Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  And that is how the vision of a few became the devotion of the many.

  (Photo Credit 1.20)

  a The canonical hours—or Divine Office(s), as they are collectively called—are a series of public prayers, sung by monks in common at appointed hours, every third hour or so during the day and once or twice in the course of the night. The number and sequence of these “hours” (more like half hours) have changed over history and cultures but are according to traditional Benedictine usage Matins and Lauds (during the night), Prime (on rising at 6 A.M.), Terce (at 9 A.M.), Sext (at noon), None (at 3 P.M.), Vespers (at 6 P.M.), Compline (before retiring). The backbone of each office is a recitation of Old Testament psalms and New Testament canticles that can be sung verse by verse antiphonally—i.e., by half the choir, answered in the next verse by the other half. The idea is to make prayer so much a part of one’s day as to fulfill the injunction of Saint Paul to “pray always.”

  b Carolingian refers to the reign and times of the Frankish dynasty established by Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus in Latin) in the mid-eighth century and which continued to rule in Germany through the first decade of the tenth century and in France till 987. Charlemagne’s reign encouraged a cultural flowering, the first among the barbarian kingdoms, a small-scale renaissance such as would not be experienced again in Western Europe till Hildegard’s century.

  c Though the writers of the Middle Ages had before them the unique example of Augustine’s Confessions, no one would again attempt such personal autobiography till the Renaissance. Margery Kempe, writing in English in the early fifteenth century, was a partial exception, but her memoir lay undiscovered and unpublished till 1934.

  d A biography of Jutta, likely written by Volmar at Hildegard’s request, turned up in 1991, casting doubt on some of our previous assumptions about Hildegard. It would seem that Jutta was only six or so years older than Hildegard and that the two may have lived together in seclusion on the estate of Jutta’s father at Sponheim before taking up residence in the anchorite’s cell at Disibodenberg. But since it will take scholars some time to weigh the authenticity of the sometimes conflicting narratives—Hildegard’s autobiography, previously available, and the newly discovered Vita of Jutta—I have stuck to the information available from Hildegard’s own narrative.

  e Contemporary pilgrims for whom spelt and lettuce do not make much of a meal will find mouthwatering dishes and superb local wines at the gracious restaurant in Bingen Castle on the opposite hill.

  f “Frenchman” is proleptic; Bernard was Champenois. France would not acquire the region of Champagne for more than a century after Bernard’s time.

  g The full text is “Let a woman learn in silence and in full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must keep silent” (1 Timothy 2:11–12). The medievals, lacking a science of textual history, had no way of knowing that this letter was written not by Paul but by someone taking his name—and with a highly selective agenda—decades after his death. See Desire of the Everlasting Hills, pp. 155ff.

  h In the ancient world, women never addressed large crowds, not only because their opinions were unsought but because there were no public address systems, and the unaided casting of the voice to a large crowd, especially in the open air, presented insurmountable difficulties to most women. Even men who were to assume public roles had to be specially trained to project their voices. The late Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, because they were echoing sound boxes, gave women their first opportunity to address large meetings. Such a happening would not have been possible much before Hildegard’s time. She gave her sermon in Trier Cathedral, a lofty late Romanesque structure. Right next door is the Liebfrauenkirche (Church of the Virgin), one of Germany’s first (and most exquisite) Gothic churches. Together, these two constitute a textbook account of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic, as well as of spatial sensibility, in the age of Hildegard.

  i In 1077, exactly one hundred years before Barbarossa’s submission, his predecessor Henry IV had knelt in the snow of Canossa, begging the pope to lift his excommunication, incurred by his interference in church affairs. In 1172, just five years before the Peace of Venice, Henry II of England had endured scourging for his inadvertent role in the murder of Thomas Becket, his archbishop of Canterbury. Each of these monarchs learned in his turn that the church was not to be trifled with.

  j The hymn is “Adeste Fideles,” composed in the eighteenth century (in a very medieval spirit) by John F. Wade. The full text of the cited quotation is “Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine / Gestant puellae viscera” (The God of God, the Light of Light / Is born from the guts of a girl). The second line was unfortunately translated in the nineteenth century by Frederick Oakley as “Lo! he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.”

  k In truth, the Norman style never quite caught on in Italy, which went from Romanesque to Palladian almost without the intervening “Gothic” connection. Famous exceptions, however, include Florence’s gemlike Santa Croce and the splendidly extravagant Duomo of Milan.

  TWO

  Aquitaine and Assisi, Courts of Love

  The Pursuit of Love and Its Consequences

  Be free in bed, infrequent in business.

  —ADVICE OF THE EMPRESS MATILDA TO KING HENRY II, HER SON

  SEX HAS NEVER BEEN ABSENT from any age. It rises in heat even if the age views passion as hardly more remarkable than eating and elimination (as did the Greeks), even if the age exalts chastity (as did the medievals), even if the age considers sexual matters beyond polite discussion (as did the Victorians). I would venture that the level of private sexual activity is a constant in the human chronicle and that only our public attitudes toward it change from one era to another. But as we all know, sex and romance are not identical, since sex is available with or without the latter. Romance as a sexual attitude was, in fact, almost unknown before the age of Hildegard.

  This may seem, at first, incredible because we have so conjoined the two that it is impossible for our minds to unhook them, but also because we may recall snatches of ancient poetry that have left us with the impression that poets have always been romantics. Weren’t Sappho, Ovid, and Catullus of this persuasion? Didn’t they write all-consumingly of their love objects as might a modern poet or novelist? Didn’t they hurl themselves into the path of their beloved, promising all manner of service, hoping to be permitted to spend an eternity with her? Didn’t they mope and despair when rejected?

  Yes and no. People have always had sex with one another, whether inside marriage or outside. Since before modern times all marriages were arranged and the betrothed seldom had contact with each other prior to the wedding night, romantic pursuit ending in marriage was impossible. What we may think of as romance in ancient poetry is strictly confined to the occasional extramarital affair, either homosexual, as in Greek Sappho’s case, or heterosexual, as in the cases of Ovid and Catullus. But both Roman poets are writing about sexual obsession for a particular woman—which, as we all know, is anything but everlasting. Catullus’s passion is for “Lesbia,” a pseudonymous married aristocrat, whom he comes to hate; and women in general fare badly in his poems, which are often obscenely degrading. For Ovid, passion is something of a joke; and if we read his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Loving) seriously, we miss his meaning. For Ovid’s famous work is actually a kind of send-up of self-help books, giving heaps of bad advice to the would-be lover, who is seen to be in the throes of a ridiculous appetite. Ovid’s irony becomes undeniable in passages where he lets us in on the joke:

  Magna superstitio tibi sit natalis amicae:

  Quaque aliquid dandum est, illa sit atra dies.

  Cum bene vitaris, tamen auferet; invenit artem

  Femina, qua cupidi carpat amantis opes.

  On her birthday, just be far away—

  no gifts, but fine excuses of all sorts.

  She knows the art of taking all she may

  And leaving you with nothing but your shorts.

&n
bsp; The love object is a demanding, even a devouring, female, her suitor a temporarily infatuated fool. In the more earnest age of Hildegard, however, Ars Amatoria was cherished as a straightforward how-to manual for knightly lovers of lovely women.

  The cultural transformations that were coming to bud about the time of Hildegard’s birth—in the late eleventh century—and that reached full flower in her lifetime were several and extraordinary. We have already seen examples of two of these: the growing power of women in religious life and the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary. Like Hildegard, afterwards known as “the Sybil of the Rhine,” many other abbesses and female visionaries began to occupy the public imagination in a way they’d never done during the long, hard Dark Ages that had preceded the lighter, more luminous twelfth century. One virgin lady in particular, Mary, formerly peasant girl of Nazareth, now Queen of Heaven, was given so much publicity that she came to overshadow her divine son in popular devotion and ecclesiastical art. It is not so surprising that the cults of such women, whether of flesh and blood or of stone and stained glass, should be especially vibrant in Germanic and Celtic realms, where women in pagan times had held more power than they ever exercised in the Greco-Roman world.

  Beyond these transformations, feudalism, the basic medieval socioeconomic system, was evolving rapidly. Feudalism was a complex set of relationships to military service and land ownership. In theory, all land was owned by the sovereign, who bestowed it in “feud” (or “fee,” or “fief”) on those who had fought (or were pledged to fight) for him in war.a The recipient of the king’s (or duke’s or count’s) land was called a “knight,” a word of Germanic origin that meant “boy” but came to accrue the meaning of “servant of the lord” or “vassal.” Throughout the Middle Ages it was used to translate the Latin words miles (soldier) and eques (cavalryman). Only someone at the level of a knight could be properly addressed as “sire” (or “sir”) by those beneath him, who were termed “villeins,” “churls,” or, if female, “wenches.”

  By the twelfth century, however, many knights were (more or less) landless retainers of the local lord, kept in readiness just in case; and between wars they were left to idle at his court, where women were in short supply. There were, of course, the lord’s wife, the well-guarded female members of his family, and their female attendants. But the exceeding number of young, lively, unattached males hanging out in the castle precincts presented something of a challenge. Goneril’s description in King Lear of her father’s retinue, though doubtless exaggerated, paints a vivid picture of the challenge confronting the well-protected courtly family:

  Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires [attendants to the knights],

  Men so disorder’d, so debosh’d and bold,

  That this our court, infected with their manners,

  Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust

  Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel

  Than a grac’d palace.

  The true knight was, of course, far from such scenes. He was imagined in the courtly literature of the Middle Ages as a valiant, questing soul, modest, full of quiet strength, incapable of bragging, though known to be deadly in warfare. Like the “verray parfit gentil knight” of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, he was always one who “loved chivalrye, / Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye,” the ideal male. It is most relevant, however, that Chaucer, immediately following this portrait, gives us another—of the knight’s son the squire, not a lover of chivalry, truth, honor, etc., just “a lovyere, and a lusty bacheler,” his clothing embroidered as if he were a meadow “Al ful of fresshe floures, whyte and rede,” “Singinge he was, or floytinge [fluting] all the day; / He was as fresh as is the month of May.” If Chaucer’s knight is shown as the ideal, his son the squire is portrayed as the more common reality, the idle frat boy. A well-stocked castle might easily host a hundred dancing layabouts like this one, “wonderly deliver, and greet of strengthe,” as Chaucer tells us, and “So hote he lovede, that by nightertale / He sleep namore than dooth a nightingale.”

  Whether the lord or his lady felt more challenged by this situation we cannot say for certain, for we have little historical evidence as to how the next step in social evolution took place. We can say, however, that what resulted was a culture of adultery—the most mannerly adultery in history, but adultery nonetheless.

  “Any idealization of sexual love,” wrote the great medievalist C. S. Lewis, “in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery.” If, as Henry Adams believed, the Virgin of Virgins was the mysterious dynamo at the heart of the Middle Ages, extramarital sex was the ordinary electricity. How the two were connected is by no means obvious; and the attempt by historians to make a connection has precipitated a dozen theories, revisions, and countertheories. What we can claim without cavil is that both the pious worship of the Virgin and the adulterous worship of the lady of the manor were connected to the general rise in the status of women during this period. If it is not, on the face of it, evident how widespread adultery can be connected to the social advancement of women, it will be, once we have examined the special rules for adultery invented in the courts of the twelfth century.

  The queen of the castle (or duchess or countess or dame or lady-in-waiting) was a prize to be won. Since there were few women of stature resident at each court, many worthy knights contended for the fair hands and full hearts of the few, all women in arranged marriages with time on their hands and daydreams in their heads. To debauch a virgin was a risky maneuver, one that could lose you life or organ, especially if the fruit of your love became the all-too-visible fruit of her womb. But a married lady, with obscure chambers at her personal disposal and guarded at evening only by female confidantes, could manage even an adulterous pregnancy rather nicely. (“Why, of course, it’s yours, my lord!” she replied indignantly. “Haven’t you noticed? It looks just like your mother.”)

  Idle men in barracks (or even in barricaded castles) inevitably invent games for themselves. The twelfth-century game: who is knight enough to win the lady? Athletic talents useful to the soldier were recalibrated for displays of peacetime jousting, tilting, melees, and similar diversions at organized tournaments—bloody, often deadly, affairs that are the origin of our field sports. A knight might enter the lists wearing a delicate flower or bright swatch of cloth, a secret (or not-so-secret) pledge of his vassalage to a certain lady. Furtive strategies of the battlefield were retooled for wooing in gardens by means of stolen glances and in passageways by means of whispered words and clandestine tokens.

  It seems most likely that women set the rules of this new game, perhaps after many hours spent poring over vernacular translations of Ovid:

  Siquis in hoc artem non novit amandi,

  Hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet.

  Arte citae veloque rates remoque moventur,

  Arte leves currus: arte regendus amor.

  If there is anyone who needs to know

  The Art of Loving, come along with me.

  It’s but a skill—like sailing, riding—so

  It can be learned in lessons one, two, three.

  It’s simple, really—and Ovid, who claimed that Venus had dubbed him “artifex tenero Amori” (artist of tender Love), will instruct us all.

  We should not think that these courts of love, as they came to be called, were confined to individual strongholds. They were as itinerant as Benedictine monasteries were stable, settling into one castle for a few months or even weeks, moving on to a hunting lodge perhaps, then on to another of the lord’s castles, then crashing at the fortress of some lesser lord who was duty-bound to put up the greater lord’s whole household, which could number a hundred or more—the lord and his knights, the lord’s spouse and her ladies, his councillors and other officials, the steward, the butler, the cooks and kitchen staff, the chamberlain, the treasurer, the bodyguards and others designated to keep order, the clerks, servants, and grooms, a chaplain or two, th
e packhorses and oxen, carts and wagons. For a king’s entourage there would be much additional paraphernalia to be stored (dramatic changes of clothing and jewelry, supplies of parchment and coin) and many additional figures to be housed: a high-ranking constable or marshall, a keeper of the king’s seals, and “ushers, huntsmen, horn-blowers, watchmen, guards, archers, men-at-arms, cat-hunters, wolf-catchers, keepers of the hounds, keepers of the royal mews [stables for horses and hawks], keepers of the tents, the chamberlain of the candles, the bearer of the King’s bed, the King’s tailor, laundresses, including the King’s personal washerwoman, and a ewerer, who dried his clothes and prepared the royal bath,” in the words of Alison Weir, a biographer of medieval royalty.

  Mention of “the royal bath” gives us a clue as to why this large assembly had to keep journeying on. The insoluble medieval problem in the face of such a company was sanitation. Plumbing was unknown; and the tradition of public bathing, though as much a part of the Greco-Roman heritage as plumbing had been, had perished beyond Byzantium. Because individual bathing in a copper basin in a drafty castle could lead so easily to chill, then to fever and death, kings and queens seldom bathed more than once a month, those with neither washerwoman nor ewerer at their command scarcely more than once or twice a year. Despite their silks and linens, their frequent changes of costume, their liberal burning of Arabian incense, the royals stank, as did their retinues. More than this, the chamber pot was the sole device for receiving human waste.b A small castle—or even a large one—might become downright uninhabitable after many weeks of residence by such a throng.

  When Duncan, an eleventh-century king of Scotland, arrives at the castle of the treacherous Macbeths, he remarks: