Love Among the Ruins

In the twenty four hours since the announcement of the probable destruction of the temple of Baalshamin, which has stood in Palmyra since the reign of Tiberius, and near where the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad was tortured and murdered this last month, thoughts of destruction have been much on my mind. It just so happens that today is the traditional date of the sack of Rome by the Visigoth Alaric I. Palaces, mausoleums and basilicas were destroyed, although not for ideological reasons.

Today is also the traditional anniversary of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Now, I am a Pliny the Elder fangirl, and it is a distressing quirk of history that the author of one of the defining artefacts of the early Roman Empire, a naval commander, military historian and orator, should be remembered for the manner of his death. Pliny the Younger, as we know, avoided his uncle’s fate because of a propensity for Greek homework. The eruption, which lasted for two days, buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. Though the site of Pompeii wasn’t discovered until the late 16th century, the eruption (‘grades Campaniae’, disaster at Campania) was known to medieval readers of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, because the vast majority of its manuscripts were prefaced by a mini-biography of the author, much as the standard text of Troilus and Criseyde begins ‘Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London’.

Destruction by nature and destruction by man cannot really be considered in the same register. Dresden in 1945 may in certain ways have resembled the shores of Aceh in late December 2004, loss of life is loss of life, but there can be no rationalisation, however unsatisfactory, for the freak natural disaster. It happens and everyone is equally powerless to prevent it. As Tewkesbury Abbey confirms, all we can do is not build on flood plains.

Where circumstances allow, i.e. not in Plymouth, Montserrat, humans will also rebuild. There was much admiration in 2011 for how quickly roads in Tōhoku were repaired after the extraordinary earthquake and tsunami, while the Franconian city of Würzburg, almost entirely destroyed in bombing raids in 1945, has been rebuilt in identical style, such that it is still recognisable from its depiction in Schedel’s 1493 Weltchronik. In cases where conquering forces have remained, there are even examples of the preservation of existing buildings, such as the requisitioning of pagan temples as Churches from the fourth to seventh centuries in Rome.

‘For thousands of years the Romans were the best in the world at… almost everything.’

Yet we as humans clearly have a desire to salt the fields, to ensure the complete destruction of an enemy’s way of life. The Harrowing of the North in 1069-70, England’s answer to the Fall of Carthage, is one method of delivering such destruction. The systematic obliteration of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Sufi shrines in Mali, the remains of the palace of Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrud, to name but a few, is another. Gilgamesh and Enkidu destroy the Cedar Forest, Alexander razed Persepolis, the Christians of Alexandria burned the Serapeum and its library, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine responds to his wife’s death as any dictator would:

This cursed town will I consume with fire
Because this place bereft me of my love.
The houses, burnt, will look as if they mourned,
And here will I set up her stature.

Such wanton destruction is inspired by a desire to cripple the enemy with the fear of one’s unwavering resolve. But, as has been much discussed in recent months, to destroy an enemy’s history is to remove every trace of their identity. In 2012, William Dalrymple wrote of the Umayyad mosque in Aleppo,

While the human pain inflicted by torture and killing is immeasurable, the destruction of a people’s heritage is irretrievable: once a monument is destroyed, it can never be replaced. With modern weaponry it only takes a few months of concerted shelling for the history of an entire people to be reduced to rubble. (The Guardian, 18.10.2012)

There is nothing that I can add that will sound any other than glib and half-hearted.

Perhaps, then, a message of hope: Saint Cuthbert was born in the early seventh century, and probably spent his entire life in Northumbria. Before the Conquest, he was arguably the most beloved of native English saints, even serving as a sort of Patron Saint of England, long before the concept existed, by merit of the devotion of the House of Wessex. He was buried at Lindisfarne, where he remained until it was sacked by Vikings in 875. Over the next two centuries, his body found rest at Chester-le-Street, Ripon and Durham, where in the early 12th century the Romanesque cathedral was constructed around his shrine. A very late Old English poem describes Cuthbert’s central role in the structure of the Cathedral:

Eardiæð æt ðem eadige      is in ðem minstre
unarimeda      reliquia,
ðær monia wundrum gewurðað,      ðes ðe writ seggeð,
midd ðene Drihnes wer      domes bideð.

[Inside the minster, by the blessed saint, are numberless relics; there many miracles occur, as books make known, while God’s servant lies there and waits for Judgement.]

The shrine was destroyed during the Reformation, and Cuthbert’s body buried elsewhere. Yet miraculously a copy of St John’s Gospel, which had been kept in his coffin perhaps since the early 8th century, survived. This book was recently purchased ‘for the nation’ for £9 million, and though officially attached to the British Library in London, has since been displayed in Durham, no more than a hundred yards from where it spent the better part of five hundred years.

There should be more stories like this.

Heckles Raised

In the interests of politeness, self-awareness and feminist solidarity, I try as much as possible to avoid saying that other women are silly, attention-seeking, hysterical, or ‘letting the team down.’ In fact, in the interests of politeness and self-awareness, I try to avoid saying these things about most people. It can be difficult to sympathise with someone’s outlooks or conclusions – and it’s extremely hard when something someone says is plain wrong – but since, according to the Electoral Roll, I am an adult, I do honestly try to give leeway and some consideration for the context that nurtured someone’s opinions and sense of self. This may be perceived as me ‘checking my privilege’.

That said, Margery Kempe really gets my goat.

Norfolk’s second-most-famous fifteenth-century non-saint, Margery was a member of a large merchant family in King’s Lynn, and dictatrix of the English language’s earliest autobiography. The discovery of the unique manuscript in the 1930s raised hopes that a new Julian of Norwich or Bridget of Sweden had been uncovered. Such hopes were, I am sorry to say, dashed rather quickly. The Book of Margery Kempe, finished by a faithful but anonymous scribe in 1436, details its subject’s visions, unconventional marital arrangements, pilgrimages around Europe and to the Holy Land, and the enmity drummed up by her public fits of weeping.

Putting the ‘fun’ in ‘fundamentalist’!

A few days ago, apropos of nothing, I took down my copy of The Book (ed. by Barry Windeatt), flipped through the pages, and was surprised to see a veritable scar-tissue of graffiti. Now, last year I said my piece on the act of scrawling on books, and concluded that, though helpful to later generations of scholars, it was mostly A Bad Thing. It feels not unlike heckling a comedian, but more cowardly, because the comedian died centuries ago. My feelings about Margery were clearly strong enough to break this resolve. Some of it was merely an interest in factual correctness:

‘When this creature with her companions came to the grave where our Lord was buried, then, as she entered that holy place, she fell down with her candle in her hand, as if she would have died for sorrow.’ Not a thing.

‘When you hear of them, you give me thanks with crying and weeping for the grace that I have showed to them, and, when you see any lepers, you have great compassion on them, giving me thanks and praise that I am more favourable to you than to them.’ You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Some notes showed how in awe I was of Margery’s, shall we say, strongly-held convictions.

‘Sometimes she wept for an hour on Good Friday for the sins of the people, having more sorrow for their sins than for her own, inasmuch as our Lord forgave her her own sins before she went to Jerusalem.’ Natürlich.

‘Here is your name, written at the Trinity’s foot.’ Back yourself.

‘If ever you’re a saint in heaven, lady, pray for me.’ Now at Hotel Back Yourself…

‘There is no clerk who can speak against the life which I teach you, and, if he does so, he is not God’s clerk, he is the devil’s clerk.’ Woop, there we go.

It is difficult to insert oneself into the mind of someone so religious that they annoy other late medieval Catholics. Margery is the antithesis of a cake-or-death Anglican, and manages to tread on all sorts of toes in the pursuit of personal religious revelation. Some of her contemporaries were more sympathetic than others. I had precisely no sympathy.

‘Then the parson stopped for a little while from his preaching and said to the people, “Friends, be quiet, and do not complain about this woman, for each of you may sin mortally in her, and she is not the cause, but rather your own judgement.”’ ‘If you weren’t so sinful, she wouldn’t be so annoying.’

‘And then, as they came homewards again, they met women with children in their arms, and the said creature asked if there were any male child among them, and the women said no. Then her mind was so ravished into the childhood of Christ, for desire that she had to see him, that she could not bear it, but fell down and wept and cried so intensely that it was marvellous to hear it. Then the priests had the more faith that all was indeed well with her, when they heard her cry in out-of-the-way places as well as public places, and in the fields as in the town.’ This actually sounds pretty unreasonable.

‘Nevertheless, on this day he preached a great deal against the said creature, not mentioning her name, but so conveying his thoughts that people well understood that he meant her.’ I like this friar. He seems quite reasonable.

The people of Bristol get a bit fed up with Margery receiving communion ‘with plentiful tears and violent sobbings, with loud crying and shrill shriekings’, and ask her to be quiet.

‘Then she wept sorely for her sins, praying God for mercy and forgiveness for them, saying to our Lord, “Lord, as you said, hanging on the cross, for your crucifiers, ‘Father, forgive them; they know not what they do,’ so, I beseech you, forgive these people all the scorn and slanders.’ Or you could just stop crying?

My biggest problem with Margery is that she is utterly lacking in that modern construct, self-awareness. She has a dream where the Virgin Mary tells her only to wear black; some time later, the Virgin reappears and tells her only to wear white. Margery complies, and then wonders why everyone not party to her dream – i.e. everyone else – is confused by her sudden volte face. She goes on pilgrimage to Rome and cries every time she meets a handsome man, because he reminds her too much of Jesus. ‘Those who saw her were greatly astonished at her, because they did not know the reason’, as if that would definitely clear things up. She fasts for one day each week, then has a dream where the Virgin tells her not to bother any more, reasoning that her emotional turmoils are both physically taxing and more pleasing to God. It’s impossible not to be snarky, and I feel impolite just thinking about it.

Margery was like an X Factor contestant who pursues a literal childhood dream of performing, and whose chief talent is her ability to shut out the ‘haters’ with her bludgeon-like personality. But nothing charms an audience like a sob story, and by god, did Margery like to cry.