Pigging Out

‘I wish I could turn out that moral voice inside me that says eating animals is murder, but I guess I’m just not as strong as you are.’
‘That’s because you need protein.’

It’s likely that the default dietary setting in the Middle Ages was vegetarian or near-vegetarian, since unless you lived by the sea meat would have been expensive to buy and probably illegal to hunt. Stringently enforced forest laws in England and Wales, though perhaps not as draconian as Walter Scott would have us believe, made poaching an extremely risky enterprise to peasant labourers. Rivers were often subject to similar prerogative laws, and it is well known that certain animals – swans, sturgeons and whales – were the exclusive preserve of the monarch. Small landholders may have kept food animals such as pigs, but the staple diet of your average English medieval peasant would have mainly consisted of pulse-based stews or pottages and rye or barley bread.

Peasants tended not to keep recipe books, and these therefore emphatically do not reflect what the peasantry would have eaten. Richard II, at whose court The Forme of Cury was written, ate a great deal of meat, and on days when meat was precluded by Church dietary laws, he would eat fish. So when I proposed cooking from The Forme of Cury this week and was alerted to a guest’s longstanding vegetarianism, I considered that we might have a problem. The book contains about 200 recipes. 83 of these contain no meat or optional meat (or lard), although far fewer also contain no dairy or egg. Only 12 of these recipes can be considered main courses: the bulk of the 83 are puddings, sauces and sides, with two recipes for spiced wine, and of course the seventeen sauces themselves were to be served with meat. Many of these tentatively vegetarian recipes still require ‘broth’, which was most likely made from animal bones. An example:

Ryse of flessh

Take ryse and waisshe hem clene, and do hem in an erthen pot with gode broth and lat hem seeþ wel. Aftirward take almaund mylke and do þerto, and colour it wiþ safroun & salt, & messe forth.

To cut a very long story short, this is risotto made with meat stock. Heston Blumenthal does a version of it at his restaurant Dinner with calf tail, but I was consigned to using vegetable stock. A perfectly adequate, if un-Ricardian, side dish, it will come as no surprise that it tastes far better with flessh than without.

Would you like some meat with your meat?

One of the guests was lactose intolerant, so the holistic vegetarian-ness of the evening was scuppered by the fact that, like in Alpine France, there are literally no main recipes in The Forme of Cury that contain neither cheese nor meat. So on the no-dairy side, we had the ominously named tartes of flessh, and on the no-meat side, an adaptation of rauioles, an early pasta dish that I made with eggy bread. We had several vegetable side-dishes made with meatless broth, and (super-anachronistic) fro-yo after a fourteenth-century fruit recipe, which was described as ‘Christmas on a stick’. This may be the greatest compliment I have ever received.

Medieval food is obviously a gimmick (albeit one of academic interest to me), so one can hardly read ones dietary behaviour in what one prepares. Nonetheless, the sheer difficulty of assembling a meal without meat was jarring. I eat meat, although I know there are many ethical and medical reasons not to. What struck me as particularly odd about The Forme of Cury in the context of current social discourse on food is that meat, sugar and salt were formerly undeniable status symbols; we now hear both that meat, sugar and salt are the most problematic excesses in a modern western diet, and that healthy eating has become the preserve of the economic elite.

In general, we eat far too much meat. Much of this no doubt stems from the industrialisation of livestock farming, but it is a curious irony that the diet of a medieval peasant, consisting mainly of lentils and rye, should now be associated with organic-cashmere trustafarians and pushy middle-class parents. The colossally unsustainable production and consumption of meat is a far cry from the careful stocking of fishponds for a tiny ruling class, but is it really much more democratic? From Jamie’s School Dinners to horsemeat lasagne, we are under no illusion that the budget meat we demand from supermarkets may be nothing of the sort, and all the while rare and expensive foods are still sought by those who can afford them, as happened with spices in ancient and medieval Europe, with pineapples in the Early Modern period, and with extravagantly bland river fish in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Just as the Queen doesn’t have a state banquet every night, perhaps Richard took private meals of porridge and leeks. But it seems unlikely. Few cases of vegetarianism are recorded amongst non-ascetics in the medieval West. Aquinas himself argued that humankind’s divine mandate to care for the beasts of the earth doesn’t forbid eating them. In a circular manner, perhaps God’s Annointed, who would later starve to death in prison, thus had the best available argument to pig out, which it seems he certainly did. This is perhaps the most extravagant recipe in The Forme of Cury:

Cokagrys

Take and make [mincemeat], but do þerto pynes and sugur. Take an hold roste cok; pulle hym & hylde hym al togyder saue þe legges. Take a pigg and hilde hym fro þe myddes dounward; fylle him ful of þe [mincemeat], & sowe hym fast togeder. Do hym in a panne & seeþ hym wel, and whan þei ben isode, do hem on a spyt & rost it wele. Colour it with ȝolkes of ayren and safroun. Lay þeron foyles of gold and of siluer, and serue hit forth.

What’s for dinner? Gout.

First Wives Club

Due to various complicating factors (the weather, my research, hangovers) this is my first despatch in over a month, but what a day to choose! For today is the anniversary of the death of wild child, imperialist pig-dog and all-around LAD Henry II. While between 85 and 92% of my enthusiasm for this king was initially inspired by the peerless Peter O’Toole, who portrayed Henry in both Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968), the historical figure was himself pretty exciting in an era filled with dramatically large characters. In January I spoke on the radio to propose a Tudors-style telly treatment for the early generations of the Plantagenet dynasty, and while the supporting cast ought to include his despotic mother the Empress Matilda, fearsome wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, quarrelling sons, and the ‘turbulent priest’ Thomas Becket, Henry would of course be at the centre, the Tony Soprano of the 12th century.

The case I made was as follows:

Henry II pacified England and Normandy after the twenty-year civil war known as ‘the Anarchy’, fought between his mother Matilda and his uncle King Stephen. He married the phenomenally wealthy, well-connected and beautiful Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was ten years his senior and very recently divorced from the King of France. His repeated clashes with the Chancellor-Archbishop Thomas Becket would lead to Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170; Becket had been the beloved tutor of his eldest son, also called Henry, and would become the most popular saint in medieval England. The ‘family firm’ nature of the Plantagenets and their influence across their Empire would cause fractures: three of Henry and Eleanor’s sons – his Heir Apparent Henry, Geoffrey, and Richard, later known as the Lion-Heart – mounted a rebellion against him, with the support of King Louis of France. As Katharine Hepburn’s Oscar-winning Eleanor says, what family doesn’t have its ups and downs?

I also made a glib remark about Henry, like England’s other famous Henry, having red hair. (Perhaps Damian Lewis could play him? was the subtext. The discussion arose from publicity about Wolf Hall.) Sex, power and plate armour – surely all anyone desires from Sunday night television? Perhaps with John Hurt in the cameo role of Pope Alexander III, narrating Bulls in voiceover. I can picture it now.

But one has to ask oneself about the environment that allowed Henry’s achievements, theatrical as they were, to warrant such attention. It is a matter of fact that his mother Matilda made an absolute hash of the whole Queen-ing business. She served as regent in Italy for her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, but had little other practical experience of rule. That is, of course, to be expected, as despite being the sole surviving legitimate child of Henry I, as a woman she cannot reasonably have expected to inherit either England or Normandy. Hence the accession of her cousin Stephen, and hence the civil war.

Henry’s wife Eleanor represents the other side of the same coin. As the elder of two sisters, she became Duchess of the quasi-independent Aquitaine in her teens following the death of her father. Aquitaine effectively comprised all of western France south of the Loire, and an easterly channel between Bourges and Limousin, as far as Lyon. In short, most of modern France. So when she married Prince Louis of France, later Louis VII, and her property theoretically transferred to her husband, France doubled in size. One of the stipulations of their marriage, however, was that Aquitaine would remain independent until their son came of age. Eleanor and Louis had two daughters, then for a combination of political and personal reasons they were divorced, and she married Henry, then Duke of Normandy, taking Aquitaine with her.

All the women who independent.

Landowning aristocratic women were not nearly as rare in the Middle Ages as one might suppose. One famous example within the English monarchy is Blanche, co-heiress to the Duchy of Lancaster, whose marriage to John of Gaunt made him the richest man in England. Another is Margaret Beaufort, only child of the Duke of Somerset and eventually mother of Henry VII. Blanche’s marriage was arranged by King Edward III himself, eager to wed his spare sons to wealthy heiresses. Margaret was also married by a king, Henry VI, to his half-brother, when she was 12 and he 24. Within a year she was pregnant and he was dead.

The grim reality for heiresses – and it is only honest to frame these women in terms of their fathers’ land – was to be fought over by noblemen, their guardians or prospective fathers-in-law, sometimes abducted (a feudal version of ‘finders keepers’, and quite legal), promptly remarried if widowed, and generally treated as an extension of their desirable property – which would, of course, be absorbed by their husbands’ families. Now, it may seem disingenuous to suggest that aristocratic women were the hardest-done-by of medieval European society, and I would claim no such thing. But I would argue that the disparity between the sexes was greater at this stratum of society than amongst the peasantry or burgeoning urban bourgeoisie.

I am often struck by how frequently working women appear in records of the medieval period, and there are hundreds of books and articles on the lives of working women before the modern period, in contrast to how little popular culture assumes about historical women-at-work. From spinners and laundresses to agricultural labourers, it is patently absurd to judge that women did not work in the past – and smacks of elitism in the same way that some western, middle-class feminists seem to believe that the success of the movement begins and ends in the boardroom (although, doing doctoral research in medieval Latin, I am barely qualified to highlight anyone else’s elitism). Women weren’t ‘professionals’, and only professionals count, is how that argument develops. Of course mainstream history is elitist – probably because, until very recently in the west and still in parts of the developing world, literacy is a matter for elites. But even the high-status and highly romanticised Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry shows women mowing, shearing sheep, harvesting grapes, and generally behaving like humans in an agrarian society. The images of aristocratic life in the same manuscript only hint at an imbalance: there may be no women at the Christmas feast, but they get to flirt in the same garden and join the same May Day hunt as their men.

©Photo. R.M.N. / R.-G. OjŽda

Working 9 to 5.

Quid enim iste cum Henrico? He, after all, was neither the cause nor the worst case of the difficult treatment of property-owning women in the Middle Ages. Henry was not responsible for his mother’s disinheritance or mismanagement, nor indeed for Margaret Beaufort’s horrific childbirth. It is all the more important to remember that Eleanor was substantially older than him at their marriage, and apparently suggested the match herself, possibly in part to avoid less desirable suitors who had attempted to kidnap her ‘fair and square’. This level of autonomy is remarkable because it is so rare.

Henry is a curious example of a man whose power was, if not provided, certainly solidified by his mother and wife, who in certain lights both overshadow him. Eleanor backed her sons’ rebellion against their father and allegedly had one of Henry’s mistresses murdered. (To clarify, this is almost certainly untrue.) Although Henry was tutored by the philosopher William of Conches and was on good terms with several other learned clerics, it is Eleanor who is remembered, perhaps without foundation, as the patron of poets and musicians. Eleanor is quite rightly described with superlatives; Henry is popularly less famous than both of his sons and his best frenemy Thomas Becket. And the icing on the cake? Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar for her portrayal of Eleanor; Peter O’Toole lost out to Cliff Robertson for Charly.

Elf and Safety

Ever on the brave frontline of journalism, the Mail Online has in the last month run two stories revealing in shocking detail how innocuous, Photoshop-illiterate housewives have been minding their own business, photographing their Labradors on idyllic country walks, only to find upon closer inspection that A FAIRY is lurking in frame. ‘I was really shocked and freaked out at first’, said a Northamptonshire mother-of-two, whose inspiring story hit the headlines on May 7th. As well you might be: the thing she photographed was distinctly mosquito-sized while, as any fule kno, fairies are at least of a height with humans.

That’s right: fairies are more like the Dutch than the Daddy-Long-Legs.

Of course, they’d have to be, if changelings were to pass for human babies, which they seemed to fairly often in The Past. The Past itself was clear about this. Shakespeare may suggest that Robin Goodfellow has superhuman speed, but Mistress Page has no doubt that ‘urchins, ouphes and fairies, green and white’ are the size of human children, the Queen of the Fairies scaled up, bee-fashion, to the dimensions of a teenage girl. Martianus Capella’s Longaevi and Adam of Bremen’s Husi – probably one and the same – are of vaguely sylvan appearance, but without even a hint of titchiness. The Aes Sídhe of Irish myth read as human in appearance, inasmuch as they have any dimensions at all.

That’s not a fairy…

There are countless medieval representations of fairies, Lamias, Wild Hunts, and they all hinge on the same idea, fundamentally lacking in the Daily Mail’s otherwise heroic coverage of supernatural phenomena: nobody seems to have believed that they occupied the same earthly dimension as humans. Hence the various portals to their realms: barrow mounds, tree rings or caves; even dreams, as we see in the BBC’s stunning adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The Middle English reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend shows Dame Heurodys possessed by the stone-crowned Faerie King as she sleeps under a graft-tree at midday. She is spirited away (no/pun intended – delete as desired) under the nose of Sir Orfeo’s entire army, is found hunting by her husband after a decade in the wilderness, and followed through a rock.

When he was in þe roche y-go,
Wele þre mile, oþer mo,
He com in-to a fair cuntray,
As briȝt so sonne on somers day,
Smoþe & plain & al grene
Hille no dale nas þer non y-sene.

In this two-dimensional landscape, a castle stands, glowing day and night like the Heavenly Jerusalem, or Minas Morgul. And like the White Witch’s castle in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, its courtyard is full of corpses.

Sum stode wiþouten hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete,
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al for-schreynt.

Far from pressing flowers and making organic porridge, these fairies pass their eternity in collecting the victims of violent deaths.

THAT’s a fairy.

Both Lewis and Tolkien lamented the association of volatile warrior-demigods with the imaginings of Cicely Mary Barker, and you could do worse than to read On Fairy-Stories or ‘The Longaevi’ in The Discarded Image. [I recommended Lewis’s chapter in particular to my students – and in grand old style, precisely one of them read it.]. Beings that are, in Lewis’s definition, ‘stronger, more reckless, less inhibited, more triumphantly and impenitently passionate’ than humans have become the patron saints of seed cake and elderflower cordial. As an analogy, I suppose it’s not unlike the use of pirates as learning aids. For those of us who prefer Black Sails to Captain Pugwash, this spiritual and physical shrinking stands as an emblem of sanitisation and creative decline.

Naturally, I blame Arthur Conan Doyle – or I would, if I weren’t so busy blaming the Daily Mail.

Roman Holiday

Like those proverbial buses, birthdays always seem to come in groups. This current eight-day period sees the birthdays of sixteen Facebook friends, five actual friends, my housemate, my sister, my mother, my godmother, my late grandfather and great-grandmother, and Iggy Pop. But it’s not all about me, and today is the grandest birthday of all: Rome.

Of course, it isn’t possible to know precisely when Rome was founded, settled, called Rome, or countless other matters that mark the beginning of its status as the most historically important city in Western Europe. So today’s commemoration becomes a bit like the Queen’s Official Birthday – her actual birthday, as if by magic, also being today. Nor is it possible to describe Rome’s colossal influence on the formation of medieval Europe, linguistic, cultural, religious, or poetic. The medievals themselves were well aware of this. Writings and artworks of the high and late Middle Ages explore Rome’s foundation myths, emulate the style of her histories and celebrate the spread of Christianity as it consumed Rome’s pagan practices and appropriated her artefacts.

Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 753 B.C.

It may be a surprise to read that Rome often overshadowed even Jerusalem, for whom centuries of wars were fought and where the holiest places of Europe’s dominant religion were recalled in countless itineraries. But overshadow it did. Alexander Neckam, the late-12th-century Augustinian academic and administrator, wrote of Rome,

Primitus Europae mea pagina serviet, in qua
Roma stat, orbis apex, gloria, gemma, decus.
[My page will first treat of Europe, where stands Rome, the pinnacle, glory, jewel and honour of the world.]

He creates a picture of a city filled with churches and inhabited by the ghosts of great men – from Caesar and Cicero to Peter and Paul – and beautiful, lost artworks. Earlier books on the marvels of Rome write of the changing ground of the city, where cathedrals grow from the rubble of demolished temples. The impressive and impressing power of the Roman church pervades these books, and others that depict the lives (or, more properly, deaths) of Christians in Rome before it was Christian. It’s all too much and too varied to cover in a career, let alone in something like this.

There is an interesting side-channel to this narrative of conquest and appropriation. The books of the Church and churchmen can be, surprisingly, tinged with regret at the beauty the Church destroyed. Now, regret is not an emotion for birthdays, and birthdays aren’t a concern of the medieval Church. If you intend, like I do, to celebrate Rome’s birthday, Titus Pullo is nearer the mark.

Spice Up Your Life

Since beginning to explore the joys of medieval cooking last year, I’ve accrued a large variety of spices and as such have been adding them to almost every meal. The origins of these spices are far-flung: nutmeg and mace from India and the Banda Islands of Indonesia; cloves from the Maluku Islands and Sri Lanka; cinnamon from Sri Lanka and Madagascar; ginger from China and everywhere in-between. The excitement I derive from this makes me wonder whether I am an orientalist pig-dog (thanks, The Guardian), or in fact a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.

Nutritious.

As anyone who has ever played Anno 1404 will be able to confirm, the acquisition of spices is a serious business. The impact of European colonisers throughout the tropics tells its own grisly story, from the Dutch in Indonesia and the Portuguese in Goa to the English, Spanish and French in the Greater Antilles. In the High Middle Ages the market desire for these substances was naturally smaller than in later periods, but was sometimes matched by a curiosity towards their origins. The Frenchman Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre in the early thirteenth century, writes several breathless chapters into his Historia orientalis, a chronicle of the Crusades, where he describes the plentiful fruits and spices of his new surroundings:

Sunt in eadem terra arbores mirabiles, quas propter earum praecellentiam nominant arbores paradisi, poma oblonga suauissima, et quasi unctuosa, dulcissimum saporem habentia ferentes: in uno autem globo plusquam centum sese contingentia et compressa inuoluuntur. [There are in that land wondrous trees, who because of their excellence are called trees of paradise, bearing very sweet and almost oily oblong apples which have a very sweet taste; and in one sphere are encased more than a hundred of them, touching and packed in tight.]

It sounds like Jacques is describing a pomegranate. We are also reminded that oranges and lemons, now abundant in Mediterranean Europe, were once exclusive to Asia and novel to the European:

Sunt praeterea alie arbores fructus acidos, pontici videlicet saporis, ex se procreantes, quos appellant Limones. Quorum succo in aestate cum carnibus et piscibus libentissime utuntur. […] In parvis autem arboribus quaedam crescunt alia poma citrina minoris quantitatis frigida, et acidi seu pontici saporis, quae poma Orenges ab indigenis nuncupantur. [Furthermore there are other trees bringing forth from themselves sour fruits, which is to say of tart flavour, which they call lemons, whose juice is very freely used in summer with meat and fish. And on certain small trees there grow other citrus apples, cooling and smaller of size, and with an acid or tart flavour, which are called orange-apples by the locals.]

Delicious.

Jacques’s notions of the harvesting of pepper, for example, are amusingly foolhardy and doubtless derive from a European literary tradition that emphasises the weird over the strictly accurate. As he muses upon cardamom, galangal, zedoary, myrrh and terebinth, he doesn’t exhort his reader to set up trade colonies, but to marvel at the richness of the earth as given them by God. There is, of course, a possessive aspect to his treatment of the Holy Land, since he is in a contested kingdom as an early sort of colonial bishop. But the botanical cornucopia he describes is not for the taking, but for dreaming about. He’d have been a sucker for Bombay Sapphire.

An Indian Summer

In a manuscript compiled around 1525 by the Venetian Alessandro Zorzi, we read that, several decades earlier, an Italian monk had been travelling in Ethiopia, and had encountered or heard a description of the city of Barrara, capital of Abbasia, near the source of the Blue Nile. This city is found on the extravagantly beautiful Fra Mauro map, completed in Murano in the Venetian lagoon around 1450 – and both accounts note that Barrara is the primary residence of the local King, Presta Jani. In the same manuscript, an itinerary from Venice to Ethiopia via Jerusalem, made around 1400 and recorded in Latin, describes how a local ruler is called Presto Johannes, and has twelve lesser kings under him – these are helpfully listed .

Later, in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius describes the whole of his masterful image of East Africa as a ‘Description of the empire of Presbyter John, or of the Abyssinians’. Now, the king himself is called David, which might indicate one of three things: in the European imagination, the territory is called the land of Prester John much as Britain was said to be named after its Trojan founder Brutus; or that European commentators realised that the king of Ethiopia had a name, and were using a title analogous to Dalai Lama; or that, much as in continental and insular French texts pagan idols were called mahomets, so non-specific foreign kings are called John: literally, Johnny Foreigner.

In various medieval traditions, from the 12th to 15th centuries, Prester John is the all-powerful king of a colossal empire somewhere near India – which, confusingly, can also be Ethiopia – and is explicitly a Christian. Though Marco Polo thought he was a recently-conquered Kerait warlord, Ong Khan, the majority of European medieval sources, from the famous, spurious Letter of 1165 to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, asserted his Christianity, which carried with it the hope of alliance with a Christian superpower in Central Asia against a heathen enemy, be it the Seljuks or the Timurids.

Denial: Not a river in Egypt.

I cannot comment as to whether the desire to render the stranger in our own image is an exclusively European trait. Somehow I doubt it. But the case of Malory’s Saracen-knight Sir Palomides is symptomatic of the longstanding approach taken by European writers and artists to admirable or notable foreign figures: despite being always described as ‘Saracen’, Palomides has no physical descriptors and even talks to himself in English. Oroonoko, Omai, recent depictions of ancient Egyptians, even Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – European writers and artists have historically imposed European, or ‘civilised’, characteristics over other, more reasonably accurate ones. This is obviously problematic, and would rightly not be tolerated (or, in social media speak, ‘called out’) in the twenty-first century.

On the other hand, what should our modern response be to historical works of art, theatre, literature, or music, which are at odds with our sensibilities but which were representative of a legitimate attitude or artistic movement at the time of their creation? This week, Mark Rylance said that he would not be happy with school-aged children reading the more anti-Semitic bits of Shakespeare. Whose responsibility is it to censor or redact Shakespeare? I’m currently reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree (1950); its vocabulary is very much Of Its Time, but it would be quite idiotic to infer any cultural or racial chauvinism on Fermor’s part from this. The episode of the disappearing ‘chinaman’ statue in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day raises questions about both language and art: would we decry the chinoiserie style today, and do we accordingly despise the interior decorators of the 1750s?

Last night I watched the ENO’s new production of Purcell’s The Indian Queen, unfinished at the time of his death in 1695. Purcell had written three acts of music, including dances and several arias, and the safe assumption is that his finished work would have served as musical interludes for John Dryden’s play The Indian Queen. The two had previously collaborated on King Arthur, first staged in 1691. Dryden’s play revolves around the warring Peruvians and Mexicans in the period before the Spanish invasions, and focuses especially on a complex love-plot involving Montezuma, rightful heir to Mexico, now employed in the Peruvian army, the Peruvian princess Orazia, the Mexican usurper Zempoalla (the titular queen), and her son Acacis. Zempoalla is Boudicca, Phaedra and Dido in a single unit. Her suicide takes the dramatic place of an averted human sacrifice, and Montezuma is restored, Guiderius-style, to the throne of Mexico. It is a baroque imagining of a foreign civilisation, where all characters adhere to standards of theatrical courtesy, like Handel’s Tamerlano or Nahum Tate’s infamous rewrite of King Lear. Said would no doubt hate it.

The ENO went in an entirely different direction. The programme triumphantly declares that Purcell’s work has been ‘completed by Peter Sellars’, the prolific American director. This feat has been achieved by splicing Purcell’s surviving music (described as a ‘torso’ by Sellars) with re-worded songs from the Greatest Hits of his Orpheus Britannicus, his choral pieces setting the words of the penitential psalms, and diegetic monologues from The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma by the Nicaraguan author Rosario Aguilar. Now, this is hardly the place to address the patronising attitude Sellars holds of Purcell and Dryden (he has described Restoration London as ‘a vision of hell’, called Dryden’s play ‘bizarre fantasy’ and said ‘there was no such thing as opera in England in the seventeenth century’). Dryden’s plots, settings and characters have vanished, to be replaced with a practically single-strand narrative concerning the marriage of Aztec princess Teculihuatzin (the titular queen, now somewhat demoted) to a conquistador, and her shifting fortunes as her people are slaughtered and her daughter is brought up as a Spaniard.

Aguirre, Wrath of Codpiece.

It has been amusing to read reviews over the past few days and see how professional critics struggle to reconcile their disappointment at its disjointed structure and gimmicky staging to their sense that this, as ‘event theatre’ by a renowned director, ought to be understood as visionary. The soloists were for the most part wonderful – especially the countertenor Vince Yi and the soprano Lucy Crowe – while the orchestra, conducted by Laurence Cummings, was excellent. The troupe of dancers, following Christopher Williams’ choreography, beautifully interpreted a set of masque-like sequences to suit the graffiti wasteland of the stage – according to the elderly gentleman behind me, perhaps a useful dovetailing of Sellars’ aesthetic and the ENO’s much-publicised financial tribulations.

Nonetheless my problems with the production are manifold, and the majority can be summarised thus: there was no nuance, no subtext, anywhere in the production. From the long dramatic pauses inserted into the choral pieces, to the farcically literal miming of the chorus, to the gun-toting, camouflaged Spanish soldiers, to the Guantanamo Bay imagery, the effect was to bludgeon the audience with Sellars’ interpretation of Purcell’s music: colonialism is bad and you should feel bad. Thus the most interesting aspect of Sellars’ additions was the casting of the Puerto Rican actress Maritxell Carrero as the narrator-self of the displaced Teculihuatzin and her daughter Leonor, the voice of a Spanish-speaking actress superimposed on the confessions of an Aztec princess and her estranged, Spanish-speaking child.

Yet the narrator’s presence was symptomatic of Sellars’ leading of his audience. She served mostly for narrative exposition, and broke up dramatically compelling scenes in the manner of cinematic voiceover, too often falling into the ‘little did I know’ formula. Elsewhere, she stood next to the ‘action’, as it were, and effectively explained, even as the singers staged the marriage consummation, that the characters were having sex and were enjoying it. These sections – of which, if I remember correctly, there were three – were in effect Aguirre, Wrath of God if crossed with Fifty Shades of Grey. The narrator could be seen as the only real character, and appeared in every scene. The singer playing Teculihuatzin, soprano Julia Bullock, was given correspondingly little to do – all the more surprising since the role was created for her.

I found myself thinking, perhaps I didn’t enjoy it because I didn’t understand it. But I fear I understood it all too well, and the intellectual get-out clause that I’ve since created – that Sellars plunders and marginalises Purcell’s music as an ironic reflection of the plunders and massacres of the period of the Spanish conquest – would, if true, be a statement of such overwhelming artistic hyperbole that even Pseud’s Corner wouldn’t take it. Such was the overt presentation of Sellars’ themes that what I mainly took away from it was a feeling of being patronised, and a crushing disappointment at the treatment of Purcell’s music. I adore Purcell, his dramatic, orchestral, vocal and choral music, in many contexts and stagings, and still remember fondly the ENO’s 2006 production of King Arthur, where the Cold Genius emerged from a fridge. I wasn’t expecting gold-plated armour and elaborate Sun King sets. I did expect Purcell.

Be My Valentine

Famously, today is the sexiest day of the year – but beyond the lukewarm cava and scentless roses, it is important to keep in mind what we’re really celebrating: motivational torture! For there is surely no sight on this earth more glorious than a pouting twink being tied to a post and filled with long, pointy objects as an example for his team mates. Except perhaps a passionate young man being stripped and roasted, whilst inviting people to eat him. Or a beautiful young woman lying in a bath all day while a moody civil servant tries to get her hot. Or two brothers giggling whilst being whipped. Or a tempestuous young king being impaled with phallic objects held by glowering lumbersexuals.

I’m sexy and I know it.

All this and more can be found in the Legenda Aurea. True, Jacobus de Voragine mightn’t have envisioned sexual gratification as the primary function of his martyrology, but heaven knows anything goes. And if the brothel adventures of Saints Chrysanthus and Daria fail to get you hot under the collar, you might try actual self-flagellation.

Calamitous Content

Peter Abelard was charged in 1121 with expressing heretical ideas on the nature of the Trinity in his Theologia summi boni, a published collection of his lectures, and was tried at a Council in Soissons. Abelard’s own account of this event in his Historia calamitatum, where we find the history of his famous castration alongside his smug verdict on the brilliance of his own teaching, presents an academic show-trial where the prosecuting council have barely read the text in question. Phrases they pick out, devoid of context, carry the danger of heretical possibility, and offers to explain what were undoubtedly difficult theological concepts are rejected, with the reasoning that the man on trial is clever, and could thus argue in such a way as to confuse less intelligent men.

We read in the Historia calamitatum that a sympathetic bishop at the Council, Geoffrey of Chartres, advised that they could not pass judgement unless Abelard were permitted to explain himself, and that when this suggestion was shot down, proposed they postpone judgement until more men of learned reputation were able to join the Council. This too didn’t appeal to those who wished to see the book suppressed. They approached the president of the Council, Ralph, Archbishop of Reims, and insinuated that his reputation would be damaged if the trial were postponed or sent elsewhere. Abelard then writes:

Et statim ad legatum concurrentes, eius immutaverunt sententiam, et ad hoc invitum pertraxerunt, ut librum sine ulla inquisitione dampnaret atque in conspectu omnium statim combureret, et me in alieno monasterio perhenni clausura cohiberet. […] Quia autem legatus ille minus quam necesse esset litteratus fuerat, plurimum archiepiscopi consilio nitebatur, sicut et archiepiscopus illorum. [They rushed at once to the papal legate, got him to reverse his verdict, and persuaded him, against his judgement, to condemn the book without any inquiry, and to burn it at once in full view, and to confine me in perpetual confinement to a different monastery. And because that legate was less scholarly than he ought to have been, he relied mostly on the advice of the archbishop, just as the archbishop relied on the advice (of these men).]

The bishops of the council then start quoting the Bible at each other, but the general outcome is that Abelard is humiliated, forced to profess his faith without permission to defend his book, and is then packed of to the Abbey of St Médard in tears. The book was burned, although he is supposed to have started rewriting it soon afterwards.

That Abelard was a self-aggrandizer is without doubt, and thus his account – especially the parts that relate to the ‘envy’ of his rivals – must be taken with a pinch of salt. That he was a target of the concerted anti-philosophical, specifically anti-dialectical, campaign of some of the most influential churchmen of the day, including Abbots Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St-Thierry, is also without doubt. The revised and expanded version of the Theologia was read by William almost two decades later; he was so disgusted with a variety of points on which he disagreed that he contacted both the papal legate in France (now Geoffrey, the formerly sympathetic bishop of Chartres) and his friend Bernard.

Bernard informed the Pope. A disputation between the two rivals was set to take place in Sens, where Abelard refused to speak – some scholars now attribute this to an illness that would shortly kill him – and Bernard in effect read a list of grievances against him. The council agreed that some of the statements attributed to Abelard by Bernard were indeed heretical, and after the Abbot wrote to the Pope, Abelard was condemned as a heretic, his followers were excommunicated, and his books were ordered to be burned.

The history of papal book-suppression in medieval Europe is long and varied but it was not always as one-sided as the case of the unfortunate, ailing Abelard. A century later, Pope Gregory IX was forced to revoke his ban on the philosophical books of Plato and Aristotle, after the University of Paris sustained a two-year strike. Further attempts at censorship of pagan books at Paris, whereby their ‘suitability’ had to be ascertained by a panel, generally did not materialise. Aristotle and Plato, recently translated into Latin from Greek and Arabic, were widely read in the European universities, and their non-Christian aspects were either overlooked or were used to better inform the shaping of Christian theology.

The men who successfully sued for the suppression of Abelard’s books were not themselves anti-intellectual or obsolete. They were rather men of great reputation and insight, who happened to disagree with both the method and the outcome of their rival’s studies. Did Bernard and Thierry, with the support of Innocent II, really succeed in rooting out ‘heresy’? Or did they just block the writings of a great philosopher and innovator from following generations?

Discomfort and Joy

In this season of over-eating, over-drinking and over-sleeping, spare a thought for some of the more sombre holidays of the medieval church calendar. The week immediately following Christmas holds the Feasts of St Stephen and the Massacre of the Innocents, and the anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. So after a day of larking about and singing to

Capons ibake with the peses of the row,
Reisouns of corrans, with oder spises mo,

you’ve several in which to contemplate sticks, stones, and broken skulls.

Stephen the Protomartyr, whose death by stoning is noted in the Acts of the Apostles, is commemorated on the 26th of December. The saint himself has some pretty nice associated music, although he is naturally overshadowed in this regard by Christmas. You may know the Victorian classic Good King Wenceslas, which celebrates the charity of the 10th-century Duke of Bohemia ‘on the Feast of Stephen’. St Ambrose of Milan wrote a hymn Stephano primo Martyri, ‘to Stephen the first martyr’, in which

Iste paratus vertice,
Gaudens suscepit lapides,
Rogans pro eis Dominum,
Gaudens tradidit spiritum

[He, upright and fully-prepared, received the stones joyfully, praying God on their [his killers’] behalf, and joyfully gave forth his spirit.]

Others exist by Adam of St Victor and numerous anonymous composers, but my particular favourite (and I have to have a favourite) is a fifteenth-century English and Latin carol, part of Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.3.58, where we hear how

Stonyd he was wyth stonys grete
Fervore gentis impie.
[By the people’s impious violence.]

Since the high point of the Christian year was the commemoration of Christ’s violent death, the hasty move from Christ’s painless birth to Stephen’s agonising martyrdom perhaps made thematic sense to the medieval worshipper. The Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents, on the other hand, is ‘set’ (if you will) three days after the birth of Christ, and commemorates something that happens surprisingly often in the Bible: the murder of new-born children.

The murder of a child rival is a literary motif that probably reflects the realities of absolute monarchy and the need to eliminate potential future rivals: consider the death of Astyanax in legends of the Fall of Troy – although it’s worth noting that various medieval and early modern traditions tried to save him, usually by substituting him for a non-royal child. The large-scale murder of children posing no apparent threat to future regimes is, one would hope, more literary than historical. But it is certainly biblical. It happens in the book of Exodus, and since (in the medieval scheme of biblical typology) Moses is a prefiguring of Christ, it also happens here. A Latin play for the Feast, written in Fleury in the twelfth century, also uses the Old Testament figure of Rachel as the archetype of the mourning parent, and looks to passages from the Apocalypse for reassurance about the children’s fate.

Herod, a Bad Thing.

The motif of mass infanticide, as horrible as that sounds, finds its way into medieval literary works in a variety of guises, but perhaps the most famous is in the Arthurian cycle. Arthur, discovering he has impregnated his half-sister and she has given birth to a son, commands that all the new born boys in England be put into a ship and set adrift. When the unmanned ship hits a rock and sinks, the target Mordred is naturally the only survivor. Whilst not a perfect analogy to the biblical Massacre – not least because Mordred is a baddy – it is both a grandiose, gruesome gesture towards how far a king is willing to go, and swiftly removes any solid sense of Arthur’s moral exemplarity. Why it was introduced to the cycle in the first place, I have no idea.

Finally, tomorrow is the anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. The details are well-known, and speak as much to the complex political influence of the Church as they do to the almost customary violence of the period: the leading churchman in England, and former Lord Chancellor, was murdered in his cathedral by four knights, ostensibly on the orders of the King. Practically overnight, shipwrecked sailors were attributing miracles to the archbishop, hagiographies were being written left, right and centre, including in Icelandic, and within fifty years a shrine had been consecrated in the new Cathedral, near to the site of his death.

Along with the Shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham in Norfolk, it was one of the great pilgrimage sites of Northern Europe, and the toll of pilgrims’ knees on the Cathedral’s steps can be seen today. The popularity of the shrine shaped parts of south east England for centuries: the Pilgrim’s Way still runs through parts of Surrey and Kent, while the Tabard Inn, of Canterbury Tales fame, stood in Southwark until the 1870s. Thomas, meanwhile, was a fixture of litanies right up to the Reformation, and many a manuscript shows his name hastily scribbled over, in an attempt to erase connections to the Catholic past.

With these cheery commemorations, it could of course be suggested that everything in the Middle Ages was governed by reference to, and fear of, death. But one must assume that a certain degree of comfort was drawn from these observances, even from the Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents. By comfort, I really do mean that, even if one cannot assimilate into a culture that supports such extremes. And what extremes: as we read in British Library, Sloane MS 2593,

Wolcum be ye Stefne and Jon,
Wolcum Innocentes everychon,
Wolcum Thomas martyr on,
Wolcum yol.

Wolcum yol, thu mery man,
In worchepe of this holy day.

Physics Is Fun!

A brief update from the midst of the lurgy-ridden wastes of November, and it’s good news this week for the public perception of the Middle Ages. Researchers from the University of Durham were nominated for a Times Higher Education Award in the Research Project of the Year category, and although they were beaten to it by a team from Nottingham, the collaboration between historians and physicists was notable for its reference to the scientific writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, who died in 1253.

A lecturer in theology at Oxford, Grosseteste was part of a network comprising the key English academic figures of the period – Adam Marsh, Thomas Wallensis and Alfred of Sareshel inter alia – and was teacher and possibly mentor to Roger Bacon, who praises the bishop’s multilingualism in his Opus Tertium. While his intellectual energies went in all directions, perhaps his most interesting writings are his commentaries on Aristotle and his treatises on astronomy and light.

Þu canst nat þe Maþþeletes iunen, yt is socciale selfe-slauȝte.

The popular notion of medieval ‘scientists’ as urine-drinking, augury-taking weirdos, deriving in no small measure from the efforts of Mark Twain and Monty Python, is given the lie by figures like Bacon and Grosseteste; and while men like my homeboy Alexander Neckam may ultimately have been answering to ideas of a divinely-ordered schema, their academic curiosity was none the worse for it. Mindful of Bernard of Chartres’s phrase, I sometimes have to remind my students that, simply by merit of living in a world where the concept of gravity is known, they are not automatically more intelligent than the intellectual giants who lived before. A paper published by the Durham research team goes to the heart of the matter:

[S]cience is never ‘complete’ — and perceiving modern scientific endeavour as part of a continuum keeps us honest. Admitting that we may be almost as far from a full understanding of colour as our thirteenth-century collaborators reminds us to doubt — and that, after all, is the only way to progress. [Hannah E. Smithson, Giles E.M. Gasper, Tom C.B. McLeish, ‘All the colours of the rainbow’, Nature Physics 10 (2014).]

While it’s always fun to explain to people why A Game of Thrones isn’t historically accurate (true story), it is my hope that an increased exposure, however small, to Grosseteste’s early work will show casual modern onlookers that rumours of the Dark Ages have been greatly exaggerated.