23 A knight on the ground is, at least temporarily, helpless.

22

23

The historical transition from the Carolingian sword to the light, agile weapon Malory would have known is traced in Kelly DeVries, Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough, OH: Broadview, 1992), 20–25. The modern stereotype has been described as “the work of romantic writers in the past, who, seeking to give to their heroes a touch of the Superman, caused them to wield enormous and weighty weapons far beyond the powers of modern man. … [C]omplete the picture with the scorn poured upon these swords by lovers of the elegance of the eighteenth century and it becomes easier to see why so plain a weapon can be accounted crude, ponderous, and inefficient. In fact the average weight of these swords is between 2 lbs. and 3 lbs., and they were balanced (according to their purpose) with the same care and skill in the making as a tennis racket or a fishing rod. The old belief that they are unwieldable is as absurd and out-dated, and dies as hard, as the myth that armored knights had to be hoisted into their saddles with a crane.” R. Ewart Oakeshott, The Sword in the Age of Chivalry (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992), 12. Rachel Kellett describes the technical details of fifteenth-century fencing manuals and explains that individual combat was a far cry from the hacking and slashing depicted in modern films about the Middle Ages. Many of these manuals suggest that while some of these techniques were to be used in actual combat, and could therefore be fatal, they were also used in entertainment, during which death or serious injury were less likely to occur. See: “‘…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zů der brust’: The Placement and Consequences of Sword-blows in Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual,” in this volume, 128–49, at 131. In such cases, lances were generally light and brittle substitutes; swordpoints, bated. Such events may well have been entertaining, but they were also instructional demonstrations. The onlookers would have little doubt as to the outcome had the weapons been real. Other manuals, such as dei Liberi’s, Fior di Battaglia, are clearly focused on real combat only. In Malory’s world, of course, combat is always in earnest. Fior di Battaglia, Los Angeles, Getty Museum, Ludwig MS XV 13, fol.36v. The entire manuscript appears online at www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?/ artobj=1706 (accessed 28 Feb. 2014). Selections with commentary, including fol. 36v, appear in Ken Monscheim, The Knightly Art of Battle (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011).

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

531

Returning to the description above with the names removed, it is possible to see precisely the contrast between how impressive wounds would appear to onlookers, and the actual relationship between wounds inflicted in the course of combat and the combat’s outcome. The copiously bleeding knight is Sir La Cote Mal Tayle, and he is actually fighting two opponents. The wounds so prominent to onlookers turn out to be incidental. The crux of the combat results from La Cote’s skill in avoiding being outflanked: “but he by fyne forse and knyghtly proues gate hem afore hym” (2.472.28–9; italics mine). His bleeding wounds are surprisingly inconsequential: La Cote “felde hem to the erthe, and wolde have slayne them had they nat yelded them” (2.472.30–2; italics mine). Thus, wounds to a standing knight in plate armor may be incidental to the outcome or no more than a means to an end: bringing the opponent “to the erthe.” Note again, though, that while La Cote uses all his “proues” to put his opponents in immediate peril of their lives, their surrender is immediately accepted. It would be apparent to a fifteenth-century reader that La Cote emerges both clearly victorious and probably more extensively wounded than his two adversaries. The relationship of fifteenth-century romance and chivalric reality has been called recursive. Art imitates life, but in a case as clear as the ­Pas de la joyeuse garde, held in 1446 outside Samur, the pattern is clearly reversed.24 Romance is an enhancement of what was possible in life, where events, for all their magnificence, are pale imitations – local, limited occasions – which try to recreate what is the seamless and constant reality of the romance world. In addition to formal tournaments, there are frequent records of pas d’armes being staged across Europe that mirror similar events in Malory’s text. The pattern, again, is that of Griflet’s fledgling experience: a knight with a shield hung in a tree awaiting all comers. The pattern occurs countless times in the Morte, even during the Grail quest, while Barber and Barker detail accounts of at least seven real pas d’armes between 1443 and 1477, many but not all associated with the Burgundian court.25 In the case of the Pas de la joyeuse garde, these events differ from their Malorian counterparts in their elaborate staging.26 Clearly, there is not even a pretense of spontaneity or chance here; the events were widely publicized well in advance.27 Despite months of preparation and publicity, 24 25 26

27

See: Barber and Barker, Tournaments, 116. Barber and Barker, Tournaments, 110–24. A wooden Joyous Gard was erected on the site and there was ample staffing, both for exhibition (a lady, of course, lions, “Turks”) and to govern procedure (“kings-at-arms and judges on horseback”). Barber and Barker, Tournaments, 116.

532

Atkinson

these too were earnest combats, even though they involved role-playing and motifs derived from romance. Suero de Quinones and companion knights held a bridge “for an entire month, fighting 705 duels against sixty-eight knights, with one killed and several wounded.”28 Here, the recursive quality comes in clearly: either Malory is imitating historical pas d’armes of his own time or the Pas de la joyeuse garde is imitating another romance, possibly one of Malory’s own sources.29 Despite opportunities to demonstrate courage in battle (of which there were many) chivalry must be demonstrated in the enactment of literary romance and opportunities to win “worship” must be created. If worship is to be gained by one knight, his opponent must suffer defeat, and wounds, possibly as minor as Guzman’s, are the concrete sign of worship – on both sides. The relationship of romance and reality, then, consists primarily of spontaneity versus preparation, chance encounters versus publicized events, and the sheer quantity of knightly combats.30 What took two years to negotiate between challenge and acceptance, the combat between Lord Scales and the 28 29

30

Benson, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, 179. From the descriptions available, it is unclear whether this pas d’armes model comes from the Lancelot or the Tristram/Tristan tradition, in both of which Joyous Gard figures importantly, but the numbers should be examined closely: 705 total encounters with only 68 opponents suggest that each encounter was, in effect, a brief “round,” stopped when there was a clear winner. The whole event must have been carefully monitored. Only a few knights are (presumably seriously) wounded, suggesting how difficult it was to injure a knight in full armor as an incidental occurrence in a continuing combat. The picture, then, is one of rapid, skilled maneuvers resulting in one knight in position to kill his opponent. The one actual fatality (0.14% of the possible chances), must have been an accident – a “lucky” maneuver which could not be prevented in time. A possible scenario: a thrust at the helmet, such as the ones suffered by Guzman, which happened to find a slit in the visor. Thus, we have an important example of what it means to say that killing your opponents was the aim of one-on-one combat. Seven hundred and five times at this event, a knight is at the point of death; one is killed. Another form of enhancement is the operation of chance: when a knight vows to “take the adventure” in Malory’s world, the adventure never fails him. In addition, though the landscape is sparsely populated by manmade structures, it is abundantly populated by knights, familiar and nameless, constantly encountering one another. Especially in the Tristram, a couple of hundred knights scattered randomly across a territory the size of the American state of Massachusetts are somehow running across each other daily. By contrast, the errantry practiced by Jacques de Lalaing appears to have been largely an exercise in frustration; he is able to fight Guzman only after a year of being refused in numerous times and places across France and Spain (Barber and Barker, Tournaments, 130). A Malorian equivalent would be preposterous.

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

533

Charles the Bold, duke (“the Bastard”) of Burgundy, at Smithfield in 1467, would have occurred in Malory’s world simply because the two knights happen to appear at the same time in the same clearing. Historically, the duel was ended because the level of violence was deemed too great; in fact, “when Lord Scales had the advantage after a few strokes of the axe, the King stopped the fight.”31 An illustration of such a moment, clearly suggesting its gravity, appears in Fiore dei Liberi’s Fior di Battaglia (The Flower of Battle), in which one combatant with a poleaxe has lifted his opponent’s visor, holding it open with his left hand while the point of the axe, in his right, is already under the visor, literally in his opponent’s face.32 If we imagine the knight with the advantage here is Scales, it is clear that this position could have been reached “after a few strokes” and that the Bastard would be a dead man if the fight were not immediately halted. Elaborate tournaments, such as that held to celebrate the marriage of Margaret of York to the Bastard of Burgundy in 1468 were staged but not scripted; they combined theatrical pageantry and real physical risk. The Bastard of Burgundy, who reconciled with Lord Scales after their earlier single combat and, thus, avoided him at the wedding tournament, was nonetheless severely wounded.33 “[T]he heralds and chroniclers who recorded the event,” Benson writes, “regarded the whole affair as … worthy of more elaborate records than we have of any contemporary battle,”34 and these are largely records of results, not preparations, preserved by witnesses as diverse as Sir John Paston and Olivier de la Marche. “With the availability of printing in the following decades,” Barber and Barker write, “full descriptions of ceremonial

31 32

33 34

Barber and Barker, Tournaments, 132 Barber and Barker reproduce an illustration from London, British Library, Harley MS 4375, fol. 171v that could show the same situation a few moments earlier (Tournaments, 133). The challenge is to carry this still frame forward, not as imagined in modern depictions of medieval combat but as one of Malory’s readers might. Despite appearances, it is, again, the knight on the right with the clear advantage. If these events lacked the spontaneous quality Malory gives them, combat in Malory is often further enhanced by duration, presumably a testament to the prowess of knights in Arthur’s time. The long-awaited encounter between Lancelot and Tristram (1.350.15–25) lasts four hours, and Gawain and Lancelot fight from early morning until well past noon, when Gawain’s strength lessens (2.705.43– 706.39). Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur, 169–73. Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur, 169.

534

Atkinson

festivals became commonplace.”35 The same, of course, can be said of Malory’s manuscript(s) and Caxton’s 1485 printing of Le Morte Darthur.36 All readers of Malory develop some unsystematic, impressionistic sense that will inform a mental prediction of the outcome when two knights already familiar meet in battle. As we read through the text, experience accumulates, and we begin to rank the knights in our minds – rankings reinforced by frequent references to Lancelot as the best knight of the world, and by such specific observations as “(Than was sir Trystrames called the strengyst knyght of the worlde, for he was called bygger than sir Launcelotte, but sir Launcelot was bettir brethid)” (1.415.31–3). It would be possible, of course, to catalogue every wound in Malory, categorize them in terms of location on the body, weapon inflicting the wound, severity, treatment, and outcome, but this is the sort of work an actuary might do in designing an insurance plan for bodily injury or death. Though no reader, early or late, would undertake such a silly task, Malory’s early reader might well, again recursively, employ his predictive skills as a reader in his role as a spectator at real combats, where, based on past events witnessed or reported, rare as they might be, he could use it in predicting the real outcome. Conversely, of course, the experience of looking on at real combats could sensitize him to predicting the results of fictional ones. The most severe of ordinary wounds, of course, are those to the head, similar to the scalp wounds Guzman suffers. Malory describes such wounds about a dozen times during the Morte, and while he sometimes speaks of the brain itself, his favorite term is brayne-panne (in one spelling or another), and it means simply the skull, so that Tristram’s defeat of Marhalt ends when, “with a myghty stroke he smote sir Marhalte uppon the helme suche a buffette that hit wente thorow his helme and thorow the coyffe of steele and thorow the braynepanne” (1.382.22–5). Remarkably, Marhalt’s fractured skull does not kill him instantly; he is able to regain his ship, though he dies shortly afterwards. Malory and his audience must have been familiar with this pattern: what kills Marhalt is presumably a subdural hematoma that develops gradually after the initial fracture and proves fatal after some delay. This diagnosis conforms to fifteenthcentury combat practice. Clearly, the helmet is not going to be sliced open like an apple by the edge of a three-pound sword. The only way to penetrate it is with the concentrated force of the sword’s point; thus, Marhalt’s skull is not 35 36

Barber and Barker, Tournaments, 121. At the same time that we see Malory’s work as romance, it has many features of chronicle, both in its substance and in its paratactic style. The definitive analysis is P.J.C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

535

shattered with massive damage to the brain. Rather, it is pierced, with local damage, and a slow bleed builds intracranial pressure until it proves fatal.37 The most serious possible head wound is, of course, decapitation. Though rare in the Morte38 in which the knight vulnerable to losing his head generally yields successfully to his conqueror, and in historical records, in which the authority that convened it often halts the fight at this point, it can only be achieved (as in La Cote’s case) by bringing the opponent to the ground. While a fallen knight can, of course, get to his feet (again, the myth must be dismissed that plate armor renders a knight immobile; it weighed about as much as a combat infantryman’s pack today and was better distributed), he rarely has the time to recover before his opponent is on top of him. At that point, it is a simple enough procedure for the knight on top to remove his adversary’s helm and cut off his head, or at least slice his throat – almost the only time when the sharpened edge of a broadsword actually comes into play, though the point will do just as well. As Malory would say, then, “leve we now” the depiction of wounds inflicted and “turne we unto” their aftermath and attempts at treatment or repair. A return to the first case considered, that of Sir Griflet, may be appropriate here. That account ends with the simple declaration that, despite the gravity of Griflet’s wound, “thorow good lechis he was heled and saved” (1.48.14). While the early reader’s understanding of the mechanics of the encounter and the wound would have been clear even from its brief description, the nature of the healing, the methods employed by these “good lechis,” is far less so. In a sense, this lack of clarity is understandable. Only in a very few instances is the treatment or healing of a wound significant in Malory’s world. In quest narratives, Malory generally follows one knight at a time and that knight is always on a winning streak. His wounded victims are left behind physically and narratively.

37

38

The circumstances in Marhalt’s case are clear: helmet, padding, and skull are pierced. Malory’s early readers could, as well, be familiar with the effect of blunt-force trauma to the head, which might, again, fracture the skull locally but without piercing its covering, though that is not the case here. Real helmets could also, of course, be defective, leaving the head more vulnerable. In the enhanced chivalric world Malory constructs, however, no such imperfections exist. While knights are rarely decapitated in the Morte, several women are beheaded. See: Barbara Goodman, “Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement and a Society in Disrepair,” in this volume, 544–71; and Larissa Tracy, “‘So he smote of hir hede by myssefortune’: The Real Price of the Beheading Game in SGGK and Malory,” in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, ed. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 207–231.

536

Atkinson

The few exceptions appear when, in fact, it is the healing that is central to the narrative, not the wound. Thus, neither here nor anywhere in this vast body of work do we glean any detail about wound repair – any more than we do about landscape or architecture. Clearly, the truncheon in Griflet’s side would be carefully removed, and clearly Griflet is again lucky: not only did the spear point miss the vital organs but the wound did not become seriously infected. Malory’s knights frequently spend a considerable amount of time healing, and we can understand this as familiar to the early reader, though the fact that these are periods when the body is struggling to fight off infection would, of course, not be. Again, it is important to realize that fifteenth-century wounds acquired in armed combat are generally punctures. The tip of a spear (in Griflet’s case) or the point of a sword (in many others) is hardly sterile itself; it will also push into the wound fragments of the leather, cloth, or padding of the garment beneath the mail. Infection would be almost inevitable. If the body fails to fight off the infection, the knight dies of septic shock and multiple organ failure. For Malory’s readers, a wounded knight may linger, but he ultimately recovers or dies. It is striking, though, that no detail is ever offered concerning the treatment of wounds. Leeches (Malory’s favorite term for medical attendants; it occurs thirteen times, while the only alternative, “surgeon,” appears three times)39 perform only one activity: they “search” the wound. What this word means is never made clear by Malory; there is never a mention of suturing or bandaging, though Middle English provides words for both.40 This may well be another 39

40

A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Tomomi Kato (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1974) s.v. Chaucer’s “doctor of physic” and “physicien” never appear. Clearly, when looking at a specific topic mentioned as frequently as wounds in a body of text as extensive as Malory’s, a concordance looks like an attractive tool. At the same time, if the aim is to reconstruct the reception of Malory’s early readers, a concordance needs to be used thoughtfully. No reader at any time makes a concordance in their mind as they proceed through a text. While they may in fact register the recurrence of words, phrases, or verbal patterns, they are not counting in their heads, nor are they awarding importance to recurring features in proportion to their frequency. Indeed, frequency may have the opposite effect: the reader may start taking recurring features for granted and pay less attention to them the more often they are encountered. Even if they are felt to be charming – a common response among Malory’s modern readers – they may start fading into the background, causing the reader to award more attention to exceptions than to the developing norm. There were clear distinctions between medical professionals in fifteenth-century England. According to Faye Getz, they were as follows: “barber (a haircutter who might perform bloodletting or minor surgery on the skin), a barber-surgeon (a barber who also performed surgery), leech, le mire, medicus, chirurgus or sururgicus, and physicus.”

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

537

instance of Malory’s reliance on the common knowledge of his readers. The Middle English Dictionary, in which most of the meanings are those familiar in Modern English as well, does quote The Siege of Thebes, where Lydgate uses the word “search” in conjunction with at least some useful elaboration: “She made first wassh his woundes smerte/And serche hem wel with dyuers instruments” (ll. 2393–94). Though “search” in this sense is not high on the list of definitions, this passage and others suggest that searching a wound entails examining it, probing it (in Griflet’s case to be sure no splinters of the truncheon remain or fragments of clothing pushed into the wound), and, perhaps by extension, applying some form of salve or “dressing,” which could refer to the substance applied or to a form of bandaging.41 The important point here is that if wounds themselves are given little detail (again, Griflet’s is, by Malory’s standards, lavishly described), their treatment is given less. The single term would be understood by Malory’s early readers, at least in general, from experience (perhaps more clearly as onlookers than as victims); it is, in a world without the concept of antisepsis, the best treatment possible: the wound is cleaned, potential sources of infection are removed (at least those that are macroscopic), and the rest is left to the body’s natural defenses. The narrative does not linger on these procedures, but it rarely lingers at all. Driven always by the storyline, Malory is concerned with who wins an encounter and sometimes how convincingly it is won, but the loser is rarely of further concern. There are occasional wounds in Malory’s Morte that demand special attention, where the narrative remains focused on the victim and where, in two instances, the repair is more important than the wound. Tristram’s wounding by Marhalt introduces a new element not present in more ordinary accounts from the simple story of Griflet onwards: poison. “[F]or, as the Frenshe booke seyth,” Malory writes, “the spere-hede was invenymed that sir Trystrams myght nat be hole” (1.384.1–3). Poison needs to be considered carefully in a prescientific age. Though no sorcery is specifically alleged here, the very fact of poison moves us into a realm that is outside of the natural – more medieval magic than modern toxicology. Tristram’s healing, through the advice of a “witty lady,” is accomplished simply by returning to the country where the poison originated. There, the effects of the poison appear to dissipate as events unfold; no special procedure is performed.42

41 42

Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8. Malory is either unfamiliar with these distinctions, expects his audience to be uninterested in them, or omits them, as he does so much detail, in the interest of narrative pace. MED, s.v. serchen. We might speculate that the place where the poison originated might be where to seek an antidote, but Malory offers nothing to encourage that speculation.

538

Atkinson

Poison is rare in Malory’s work. He does not have the next century’s awareness of the Italian world or its penchant for poison as a political weapon. A more typical appearance of magic among knightly affairs involves the sorceress Hallewes, probably best remembered by Malory’s readers as a prospective necrophiliac, who seeks Lancelot’s death that she may sleep with his corpse. More immediately, though, she has cast what is the standard magic spell: Sir Melyot’s wounds, suffered in a fight against Gilbert the Bastard, “sholde never be hole,” his sister tells Lancelot, “… tyll I coude fynde a knyght wolde go into the Chapel Perelus, and there he sholde fynde a swerde and a blody cloth that the woundid knyght was lapped in; and a piece of that cloth and that swerde sholde hele my brother, with that his woundis were serched with the swerde and the cloth.” (1.279.21–6) This is the standard pattern for magical wounds: they remain open (“he was passyng paale as the erthe for bledynge” [1.281.31–2]) until a particular knight is able to heal them, in this case Lancelot, who can brave the threats of the Chapel Perilous to recover the sword and the cloth. An open wound is, of course, an invitation to airborne infection, so in the real experience of Malory’s early readers, wounds that remained open and bleeding were almost certainly mortal; it was a race between the infection and the blood loss. A wound that remained open indefinitely, weakening but not killing the victim, might demand a supernatural explanation. In many respects, the healing of the Maimed King by Galahad follows much the same pattern as Lancelot’s healing of Melyot, despite the perceptible differences between the world of the Grail quest and the world seen in Malory’s narrative previously. Though the Grail world, with its abrupt introduction of allegorical meanings for apparently commonplace events and the appearance of loquacious hermits to explicate those meanings, strikes many modern critics as entailing the introduction of an entirely different set of values and perspectives, an approach focused on wounds and healing suggests that these differences might be more muted for Malory’s original audience. Most of the wounds suffered in Malory’s Quest are, in the fifteenth-century English sense, standard – and rare: nearly all the knights, spiritually unprepared for this adventure, complain of boredom! The frequency of encounters in the Tristram is followed in the Sangreall by a notable scarcity, and a scarcity of combat means a scarcity of wounds. In fact, wounds are not only scarce in the Grail

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

539

narrative, they have, when they do occur, the sort of spiritual significance attached to all elements of the Grail world.43 Galahad’s healing of the Maimed King is hugely important in spiritual terms, but it is treated quite briefly and matter-of-factly, considering that Galahad has first spoken with God in terms almost as spare as most of Malory’s dialogue (2.1030.12–36–1031.7): And sir Galahad wente anone to the speare which lay uppon the table and towched the bloode with hys fyngirs, and cam aftir to the Maymed [kynge] and anoynted his legges and hys body. And therewith he clothed hym anone, and sterte uppon hys feete oute of hys bedde as an hole man, and thanked God that He had heled hym. (2.1031.8–13) The only procedural or narrative distinction between this apparently spiritual healing and Lancelot’s breaking of a magic spell in healing Melyot is the word “anointed” in place of “searched” and that the treatment is applied to the king’s entire body, not simply the site of the wound. Further – and this is central to the later healing of Urry – the victim thanks God, not God’s human agent. Here, the healing takes primacy, in part because of its spiritual significance and in part because the wound, important at the time, is now a distant memory from the strange story of Balin. More than half of the text has been interposed, hundreds of manuscript leaves or printed pages. 44 Its significance at the time is not entirely clear; its importance in retrospect, dimmed. The circumstances are complicated, like everything in Balin’s story, and far outside 43

44

An assortment of critical entanglements awaits the modern critic who follows Vinaver into the realm of source study and comparison. On the other hand, we can be reasonably sure that Malory’s early readers had not read the French Queste del Saint Graal and were not interested in comparing Malory’s mysterious world with the stranger still – but at the same time fuller and more consistent – Cistercian imaginings by which secular chivalry is condemned. C.S. Lewis’ famous “paradox” can thus be unraveled. C.S. Lewis, “The English Prose Morte,” in Essays on Malory, ed. J.A.W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 7–28. The Grail quest seems to modern readers – and early ones as well, no doubt – deeply religious because they are not reading it alongside the French Queste; the allegorical interpretation of events seems equally strange at a third their length in the French; the confusions and contradictions within the Grail material, and with Grail-related material preceding it, only deepen the sense of mystery. Malory’s account is indeed confusing to readers in any century, but it can only appear confused if the French source is primary in the reader’s mind. That condition may be unique, among all Malory’s readers, to Vinaver himself. In the one-volume Vinaver edition, with more words on the page than Caxton’s, the gap is almost exactly 500 pages, more than two-thirds the length of the book. Malory Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).

540

Atkinson

the norm of knightly encounters. They culminate in Balin’s frantic search for a weapon, which leads him, unwittingly, to Longeus’ spear: “So whan Balyn saw the spere he gate hit in hys honde and turned to kynge Pellam and felde hym and smote hym passyngly sore with that spere, that kynge Pellam [felle] downe in a sowghe” (1.85.8–11).45 Only the aftermath of this blow is out of the ordinary: “And therewith the castell brake rooffe and wallis and felle downe to the erthe. And Balyn felle downe and myght nat styrre hande nor foote, and for the moste party of that castell was dede thorow the dolorouse stroke” (1.85.11–14). How extraordinary are the consequences is only explained after Merlin appears, the history is revealed, and Balin leaves through a land laid waste (1.85.33–86.6). This discussion concludes with two wounds and perhaps two healings. The first of the latter has proven especially controversial among Malory critics: the healing of Sir Urry.46 This intriguing episode has generated more critical discussion than perhaps any other in the Morte, and it can be viewed from a number of perspectives – maybe more than one at the same time – most of which are available both to the early and the modern reader. Though frequently understood as, in some sense, a continuation of Lancelot’s career in the Grail quest, the fact is that the background to Urry’s arrival at Arthur’s court is a familiar story by this point. The mother of the opponent Urry has killed is “a grete sorseras” (3.1145.15). Thus, Urry’s wounds belong now to the realm of magic, like the wounds of Melyot. The backstory here bears no real resemblance to that of the Maimed King, whose wound is ultimately linked to the Crucifixion through Balin’s use of Longeus’ spear. The only spiritual dimension to this event is the one introduced by Lancelot himself, the only knight to pray before attempting the healing. The spell stipulates that Urry’s wounds can be healed only by “the beste knyght of the worlde” (3.1146.12). Had this episode occurred early in the Tristram, for instance – and since it is not linked to any French source, its placement here, at the end of the tale following the Grail quest, has to have been Malory’s choice – the “best knight” credential would 45

46

This is the first of only two occasions in the Morte where a knight uses a spear on foot. The other is Arthur’s final combat with Mordred. There, the spear is clearly a jousting lance that has survived the battle (3.1237.9–10); how a fifteenth-century reader would have pictured a Roman footsoldier’s spear designed for thrusting or throwing will always be a puzzle. A brief sampler of criticism on the topic: Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur, 227–29; Atkinson, “‘Malory’s ‘Healing of Sir Urry’: Lancelot, the Earthly Fellowship, and the World of the Grail,” Studies in Philology 78 (1981): 341–52; Catherine Batt, Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 153–58; Kenneth Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 58–59.

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

541

have been beyond dispute. By the end of the Tristram, though, Lancelot has been warned by a hermit, through Bors, about his altered status in the Grail quest: “in thys spyrytuall maters he shall have many hys bettyrs” (2.801.32–3). Following the Grail quest, then, his credential remains questionable. After all, Bors, one of the Grail knights, is present. Thus, critical dispute has centered on this phrase and on Lancelot’s response to achieving the healing: “And ever sir Launcelote wepte, as he had bene a chylde that had bene beatyn!” (3.1152.35– 6). Lancelot’s healing recalls both the magical healing of Melyot and Galahad’s healing of the Maimed King, one quintessentially magical, with Hallewes in the background; the other, quintessentially spiritual with God overseeing the proceedings. All 110 knights who precede him in the attempt to heal Urry treat the task as magical: the spell has stipulated a single healer, so each knight’s attempt serves only to test whether they are the one designated by the mother’s spell. Lancelot is the last and most reluctant candidate, protesting: “never was I able in worthynes to do so hyghe a thynge” (3.1152.14–5). He attempts the healing only when commanded to by Arthur. His instant success provokes the controversial tears, but what singles out his attempt from the others’ is that he sees it in a spiritual light. In other words, for Lancelot, at least, “best” still has its Grail world sense, not its sense of prowess in combat; hence, his prayer: “Now, Blyssyd Fadir and Son and Holy Goste, I beseche The of Thy mercy that my symple worshyp and honesté be saved, and Thou Blyssed Trynyté, Thou mayste yeff me power to hele thys syke knyght by the grete vertu and grace of The, but, Goode Lorde, never of myselff” (3.1152.20–5). Lancelot’s self-estimate has been dismissed by more than one modern critic on various grounds and might have been dismissed by some early readers for whom the Grail world held less interest or narrative impact than the far more familiar world, for them, of earthly chivalry. In other words, early readers, though for somewhat different reasons, may have split along the same lines as modern critics. Lancelot’s tears may have seemed to some as they do to Benson: a cliché commonly used to depict an adult male weeping,47 though in fact men being easily overcome by emotion seems to have been a common occurrence in the late Middle Ages.48 To other readers, then and now, the simile “as he had bene a chylde that had bene beatyn” can be taken more literally, as a stinging 47 48

Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur, 228–29. See, for example: Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 1997). In the Morte, tears are shed lavishly when Lancelot returns Guinevere to the king (694.14–16).

542

Atkinson

rebuke. God has allowed him to perform a task for which he is not qualified; the Grail world sense of “best knight” is still in place, God has simply, through His mercy, granted a special privilege to the troubled Lancelot. If the healing of Urry seems extraordinary in blending the categories of magical and spiritual, the work’s final wounds fall outside any previous experience. Though there are, of course, wars in the first two tales, and they are recounted in the terms that are conventional, from The Iliad to at least Book 6 of Paradise Lost, as a series of single combats The Battle of Salisbury Plain is treated differently. Though it is certainly not depicted in strategic or tactical terms, there is a sense of summary overview (3.1235.30–1236.15), and there is the gritty reality of the peasant looters (3.1237.32–1238.4).49 The battle ends, of course, with a final single combat, since – apart from the two leaders (and, in their respective noncombatant roles, Lucan and Bedivere) – it has achieved a 100% fatality rate. The final confrontation of Arthur and Mordred falls far outside the Malorian norm. There are no horses left, just one spear (Arthur’s) and one sword (Mordred’s), and the final image comes not from chivalric jousting, however grimly undertaken, but from hunting. Mordred, fatally wounded but not dead, does what wounded boars are repeatedly said to do in medieval hunting texts: he climbs the spear, letting it pass through his body, to reach his enemy (3.1237.15–22). Since Arthur’s spear does not have the crosspiece of a hunting spear, designed to prevent the boar from reaching the hunter, Mordred is able to deliver his last blow: “he threste hymselff … upp to the burre of kyng Arthurs speare” (3.1237.16–8). Though Malory does not explicitly make the comparison of Mordred to a boar, it is a common simile in his descriptions of single combat: (e.g. 1.260.18). While the early reader might well recall such phrases, they are surely inadequate here. The event is, again, without parallel or precedent in the Morte. The ambivalent account of Arthur’s prospective healing features one of the rare appearances in the Morte of the narrative voice. That voice is usually heard pronouncing aphorisms, such as “Here men may undirstonde that bene men of worshyp that man was never fourmed that all tymes might attayne…” (2.484.18– 9) or delivering admonitions: “Lo ye all Englysshemen, se ye nat …” (3.1229.6). 49

On possible parallels to the Battle of Towton, in which Malory may have participated, see: K.S. Whetter, “The Historicity of Combat in Le Morte Darthur,” in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P.J.C. Field, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 261–70. M.R. Geldof analyzes osteoarcheological evidence of wounds from the Battle of Towton in this volume. See: “‘And describe the shapes of the dead’: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence,” 57–80; and Woosnam–Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare,” 43–4.

Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory

543

Here, though, the voice is strangely uncertain. If Arthur is to be healed, it will be by the ladies in the barge, but even they are doubtful: “A, my dere brothir! Why [ha]ve ye taryed so longe frome me? Alas, thys wounde on youre hede hath caught overmuch coulde” (3.1240.23–5). The narrator himself despairs, “[n]ow more of the deth of kynge Arthur coude I never fynde…” (3.1242.15–6). Uncertainties abound, an alternative ending is offered – the king’s death from his wounds and the famous tombstone – but the contents of the grave are questioned as well, and the narrator can only reach a conclusion which concludes nothing: “here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyffe” (3.1242.26–7). Despite this final ambivalence, the modern reader must understand Malory’s generally clear picture of chivalric prowess for what it was to his first readers: a crucial element in an ideal Arthurian kingdom many of whose features are nonetheless rooted in their own century. In some respects, of course, the ideal stands in sharp contrast to the world of Malory’s first audience, but in the realm of combat wounds, it would be familiar. Those readers (or listeners) would not envision the clanking of unwieldy swords or the infliction of great slashing wounds but a refined, deft set of techniques, their own raised to an extraordinary level of expertise. The stability – albeit transient – of the Arthurian world, embodied in the Pentecostal Oath’s contractual language (1.120.17–24), is defended by knights for whom stability was first a matter of physical balance, maintained despite wounds to the victorious knight. His job was to disrupt the enemy’s balance, on horseback or on foot, so that the outcome held a flawless stability: one combatant standing, the other on the ground, either concluding the combat by surrender or, in short order, dead.

544

Goodman

Chapter 23

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defilement, Disfigurement, and a Society in Disrepair Barbara A. Goodman Representations of women’s wounds often revolve around patterns of sexual transgression, loss of voice, and societal suspicions. Discussions of such wounds in Middle English texts often focus on how these patterns are incorporated into the torture of female saints or women besieged during war. Yet these patterns also can be found in Middle English romances in which social tensions are aroused by ongoing sexual transgressions and ensuing punitive wounds; depictions, however, at times contravene the conventions of the patterns established in hagiographies and chronicles. Instead, by utilizing violence, rape, unheeded or silenced voices, imposed injuries, and social disrepair, women’s wounds in late Middle English romances, rather than glorifying personal valor, religious, or national status, reveal a society in disrepair. Elaine Scarry’s exploration in The Body in Pain offers important insight into how wounds, resulting from torture and war, interact within the social constructs: Thus war, like torture, is […] a structure through which the attributes of the hurt body are connected to unanchored verbal constructs: […]. Like torture, war claims pain’s attributes as its own and disclaims the pain itself.1 Scarry underscores that torture usually happens between two people while war happens on a “vast scale,”2 among many people or nations: “The structure of torture resides in, takes shape in, the physical and verbal interactions between two people, a torturer and a prisoner.”3 While the endorsement of torture can involve a group whose needs and expectations are embodied by 1 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 139. 2 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 139. 3 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 63.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_025

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

545

the torturer, Scarry focuses her discussion of the organic relationship between pain and voice on the actual torturer and the prisoner: Pain and interrogation inevitably occur together in part because the torturer and the prisoner each experience the opposite. The very question that, within the political pretense, matters so much to the torturer that it occasions his grotesque brutality will matter so little to the prisoner experiencing the brutality that he will give the answer.4 In medieval female hagiography, torture is often between a female saint and a cohort of males from her family and community; this cohort may be comprised of joint persecutors, decreeing what punishment the female saint must endure.5 These women usually are not being tortured for information as much as they are being tortured so that they will repudiate their beliefs. The males work as a unit trying to force the recantations. Similarly, women caught in war usually find themselves threatened or besieged by a cohort of soldiers, not by army-to-army battlefield confrontations; this cohort is made up not of family members but rather men who oppose the woman’s family and its political allegiances. The unit represents a larger, more abstract group, but often does not behave in alignment with the larger group’s decrees. The injuries these women suffer are, in Scarry’s words, “by-products” of war in that they emanate from outside the battlefields,6 and these women’s voices may not be heard at all. However, all of these women’s wounds, whether inflicted by family members or foreigners, whether from torture or war, are inflicted by males and reinforce a religion’s or a nation’s beliefs. This process, which Scarry terms “analogical verification,” allows physical wounds to support or endorse intangible cultural values.7 With regard to patterns of sexual transgression and loss of voice, female saints appear to have more voice than women enmeshed in war, but their aspirations can be undermined by their community leaders. Many of them give lengthy speeches or disquisitions about their religious beliefs. Saint Katherine is especially noted for her voice: she debates with fifty philosophers appointed by the pagan emperor, and she converts the philosophers to Christianity. Yet, 4 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 29. 5 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 43. Scarry discusses three differences between those who suffer pain for religious causes and those who are tortured for political causes: duration, control, and purpose. 6 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 72. 7 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 13–14.

546

Goodman

because these women are viewed as property and may not legally be allowed to preach, their torturers attempt to extinguish their speeches. Their words may be heard by the people, but they are disregarded by those in power. St. Katherine converts not only the philosophers but also those appointed to guard her, yet the emperor is not swayed. The emperor starves her, tortures her, and finally has her beheaded.8 Moreover, female saints’ bodies may be displayed before they are tortured: their bodies, in this situation, become blank canvases that their attackers display and adorn with their torture. As Beth Crachiolo explains, “[R]epresentations of the torture of women encourage the narrative’s audience to concentrate its attention on the sight of a suffering female body, while representations of the torture of men focus attention away from the suffering male body.”9 These displays are meant to highlight these women’s vulnerability and their loss of status and value.10 Larissa Tracy, who perceives the representation of women’s bodies less as audience entertainment and more as reactions against torture,11 also acknowledges the sexual nature of the torture: “[T]he young female virgin saints are most frequently abused and tortured in a manner specific to their gender: […] they are threatened with brutal rape, or in rare and extremely shocking instances, their genitalia are mutilated.”12 Often these women are tortured because of their refusal to marry or to consummate their marriages. Having their virginity remain intact is an important element of the female saints’ identity and, thus, makes the physical nature of the women’s torture and wounds more sexually-infused: “The texts imply that these women would probably not have been tortured had they consented to the sexual demands made upon them.”13 The torturers’ actions expose the sexual nature of torture as their weapons plunge deep into the female flesh, as demonstrated in the South English Legendary’s narrative of St. Juliana’s life: “Þe rasors kene iwette/ Þat þo hure uless was al to torne so deope wode & gnowe/

8 9

10 11 12 13

John Capgrave, The Life of Saint Katherine, ed. Karen A. Winstead, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1999). Beth Crachiolo, “Seeing the Gendering of Violence: Female and Male Martyrs in the South English Legendary,” in ‘A Great effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 147–163, at 147. Crachiolo, “Seeing the Gendering of Violence,” 158. Larissa Tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 39. Tracy, Torture and Brutality, 55. Tracy, Torture and Brutality, 60.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

547

Þat þe bones hy to slitte” (144–146).14 The injuries are reflective of their sexual natures and the manner in which the women are viewed as valuable commodities. The inflicted wounds, to be compelling in the minds of the torturers, can require cutting off the woman’s breasts or puncturing the woman’s body, creating new slits and openings. By defying familial and community norms, the women are wounded, but those wounds become emblematic of their faith. As Tracy states, “Torture becomes one of the defining factors separating pagan and apostate tyranny from Christian authority – only pagans would employ such barbaric means against innocents.”15 In the terms of analogical verification, these women’s deaths, which may occur at the end of the narratives, celebrate their release from the suffering they endure as warriors for Christ. While the focus of texts that recount sieges and war is not usually on women, women can be an element in their narratives. Various texts such as letters, chronicles, and romances deal in part with women’s concerns about being attacked and the need to defend themselves from such attacks. Fear of attack is illustrated in the letters of Margaret Paston to her husband John when their property was under attack due to litigation: “great affrays have been made vppon me and my felashep.”16 Margaret Paston’s itemized preparations for such attacks demonstrate her awareness of the world of violence and the need to protect herself, her people, and her property. The wounds women suffer in texts detailing such attacks are often obtained under siege.17 As Peggy McCracken states, when comparing men’s and women’s sufferings in war: “To be sure, women are hurt, killed, raped, and wounded in war, but women’s wounds and women’s deaths are usually classed under the heading of atrocities; they are the result of illegitimate violence that takes place outside the battlefield.”18 Similarly, Scarry determines four “paths by

14 15 16

17

18

Qtd. in Crachiolo, “Seeing the Gendering of Violence,” 150. Tracy, Torture and Brutality, 47. Qtd. in Corinne Saunders, “Women and Warfare in Medieval English Writing,” in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. Corinne Saunders, Francoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 187–212, at 192. Saunders, “Women and Warfare,” 190. Saunders also discusses that, at times, women warriors are represented as acceptable. These women, some of who are legendary and others of whom are historical, lead their countrymen in battle. They are not wounded women. These women, even when viewed as morally ambiguous, were recognized for their toughness, and their injuries were not those that women under siege suffered. Having taken on male dress and characteristics, they are outside the parameters of this paper. Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve, The Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 21.

548

Goodman

which injuring can be relegated to a still visible but marginal position.”19 As mentioned above, she terms the path relevant to these women’s wounds as “by-products”: [T]he injuries and deaths and damages are referred to as a “by-product” of war […]. The language of “by-product” denotes “accidental,” “unwanted,” “unsought,” “unanticipated,” and “useless.”20 The violence that the women suffer and their consequent wounds are not part of the official fight but are inevitable results of war. Moreover, the violence that these women may suffer is almost always associated with their fear of rape. This constant horror of capture and rape is underscored in Flowers of History, the chronicle of Roger of Wendover, who tells of nuns deliberately mutilating themselves to avoid rape in the face of Viking invasions. In 870, Abbess Ebba of Collingham “with an heroic spirit, affording to all the holy sisters an example of chastity […] took a razor, and with it, cut off her nose, together with her upper lip unto the teeth, presenting herself a horrible spectacle to those who stood by.”21 The nuns in her monastery followed her example and also deformed themselves. In this chronicle, the nuns act to protect themselves from those “tyrants [who wished] to disgrace the holy women devoted to God.”22 Although they are burned alive in their convent, they save their virginity. Because the nuns understood their status as desirable property, they chose to disfigure themselves in order to be unattractive or undesirable objects. As Corinne Saunders terms it, the abbess and nuns of Collingham saved their virginity by “ungendering themselves”23 and refusing to be objectified by the invading Vikings. Other women do not take such drastic measures to avoid defilement. Jean Froissart, in his Chroniques, details sieges and battles during the first half of the Hundred Years War, and, at times he tells how the women were treated in these sieges. For example, describing the siege of Caen, Froissart tells how Sir Thomas and his men rode through the city preventing acts of violence: “and many nuns were saved from violation.”24 Again, the potential harm to women is rape or 19 20 21 22 23 24

Scarry, The Body in Pain, 72. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 72, 73. Roger of Wendover, Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History, ed. and trans. J.A. Giles (London: Henry G. Bohun, 1849; rptd. New York: AMS, 1968), 1:191. Roger of Wendover, Flowers of History, 1:192. Saunders, “Women and Warfare,” 194. John Froissart, Chronicles of England, France and Spain and the Surrounding Countries, trans. and ed. John Joliffe (New York: Modern Library, 1967), 35. Gallica: (accessed 15 June 2014) contains the Luce and de Letterhove medieval French editions of Chroniques. Saunders, “Women and Warfare,” 192. Saunders, “Women and Warfare,” 194. King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1986, rptd. 1988), 201. Hereafter, lines numbers are given in parentheses.

550

Goodman

In such a romance, the women have voices – to praise the king and ask him to intercede. Other romances’ descriptions of what the women undergo can be factually intense, such as in the Siege of Jerusalem: A womman, bounden with a barn, was on the bely hytte With a ston of a stayre, as the storyj telleth That the barn out brayde fram the body clene And was born up as a bal over the burwe walles (829–832).28 Indeed, while the women may fear rape, their physical wounds often stem from the siege itself. Thus, the Siege of Jerusalem catalogs how a prolonged siege can lead to starvation and madness: Than saith that worthi wif, in a wode hunger, “Myn owen barn have I brad and the bones gnawen; Yit have I saved you som,” and forth a side feccheth Of the barn that ho bare – and alle hire blode chaungeth. (1093–1096) Naturally, the woman who commits such a horrific act is a non-Christian – someone who is vulnerable because of her lack of true faith. In a manner similar to the actions of women in female hagiographies and the chronicles, this non-Christian woman’s mad act reinforces the superiority of a Christian nation. When the violence that women suffer in the romances is not a result of religion or war, the resulting wounds become far more oblique and convoluted. Actual sexual violence, not fear of rape, becomes an integral component of the injuries. Malory narrates one of the most violent acts when Gaheris decapitates his mother, Margawse, because he finds her in bed with Sir Lamorak.29 Similar violent acts with sexual implications occur in Sir Gowther and Athelston, respectively: in the first text, a barren duchess is raped by the fiend and her nipple is torn off while nursing his son; and, in the second text, the pregnant queen intercedes to save her sister-in-law’s family and the enraged Athelston beats his wife, striking her until their unborn child is killed. These women’s sexual virtues and voices are not protected. In the case of Malory and Sir 28

29

Siege of Jerusalem, ed. Michael Livingston, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, Publication, 2004): (accessed 15 June 2014). Lines numbers are given in parentheses. Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3rd edition, rev. P.J.C. Field (Oxford: Clarendon 1990), 2.612.9–35.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

551

Gowther, the women speak no words, and in Athelston, the queen’s words of intercession go unheeded. The women are sexually active and voiceless when violently attacked by their family members: sons, husbands, and lovers. Their wounds are direct results of that sexual activity, and their lack of voice is due to their gender. Just as the female saints speak their beliefs while being persecuted, the women in these romances talk, but they are not heard by the men with the power; for all practical purposes, they are voiceless. These women’s wounds are permanent and carry no honor or glory with them. Male wounds in medieval romances are often represented as curable decorations earned to achieve greater honor.30 Wounds that these males suffer are medically defined as acute in that the patient can be treated and healed. Even when male wounds are caused by a wicked woman’s crafts and require a miracle to be healed, healing can occur, such as when Lancelot searches the wounds of Sir Urry and heals him – earning honor for both Sir Urry and himself.31 Such chronic male wounds may take more time and ability to heal, but they still can be healed. As McCracken states, “Men bleed prominently in medieval fiction to prove valor, to avenge unjust wounds, and to impose justice.”32 Their wounds are glorious and customarily curable. Moreover, when the wounds are not curable, they still bleed copiously and are usually magnificently lethal. Celebrating a death becomes appropriate because of the nobility of the man and the wounds he endured. Thus, in the Alliterative Morte Arthur, when Gawain dies fighting for Arthur, he bleeds copiously and is heralded for his nobility: And Sir Gawain the good in his gay armes, Unbegripped the gers and on grounf fallen His banners braiden down bęten of gūles His brand and his brǫde shēld all bloody berunnen. …………………………………………………… Then the crownd king crīes full loud: Dęre cosin of kind in care am I lęved For now my worship is went and my war ended! Hēre is the hǫpe of my hęle, my happing in armes, My herte and my hardīness hǫlly on him lenged! (3943–46; 3955–59) 30

31 32

Patricia Skinner notes, however, that some men suffer shameful wounds. See: “Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE,” in this volume, 81–101, at 81. Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3.1145–6. McCracken, The Curse of Eve, 10.

552

Goodman

Antithetically, women’s wounds, unbloody and permanent, tend to be detrimental, even malignant, in their impact.33 In fact, an unusual part of the narrative regarding Gaheris’s beheading of his mother is that she bleeds; most women, despite the violence done to them, do not bleed from their wounds.34 This use of blood matches what McCracken states about women’s blood, that it is usually specific and local, and, thus, not significant.35 Bettina Bildhauer clarifies the contrast between men’s bleeding and women’s bleeding when she states: “Menstruation and heroism are mutually exclusive.”36 While these women might not be expected to menstruate, they might be expected to bleed from their inflicted wounds. But usually, they do not bleed because they are not heroic in nature, and any blood they do accidentally shed is outside the parameters of men’s heroic wounds. Analogous to the degrading elements of these wounds is the objectification of the women’s bodies in these narratives. The women’s sexual transgressions and their permanent wounds expose the society’s erratic disordering. With women’s wounds inflicted rather than earned, the representations of male wounds won honorably in battle are displaced with depictions of unfair female injuries compelled by a disordered society.37 In Middle English romances composed in the later Middle Ages, this violence, sexual and otherwise, combines with stifled voices to underscore social disrepair and unrest. One manner by which women are brutally wounded is through the mutilation of their tongues. Depictions of silent women, or women being silenced in medieval texts, parallel the religious and social perceptions of women’s voice 33

34

35 36 37

A similar pattern emerges with regard to spells or enchantments that cause physical transformations. Males, such as the Alphouns in William of Palerne, the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Turk in The Turk and Gowin, are described as upright or well-formed in their enchanted forms, and they are all disenchanted at the end of the romances. Females are hideous in their enchanted forms and tend to be disenchanted in early romances (e.g. loathly lady tales); in post-1400 romances, female forms that are due to spells or curses, such as Melusine’s serpent form in Romans of Partenay, tend to be permanent and disfiguring. Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3.1132.8–1133.4. In fact, Malory removes the allusion that a woman might have bled in his telling of The Knight of the Cart when Lancelot sleeps with Guenevere and his wound bleeds on the sheets. In Chretien’s The Knight of the Cart, Guenevere claims the blood is from a nosebleed; in Malory’s version, she gives no explanation for the blood. McCracken, The Curse of Eve, 10. Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), 36. For further discussion of the social effect of wounds and scars on masculine prowess, see: Skinner, “Visible Prowess?,” 97–8.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

553

as dangerous or blasphemous. As Sandy Bardsley elaborates in Venomous Tongues: [A]ttitudes toward women’s voices also reflected and helped constitute their status, and the late Middle Ages were a period in which perceptions of women’s speech underwent a sea change. Views of female speech mattered because those whose speech was disparaged lost social and cultural power as a result.38 With regard to religion, women’s voices were perceived as representative of the sins which the mouth could effuse: minor sins such as scolding and illicit speech, as well as the major sins, such as heresy itself, were perceived as coming more often from a woman’s mouth. Advice texts, such as that of the Knight of the La Tour Landry, caution husbands to monitor their wives and to be responsible for speaking for the family in public. Such texts emphasize how women who talk too much disrupt the community’s peace and how they upend the family social structure.39 In Middle English romances, when women are silenced, the delineations are not as clear. In general, there are two types of silencing: rhetorical and physical. Some women are given no words to speak although the assumption is that they retain the physical ability to speak, and others are physically injured in order to prevent their speaking. Silenced but uninjured women, such as the unnaturally aged40 Morgan le Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, have 38 39

40

Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 2. The Knight’s design, as the EETS edition indicates, was “to write a treatise for the purpose of instructing them in all those mental qualities which, in the fourteenth century, were looked upon as constituting the character of a pure and perfect lady.” Geoffrey La Tour Landry, Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, ed. Thomas Wright (1906 University of Michigan Humanities Text Index 1997), xi (accessed 15 June 2014). Tolkien, in his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, addresses the issue of Morgan le Fay’s aged appearance in comparison to her half-brother Arthur’s youthful appearance in footnote 2460 by referring to Suite de Merlin, which attributes Morgan’s hideous appearance to her indulging in the black arts, learning enchantments and spells. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 130. Sheila Fisher, in her articles “Taken Men and Token Women” and “Leaving Morgan Aside,” terms Morgan’s appearance as “suspiciously old” (“Taken Men”) and notes, not only Tolkien’s interpretation, but other scholars who have discussed her appearance. In “Leaving Morgan Aside,” she indicates that Morgan’s fleshly corruption might be connected to the corruption “that is women.” Sheila Fisher, “Taken Men and Token Women,”

554

Goodman

negative motives ascribed to them but are not allowed to explain their actions. Other women who are emotionally tortured and silenced, such as Griselda in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, suffer loss of voice because of an earlier promise of obedience. These romances integrate women who are silenced rhetorically with issues of patriarchies and dynastic control. The voiceless women in these romances are not reported to be virtuous or to speak the words of God. These women threaten to disrupt the family and community structures, yet because of their silence, they are powerless to press forward their ambitions. They are silenced to prevent them from asserting their authority. Their words cannot be heard because to hear their words would acknowledge their being and their potential power as sisters, wives, and daughters of the ruling males. But what are the purposes and the consequences of the physical maiming that these women endure so that they cannot speak? In both the South English Legendary and Gilte Legende, as well Bokenham and other versions, St. Christine, despite being physically silenced, receives speech from God. Her tongue is cut out by the order of Julian, the judge, and she spits a piece of her severed tongue back into his face so forcefully that he is blinded – and miraculously she is able to taunt him verbally despite being tongueless. As Tracy states, “She challenges not only the authority of the pagan Roman prelates but also the paternal authority wielded by her father.”41 In this situation, the tongue is not only a symbol of speech but a physical weapon striking a blow against the secular male hierarchy and for Christianity: God’s words cannot be silenced by loss of a tongue. But the mutilation of a woman’s tongue in Middle English romances serves a different purpose. The woman may pray to God to save her from rape or cry for vengeance on those who have raped her, but she loses her voice and no mercy is shown. Perhaps the most famous story of a woman having her tongue cut out in order to prevent her from speaking is the classical story used by medieval authors of Philomela who is raped by Tereus, her brother-in-law, the King of Thrace; indeed, he cuts out her tongue to prevent her from telling what he did and imprisons her, saying she has died. Philomela is perhaps closest to the portrayal of the female victims of war or the female saints in that she is a virgin, an object of desire for Tereus, and has voice when she laments his

41

in Seeking the Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 96; and Sheila Fisher, “Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, ed. Christopher ­Baswell and William Sharpe (New York: Garland, 1988), 129–51, at 144. Tracy, Torture and Brutality, 41.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

555

action. In this tale, the man upends the social order, represented by the familial structure with the man as protector, by committing incest and raping his sisterin-law; the woman is silenced through mutilation in order to prevent her from revealing this affront to the family social order. Ovid’s narrative in Metamorphoses is the account that most Middle English authors referenced. His version relates how Tereus’s lust was inflamed by seeing his sister-in-law, Philomela, at her father’s court. The rape itself is glossed over with extended metaphors of a lamb in the jaws of a wolf and a dove being torn apart by a bird of prey. But while the rape is presented through these analogies, the destruction of her tongue is vivid in its details. Tereus slices Philomela’s tongue off with his sword; the tongue, animated in the Ovidian text, quivers, wriggles, murmurs, and tries to return to its mistress.42  When Philomela sawe the sworde, she hoapt she should have dide, And for the same hir naked throte she gladly did provide. But as she yirnde and called ay upon hir fathers name, And strived to have spoken still, the cruell tyrant came And with a paire of pinsons fast did catch hir by the tung, And with his sword did cut it off. The stumpe whereon it hung Did patter still. The tip fell downe and quivering on the ground As though that it had murmured it made a certaine sound. And as an Adders tayle cut off doth skip a while: even so The tip of Philomelaas tongue did wriggle to and fro, And nearer to hir mistresseward in dying still did go. And after this most cruell act, for certaine men report That he (I scarcely dare beleve) did oftentimes resort To maymed Philomela and abusde hir at his will. (ll. 562–576) This animation of the tongue, with its muttering and sense of loss, underscores Philomela’s loss and Tereus’s assault. Philomela’s maiming is a direct result of Tereus’s need to silence her, to prevent her from telling what he has done. In Ovid’s narrative, after Philomela recovers from her faint, she retains her voice and berates her attacker at length, threatening to reveal his actions – provoking him to disfigure her. Her wound is a direct result of her words. Moreover, like the female saints, Philomela is objectified by her defiler. Seeing Philomela’s 42

P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses (Perseus Digital Library, 2013): (accessed 15 June 2014). There are two Latin versions and two English translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses available at this website. Arthur Golding translation. Line numbers are given in parentheses.

556

Goodman

body, Tereus desires ownership and he takes possession of her. However, unlike the female saints who are tortured but usually escape defilement through God’s intervention, Philomela is both raped and mutilated. She is not saved by miracles, despite her cries for mercy. Her voice is only regained when she weaves the tapestry narrating her rape and imprisonment and has it sent to her sister, Procne, Tereus’s wife, who then vows to avenge her sister’s dishonor. This account is re-imagined and re-structured by both Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower in the late 1300s. Both interweave the topos of the rape and the maiming to accommodate their own social and political perspectives. The wounds inevitably are the same as those in Ovid, rape followed by mutilation, but the manner in which they are developed differs with each poet. Chaucer uses the story of Philomela and her injuries in his unfinished The Legend of Good Women. However, just as Chaucer omits the part of Medea killing her children in order to portray her as a good woman, he also leaves out the entire last part of the Ovid’s narrative, perhaps to give Procne a place in the pantheon of good women. Chaucer’s account of the rape and of the subsequent cutting of Philomela’s tongue is brief. The entire narrative from the rape through the loss of her tongue is only 22 lines: “Wher is my sister, brother Tereus?” And therwithal she wepte tenderly And quok for fere, pale and pitously, Ryght as the lamb that of the wolf is biten; Or as the culver, that of the egle is smiten, And is out of his clawes forth escaped, Yit it is afered and awhaped Lest it be hent eft-sones, so sat she. But utterly, it may non other be. By force hath this traytour don a dede, That he hath reft hire of hire maydenhede, Maugre hire hed, by strengthe and by his myght. Lo! here a dede of men, and that a ryght! She cryeth “Syster!” with ful loud a stevene, And “Fader dere!” and “Help me, God in hevene!” Al helpeth nat; and yit this false thef Hath don this lady yit a more myschef, For fere lest she shulde his shame crye, And don hym openly a vilenye, And with his swerd hire tong of kerveth he,

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

557

And in a castel made hire for to be Ful pryvily in prisoun everemore, And kepte hire to his usage and his store. (2315–2337)43 Chaucer employs all the elements of Ovid’s account; however, the words Philomela speaks are abbreviated and non-threatening. More importantly, the description of the carving of the tongue is truncated, without any of the animating details provided by Ovid. The mutilation of Philomela’s tongue is covered in one line, “hire tong of kerveth he” (2334). By eliminating the poignant imagery of a tongue trying to return to its mistress, Chaucer’s account is blunt and more incisive. The tongue is carved off: she has been raped and she is permanently marred. The carving of the tongue complements the rape by physically demonstrating the disfigurement she has undergone. There is no play for poetic pity in Chaucer’s account. Tereus’s actions are not glossed over with additional metaphors. The brevity of these lines and their lack of detail correspond with Chaucer’s description of the loathly lady in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. In the only telling of the loathly lady tale that includes a rape, Chaucer uses abbreviated descriptions like those he uses in The Legend of Philomela. Other narratives of the loathly lady tale, including Gower’s own version in the Tale of Florent, are much more descriptive of the loathly lady’s deformed appearance, including details of tusks, sagging breasts, and abysmal table manners. In both The Wife of Bath’s Tale and The Legend of Philomela, Chaucer deliberately avoids gruesome descriptions of external wounds and deformities in order to focus on the internal deformities or vices he catalogs. In both tales, a rape occurs and a woman is disfigured. In neither case does Chaucer elaborate on these events. Going against the norm, his abbreviated accounts of rape and disfigurement do not sugarcoat the events; instead, they pinpoint the consequences. The description of the physical wound that Philomela suffers is minimized by the truncated account and the emphasis is the psychological wounds she suffers and the social disorder they represent. In Chaucer, Philomela’s wounds reflect a social construct in upheaval. Through the metaphor of the familial structure, the talking woman, for once, is blameless and her voice is virtuous. The loss of her tongue and consequent voice, which in Chaucer’s version she does not regain, are due to her being raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law, her should-be protector. These losses demonstrate that women’s voice can be for the good and that the losses are coupled with social disarray. 43

Geoffrey Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 625. Line numbers are given in parentheses.

558

Goodman

Gower’s narrative is found in Book Four of his Confessio Amantis. This version is closer to Ovid’s narrative than Chaucer’s account in that it includes the second part of the tale: Procne’s revenge and the final transformations. Moreover, the description of Philomela’s rape and disfigurement parallels Ovid’s descriptions more closely: As he that lost hath alle grace Foryat he was a wedded man, And in a rage on hire he ran, Riht as a wolf which takth his preie. .......................... Defense ayein so ruide a knyht To make, whanne he was so wod That he no reson understod, Bot hield hire under in such wise That sche ne myhte noght arise, Bot lay oppressed and desesed As if a goshauk hadde sesed A brid, which dorste noght for fere Remue: and thus this tirant there Beraft hire such thing as men sein Mai neveremor be yolde ayein, And that was the virginite: Of such Ravine it was pite. (5630–5633, 5638–5650)44 Gower utilizes and extends the wolf and bird metaphors that Ovid employs. Moreover, like Ovid, Gower has Philomela recover from her rape and threaten Tereus before he cuts out her tongue. Her words are lengthy, and his fear is why she is silenced: And he thane as a Lyon wod With hise unhappi handes stronge Hire cauhte be the tresses longe, With whiche he bond ther bothe hire armes, That was a fieble dede of armes, And to the grounde anon hire caste, 44

John Gower, Confessio Amantis or Tales of Seven Deadly Sins (1901; Online Medieval and Classical Library, 1994), Incipit Liber Quintus: Part 3 (accessed 2 June 2014). Line numbers are given in parentheses.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

559

And out he clippeth also faste Hire tunge with a peire scheres. So what with blod and what with teres Out of hire yhe and of hir mouth, He made hire faire face uncouth. Sche lay swounende unto the deth, Ther was unethes eny breth; Bot yit whan he hire tunge refte, A litel part therof belefte, Bot sche with al no word mai soune, Bot chitre and as a brid jargoune. (5684–5700) It is at this point in the narrative that Gower deviates from Ovid’s account – specifically with the tongue’s removal. Gower details the carving much more than Chaucer does; however, he does not animate the tongue. He describes the mutilation much more realistically than Ovid, mentioning bleeding and a deformed mouth. Gower does use the image of blood in describing Philomela’s wounds. Interestingly, he alludes to it in conjunction with tears from her eyes, thus, the blood is shed in despair or sorrow, not as proof of heroism. Also, his narrative uses a different type of metaphor. The image invokes pity, as Ovid’s does, but the pity it invokes is from the mention of the small part of the tongue that remains in her mouth, a piece which is not enough for her to make any noises except those like a bird might make – an effective reference back to the earlier reference to her as a bird under attack from a goshawk.45 Her loss of voice and metaphorical loss of human form become Gower’s focus. Both Chaucer and Gower utilize Ovid’s narrative, but they modify and eliminate the aspects of the narrative that do not meet their objectives. For Chaucer, the importance is not pity but the reality of rape and disfigurement. His brevity emphasizes the facts of Philomela’s ordeal. For Gower, the importance is the loss of voice itself – the stem of a tongue leaves her without words, thus, erasing her human essence. Both narratives entwine rape with mutilation. The fear of rape, found in the saints’ lives or war chronicles, is replaced with actual rape, and the disfiguring wound is imposed through a one-on-one confrontation with a man, not through a community of men. In some manner, their accounts of Philomela’s 45

The usage of another bird image of course corresponds with the part of the tale Gower uses and Chaucer omits – the revenge and the three of them being transformed into birds by the gods. Chaucer, not using this part of the tale, abandons the bird imagery after the abbreviated reference when Philomela is raped.

560

Goodman

defilement and mutilation parallel what Scarry says about the intimate relationship between the torturer and torture and about how the torturer destroys language: Even where the torturers do not permanently eliminate the voice through mutilation or murder, they mime the work of pain by temporarily breaking off the voice, making it their own, making it speak their words, […] be silent when they want its silence […].46 However, in both of these narratives, the permanent wounds and the permanent loss of voice underscore the permanent societal concerns and upheavals. Chaucer, by ending his tale before Philomela’s cry of justice and Procne’s revenge, leaves the focus on the mutilation of innocence, while Gower, by keeping the second part of the tale intact, allows the focus to shift from disfigurement to the voice lost and regained. Chaucer leaves his raped and mutilated woman in the precarious dynamic with her torturer; Gower allows her to regain her voice and assist with torturing the torturer. These differences indicate the manner in which Chaucer and Gower employ the text with regard to the social issues of their times, particularly the issues of women’s position and patriarchal roles in the family structures. By focusing on the rape and the disfigurement, Chaucer’s narrative upends familial and societal conventions; indeed, the social order is set aside by Tereus’s actions. He abuses his father-in-law’s hospitality and rapes his sister-in-law. By ending the story before justice and/or revenge is taken, Chaucer leaves the societal structure in turmoil. The male has betrayed the social order he promised to uphold. Perhaps, as some have suggested, Chaucer has to end the tale early to make Procne a good woman, but he also leaves the social order in disarray at the same time. Philomela’s rape and disfigurement highlight that ambiguity: she cannot speak, which is normally a positive from fourteenth century society’s perspective, yet her silencing is part of the social chaos. She calls on God for help, but unlike the female saints, she is not saved. She was a virgin, is not sexually promiscuous, but she is sexually corrupted. Her wounds speak to the ambiguity which women faced with regard to their status and to the social disorder and failure of societal institutions. In his telling of Philomela’s rape and mutilation, Gower has written a more conservative text. By implementing all of the narrative, he allows for the reestablishment of some sort of social order. Gower does not discount the rape and disfigurement, but Philomela’s wounds are only part of the story, not the 46

Scarry, The Body in Pain, 54.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

561

entire focus. Her wounds reflect an unstable society attempting to re-establish order. The small bit of tongue left in her mouth represents both the upending of the social order and the desire to re-establish the social order – she cannot talk, which is good for women – but her silencing was done as an affront to family order when she cried out to her family members for protection. Moreover, in her objectification, she has been dehumanized: she is not making human noises and she has been stripped of her human voice. Her blood, similarly, comes from loss not gain of reputation. Consequently, any patriarchal social order that is restored is flawed; Procne kills her own son and feeds him to Tereus as a means of vengeance. While the perpetrator of the wounds does not suffer any wounds himself, his lineage is ended by the death of his son. The Testament of Cresseid and The Awntyrs off Arthur, unlike the versions of Philomela told by Chaucer and Gower, depict women who are implicated in their sexual misconduct. Consequently, these women’s wounds reflect their voluntary activities as well as what is exacted upon them because of those activities. These women are not silenced, neither physically nor rhetorically; rather, they use their voice to lament their open wounds and to warn others about how they acquired their wounds. This complicity of the women in their acquired wounds, as well as their use of their voices, leads to texts that are far more outspoken in their criticism of the social order than those of Chaucer and Gower. The women’s voices, while berating their own sexual transgressions, also condemn the social and political hierarchies with their patriarchal bent that led to the women’s personal punishments. These two texts were both written in the fifteenth century when their respective countries, Scotland and England, were undergoing political upheaval and social mobility. In Scotland, “[t]he fifteenth century witnessed efforts by the Stewart monarchs to consolidate power in the face of strong barons and an increasingly stronger middle class […] Constant conflict with English also created economic and social uncertainty in Scotland.”47 In England, similar dynastic struggles were embodied in the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485) and the establishment of a new dynastic regime under Henry VII. Moreover, England, like Scotland, faced economic upheaval with the growth of the merchant class and the shortage of labor due to plague and war. Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is a Middle Scots romance. The text is believed to be one of Henryson’s mature works, perhaps written near the end

47

Robert Henryson, Testament of Cresseid, in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Robert L. Kindrick, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1997), 3.

562

Goodman

of his life.48 The text correlates sexual transgression and physical wounds; the wounds are again subsequent to the sexual activity just as in the Middle English romances. The difference, however, is that Cresseid participates in the sexual transgressions, and her wounds are a result of a disease with which she is deliberately infected. Unlike Philomela, who cries out to God to save her from rape, Cresseid curses her gods for allowing her to be seduced by Diomede and other Greeks: “Scho cryit out, and said on this same wyse, / ‘Allace, that ever I maid yow sacrifice!’” (11.125–126). Cresseid is not raped; she may have been seduced, but she willingly joins in the sexual activities. However, she blames the gods for her choices. In fact, Cresseid more than berates the gods; she accuses them of deceiving her. The gods view her accusation as irrational and, more importantly, they regard it as defying their hierarchy. Robert Kindrick explains, “[I]n affronting the powers of the universe, she is also attacking a universal medieval principle of order, the hierarchical structure of the universe.”49 In this way, Cresseid’s sexual transgressions reflect her social weaknesses, and her blame of the hierarchy of the gods leaves her vulnerable to disease and disfigurement. By being a willing participant in her sexual activities, Cresseid is a participant in the social hierarchy, but by castigating that hierarchy, she exposes its corruption and so must be punished. Cupid clearly indicates Cresseid’s offense to the hierarchy when he laments to the other gods: “‘Lo,’ quod Cupide, ‘quha will blaspheme the name / Of his awin god, outher in word or deid, / To all goddis he dois baith lak and schame” (274–276). Cupid’s lament illustrates Cresseid’s affront to the entire hierarchy structure. For Cresseid, to challenge the gods is to challenge that hierarchy and, perhaps, to bring that universe into chaos.50 This entire section precedes the part of the text in which Cresseid is cursed with leprosy. Female attacks on the patriarchal hierarchy lead to wounds, blisters, and open sores. Interestingly, the wounds do not ooze pus or blood. Cresseid’s leprosy and her resulting wounds are, in part, due to her sexual habits, but they are due, in a greater part, to her attitude toward the gods and the hierarchy. The gods elaborate on her disease, providing the full description of Cresseid’s leprosy. For example, after Saturn curses Cresseid, Cynthia continues the curse: “Fra heit of bodie I the now depryve, 48

49 50

Henryson, Testament of Cresseid, 1. “[W]e know very little about Henryson’s life. It appears he was likely born sometime between 1420 and 1430 … we know he died no later than 1506.” Line numbers are given in parentheses. Robert L. Kindrick, Robert Henryson (Boston: Twayne Press, 1979), 127. Kindrick, Robert Henryson, 127.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

563

And to thy seiknes sal be na recure, But in dolour thy dayis to indure. ‘Thy cristall ene minglit with blude I mak Thy voice sa cleir unplesand, hoir, and hace, Thy lustie lyre ovirspred with spottis blak, And lumpis haw appeirand in thy face: Quhair thow cummis, ilk man sall fle the place. This sall thow go begging fra hous to hous With cop and clapper lyke ane lazarous.” (334–343) Her wounds are open sores and boils: “With bylis blak ovirspred in her visage” (395), acquired through disease, not mutilated body parts. Moreover, any future loss of body parts for Cresseid will come from her leprosy. Cresseid’s wounds differ from those inflicted on Philomela, the female saints, and women in war in that Cresseid’s wounds do not result from physical mutilation performed by men; instead, they result from a disease imposed by the gods. However, just like the other women, once Cresseid’s body is marred, she cannot be cured. The permanence of her wounds clarifies, as Kindrick indicates, that the hierarchy will not accept challenges and defiance from those deemed socially inferior. To ensure the permanence of the hierarchy, her wounds must be permanent. The wounds are punitive, punishing her for defying the mores of society. In line 337, there is a brief and specific mention of blood similar to Philomela’s, which is given in conjunction with her eyes. As with the wounds’ permanence, the minimal blood is significant, illustrating that a woman’s wounds cannot enhance the social order. She is objectified like Philomela and the female saints. She has been desired, used, and abandoned by men. Moreover, the gods view her body as a canvas, upon which they write, not wounds of torture, but wounds of leprosy. Cynthia and Saturn add strokes of punishment to her body, physically wielding a wand as a brush: “This doleful sentence Saturne tuik on hand,/And passit doun quhair cairfull Cresseid lay,/ An on hir heid he laid ane frostie wand” (309–311). The gods view her as something whose life should be a living death. However, unlike the female saints, her objectification and wounding stem from her lack of virginity and, even more significantly, from her failure to recognize the gods’ superiority. Cresseid then uses her wounds to serve as a warning. Unlike the female saints who view their wounds as representative of Christ, Cresseid sees her wounds as representative of her moral failings. She compares her past beauty to her current deformities and emphasizes the significance sexual trans­ gression has played in these changes: “Quhair thou was callit of eirdlye wichtis flour, / All is decayit, thy weird is welterit so; / Thy hie estait is turnit in

564

Goodman

darkness dour” (435–437). Cresseid recognizes her loss of beauty and connects it to a bleak and hopeless fate. In her lament and later when she sees Troilus, she warns other women: Be war in tyme, approchis neir the end, And in your mynd ane mirrour mak of me: As I am now, peradventure that ye For all your micht may cum to that same end, Or ellis war, gif ony war may be. (456–460) She muses on her fate, and she draws on her grim destiny as a way to warn other women of what could befall them if they do not heed her warnings. But her warnings reflect not only what happens because of sexual transgressions but also what happens when the established hierarchy is challenged. Another text from the late Middle Ages that integrates female wounds with sexual transgressions and societal disorder is The Awntyrs off Arthur, a text which was composed in the north of England, possibly during the heart of the Lancaster-York dynastic struggles in the fifteenth century.51 This text presents both female and male wounds, illustrating how their representations reflect antithetical perspectives of the social structures and strictures. The romance, as A.C. Spearing points out, divides almost perfectly into what he terms a diptych.52 The first half, which contains the description of women’s wounds, condemns the values of the Arthurian court. The ghost of Guenevere’s mother appears to Guenevere and Gawain when they become separated from a hunting party. Guenevere’s mother, whose form is hideous and grotesque, warns Guenevere about the pitfalls of immoral activities and the superficial brilliance of the court. The second half of the text, which contains male wounds, demonstrates the glory of male wounds obtained in hand-to-hand battle, while seemingly celebrating imperialistic dreams and rewarding male combatants with acceptance at Arthur’s court. The hideous appearance of Guenevere’s mother in the first half represents her punishment for her sexual activities in her lifetime; she is described as 51 52

There is no consensus on a date for its composition. There are four extant manuscripts dating from the fifteenth century. A.C. Spearing, “The Awntyrs off Arthure,” in The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Bernard S. Levy and Paul E. Szarmach (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981), 187. “[I]n the diptych and (as I shall soon argue) in The Awntyrs off Arthure, the artist or poet does indeed have in mind a theme which the parts of his work are to evoke by their juxtaposition. [. . .] the theme is created or recreated by the act of juxtaposition and that the meaning thereby produced cannot be defined any other means” (187).

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

565

having toads biting into her skull, sunken hollow eyes that burn like coals, and serpents that encompass her body: Bare was the body, and blak to the bone Al biclagged in clay, uncomly cladde. Hit waried, it wayment, as a woman, But on hide ne on huwe no heling hit hadde. ...................... On the chef of the cholle, A pade pikes on the polle, With eighen holked ful holle That gloed as the gledis. Al glowed as a glede the goste there ho glides, Umbeclipped in a cloude of clethyng unclere, Serkeled with serpentes all aboute the sides– to tell the todes theron my tonge wer full tere. (105–108; 114–121)53 The wounds in this text are not as overt as those in the other texts. The description reflects the overall hideousness of her body, but she does have wounds – toads are biting into her skull and her body is fleshless.54 Moreover, her appearance has strong sexual implications; indeed, according to her own report (l. 213), her form is due to her sexual misconduct when alive. A similar situation, she suggests, awaits Guenevere and others who behave so carelessly in life. Guenevere’s mother, like Cresseid, compares her past beauty to her current disfigurement, and emphasizes the significance that sexual transgression has played in these changes. In the same manner as Cresseid, the ghost catalogues her beauty and riches when alive and contrasts that life with her current tormented death: Lo, how delful deth has thi dame dight! 53

54

The Awntyrs off Arthur, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1995), 181. Line numbers are given in parentheses. This is similar to the lines Cresseid speaks, recognizing her own mortality to come; she prepares for her death by visualizing that her dead body will have the same wounded appearance of Guenevere’s mother’s body: “Heir I beteiche my corps and carioun / With wormis and with taidis to be rent” (577–578). Henryson, Testament of Cresseid, 173. Thus, the wounds and open sores she bears while alive will transform to wounds and body decay when she is dead.

566

Goodman

I was radder of rode then rose in the ron, My ler as þe lelé lonched so hight; Now am I a graceles gost, and grisly I gron. (160–163) These lines reflect only a few of the close to fifty lines Guenevere’s mother uses to introduce herself and her plight, first to Gawain and then to Guenevere. In this fifteenth-century text, the woman is not silenced either rhetorically or physically because her voice will support the patriarchy and catalog her own failings. She is allowed to report her own demise. The woman has regained her voice, if only to articulate her mistakes and faults. Leah Haught contends that the regained voice of “a traditionally silenced female figure” is what makes it easier for Arthur and the court to dismiss her words in the second half of the text.55 Initially, the ghost concentrates her words on individual moral imperatives, but then she warns of two deadly sins, Pride and Avarice, which are both private and public vices. Indeed, she even equates uncontrolled pride with permanent wounds: “Pride with the appurtenaunce, as prophetez has tolde ………………………………………………………… Hit beres bowes bitter; ……………………………… ………………………………………………………. But thei salved of that sare [pride] Er they hethen fare, They mon weten of care” (239; 241; 244–46) Pride is a wound that will not heal, and, as illustrated in Part 2, of the text, pride will lead to Arthur’s inability to hear the ghost’s warnings through Guenevere’s words. Moreover, her warnings become more specific when Gawain asks the future of Arthur’s court and knights. In answer to Gawain’s questions, she warns Arthur’s court that its covetousness and imperial ambitions may at first seem to be satisfied, but then the court will be betrayed by one who seizes the crown. Guenevere’s mother’s wounds, like Cresseid’s, are a warning to those who make the same mistakes with regard to sexual and societal transgressions. However, she takes the wounding further by paralleling the physical wounds with spiritual wounds, such as pride, and political wounds, such as Arthur’s court will endure. 55

Leah Haught, “Ghostly Mother and Fated Fathers: Gender and Genre in The Awntyrs off Arthure,” Arthuriana 21.1 (Spring 2010): 3–24, at 17.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

567

The second half of the romance superficially contradicts the warning of the first half. A facile reading might lead one to seeing the second half as propounding the greatness of imperialism. In the second half, a lady approaches Arthur and asks him to treat an approaching errant knight with fairness and due consideration. The knight is Sir Galeron who lays claim to Scottish lands – a challenge to Arthur’s court, as Gawain has been granted the same titles and lands which Galeron claims. This accusation not only charges Arthur with taking Galeron’s lands but also of doing so with unfair or dishonest tricks. The battle between Gawain and Galeron is detailed at great length. Both men fight nobly and are extensively wounded. The narrative of their fight lasts for over 100 lines and includes references to blood-stained mail, injurious strokes, and numerous wounds until Galeron falls onto the ground, groaning and writhing in pain: “He gurdes Sir Galeron groveling on gronde. / Grisly on gronde, he groned on grene (606–607). When Gawain appears ready to capture or kill Galeron, Galeron’s lady begs Guenevere to show mercy, and Guenevere begs Arthur to have the knights show “accord” or charity with one another. This intercession does not result in violence against the woman, such as occurs in Athelston; instead, Arthur does not reply to his wife’s attempt to intercede. Galeron kneels and yields up his claims of land to Arthur, and it is to this gesture that Arthur replies. The actualization of imperial desires is what causes Arthur to grant mercy – not Guenevere’s unheeded words or the qualities of generosity and charity that Guenevere’s mother advocated. Arthur rewards Gawain with lands in Wales and Ireland, an interesting usurpation of more Celtic lands, and Gawain returns the Scottish lands to Galeron, who is now to be a knight of the Round Table, so that none of the lands actually leave the Arthurian realm. The social order, with Arthur as head, is apparently upheld with Galeron’s acknowledgment of Arthur’s right and with Arthur’s charity to Galeron and his lady. The male wounds, as described by McCracken, once again are honorable and uphold the social order. The blood shed in Galeron and Gawain’s battle allows for the extension of the empire and for a new knight to be seated at the Round Table. As Thomas Hahn indicates in his introduction: [T]he integration of the initially truculent Scots knight Galeron – sets out the fundamental pattern within the Gawain romances, whereby outlying Celtic territories are assimilated to a centralizing English perspective; Arthur’s kingship consists in his power to control and redistribute

568

Goodman

lands – Scotland, Wales, Brittany, perhaps Ireland – that mark the borders of the body politic.56 But this apparently contented imperial court has hanging over it the ghost’s prediction of its dismemberment by betrayal and treason from an internal source, just as England’s own dismemberment in the 1400s comes from internal sources. Both Arthur’s court and the English monarchy in the mid-1400s are under attack from within due to issues of succession. Arthur’s lack of a legitimate heir and his promotion of his illegitimate son will bring down his kingdom; too many cousins, direct heirs to Edward III with claims to the throne and no clear successor, will lead to the Wars of Roses.57 The second half of The Awntyrs off Arthur, with its “honorable” male wounds, is overshadowed by the first half, with its “disreputable” female wounds. The blood shed by males in battle does not overturn the shadow of permanent wounds caused by greed and ambition – the wounds of hell, toads and serpents, and fleshless skulls. Rather than confirming greatness for the imperial throne as the male wounds of Galeron and Gawain imply, the romance, with its female wounds, indicates the absurdity and irony that these land-grabbing actions, which, though seemingly rooted firmly in success, will lead to the throne’s destruction in the end. Society’s disorder becomes more apparent through the superficial order established by Arthur granting both Galeron and Gawain more lands. The ghost’s wounds, inflicted after death, are part of her eternal suffering, and her words reflect the inability to cure a kingdom of its societal failings: pride, imperialism, and covetousness. Her warning to Guenevere cannot save Arthur’s kingdom, however, because imperialism is too prevalent and too integrated throughout the realm for it to be undone. Just as in Cresseid, the hierarchy, controlled by powerful males, is to blame for the chaos and destruction that will follow, and the woman is the one with incurable, punitive wounds who speaks but is not heard. In all four romances, these women’s wounds, whether from disease, decay, or mutilation, bear the stigma of sexual transgression. Indeed, the sexual implications of women’s wounds in medieval texts, whether they are found in 56 57

Thomas Hahn, ed., introduction to The Awntyrs off Arthur, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1995), 172. In this volume, Larissa Tracy connects the head wounds suffered by Lancelot, Gawain, and Arthur in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur with the instability of kingship during initial years of the Wars of Roses, leading to the deposition of Richard II in 1399. See: “‘Into the hede, throw the helme and creste’: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” 496–518.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

569

hagiographies, chronicles, or romances, are clear. In hagiographies and chronicles, women who fear sexual violation suffer wounds. In the romances, while all the wounds the women endure have sexual implications, the sexual implications are different: the women in the romances are sexually active, sometimes forcibly and other times voluntarily. These women are not injured while fearing rape; instead, they are wounded after they are raped or, in their own words, after they are promiscuous. While the female saints and besieged women are wounded in lieu of being raped or violated, the women in the romances are both wounded and sexually active. In all four narratives, their wounds are inflicted on them subsequent to their sexual transgressions. Their wounds, therefore, are inevitable by-products of their sexual transgressions, just as women’s wounds are termed as inevitable by-products of war according to McCracken. Furthermore, in all four narratives, these wounds are connected with the women’s words or their loss of words, and that voice or lack of voice underscores social upheaval and disorder. Whereas in most medieval texts, women’s voice is represented as disruptive and her loss of voice viewed as restorative, in these texts, the women’s constricted voices underscore the failure of the patriarchy to oversee and protect the women who they control. The inevitability of the wounds parallels the inevitability of their injured voices. Either their loss of voice is part of their injuries, as happens to Philomela, or their voice is constrained by the end of the romance to follow the parameters of societal expectations. These wounds correspond to what Scarry termed “illegitimate violence” in that they are atrocities enacted by dominant males, both secular and religious, within their social hierarchy. The Philomela narratives parallel female saints’ lives and women in the war chronicles in that Philomela is an innocent woman under attack. However, unlike those female saints and besieged women, she is penetrated and then mutilated. The blameless woman in the Philomela narratives suffers defilement, and the ravisher and cause of her injuries receives no physical wounds. Her rape reflects her inability to defend herself, and her mutilation represents the need for women to be silenced in order to maintain the corrupt social order. Without voice, Philomela is unable to accuse her brother-in-law of rape and to reveal his loss of honor in his failure to uphold his responsibility as protector. Her injuries and her wounds are a direct result of her potential to speak disruptive words. Both Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and The Awntyrs off Arthur differ from the Philomela narratives in that their women are implicated in their sexual misconduct and their wounds are effected by spiritual beings rather than mortal man. Unlike Philomela, Cresseid and Guenevere’s mother can and do speak – although their words are viewed as disruptive and are not heeded. When

570

Goodman

Cresseid uses her voice in protest at the beginning of the romance, those words are why she is wounded; when the ghost warns about the future of Arthur’s realm with regard to ambition and pride, she is disregarded. The only words these two women are welcome to speak are words that berate themselves for their transgressions; their words of protest and warnings are either punished or disregarded. Consequently, all of these women’s voices are controlled by those who inflict their wounds. Just as all of the wounds are imposed, they are punitive – inevitably punishing the woman for her words challenging a male or for her defiance of the social order. Moreover, the males who effect these wounds are those who might be expected, in other circumstances, to protect, not injure, the women. Instead of being the women’s protectors, the family members and the gods these women worship are the ones who inflict the wounds. The wounds that female saints and women besieged by war suffer may serve to enforce the religious or social values of the society; however, the wounds these women endure through mutilation, disease, and decay serve to underscore that society’s decline and disrepair by delineating how governing males inflict illegitimate violence and permanent, dishonorable wounds on women who have threatened to disrupt the social order. Those who live, such as Philomela, have wounds that are violently perpetrated and have their voices taken away so they cannot decry their abuse. Those who are to die or are dead, such as Cresseid and Guenevere’s mother, are allowed to keep their voices to tell how their wounds mirror their offenses, but those wounds do not reinforce the Christian world or the social order. The voices they lack or have at the end of the romances reflect the punitive aspects of their wounds: they must use their words to berate themselves or not speak. Finally, these wounds’ similarities extend beyond their sexual implications and the manipulation of voice. These similarities, in conjunction with the sexual transgressions and questions of voice, are what make the wounds distinctly women’s wounds. All of the wounds are permanent. Unlike many of the males in Middle English romances, these women will not be cured of their injuries.58 While male wounds, whether acute or chronic are curable or, if not curable, glorious in their lethalness, the female wounds are neither curable nor glorious. The women will bear them throughout their lives and into death. In a society in upheaval and social disorder, such healings are not viable. Similarly, 58

Interestingly, in hagiography, female saints’ inflicted wounds are healed. The virgin ­ artyrs are miraculously healed of their wounds before they are executed (usually m beheaded). These healings could be viewed as instances of analogical verification, in that the healings occurs because the wounds are suffered for Christ.

Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances

571

unlike the many males who are wounded, none of these wounds were won in war or in honorable combat. The women do not wear their wounds proudly as blazons of glory to celebrate their society’s or religion’s beliefs. As both McCracken and Bildhauer indicate, there is little or no blood as there are no triumphs to celebrate. This lack of blood becomes even more extraordinary considering that all of the wounds result from sexual transgressions. Disease and decay lead to open wounds and blistering sores but not much bleeding: Cresseid’s bleeding in her eyes is what McCracken terms as local, not meaningful. Even more unusually, a virgin is raped and there is no blood: the only blood shed is again a local descriptor of blood in Gower’s version of Philomela’s mutilation, and that blood is not from her rape, but from her silencing at a time when her reputation is being destroyed, not made. This lack of blood, along with the constraining of voices, the inability to heal the wounds, and the women’s sexual transgressions, demonstrate that these imposed wounds reflect a society that cannot be cured of its disorder and disrepair. In these romances with women’s wounds, there is no analogical verification because the societies in which these women endure their wounds are not only associated with, but implicated in, their wounding.

572

Turner

Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds Wendy J. Turner The chapters above cover wounds from a wide variety of perspectives.1 Skeletal evidence provides the most physical means for understanding medieval wounds, wounding, and recovery, as might forensic pathology today (WoosnamSavage and DeVries, Geldof, Skinner, MacInnes, Kellett).2 In written records, observers and participants left behind first-hand accounts of battles, accidents, or other encounters. These were mostly formal reckonings by way of chronicles, reports, or manuals of battle strategies or fighting techniques (Kellett).3 More personal medieval letters and journals enhance scholarly understanding of emotional strain of pain and suffering associated with wounds or correlated lost loved ones.4 Some primary materials contain hearsay or imagined scenes of battles, such as in poems, songs, or tales; and, while fictive, these are no less poignant as a means of understanding the mentalité of the Middle Ages.5 1 I owe many thanks to Larissa (Kat) Tracy and Kelly DeVries for their friendship and for inviting me to write this afterword; and to my husband, Nathan Yanasak, for making dinner most evenings while I work. 2 For information on medieval pathology, forensics, and coroners, see: Sara M. Butler, Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Hiram Kümper, “Learned Men and Skillful Matrons: Medical Expertise and the Forensics of Rape in the Middle Ages,” in Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 88–108. 3 A good primary example of a fighting manual: Royal Armouries manuscript, Fechtbuch I.33 (once at the Tower of London and now in the Royal Armouries, Leeds, it carries a British Museum number Tower Fechtbuch, ms. I.33, no. 14 E iii, no. 20. D. vi), which most interestingly depicts at least one woman at practice fighting. There are also many depictions of “marital duels” – in effect, trial by combat between husband and wife. The woman normally held a cloth wrapped stone and the man was in a pit with a club; the examples show possible outcomes. See: Hans Talhoffer, Medieval Combat: A Fifteenth-Century Manual of Swordfighting and Close-Quarter Combat, trans. Mark Rector (rpt. Bansley, UK: Frontline Books, 2014); Paulus Kal’s fightbook: Paulus Kal Fechtbuch, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich, Germany), Cgm 1507; (accessed 1 July 2015). 4 Aleksandra Pfau, “Crimes of Passion: Emotion and Madness in French Remission Letters,” in Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, ed. Wendy J. Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 97–122. 5 Christina Lutter, “Peachers, Saints and Sinners: Emotional Repertoires in High Medieval Religious Role Models,” in A History of Emotions, 1200–1800, ed. Jonas Liliequist (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 55–6.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_026

Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds

573

Medical knowledge of wounds is found in medieval Materia medica, commonplace books, herbariums, recipe books, and medical tracts. Such works offer fascinating details of facial disfiguration (Geldof, Sayers, Skinner, Livingston), amputation (MacInnes, Ferragud), and other injuries that might have been survivable but more often than not led to death. All in all, the topic of “wounds” cuts to the quick of medieval society. High to low, physicians, surgeons, soldiers, peasants, nobles, men, women, and children – everyone would have understood wounds, large or small. Physical Wounds Certainly the medieval fighter, like any fighter before or since, tried to protect him- (or occasionally her-) self.6 The “knight in shining armor” iconic image of the Middle Ages only remained “shining” until he began to fight in earnest. Weapons could dent, pierce, crush, or otherwise damage armor and the person beneath it.7 There is evidence of wounding to aristocrats – including kings,8 princes,9 and other ranked nobles, as well as average soldiers. Aristocrats, especially those with their sigil on their shields, seem to have been targeted for attack; they represented much to their troops – and, as Iain A. MacInnes points out in his translation, shields of these leaders might be “shattered not once but often in the fiercest of battles.”10 Peasants, frequently on the front lines, wore only the simplest armor, which, while effective for most hand-to-hand combat, could not stop or deflect a direct blow from something sharp – bolt, arrow or lance.11

6

7 8 9 10 11

There has been a lot more scholarship on the topic of gender and war in recent years, from individuals to general histories on female warriors and fighting including: Linda Grant De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); Susan Edgington and Sarah Lambert, eds., Gendering the Crusades (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Linda Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007) chapter 1 on Nicola de la Haye (1191–1217), the female defender of Lincoln. See also: the manuals in note 3 above. See: notes 2 and 3 above. Most notable is King Richard III, found in 2014, see: Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, 44-5. Such as Henry V, while still a young man (Livingston). Chron. Bower, 7:52–5, qtd. in MacInnes, 109. While the unnamed “Towton 16” (Geldof, 58–9) might be part of the aristocracy, he, like so many in battle, was probably gentry at best.

574

Turner

Individuals with injuries might survive, even if the wounds at first appeared mortal. Survival increased or decreased depending on all sorts of factors: age, general health, place of injury, number of injuries, rapid medical treatment, etc. According to several medieval medical manuals, the danger was in infection.12 Skeletal remains tell stories of those who lived for days, if not years, after damage to eyes, teeth, and heads, or missing hands, feet, arms, and legs, or damage to other internal ribs, hips, or backs. There is no doubt that not just skin but also muscles and internal organs were damaged on the way to creating this skeletal map of wounds (MacInnes, May, Livingston). Healing Wounds Medieval understanding of the body and the medical knowledge to heal it was not so “backward” as postmodern readers might at first think (Banham and Voth, May, MacInnes, Krug, Livingston, Langum, Ferragud, Tracy).13 Soldiers often incurred similar wounds in battle to those used to mark a lawbreaker14 (which continued to be used as punishment for crime well into the early modern era), and so sought the best medical assistance they could afford to make sure they, too, did not appear to passers-by to be criminals with missing, visible body parts: noses, ears, fingers, or hands. Some skilled surgeons and physicians became quite well known for their assistance with injuries or illness, and, because of their expertise, they served as witnesses in civil cases regarding wounds and medical malpractice (Ferragud).15 It may be that some early physicians not only wanted to avoid touching their patients for personal or health related reasons, but because they were, as often as not, connected to the Church and, as such, would not want to “draw blood.”16 They stuck to checking pulse and urine, letting surgeons, phle12 13 14 15

16

C.H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England (London: Oldbourne, 1967), 98. Roger Frugard, Chirurgia, in Anglo-Norman Medicine, edited by Tony Hunt, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 53, 1.26. Eska, 258. Joanna Carraway Vitiello, “Forensic Evidence, Lay Witnesses and Medical Expertise in the Criminal Courts of Late Medieval Italy,” in Medicine and the Law, ed. Turner and Butler, 133–156. Banham and Voth, 158–9. There are plenty of fighting bishops even after the Church’s ordinance against “drawing blood.” For example, see: Hugo Schwyzer, “Arms and the Bishop: The Anglo-Scottish War and the Northern Episcopate, 1296–1357” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 1999). Yet, many clergy-physician did avoid blood altogether.

Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds

575

botomists, midwives, nurses, or others clean wounds or do other not so “bookish” tasks.17 In all cases, the writings of medieval physicians and surgeons are a testament to medical practices of the Middle Ages.18 In addition, there are other sources that aid scholars in assessing medieval medical and social understanding of the body, such as injury tariff lists of wounds and their accompanying monetary compensations (“man price” or wergild) for various persons and their body parts (Banham and Voth).19 Disability scholars, for example, now look to these lists of body parts, not just to find their worth, but also to learn more about the perceived importance or concern about one impairment versus another.20 Disabling Wounds No matter whether from battle or accident in the Middle Ages, injuries left scars on individuals – both mental and physical. This trauma, especially, as stated above, the physical trauma to the skeletal structure, can be read in the archaeological record (Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, Geldof, Skinner, MacInnes, Kellett), but other types of soft tissue wounding were reported in medieval records of all types (Banham and Voth, May, Krug, Livingston). Described in administrative accounts, artwork, poetry, or song, scars – visible on faces or hands, or hidden under clothing – could be physically and socially disabling.21 It could be hard on a family to cope with a disabling wound; the cost involved in ordering prosthetics might be prohibitive, if they could be fit17

18 19 20

21

These medical practitioners, other than physicians, occasional assisted these lofty booklearned physicians (physicus or fisicien), but most often acted independently. For definitions of all of these medical persons, see: Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 2006), 12. Benjamin Pugno, “Physicians of the Soul: Healing and Conversion in Anglo-Saxon England” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Houston, 2010). Han Nijdam, “Compensating Body and Honor: The Old Frisian Compensation Tariffs,” in Medicine and the Law, ed. Turner and Butler, 25–57. John P. Sexton, “Difference and Disability: On the Logic of Naming in the Icelandic Sagas,” in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 149–163. For more on social trauma and scarring see: David M. Turner, “Disability Humor and the Meanings of Impairment in Early Modern England,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 57–72.

576

Turner

ted or managed, let alone the psychological cost of a lost limb, scarred face, or missing eye. It could also be quite disruptive for a family of any status to have a loved one come home physically whole but psychologically altered or incapacitated because of a head wound or psychological trauma (Spenser-Hall, Classen, Goodman).22 For example, Bartholomew de Sakeville had an “acute fever” after he experienced a “blow to the head”; he never fully recovered.23 His widowed mother, Matilda, governed his estates in England and Ireland through their attorneys until she became “infirm” and could no longer manage, at which point the crown provided Bartholomew with several guardians.24 In another example, Nigel Coppedene of Sussex had mental trauma following his ransom after the Hundred Years’ War. Several years later when he murdered his neighbor, the crown pardoned Nigel, since, in his mental state following his “sufferings as a prisoner of war,” he could not be held accountable for the homicide.25 Although “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” or “Shell Shock” or some other such term describing a mental change in connection with battle violence was not among the medieval vocabulary, mental breakdown and mental changes from head wounds are evident in medieval accounts such as Nigel’s. Moreover, head injuries, as in the case of Bartholomew, were not uncommon in battle or at home. A concussion or other injury to the head could lead to loss of brain function and either physical or mental difficulties or both.

22

23

24

25

For a full account of medieval mental health: Wendy J. Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013), 68; and Turner “Defining Mental Afflictions in Medieval English Administrative Records,” in Disability and Medieval Law: History, Literature, Society, ed. C.J. Rushton (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 134–156. 1290–1309. The National Archives: Public Record Office (TNA: PRO) C 66/109/m 25; C 66/110/m 4; C 134/13/m 1; Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and other Analogous Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office (CIPM), Public Record Office, 20 vols., London: HMSO, 1904–1970, v. 5, #149 (p. 79); Calendar of the Patent Rolls (CPR), 1216–1509, Public Record Office, 52 vols., London: HMSO, 1891–1901, Edward I v. 2, 362, 446. See: note 26 and Wendy J. Turner “Mental Incapacity and Financing War in Medieval England,” in The Hundred Years War (Part II): Different Vistas, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 387–402. For more on guardianship, see: Turner, Care and Custody, 183–210. 1306. TNA: PRO C 260/16/m 5b; JUST 1/934/m 3.

Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds

577

Sacred Wounds The Church did its best to cope with the ongoing tide of battles. Prayer was encouraged among soldiers and their families, and for those suffering from any injury – both mental and physical ones.26 The injured person became a metaphor for the wounded Christ in sermons, art, and religious songs and poems, a version of Imitatio Christi (Langum, Ryan, Olson, Gertsman).27 If an individual suffered, he was encouraged to think of himself as sharing something with the suffering Christ – a religious bond that only those in long-term pain could have with their Lord (Easterling, Spencer-Hall, Classen, Johnson). Further, the trope of Christ as sufferer for all sin lent itself as a backdrop to suffering as metaphor for overcoming breakdown and decay – part of a collection of metaphors surrounding the medieval concept of the God-given right to kingship (Sayers, Atkinson).28 Another of those metaphors, head injury, could well indicate a problem with the head of state; that God’s chosen had failed in some way (Tracy).29 Wounds in literature played upon the heartstrings of listeners. For example, Roland turns to Olivier to say:  “Grant us this, oh God! It’s fitting we should stay here for our king: a man should suffer hardships for his lord, 26

27 28

29

On prayer and medicine, see: Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 44; Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 21, 95–9; Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 86; and Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 35–41. On families and mental health patients: Wendy J. Turner, “Angry Wives of Madmen: The Economic constraints of Families under Royal Guardianship in England,” in The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe, ed. W.J. Turner and T.V. Pearman (Lewiston: Mellen, 2010), 51–68. Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages, 41. Kisha G. Tracy, “Representations of Disability: The Medieval Literary Tradition of the Fisher King,” in Disability in the Middle Ages, ed. Eyler, 105–118; Beth Tovey, “Kingly Impairments in Anglo-Saxon Literature: God’s Curse and God’s Blessing,” in Disability in the Middle Ages, ed. Eyler, 135–148; and Cory James Rushton, “The King’s Stupor: Dealing with Royal Paralysis in Late Medieval England,” in Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, ed. Turner, 147–176. Kate McGrath, “Royal Madness and the Law: The Role of Anger in Representations of Royal Authority in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Anglo-Normal Texts,” in Madness in Medieval, ed. Turner, 123–146; and Sara Scalenghe, Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 52–58.

578

Turner

and persevere in fearful heat and cold; a man should lose, if need be, hide and hair. Now each of you be sure to strike hard blows, so mocking songs may not be sung of us!” […] See Roland, who has fainted on his horse, and, wounded unto death, Olivier, his vision so impaired by loss of blood that, whether near or far, he cannot see enough to recognize a living man; and so, when he encounters his companion, he hits him on his jeweled golden casque and splits it wide apart from crown to nasal, But doesn’t cut into his head at all.30 Writers were in tune with the idea that people are basically compassionate toward those in need or in pain and would cheer for those who, through sheer will or with God’s help, could continue to fight for those they loved while dying, refusing to give in to their pain (Atkinson, Spencer-Hall). Women in medieval literature (both secular and sacred) it seems, were rarely separated from their ability to give birth and, in conjunction, to have sex. Women’s wounds, therefore, often represented “social tensions” relating to sexual desire and deviancy (Eska, Goodman). Women, then, rather than being Christ in Passion or heroic in their battles, were depicted as punished for transgression by their wounds and their pains, far more often than men. There are, of course, exceptions – virgin nuns who struggled long with illness, Hanson’s disease (or other Leprosy-like medieval disease) or forms of self-inflicted wounds (Spenser-Hall). Part of this was a social, male dominant need to control women, keep them from become warrior-like, heroic, powerful, intellectual, or male.31 Wounding was, therefore, gendered in literature.

30 31

The Song of Roland, trans. Robert Harrison (New York: Penguin, 1970), 83 and 112 (stanzas 79 and 147). Works that highlight the gender differences within medieval society include: Shannon McSheffery, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Regulation of Sexuality in the Late Middle Ages: England and France,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 86.4 (October 2011): 1010–1039.

Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds

579

A Conclusion About 1999 or 2000, I heard Carlo Ginzburg give a lecture in a lovely home just off the campus of University of California Los Angeles. He spoke to us of paintings and how authenticators looked not at the main elements of the work but at the borders in order to tell whether or not the painter was the real master or someone who, in his or her efforts to seem like a master, had practiced only the techniques of the main focus of the painting, but could not duplicate the background in the same way or with the same detail. I hope I am doing Ginzburg’s argument justice here; his overall thesis stuck with me. If we as scholars of the past want to understand the main focus of a period, we need to look at the background elements to get a sense of truth of the whole picture. In 1986 Ginzburg quotes Ernst H. Gombrich: “In posing new questions over the ties between form and function in art, one should perhaps make new contacts with sociology and anthropology. But this, in large part, remains to the future.”32 Ginzburg, then, suggests that, as scholars of the past we should embrace as many disciplines as possible in order to access as many artifacts and as much evidence as available in order to authenticate the “background” in our effort to understand the truth behind the focus of our study. Twenty-six years later, Ginzburg returns to the topic of evidence in his 2012 book, Threads and Traces, writing: [… T]he historian, by definition, is a researcher for whom such [scientific] experiments, in the strict sense of the term, are excluded. To reproduce a revolution, an upheaval, a religious movement is impossible [….] More than ever the question of evidence remains the nub of historical research: but its status inevitably is modified the moment different themes are confronted in respect to the past, with the assistance of documentation which is itself diverse.33 This volume on Wounds and Wound Repair stays true to Ginzburg’s general thesis: it investigates wounds from multiple angles, using a variety of fields – including archeology and sociology, the two most often suggested by Ginzburg 32

33

Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 59. Ginzburg’s quote of Ernst H. Gombrich is from Arte e illusione: Studio sulla psicologia della rappresentazione pittorica, trans. R. Federici (Turin: Einaudi 1965), xxxiv. Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John ­Tedeschi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 55 and 70.

580

Turner

– until a more satisfying and complete picture of medieval wounding is visible. Beginning with skeletal remains, the authors guide us through traces of recorded wounding, healing of wounds, laws governing wounds and testimony of wounding, to the threads of medieval spirituality of wounds, use of wounds as metaphor, and the power of wounding and overcoming wounds as presented in literature. We now have a clearer picture of the whole: from war or accident to medical treatment and death or recovery, as well as medieval attitudes and ideas regarding wounds and wounding. And, while we cannot reconstruct battles or a wounding as it happened in the Middle Ages, we can now – with threedimensional computer graphics, three-dimensional printing, and other new technologies – reconstruct, to a degree, what happened to make a particular wound we find in a skeleton. We also more regularly talk across disciplines, and, as the essays here show, publish inter-disciplinarily as well. This work will impinge on all sorts of other studies including medieval conceptions of trauma and disability, pain and injury, grief and illness, strength and weakness, health and stamina, war and aggression, faith and compassion, aesthetics and bodies, kingship and law, medicine and healing, and human endurance and conceptions of the afterlife. The body, in the Middle Ages as today, is a remarkable thing – able to withstand damage and to heal itself much of the time. The authors in this collection help all of us in the present to feel and contextualize the pain of those who suffered wounds so long ago in the medieval past.

Bibliography Bibliography

581

Bibliography

Manuscripts

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich, Germany), Paulus Kal Fechtbuch, Cgm 1507. London, British Library, Royal MS 12 D. xvii (s.xi) Royal Armouries MS I.33 (approx. 1270–1310; anonymous). The National Archives: Public Record Office. Manuscripts: C 66/109/m 25; C 66/110/m 4; C 134/13/m 1; C 260/16/m 5b; JUST 1/934/m 3. Nuremberg, Germanisches Museum MS 3227a (late 1300s; contains material by several authors). Rome, Bibl. dell’Academia Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana, Cod. 1449, 44 A 8 (1452; contains work by Peter von Danzig). Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 1507 (1470; by Paulus Kal). Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek Codex Mscr. Dresd. C 487 (early 1500s; contains work by Sigmund Ringeck). Glasgow Museums, R.L. Scott Collection MS E.1939.65.341 (1508; contains work by Sigmund Ringeck). Augsburg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod.I.6.2º.5 (1539; by Hans Medel). Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod.icon.393 (16th century, by Paulus Hector Mair).



Primary Sources

A. Cornelii Celsi. De medicina. Loeb Classical Library: 1935. Accessed 2 June 2014. Abul-Qasim Halaf ibn Abbas az-Zahrawi detto Albucasis. La chirurgia: versione occitanica della prima metà del Trecento, edited by Mahmoud Salem Elsheikh. Florence: Malesci, 1992. Aelred of Rivaulx. De Institutione Inclusarum, in Aelred of Rivaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum: Two English Versions, edited by John Ayto and Alesandra Barratt. EETS o.s. 287. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. Opera Omnia, edited by A. Hoste O.S.B and C.H. Talbot. Turnhout: Brepols, 1971. Aethelberht of Kent. Laws, edited by Lisi Oliver. Accessed 4 August 2014. Aithdioghluim Dána, edited by Lambert McKenna. 2 vols. London: Irish Texts Society, 1939–40.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004306455_027

582

Bibliography

Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, translated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge. London: Penguin, 1983. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, trans. John Ciardi. New York: The New American Library, 1957. Ancient Laws of Ireland, edited and translated by W.N. Hancock, et al. 6 vols. Dublin: A. Thom, 1865–1901. Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Work, edited by Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson. New York: Paulist Press, 1991. Andrew of Wyntoun. The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, edited by D. Laing. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872–9. Angela of Foligno, Ludger Thier, and Abele Calufetti. Il Libro Della Beata Angela Da Foligno: Edizione Critica. Spicilegium Bonaventurianum. Grottaferrata, Romae: Edi­ tiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Quas, 1985. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated by G.N. Garmonsway. London: Dent, 1972. Annales Bertiniani. Monumenta Germaniae Historica SS I: Annales et Chronica Aevi Carolini, edited by G.H. Pertz. Hanover: Hahn, 1826. Annales Gandenses/Annals of Ghent, edited and translated by Hilda Johnstone. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. Annales Regni Francorum. Monumenta Germaniae Historica SS rer. Ger. VI, edited by G.H. Pertz. Hanover: Hahn, 1895. The Annals of St Bertin, translated by J.L. Nelson. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1991. Arber, Edward, ed. The Revelation to the Monk of Evesham 1196. London: English Reprints, 1869. Ascham, Roger. Toxophilus. 1545. Repr. in The Renaissance in England, edited by Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1954. Asser’s Life of King Alfred Together with the Annals of St Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, edited by W.H. Stevenson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959. Atlas, Alia, edited by Ein Buch von guter Spise. 1993. (accessed May 20, 2013). Austin, Thomas, ed., Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books. EETS o.s. 91. London: Early English Text Society, 1888. Augustine. De doctrina christiana, edited by Joseph Martin. CCSL 32. Turnhout: Brepols, 1962. Avicenna. The Canon of Medicine, translated by O. Cameron Gruner. London: 1930. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970. The Awntyrs off Arthur. In Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, edited by Thomas Hahn. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publication, 1995. Bain, Joseph, ed., Calendar of Documents Related to Scotland. 5 vols. London: H.M.S.O., 1881–88.

Bibliography

583

Barbour, John. The Bruce, edited by A.A.M. Duncan. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. De proprietatibus rerum. Köln: Johan Koelhoff, 1483. ———. De Rerum Proprietatibus. Frankfurt: Minerva, [1601] 1964. ———. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum: A Critical Text, edited by M.C. Seymour et al., 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975–88. Battagli, Marco. Marcha di Marco Battagli da Rimini [1212–1354], edited by Aldo Francesco Massèra. Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1900. Beowulf, translated by M. Alexander. London: Penguin, 1973. Bergin, Osborn, and R.I. Best, eds. Tochmarc Étaine. Ériu 12 (1938): 137–96. Bieler, Ludwig, ed. and trans. The Irish Penitentials. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1963. ———, ed. Four Latin Lives of Patrick: Colgan’s Vita Secunda, Quarta, Tertia and Quinta. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1971. Binchy, D.A., ed. 1978. Corpus Iuris Hibernici. 6 vols. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. ———, ed. Críth Gablach. 1941; repr. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970. ———, ed. and trans. “Bretha Crólige.” Ériu 12 (1938): 1–77. ———. “The Old-Irish Table of Penitential Commutations.” Ériu 19 (1962): 47–72. ———. “Bretha Déin Chécht.” Ériu 20 (1966): 1–66. Blake, Robert F. and Richard N. Frye, trans. “History of the Nation of Archers.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12 (1949): 269–399. Bonaventure. Holiness of Life, Being St. Bonaventure’s Treatise De Perfectione Vitae ad Sorores, translated by Laurence Costello. St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1928. ———. De Perfectione Vitae ad Sorores. In Bonaventura, Opera Omnia. 10 vols. Quaracchi: College of St. Bonaventura, 1882–1902. The Book of Magauran: Leabhar Méig Shamhradháin, edited by Lambert McKenna. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1947. The Book of O’Hara: Leabhar Í Eadhra, edited by Lambert McKenna. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1952. Bower, Walter. Scotichronicon, edited by D.E.R. Watt et al. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987–98. Breatnach, Liam, ed. and trans. “The first third of the Bretha Nemed Toísech.” Ériu 40 (1989): 1–40. “The Bridge of Salvation,” edited by Lambert McKenna. Irish Monthly 58 (1930): 51–4 The Brut or Chronicles of England, edited by Friedrich W.D. Brie. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1906–8. Bryant, Nigel, trans. The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011.

584

Bibliography

Buell, Paul D. and Eugene N. Anderson, trans. and eds. A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui’s Yin-Shan Cheng-Yao: Introduction; Translation; Commnetary and Chinese Text. London: Kegan Paul, 2000. ———., trans and eds. Huihui Yaofang: Translation and Interpretation. Forthcoming. Byrne, Francis J. and Pádraig Frances, trans. “Two Lives of Saint Patrick: Vita Secunda and Vita Quarta.” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (JRSAI) 124 (1996): 5–117. Calendar of the Patent Rolls (CPR), 1216–1509. Public Record Office, 52 vols. London: HMSO, 1891–1901. Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and other Analogous Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office (CIPM), Public Record Office, 20 vols. London: HMSO, 1904–1970. Capgrave, John. The Life of Saint Katherine, edited by Karen A. Winstead. Kalamazoo: TEAMS Medieval Institute Publication, 1999. Carnandet, J., ed., Vita Iulianae Corneliensis. In Acta Sanctorum, April 5, 435–75. Paris: Palmé, 1866. Carney, James, ed. and trans. The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cú Brettan Together with the Gospel of Thomas and a Poem on the Virgin Mary. Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1994. Cassian, John. Collationes XXIIII, edited by Michael Petschenig, repr. Gottfried Kreuz, CSEL 13. Vienna: VÖAW, 2004. Chardonnens, L.S. Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100: Study and Texts. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Charles-Edwards, Thomas and Fergus Kelly, eds. and trans. Bechbretha. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales. In The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. ———. Legend of Good Women. In The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Chih-Ch’ang, Li. The Travels of an Alchemist, translated by Arthur Waley. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976. The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272–1346, edited by Herbert E. Maxwell. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1913. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD284–813, edited and translated by C. Mango and R. Scott with the assistance of R. Greatrex. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynebroke, edited by Edward M. Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889. Chronicon de Lanercost, edited by Joseph Stevenson. Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1839. Cicero. Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), translated by Harry Caplan. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Clancy, Joseph P. The Earliest Welsh Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1970.

Bibliography

585

Cleaves, Frances W., trans. and, ed., The Secret History of the Mongols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1982. Compagni, Dino. La cronaca fiorentina, edited by Domenico Carbone, 8th ed. Florence: G. Barbèra, 1905. Companion to the Works of Hartmann von Aue, edited by Francis G. Gentry. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. Connolly, Seán, ed. and trans. “Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae: Background and Historical Value.” JRSAI 119 (1989): 5–49. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae: Theophanes volumen I, edited by B.G. Niebuhr. Bonn: Weber, 1839. Corthals, Johan, ed. Táin bó Regamna: eine Vorerzählung zur Táin bó Cúailnge. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1987. Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac, edited by Margaret Ogden. EETS o.s. 265. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Dán Dé: The Poems of Donnchadh Mór Ó Dálaigh and the Religious Poems in the Duanaire of the Yellow Book of Lecan, edited by Lambert McKenna. Dublin: The Educational Company of Ireland, 1922. Damian, Peter. The Letters of Peter Damian, translated by Owen J. Blum. Fathers of the Church Medieval Continuation, 6 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1989–2005. ———. The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation. The Letters of Peter Damian. Vol. 3, translated and edited by Owen J Blum. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989. D’Arcq, L., ed. Choix de pièces inédites relatives au règne de Charles VI. 2 vols. Paris: J. Renouard, 1864. De B. Iulianae Virgine Priorissa Montis-Cornelii. In Acta Sanctorum. April Vol. 1 (April 5), edited by G Henschen. 435–75. Paris, 1866. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. I Nicaea I to Lateran V, edited and translated by Norman P. Tanner. London: Sheed and Ward, 1990. Dei Liberi, Fiore. Fior di Battaglia, Los Angeles, Getty Museum, Ludwig MS XV 13. www. getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?/artobj=1706. Accessed 28 Feb. 2014. “De vener. Ida Lovaniensi, Ord. Cisterc. in Brabantia prope Mechliniam.” In Acta Sanctorum, edited by Daniel Papebroeck. April, 2:157–189. Société des Bollandistes, 1902-1970. de Vriend, Hubert Jan, ed. The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, EETS o.s. 286. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Diaz de Gamez, Gutierre. The Unconquered Knight: A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Niño. Trans. Joan Evans. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928. Die Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, edited by Michael Tangl. 3 vols. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1916.

586

Bibliography

Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, edited by Felix Liebermann. 3 vols. Halle: Niemeyer, 1897. Dillon, Myles, ed. Serglige Con Culainn. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1953. Dooley, Ann, and Harry Roe, trans. 1999. Tales of the Elders of Ireland. London: Oxford University Press. Dreves, Guido Maria and Clemens Blume, eds. Analecta hymnica medii aevi. Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1907, reprinted NY, 1961. “Duelling in German Universities: By An English Student.” Strand (February 1897): 148–53. The Earlier Version of the Wycliffite Bible, edited by Conrad Lindberg. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1994. The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, edited by Sidney J.H. Herrtage. EETS e.s. 33. London: Oxford University Press, 1879. Eliot, T.S., Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Elliott, J.K., ed. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. An English Chronicle 1377-1461: A New Edition, edited by William Marx. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003. Epistolae Merovingici et Karolingici Aevi, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, IV. Berlin: Weidmann, 1925. Eska, Charlene M. Cáin Lánamna: An Old Irish Tract on Marriage and Divorce Law. Medieval Law and Its Practice 5. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Ex Adonis Archiepiscopi Viennensis Chronico, edited by I. de Arx. Monumenta Germaniae Historica SS II. Hanover: Hahn, 1829. The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, edited by J. Stuart et al. Edinburgh: 1878–1908. First English Life of Henry V, edited by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. Fletcher, W. G. D., ed. “Some Documents Relative to the Battle of Shrewsbury.” Trans­ actions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 2nd series, 10 (1898). Fortescue, John. The Governance of England: Otherwise called The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, by Sir John Fortescue, edited by C. Plummer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885. (accessed 3 Feb. 2013). Froissart, John. Chronicles of England, France and Spain and the Surrounding Countries, edited and translated by John Joliffe. New York: Modern Library, 1967. ———. Chroniques de J. Froissart, edited by Siméon Luce, Gaston Reynaud, Leon Mirot and Albert Mirot. 15 vols. Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1869–1875. From Camelot to Joyous Guard: The Old French La Mort Roi Artu, translated by J. Neale Carman, edited by Norris J. Lacy. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1974.

Bibliography

587

Frugard, Roger. Surgery, translated by Michael R. McVaugh. In Sourcebook in Medieval Science, edited by Edward Grant. 795–96 (no. 112). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. ———. Chirurgia. In Anglo-Norman Medicine, edited by Tony Hunt in 2 vols. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994. Furs de València. Vols. 7 and 8, edited by Germà Colón and Arcadi García. Barcelona: Barcino, 1999. Gadamba, Sh. Mongoliin Nuuts Tovchoo. Ulaanbaatar: Bükh erkh khamgaaladsan, 2012. Geoffrey La Tour Landry’s Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, edited by Thomas Wright 1906. University of Michigan Humanities Text Index, 1997. (accessed 5 August 2014). Gertrude of Helfta. The Herald of Divine Love, edited and translated by Margaret Winkworth. New York: Paulist Press, 1993. ———. Oeuvres spirituelles, edited by Pierre Doyere, Vol. 3. Paris: Cerf, 1968. ———. Legatus divinae pietatis, edited by Joannes Lanspergius. Paris: Oudin, 1875. Giacomo Bianconi. “Vita De B. Jacopo Mevanate, ex Ordine Fratrum Praedicatorum, Mevaniae in Umbria.” Acta Sanctorum, 23 August. Paris & Rome: V. Palmé, 1868. Gilte Legende. Edited by Richard Hamer. EETS o.s. 327, 328. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Grothé, Richard. “Le MS. Wellcome 564 Deux Traites de Chirurgie en Moyen-Anglais.” PhD dissertation, University of Montreal, 1982. Goswin of Bossut. Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramee, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, translated by Martinus Cawley. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. ———. Vita Arnulfi. In Acta Sanctorum, June 7, edited D. Papebroeck. 558–79. Paris: Palmé, 1867. ———. Vita Idae Nivellensis. In Quinque Prudentes Virgines, edited by Chrysostomo Henriques. 197–297. Antwerp: Joannem Cnobbaert, 1630. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis or Tales of Seven Deadly Sins. 1901. Online Medieval and Classical Library, 1994. Incipit Liber Quintus: Part 3. . Gray, Elizabeth A., ed. and trans. Cath Maige Tuired – The Second Battle of Mag Tuired. Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1982. Gray, Thomas. Scalacronica, edited by Herbert E. Maxwell. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1907. Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri Historiarum X, edited by B. Krusch and W. Levison. Monumenta Germaniae Historica SS Rer. Merov. 1.1. Hanover: Hahn, 1951. Guidonis de Cauliaco. Chyrurgia Guidonis de Cauliaco. Lugduni: Vincentius de Portonariis, 1537.

588

Bibliography

Gwynn, E.J., ed. and trans. “An Irish penitential.” Ériu 7 (1914): 121–95. Gwynn, Lucius, ed. and trans. “The Life of St. Lasair.” Ériu 5 (1911): 73–109. Hartmann von Aue. Der arme Heinrich, edited by Hermann Paul. 16th, newly rev., edited by Kurt Gärtner. Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 3, 1882; Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996. ———. Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. with commentary by Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. ———. Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich, edited and translated by Volker Mertens. Bibliothek des Mittelalters, 6, Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2004. Haynin, Jean de. Mémoires, 1465-77, edited by D.D. Brouwers. 2 vols. Liège, 1905. Heist, William W., ed. Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae ex Codice olim Salmanticensi nunc Bruxellensi. Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1965. Herbert, Máire and Martin McNamara, eds. and trans. Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts in Translation. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989. Heliga Birgittas Uppenbarelser, edited by G.E. Klemming. Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt and Sons, 1860. Henderson, George, ed. and trans. 1899. Fled Bricrend. Dublin: Irish Texts Society. Henryson, Robert. Testament of Cresseid. In The Poems of Robert Henryson, edited by Robert L. Kindrick. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997. Hippocrates. On Ulcers. (accessed April 23, 2011). Hochegger, Karina, ed. and trans. “Untersuchungen zu den Ältesten Vitae Sanctae Brigidae.” M.Phil. thesis, University of Vienna, 2009. Online at . Hoffmann, Werner J. Die deutschsprachigen mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Sächsischen Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) Dresden. Vorläufige Beschreibungen. . Hope, Sir William A New, Short and Easy Method of Fencing. Edinburgh: Watson, 1707. Howlett, David. “Vita I Sanctae Brigitae.” Peritia 12 (1998): 1–23. Hugh of Floreffe. “The Life of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy, by Hugh of Floreffe.” In Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century. The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy, Juliana of Cornillon, Inventor of the Corpus Christi Feast, Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker. 47–141. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Hugh of St. Victor “Allegoriae in Novum Testamentum.” In Opera Omnia, edited by J.P. Migne. Patrologia Latina 175, col. 751–924, 1854. Ingridsdotter, Kikki. “Aided Derbforgaill (The Violent Death of Derbforgaill): A Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation and Textual notes.” Uppsala University, doctoral dissertation, 2009.

Bibliography

589

Jacques of Vitry. The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques of Vitry, edited by Thomas Frederick Crane. London: D. Nutt, 1890. ———. “De B. Maria Oigniacensi in Namurcensis Belgii dioecesi.” In Acta Sanctorum, June, vol. 4, edited by Daniel Papebroeck. Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970. Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, translated by William Granger Ryan. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. James, M.R., ed. and trans. The Apocryphal New Testament. 1924; repr. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963. Johannis de Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, edited by William F. Skene. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871. John of Genoa. Joannes Balbus. Catholicon. Venice: 1497. Julian of Norwich. A Revelation of Love, edited by Marion Glasscoe. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1993. ———. Showings, translated and edited by Edmund Colledge O.S.A. and James Walsh S. J. Mawah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978. ———. The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, edited by Georgia Ronan Crampton. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994: (accessed 21 April 2014). John of Plano Carpini. “History of the Mongols,” translated by a Nun from Stanbrook Abbey. In Mission to Asia, edited by Christopher Dawson. 3–72. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Joinville, Jean de. The Life of St. Louis, translated by Rene Hague; edited by Natalis de Wailly. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955. Kal, Paulus. Fechtbuch. Manuscript in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich, Germany). (accessed 29 June 2015). Kearns, Conleth, trans. and ed. The Life of Catherine of Siena by Raymond of Capua. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1980. Keiser, George R. Works of Science and Education. In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500. Vol. 10, edited by Albert E. Hartung. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Konrad von Würzburg. Der trojanische Krieg, edited by Adalbert von Keller. Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein, 1858. ———. Konrads von Würzburg Partonopier und Meliur, Turnei von Nantheiz, Sant Nicolaus, Lieder und Sprüche, edited by Karl Bartsch. Vienna: Braunmüller, 1871. Kudrun, edited by Karl Bartsch. 5th edition, edited by Karl Stackmann. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1965. La Marche, Olivier de. Mémoires, edited by Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont. 2 vols. Paris: Librairie, 1883–88.

590

Bibliography

Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirurgie,” edited by Robert von Fleischhacker. EETS o.s. 102. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894. Langland, William. The Vision of Piers Plowman, edited by A.V.C. Schmidt. London: Dent, 1995. A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, Vol. 1, edited by Stephen Morrison. EETS o.s. 337, 338. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Laws of Hywel Dda (The Book of Blegywryd), translated by Melville Richards. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1954. Le Bel, Jean. Chronique, edited by Jules Viard and Eugène Déprez. 2 vols. Paris: Libraire Renouard, 1904-05. Le Bouvier, Gilles. Chronique. In Histoire de Charles VII, edited by Denis Godfrey. Paris, 1661. Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, edited by O. Cockayne. 3 vols. London: Longmans and Green, 1864–6. Leges Langobardorum, edited by F. Bluhme. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum. Vol. 4, edited by G.H. Pertz. Hanover: Hahn, 1868. The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, edited and translated by F. Behrends. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Lex Baiwariorum, Pactus Alamannorum and Lex Alamannorum, edited by J. Merkel. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum. Vol. 3, edited by G. Pertz. Hanover: Hahn, 1868. Lex Frisionem, edited by K. de Richthofen. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum. Vol. 3, edited by G. Pertz. Hanover: Hahn, 1863. Lex Francorum Chamavorum. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum. Vol. 5, edited by Rudolf Sohm. 103–42. Hanover: Hahn, 1875–1889. Lex Salica Carolina. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum. Vol. 2, edited by K.A. Eckhardt. Hanover: Hahn, 1969. Leges Baiuwariorum. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum. Vol.3, edited by Johann Merkel. 183–496. Hanover: Hahn, 1898. Leges Burgundionum. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum. Vol. 3, edited by Friedrich Bluhme. 497–630. Hanover: Hahn, 1898. Leges Saxonum. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum. Vol. 5, edited by Karl von Richthofen and Karl Friedrich von Richthofen. 1–102. Hanover: Hahn, 1875–1889. Leges Visigothorum. Leges nationum Germanicarum. Vol. 1, edited by Karl Zeumer. Hanover: Hahn, 1902. The Liber Celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden, edited by R. Ellis. EETS o.s. 291. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. Liebermann, F. , ed. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. Halle: Niemeyer, 1903. The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth: 1200–1268. Translated by John Baptist Hasbrouck and Roger De Ganck. Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 1991.

Bibliography

591

Life of St. Alice of Schaerbeek. Translated by Martinus Cawley, O.C.S.O. Lafayette, Oregon: Our Lady of Gaudalupe Abbey, 2000. Liuzza, Roy. Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Translation of Texts from London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. iii. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011. Livingston, Michael, ed. Siege of Jerusalem. Kalamazoo: TEAMS Medieval Institute Publication, 2004. . Lollard Sermons, edited by Gloria Cigman. EETS o.s. 294. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Love, Nicholas. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text, edited by Michael G. Sargent. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2004. Mac Airt, Seán and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, eds. and trans. Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). Dublin: Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, 1983. A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England: Oxford Bodley 649, edited and translated by Patrick J. Horner. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2006. MacNeill, Eóin, trans. “The Law of Status or Franchise.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 36C (1923): 265–316. Malory, Thomas. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Eugène Vinaver, 3rd ed., rev. P.J.C. Field. Oxford: Clarendon 1990. ———. Le Morte Darthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales, edited by P.J.C. Field. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2008. Marienwerder, Johannes. The Life of Dorothea von Montau, a Fourteenth-Century Recluse, translated by Ute Stargardt. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1997. ———. “Das Leben der heiligen Dorothea,” edited by Max Toeppen. In Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum: Die Geschichtsquellen der preussischen Vorzeit bis zum Untergang der Ordensherrschaft, edited by Theodor Hirsch, Max Töppen, and Ernst Strehlke. Vol. 2, 1863; Frankfurt a. M.: Minerva GmbH, 1965, 179–350. Margaret of Oingt. Li Via Seiti Biatrix, Virgina De Ornaciu. In Oeuvres De Marguerite D’oyngt, edited by E. Philipon. 49–76. Lyon: N. Scheuring, 1827. ———. The Life of the Virgin Saint Beatrice of Ornacieux, translated by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. In The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic, edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. 47–62. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ———. Mirror, translated by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. In The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic, edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. 41–47. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ———. A Page of Meditations, translated by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. In The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic, edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. 25–41. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ———. Pagina Meditationum. In Oeuvres De Marguerite D’oyngt, edited by E. Philipon. 1–33. Lyon: N. Scheuring, 1827.

592

Bibliography

———. Speculum Sancte Margarete Virginis. In Oeuvres De Marguerite D’oyngt, edited by E. Philipon. 35–48. Lyon: N. Scheuring, 1827. Matthew Paris. The Life of St. Edmund, edited and translated by C.H. Lawrence. Oxford: Alan Sutton Publishing LTD, 1996. Mechthild of Magdeburg. The Flowing Light of the Godhead, translated with introduction by Frank Tobin, New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998. Mechthild of Hackeborn. Liber gratiae spiritualis visionum et revelationum beatae Mecthildis virginis devotissimae, ad fidelium instructionem. Venice, 1558. Medieval Medicine: A Reader, edited by Faith Wallis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Meyer, Kuno, ed. and trans. Betha Colmáin maic Lúacháin. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, and Company, 1911. Meyer, Kuno, ed. and trans. The Death-Tales of the Ulster Heroes. Todd Lecture Series 14. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy Dublin, 1906. Meyer, Kuno, ed. and trans. Tecosca Cormaic. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, & Co., 1909. The Middle English Mirror, edited by Kathleen Marie Blumreich. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. The Middle English Translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Anatomy, edited by Björn Wallner. Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1964. The Middle English Translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Treatise on Wounds, edited by Björn Wallner. Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1976. Monstrelet, Enguerrand de. La chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrlet: en deux livresavec pièces justificatives 1400–1444, edited by L. Douët-D’Arcq. 6 vols. Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1857–62. La Mort le Roi Artu: Roman du XIIIe siècle, edited by Jean Frappier. Paris: Droz, 1936, rptd. 1996. Le Morte D’Arthur: A Critical Edition, edited by P.F. Hissiger. Paris: Mouton, 1975. Morte Arthure, edited by Edmund Brock, EETS o.s. 8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1871, rptd. 1961. Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B., ed. Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century, translated by Barbara Newman et al. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Ní Dhonnchadha, Máirín. “The Law of Adomnán: A Translation.” In Adomnán at Birr, ad 697, edited by Thomas O’Loughlin. 53–68. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001. Ó hAodha, Donncha, ed. and trans. Bethu Brigte. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1978. O’Keeffe, James G., ed. and trans. Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne): Being the Adventures of Suibhne Geilt. A Middle-Irish Romance. Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1904. Onon, Urgunge. The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan. London: Routledge Curzon, 2001.

Bibliography

593

O’Rahilly, Cecile, ed. and trans. Táin bó Cúalgne from the Book of Leinster. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1967. ———. Táin bó Cúailgne: Recension I. Dublin. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Ó Riain, Pádraig, ed. and trans. Beatha Bharra: St. Finbarr of Cork – the Complete Life. London: Irish Texts Society, 1994. “Our Salvation,” edited by Lambert McKenna. Studies 38 (1949): 463–9. Pactus Legis Salicae, edited by K.A. Eckhardt. Monumenta Germaniae Historica LL Nat. Germ. 4.1. Hanover: Hahn, 1962. Pauli, Johannes. Johannes Pauli: Schimpf und Ernst. Teil 1, edited by Johannes Bolte. Berlin: Stubenrauch, 1924. Philip Bocht Ó hUiginn, edited by Lambert McKenna. Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1931. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, translated by Arthur Golding. Perseus Digital Library, 2013. . Pettit, Edward, ed. Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms and Prayers from British Library MS Harley 585: The Lacnunga, 2 vols. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Pietro d’Argellata, Cirurgia. Perpignan: Joan Rosenbach, 1503. Plummer, Charles, ed. Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, 2 vols. 1919; repr. Dublin: Four Courts Press: 1997. ———, ed. and trans. Miscellanea Hagiographica Hibernica: Vitae Adhuc Ineditae Sanctorum MacCreiche, Naile, Cranat, ad Fidem Codicum Manu Scriptorum Recognovit Prolegomenis Notis Indicibus Instruxit Carolus Plummer. Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1925. ———, ed. Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica. Oxford: Clarendon, 1896. Preest, David, trans. Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinebrook. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012. Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum: lexico anglo-latinus princeps, edited by Albert Way. Camden Society 25, 54, 89. London: Camden Society, 1843–65. Quin, E.G., gen. ed. 1913–76. Dictionary of the Irish Language. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1976. Rachewiltz, Igor de, trans. and ed. The Secret History of the Mongols. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Raoul de Cambrai, edited and translated by Sarah Kay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Rashid al-Din. Jami’at al-Tawarikh, edited by B. Karimi. Teheran: Iqbal, 1983. Rashiduddin Fazullah. Jami’u’t-Tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles, translated by Wheeler M. Thackston. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. Reginonis Abbatis Prumiensis Chronicon, edited by F. Kurze. Monumenta Germaniae Historica SS rer. Germ. Vol. 50. Hanover: Hahn, 1890. Richard of St. Victor. Liber Exceptionum, edited by Jean Châtillon. Paris: J. Vrin, 1958. Robert Reynes of Acle. The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle: An Edition of Tanner MS 407, edited by Cameron Louis. Garland Medieval Texts I. New York and London: Garland, 1980.

594

Bibliography

Roca, Josep M. La medicina catalana en temps del rey Martí. Barcelona: F. Giró, 1919. Roger of Wendover. Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History, edited and translated by J.A. Giles. London: Henry G. Bohun, 1849; New York: AMS, 1968. Rotuli Scotiae in Turri Londinensi et in Domo Capitulari Westmonasteriensi Asservati, edited by D. Macpherson et al. London, 1814–19. Ruiz Moreno, Aníbal. La medicina en la legislación medioeval española. Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1946. Facsimile edition in Alcalá del Real: Formación Alcalá, 2009. Rymer, Thomas, ed. Foedera, conventiones,literae. 20 vols. The Hague, 1704–35. Scalacronica, edited by Joseph Stevenson. Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1836. Shakespeare, William. I Henry IV, edited by Gordon McMullan. Norton Critical Editions. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon. 2nd ed. revised by Norman Davis. Oxford: Clarendon 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl: Verse Translations, translated by Marie Borroff. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. The Song of Roland. Translated by Robert Harrison. New York: Mentor/Penguin, 1970. “Sorrow for Sin,” edited by Lambert McKenna. The Irish Monthly 56 (1928): 437–40. Speculum sacerdotale. Edited by Edward H. Weatherly. EETS o.s. 200. London: Oxford University Press, 1936. Stokes, Whitley, ed. and trans. Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1890. ———, ed. and trans. Acallam na Senórach. Irische Texte 4. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1900. Sudhoff, Karl, ed. “Die Chirugie von Roger Frugardi von Salern.” In Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chirurgie im Mittelalter, vol. 2.148–236. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1918. The Surgery of Theoderic, c. AD 1267, translated by E. Campbell and J. Cotton. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955. Suso, Henry. The Examplar, with Two German Sermons, translated and edited by Frank Tobin. Preface by Bernard McGinn. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1989. ———. The Life of the Servant, translated by James M. Clark (1952). Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1982. Tacitii, Cornelii. Opera minora, edited by J.G.C. Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1900, 1970 reprint. Tacitus. Agricola and Germania, translated by Harold Mattingly. London: Penguin Classics, 1948, reprinted 2009. Talhoffer, Hans. Medieval Combat: A Fifteenth-Century Manual of Swordfighting and Close-Quarter Combat, trans. Mark Rector. (Org. 2000) Reprinted Bansley, UK: Frontline Books, 2014. Thomas Aquinas. Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, edited by P. Mandonnet. 2 volumes. Paris, 1829.

Bibliography

595

Thomas of Cantimpré. Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives. Abbot John of Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres and Lutgard of Aywières, edited by Barbara Newman and translated by Margot H. King and Barbara Newman. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008. ———. Vita S. Lutgardis. In Acta Sanctorum, edited by J. Carnandet, June 16, 187–210. Paris: Palmé, 1867. ———. Vita S. Christinae Mirabilis. In Acta Sanctorum, edited by J. Pinius, July 4, 637–60. Antwerp: Société des Bollandistes, 1727. ———. “De S. Lutgarde virgine, sanctimoniali Ordinis Cisterciensis, Aquiriae in Bra­ bantia.” In Acta Sanctorum, edited by Godfrey Henschen. June, 3:234–263. Société des Bollandistes, 1902–1970. ———. Vita Margaretae. Archivum fratrum praedicatorum 18 (1948): 106–30. Thorp, Nigel, ed. La Chanson de Jérusalem. The Old French Crusade Cycle. Vol 6. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Thurneysen, Rudolf, ed. Scéla Mucce Mac Dathó. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1935. Togail Bruidne Da Derga, edited by Eleanor Knott. Mediaeval and Modern Irish Series 8. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1975. Toner, Gregory, ed and trans. Bruiden Da Choca. Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 2007. The Tretyse of Loue, edited by John H. Fisher. EETS o.s. 223. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. Tubach, Frederic C. Index exemplorum: a Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales. Helsinki: Suamalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969. Valls, Helen. “Studies on Roger Frugardi’s Chirurgia.” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1995. van Hamel, A.G., ed. Compert Con Culain and Other Stories. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1933. Vegetius. Military Institutions of the Romans, translated by John Clark. Harrisburg: Military Service Publishing Company, 1944. Vincent of Beauvais. Speculum Naturale. Douai: C. Beller, 1624. Villani, Giovanni. Croniche di Giovanni, Matteo e Filippo Villani, 2 vols. Trieste: Sezione letterario-artistica del Lloyd autriaco, 1857–1858. ———. Nuova Cronica di Giovanni Villani, edizione critica a cura di Giovanni Porta. 3 vols. Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1991. Vita Aleydis De Scarembecanae. In Acta Sanctorum, June Vol. 2 (June 11), edited by G. Henschen. 471–77. Paris, 1867. Wasserschleben, Hermann, hrsg. Die irische Kanonensammlung. 1885; repr. Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1966. Weizlan, Einwik. Die Vita Wilbirgis des Einwik Weizlan, edited by Lukas Sainitzer. Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, 1999.

596

Bibliography

Westra, M. Salvina, ed. and trans. A Talkyng of þe Loue of God Edited from MS Vernon, Bodleian 3938, and Collated with MS Simeon Brit. Mus. Add. 22283. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1950. William of St. Thierry. The Works of William of St. Thierry: On Contemplating God, Prayer, Meditations. Translated by Sister Penelope. Cistercian Fathers Series 3. Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 1970. ———. Meditativae Oritationes. J.P. Migne. Patrologia Latina. Wörter und Sachen in Lichte der Bezeichnungsforschung, edited by Ruth SchmidtWiegand. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980. Wolfram von Eschenbach. Titurel, edited, translated with a commentary and intro. by Helmut Brackert and Stephan Fuchs-Jolie. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. ———. Titurel and the Songs, translated by Marion E. Gibbs and Sidney M. Johnson. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Series A, 57. New York and London: Garland, 1988. ———. Willehalm, 6th edition, edited by Karl Lachmann, translated by Dieter Kartschoke. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968. Zhao Hong. Meng-Da Bei-Lu: Polnoe Opisanie Mongolo-Tatar. Russian trans. Nikolai Ts. Munkyev. Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1975.



Secondary Sources

Abramson, Henry and Carrie Hannon. “Depicting the Ambiguous Wound.” In The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite, edited by Elizabeth Wyner Mark. 98–113. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003. Aerford, David S. “Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-Century Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation.” In The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, edited by Peter Parhsall. 141–147. Studies in the History of Art, 75. Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Symposium Papers 52. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. ———. “The Passion Measured: A Late-Medieval Diagram of the Body of Christ.” In The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, edited by A.A. MacDonald, H.N.B. Ridderbos, and R.M. Schlusemann. 211–38. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998. Aers, David. “The Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Orthodox Late Medieval Representations.” In The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture, edited by David Aers and Lynn Staley. 15–42. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Aichinguer, Wolfram. El fuego de San Antón y los hospitales antonianos en España. Berlín: Verlag Turia & Kant, 2009.

Bibliography

597

Aigle, Denise. Le Fārs sous la domination Mongole: Politique et Fiscalité. Paris: Association Pour L’avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2006. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin and Jill Ross, eds. The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Aldini, Nicolò N., Milena Fini and Roberto Giardino, “From Hippocrates to Tissue Engineering: Surgical Strategies in Wound Treatment,” World Journal of Surgery, 32 (2008): 2114–2121. Allen, Peter Lewis. The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. Chicago ; London: University of Chigago Press, 2000. Allmand, C. Henry V. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. ———. Society at War. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1973. Amberger, J. Christoph. “Killing Arts or Upper-Class Leisure Activity?: Aspects of European Combatives in Image and Literature.” In The Cutting Edge: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Combat, ed. Barry Molloy. Stroud: Tempus, 2007, 177–87. Amundsen, Darrel W. “Casuistry and the Professional Obligations: the Regulation of Physicians by the Court of Conscience in the Late Middle Ages.” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 3 (1981): 22–37. ———. “Medieval Canon Law on Medical and Surgical Practice by the Clergy.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 22–44. Andberg, Bjarne.  “Le Paysage Marin Dans La Crypte De La Cathedrale D’Anagni. ” Acta Ad Archaelogiam Et Artivm Historiam Pertinentia 2 (1965): 195–203. Andorlini, Isabella. “Teaching Medicine in Late Antiquity: Method, Texts and Contexts.” In Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contem­ porary Manuscript Evidence, edited by Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, and Maria Amalia D’Aronco. 401–14. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Anglo, Sydney. The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe. New Haven: Yale, 2000. Appleby, Jo, Guy N. Rutty, Sarah V. Hainsworth, Robert C. Woosnam-Savage, Bruno Morgan, Alison Brough, Richard W. Earp, Claire Robinson, Turi E. King, Mathew Morris, and Richard Buckley. “Perimortem Trauma in King Richard III: A Skeletal Analysis.” The Lancet 385.9964 (17–23 September 2015): 253–59. Arbesmann, Rudolph. “The Concept of Christus Medicus in St. Augustine.” Traditio 10 (1954): 1–28. Armour from the Battle of Visby, 1361, edited by B. Thordman, O. Norlund and B.E. Ingelmark. Vitterhets Historie Och Atikvitets Akademien Kungl: Stockholm, 1939. Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland, edited by Rachel Moss, Colmán Ó Clabaigh, and Salvador Ryan. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006. The Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition, edited by Karen Cherewatuk and K.S. Whetter. Arthurian Studies 74. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009.

598

Bibliography

Askew, Graham N., Federico Formenti and Alberto E. Minetti. “Limitations Imposed by Wearing Armor on Medieval Soldiers’ Locomotor Performance.” Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, Biological Sciences 279 (2012): 640–4. Atkinson, Stephen C.B. “Malory’s ‘Healing of Sir Urry’: Lancelot, the Earthly Fellowship, and the World of the Grail.” Studies in Philology 78 (1981): 341–52. Auerbach, Erich. 1946. Mimesis; dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. 3rd ed. Bern: Francke. Ayton, Andrew. “The English Army at Crécy.” In The Battle of Crécy, 1346, edited by Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston. 159–251. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005. ———. “Crécy and the Chroniclers.” In The Battle of Crécy, 1346, edited by Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston. 287–350. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005. Bachrach, Bernard S. Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Banham, Debby. “Dun, Oxa, and Pliny the Great Physician: Attribution and Authority in Old English Medical Texts.” Social History of Medicine 24 (2011): 57–73. ———, and Conan T. Doyle. “An Instrument of Confusion: The Mystery of the AngloSaxon Syringe.” In Recipes for Disaster, edited by Jennifer Rampling, Debby Banham, and Nick Jardine. 27–38. Cambridge: Whipple Museum, 2010. Barker, Juliet. Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle that Made England. New York: Back Bay, 2005. Barnes, E. “The Dead Do Tell Tales.” In Corinth: The Centenary, 1896-1996, edited by C.K. Williams and N. Bookidis. 435–43. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2003. Bannerman, John. The Beatons: A Medical Kindred in the Classical Gaelic Tradition. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986. Banz, Romuald. Christus und die minnende Seele: Untersuchungen und Texte. Germanische Abhandlungen, 29. Breslau: M. & H. Marcus, 1908; rpt. Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1977. Barber, Richard. Edward III and the Triumph of England. London: Allen Lane, 2013. ———, and Juliet Barker. Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry, and Pageants in the Middle Ages. New York: Weidenfeld, 1989. Bardsley, Sandy. Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Bartlett, Anne Clark. Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Barker, Juliet. Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle that Made England. New York: Back Bay, 2005. Barnes, E. “The Dead Do Tell Tales.” In Corinth: The Centenary, 1896–1996, edited by C.K. Williams and N. Bookidis. 435–43. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2003.

Bibliography

599

Bartlett, Robert. “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6.4 (1994): 43–64. Bates, Linda Rachel. “Christ’s Birth and Infancy in Middle English.” PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2011. Batt, Catherine. Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition. New York: Palgrave, 2002 Baxendall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Beccaria, Augusto. I codici di medicina del periodo presalernitano (secoli IX, X e XI). Storia e letteratura 53. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1956. Bennett, Jill. “Stigmata and Sense Memory: St. Francis and the Affective Image.” Art History 24.1 (2001): 1–16. Bennett, Judith. Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Benson, Larry D. Malory’s Morte Darthur. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. ———, ed. King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, revised by Edward E. Foster. 1–7. TEAMS. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1994. Bériou, Nicole. “La Confession Dans Les Écrits Théologiques Et Pastoraux Du Xiiie Siècle: Médication De L”âme Ou Démarche Judiciaire?. ” In L’aveu. Antiquité Et Moyen Âge. Actes De La Table Ronde De Rome (28–30 Mars 1984), edited by Ecole Française de Rome. 261–82. Rome: École Française de Rome, 1986. Bildhauer, Bettina. “Blood.” In Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, edited by Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow. Vol. 1. 106–09. Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2000. ———. Medieval Blood. Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006. Bitel, Lisa M. Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Blair, Claude. European Armour: circa 1066 to circa 1700. London: B.T. Batsford, 1958. Bloch, Marc. La société féodale. Paris: Michel Albin, 1939. Blood in History and Blood Histories, edited by Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio. Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2005. Bowen, Charles. “Great-Bladdered Medb; Mythology and Invention in the Táin Bó Cuailgne.” Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 10 (1975): 14–34. Boylston, Anthea. “Evidence for Weapon-related Trauma in British Archaeological Samples.” In Human Osteology in Archaeology and Forensic Medicine, edited by M. Cox and S. Mays. London: Greenwich Medical Media, 2000. Breatnach, Caoimhín. “The Significance of the Orthography of Irish Proper Names in the Codex Salmanticensis.” Ériu 55 (2005): 85–101.

600

Bibliography

Breatnach, Liam. A Companion to the Corpus Iuris Hibernici. Early Irish Law Series 5. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2005. ———. “Canon Law and Secular Law in Early Ireland: The Significance of Bretha Nemed.” Peritia 3 (1984): 439–59. Breeze, Andrew. “The Charter of Christ in Medieval English, Welsh and Irish.” Celtica 19 (1987): 111–20 ———. “The Number of Christ’s Wounds.” The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 32 (1985): 84–91. Bremmer, Rolf H. “The Children He Never Had, the Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law.” In Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, edited by Larissa Tracy. 108–130. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013. Brødholt, E.T., and P. Holck. “Skeletal Trauma in the Burials from the Royal Church of St. Mary in Medieval Oslo.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. 22.2 (2012): 201–218. Brody, Saul Nathaniel. The Disease of the Soul; Leprosy in Medieval Literature. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974. Brooks, Nicholas. “Weapons and Armour.” In The Battle of Maldon, AD 991, edited by D. Scragg. 208–219. Oxford: Basil Blackwell in Association with The Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies, 1991. Brothwell, D. “Forensic Aspects of the So-called Neolithic Skeleton Q1 from Maiden Castle, Dorset.” World Archaeology 3 (1971): 233–41. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Brown, Warren C. Violence in Medieval Europe. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011. Buckberry, Jo, Janet Montgomery and Julia Lee-Thorp, “Death during the Scottish Wars of Independence: An Osteological and Isotopic Analysis of Medieval Individuals from Stirling Castle, Scotland.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 153.558 (2014): 86. Buell, Paul D. “Tibetans, Mongols and the Fusion of Eurasian Cultures.” In Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the musk routes, edited by Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim. 189–208. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. Bührer-Thierry, Geneviève, “‘Just anger’ or ‘vengeful’ Anger? The Punishment of Blinding in the Early Medieval West.” In Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, edited by Barbara H. Rosenwein. 75–91. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Bullough, Vern L. “Duke Humphrey and His Medical Collections.” Renaissance News 14 (1961): 87–91. ———. “Status and Medieval Medicine.” Journal of Health and Human Behavior 2 (1961): 204–210.

Bibliography

601

———. “Training of the Nonuniversity-Educated Medical Practitioners in the Later Middle Ages.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 14 (1959): 446–58. Bumke, Joachim. Die Blutstropfen im Schnee: Über Wahrnehmung und Erkenntnis im “Parzival” Wolframs von Eschenbach. Hermaea. Germanistische Forschungen, Neue Folge, 94. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001. Burns, Robert I. “The Medieval Crossbow as Surgical Instrument: An Illustrated Case History.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 48(8) (1972): 983–9. Burrus, Virginia. Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. ———. The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Sara M. Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England. New York: Routledge, 2015. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ———. “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages.” Church History 71.4 (2002): 685–714. ———. “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety.” German Historical Institute Bulletin 30 (2002): 3–36. ———. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ———. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992. ———. “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. 160–219. New York: Zone, 1989. ———. Holy Feast and Holy Fast : The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. The New Historicism : Studies in Cultural Poetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ———. “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.” Representations 11 (1985): 1–25. ———. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1982. ———. “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing.” The Harvard Theological Review 70.3–4 (1977): 257–284. Caciola, Nancy. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

602

Bibliography

Cameron, M.L. Anglo-Saxon Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cameron, Sonja. “Keeping the Customer Satisfied: Barbour’s Bruce and a Phantom Division at Bannockburn.” In The Polar Twins, edited by Edward J. Cowan and Douglas Gifford. 61–74. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1999. Campbell, John Emory, ed. Basic Trauma Life Support for Paramedics and Other Advanced Providers, 4th edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Health, 2000. Campion, Eleanor, O.C.S.O. “Bernard and Alice the Leper: An Odor of Life for Some.” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 39. 2 (2004): 127–39. Camporesi, Piero. The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, translated by Tania Croft-Murray. Latin texts trans. Helen Elsom. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 17. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Carreras Valls, Ricard. “Introducció a la història de la cirurgia a Catalunya: Bernat Serra i altres cirurgians catalans il·lustres del segle XIV.” In Tres treballs premiats en el concurs d’homenatge a Gimbernat, edited by Ricard Carreras Valls, Jaume Pi-Sunyer Bayo, and Antoni Cardoner Planas.1–63. Perpinyà and El Masnou (Barcelona): Societat de Cirurgia de Catalunya and Laboratoris del Nord d’Espanya, 1936. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1990. ———, and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds. The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Cawley, Martinus. O.C.S.O. “The “Life of Alice” and the Silver Age at Villers.” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 31.1 (1996): 51–74. Cerveró, Lluís. La medicina en la literatura valenciana del segle XVI. Valencia: Eliseu Climent, Editor, 1987. Cervone, Cristina Maria, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love. 85–105. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Chamberlin, John. Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Places in Langland’s Poetics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2000. Chambers, James. The Devil’s Horsemen: the Mongol Invasion of Europe. New York: Atheneum, 1975. Chan, Hok-Lan. “Siting by Bowshot: A Mongolian Custom and Its Sociopolitical and Cultural Implications.” Asia Major 4 (1991): 53–78. Charles-Edwards, Thomas M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. “Boundaries in Irish Law.” In Medieval Settlement: Continuity and Change, edited by P.H. Sawyer. 83–7. London: Edward Arnold Publishers, Ltd., 1976. ———. “Review Article: The Corpus Iuris Hibernici.” Studia Celtica 20 (1980): 141–62.

Bibliography

603

Chazelle, Celia. “Crime and Punishment: Penalising without Prisons.” In Why the Middle Ages Matter, edited by Celia Chazelle, et al. 15–28. New York: Routledge, 2012. ———. The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cheshire, Eddie. “Non-metallic Armour.” PhD dissertation, University of Reading, Engineering and History, 2010. Christie, Neil, and M. Yazigi, eds. Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Christian Martyrdom in Late Antiquity (300 – 450 AD): History and Discourse, Tradition and Religious Identity, edited by Peter Gemeinhardt. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, 116. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Cifuentes i Comamala, Lluís. “La promoció intel·lectual i social dels barbers-cirurgians a la Barcelona medieval: l’obrador, la biblioteca i els béns de Joan Vicenç (fl. 1421– 1464).” Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 19 (2000): 429–479. Cifuentes, Lluís. La ciència en català a l’Edat Mitjana i el Renaixement. Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca: Universitat de Barcelona and Universitat de les Illes Balears, 2006. Citrome, Jeremy. The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Clark, D.L. “Optic for Preachers: The De oculo morali by Peter of Limoges.” The Michigan Academician 9.3 (1977): 329–343. Classen, Albrecht. “Herz und Seele in Hartmanns von Aue ‘Der arme Heinrich’: Der mittelalterliche Dichter als Psychologe?” Mediaevistik 14 (2003): 7–30. ———. Utopie und Logos. Vier Studien zu Wolframs von Eschenbach “Titurel- Fragmenten. Beiträge zur älteren Literaturgeschichte. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1990. ———., ed. The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 2118. New York-London: Garland Publishing, 1999. Cleaves, Frances W. “A Medical Practice of the Mongols in the Thirteenth Century.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17 (1954): 428–44. Cohen, Esther. The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Cohen, Esther. “The Animated Pain of the Body.” The American Historical Review 105.1 (2000): 36–68. ———. “Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages.” Science in Context VIII (1995): 47–74. Cole, Hector, and Tig Lang. “The Treating of Prince Henry’s Arrow Wound, 1403.” Journal of the Society of Archer Antiquaries (2003): 95–101. Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Tomomi Kato. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1974.

604

Bibliography

Constable, Giles. “Attitudes Toward Self-Inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages.” The Ninth Stephen J. Brademas, Sr., Lecture. 5–27. Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1982. ———. “Moderation and Restraint in Ascetic Practices.” In From Athens to Chartres: Neoplatonism and Medieval Thought, edited by Haijo Jan Westra. 315–27. Leiden: Brill, 1992. Contamine, Philippe. War in the Middle Ages, translated by Michael Jones. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Cooper, C. “Forensisch-anthropologische und traumatologische Untersuchungen an den menschlichen Skeletten aus der spätmittelalterlichen Schlacht von Dornach (1499 n. Chr.).” PhD dissertation, Gutenberg University, 2009. Cooper, Rose. “Using Honey to Inhibit Wound Pathogens.” Nursing Times 104.3 (2008). Cornell, David. Bannockburn: The Triumph of Robert the Bruce. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Coupland, Simon. “Carolingian Arms and Armor in the Ninth Century.” Viator 21 (1990): 29-50. Courville, Cyril. “War Wounds of the Cranium in the Middle Ages I.” Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Society 30 (March, 1965): 27–33. Crachiolo, Beth. “Seeing the Gendering of Violence: Female and Male Martyrs in the South English Legendary.” In ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval Violence, edited by Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk. 147–163. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Craughwell, Thomas J. The Rise and Fall of the Second Largest Empire in History. Beverly, MA: Fair Winds, 2010. Cré, Marleen. “The Literary Significance of Illness in Julian of Norwich’s ‘A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman.’” Poetica 72 (2009): 43–57. Cunha, Eugénia N. and Ana Maria Silva, “War Lesions from the Famous Portuguese Medieval Battle of Aljubarrota.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 7 (1997): 595–599. Cunningham, Bernadette. “Illustrations of the Passion of Christ in the Seanchas Búrcach Manuscript.” In Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland, edited by Rachel Moss, Colmán Ó Clabaigh, and Salvador Ryan. 16–32. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006. Curry, Anne. Agincourt: A New History. Stroud: Tempus, 2005. Davis, Stephen T., et al. The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. DeConick, April D. Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter. London and New York: Continuum, 2011.

Bibliography

605

Demaitre, Luke. Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. DeMarco, Patricia. “Inscribing the Body with Meaning: Chivalric Culture and the Norms of Violence in The Vows of the Heron.” In Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, edited by Denise N. Baker. 27–53. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. De Pauw, Linda Grant. Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Deuchler, Florens. “Looking at Bonne of Luxembourg’s Prayer Book.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 29.6 (February, 1971): 267–278. DeVries, Kelly. Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century: Discipline, Tactics, and Technology. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996. ———. Medieval Military Technology. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1992. ———, and Robert Douglas Smith. Medieval Military Technology. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. ———. “Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 7 (1990): 131–46. ———. “The Use of Chronicles in Recreating Medieval Military History.” In Journal of Medieval Military History, vol. 2, edited by Bernard S. Bachrach, Clifford J. Rogers and Kelly DeVries. 1–15. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004. ———. “Medieval Warfare and the Value of a Human Life.” In Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, edited by Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi. 27–55. Leiden: Brill, 2006. ———, and Robert D. Smith. Medieval Weapons: An Illustrated History of their Impact, Weapons and Warfare. Oxford: ABC Clio, 2007. Dinzelbacher, Peter “Einführung.” In Mittelalterliche Visionsliteratur: Eine Anthologie. Ausgewählt, übersetzt, eingeleitet und kommentiert von Peter Dinzelbacher. 1–35. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. ———. Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik, Paderborn, Munich, et al.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992. Dockray, Keith. Henry V. Stroud: Tempus, 2004. Dooley, Ann. “The Invention of Women in the Táin.” In Ulidia: Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales, Belfast and Emain Macha, 8–12 April 1994, edited by J.P. Mallory and G. Stockman. 123–34. Belfast: December Publications, 1994, ———. “The Deaths of Lugaid and Derbforgaill.” In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. 4, edited by Angela Bourke, et al. 204–6. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

606

Bibliography

———. “The Gospel of Nicodemus in Ireland.” In The Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe, edited by Zbigniew Izydorczyk. 361–401. Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997. Dunford, Cheryl. “The Use of Honey-Derived Dressings to Promote Effective Wound Management.” Professional Nurse 20.8 (April, 2005): 35–8. ———. “The Use of Honey in Wound Management.” Nursing Standard 15.11 (Nov. 2000): 63–68. Durkan, John. “Care of the Poor: Pre-Reformation Hospitals.” Innes Review, 10.2 (1959): 268–280. Dutton, Paul. Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of the Dark Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Eaves, Ian. “On the Remains of a Jack of Plate Excavated from Beeston Castle in Cheshire.” Journal of the Arms and Armour Society 13 (1989–91): 81–154. Ebin, L.A. “John Barbour’s Bruce: Poetry, History, and Propaganda.” Studies in Scottish Literature 9 (1972): 218–47. Echard, Siân. “‘But here Geoffrey falls silent’: Death, Arthur and the Historia regum Britannie.” In The Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition, edited by Karen Cherewatuk and K.S. Whetter. Arthurian Studies 74. 17–32. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. Eckermann, W. “Wunden Christi.” Lexikon des Mittelalters 9.2. 350–51. Munich: LexMa, 1998. Edel, Doris. Helden auf Freiersfüssen, “Tochmarc Emire” und “Mal y kavas Kulhwch Olwen:” Studien zur frühen inselkeltischen Erzähltradition. Amsterdam: New Holland Publishing, 1980. Edgington, Susan and Sarah Lambert, eds. Gendering the Crusades. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Elias, Norbert. The Civilising Process, translated by E. Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell, 1939, rptd. 1978. Elliott, Dyan. “Dorothea of Montau.” In Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis. Vol. I: A-J. 258–60. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2004. Elverskog, Johan. Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Emerton, Ephraim, trans. The Letters of Boniface. New York: Octagon Books, 1973. Enders, Jody. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Ernst, Wolfgang. Beschwörung und Segen: Angewandte Psychotherapie im Mittelalter. Vienna: Böhlau, 2011. Envisioning Christ on the Cross: Ireland and the Early Medieval West, edited by Juliet Mullins, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh and Richard Hawtree. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013.

Bibliography

607

Eska, Charlene M. “Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources.” In Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, edited by Larissa Tracy. 149–73. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013. Etchingham, Colmán. “The Location of Historical Laithlinn/Lochla(i)nn: Scotland or Scandinavia?” In Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica, edited by M. Ó Flaithearta. 11–31. Uppsala : Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2007. Falys, Ceri. “A Late Saxon Mass Grave: the Human Bone.” In The Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre with Medieval and Later Occupation at St. John’s College, Oxford, edited by Sean Wallis. 41–130. Oxford: Thames Valley Archaeological Services, 2014. Fanning, Steven. Mystics of the Christian Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2001. Fellows, Sarah and Bob Fellows. Paramedics: From Street to Emergency Department Case Book. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2012. Ferguson, Anna-Marie. “The Illustration of Malory.” In Le Morte D’Arthur, edited by John Matthews. v-vii. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004. Ferragud, Carmel. Medicina i promoció social a la Baixa Edat Mitjana (Corona d’Aragó, 1350–1410). Madrid: CSIC, 2005. ———. La cura dels animals: menescals i menescalia a la València medieval. Catarroja: Afers, 2009. ———. “Els barbers de la ciutat de València durant el segle XV a través dels llibres del justícia criminal.” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 41.1 (2011): 31–57. ———. “El metge sota sospita. Actuació mèdica en els testimonis pericials a ferits davant la cort del justícia criminal de la ciutat de València (1396).” Recerques 62 (2011): 69–94. ———. “La práctica de la medicina en una frontera: el establecimiento de un sistema asistencial en Alcoi y Cocentaina (Reino de Valencia) durante los siglos XIII y XIV.” Mediterranean Chronicle 2 (2012): 117–133 ———. “The Role of Doctors in the Slave Trade during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries within the Kingdom of Valencia (Crown of Aragon).” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87/2 (2013): 143–169. ———. “El coneixement expert dels cirurgians en la cort del justícia criminal de la ciutat de València durant els segles XIV i XV: la pràctica de la dessospitació.” In Expertise et valeur des choses, edited by Laurent Fallard and Antoni Furió. Madrid: La Casa de Velázquez, in press. Field, P.J.C. The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993. ———. Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Fiorato, Veronica, Anthea Boylston, and Christopher Knüsel. Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton, AD 1461. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000.

608

Bibliography

Fish, Stanley. “Edgar Martinez and the Uses of Theory.” Yale Law Review 96 (July, 1987): 1773. Fisher, Sheila. “Taken Men and Token Women.” In Seeking the Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, edited by Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley. 71–105. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. ———. “Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, edited by Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe. 129–151. New York: Garland, 1988. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Aesthetik des Performative. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Flint, V.J. “The Early Medieval Medicus, the Saint – and the Enchanter.” Social History of Medicine 2.2 (1989): 127–45. Foley-Beining, Katheleen. The Body and Eucharistic Devotion in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s “Meditations.” Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997. Forgeng, Jeffrey and Alex Kiermayer. “‘The Chivalric Art’: German Martial Arts Treatises of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.” In The Cutting Edge: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Combat, edited by Barry Molloy. 153–67. Stroud: Tempus, 2007. Foucault, Michel. Care of the Self: the History of Sexuality, Vol. 3., translated by R. Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. ———. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan. London: Allen Lane, 1977. Foscati, Alessandra. Ignis sacer: una storia culturale del ‘fuoco sacro’ dall’antichità al Settecento. Tavarnuzze, Florence: SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2013. Fradenburg, L.O. Aranye. Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. ———. “Making, Mourning, and the Love of Idols.” In Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, edited by Jeremy Dimmick et. al. 25–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. France, John. Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000–1300. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Freedman, Paul. “Atrocities and the Executions of Peasant Rebel Leaders in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 31 (2005): 101–113. Fresquet, José L., López, Mª Luz, Catalá, Jesús, and Micó, Juan. Archivo Rodrigo Pertegás, CD Rom. Valencia: Universitat de València and Fundación Marcelino Botín, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia, translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1955. Friedman, John B. Northern English Books, Owners, and Makers in the Late Middle Ages. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Bibliography

609

Frugioni, Chiara. “Female Mystics, Visions, and Iconography.” In Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, edited by Daniel Bornstein and Robert Rusconi and translated by Margery J. Schneider. 130–164. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Fulton, Rachel. “‘Taste and See That the Lord is Sweet’ (Ps 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West.” The Journal of Religion 86.2 (April 2006): 169–204. ———. From Judgment to Passion: devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Furió, Antoni. “‘Car la retòrica més se pertany a notaris que a cavallers.’ Escriptura, orgull de classe i autoria del Tirant.” EHumanista 4 (2013): 150–164. Gabarró i Garcia, Pere. “Sixtus Fort, un cirurgià barceloní del segle XIV.” In I congrés internacional d’història de la medicina catalana (Barcelona-Montpeller, de l’1 al 7 de juny de 1970): llibre d’actes. 213–214. vol. 4. Barcelona: Scientia, 1971. Gabriel, Richard A. Genghis Khan’s Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. Gantz, Jeffrey, trans. “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel.” In Early Irish Myths and Sagas. 61–106. London: Penguin Books, 1981. García Ballester, Luís. “‘Artifex factivus sanitatis’: Health and Medical Care in Medieval Latin Galenism.” In Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions, edited by Don Bates. 127–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. La medicina a la València medieval. Medicina i societat en un país medieval mediterrani. Valencia: Alfons el Magnànim, 1988. Gardiner, Eileen, ed. Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante. New York: Italica, 1989. Gask, George. Essays in the History of Medicine. London: Butterworth & Co., 1950. Getz, Faye. Medicine in the English Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. ———. “Charity, Translation and the Language of Medieval Learning in Medieval England.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1990): 1–17. ———. Healing and Society in Medieval England: A Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. ———. “John Mirfield and the Breviarium Bartholomei: the Medical Writings of a Clerk at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in the Later Fourteenth Century.” The Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 37 (Dec., 1985): 24–6. Gillingham, John, “Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles from the Late 12th to the Early 14th century.” In Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, edited by Brendan Smith. 114–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ginzburg, Carlo. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

610

Bibliography

———. Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2012. Given-Wilson, Chris. “The Earl of Arundel, the War with France, and the Anger of King Richard II.” In The Medieval Python: the Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, edited by R.F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya. 27–38. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ———. Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England. London: Hambledon, 2004. Glasscoe, Marion. English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith. London: Longman, 1993. Gombrich, Ernst H. Arte e illusione: Studio sulla psicologia della rappresentazione pittorica, trans. R. Federici. Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Gonthier, Nicole. Le châtiment du crime au moyen age (XIIe-XVIe siecles). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1998. Grant, Alexander. “Disaster at Neville’s Cross: The Scottish Point of View.” In The Battle of Neville’s Cross 1346, edited by David Rollason and Michael Prestwich. 15–35. Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 1998. Gray, Douglas. Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric. London: Routledge, 1972. ———. “The Five Wounds of Our Lord.” Notes and Queries 208 (1963): 50–51, 82–89, 127–134, 163–168. Gray, Stuart. Life and Death on the Streets: A Paramedic’s Diary. London: Monday, 2007. Green, Monica H. “Books as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages.” Dynamis 20 (2000): 331–69. Gertsman, Elina. “Signs of Death: The Sacrificial Christ Child in Late Medieval Art.” In The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha Es Et O!, edited by Mary Dzon and Theresa Kenney. 66–91. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Grigsby, Bryon. “The Social Position of the Surgeon in London, 1350–1450.” Essays in Medieval Studies 13 (1996): 71–80. Groebner, Valentin. Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, translated by Pamela Selwyn. New York: Zone Books, 2004. Groeneveld, Leanne. “Salvation, Damnation, and the Wounded (Corporate) Body of Christ in Late Medieval Culture.” Florilegium 22 (2005): 86–90. Guigonis de Caulhiaco. Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna, vol. 1, edited by Michael R. McVaugh. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997. Haas, Alois M. “Sinn und Tragweite von Heinrich Seuses Passionsmystik.” Die Passion Christi in Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters, edited by Walter Haug and Burghard Wachinger. 94–114. Fortuna vitrea 12. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Hadley, D.M., edited by Masculinity in Medieval Europe. London: Longman, 1999. Hagedorn, Dierk. Peter von Danzig: Transkription und Übersetzung der Handschrift 44 A 8, Bibliothek der historischen Kampfkünste 2. Herne: VS Books, 2008.

Bibliography

611

Hagen, Susan K. Allegorical Remembrance: A Study of “The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man” as a Medieval Treatise on Seeing and Remembering. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Hahn, Thomas, ed. Introduction to The Awntyrs off Arthur. In Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publication: 1995. Haldon, John. Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204. London: UCL Press, 1999. Halsall, Guy, ed. Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998. Hamburger, Jeffrey. The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Hamilton, David. The Healers: A History of Medicine in Scotland. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1981. Hamilton, J.S. “Some Notes on Royal Medicine in the Reign of Edward II.” In Fourteenth Century England II, edited by Chris Given-Wilson. 33–44. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002. Hardy, Robert. “The Military Archery at Neville’s Cross, 1346.” In The Battle of Neville’s Cross 1346, edited by David Rollason and Michael Prestwich. 112–31. Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 1998. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Harriss, Gerald. Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Haught, Leah. “Ghostly Mother and Fated Fathers: Gender and Genre in The Awntyrs off Arthure.” Arthuriana 21.1 (Spring 2010): 3–24. Heß, Cordelia. Heilige machen im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum: die Kanonisations­ prozesse von Birgitta von Schweden, Nikolaus von Linköping und Dorothea von Montau. Europa im Mittelalter 11. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008. Hellinga, Lotte. “The Malory Manuscript and Caxton.” In Aspects of Malory, edited by Toshi Takamiya and Derek Brewer. 127–38. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986. Hester, James. “Home-Grown Fighting: A Response to the Argument for a Byzantine Influence on MS I.33.” Arms & Armour 9 (2012): 76–84. Hils, Hans-Peter. Meister Johann Liechtenauers Kunst des langen Schwertes. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985. Hinojosa, José. “Médicos judíos en la ciudad de Valencia durante la baja Edad Media (siglos XIII y XIV).” In Estudos em homenagem ao Professor Doutor José Marques, vol. 2. 415–436. Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidad do Porto, 2006. Hodges, J.C. “The Blood Covenant among the Celts.” Revue Celtique 44 (1927): 107–56. Hodges, Kenneth. Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. New York: Palgrave, 2005.

612

Bibliography

Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hörner, Petra. Dorothea von Montau: Überlieferung – Interpretation. Dorothea und die osteuropäische Mystik. Information and Interpretation, 7. Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Holsinger, Bruce W. Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Holweck, Frederick. “The Five Sacred Wounds.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New Advent. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. Huard, Pierre and Mirko Drazen Grmek. Mille ans de chirurgie en occident: Ve-XVe siècles. Paris: R. Dacosta, 1966. Huizinga, Johan. The Autumn of the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, 1997. ———. The Waning of the Middle Ages. Michigan: E. Arnold, 1924. Hunt, Tony. The Medieval Surgery. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992. ———. Anglo-Norman Medicine. 2 vols. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994. ———. Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990. Huot, Sylvia. Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. International Association for the Study of Pain. “Iasp Taxonomy.” . Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Jackson, Mark, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Jacquart, Danielle. La Médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Johnson, Holly. “A Fifteenth-Century Sermon Enacts the Seven Deadly Sins.” In Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: the Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, edited by Richard Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard. 107–131. York: York Medieval Press, 2012. Johnson, Lizabeth. “Mutilation as Cultural Commerce and Criticism: The Transmission, Practice, and Meaning of Castration and Blinding in Medieval Wales.” Istoria 1 (2008): 1–23. Johnson, Máire. “Preserving the Body Christian: The Motif of ‘Recapitation’ in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography.” The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 10 (2009). . ———. “‘Vengeance is Mine’: Saintly Retribution in Medieval Ireland.” In Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion, and the Discourse of Violent Conflict, edited by Susanna Throop and Paul Hyams. 13–63. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. ———. “Vita I S Brigitae and De Duodecim Abusiuis Saeculi.” Studia Celtica Fennica (SCF) 9 (2012): 22–35.

Bibliography

613

———. “Medicine and Miracle: Law Enforcement in The Lives of Irish Saints.” In Medicine and Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Jones, Claire. “An Assortment of Doctors: the Readers of Medical Books in Late Medieval England.” Journal of the Early Book Society 3 (2000): 136–151. ———. “Discourse Communities and Medical Texts.” In Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, edited by Païvi and Irma Taavitsainen. 23–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “Vernacular Literacy in Late-Medieval England: the Example of East Anglian Medical Manuscripts.” PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow, 2000. Jones, George F. “The treatment of bloodshed in medieval and modern literature.” Studia Neophilologica 70.1 (1998): 83–88. Jones, Peter Murray. “Four Middle English Translations of John of Arderne.” In Latin and Vernacular Studies in Late Medieval Manuscripts, edited by A.J. Minnis. 61–89. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989. ———. “Medicine and Science.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, edited by Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp. 433–448. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Jones, Peter N. “The Metallography and Relative Effectiveness of Arrowheads and Armor during the Middle Ages.” Materials Characterization 29 (1992): 111–117. Jones, Terry. “Was Richard II a Tyrant? Richard’s Use of the Books of Rules for Princes.” In Fourteenth Century England V, edited by Nigel Saul. 130–60. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008. Kaeuper, Richard W., ed. Violence in Medieval Society. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. ———. War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, rptd. 2001. Karger, Bernd, Hubert Sudhues and Bernd Brinkmann. “Arrow Wounds: Major Stimulus in the History of Surgery.” World Journal of Surgery 25 (2001): 1550–1555. Karras, Ruth M. From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. ———. “The Regulation of Sexuality in the Late Middle Ages: England and France.” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 86.4 (October 2011): 1010–1039. Kaszuba, Sophia. “Wounds in Medieval Mongol Warfare: Their Nature and Treatment in The Secret History, with Some Notes on Mongolian Military Medicine and Hygiene.” Mongolian Studies 19 (1996): 59–68. Kay, Sarah and Miri Rubin, eds. Framing Medieval Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

614

Bibliography

Kealey, Edward J. Medieval Medicus: A Social History of Anglo-Norman Medicine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Keen, Maurice, ed. Medieval Warfare: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Keller, Hildegard Elisabeth. My Secret is Mine: Studies on Religion and Eros in the German Middle Ages. Studies in Spirituality, Supplement 4. Leuven: Peeters, 2000. Kellett, Rachel E. “Guts, Gore and Glory: Representations of Wounds Inflicted in War in Medieval German Literature.” In Battles and Bloodshed: The Medieval World at War, edited by Lorna Bleach and Keira Borrill. 161–76. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. Kelly, Fergus. A Guide to Early Irish Law. Early Irish Law Series 3. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988. ———. Early Irish Farming. Early Irish Law Series 4. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1998. Kennedy, Beverly. “Gawain and Heroic Knighthood in Malory.” In Gawain: A Casebook, edited by Raymond H. Thompson and Keith Busby. 287–95. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———. Knighthood in the Morte Darthur. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992. Kennedy, Edward Donald. “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur: The Adaptation of a French Romance for an English Audience.” In Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, edited by Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley. 91–112. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Kessler, Herbert. Seeing Medieval Art. New York: Broadview, 2004. ———, and Gerhard Wolf, eds. The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996. Florence: Electa, 2000. Khudyakov, Yu. C. Vooruzhenie Tsentral’no-Aziatikikh Kochyevnikov v Epokhu Rannyego I Razvitogo Spegnyeveko’ya. Novosibirsk, Academy of Sciences, 1991. Kiernan, Victor G. The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of the Aristocracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Kindrick, Robert L. Robert Henryson. Boston: Twayne P (G.K. Hall and Co.), 1979. King, Andy. “‘According to the Custom Used in French and Scottish Wars’: Prisoners and Casualties on the Scottish Marches In The Fourteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002): 263–290. King, Margot H., and Ludo Jongen. “The Holy Women of Liège: A Bibliography.” . Kirkup, John. A History of Limb Amputation. London: Springer, 2007. Kjellström, A. “A Sixteenth-Century Warrior Grave from Uppsala, Sweden: the Battle of Good Friday.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 15 (2005): 23–50.

Bibliography

615

Klaniczay, Gábor. “On the Stigmatization of Saint Margaret of Hungary.” In Medieval Christianity in Practice, edited by Miri Rubin. 265–73. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Knopp, Sherron. “Artistic Design in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur.” ELH 45 (1978): 563–82. Knüsel, C. and A. Boylston. “How has the Towton project contributed to our knowledge of medieval and later warfare?” In Blood Red Roses. Edited by V. Fiorato, A. Boylston and C. Knüsel, 169–88. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kroll, Jerome and Bernard Bachrach. The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics. New York: Routledge, 2005. Kuhn, Cynthia, Scott Swartzwelder, Wilkie Wilson, with Leigh Heather Wilson and Jeremy Foster. Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy. 3rd edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2008. Kümper, Hiram. “Learned Men and Skillful Matrons: Medical Expertise and the Forensics of Rape in the Middle Ages.” In Medicine and the Law, edited by Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. New York: Norton, 1992. Lang, S. J. “Bradmore, John (d. 1412).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “John Bradmore and His Book Philomena.” Social History of Medicine 5 (1992): 121–30 Langum, Virginia. “Discerning Skin: Complexion, Surgery, and Language in Medieval Confession.” In Reading Skin in Medieval Culture, edited by Katie L. Walter. 141–160. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Langslow, D.R. Medical Latin in the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Largier, Niklaus. In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, translated by Graham Harman. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Lathem, J.D. and W.F. Paterson. Saracen Archery: An English Version and Exposition of a Mameluke Work on Archery. London: New Holland Publishing, 1970. Lateef, Fatimah and Tan Kelvin. “Military Anti-Shock Garment: Historical Relic or a Device with Unrealized Potential?” Journal of Emergencies, Trauma and Shock 1.2 (2008): 63–69. Latimer, Paul. “Henry II’s Campaign Against the Welsh in 1165.” The Welsh Historical Review 14 (1989): 523–53. Latvio, Riitta. “Status and Exchange in Early Irish laws.” SCF 2 (2005): 67–96.

616

Bibliography

Lauwers, Michel. “‘Noli Me Tangere.’ Marie Madeleine, Marie D’oignies Et Les Pénitentes Du Xiiie Siècle.” Mélanges de l”Ecole française de Rome. Moyen âge, temps modernes 104.1 (1992): 209–68. Lawrence, C.H. St. Edmund of Abingdon: A Study in Hagiography and History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Le Bohec, Yann. The Imperial Roman Army, translated by Raphael Bate. London: Routledge, 1994. Lermack, Annette. “Pilgrimage in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg.” In The Art, Science and Technology of Medieval Travel, edited by Robert Bork and Andrea Kann. 97–112. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Lewis, C.S. “The English Prose Morte.” In Essays on Malory, edited by. J.A.W. Bennett. 7–28. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Lewis, Flora. “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response.” In Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, edited by Jane H.M. Taylor and Lesley Smith. 204–229. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Lewis, Gertrude Jaron. By Women, For Women, About Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany. Studies and Texts 125. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1996. Lindholm, David and Peter Svärd. Sigmund Ringeck’s Knightly Art of the Longsword. Boulder, Colorado: Paladin, 2003. Lindquist, Sherry. Agency, Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Livingston, Michael, ed. The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011. ———, and John K. Bollard, eds. Owain Glyndŵr: A Casebook. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Lochrie, Karma. “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies.” In Constructing Medieval Sexuality, edited by Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken and John A. Schulz. 180–200. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. ———. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Loe, Louise, Angela Boyle, Helen Webb and David Score. “Given to the Ground”: A Viking Age Mass Grave on Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth. Dorset Natural History and Archaeo­ logical Society Monograph 22. Oxford: Oxford Archaeology, 2014 Lutter, Christina. “Peachers, Saints and Sinners: Emotional Repertoires in High Medieval Religious Role Models.” In A History of Emotions, 1200–1800, edited by Jonas Liliequist. Studies for the International Society for Cultural History 2. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012.

Bibliography

617

Lynch, Andrew. “‘Peace is Good after War’: The Narrative Seasons of English Arthurian Tradition.” In Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, edited by Corinne Saunders, Francoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas. 127–46. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Lynch, Andrew. Malory’s Book of Arms. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. Mâle, Émile. L’art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en france. 7th edition. Paris: A. Colin, 1995. Macdonald, Alastair J. “Courage, Fear and the Experience of the Later Medieval Scottish Soldier.” Scottish Historical Review 92.2 (2013): 179–206. MacKendrick, Karmen. “The Multipliable Body.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1.1–2 (2010): 108–114. ———. Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of the Flesh. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. ———. Counterpleasures. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Madison, Shawn. “Suffering, Sacrifice, and Stability: ‘The Life of Aleydis of Schaerbeek’ in a Contemporary Context.” Magistra 8.2 (2002): 25–44. Majno, G. “The Medicus.” In The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World. 339–94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Marstrander, Carl. “The Deaths of Lugaid and Derbforgaill.” Ériu 5 (1911): 201–18. Matthews, Leslie. The Royal Apothecaries. London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1967. Matthews, William. The Ill-Framed Knight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Matusiak, John. Henry V. New York: Routledge, 2013. Maurice, John. “Leprosy: Liberation from the Colonies.” New Scientist (4 February 1989): 48–52. May, Timothy. The Mongol Art of War. Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2007. Mays, Simon A. “Healed Limb Amputations in Human Osteoarchaeology and their Causes: A Case Study from Ipswich, UK.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 6 (1996): 101–113. ———. “A Possible Case of Surgical Treatment of Cranial Blunt Force Injury from Medieval England.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16 (2006): 95–103. Mays, Stuart. “A Possible Case of Surgical Treatment of Cranial Blunt Force Injury from Medieval England.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16.2 (2006): 95–103. Macalister, R.A. Stewart, ed. and trans. Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland. 4 vols. Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1938–56. McCarthy, Daniel. “The Chronology of St. Brigit of Kildare.” Peritia 14 (2000): 255–81. ———. “Topographical Characteristics of the Vita Prima and Vita Cogitosi S Brigidae.” Studia Celtica 35 (2001): 245–70. McCone, Kim. “Brigit in the Seventh Century: A Saint with Three Lives?” Peritia 1 (1982): 107–45.

618

Bibliography

———. The Celtic and Indo-European Origins of the Fían. In The Gaelic Finn Tradition, edited by Sharon Arbuthnot and Geraldine A. Parsons. 14–30. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. McCracken, Peggy. The Curse of Eve, The Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. McCullough, Eleanor. “’Loke in: How Weet A Wounde is Heere!’: The Wounds of Christ as a Sacred Space in English Devotional Literature.” In Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, edited by Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo and Jens Zimmermann. 25–37. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010. McCulloch, Ian. “Battlefield Medicine – The Middle Ages AD 500–1450.” Osprey Military Journal 4.2 (2002): 14–17. McGinn, Bernard. The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350. New York: Crossroads, 1998. McGlynn, Sean. By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008. McGrath, Kate. “Royal Madness and the Law: The Role of Anger in Representations of Royal Authority in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Anglo-Normal Texts.” In Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, edited by W.J. Turner. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. McKinnell, Thomas H., Iain S. Whitaker, Rhian Johns, Charles S. Brown, and John S. McKinnell. “The Management of Maxillofacial Trauma in the Renaissance: A Minicase Series.” Annals of Plastic Surgery 59.4 (2007): 372–74. McKinnon, G. “‘Where Swords Seek to Shatter ...’ A Study of Deliberate Trauma in the Medieval Cemeteries of St. Andrew, Fishergate.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bradford, 1998. McNamara, Jo Ann. “The Need to Give: Suffering and Female Sanctity in the Middle Ages.” In Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, edited by Renate BlumenfeldKosinski and Timea Szell. 199–221. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. McNamara, Martin. The Apocrypha in the Irish Church. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1975. McNamer, Sarah. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. McNeill, John T. “Medicine for Sin as Prescribed in the Penitentials.” Church History 1 (1932): 14–26. ———, and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. McSheffery, Shannon. Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Bibliography

619

McVaugh, Michael. The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages. Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006. ———. Medicine Before the Plague: Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1245–1345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. “Royal Surgeons and the Value of Medical Learning: The Crown of Aragon, 1300–1350.” In Practical medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, edited by Luis García Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham. 211–236. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages. Florence: SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006. ———. “Arnald of Villanova’s Regimen Almarie (Regimen Castra Sequentium) and Medieval Military Medicine.” Viator 23 (1992): 201–14. Meale, Carol M. “London, British Library, Harley MS 2252, John Colyns’ ‘Boke’: Structure and Content.” In Tudor Manuscripts 1485–1603, edited by A.S.G. Edwards. 65–122. London: The British Library, 2009. Meaney, Audrey. “Medical Practice in England about the Year 1000.” Social History of Medicine 13.2 (2000): 221–37. Menke, Bettine and Barbara Vinken, eds. Stigmata: Poetiken der Körperinschrift. Paderborn and Munich: Fink, 2004. Merback, Mitchell B. The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Merton, Thomas. O.C.S.O. Modern Biographical Sketches of Cistercian Blessed and Saints. Cistercian Studies: Abbaye de Gethsemani, 1954. Metzler, Irina. “What’s in a Name? Considering the Onomastics of Disability in the Middle Ages.” In The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe: Examining Disability in the Historical, Legal, Literary, Medical, and Religious Discourses of the Middle Ages, edited by Wendy Turner and Tory Vandeventer Pearman. 15–50. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. ———. Disability in Medieval Europe. London: Routledge, 2006. Mikkers, Edmund. O.C.S.O. “Meditations on the ‘Life’ of Alice of Schaerbeek.” In Hidden Springs: Cistercian Monastic Women, edited by John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas. O.C.S.O. Shank. Medieval Religious Women. 395–413. Trappist, KY: Cistercian Pub­ lications, 1995. Miller, Timothy S., and Rachel Smith-Savage. “Medieval Leprosy Reconsidered.” International Social Science Review (2006). . Miller, William I. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990.

620

Bibliography

Mills, Robert. Suspended Animation : Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture. London: Reaktion, 2005. Mitchell, Piers D. “The Integration of the Palaeopathology and Medical History of the Crusades.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 9 (1999): 333–343. ———. Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “The Palaeopathology of Skulls Recovered from a Medieval Cave Cemetery near Safed, Israel (Thirteenth to Seventeenth Century).” Levant 36 (2004): 243–250. ———., Yossi Nagar and Ronnie Ellenblum. “Weapon Injuries in the Twelfth Century Crusader Garrison of Vadum Iacob Castle, Galilee,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16.2 (2006): 145–155. Monschein, Ken. The Knightly Art of Battle. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011. Mooney, Catherine M. Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Moore, Philip S. “The Authorship of the Allegoriae Super Vetus Et Novum Testamentum.” The New Scholasticism 9.3 (1935): 209–25. Morey, James H. Book and Verse: a Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Morrison, Molly. “Ingesting Bodily Filth: Defilement in the Spirituality of Angela of Foligno.” Romance Quarterly 50.3 (2003): 204–16. . Moscoso, Javier. Pain: A Cultural History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Moss, Candida R. Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2012. ———. The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Mounier-Kuhn, Alain. Chirurgie de Guerre: Le cas du Moyen Age. Paris: Economica, 2006. Mowbray, Donald. Pain and Suffering in Medieval Theology : Academic Debates at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2009. Muessig, Carolyn, ed. The Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques of Vitry. Toronto: Peregrina Publishing Company, 1999. Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B. “Holy Laywomen and Their Biographers in the Thirteenth Century.” In Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century: The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy, Juliana of Cornillon, Inventor of the Corpus Christi Feast, Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker. 1–42. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. ———. Lives of the Anchoresses : The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Bibliography

621

Murray, Alexander. Suicide in the Middle Ages. Vol. II: The Curse on Self-Murder, 2000; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. “Keeping the Acallam Together.” In The Gaelic Finn Tradition, edited by Sharon Arbuthnot and Geraldine A. Parsons. 111–21. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Narbona, Rafael. “El Justicia Criminal. Una corte medieval valenciana, un procedimiento judicial.” Estudis Castellonencs 3 (1986): 287–310. ———. Malhechores, violencia y justicia ciudadana en la Valencia Bajomedieval (1360– 1399). Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 1990. Naylor, L.L. “Ulcer Care in the Middle Ages.” Journal of Wound Care 8: 4 (1999): 208–20. Nicholson, Helen. The Knights Hospitaller. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001. ———. Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe 300–1500. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Ní Chonaill, Brónagh. “Impotence, Disclosure and Outcome: Some Medieval Irish Legal Comment” . Nicolle, David. Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era. London: Greenhill Books, 1999. ———. Medieval Warfare Source Book: Christian Europe and its Neighbors. London: Arms and Armour, 1997. ———. “Wounds, Military Surgery and the Reality of Crusading Warfare: The Evidence of Usāmah’s Memoires.” Journal of Oriental and African Studies 5 (2002): 33–46. Reprinted in Medieval Warfare 1000–1300, edited by John France. 599–612. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Nijdam, Han. “Compensating Body and Honor: The Old Frisian Compensation Tariffs.” In Medicine and the Law, edited by Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, Ailís. “Satirical Narrative in Early Irish Literature.” Doctoral dissertation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2007. Norman, Joannes. Metamorphoses of an Allegory: The Iconography of the Psychomachia in Medieval Art. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988. Novak, Shannon. “Battle-related Trauma.” In Blood Red Roses, edited by V. Fiorato, A. Boylston and C. Knüsel. 90–102. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007. ———. “Case studies.” In Blood Red Roses, edited by V. Fiorato, A. Boylston and C. Knüsel. 240–68. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007. Nunzi, Enrico, and Cesare Massone, eds. Leprosy: A Practical Guide. Milan: SpringerVerlag Italia, 2012. Oakeshott, R. Ewart. The Sword in the Age of Chivalry. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992. Ó Clabaigh, Colmán. The Friars in Ireland, 1224–1540. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. O’Collins, Gerald. Jesus Our Redeemer: A Christian Approach to Salvation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Oliver, Lisi. The Body Legal in Barbarian Law. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

622

Bibliography

———. “Sick Maintenance in Anglo-Saxon Law.” Journal of English and German Philology. 107.3 (2008): 303–326. ———. The Beginnings of English Law. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. ———. “Forced and Unforced Rape in Early Irish Law.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 13 (1993): 93–105. Ó Riain, Pádraig. “Codex Salmanticensis: A Provenance inter Anglos or inter Hibernos?” In ‘A Miracle of Learning’: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning, edited by Toby Barnard, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, and Katharine Simms. 91–100. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1988. ———. A Dictionary of Irish Saints. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011. ———. “The O’Donohue Lives of the Salamanca Codex: The Earliest Collection of Irish Saints’ Lives?” In Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley, edited by Sarah Sheehan, Joanne Findon, and Westley Follett. 38–52. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013. O’Riordan, Michelle. Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality. Cork: Cork University Press, 2007. Ormrod, Mark. Edward III. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Pahta, Païvi and Irma Taavitsainen. “Vernacularisation of Scientific and Medical Writing in Its Sociohistorical Context.” In Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, edited by Païvi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen. 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Panhuysen, Raphael. “Het scherp van de snede: sporen van geweld in vroegsmiddel­ eeuwse Maastricht.” Archeologie in Limburg 92 (2002): 2–7. Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Parshall, Peter. “The Art of Memory and the Passion.” The Art Bulletin 81.3 (September 1999): 456–472. Pasquelin, Louis. Revelationes Gertrudinnae et Mechthildiannae 2: Sancta Mechthildis virginis ordinis Sancti Benedicti Liber specialis gratiae. Poitiers: Oudin, 1877. Pastors and Care of Souls in Medieval England, edited by John Shinners and William J. Dohar. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Paterson, Linda. “Military Surgery, Knights, Sergeants, and Raimon of Avignon’s Version of the Chirurgia of Roger of Salerno (1180–1209).” In The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood II, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey. 117–46. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998. Patrick, P. “Approaches to Violent Death: A Case Study from Early Medieval Cambridge.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 16.4 (2006): 347–354. Patterson, Paul J. “Myrror to Devout People (Speculum devotorum): an Edition with Commentary.” PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2006. Pearson, Kathy. “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet.” Speculum 72.1 (Jan., 1997): 1–32.

Bibliography

623

Peltier, L.F. Orthopedics: A History and Iconography. San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1993. Penman, M. David II. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2004. Perkins, Judith. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era. New York: Routledge, 1995. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ———. Medieval Women”s Visionary Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. ———. “Medieval Women Visionaries: Seven Stages to Power.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 3.1 (1978): 34–45. Pfau, Aleksandra. “Crimes of Passion: Emotion and Madness in French Remission Letters.” In Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, edited by W.J. Turner. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. Pilsworth, Clare. “Could you just sign this for me John? Doctors, charters and professional Identity in Early Medieval Northern and Central Italy.” Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009): 363–388. Pincikowski, Scott E. Bodies of Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue. Studies in Medieval History and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2002. Platelets, edited by D. Michelson. 2nd edition. Amsterdam and Boston: Academic Press/ Elsevier, 2007. Pleuser, Christine. Die Benennungen und der Begriff des Leides bei J. Tauler. Philologische Studien und Quellen 38. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1967. Pollard, Tony and Neil Oliver. Two Men in a Trench: Battlefield Archaeology – The Key to Unlocking the Past. London: Penguin, 2002. Pormann, Peter E., and Emilie Savage-Smith. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1997. Post, R.R. The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism. Leiden: Brill, 1968. Pouchelle, Marie-Christine. Corps et chirurgie a l’apogée du Moyen-Age. París: Flammarion, 1983. ———. The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Polity, 1990. Poulain, A. “Mystical Stigmata.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New Advent. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. Powers, Natasha. “Cranial Trauma and Treatment: A Case Study from the Medieval Cemetery of St. Mary Spital, London.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 15 (2005): 1–14. Prag, John and Richard Neave. Making Faces: Using Forensic and Archaeological Evidence. London: British Museum, 1997.

624

Bibliography

Prestwich, Michael. Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. ———. Edward I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. ———. “Victualling Estimates for English Garrison in Scotland During the Early Fourteenth Century.” English Historical Review 82.324 (July 1967): 536–43. Prince, Eileen. “Towards a Taxonomy of Given – New Information.” In Radical Pragmatics, edited by P. Cole. 223–55. New York: Academic Press, 1981. Proctor, Caroline. “Physician to The Bruce: Maino De Maineri in Scotland.” Scottish Historical Review 86 (2007): 16–26. Pryce, Huw. “British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales.” The English Historical Review 116 (September 2001): 775–801. Pugno, Benjamin. “Physicians of the Soul: Healing and Conversion in Anglo-Saxon England.” PhD dissertation, University of Houston, 2010. Rabinowitz, Peter. Before Reading. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Raimundo Capuano. “Vita S. Catharinae Senensis.” Acta Sanctorum, 30 April. Paris and Rome, 1866. Ralley, Robert. “Medical Economies in Fifteenth-Century England.” In Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850, edited by Mark S.R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis. 24–46. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Randall, P., J. Banks and R.A. Little. “Medical (military) anti-shock trousers – a short review.” Archives of Emergency Medicine 1 (1984): 39–51. Ratchnevsky, Paul. Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy, translated by Thomas Nivison Haining. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. Rawcliffe, Carole. The Hospitals of Medieval Norwich. Norwich: Centre of East Anglian Studies, 1995. ———. Medicine for the Soul: the Life, Death and Resurrection of an England Medieval Hospital, St Giles, Norwich, c. 1249–1550. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1999. ———. Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995. ———. Leprosy in Medieval England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006. Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, edited by Katie Walter. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Rector, Mark. Medieval Combat: A Fifteenth-Century Illustrated Manual of Swordfighting and Close-Quarter Combat. London: Greenhill, 2000. Reid, Shelley Annette. “‘The First Dispensation of Christ is Medicinal’: Augustine and Roman Medical Culture.” PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2008. Resnick, Irven M. Marks of Distinctions: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Richards, Peter. The Medieval Leper and His Northern Heirs. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer Ltd., 1977.

Bibliography

625

Riley-Smith, Jonathan. Hospitallers: The History of the Order of St. John. London: Hamble­ don Press, 1999. Robbins, Rossell Hope. “Medical Manuscripts in Middle English.” Speculum 45 (1970): 393–415. Robertson, Elizabeth. “Medieval Medical View of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings.” In Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, edited by Lisa Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury. 142–167. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Robeson, Lisa. “Malory and the Death of Kings: The Politics of Regicide at Salisbury Plain.” In The Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition, edited by Karen Cherewatuk and K.S. Whetter. Arthurian Studies 74. 136–150. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. Rodrigo Pertegás, José. Recuerdo apologético del maestro en medicina Domingo Ros de Ursins, archiatro de los reyes de Aragón. Valencia: Imprenta de M. Alufre, 1902. Rogers, Clifford. Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages. London: Greenwood Press, 2007. Roisin, Simone. L’hagiographie Cistercienne Dans Le Diocèse De Liège Au Xiii Siècle. Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947. Roksandic, Mirjana, Caroline Wood and Dejana Vlak. “Death in the Line of Duty: Late Medieval Burials at the Site of Lepenski Vir, Serbia.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 17 (2007): 635–642. Rosdahl, Caroline Bunker. Textbook of Basic Nursing. 9th edition. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williamson & Wilkens, 2008. Rose, Susan. Calais: An English Town in France, 1347–1558. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008. Ross, E. “‘She Wept and Crid Right Loud for Sorrow and for Pain’: Suffering, the Spiritual Journey, and Women’s Experience in Late Medieval Mysticism.” In Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, edited by Ulrike Wiethaus. 45–59. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Ross, Ellen M. The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Rubin, Stanley. Medieval English Medicine. London: David and Charles, 1974. Rubini, M., and P. Zaio. “Warriors from the East: Skeletal Evidence of Warfare from a Lombard-Avar Cemetery in Central Italy (Campochiaro, Molise, 6th-8th century AD).” Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 1551–1559. Rudolph, R.C. “Medical Matters in an Early Fourteenth Century Chinese Diary.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2 (1947): 209–306.

626

Bibliography

Rushton, Cory James. “The King’s Stupor: Dealing with Royal Paralysis in Late Medieval England.” In Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, edited by W.J. Turner. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. Russcher, Anne, and Rolf H. Bremmer Jr. “‘For a broken limb’: Fracture Treatment in Anglo-Saxon England.” In Secular Learning in Anglo-Saxon England: Exploring the Vernacular, edited by László Sándor Chardonnens and Bryan Carella. 145–75. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Russell Kenneth C. “Peter Damian’s Whip.” American Benedictine Review 41.1 (1990): 20–35. Ryan, Salvador. “A Slighted Source: Rehabilitating Irish Bardic Religious Poetry in Historical Discourse.” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 48.4 (2004): 75–99 ———. “‘Reaping a Rich Harvest of Humanity’: Images of Redemption in Bardic Religious Poetry.” In Having Life in His Name: Living, Thinking and Communicating the Christian Life of Faith, edited by Brendan Leahy and Séamus O’Connell. 239–51. Dublin: Veritas, 2011. ———. “Reign of Blood: Devotion to the Wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Ireland.” In Irish History: A Research Yearbook, edited by Joost Augusteijn and Mary Ann Lyons. 137–49. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002. ———. “The arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland.” In The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown. 243–72. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013. Sadler, Donna L. “The Well of Moses and Barthes’s ‘Punctum’ of Piety.” In Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative and Emotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art. Vol. 1, edited by Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand. 385–414. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Sager, Alexander “Geheimnis und Subjekt in Wolframs ‘Titurel’.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 125.2 (2003): 267–91. ———. Minne von mæren: on Wolfram’s >Titurel