His noble aim is complicated by the fact that the work reflects both the personal views and opinions of the author and the general beliefs of the society in which he is operating. While Einhard strives for an impartial, unbiased tone that appears to relate only the accurate details of events, he cannot help but interject his personal beliefs as he works to achieve both his stated purpose and his unstated goals. Due to this, Marcellinus and Peter transforms from what could be seen as a simple recounting of historical events to a rich source of knowledge on the power and veneration of saints and their relics as perceived by Einhard and wider Carolingian society.

Einhard, the author of the work, was a respected member of the court of both Charlemagne and Louis the Pious and was known for his intelligence. Educated at the great learning center at the monastery of Fulda and selected for his above average intelligence to serve at Charlemagne’s court in 791, Einhard was well versed in the theology of the church, the details of imperial administration, and practically every other aspect of the empire. He displays his intimate knowledge of the status of political and intellectual life within his work, as he systematically attempts to prove the power of the relics of Marcellinus and Peter.

In writing and distributing Marcellinus and Peter, Einhard hoped to defend his theft of the holy relics from Rome and to prove beyond doubt that his actions were in accordance with the will of the saints themselves and blessed by providence divine. Furthermore, he hoped to prove beyond doubt that the relics, encapsulated in the relics that he possessed, were extremely powerful and influential in achieving physically tangible goals on earth and to settle permanently the questions surrounding the legitimacy of his claim to the possession of the saints. The method by which he did so reveals the strong emphasis placed by Carolingians on visual evidence, physical proof, and eyewitness testimony in deciding the veracity of a claim and the overwhelming power but limited geographic scope with which the saints interacted in the world of the living.

In the light of modern atheistic skepticism concerning religion and divine intervention, it is easy to dismiss the many claims of miracles within Einhard’s work as mere superstition unworthy of study. To do so, however, would be to miss the very important answers that Einhard presents regarding how one can be certain about religious experiences. When dealing with something as important as the revelation of divine will and the desire of the saints, Einhard established and employed high standards of proof to establish the veracity of evidence gained by different methods. In essence, he assigned more weight to direct, physically observable evidence that would be hard to fabricate or forge and less weight to visions that occurred while sleeping, which easily could be confused for dreams in a genuine attempt to convince his readers that his statements are true. For example, when Einhard discusses the days leading up to the translation of the saints from Michelstadt to Seligenstadt, he notes that:

While I [Einhard] was troubled with these worries … it happened that for twelve straight days no night passed in which it was not revealed in dreams to one, two, or even three of our companions that the bodies of the saints should be transferred from that place [Michelstadt] to another.

Noticeably, despite the many visions urging Einhard to move the relics, it takes almost a fortnight for him to finally decide to do so, and only after incessant urging on the part of the saints. Since these visions occur without the support of a physical sign, Einhard chooses to assign them less weight when making his decisions and so does not act on them immediately.

Other individuals in society are aware of the issue that divinely inspired visions are not as believable as physical signs and so they seek more proof. Multiple times in Marcellinus and Peter, a person asks for a visible, physical sign of proof while in the midst of the vision to ensure that others will believe him. When Reginbald, a servant of Ratleig, is shown a vision of Rome and the church from which they will take the relics, Reginbald states flatly that “none of his companions would believe an account of this sort,’” leading his guide to answer “‘I wish [to provide] a sign to you’” as additional evidence. The issue of believable proof is so important that a physical sign is necessary even when the agent of the vision is not merely an unidentified man but rather is one of the leading figures in the host of heaven. Alberic, a blind monk attached to the relics at Seligenstadt, receives the edicts that Einhard presents to the emperor Louis the Pious from a vision of the Archangel Gabriel in the form of Saint Marcellinus. Despite the commands coming from such a high figure, Alberic still protests that “‘no one will believe that an angel spoke to [him] or commanded [him] to announce these things” leading Gabriel to respond that “that is not so, for I [Gabriel] shall give you [Alberic] a sign that you can demonstrate in their presence, and, once they have seen it, they will no longer doubt the things you have told them on my orders.” Thus, no matter what the source of the vision, Einhard acknowledges that visions alone are not sufficient proof of divine will and so he deliberately includes in his stories more convincing physical proof.

Interestingly, the request for additional proof in the form of a physical sign is not framed for the person experiencing the vision to certify that their vision is true, but rather as a way for others to be convinced. Reginbald notes that “his companions” would not believe his vision, likewise Alberic fears that “no one” will believe him. Neither one asks for additional proof for themselves but rather for others. This separation between personal belief in the vision and the need to convince others highlights the stress on visual evidence placed by Einhard in Marcellinus and Peter, and, by extension, by Carolingian society in order to know things. The subjects of the visions, precisely because they are seeing the vision, need no further proof. However, others cannot simply be convinced by the spoken words of one person relating his own vision; rather they must be convinced by seeing a sign for themselves. Thus, personal sight became the primary method by which Carolingians convinced themselves of the truth.

This emphasis on visual evidence as the key to conviction in itself creates a problem for Einhard operating as an author, as his readers are not witnessing signs themselves and thus are dependent on the words of others. To resolve this issue, Einhard relies on the repetition of witnessing, as many of the evidence, signs, and miracles are witnessed by a sizable number of people. Many of the miracles take place during the celebration of Mass or immediately after the conclusion of the service, meaning many other people would be present during the time of the miracle and so could testify to the power of the saints. The other people present during the miracle do not serve merely as scenery, a passive backdrop against which the miracle occurs, but rather as eye-witnesses who can be called upon to swear that they did indeed see the miracle be performed. The existence of multiple eye witnesses for the same miracle, as well as the physically durable impact of the miracle in the form of relieving people of crippling diseases, seems to Einhard to be sufficient to establish for his readers (i.e. wider Carolingian society) beyond a reasonable doubt that the saints did indeed have the power to intercede for miracles on the behalf of those who prayed to them.

What is perhaps most important in understanding wider Carolingian civilization may be the fact that Einhard, as an author carfting this book, has selected these details describing what evidence was presented and asked for during the performance of these miracles. His extensive academic and intellectual training at the monastery at Fulda is sufficient evidence to assume that he knew how to argue with and to convince the people of his day. Operating under the assumption that Einhard knew what evidence was necessary to convince a member of Carolingian society of a belief, the evidence that he presents within Marcellinus and Peter can be used to construct the dominant Carolingian views on ways of knowing. The above analysis leads to two conclusions. First, direct eye-witness testimony of many individuals was the best means to convince the general audience of the veracity of a statement or event. And, second, despite the intense interest in religion and the strong belief that God intervened directly in the world, divine revelation alone without additional physical evidence was insufficient in convincing people of the truth of a belief.

Having established how Einhard establishes the truth of his claim, one must examine why establishing the truth of his claim is so important to him. The most important theme to Einhard, the one he returns to over and over again, is to establish the power that he saints have in interceding in the world. Ever the careful theologian, Einhard attempts to draw a distinction between having God perform a miracle because of the intercession of the saints and having the saints perform a miracle by their own power. That Einhard had to devote time to this topic, indeed to clarify an earlier, more ambiguous statement that the miracles had somehow been “brought about” by the saints, shows that this issue was a pressing one. Indeed, an examination of the descriptions of the miracles reveals that the people asking for miracles will call upon the martyrs directly, shouting, for example “‘Help me, Saint Marcellinus!’” or “May the holy martyrs Marcellinus and Peter help us!” It is only the editorial comments of Einhard that note that the saints did not perform the miracle
but rather God did. Here is evident, perhaps, the separation in the understanding of theology between Einhard, educated at Fulda and well versed in issues of martyrs and veneration versus worship, and the common people who flocked to the relics for miracles and cures. In any case, one of Einhard’s primary underlying motivations is to establish without doubt the great influence that the relics have on earth.

One of the primary ways that Einhard establishes the real, physical power that the saints can bring to bear on earth is by representing them as real, living people on Earth, a reflection of a view held in general by the society at the time. According to Einhard, as Ratleig contemplated the translation of the relics:

it seemed wrong to him [Ratleig] to return home with only the body of the blessed Marcellinus. [Indeed] it would almost be a crime for the body of the blessed martyr Peter, who had been his companion in death and who had for more than five hundred years rested with him in the same sepulcher, to remain there after his [friend] had left.

Within this brief description, Ratleig assigns emotion and personal characteristics to the saints, noting that Peter would feel lonely if his companion was removed and he remained. Clearly, inanimate objects do not possess such emotions, so it is implicitly understood that the saints continue to live on, so to speak, after their corporal deaths. This passage also reveals the unique position that the saints occupy, inhabiting both the physical world on earth and the spiritual world in heaven. While the saints would be considered to be living eternally in heaven, they are portrayed as still having emotional concerns over the position and proximity of their physical remains to one another. This presents the view that the physical relics of the saints on earth forms a direct link with their spiritual life in heaven, a link that those who venerate the saints hoped to utilize.

Because the relics of the saints were treated with the same privileges and respects as living people high in the aristocracy of the Frankish empire, it can be inferred that the saints were seen to be direct participants in the social and political hierarchy of Carolingian society. Wherever the relics go, they are treated with the same ceremony as that of a visiting dignitary, with a heavy emphasis placed on the arrival of the “saints” as people and not on the arrival of the “relics” as objects. As the saints arrive at any location, they are always met by a great throng of people eager to praise God and receive healing. Einhard’s own preparations to greet the saints is revealing of the attitudes that he and others at the time had of the relics:

After reading that letter I [Einhard] learned about the approach of the saints and I immediately ordered a member of my household to go to Maastricht to collect priests, other clergymen, and also laymen there, and then to hasten to meet the oncoming saints at the first possible place. … I immediately hurried to [Michelstadt] as quickly as I could.

In sending much of his household out to meet the saints as a vanguard in order to intercept them while en route and escort them back to the church, as well as rushing to meet them himself, Einhard is echoing the preparations that Pippin III made for the reception of Pope Leo in 799, highlighting the gravity of his guests. This reveals a clear belief, both explicit in the text and implicit in Einhard’s way of thinking, that the saints are active players in the physical world that he inhabits.

Importantly, the miracles that the saints can perform are physically restricted to the location of their relics. Miracles were almost always performed within the church where the relics lay. In fact, in the case of a woman named Marctrude, leaving the physical area round the church caused her to loose her health and regain her illness, forcing her to vow “that she would never again depart voluntarily from her service to the saints” in the immediate vicinity of the church at Seligenstadt. While having the effective range of the healing be tied to the physical location of the relics is rare, Einhard does wonder and “after long and careful reflection [fails] to reach [a conclusion]” why a miracle would occur in a place removed from “where the most sacred bodies of the blessed martyrs, who accomplished these remarkable things through Christ’s power, were stored away,” thereby giving a clear indication that it was the widely established standard for miracles to occur locally. And finally, as a pilgrim walks towards the relics while they were temporarily in Aachen, she is healed not in the church but rather in the cemetery near the palace, leading Einhard to remark that “it was as if divine grace had come out to meet her at that point.” This gives a sense of Einhard’s theological thoughts on the “divine spirit.” Rather than being manifest everywhere, it is instead a local entity that must move physically in the world to perform miracles. Thus, while the saints were considered extremely powerful, the geographic scope of their power was rather limited.

The saints, and, by extension, their relics gained their power and importance in the eyes of the Carolingians precisely because they occupied a unique junction between the worlds of earth and heaven, having the ability to intercede directly to God on behalf of people on earth in order to achieve miracles. The saints are not only seen inspiring ethereal visions in sleeping individuals, but they also perform concrete action that leads to physical evidence of their miracles and tangible improvements in the lives of the people who ask for their help. In part, this allows Einhard to gather
physical evidence, a type of evidence that carried great weight in the Carolingian world for convincing others that his relics have the powers that he claims they have. When the reliquary containing the relics of the saints bleeds for seven days and stains the linens, Einhard “ordered that the linen cloth … which had been splashed with that liquid and so was stained with bloody spots should be saved” to serve as “considerable proof” of the miracle. More powerful, still, was the physical interaction that the saints engaged in when performing miracles to cure people of physical ailments and disorders.

A careful examination of the actual miracles that the saints perform shows that the overwhelming majority of non-vision miracles were to cure physical paralysis and blindness. In an economy dominated by its agricultural sector in which physical labor was required practically every day and in which the members of the aristocracy prided themselves on their physical abilities, such physical handicaps would have made life extremely difficult, if not impossible. Furthermore, the way in which the saints cured those who were suffering form physical disabilities is not only physical but also violent. Several miracles involve blood “gushing” or “pour[ing]” from the nose, mouth, ore toenails to cure such things as hunched backs, deafness and muteness, and paralysis, while those who are crippled by a hunched back or paralysis are often described as falling though “as if [they] had been struck by someone.” Indeed, some of the descriptions of the miracle healings sounds almost like an experience that amounts to torture. Gerlach, a man with a hunchback from Rheims, is described as “being pulled, as though by [unseen] hands, and … his limbs, which had been contorted by the disease were … stretched out.” Similarly, according to another old, crippled man:

It had seemed to him as if two men had grabbed hold of him while he lay there. One had seized him by his shoulders and arms, the other by his knees and feet. It seemed as if by pulling him that they had stretched out his tendons, which had been very tight.

The significance of these descriptions of the miracles is twofold. First, while it is never directly stated in the text, it is implied heavily that it is the saints, interacting in some way with the physical world, who are performing the miracles. The saints seem to appear and take on a sufficiently corporal state to physically hit someone or stretch someone out. This could then be an explanation as to the common belief that the miracles that the saints could perform were tied geo-physically to the location of their relics. Because the martyrs appear to take the physical form of men, capable of interacting with the world, as they perform their miracles, it would make sense (in Carolingian eyes) for the martyrs to be limited in terms of mobility like other men. Second, these miracles provide a clear reason why the Carolingians had a fear of God and so fervently wanted him on their side in conflicts with others. For, if the martyrs, in healing those they found worthy, inflict physical paint that caused “screams” and fountains of blood that “drenched” the “chest and stomach right down to the clothes covering [the] groin,” one can  imagine how the Carolingians envisaged with dread the saints attacking their enemies.

A vital clue that this view of the saints as extremely powerful was not confined to Einhard alone but was shared by the whole spectrum of Carolingian society is contained in the geographic evidence that Einhard includes as he diligently documents the miracles performed by the saints. If Einhard is to be trusted in the details that he includes, than the vast geographic range of the people who gathered to venerate the relics indicates that the certainty of belief in the power of the saints was sufficient to overcome the large challenges in transportation to merit the trip to Seligenstadt. While the relics drew many venerators from local regions, they also attracted pilgrims from Bourges, a city nearly three hundred miles away from Seligenstadt, as the crow flies. In describing the deaf and mute girl from Bourges, Einhard notes that she “was at long last brought [to Seligenstadt],” indicating a journey of considerable duration and difficulty. As both Bourges and Seligenstadt are located far inland without a direct water route connecting them, this journey must have been the difficult overland one. Furthermore, as the book Marcellinus and Peter was necessarily composed after the events that it includes, the pilgrims from Bourges could not have learned of the powers of the saints directly from the book and instead must have heard from personal correspondence, other travelers or some other means. That they would have sufficient faith to undertake the long and hard journey without the support of Einhard’s book declaring the powers of the saints indicates that there was already a belief held across a large geographic area that the relics of Marcellinus and Peter were extremely potent in miraculous healings.

And so, given the great power the saints possessed in their ability to have God intervene directly in the physical world in the eyes of the Carolingians, Einhard goes to great lengths to establish the legitimacy of his claim to the relics. With only a few notable exceptions, the Carolingians had no saints of their own and so venerated the Roman saints of centuries past. Thus, their primary source of relics was Italy, specifically Rome and its catacombs. In initially framing the translations of the relics to Francia, Einhard notes that both he and Hilduin of St. Médard were in search of relics
and that Hilduin of St. Denis had recently acquired the relics of St. Sebastian from Rome. In so doing, Einhard acknowledges the fact that there was a large demand within the Frankish church for Roman relics. And the existence of Deusdona, the deacon who trades in relics, reveals the method by which the Carolingian clerics supplied their churches with relics. Deusdona is described as “cunning and slimy” in his many attempts to thwart the translation of Marcellinus and Peter, and yet Einhard accepts without question his “great gift, a single joint of the blessed martyr Hermes’s finger.” reveals that Einhard here reveals himself to be aware both of the dirty tricks involved in the occasionally illegal relics trade and is willing to either ignore completely any misgivings he might have concerning the source of the relics in his possession, as is the case with the relic of Hermes, or attempt to justify away any lingering concerns, as is the case with the relics of Marcellinus and Peter.

Perhaps the most common form of evidence that Einhard uses to prove that the translations of the relics was legitimate is the saints themselves. The form this evidence takes on varies greatly from—visions of the saints themselves expressing displeasure and demanding to be removed from Rome (and later, from Michelstadt), to the apparent ease with which Ratleig managed to remove the relics of Marcellinus and Peter, especially when compared with the difficulty of removing the remains of St. Tiburtius. According to Einhard, one of the indicators that the saints supported an action was the physical ease with which the action was completed, thus, the fact that Ratleig managed to remove the relics from the church in Rome “with no trouble” and “without any resistance” was meant to be an indicator that the relics did indeed desire to move from that place.

Einhard as owner of the relics and editor of the book, remains anxious to reiterate over and over again that he possesses the relics legitimately, and so he continues to mention that the translation to Seligenstadt was divinely inspired long after the translation was accomplished. The text of Marcellinus and Peter is subdivided into four book which come in two pairs – the first pair of books documents the translations of the relics to Seligenstadt while the second pair of books documents the miracles the relics perform one in Francia. Einhard not only fills the first part of the book with evidence to prove the legitimacy of his claims to the relics, he continues to mention reminders that he is the rightful owner of the relics and that the relics came to him by the will of God and the saints in the second part of the book as well. This issue of legitimacy is so important that he has the Archangel Gabriel, otherwise occupied in giving a politically-motivated revelation to Alberic, say that “these things are extremely important to that ruler in whose kingdoms these martyrs have come by divine command.” Through visions and miracles, Einhard continually uses divine evidence to support his claim on the relics.

Einhard attempts to buttress the legitimacy of his claim to rightful possession of the relics by pointing out the neglect in which they were kept in Rome. Almost in passing, Einhard slips in that, during his conversation with Deusdona, he noted “the neglected tombs of the martyrs, for there are many of those in Rome.” Einhard, on the other hand, sees to it that the relics are refurbished, giving them a new reliquary due to “the poorness of the material” of the old, as well as “a wooden structure and, in order to beautify it, … [covers of] linen and silk cloth.” What Einhard may have considered the greatest proof that negligence was sufficient to invalidate a particular church or cleric’s claim on the relics to be when, by delaying the translation of the saints from Michelstadt to Seligenstadt, he almost looses his claim, as a priest has a vision in which a white haired man warns him to “Tell [Einhard] that what the blessed martyrs want done with their bodies cannot remain undone … [so] let him now hurry, if he does not want the reward for this deed to pass to another.” It would appear that, by showing that he too could have potentially lost possession of the relics for failing to listen to their demands, Einhard establishes a universal principle that relics that are neglected are viable for someone else to claim. However, given the fact that this doctrine is presented by Einhard, an individual who would benefit immensely from its acceptance, and that it does not have corroborating support beyond Einhard, it is difficult to determine whether or not that particular belief was widely held in Carolingian society or if it was an expedient belief promulgated by Einhard.

Einhard means for his interaction with Hilduin in book two to serve as an example of an illegitimate claim to a relic, standing in contrast to Einhard’s legitimate claim. The priest of Hilduin is said to have wanted to “acquire by fraud what he had not been able to acquire honorably,” thereby definitively establishing Hilduin’s claims to the relics as based on fraud and so illegitimate. Simultaneously, he portrays Ratleig’s acquisition of the relics (though technically also a theft) as “honorable.” The priest who perpetrated the deceit is labeled a “worthless rascal” and Einhard eventually gains possession of all the relics, thereby leading to a happy miracles as the streets of Aachen are filled with a “sweet smell,” indicating that the saints are pleased by their reunion under Einhard.

However, much more occurs in the story than Einhard simply presents; while Hilduin openly acknowledges that the portions of the relic of Saint Marcellinus that he possessed were stolen, he still maintains an extremely powerful hand, for the relics are not simply returned but rather are bargained for. Einhard sends 100 pieces of gold to Hilduin’s church, a sum of money that Einhard claims to be “a gift” but, given the circumstances, is much more likely to be part of an exchange resulting in Einhard gaining the relics. That Einhard sent gold, which was extraordinarily rare in the Carolingian economy, and not the silver that was typically used as the precious metal for coinage is a clear sign that, legitimate or not, Hilduin was leveraging his possession of the saints for tremendous gain. Furthermore, even once the relics arrive in Aachen, they are given not to Einhard but rather to Hilduin, who keeps them in his house during Easter, the holiest celebrations in the Christian calendar. Einhard presents the delay in the transfer of the relics as caused simply by “the many engagements of Easter” keeping everyone busy, but this too seems to be a deliberate part of the agreement transferring the relic from Hilduin’s possession to Einhard’s. And finally, the transfer of the relics does not occur at either Hilduin or Einhard’s personal homes, but rather at “the church of the Holy Mother of God [Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen].” This is a neutral ground for both parties, and the fact that the transaction occurs in the personal chapel of the former emperor underscores the importance of the transaction. And so, while Einhard may try to underplay and obfuscate the complicated political dealings that surrounded claims and counterclaims to relics within the empire, the truth of the complicated deal he had with Hilduin, and the many concessions that he had to grant Hilduin in order to ensure his own possession of the saints, reveals just how important politically the physical possession of relics could be, regardless of the legitimacy of the claim.

And so, what purported to be on face value a simple documentary of events, with the only goal of inspiring true believers of Christ and comforting lovers of God of his omnipotence, actually contains a great deal of knowledge concerning wider Carolingian society. Perhaps the greatest mistake that can be made when interpreting The Translations of the Blessed Martyrs, Marcellinus and Peter is to approach the work blinded by the perspective of modern atheistic skepticism and so dismiss much of Einhard’s words and stories as unfounded superstition. Quite on the contrary, Einhard writes with an aim to prove the things that he says are true, and includes multiple layers of eye witnesses, verification of visions in physical signs, and enough hard evidence that he feels sufficiently confident to conclude that unbelievers ought not read his book lest they loose control of themselves when presented with such conclusive testimony. His work shows the extreme power that the saints were seen to possess. Standing between heaven and earth, the saints could forward the prayers of people to God and act as agents in the granting of those prayers. Noticeably, though, in the eyes of Carolingians, the notion of an omnipresent God does not extend to the saints, as the miracles that the saints could perform were directly tied to the location of their relics and for their influence to be felt beyond the geographic confines of their relics was considered highly unusual. And finally, any transaction of relics within the Frankish empire was of the highest order, requiring imperial oversight and complicated political dealings. For the Carolingians, the relics of the saints were perhaps the most valuable resource, maddeningly scarce and tremendously powerful. In documenting the translation and miracles of the saints Marcellinus and Peter, Einhard reveals in yet another way just how important the veneration of the saints truly was to his society.

In the first section of my thesis, I considered Robert Guiscard’s development of feudal vassalage in the service of the papacy. While the historiography has stressed the transient nature of this vassalage, I considered the motives for Norman participation and found a stronger relationship in place in the 1070s coinciding with the fading strength of the Drangot princes of Capua. This continuity throughout the turbulent 1070s enabled Robert Guiscard and the popes to establish a stable relationship often unfairly trivialized. Such an understanding in turn alters our understanding of Guiscard’s march on Rome in 1084, providing more justification for his slow but ultimately decisive action in support of Pope Gregory VII.

My second section contained what I consider my most interesting discovery from the treaty documents: the reevaluation of antipope Anacletus II’s role in such agreements and his legacy in Innocent II’s following Treaty of Mignano in 1139. Anacletus had been widely considered a struggling rival desperate for allies and thus too quick to make concessions in his royal investiture of Roger II in 1130. Comparison of these texts to each other and earlier documents from the twelfth century, however, demonstrated that Innocent’s investiture consciously continued from Anacletus’ one without ‘wiping the slate clean’ as earlier argued. Furthermore, Anacletus’ concessions were seen to have been less substantial than immediately apparent.

The third and final section of my thesis considered the last phase of the diplomatic relationship, from the 1140s through the reign of William II up to 1189. William participated in the Treaty of Benevento with Pope Adrian IV, a significant document that served as a capstone for disputed territory and ecclesiastical concerns. Whereas in the second phase of papal-Norman diplomacy the Normans’ legatine rights had been challenged and upheld with differentiation of power as de facto for the Norman ruler and de jure for the pope, in this final major treaty such powers were divided by territory. The Norman rulers preserved official, greater control in Sicily than they did the southern Italian provinces. Yet documents from later periods, such as the 1160s, made clear that the papacy also maintained final authority in those territories. A comparison of Benevento to the earlier tradition actually made this treaty appear more favorable to the pope than often thought.

The thesis faced limitations of language (it would have been beneficial to read German) and the constraints of undergraduate work, with an inability, for example, to consider the texts in their manuscript forms in the Vatican Archives. Yet the work suggested interesting revisions to the framework of Sicilian Norman history and to the notion of papal concessions during a period that also witnessed the Investiture Controversy. As such it is my hope that future works provide more emphasis on treaty documents as comparative sources for analysis.

Alexander Konrad, Cambridge, 2011

The relationship between collective memory and historiography has received considerable attention in the past two decades, especially as historians have explored the ways that ideology shapes contemporary memory. Yael Zerubavel, for example, has shown how the collective suicide of the Zealots at Masada in 73CE was reinterpreted by the twentieth-century Zionist movement from the traditionally somber liturgical themes of defeat to serve new readings of national heroism and loyalty. Because new nations need new pasts, they creatively appropriate select events from history in the service of national myth. Yet perhaps because we have continued to see premodern Jewry in romantic terms as unchanging and lugubrious, historians have been loath to apply the same rigorous framework to medieval Jews. While postmodern scholarship has embraced for own complex times the notion that history and memory are intertwined, historians such as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Pierre Nora have contended that for medievals there exists an unbridgeable and unambiguous gap between historiography and memory.

Collective memory, according to Yerushalmi and Nora, belonged to those premodern societies built upon tradition where memory was a primitive or sacral form. The discipline of history, in contrast, emerged in the nineteenth century and belonged to modern society, where tradition as such was in decline. Whereas memory entailed an uncritical and passive collection of experience, history was a self-consciously interpretative attempt to evaluate and often undermine these inherited memories in pursuit of objective truth. Memory stood for a kind of continuous unbroken relationship with the past, an immediacy of experience; history highlighted rupture. At the heart of the matter was not only a debate about the ways societies apprehended the past but also a question of how they assigned value to the present. The ability of modern historians to “use” the past was a sign of their intellectual maturity and sophistication. Medieval rememberers, on the other hand, lacked the presentist self-awareness to manipulate their subject.

Yerushalmi argued eloquently in the early stages of this discourse that, “while memory of the past was always a central component of Jewish experience, the historian was not its primary custodian.” In his book Zakhor, Yerushalmi explains the rise, fall, and ultimately the modern rebirth of Jewish concern with historiography. Although the Mosaic scriptures contain no less than “one hundred and sixty-nine” commandments of remembrance, from which the ancient Hebrew people developed as the first people who “assigned a decisive significance to history,” after the close of the Biblical canon.Yerushalmi contends that the “Jews virtually stopped writing history.” Jewish consciousness became locked between the remembered Biblical past and the anticipated messianic redemption. The Bible became reinterpreted not as a “repository of past history” but rather as a source that revealed a “pattern of the whole of history.” The present functioned only as a viewpoint onto distant, more desirable horizons, with no apparent value unto itself.

In tannaitic and amoraic times, and again throughout the medieval period, Yerushalmi argued, memory remained essentially ahistorical. The rabbis of the Talmud seem to move freely through time, with little regard for the present moment. Although the literature contains a wealth of “philosophy, homiletics, Biblical exegesis, law, [and] mysticism,” it remained unconnected to the present, containing scarcely “a single mention of actual historical events or personalities, and with no attempt to relate to them.” Yerushalmi attributed this ahistorical character of post-Biblical Judaism to the primacy of rabbinic understandings of exile and suffering as fundamentally religious experiences, and as such, unconnected to historical forces. In lieu of a proper history, Jewish religion engaged with the past through the “vessels and vehicles of memory” that served to commemorate contemporary events without directly specifying them. Yet by privileging “liturgy and ritual over historical narrative,” these religious vectors were essentially ahistorical, functioning solely in the realm of memory. They resisted novelty and instead displayed a tendency to fit each “recent catastrophe into the mold of past [Biblical] tragedies.” Through these “vessels and vehicles,” every enemy became a manifestation of the Biblical enemy Amalek, every persecution was recorded in the lamentable trope of the destruction of the Temple. The present was squeezed into the typologies and categories of the past, without the possibility of recognizing contemporary singularity. For medievals, Yerushalmi argued, the past and the present were inseparable.

In this way, the contested relationship between history and memory also stands to inform a longstanding debate about the discovery of the self and the mechanics of identity acquisition in the medieval world. It has been argued that while the modern individual is distinguished as such by his ability to choose his own unique identity, to fully self-determine his personal character and values, primitive and medieval man existed in a relatively fixed and stable order, defined at birth by his “social rank and kinship network,” in addition to the decisive role played by gender in setting the course of a medieval life. The inability to write history—to creatively appropriate the past— is therefore not merely a reflection on the genres of premodern Jewish scholarship, but also an argument that medieval Jews, stuck in the realm of pure unadulterated religious memory, lacked a certain critical self-awareness. As Stephen Neill puts it, “the Middle Ages were dominated by theology; and it is not surprising that the imaginative approach to the problems of human personality is rare until the Middle Ages began to pass over into the Renaissance.”

Other historians, most notably Eric Hobsbawm and Amos Funkenstein, do not subscribe to the sharp division between memory and history. Hobsbawm argues for a “twilight zone” between memory and history, “between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection, and the past as part of, or background to one’s own life.” Funkenstein agrees, calling this intermediary category “historical consciousness,” an appropriation of the past in present idioms. Funkenstein holds that “Jewish culture was and remained formed by an acute historical consciousness…different at different periods.” Like history, memory, is not inscribed in a vacuum; it always refracts through the prism of the shared collective consciousness of society. Commemoration is not a process of fossilization in which the past, properly preserved, might be reconstructed as it once was; rather, memory is continually reproduced and shaped under the influence of present social milieus. Medieval memory, then, has more in common with modern history than Yerushalmi recognized: both are cynical processes heavily influenced by the identity and political motivations of the author.

The Sephardic Haggadah, the religious text used at the family table on the holiday of Passover, is a case in point. The turbulent experience of the Jews in late-medieval Spain nourished an ongoing process of engagement between a past that influenced the identity of the nation and a present in which the nation’s changing sense of self led to successive transformation in its perception of that past. In this process, historical narration and collective memory became interwoven as remembrance of the past incorporated elements of the present. Engendered by internal conflicts and external pressures, medieval Spanish Jews engaged in a dramatic negotiation of their Jewish identity through a self-conscious manipulation of history and memory.

The Haggadah, the ritual service book for the holiday commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, was also the subject of one of Yerushalmi’s earliest studies. Haggadah and History contains facsimile plates of nearly two hundred printed Passover Haggadot in the Harvard University and Jewish Theological Seminary collections dating from the fifteenth-century to the late twentieth-century. Yerushalmi’s keen eye for artistic details notes the aesthetic changes in Haggadot over time and highlights the interplay between “stylistic and ideological innovations, and liturgical norms.” From this broad survey of Haggadot, Yerushalmi suggests that “Passover is the great historical festival of the Jewish people, and the Haggadah is its book of remembrance and redemption.” Yet by characterizing the Haggadah as a vehicle of remembrance, Yerushalmi categorically denied the Haggadah historiographical status. In spite of the vast diversity of representations, artistic styles, and even languages of the Haggadah that Yerushalmi details, he concludes that the Haggadah was but another of the “vessels and vehicles” in which “the memory of the nation is annually revived and replenished.”

Yerushalmi categorized the Haggadah as a tool of memory, romantically refering to the simple recall of the past. However, approached through Funkenstein’s framework of historical consciousness, the Haggadah shows a more dynamic concept of memory, revealing a Jewish society conscious of both the present moment and the connection to a storied historical past. Rather than collapsing the present into a typological past, the Haggadah instead posits a multi-layered past in the service of the present. If modern history often wields the past for political or polemic ends, here too medieval memory shapes the past for its own contemporary needs.

Past and Present in the Haggadah

Passover is the Jewish holiday celebrated annually in late Spring that commemorates the central moment in Jewish history: the redemption of the ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. In Biblical scripture, Passover is designated as one of the three pilgrimage festivals in which agricultural offerings were brought to the Temple in Jerusalem. At that time, the sacrifice of the paschal lamb, which recalled the offering on the eve of the Exodus, was focused around the ritual Temple service performed by the priests. After the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 BCE, the elaborate choreography of the Passover rituals (called seder, “the order,” in Hebrew) gradually changed to fit the new situation. Most notably, the Passover seder became a domestic ceremony performed by each family around the dining room table at home, orchestrated by the text and illuminations of the Haggadah. In this way, the Passover seder reflected in a concrete sense the rabbinic metaphor of the dinner table as the temple altar. In one of Adin Steinsaltz’s recapitulations of this metaphor, for example, “when the Temple still existed, the altar atoned for his sins, whereas after the destruction [of the Temple] each man’s table atoned for him.”

Although the basic requirements of the Haggadah text were fixed in the Mishnah during the second century, the Passover seder continued to be shaped in each context and period, responding to and incorporating contemporary realities with the historical identity of the Jewish people. In this way, medieval Jews constructed a dynamic usable past that incorporated contemporary local conditions and peculiarities. Jewish memory had both cumulative and presentist aspects, insisting on partial continuity with the past while incorporating new readings of that past in terms of the present. The result of this process is particularly visible in the rich illuminations that adorn the Haggadah manuscripts.

Of the seventeen surviving medieval Spanish illuminated manuscripts of the Passover Haggadah, the Golden Haggadah is among the most sumptuous and oldest, originating in Barcelona around 1320. It is a medium- -sized codex, comprising some 100 vellum folios with two additional paper leaves added in the seventeenth-century. The volume is covered in “blind-tooled leather binding of fine brown morocco.” The illustrations of the Haggadah form two parts that merit our investigation: full-page miniatures retelling the Passover narrative and the illuminated ritual illustrations of the Passover seder. The aesthetic of the Golden Haggadah reveals a dynamic moment in Spanish Jewish history, when the Judeo-Arabic culture of al-Andalus came into contact with Christian culture in the cities of the Crown of Aragon.

The Golden Haggadah is replete with vibrant images of the ritual objects used during the Passover seder and the depiction of the unleavened matzah bread is the most impressive. The traditional meaning of the matzah is embedded in the Biblical narrative. According to scripture, when the Israelites escaped from bondage in Egypt, they left in such haste that they did not have time to allow their bread dough to rise. As a result, the Israelites ate unleavened bread, matzah. Indeed this is the reason given in the Aramaic ritual instructions that encircle the illustration in our Haggadah: “Our houses were saved and you accounted for the people and so we praise you. Why is it that we eat matzah? Because they did not have enough time with their dough.” If this matzah signified a simple recall of the Biblical past, we might expect to find an illustration with traditional Jewish symbology. Instead we find an image that is strikingly Islamic. The round wafer of matzah is decorated with colorful “geometric interlace resembling Moslem arabesque patterns.” The red and blue floral arabesques overlaid with intricate gold patterns bear semblence to the glazed tiles of Islamic architecture and sacred text illumination. At the center of the matzah wafer is not the six-pointed Jewish Star of David, but rather an eight-pointed star, appearing in Islamic tradition as the khāṭim al-nabiyīn, the seal of the prophets used prominently in Andalusian tilework. Arabesque patterns also appear on other objects in the full-page miniatures and on several word panels. In one panel, which depicts the bed-ridden Biblical patriarch Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph, Jacob rests his head on a pillow embroidered with a geometric Islamic design.

The Golden Haggadah also shows the Sephardic adoption of Christian iconography in the fourteen full-page Biblical miniatures that have earned the Golden Haggadah its aesthetic reputation and lustrous name. Although figurative painting in Islamic art was rare, Christian interchange provided another source for Jewish artistic vocabulary. Each of the full-page miniatures are divided into four panels, which together tell a series of Biblical narrative episodes beginning with primordial Adam naming the animals and ending with the song of Miriam the prophetess after the splitting of the Red Sea. In one panel, for instance, depicting Moses and Aaron approaching Pharaoh in his chambers, the Biblical characters appear in contemporary medieval dress. Pharoah is portrayed as a bearded, crowned, enthroned king seated under a canopy. He holds an ornamental scepter marked with a Christian fleur-de-lis. The draping robes and stereotyped oval faces are both derived from northern French styles popular in fourteenth-century Parisian Christian illumination. At the same time, the Golden Haggadah reveals a degree of Italian influence, for example in the softer drapery, coffered ceilings, and architectural framing around the ritual scenes. A panel depicting the passage of the Red Sea reveals explicitly medieval elements. Pharaoh and his men are imagined pursuing the Israelites on armored horseback, dressed in European chain mail and coif. The Egyptians appear in full medieval regalia, including a blue speckled pennant and kite shields decorated with the heraldic imagery of the thirteenth-century Spanish kings of León and Castile.

The Golden Haggadah, combining on the same page a traditionally formulated liturgical text with aesthetic elements selectively drawn from Islamic and Christian mileus, reveals a transformative moment of syncretic Jewish cultural generation in the thirteenth-century Crown of Aragon. Although the classic historians of the Jews in Spain often rhetorically contrasted an unalloyed Jewish core with the dangers of assimilation, in truth the presence of Jewish artists trained equally in traditional Jewish themes and foreign aesthetics reveals a more complex paradigm of strategic acculturation. Medieval Spanish Jews were multilingual and ideally fitted for the work of cultural translation, critically moving between their host cultures and the Jewish world and selectively adopting stimuli of diverse origin. The medieval artists and patrons of the Golden Haggadah are captured negotiating their identity between layers of the historical past and elements of contemporary experience. Even when the liturgical consciousness of exile, of their estrangement from their current surroundings, became poignant at Passover, this condition was governed aesthetically by a distinctly Iberian politic and sensibility.

From a theological perspective, these borrowings and exchanges represented in the Haggadah, the cultural trajectory shared between Jews and their neighbors, fits well with the message of the Exodus. The narrative of the Hebrews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt is often misappropriated in contemporary public discourse for tendentious ends, harnessing the enormous moral force of the Bible in support of social reform. In this discourse of “liberation theology,” the interwoven national and religious valences of the Exodus narrative are suppressed and flattened in a secularization of the Biblical themes: the message is reduced to unnuanced notes of liberation, justice, and freedom. Yet the Book of Exodus cannot be read as a simple call for emancipation of slaves—indeed, the chapters following the splitting of the Red Sea establish the legality of slavery—nor can its social message be understood outside of the covenantal theological framework established at Sinai, an integral part of the Exodus narrative. It is more proper to say that the Exodus establishes the particularistic concept of Jewish peoplehood, with all of its incumbent responsibilities, against the horizon of Biblical universalism; it insists on an identity of national distinction within a larger universalistic purpose enthroned in the covenant of Sinai. Indeed, in the illuminations of our Haggadah it is not the ubiquitous insider-outsider dichotomy so often assumed when speaking about the Biblical mentality that finds expression but rather a vision of Judaism in intimate conversation with the world. The creators and users of the Golden Haggadah mediate tradition and their surroundings through a uniquely Iberian prism, selectively choosing how to represent the past and commemorate the Exodus.

The Islamic and Christian idioms in the Haggadah are thus remarkable beyond their contributions to the discussion of dominant society relations when we consider these artistic assimiliations in terms of the relationship between history and memory. The Golden Haggadah reveals fourteenth century Jews showing fidelity both to the past and present, embedded fully in medieval Spain but also artfully drawing on both ancient tradition and more recent surroundings. Yerushalmi famously alleged that medieval Jews preferred to assimilate new historical events into “familiar archetypes” where “the latest oppressor is Haman…Christendom is ‘Edom’ or ‘Esau,’ and Islam is ‘Ishmael.’” This is, in fact, the reverse of the phenomenon displayed by the Golden Haggadah. Instead of representing contemporary affliction in the language of the past, representations in the Golden Haggadah are interpretations of the Biblical past in the aesthetic idioms of the medieval present. Far from indicating a deficiency in medieval Jewish civilization then, the lack of conventional historiographical sources noted by Yerushalmi instead indicates that medieval Jewish civilization must have had other mechanisms, besides the chronicle, in which to craft its memories and negotiate its historical identities. The Haggadah, as we have seen, was one of those devices. The rich liturgical, ritual, and even culinary repositories of Jewish culture represent another resource to investigate medieval uses of the past.

The Social Life of the Seder Table: Gastronomy and Drama

It is true, as Yerushalmi states of Biblical Jews, that the creators and users of the Haggadot were masters of “the meaning of history,” striving to imbue their lives with the significance of the past. But as we have seen, medieval Jews also possessed a historical ethos in their own way, working to construct a usable past in contemporary cultural idioms. The dramatic and social life performed around the seder table functioned as another device employed to construct cultural memory. With the narrative of Passover anchored in a fixed Mishnaic text, these “non-textual and non-cognitive” performances allowed the memory of Passover to be shaped in each time and place by changes in gastronomy and drama. As Paul Connerton points out, the distinguishing feature of such commemorative acts is that they “explicitly claim…continuity” with the past, even when they are made up of layers of built experience.

The importance of choreographed ritual in establishing the complex memory of the formative moment in Jewish history is adumbrated by the Biblical text itself. The Exodus text seems immediately to recognize at the moment of leaving Egypt that the memory will not simply be autonomously inscribed on behalf of the Jewish people, for G-d predicts that Israel must be prepared for the moment when future generations will ask, “What is this?” The gastronomic and dramatic rituals that the same Biblical text prescribes then are in part mnemonic devices, invitations to commemorate the past creatively. Yet by establishing these mnemonic devices working through ritual rather than text, the Jewish tradition sets up a system of commemoration that is naturally disposed to accommodate and retain multiple levels of memory. Rituals are more tenacious than stories.

The Passover seder as experienced by late-medieval Spanish Jews is an example of such commemorative eating. Just as the illustrations of the Golden Haggadah reveal a Jewish community with a dynamic conception of memory, incorporating not only the ancient past but also the medieval present, the gastronomy of the Passover seder commemorates a dynamic taste of Jewish history through multiple layers. The festival meal on the one hand recalls the Biblical command given to the Hebrews on the eve of the Exodus: “and this day shall be for you a memorial, and you shall keep it as a celebration to G-d; throughout your generations you shall keep it a celebration by law forever.” On the other hand, the seder incorporates layers of contemporary experience, as exemplified by rabbinic and later medieval transformations.

This Biblical drama, which was performed first by the enslaved Hebrews leaving Egypt, was reenacted and reinterpreted by following generations. When the Israelites settled into their land after the Exodus, they would have followed the instructions of the Torah to slaughter a year-old lamb or goat on the afternoon of the fourteenth of Nissan and consumed the roasted Paschal lamb with matzah and bitter herbs. During the Second Temple period, over a million Jewish pilgrims were commanded to flock en masse to Jerusalem for the Passover celebrations, particularly the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb. Unlike in other offerings where the priests would perform the slaughter, during this period the Passover seder began to take on its domestic orientation as the lamb would be privately slaughtered by each Israelite family. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the rabbis of the Mishnah responded to the loss of the temple by remodeling the Passover holiday on the pattern of the Greek symposium with its orchestration of foods and ritual. This meant not only the elevation of the roasted lamb meal to a higher significance independent from the sacrifice but also the addition of the Greek practices such as ritual hand washing and Hellenistic foods. Rabbinic sources indicate that Jews during this period added to the Passover meal fruit, nuts, mushrooms, pigeons, poached corn, dates, and honey cakes. In the transformed rite, the unleavened bread and bitter herbs became central objects and not just subsidiaries to a sacrifice as specified in the Biblical instructions. Moreover, as Baruch Bokser has noted, a ramification of this change in ritual entailed a shift in the notion of redemption, for now the festival’s original significance of celebrating national redemption from Egypt contradicted the reality of living again under foreign domination and outside the Land of Israel. The message then shifted from a focus on national sovereignty in the Land of Israel to an ongoing internal redemption, partially independent from the eschatological return to the land proper. Therefore, whereas the base text of the Passover seder remained constant, the changing flavors of the Passover seder not only reflected an adaptation to each historical circumstance; they also recalled and recuperated a dynamic memory of the entirety of Jewish history, granting special importance to the present moment.

The incorporation of contemporary gastronomy into the choreography of the seder continued in late medieval Spain. As the Jewish experience in exile unfolded, once benign foods became layered with additional meaning. Spread by the early Islamic conquests from Persia into Spain by the ninth-century, the eggplant became a staple of Moorish and Arabic cuisine. As Andalusian Jews migrated into the Christian cities of the Crown of Aragon, they brought with them the eggplant, a vestige of their Judeo-Arabic provenance. In Christian Spain, the tough-skinned vegetable became so associated with the Jews that the word berenjena, Ladino for eggplant, became an ethnic slur and insult. By the thirteenth-century, it was customary for onlookers to pelt those indicted by the Inquisition for witchcraft with aubergines as a sign of their heresy. The violet vegetable became so associated with Sephardic Jewry that one Ladino folk song even details seven recipes for eggplant, instructing how to chop, roast, and season the eggplant according to Jewish custom, and another folk song, Si savesh la buena djente, features a quarrel between an eggplant and a tomato over which is the more quintessentially Jewish vegetable. As Joelle Bahloul has shown, Jews living in host societies were always poignantly aware of the complex valences of their foodways and structured their culinary rituals deliberately so as to express particular sensibilities. In this way, Jewish memory was inscribed and ultimately embodied through gastronomy.

The tenacity of gastronomic memory, the ability of the physical act of eating to retain and shape social memory, persevered even after Spanish Jews were converted under duress to Catholicism. To root out those who maintained their Judaism in secret, the courts of the Inquisition published checklists of eating practices and food items. These court records show that the Inquisitors asked maids if their employers frequently requested eggplant, a sure sign of Jewish proclivities. In a sense, it is fitting that the eggplant became identified as the distinctive food of medieval Jews. Easily grown in the hot climates of the Mediterranean, the eggplant is able to take on the flavors of the spices in which it is cooked. This most versatile vegetable, a reminder of a splendid arabesque past that bore the capability to adapt to changing local environments was not unlike the Jewish communities who carried its seeds in their pockets across the diaspora.

The history of Sephardic Jewry was also mediated through a multi-layered gastronomic experience. In medieval Judeo-Spanish households the experience of Jewish history was literally performed through dramatic rituals and postures. The oral law instructs that, “in every generation, every one must look upon himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt.” This “as if” (k’eilu in the Hebrew) was creatively interpreted as an appeal to the imagination to expand the experience of the seder participants from their immediate surroundings at the seder table and make the journey themselves from slavery to redemption. By insisting on an annual reenactment of the story, the text invited medieval Jews not to reproduce the Exodus from Egypt in an objective form but rather to interpret it through a kaleidoscopic vision of Jewish history.

In Judeo-Spanish households, this invitation was embraced fully. As the Passover seder was underway, the head of the household would throw the napkin containing the a piece of matzah over his shoulder and walk out of the room, returning with a belt tightened around his waist and a cane in his hand. The family seated around the seder table then would then ask him, “Where do you come from,” to which he would answer “I have come from Egypt.” They then would ask “To where are you going?” and he would respond “I am going to Jerusalem.” This dramatic reenactment of the exodus from Egypt was intended to stimulate the curiosity of the seder participants, especially the children. In many Judeo- Spanish households, this would be followed by the Socratic recitation by the entire table of four ritual questions about the origins and reasons behind the peculiar eating practices of the Passover seder. As an illuminated panel from the 1320 Barcelona Haggadah reveals, in other households this recitation would be stimulated by the leader of the seder placing a basket of matzah on the head of the youngest child, involving the children in the drama of reenacting Jewish history.

The three extra-textual elements of the Passover seder preserved in the Haggadah—aesthetic, gastronomic, and dramatic—thus served to help medieval Spanish Jews negotiate their identities and mediate their tradition through the distinctive idiom of late medieval Spain. With the fixed-b-base textual element carrying the weight of fidelity to the biblical text, the extra-textual elements were tools that could be used to adapt to historical circumstance, revealing a dynamic vision of Jewish identity integrating past and present.

Memory and Identity in Late Medieval Spain

At the height of the Golden Age of Judaism in Spain, Benjamin of Tudela, a Navarrese rabbi-adventurer, set forth from Spain and took the long road on a journey across multiple continents, stopping frequently and visiting the Jews of each town and country. His journey began in the city of Zaragosa and set off north through Barcelona to France, and then set sail from the port of Marseilles. After visiting Genoa, Pisa, Rome, Greece, and Constantinople, he continued across Asia, visiting Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and northern Mesopotamia before reaching the legendary Jewish community in Baghdad. From there he went to Persia, then cut back across the Arabian Peninsula to Egypt and North Africa, finally returning to the Iberian Peninsula in 1173. Every place that Benjamin of Tudela traveled, he recorded in his diary the customs, landmarks, scholars, and leaders of each local Jewish community. As Benjamin finished his journey, he remarked upon both the diversity and unity of the Jewish people in exile.

Despite the differences between local communities, he observed with hope how each town “contains scholars and communities that love their brethren, and speak peace to those that are near and far.” Benjamin’s confidence in the solidarity of Jewish identity came in part from the shared social world of Jewish eating, for “when a wayfarer comes they rejoice, and make a feast for him, and say, ‘Rejoice, brethren, for the help of the L-rd comes in the twinkling of an eye.’”

Although a traveler like Benjamin might not have understood the peculiar adaptations and innovations of the practices of each community, he would have identified with the constant mixing between tradition and historical circumstance, the continuous dialogue between past and present. This phenomenon is true of Jewish memory and identity more largely. As Jews scattered across the world, their cultural identity survived through selective adaptations. A dynamic memory preserved permutations of inherited experience articulated through contemporary language. The invention of tradition, the use of the past, the subjectivity of memory – all of these postmodern constructs said to characterize the contemporary Jewish experience in reality have deep roots in the Jewish past.

Jewish memory was never as simple as the recall of an ancient past or a distant gaze towards a messianic future. Even Moses himself, the Hebrew prophet with an Egyptian name, was shaped by the experience of living between two contrary worlds with discordant cultures and memories. Despite the fervid insistence of modern reactionary forces to resist the forces of history, medieval Jewish collective memory was never divorced from historical consciousness. Even if medieval Spanish Jewry lacked the historical chronicles of later generations, they were equally political and intentional in their approach to the past and their shaping of memory.

Being a Jew in medieval Spain, much like being a Jew in the modern world, required an elaborate juggling of religious, ethnic, and cultural affiliations. It demanded a fraught dialogue between past and present and a continuous re-articulation of the meaning of tradition. Despite their own proclamations and the views of some outsiders, Jews did not isolate themselves from surrounding cultures nor did they seek refuge in a romantic past. To the contrary, they drew actively on their traditions to nourish an identity rooted as much in the past as the present. Then, as now, Jews lived between many worlds. Each demanded a loyalty seemingly in contradiction with the others. The social world of the seder functioned as one stage for this contested dialogue, a way for medieval Spanish Jews to negotiate the values of their surroundings and nevertheless keep alive the memory of the past by using it in the present.

Throughout the work we see Criseyde drawing pockets of feminine space in which to exist. We also see these safe spaces continually invaded and dismantled. This pattern draws attention to the fact that Criseyde in many ways acts as a mirror of the besieged city of Troy. This topic has in fact been touched on in an article by Angela Weisl and Tison Pugh, which finds that:

Although Troilus is often figured as a simulacrum of Troy, the powerful warrior city undone by a woman, Criseyde serves as an image of Troy in its vulnerability. Criseyde appears in a series of small, enclosed spaces (like the walled city). Each space however, turns out to be penetrable.

Yet Weisl and Pugh do not explore the effects of this comparison, do not link it to traditional ideas about virginity and chastity, and fail to take into account Criseyde’s position after her expulsion from Troy. The article seems cautious of making gender-based assertions. Although of course ideas of gender within Troilus and Criseyde are often complex, I do not feel it is misguided to read Criseyde’s character in terms of female societal roles, especially considering her very specifically defined position as a widow. I intend to discuss these ideas more fully, taking into account the three main types of “space” that Criseyde finds invaded throughout the poem: physical or geographical space, psychological space, and the female body itself.

Perhaps the most obvious constructions of space within the poem are those that can be defined physically. There are certain areas and environments within the poem in which Criseyde, we would assume, can function as an autonomous female. One of the most important of these is, of course, her household and garden. The walls of her property act as “a very physical representation of the exclusion of outsiders,” and it is within this context that we see her surrounded by an entirely female company of attendants and wards. The introduction of her uncle Pandarus into this setting is not in itself an intrusion—though he is a man in female space, he is expected—but it is the news that he brings and the manner in which he delivers it that begins the breaking down of Criseyde’s carefully constructed sanctuary. From the very moment Troilus’s suit is introduced we understand that the widow’s barriers are not to be respected. Pandarus persuades her to “rys, up and lat us daunce,” something she initially rejects, knowing that her place in society relies on her decorous isolation. But because he is her uncle, she relents. Pandarus is in the privileged position of one trusted to enter certain spaces that other men would be denied access to. However, he soon takes this too far and becomes the first person to forcibly dismantle the walls Criseyde draws about herself. That it is a family member, an “insider,” who initiates this motif of intrusion and exposure is telling: Criseyde’s plight is made more tragic by the fact that before she betrays, she is betrayed. She, like Troy, is left vulnerable and undefended due to the scheming of someone trusted to provide protection.

A particularly interesting article on the subject of Pandarus’s scheming has been written by Josephine A. Koster, who makes the point that he cleverly manipulates Criseyde’s private feminine spaces to entrap her. She discusses both Criseyde’s walled garden and her household as examples of his ability to “manipulate… presumably public space to speak ‘pryvely’ with her.” The article highlights the fact that Criseyde is always under observation in her home and garden and that she is only truly alone in the closet where she reads Troilus’s letter. The fact that Criseyde is always attended should make it impossible for Pandarus to break into Criseyde’s space in any unwanted way. Yet he succeeds in bringing Troilus’s suit to her under the eyes of her maidens and in her own domestic environment. Laura Howes sees this as part of a recurring trend in the poem: “the gardens’ protective walls weaken metaphorically under the weight of social convention so that the garden… offers no protection, only an illusion of safety.” I would argue that it is not the weight of social convention that destroys these walls, but the weight of her uncle’s masculine cunning. His ability to by-pass the social conventions designed to protect the vulnerable feminine destroys the illusion of security within the walled garden and suddenly shows it to be vulnerable to the outside world.

After first manipulating Criseyde’s private environment, Pandarus develops his campaign to seduce her for Troilus by drawing her into more and more public arenas. The account of her visit to Deiphebus’s house shows him masterfully manoeuvring his niece into increasingly inappropriate places by deception. Her appearance in Troilus’s bedchamber without a suitable chaperone would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the poem, before Pandarus’s subtle breaking down of her protective barriers began in those most private of spaces. In exploring the methods Pandarus uses to lure Criseyde into Troilus’s room, we begin to see a pattern emerging. Under the pretence of protecting Criseyde’s honour Pandarus in fact places her in a position where that honour could be heavily compromised. When Pandarus sets up Criseyde’s visit to Deiphebus’s house, he claims that he is seeking help for niece, to whom “some men wolden don oppressioun,” (2.1418). Earlier in the poem Pandarus exploits the presence of her maidens in the garden, using them as a guise of respectability under which he brings her Troilus’s suit. In setting up the meeting at Deiphebus’s house, a meeting which will go against all rules of propriety between men and women, he once again exploits the presence of honourable persons to veil his true intentions. Laura Howes discusses the emphasis on the inappropriateness of Criseyde’s situation in terms of the comparison that can be drawn with Deiphebus and Helen, who can enjoy each other’s company without guilt and “can risk being seen by other members of the household” while “Criseyde must hurry out of the bedroom … when she hears Helen and Deiphebus’s footsteps on the stairs.” The fragility of the peace in this episode cannot help but call to mind a later bedroom scene, equally fraught with potential danger, in which Pandarus once again has a hand.

The bedchamber is perhaps the most hallowed female sanctuary for an unmarried high-class woman in the Middle Ages. Under no circumstances should a man be present. Although Criseyde is not in her own bedroom in her own house, a bedroom set aside for her in the house of her kinsman seems the next best thing. However, when this situation is set-up in Pandarus’s house we see no such security. The bedchamber is infiltrated, not just by her uncle, but by Troilus, through a “secre trappe-dore” (3.759). Troilus once again enters this feminine world with the help of Pandarus, whose previous role as messenger has already set him up as the conduit through which Troilus’s attentions flow. What is striking is the way Pandarus uses a false concern for Criseyde’s honour as an excuse to further impose Troilus upon her. He persuades Criseyde not to “som wight calle” (3.760) when he appears unexpectedly in her room, for fear that in summoning one of her women she will arouse previously inconceivable suspicions. His plea plays on the same fears that he has exploited on previous occasions when pressing Troilus’s suit.

I! God forbede that it sholde falle,
… that ye swich folye wroughte!
They myghte demen thyng they nevere er thoughte (3.761-3).

He has Criseyde in an impossible bind. She must either continue to talk with her uncle while they are alone and thus breaking social codes, or call one of her entourage to act as a chaperone and reveal the fact that he is already in her room unaccompanied, albeit for a matter of moments. Once she has granted her uncle permission to speak with her alone, her honour is compromised, and she can hardly refuse Troilus entry when he is introduced on the back of Pandarus’s flimsy excuse that there is talk that Criseyde “sholden love oon hatte Horaste” (3.797).

Previous critics have seen the complex social expectations regarding space within the world of the poem as restrictive. Koster claims that “Criseyde’s conduct portrays her as a woman trapped in her own social spheres, behind the walls of her own constricted understanding of class and behavior.” I disagree. Although it is true that Pandarus manages to manipulate these spheres to his advantage, it is, in the end, a need for just such a protective sanctuary that “traps” Criseyde into accepting Diomede, as Koster herself partially acknowledges, writing:

Criseyde in the Greek camp has no closets or gardens or maidens around her… she is without proper chaperonage or other guarantees of her status and chastity… Alliance with Diomede (marriage is never specifically mentioned) offers her a kind of respectability and a secure place in Greek society—walls to hide behind again—

In fact, the moment of Criseyde’s expulsion from Troy is perhaps the most illuminating and literal example of Criseyde’s protective sphere being dismantled. If Troy is (as has in the past been suggested) a man’s world, then it is at least a man’s world that allows for the localised creation of smaller feminine worlds within it. The domestic pace of life has as much to do with the women of the city as with its men; indeed, the temple in which we first meet Criseyde is “a very public space for women,” a space in which women need not be in the company of men. It is not incongruous to see the walled city as an almost womblike sanctuary, where the vulnerable are kept away from the warring armies and the wounded return for respite. How much more threatened must our single heroine feel when faced with the Greek army camp, an unequivocally male environment with no room for femininity?

Throughout the poem Criseyde’s mind is filled with anxiety about the machinations of her uncle and the complexity of her situation with regards to Troilus. It is possible to read this ongoing concern as a sign of a further, perhaps unlooked-for, male intrusion, the penetration of another private space in which she operates: her mental space. The impact of her continual disquiet regarding Pandarus and Troilus’s physical intrusions allows the two men, by extension, intrusion and domination of her thoughts. This is particularly evident as she mulls over the news that Troilus loves her, as she says:

Allas! Syn I am free,
Sholde I now love, and put in jupartie
My sikernesse, and thrallen libertee?
Allas, how dorst I thenken that folie?
May I naught wel in other folk aspie
Hire dredfull joye, hire constreinte, and hire
peyne?
Ther loveth  noon, that she nath why to pleyne (2.771-77).

The concern in her mind is all for her safety comfort—understandably, given her precarious position. That being the case, it is perhaps not unfair to suppose that her decision to show some loving kindness to Troilus is at least in part an act of self-preservation. However, if we hark back to Troilus’s first glimpse of Criseyde, we see that his original intention is to infiltrate, rather than protect, her womanly space. As Elaine Tuttle Hansen observes, his “male gaze actively penetrates the crowd and smites and fixes on Criseyde herself.” Hansen does not extrapolate further from this, but it is telling that Criseyde’s instant reaction to being “found out” is to cast a look that asks “What, may I nat stonden here?”(1.230). Criseyde is defensive, surprised that through such a milieu of people, which she has presumably surrounded herself with on purpose, she has been pinpointed and left unguarded.

The most striking example of the extent to which Criseyde’s consciousness has been infiltrated by outside male influences is the dream in which she finds her heart ripped out of her chest by an eagle, to be replaced forcibly by the bird’s own. Criseyde falls into this dream to the song of a nightingale, the same bird that wakes Pandarus as he sets in motion the events leading up to Troilus and Criseyde’s consummation. Jospeh E. Gallagher discusses this scene in terms of the changing nature of a man (and as a consequence, the changing nature of his love) in war. He claims that it “establishes [Troilus] as a warrior-lover” and that the transformation of the nightingale into the eagle is a positive, regal symbol. I also see a connection between the violent sexual nature of the dream and war. It has been noted that:

an awareness of being besieged permeates Chaucer’s poetic voice… The absent presence of siege [embodies] an image of surrounding, potentially mortal, but not immediate danger.

That being the case, perhaps it is unsurprising that in such a climate Criseyde’s thoughts, even those of love, turn to violence. However, I feel that the overt reference to Philomel, often alluded to in relation to rape in classical texts, certainly adds a greater note of unease to what occurs in the bedroom, even if the allusion is not meant to fully implicate Troilus in a rape. That the reference to a nightingale is repeated during the actual consummation—Criseyde is likened to “the newe abaysed nyghtyngale” (3.1233)—only strengthens this comparison.  It is also important to point out that in the violence and sexuality of the dream, Criseyde finds herself vulnerable to male intrusions even within her own mind. The men in her life have so far manipulated her that she has no respite even in dreams.

The increasing penetration of Criseyde’s mental spaces often appears to be a direct result of the breaching of physical walls in the poem. The violent dream comes to her after Troilus’s suit has been pressed upon her by Pandarus, but also after she sees Troilus from the window of her closet. This is in effect a double infiltration, of her garden by her uncle, and then of her private closet, by Troilus, although Troilus imposes upon her unwittingly. It is interesting to note at this early stage of the poem that Criseyde tries to escape the masculine outside by confining herself to ever smaller private environments. Once she catches sight of Troilus from her closet window, she can retreat no further, and it is at this moment that she seems to surrender. Even his image at her window has penetrative power. Love enters through her eyes, whether she would have it or no. This correlation of physical and psychological walls is also apparent in the scene in which, having spent the night with Troilus after her bedchamber in Pandarus’s house was infiltrated, she finally confronts Pandarus with his manipulations. Criseyde is said to “wax for shame al reed” (3.1570), a physical manifestation of the mental confusion she is feeling. It seems that she has been aware of her uncle’s intentions throughout the seduction, but that she had no choice. Her accusation shows us the extent to which Pandarus has caused her protective hauteur to crumble:

Fox that ye ben! …
God help me so, ye caused al this fare,
Trowe I,” quod she, “for al youre words white. (3.1565-7)

At the beginning of the poem, Criseyde’s dignity as a widow would never have allowed her such a passionate reaction, but now she can no longer hide behind her widowhood for protection. That cerebral space has been dismantled and she lies before Pandarus stripped both physically and emotionally bare.

It is not only Criseyde’s public face and peace of mind that are threatened by the intrusive nature of male interactions in the poem, but her body itself. Pandarus is the main perpetrator of inappropriate invasions of Criseyde’s body, we also see Troilus behaving in an intrusive manner towards her. The first obvious example of Pandarus’s transgressive behaviour comes when he thrusts Troilus’s letter into her bosom, as quoted below.

“Refuse it naught,” quod he, and hente hire faste,
And in hire bosom the letter down he thraste (2. 1154-5).

Here Pandarus has quite clearly abused his privileged position in Criseyde’s household. Not only has he taken liberties with her body but also with her reputation, as if she were to discard it now her women would see and “gauren on us tweye” (2.1157). It is clear that Criseyde will have no choice about whether to attend to Troilus’s suit or not. By allowing Pandarus part of the way into her space, Criseyde opens herself up to his impositions. In this instance, Pandarus’s invasive behaviour is a means to an end: it brings Troilus’s suit to Criseyde. However, and perhaps more worryingly, we later see evidence of Pandarus taking liberties with Criseyde’s body on what seems to be nothing more than a whim. After the night of Troilus and Criseyde’s coming together, Pandarus peers under the sheets at her nakedness and “With that his arm al sodeynly he thriste / Under hir nekke, and at the laste hir kiste” (3.1574-5). This is an action far more inappropriate than even the thrusting of the letter into Criseyde’s bodice. His voyeurism is made even more unsettling by the half-veiled suggestion that his exploration of Criseyde’s body goes further than a cursory glance and a kiss. The addition of the phrase “And Pandarus hath fully his entente” (3.1582) cannot help but conjure up the possibility that Pandarus takes advantage of Criseyde’s position in a more sinister way. Whether Pandarus’s “intent” stretches to sexual activity with his own niece we do not know, but the vulnerability of Criseyde at this moment is testament enough to the extent of his penetration of her safe spaces.

To see this invasive tendency repeated in Troilus, we must return to the bedroom in Pandarus’s house. We can see this same aggressive, intrusive approach to Criseyde’s body on the lovers’ first night together. In a very dramatic way, Criseyde’s private space is conquered and re-appropriated as the arena of male fantasy. Her body is visually dismembered, by Troilus, the narrator and as a consequence, the reader. We read about her physical form in discrete pieces, with no continuity of form to show the full woman. We hear instead of:

Hire armes smale, hire streghte bak and softe,
Hire sydes longe, flesshly, smothe, and white
…
Hire snowissh throte, hire brestes rounde and
lite (3.1247-50).

Upon dissecting this scene we see a clear and worrying progression: a man is given entry to a woman’s bedroom against her will; with the help of her uncle he then tricks her into accepting him into her bed; he then, while sleeping with her categorises her as a list of body parts. In line with my previous observations about the dream of the eagle, there is more than a shadow of rape here. If rape is too strong a word, then perhaps Peter Beidler’s assessment of the situation as a “sexual deception” is more palatable. He points out that “Criseyde does not explicitly agree to become the sexual lover of Troilus” and discusses the textual reference to Alcmena as evidence for this. Although we may not be convinced that Troilus does take Criseyde against her will, there is an uncomfortable sense that if she had spoken out against the consummation and refused his advances, her refusal might not have been respected. The potential for a consummation in which she has no choice of course calls to mind the likely fate of the women of Troy  in the aftermath of the war with Greece, and serves to highlight the difficulty of Criseyde’s position later in the poem when she must choose between staying in the army camp and returning to Troy. There is a strong connection between the sanctity of a woman’s virginal state and the security of the besieged city, in both metaphorical and literal terms.

In examining feminine space as mind, body and locality, it becomes clear that systems of intrusion and destruction affect Criseyde on multiple levels throughout the narrative, and that this threatens several different areas of her life. Bearing this in mind, I find it difficult to agree with Edward Condren’s claim that, with regards to the prisoner-trading episode, Criseyde’s “equivalence to Antenor [is] disturbingly clear”. He states that “As surely as Antenor betrays Troy, the city of his birth, Criseyde betrays Troilus, the man who loves her.” I cannot help but feel he misses the point. In light of the fact that these events are occurring during a siege, and the pains that Chaucer has taken to show us the continual invasion of Criseyde’s feminine spaces, I feel that a much more apt comparison can be drawn between Criseyde and the city of Troy. As Laura Howes has argued, Criseyde is subject to “a complex series of betrayals by men.” She cites the betrayals in order, as those of Calchas, Hector, Pandarus and, finally, the narrator. All of these men have a duty to protect Criseyde. All of them fail. Antenor is trusted to protect Troy: he hands it over to the Greeks. Surely he has more in common with the men who freely give up Criseyde in trade than with the woman herself. If we read the exchange in this way, then the comparison of Criseyde to the city becomes unavoidable. The connection between the walled fortress of virginity and the walled city besieged is an easy one to make, and one that, if exploited fully, can reveal much about the text’s inner workings. By linking his main female character’s destiny to that of a great city of antiquity, Chaucer makes a case for a woman’s place in the story as more than a plot device to show-case the hero’s suffering.

Once Criseyde’s importance in her own right has been established, the question of the ending must be addressed. The poem’s conclusion with regards to Troilus leaves little unanswered. Criseyde’s future, however, is more uncertain. Despite its obvious benefits for her, most critics, including Robert Henryson in his damning Testament of Cresseid, assume the alliance with Diomede will end with his forsaking her, casting her off to live forever in regret and shame. Although Diomede never mentions marriage, although he seems to see the winning of Criseyde as a game, Chaucer never explicitly states that he will cast her aside. Neither does he tell us that she will not have a perfectly happy life. He gives us only silence. Many critics have commented on the fact that Criseyde’s thoughts are less and less prevalent in books four and five of the epic, and read this as a sign that she has fully taken on the role of betrayer, no longer the woman we grew to know and love. Sashi Nair is in agreement with many as she writes that Criseyde’s character is “systematically deconstructed by the poem’s conclusion.” It can, however, be argued that in fact the “betrayal” is very much in keeping with the character of Criseyde. The switch from Troilus to Diomede is after all not unexpected. Not only is it in character, but Peter Beidler makes the point that, when we consider Criseyde’s treatment of Troilus, we cannot “condemn a woman for not loving deeply a man she does not love deeply.” I would not necessarily go so far as to say that Criseyde never loves Troilus, but certainly the self-protection evident in Criseyde’s original acceptance of Troilus is echoed in her dealings with Diomede, and the fear for her own safety overshadows her love. Indeed, in Inthe same article Beidler alludes to the similarities between Criseyde’s acceptance of Troilus and her eventual acceptance of Diomede, a point also made by Jill Mann, who claims:

it is the slow process of Criseyde’s acceptance of Troilus that we learn to understand how, when the time comes, she will gradually abandon him for Diomede… It is the comparability of the two processes that cleanses the betrayal of its antifeminist implications…

If the betrayal is in character, then we do still know Criseyde, and the manner in which she gradually falls silent must be read as a sign of something other than alienation from readers who have been betrayed, who no longer know the heroine.

I would propose a reading that counters the traditional view of Criseyde’s betrayal, one that perhaps will sit uncomfortably with some of Criseyde’s harsher critics. We can see Criseyde’s acceptance of Diomede as necessary rather than faithless. C Considering the build up of invasive and destructive behaviour displayed by the men in Criseyde’s life, and considering that her aim throughout is, in my view, fin fifiding a private space to exist in, it is possible to read Criseyde’s disappearance from the text not as a sign of her betrayal, but of her emancipation. It is possible to read her silence as a mark of her success in finally building that impenetrable wall around herself that she has so desperately sought. In Diomede, she has found a man who can do what Troilus could not, for either his lover or his city. Diomede can defend her from invasion, whether it be by other Greeks, by “som wrecche” (5.705) on the road back to Troy, or indeed by us as readers. It is only as Criseyde slips from view that we realise that, in the same way as in the bedroom scene at Pandarus’s house, we too have been engaging in the intrusion of Criseyde’s hallowed spaces. When we can no longer see into her mind and her private rooms, she has succeeded. In her alliance with Diomede we see her achieve the isolation she has sought throughout the poem. Rather than condemning her, I add my voice to those, like Laura Howes, who ask “What … is so bad about that?”

Why would men dedicated, above all, to finding divine perfection in this life be so haunted by the servants of Satan? What purpose was served by these demonic visions for men whose ultimate goal was systematically to tune out the physical world of sin and temptation? While there are undoubtedly many answers to these questions, I would posit that at least a part of the ascetics’ obsession with demons was a result of their subconscious inability to let go entirely of their physical existences — and perhaps their lack of desire to do so. This is not to say that I doubt the ascetics’ devotion to achieving unity with the divine; I simply think that while the ascetics’ desire to be close to their God is perfectly understandable, their methods of denying the body to the point of illness and avoiding almost all human company were incredibly difficult. Conversing and struggling with demons — beings whose form and nature were dependant on what monk they were encountering, who spoke to monks far more easily than God and his angels — served as a way to advance towards God while still letting the physical world and the body of the monk itself take central stage

Demons were ambiguous creatures. Their forms were mutable, conceived of with the monk they were encountering specifically in mind. That they claimed to know the future was not disputed, but demon experts did not agree on the exact source of that knowledge. These disagreements open up the larger question of the physical composition of demons. According to Athanasius, St. Antony claimed that demons’ seeming gift of prophecy was in fact a byproduct of their physical natures, describing how they, “like thieves, run ahead and report what they see … Should someone begin to travel from the Thebaid, or from some other place, they do not know before he begins to walk if he will walk. But after they see him walking, they run ahead, and before he comes they announce him.” The demons of St. Antony were in a sense superphysical, built upon the same basic lines as humans, but enhanced. By contrast, John Climacis describes demons as being “ … lighter than the human body, being capable of flying suspended in the air. Their ability to float enables them to see what is about to happen before humans can see it; they appear, therefore, to be able to predict the future, even though this is simply the result of their lighter bodily construction.” The freedom that these two definitions granted is easily inferred; if a demon could be either physical or incorporeal, the method in which the monk fought it became the monk’s decision.

In the same way that concrete definitions of demons are unknowable and therefore subjective, the purpose demons served for the desert fathers is also nebulous. They could simultaneously act as enemies and allies, providing monks with the sort of visible, tangible proof of their improvement that angelic forces were not as quick to give. Valantasis claims that “[w]ithout the daemons, there could be no progress in the monastic life since progress begins when the daemons attack and succeeds by the monk’s activity in their defeat.” Being set upon by demons could be seen as proof that the devil considered a monk to be a considerable opponent. St. Antony was constantly under attack, exclaiming, “How many times they [demons] have called me blessed, and I cursed them in the Lord’s name! How often they have prophesied about the water of the River, and I said to them: What concern is that of yours? Once they came with their threats and encircled me like warriors in battle array. On another occasion they filled my dwelling with horses and beasts and serpents.” The demons call Antony “holy” as though it is an insult; perhaps they are announcing why they are targeting him specifically. Thus, though they may physically wound him, the demons are letting Antony know that he is on the right track, that his actions will ultimately be beneficial; they are, in short, the bearers of good news.

Monks, however, often interpreted his good news as encouragement to mortify their bodies. Desert ascetics already routinely cleansed and purified their flesh in order to more efficiently connect with God both mentally and spiritually, but this demon-inspired location of the monk’s battle on and within his body had negative results as well as positive. For Antony, near-constant demonic visitations and battles helped him to become the spiritual paragon that he eventually was. The demons only increased his resolve to be pure and to focus exclusively on God. For monks less strong than Antony, demons perhaps only reinforced their focus on the physical body, letting this tangible battle take the place of the more elusive search for the divine presence. Antony’s demonic encounters allowed him to take the ambiguity of the ascetic’s body — “the monk simultaneously experiences the body as friend, ascetic arena, instrument of glorification; and as foe, tyrant, and object for mastery … the body remains the origin of the human problem, the means to its remedy, and the environment of its final victory” — and to use it in the service of the greater goal of achieving spiritual perfection.

Spiritually weaker monks, however, could unwittingly fall into the demons’ traps by over-focusing on their bodies, becoming obsessively convinced that only by punishing their bodies could they triumph over their foes. To a certain extent, this demon-inspired physical fixation could be seen as permission to do what ascetics were specifically not meant to do: glorify in their corporeal existence. As Brakke writes, “the Christian’s primary goal is a ‘disposition’ of detachment from the world and ‘bodily desire,’ gained through asceticism … One’s entire life could be one of self-denial.” But dealings with demons allowed monks to make their bodies, their inescapably physical selves, central to their spiritual strivings. There were, of course, teachers warning of the results of excess punishment of the body. Cassian reflected that “too much fasting and too much eating come to the same end … often I have seen men who could not be snared by gluttony fall, nevertheless, through immoderate fasting and tumble in weakness into the very urge which they had overcome.” It was no secret that the extreme punishment of the body was just as dangerous a form of self-indulgent behavior, but that did not stop monks from abstaining from food almost to the point of starvation, or from flagellating themselves. Regardless of the warnings, the self-punishment inspired by demonic visitors was a way to make physicality spiritual, since “when the self-flagellating ascetic gazes at himself, he not only sees his position before the eyes of God: he also witnesses the unfolding of an inner world of manifold desires, even while gaining liberation from it.” If demons were in many ways what monks chose to make them, then many took these visions as excuses to practice a religion centered around the body.

The demons of the desert ascetics were anything but figurative; they were highly individualized. In a certain sense they could be seen as spiritual guides specifically tailor-made for each monk they visited—and it is not difficult to believe that, considering the ascetics were still trying to understand exactly what it was to be a monk: “The monk is now such a familiar figure that it is difficult to remember that he did not always exist, that he has had to be imagined, embodied, legitimated, and reconceived from late antiquity to the present day.” Removed from humanity and encouraged to be removed from themselves, they sought to become new types of men, a difficult proposal at best. Their encounters with demons were so complex and ambiguous, I think, in reaction to their challenging goals — seeking to spiritually ascend to God, many of these men took their cues from demons and refused to leave their bodies. Faced with their need to be closer to God, these monks used demons to give themselves a path to God that did not necessitate the dismissal of their ineluctable bodies.

Michael McCormick is the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History and Chair of the Standing Committee on Archaeology, Harvard University. The interview was conducted by Sententiae editor Lauren Tiedemann.

Discuss your thoughts on approaching different disciplines from a more holistic view rather than dividing everything separately as has often previously been done.

It is true that we are specialists in disciplines, and the advance of scholarship and science certainly since the nineteenth century has been one where we take the evidence and divide it up and focus on seals or on handwriting and fifteenth century manuscripts, and that allows us to dig deeper in a particular piece, area, sector of evidence as we try to understand the past. But I think your very question suggests that we’re looking at a civilization, we’re looking at a culture, a society, that we’re looking at a bunch of human beings like you and me, who lived and loved and suffered and experienced the full gamut of human life, and who were dealt cards, which were nowhere near as wonderful, in most cases, as the cards that you and I’ve been dealt, and still played them pretty well.

So, it’s about human civilization, and we can know about human civilization in different ways. We can know about it from the histories and poems they wrote. We can know about it from the plays they produced, or didn’t produce. We can know about it from the paintings they made, from the way they built their houses. Where did children sleep? Where was the hearth? We can know about it from the dreams they had, the dreams for the future, for their children, for their family. All of these things help us see the past. We can know the food that they ate, the health crises that they experienced as children or as adults, the hard labor that women may have done, helping to plow the fields or to harvest, or run some kind of instrument, which leaves traces, lesions, that leaves markers on the bones, and allow you to reconstruct the habitual exercise and physical activity patterns of human beings.

So all of these things can give us insight. Now, I can’t sit down and look at a bone and say, oh my gosh, this person worked a loom, but a specialist can, maybe. And I can’t sit down and say, oh, well, this picture is 1390s and I can see therefore in the 1390s the influence of this traveling painter who came here from Paris and went through. But an expert could. So what we have to do is rise above and beyond this tremendous explosion in evidence and our understanding of evidence, that started already in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with discovering different types of texts, and then monuments, and then paintings and manuscript illuminations, and now has moved to the object-level of tools and weapons, and dinnerware and pilgrim badges and so forth, and even more recently has moved to the lesions in the enamel of a child’s teeth, recording the first serious health crisis that the child has experienced in the first twelve years of life which we can potentially date down to approximately a week or so in their existence.

So all of a sudden, those of us who work in antiquity and the Middle Ages and have been accustomed to working with a more limited set of source materials, all of a sudden we’re faced with a super abundance of data. So the challenge becomes, how do we understand the new data? Where is the new data coming from? How are we understanding it? And then, in the end, how do we take the new insights and fit them together to paint a picture of what it was like to live then and to help us understand that, and how it changed, and how it was changing for different people and different places, and how it changed in the big picture, over a 1000-year period, and how it changed in the course of someone’s life, or seasonally. So that is indeed the challenge, to revel in this fantastic new information, not to get lost in the forest although it’s kind of fun to at least get a little bit waylaid somewhere in the forest– and to get a little bit disoriented, but then come back and find the road and try to see where the heck the forest is for all these trees…but there are some pretty neat trees here that are worth looking at. So that’s how I would think about it. What do you think about that?

I think it’s very important for us to have the specialists who understand the material the best and can give us the most accurate reading of it, but then to have people who can approach it from a different view and maybe have a different insight because they haven’t been so trained to look at it a certain way.

Exactly, and it’s so important for the specialists to always be able to express what they find in words that can be understood by other people who aren’t necessarily so technically adept as they are. It’s a big challenge for us all.

I think that’s something that is often forgotten.

Indeed.

It seems to be perhaps a new trend with learning today, that people are starting to incorporate all these different aspects of it, but I feel like, at least in my own personal experience, reading scholarship from, 10 or 20 years ago, it seemed like it was very much geared, an archaeological report is only for archeologists to be able to understand, or its geared for somebody who studies architecture to understand; it’s all in architectural terms that the average reader can’t comprehend.

This is really important, this observation that you make. It underscores the value of teaching your own material in such a high-grade institution as this one, where we are teaching, not the molecules of this or anything, but we’re looking at a time and place, and trying to fit together, to kind of, step by step, grope our way to a better understanding of what it was like in that time and place, from all different kinds of evidence. In our courses together I’m trying to put together a picture for you to synthesize it, you’re trying to understand it, and saying, wait a minute, I don’t understand this part. Well, if you don’t understand it, then I don’t understand it either , and now I’ll have to explain it to you, let’s think this through together. And we’re kind of pooling all of our intellects and knowledges, different knowledges, around the question of trying to figure out what it was like, and that obliges us to try and pull things together from many different areas, so in a sense one could say that our coursework together is the antechamber to the synthesis, the vestibule to the synthesis. It’s the entrance room to the synthesis; it’s where we start the process of synthesis. So that’s an interesting way of thinking about it.

Would you mind if I asked you a little bit about your background, and how you got interested in medieval history and archaeology?

No, not at all. Medieval history. I was always interested in history as a child, but history, I thought, was when I would sit under the table and my uncles would drink and tell stories. History was anecdotes about the family, about big jokes they pulled off or the problem with the mule on the canal, my uncle who fell off it and how he couldn’t get back on it because he was too little, so it was American history through the eyes of a family’s oral tradition, and I kind of thought that was history. So I thought, oh that would be fun to do. And so I got sent off to the little parochial school I was in, in our little town of Tonawanda, which is the western end of the Erie Canal. Then I got send off from the parochial school to an experimental school in Buffalo. It was founded by refugees from the Hungarian uprising. Essentially, what they did was they created a central European gymnasium in Buffalo. I was just plunged into a different world, where I had to do 5 years of European history, I started Greek in the 8th grade, I did 5 years of French, and 4 years of biology, 3 years of chemistry, 2 years of physics, and comparative literature, systematic theology, ethics, you know, all kinds of stuff that was beyond the ken of Tonawanda. But then of course, since I was in Tonawanda, I could not possibly do medieval or Byzantine history, because that was far too difficult for someone from Tonawanda, because you have to know all these languages, and of course that’s all you had to tell somebody from Tonawanda, that this is too hard, and argh, let me at it! So I got interested in medieval history, and actually I started in the eighth grade, with Roman and Byzantine history.
So I had an extraordinary education. And then I, by a series of interesting accidents, wound up applying not only to a series of American colleges, but to the University of Louvain, in Belgium, which was quite taken with my application and designed a special program for me, recognizing all my advanced placement exams. I got a New York state loan, from the New York State Higher Education Authority, which would pay for a year of education in Belgium, so I went to try it, and it was fantastic, absolutely fantastic. I was surrounded by Medievalists. I didn’t know; I kind of lucked into it, but you had this extraordinary convergence of this universe of intellects and scholars. There were twenty to thirty medievalists, in all areas of medieval studies: medieval philosophy, medieval art history, medieval history, economic history, medieval Latin literature, paleography. Codicology had just been invented in Brussels, and it was the first generation of practitioners that I was learning from; I was almost the first generation: I started it ten years after the discipline had started. It was intellectually a very exciting time; it was fantastic training. My teachers were immensely generous, in pouring knowledge on me, and there were times where I didn’t have any money, and so I did not have food, and they would actually take me and feed me, and while I was eating, continue to teach me. So I owe great debt to my teachers, and I feel the only way I can repay that, – since all save one of them are now gone, I take him out to lunch every year. I go to Brussels and take him to lunch, and I pick up the tab. He gets whatever he wants! – But the only way I can continue to repay bills for those I can’t buy oysters for any more, is to by trying to teach my students as they taught me. So that’s how I got interested in history.

Archaeology was much more slow-coming, because when I was in graduate school, so we’re talking 1969 to 1979, medieval archaeology was still being born in Belgium. But they couldn’t date things, so they’d say, ‘this barn is between 1000 and 1200.’ Well, there’s not a heck of a lot you can do with that, and the typologies of medieval ceramics were just beginning, and in fact the typology that revolutionized late Roman archaeology, that of John Hayes, was published I think in 1972, so during my third year in college. He classified all ARS, all African Red Slipware, between c.200 and 700, and often down to a 25 year period or so. That just can’t be [according to other scholars], and it turns out, after forty years of testing and checking, it can be, he’s got it mostly right, and it’s just gotten more precise since. And then other things were dated on that basis, so other ceramics could be dated thanks to that. It just spawned this new, tremendous new instrument for relatively fine dating, of particular pottery — diagnostic ceramic — and that allows fine chronology of a site. So all of a sudden Carthage goes from being a site where you really can’t tell the difference between 300 and 600, to being able to see the difference between 300 and 350 and 425 and 450, and so on and so forth. So that all of a sudden made late Roman and early medieval archaeology in the Mediterranean something that became historically very relevant. With that kind of chronological resolution, you could start to think historically about the significance of flows of trade, what have you, and buildings and walls and everything. So that happened in late Roman archaeology.

In the north, the Anglo Saxons, the Germans, and then the Scandinavians of the nineteenth century had been developing northern archaeology, and improving bit by bit, beginning to establish their typologies. And they’ve taken off since the 1980s and ‘90s. So all of a sudden you have dates, the methods got refined; you can see stuff where people just didn’t see what was there, because it was simply a question of discolor and arrangement of small stones. Methods of prehistoric archaeology became applied to the early Middle Ages, so there’s been this stupendous growth in the power of both, independently, late Roman and early medieval archaeology to understand the material evidence that’s emerging, based on classic archaeological techniques of typology. Dendrochronology plays a big role now, and then in the last ten or fifteen years we’re undergoing a molecular shift, where archaeology is shifting now, after these tremendous breakthroughs from what you might call macroarchaeology, stuff you can see with your eyes, to what Steve Weiner, a wonderful, really a pioneer of this kind of archaeology, and founder of the Kimmel Institute of Archaeology at the Weizmann Institute for Science, in Rehovot, Israel, what Steve calls microarchaeology. That’s all the kind of stuff in archaeology that you can’t see with your eyes, so whether that’s on the molecular level or larger, all of a sudden there’s this just extraordinary new realm of transformed natural substances, organic or inorganic, that human beings have somehow affected, that are becoming increasingly loquacious witnesses to aspects of life in the past. The growth of archaeology in the foreseeable future looks unlimited, it’s incredible.

We used to just look at France and Germany for the history of the Middle Ages, and England, then we started to spread, oh yeah, Italy and Spain, that’s also part of the Middle Ages, but we’re only interested in the 11th and 12th centuries, maybe the 13th century. And it spread out to the late Middle Ages, à la Professor Smail, to the early Middle Ages, à la McCormick, and so temporally, the dynamic areas of investigation of this huge 1000 years of western Eurasian civilization have expanded.

Thematically it has expanded; we’re not just interested in kings and their battles, or the origins of Parliament. Those are still important things, but we’re also interested in children, climate change, health crises, the rise of consumerism and the ethnogenesis, and all those kind of things, and we’re interested not just in the princes but in peasants and the slaves, so that there’s just been this extraordinary explosion in all the stuff we’re interested in that we can and should know, and are knowing about. The field in my lifetime and your lifetime is undergoing this extraordinary expansion in the focus of its lines of investigation and the questions it’s asking, so it’s an pretty neat time to be doing this. I wake up every morning, [and think] oh my god, how do I get more knowledge, this is fantastic, right? The only thing I’m a little jealous of is you, because you’re born a little bit later, so maybe you’ll get to do more and see more, you know. It’s just fun to discover it together as we go forward.

Are there any concluding thoughts you’d like to express?

I just think you and I and all of us working together, are really lucky to be living now and having this tremendous fun, of really getting to do medieval history, or any type of history, in ways that were inconceivable twenty years ago. If you would have told me that we would have medieval archaeology, that I would be teaching a course in medieval archaeology, it’s just amazing. Together we have the privilege of kind of being the first explorers of this new world, and it’s fun.

Great, well, thank you so much all of this.

Thank you, Lauren, this has been a pleasure.

Kings did not always manage to live up to this lofty goal, however, and coups were not uncommon in Plantagenet England. Seventy years earlier, in 1327, Richard and Henry’s great-grandfather, Edward II (r. 1307-27), was forced to abdicate in favor of his son Edward III (r. 1327-77). During the fifteenth century, England was led by six kings and experienced four coups, culminating in the series of conflicts known as the War of the Roses (1455-1485), before Edward III’s many descendents finally came to an accord. The marriage of Henry VII (r. 1485-1509), the Lancastrian claimant, to Elizabeth of York reunited the two opposing branches of the royal family in 1485, after thirty years of civil war.

England in the fourteenth century focused far more on the Hundred Years’ War with France than on disputes within the royal family. How then did England come to be fraught with decades of civil war a century later? Over the course of the fourteenth century, the nature of kingship was greatly altered. New limits on regal authority were established, and the influence of Parliament grew. Many documents survive from this period, illuminating various aspects of royal power. By focusing on the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, the kings who ruled during the second half of the fourteenth century, and who ruled directly before Henry IV’s coup of 1399, we can begin to understand these transformations.

Particularly helpful in illustrating changing aspects of the monarchy are the chronicles known as the Brut, as a comparison of the way kings are depicted produces interesting disparities.  All Brut chronicles follow the same basic from, stemming from a late thirteenth century Anglo-Norman exemplar. They trace the story of England from its mythical foundation by Brutus (hence the name Brut), son of Aeneas of Troy, through the reigns of many kings who followed thereafter. The exemplar concludes in 1272 with the death of Henry III (r.1216-72), but many of the chronicles continue as late as the end of the fifteenth century.  Over 240 Brut manuscripts exist, dating from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries and composed in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, Latin, and French. Over 180 Middle English manuscripts survive, making it the most widely copied Middle English text except for the Wycliffe Bible. The Brut chronicles served as the standard version of English history until the early modern period.

In examining the events of the fourteenth century, a Brut chronicle copied in the early fifteenth century is the most useful. MS Richardson 35, now kept at Harvard’s Houghton Library, has been dated to c.1420-1430. Lister Matheson, who has extensively studied and classified the extant Brut manuscripts, classifies MS Richardson 35 as an Extended Version to 1419, Group A, due to the addition of a prologue and other small changes. The manuscript contains 106 folios; 94 are devoted to the actual chronicle and 12 contain the coats of arms of various Lancastrian knights. It is divided into 244 chapters, and appears to have been written in its entirety by a single scribe. The account ends abruptly in 1399, directly before the usurpation of Henry IV. This was not deliberate; it ends midsentence so presumably the remaining folios have been lost or destroyed. The folios were since rebound, and were mounted on paper where the edges were damaged, so discovering the original quire structure and thus how many folios have been lost is not feasible.

Someone quite wealthy evidently commissioned MS Richardson 35, lending credence to the idea that royal authority may have influenced the scribe’s portrayal of recent kings. The parchment is of high quality; it is quite difficult to distinguish between the hair and flesh sides of each folio, and the manuscript contained almost no holes at the time of composition. Nearly all of the folios are decorated with an ink or watercolor bas-de-page, in vibrant red, blue, green, and gold. Marginalia, in the form of grotesques, can also be found on many of the folios. In both the case of the bas-de-pages and marginalia, the figures have little or nothing to do with the text.

To begin to understand the changes that occurred in England throughout the fourteenth century, we should first consider how the manuscript treats both Edward III and Richard II. Edward reigned for over fifty years, and accomplished much in his time.  Twenty folios are dedicated to Edward, while Richard’s reign of twenty-two years only receives four. Richard’s meager mentions recall very few glorious deeds; they deal with a peasant revolt, a baronial revolt, and an entire chapter devoted to a tournament he once threw at Smithfield. This is not entirely surprising. As the manuscript was written during the period of Lancastrian rule, his usurpers certainly would not want Richard glorified and instead detailed his lavish spending.

The chronicle presents the image of Edward III as an astute politician. In the last twenty years of Edward’s reign, MS Richardson 35 mentions Parliament twenty-one times. By comparison, in the twenty years of Richard II’s reign, the manuscript only mentions Parliament seven times. However, parliamentary records indicate that both kings summoned Parliament nearly every year. Thus the infrequency of Richard’s parliaments mentioned in the manuscript is not an indication that he rarely held Parliament, but rather that nothing occurred that the scribe felt was worthy of noting or that scribe wanted to be remembered.

By the time Edward III came into power, Parliament was nearly always called annually to discuss various aspects of running the kingdom, from raising taxes to declaring war. At “p(ar)lement at Westmynster,” the “grandrys and comenys” met together to debate these issues and advise the king on how he should proceed. The grandrys consisted of lords spiritual, namely abbots and bishops, and lords temporal, or barons and earls. The comenys, or Commons, consisted of knights of the shires and burgesses.

The Parliament of 1376, known as the Good Parliament, set a new precedent for how much authority Parliament could hold over the king. It was “the grettest that wis seyn many wyntres and years a fore” and lasted longer than any Parliament previous, staying in session for over ten weeks. The king wanted to raise taxes, but Parliament, especially the Commons, outright rejected his request. The manuscript notes Parliament refused because they felt the king would not need to raise taxes if he had not been given poor advice on fiscal matters. Namely, they accused Lord Latimer, the king’s chamberlain, and Edward’s mistress Alice Perrers of “evyll governaunce bothe to the kynge and yke [also] to the roialme.” The Commons went as far as demand that Latimer and Lady Perrers be removed from court, and in their stead should be placed “wise men and worthy that weren true and of good governaunce.” The Commons agreed that these two, along with Lord Neville, the steward of the king’s household, and Richard Lyons, also a member of the king’s council, were at the root of England’s financial troubles and could no longer be tolerated.

The Commons came close to accusing the king himself of mismanagement; for the first time in English history, they impeached members of the king’s council, and Edward found some of his strongest supporters on trial. The king had no choice but to banish three of his advisors along with his mistress, stripping away all of their titles in order to appease Parliament. However, within the year Edward had restored them to their former titles and positions, undoing all the accomplishments of the Good Parliament. Although Parliament may have had a strong impact on the king’s actions while it was in session, the king himself still had the final word in matters of state.
In addition to summoning regular meetings of Parliament, Edward III and Richard II were advised by a smaller council of lords, knights, and ministers, known as the consilium regis, which would later become known as the privy council. This council consisted of the chancellor, the treasurer, the keeper of the privy seal, the steward of the royal household, and the constable, along with other lords of the king’s choice. The consilium regis met far more frequently than Parliament, advising the king on everyday matters as well as major issues; some councilors were employed on council business for up to 250 days a year.

The chronicle often describes Edward III reaching decisions in concert with his council, and many announcements are issued by the authority of both the king and consilium. When a Danish army invaded England in 1366, those defeated and captured were “by the kyng of Englond and his counsell imp(ri)soned.” The decision was still ultimately the king’s, but by debating his actions with the council, Edward allowed a select group of the English populace to voice their opinions. Besides allowing a few men to offer their expertise, it allowed the king to share the blame if his decisions did not achieve the desired results.

As with other aspects of governing England, the chronicle rarely depicts Richard II making decisions with the support of his council, although he does appear to consult his council more often than he holds Parliament. Perhaps, like in the case of Parliament, this does not indicate the lack of a council but rather the lack of decisions reached under Richard that the scribe wanted to be remembered. In fact, the chronicle indicates that the council traveled with Richard and his court. After a dispute with the mayor of London and his men, “the kyng and his counsyll for grete malice of the cyte of London and for dyspyte remouyd all the courtes from Westmynstre unto the cyte of York.” Thus, even if the scribe did not seem to feel the council made many significant decisions with Richard, Richard himself at least felt the council to be an important aspect of government.
The chronicle continues to stress ways in which Richard fails to live up to his predecessor’s example through the mention, or lack thereof, of the use of royal prerogative. Edward frequently states his will, ordaining his desire upon the assumption it will be fulfilled without hesitation. The word “ordain” occurs nineteen times as the chronicle relates the final twenty years of Edward’s reign. Edward understood that he was not an absolute monarch, however, and he could not expect his subjects to remain loyal to him if he offered them nothing in return. He frequently granted their requests, according to the chronicle. Thus Edward appears to be both an assertive administrator and a kind, forgiving king; this image in turn encourages people to love and have confidence in him.
Richard did not adopt Edward’s policy; he issued no ordinances as far as the chronicle is concerned and seemed to care nothing for the ruling of his realm. Richard was not a military leader, and did not seem interested in continuing Edward’s war with France or subduing Scotland, another military focus of Edward’s regime. Although the chronicle neglects to mention any occasion of Richard leading an army, Richard did in fact launch a few military campaigns, including one into Scotland in 1385. However, Richard and his army never actually engaged the Scots in battle and returned home within the month. Unable to win the hearts of his people through his victories on the battlefield, Richard also seems to not have granted any of their wishes. While the chronicle spends much time detailing the actions of good king Edward, Richard is never mentioned as granting anything to anyone.

In Edward III’s time, it was essential for his subjects to see him as king mentally and physically. Although it was dangerous, he frequently led his men into battle himself, rather than place the army in the hands of a trusted lord. He was greatly respected for this, and quickly proved himself to be a very different king from his father. Edward led many campaigns throughout his long reign, but at least as far as the chronicle is concerned, he never struggled to enlist men to fight with him. He ordained it, and quickly an army was gathered. Perhaps these men were more willing to fight for their kingdom when their king himself was leading the charge.

The state of England changed quickly with the death of Edward’s eldest son, Prince Edward, in 1376 and that of the king himself in 1377. “All men bothe hethens and cristens” mourned the loss of their prince, and England went from having a secure line of succession, with an experienced military commander as the king’s heir, to finding her fortunes resting in the small hands of Prince Edward’s ten-year-old son Richard. Unlike Edward III, who quickly outgrew his regency council, Richard was faced with long years of minority. As Richard came of age, people were loath to give up any of their recently gained independence and submit themselves once again to the caprice of an authoritative king.

Both Edward III and Richard II came into power in their minority; yet as they assumed the reins of kingship themselves, they handled their authority quite differently. Edward III was crowned in 1327, at the age of fourteen, and was the first English king to rule by a Parliamentary title. Parliament proved useful in rebuilding royal authority after the weak rule of Edward II. The former king died a short time after his son was crowned. However, no suspicion fell on Edward III as Parliament declared the death to be perfectly natural. Within a few years of coming to the throne, the young king, supported by Parliament, fought to take control of the kingdom himself instead of remaining the pawn of his regents. Working in accordance with Parliament, Edward reigned with a firm hand for more than fifty years.

Richard II, on the other hand, received the crown through a peaceful transition of power. In 1377, upon the death of his grandfather, he became king at the age of ten. Unlike Edward, he inherited a relatively stable kingdom and thus did not have to fight to assert his royal authority in the same way as Edward did. Through the long years of his minority, Richard’s uncles John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock controlled the governance of the realm, aided by a few court favorites such as Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. As Richard assumed more control, his tendency to reward his favorites with lavish land grants made him unpopular with the rest of his lords, and he never managed to win their respect as Edward had.

As the chronicle relates, Richard faced his first major test of character in 1381 when a group of peasants from Kent and Essex staged a large-scale rebellion, known to historians as the Peasants’ Revolt. The rebels stormed into the city of London, wreaking havoc as they went. They were not protesting the king himself, but rather the poor guidance of his advisors, who were the de facto rulers during Richard’s minority. However, by attacking the city of London and the Tower, the king’s city residence, the rebels announced their disregard for royal authority. The chronicle scorns them, listing the various deeds of needless violence they conducted and lamenting the rebels “made hauoke” and “deuoured [devoured] and dystroyed all the goodes that they myght funde.” To complete their devastation of the city, the rebels also burned and looted many churches.
Although the chronicle does not give him credit for it, the way Richard handled himself during the revolt proved that, while not a soldier, he was by no means a coward. Richard rode out among the sixty thousand peasants gathered around the city, with few men to protect him, and carefully listened to their demands, leading the rebel leaders to think he would concede to their requests. Once among the crowd, he had no other choice; had he refused them outright, the peasants would have likely destroyed the entire city and held the king captive. Once Richard and his lords had time to subdue the mob with the pretense of compromise, the leaders were captured and executed. Richard, in a show of generosity, pardoned the remaining rebels, and convinced them to return home. The king managed to survive what could have been an extremely damaging incident to maintaining royal control.

The Peasant’s Revolt was a rare instance of Richard handling a crisis situation effectively. Unlike Edward, Richard did not seem to understand when best to exert royal authority and when allow concessions. Under Edward’s long reign, nobles grew immensely powerful and built up private armies to use against England’s enemies, primarily France and Scotland. Edward thus had to tread a careful path between domination and appeasement of these nobles, to prevent these nobles from asserting their military strength within the realm. Richard, who at a young age received the power to grant out lands and titles, tried to create loyal men through gifts of vast plots of land, thus disrupting the balance maintained by Edward. In 1385, at the age of seventeen, Richard created five new earls in one day; however, nearly all of these men were members of his immediate family, making the act highly unpopular. Richard’s favoritism angered the established nobility, who feared a loss of authority and influence.

The anger and mistrust Richard generated among his nobles resulted in a series of crises, culminating in his deposition. Five of Richard’s most powerful lords rose against him in 1387, and like the Good Parliament of 1376, they cited mismanagement of the realm due to poor governance as their prime concern. These lords forced Parliament to meet, claiming “the myschef and the mysgou(er)naunce  and the falsenes of the kynges counsill” needed to be rectified, and soon succeeded in removing and executing the offending men from office on accounts of treason. Unlike Edward, who quickly undid all the offending Parliament had enacted, Richard waited ten years, all the while plotting revenge. The chronicle refrains from mentioning it, but Richard eventually executed or banished the five discontent lords.

Henry of Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, was one of these rebellious lords; he had always had a tumultuous relationship with his cousin King Richard, who eventually succeeded in banishing him in 1398. The sentence was to last six years, but Richard promised that Henry would still inherit his father’s property when the man died. However, upon the death of Henry’s father, Richard confiscated the lands that rightfully should have fallen to him. Henry returned to England immediately to defend his inheritance, after serving only one year in exile. He ultimately gained enough support from the other nobles to stage a revolt, defeat Richard, and have the king himself declare to Parliament that he was unable to govern the kingdom because of his demerita notoria, his notorious faults. Legally, Henry was not usurping the throne, as Richard, albeit under duress, agreed he should not rule, thus leaving the throne vacant for Henry, as heir, to claim. Even more so than with the deposition of Edward II in 1327, it was through the authority of Parliament that Richard was no longer to be king, and Henry IV was allowed to take the crown in his stead.
Through the chronicle, a clear picture begins to form of what a fourteenth century English king was supposed to be. Edward, the bold military leader, is constantly praised and known as “good Edward,” the beloved and respected leader of England for over fifty years. Richard, on the other hand, preferred peace and spent his time at his lavish court, attracting artists and scholars. According to the chronicle, Richard was a weak, ineffective ruler who did almost nothing of interest in his twenty-two years on the throne. This image was partially created to legitimize Henry of Bolingbroke’s coup, but it also reflects the popular opinion of the time; to be a good king, a man must be a strong leader both on and off the battlefield. Richard, with an interest in peaceful pastimes, did not fit this image, and as the chronicle records twenty years after his death, he was looked down upon as a failure of a king. The future Henry IV was not alone in his opinion of Richard, or else he would not have been supported in his coup.

During the reign of Edward III, although he maintained control of the realm in part through his popularity with the English people, the respect for the King’s authority began to dwindle. Men began to make demands on the king as never before, evidenced in the pressure exerted on royal authority by the Good Parliament. Richard slowly lost control of his country throughout his reign, as he never managed to achieve the love and respect of his people. While not described as an absolutely terrible king, the Brut chronicle portrays Richard as an ineffective ruler. He learned the importance of maintaining the traditional image of kingship as a military and judicial leader, and paid for his oversight with his crown and his life. In 1470, Henry IV’s grandson Henry VI, the last of the Lancastrian kings, would learn the same lesson as Richard; a king who appears to simply settle for peace can easily appear weak instead of beneficent. In an age where men outside of the royal family began to have an increasing say in the governance of the kingdom, perceived image became increasingly important. Over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it became evident that in order for an English king to hold his crown, he had to appear to be a powerful yet gracious military leader; to be otherwise risked failing to convey the level of majesty expected of the king of England.

Within the framework of Beowulf, mearcian, mearc, and mearcstapa carry three connotations. Throughout the poem, the ambiguity in their meaning stems from the impossibility of distinguishing between mearc as setting physical boundaries, marking with a sign, or literally writing upon a place or thing, and, although these are three very different meanings, the contexts do not allow for a definite distinction. This ambiguity is most clearly seen in mearcstapa and its derivative forms, since this word appears only twice in the entire Dictionary of Old English corpus — both times in Beowulf. Thus, it is not only reasonable but also crucial to reconsider mearcstapa in light of all of possible meanings of mearc — not just as it pertains to a geographic element, as in the long-standing lexicographical tradition. Instead, by viewing mearc as a multidimensional word, we see the complicated doubling of Grendel and the landscape he inhabits. This double meaning is played out not only in the mark of Cain, from whom Grendel and his mother descend, but also in Grendel’s transgression of the Mark and the displaying of his severed arm as a sign.

When viewed within the legal culture surrounding the Anglo-Saxon Mark, however, Grendel’s interaction with the borderlands surrounding Heorot is of especial interest. In this paper, I will trace the development of “mark theory,” arguing both that Grendel’s lair exists within the Mark’s bounds and that his presence there reinforces Anglo-Saxon legal practices against wandering through the wastelands. Furthermore, I will argue that Grendel’s intrusion into Heorot violates widespread practice, so that the loss of his arm and its display in the roof of the hall might be seen as legal penalties for his transgression through the borderlands.

The Mark

The specific structure of the Anglo-Saxon Mark was widespread in medieval British culture, and vestiges thereof can be seen in contemporary England. In his book, Beowulf: a heroic poem of the eighth century, Thomas Arnold notes, “To this day there are English parishes the boundaries of which correspond to those of ancient marks” — just as Glasgow and Linlithgow both retain signs of the ancient Gau. Although his book is admittedly dated, John Mitchell Kemble clarifies these geographical terms, providing a detailed account of medieval land divisions in The Saxons in England, his history of Anglo-Saxon law and land ownership. As Kemble notes, land held in common was divided into three categories: the Mark (or March), the Gau (or Gâ), and the Shire. More specifically, though, Kemble defines the Mark as the simplest division of land ownership after the personal landholdings of the “Markman.” He adds that the Mark is more common in German than Anglo-Saxon muniments, but Thomas Arnold explains that this is because the custom arose among the North German tribes, to which he argues that the Angles and Saxons belonged. More recently, James Campbell has outlined the popularization of Kemble’s “mark theory” by William Stubbs and Henry Maine in the 1870s. Campbell explains, “The dominance of the theory soon diminished. However, to read a fairly recent contribution by Steven Bassett, is to see that the mark theory is not dead and has not laid down.” For the purposes of this paper, the Mark will serve as a convenient term for what seems to be the most logical system of land organization proposed for early Anglo-Saxon England. Reading analogues in Bassett, I will adopt Kemble’s definition of the Mark as the borderland surrounding — and protecting — a community.

To provide a fuller definition, Kemble explains that the Mark “is something marked out or defined, having settled boundaries; something serving as a sign to others, and distinguished by signs. It is the plot of land on which a greater or lesser number of free men have settled for purposes of cultivation, and for the sake of mutual profit and protection” (36 – 7). Thus, the Mark is both legal and territorial in its demarcation, and, with this, it becomes the surrounding untamed space that separates one community from another, so that the entire Mark can be seen as a boundary. Kemble clarifies, “No matter how small or how large the community, — it may be only a village, even a single household, or a whole state, — it will still have a Mark, a space or boundary by which its own rights of jurisdiction are limited, and the encroachments of others are kept off.” Since Heorot is built to be a “medoærn micel… þone yldo bearn aefre gefrunon” and is clearly guarded by a watchman on the coast, it would seem logical that Hroðgar’s men would employ a similar protective barrier (l. 69-70, a great mead-hall… that the sons of men would hear of forever). Ultimately, the Mark serves to keep off the “encroachments of others,” so the wastelands surrounding Heorot should ward off Grendel’s entry into Hrothgar’s community, yet, as Hroðgar and his men soon realize, these boundaries are permeable.

Similar ideas of uncultivated borders are attested in ninth century charters—particularly as they confirm the custom of yfesdrype (eavesdrip), which mandated that a private landowner could not build to the edges of his estate, but had to leave a periphery. As a record of this practice, Codex Diplomaticus No. 296, a charter from the year 868, dictates, “by the custom (folees folcriht) two feet space only need be left for eavesdrip on this land” (45). Due to the custom of yfesdrype, it is clear that these borders were prevalent in all levels of Anglo-Saxon society — at least during the second half of the ninth century, when this charter was written. Because this cultural custom of leaving an uncultivated buffer around social areas seems so ingrained, it is reasonable to assume that the Beowulf poet may have had a similar notion of borders in mind when he associated Grendel with the liminal space of the wastelands surrounding Heorot.

Although it is impossible to definitively date Cotton Vitellius A. xv, which contains the only extant copy of the poem, scholars generally accept that it was copied early in the eleventh century, as Kevin S. Kiernan explains. More specifically, the date of ca. 1000 — typically interpreted as 975 – 1025 — has generally held since the late paleographical expert Neil Ker proposed it. Thus, ninth century land laws might provide a contemporaneous background for ideas about land in Beowulf—especially since such laws only became more standardized in the following centuries. Susan Kelly further legitimizes this claim when she writes that “[i]n the ninth century and later charter-scribes regularly included a detailed boundary-clause in English, which indicates that charters now functioned, at least in some respects, as true written records” (46).

Borders and Border-Walkers

In light of the expanded definition of the Mark as a borderland, Grendel seems to be operating within its bounds — not outside of them. Perhaps as a mearcstapa, he is more accurately walking the line between the wastes and the pastures — a fitting position for a descendant of Cain and one who is both human and monstrous. The first time Grendel is mentioned in the poem, he is introduced as a “grimma gæst… mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold, fen ond fæsten” (l. 102 – 104, The grim spirit… the famous border-walker, who held the marshes, the fen, and the stronghold). Thus, although it is impossible to categorize this “grimma gæst,” as a spirit, human, or monster, it is easy to associate Grendel with his geographical surroundings, as both the Beowulf-poet and Hroðgar do. Furthermore, Grendel himself “mearcað morhopu” (l. 449, marks out his moor-retreats), so nobody dictates this space but himself. Thus, a connection exists between the act of marking or being marked and the monstrous, and it is notable that only monsters mark out space in Beowulf — not men.

However, the geography of Grendel’s landscape remains undefined and, ultimately, liminal. He and his mother inhabit an amorphous environment — literally on the edge of the landscape as it can be known or charted. It is explicitly stated that “Hie dygel lond / warigeað, wulfhleoþu, windi(ge) næssas, / frecne fengelad, ðær fyrgenstream / under næssa genipu niþer gewiteð, / flod under foldan” (l. 1359 – 1363, They inhabited a secret land, wolf-retreats, windy sea-cliffs, a dangerous fen-track. There, a mountain stream goes downward under the headlands’ darkness, a flood under the ground). This “secret” landscape — with its cliffs and tracks — is a far cry from the ordered fields associated with the innermost area of the Mark. In particular, the “flod under foldan” blends earth and water in an unnatural way. Furthermore, Grendel’s lair has no physical state of its own; although he is always marking out or walking boundaries, his lair mixes forest and sea with fire and air, since “ofer þæm hongiað hrinde bearwas, wudu wyrtum fæst wæter oferhelmað… Þær mæg nihta gehwæm niðwundor seon, fyr on flode” (l. 1363 – 1366, over it hang frost-covered groves, a wood securely overshadowing the water with roots… There one may on each of nights a dreadful wonder behold, fire in the flood). Here, the contrast between the wood and the water and the indefinite boundary between the two iterate yet another border, and, for the mearcstapa himself, nothing is marked out in his own territory: The trees mix with the floodwater, which in turn churns among flames. Nothing is clearly separated or defined, and, although Grendel marks off the territories of others, his own dwellings are clearly in the outer edges of Kemble’s Mark. To further emphasize this point, Kemble notes that Jacob Grimm believed marc originally meant “forest.” This theory is supported by some examples from Old Norse, where moerk serves as a gloss for the Latin silva (forest) and mark for the Latin limes (threshold). As Kemble goes on to explain, though, the forests of the Mark were dark and frightening, leading to his suggestion that the modern English adjective “murky” derives from the darkness of the forest. With this, the Mark is developed as an unowned space open to all Markmen, a term potentially glossed by the Old English mearcgeneatas.

Although the interpretation of mearc as a physical boundary maintains its importance as a figure, this mearc is not just a boundary between spaces; more accurately it should be seen as the limit beyond which knowing stops. After Grendel’s mother avenges her son’s fatal wound, Hroðgar can only tell Beowulf that he has heard people report “þæt hie gesawon swylce twegen micle mearcstapan moras healdan, ellorgæstas” (l. 1347-49a, that they saw two such great border-walkers guarding the moors, alien spirits). It is clear that “men ne cunnon / hwyder helrúnan hwyrftum scríþað” (l. 162-63, Men do not know where such hell-whisperers slink in their courses). O’Brien O’Keeffe suggests that such unknowability—especially as seen in ambiguous epithets—allows for a multidimensional reading of Grendel instead of a monolithic view of him as either a demon, a cousin to trolls and other monsters, or as an extreme misanthrope.

Grendel and his mother are ultimately incorporeal — or at least indefinitely corporeal, and therefore they remain hard to define in any other way than geographically. Beginning with N.F.S. Grundtvig, Ludvig Schrǿder, and J.R.R. Tolkien, critics have argued for Grendel as a sort of anti-thegn, representing a perversion of human society and principles. O’Brien O’Keefe develops the idea that, according to his mental states, Grendel becomes more human as he approaches Heorot and more monstrous as he returns to his mere. Thus, he is a vacillating figure, who is closely linked to the community he attacks, and, although his exact character cannot be pinned down, he is best seen in light of both his mearc — the borders he marks out—and his own status as a mearcstapa.

Crossing the Threshold

Due to the structure of the Mark and Grendel’s location therein, his intrusion into Heorot might be viewed legally — especially in light of certain laws, which prescribe penalties for anyone who trespasses the Mark unannounced. Clearly, Grendel operates within the limits of this border-area; the distance from Heorot to his lair is easily traversed, and Grendel’s dwellings show all of the signs of the Mark’s uncultivated perimeter. Furthermore, he seems to fit into pre-established superstitions about the wastelands. Elaborating on the Mark’s frightening aspects, Kemble explains how they protect the community, noting that “the terrors of superstition come in aid of the enactments of law: the deep forests and marshes are the abodes of monsters and dragons; wood-spirits bewilder and decoy the wanderer to destruction … Grendel, the man-eater, is a ‘mighty stepper over the mark.’” As one of the semi-mythic creatures in this list, Grendel belongs in the Mark, and, as Kemble notes, both law and superstition sanction his presence there. No one is allowed to trespass in this buffer zone, so the superstitious belief in Grendel’s status as a mearcstapa reinforces this legal barrier. The value of such superstition is clear: Because monsters are believed to lurk in the borderlands between communities, people will be less likely to trespass in those borderlands. Thus, Grendel fits into a pre-existing social scheme, which serves to reinforce laws that forbid exploring the Mark, and, in this light, he may serve a similar role to the characters of nineteenth century fairy tales; his presence is cautionary, and the mere story of him discourages listeners from wandering into the borderlands that surround a community. Such superstitions clearly held weight, as “Grendel’s mere” is found in two later boundary clauses appended to Old English charters.

Even if he manages to cross over its boundaries, however, Grendel still cannot escape from the Mark’s laws. As Kemble clarifies, “although the Mark is waste… it may as little be profaned by the stranger, as the arable land itself which it defends … death lurks in its shades and awaits the incautious or hostile visitant.” Interestingly enough, Grendel is often referred to as a “gæst”—even when he is first introduced — so he can easily be read as a hostile visitant—one who functions within society and wanders the paths of exile (l. 102). Although he wanders the paths of exile, Grendel comes to Heorot to devour Hrothgar’s men, so this exile is clearly one that may be transgressed, leading the reader to question all boundaries and their rupture. Lewis E. Nicholson argues that mearcstapa, “usually glossed ‘wanderer in the waste borderland’” literally “looks like an equivalent of the Latin ‘transgressor.’ Cf. ‘trespasser,’” so Grendel’s transgression may be figured by this multivalent epithet.

O’Brien O’Keefe consigns Grendel to his marked out space, even defining him by the moments when he crosses over the mearc. She writes, “Indeed, when Grendel is lurking in the fens and marshes, he is not so very frightening, for we understand what he is… Grendel is at his most terrifying not in the marches but in the place of men.” Yet the mearcstapa does not simply walk the marshes; the mearcstapa walks the border-line, repeatedly marking out his area and demonstrating a monstrous affinity for the liminal. This walking on the edges invokes a sense of dread, but the actual crossing of the border is the most terrifying of all. As he approaches Heorot, Grendel is described in terms of his coming in off of the moors: “Ða com of more under misthleoþum Grendel gongan” (l. 710 – 11, Then came Grendel walking from the moor under the misty cliffs). Here, he is clearly emerging from the wasteland and entering into a human space, and this crossover is the most terrifying aspect of his approach. We are always most afraid of what we do not or cannot know, and the reader can never quite map out the borders between realms. As Grendel nears Heorot, the narrator vividly describes how “goldsele gumena gearwost wisse… him of eagum stod / ligge gelicost leoht unfaeger” (l. 714 – 727, he most definitely saw the wine-hall, the gold-hall of men… from his eyes stood—like unto a flame—a hideous light). Here it is clear that Grendel is acting as a transgressor; he trespasses through the wastelands to enter the hall. Then, once he has gained entry, his eyes glitter with a hideous, flame-like light. This flame imagery, combined with the travel through the forbidden areas of the Mark, sets Grendel up for precise legal penalties.

Punishing Transgression

As Jacob Grimm makes clear in Deutsche Rechtsalterhümer, his lengthy collection of ancient Germanic legal customs, there were very specific punishments for those who violate the Mark, and, interestingly, these punishments typically involve some sort of mutilation of the trespasser’s hand — whether it be cut off at the wrist or driven through with iron nails. There are analogues of this motif — known as “The Hand and the Child” — in the Welsh Mabinogian as well as in a number of Irish folktales and Icelandic variants, so the penalty seems pervasive enough to resonate with Beowulf. Grimm provides a specific context for this in his discussion of “alterhümliche strafen der markfrevel” (old legal penalties of Mark-crimes), in which he underscores that “Des enthauptens und handabschlagens auf dem stamm ist so eben gedacht worden; gleichharte drohen die weisthümer dem waldbrennen und baumschälen” (518, Of beheadings and the chopping off of hands among the tribe it is thought to be so even / fair [that] the law-enforcers threaten wood-burners and tree-cutters with this same harshness). Clearly, the chopping off of hands was not an uncommon penalty, so it may not have been unexpected for Anglo-Saxon listeners when Beowulf ripped off Grendel’s arm. Furthermore, Grendel destroys the door to Heorot when he enters and then stands, eyes smoldering, ready to wreak havoc. This is fairly parallel to Grimm’s citation of a man being caught burning green, still-standing trees — the punishment for which is that the forester who catches him “fol … ime die hand uf dem stumpfe abeslahen” (518, will knock off the hand from him at the wrist). Although Grendel does not destroy any trees, he does destroy a thriving hall, the penalty for which is the loss of his arm.

The connection between the loss of Grendel’s arm and the laws of the Mark is also evident in the displaying of his arm from the roof of Heorot. In his original definition of the Mark, Kemble focuses on it being “distinguished by signs” — an interesting feature in light of Grendel’s arm, which is officially designated as a “tacen sweotol” (l. 833, a clear sign) as Beowulf “hond alegde / earm ond eaxle — þaer wæs eal geador / Grendles grape under geapne hrof” (l. 834 – 836, placed the hand, arm and shoulder — there was all together Grendel’s grip — under the gaping roof). Just as signs distinguish the Mark at large, Heorot—the social center of the community of marksmen—displays the bloody sign of Grendel’s defeat. For the crime of murdering Hrothgar’s men and generally glutting himself in the hall, Grendel is a traitor against the social norms of the Mark and must be publicly punished, resulting in the hanging of his arm from the roof of Heorot.

Although he fits into this schematization, however, Grendel is more complex because he remains partially human. In placing Grendel within Cain’s lineage, the poet partially removes him from the superstitious traditions of the Mark and inserts him instead into those of the Old Testament. Both Grendel and Cain are closely linked to mearcian — a linguistic connection that reinforces their relationship, since the Beowulf-poet also labels Cain as “gemearcod,” closely tying his past to Grendel and his mother (l. 1258). With the mark of Cain — literally a mearc — these boundaries take on a moral tone, and transgression is something morally as well as geographically questionable. The border between realms — monstrous and human, earthly and otherworldly, corporeal and disembodied — breaks down in Cain, who manages to unite both spaces. Likewise, by crossing the Mark and entering Heorot, Grendel manages to live in both the cultivated and wild parts of the community.

Thus, even if Grendel seems somehow un-human, or at least only partially human, he clearly functions within the legal limits of the Mark, and, as such, his intrusion into Heorot might be viewed legally. Furthermore, since hands were often chopped off as a penalty for crossing borders unannounced, it is perhaps fair to interpret the hanging of Grendel’s arm in Heorot as a sign of Anglo-Saxon law in effect. In the model of the Mark itself, conceptions of the geographic and the social converge, and Grendel, too, functions in a knowable way, reinforced by both law and custom. Thus, when Grendel is described as a mearcstapa, this term is not only applicable to geography but also to moral and social order.

Gehyrst þu, sælida,     hwæt þis folc segeð?
Hi willað eow to gafole     garas syllan,
ættrynne ord     and ealde swurd,
þa heregeatu     þe eow æt hilde ne deah.
Brimmanna boda,     abeod eft ongean,
sege þinum leodum     miccle laþre spell,
þæt her stynt unforcuð     eorl mid his werode,
þe wile gealgean     eþel þysne,
æþelredes eard,     ealdres mines,
folc and foldan.     Feallan sceolon
hæþene æt hilde.     To heanlic me þinceð
þæt ge mid urum sceattum     to scype gangon
unbefohtene,     nu ge þus feor hider
on urne eard     in becomon.
Ne sceole ge swa softe     sinc gegangan;
us sceal ord and ecg     ær geseman,
grim guðplega,     ær we gofol syllon.

[Hear you, seafarer, what this people says?
As tribute to you they will cast javelins,
The deadly spear-point and the ancient sword,
Those armaments that will not bid well for you in battle.
Messenger of the seamen, relate this in response,
Tell your people the much dreaded message,
That hear stands unafraid an earl with his army
Who will defend this homeland
The land, people and earth of my lord Aethelred.
The heathen must die in battle! It seems too much a shame to me
That you should go with our coins to your ships
Without being fought, now that you have come thus far hither
Into our land.
You shall not acquire our treasure so easily;
Spear-point and sword-edge, grim battle-play will reconcile us
Before we shall yield tribute]. (45-61)

Thus Byrhtnoth, an Anglo-Saxon general, refuses the Vikings’ request for tribute, opting instead for battle. Donoghue has pointed out that dramatic monologues like the one quoted above occur with remarkable frequency in The Battle of Maldon, a late Anglo-Saxon poem, and that they dominate thematically as much as descriptions of combat. This emphasis on verbal utterances is surprising in a battle narrative, but it may be elucidated by Victor Turner’s performance theory. Turner argues that culturally meaningful acts should be compared to theatrical performances that “are inherently dramatic because participants not only do things, they try to show others what they are doing or have done.” According to Turner, these acts of ostentation exert their greatest significance within the context of social drama, a process involving interpersonal conflict whereby social structures and relations have the potential to change. A related component of Turner’s performance theory involves what he terms “liminal” or “liminoid” activities, which are other mechanisms by which social structures can change outside the context of social drama. These activities, which are ritualistic in character, occur during “a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo” in the midst of rites of passage, symbolic processes surrounding transitions. In this paper, I investigate the curiously dramatic and ritualistic aspects of warfare in The Battle of Maldon in terms of Turner’s performance theory. I argue that the prominent oral declarations in the poem give the battle a theatrical quality, and that, at the same time, the battle may be regarded as a liminal ritual. I also seek to address the two levels on which the dramatic and ritualistic aspects of the depicted battle occur. In some respects, the battle is an inclusive social ritual involving both the Vikings and the Saxons. On this inclusive level, both sides play essential roles in the performative aspects of the battle, and the enemies are in genuine competitive interaction. However, in other respects, the Saxon and Viking armies are each independently engaged in their own social dramas and liminal rituals. On this level, the two armies interact with one another only superficially, and their interaction is, if anything, cooperative, as it fulfills a social function for each army. The Battle of Maldon depicts both of these social dynamics, but the latter is dominant.

In The Battle of Maldon, dramatic verbal declarations serve as a means by which warriors demonstrate the social meaning behind their actions in combat, and an emphasis on such utterances gives the depicted battle a theatrical quality. Consider, for example, the declaration Aelfwine makes before rushing into combat: “Ic wylle mine æþelo eallum gecyþan, þæt ic wæs on Myrcon miccles cynnes; wæs min ealda fæder Ealhelm haten, wis ealdorman, woruldgesælig. Ne sceolon me on þære þeode þegenas ætwitan þæt ic of ðisse fyrde feran wille” (“I wish to make known my noble ancestry to all, that I was of a great Mercian clan: my hoary father was called Ealhelm, a wise chieftain rich in worldly wealth. Noblemen shall not reproach me amidst the nation for fleeing from this army,” 216-221). Here, Aelfwine reveals his motives for entering hopeless combat: to bring honor to his clan and to avoid the shame of desertion. Aelfwine’s actions in battle, therefore, are not motivated by the pragmatic goals of killing the enemy or of defending England. They are, rather, performative acts that will achieve their intended social consequences by being watched and reported by others. Aelfwine’s declaration serves to clarify and to establish the meaning behind his actions in combat. Similarly, Leofsunu states: “Ic þæt gehate, þæt ic heonon nelle fleon fotes trym, ac wille furðor gan, wrecan on gewinne minne winedrihten” (“I vow that I shall not flee hence the length of a foot but will go onward to avenge in battle my friend-lord,” 246-248). Here, “friend-lord” (winedrihten) refers to Byrhtnoth, the army’s commander who has recently fallen in battle. This is essential to understanding Leofsunu’s declaration. Unyielding loyalty to one’s military leader, even to the point of death, is a central characteristic of what Donoghue terms the “imagined heroic world” of the Anglo-Saxon past which the poem attempts to portray. Therefore, when Leofsunu declares his intention to avenge his commander, he calls attention to his own adherence to the courageous values of this mythic past. This declaration serves as a label for his actions in combat, making clear to all who observe these actions (the audience) that they should be interpreted as signs of Leofsunu’s archetypal loyalty to his leader. It is tempting to interpret the warriors’ utterances as poetic devices used to give depth to the depiction of these characters. But the oral declarations paint far too formulaic, one-dimensional pictures of their speakers to be regarded as contributions to characterization. We should, therefore, understand these dramatic utterances not as the poet’s way of describing his characters, but as the characters’ way of establishing the social meaning behind their theatrical acts in battle.

If the soldiers in The Battle of Maldon are engaged in a Turnerian performance, where do we see traces of the social drama to which this performance contributes and the social structures which it has the power to alter? Let us limit ourselves to only a few examples for the time being, since later on we shall return to the modes of social drama depicted in the poem. Midway through the poem, we learn:

Hi bugon þa fram beaduwe     þe þær beon noldon.
þær wearð Oddan bearn     ærest on fleame,
Godric fram guþe,     and þone godan forlet
þe him mænigne oft     mear gesealde;
he gehleop þone eoh     þe ahte his hlaford,
on þam gerædum     þe hit riht ne wæs,
and his broðru mid him     begen ærndon,
Godwine and Godwig,     guþe ne gymdon,
ac wendon fram þam wige     and þone wudu sohton,
flugon on þæt fæsten     and hyra feore burgon

[Then turned away from battle those who did not wish to be there.
Godric the child of Odda became there the first in flight
From battle…
He mounted the horse which his lord [Byrhtnoth] had owned,
On the equipage which was not proper [for him to ride],
And both his brothers ran with him;
Godwine and Godwig did not care for combat,
But turned from the battle and sought the forest,
Fled towards that stronghold and protected their lives] (185-194).

The poet singles out several deserters to ensure that their shame will last, but what is of greatest interest here is his emphasis on their familial origins. Godric is referred to as “Oddan bearn” (“the child of Odda”) and Godwine and Godwige are labeled as his “broðru” (“brothers”) before they are specified by name. The poet is less concerned with casting shame upon these men as individuals than he is with grouping them together as three brothers and sons of Odda, thereby lowering the status of their entire family. To this effect, when Offa, another warrior, later bemoans the many desertions prompted by Godric’s cowardly example, he refers to Godric as “earh Oddan bearn“ (“the wretched child of Odda,” 238). Recall, as well, Aelfwine’s desire to bring honor to his Mercian clan by means of heroic deeds in battle (see quote above, p. 2). Thus competition between kinship groups, which the warriors in the battle theatrically enact and in which they engage on behalf of their families, is one form of social drama that is depicted prominently in the poem.

Aside from the battle’s theatrical, socially dramatic elements, it is also, in certain respects, a Turnerian liminal ritual. Turner emphasizes that states of liminality are initiated by symbolic processes in which participants are set apart from normal social life. This often involves the suspension of normal social hierarchies and relations, the “symbolic inversion of social attributes” and the “blurring and merging of distinctions” aimed at achieving a social “non-status” unique to the liminal state.  Also of importance is the removal of the liminal ritual’s participants to a location isolated from society, marking their entry into a transitional process in which they depart from normal life. Both of these forms of liminal separation occur in The Battle of Maldon. First, there is a temporary erosion of social distinctions during the battle (not to be confused with the socially dramatic changes in status following the battle resulting from warriors’ behavior in combat). For example, before the battle begins, the poet recounts: “Het þa hyssa hwæne hors forlætan” (“Then [Byrhtnoth] commanded each of the warriors to abandon his horse,” 2). This command is puzzling. Scragg has described it as a plot-narrative tool, while Alexander has explained it as an indication of the Vikings’ inability to escape from combat. Instead, it is best understood as a symbol of the temporary social leveling of the Saxon army, removing any social distinction between soldiers mounted on horses and those marching on foot and thereby marking their entry into the liminal world of battle. This is not only a means of equalization, but also a temporary relegation of all the soldiers to a subordinate status, reflecting Turner’s observation that “initiations humble people before permanently elevating them.”

It is equally important to note that Byrhtnoth retains his horse. Turner has pointed out that in many cultures, the “novices” in liminal initiation rituals “are confronted by the elders” and instructed in cultural activities. Thus Byrhtnoth is not subject to the social leveling undergone by the remainder of the Saxon army; he is not a novice undergoing initiation, but an “elder” guiding his army of novices. It is perhaps for this reason that, when we learn of Byrhtnoth’s command to abandon horses, his warriors are referred to by the word “hyse,” which often carries the connotation of “young man.” This word is used frequently throughout the poem, emphasizing the novitiate, liminal status of the members of the Saxon army. Similarly, Byrhtnoth is later referred to as “har hilderinc” (“the hoary battle-warrior,” 169) and he frequently instructs his warriors in the art of combat. The poet recounts:

ða þær Byrhtnoð ongan     beornas trymian,
rad and rædde,     rincum tæhte
hu hi sceoldon standan     and þone stede healdan,
and bæd þæt hyra randas     rihte heoldon
fæste mid folman,     and ne forhtedon na.

[There Byrhtnoth then began to encourage the warriors;
he rode and advised, taught the soldiers
how they should stand and hold the line
and bade them hold their spears correctly,
firmly amidst their hands, and that they must never fear].(17-21)

Byrhtnoth acts as a teacher, the sort of “elder” to whom Turner refers, who instructs his men in warfare. This instruction is not aimed at conveying knowledge of a pragmatic skill; it is, rather, the transmission of a cultural art, as demonstrated by the juxtaposition of technical advice with a more exclusively culturally meaningful exhortation against fear. Of significance, as well, is the poet’s emphasis on the fact that Byrhtnoth delivers his instructions while riding his horse, as his mounted position is the primary marker separating him from the novices under his command, who have already abandoned the preliminal social status indicated by their horses.

The liminal qualities of the battle are also highlighted by its geographic setting. Most simply, it occurs by the shore, a symbolic point of transition between land and sea, between the territory of the Saxons and the water with which the Viking enemy is associated. Turner has commented on the status of the sea as an essential “liminoid outlet” in the Icelandic saga, a cognate genre of Germanic literature to which Scragg has compared The Battle of Maldon. In our poem, the Vikings are encamped on a small island connected to the mainland at low tide, and the two armies await the emergence of the connecting ford before they meet upon it. This ford is the perfect location for the beginning of a liminal battle, as its periodic submergence indicates its status as the true point of transition between the domain of the Saxons and that of the Vikings, as well as its distant removal from normal, preliminal Saxon society restricted to land. It is perhaps useful, at this point, briefly to mention the Foucauldian concept of the heterotopia, a location which, unlike a true utopia, is “real,” but which has an ambiguous status because it combines the attributes of more than one type of location and lies conspicuously “outside of all [normal] places.” The temporary ford at which the armies first meet, with the dual identity of its location as both land and water, is the quintessential heterotopia, and the battle achieves an added liminal quality due to the symbolic isolation afforded by this unusual space.

If the battle depicted in the poem is both a social performance and a liminal ritual, in what respect are the two armies interacting with each other? Can the battle be regarded as one, unified liminal performance including both the Saxons and the Vikings, or is each army engaged in its own liminal performance entirely removed from that of the other? We will find that both of these dynamics coexist in The Battle of Maldon, but that the latter does to a much greater degree. Let us begin by reviewing ways in which battle is one collective social performance involving both armies. At this point, it is useful to note that Turner describes social drama as a process that begins with a “breach,” a demonstrative, symbolic act that exposes social conflict. The Vikings make a breach in social relations by entering into Saxon territory. Recall Byrhtnoth’s comment to the Viking messenger: “To heanlic me þinceð þæt ge mid urum sceattum to scype gangon unbefohtene, nu ge þus feor hider on urne eard in becomon” (“It seems too much a shame to me that you should go with our coins to your ships without being fought, now that you have come thus far hither into our land,” 55-58, emphasis added). Here, Byrhtnoth explains the need to fight by pointing out that the Vikings have entered Saxon territory. Recall, as well, Leofsunu’s declaration, “Ic þæt gehate, þæt ic heonon nelle fleon fotes trym” (“I vow that I shall not flee hence the length of a foot,” 246), indicating that the Vikings’ local intrusion is what is at stake in the battle. Thus the Viking incursion into Anglo-Saxon territory serves as a breach initiating the socially dramatic conflict between the two armies. Similarly, at the beginning of the poem, the Vikings send a messenger who delivers a long monologue to Byrthnoth in front of the Saxon army, offering peace in exchange for tribute. This proposal that the Saxons subordinate themselves to the Vikings is deeply insulting, and in Byrhtnoth’s response to the Viking messenger (quoted at the beginning of this essay), he explicitly refers to and denies this request for tribute three separate times (he refers to the request for “gafole,” “tribute” in line 46; for “sceattum,” “coins” in line 56; and again for “gofol,” “tribute” in line 61). The poet likewise emphasizes the insulting quality of the messenger’s address by stating, “þa stod on stæðe, stiðlice clypode wicinga ar, wordum mælde, se on beot abead brimliþendra ærænde to þam eorle” (“Then the messenger of the Vikings stood on the shore, called out severely, spoke words. Boastfully he related the message of the sea-runners to the earl,” 25-28). The phrase “on beot” (“boastfully”) is placed prominently at the beginning of the second sentence, and it calls attention to the insulting nature of the Vikings’ proposal. This proposal, therefore, is itself an act of breach. These social breaches, which the Vikings direct at the Anglo-Saxons, indicate that on some level, the social drama depicted in the poem does occur between the two armies. However, following these initial insults, we find little evidence of meaningful interaction between the two armies. The Vikings, in fact, are largely ignored by the descriptive attentions of the poet, especially in the second half of the poem, after the social breaches have occurred. Therefore, this mode of collective social drama involving both armies occupies only a minor position in the poem.

Let us now address the ways in which the liminal and socially dramatic aspects of the battle are restricted to within each respective army. In our earlier discussion regarding the mode of social drama in which the battle is involved, I demonstrated that it is a medium for competition between kinship groups. It is possible that the battle’s social drama is predicated upon underlying tensions and conflicts between kinship groups with similar or identical hierarchical statuses, each family trying to define its vague hierarchical relation with the others to its own advantage. The battle resolves these conflicts by defining an inter-familial status hierarchy dependent upon the deeds of warriors in combat, which are therefore demonstratively and theatrically performed so as to have their intended social consequences.  In this respect, the social drama depicted in The Battle of Maldon is restricted to the Saxon army, and we are left to presume that the battle serves similar social functions within the Viking army as well. Similarly, in some ways, the liminal-ritual aspects of the battle are restricted to the scale of each individual army. As described above, the soldiers assume a temporarily equalizing novitiate role, with Byrhtnoth serving as their initiator in the rite of passage, riding above them on horseback as a superior and instructing them in the culturally symbolic art of war.

Thus the battle involves elements of social drama and liminal ritual that are strictly intra-societal. In this respect, the violent confrontation between the Saxons and Vikings, which is ostensibly the most important interaction in the battle, is in fact a form of cooperation. It does not exist merely for its own sake as a means of competition between the two armies, one of whom benefits from victory and the other of whom is hurt by defeat. Instead, it is a mutually beneficial interaction which enables both armies to undergo socially dramatic and liminal-ritual processes that are intra-socially functional or meaningful. This helps us understand Byrhtnoth’s decision to allow the Vikings to cross the ford so as to engage with the Saxons on dry land (after the armies first meet on the ford, resulting in a standoff). Byrhtnoth calls out to the Vikings, “Nu eow is gerymed, gað ricene to us, guman to guþe; god ana wat hwa þære wælstowe wealdan mote” (“Now room has been cleared for you; come hastily to us, warriors to battle. God alone knows who shall hold the battlefield” 93-95). His invitation for the Vikings to relocate to a more mutually advantageous combat position suggests that the battle is, primarily, a means by which each army can perform internal social rituals rather than a genuine conflict between the two armies. This is why the poem states that Byrhtnoth allows the Vikings to cross the ford on account of his “ofermode” (“over-pride,” 89). He is motivated not by any tactical consideration, but by his rash desire to exhibit valor in the theatrical social performance made possible by closer combat with the Vikings.

The Battle of Maldon provides an interesting window into the cultural roles of warfare in Anglo-Saxon England. The battle depicted in the poem is both a liminal ritual as well as a theatrical demonstration within the framework of social drama. In some respects, these social aspects of the battle include both armies and involve their hostile interaction. In most respects, though, the battle’s ritualistic and dramatic components are entirely self-contained within each army, and on this level, the two armies’ interaction with one another is superficial and amounts to little more than tacit cooperation. In this discussion, I have devoted my analysis primarily to the battle depicted in the poem, rather than to the poem itself. It is commonplace for cultural and psychological theorists likewise to detect in literature manifestations of phenomena predicted by their theoretical frameworks. But interpretations of this sort, in order to be complete, must be accompanied by explanations of how such literary representations of theoretical phenomena come about. For example, when a psychoanalytic critic reads the Oedipus Complex into Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, he may explain this correspondence as an encoded expression of the authors’ unconscious psychological intuitions. Likewise, in order more fully to understand The Battle of Maldon, we must explain how phenomena described by Turnerian anthropology enter into the poem. Future research into The Battle of Maldon should investigate what it means for Turnerian social drama and liminal ritual to be depicted within a literary context.