The Mummers’ Story (such as it is)

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Ruth

We think that Mumming happened in other parts of early Germanic or Celtic Europe too, but it really hung on in England, so that’s where we go to study it. We only have written descriptions of Mumming scripts since the 18th century.

To study the story, we fall back on principles similar to principles of New Testament scholarship, because the problem is similar. In both cases, there are many copies of something, but the original is lost. You have to look at the many versions to work out what the original had looked like. You look for things that the versions have in common, things that make no sense (and therefore might be “corrected” in some versions, which would lose the original).

The versions all have in common a death, and a cure that brings the dead person back to life. They all have some kind of dance, most often including the sword used for the execution. The man who carries out the execution is virile, a champion. The victim is weak or a hated enemy. The script is a rhymed verse, and the players stop and collect money from the audience. Additionally, what all versions have in common is that they seem to incorporate change as a function of the story itself.

What did it originally look like? Perhaps at first it had a real victim, a captured enemy, and the warlord killed him with a sword to bless the spring. It might not have been so literal. Perhaps a man dressed as Tyr the Great Boar, lord of swords and fertility, mock-executed another man who represented farming (or something). But that victim was someone we needed! So perhaps a real shaman or someone dressed as one came in to raise the victim from the dead. And everyone rejoiced, giving gifts to the players (or perhaps just the shaman?). It was probably an early spring ritual, but it gradually became just the “folk drama” that could be done other times too.

In modern versions, the Narrator, who speaks in verse, is often Father Christmas. He calls out for a champion, and it’s usually St. George the Dragonslayer. The enemy became a Muslim during the Crusades, and by the 18th century, he was often “The Turk” with a turban. St. George and the Turk fight with swords, hopping and dancing. The Turk always falls, and he dies. The Narrator calls out for a Doctor! and a Doctor appears! he gives a cure to the Turk, who is restored to life. It’s likely that this has been the essential story for over 1000 years. the Turk’s being raised back to life makes no sense, so it’s probably original.

If someone wants to do a version with the basic roles relabeled to form some sort of satire, they can. Local groups go from pub to pub, putting on their little show while collecting cash in a can. Seen one Mummer story, seen them all? That’s the problem, how to freshen it up while keeping it the same.

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Early Non-Christian, Non-Roman, Non-Greek Spectacles

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Ruth

We know so little. Writing only came with Christianity, and some records of the past or of current pagan customs were jotted down at times, but it’s a wide study to find the bits. We can also see what persisted in European folk customs and make educated guesses.

We think Celtic religion had not only secret rites involving animal and human sacrifice, but that sometimes they included public show. Julius Caesar tells us that the original “Wicker Man” custom had real people stuffed inside the wicker. In a much less gory vein, the fall festival of Samhain seems to have included masks and faces blackened with ash, perhaps from the sacred bonfire, and people going door to door reciting verses or singing.

Early English country custom continued to have some kind of mock creature burnt in the fall, sometimes a straw man (the Harvest King), and of course in modern times, the “Guy,” who was made of straw and old clothes. The head from the straw man was sometimes cut off and kept for later use as a ball to kick around in the spring festival. So from all this, there seems to have been a custom of burning something symbolizing the old year, the summer, or something, with perhaps a parade of the mannequin first.

The Germanic side of English custom suggests that in the spring, an old ritual involved staging a rite that showed something like the old year being killed by the new, or the earth having been “killed” by winter and now returning to life. What we do know is that as early as we have any records, a ritual they called “mumming” staged a play in which someone was killed with a sword, and then brought back to life.

Celtic Beltane, the celebration of driving the cattle out to pasture, was around May 1. Bonfires were part of Beltane, but so was what’s now called a “pantomime horse.” The Celts seem to have used a horse’s skull and a white sheet to costume a man to be the “White Horse.” Medieval records of mummers show some of them with mock animal-heads on their own heads, such as donkeys or dogs.

The Mummers’ Play tradition was extremely strong in England, so much that it persisted all through the Middle Ages and into the present. Old-style Mummers still act out the traditional story, but the custom has also transitioned to stage productions called Pantomimes, or Panto for short. These have little to do with the traditional story, but they retain some of its spirit or style.

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Origins of Medieval European Theater

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Ruth

Medieval Europe was the product of three branches of Indo-European culture colliding and blending. I’ve sometimes defined it as the time it took for the Barbarians who felled Rome to learn and surpass Rome’s greatness (at least in some ways). In France and England, a third branch was involved: the Celts, who were perhaps the first emigration of Indo-Europeans, settling along the Atlantic coast.

Medieval theater is distinguished by its blend of Latin and native folk traditions, returned in new form to the common people. We know how medieval theater ended, because it was the precursor to Shakespeare. But where did it start?

Both the Celts and the Germans had elements of their old religion that involved costumes and acting. They had a seasonal repertoire as religious holidays came with seasonal events. We don’t know much about it, since writing only came with the Latins. More about what we do know, next.

Greek and Roman theater also traced some seasonal religious holidays; the great plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus were written for festivals honoring Bacchus, god of wine (also called Dionysus). There were four Bacchanalia festivals that may have been held before the golden age of Athens, but they certainly were being held from the 500s BC, forward. Rome adopted them, too.

Some of the Bacchanalia did not involve public theater, but instead had secret rites and drinking festivals. But the Great Festival was the one we focus on, in which tragedies and comedies were staged. The Greek dramatic tradition was picked up and carried on by Rome, until finally Rome’s culture died off under pressure of Barbarian and Muslim invasions.

We see the same elements in all four cultures: seasonal religious festivals with secret rites that nobody wrote down for us modern Peeping Toms, and often with rites acted out dramatically, or with fully staged public drama. Northern Europe had no amphitheaters apart from the few Roman ones, but there’s no question that northern pagan plays were public, mostly repeated every year the same, but eventually with a tradition of changes.

In this series, we’ll start with the northern non-Christian drama customs, then go back to late Classical Latin plays and the role they played in shaping European intellectual life. Then we’ll move to the drama created by and for the church, and eventually to the publicly staged plays that blended elements from all of these branches and began developing ways to break the 4th wall and create special effects, things we’re still interested in today.

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Occult magic

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Ruth

Obviously, the origin of “occult” magic was the pre-Christian practice of calling directly on the old gods with prayers and charms. In a sense, the “occult” stage of magic in the medieval period represents a time in which the old gods were no longer relevant and the worldview of the magicians was entirely Christian. The Bible stated that prayers to God might or might not prevail, but faith to keep believing when things ran against your interests was too much to ask of some. These people wanted a way to make things turn out right: heal the sick, stop the drought, win back love. Natural magic went only so far. When the outcome counted most, it was time to turn to something forbidden that really worked.

That’s always been the main pitch for occult magic: hey, it works. You may not approve of using blood to call on spirits, but if you really want your child’s fever to break, get off your high horse and find someone who knows the ritual. It’s hard to believe that it really always worked; it probably didn’t. But since it was not used routinely, there was no averaging of results. Anything that we turn to in an extremity usually seems more effective.

The prevailing charms we read about were to induce love or pregnancy, or to inflict death on an enemy. For saving life in times of sickness, or for carrying a baby to term, occult magic’s boundary with natural magic—that is, early science—was shaky. For inflicting death for revenge, or to steal a man’s affection from another woman, the boundary was quite clear. This type of magic was a sin, even in the eyes of those who sought it. We read of some using wax images of their victims, which of course was right in line with natural magic’s principle of “like affects like,” but in an aggressive way. Similarly, a knife stuck into the wooden wall of a dairy barn could resemble the cow’s teat and therefore steal milk by magic.

Another type of medieval magic was the practice of divination: using objects and events to tell the future. Of course, this practice went way back into antiquity. Specialists in divination used to tell the future by seeing omens in flocks of birds, or in the entrails oozing out of a dead animal. Medieval diviners listened to thunder and bird calls. There were also significant patterns in oil or water, especially when it was holy and placed on someone’s fingernail. We have some vestiges of medieval divination that survive in customs of divining whether an unborn baby is male or female. Have you heard that your wedding ring, suspended on a red thread, will swing one or another direction based on the baby’s sex? Astrology was also part of divination, since the thunder meant something different on an “Egyptian Day” of bad luck or under certain signs. This was probably high-class divination for the rich, since it involved some learning.

The worst kind of magic was necromancy, and here we have another root of modern fantasy about magic. Necromancy was the fancy-pants college boy among other magic branches; it was not your old herb-woman’s charm or the wandering divination quack’s pronouncements for a penny. Necromancy was theology, turned inside out. It required Latin and books. It was made up of rituals and prayers done in a very wrong way.

Basically, there were two career paths for failed university students: stand-up comic and necromancer. All that education could lend itself to some thigh-slapping mimicry and satire, and castles were paying for that. But it could also bring in much higher fees if it were turned to support the desires of wealthy broken hearts or vengeful siblings. Necromancers did all the stuff we see in vampire movies: they had hoary old books, they drew circles and lit candles, they recited prayers backwards. They were more likely to have read the esoteric alchemists, too, so they might peddle “secrets” that could make the magic more powerful. They could use demons’ names or even invert the exorcism rites to call, not expel, demons. Some of this material came from orthodox Christian books and manuals that were available in any cathedral town, and could be invented by any priest who wanted to slip off the path of truth. Other material was specialized and not well known.

The official hierarchy was against occult magic. We have a decree of Charlemagne that anyone found practicing sorcery would become a slave on an estate owned by the church. Much of what we know about daily practice of occult magic comes from the church’s manuals for priests that listed sins with suggested penances. We also have records of the Inquisition among the Cathars in southern France. This Inquisition was more of a forensic investigation and mass-scale interview program than a witch-burning spree. They asked the peasants if they knew anyone who practiced magic, then investigated these reports. The church itself did not condemn witches to death, but imposed penance on them. Local barons and kings, however, often took it a step farther.

Before the 14th century, there were not many trials of witches. Most of the records we have (outside of the Cathar region) are about high-profile cases. One Frankish king died suddenly, while another remained childless, and people suspected the malign hand of dark magic in both cases. The Templar Knights were accused of witchcraft, and that was one of the chief charges used to condemn its last leaders to death in 1314.

This all changed after the Black Death years. When half the population is suddenly dead, the surviving half becomes very interested in life after death, contacting the dead, and influencing life and death. Immediately after the plague ended, most areas experienced a time of great sexual freedom. It seemed like the old order was dead, and they also needed to repopulate! In this context, there was a great demand for charms to use against the fathers of babies who had absconded or chosen a different baby-mother. That’s one way that the female form of the “witch” became prevalent. Men were the victims, women were controlling them. In one charming anecdote, a witch supposedly charmed away men’s penises if they abandoned the girl, and then she kept them in a box. They were still alive and could be returned for a fee, or for repentance. (What did the witch feed them? Guess.)

The old medieval view had been that spiritual things were for others, especially for the monasteries. The priests and monks prayed, while the rest of us farmed. But after the plague years, and during repeat visitations of the plague, the lay people wanted to participate in spiritual things. Orders of Friars preached to the common people, and educated people began owning and reading the Bible in Latin or Greek. On the other side, the intense interest in spirits and the dead was also turned in the occult direction. Everything about magic became more developed and common. In 1431, the English accusation that Joan of Arc was a ‘witch,” with her public burning, made witchcraft even more famous, but that’s near the end of the medieval period. Most of the witch-hunts we think of as medieval were actually from the Renaissance-Reformation period, when chronic war and charges of heresy made executions seem appropriate. The peak of witchcraft trials, at Salem, were in the 1690s, 250 years after the official close of the Middle Ages.

 

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Astrology and alchemy: magic as the mother of science

Posted on February 12, 2020 by Ruth

Astrology and alchemy were the two medieval magical sciences, but both led to real science. We have a number of mathematical and scientific words that start with “A” because they are from Arabic’s definite article “al.” Astrology, of course, is of Greek derivation: the study of the stars. Alchemy is an odd blended word, since Arabic “al” prefaces a Greek word, “chemia.” (The Greek word is obscure, with some suggesting it’s from Egyptian “kemet,” black earth, although there’s a similar native word for combining things.)

Astrology came to us from Arabic sources, despite its Greek name. People had tracked the stars since our earliest written records (Babylonian and Egyptian), but the new Arabic “science” consisted of working out how the stars did natural magic, not just where they would be an hour from now. Astrology meant everything about the stars, though: their positions, how to use them for navigation, how to tell time, and how to avoid unlucky constellations.

On the scientific side, a Greek device for tracking star positions was much improved to create the Arabic astrolabe. It was made of brass and consisted of several flat plates and some arms and pointers. It divided the day/night time period into 24 units before mechanical clocks were in use. Most astrolabes were marked in Arabic, so most science students had to learn at least some Arabic, the way students today must learn English. Many of our modern star names are either Persian or Arabic, or some garbled medieval version of a name that used to be Persian or Arabic, probably written into Latin letters during those years.

On the magic side, they believed strongly that stars and planets looked down on earth and exerted influences, good and malign. The stars were not good or evil, they just took part in a celestial weather system that wise men took into account, just as they might not start a journey in storm season. The most scientific European king, Frederick II of Germany, paid a royal astrologer to give him reports on the influence of the stars! The astrologer may well have also kept an observatory with accurate records of stars’ time of rising. Frederick II would have been astonished to learn that his descendants would consider astrology superstition. The separation of astronomy and astrology came about mainly after the Galilean-Copernican revolution that transferred the stars from a “fixed sphere” with the earth at its center to the universe we envision today, in which our sun is merely one of trillions of other stars.

Alchemy began as an Arabic project to translate some Greek philosophy; we know that the first Abbasid Caliphs who built Baghdad provided a generous budget to translate all of the world’s literature into Arabic, which was a fairly new written script. Some of the philosophy came from mystical sects like the Hermetics and Gnostics, who pondered the unity of all matter and spirit, and things like that. The translators became interested and wrote their own books, fusing these Greek ideas with Muslim monotheistic theology. In Baghdad’s center of learning, alchemists not only suggested ways that matter and spirit interacted, but also experimented with how specific forms of matter, such as spices or metals, interacted.

In 1144, an Englishman named Robert translated some important scientific texts into Latin. He was living and working in Spain, where Arabic books flowed freely, on the frontier of the Latin-scholarship region of the north. He translated both al-Khwarismi’s book about mathematics and an important alchemical text by Jabir ibn Hayyan, a doctor and philosopher. Jabir’s works were deliberately written in an obscure way, so that your best shot at understanding him was to have been his student, that is, to learn his code. Reading them years later in Latin, they were certainly mysterious enough.

Yet Jabir’s works mixed esoteric mysteries with basic scientific advances, such as basic classification of substances. He explained how to extract an inorganic substance, like ammonia, from an organic one, like urine, using another chemical agent. Europe already had a layer of budding chemists in its art industry, since mixing paint was a type of experiment. Perhaps leaning on Jabir’s work in Latin, European artists extracted chemicals by exposing metals to ammonia, producing salts that made uniquely strong and stable blues and greens.

During the 12th century, there was a boom of translation into Latin from Arabic. It’s when we received Ptolemy, Euclid, and much of Aristotle back into Western knowledge. With the fall of Rome and the destruction of Alexandria’s library, the only Greek texts that came back to us had either been stored successfully in Constantinople or sold to Baghdad for translation. The medieval time was a succession of book transfers just in time, as each leading city was crushed by a conqueror and its library burnt or scattered.

Two leading European scholars wrote prominent encyclopedias or commentaries on the new knowledge bases. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, who were Dominican and Franciscan friars, both wrote books that were, in turn, copied and distributed around Northern Europe. Bacon composed a giant textbook at the Pope’s request, so that European universities would have the most up to date scientific discoveries.

The esoteric spiritualism of these early texts came to dominate the tone of early European alchemy. One could only learn their secrets by studying long hours without divulging the esoteric, secret knowledge. We can see both the magical wizard legends and modern chemistry developing: the initiated practiced combining substances, trying to purify both the soul and gold. Man could learn how the universe was put together while uniting mankind with God’s truth.

Meanwhile, mineral deposits were found in Hungary and Germany that began to change industrial history. Alchemists had a real role to play there, working out how to use new minerals in alloys or to purify other minerals from their natural state. Gunpowder began to be used in Europe around 1350, and then the arms race was on. Every king wanted to produce the metals and chemicals needed to create stronger and better firearms. Making gunpowder was itself a skilled art of alchemy, since each element had to be made from other materials and then combined just right. The charcoal in it, for example, was often made from obscure plants like grapevines, not from the sturdy oaks used in iron-making. Why grapevine charcoal? It was a mystery of natural magic.

And so chemistry began to pull away from alchemy as it moved in a pragmatic direction. Pure alchemy continued to exist as a sort of philosophical blend of magic and chemistry. Its basis in esoteric mysteries of the soul kept some focused on higher goals, often in the purifying soul/or/gold direction. One of its famous searches was for the “Philosopher’s Stone,” which could transform one thing into another, like a Google Translate of matter. We get our word “elixir” from this search: like alchemy, it’s a Greek word borrowed into Arabic, so it’s el-ixir (kserion, in Greek). Legends and rumors flew about saying that Albertus Magnus or Roger Bacon had discovered the Philopher’s Stone but had encoded the knowledge in a mystical text. The elixir, if it existed, could bring life to the dead or it could translate one substance of no value into another of great value. From this, of course, we get the lasting modern rumor that alchemy was the practice of turning lead into gold.

 

 

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Medieval principles of magic

Posted on December 8, 2019 by Ruth

As discussed in earlier entries, natural magic and “magical” magic were very much blurred in early times, when every principle of nature seemed like magic. Magnetic stones were magic, and so was garlic’s power against infections. The stars had magic as they influenced the world: after all, the moon controlled tides, so why might not Jupiter control destiny? It was all one. Only with time and the gradual post-medieval development of science did the two untangle. Before 1500, alchemy and chemistry were the same, and so were astrology and astronomy.

One way that we can distinguish “natural magic” from what we’d now consider scientific property is that the basic principles of magic were not what we recognize as science. We know that something like garlic fights infection because it has some compounds in the presence of which bacteria in a petri dish dies. Sometimes we can explain it one step further, sometimes we can’t. But we are always looking for an internal, atom-based explanation that we consider scientific. Even when we can’t explain something, we consider it scientific if it’s replicable: can someone else do this 50 times and get the same result? And was the result greater than chance? Did anything else influence the results?

But natural magic worked on entirely different principles. To the people then, these seemed “scientific.” There must have been some natural skeptics, but skepticism was not taught in school or discussed in public forums. So most people bought in. The Four Humors framework was a kind of natural magic that separated everything by temperature and wetness, the way we separate things by gas-liquid-solid states. Reasoning from inside that framework, they could form very logical links between pepper and fever.

  1. “Like cures like, or sometimes, unlike.” The shape of a plant suggested which organ it could cure, or the “hair of the dog that bit you” would literally be able to cure the infection caused by the bite. A preparation including the body part of an animal that was the same part you were afflicted in could cure it, too. This belief is found all over the world; Michael Ondaatje reports that in Sri Lankan traditional medicine, making a child eat the tongue of a certain lizard would cure the child of being shy and tongue-tied. Many, many herbs were prescribed on this basis: the leaf or flower or seed looked like something in the condition.
  2. “Herbs or animal parts must be obtained under the right conditions.” Some things had to be picked at dawn, others at midnight. Sometimes it mattered not to speak for hours prior to picking or administering it. Sometimes it mattered that the herbalist or the patient did not have sex for a period of time. There was a very strong prohibition against cutting herbs with an iron knife, and it doesn’t seem to have been a consideration of how the element Fe interacts with the compounds. Rather, it was an echo of the Bronze Age, when iron was the new metal on the block.
  3. “Letters are powerful.” This feeling seems to be common to any newly literate society, since literacy begins with the elite who have special uses for letters. We call Egypt’s letters “hieroglyphs” because they were the letters used by priests (hiero-). Ordinary people often see these letters only during ceremonies, or when buying written charms. Coptic writing came about first when the Egyptian priests realized nobody could read/purchase their charms unless they used Greek letters. In Norse society, runes remained the letters of magical writing for a long time, and especially when Latin letters quickly moved from priestly use to writing the vulgar tongue to send messages.  So in medieval European magic, both runes and Latin letters used like runes were key parts of magic. A medical recipe might direct the preparer to stir the herbs only with a stick that had “MATTHEW MARK LUKE JOHN” carved on it. Another form of letters as magic was in making a square of letters, sort of a Sudoku-like chart that could be read in any direction. We would see it as nonsense, but they saw it as powerful because even moving in the wrong direction, the reader could produce a “word.”
  4. “Spoken words as charms are powerful.” Incantations in the medieval period usually involved Latin, both real and fake. Our idea that you can summon a demon with Latin comes straight from that source, though the medievals were not into demon-summoning. You saw in some of the charms in the Lacnunga and Bald’s Leechbook that charms could also be stories about Jesus or the saints; the story had to be told just so, and it often had some real and fake Latin to close it out. Muslim charms, by contrast, were only passages from the Quran.
  5. “Things can transfer power or blessing if you touch them.” We moderns believe that heat and an electrical shock can be transferred by touching some things, but nothing else. If you touch Hitler’s shoe, you do not become evil. But that’s not how the ancient world saw it at all. Holiness and evil were inherent in the materials, and you could get them by touch or proximity. In magic, this meant the use of amulets, little prepared objects that you carried on your person. The pre-Christian North Germans (including the Franks, in earlier centuries) had used a lot of amulets for the gods: Wodin, Thor, Tiu, Frey, and so on. Thor’s iron hammers can be found in many archeological sites. Iron was often part of an amulet, even if it wasn’t Thor’s hammer: the most obvious baptized version of the hammer would be an iron cross, or an iron nail said to be used on Jesus’ cross. Amulets tended to be very conservative and more often still used pagan forms than Christian ones, which may be part of why the Church elevated relics—clearly not pagan, but filling the same niche—-so prominently. The amulets that persist even into our time are the rabbit’s foot and the iron horseshoe, although we no longer believe that coral protects against lightning.
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Funding and reforming medieval hospitals

Posted on December 4, 2019 by Ruth

By the late medieval period, that is, the 13th-15th centuries, the monastic and city hospitals were often large and highly developed. The largest hospital in medieval England was St. Leonard’s in York, where 200 patients and 18 orphans were supported. St. Leonard’s had the very advanced—and expensive—touch of keeping lamps burning in the wards all night. Long-term patients sometimes wore uniform robes like the monks and nuns, and they participated in maintenance chores if they were able. The orphans formed a school and support staff for the regular hospital. Monks and nuns with practical medical and herbal training made the rounds for patient care.

How was such a large establishment funded in that time? In some cities, tax money directly supported the hospitals. In others, the hospital was granted the revenue rights to something, like ferry tolls or port fees. That was generally a popular medieval way of funding quite a few things. The beneficiary had an interest in overseeing the revenue activity, so it created administration and funding at once.

Hospitals sought private donations actively and aggressively. Leper houses required lepers to beg in public, as long as they kept some distance from the patrons. But most donations came in bequests at a wealthy person’s death. Some donated beds, and others donated houses. Hospitals might receive a farm or just about any other revenue stream that an individual had owned, such as a mill or a forest. Most of these were either sold or managed as an income stream.

When the house was in a good place to expand the hospital, it was retrofitted for a new use. Manor halls with high ceilings became wards with lines of beds along both walls, while private rooms were built at the ends. The same thing was done during the First World War, though as temporary housing, so we can get a sense of what this looked like. The beds that were donated usually went straight into such wards, so probably the beds in a ward were far from uniform.

As hospitals organized in a more advanced way, bequests and endowments were managed by a board, as they are today. Or mismanaged as the case may be. In 1311, the Pope directed that cities should audit their hospitals to make sure the money was going to the right place. Some “hospitals” were caring for few if any patients, and some hospital administrators were living comfortably while the roofs of their institutions were falling in.

After the plague in 1348-50, things got worse. The plague overwhelmed a hospital system that was set up for relatively static needs like old age or blindness. Most hospitals did not distinguish between sick patients and orphans, since both needed care, but the plague exponentially increased the number of orphans. Hospital staff died off with their patients, and endowments were left with nobody to use them. Cities and orders combined failing hospitals and set up new ordinances for their purposes. Typically orphanages, almshouses (for the aging poor) and sick care were now specified. That way, no one institution would be as overwhelmed by a new visitation of the plague, since it could restrict its help to just some sectors of need.

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The growth of medieval hospitals

Posted on December 4, 2019 by Ruth

In the ancient world, care for the sick was presumed to be the domain of the family home. The hospital system developed for care of travelers, orphans, and the very poor. The words “hospital” and “hostel” are cognates, both derived from Latin “hospitium.” For a time, the medieval English word for a hospital was simply “spital.”

The first European hospitals were designated sick bays in Roman army camps. In a sense, every soldier was a traveler and an orphan (except for those whose sisters or mothers came along). If the army was to take a man from his family for years, it had to create a substitute sick care system. After the fall of the western empire, the Roman idea of dedicated houses for the sick persisted in its eastern capital, Constantinople. If you wanted to try out one of Paul of Aegina’s surgery methods, your best bet would be one of those Byzantine hospitals, where one could recover from an infection or have simple surgeries.

The next major hospital development was the growth of Benedictine monasteries in Europe. The Order of St. Benedict required rooms set aside for the sick, with a monk assigned to care for them. Monasteries grew medicinal herbs for the sick, and they also made sure that regular meals and baths were given. The sick were exempted from fasting; they could eat meat soup during Lent. (People being what they are, quite a few monks got sick during Lent.)

The monasteries primarily cared for their own sick and aged, especially the aged. Joining a monastery was a way of ensuring that you’d have nursing care in your last years. But the monasteries were also required to give care to travelers who fell sick, and to the local poor who were sick and aged. Gradually, some of the monasteries expanded their hospital functions to be more general.

A big turning point came with the Crusades, when Europeans got to see Constantinople’s hospital system. The idea of having dedicated places for the old, poor, and sick came home with Crusaders, who then supported hospitals with endowments. The first main group to bring the idea back was, of course, the Knights of the Hospital. Their original purpose was to guard pilgrims to Jerusalem by providing defensible houses with a few knights and men at arms attached. The Knights of the Hospital were a military-monastic order, so some of their number mainly fought in the Crusade wars. But others developed the function of the hostel/hospital in imitation of the Byzantine customs, and they began to spread Hospitaler houses into Europe. The first Hospitaler hospital in England began in 1128.

Other religious orders were founded specifically to care for the sick and poor, and many of them started in the Holy Land on the same model as the Hospitalers. The Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem cared for lepers. St. Mary of Bethlehem cared for, among others, the insane, and its institution in London became known as the infamous “Bedlam” short for Bethlehem. The Order of the Trinity administered hospitals in France, and a small order of St. Thomas the Martyr of Acon managed one large hospital in England.

Cities began to found hospitals with specific purposes. Some were for the blind, or for orphans, while others were for the aged. Most of them shunned infectious disease, since it was dangerous and there was at least enough physical frailty to keep their rooms full without it. Most of the charters included or excluded other conditions: pregnancy, leprosy, insanity. The most numerous and best city hospitals were in Italy, where each city-commune organized fairly efficiently at a time when the rest of Europe was primarily feudal. Guilds, too, founded hospitals for the sick and aged among their members.

The hospital at this time did a few basic things for its patients. First, it gave them a bed: literally a bed, perhaps the first bed the patient had ever seen. The rooms were heated and sometimes had lights burning at night. The patients got regular meals and baths. For many sick people, this was enough to recover. Second, it gave them spiritual care, which was seen as a key service in medieval times. The sick so often did not recover, and to die unconfessed meant spending much more time in Purgatory. So the monks and nuns who staffed the hospitals kept up regular prayers and masses, and patients were required to participate if at all able. Dying in a hospital meant almost certainly having the benefit of the last rites, which gave the dying some peace of mind, easing their pain.

 

 

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Medieval Muslim medicine

Posted on November 26, 2019 by Ruth

Medicine in the Muslim regions was at once better and slightly worse than in the Christian areas. In the academic realm, all the best books were in Arabic, and the cutting-edge research (such as it was) was too. But at the day to day treatment and care level, medical practice was in general more passive in the Muslim regions. The difference may not have been great, since effective medicine was generally lacking. Passivity for philosophical reasons probably also varied with place, time, and person (same as with anything).

My comments in this article are based on general knowledge from many sources, and specifically on the Tibb al-A’imma, an Ismaili (Shi’ite) collection of medical advice. You can find this document here: https://www.al-islam.org/printpdf/book/export/html/41434

Most of Europe and the Middle East accepted the Greek doctrine of four humors. This framework was simply Science, their construct of how things worked. Bodies, climates, foods and herbs, were divided into hot and cold, wet and dry. The Tibb al-A’imma notes that, of course, medical treatment had to take climate into consideration. A cold rainy place like Paris needed different medicine from a hot dry place like Cairo.

The Muslim philosophical tradition was ambivalent about intervening in disease. Religious leaders had been respected as physicians, so there are sayings from the Prophet, his Companions, and leading men (including the others in the line of 12 Imams) explaining the connection between physical and spiritual. The Tibb al-A’imma notes that emotional and mental sources of stress could cause physical symptoms, which is why its writers generally justified the use of charms which addressed the beliefs of the sufferer. The key point was that the charms had to be phrases from the Quran, to make sure that nothing illicit was allowed. Christian use of charms followed the same principle, but the Islamic charms may have been more strictly straight out of the Quran than the syncretic Christian charms.

Islamic philosophy saw pain as a way to expiate sin. One saying notes that “a night of fever expiates a year of sins.” Because the soul’s health mattered most, a doctor might hesitate to relieve pain when it was better for the patient to suffer patiently. In practical terms, a physician probably used whatever herbs for pain that he could supply, without hesitating, but the philosophy supplied him with reasons to feel less urgency about curing a pain at all costs. Some pains were direct rebukes from Allah, so should these be cured at all?

Perhaps for this reason, Islamic medicine focused primarily on prevention. Good health came from eating little and abstaining from various excesses, and also from strong faith. Strong faith meant not going to doctors. The Tibb al-A’imma praises those whose faith was so strong that they were rarely sick and never called doctors. The four humors theory, of course, also focused on prevention. Eat for your physical type and climate, which is the will of Allah anyway. It was not clear what was the will of Allah for the sick, but for the healthy, it was clear, so squandering your health with overeating was seen as close to a sin. Prevention and piety were hand in hand.

The hadiths about medicine were evaluated not for success in healing, but as hadiths were in general:  by who had transmitted them, and how. Pragmatic success was not a way to judge skill, as illustrated by a hadith of the Prophept. A man asked Mohammad about his brother’s abdominal pain, and the Prophet suggested honey in hot water. The next day, the man reported that it had not helped. The Prophet said that Allah does not lie, but the brother’s belly could. Privately, he told his followers that this man must be a hypocrite, and medicine could never help such a one.

One of the points of dispute among Muslim physicians was in the role of wine in medicine. It was the base fluid for many, if not most, Christian herbal medicines. We moderns can’t help pointing out that alcohol kills germs. But since the Prophet had forbidden wine, most Muslim doctors held that no, it could not be used as medicine. Why would Allah use something forbidden to heal? That made no sense.

Islamic medicine may have focused more on bleeding and cupping than Christian medicine at this time. It certainly recommended these remedies, cautioning that recitations of the Quran had to be pronounced over the flowing blood. I wonder if treating blood this way became a more common practice when mixtures with wine were prohibited, and also I wonder if bleeding came into European early modern medicine mainly through the Arabic medical texts. But I haven’t researched these questions.

Herbal treatments and accompanying charms were not very different from those we saw in Bald’s Leechbook, accounting for different climates and plants. One of the Imams left us a treatment for phlegm: Equal parts of Byzantine mastic, frankincense (a major product of the Arabian peninsula), thyme, bishop’s weed, and fennel were ground into powders, sifted, and combined. This mixture was added to honey, to be taken twice a day.

Quran-based charms were also similar in spirit. One charm for tooth pain in Timm al-A’imma says to take 3 olive leaves and write on each one, “In the name of Allah. There is no sovereign greater than Allah, the King, and you are his Khalifa. Ya Haya Sharahiyya, remove the illness and send the cure, may Allah bless the Prophet and his family.” A note explains that Ya Haya and Sharahiyya were names of God from Hebrew. (Ya Haya must be the four-letter name of God that we render Jehovah, but I can’t place the other.) A further instruction to make the charm better suggested putting the olive leaves into a cloth, and tying the cloth with seven knots, and naming each knot after one of the prophets: Adam, Nuh (Noah), Ibrahim, Musa, Isa (Jesus), and Shuayb (?). The cloth was to be attached to the tooth while praying for peace on the Prophet and his family.

I doubt that the differences in medical philosophy meant much for the health of a population during the main medieval centuries. It was in the following centuries, the Renaissance to Early Modern periods, that it mattered. European medicine became based on dissection and experimentation with herbal chemicals, but Islamic medicine was forbidden to pursue dissection, at least. Europe’s Christian philosophy promoted intervention in nature’s ways, perhaps based on how the stories of the saints showed them putting out fires and curing diseases. If the saints changed the course of nature, how could it be wrong to imitate them? This early stage laid the foundation for modern science.

People often ask why the Muslim world, with its base of Egyptian, Persian and Indian sciences, fell behind after the close of the Middle Ages. I think here is one of the reasons: the rise of scientific medicine was not something Islamic philosophy could at first accept, especially as embodied by the Ottoman Empire of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Empire was wary of innovative religious ideas, because they had learned the hard way that such things led to revolts. It preferred a uniform and change-resistant set of religious beliefs and practices. At the same time, Europe was exploding into diversity of opinion and practice in the Reformation. Europe paid in massacres and persecutions, but it also made space for intellectual innovation that broke previous religious barriers in medicine.

 

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Medieval discrimination against Jewish doctors

Posted on November 23, 2019 by Ruth

Medieval Christians often feared that Jews were not bound by the same moral rules as Christians. Their helplessness in the face of disease or medical hocus-pocus made them suspicious that their medicine might be poison.

Leprosy had already established medicine as an adjunct of the legal profession: there were court battles over whether a man did or did not have leprosy, because if he was certified to have it, he had to die legally. The city enforced his writing a will and vanishing from society. Some men hired their own doctors and took the city to court. Sometimes juries had to decide if they could trust the word of a Jewish doctor who disagreed with Christian doctors.

All medieval doctors were liable to being sued for malpractice. Doctors were frequently fined, and sometimes they were condemned to banishment or even death. Jewish doctors were not more liable than others, but when they were found guilty, it reinforced Christian suspicions against their whole community. When fines were too heavy for an individual doctor to pay, the Jewish community often helped because paying the fine made the talk settle down.

Jews avoided working as pharmacists. That was the quickest way to be accused of maliciously compounding a poison. If a Christian did the compounding, then the Jewish doctor at least did not bear responsibility if he could prove that his prescription was reasonable. After the plague of 1347-50 sharpened Christian fears that some disease was deliberate Jewish poisoning, Jewish doctors were required to taste their medicinal wines before administering them—and the wine not being kosher was excluded as an excuse.

But the basic problem was that medieval people had begun to expect doctors to care for them in sickness, even if they were not aristocrats, and there was a shortage of Christian doctors. University education was incredibly expensive, and the Church forbade its priests and monks from studying medicine. But Jewish families that arranged for training within a family network were able to manage the training more easily. The number of Jewish doctors was rising, so forbidding Jews too widely would mean cutting off medical care.

Eventually, some rulers forbade Jews to practice medicine. A number of doctors had been accused and convicted of deliberately poisoning their patients; those convicted were hanged. Christians also had rumors going back to to the 12th century that suggested Jews liked to dig up dead Christian bodies and make potions out of their ground-up bones, adding Hebrew spells that invoked Satan.

Provence forbade Jews to practice medicine, or Christians to consult them, in 1306. Sicily did the same in 1310. In 1337, the Pope at Avignon spelled out rules forbidding Christians to consult Jewish doctors unless the patients was at death’s door and nobody else was reachable. But Provence had to revoke its decree a few years later, as did the Pope.

For the next few centuries, this pattern continued. A ruler would forbid Jewish doctors, but everyone would circumvent and complain against these laws. Sometimes the decrees were repealed, other times both the Church and secular officials continued to call in Jewish doctors. It got worse after the plague, and by the early 1400s, Italian cities that had public hospitals were confronted with firing their Jews or dealing with paranoid patients. Still, Christians really never stopped consulting their favorite Jewish doctors. By this time, medicine was widely taught among Jewish families. It was a life-preserver.

 

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