Recently, in Kaftal’s Iconography of the Saints (i don’t remember which one), a picture of a family being roasted in a hollow bull got my attention.

St. Eustace and his family were roasted in a metal bull by Diocletian. His martyrdom is apparently a frequent object of stained glass in French cathedrals. Even more interesting…

Why is he a martyr and not his family? His conversion was brought about by a vision of a stag.

Does anyone else find the echoes of the Trojan horse sort of perplexing? The echoes to the golden calf in the Hebrew Bible? It is a very weird sort of punishment. I have heard the reasons that Peter was crucified upside down (because he didn not want to be confused with the crucifixion of Christ), but the reasons for roasting a man and his family alive in a brazen beast of burden sort of perplex me. When people try to rewrite some of these arch-tyrants are more “understandable” people, it’s atrocities like this that make me wonder as to the merit of such attempts.

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It may not be Nero… but i learnt a lot about anti-heros yesterday when i attended a lecture my advisor was giving for the Spring Renaissance Program at U of T.

Yesterday i had picked up an extra three hour lunch shift at work. It went well, but i REALLY could have used the time to work on my dissertation which is advancing much too slowly for my tastes.

After work and in newly-soled boots (because i am good at multi-tasking i had them repaired while i was at the restaurant), a VERY short pleated skirt and black fishnets, i headed over to a lecture given by my advisor entitled “Massacre of the Innocents: The Meaning of a Tragedy.” It was really interesting how just two verses from one of the gospels has had such an effect on art history. The male children murdered on Herod’s orders in Bethlehem could not have totaled more than twenty, but the historical sources always claim that thousands were killed. They pose quite a theological problem, which both Augustine and Aquinas contributed to resolving so that they would end up in heaven (they can’t actually be martyrs because Christ has not died yet, but Augustine says that because they die FOR Christ they won’t be stuck in limbo while Aquinas says their shed blood can be equated with the eucharist).

The early and high medieval depictions focus on the martyrdom aspects of the tale. The mothers are usually mournful but unactive… in much the same way Christian families were depicted as being when one of their own was persecuted for the faith.

By the late Middle Ages, much more of a depiction of the sociopathic nature of Herod emerges and he, as anti-hero, gets directly linked to the social problems of the given society. For example, a Florentine play has the wet nurses bring the babies to the massacre and return with no compunction for what they have done. Wet nursing was a big philosophical issue in late medieval Florence.

As the early modern era begins, Herod recedes out of the depictions which now are mostly exercises in human anatomy and facial emotion. My advisor feels this has to do with the fact that the rising absolutist governments are using a rhetoric akin to Herod’s and, hence, cannot demonize him without demonizing themselves.

We then looked at some more modern and even a contemporary depiction. Apparently the anti-abortion movement has adopted the aethestic troupe - which is interesting considering that in the biblical story the mothers are more than a little upset by the massacre.

I have a back-pack full of books to read and another shift at work today. When will i get it all done? i need to stop learning interesting things and start learning dissertation-related things. Eep. However, i am very happy i went AND it was nice to be addressed directly by my advisor who was at pains to point out the links to my own project while lecturing - an odd sensation to say the least.

In an attempt to increase my web presence in the appropriate spheres (i.e. in the search for my intended audience), i have recently discovered Blog Carnival. Blog Carnival is a website that maintains a directory of the individual carnivals published online (and obviously registered with the site). A carnival is a collection of posts on a given theme - similar to an online magazine. I’ve taken an interest in Carnivalesque, a carnival devoted to pre-modern history and, in fact, was lucky enough to have my post on the Great Florentine Fire of 1304 included in the latest edition at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe.

It’s nice to see what other medievalists are up to on the internet and i think i am quickly becoming a fan of Carnivalesque.

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The number of people who roll their eyes or make couched, snide remarks about the possibilities for employment, useful contribution or even making ends meet when I tell them that I am about to complete an M.A. in Medieval History is astonishing. Being surrounded almost 24/7 by others with a similar passion to my own, I too often lose perspective as to why this process, with its accompanying $20,000 of debt, is worthwhile. Recently, however, I have begun contributing to the craigslist discussion forums, particulary the one entitled “history.” Hobnobbing with the general populace, ok, let’s be honest – the general adolescent populace – has helped me reassert my own self-worth. As if I weren’t arrogant enough already.

Perhaps the greatest revelation that studying medieval history has given to me is the following: if you think you understand someone (or something in the social realm) – you are wrong. I have yet to encounter a problem or historical phenomenon that does not have at least four interpretations. Causal links are complex. Meta-narratives are overly reductionist. Or… if you like… PEOPLE ARE COMPLICATED.

We, the graduate students and professional academics, joke amongst ourselves regularly: “Wouldn’t it be great if something were simple? If I actually finished studying something and felt I understood it better than when I begun?” Alas, that is not going to happen.

It has taken even historians a horrifyingly long time to uncover this – and I think we, as a practitioners of an academic discipline, may in fact be best placed to appreciate the incredible wealth of human experience. I am reading a beautiful article by Barbara H. Rosenwein in a 2002 issue of The American Historical Review entitled “Worrying About Emotions in History that spends considerable time talking about the representation of medieval people’s emotional lives before the 1980s. She uses a particularly cogent quotation from Norbert Elias (whom I do not regret not having read, the man is an anathema to all good medievalists and it appears to be for good reason from his numerous citations):

People [in the Middle Ages] are wild, cruel, prone to violent outbreaks and abandoned to the joy of the moment. They can afford to be. There is little in their situation to compel them to impose restraint on themselves. Little in their conditioning forces them to develop what might be called a strict or stable super-ego (Elias’ The Civilizing Process).

Eew. This kind of reductionism makes my skin crawl.

So, as I am finishing up this degree, I share with the general population the one insight I value most and one insight that I think will just might begin to break down your own preconceptions about the historical subject.

1. I do not understand why I do things – and I have direct access to my actual thought process. I am never REALLY going to understand another person whose thought process I cannot access. The most I can do is attempt to appreciate the factors, situations and motivations that contributed to their actions. WHY is not an answerable question. Anyone who has ever played the “why” game with a three-year-old will appreciate this point.
2. The Middle Ages was a period covering 1000 years. We are 100% closer to Christopher Columbus than someone alive in the early Middle Ages was to someone of the late medieval period. Think about that for a moment… If we are all modern – do you really think anything could be gleamed about your lived experience from studying someone who lived in 1870 London? Even 1990 Bosnia? This is not to say that tracing continuities is pointless – it is to say “be wary of grand statements, categorizations, periodizations and other forms of reductionism.”

So, what use is a degree in medieval history? It allows me to appreciate and yet not be overwhelmed by the complexity in any relational situation. It furthermore has encouraged me to attempt the impossible – to understand a radically different way of life about which I have very little investment. Anything that challenges you to go about completing a task that you know is impossible – is a good thing. It’s called faith. I have no longer believe in higher powers, destiny or intelligent cosmological creation, but I have faith in something else – that attempting the impossible is not futile.

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During much of the Middle Ages, the most common brevia texts to be copied out were charms against a sudden death. Our current culture idealizes a death that is swift and painless with no time for reflection. There is no “ars moriendi” or “art of dying.” I often find, when people inadvertently presume that medieval commonfolk were somehow dumber than twenty-first century commonfolk, they actually are just unaware of the problems that medieval people were concerned with.

On Saturday, i attended a lecture at the First Annual Canada Chaucer Conference sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies and the English Department at U of T. D. Vance Smith, of Princeton University, gave a great talk of Dying, Death and Allegory using Chaucer’s the Pardoner’s Tale as a jumping off point. The room was filled with not only medievalists like myself, to whom much of this material was not new but had never been this material presented to them in a cohesive manner, but also English graduate students of other eras to whom i think much of the information was a bit of a revelation - hence my summary of some of the many points below for your general edification.

To see Death, is always to see an allegory. Although we recognize Death in all his iconographic trappings (the skeleton, the sickle (it was a spear in the Middle Ages, but whatever), the hooded figure), we are not capable of depicting Death - what we get is depictions of dying. In fact, the only part of the Death we can even really speculate about as something “real” or “logical” at all is the moment immediately following the last moment of life - and only because we understand that there must be a moment after.

Problems of representing Death in the Middle Ages actually reached a grammatical level (speculative grammar was a big philosophical movement) and filtered down to much of the general population when they were taught Latin for any number of reasons, from business correspondence to a career in the Church. You cannot us the verb “to-be” in the present tense about someone that is dead - here i draw a distinction between Deadness and Death (Deadness being a descriptor for the negation of the verb “to-be” while Death describes the state of Deadness about which we cannot speak). For example: Aristotle is the Philosopher. Aristotle does not exist. The verb “to-be” requires a predicate - and a predicate “of” something. Non-being cannot be a predicate for being, or, in other words, you cannot say something real and true about something that does not exist.

So, why the fascination with depictions of Death in the Middle Ages? Well, Chaucer takes a look at this in the Pardoner’s Tale where his Man in Black is always dying but can never die… Being able to speak about Death is the very assurance you are still alive. Poems about the signs of Death are usually written in the first or second person in order to emphasize one’s non-death state. Talking about dying is a celebration of existence. Death has a paradoxical relationship to life… the more life was has… the less life one has. By writing about dying, the time of dying is deferred… it will be impossible to witness your own Death.

Or, as D. Vance Smith put it so nicely - if Death were anything more than an allegory for you, you would already be Dead.

A merited death is fitting - it brings closure and satisfaction.
An unmerited death is ironic.
The best death was mid-prayer - when thinking about the next life was the only time to leave this one.

Our own relationship to Death is very different from the medieval conception. Neither is simple.