Sources and References

These notes are compressed from the original MEDVL 252 course materials authored by Steven Bednarski, Andrew Moore, and Ann Marie Rasmussen (University of Waterloo). All primary and secondary source citations from the original modules are retained within their respective sections. Additional references include works by John B. Friedman, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Edmund Burke, Linda Hutcheon, and Marie de France, among others.

Module 1: Introduction to Medieval Monsters

Steven Bednarski & Andrew Moore (History, University of Waterloo)

1a. Context: The Middle Ages and Periodization

Overview

Studying medieval monsters serves two interrelated purposes. The first is to illuminate how medieval people structured their understanding of the world: by examining what exceeded the boundaries of the normal, we can trace the limits of the acceptable. As in anthropology generally, looking at the extreme reveals the contours of the centre. The second purpose is to demonstrate how an interdisciplinary field of research operates in practice. Medieval Studies brings together historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, art historians, musicologists, philosophers, and theologians — each with distinct methodologies and source traditions. Because monsters appear across all of these disciplines, they make an ideal common ground for observing cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Medieval Studies and Interdisciplinarity

When it comes to interdisciplinarity, medievalists were among the very first humanists and social scientists to collaborate, and Canadians led the charge. In 1929, the Institute of Mediaeval Studies (today the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies) was founded at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. In the 1930s and 1940s, American scholars followed suit, notably at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Most early efforts were driven by Catholic intellectuals, since the Middle Ages represented a historical flourishing of Catholic institutions. When the University of Waterloo formed in the late 1950s, Catholic medievalists at St. Jerome’s College partnered with UW classicists to found a joint Medieval Studies Program — the oldest interdisciplinary program at the University of Waterloo. By the 1960s, full-blown programs with interdisciplinary breadth emerged in the UK (Reading, Leeds, York) and at American institutions such as Fordham and UC Berkeley.

Historical Development of Medieval Studies

This timeline shows significant points in the development of Medieval Studies programs with interdisciplinary breadth.

By working together, medieval historians, archaeologists, musicologists, literary scholars, art historians, philosophers, and linguists paint a more nuanced, more complex understanding of a lost world. More recently, newer fields such as the digital humanities, environmental studies, and popular culture continue to expand Medieval Studies’ collaborative boundaries. Today, Medieval Studies is a shining example of how scholars with different methodological training, relying on different evidence and asking different questions, can collaborate effectively.

Each module presents a different monster studied by a different scholar and discipline — how archaeologists interpret giants, how intellectual historians approach dragons or conjured spirits, how literary scholars conceive of wild people. The monsters vary, but so do the disciplinary lenses, making the comparative dimension as instructive as the individual cases.

The Middle Ages and Historical Periodization

These notes presuppose basic familiarity with the broad outlines of medieval history. Specialist terms such as “ecclesiastical,” “liturgical,” or “scholasticism” are generally defined on first use; a general reference like Wikipedia’s “Middle Ages” article or the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (ed. Joseph R. Strayer, available through UWaterloo Library) can fill in broader context.

A Note on Referencing Historical Eras: BC / BCE and AD / CE

Broadly speaking, the Roman Empire was at its height in the first century CE — the Common Era (CE), the modern successor to the Christian dating system using AD (Anno Domini, Year of the Lord) and BC (Before Christ). The corresponding secular terms are BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE. In the first and second centuries CE, the Roman Empire encompassed all of Europe, including parts of Britain, as well as much of the Middle East and North Africa.

The Roman Empire

The Roman Empire collapsed due to external and internal pressures. Externally, migrations of foreign peoples strained Rome’s vast border. Internally, Roman political and economic systems broke down after centuries of challenges. These pressures came to a head sometime in the fifth century CE; by the year 500, the western Empire was a distant memory.

In western Europe — modern-day Britain, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and neighbours — former Roman lands were replaced by newer Germanic “barbarian” kingdoms. Foreign peoples migrated into old imperial lands and established their own nations, a process that also occurred in less Romanized northern regions such as Scandinavia and Iceland.

Farther east, especially around modern-day Turkey and the Middle East, Roman traditions evolved and continued much longer. Though the western capital of Rome was conquered by the Visigoths in 410 CE and more thoroughly by the Vandals in 476, the eastern capital of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) remained intact for almost another thousand years, only falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Focusing on western Europe, Roman ways transitioned as new cultures established themselves. This initial period of resettlement (c. 500–800) is the early Middle Ages. Over time, many Roman institutions continued in modified forms, providing continuity. Rome’s official religion since the early fourth century, Christianity, survived through the conversion of barbarian kingdoms. With Christianity came the vast administrative network of the Roman Catholic Church, which promoted education, constructed monumental buildings, and developed a legal system rooted in Roman traditions. The common tongue of Rome, Latin, remained the language of European education. As barbarian kingdoms stabilized, new hybrid cultures flourished.

By about the year 1000, most European polities were dominated by a military class of horse-riding warriors wearing armour. “Chivalry” (from French cheval, horse) defined their elite culture. Their leaders organized courts, built stone castles, and launched crusades to spread their religion through war in the Middle East and North Africa. They also dominated their own populations: agrarian farm workers had far fewer rights, did not own the land they worked, had limited property rights, and could not move freely. Agricultural advances and population stability eventually enabled the rebirth of cities and the shift from subsistence to surplus agriculture — extra food meant a culture could afford artists, intellectuals, and elites who did not produce food themselves. This western European culture flourished between about 800 and 1200, the period we call the high Middle Ages.

After about 1200, conditions changed. Europe exited the Medieval Climate Optimum and entered the Little Ice Age. By the early 1300s, heightened precipitation led to rotten crops and failed harvests. Between 1315 and 1317, waves of successive famine swept across Europe. A generation later, the Black Death — the worst epidemic to strike the planet — caused widespread mortality across the land; in some places well over a third of the population perished in a short time. This disease recurred in successive waves for centuries. The demographic surge of the earlier Middle Ages crashed, and Europe’s population did not recover its 1300 levels until around the industrial revolution. This was a time of crises, but also one that sowed the seeds of modernity. By the 1400s, Europeans widely questioned old ways, broke the universal control of the Catholic Church, asked new questions about the universe, and began exploring beyond their shores thanks to advances in shipbuilding, weaponry, and navigation. When European settlers arrived in North America in the late 1400s, the world changed. This was the late Middle Ages (c. 1250–1500).

Why “the Middle Ages”?

We call this era “the Middle Ages” simply because it is the thousand-year period between the ancient world and the modern period — literally, in the middle. Since this age has three distinct phases (early, high, and late), in English we refer to the Middle Ages, plural.

The English adjective “medieval” comes directly from Latin medium aevum (middle age). No one alive during that period called it that; this is purely a modern way of breaking up the past. This is called periodization — humans look back and divide the past into different ages, eras, or periods. It helps us see connections and track change, though it does not necessarily reflect how things actually evolved.

Summary

The Ancient world ended by roughly 500 CE. Between 500 and 800, new cultures established themselves on western European soil — hybrids of Germanic and Roman civilizations characteristic of the early Middle Ages. Between about 800 and 1250, pan-European culture became well established, characterized by chivalric culture, knights, crusades, and population growth: the high Middle Ages. Between roughly 1250 and 1500, this world fragmented due to environmental changes, internal pressures, and social upheaval: the late Middle Ages. Each category of monster tends to cluster in particular periods, and placing it chronologically sharpens the historical analysis.

Works Cited

Coldeel. 2009. “Map of the Roman Empire in 116 AD.” Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_Empire_in_116_AD.png

Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. c. 1929. “Seal of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto.” Wikimedia Commons.

Roke. 2006. “Map of Europe in 998 AD.” Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_map_998.PNG

Unknown. n.d. “Medieval Studies.” Wikipedia. Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_studies

1b. Here There Be Monsters

Introduction to Medieval Monsters

The very term monster (French monstre, German monstrum, Italian mostro) has been with Europeans for a very long time. In the ancient Roman Empire, the Latin noun monstrum simply meant an ill omen, a bad sign — it would have been used, for example, to refer to the birth of a two-headed calf, an omen that things are not right in nature. That noun was also connected etymologically to the Latin verb monstrare, meaning to show or point something out. Both senses are fossilized in modern English through the verbs to remonstrate (to present negative reasons) and to demonstrate (to show something).

The Legacy of Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE)

The Roman author and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder used the term monstrum more generally in his Historia Naturalis (Natural History) to describe unusual creatures reportedly found only in India or Africa. Pliny recounted tales of dog-headed men called cynocephali and big-footed men called sciapodae, though he by no means invented such creatures. He was repeating what had been written and rewritten for centuries, going back to ancient Greek authors such as the fifth-century BCE Herodotus of Halicarnassus, often called the “father of history.” Because Pliny remained popular throughout the Middle Ages, and medieval writers continued the tradition of repeating and reincorporating earlier tales, his mythical creatures remained well known. Throughout the Middle Ages, “monsters” thus meant creatures that were fantastical, and they appeared everywhere in medieval art, architecture, poetry, and prose.

Cynocephali were among the most copied monsters of the Middle Ages. Many chroniclers described them, though their appearance sometimes varied. The medieval chronicler Adam of Bremen (d. 1081) wrote that cynocephali were the children of Amazons, wild warrior women living on Baltic shores, and that they had their dog-heads situated on their torsos, from which they barked loudly. Other popular monstrous races included pygmies (miniature wild humanoids), giants (oversized humanoids), himantopodes (men with backward-facing feet), panotii (humanoids with oversized ears), monoculi (one-eyed humanoids), and bleymae (headless men whose faces were on their bodies).

Why Study Monsters?

The American literary scholar John B. Friedman notes that the early medieval theologian St. Augustine (354–430 CE) raised a troubling question for Christians: since the Book of Genesis does not mention God creating such monsters, where did they come from? If the Bible did not describe God creating them, who did? Moreover, Augustine asked when these monsters appeared and to what end. In response, Friedman posits two possible answers: medieval thinkers might have viewed monstrosity as punishment for human wickedness (sin), or they might have seen monsters as something fantastic and wonderful — a sign of God’s infinite creativity and love of diversity.

Friedman concludes that medieval descriptions of monsters help us understand the Middle Ages in several ways. Since many monsters appear in travel literature — stories of far-off lands — they reveal how Europeans viewed foreigners. Those views, ranging from strange to xenophobic and at times Eurocentric, formed part of the background knowledge Europeans brought to encounters with Muslims, Jews, Africans, and eventually the indigenous populations of the New World.

More positively, monstrosity informs how medieval people saw themselves in relation to a larger world that, unlike ours, remained deeply mysterious and unknown. The otherness of monsters reflected medieval peoples’ sense of the normal, the safe, the knowable, even the good. Through monsters, we see the contours of medieval people’s world, its boundaries. By crossing into the world of monsters, we understand better how medieval people understood themselves.

Works Cited

John B. Friedman, “Monsters and monstrous races,” Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. R. G. Dunphy (London: Brill, 2010): 1117–1121.

Unknown. 1397. “p.67: Illumination of Jesus Christ surrounded by cynocephali.” The Boris Yeltzin Presidential Library. The Kiev Psalter of 1397. Kiev.

1c. Disciplinary Lenses

Overview of Interdisciplinarity Across Modules

Every field of study has its own rules, preferred sources, and ways of deriving meaning from evidence. The modules below survey several disciplinary lenses, each illustrated through a specific category of medieval monster:

Medieval Giants

Andrew Moore, an environmental historian whose work draws on archaeological evidence, examines giants. Giants held a special place in medieval lore. The twelfth-century philosopher Bernard of Chartres (d. 1124) said that thinkers of his age were as dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants (nanos gigantum humeris insidentes) — meaning that human progress is cumulative. But giants signified much more to medieval people and were popular monsters throughout Europe. To understand them, this module explores the perspective of the archaeologist, who relies on physical evidence to reconstruct material culture.

Werewolves

Ann Marie Rasmussen, a scholar of medieval German literature, gender, and material culture, examines werewolves — men who transformed from rational human form to wild beasts. Since no physical werewolf remains exist, archaeology is the wrong tool; instead she adopts the technique of the literary scholar to explore lycanthropy, deploying a close reading of texts to gain deeper cultural understanding of what werewolves signified.

Satirical Monsters

Kate Steiner examines how medieval people tested the boundary between human and monstrous through satirical monsters. She analyses anthropomorphized asses and horses through the lens of musicology, showing how living beasts intersected with sacred and profane culture.

Ghosts and Revenants

Caley McCarthy, a medical historian, turns attention to the dead and the boundaries between this life and the next. The study of medieval ghosts and revenants requires an inherently culture-based approach rooted in anthropology, sociology, and archaeology — a blended technique for seeing the otherwise invisible.

Dragons

Steven Bednarski examines the most iconic medieval monster: dragons. It was no accident that Tolkien set his antagonist Smaug at the heart of The Hobbit, or that George R. R. Martin built Westeros around returning dragons. Like knights and castles, dragons are emblematic of the Middle Ages. The disciplinary lens here is that of the historian, specifically the intellectual historian, who traces the history of ideas across cultures, time, and space.

Summoned Spirits

David Porreca, a scholar of intellectual history focused on medieval magic, explores how medieval people used applied magic to summon “spirits” that obeyed the practitioner. Conjuring reveals how complex systems of thought lie at the intersection of science, ritual, ideas, and religious expression.

Demons

Gabriele Niccoli, an expert on late medieval and Renaissance Italian literature and culture, presents a case study from Dante’s Divine Comedy, examining demons and hellish monsters. Through Dante, this module reveals the lasting connections between the ancient and late medieval world, showing how Catholic influence in Italy reshaped Classical myth to fit its own ideologies.

Wild People

Rasmussen explores the boundaries between civilization and chaos in the module on wild people. Medieval people imagined all sorts of fantastical creatures living outside civilization’s bounds. Through their obsession, she applies a gendered analysis underscoring medieval priorities.

Medieval Conceptions of the Devil

Andy Stumph demonstrates how philosophers and theologians approach the medieval concept of the devil, the ultimate medieval monster. Theological methodology shares something with medieval thinkers themselves: it allows analysts to ask questions similar to those posed by the authors under examination, bringing scholar and subject unusually close together.

Political Monsters

Norm Klassen, an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer, uses examples from The Canterbury Tales in contrast to the earlier Old English Beowulf to think broadly about monstrosity. Through this comparison, readers can juxtapose a work from the early Middle Ages against one from the late Middle Ages, bookending medieval English culture.

All scholars share a commitment to the core mission of Medieval Studies: while individual scholars develop distinct approaches to surviving sources, working across disciplines produces a richer, more holistic understanding of the Middle Ages.

The Historical Disciplinary Lens

As a concrete illustration of how a disciplinary methodology operates, consider history — the most immediately accessible of the medieval disciplines. Historians engage the present in dialogue about the past to understand the future. As the famous French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) explained in On History:

Live in London for a year and you will not know much about England. But by contrast, in light of what has surprised you, you will suddenly have come to understand some of the most deep-seated and characteristic aspects of France, things you did not know before because you knew them too well. With regard to the present, the past too is a way of distancing yourself. (Braudel 37)

Historians try not to analyse our own situation directly. That task is better left to anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists, who have developed rigorous methodologies for engaging the present. The historian’s method demands a certain degree of distance; as soon as the historian becomes caught up in the events being studied, historical understanding becomes compromised. This does not mean historians never engage the present, but doing so complicates the work.

The overarching goal is to cultivate historical literacy and historical consciousness — the abilities to know and understand past events, appreciate continuity and change over time, interpret evidence appropriately, make connections, and grapple with causation and motivation. At its most sophisticated, the historical method equips us to make meaning of modern debates through knowledge of similar (if never identical) past contexts.

Historians, much like physicians, accept that their art is diagnostic and never prescriptive or absolute. Imagine a doctor confronted with a patient presenting certain symptoms. The patient can relay some symptoms directly, but their perception is always filtered through experience — the patient might say “Doctor, I am burning up!” leading the doctor to conclude the patient reports a fever, though a thermometer reveals only a low-grade fever. Next, there are symptoms the patient cannot report directly, requiring deeper investigation: blood and urine samples, throat swabs, ultrasound. The doctor sends these to specialists who provide their opinion. Once the doctor receives all this information, she performs her own diagnosis based on the assembled evidence. But here is the catch: two doctors receiving the same data may arrive at totally different diagnoses. Patients know this and often seek a second opinion.

Primary Evidence

Similarly, the historian must decipher the evidence left behind directly from the past: primary evidence. This includes written records (diaries, account books, laws, charters, religious manuals), stone sculptures, buildings, paintings, music, jewellery, or any other original artefact from the period. The historian approaches primary evidence suspiciously and sceptically: what people wrote and said was not necessarily what was really happening. Like a patient describing symptoms to a doctor, it was more a reflection of medieval peoples’ values, wants, desires, and beliefs.

Secondary Evidence

To provide context, historians consult secondary evidence — anything that people since the period have created, written, thought, or said about the primary evidence or its time. Much as a doctor relies on a radiologist’s interpretation of an ultrasound, the historian considers what later observers came to think about medieval events, since new details may emerge over time that allow more accurate assessment.

The very best historians also work through interdisciplinarity, looking beyond their own discipline to other branches of science. For example, a cultural historian of climate change might examine data preserved in ice core samples, pollen, soil, and trees, then “read” that data against what people wrote and drew about climate to draw conclusions.

Even so, another historian faced with the same evidence might tell a very different story. The study of history remains deeply subjective. It tells us about things that actually happened, but the analysis — the story written to give events meaning — is interpretive, crafted by skilled thinkers who study primary and secondary evidence across disciplines to formulate meaningful narratives.

Works Cited

Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 37.

Peter Seixas, “What is Historical Consciousness,” in Ruth Sandwell (ed.), To the Past: History Education, Public Memory & Citizenship in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006): 11–22.

Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg (eds.), Knowing, Teaching & Learning history: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

Unknown. c. 1300. “Medicine: Examining Urine.” British Library. Harley 3140 f. 32v.

Module 2: Medieval Giants

Andrew Moore (History, University of Waterloo)

This module, written by an environmental historian, draws on perspectives from archaeology and geography — including landscape history — to discuss the origins and development of cultural myths about giants. Archaeologists and geographers focus mainly on context, particularly the relative location of items of interest. Studying physical objects and spaces fills gaps in the written record, especially given how sparse ancient documentation can be. Even with scientific methodology, a level of interpretation is always involved.

2a. Giants in Mythology

Different Cultural Portrayals of Giants

Tales of giants loom large in traditions throughout world history. These massive humanoids — notable for size, strength, and appetite — appear in the books and stories of many religions and mythologies, including Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian and Islamic), Norse, Celtic, Greek, Hindu, Jain, Native American, and many others.

Giants were often portrayed, especially in European traditions, as creatures with little intelligence and destructive tendencies. This perception generally persisted through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. As Edmund Burke wrote in 1757:

It is impossible to suppose a giant the object of love. When we let our imaginations loose in romance, the ideas we naturally annex to that size are those of tyranny, cruelty, injustice, and every thing horrid and abominable. (Burke 157–58)

Modern authors have nuanced these views. Roald Dahl’s The BFG (an acronym for “The Big Friendly Giant”) still portrays most giants as simple beings with limited vocabularies and a fondness for eating humans, but the BFG himself eats vegetables, sends good dreams to children, and protects his human friend Sophie.

Ancient myths, however, overwhelmingly portrayed giants as violent antagonists posing existential threats. The Gigantes of Greek mythology waged a famous war, the Gigantomachy, against the Olympian gods and were defeated only when Hercules intervened. Notably, Greek depictions did not always show giants as particularly large — they were defined primarily by strength and aggression, not massive size. After their defeat, the giants were buried under the earth and considered the cause of volcanoes and earthquakes. Norse mythology foretold that during Ragnarok, giants would rise against the gods and storm Asgard; volcanic eruptions played an important role in this narrative.

In the Hebrew Bible, giants often appeared as antagonists attacking the people of Israel. The gigantic Nephilim reputedly blocked Moses’ entry into Canaan. Most famously, the Philistine giant Goliath challenged the Hebrew army until David defeated him in single combat.

From Where Did These Stories Come?

Determining where myths originate is exceedingly difficult. Tracing familiar stories back to their source risks running into insurmountable obstacles, especially if tales have evolved drastically over time. Many myths originate in oral traditions, so we often lack surviving records apart from what later authors wrote down. The most important thing is to empathize and consider how contemporary people understood these stories, not necessarily whether a version is “original” or makes sense to modern readers. Many narratives we take for granted as “medieval” or “ancient” were created by later writers trying to explain how their society originated. Different research methods — literary history, science, and archaeology — can provide a holistic view of how medieval people conceived of mythical creatures like giants.

Cultural Narratives Around Giants

Medieval people drew heavily on familiar stories when explaining their world. Biblical narratives especially influenced medieval culture, including conceptions of supernatural beings. The stories of Gog and Magog — later combined into one giant named Gogmagog — exemplify this clearly. According to some legends, Gog and Magog were trapped behind a wall in the Caucasus by Alexander the Great and would escape during the Apocalypse (Lindquist and Mittman 15). They were so prominent that they appear on many medieval maps, including the famous Hereford mappa mundi (c. 1300) and maps by the Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi (c. 1154).

Classical myths also significantly influenced medieval European traditions, particularly the common theme of heroes overcoming giants. Many prominent Western figures, both historical and mythical — Hercules, Alexander the Great, and King Arthur — were all said to have fought giants.

Works Cited

al-Idrisi, Muhammad. Muhammad al-Idrisi’s World Map. 1154. Wikimedia Commons.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful. London, Routledge, 2008.

Dollman, John Charles. The Giant with the Flaming Sword. 1909. Wikimedia Commons.

Lindquist, Sherry C. M. and Asa Simon Mittman. Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders. New York, The Morgan Library & Museum, 2018.

Reynolds, Joshua. Edmund Burke. 1769. National Portrait Gallery.

Richard of Haldingham. Hereford Mappa Mundi. 1300. Wikimedia Commons.

Scherb, Victor I. “Assimilating Giants.” JMEMS vol. 32, no. 1, 2002, pp. 59–84.

2b. Giants, Geography, and Climate

Using Giants to Help Explain the Natural World

Myths about giants did not come only from other cultural traditions; they also developed independently based on local ruins, geography, and climate. Stories of long-disappeared gigantic races explained massive structures and enormous natural features that defied understanding of human construction capabilities. The Aztecs credited ancient giants with building Teotihuacan, and some early medieval northern European writers attributed grand Roman ruins to gigantic construction (Grammaticus 24–5).

Many ancient writers mentioned massive bones found in the earth, which they ascribed to lost species of giants. Some modern scientists suggest that Ice Age-era mammal bones, found buried in the ground, led to such stories (Romano and Avanzini 116–17). Dinosaur bones were not “discovered” until the 1820s, and so ancient people had little conception of long-extinct animal species.

Landscapes and natural phenomena have always stimulated curiosity. Giants have captivated imaginations for millennia. Stories of giants are common throughout Indo-European cultural traditions as beings of awesome primeval power, closely tied to nature. The Norse equated giants with representations of raw natural power, and many places in Iceland and Scandinavia are named after them. Tales of mythical-era heroes hurling massive stones at each other helped explain awe-inspiring geological formations. The most famous is Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland — roughly 40,000 hexagonal basalt columns stretching into the North Sea, created by a prehistoric volcanic fissure. In Gaelic mythology, the Irish giant Finn MacCool built this causeway to reach the Scottish giant Benandonner.

In the British Isles, myths of giants played an important role in medieval conceptions of history and national identity. The best example is Geoffrey of Monmouth, an important twelfth-century writer who popularized the early history of Britain and King Arthur. While not considered historically reliable today, his works were widely considered authoritative in the Middle Ages. He described how Trojan colonists under Brutus found the island of Albion inhabited only by giants:

At this time the island of Britain was called Albion. It was uninhabited except for a few giants. It was, however, most attractive, because of the delightful situation of its various regions, its forests and the great number of its rivers, which teemed with fish; and it filled Brutus and his comrades with a great desire to live there. When they had explored the different districts, they drove the giants whom they had discovered into the caves in the mountains. With the approval of their leader they divided the land among themselves. (Monmouth 52–4)

Brutus named the island Britain after himself, and Corineus chose Cornwall, where he especially enjoyed wrestling the more numerous giants. Among them was a particularly repulsive one called Gogmagog, twelve feet tall, so strong he could uproot an oak tree as if it were a hazel wand. When Gogmagog and twenty other giants attacked the settlers during a feast, the Britons slew them all except Gogmagog, whom Brutus kept alive so Corineus could wrestle him. In the contest, Gogmagog broke three of Corineus’ ribs; Corineus then heaved the giant onto his shoulders, rushed to a cliff, and hurled him far out into the sea:

The giant fell on to a sharp reef of rocks, where he was dashed into a thousand fragments and stained the waters with his blood. The place took its name from the fact that the giant was hurled down there and it is called Gogmagog’s Leap to this day. (Monmouth 52–4)

Two now-vanished images of giants, carved into the hillside outside Plymouth until the early seventeenth century, may have commemorated the supposed site where Corineus cast Gogmagog into the sea. The legend says the sea was stained with his blood; in parts of Devon near Plymouth, naturally red rocks can give the appearance of blood washing up on shore (Clark 120). Some medieval commentators believed the Plymouth figures represented Gog and Magog, the two biblical giants discussed earlier. Although they remained invisible for centuries, other lost or nearly lost images of giants in the English countryside have been revealed through infrared photography and resistivity surveys.

Works Cited

Case, Daniel. Pyramid of the Sun from Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacan. 2015. Wikimedia Commons.

Clark, John. Trojans at Totnes and Giants on the Hoe. Rep. Trans. Devon. Assoc. Advmt Sci., 148, 2016, pp. 89–130.

Monmouth, Geoffrey of. The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe. London, Penguin Books, 1969.

Romano, Marco and Avanzini, Marco. “The skeletons of Cyclops and Lestrigons.” Historical Biology vol. 31, no. 2, 2019, pp. 116–139.

Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum, vols 1-9. Trans. Oliver Elton. London, 1894.

2c. Case Study: Archaeology and the Giant Hill Figures of England

Giants in the Hills

Throughout England, mysterious white figures carved into hillsides are so large they can be seen from miles away. These iconic chalk hill figures have long dominated their landscapes, inspiring legends of giants and semi-mythical ancient heroes. Their actual origins, however, have eluded historians — written accounts before the eighteenth century rarely survive. Recent archaeological work focused on geography, topography, soil type, and vegetation, using tools such as infrared photography and resistivity surveys, has provided new insight.

These hill figures are large images made visible by cutting shapes into steep hillsides to reveal the geology underneath. Similar landscape art exists elsewhere — the Nazca Lines in Peru (c. 500 BCE–500 CE), for example. But the English examples are especially striking due to the vibrant white chalk beneath southern England’s vegetation, the same material visible at the White Cliffs of Dover and Beachy Head.

Many different figures have captivated observers among locals and tourists alike. They vary greatly in size, shape, theme, and likely provenance, but share methods of creation and maintenance, and the way they dominate their landscapes — visible from remarkably far away. Some are obviously modern, such as the Fovant Regimental Badges; others are well-documented modern cuttings, such as the Osmington White Horse (a depiction of King George III). By far the most common subject is horses. Many are well documented as modern creations, either unique or as imitations of older figures. These include the Marlborough White Horse, the Cherhill White Horse, the Mormond Hill White Horse in Scotland (one of the very few such figures in Scotland), and the Westbury White Horse, which some believe may actually be much older than the others. Some hill figures were so geographically significant that they were covered during World War II to avoid being used as landmarks by the Luftwaffe (Cleaver).

Methods Used to Create Giant Hill Figures

The hill figures differ in clarity and brightness due to various creation methods:

Stripping: Removing the top layer of vegetation. Quick but lacking longevity — once overgrown, virtually impossible to recreate. A favourite method for modern copycats.

Covering: Used mainly where chalk is unavailable. Rocks are stacked atop vegetation in the desired shape. More labour-intensive and less visible.

Trenching: The most common method. Virtually all famous figures are examples of trenching. Trenches can be quite deep, sometimes requiring chalk added from elsewhere. Sites with planned drainage last longer; otherwise chalk runs off and the image “moves down the hill” or sediment washes into the bottom.

Concrete: Solely modern — white-painted breezeblocks and lime mortar make the image permanent. Most major figures now use this composition, ensuring longevity that other methods do not.

Maintaining Ancient Hill Figures

The Uffington White Horse, widely considered to be ancient (probably the oldest surviving such figure), has inspired uncountable lookalikes and legends. Yet it requires constant maintenance. Within just a decade of neglect, the image would become unrecognizable. Local groups of enthusiasts have maintained this tradition for centuries, possibly millennia (Brown 38).

Ancient Giants: Local Lore Meets Modern Technology

Images of humans carved into hillsides are far rarer, though two famous examples survive: the Long Man of Wilmington in East Sussex and the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset.

The Long Man is 235 feet (72 metres) tall and holds what are commonly believed to be two staves. Historians traditionally considered it an Iron Age creation, or possibly Neolithic. Many local legends surround it. At one time it was commonly referred to as the Green Man of Wilmington — the Green Man motif has wide traction across many cultures, generally involving a human representation surrounded by leaves and representing deities of growth and rebirth. Legends range from such ancient myths, still revered by modern Wiccans and Druids, to science fiction theories (some locals suggest it could be an alien opening the doors of his spaceship, mirroring conspiracy theories about crop circles and the Pyramids). The most prevalent legends, however, involve giants; one noteworthy story tells that the Long Man marks the burial site of a giant struck down by a rival on a nearby hill.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, sometimes called the “Rude Man,” is somewhat smaller at 180 feet (55 metres) high, though he holds a 120-foot club. Like many hill figures, he was long considered ancient. The first commentaries posited a Saxon god named “Helis.” Over time, theories suggested Celtic origins or a Romano-British interpretation of Hercules. The Herculean theory was strengthened by two rounds of resistivity surveys (late 1970s and mid-1990s) with corresponding drill samples. Resistivity surveys map archaeological features by introducing electrical currents into the ground and testing voltage resistance. In these cases, they revealed a missing carving of an animal-skin cloak draped over the figure’s arm, similar to the Nemean Lion-skin cloak of Hercules lore.

How Ancient are the Giant Hill Figures?

Similar themes unite British hill figures: most depict horses; they have mythical inspiration (often giants); they inspire local legends; and they were traditionally considered ancient. Many are near Iron Age or Neolithic barrows or burial mounds. The Cerne Abbas Giant lies amid what appears to be an entire Late Neolithic or Bronze Age community. However, the presence of nearby ancient ruins does not necessarily imply the same origin for the figures themselves.

Evidence the Hill Figures May Be Relatively “New”

The first clue that these figures may be relatively recent is that virtually no mention of them survives before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The notable exception is the Uffington White Horse, referenced from the eleventh century in an Abingdon Abbey cartulary (“mons albi equi”) and in the fourteenth-century Welsh Red Book of Hergest. But a 1617 survey of Cerne Abbas makes no mention of the Giant.

This absence does not prove the figures did not exist — many thousands of medieval documents simply did not survive. Also, since almost all of these figures are in rural areas, you might expect them in manorial records, but the only land descriptions in those rolls are vague and based on tenants’ holdings, so hill figures may not have been relevant for rural medieval socioeconomic documentation.

However, one must take into account the constant annual maintenance these figures require. The Long Man of Wilmington, due to local topography and vegetation growth rate, loses the bottom half of its figure within a remarkably short time. In fact, the carving of the current image is largely a guess based on older descriptions and sketches. It is thus surprising that so few mentions of the labour required survive from before the seventeenth century. Starting in the Stuart period (seventeenth century), and increasingly in the Georgian and Victorian eras (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), references suddenly appear prolifically: manorial budget allocations for clearing figures, churchwarden accounts (Cerne Abbas, 1694: three shillings for re-cutting the Giant), published surveys (the first mention of the Giant in a published survey dates from 1764, and in 1774 it was reported to be one century old), and references in travel diaries and local histories appear to an unprecedented level from the mid-eighteenth century onward.

Could the Hill Figures Be From the Georgian and Victorian Era?

Three characteristics of Georgian and Victorian society may offer insight:

Pranks: Victorian gentlemen were well-known pranksters. They built entire houses that from a distance seem full-size but up close are basically facades — commonly known as follies. The folly at Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex looks like a full guest house but is only several metres deep. It is no great leap to imagine hill figures as the creation of several generations of adventurous schoolchildren brought up on tales of an ancient past. To this day, English authorities deal with constant reports of vandalism and copycat ventures regarding the hill figures. The most common involve the addition of genitalia onto the images, as when the Long Man was defaced in 2010.

Sexual expression: Georgian and Victorian society had very complex views about sexuality. The officially repressive nature of their society clashed clearly with the sexual expression visible in documentary evidence. Consider the 36-foot-long erection of the Cerne Abbas Giant. Many contemporary couples used the site as the locus for complex fertility rituals, including dancing around some form of maypole. Victorian illustrators often consciously left the phallus out of drawings yet allowed postcards of it to pass freely through the mail system as the “only indecent photo” to make it through. The Cerne Abbas Giant has thus been called “the most famous phallus in England.”

Fascination with antiquity: Generations of British imperialists were obsessed with tracing origins of human civilization. Geoffrey of Monmouth had declared Britain once inhabited by races of giants. As the British Empire expanded in the early eighteenth century, sketches and descriptions of giant hill figures began appearing with remarkable regularity.

A 2003 archaeological dig confirmed that the Long Man was at least a sixteenth or early seventeenth century creation.

Were the Hill Figures a Form of Satire?

The prevailing theory for the Cerne Abbas Giant is that it was created to mock Oliver Cromwell. Evidence suggests that servants of Lord Denzil Holles, who owned the estate, created the satirical image to mock their lord’s major rival during the English Civil War. The timing fits: no mention of the Giant occurs before 1694. If Cromwell was often called “England’s Hercules” by his enemies, then the most famous “ancient” human hill figure may be an early modern satire.

Summary of British Hill Figures

• Usually depict horses
• Mythical themes, often giants
• Inspired numerous local legends
• Long considered ancient (many are near Iron Age barrows)
• Recent research has challenged assumptions of antiquity: almost no surviving references before the seventeenth century, and constant maintenance would be required for centuries
• Archaeological methods can help investigate their origins

Works Cited

Barker, Katherine. “Brief Encounter: The Cerne Abbas Giantess Project.” Proceedings – Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 1997, vol. 119, pp. 179–183.

Brown, Ian. Beacons in the Landscape: The Hillforts of England and Wales. Oxford, Windgather Press, 2009.

Castleden, Rodney. “Shape-shifting: The Changing Outline of the Long Man of Wilmington.” Sussex Archaeological Collections, vol. 140, 2002, pp. 83–95.

Cleaver, Emily. “Against All Odds, England’s Massive Chalk Horse Has Survived 3,000 Years.” Smithsonian Magazine, July 2017.

Module 3: Werewolves

Ann Marie Rasmussen (German Literary Studies, University of Waterloo)

3a. Introduction

Werewolves as Shape-shifters

The idea that some humans shape-shift, whether purposefully or because of a curse, is ancient and near universal, reported by many classical authors and in folklore throughout the world. The adjective berserk (meaning wild and enraged) derives from the Old Norse word berserkr, thought by some to mean “bear-shirt” (others say “bare-shirted,” i.e. bare chested). In Old Norse texts, berserkers were warriors who fought in a terrifying, trance-like frenzy — shape-shifters who took on the guise of bears while fighting. This module treats one of the most familiar shape-shifters, the werewolf, focussing on a remarkable story from twelfth-century France.

“Werewolf” is a compound word: “wolf” (the animal) and “were” (an extinct Old English word meaning “man,” cognate with Latin vir). Werewolves are shape-shifting monsters, traditionally said to alternate between human and wolf form, their physical appearance and state of cognition entirely transforming from one guise to the other.

Some Background on Wolves

What might it mean to become a wolf? Wolves are large predatory mammals that kill to live. The Eurasian grey wolf was endemic throughout medieval Europe and survives in isolated pockets of Eastern Europe today. Males typically weigh around 40 kilos (exceptionally up to double that), standing 50–80 centimetres at the shoulder. Wolves are fast, possess enormous stamina, and employ varied tactics including stealth, stalking, and cooperative pack hunting.

Wildlife biologists tell us wolves are shy and try to avoid humans. However, steady human encroachment on wild places — as in parts of Ontario or Vancouver Island — brings repeated contact, sometimes habituating wolves and producing bold behaviours such as attacking pets or stalking humans.

Regardless of modern scientific realities, the wolf occupies a singular place in human legend as a feared creature, perceived as an embodiment of greed, savagery, and wickedness. The Latin proverb homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man) expresses the dark view that human beings prey savagely on one another. In his translation of Beowulf, Seamus Heaney evoked ravenous wolfishness when describing Grendel’s attack on Hereot: “In off the moors, down through the mist bands / God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping” (Beowulf, lines 710–714, p. 49). In traditional lycanthropy, it is this loathsome creature that appears when the werewolf inhabits the wolf guise.

Werewolves in Popular Culture Today

Works Cited

Cranach the Elder, Lucas. 1472–1553. “The Werewolf or the Cannibal.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Heaney, Seamus, translator. Beowulf. Norton, 2000, lines 710–714, p. 49.

3b. Philology: Marie de France as a Case Study for Working with Medieval Sources

What is Philology?

The Original Language: Anglo-Norman French

The Manuscript: London, British Library, Harley MS 978

Codicological Detective Work

Who was Marie de France?

Debate: Is Marie Real or Fictitious?

Works Cited

Marie de France. “Guigemar.” Lais of Marie de France. Ed. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante, 1978, p. 30.

Marie de France. Les Fables. Ed. and trans. Charles Brucker, Louvain, 1991.

Marie de France. L’espurgatoire Seint Patriz. Ed. and trans. Yolande de Pontfarcy, 1995.

Unknown. ca. 700 CE. “Lindisfarne Gospels.” Cotton Nero MS D I IV. British Library.

Unknown. 1245. “Sumer Is Icumen In.” British Library. Harley MS 978.

3c. Interpretation: Nature and Culture

What are Stories Good For? Marie’s Prologue

A Lai: A Text to be Heard

Dedications

Dedications like the one closing the prologue are standard in medieval literature. Many lords and kings cultivated learning at their courts, and relationships with writers were conceptualized as patronage. Imagining the lais as a carefully assembled gift presented by Marie to a refined and learned ruler, the prologue slips from narrated past to imagined present and closes with the storyteller’s timeless command: “Now hear how they begin.”

Close Reading: Nature and Culture

Demonstration of a Close Reading

The reader is encouraged to finish re-reading the text and to have it open, watching for the ways the story presents insights and events that summon conventional expectations and then undermines them. The story continues to challenge readers to rethink the relationship between nature and culture. Other themes to consider include:

• how culture is equated with chivalric values;
• the nature of love and trust;
• the contrast between the bisclavret’s relationship with his wife and with his overlord.

Bisclavret raises existential questions: Who is more “beastly” and who more virtuous? What is the relationship between nature and culture? Is the bisclavret ever really a wolf?

Works Cited

Unknown. ca. 1261–1265. “Harley MS 978.” British Library. Folio 131v.

3d. Adaptation

Adapting Works of the Human Imagination Across Time, Space, and Media

Interpreting the Gaps

Gaps from Transposing Between Media

Adaptation: A Product and A Process

A Working Definition of Adaptation

Works Cited

There are no additional references for this section.

Module 4: Satirical Monsters

Kate Steiner (Musicology, University of Waterloo)

4a. The Ass in Music

Satire Expressed in Deformed Genres

Satire is a mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, and societies to ridicule or scorn. It is closely linked to the idea of monsters in the Middle Ages. If monsters were useful symbols to describe conditions of depravity, as David Williams argues in Deformed Discourse, then it is no surprise that monsters appear in musical satires. Monsters symbolized that which eluded logic and disordered form, both of which had moral implications. Depravity, deformity, and disorder were tied together in the medieval world.

In music, the ass most often symbolized the deformed singer. In one of the best-known treatises on singing plainchant by Guido of Arezzo (c. 992-1033), the bad singer who thinks louder is better is compared to the ass, which cannot sing with understanding. The ass was the most common satirical monster. Although not threatening, it symbolized something scarier: a fundamental disorder of the world. A singing ass represented everything rational about the world, including music, gone awry.

The Singing Ass

The ass appears in lyrics of many songs criticizing political leaders and clergy. The Carmina Burana (Songs of Benediktbeuern) contains one such satire. This hefty collection of songs and poetry (c. 1230) was written by disgruntled university students known as the goliards (after a lewd and drunken mythical Bishop Golias). One poem laments the current state of learning by invoking the great symbol of the world up-side-down: the ass playing the lute and singing.

(Church of Saint-Pierre-de-la-Tour d’Aulnay, c. 1120-1140)

Florebat olim studium/nunc vertitur in tediumOnce learning flourished. Now it’s cometo be condemned as tediumthe days of thirsting after truthare now the idle days of youth…Now lads of barely a decadecan graduate - get themselves madeprofessors too! And who’s to mindhow blind the blind who lead the blind?So fledglings soar upon the wing,so donkeys play the lute and sing:bulls dance about at court like spritesand ploughboys sally forth as knights.Parlett 2007, CB6

No music survives for this poem, but readers are asked to imagine an absurd noise: an ass playing the lute and singing. The original Latin text suggests what it might have sounded like. A heavily accented rhythm with regular eight-syllable lines suggests a genre of popular song, perhaps with drum accompanying. The goliards’ goal was entertainment, not furthering learning – the very thing they criticize in students of their day.

The Feast of the Ass

The symbol of the ass also appeared in an inverted sacred ritual the week after Christmas in northern France. The Catholic Church controlled religious beliefs through its sacred rituals, known as the liturgy: the daily cycle of prayer services called the Divine Office, and the celebration of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ called the Mass. The Feast of the Ass, celebrated on Jesus Christ’s Circumcision on January 1, turned the major festivities of Christmas up-side-down. A young choir boy dressed and acted as bishop, the most significant church position in the region. A donkey was introduced into the most sacred ritual of the mass – ostensibly to re-enact Jesus Christ’s flight to Egypt, but its presence also symbolized the parodic nature of the celebration. The choir added braying sounds to every song of the mass, turning the core music into the absurdly ugly “he-haw.” At the end of the mass, everyone was to genuflect before the ass after singing a song of praise, a conductus:

(Maître de Fauvel, c. 1318-1320)

Out from lands of OrientWas the ass divinely sent.Strong and very fair was he,Bearing burdens gallantly.Go, sir ass, Go.In the hills of Sichem bredUnder Reuben nourished,Jordan stream he traversed,Into Bethlehem he sped. Go, Go!Higher leaped than goats can bound,Doe and roebuck circled round,Median dromedaries’ speedOvercame, and took the lead. Go, Go!While he drags long carriagesLoaded down with baggages,He, with jaws insatiate,Fodder hard doth masticate. Go, Go!Chews the ears with barley corn,Thistle down with thistle corn.On the threshing floor his feetSeparate the chaff from wheat. Go, Go!Stuffed with grass, yet speak and sayAmen, ass, with every bray:Amen, amen, say again:Ancient sins hold in disdain. Go on, go on,Fair Sir Ass, you trot all day;Fair your mouth, and loud your brayTranslation adopted from Greene, 535.

Ritual, Musical Genre, and Satire

What marks the Song of the Ass as satire is the music. The conductus was a genre that developed in the late eleventh century for sacred rituals, but it took second place to plainchant, the main music of all sacred rituals. Plainchant has a distinctive sound: it is sung without instruments, monophonically, and with flexible rhythm.

(Aboense, c. 1301-1400)

Plainchant is still sung in Latin today, particularly by monastic communities.

Neumz. “Communio - Cantate Domino - Abbaye Notre-Dame de Fidélité - Complete Gregorian Chant.” , 5 May, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyAA_BG11pg.

The conductus was similarly sung in Latin, but the text was accented poetry, with one syllable per note, making it sound more like a popular song. In Orientis partibus, the popular style was amplified through incessant seven-syllable rhyming lines. The melody repeats for each stanza with a simple rounded tune, completed with the refrain “Go, Sir Ass, Go!” which mimics the opening line. The result is a mockery of a genre already on the fringes of acceptable ritual music.

• Orientis partibus, sung by the Boston Camerata directed by Joel Cohen, onWorlds of Early Christmas Music, Erato 825646759675, 2010, Naxos Music Library.

Ritual Context for Music

There is folly in praising the ass. What makes it monstrous is the humanization of the beast. To hail the lowly donkey as “Sir Ass” is to disorder the world, putting the human lower than the lowliest beast. The refrain “Go, Sir Ass, Go” was characteristic of other Christmas conductus and plainchants in form, but the text – combining the common goad for a donkey with hailing him as a lord – points to fundamental irrationality. Some bishops strongly disapproved and censured the ritual to maintain order. What survives is likely a tamed version of what was often performed, and the Feast may have been a Christianized version of a more grotesque New Year’s celebration in which people dressed as wild beasts. Understanding the roles of the singers and clergy, as well as the ritual’s function, is key to uncovering the monstrous nature of the ass. Each participant had symbolic significance, allowing the ritual and its music to be “read” as a sacred text.

• Ahn, Dongmyung. “Beastly yet Lofty Burdens: The Donkey and the Subdeacon in the Middle Ages.” L’Humain et l’Animal Dans La France Médiévale (XIIe-XVe s.), January 1, 2014, 145–60.

The subdeacon and ass were compared to each other in the Feast of the Ass because

Works Cited

Aboense, Graduale. The Introit Gaudeamus omnes. Hymn book of Turku, Finland. c. 1301-1400.

Ahn, Dongmyung. “Beastly yet Lofty Burdens: The Donkey and the Subdeacon in the Middle Ages.” L’Humain et l’Animal Dans La France Médiévale (XIIe-XVe s.), January 1, 2014, 145–60.

Church of Saint-Pierre-de-la-Tour d’Aulnay. Animal terrestre musicien, lion se mordant la queue, bestiaire. Aulnay, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France, 1120-1140.

Greene, Henry Copley. “The Song of the Ass.” Speculum 6, no. 4 (1931): 534–49.

Parlett, David, trans. Selections from the “Carmina Burana.” Penguin UK, 2007.

Williams, David. Deformed Discourse the Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996.

Zayaruznaya, Anna. The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. Cambridge: University Press, 2015.

Orientis partibus, sung by the Boston Camerata directed by Joel Cohen, on Worlds of Early Christmas Music, Erato 825646759675, 2010, Naxos Music Library.

4b. The Monstrous Horse in Musical Symbols

Musical Destruction of Fauvel

Another beast related to the ass is the subject of the most prized collection of music from around 1317, the Roman de Fauvel. This lavish manuscript – composed by scribes, artists, poets, and musicians – is a scathing critique of the king of France, Philippe IV (1285-1314), and his chancellor, Enguerrand de Marigny (1260-1315), in the form of a satire. The literary genre is a romance, a genre of vernacular literature upholding courtly love values and the predecessor to the modern novel. It is the medium in which the characters of Arthurian legends were developed. Romances frequently recounted musical performances, giving us some idea of how unnotated music shaped aristocratic life. In the Roman de Fauvel, music and image join the word to provide the fullest possible indictment of the king and his officers.

Fauvel is a horse that fools people into fawning over him, moving from stable to palace. In character with a romance, he courts Lady Fortune, a symbol of life’s unpredictable turns. She denies him but helps him find better fortune. Spurned, he weds a Vice instead – Vaine Gloire (vanity). By that point he has morphed into a hybrid beast – sometimes a horse with hands, sometimes a human with hooves.

Opening folio (page) of the Roman de Fauvel. This folio is found in the most extensive copy held at the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 146, fol. The central image of Fauvel is framed by music on both sides. (Maître de Fauvel, c. 1318-1320)

His match with Vaine Gloire is appropriate, since Fauvel’s name is an acrostic for six vices:

• Flaterie
• Avarice
• Vilanie
• Variété (changeability)
• Envie
• Lâcheté (cowardice)

Virtues and vices were not only guideposts for being a decent person; they were qualities of the Divine. As a symbol of vice, Fauvel’s hybrid nature was an image of depravity: a creature that had lost its proper form and fallen away from God. This monstrous creature might have been conceived not just to criticize the King, but also to reveal the true nature of God, since Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), writing only a few years earlier, said:

(Maître de Fauvel, c. 1318-1320)

It is more fitting that divine truths in the Scriptures should be imparted to us in the guide of figures drawn from base objects rather than noble objects . . . [since] it is natural for man to reach intellectual things by means of sensible things . . . Likenesses drawn from those things which are furthest removed from God give us a truer estimation of God.St. Thomas Aquinas

A satirical monster like Fauvel might have been funny, but the truth underlying him was grave.

Hidden Truth in the Isorhythmic Motet

One of the key interests for musicologists in the Roman de Fauvel is the great variety of genres used. Latin chant was the bread and butter of sacred ritual in the Divine Office and Mass. French monophonic songs in fixed forms on subjects of courtly love also pervade the romance. But the isorhythmic motet is the genre with the most opportunity for hidden truths, discoverable only through music analysis.

Music analysis starts with the music itself rather than external factors, focusing on internal structures and their function. Developed largely in the late nineteenth century, its methods initially reflected the music of that era, but scholars have since developed analytic methods reflecting medieval music theory and compositional process.

Music theory developed methods of explaining the phenomenon of music through principles and processes. Medieval music theory focused on harmony and rhythm, both based on proportions discovered by Pythagoras (c. 570-c. 495 BC). Harmony was understood as two sounds in a simple ratio; dissonant sounds were not only unpleasant but metaphysically significant. Rhythm was ordered through division of a unit of time (long) into three or two shorter notes (breve), creating ratios of 1:2 or 1:3. Some composers organized pieces according to the golden section, developed by Euclid (fl. 300 BC), where a:b equals a+b:a.

In the isorhythmic motet, the composer built three parts with different French texts above a snippet of melody (called a color) taken from a Latin chant, the tenor. Though the original chant melody lacked clear rhythm, the composer created a repeating rhythmic pattern, the talea. This treatment of composed color and talea defines the isorhythmic motet. Beyond structuring the music, the talea and color could themselves carry hidden symbols.

Johannes de Grocheo (1255-1320), writing roughly when the Roman de Fauvel was composed, thought the motet suitable only for certain audiences:

A motet is a song composed of many voices, having many words or a variety of syllables, everywhere sounding in harmony. Each line ought to have a text with the exception of the tenor, which in some has a text and in others not. This kind of song ought not to be propagated among the vulgar, since they do not understand its subtlety nor do they delight in hearing it, but it should be performed for the learned and those who seek after the subtleties of the arts. And it is normally performed at their feasts for their edification…Johannes de Grocheo, 26

The community Grocheo imagines may have grasped the meaning of multiple texts performed at once and the literary and musical quotations. But there were sometimes musical symbols revealed only through study of the notation.

Ensemble La Rota - Topic. (2015, January 29). Tribum que / Quoniam secta / Merito hec patimur - Tribum quem non abhorruit. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90HTg-nCaIs

Many Forms of Fauvel

We take as an example a famous motet near the end of the Roman, known by the incipits of its three voice parts: Tribum / Quoniam / Merito. The lower two parts frame an image of the Fountain of Youth, in which Fauvel and Vaine Gloire’s human spawn are eternally renewed. A short musical piece imitating chant compares the Fountain of Youth to a baptismal font – mimicking baptismal chant but with the words, “This fount, this water of degeneration, this damning wave. Amen.” Even after Fauvel’s marriage to Vaine Gloire and the defeat of his Vices by the Virtues in a tournament, Fauvel still wins in the end. His hybrid form has so changed that he spawns human flesh that will never die.

(Maître de Fauvel, c. 1318-1320)

(de Lorris and de Meung, c. 1200-1304)

But the motet lays bare the belly of this monster. Though it does not speak directly of Fauvel, another monster hides in its midst. The duplum text speaks of a fox (Fauvel, i.e. Enguerrand de Marigny) which gnaws on the cocks while the blind lion rules (Philippe IV). The fox’s identity is revealed in the final motet two folios later, where the triplum compares the fox with the dragon of the Apocalypse (Revelation 12:9 and 12) – the ultimate evil force, Satan. In Tribum/Quoniam/Merito, the fox devours the French people while their ruler turns a blind eye.

This isorhythmic motet has further hidden meanings in the tenor, structure, and textual allusions discoverable only through analysis. The structure, numerical symbols, and textual surface all point to one hidden truth: the monster Fauvel may run free now, but “furious fortune” will cause his downfall. The tenor line, amounting to 72 longs, symbolizes Fauvel’s fall as it represents the number of disciples of Christ, who spread truth and cast out Satan. The words of the chant, “We deserve to suffer these things justly,” are put into the mouths of Fauvel’s followers, expelled by the just disciples of Christ.

• Bent, Margaret. “Polyphony of Texts and Music in the Fourteenth-Century Motet: Tribum Que Non Abhorruit/Quoniam Secta Latronum/Merito Hec Patimur and Its ‘Quotations.’” InHearing the Motet Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Dolores Pesce, 82–103. New York; Oxford University Press, 1998.

2) The isorhythmic motet Tribum/Quoniam/Merito hides the monstrous nature of Fauvel

3) The Roman de Fauvel is an unusual romance because:

Works Cited

Johannes de Grocheo, De musica, trans. Albert Seay (Colorado Springs: The Colorado College Music Press, 1974).

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, trans. Thomas Gilby (London and New York: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964).

Bent, Margaret. “Fauvel and Marigny: which came first?.” Fauvel Studies, edited by Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, Oxford, 1998, pp. 35-52.

de Lorris, Guillaume and de Meung, Jean. “Lady Fortune” in Recueil. c. 1200-1304. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Dillon, Emma. Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Fassler, Margot Elsbeth. Music in the Medieval West. WWNorton and Company, 2014, 197-222.

Kelly, Thomas Forrest. Capturing Music: The Story of Notation. WWNorton & Company, 2015, 143-167.

Maître de Fauvel, [Enlumineur]. Gervais du Bus et Raoul Chaillou de Pesstain, Roman de Fauvel. F-Pn Fr. 146. c. 1318-1320. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Roesner, Edward H. “Labouring in the Midst of Wolves: Reading a Group of ‘Fauvel’ Motets.” Early Music History, vol. 22, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 169–245.

Zayaruznaya, Anna. The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. University Press, 2015.

Module 5: Ghosts and Revenants

Caley McCarthy (History, University of Waterloo)

This module examines ghosts and revenants – the returned dead – in the Middle Ages. It approaches the subject from three perspectives: intellectual history, sociocultural history, and archaeology. Like much sociocultural history, this module underscores that when studying a history of beliefs, what matters is not whether what a society believed was true, but why they believed it.

5a. Introduction

Studying Medieval Ghosts and Revenants: Sources, Methods, and Focus

Sources and Methods

Beliefs about ghosts and revenants left traces in many medieval sources, including:

• Sagas
• Chronicles
• Criminal inquests
• Canonical inquests
• Vitae (saints’ lives)
• Art
• Ecclesiastical writings
• Penitentials
• Medical writings
• Physical remains (burials)

These sources capture different beliefs, sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant. This module approaches the study from a sociocultural perspective, putting into conversation research on learned attitudes toward death, the soul, and the afterlife with more popular attitudes reflected in inquest records, physical remains, and art.

It happened that this man was talking with the master of the ploughmen and was walking with him in the field. And suddenly the master fled in great terror and the other man was left struggling with a ghost who foully tore his garments. And at last he gained the victory and conjured him. And he being conjured confessed that he had been a certain canon of Newburgh, and that he had been excommunicated for certain silver spoons which he had hidden in a certain place. He therefore begged the living man that he would go to the place he mentioned and take them away and carry them to the prior and ask for absolution. And he did so and he found the silver spoons in the place mentioned. And after absolution the ghost henceforth rested in peace. But the man was ill and languished for many days, and he affirmed that the ghost appeared to him in the habit of a canon.Joynes, 2001

Studying medieval ghost stories is illuminating and entertaining. By considering beliefs about the returned dead within their historical contexts, we understand the cultural attitudes and social structures that shaped them. This module examines both what medieval people believed about ghosts and why, through the lenses of intellectual history, sociocultural history, and archaeology.

This sociocultural approach borrows methods from the Annales school of history. Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) and Marc Bloch (1886-1944) established the Annales school through their journal, promoting the study of social history over long periods. Scholars of this school rejected earlier approaches focused on “great men” and instead sought to retrieve the history of ordinary people using methods from anthropology, sociology, geography, psychology, and economics. Later Annalistes like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Philippe Ariès championed the study of cultural mentalités, understanding history as a construction of perceptions, not just events. This module reconstructs the mentalités that underpin medieval beliefs in ghosts and revenants.

A Note on Subject Selection

This module operates within two constraints:

• It focuses primarily on medieval Western Christian beliefs about ghosts. Other religions held beliefs in the returned dead, but their beliefs are difficult to access due to scarce extant sources. An assigned reading by Ido Peretz provides a brief examination of medieval Jewish beliefs for comparison.
• It focuses on ghosts of ordinary people. Medieval sources are replete with visions of dead saints, but as Peter Brown has noted, saints were the “very special dead” and served a different sociocultural function.

Introduction: Appearances of the Dead in the Middle Ages

Beliefs in ghosts and revenants varied throughout and across the Middle Ages. In the Early Middle Ages, ghosts were theoretically impossible, as theology understood death as a finite event marked by the separation of body and soul. By the sixth century, however, death came to be understood as a process, creating theoretical space for ghosts that persisted throughout the Middle Ages, even as twelfth-century theological and medical discourses returned to the concept of death as a discrete event.

Even where medieval Europe shared the same learned understandings of death, how the returned dead visited the living differed geographically. In Northern Europe, the dead returned bodily, while in the Mediterranean, they returned in spirit form (Caciola, Afterlives). This module uses revenant to connote the dead who return bodily and ghost to connote the dead who return only in spirit.

These tales served multiple functions. In prescriptive discourses like theology and pastoral literature, they served an edifying function – first as a tool for conversion, later as a tool for educating the laity about proper belief and practice. In folk culture, they reveal preoccupation with the dangers of a “bad death.”

(Maître du Pierre Michault de Guyot Le Peley, c. 1475-1480)

Learned Beliefs about Death and the Soul

Death as Event, Death as Process

In Christianity’s early years, Church writers worked to articulate a theology of death and the afterlife, partly to combat persistent pagan beliefs. Lactantius (d. 320) ridiculed folk who “believe that the souls of the dead wander around their tombs.”

For early Church Fathers, death was a finite event. Tertullian (c. 160-c. 255) argued:

The operation of death is in essence the separation of body and soul. Some, however …choose to believe that some souls cleave to the body…But not even a little bit of the soul can possibly remain inside a [dead] body, which is itself destined to disappear… Death, if it is not complete, is not death; if any part of the soul remains, it is life. Death will no more mix with life than will night with day.Tertullian, Liber de anima, LA, col. 736-738, as cited in Caciola, Afterlives, p. 39-40

A century later, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) similarly rejected death as a process, challenging even the idea that a person could be dying: a person may be close to death but is still alive until they arrive at death; then they are dead.

These articulations challenged earlier beliefs in the wandering dead. Ancient pagan cultures commonly held such beliefs – continued existence of the dead inside the grave, hovering of spirits around corpses. People avoided graves at night, and there is evidence of tubes allowing the living to pour offerings to the dead in their graves. The early Christian belief that death was an instantaneous separation of body and soul left no conceptual space for the lingering dead.

If ghosts were theoretically impossible, how did early Christians explain encounters with the recently deceased? According to Augustine, such encounters could only be visions – presented by angels – neither the material nor the soul of the deceased, perceived not by one’s eyes but by the eyes of one’s soul. These were what Augustine categorized as an imago, a “spiritual image” (Schmitt, 26).

Although Augustine’s conceptualization dominated early Christian discourse, occasional references to apparitions appeared, generally articulated within the divine/diabolical framework: appearances of the dead were either God’s work or the devil’s. When the “evil dead” appeared, would-be saints could demonstrate miraculous powers through exorcism.

This view subsisted until the sixth century, when Pope Gregory I “the Great” (540-604) revived the ancient belief that death was a gradual process. According to Gregory’s Dialogues, the souls of the dead may remain and interact with the living, may return after departing, may be corporeal or incorporeal. All served an instructive function: attesting to the eternal nature of the soul and the existence of an afterlife.

(Crivelli, c. 1435-1495)

Gregory recounts the tale of a ghostly encounter by Bishop Felix. The bishop frequented a place with hot baths, where an attendant always helped him. One day, the grateful priest brought two eucharistic loaves. The attendant said:

Why did you give me these, father? This is holy bread and I cannot eat it, for I, who you see here, was once overseer of these baths, and am now after my death appointed for my sins to this place. But if you wish to please me, offer this bread unto the Almighty God, and by this shall you know your prayers have been heard, if when you come again you find me not here.Joynes, 10

The man vanished. The priest offered daily sacrifice and prayers, and when he returned, the attendant was gone.

Gregory thus reformulated persistent beliefs in death as a process within a Christian framework. One historian has called Gregory the Great “the father of the Christian ghost story” (Caciola, Afterlives, 49). Though thirteenth-century university medicine would challenge his conceptualization, the theoretical space he created continued alongside differing discourses throughout the Middle Ages.

Death in Medieval Medicine

By the late twelfth century, medical interpretations supported the Augustinian view that death was instantaneous. This period witnessed the revival of classical medical texts from ancient Greece and Rome. Lost to Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages, these texts survived in the Arab world and were transmitted to the West through increased twelfth-century cultural contact, where they entered the scholastic university curriculum.

(Legrand, c. 1475-1500)

The Hippocratic corpus included advice on diagnosis, treatments, and apprehension of death. Many treatises contained sections on “signs of death” (signa mortis).

Vincent de Beauvais, citing al-Razi, describes in his Speculum naturale:

At that time the face will have collapsed, the eyes will appear sunken, the temples will have caved in, the ears will have become cold and turn yellow (and their end parts that hang down will have shrunk), and the facial skin will appear slack. Besides these things, if the patient passes anything the color yellow, or else green or black, then the ill person will not last long past the evacuation: all these are signs of death. In particular black urine, black saliva, or black stools are signs that indicate death.Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, col. 2372, as cited in Caciola, Afterlives, 81

A fourteenth-century English Franciscan preacher’s aid adopts similar classical signs:

When the head tremblesAnd the lips turn paleAnd the nose sharpensAnd the sinews stiffenAnd the breast shuddersAnd the breath is wantingAnd the teeth chatterAnd the throat rattlesAnd the soul has gone outThen the body is nothing but a lump.Soon it will stink so badlyThat the soul will be completely forgotten.Fasciculus Morum, trans. Caciola, Afterlives, 84

These theories indicate that medieval medicine understood death as a predictable, diagnosable event resulting in the rupture of soul from body – aligning with the Augustinian model and leaving little theoretical space for ghosts.

Still, from the year 1000 onward, ghost stories proliferated in medieval Europe.

True or False: By the sixth century, the idea that death was a gradual process completely replaced the idea that death was a discrete event.

Works Cited

Caciola, Nancy. 2016. Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Crivelli, Carlo. c. 1435-1495. “Augustine of Hippo.” National Museum of Western Art.

Joynes, Andrew. 2001. Medieval Ghost Stories. Rochester, New York: The Boydell Press.

Legrand, Jacques. c. 1475-1500. “The good death.” British Library. Harley 1310.

Maître du Pierre Michault de Guyot Le Peley. c. 1475-1480. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Français 1654.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 1998. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5b. Medieval Tales of the Restless Dead

Overview

Around the year 1000, ghost stories appeared more frequently. Beliefs in the returned dead differed along a geographical divide. This section discusses the form the returned dead took. Northern European sources expressed a bodily return, while Mediterranean cultures conceived of the dead returning only in soul. The next section will discuss the function of these tales.

Northern Europe: Revenants

Numerous writers throughout medieval Northern Europe recounted tales of the dead who return in corporeal form (revenants). In Icelandic sagas, these are called draugr. Archaeologists have uncovered physical evidence of these beliefs throughout Iceland and Northern Europe.

Revenants led lives parallel to the living. Although many appeared alone, they often lived in communities, worshipped, interacted with the living, and defended themselves against outsiders. In the chronicle of Henry of Erfurt, a ghost named Reyneke says, “No, there is a large population of us… We eat, we drink, we take wives, we have children; we arrange the weddings of our daughters… and various other things just as you do” (Caciola, Afterlives, 149).

Thietmar of Merseburg (975-1018) writes of communal revenants during the tenth-century Germanic conquest of Slavic lands:

So that none of the faithful in Christ should doubt the future resurrection of the dead, but should eagerly desire the joys of blessed immortality, I will recount that I have discovered happened in the town of Walseben after it was rebuilt following its destruction by the Slavs. The priest of the church was in the habit of going at dawn to sing matins in the church, but one day, passing the cemetery, he saw a great multitude offering prayers at the entrance to the holy chapel. Standing his ground, he prepared himself by making the sign of the holy cross, and then made his way apprehensively through the crowd. But then a woman whom he recognised, who had just departed this life, came forward and asked him what he wanted. When she had been informed by him why he had come, she told him they had prepared everything and made ready for his imminent departure from life. According to the story as told locally, this prediction was shortly afterwards fulfilled by the priest’s death.Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, Book I, Chapter 7, trans. Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories, 17

Communities of revenants could also be harmful. Another of Thietmar’s tales tells of a church in Deventer. A priest saw a dead congregation celebrating mass inside. When told, Bishop Baudry ordered the priest to spend the night in the church. The dead congregation threw him and his bed out. The bishop sent him back with relics, but the dead returned, placed him on the altar, and killed him by burning.

Perhaps the most notable community of revenants was Hellequin’s Army. The first reference appears in the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis (1075-1142) – an army of the undead roaming the French countryside. The term Hellequin may derive from Old French hèle-chien (hunting dog) or the German underworld word Helle. The tale may derive from myths of the pagan god Wotan as wandering huntsman.

(Limbourg, Limbourg and Limbourg, c. 1411-1416)

According to Orderic, a young priest named Walchelin, returning from visiting a sick parishioner, heard the approach of a great army. A giant man with a mace ordered him to watch. The army comprised groups: individuals on foot with beasts of burden, bearers carrying biers with large-headed dwarfs, Ethiopian demons carrying a tortured man on a tree trunk, women on horseback pierced with burning nails crying their sins, a band of clergymen begging for prayers, and finally the largest group – the knights.

Walchelin tried to capture a horse as proof. The first evaded him; when he mounted the second, burning pain forced him to release it. Four knights accused him of theft. The fourth asked Walchelin to relay a message: in life, the knight had committed usury, fraudulently acquiring a mill he bequeathed to his heirs. As punishment in death, he carried a burning mill-shaft in his mouth, and begged Walchelin to have his wife return the mill so he could be relieved of eternal suffering. Walchelin refused, fearing he would seem mad. The knight grabbed his neck with a burning hand, leaving an indelible mark. Then Walchelin’s dead brother Robert appeared, forced to carry a heavy flaming sword. Robert asked Walchelin to pray and offer alms so he could be released within one year.

The details – the burning stirrup, the mark on his neck – attest to the materiality of the army. This material form reflects the inheritance of Germanic culture, in which the dead most often returned corporeally, contrasting with Roman culture and custom in the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean: Ghosts

In the Mediterranean, the restless dead appeared most often only in spirit. Like northern revenants, these ghosts haunted churches and homes. They could be violent, but their attacks were spiritual rather than physical. They appeared of their own volition, could be summoned, or possessed the bodies of the living.

In fourteenth-century Montaillou, people believed certain individuals could see and communicate with spirits of the dead. These individuals were called amariés (messengers of the soul). Similar spirit mediums appeared in medieval Italy (benedante) and Switzerland (Seelenmutter). The most notable amariés in Montaillou was Arnaud Gélis, a canon’s servant, who claimed visits from some twenty spirits. Gélis used his interactions to help both the dead and the living, settling disputes through exchanges with the spirits. We learn of these through the inquisitorial register (1318-1325) of Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers and later Pope Benedict XII. This record preserves the voices of ordinary people, making it valuable for studying mentalités (Schmitt 1998).

In Alès, around the same time, Jean Gobi was called in as interlocutor when a widow was haunted by her dead husband, Gui de Corvo. Eight days after Gui’s death, his widow heard noises and moans in her bedchamber. She sought help first from city consuls, then from Dominican prior Jean Gobi. She confessed that she and her husband had committed a sin in that bed – confessed before his death but never absolved. Jean visited with theologians, a notary, and two hundred armed guards. Over two nights, he conversed with Gui’s ghost, whose voice his widow identified. The notary recorded their dialogue, covering purgatory, angels, demons, and judgement. Gui confirmed his incorporeal nature: he cannot sign himself for he has no hands. He implored Jean to say one hundred masses. After these were said, the ghost departed, leaving his widow at peace. (de Beaulieu 2003)

(Marmion c. 1455-1457)

The incorporeal nature of ghosts like Gui de Corvo meant they could possess the living. Whether the spirits possessing the living were ghosts of the dead or demons was contested. Jerome de Raggiolo, in his fourteenth-century Miracles of John Gualbert, illustrates the attempt to reconcile these dissonant discourses:

Another woman came to us… and the demon that had invaded her, as many are accustomed to do, confessed that it was the soul of a certain Ligurian named Beltramo. It must be noted that this is an impudent lie that must be restrained by the authority of Holy Mother Church, so that the average common man might perceive that such a thing is hardly possible, and thus be instructed in true religion…(Miraculi S. Joannis Gualberti Abbatis, AASS, xxix, trans. Nancy Caciola)

By rejecting the idea that the invading spirit could be the recently deceased Beltramo, Jerome de Raggiolo reveals the popularity of this (to him unacceptable) belief among the laity.

Among the miracles of Nicholas of Tolentino, we find tales of exorcism. In 1322, a Cistercian nun named Salimbena claimed possession by ghosts of three men. Under their possession, she hurled verbal abuses, made grotesque faces, and walked on her hands. She was brought to Nicholas’ tomb for the ancient custom of incubation – spending the night watching over relics – and after one night was healed. Other possessed women, Zola and Philippucia, experienced similar classic signs of possession – eyerolling, seizing, foaming at the mouth, contortions – and were likewise freed through incubation.

As these tales reveal, although Mediterranean ghosts appeared primarily in spirit form, they could assume corporeal form through possession. The purposes of the ghosts’ returns reflect the functions ghost stories served in medieval societies, explored in the next section.

The main difference between the restless dead in Northern versus Mediterranean Europe is:

Works Cited

Caciola, Nancy. 2000. “Spirits seeking bodies: death, possession and communal memory in the Middle Ages”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—. 2016. Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

de Beaulieu, Marie Anne Polo. 2003. “Paroles de fantôme: Le cas du revenant d’Alès.” Ethnologie Française 33: 565-574.

Joynes, Andrew. 2001. Medieval Ghost Stories. Rochester, New York: The Boydell Press.

Limbourg, Herman, Paul Limbourg, and Johan Limbourg. c. 1411-1416. “The Horsemen of Death.” Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry.

Marmion, Simon. c. 1455-1457. “Miniature de Dédicace.” Les Grandes Chroniques de France.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 1998. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5c. Conclusion

The Function of Ghost Stories in Medieval Society

The previous section examined the form of the returned dead; this section examines their function. Ghosts and revenants were powerful cultural figures, providing evidence of what lay after death. In normative discourses like theology, chronicles, and vitae, they often serve an edifying function, teaching “proper” Christian belief and practice. In more popular discourses, they illustrate concerns about the “right way” to die – what was called “a good death.”

Conversion and Edification

Much of Christian doctrine concerns what transpires after death. Since ghosts and revenants attest to life after death, they served as invaluable instruments for the Church: first for teaching converts about proper belief, later for reforming beliefs that did not conform with official teachings. Tales of the returned dead contain expressions of medieval Christian soteriology (beliefs about salvation) and eschatology (theology concerned with the “last things” or end times).

Medieval Christian soteriology asserted the soul lived on eternally, in torment or bliss. In early Christianity, souls went to heaven or hell. Those who attained salvation went to heaven; those who did not suffered in hell. Prayer, confession, atonement, and penance helped individuals attain salvation. In the late twelfth century, purgatory developed as a space for souls not fully absolved at death to atone before entering heaven. Indulgences – partial or plenary remission of sins – could reduce punishment and were obtained through prayer, good works, or, increasingly, purchase. The living could lessen time in purgatory through prayer and masses for the dead.

(Lochner, c. 1400-1451)

According to Christian eschatology, the dead would be judged again during the Last Judgement at the Second Coming of Christ. The dead will be resurrected bodily by Christ and consigned to heaven or hell. Since this doctrine asserts bodily resurrection, burial site became a major concern: only those buried in consecrated ground could be resurrected.

The eternal life of the soul was central to medieval Christian belief, and we find in early Christian ghost stories the use of returned dead as corroboration. Gregory the Great concludes his tale of the ghostly bath attendant by noting “from this we can see what great profit the souls of the deceased received by the sacrifice of the holy oblation.” Gregory’s tale demonstrates both the significance of absolution and the role of the clergy in mediating salvation.

The returned dead also served as instruments of conversion. Thietmar of Merseburg was a frontier bishop during Germanic conquest and Christianization of pagan Slavic lands. The revenants played a role in conversion efforts. Thietmar tells his reader he recounts these tales “so that none of the faithful in Christ should doubt the future resurrection of the dead.” In these tales, Thietmar reconstructs local pagan beliefs within the Christian framework provided by Gregory the Great.

Church officials also used tales as instruments of edification after conversion, instructing the laity and reforming deviant practices. Orderic Vitalis’ account of Hellequin’s Army affirms the doctrine of purgatory. The revenants suffer physical burdens of their sins and atone for their wrongdoings, communicating the importance of a good life and the power of prayers for the dead. In another thirteenth-century tale, a murdered woman appears to her sister and says she is horribly burned because on feast days she left church before receiving Communion – teaching the importance of Communion for salvation.

(Angelico, c. 1395-1455)

The Mendicant Orders – especially the Dominicans and Franciscans, founded in the early thirteenth century – used ghost stories as a method of communicating proper belief to the laity. These orders lived lives of poverty in the city, with preaching to the laity as a main vocation. Ghosts were an entertaining and useful tool for these efforts.

The Good Death

Even if the general population did not compose tales of the dead, the subjects must have resonated, or the tales would have served no function. The theme underpinning most medieval ghost tales is restlessness – inability to rest due to incomplete deeds. These restless dead died a bad death and could not attain eternal salvation.

The idea of dying a good death preoccupied society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The devastation of the Black Death, which reached its height between 1347 and 1349, evoked a consciousness of death not previously evident. This plague killed an estimated one-third of Europe’s population. The danger of contagion and speed of death meant bodies were disposed of quickly, often without ceremony. Agnolo di Turo gives a firsthand account:

…It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful thing. Indeed one who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed. And the victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath their armpits and in their groins, and fall over dead while talking. Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship.Agnolo di Turo, The Plague in Siena, trans. William M. Bowsky, The Black Death: A Turning Point?, 13

The account illustrates components of a bad death. People died alone, without rite, in mass unmarked graves. Inversely, a good death generally included:

• Presence of family: ensuring people could pray for the individual’s soul
• The Last Rites: confession, extreme unction, and viaticum (Communion) so the individual died blessed
• Funerary rites: enabling complete passage to the next world
• Burial and marked graves: consecrated ground for bodily ascension at the Last Judgement, marked graves for commemoration and prayer
• Testament: ensuring last wishes could be executed, including charitable donations for the salvation of the soul

The idea of dying well reached its fullest expression in the artes moriendi, manuals on the art of dying, in the early fifteenth century.

Medieval tales of the returned dead express societies’ anxieties about death and dying well. The restless dead have unfinished business, sometimes temporal – like Hellequin’s knight who needed his wife to return the fraudulently acquired mill – and sometimes spiritual, as in the fourteenth-century tale of Richard Rowantree. While on pilgrimage, Rowantree encountered a baby who was his own stillborn child, buried without baptism. He baptized the child, which then walked off. When he questioned his wife at home, the midwives confessed to burying the baby without proper rites. This tale underscores the importance of sacraments for eternal salvation, since without baptism the child could not be buried in consecrated ground. Other tales tell of the dead returning to be absolved of excommunication, or of unconfessed sins holding them in purgatorial suffering.

(Lotter, M., c. 1500)

Tales about the returned dead were used, in the Middle Ages:

Conclusion: Beliefs in Practice, Archaeological Evidence

Tales of the restless dead served an edifying and expressive function. But did medieval societies actually believe in revenants?

It can be difficult to discern the degree to which medieval societies subscribed to these beliefs. Tales of the restless dead could simply conform to literary tropes. But evidence from other sources illustrates practices aimed at preventing the wandering dead. The eleventh-century penitential of Burchard of Worms (c. 965-1025), the Corrector, warns against staking unbaptized infants’ corpses:

Have you done what some women do at the instigation of the devil? When any child has died without baptism, they take the corpse of the little one and place it in some secret place and transfix it with a stake, saying that if they do not do so they child would rise up and injure many? If you have done, or consented to, or believed this, you should do penance for two years on the appointed days.(Burchard of Worms, Corrector, as cited in Gordon 2019)

The Eyrbyggja Saga tells of Thorolf Half-Foot, who returned from the dead and wreaked havoc until his body was relocated to a headland surrounded by a wall. The Laxdoela Saga tells similarly of the exhumation and reburial of violent Hrapp.

Archaeological evidence of deviant burial practices corroborates these beliefs. Such practices – burials differing from normative customs – included liminal burials, decapitation, staking, weighting, ligation, and dismemberment.

• Stephen Gordon, “Dealing with the Undead in the Later Middle Ages,” inDealing with the Dead, ed. Thea Tomaini (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p.97-128.

This module examined the returned dead through three lenses: intellectual history, sociocultural history, and archaeology. An intellectual lens allowed us to see what people believed; a sociocultural lens revealed why they believed it; an archaeological lens showed how they practiced their beliefs. As Jean-Claude Schmitt has noted, “the dead had no other existence than that which the living gave them” (Schmitt, 224).

Which type of archaeological evidence best illustrates medieval beliefs in the returned dead?

Works Cited

Angelico, Fra. c. 1395-1455. “Meeting of St Francis and St Dominic.” Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Bowsky, William M., editor. 1971. The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc.

Gordon, Stephen. 2019. Supernatural Encounter: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050-1450. London: Routledge.

Joynes, Andrew. 2001. Medieval Ghost Stories. Rochester, New York: The Boydell Press.

Lochner, Stefan. c. 1400-1451. “The Last Judgement.” Wallraf-Richartz Museum.

Lotter, Melchior. c. 1500. “Ars moriendi.” Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 1998. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Module 6: Dragons

Steven Bednarski (History, University of Waterloo)

This module applies a historical lens to the topic of dragons. Historians divide evidence into two types: primary sources (anything left from the period being studied) and secondary sources (anything produced after the period, such as published works by later scholars).

6a. General Introduction and Argument

Dragons in the Middle Ages

There were no dragons in the Middle Ages and yet they were everywhere.

No monster is more linked in popular consciousness to the Middle Ages than the dragon. This owes as much to writers like J R R Tolkien and George R R Martin as to anything medieval people left us. But dragons played an important role in the universal mythology of the medieval world, across Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures. While these three religions disagreed on a great deal, when it came to dragons there was considerable consensus, along with some variation.

Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil

This unit argues, from an historical perspective, that certain massive cultural assumptions about the nature of the universe transcend space and time. Dragons represent the continuation of an ancient Near Eastern assumption of an eternal struggle between good and evil.

For the ancient Mesopotamians, this struggle was personified by the god Marduk battling Tiamat, a sea dragon and the first “Mother of Dragons,” whose monstrous offspring had poison in their veins. For the ancient Egyptians, it manifested in the sun god Ra battling Apep, the Serpent of the Nile and Lord of Chaos, born from Ra’s umbilical cord and represented as a large serpent or crocodile. This assumption was so powerful that even the shift to monotheism could not entirely shake it.

The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) maintained this tradition. For medieval Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the dragon represented:

• the forces of evil,
• the embodiment of chaos,
• the opponent to order,
• justice, and divinity.

A Window Through Which to Perceive Medieval Culture

Even though the three great religions disagreed about much, they shared a common cultural assumption about the nature of the cosmos. The study of medieval dragons helps us understand a basic assumption shared by most people of that time – a common, ancient, ideological currency that facilitated encounter and exchange and transcended ideology.

Everyone in the Middle Ages was likely to encounter a dragon at some point, if only in their imagination. The universality of the creature affords a unique window through which to perceive a general medieval culture.

Works Cited

There are no additional citations for this section.

6b. Dragons in Medieval Myth

The Ancient Tradition: Ancient Greece

The Greek writer Hesiod (c. 750-650 BCE) transmits the ancestry of the great wyrms of ancient mythology. In his Theogony, Hesiod lays out the origins of the world and its deities. His creation story is influenced by older eastern traditions, including the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which contains the legend of Tiamat the terrible goddess sea dragon. Hesiod thus incorporated a monstrous dragon who battled his Greek gods.

• Hesiod, Theogony, 270-336, in Daniel Ogden, Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford: OUP, 2013), pp. 13-14.

2) Of all the monstrous creatures named, in her death, only one gave life to winged horse who flew up to Zeus, king of the Greek gods, to bear his lightning. They are:

3) Which mythical Greek creature had the head of a lion, a goat, and a snake?

(Pollaiolo, c. 1475)

Zeus was not the only hero to battle a dragon. The most famous hero of the ancient Greek world, Heracles, performed twelve epic labours, the second of which was slaying the hydra of Lerna. Lerna was a supposed entrance to the underworld, and archaeological excavations in the 1950s confirmed it was inhabited since the Neolithic age.

The goddess Hera created the many-headed serpentine Hydra which attacked the countryside around Lerna. Heracles and his nephew Iolaus lured it out with flaming arrows. When Heracles killed one head, two more erupted from the stump. They worked together: Heracles removed heads with his sickle or club while Iolaus cauterized the wounds. The ninth and final immortal head was buried under a boulder. Heracles then dipped his arrows in the creature’s toxic blood.

The Greeks were not the first to have a hero subdue a dragon. In the Assyrian tradition, the god Ninurta slew a similar serpent. The god Marduk was accompanied by a sacred dragon servant, mushushshu, which he had previously subdued. As far back as the origins of western civilization, there was a strong common tradition of a hero subduing a dangerous, serpentine monster.

The hydra was far from the only dragon in Greek mythology. Ladon guarded golden apples in a tree; Ares deployed his dragon against Cadmus at Thebes – after slaying it, Cadmus planted its teeth and grew an army of bronze warriors. Ares eventually transformed Cadmus and his wife Harmonia into dragons. And Perseus flew over a serpentine monster before turning it to stone with Medusa’s head.

(Mattielli, c. 1678/1688-1748)

The Ancient Tradition: The Romans

(Jan van der Straet, c. 1596)

As heirs to the Greek tradition, the Romans reworked many tales and added their own. In 256 BCE, during the First Punic War, General Regulus encountered a monstrous serpent during the invasion of North Africa. The writer Aulus Gellius (c. 125-after 180 CE), drawing on Quintus Aelius Tubero’s first-century BCE Histories, tells us:

… in the first Punic war the consul Atilius Regulus, when encamped at the Bagradas river in Africa, fought a stubborn and fierce battle with a single serpent of extraordinary size, which had its lair in that region; that in a mighty struggle with the entire army the reptile was attacked for a long time with hurling engines and catapults; and that when it was finally killed, its skin, a hundred and twenty feet long, was sent to Rome.Gellius

Regulus and his troops slew the dragon, but the water nymphs of the nearby river cursed them for it. Even the sensible Romans could not resist adding dragons to their most important legends.

Other ancient Greco-Roman monsters incorporated draconic features: chimaeras (combinations of serpents, lions, and goats) and lamia (blending human female parts with serpents).

As classical historian Daniel Ogden has remarked, there is a symmetricity to all ancient Mediterranean dragon tales. They all involve a brave male hero (human, demigod, or god) battling a monstrous serpentine creature whose standard weapon is fire:

The dragon is above all a creature of fire, its fieriness being an imaginative extrapolation of the burning sensation caused by the natural viper’s venom. But it is not only the dragon’s venom that is fiery: so are its eyes and, as we have seen, its breath.Ogden 7

Judeo-Christian Traditions

The Book of Genesis, the start of both the Jewish Torah (the first books of the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible) and the Christian Bible, lays the foundation for wicked serpents who seek to undo humanity.

The First Book of the Bible and the Serpent

Genesis opens with two creation stories – the result of the historic union of divergent nomadic oral traditions that eventually fused into a single Jewish tradition.

In the first century, followers of Jesus of Nazareth, called Christians, translated their most sacred stories first from Aramaic, then into Greek, and eventually into Latin, the lingua franca of the Roman empire. By the fourth century, Christianity had spread far beyond Palestine, diverging permanently from its Jewish origins, except for the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Bible, held sacred by both faiths. This gave Christians and Jews a common mythological foundation recognized as essentially historic and factual.

In the year 383 CE, a saintly hermit named Jerome (c. 347-420) wrote to Pope Damasus (c. 305-384) explaining his revision of the older Latin translations of scripture:

You urge me to revise the old Latin version, and, as it were, to sit in judgment on the copies of the Scriptures which are now scattered throughout the whole world; and, inasmuch as they differ from one another, you would have me decide which of them agree with the Greek original. The labour is one of love …St. Jerome, n.d.

Two Creation Stories in Genesis

The first creation story – the “cosmic creation story” – presents God as an omnipotent being who creates the universe by speaking powerful words:

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram terra autem erat inanis et vacua et Tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux(In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: Be light made. And light was made.)Genesis 1:1-3

The abyss or “deep” is some form of primordial waters. The Hebrew word is Tehom, a cognate of the Akkadian tamtu which scholars equate to Tiamat. There is a linguistic basis to discern cultural transmission between the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Israelite creation story.

The second creation story (Gen. 2:5) is more human-centered. God fashions Adam from the earth and breathes into him the breath of life, imbuing him with a soul. God-the-gardener creates paradise, but forbids eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

(Unknown. c. 1350-1400)

God creates woman, Eve, from Adam’s rib. Then in Gen. 3, we meet the serpent, “more subtle than any of the beasts.” The serpent tells Eve her eyes will be opened and she shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Eve eats the forbidden fruit and gives it to Adam.

God curses the serpent to slither on the ground, creates lasting hatred between it and humanity’s children, and punishes Eve with pain in childbirth and Adam with labor. Most seriously, all three are cast out of paradise, forced to live and die in a harsh, imperfect world.

The Role of the Serpent in Genesis

According to Jewish and Christian creation stories, drawing on ancient Middle Eastern tropes, the serpent ruined god’s perfect plan by corrupting humanity. It was the:

• root of human unhappiness,
• the cause of all suffering,
• the original reason for death,
• representation of evil, and
• embodiment of forces that distance humans from god.

The Last Book of the Bible and Dragons

If Genesis laid the foundation for an association between evil and a “serpent,” the closing book triangulated the link with dragons.

The Apocalypse of John (or The Book of Revelation), unique to Christians and not part of Jewish scripture, prophesizes the End Times – a chaotic moment of global unravelling ushering in the end of human history and a new eternal age.

According to Rev. 12, at the end of history there will be a great sign: a pregnant woman dressed in the sun with the moon at her feet. Along with her will come another sign:

draco magnus rufus habens capita septem et cornua decem et in capitibus suis septem diademata et cauda eius trahebat tertiam partem stellarum caeli et misit eas in terram et draco stetit ante mulierem quae erat paritura ut cum peperisset filium eius devoraret(a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns and on his heads seven diadems and his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and cast them to earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth; that, when she should be delivered, he might devour her son.)Rev. 12:3 – 4

(Berry Apocalypse, c. 1415)

Chapter 20 tells of a great battle mirroring the war in heaven which cast Lucifer out with the rebellious angels. The archangel Michael will lead the heavenly host against the devil, clearly identified as a dragon – “the old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, he who had seduced the whole world.”

(Yolande de Soissons Psalter-Hours, c. 1350)

et vidi angelum descendentem de caelo habentem clavem abyssi et catenam magnam in manu sua et adprehendit draconem serpentem antiquum qui est diabolus et Satanas et ligavit eum per annos mille et misit eum in abyssum et clusit et signavit super illum ut non seducat amplius gentes donec consummentur mille anni post haec oportet illum solvi modico tempore.(And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.)Rev 20:1-3

The Serpent at Creation, the Dragon at the End

From the time Christian theologians assembled their Bible, the narrative was clear: there had been a war in heaven led by the devil resulting in rebellious angels being cast down.

At the creation of man: The devil appeared in paradise as a serpent and introduced evil.

At the end of time: This war will repeat itself and the old serpent, a great dragon, will battle the heavenly host who will vanquish it so paradise may be restored.

For Christian theologians, there was an ancient, enduring connection between the dragon and the source of all evil. For medieval Christians, dragons were the very embodiment of all that was impure.

The so-called Gospel of Bartholomew, an early Christian apocryphal text not included in the Bible, remained popular and circulated broadly. Jerome knew of it in the fourth century, and copies survive in Greek, Latin, and Slavonic from the fifth to the ninth centuries.

• Excerpt from the Questions of Bartholomew. Read section IV starting at 7 down to the end of 46.

2) According to this story, who is the first angel formed by God?

3) If Beliar was able, he tells Bartholomew he would like to …

Works Cited

Berry Apocalypse. France, Paris, ca. 1415. Morgan Library & Museum MS M.133 fol. 39v.

Book of Hours: Netherlands, S., 2nd quarter of the 15th century: Harley MS 2982, f. 97r.

Gellius, A. Cornelius. “Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights),” translated by William P. Thayer. Loeb Classical Library, 1927.

Gospel of Bartholomew from The Apocryphal New Testament, translated by M.R. James. Clarendon Press, 1924.

Jan van der Straet. Plate 25 in the Venationes Ferarum series. Cooper Hewitt Museum. c. 1596.

Jerome, St. Latin Vulgate Bible, Vulgate.org.

Mattielli, Lorenzo. Hercales and the Lernean Hydra. Hofburg Palace in Vienna.

Ogden, Daniel. Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Pollaiolo, Antonio del. Hercules and the Hydra. Uffizi Museum. c. 1475.

Unknown. c. 1350-1400. “Eve: tempted by Serpent” in Speculum humanae salvationis. The Morgan Library & Museum.

Yolande de Soissons. Psalter-Hours (Morgan Library, M.729, fol. 404v). c. 1350.

6c. The Battle of Good vs. Evil: Saintly Dragonslayers

Medieval Saints

For medieval Christians hoping for eternal life, the goal was to live as pure a life as possible. People who did this most successfully served as role models. Medieval Christians recognized the especially pure with the title saint, from the Latin sanctus meaning “holy.” The Catholic Church conferred the mantle of sainthood on noble individuals who then served as focal points for veneration.

(Hours of Henry VIII, France, c.1500)

Many medieval saints purportedly battled dragons. Among them: St. Theodore Tiro, St. Agapetus, St. James the Apostle, St. Martha, St. Peter, St. Dominic, St. Donatus, St. John the Evangelist, St. Silvester, St. Sebastian, St. Matthew, St. Saturnine, St. Simeon, and St. Quiriacus. Here we focus on the three most associated with dragons:

• St. Margaret,
• St. George, and
• St. Michael.

St. Margaret of Antioch

By the late Middle Ages, people throughout Christendom believed in a virgin girl who slew a dragon. Margaret of Antioch was quite possibly a derivation of another saint named Pelagia or of an older pagan goddess like Aphrodite / Venus.

Medieval people believed in a historical girl named Margaret (“pearl”) who lived under Roman Emperor Diocletian (r. 286-305), remembered for his brutal persecutions of Christians. Margaret’s father, a pagan priest in Antioch, sent her to the countryside to be nursed. Her Christian nurse baptized her, displeasing her father. When she spurned the advances of a local Roman official, he had her tortured. The devil visited her as a dragon and swallowed her whole. Margaret escaped by making the sign of the cross (or, in some versions, wielding a crucifix), and the dragon belched her up.

Margaret’s tale was recorded in the ninth century by Frankish Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus (c. 780-856). Recording the lives and miracles of holy people was a genre called Vita. The study of saints’ lives is known as hagiography. After the mid-thirteenth century, the most famous collection was the Legenda aurea or The Golden Legend, assembled by Jacobus (or James) de Voragine (1230-1298).

(Unknown. Portrait of Margaret of Antioch, c. 1500)

• The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints. Compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, 1275. Read the section “Here followeth the glorious Life and passion of the Blessed Virgin and Martyr S. Margaret.”

2) How did the imprisoned Margaret defend herself against the dragon? She …

3) Because she refused the provost’s advances, Margaret was …

Margaret was among the most famous medieval saints. In the early thirteenth century, the Catholic Church assigned her a Feast Day. During the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), Joan of Arc (1412-1431) claimed Margaret was one of three saintly guides who spoke to her. Margaret was so beloved that hundreds of English churches are still named for her, and she is still venerated by Roman Catholic, Anglican, and several Orthodox and Coptic Churches.

(Unknown. Book of Hours, Use of Bayeux, c. 1400-1425)

Because of her popularity, Margaret is one of the most artistically depicted saints. Christians across Europe recognized her by her iconography – the symbols depicted with a holy figure that identify them without words. She was very often depicted with the dragon she purportedly vanquished.

(Unknown. Miniature Margaret with Cross Staff, c. 1500)

(Unknown. Margaret in the Round, c. 1500)

(Unknown. Miniature of St. Margaret, c. 1500)

2) Margaret was believed to have burst from the belly of a dragon who had swallowed her and was, thus, invoked by…

3) What is boiling pitch and why was it being thrown on a naked Margaret?

St. George

According to Jacobus de Voragine, St. George was born a knight in Cappadocia. He travelled to the city of Silene, where townspeople lived near a stagnant pond with a dragon that terrorized them. The dragon “venomed the people with his breath” until they paid it tribute of sheep or virgins. When the king’s daughter drew the unlucky lot, the king begged his people to spare her. Dressed like a bride, she was sent to be eaten. George happened to pass by, saw her weeping, and asked what was wrong. When the dragon appeared, George charged and skewered it with his spear. He asked the princess for her girdle, which he used as a leash so she could lead the tamed dragon back to the city. George told the people that if they were baptized as Christians, he would slay the beast. They were, and he cut off the serpent’s head.

(Jacobus de Voragine, 1382)

Like many saints, Christians believe George was martyred by decapitation. George, or Hazrat Jurjays in Arabic, was so famous he appears in Muslim sources as a sort of prophet who opposed a wicked pagan king and was defended by angels. After his martyrdom, Allah destroyed the king’s city with fire. In some versions, George resurrects after each death. However, the dragon is conspicuously absent from Islamic versions.

George was instantly recognizable in iconography. In earlier images, he appears as a Roman soldier with a spear. During the Crusades his popularity increased throughout Europe, and the dragon became his most identified symbol. Almost invariably in the later Middle Ages, when an image depicted a soldier, a horse, a spear, a dragon, or some combination, it is George.

The Miracle of St. George and the Dragon (Unknown. The Miracle of St. George and the Dragon, c. 1500)

St. George and the Dragon (Master of Guillebert de Mets, c. 1450-1455)

St. George and the Dragon (Michel Colombe, 1508)

St. George (Unknown, 1475)

George’s legend extends back to the first 500 years of Christianity, with the oldest written fragments in Greek. He is still the patron saint of England, where his standard – a red cross on a white field – forms the heart of the Union Jack flag and appears on flags of former British colonies. George is also patron saint of Malta, Portugal, and the Spanish regions of Aragon and Catalonia, where his cross appears on the flag of Barcelona.

The St. George’s Cross (Anomie, 2011)

St. Michael the Archangel

If the Book of Revelation prophesizes that in the End Times a dragon representing Lucifer will be defeated by Michael and the heavenly host, medieval people understood this as a repetition of the battle which cast Lucifer out of heaven.

In medieval Catholic theology, Michael is one of the major angels, his name appearing twice in the “Old Testament” and twice in the “New Testament”:

The Book of Daniel, Chapter 10:13:

princeps autem regni Persarum restitit mihi viginti et uno diebus et ecce Michahel unus de principibus primis venit in adiutorium meum(But the prince of the kingdom of the Persians resisted me one and twenty days: and behold Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me.)Daniel 10:13

Daniel 12:1:

in tempore autem illo consurget Michahel princeps magnus qui stat pro filiis populi tui(But at that time shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people.)Daniel 12: 1

The Epistle of Jude, verse 9:

cum Michahel archangelus cum diabolo disputans altercaretur de Mosi corpore non est ausus iudicium inferre blasphemiae sed dixit imperet tibi Dominus(When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee.)Jude, v. 9

Revelation 12:7:

et factum est proelium in caelo Michahel et angeli eius proeliabantur cum dracone et draco pugnabat et angeli eius(And there was a great battle in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought, and his angels.)Rev 12:7

Based on these lines of scripture, medieval tradition bestowed upon Michael four duties:

• battling Satan (at the beginning and end of time),
• rescuing the souls of the dying from the devil,
• defending god’s people, and
• bringing the souls of the departed forward for judgement.

He is called the Archangel because he holds a position above all other angels (though Thomas Aquinas did not hold this view). Early in his cult, Michael was associated with healing and invoked in times of plague. He also became associated with sailors, and visitors still travel to Mont-Saint-Michel, the famous medieval abbey in Normandy.

(Rosser1954, 2019)

Distinguishing Michael from George

Michael is easy to distinguish from George, since Michael usually has angelic wings. Like George, Michael was almost always depicted slaying a dragon with a lance or sword. But Michael’s “dragon” is not always as draconic as George’s. In some traditions, medieval artisans emphasized that Michael’s dragon is the incarnation of the devil. Depending on place, time, genre, and artist, Michael’s “dragon” can appear like that of George or deliberately more demonic.

Consider thirteenth-century bishop’s croziers made in Limoges, France. A crozier is the staff used by bishops – a symbol that they are “shepherds” of their “flock,” originating from traditional shepherds’ staves. In these artifacts, the crook has been replaced with a stylized snake, and within the circle formed by the snake’s body St. Michael the Archangel stabs a distinctly draconic dragon.

• Crozier with St. Michael and the Dragon. Walters Art Museum. Limoges, c. 1225-1250.
• Head of a Crozier with St. Michael Slaying a Dragon. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Limoges, c. 1220-1230.
• Crozier with St. Michael Slaying the Dragon. Victoria & Albert Museum. Limoges, 13th century.
• Crozier Head: St. Michael and the Dragon. Detroit Institute of Art. Limoges, c. 1210-1225.

These examples suggest that thirteenth-century Limoges had workshops producing a specific type of crozier. In other genres too, Michael clearly stabs a reptilian dragon:

• Gold “angel” coin minted by Richard III. England, 1483-1485.
• Limestone statue of St. Michael. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Touraine, c. 1475.
• Carved ivory statuette of St. Michael. Victoria & Albert Museum. Netherlands or Spain, c. 1460-1490.
• Tempera panel, Archangel Michael Slaying the Dragon. Italian, Master of St. Verdiana, c. 1380-1420.

Michael is clearly associated in the medieval mind with dragons, but nowhere else is the dragon so directly linked with the embodiment of evil. Of all the saints who encountered dragons, the dragon represented with Michael most directly brings us back to the ancient struggle between order and chaos. Ironically, in the archangel we see the stripping away of Christianization and the return to ancient myth: Hercules killing the hydra, Marduk against Tiamat, Ra against Apep.

(Unknown, n.d.)

1) Where does the altarpiece depicting St. Michael come from?

2) How is this image part of a multimedia experience and why was that important in the Middle Ages?

They would have viewed the altarpiece while hearing the divine offices chanted, smelling burning incense, and seeing fabric, metal, and jewelry all around them in the church.

3) What is the story, at its most basic level, about?

Though we may no longer share medieval belief systems, at the most basic level we can relate to their human struggles. Just as Hollywood depicts the battle between good and evil, so did medieval myths.

Works Cited

Anomie. 2011. St. George’s Cross. Wikipedia.

Anonymous. The Taming of the Tarasque. The Morgan Library & Museum.

Jacobus de Voragine. c. 1382. Legenda Aurea, translated by Jean de Vignay, British Library Royal 19 B XVII.

Jerome, St. Latin Vulgate Bible, Vulgate.org.

Master of Guillebert de Mets. c. 1450-1455. St. George and the Dragon. The J. Paul Getty Museum.

Michel Colombe. St. George and the Dragon. 1508. The Louvre.

Rosser1954. 2019. Distant view of Mont Saint-Michel. Wikipedia.

Unknown. c. 1400-1425. Book of Hours. Use of Bayeux. Bodleian Library.

Unknown. c. 1500. Portrait of Margaret of Antioch. Princeton University Library.

Unknown. n.d. Medieval Pilgrim’s Badge. British Museum.

Unknown. c. 1475. Saint George and the Dragon. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Unknown. c. 1500. The Miracle of St. George and the Dragon. The British Museum.

6d. Comparing Cultures

Dragons in Judaism

(Peraldus, 1236)

Christianity inherited its anthropomorphic creation story in Genesis from Judaism, and from the start there was general consensus about the role of evil in paradise and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

More broadly, Jewish holy texts contain creatures which rabbinical scholars tend to translate as “dragons.” The Hebrew word connotes a dangerous monster with a poisonous bite (the same term used in Genesis 1:21 for great sea creatures brought into existence by Yahweh).

In Exodus 7:9, this term appears in relation to Moses’ staff transforming into a serpent. The Book of Isaiah mentions it in relation to sea creatures:

In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.Isaiah 27:1

Isaiah 14:29 mentions a fiery flying serpent. The Book of Numbers, Chapter 21:4, tells of another time Moses’ staff was associated with dragons:

And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died… And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.Num 21:4-9

The Book of Ezekiel, Chapter 29:3 tells of “the great dragon that lies in the midst of his rivers.”

So medieval Christians and Jews shared a rich textual tradition linked to their common sense of biblical history which involved dragons. It would not have been difficult for medieval Jews to understand the Christian notion of wicked dragons.

Dragons in Islam

If St. George increased in Christian popularity during the Crusades, and the Muslim world venerated him as a holy prophet, it seems a shame that Islam did not adopt his dragon slaying. But Islam was far from devoid of dragons. No other mythical creature was more represented in Islam than the dragon, in both sacred and mundane settings.

Islam grew up in regions that had dragons since the Bronze Age and, as it spread, encountered new forms closer to the undulating Chinese dragon known to the cultures of Mongolia.

For many years, Islamic scholarship focused on the wickedness dragons represented, paralleling Christian scholarship. More recently, Prof. Abbas Daneshvari has shown that dragons in Islam could represent both light AND darkness, good AND evil; dragon fire could be both hellfire and divine radiance.

(Unknown, c. 1650 – 1700)

As Dr. Sara Kuehn writes:

However, unlike in most of Christian culture where the overall image of the serpent or dragon is predominantly associated with its portrayal in the Bible as the epitome of evil and sin, the position of serpents and dragons in Islamic culture is ambiguous and can have benevolent as well as malevolent connotations. The serpent as symbol of evil does not exist in the Qur’an where it appears only once in the story of the staff of Musa (Moses) metamorphosed into a serpent (sūras 20, 20; and 79, 16). However, both serpents and dragons figure more frequently in Persian than in Arabic tradition.Kuehn, p. 6

In Arabic and Persian literature, dragons could be helpful, powerful, and friendly. Islam inherited the thoroughly evil Azhi Dahaka from Zoroastrianism, while the pre-Islamic poet Abid ibn al-Abras emphasized how a serpent saved Banu Asad after he gave it his last drops of water.

Despite the ambiguities, there was common ground with Christian traditions. The serpent is mentioned in the Qu’ran. According to canonical Islamic tradition, at creation the serpent was the fairest and strongest creature in paradise – like a camel with a rainbow-coloured tail. The devil (Iblis), prevented from entering paradise by angels, tricked the serpent and hid inside its mouth (hence the venom in serpents’ fangs). The devil found the forbidden fruit and brought it to Adam and Eve. The serpent’s punishment was the loss of its legs. (Kuehn 9)

So despite pre-Islamic traditions of positive dragons, Muslims also understood the Christian equation of serpents, dragons, and evil. Sharing a common scriptural tradition helped.

2) How does Islam portray serpents?

Works Cited

Daneshvari, Abbas. Of Serpents and Dragons in Islamic Art: An Iconographical Study. Costa Mesa, California, Mazda Publishers, 2011.

Hirsch, Emil G. “Dragon,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906.

Kuehn, Sara. The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art. Brill, 2011.

Jerome, St. Latin Vulgate Bible, Vulgate.org.

Unknown. c. 1650-1700. Manuscript of Zakariya al-Qazwini. Harvard Art Museums.

Peraldus. c. 1236. Theological miscellany. British Library, Harley 3244 fol. 65.

6e. Conclusion

Summary

You should by now have a good sense of how the ancient, transcendent concept – growing out of the East and spreading westward – of a cosmic struggle between the embodiment of good (Heracles, Ra, Marduk, St. George) and the embodiment of evil (the Hydra, Tiamat, Apep, dragons) infiltrated the medieval consciousness. Medieval Christians, along with their Jewish and Muslim neighbours, shared similar, sometimes almost identical, concepts that allowed them to participate in a common cosmology.

While it may not seem particularly relevant today that they all believed in evil dragons, it is. Dragons were part of their understanding of the universe and mankind’s role in creation. When Muslim and Jewish astronomers and doctors sought to advance scientific knowledge, this shared understanding helped Christian thinkers access diverse works and incorporate them. It is easier to absorb knowledge if it feels familiar. Dragons help illustrate this.

More on Dragons

There is much more we could do with dragons. This unit has not touched on their role in medieval magic or medicine. Richard Kieckhefer notes a medical scroll from c. 1100 advising the use of “herb dracontium, so called because its leaves resemble dragons [to] counteract snakebite and internal worms” (Magic in the Middle Ages, 13).

Medieval people had rich internal lives and wonderful imaginations, but they were no fools. They had the same intellectual capacity we do, merely lacking our cumulative knowledge. Consider what you might have made, in the Middle Ages, had you come upon a dinosaur fossil. A 2008 Stanford University exhibit, “Dragons Unearthed,” presented a 66-million-year-old dragon-like dinosaur called the Dracorex. Adrienne Mayor has argued that dragon tales may have been sparked by the discovery of dinosaur bones near the Himalayas.

(Harley MS 3244, c. 1236-1250)

Works Cited

Humanities at Stanford. “Dinosaurs and Dragons, Oh My!” Stanford Humanities Center, 2 Oct 2008.

Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 13.

Harley MS 3244. Dragon illustration in 13th century manuscript. c. 1236-1250. The British Museum.

Module 7: Summoned Spirits

David Porreca (Classical Studies, University of Waterloo)

7a. Introduction

Defining Magic

This module deals with a type of monster thought to exist on Earth solely through the active participation of an expert in the science of applied magic – a magical practitioner. This participation came in the form of rituals conducted at specifically appointed times, involving particular collections of ingredients manipulated in precise ways, all while chanting appropriate prayers. The objective was to call to Earth – to “summon” – immaterial, intelligent beings called “spirits,” in order to command them to act on behalf of the practitioner or their clients.

The module aims to convey the complexities involved in the practice of summoning spirits. To do so, we must begin by defining magic and situating it within the history of science, the history of ideas, and the history of religion.

The Sources

This module draws upon two specific Medieval written sources:

• The Picatrix, and
• The Munich Handbook

These preserve numerous examples of both specific instructions for summoning spirits, as well as broader theoretical discussions of the principles behind the workings of magic. These two books are introduced briefly in this section.

For the Picatrix, a three-digit reference is provided (e.g., Picatrix 3.5.2, p.145) corresponding to the book (3), chapter (5), paragraph number (2), and the page number (p.145) in the Attrell and Porreca translation. For the Munich Handbook, the ritual number in the published series and the page number in Kieckhefer’s edition are provided.

The Intellectual Framework

The conceptual principles underpinning how magic was thought to work draw their roots in standard philosophical models of the universe dating to Classical Antiquity, widely accepted throughout the Middle Ages. These were later supplemented by the theological concerns and worldviews of monotheistic faiths, particularly Christianity and Islam.

Summoned Spirits

With a good grounding in the background material, the module turns to specifics: defining summoning, and defining spirits. Only then are we ready to examine how the theories manifest concretely in the written sources, with the following questions in mind:

• What kinds of spirits are being summoned?
• For what purpose(s) is/are the spirit(s) being summoned?
• Is there a difference between summoning a spirit, and summoning the power of a spirit?
• Are there any commonalities between the various rituals that involve summoned spirits?

7b. Introduction to Magic

Defining Magic: General and Historical Perspectives

The “magic” discussed here has very little to do with parlour tricks or stage magic intended for entertainment. Although some form of prestidigitation has existed since time immemorial, what concerns us is more closely associated with the history of religions, the history of science, the history of ideas, and social history.

Magic is one of those terms that becomes increasingly difficult to define precisely the more closely one examines it. This is partly because for most of the history of Western culture, magic has been the activity against which mainstream culture has defined itself. In ancient Greek times, the term magoi (from which our term “magic” derives) referred to a class of Persian priests whose religious rituals were different from those of the Greeks, and therefore suspicious. Over time, any ritual activity conducted outside mainstream public and private cults fell under suspicion and was therefore defined as “magic.”

When monotheistic Christianity took over as the principal mode of religious expression in the final centuries of the Roman Empire, it redefined what was considered sacred, and re-categorized all polytheistic pagan religious practices as “magic” – either considered complete charlatanry or thought to operate through the intervention of demons. In fact, all pagan deities were summarily re-defined as demons, which explains early Christians’ zeal in destroying pagan temples and statuary, as well as successive waves of criminalizing pagan practices with increasingly harsh penalties.

In the modern world, the collective social enterprise known as “science” has largely taken on the norm-defining role that the Christian churches previously played. Yet magic remains one of the things that science uses to define itself: fundamentally, it’s not magic. According to modern scholar Wouter Hanegraaff, magic thus falls into a category he describes as Western culture’s “rejected knowledge” – practices that had at one point been accepted as normative but have since been rejected for various reasons. Examples of other practices falling under this heading include alchemy, astrology, phrenology, and eugenics.

Magic can be considered a manipulative strategy to influence something in the material world by supernatural (or “occult,” or hidden) means. Let’s unpack each component:

• A manipulative strategy: requires specific actions applied to physical objects, the process of which is usually described as a “ritual”; magic cannot be practiced passively
• To influence something: magic is goal-directed
• By supernatural means: processes of perceptible cause-and-effect do not apply; forces hidden to our senses are involved

Note that several other human activities overlap with portions of this definition. Every piece of technology qualifies as a goal-directed manipulative strategy, but technology lacks the supernatural aspect on which magic relies. Religion and its ceremonies involve manipulative strategies and the supernatural, but religion tends not to be goal-directed, since it is practiced out of faith for its own sake. A magical ritual is always conducted with a specific goal or objective in mind. Additionally, unlike many religious customs, magic tends to be a solitary pursuit (or sometimes involving a small group of associates), while religion tends to be a communal activity whose main rituals are conducted publicly.

Some Final General Comments About Magic

Since we are dealing with magical practices based on what was written down in surviving books, the individuals who wrote these books (as well as their intended audiences) were by definition literate. Therefore, everything here assumes those involved were from sufficiently elevated social classes to have learned to read and write. The corollary is that what we discuss here by definition excludes the widespread beliefs, practices, and superstitions of the lower classes who made up the majority of the European population throughout the Middle Ages.

7c. The Medieval Written Sources

Introduction to Magic Texts

Summoning spirits was one of the major components of the learned magic that was discussed and practiced by educated people (mostly men) during the Middle Ages. Since the Christians re-defined pagan gods as demons early on, and demons are (as we will see) one type of spirit, it should come as no surprise that the sorts of magic involving summoned spirits were considered especially troublesome to Church authorities.

The Need for Secrecy

The practice had to be kept secret for two reasons:

• The risk of harsh punishment by Church and legal authorities, and
• To keep practices considered extremely powerful from falling into the wrong hands.

Indeed, emphasis on the need for secrecy is a regularly recurring trope in both texts. Moreover, the goal-directed nature of magical practice did not always aim solely for anyone’s benefit, but instead sometimes directed harm at others, up to and including murder. A planetary spirit summoned for the sake of doing harm can be found in the Picatrix (3.7.26, p.169):

I ask you (Benethnays) that you pour into this individual your power and spirit with great fury and anger, that you swiftly transmit to him all these penalties because he deserves loss, misery, great pain, to be treated poorly by everyone around… (Picatrix, 3.7.26, p.169)

Magical texts from the Middle Ages are fairly scarce, and those regularly relying on summoned spirits are scarcer yet. The two texts used here were chosen for three reasons: their length provides an exceptional wealth of material; each contains numerous examples involving summoned spirits; and both have become accessible to modern readers only recently.

Picatrix

The Picatrix is a volume dedicated to the theory and practice of astral magic, which is ritual magic specifically focusing on harnessing the powers and properties of the heavens – planets, stars, constellations – as opposed to alchemy, for example, which focuses on the manipulation and transformation of physical matter.

The original version was written in Arabic during 954-959 by Maslama al-Qurtubi, who states he assembled no fewer than 224 different sources. It is a carefully curated compilation of materials he encountered during his travels in the Eastern Mediterranean during the 930s. The original Arabic title was Ghayat al-Hakim (The Goal of the Sage), accompanied by a sister volume on alchemy entitled Rutbat al-Hakim (The Rank of the Sage), which was never translated into any Western language and thus had no influence on European intellectual culture.

During the reign of King Alfonso X (“The Wise”) of Castile in Spain (r. 1252-1284), a team of scholars produced a Spanish translation in the 1250s, but only fragments survive. We have the complete text in a Latin translation produced from the Spanish. Substantial differences exist between the original Arabic and Latin versions; the translators apparently tailored their work for Western audiences, leaving out sections they thought would be distasteful or incomprehensible to their intended readership.

Despite internal evidence pointing to the Latin version being completed by 1300, the oldest manuscript dates to the late 1450s. No fewer than seventeen manuscripts were copied over the following two centuries, revealing widespread interest, yet the text never saw print – the Latin text was finally published only in 1986 – indicating its contents were considered sufficiently controversial that no one was willing to be formally associated with its distribution.

The Picatrix offers unevenly alternating sections of:

• Theory (discussions of how astral magic was thought to operate within the broader intellectual framework), and
• Practice (magical rituals described in very concrete terms, often reminiscent of cooking recipes)

The theoretical passages were most substantially reduced between the Arabic and Latin versions, suggesting the practical side was of greatest interest to Latin audiences. The Picatrix presents magic as the culmination of human science: practitioners needed to be thoroughly versed in every branch of human knowledge in order to perform their rituals correctly, with the right ingredients, at the right times.

Munich Handbook

The Munich Handbook survives in a single manuscript held in Munich and presents forty-seven sections, most of them detailed recipe-like instructions for magical rituals. The Latin text was compiled from numerous sources during the middle decades of the fifteenth century – precisely the timeframe when the Picatrix became widely known. It was compiled by a Bavarian cleric of lower rank whose precise identity remains unknown.

7d. Intellectual Frameworks

An Introduction to Intellectual Frameworks

Fundamental questions underpin the intellectual framework: What is the world around us made of? Why does it behave the way it does? How did it come to be? Where does our planet fit within the whole? How and where do we humans fit within the above as beings both material and sentient?

The Intellectual Framework of Scientific Consensus

Today, broadly speaking, there is a widely shared scientific consensus featuring an internally consistent theoretical system – one in which there are as few clashes between observed reality and what one would expect through theory, and in which the theory itself aims to have as few internal contradictions as possible. Internal consistency enables a theoretical system to be both broad in its explanatory power (explaining many different phenomena) and resilient in adapting to contradictory evidence.

The modern scientific consensus, built around the scientific method, has a theory of causation that assumes a physical, observable, and explainable cause for the existence of and/or change in any given thing. The Medieval magical practitioner’s intellectual framework was radically different in many important ways, yet both frameworks share a remarkable level of internal consistency.

Intellectual Framework: Cosmology

The modern cosmological model holds that Earth orbits the Sun, other planets similarly orbit at various distances, the Moon orbits Earth, and other stars appear as distant points of light due to their great distance. This model had not been conceived when the Picatrix and Munich Handbook were composed. Instead, their cosmology drew partly from scientific theories elaborated during Greco-Roman antiquity and partly from Christian theology.

Ancient Model of the Universe

Ancient scientists (principally Aristotle [384-322 BC] and Claudius Ptolemy [c. 100-c. 170]) posited an Earth-centred cosmos, with other planets occupying a series of concentric, transparent spheres along which they traveled in predictable, circular paths around the Earth: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Beyond the planets was the firmament: the sphere of fixed stars providing the stable backdrop for observing planetary motions.

A fundamental distinction was drawn between the celestial realm (from the Moon upward) and the terrestrial or material realm (everything below the Moon), based upon the types of motion observed: irregular, chaotic motion below, and regular, predictable motion in the heavens. Below the Moon, everything was thought to be composed of varying mixtures of the four basic elements – earth, air, fire, and water – each characterized by a pair of properties: temperature and moisture (earth: cold and dry; water: cold and wet; fire: hot and dry; air: hot and wet). The variety of material objects resulted from the infinitely variable range of possible combinations of these elements. One fundamental property of matter is that these combinations can change, accounting for the growth and decay observed in the world.

The celestial realm, with its regular and predictable motions, was considered more perfect precisely because of its predictability. The brighter stars created patterns identified with culturally significant figures called constellations. The more important constellations – those through which planets traveled – became the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Based on the principle of “As above, so below,” each constellation and planet was attributed properties and areas of influence over earthly affairs. The fact that distant celestial objects could have such influence via invisible correspondences was justified by observation: the Moon and Sun clearly show invisible influence through the tides, so why wouldn’t such influence extend to other earthly affairs?

The Role of Analogy in Ancient Cosmology

Modern notions of causality do not apply in this framework. Instead, links and correspondences were justified by analogy. Analogical modes of thinking meant that because two things resemble each other, they must be linked in some way. The most obvious example involves the planet Mars, which appears red in the sky. Since blood is also red, Mars governs the shedding of blood, and by extension warfare, anger, aggression, and conflict. Equivalent governances were attached to each planet and constellation.

The Picatrix expresses this notion of connectedness (4.5.11, p.244): “It is said in the books of the wise that the binding of spirits with harmonies and appropriate substances consists primarily in love.” The “love” here means a sense of natural attraction of like to like – similar things come together due to natural affinities. The magical practitioner, however, is aware of the hidden natural connections uniting things that seem vastly different on the surface (e.g., links connecting planets to specific animals to specific plants to specific gemstones).

Christian Adaptations to the Cosmological Framework

In the infinite space beyond the sphere of fixed stars resided angels, the souls of the blessed (i.e., the saints), and God. The great distance separating the material world from the heavenly realm was not merely physical but also qualitative and moral. The farther from that infinite space one is:

• The farther from God,
• The more corruptible,
• The denser,
• The less perfect, and
• The less morally good.

The universe was Earth-centred physically, but the physical world was precisely the one that mattered least conceptually – a messy, constantly changing and imperfect realm almost as far as can be from the infinite perfect changeless goodness of God. The only place farther from God than the material world is the space beneath our feet, and that is where Christians placed hell in this framework.

Like God, the firmament of fixed stars is basically changeless. Moving outward from God but inward through each planet, each moves more quickly until the Moon, which manifests the greatest change of any celestial object and is also the farthest from God. Distance from God involved not only motion but also physical density and resistance to light. Each of the four elements had its own “home” or proper place, stacked in order of increasing density from the sphere of the Moon downward: fire (the most “rarefied” or least dense) came first, then air, water, then earth. Combined with the principle whereby any sub-part of an element seeks its “home” as default natural behavior, the model explains why fire seems to want to rise, why rain falls, why water flows downward toward oceans, and why solid objects fall.

This model of physical density interacting with light extended into the theological and moral realms. Fire, the least dense element, is considered most like God: it is itself an emitter of light and seeks to extend itself into combustible materials, just as the word of God spreads among those ready to receive it. Air allows light through unhindered; water does so with resistance; earth is so far from God that even physical light cannot penetrate it. When this model is extended morally, hell – the absolute farthest spot from God both physically and morally – is placed at the centre of the Earth.

The spirits summoned in the Picatrix and Munich Handbook are generally thought to be summoned from beyond the firmament.

The Intellectual Framework: Neoplatonic Hierarchy of Being

Another component of the intellectual framework was the hierarchy of being (or “great chain of being”) deduced from the writings of Plato (428/27-348/47 BC) and elaborated by later intellectual successors such as Plotinus (c. 204/5-270), Porphyry (c. 234-c. 305), Iamblichus (c. 245-c. 325), and Proclus (412-485). This hierarchy ranks everything in the universe according to the type of soul it was thought to have, and the type of motion of which it was capable. The Latin word for soul, anima, is the source of “animate” – capable of movement. Types of soul and types of motion amount to the same thing in this scheme.

At the bottom is inert matter (inanimate, soulless), such as rocks and water – things that don’t move unless something else moves them. Above that is the vegetable world, since plants have the capacity to move through growth, possessing a vegetable soul. Above them are animals, who not only grow but can move themselves about by their own means (legs, fins, wings), possessing an animal soul. Above animals are people, who grow, move around, and also can reason: humans thus have a rational soul in addition to our animal and vegetable souls. Our rational soul has a notionally infinite range – we can project our minds to anywhere in space or time via imagination – but our bodies hinder us from actually engaging in such travels.

Humans are the only beings with simultaneously a rational soul and a physical body, making our position unique. Above humans are disembodied, rational souls – angels, demons, and spirits. Humans are the only beings who can willfully transcend their hierarchical position: by cultivating our rational souls and rejecting bodily impulses, we become more like angels. Above the angels and demons is God, at the top through uniqueness, indivisibility, perfection, infinity, goodness, and power. Each of these properties becomes less present the farther down the hierarchy one looks.

Each main layer could be subdivided by the same principles: birds fly and are therefore superior to other animals; trees are superior to shrubs, which are superior to grasses. Applied to humans, the hierarchy reinforced notions of social and racial hierarchy, with Church figureheads poised naturally (from their perspective) at the top.

The Hierarchy of Being and Magic

Just as analogical thinking fueled notions about celestial influences, analogical thinking also forms the basis of the knowledge practitioners needed to master. The hidden (i.e., “occult”) vertical linkages between layers of the hierarchy were the magician’s special concern. Each ritual had its own objective, and that objective determined what ingredients to use in combination with which prayers, manipulations, and which angels, demons, or spirits to call upon. In the hierarchy conceived as a pyramid, one could trace a vertical line connecting necessary components from each layer. A ritual for success in conflict might require some form of red or hard stone, a hot plant, blood of a fierce animal (e.g., a lion), and prayers to Mars, conducted when Mars was appropriately positioned relative to the Zodiac.

Importance of Gems and Crystals

The hierarchy even explains the particular importance of gems and crystals to practitioners. Their bright colours and ability to transmit light (and therefore divine emanation) made them stand out. Crucially, crystals grow – the only inert matter to do so – and were therefore thought to possess a basic form of soul, making them more potent for magical operations.

The Notion of Occult Links and Natural Affinities

The notion of hidden links and natural affinity between things is repeatedly observable through magnets: they cling to ferrous materials but not others, and when placed at the tip of a floating board, point toward the Earth’s magnetic poles. Such phenomena served to confirm and reinforce belief in the intellectual framework’s internal consistency.

The Planets as Rational Souls and the 5th Element

The regularity and predictability of planetary motion was thought to occur because those planets were themselves rational souls. The material world of the four elements was thought to be inanimate – it had no soul. Its seemingly random motions (storms, volcanoes, earthquakes) contrasted with the predictable behavior of ensouled things. The even more predictable motion of celestial objects could only result from rational souls untroubled by a material existence attached to the four elements. They were thought to be made of a fifth element – the “quintessence” – immaterial, shining by its own light, and existing only beyond the sphere of the Moon.

It is important to note that the model described above is a simplified synthesis of notions never described so succinctly in any ancient or medieval source. The Picatrix itself contains three separate descriptions of a “hierarchy of being,” none of which are identical at the level of detail.

Intellectual Framework: Al-Kindi’s Theory of Rays

The mechanisms whereby the celestial realm could project its influences down onto the material world were most succinctly explained by Al-Kindi (c. 801-c. 873), a Baghdad-based Arab author whose principal treatise on the topic, entitled On Rays (De radiis), survives only in Latin translation. He explains that rays emanate outward constantly from every object in the universe and reflect the nature of their source object.

These rays share all the physical properties that apply to light:

• Spherical propagation from a source,
• Immateriality,
• Diffusion of intensity in proportion to distance from its source,
• Always travels predictably in straight lines.

When extended by Christian thinkers (such as Robert Grosseteste, c. 1175-1253, who provided the most succinct treatment in his treatise On Light [De luce]) to apply to God, Al-Kindi’s theory combined with the idea that all creation is an emanation from God to produce a cosmology and theory of physics fully compatible with biblical theology. Since God inhabits the infinite space beyond the fixed stars, divine emanations appear to move downward toward us. Since light was thought to share its physical behavior with the divine emanation, the result of creation would logically see things most like God positioned close to him – explaining the placement of disembodied rational souls like angels closest to God, the planets in the heavens, and even the elements in the sublunar realm.

Animal Sacrifice and Suffumigations

Al-Kindi’s theory also explains the frequent need for animal sacrifice as part of magical rituals. Ritually slaying an animal severed the link between that creature’s body and soul, producing a sort of invisible explosion of rays bearing the essence and inherent properties of that animal in a concentrated burst. This explosion, when conducted at the astrologically appropriate moment and accompanied by the corresponding prayers, gestures, actions, ingredients, and suffumigations (specially concocted blends of incense made of herbs, resins, congealed liquids, and/or animal parts – the resulting smoke being the “suffumigation” – all of which have analogical links that collectively amplify effectiveness), harnesses the combined influences to produce the desired effect. Knowledge of these combinations – representable as vertical lines through the hierarchy of being – was the magical practitioner’s claimed specialty.

7e. Spirits and Summoning

Defining Spirits

The spirits in these magical texts are disembodied, rational souls. Due to the very different origins of the two texts, the spirits are treated somewhat differently in each.

In particular, Arab theorists such as Abu Ma’shar (787-886) proposed that all celestial objects (planets and stars) are:

• Conscious,
• Spiritual (non-material),
• Living beings who are the agency behind stellar and planetary influences on the world below, and
• Have their own specific term in Arabic: “ruhaniyyat” (spiritual powers).

It is these beings whom the magical practitioner attempts to convince, through appropriately conducted ritual with correctly corresponding ingredients, to invest their powers in a talisman or in the results of the ritual.

Spirits that are Excluded

Some spirits are explicitly excluded here. Spirits that show up uninvited (e.g., ghosts) are the subject of a different unit, and spirits associated with specific natural places (e.g., faeries) are likewise excluded. However, the Picatrix (4.7.23, p.255) brings together in one place the concerns of several course units:

If you gaze into that [ritually prepared] mirror and guard it well, know that through it you will bring together men, winds, spirits, demons, the living, and the dead. All shall be obedient to you and heed your command. (Picatrix, 4.7.23, p.255)

Defining Summoning

This section adopts a fairly restricted definition of “summoning” a spirit:

• The spirit must meet the definition above;
• The spirit must be ritually called to the presence (physical or mental) of the practitioner or someone else involved in the ritual;
• There must be some defined purpose for summoning.

Not all magical practices require an entity’s immediate presence. In many cases, merely invoking a supernatural entity’s name is sufficient to harness its power without requiring its actual presence. This module considers only instances where spirits are present and contribute somehow to the ritual.

Summoned Spirits in the Munich Handbook

Of the forty-seven subdivisions in the text, thirteen feature conjurations that bring the spirit(s) into physical presence of the operator or the target(s). In eight others, spirits do not manifest physically but rather only in reflective surfaces such as mirrors or swords (for divination), or become visible by candlelight in an anointed fingernail of a child medium, or on a polished ram’s shoulder blade bone. There are also singular instances of a ritual for constraining a spirit and one providing generic preparation for conjuring spirits.

Excerpts from twelve of the thirteen rituals involving spirits appear in Kieckhefer’s edition, showing the nature of the spirits, how they are conjured, for what purpose, and how they interact with the operator. The rituals include purposes such as gaining knowledge of the seven liberal arts, arousing love or hatred, obtaining a banquet, castle, or horse, resuscitating the dead, achieving invisibility, constraining entities, revelation through mirrors, obtaining information about theft via gazing into a fingernail, and discovering hidden treasure in sleep.

Summoned Spirits in the Picatrix

Specific passages from the Picatrix concerned with summoning spirits divide into three sub-sections: the background as expressed in the text, the difficulties and hazards, and the prayers and names of planetary spirits.

Background as Expressed in the Picatrix

The Picatrix defines magic as a science in which “the spirit and all the senses are engaged throughout the whole process” to produce miracles (1.2.1, p.41). It presents magic as operating from “spirit to spirit,” making similar what is not similar by essence. Working with images involves “spirit in matter,” and alchemical work involves “matter in matter.” “Talismans” (literally “force-bearers”) are images built with mathematical proportions and celestial effects, composed from appropriate substances and fortified by suffumigations that attract specific spirits to particular images.

The text traces magic’s origins to the sage Caraphzebiz, to whom spirits first appeared, unveiling a “Perfect Nature” in regard to science and causing him to understand nature’s secrets. The spirit instructed: “Hold me with you, but reveal me to no one except to those who invoke me and sacrifice in my name” (3.6.3, p.152). Between Caraphzebiz and a second sage named Amenus, 1,260 years passed. Amenus warned that any sage wishing to perform magical rituals must cut himself off from all inner anxieties and every other body of knowledge.

Multiple passages explain how practitioners seek the powers of planetary spirits to join their figures. Images must be fashioned from materials at the hours and minutes naturally appropriate to the desired effect. The practitioner must align the colour of the image’s surface, incense, clothing (of both image and operator), suffumigations, and even diet and humoral complexion with the chosen planet (3.5.5, pp.147-149).

Ancient sages preparing for magical work fasted for forty days, beginning in the first hour of Sunday. They diminished food intake daily until the fortieth day, eating one fortieth part of the first day’s portion. Through this process, they discovered “a subtlety and sharpness of mind in their spirit,” understood everything they wished, and “the spirits of the stars were obedient to them” (2.12.53, p.127).

The process required comprehensive astrological knowledge: all figures on the eighth sphere, motions of all spheres, the twelve signs with their degrees and natures, qualities of each sign and their implications, the seven planets and the Head and Tail of the Dragon, their terrestrial meanings, and all other astrological fundamentals (1.2.5, p.43).

When correctly performed, suffumigation smoke reaches the sphere of the signs in a straight line, and “the planetary spirit should be harnessed, and its power should descend through its own rays down to the Earth into the ritual. Then the thing sought will be fulfilled” (3.5.5, p.149). Indian sages used compound suffumigations to “attract the spirits of the planets and make them enter whatever they wished” (4.6.1, p.245). Detailed recipes follow, such as the suffumigation of Saturn: 100 oz. each of mandrake fruits and dried olive leaves; 10 oz. each of black myrobalan seeds and dried black chickpeas; 30 oz. each of black crow’s brains and dried crane brains; 40 oz. each of pig blood and dried monkey blood, to be ground, blended, and formed into tablets while operating with the spiritual power of Saturn (4.6.2, p.245).

Difficulties, Hazards and Precautions

The Picatrix repeatedly warns of secrecy and danger. Magical rituals “must be hidden from humankind and the light of day” and not performed where the Sun might enter. No one should know of these rituals “unless he be faithful in his friendship and persuaded in the work” (1.5.36, p.60). The ancient sages had no intrinsic knowledge about spirits and came to understand them “only through great difficulty, study, and toil,” achieved “first in quietude, removed from all anxiety” (2.11.1, p.115).

There are mortal dangers: “there are names of spirits that if one were to invoke and draw them down, their powers in their respective hour would kill the invoker unless he was wise and well-instructed in the nature of that spirit” (1.5.37, p.61). Spirits sometimes “attack those working on the aforesaid stones by cursing their natures.” A complex medicinal remedy involving human blood, sweet almond oil, rabbit’s marrow, and donkey urine is prescribed for those afflicted, to be administered daily for nine days on an empty stomach, after which “the seven evil planetary spirits… will be driven from them” (3.10.6, pp.192-193).

Similarly, if the operator does not follow the procedures precisely with suffumigations, “the ritual will be ruined – know that destruction will come to the operator” (4.6.9, p.246). A protective compound guards against harm: made from scorpion, white dog, peacock, quail, sparrow, and hawk brains, hedgehog blood, donkey and hoopoe brain, combined with sandalwood, saffron, cinnamon, spikenard, pine resin, amber, ammoniac, frankincense, nutmeg, camphor, and mandrake, mixed with moringa oil. Seven round pills are dried in shade and stored in a box made from seven planetary metals “so that the spirits of the planets abide in them continuously.” The ancient sages protected themselves with this mixture, called “an utmost and very useful secret” (4.6.12, pp.247-248).

Prayers and Names of Planetary Spirits

A detailed example describes how to speak with Saturn: wait until Saturn enters a favorable position (Libra, Aquarius, or Capricorn), dress entirely in black “with a black cape tailored in the manner of a professor,” wear black shoes, go to a remote place, walk “with a humble will, in the fashion of a Jew, for Saturn was the lord of their Sabbath,” carry an iron ring and iron censer, and burn a specific suffumigation including opium, storax, saffron, seed of laurel, carob, wormwood, lanolin, colocynth, and the head of a black cat, ground and mixed with the urine of a black she-goat. Then face wherever Saturn stands and recite a lengthy prayer addressing Saturn as “lord on high,” “cold and dry, dark, author of good, honest in your friendship, true in your promises,” and requesting the desired outcome. “Know that your request will be fulfilled with effect” (3.7.16, pp.158-159).

Each planet has a principal spirit whose name contains and governs subordinate spirit names. Saturn’s spirit, called Redimez, binds all compound and separate names: Toz (above), Corez (below), Deytyz (right), Deriuz (left), Talyz (front), and Daruz (rear), all joined in the name Tahaytuc (3.9.1, p.184). These spirits’ powers affect the climes and generative things; they “give, take away, and divert” and “have bodies by which they are covered and made physical.” In their own climes, each governs individuals “into whom flow their powers and spirits” (3.9.8-10, p.185).

Specific rituals describe how spirits manifest in strikingly different ways. In a Jupiter ritual, after repeating prayers, “the spirits will come in beautiful forms, dressed in ornate clothes. They will undertake your petition, whatever it was. They will help you in knowledge and understanding.” In a Mars ritual, after proper sacrifice and suffumigation, one speaks: “O spirits of Mars, this is your sacrifice! Come, and smell this suffumigation, and make what you will from that sacrifice and those offerings.” At that moment, “a red spirit will descend like a tongue of flame” and consume some offerings (3.9.12, p.186). A Moon ritual in Capricorn involves covering a small house with odoriferous branches for seven days, suffumigating daily with aloewood and incense, then entering dressed in red, uncovering the house, speaking a ritual formula, and walking around the house seventy times. Upon re-entering, “you will find a seated man to whom you should say: ‘I conjure you by the beautiful and luminous Moon, ornate and honoured, so that you may speak to me’” (4.2.12, pp.228-229).

Many suffumigation ingredients are genuinely dangerous, combining psychoactive and poisonous substances – a much-needed warning against trying any formulas.

Module 8: Demons: Dante’s Inferno

Gabriel Niccoli (French and Italian Studies, University of Waterloo)

This module, composed by a literary comparatist, provides a comparative analysis of various commentaries (Italian and English) on Dante’s poem, The Divine Comedy, with particular attention to the Cantos describing demonic monsters. The comparatist not only summarizes various sources and annotations but adds his own textual interpretation. More specifically, the module explores how the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) presents the nature and consequence of sin through the description of monsters in his Divine Comedy, likely begun around 1295 and revised up to his death. The focus is specifically on the Inferno.

8a. Introduction to Dante’s Inferno

Introduction to Dante’s Demonic Monsters

Dante and his Divine Comedy

As with his other major works (in Latin or Italian), Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), through his Comedy’s plots, thoughts, and characters, provides us with an accurate idea of the European forma mentis (mental framework or habit) of his times. His strong engagement in Florentine politics (Florence was an independent city state or republic), his political rivalries that caused lifelong exile, his ideal world order, his love for Beatrice (who becomes a saint and his guide through most of Paradiso), his courageous attempt to reform the Church, his profound Christian faith, and his desire to express them all in a brand new language (Italian) – these were the issues that fuelled his life and imagination.

Fusion of Classics with Christianity

Masterfully able to synthesize classical learning with Christian teachings, and leaning on major literary figures of the classical and Christian eras, Dante taught the medieval world a novel way of thinking about human life, nature, and meaning. The nature of sin and the reason why we are so attracted to it engenders the structure of hell and the creation of demonic monsters we must learn to combat if we are not to be vanquished by their brutal violence. After all, Dante tells us, it is our choices on earth that will eventually place us either in blessedness or eternal damnation. Journeying through Inferno is for Dante (and for us) perhaps the best way to learn how to properly navigate our present life and make proper, reasoned choices.

Dante places as guardians of his medieval hell a series of important, often majestic classical characters drawn from pagan mythology but transformed into monstrous demons by the poet’s medieval symbolism. Classical tradition and literature offered numerous guardians of the pre-Christian underworld, legendary figures met by Homer’s Ulysses and Virgil’s Aeneas. Often departing from classical tradition and drawing heavily on Christian medieval thought, Dante morphs such figures into monstrous demons, subjecting them to the poetic structure of his Inferno and the infernal law of Contrappasso (discussed in the section on Cerberus). These Dantean guardians’ deformed and bestial monstrosity signals the violently degenerative and deathly effects of sin on our sense of humanity.

The Devil in Medieval Imagery and Reality

In medieval religiosity, the personification of evil – the devil – plays a role of fundamental importance. People’s supreme terror of the devil was nothing short of an obsession in the Italian Middle Ages, a terror visible in innumerable paintings and sculptures occupying religious and urban spaces, which demonstrate vividly the dangers and horrors of eternal damnation with bestial demons tormenting the living and punishing the dead. Dante’s contemporaries believed demons operated cunningly in their midst, on earth, always battling against good to win more souls for Hell. Dante drew freely from such popular beliefs, inserting them into the context of medieval theology. From the Book of Revelation and abundant fire-and-brimstone sermons, every medieval man, woman, and child knew of the great battle in Heaven between God and the rebel angels headed by Lucifer, or Satan. The quintessential battle of good against evil ends with Satan being cast from Heaven and hitting the Earth with such force that he encases himself forever at the centre of the earth – the farthest point from God in Dante’s medieval cosmology. The hierarchy of demons Satan mutely and bestially rules for eternity forms some of his most beast-like guardian monsters.

8b. Charon

Introduction to the Demonic Ferryman

Canto 3, vv. 67-99

In Canto 3 (vv. 67-99), having crossed the gates of Hell with their cryptically coded language telling us to lose all hope, we meet Charon, the first hellish monster – the demonic ferryman whose infernal and eternal chore is to ferry the naked damned souls stranded on the shores of the classical river Acheron to the other side, into Hell. Acheron is the first of the four classically anointed rivers Dante encounters in Inferno. This Canto, described by some commentators as perhaps the most Virgilian, forms the Antinferno, the antechamber to the nightmarish sights and sounds ahead.

This grim and violent monster, this spectral ferryman of the river of death, makes his horrific entrance as a menacing old man shouting in anger:

Woe to you, wicked souls! (v 23)

Anger, as we shall see throughout Inferno, will be one of the essential elements of both the monstrous guardians and the sinners. Anger and infernal fury, blasphemy, and inarticulate violence – these will be the major attributes defining both the monstrous demonic guardians and the damned souls in their custody.

Dante’s Monsters Reveal about Medieval Italy

Dante’s description of the monster ferryman, as with the other demonic monsters throughout Hell, caters to the artistic and popular culture of the strongly Catholic and Church-dominated world of Medieval Italy. Otherwise imposing figures of the pagan world are degraded by our 14th-century poet to aggrandize the new world order of Christendom. Charon, taken from the well-read classics (Dante relies heavily on Virgil’s Aeneid), becomes both a filthy monster and a demon – in keeping with the Christian belief from early Church beginnings that gods and prominent figures of the pagan world were really demons leading humanity astray. Virgil himself, in the very first canto of Inferno, regrets having lived under false and lying gods.

Already with this very first monster guardian we sense the monumental violence, the furious brutality, and the desperate vitality that will characterize the other infernal monster demons: Minos, Cerberus, Plutus, Phlegyas, Geryon, and the ultimate and greatest monster sinner, Satan (also called Lucifer).

8c. Minos

Infernal Judge

Canto 5, vv. 1-23

In Canto 5 (vv. 1-23), as Dante and Virgil descend to the second circle of Hell (the lustful), we have the first indication that the Inferno is funnel-shaped and that torments and darkness increase with each descending circle. The monster Minos is characterized more by his horrendous “dreadful snarls” and the wrapping and turning of his tail than by physical description. This monstrous guardian demon is an angry beast yet a strange mix of majestic and grotesque elements – all snarl and tail, his tools of judgment. This infernal judge’s inflexible and eternal condemnations still emanate from above: his anger is an infernal expression of God’s will.

Classical Sources

According to Greek and Roman legends, Minos was the son of the great god Zeus and king of Crete. He became one of the major judges of the underworld in classical mythology and literature. Dante finds him best exemplified in Virgil’s Aeneid (Book VI) and, while attempting to maintain the character’s monumentality, goes further by adding a bestial and furious rapidity typical of the geography of his Medieval Christian Hell but lacking in the classical underworld (whether Tartarus or Hades). This rapidity perversely parallels the damned souls’ instant confession:

They tell; they hear – and down they all are cast. (v 14)

Diabolical Guardians

These demonic guardians also give proof of their diabolical intents and deeds by trying to trick the pilgrim, first by attempting to frighten him with their terrifying appearance and angry yelling. Minos tries to dissuade Dante from trusting Virgil as proper guide, attempting to place seeds of doubt in the pilgrim’s mind about whether classical literature is properly equipped to understand the nature of sin. Virgil, the voice of classical reason, prevails over the irrational beast. Notably (vv 19-20), Minos also alludes in a satanical manner to biblical passages, specifically Matthew 7:13:

Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. (Matt. 7.13)

These are examples of satanic verses, perversions of Christ’s teachings about the dire consequences of sinful life. This type of linguistic deviance is the monster’s food.

8d. Cerberus

The Three-Headed Dog

Canto 6, vv. 12-32

In Canto 6 (vv. 12-32), having descended to the third circle of Hell (the gluttons), Dante and Virgil come face to face with one of the most grotesque infernal guardians: a bizarre mixture of beast and man in the monstrous body of a three-headed dog. Flaming eyes and a greasy beard soiled by excessive eating give a premonition of the cannibalistic motifs found in the lowest region of Hell and best exemplified by Satan himself.

Classical and Biblical Sources

The three-headed dog of Greek mythology, Cerberus, is the guardian of the entrance to the classical underworld of Hades. Dante draws freely from the Aeneid (Book VI) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses IV. Cerberus’s three mouths are always ready to fill the bottomless pit of his belly, and his grotesquely clawed hands grab his infernal prey, tearing them eternally to pieces. He is a monster of voracity guarding voracious souls sloshing about in filthy mud.

The Infernal Law of Contrappasso

Here the law of contrapasso (a perversely fitting punishment for a soul’s sin) is easily visible: the damned who lived and devoured gluttonously like beasts are condemned to be eternally torn to pieces, flayed and quartered, by the resident devils and guardian monster. As Sinclair comments in his prose translation:

The tearing of the spirits by Cerberus may well express the miseries, continued and magnified in eternity, which are the normal consequences of gluttony, and the din of his triple barking in their ears, their own howling, the bitter, pelting sleet, the stench in which they lie, are all a grotesque contrast to the luxurious banqueting which have been their chief joy. (Sinclair 94)

This circle provides the first hint of the man-beast representation in Inferno, a motif increasingly frequent in the lower regions. While an imposing figure in classical mythology, Dante transforms Cerberus into the monstrous personification of gluttony and a demon, debasing him into a monstrous animal with human semblance. This reflects Dante’s revisionist stance of rewriting classical literature for the Christian providential spirit of salvation predominant in Italy in the 14th century. Virgil quiets the monster by throwing:

gobbets of earth down each voracious throat. (v. 25)

In the Aeneid, the Sybil placates Cerberus (called “gran vermo” – the great worm, a term Dante also uses for Satan) with a honied cake. Dante’s variant of throwing earth has generated abundant commentary.

8e. Plutus

The Great Enemy of Humanity

Canto 7, vv. 1-13

In Canto 7 (vv. 1-13), at the boundary of the fourth circle of Hell (the avaricious/greedy and squanderers), Dante and Virgil confront Plutus, “the great enemy” (last verse of Canto 6) of humanity. Great enemy mainly because, in Dante’s mind, riches are the great scourge and ruin of humanity. Canto 7 starts ex-abrupto with a line of cryptic words yelled by this demon, likely meant to dissuade the pilgrim. Virgil (“who knew”) seems to understand them, while Dante and readers struggle with interpretation.

Possible Interpretations of Language

For some Italian commentators like Momigliano, these seemingly nonsensical utterances have a Greek and Jewish flavour and may allude to the Babel-like confusion reigning in Hell, while others see a satanic hymn to Satan as God, and yet others favor arcane infernal incantations. “Aleppe” seems to derive from the Hebrew “aleph” (also denoting the number one), while “Satan” means “enemy” in Hebrew – fitting, since Plutus is labeled as the enemy.

This is considered one of the most satanic verses in all Inferno. Except for his angry “swollen face” (highly poetic the comparison with “sails swollen with wind” that quickly collapse at Virgil’s scolding), his “clucking voice,” and “devouring rage,” Plutus receives little physical description. Virgil indicts him as an “accursed wolf,” referencing the she-wolf of the “selva oscura” (dark wood) of the first Canto, almost always connected to avarice in the commentaries and confirmed explicitly in Purgatorio Canto 20, v 10: “cursed be you, ancient she-wolf.”

Plutus’ Inarticulateness

The inarticulateness of this beast and Virgil’s mention of the providential journey and the heavenly victory (Revelation 12:7-9) over the rebellious infernal forces say as much or more than the sketchy physical details. If there seems to be little vitality in Plutus compared to previous monsters, there is certainly a great degree of monumental stupidity, foreshadowing that of Satan himself. Plutus is the pagan god of wealth, plucked from mythology and placed in Dante’s Christian Hell to guard the prodigal and the miserly, debased into a demonic monster while the sinners he guards become senseless dancers in their greed and dissipation.

8f. Phlegyas

The Monstrous Sentinel of the Styx

Canto 8, vv. 13-25

In Canto 8 (vv. 13-25), at the banks of the swamp-like river Styx (the fifth circle of hell), Dante is horrified at seeing the wrathful mangling each other, while beneath the river’s slime hide the slothful, their presence indicated by bubbles on the surface. Having come to the foot of a high tower, the poets notice a rapidly moving little boat rushing toward them, its angry monstrous boatman, Phlegyas, cursing and yelling, deceived into thinking he has found an “evil soul” for punishment.

Medieval War Scene between Christian Crusaders and “Infidels”

Some commentators suggest Phlegyas acts not only as guardian of the marsh but also as a sentinel, ensuring no aggressors slip into the lower regions unnoticed. The two mosque-like towers of the infernal city of Dis, the walled citadel of fire, signal each other with fire lights at the poets’ approach, prompting the boatman’s quick response. This is not only a typical medieval war scene between opposing Italian city states but also a popularized version of Catholic Crusades against dissidents, one of which Dante himself would have witnessed as a child.

Virgil placates the demoniacal boatman’s ire by admonishing him to ferry them across. The monster’s bent-up rage is quieted in humiliation. Notably, Virgil does not use the usual formula of divine will or providential plan to placate this demon, which has generated much critical speculation.

Classical Sources

In Greek mythology, Phlegyas was king of Thessaly who avenged his daughter’s rape by the god Apollo by burning the god’s temple at Delphi. As Durling suggests, Dante associated the character’s name with the Greek root word for fire. Virgil remodels Phlegyas in Aeneid VI as an exemplary figure teaching souls to study justice and honor the immortal gods. Dante degrades him by reinventing him as a furiously monstrous guardian of the fetid swamp where the wrathful and slothful are immersed. In this instance, we infer Phlegyas’s monstrosity from the fury and violence of the damned themselves, and from the angry words (“now get out”) he spits at the poets, having ferried them across.

8g. Geryon

The Fraudulent Monster

Canto 17, vv. 1-26, vv. 70-127

In Canto 17 (vv. 1-26, 70-127), in the seventh circle of hell (the violent and usurers flayed by eternal fire), one of the most monstrous figures appears. Virgil takes the cord from around Dante’s waist and tosses it into the abyss as a lure to attract Geryon. True to his violent and fraudulent nature, the monstrous form looms from below, swimming through the air.

The meaning of this cord has been and continues to be one of the interpretive cruxes of Inferno. Almost all commentators agree that in medieval symbolism, the cord represents fraud, attracting the demonic Geryon convinced he is about to entrap a cursed soul. The horror of Canto 17 reveals the filthy image of fraud (“fraud’s foul emblem”) which makes the whole world stink, described by Virgil with more attention than the quick dramatic touches devoted to previous monsters. As with Satan, there reigns an indecipherable silence on the part of this demon.

The Usurer’s Appearance

Geryon has the face of an honest, trustworthy man, the rest of the body beastly, ending in a scorpion-like stinging tail. In Greek mythology, Geryon was a giant with three heads and three bodies, eventually slain by Hercules. Dante invented a new, more grotesque form, perhaps inspired by the locusts described in Revelation 9:7-10. Dante takes the name and triplicity from the Aeneid and some evil attributes from popular medieval legends, but as Sinclair points out, essentially reinvents the monster by giving him:

a gracious human face, predacious clawed feet, the body of a subtle serpent marked with enticing knots and circlets, the ready, swinging tail pointed with a sting. (Sinclair 222)

Perched on the edge of the abyss, Geryon’s poisonous tail hidden and hanging in emptiness, the figure clearly recalls the obscure machinations of the fraudulent 14th-century Florentine usurer. Geryon’s tripartite monstrous body signifies (the number 3 having particular symbolic valence throughout the Divine Comedy) a satanic version of the Christian trinity, prefiguring the degraded humanity of Malebolge, Dante’s medieval invention of the evil pouches in Hell. At the end, Geryon obeys Virgil’s orders to descend the poets but, remaining angry and disillusioned at his useless transport (he gained no souls for Hell), vanishes “like an arrow from the string.”

8h. Satan

Supreme Evil

Canto 34, vv. 31-68

In the last Canto 34 of Inferno (vv. 31-68), where the ultimate sin of treachery against secular or political authority and divine grace is punished, we meet Satan (or Lucifer). Hell is formed by nine increasingly deeper and decreasing circles leading to the centre of the earth. As we descend, we witness horrible signs of progressive degeneration that the monster guardians personify through increasingly grotesque distortions of their human form. Dante is dealing with the nature and gravity of sin and how it monstrously perverts both body and intellect. The greater the sin, the deeper it descends.

Deep Hell Does Freeze Over…

In the ninth and last circle of hell, dunked in the frozen lake of Cocytus with all who betrayed their benefactors, utterly beastly and totally inarticulate, lies half-immersed in ice the supreme sinner, rebellious Satan himself, who was once God’s prime angel in Heaven and the most gracious. Now “the emperor of the realm of grief” (v. 31) is monstrously deformed and ugly. As Marguerite Mills Chiarenza notes:

…he is covered with hair like an animal; he has bat-like wings whose flapping freezes the bottom of Hell solid with their wind; and possesses three weeping faces smeared with the blood of the three souls he chews and scratches: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. (Mills Chiarenza 52)

Privileging images of cannibalism at the centre of the earth, Dante is horrified at the sight. Satan is monstrously, imposingly gigantic – so much so that from a distance Dante thought he was looking at a whirling windmill. Three enormous sets of wings, six dolorous eyes crying in rage, three bloody mouths eternally munching on the three greatest traitors of mankind make this an incomparably frightening sight. The monstrous figure draws from medieval painting and architecture, medieval angelology, and Biblical stories of the rebellious angels’ expulsion from Heaven. The Trinitarian aspects of the supreme demonic monster are a satanic parody of the Trinity. Satan is the depth of corruption. There cannot be any communication here, as we have seen with other monsters in truncated, almost irrational ways. Here reigns frozen silence beneath the bestial ignorance of supreme evil, and Virgil signals to quickly depart: “…we have seen the whole.”

The Three Supreme Traitors

In his idealistic view of world order – a world equally divided between a just emperor (who would direct us properly on earth) for political order, and a just Pope (who as representative of Christ would lead us in our salvific mission) for spiritual order – Dante considers Brutus and Cassius as the worst traitors of the former (they betrayed Caesar, emblem of world order), while Judas betrayed Christ. This is in keeping with the medieval cultural, religious, and social milieu, as well as the Patristic readings (Church Fathers and theologians) that shaped the Florentine poet.

Module 9: Wild People

Ann Marie Rasmussen (German Literary Studies, University of Waterloo)

This module introduces perspectives from the discipline of art history, providing tools that will help you to better see and understand the enormously rich and varied visual cultures of the Middle Ages. Rather than a purely taxonomic approach to art styles (Romanesque, Gothic, etc.), the module focuses on careful description and analysis of medieval images, attending to how they reflect and refract medieval knowledge, thought, and society.

9a. Who or What Are Wild People?

Introducing Wild People

This course calls the monsters in this module wild people, and indeed the figure Wild Family shows a man, woman, and child. Wild women feature in medieval stories, as discussed by Sarah Westphal-Wihl, but medieval images of wild women and children are less common. This module, concerned with visual culture, focuses on wild men.

The term “wild men” or “wild man” is much more common than “wild people.” It partly reflects the older, now outdated universalizing use of “man” or “men” for all human beings, but also reflects the fact that most medieval images show furry humanoid creatures with male bodies. The connotations of wildness were often understood in the Middle Ages as belonging to a domain of power gendered masculine.

How To Recognize a Wild Man

In medieval visual culture, wild people are easy to spot. The same size and anatomy as humans, they were covered head to foot with fur and therefore went unclothed, like animals and beasts. Wild people inhabited forests, apparently living by hunting and gathering – they are never shown cultivating crops and only rarely use any tool other than the ubiquitous wooden club, the wild man’s most common attribute. Like humans and many mammals, they were imagined living in small family groups.

There was a specific Middle English word for a wild man: wodewose (with many variant spellings). The first element, wode, is an older form of “wood” (forest); the second probably derives from a noun related to modern German Wesen (a living creature). A manuscript page from The Taymouth Hours features a wodewose with an Old French caption using this English word:

Et tient le wodewose & rauist un des demoyseles collaint des fleurs. [And the wodewose is here and is ravishing a maiden who is plucking flowers]

This Latin religious manuscript with a visual program of wild men in its margins and a French caption using an English word provides a succinct example of the multilingualism of medieval England.

The wild man relates to other monsters in this course. Like werewolves, wild men live in forests and wilderness, but unlike werewolves they do not shapeshift. Late medieval wild men overlap with the figure of the giant, as giants are often furry, scantily clothed, and fight with clubs. Wild men also appear among the satirical monsters of the Middle Ages. They are further related to the Green men found in medieval sculpture and architectural ornament, identified through foliated and bearded faces emerging from vine-like vegetation. One of the most famous medieval stories featuring a wild-man-like figure is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an early fourteenth-century Middle English alliterative verse work. The Green Knight has lost many wild man qualities – he is a knight who lives in trackless wilderness, is green like the verdant forest rather than furry, and possesses the magical ability to reattach his severed head, but is otherwise the mirror of the Arthurian knights whose feast he joins, uninvited, on New Year’s Day.

How Ancient is the Figure of the Wild Man?

Wild men overlap with a host of mythical woodland beings from classical times: fauns, satyrs, and pan-like creatures. Learned medieval writers knew these from classical authors and the Old Testament. In the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar II is humbled by God through seven years of madness:

…driven out of human society and ate grass like an ox. The dew fell on his body, and his hair grew as long as eagle feathers and his nails as long as bird claws. (Daniel 4:33)

Nebuchadnezzar regains sanity only when acknowledging the sovereignty of God.

Modern scholarship rejects the nineteenth-century folkloric notion of an unchanged substrate of “pagan” belief percolating among European peasants for centuries. The wild man is not inherited from a pre-Christian past and handed down unchanged. This hypothesis contradicts scientific evidence, historical evidence (medieval Christianity was a near-universal belief system that nevertheless differed from its modern descendants), and historical thinking (traditions are continually being made and remade; claims of ancient origins are advanced for specific purposes in any present).

If it is intellectually unproductive to see the wild man as simply derived from older traditions, alternative approaches include Freudian and Jungian models suggesting universals of human culture derived from cognition and social development, and anthropological theories of alterity and similarity. This module approaches wild men from a historical perspective, attending closely to how medieval images reflect medieval knowledge and society.

Is the Wild Man Really a Monster?

To what extent are wild men monsters at all? The title of the Required Reading by Lindquist and Mittman, “In a Furry Mirror,” implies that when medieval people looked at wild men, they saw creatures who doubled themselves. Reflecting on the vexed relationship between wild men and human beings is an important part of this module.

In many medieval images, stories, and performances, wild men and human beings seem like different branches of the same dysfunctional family. Wild men are strong and ferocious but also innocent as natural creatures. In the later Middle Ages, they often represented a kind of libidinous freedom – animal-like strength and sexuality unconstrained by social norms. This could represent erotic freedom and pleasure or danger.

The threatening aspect appears in the marginalia (small drawings in manuscript margins) of religious Latin manuscripts, where wild men pursue human women in what might be called attempted rape. In the Taymouth Hours and Smithfield Decretals, these stories re-appear on successive pages, suggesting narrative sequences told in pictures. Human women are saved by human men who sometimes slay the wodewoses. The threat of a wild man differs from that of a dragon because intercourse and offspring between humans and wild people is imagined as possible and even natural. There is ambivalence about wild men’s strength: clerics might disparage implicit violence and sexuality, but secular men might have been more positive about claiming the drive, freedom, and strength of wild men.

9b. Looking at Wild People

Introduction to Close Looking

Visual analysis is based on observation and description. This section offers a close looking template providing definitions of the most common qualities art historians look for and useful questions to ask, modeled on the close reading template from the Werewolves Module.

Close Looking Template

An Example of Close Looking: The Tapestry of Der Busant

The example analysis of the Der Busant tapestry (Upper Rhenish, 1480-1490, woven with linen warp and wool, silk, linen, cotton, and metallic wefts, 79 x 113 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art) demonstrates the template in action.

A blue, white, brown, and red tapestry depicts a princess on horseback, a man, and a furry wild prince on all fours, surrounded by trees, plants, a unicorn, and birds, with inscribed bands. The three figures each occupy roughly a third of the tapestry. The Middle High German inscriptions allude to the written tale: the fleeing princess says to the miller, “I ask and beseech you, for God’s sake, to give me shelter,” and the miller replies, “Willingly, though as a poor man I can offer you nothing honourable.” This tapestry was woven and is clearly a fragment from a larger work that probably told the whole story.

Though in excellent condition, the colors would originally have been much brighter. Expensive imported dyes and metallic wefts including gold and silver thread would have shone in sunlight, bringing light into the room. In the Middle Ages, all tapestries were the preserve of the wealthy, made entirely by hand. A wealthy commissioner (likely aristocrat, cleric, or merchant) invested heavily in a scene from fiction. Der Busant tells the story of an English prince who turns into a wild man and his lover, a French princess hiding from her betrothed.

The tapestry provides a gateway to exploring late medieval wealth culture, but fixed images do not have fixed meanings. Someone today is unlikely to assume it has anything to do with courtly romance; the woman appears to be fleeing a crowned wild man, and the wilderness looks like a garden, perhaps reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. Modern symbols of luxury differ entirely: the Industrial Revolution created mechanized weaving, ending tapestries as symbols of wealth.

9c. Material Contexts

Modern Contexts

We can only gesture toward the most important modern contexts for medieval art: the practices of preserving, collecting, conserving, curating, and displaying surviving works. Museums – inventions of the modern age – are typical settings, and how a medieval object reached a museum is often a fascinating piece of history involving removal from the original setting and changing hands many times. Many objects reside in private collections, and occasionally one can see a work in situ, still in the place for which it was purpose-made.

Medieval Spaces

It is critically important to imagine the spaces for which these representations were intended. Stone-carved green men, for example, can be found in medieval cathedrals, often on pillars far above the human eye, where they are but one example of exuberant visual art. The artists and craftsmen who produced them are anonymous, as are manuscript illuminators, fresco painters, and badge makers – with the exception of the final image discussed in this module.

Medieval Materials

A brief discussion of the materials from which the featured images and objects were made:

Parchment, Vellum, and Paper

Many manuscript illuminations featuring wild men appear in this module. Manuscripts (also called codices) were made from parchment or (from the 1300s) paper. Parchment is a general term for any animal hide prepared for writing; common types include calf, sheep, and goat. Vellum (from French “veau,” meaning calf) is a specific type of parchment. In the medieval preparation process (still followed today), hides were soaked in salt and lime brine for several days, de-haired, stretched, and dried. Medieval paper was made from linen rags (a much stronger material for quills than modern paper). The process involved washing and soaking rags in a strong solution, beating in cold clean water, fermenting (repeated until the mixture became a waterlogged pulp), dipping rectangular wire frames into the pulp, pressing between layers of felt, drying, and finally sizing with animal glue to reduce absorbency.

Creating a book was laborious. The book was designed with a plan for which texts to include, allowing estimation of materials needed. Vellum or paper was purchased, collected, and cut to size. The layout was designed with spaces for initials or illuminations, and each folio was scored with lines. Texts were written with ink and quill, followed by highlighted letters and finally illuminations. Each step was carried out by specialists. Finally, the manuscript was bound. Medieval manuscripts also contain unplanned additions – scribbles, doodles, comments, pen marks – dating to original scribes or subsequent owners.

For our purposes, studying the contexts of wild men images is critical: What texts does the manuscript contain? What languages? For whom was it intended?

Oil on Panel

Panel broadly refers to painting on a rigid support – in the Middle Ages, wood panels sawed, planed, and sized from close-grained hardwoods. There were no standard sizes. Medieval altarpieces often used multiple panels (diptych: two-panelled; triptych: three-panelled). One example here is the Portrait of Oswolt Krel by Albrecht Durer, a triptych on wood. Prior to painting, the wood was boiled or steamed to remove gum and resin, then coated with size and gesso to smooth the surface and prevent splitting.

While European oil painting traces back to the twelfth century, expert Netherlandish use in the early fifteenth century made it dominant by Durer’s age. Oil as a medium means pigments are suspended in drying oils such as linseed oil. Advantages included fusion of color tones, creation of crisp lines (easily seen in the fur of Durer’s wild people), and the ability to paint opaquely, translucently, or transparently.

Fresco

Fresco painting applies water-based pigments to wet plaster. The process begins with preparing the wall with a sand and plaster mixture, transferring a charcoal cartoon outline, adding a thin final coat of plaster, and painting while it is still wet – a period lasting only hours, making fresco a difficult art form to master. Mistakes cannot be corrected through overpainting because this requires a new plaster layer. Painters worked in sections, as with the wild man fresco from Sacco, Italy.

Carved Stone

Medieval stone carvers required physical strength and precision. Stone is very hard but brittle due to its crystalline structure, far more difficult to carve than wood. Expert craftsmen dedicated lifetimes to mastering their craft yet often remain anonymous. Fine medieval stonework survives today weathered and plain, but was once highly polished, painted, and gilded. Faded traces, such as those on the famous smiling angel of Reims Cathedral, provide glimpses into the bright tones of an age often associated with cold, natural stone.

Tapestries

Stone walls were cold, so wealthy dwellings were hung with woven tapestries providing both beauty and warmth. Tapestries were the preserve of the rich throughout the Middle Ages; their creation was incredibly labor-intensive, requiring far more material than other art forms, including threads of wool, linen, silk, and fine metals including gold thread.

Engraving

In engraving, a tool gouges sharp lines into a metal plane – a technique that evolved from goldsmiths and became popular in Germany in the 1470s. Albrecht Durer, perhaps the most famous engraver, was born to a goldsmith family in 1471. His Coat of Arms with a Skull shows a woman wearing a bridal crown embraced from behind by a muscular, bearded wild man, using the memento mori (“remember death”) theme with the skull on the shield. Throughout his life, Durer used engraving as a means to economic success because the medium allows multiple prints from the same plate.

Medieval Badges

While engravings reached larger audiences than manuscripts or tapestries, medieval badges were the most accessible images for ordinary people. Although a handful survive in precious materials aimed at the wealthy, the vast majority were made of inexpensive lead-tin alloy (pewter), mass-produced by pouring molten pewter into stone molds. The majority were religious, featuring images of saints or relics linked to holy sites, produced for pilgrims. Secular badges were also produced for political and cultural purposes, some bawdy. Badges of wild people are secular badges, often bawdy or vulgar, as figures like Wild Man with Club, Naked Wild Man Wearing Hood, and Wild Man in Rectangular Frame suggest. The contexts to which they might have belonged are discussed in the next section.

9d. Cultural Contexts

Stories of Wild Men and Wild Women

Wild people are not protagonists of their own stories in the way that Arthurian knights or martyred saints are, but they feature regularly in many tales across languages and cultures, sometimes as helpers and sometimes foes. What matters here is that narratives about wild women and men often differ in salient ways from the dominant images of wild men in medieval visual culture.

Medieval narratives explore the wild double differently. One difference is that wild women are more common in stories than in visual programs, reminding us that visual and narrative cultures represent discrete cultural domains whose themes and values are not interchangeable. We must also set aside our modern expectation that images illustrate the text. In medieval manuscripts, image and text are sometimes narratively independent, as we have seen with wild men in religious and theological manuscripts.

Appearance

In popular medieval German stories, Dietrich of Berne frequently battles giant-like wild men who are implacable foes of human beings. In some stories, wild men and women are described in racialized ways, with dark skin and what are termed moorish features. The best-known example appears in French and German stories about the Arthurian knight Yvain (Old French) or Iwein (Middle High German), written around 1200. On his first adventure, Yvain/Iwein encounters a wild man described in racialized terms who is the sovereign of the forest realm and guardian of forest beasts. Though intended to seem threatening, he is not a foe but helps Yvain/Iwein find the adventure of the fountain.

Thirteenth-century frescoes of the Yvain/Iwein story were painted at the Italian castle of Rodenegg (Rodank) in a culturally German region. The wild man shown there has a broad, naked chest and unruly red hair, appearing formidable. The image serves a dual purpose: showing the wild man giving directions as in the story, and directing the viewer to the next visual frame in the fresco’s pictorial sequence.

In many medieval stories, wild women’s physical appearance draws on racial, gendered, or age-related stereotypes to create a figure considered loathsome. This appearance often conceals other characteristics: the female Grail messenger, Cundrie, possesses formidable education and outstanding intellectual skills. “Loathsome ladies” in other tales often have magical abilities or turn out to be beautiful young women testing their lovers.

Transformation

The transformation of a loathsome lady into a beautiful maiden is a standard trope. Another typical transformation is when a male protagonist goes mad and lives as a wild man until his sanity is restored – as in the Book of Daniel and in Yvain/Iwein, where the hero loses his mind after being publicly shamed for abandoning his duties as ruler to go tournamenting with chivalric friends, runs naked into the forest, and lives like a beast until cured.

In The Buzzard (Der Busant), a thirteenth-century German story, an English prince and French princess elope and endure many adventures. The prince goes mad and lives as a wild man before they are reunited. The surviving tapestry shows the wild prince with a flowery crown clarifying his princely identity, a furry body typical of visual depictions, and running on all fours like a beast – a posture otherwise rare in visual depictions, even though their postures usually suggest movement of some kind.

Embodying Wild Men

The wild men on medieval badges are usually shown in odd poses with legs bent, crossed, or lifted, gesturing toward another cultural sphere: the realm of performance and spectacle. Here medieval wild men broke out of representational confines and came to life in public and private performance.

Public rituals and festivities, including processions, were ubiquitous in late medieval urban life. Important religious ceremonies spilled into streets with plays and processions. Secular events – public trials, weddings, funerals, diplomatic visits – included public-facing events mixing secular and religious features. There was great variation across medieval Europe, as festivities were locally realized and responsive to local traditions, ranging widely in size, scale, and character. Some aspects fit a wider medieval tradition of transgressing social boundaries on special occasions, and it is here that wild men had their place in at least two kinds of festivities: carnival and charivari.

Carnival

Carnival, also known as Shrovetide, traditionally precedes Easter. All across medieval Europe it included public processions, festivities, and performances ranging from morally edifying to obscene. In German-speaking lands, wild men performances were integral. Every year in Nuremberg, butchers and upper-class youths dressed as wild men for the Schembart run (Schembartlauf), a processional event involving a grotesque dance before a woman who would crown one dancer king. The literary scholar Eckehard Simon describes other performances:

First attested in 1338 in the Swiss town of Aarau, this ritual [the wild man hunt] involves revelers chasing after one of their own, who is covered only with ivy leaves, or hair, the mythical savage from the wood, and putting him in chains or mock-killing him. … In 1435, Basel entertained its church council with a wild-man dance. It featured twenty-three fellows with hair, half red, half green, falling to their feet, who danced while bashing each other with clubs stuffed with tow. (Simon, “Carnival Obscenities,” p. 199)

The surviving wild man badges show men with fur clutching cudgels in odd postures. Textual evidence helps decode these postures as indicating movement such as hopping or dancing, alluding to ambulatory enactments. The relationship between badges and performances remains unclear. Some badges have been found in regions where shrovetide activities were common, but who commissioned, wore, or exchanged them continues to puzzle scholars.

Charivari

Nineteenth-century assumptions that only lower-class men dressed as wild men are unfounded. Medieval elites were deeply involved in public festivities, from sponsoring and organizing to enthusiastically participating. In carnival evidence, performers are non-noble urban elites from corporations and guilds. Masquerading as wild men was part of noble traditions as well, particularly in charivari – a boisterous, noisy, mock serenade or dance performed on the occasion of a remarriage or “unsuitable” marriage, typically by disguised young men who could be appeased with money for drink.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, charivari interludes were popular with elites and often featured wild men. A fictional representation appears in a German manuscript from around 1400 illustrating Pontus and Sidonia. At the wedding of Sidonia and Genelet, Pontus and his men disguise themselves as wild men, wearing greenish costumes with “scales” (probably representing bunches of tow or shrubbery) and bells tied to their limbs.

The most famous medieval charivari was the real disaster of 1393. At a wedding feast held in honor of the remarriage of one of the French queen’s ladies in waiting, French king Charles VI and five male courtiers dressed in elaborate wild men costumes made of linen soaked in resin with flax attached. A torch accidentally ignited first one and then rapidly all of the resin-soaked costumes. Four wild men perished; one saved himself by jumping into a vat of wine. Charles VI survived because of his cousin the Duchess of Berry, who called him over to ask his identity and is said to have thrown her skirts over him. This terrible mishap, known as the Bal des Ardents (the ball of the burning men), was recorded in Jean Froissart’s Chronicles.

9e. Albrecht Durer’s Portrait of Oswolt Krel

Looking Closely at the Portrait of Oswolt Krel

This masterpiece of portraiture was painted by Albrecht Durer (1471-1528). The central panel measures 50 x 39 cm with side panels of 50 x 16 cm – a relatively intimate scale worth imagining on one’s own wall.

Between Medieval and Modern

Durer’s life and art straddle the medieval and early modern periods. His innovative self-portraits and self-consciousness as a great artist point decisively toward the future, but works like the Portrait of Oswolt Krel are embedded in medieval practices of visual meaning-making, as an analysis of its wild men makes clear. As art historian Joseph Leo Koerner wrote:

The self-portrait has become a model of what art is: the artwork is the image of its maker, and understanding the work means recovering from it an original vision of the artist. (Koerner, 1993)

The portrait was an expensive work created in oil with two closeable wings. It was painted when Durer was not yet thirty but already a rising international star. It was probably commissioned by the sitter, Oswolt Krel (1460-1534), a wealthy merchant from Lindau residing in Nuremberg. Its intimate size indicates it was intended for a smaller room – plausibly a well-furnished representative space used for business meetings. The portrait has an aggressive quality demanding attention, and the ability to open and close it underscores theatrical qualities, suggesting it was opened for specific occasions.

The middle panel shows an adult man in the prime of life sitting before a red background with a woodland setting on the left. Brown, curly hair frames a severe yet compelling face. His mouth set in a straight line, the sitter glances pugnaciously to the right. Bare-headed, he wears a white pleated shift and a sumptuous collared black robe thrown over one shoulder with fur lining draped to his waist, his bare upper chest exposed. A black and gold necklace rests on his chest. His right hand rests on the frame as if on a window sill; his large, muscular left hand, with signet ring, holds the fur firmly in a fist.

The sitter is present three times: in the visual portrayal, linguistically (his name painted at top with the year), and heraldically through the coat of arms held by wild men on each wing – Krel’s coat of arms on the viewer’s left, those of his wife, Agathe von Esendorf, on the right.

The Wild Men in Durer’s Painting

Each wing shows a wild man displaying traditional medieval features: furry, naked, hopping or dancing, holding a club. The wild man on the viewer’s left holds Krel’s coat of arms, which itself features a wild man or giant – making three wild men, and the author argues Krel himself is the fourth.

The wild man holding Krel’s coat of arms echoes the sitter’s features and glances in the same direction. The backdrop is half curtain, half forest. Krel’s body is visible (the naked chest) and his expression is fierce. (In addition to being a powerful force in Nuremberg commerce, Krel was a known rowdy who was once imprisoned for his unruly behavior at a Fastnachtspiel – carnival play.) And Krel is wearing fur.

Fur carries multiple associations. Naked, furry wild men are innocent as natural creatures. Fur can represent potential animality, neither good nor bad. As Koerner reminds us, in the Middle Ages, fur was “a statement of status, a badge of wealth, power, and distinction.”

Durer uses the wild man motif to individuate Krel and underline his physicality, forcefulness, and powerful presence. At the same time, Krel is shown holding the fur drape tightly closed, asserting his will and controlling his wild tendencies:

Krel clutches his fur in a manner suggesting not only the sitter’s victory over his baser instincts but also his lingering alliance with these powers of the earth. (Koerner 170, 1993)

Durer, who used fur in other portraits including self-portraits, here uses the wild man motif and its association with fur to create a new, heroic ideal celebrating the power of assertive, creative, masculine animality.

Module 10: Medieval Conceptions of the Devil

Andrew Stumpf (Philosophy and Theology, University of Waterloo)

This module follows the approach of the Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, seeking to understand the contribution of both reason and faith to a theological account of the devil. Using historical theology — the branch of theology that studies the historical development of key theological ideas — this module focuses on the devil in light of Christian faith, but in dialogue with Jewish, Muslim, and “pagan” philosophical traditions. The devil will be considered in relation to evil and the problem evil poses for belief in God.

10a. Situating Devil-Theology

Biblical Sources

This section explains diabology (the study of the devil) as a theological topic and considers the main sources for medieval diabology, distinguishing theological accounts from popular representations.

Christian theology has held a very high view of Scripture — the writings considered sacred in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and New Testament. These contain numerous portrayals of the devil, beginning with the serpent who tempted humankind in Genesis 3:1-7. That text does not name the devil, but interpreters have almost unanimously understood him to be at work in or through the serpent. In Revelation 12:7-9, the serpent appears again, clearly identified:

The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Revelation 12:7-9, NRSVCE

The biblical data theologians had to consider included the following: the devil was an angelic being, created by God, who rebelled and fell from heaven, taking other angels with him (patristic and medieval theologians read Ezekiel 28:11-19 as elaborating this). His goal is to destroy humanity, and his main method is deception. Jesus characterizes him as “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). We see him prompting Judas to betray Jesus (John 13:27) and tempting Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). The Lord’s Prayer teaches Christians to pray for rescue “from the evil one” (Matthew 5:13), suggesting constant concern about the devil’s temptations. From the New Testament perspective, the devil is a defeated foe — substantially defeated by Christ’s crucifixion (Hebrews 2:12), to be defeated with finality at Christ’s second coming (Revelation 20:10). Clarifying what powers the devil continues to exercise between the first and second coming of Christ is one of diabology’s thorniest problems.

Gambling with the Devil?

The book of Job contains a particularly interesting account. The devil appears under the name “Satan,” from the Hebrew word for “adversary.” The first chapter presents Job as very upright, wealthy, and with many children. Then the text tells us that “the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them” (Job 1:6). Already this raises many questions. Should we read this as a literal or historical account, or as metaphorical or poetic? If it is a wisdom narrative, can we learn anything from it about the devil’s interactions with God? Why does Satan appear in the council of heavenly beings?

Things quickly get stranger. God points out Job’s righteousness to Satan, and Satan replies that Job only fears God because God has protected and blessed him: “stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 1:11). God grants Satan permission to test Job: “all that he has is in your power; only do not stretch out your hand against him!” (Job 1:12). The first oddity is that God seems to be boasting to the devil. Next, Satan gives counsel to God, and God listens. Finally, God and the devil seem involved in a wager, with Job’s life at stake. Satan destroys Job’s wealth and children and then afflicts him with terrible suffering. “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing” (Job 1:22).

A somewhat similar story of Job (Ayoub) appears in the Quran (21:83-84 and 38:44). These accounts have given Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers much to ponder. They raise profound questions about the causes of suffering and who should be seen as responsible for it. Medieval theologians invested much energy in the problem of evil and the problem of suffering, and these problems continue to be widely discussed today.

Interpretation and Tradition

Biblical texts require interpretation. Christian theology begins with understanding what to believe and do based on Scripture. For Christians, the Scriptures form canonical documents with authority for faith and life. Medieval theologians were inheritors of a long tradition of biblical commentary that included authoritative teachers.

From the beginning, the mainstream church had to define its views against alternative perspectives. As Christianity incorporated diverse people groups (Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, pre-Christian Mediterranean and Anglo-Saxon), converts blended previous beliefs with the Christian story. To defend the “truths of the Christian faith” against heresy, church leaders formulated creeds and doctrinal statements, establishing an orthodoxy and standards for judging who was inside or outside the faith.

Creeds and Councils

The first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine (272-337), convened the first ecumenical council of the Christian church at Nicea in 325. His purpose was to help early church leaders respond to questions raised by the Arians (followers of Arius of Alexandria) who claimed that Christ was not equal to God but was one of God’s creatures. This council denounced Arianism as heresy and produced the Nicene Creed, which stated that Christ was of one substance with God the Father. This creed was modified at the second council, held at Constantinople in 381.

Later ecumenical councils at Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople (553 and 680-681), and Nicea (787) aimed to unify Christianity and combat heretical views, but also dealt with practical and political questions like the authority of bishops. After the “Great Schism” of 1054, which split Christendom into the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Roman Catholic) churches, councils were no longer held together. The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century brought further division; the teachings of the Reformers, including Martin Luther, were condemned by Roman Catholics at the Council of Trent (1545-1563).

The councils most important for teaching on the devil were the Council of Braga (561), the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and Trent. Fourth Lateran, convened under Pope Innocent III, addressed dualist heresies propagated by the Cathars in Canon 1, which stated: “The devil and the other demons were indeed created by God good by nature but they became bad through themselves; man, however, sinned at the suggestion of the devil.” The same statement affirmed monism — that the Trinity is “the one principle of the universe, Creator of all things.” This tension between heretical dualism and orthodox monism shaped how late medieval theologians approached diabology.

Theological Diabology and Other Views of the Devil

Medieval theologians formulated their teachings within a nexus of authorities: biblical texts, patristic commentary, and conciliar statements. With the rise of universities and scholasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, accounts were increasingly constrained by methodology. Scholastic theologians were required to produce biblical commentaries and to comment on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1095-1160). In both theological treatises and public academic disputations, they proceeded dialectically, examining arguments for and against each statement.

Ordinary people formed their conception of the devil from pre-Christian folklore (such as the Greco-Roman and Celtic horned gods Pan and Cerunnos) and popular religion. As Jeffrey Burton Russell writes, popular Christianity presented a vivid, frightening devil. Homilists dwelt on the appalling to terrify their auditors into good behaviour, and the folkloric devil shaded off into related concepts — Antichrist, giants, dragons, ghosts, weranimals, and “the little people” (Russell, 1984, p. 63). Popular saints’ lives told of overcoming intense demonic attacks, such as those suffered by St. Anthony of Egypt (251-356), the famous desert father.

By contrast, scholastic theologians employed abstract logical argumentation. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) used the devil’s free choice to explain how evil entered the world, absolving God of responsibility for moral evil. According to Anselm, the devil sinned freely, then tempted the first humans, who also freely sinned. This original sin brought disharmony into the human race. Russell contends that scholastic accounts made the devil’s role relatively superfluous: theological accounts of both human sin and salvation can be given without necessary appeal to the devil (Russell, pp. 170-172).

Works Cited

Russell, J. B. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 1984.

10b. Diabology and the Problem of Evil

The Philosophical Problem of Evil

The problem of evil arises for anyone wanting to hold that all four of the following statements are true:

• God is able to prevent evil from occurring;
• God is perfectly good;
• God knows everything;
• Evil exists.

As an example of evil, consider the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It is traditional to distinguish natural evil — evil in the form of pain and suffering — from moral evil, the evil of the will that chooses things morally wrong. The bombing caused massive suffering (natural evil), and the decision to drop it arguably reflected deplorable disregard for civilian lives (moral evil).

If God is perfectly good, we would expect God not to want evil and to try to prevent it in either form. Perhaps God is perfectly good but not able to prevent evil. In that case, evil is compatible with God’s existence, but God’s power is limited. Russell argued that the Cathars’ dualist heresy involved this response, arising “to save the goodness of God by limiting his power, to account for the conflict between good and evil that we observe in life” (Russell, 187). In other words, the Cathars presented God’s power as limited by the power of the devil.

Alternatively, God might be able to prevent evil but does not want to — God might desire or be indifferent to evil. A third possibility: God can prevent evil and wants to, but does not know that certain acts involve evil. For the Christian theist who holds all four statements, none of these solutions works: God is capable of preventing evil and perfectly good and knows all things. Yet evil exists. More strongly, the existence of evil seems to show that such a God cannot exist. That, at first approximation, is the problem of evil, first appearing in the writings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus in the third century BC and discussed in every age since.

The Theological “Problem of Evil”

For the theist, denying God’s existence is not an option. God’s existence is a basic starting point for Christian theology, revealed and accepted in faith. But in the face of the problem, the theologian owes us a theodicy — an explanation of where evil comes from and how it coexists with God. Russell describes the influential account of Pseudo-Dionysius:

Evil cannot come from God, since it is a contradiction of God, and it cannot be an independent principle, since all that is comes from God. Evil is therefore literally nothing in itself. It is merely a deficiency, a lack, a privation in what is. Russell, 34-35

Monism (from Greek monas, “one”) holds that everything, including evil, comes from God. But if evil originates in God, God is not perfectly good. Dualism (from Greek duo, “two”), as found in Manicheanism (a movement stemming from Mani, who lived in the 3rd-century Persian Empire), posits two independent, equal principles — one good, one evil — but Christian theologians could not accept this because it undermined belief in a single, Almighty Creator.

Russell notes that the logic of Christian theological thought gravitated almost by necessity to the claim that evil doesn’t really exist. A powerful analogy supports this: just as darkness is not something real in itself but the absence of light, so evil is not a positive reality but merely a lack of goodness. In one way or another, the idea of evil as nothingness can be found in medieval theologians from Augustine through Aquinas and into modern theologies.

Evil and the Devil

Given the attention paid to the devil in the biblical texts, no Christian theological account of evil would be complete without showing the relation between evil and the devil. But if evil is nothingness, then what can we mean by saying the devil is evil, or that the devil tempts us to do evil? In his Divine Comedy, Dante locates Lucifer in a frozen lake in a dark cave at the centre of the earth, the lowest place in the entire cosmos, where he acts like a black hole sucking down all goodness, life, and colour into cold darkness (Russell, pp. 216-233). Dante’s devil is ugly, futile, empty, blind and stupid, isolated and shut off from reality, filled with meaningless hatred — the very opposite of the beautiful expansive light, openness, and freedom of the Creator, whose love is infinite and whose justice and truth govern the cosmos.

But if the devil and evil are identified with nothingness, what are we to make of the seemingly real and palpable threat of both? Here we locate one of the central tensions involved in attempting a theological account of evil. Certain key Christian doctrines require understanding evil as non-being. But other important teachings urge constant vigilance against the very active and potentially devastating works of the devil and his demons. Thomas Aquinas attempts to bring both aspects together.

Works Cited

Russell, J. B. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 1984.

10c. The Devil and Aquinas’ Theory of Evil

Who is Thomas Aquinas?

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an Italian who joined the intellectually powerful Dominican monastic order at nineteen, completed the highest degree in theology and taught at the University of Paris. He became one of the greatest Christian theologians, was canonized as a saint and acclaimed as a Doctor of the Church, and continues to exert powerful influence on contemporary theology and Western philosophy.

Aquinas had his own encounters with temptation. His family opposed his religious vocation. To compel him toward a more worldly path, they had him locked in a castle for a year and reportedly sent a prostitute to lure him from his vow of celibacy. According to the story, he drove her away with a hot fire iron.

In his theological writings, Aquinas had much to say about angelic beings, including the fallen ones. But to understand his diabology, we must situate it within his broader account of evil’s nature, origin, and place within creation.

Aquinas’s De malo (On Evil)

In the last decade of his life, Aquinas produced Disputed Questions Concerning Evil (commonly called De malo, abbreviated QDM). This work contains edited results of a disputation organized between 1266 and 1269, published between 1270 and 1272. It presents key arguments on evil more completely than the Summa Theologiae or Summa Contra Gentiles.

Example

The De malo consists of sixteen “questions” (topics), each broken down into “articles” (sub-questions). Each article presents: (1) a disputed statement, (2) objections to Aquinas’s position, (3) authorities in favour of his position, (4) his own resolution, and (5) replies to the objections.

The work’s thematic structure includes:

Aquinas devotes most attention to sin (moral evil) in human beings. But Q1 gives his metaphysical solution to the problem of evil, Q16 and parts of Q3 connect the devil to that problem.

Evil in General: De malo Question 1

The five articles of Q1 present Aquinas’s metaphysical conception of evil. Aquinas inherited the idea that evil is nothing from Pseudo-Dionysius (late 5th–early 6th centuries) and Augustine (354-430), but his original contribution lies in precisely what he meant by this: evil is a privation — a real lack of goodness in something that ought to possess that goodness.

Evil as Privation (Articles 1-3)

Article 1 asks whether evil is anything at all. Following Aristotle, Aquinas defines the good as what is desirable. Since all being is created by God (the supreme good), whatever exists is good, and evil can only be spoken of as non-being. In his reply to the first objection, he clarifies: “sickness is evil for an animal because it deprives the animal of the balance of fluids that is required for the perfection of the animal’s existing” (On Evil, 59). The sick animal, insofar as it exists, is good — but it is “evil” insofar as it lacks something required by its nature. Similarly, “blindness itself is not an entity, but the subject that blindness befalls is” (ibid).

Evil is parasitic on goodness (Article 2). Without good things that can lack perfections proper to them, there could be no evil. A human being who lacks virtue (a moral perfection) is good insofar as they exist, but the lack is a real fact — a cowardly person acts very differently from a courageous one.

Aquinas writes in Article 3 that insofar as evil can be said to have a cause, it is always caused by something good. Since the deficiencies that constitute evil are neither desirable nor in accordance with the natures of things, they cannot have what Aquinas calls “intrinsic” causes, but only “accidental” causes. Evils arise as deviations from the order of nature or reason established by God. Aquinas compares a will that freely chooses evil to a carpenter cutting wood without a ruler: “the moral fault of the will consists in the fact that the will proceeds to choose without using the rule of reason or God’s law” (On Evil, 72). The will making the choice, insofar as it exists, is a good thing; its evil consists in a deficiency. Aquinas uses the example of adultery: the will chooses something good (sensual pleasure) but disregards the order of God’s love and justice. The adulterer is without excuse because, “although not willing the evil itself as such, [they] still prefers to fall into the evil than to be without such a good” (On Evil, 74).

Kinds of Evil (Articles 4 and 5)

In Article 4, Aquinas divides evil into types. He acknowledges three kinds: (1) moral wrong or sin, (2) punishment for sin, and (3) natural evil or suffering (caused by earthquakes, fires, etc.). Unlike many contemporary authors, Aquinas pays very little attention to type (3). His reason for focusing on moral wrong and punishment is that these are the kinds of evil relevant to rational creatures insofar as they are rational. These two differ in that moral wrong is actively willed, and punishment is suffered but unwilled, by rational creatures (On Evil, 77). Punishment involves harm ordained by God (“divine providence”) as a way of “rectifying moral fault” (On Evil, 78). A question that remains open is whether Aquinas would ultimately subsume type (3) under type (2), as though all sources of suffering should be considered forms of punishment for sin.

Article 5 argues that moral wrong is more evil (“has more of the nature of evil”) than punishment. We call people evil because they have evil wills, not because they suffer punishment (On Evil, 83). Because God is perfectly good, God cannot commit moral evil but can cause punishment, which is an expression of divine justice intended to rectify sin. Any evil introduced by an expert artisan (such as God) to avoid another evil must be less evil than what is avoided (On Evil, 84).

The Cause of Moral Evil: De Malo Question 3

Q3 asks who is responsible for human sin: God (articles 1-2), the devil (articles 3-5), or human beings themselves (articles 6-15)?

Articles 1 and 2: Is God Responsible for Human Sin?

One might argue God is responsible because God created human free will and the drives that move people to sin (roughly paraphrasing some of the objections). Furthermore, human beings need God’s grace to do right, so if God does not provide grace, God is responsible for their sin. Aquinas answers that God, being supremely good, cannot sin or cause anyone else to sin. God is the ultimate goal of every creature, and all causes make their effects “like themselves.” Therefore God “cannot cause the will to turn away from the supreme good, and the nature of moral wrong… consists of turning away from that good” (On Evil, 144). Sin flows not from human powers as created by God but from a deficiency in them, for which God is not responsible. People fail to receive grace because they turn away from it, not because God fails to supply it.

Yet sinful acts do come from God in one sense (Article 2), since acts are things that exist, and everything that exists comes from God as “first mover.” How then can we avoid saying God is responsible? Aquinas explains that God “moves certain things in such a way that they also move their very selves” — namely those with free choice. If properly disposed, good acts result. But if free choice defects from the proper order, sinful acts result. “We trace what regards the activity of those with the power of free choice to God as the cause, while only free choice, not God, causes what regards the deordination or deformity.” In short: “acts of sin come from God, but sin does not” (On Evil, 148).

Articles 3-5: The Devil and Human Sin

In Article 3, Aquinas argues the devil “can cause sin as one who disposes or persuades internally or externally, or even as one who commands… he cannot cause sin as an efficient cause” (On Evil, 151). The devil never has direct control over the human will.

Article 4 elaborates: the devil can persuade “externally” by appearing and speaking, or “internally” by making “impressions on the internal sense powers” (On Evil, 155). Fallen angels retain their angelic ability to control matter and can manipulate physiological aspects of our brains (“internal vapors and fluids”), thereby affecting our emotions, passions, and imagination.

Article 5 holds that because the devil tempted the first humans, he is indirectly involved in all human sin. Yet his active persuasion is not directly involved every time; humans can sin simply “due to the freedom of human beings to choose and to the corruption of the flesh” (On Evil, 158).

To summarize: God creates humans with potential to sin but is not causally responsible for their sin. The devil’s persuasion is involved directly or indirectly in every sin, yet the devil cannot force anyone to sin.

Evil and the Devil: De Malo Question 16

Q16 considers demons in twelve articles: one on whether demons have bodies (Article 1), five on the sin of demons (Articles 2-6), and the rest on the nature and extent of their powers (Articles 7-12).

Article 1: Body-less Devils

Aquinas argues devils do not have bodies, though this “does not matter much for the doctrine of Christian faith” (On Evil, 439). Air lacks the definite limits and sense organs that bodies require. Devils, like all angels, are pure spirits — immaterial beings with intellect and will but no bodily senses. They cause matter to move “simply at the command of their will,” much as “the human soul moves the body joined to it by intellect and will alone” (On Evil, 443).

Articles 2-5: The Sin of the Devil

Article 2 establishes that devils were created good but became evil by choosing not to “follow the ordination of a higher rule, namely, God’s wisdom” (On Evil, 449). They sought to attain their own good “by their own power and not by God’s grace,” exceeding the due measure of their status (On Evil, 450).

Article 3 clarifies that the devil desired equality with God — not absolute equality (he knew that was impossible), but independence: being perfect and happy through his own nature rather than depending on God’s grace (On Evil, 456).

Article 4 considers timing. Aquinas argues the devil sinned after the first moment of creation, since it would have taken time for angels to move from natural self-knowledge to contemplation of the supernatural God (On Evil, 464).

Article 5 establishes that after sinning, devils cannot return to good by free choice. Unlike humans who can repent, the sin of angels is a once-for-all event, following from the distinctive nature of angelic knowledge and will.

Articles 8, 11, 12: The Devils’ Power

Article 8 argues devils do not directly know our interior thoughts. They can know our thoughts only by outward signs — words, emotional responses like blushing or going pale (On Evil, 492-493). Only God knows a person’s thoughts directly.

Devils can move matter by direct acts of will (Article 10), but only as far as God permits, as in Job’s story. Article 11 explains they can affect our perception by presenting material objects to our senses or by manipulating our imagination through the brain’s physiological processes (“vapors and fluids”). Article 12 argues they can affect our higher intellect indirectly, through the senses and imagination, arranging images “whether to desire sin… or to prevent true understanding itself” (On Evil, 511).

Does Aquinas’s diabology help explain evil? The answer has to be both yes and no. According to the story told by Christian faith and teaching, the devil — who sinned first — was involved in persuading and tempting human beings to sin, and continues to this day to actively persuade and tempt in various ways. The influence of the devils on us has to be understood as very real, given that they can make us see things and even manipulate our imagination. So diabology does help explain moral evil and its ensuing punishment. But at the same time the answer is “no,” because human beings can sin even without the direct influence of the devil. And as much as the devils can act to persuade and make impressions on us, they cannot enter into the inmost sphere of the human person — the heart and the will — to make us sin. If they were to gain direct control over a person’s will (as Aquinas considers possible in demonic possession), the resulting acts would not then be the person’s own, and so would not constitute sin on the part of the person.

Conclusion

Aquinas accepts all four statements generating the problem of evil. In Summa Theologiae I.1.3.ad1, responding to the objection that God cannot exist because evil exists, he cites Augustine: “it is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.” Why God allows evil we may not fully answer, but given what we know of God, we trust God allows it for a good reason — that there may be greater good in the end.

The overall structure of De malo reveals that Aquinas’s real concern was not reconciling God with suffering but the problem of avoiding evil in our own actions. This explains why most of the treatise covers what sin is, what kinds exist, and which are deadliest. Aquinas is clear: moral evil is our own responsibility. We cannot blame God, who created us good, nor the devil, who can tempt but cannot move our will. The two kinds of evil that matter are moral evil and punishment — the latter being God’s just response to the former. For Aquinas, it is not the devil outside us that we most need to worry about, but the devil inside us.

Works Cited

Aquinas, T. (2003). On Evil. (B. Davies, Ed., & R. Regan, Trans.) New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Module 11: Political Monsters

Norm Klassen (Theology and Literary Criticism, University of Waterloo)

11a. Confronting Monsters in a Literary Way

Looking At or Looking With?

This module examines two texts that serve as bookends to medieval English literature. The first, Beowulf, was probably composed in the Midlands or north of England in the eighth century, though the sole manuscript dates from the late tenth century. Its form of English is known as Old English — learning it is like learning a new language. Beowulf concerns events of Germanic forbears who lived in the lands of the Danes and Geats (present-day Denmark and Sweden). The second, The Canterbury Tales, was written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the last fifteen years of the fourteenth century, in Middle English, a form that can be learned relatively easily though it is harder than Shakespeare’s. The word “medieval” covers a multitude of times, places, texts, languages, and imaginative conceptions.

Despite their differences, both works are human cultural artefacts bearing family resemblance to one another and to us as their interpreters. As the philosopher Gadamer puts it, when one posits an “I” and a “thou,” one assumes a “deep common accord” (Gadamer, 7-8). This commonality makes itself accessible through the imagination, important for historian, literary critic, and scientific researcher alike.

In politics, the question — how can and ought we live together? — puts us in touch with medieval voices in surprising ways. We might assume we can identify monstrosity elsewhere, in someone else. But these medieval texts pose a different kind of question: “How does such-and-such reality represent a threat to life together?” In one case the threat is a fabulous monster, in the other a historical tyrant. In both, the monster draws attention to the value and possibility of enduring life together.

Defamiliarization

Monsters are not all bad. The monstrous can unsettle us productively, jolting us out of complacency. To use an important literary term, it can defamiliarize our reality so we can see obscured dimensions (Milbank, 29-55). Poetry specializes in seeing familiar things anew. As Seamus Heaney, a great translator of Beowulf, wrote:

…literariness as such is not an abdication from the truth. The literary is one of the methods human beings have devised for getting at reality…. Its diversions are not to be taken as deceptions but as roads less travelled by where the country we thought we knew is seen again in a new and revealing light. (Heaney, 4)

Monsters may be a diversion, but they are not necessarily a deception; they can serve as a “revealing light.”

Works Cited

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem (1966).” Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated by David E. Linge, Berkeley, 1976, pp. 3-17.

Heaney, Seamus. “Eclogues in Extremis: On the Staying Power of Pastoral.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 103C (2003), pp. 1-12.

Milbank, Alison. Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real. T&T Clark, 2007.

11b. A Monstrous Threat to Community in Beowulf

Context

Beowulf is over three thousand lines long. The entire extant corpus of Old English literature (written between the mid-fifth century and the 1066 Battle of Hastings) amounts to about as much as a weekend edition of the Toronto Star. We focus on the Grendel episode: the monster attacks the hall built by Hrothgar; Beowulf comes from the land of the Geats to help, confronts Grendel, and rips off his arm, leaving him to die when he flees back to the mere-pool.

J.R.R. Tolkien, the trained philologist and Oxford professor, wrote the influential essay “The Monster and the Critics,” describing the poem as “a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death” (108). Beowulf faces three monsters in all: Grendel; Grendel’s mother (lines 1250-1649); and, half a century later, the hoard-guarding Dragon (lines 2206-3034). We examine only Grendel.

Being-Unto-Death

The opening establishes two important contexts. The first is lineage, which brings reflection on the preservation of society and the meaning of life itself. After the death of Scyld Shefing, forbear of Hrothgar, the poet reflects: “Men under heaven’s / shifting skies, though skilled in counsel, / cannot say surely who unshipped that cargo” (49-51). As the Canadian philosopher George Grant put it: “A man must do his own believing as he does his own dying” (37). Beowulf opens this anguished question at the heart of human experience.

The poem also opens the question of what difference Christianity makes. The poet’s references to religion range from general (“under the heavens,” “sent them by God”) to specifically Christian. God is the “Creator” (105), and the source of monsters is set within Genesis:

This unhappy being / had long lived in the land of monsters / since the Creator cast them out / as kindred of Cain. For that killing of Abel / the eternal Lord took vengeance. (103-13)

Other references to hell, the “Prince of Heaven,” “grace,” and “Holy God” establish a mythic contrast of good and evil in Christian terms. Beowulf becomes a muted Christ-figure in the tradition of Christus Victor.

The poem locates the problem of evil in two ways: externally (Grendel and the monsters descend from Cain) and internally to the society. The poet sounds a note of foreboding: “The time was not yet / when the blood-feud should bring out again / sword-hatred in sworn kindred” (83-85). The poet is ambivalent about the relationship between the Christian metanarrative and the local culture of retribution and fatedness, expressed in “wergild” and “wyrd.” The word “wyrd” gives us Shakespeare’s “weird sisters” in Macbeth and the modern notion of the weird. Questions of freedom versus fate, and whether the future must be violent, emerge throughout the poem.

The Hall of Heorot

The description of Heorot’s construction sets up the poem’s main point about Grendel’s threat. The hall embodies the building of culture — human creativity interwoven with a Creator-God’s activity. (This is why Tolkien calls human artists “sub-creators.”) Hrothgar builds a “huge mead-hall” (68) where he shares “the gifts God had bestowed on him” (70) with young and old. Heorot is the society’s heart, where words bring things into being and are aligned with deeds: “he made good his boast.”

This is what Grendel threatens — an existential threat to political flourishing:

So the company of men led a careless life, / all was well with them: until One began / to encompass evil, an enemy from hell. (98-100)

Grendel comes right into the heart of the hall: “he grasped on their pallets / thirty warriors” (121-22). His effect reverses everything: “night’s table-laughter turned to morning’s / lamentation” (127-28). Perhaps the greatest effect is the one most easily overlooked:

It was not remarked then if a man looked / for sleeping-quarters quieter, less central… / Each survivor / then kept himself at safer distance. (137-38; 141-42)

The society is riven; people retreat into themselves — a denial of the very meaning of existence in heroic society, which is manifest in a complex network of ties and interrelationships. A carpet page from the Lindisfarne Gospels illustrates the outlook that emphasizes such rich connections. The poem Beowulf itself, like those carpet pages, represents the interwovenness of life: epic length, comprehensive scope, interlaced alliteration, and rhythmic movement of beat and caesura (pause). The very existence of the poem is an affirmation of sociality.

Beowulf sets things right. Physically, he destroys Grendel by dismembering him, fulfilling his promise to “cleanse your hall Heorot” (431-32). But the achievement is expressed in other terms too. Old English poetry is highly structured; the killing episode is carefully nested in mirroring actions and speeches. Whereas Grendel brings chaos, Beowulf restores order — and the place where stories can be told is restored.

There is an irony: the poem’s structure is primarily oral, and our knowledge of it comes through a single manuscript (BL MS Cotton Vitellius A xv) that survived a major fire. The manuscript bespeaks both miracle and the lostness of the society that produced it. Yet imaginative works like Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings perpetuate meditation on heroism, the monstrous, and the importance of fellowship.

For Tolkien, technology and industry represent a monstrous threat to placid shire life (Jacobs). Our fascination with medieval monsters may offer a safe space to consider closer threats — or a vision for a solution so surprising it seems fantastical. The extent to which medieval political vision strikes us as a threat may reveal, as in a magic mirror, the deformed shape of our own political discourse.

Works Cited

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Joseph F. Tuso, ed. Beowulf. Norton, 1975, 105-13.

Jacobs, Alan. “Fall, Mortality, and the Machine: Tolkien and Technology.” The Atlantic, 27 July, 2012.

11c. Tyrannical Monsters in The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales

We now turn to political monsters in The Canterbury Tales, a late fourteenth-century work by Geoffrey Chaucer. By this point in English literary history, political monsters have a much more realistic feel. Our aim is not a superficial comparison of an early and a late medieval work but to open ourselves to what one thinker calls “the world of the text” (Ricoeur 99-100) and catch resonances not only with the Beowulf-poet’s questions, but with ours. We look with both texts in the direction their questions prompt us to look.

Being-Unto-Death II

The Canterbury Tales consists of a story-telling contest set in spring, while the tale-tellers are on pilgrimage to Canterbury. Chaucer imagines himself a pilgrim joining a group of “nine and twenty” at a pub. The host suggests the contest and joins them.

A Knight begins the contest with a tale set in ancient Greece. As the literary critic Joseph Westlund observed, “The pagan outlook, and the strong sense of man’s tragic position, make the tale especially suitable for the beginning of pilgrimage” (Westlund 527). Westlund notices that the entire tale conveys man’s tragic position, it is set in a pre-Christian context, and the pilgrimage motif is crucial. The tale-tellers are on pilgrimage together, representing life together. They collectively represent all three medieval estates — those who fight, those who pray, and those who work — ranging from ideal to less ideal figures (Sadlek, 91).

Strange though it may seem, this pilgrim fellowship is, for Chaucer, the people of God. Being destined for God is part of how Chaucer would define what society is. His political thought is both like and unlike that of the ancient Greeks. Like them, he offers a comprehensive philosophical vision full of realistic figures and the everyday, while simultaneously reflecting on life together and the meaning of politics. Unlike ancient Greek thought, or more accurately in conversation with and in response to the earlier outlook, Chaucer proposes a richer understanding that depends on the difference Jesus makes to the world.

Canterbury stands in for Jerusalem as a pilgrimage destination. Chaucer has his last tale-teller, a Parson, refer to this destination explicitly: “And Jhesu for his grace wit me sende / To shewe yow the wey in this viage / Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrimage / That highte Jerusalem celestial” (10.48-51). As editors note, this allusion to Revelation 21:2 “lends a clear allegorical dimension to the journey to Canterbury.”

In saying Christianity provides a more satisfying picture of reality than ancient Greece alone, Chaucer stands in a medieval tradition including Thomas Aquinas and Dante. Medieval intellectuals did not see the Greeks as wrong but as “seeing through a mirror dimly” (Lewis 10-12). Dante adored the pagan Roman poet Vergil, who once wrote an eclogue sounding like a prophecy of Christ’s coming:

Now the Virgin returns, Saturn’s reign returns, / now a new offspring is being sent down from high heaven. (585)

Dante makes Vergil his personal guide through the universe in The Divine Comedy, but because Vergil is pre-Christian, he cannot show heaven to Dante. This trope shows the medieval sense of a comprehensive pilgrimage from a pagan mentalité toward a Christian one, with Saturn associated with the return of a golden age.

Tyranny in “The Knight’s Tale”

For Chaucer, the political monster is the tyrant. The Knight’s Tale begins with Theseus vanquishing the tyrant who has taken over Thebes after the battle between the sons of Oedipus. Their uncle Creon, “the medieval stereotype of a tyrant” (Allen and Fisher 30), rules Thebes and refuses to allow the fallen dead to be buried. Theseus’s victory, as Duke of Athens, represents the triumph of reason over the dysfunction that Thebes and Creon symbolize.

With Theseus’s victory, tyranny seems to have disappeared. But as readers have increasingly noticed, Theseus himself has worrying traits. His “rationality” resembles the bureaucratization and micro-management satirized by writers like Kafka. A certain kind of rationality quickly becomes monstrous. After defeating Creon, he razes Thebes, returns to Athens, and the narrator says there is nothing to tell: “what nedeth words mo?” (1029). For a poet who celebrates life together as the flourishing of tale-telling, this quietness is disquieting.

When events do disrupt his ordered world, Theseus spends the rest of the tale trying to regain control. He is repeatedly described as “busy”; at one point he is presented as “a god in trone” (2529). He keeps trying to show he is in control — but perhaps that is the problem. He looks like he might become a tyrant himself. The failure to control death and events ironically produces the impulse to try too hard to control one’s environment.

Who is responsible for the death that upsets Theseus? Saturn: “Out of the ground a furie infernal sterte / From Pluto sent at requeste of Saturne” (2684-85). Behind the Fury is Pluto, and behind Pluto is Saturn.

We have seen that Saturn is associated with the possible return of a golden age. He is also the god of catastrophe — the Titan who eats his children when told one will usurp his power. Chaucer puts the following speech into Saturn’s mouth:

“My deere doghter Venus,” quod Saturne, / “My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne, / Hath moore power than woot any man. / Myne is the drenchyng in the see so wan; / Myn is the prison in the derke cote; / Myn is the stranglynge and hangyng by the throte; / The murmure and the cherles rebellyng; / The groynynge and the pryvee empoysonyng. / I do vengeance and pleyn correccioun… / Myn is the ruyne of the hye halles, / The fallynge of the toures and of the walles… / I slow Sampsoun, shakynge the piler; / And myne be the maladyes colde, / The derke tresons, and the castes olde; / My looking is the fader of pestilence.” (1.2453-69)

The repetition of “myne” gives the passage a steady, ominous drumbeat of impending doom.

In the Middle Ages, plagiarism was no big deal; people believed everything harmonized eventually and there was ultimately only one story unfolding. Parts of the Knight’s Tale were borrowed from an Italian poem called Il Teseida. Significantly, Saturn is original to Chaucer’s telling — not present in his source — indicating Saturn’s importance to his vision.

Chaucer is deeply sympathetic to the Greek sense of the monstrous dimension of life. It manifests most meaningfully in politics. Tyranny represents the greatest threat to a happy life, which in the ancient world is lived out in togetherness with others. Exile is literally a fate worse than death. For the Greeks, there is another aspect too, on the level of fate, the action of the gods, the presence of suffering. In both aspects, there is something irresolvable about human existence that tinges it with sadness. Saturn represents these dimensions.

Significantly, Saturn claims “I slow Sampsoun.” Samson is a judge, a political leader in Hebrew Scriptures — no tyrant, but rather a type of Christ. The most ominous detail is Saturn’s declaration that he killed Samson: he is essentially claiming there is ultimately no hope in the world. Saturn, in this passage, is a pre-Nietzschean nihilist.

Yet for Chaucer as a medieval thinker, Saturn is also associated with the hope realized in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Samson is a type of Christ in Hebrew Scriptures. Saturn at one and the same time points to a limitation in the Greek worldview and to the possibility of its being overcome. That overcoming will not happen within the Knight’s Tale — only in the pilgrimage project that contains it.

Other Tyrants in The Canterbury Tales

The monstrous tyrant recurs at least three more times. The Physician’s Tale opens with a reference to the classical writer Livy and tells a political story about arbitrary rule. As in the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer alludes to Hebrew Scriptures and draws attention to the figure of Mary, pointing toward a different narrative tradition and future hope.

In the Clerk’s Tale, a marquis and his people live in an apparent fantasy land of happiness, except that the people worry the marquis has no wife and heir. After marrying, the marquis goes off the rails: he arbitrarily tests his young wife’s faithfulness, monstrously taking from her first their daughter, then their son, and ultimately pretending to abandon her for another woman. Throughout, the wife remains passive and submissive. This tale, with its threefold trial structure, has deep folklore elements. Once again we have a female figure associated with Mary and good political rule:

Though that hire housbonde absent were, anon / If gentil men or othere of hire contree / Were wrothe, she wolde bryngen hem aton; / So wise and rype words hadde she, / And juggementz of so greet equitee, / That she from hevene sent was, as men wende, / Peple to save and every wrong t’amende. (4.435-41)

The leader becomes a monster, testing his wife absurdly, and his people support him. The wife, meanwhile, is as if “from hevene sent” and has the right words. She represents political hope.

The Second Nun’s Tale also takes a similar approach. Before starting, the nun asks the Virgin Mary for help and Chaucer puts into her mouth lines borrowed directly from Dante:

Withinne the cloistre blisful of thy sydis / Took mannes shap the eterneel love and pees / That of the tryne compas lord and gyde is… / and thou, virgine wemmelees, / Baar of thy body — and dweltest mayden pure — / The creatour of every creature. (8.43-49)

Mary bears in her womb “the creatour of every creature,” as well as the “lord and gyde” of the universe. At the heart of the tale, St Cecilia confronts the tyrant Almachius, calling him “lyk a bladdre ful of wynd” (8.439) — like a bladder full of wind. He orders her burned, and when that fails, his servant tries to cut off her head but cannot quite sever her neck. She clings to life for three days, spending them teaching the faith. The repetition of “hem” (them) insists on the people — they become a local religious community that survives her martyrdom.

Chaucer’s genius is to contrast the tyrant as a bladder full of empty air with Dante’s image of Jesus in Mary’s womb. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the Word: “In the beginning was the Word” (Jn 1:1). If Almachius is a bladder of empty words, Mary is full of the Word who, for both Chaucer and Dante, is the true sovereign over all of life.

For Chaucer, the most concerning monster is the tyrant. He is a political poet anxious about arrangements sliding into authoritarianism. Drawing on cultural history and political philosophy, he provides a vision of hope that such monsters can be vanquished — a vision resembling a democratic society functioning with warts and all.

Works Cited

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by Mark Allen and John H. Fisher, 3rd ed., Wadsworth, 2012.

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge UP, 1964.

Ricoeur, Paul. “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation.” Essays on Biblical Interpretation, edited by Lewis S. Mudge, Fortress, 1980, pp. 73-118.

Sadlek, Gregory M. “Visualizing Chaucer’s Pilgrim Society.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, vol. 8, no. 2, 2000, pp. 77-97.

Westlund, Joseph. “The Knight’s Tale as an Impetus for Pilgrimage.” Philological Quarterly 43 (1964), pp. 526-37.

11d. Reflection: The Monstrous and Creative Freedom

The Monstrous and Creative Freedom

The monstrosity of political tyranny has implications for storytellers, who in their own way imitate God by creating imaginative worlds. A key question arises: are the characters in those worlds free? Are we?

The standard thinking in the medieval Christian worldview is that people are indeed free. This idea comes under pressure from time to time, both within Christianity and from outside it. One common dissenting view holds that humans are merely the products of their material environment; the chemistry within them may foster the illusion of personality and freedom, but they are really nothing more than the by-product of a deterministic, mechanical, and impersonal universe. From within Christianity, the notion of creaturely freedom comes most under pressure shortly after the close of the Middle Ages. Reformation-era thinkers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and especially some of Calvin’s followers severely question the notion of freedom in practical, everyday terms.

For the creative writer working with the standard Christian understanding, the task is to replicate such freedom in their works. Both Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers — both excellent medievalists — held this view. Sayers wrote:

The notion that the artist is a vague, dreamy creature living in retreat from the facts of life is a false one…. It is for the sacrilegious hand laid on the major premise that the artist is crucified by tyrannies and quietly smothered by bureaucracies. As for the common man, the artist is nearer to him than the man of any other calling, since his vocation is precisely to express the highest common factor of humanity — that image of the Creator which distinguishes the man from the beast. (Sayers 128)

The impulse to replicate freedom lies behind the creative-writing maxim “Show, don’t tell.” The imitator of the God of freedom cannot propagandize; they can only propose a world for readers and characters to inhabit. Rowan Williams, theologian and Fellow of England’s Royal Society of Literature, discusses this in relation to Dostoevsky, whose approach closely resembles Chaucer’s:

The Dostoevskian novel is… an exercise in resisting the demonic and rescuing language. It does this by insisting on freedom — the freedom of characters within the novel to go on answering each other, even when this wholly upsets and disappoints any hopes we may have for resolutions and good endings…. It enacts the freedom it discusses by creating a narrative space in which various futures are possible for characters and for readers. And in doing so it seeks… to represent the ways in which the world’s creator exercises “authorship,” generates dependence without control. (Williams 12)

Williams begins with the demonic or the monstrous. In this context, it is the opposite of freedom. The latter has to do with language, with the ability to answer back, to reflect and to say more. A good writer — the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Dostoevsky — creates “a narrative space in which various futures are possible.” In their hands the narrative itself is an invitation into freedom.

For the Beowulf-poet, for Chaucer, and for Dostoevsky, the monstrous is ultimately the denial of freedom. It represents a lurking threat in the political sphere and is an issue the artist must parry as well. Its opposite is rhetorical wisdom and the freedom to say more. If the monstrous, positively, is defamiliarization, then it can be an expression of such freedom. In art and politics alike, speech properly generates responsiveness and further tale-telling. For Chaucer and the Beowulf poet, our words resonate with the creative energy of the universe itself and with its Creator, who addresses and sustains it with his Word.

Works Cited

Sayers, Dorothy L. Man: The Creating Creature. Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World. Eerdmans, 1969, pp. 67-129.

Williams, Rowan. “Introduction.” Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, Baylor, 2008, pp. 1-14.

Module 12: Conclusion

Steven Bednarski (History, University of Waterloo)

12a. Final Summary

Medieval People and their Monsters

Medieval monsters are a remarkably effective lens for understanding medieval culture because they sit at the boundary of the thinkable. We can understand historical societies not just by examining the ordinary but by examining what they considered extraordinary. Some monsters, like giants and dragons, manifested as larger-than-life mythic creatures. Others, such as summoned spirits or revenants, represented connections with a supernatural realm. Tales of werewolves and wild men warned about the fragility of human rationality. Medieval authors also deployed “monstrous” figures for satirical and political purposes, while demons and the Devil embodied the age’s most profound fears. Together, these constructions of the monstrous illuminate the medieval worldview: by charting what medieval people feared and imagined, we map what they valued and considered normal.

We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves. — Carey and Gross, 2011

Scholars and their Disciplines

The study of medieval monsters draws on an unusually wide range of scholarly disciplines. Some scholars utilize a range of sources or methods — archaeology, anthropology, geography — to situate textual evidence within a material world. Others demonstrate expertise in a single source type, applying close reading to reveal finer detail. Still others trace common themes across time and space, comparing and contrasting the same category of source across eras, regions, or authors. All approaches have strengths and limitations varying with subject, context, and evidence.

One index of variable evidence is manuscript production. Surviving manuscripts differ dramatically by period and region. Scholars of the British Isles have far fewer records than those working on France or Italy, and the gap between the early Middle Ages (sixth to eighth centuries) and the high and late periods (ninth to fifteenth centuries) is enormous. These disparities shape the questions scholars can ask and conclusions they can draw.

The Shoulders of Giants

Medieval scholarship builds on foundations laid by predecessors. The phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” — usually attributed to Newton’s 1675 letter to Hooke — was originally a medieval metaphor traced to the twelfth-century philosopher Bernard of Chartres, who used it to describe how thinkers of his age could see further than the ancients precisely because they built upon ancient foundations. For over eight hundred years, the expression has captured the cumulative, collaborative nature of intellectual inquiry.

Works Cited

Buringh, Eltjo, and Jan Luiten Van Zanden. “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 69, no. 2, Jun., 2009, pp. 409-445.

Carey, Mike, and Peter Gross. The unwritten, Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the bogus identity. New York, NY: Vertigo Comics, 2011.