In Pierre d’Ailly’s late fourteenth-century treatise on weather (De impressionibus aeris), the discussion of earthquakes immediately follows a treatment of winds. D’Ailly attributed earthquakes to the actions of warm, dry vapors enclosed within the earth (spiritus), which, on account of their subtle nature, seek to escape from the earth. When their free escape is impeded, an earthquake results.89 He explained a number of phenomena associated with earthquakes based upon the actions of these vapors, including the strange noises that frequently accompany earthquakes (rumblings and the fact that in Aristotle’s phrase, “the earth seems to moo”) and the sun’s darkened appearance during earthquakes.90 At times, an earthquake could cause both vapors and stones to be thrown from the earth, in a boiling fashion, as vapors brought small stones up with them, and those stones falling caused other stones to dislodge.91 Thunderous rumblings, darkening of the sun, and a rain of stones—many of the signs associated with plague by chroniclers—all could result from the actions of earthquake-causing vapors, according to d’Ailly.
Further, d’Ailly compared earthquakes to sicknesses in the human body, associating earthquakes with disease metaphorically, just as the chroniclers, Paris doctors, and anonymous quaestio had associated earthquakes literally with the plague. First, following Aristotle, d’Ailly noted an earthquake’s similitude to bodily paralysis or tremors in animals.92 In such cases, d’Ailly said, a superheated vapor within the body (the animal’s or the earth’s) causes a trembling motion. Second, d’Ailly adds that a similar effect is sometimes seen in humans after they produce urine, when subtle vapors sneak into the body through the natural paths of the urine (per vias naturales urinales), disperse throughout the other inner parts of the body, and cause a tremor of the whole body as they exit through the pores.93 D’Ailly also explained the pattern of aftershocks following an earthquake by comparison to disease, in this case tertian or quartan fever, in which the entire amount of the febrile vapor seeking expulsion was not released in the original fever (or earthquake).94 Earthquakes thus behaved much as sicknesses in the body of the earth in which excessively warm vapors were expelled from the earth’s body. By equation of macrocosm and microcosm, earthquakes pointed to sicknesses in the human body and in fact were noted to be a cause of epidemics.95
Earthquakes, bizarre weather, toads, worms, and serpents all featured in medical analyses of plague because they caused or resulted from the corruption that was the epidemic’s cause. Yet these phenomena were also the very signs that gave plague its apocalyptic punch. Indeed, the earthquakes, thunder and lightning, rains of blood, worms, and snakes, and the other marvelous phenomena that show up in fourteenth-century writings about the plague had multiple significances. There was an overlap between their apocalyptic and scientific connotations even within the same treatise. Such language set up a chain of associations in readers’ minds, so that an earthquake could at the same time serve to release corrupt air and to point to Matthew 24 or other apocalyptic passages in Scripture. By and large the authors of such treatises left these overlaps unexplained without comment. These phenomena neither served as natural causes of the apocalypse, as they might have for Roger Bacon, nor appeared specifically as supernatural, and therefore apocalyptic, signs, as they might have for Matthew Paris or the Parisian authors around 1300. The very ambiguity of these portents, as I will argue, was profoundly important. Perhaps nowhere is this overlap and ambiguity between the natural and the supernatural more apparent than in the chronicle of Heinrich of Herford.
Heinrich of Herford’s Chronicle
Heinrich of Herford’s Liber de rebus memorabilioribus is particularly noteworthy for the number of signs and portents the author describes in the final decades of his chronicle, which ends in 1355. As noted above, Heinrich makes specific mention of a cluster of portents at the start of the reign of the emperor Charles of Bohemia in 1348.96 Given his citation of apocalyptic texts from 2 Timothy and 2 Corinthians, his use of other apocalyptic language,97 and his deliberate pointing to the cluster of portents around the time of the plague, it is apparent that Heinrich meant to give his text an apocalyptic slant. And yet, Heinrich also frequently appended to his descriptions of just such marvels explanations drawn from natural philosophy. No longer are these portents seen through the lens of an either/or dichotomy either as natural events or as supernatural apocalyptic signs. In Heinrich’s chronicle, the same events are often uncomfortably and unexplainedly both.
For example, for the year 1337, Heinrich described in immediate succession the following prodigies: a rain of blood in Erfurt, a nine-year-old girl bearing a child by her father, and the birth of a baby girl with breasts, pubic hair, and menstrual periods. Then he immediately quoted a passage from Albertus Magnus’s Physica in which Albert explained just such a monstrous birth. Such monsters, according to Albert, result from an abundance of the material of the first seed and the strength of the heat and virtue forming the infant. “And in my own times,” Albert wrote—and Heinrich quoted him—“there was displayed a girl who had been born with breasts and with hair under her arms and in her groin, and her mother asserted that she also suffered from a monthly flow, which without doubt happened on account of the heat that formed and matured [the fetus].”98 This same principle is at work in the births of children who already have teeth, according to Albert. The sexually precocious girls of 1337 thus could be explained by natural causes. Heinrich did not offer here an explanation—marvelous or scientific—for the rain of blood in Erfurt, although he was careful to note that he himself had seen “its drops captured in a white linen cloth.”99 (The same sort of attention to first-person observation marks the pages of Albert’s treatises also.) Several pages later, however, the reader is again inundated with a wave of portents and with a scientific explanation of them.
Under the year 1345, Heinrich opened his discussion of the Black Death, with his quotation of a letter describing the earthquake in Carinthia on the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, a rain of fire in the land of the Turks, and a rain of toads and snakes. Under the same year, he recounted the stories of a number of battles, the appearance of a devil (dyabolus) who killed or harassed several men in the household of one Thyderic Sobben, and ghosts (fantasmata) who were carousing in a church in Mendene.100 In the following brief entry for the year 1346, Heinrich noted some important political events: the election of Charles of Bohemia as king of the Romans and the death of King Philip of France. The bulk of his remarks for the year 1346, however, concerned yet another marvelous phenomenon, this time the birth in Westphalia of a lamb with two heads, the lower one a lamb’s head and the upper one a bird’s head. The monster seemed “both to have been a portent and to be attributed to the virtue of the stars.”101 Heinrich again appended quotations from Albertus Magnus’s Physica and De meteoris offering explications of the birth of monsters. These quotations, however, can apply not simply to the two-headed lamb that Heinrich has just described, but also to the portents in the east in the letter he had quoted with respect to the outbreak of plague.
Following the description of the two-headed lamb, Heinrich quoted three passages from Albertus Magnus. In the first, from the Physica, Albert explained monstrous births similar to the two-headed lamb Heinrich described, using as an example the birth of piglets with human faces. In such a case where the offspring had the characteristics of two very different beings, the operation of the heavenly bodies had to be at work, for the seeds of humans and pigs (or, mutatis mutandis, sheep and birds) were too different for any progeny to be engendered. Rather, the seeds would mutually corrupt one another. But the planets could induce the pig’s seed to take on a form outside of its ordinary capacity, as, for example, when the sun, moon, and some other planets were all in a certain region of Aries and no human could be generated.102 Presumably, the lamb’s bird head was formed in this manner. Next, and with no explanation of why, Heinrich quoted two passages from Albertus Magnus’s De meteoris. Both dealt with the generation of animals in an unusual manner, but not
this time with two-headed sheep, human-headed pigs, or even pig-headed humans. Rather, the two passages Heinrich lined up here describe the generation of animals in the clouds, with resulting rains of small frogs, fish, worms, and, even once, a calf. Heinrich seems to be thinking back to his entry for the previous year about the rain of toads and snakes in the east that preceded the outbreak of plague.
According to the passages Heinrich quoted from Albert, these phenomena, too, were susceptible of natural explanations. As heat causes rainwater to evaporate, Albert had argued, it can draw up a little earthly matter mixed in with the moisture. That mixture, once taken up into the air, begins to harden and to become skin. The continual exposure to heat produces a spirit within that skin, to which the virtue of the stars adds a sensitive soul, so that an animal results. The beings so generated are usually aquatic animals like frogs, fish, and worms because in such rains the watery element prevails over the earthy element.103 As in the case of the calf that fell from the sky, however, the body of a perfect animal could be formed in the clouds, a fact to be explained by the virtue of the stars.104 The joint actions of evaporation and the stars, thus—although Heinrich does not explicitly draw this connection—could be responsible for the marvelous rain of toads and serpents that preceded the plague as well.
The same conflation of the natural and the apocalyptic comes in Heinrich’s treatment of the flagellants. On the one hand, his most overtly apocalyptic language comes in his description of the flagellants, of whom he wrote, “[the appearance of] a race of flagellants without a head foretold the advent of Antichrist.”105 At the same time, here, too, comes his most blatant scientific explanation of a presumed apocalyptic sign. Heinrich dwelt at length on the flagellants (for more than four pages in the modern edition), whom he condemned as imprudent, defiant, and a corrupting influence. He apparently was drawing on firsthand experience of their rituals, saying that he himself had seen the sharp points at the ends of their whips embedded in their flesh so that they could not easily be pulled out and noting with the empathy of one who had been there that “it would take a heart of stone to watch such behavior without shedding tears.”106 He also quoted at length (perhaps in its entirety) a treatise on the flagellants composed by one Gerhardus de Cosvelde, “rector of the scholars in the city of Münster in Westphalia.”107 This remarkable treatise offered an explanation of the flagellant movement based entirely on astrology.
Gerhardus’s analysis of the flagellants rested upon the horoscope he erected for the moment of the sun’s entry into Aries on March 12, 1349, the beginning of the astrological year. (The horoscope is also reproduced in Heinrich’s chronicle.) For Gerhardus, the key component of this horoscope was the third mundane house, beginning with Aries and containing the planets of the sun, Saturn, Mars, and Mercury.108 According to Gerhardus, the third mundane house presided over faith, religion, and mutations of religion. The sun was in a position of particular strength in this horoscope (Gerhardus indeed dubs the sun the “lord of the year”), and its position in the mundane house signifying religion meant that it would “multiply a religion and sect.”109 Further, Gerhardus declared that the new sect foretold by the horoscope would have its origins “in the east,” since Aries was an eastern sign having significance mainly over Germany, according to Alchabitius, author of a widely used medieval textbook of astrology. Thus the new sect would thrive chiefly in Germany.110 The fact that Mars and Mercury were in conjunction in the horoscope signified beatings with whips and the effusion of blood.111 Because the two planets were in Jupiter’s domus, their influence would lead men to join this sect—and not without hypocrisy (all attributed to Alchabitius).112
Every detail of the flagellants’ activities finds an astrological explanation in the treatise Heinrich quotes. The flagellants wear a grey hood before their eyes, and thus a saturnine aspect, because in the horoscope Saturn is in the sign of Aries, which has significance for the head.113 In their rituals, they “fall down to the ground horribly” because the planets signifying the flagellants are in one of the “falling” (cadens) mundane houses.114 The cause of their (partial) nudity is found in the fact that Saturn is both combust (i.e., within a given number of degrees of the sun) and in Aries, the sign of its dejection. Their strange garments arise from the influence of Venus, which is in Saturn’s domus in the horoscope and is a signifier of women’s clothing.115 The flagellants claim to be inspired by a stone tablet brought down from heaven by an angel. This “fiction” is caused by the falling Saturn (i.e., the planet is in its dejection and in a cadent mundane house), which signifies about heavy things like stones, as well as about oracles and the apparition of secret things.116 The lying nature of the sect, as well as its instability, result from the baleful appearance of the sign of Scorpio in the midheaven (the tenth mundane house in a horoscope), for Scorpio signifies sorrow, lying, and instability. The fact that Scorpio appears in the tenth mundane house, the domus of Jupiter, results in people believing the flagellants’ lies and calling them miracles, “on account of Jupiter’s faith.”117 In short, Gerhardus concludes, “I say that in my estimation this sect is purely natural, and that they are acting under a species of fury called mania. . . . And the sect will not last long, but will end quickly and with confusion and infamy.”118 The apocalyptic “race without a head” is now explained entirely by the stars. If this is not Heinrich’s conclusion also, he gives us no sign here, for he moves immediately to a discussion of political events and leaves the flagellants behind.119
Even the succeeding passages in Heinrich’s text, however, leave the reader poised between marvelous and scientific explanations of events. Under the year 1351, Heinrich described an unusual plague in the town of Hameln. A pit was being dug and cleared out in grounds belonging to one of the town’s citizens when one of the workers suddenly fell down and at once expired. A second worker went into the pit to retrieve the body and suffered the same fate. The word quickly spread, but no one knew the cause of the plague. A third worker was sent into the pit, but this time with a rope tied around his waist, so that he could quickly be hauled out. Again, the pit proved poisonous, but the worker was able to give a sign as he was becoming stiff and stupefied and was pulled out half-dead. A fourth worker entered the pit and died as the first two had. Opinion was divided, according to Heinrich, on the cause of this singular plague. Some leaned towards a marvelous explanation. They maintained that there must be a basilisk in the pit, able to kill instantly by its breath or even its very glance. Others tended towards a scientific analysis. They held that the earth in the pit had been poisoned by the fact that in the past there had been many latrines in the same place. At length, the pit was filled with a brothlike mixture of boiling water and flour, and the plague was ended, either by the death of the basilisk or by the purging of the poisons from the pir.120
This story very closely parallels passages from scientific treatises on earthquakes. In the De meteoris, for example, Albertus Magnus claims to have witnessed just such an incident when a long-closed well in Padua was opened up, a happening he attributed not to a basilisk, but to the venomous nature of vapors remaining enclosed within the earth for a long time.121 There is also a like passage in the anonymous quaestio attributing the Black Death to earthquakes. The author of that quaestio, like Albert, adduced such a scenario to prove how poisonous were the fumes released by earthquakes. He further remarked that ignorant people attributed deaths just like those Heinrich here described to the existence of a basilisk in the pit, whereas the explanation was properly to be found in the poisonous vapors enclosed within the earth.122 Heinrich is clearly aware of both sorts of explanations as he describes the venomous pit of Hameln. Just as he does with the monstrous births and rain of worms and snakes in his chronicle, however, he refuses here to give the nod to either a purely marvelous or a purely scientific explanation. This little “plague” in Hameln, like the universal bubonic plague, is ambiguous in Heinrich’s chronicle, capable of multiple interpretations. In the case of the littl
e Hameln plague, Heinrich offers us two competing, and by implication mutually exclusive, explanations. Either there is a basilisk in the pit or the latrines once on that site poisoned the soil. In the case of the universal pestilence, however, the interpretation is not posed in either/or terms. We may understand the earthquakes, fire from heaven, rain of toads, and pestilence at the same time as proceeding from God’s wrath, as being signs of the approaching end, and as resulting from natural causes.
Multiple Meanings and the Trend to Naturalize the Apocalypse
Why might plague in the minds of fourteenth-century authors bear such a multivalent analysis? Why might one aspect of a description of the plague—frogs, say—carry us effortlessly from biblical imagery (Exodus and Revelation) to natural philosophy? Why does the same cluster of phenomena (earthquakes, frogs, worms, rains of fire) pop up as readily in a natural philosopher’s analysis of the disease as in an apocalyptic letter about marvelous prodigies in distant and nearby lands? How is it that an author like Heinrich of Herford came to move effortlessly from apocalyptic texts to Albertus Magnus’s De meteoris?
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