Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Medieval medicine
However, medieval doctors had little concept of germs as the medium of disease and the cause of illness. While the body was known to degenerate with age, medieval doctors believed that a healthy body required a state of harmony or balance. An unhealthy body represented an imbalance, usually identified through a change or sign on the outside of the body, either on the skin or from an excreted fluid, such as urine. Thus the body becomes the symbolic text which a doctor needed to interpret in order first to diagnosis and then to cure.
Lacking any concept of viruses or bacteria as causes of illness, medieval doctors were left to reason that certain behaviors led to illness. There were three types of possible illnesses: those caused by the body's natural degeneration, those to which the body was predisposed, and those caused by immoderate living.
The connection between morality and illness is not a medieval creation, but part of the heritage of Greco-Roman medicine. Galen unified two competing theories, the Empiricists and the Dogmatists into one philosophy which became the foundation of medieval medicine. The Empiricists believed in experience as the greatest teacher of medical learning. The Dogmatists relied on a learned tradition and propounded a notion of a microcosm and macrocosm. The microcosm consisted of the four bodily humours: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Each of the four humours reflected the elements of the macrocosm: air, water, earth, and fire, respectively. The humours also had temperature and moisture properties. Blood was hot and wet, phlegm was cold and wet, black bile was cold and dry, and yellow bile was hot and dry. According to this theory, when a person became sick, one of the four humours was out of balance. To balance the humours, one needed to take a prescription, usually made from some combination of plants or animals. Doctors categorized all plants and animals by their temperature and moisture.
Galen believed that authoritative learning was important but must not be accepted blindly; "rather, [medical authorities] are authorities in as far as they are proved right" through clinical experience. Essentially, Galen saw medicine as a cumulative process in which one studied medical authorities and appended or altered the authoritative corpus through clinical experience. Galen's emphasis on immoderation as a cause of illness appealed especially to early Christians.
A third misconception about medieval medicine concerns ascribing the belief to medieval people that all illness was connected to moral failings. In fact, some illnesses were believed to occur naturally or as a result of old age.
The clearest literary example of both the influence of medicine on literature and the connection between morality and illness appears in our own adjectives: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholy. At one time, these adjectives referred both to the emotional and moral state of the individual as well as to his or her physical constitution. Each ... ailment corresponds to an emotional state--an emotional state that could lend itself to sin. The assumptions which underlie this poem are that the phlegmatic is prone to the sin of idleness, the sanguine is prone to the sins of lust and overindulgence, the choleric is prone to the sins of covetousness, and the melancholic is prone to the sins of deceit and envy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050306190053/http://www.the-orb.net:80/non_spec/missteps/ch4.html
http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/04/ointments-and-potions.html
Apothecary, Barber, Pharmacist, Physician, Surgeon
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL745-VcJ1xdWwpYGTyu2lr3PeL5OR1yy1 .
Marriage banns and marital bans
Marriage banns and marital bans
The original Catholic Canon law requiring marriage banns---intended to prevent clandestine marriages---was decreed in Canon 51 of the Lateran IV Council in 1215; until then, the public announcement in church of marriages to be contracted was only made in some areas.
.......
Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) decided to follow the recommendations of scholars at the University of Paris and ruled that marriage was created simply when spouses both said they were married. No priest, no witnesses and no ceremonies were required. Alexander III’s decision marks the high water mark of easy access to marriage. This rule – that you contracted marriage by speaking the marriage vows – continued in England until Lord Hardwick’s marriage act in 1753.
To many clerics and lawyers this all felt a bit too easy, so it was felt that something was needed to safeguard marriages contracted by words alone. In attempt to do so the Fourth Lateran Council passed the rules in 1215 which required the reading of banns in church on three consecutive Sundays. In doing so, the council introduced a final principle: marriage was not just a matter between individuals but an institution that was protected by the community. The fact that you were legally able to marry – that you were marrying of your own free will, that you were not already married, that you were not too closely related, and that you were old enough to make the decision to marry – was guaranteed and testified to by every member of the local community.
The banns of marriage, commonly known simply as the "banns" or "bans" (from a Middle English word meaning "proclamation", rooted in Frankish and from there to Old French), are the public announcement in a Christian parish church or in the town council of an impending marriage between two specified persons. It is commonly associated with the Catholic Church and the Church of England and with other denominations whose traditions are similar; in 1983, the Roman Catholic Church removed the requirement for banns and left it to individual national bishops' conferences to decide whether to continue this practice, but in most Catholic countries the banns are still published.
The purpose of banns is to enable anyone to raise any canonical or civil legal impediment to the marriage, so as to prevent marriages that are invalid. Impediments vary between legal jurisdictions, but would normally include a pre-existing marriage that has been neither dissolved nor annulled, a vow of celibacy, lack of consent, or the couple's being related within the prohibited degrees of kinship.
https://theconversation.com/reading-of-the-banns-how-the-church-tried-to-perfect-the-institution-of-marriage-51411
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banns_of_marriage
Anglo Saxon Sex
Medieval sex is far more often discussed in penitentials – lists of sins (according to the Church) and the various penances that confessors should give the perpetrators for committing them:
Had sex with another man’s wife? Fast for one winter
Had a wet dream? Sing 23 psalms
Had sex with a pig? Fast for seven years
We have no way of knowing how this related to real life practice. Just because a sex act is mentioned doesn’t mean that anyone actually performed it. We don’t know how often Anglo-Saxons had sex with pigs (if at all), whether they bothered to confess it to a priest, or whether the priest actually gave them the penance he was supposed to assign.
And, in theory, if you obeyed the Church, even marital sex was off the table for most of the year:
Not during Lent, Easter, Pentecost and various other feast and fast days
Not while the wife is menstruating
Not while the wife is heavily pregnant or for 40 days after she gives birth
Not on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday nights
Not during daylight
And the type of sex you could have was also limited:
No oral or anal sex
No masturbation
No positions other than the “missionary” position
No sex unless your express intent is to produce children and you’re not enjoying it too much
It seems unlikely that ordinary people obeyed these prohibitions to the letter, particularly since historians such as Bede describe monks and nuns giving the Church a bad name through their drinking, gluttony, and fornication. No, religious documents don’t tell the whole story.
So perhaps we get a clearer picture from the literary descriptions. Does the “onion” riddle prove that Anglo-Saxon peasant women were enthusiastic and active sexual partners (note those verbs: grabs, rushes, holds, claims)? Or does it represent some monk’s sexual fantasy? The answers are not obvious here either.
The final tricky area is to do with sexual identity. In the 21st century, Westerners often like to divide people into straight and gay (even now we struggle to come to grips with categories such as bisexuality, asexuality, sexual fluidity). But the gay-straight opposition is only about 130 years old. Before that, people tend to talk more about what they do rather than what they are. In fact, if medieval people did think much about sexual identity, they may have been more inclined to do so in terms of categories such as virginity and chastity.
And that’s what’s really exciting about the Anglo-Saxon period. It’s not just the joys of good (or bad) sex in literature. Reading texts produced over 1000 years ago can make us think wider and deeper than the binaries and labels we fight over today. Asking questions about the past, it turns out, might help us re-envision the present.
https://theconversation.com/and-the-winner-of-the-medieval-bad-sex-in-fiction-award-is-51288
Over the centuries, countless women in the Christian West have been defined by appearance or attire and have been variously objectified by those in authority over them.
Among these countless women, there is a particular group called “anchorites” (anchorites could be men, but were more frequently women). Anchorites, who were very common in England in the Middle Ages, were people who wanted to live lives of Christian prayer and extreme devotion to God. In order to do this, they allowed themselves to be permanently enclosed in small rooms (called “cells”) adjoining their local church and vowed themselves to a life of chastity and penance. Their enclosure began when they were literally bricked into their cells, and was meant to continue until the moment of their death. In fact, we have quite a few records of anchorites being buried within their own cells.
The original Catholic Canon law requiring marriage banns---intended to prevent clandestine marriages---was decreed in Canon 51 of the Lateran IV Council in 1215; until then, the public announcement in church of marriages to be contracted was only made in some areas.
.......
Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) decided to follow the recommendations of scholars at the University of Paris and ruled that marriage was created simply when spouses both said they were married. No priest, no witnesses and no ceremonies were required. Alexander III’s decision marks the high water mark of easy access to marriage. This rule – that you contracted marriage by speaking the marriage vows – continued in England until Lord Hardwick’s marriage act in 1753.
To many clerics and lawyers this all felt a bit too easy, so it was felt that something was needed to safeguard marriages contracted by words alone. In attempt to do so the Fourth Lateran Council passed the rules in 1215 which required the reading of banns in church on three consecutive Sundays. In doing so, the council introduced a final principle: marriage was not just a matter between individuals but an institution that was protected by the community. The fact that you were legally able to marry – that you were marrying of your own free will, that you were not already married, that you were not too closely related, and that you were old enough to make the decision to marry – was guaranteed and testified to by every member of the local community.
The banns of marriage, commonly known simply as the "banns" or "bans" (from a Middle English word meaning "proclamation", rooted in Frankish and from there to Old French), are the public announcement in a Christian parish church or in the town council of an impending marriage between two specified persons. It is commonly associated with the Catholic Church and the Church of England and with other denominations whose traditions are similar; in 1983, the Roman Catholic Church removed the requirement for banns and left it to individual national bishops' conferences to decide whether to continue this practice, but in most Catholic countries the banns are still published.
The purpose of banns is to enable anyone to raise any canonical or civil legal impediment to the marriage, so as to prevent marriages that are invalid. Impediments vary between legal jurisdictions, but would normally include a pre-existing marriage that has been neither dissolved nor annulled, a vow of celibacy, lack of consent, or the couple's being related within the prohibited degrees of kinship.
https://theconversation.com/reading-of-the-banns-how-the-church-tried-to-perfect-the-institution-of-marriage-51411
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banns_of_marriage
Anglo Saxon Sex
Medieval sex is far more often discussed in penitentials – lists of sins (according to the Church) and the various penances that confessors should give the perpetrators for committing them:
Had sex with another man’s wife? Fast for one winter
Had a wet dream? Sing 23 psalms
Had sex with a pig? Fast for seven years
We have no way of knowing how this related to real life practice. Just because a sex act is mentioned doesn’t mean that anyone actually performed it. We don’t know how often Anglo-Saxons had sex with pigs (if at all), whether they bothered to confess it to a priest, or whether the priest actually gave them the penance he was supposed to assign.
And, in theory, if you obeyed the Church, even marital sex was off the table for most of the year:
Not during Lent, Easter, Pentecost and various other feast and fast days
Not while the wife is menstruating
Not while the wife is heavily pregnant or for 40 days after she gives birth
Not on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday nights
Not during daylight
And the type of sex you could have was also limited:
No oral or anal sex
No masturbation
No positions other than the “missionary” position
No sex unless your express intent is to produce children and you’re not enjoying it too much
It seems unlikely that ordinary people obeyed these prohibitions to the letter, particularly since historians such as Bede describe monks and nuns giving the Church a bad name through their drinking, gluttony, and fornication. No, religious documents don’t tell the whole story.
So perhaps we get a clearer picture from the literary descriptions. Does the “onion” riddle prove that Anglo-Saxon peasant women were enthusiastic and active sexual partners (note those verbs: grabs, rushes, holds, claims)? Or does it represent some monk’s sexual fantasy? The answers are not obvious here either.
The final tricky area is to do with sexual identity. In the 21st century, Westerners often like to divide people into straight and gay (even now we struggle to come to grips with categories such as bisexuality, asexuality, sexual fluidity). But the gay-straight opposition is only about 130 years old. Before that, people tend to talk more about what they do rather than what they are. In fact, if medieval people did think much about sexual identity, they may have been more inclined to do so in terms of categories such as virginity and chastity.
And that’s what’s really exciting about the Anglo-Saxon period. It’s not just the joys of good (or bad) sex in literature. Reading texts produced over 1000 years ago can make us think wider and deeper than the binaries and labels we fight over today. Asking questions about the past, it turns out, might help us re-envision the present.
https://theconversation.com/and-the-winner-of-the-medieval-bad-sex-in-fiction-award-is-51288
14th Century Hygiene, Clothing, Herbals ..
Marriage ..
Rape Culture ..
Among these countless women, there is a particular group called “anchorites” (anchorites could be men, but were more frequently women). Anchorites, who were very common in England in the Middle Ages, were people who wanted to live lives of Christian prayer and extreme devotion to God. In order to do this, they allowed themselves to be permanently enclosed in small rooms (called “cells”) adjoining their local church and vowed themselves to a life of chastity and penance. Their enclosure began when they were literally bricked into their cells, and was meant to continue until the moment of their death. In fact, we have quite a few records of anchorites being buried within their own cells.
Drama in Middle Ages
Reputation in Medieval Literature
Get medieval on your haters: lessons from Beowulf and Chaucer:
Reputation mattered to medieval people a great deal, in many ways more than to us today. They were concerned about what could happen to their public standing; to people at the time, both glory and infamy seemed to move as fast as the wind. And just as today we usually understand how unreliable public opinion is, so did people in the past. Anyone in the Middle Ages with a decent classical education knew that Latin fama meant both the positive kind of renown gained for great deeds, and mere rumour. In the Latin epic Aeneid, a popular medieval school text, Virgil depicted ‘Fama’ as a horrible feathered monster covered in many tongues, mouths and ears. She doesn’t sleep, but flies through the night screeching and terrifying cities with her mix of facts and crooked lies. So how do you fight rumour, the beast that never rests?
- Faced with an insecure thane questioning both his brawn and his good sense, Beowulf fills the story with details that will impress the Danes. ....
- Perhaps an even more effective way to respond to criticism – especially when it is unfair – is to bear the hatred of critics as a badge of pride. Christianity offered a useful model: Jesus was depicted as an outsider, mocked and reviled by the masses, and saints’ lives presented early Christian martyrs as heroes who were bold enough to affirm their faith in the face of social disapproval and violent punishment. Rejection and ostracism form a central emotional experience of Christianity. A prophet has no honour in her own country, after all. ... This is the approach that the 15th-century mystic Margery Kempe took when she faced public scorn for her unusual conduct. ....
- If, try as you might, you can’t see a way to shed a more positive light on your actions, then you can admit to your wrongs but portray your accusers as petty and unsophisticated for being so upset about them. In a playful work written late in his career, Geoffrey Chaucer depicted a fictionalised version of himself being denounced for writing misogynistic poetry. ....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)