A Sense of Doubt blog post #3574 - Understanding Crows
The Capacity To Understand Crows
Writing to protect against harm was common in medieval England. Written amulets like the girdle were a branch of charm magic, words and rituals that invoked supernatural power, whether divine or arcane, in order to gain protection, medicine and secret knowledge. Those seeking assistance wrote down holy verses, sacred names, symbols, runes and pure nonsense in the hope of harnessing the mysterious efficacy of the written word. Charms were used to confront every manner of problem, from life-threatening illness and terrible misfortune down to the very smallest inconvenience: to cure insomnia or soothe an abdominal stitch; to stop vermin from getting at grain; for the recovery of stolen goods or when someone accidently swallowed an insect. There were charms for problems that you never even knew needed solving. One promised to imbue children with the capacity to understand crows
I adjure you, egg
Tom Johnson
Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval
England
by Katherine
Storm Hindley.
Chicago, 299 pp., £36, August 2023, 978 0 226 82533 5
In the Wellcome Collection, there is a 15th-century
parchment roll that works as a kind of holy tape measure. Unfurled to its
fullest extent, the manuscript gauges the combined height of Jesus and the
Virgin Mary: about three and a half metres if they were standing one on top of
the other. On the dorse is a text promising that whoever carries ‘thys mesure’
around with them – rolled up it is quite small, fitting easily into a pouch or
a pocket – will receive divine protection from pestilence, wrongful judgment,
stormy weather, devils and fire, as well as protection during childbirth.
Historians have long suspected that the roll was used as a birth girdle. At
just ten centimetres wide, it resembles a very long belt, and would have been
wrapped (a few times over) around a woman’s waist during delivery for ritual
protection. Among the texts on the front of the roll are invocations of St
Julitta, the patron saint of family happiness, and her infant son St Cyricus,
patron of sickly children. Its images are heavily worn, a sign of frequent
touching, and they are covered in blotchy russet stains. In 2021 a team of
bioarchaeologists investigated the marks. They found residues of honey, broad
beans and sheep or goat’s milk – all used in obstetric medicine – as well as
proteins associated with human cervico-vaginal fluid. The roll promised that if
a pregnant woman ‘gyrde thys mesure abowte hyr wombe’, the baby would live to
his christening and the mother to her churching. That it was used and preserved
suggests it was thought to work, at least some of the time.
Writing to protect against harm was common in medieval
England. Written amulets like the girdle were a branch of charm magic, words
and rituals that invoked supernatural power, whether divine or arcane, in order
to gain protection, medicine and secret knowledge. Those seeking assistance
wrote down holy verses, sacred names, symbols, runes and pure nonsense in the
hope of harnessing the mysterious efficacy of the written word. Charms were
used to confront every manner of problem, from life-threatening illness and
terrible misfortune down to the very smallest inconvenience: to cure insomnia
or soothe an abdominal stitch; to stop vermin from getting at grain; for the
recovery of stolen goods or when someone accidently swallowed an insect. There
were charms for problems that you never even knew needed solving. One promised
to imbue children with the capacity to understand crows.
To make an amulet, it wasn’t enough to jot down a few
prayers on a spare piece of parchment. For text to be efficacious, it had to be
written in the right manner, on the right substance, and used in the right way.
Some amulet charms were simple, with incantations or prayers to be uttered.
Others recommended cryptic ceremonies: one charm for swellings instructed the
healer to take a stick of hazel, cut the patient’s name into it and fill each
of the incised letters with blood, throw it over their shoulder (or between
their thighs) into running water, stand over the patient, and then strike
through the inscription. ‘And do all that silently.’ Whether thrown into rivers
or simply carried on one’s person, most written amulets have long since worn
away. But there are many surviving manuscript books containing the recipes that
told people how to make and use such texts. Katherine Storm Hindley’s Textual
Magic rests on a catalogue of more than 1100 recipes (unfortunately
the link to its accompanying online database is currently broken – send prayers
to Isidore of Seville, patron saint of the internet). With this corpus of
evidence, Hindley reveals the ways medieval people imagined the possibilities
of writing, and the strange ways in which it might affect the world.
The mystical efficacy of text was essential to Christian
cosmology. In the beginning, the word was with God; at the end, a passage in
Revelation describes an angel appearing to St John holding an open book and
instructing him to eat it: ‘it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as
sweet as honey in your mouth.’ In the 12th-century Glossa Ordinaria,
the standard set of medieval biblical commentaries, some passages of the Bible
were said to be like food, in need of chewing over, while others were like
drink, easily swigged down. The writers of charm recipes took the metaphor
literally. Holy texts for amulets could be written on bread or sage leaves,
sketched in chalk or daubed out in the blood of the person seeking protection;
they might be worn or wrapped about the body, but also eaten, mixed into a
potion or ritually destroyed. A recipe to protect chickens instructed the user
to write the Paternoster on a piece of parchment, wash the text with water, and
have the fowl drink the inky fluid. A whole subgenre of charms for fevers
involved writing magic words on communion wafers. Such prescriptions were part
of a worldview that understood matter – including human bodies, nothing but
ashes and clay – to be radically permeable. Pilgrims to Canterbury drank holy
water from St Thomas Becket’s shrine because it was thought to be mixed with
his blood; they chewed the melted wax or burnt wicks of the candles that lay
before the altar. St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, was so holy that he took a bite
out of a relic: the arm bone of Mary Magdalene, kept at Fécamp Abbey in
Normandy. As he pointed out to the horrified onlookers, he consumed Christ’s
body every Sunday at Mass, so what was the problem?
Both spoken prayers and written charms drew on the same
logic of divine efficacy, teasing at the correspondences between holy words and
worldly ailments. The charm for a stitch instructed the sufferer to draw the
sign of the cross and sing incantations about Longinus, the soldier said to
have speared Christ in the Passion; the charm for insomnia drew on the
religious legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, their names inscribed on
leek leaves to furnish a sleeping pill. Such invocations can seem too literal-minded,
even unimaginative. But this analogical reasoning revelled in the mystical
possibilities of language, the way that words can alter things. To mark matter
with meaning – a knife or a nib on a leek leaf, a piece of parchment – was to
change the world, to play God; writing made a physical impression on the great
waxen mass of Creation. To write a charm text was to sculpt a little bit of
reality for yourself.
In a 14th-century manuscript held in the Bodleian, one
recipe gives a charm to secure favours, promising that ‘you may have whatever
you want.’ It consists of a short prayer and a sequence of letters with no
recognisable meaning, separated by crosses. At some later date, a reader went
through the text with a needle, pricking pinholes through the letter shapes of
the magical phrase; they seem to have been employing the technique known as
‘pouncing’, in which chalk or charcoal was rubbed over the pricked surface to
transfer the image onto a new sheet underneath. Magic leached through the forms
of letters like water through limestone. As Hindley points out, amuletic texts
became like relics, held close to provide succour. A 15th-century ‘charm for
the toth ache’ told sufferers to write down the name of St Apollonia – the
patron saint of dentists, known to medieval Christians for having had her teeth
knocked out when she was martyred – and carry it around with them. To feed a woman
in childbirth little pieces of butter inscribed with prayers was to alter her
substance, to infuse her body with hopeful, holy presence.
But in the great wash of substances it was easy to confuse
the world with the word, mistake effect for cause, and place one’s faith in
idols. Theologians were often uneasy about amulets because they veered so close
to breaking the first commandment. In the eighth century, Alcuin of York
suggested it was ‘better to have gospel teachings written in the mind than to
wear them around the neck scribbled on scraps of parchment’. Thomas Aquinas
held that amulets were not inherently wrong, but no faith should be placed in
‘some irrelevance, for instance that the locket [containing the words] is
triangular and the like, which has no bearing on the reverence due to God and
the saints’. Though amulets were not prohibited in theory, in practice they
were associated with forms of lay superstition that Church authorities sought
to discourage. In 1448 John Dixson, a cook, was hauled before inquisitors of
the bishop of Lincoln ‘for invocations of malign spirits, in order to find
stolen goods’. He was said to have placed a key inside a psalter, along with ‘a
bill containing the names of those who were suspected’; if the identification
was correct, the book would tremble. This charm was at least more hygienic than
his backup plan, which involved the hand of a corpse.
Hindley is a sure-footed guide to this strange terrain; she
maintains scholarly solemnity while discussing elf hiccups and finds a way to
translate the phrase ‘I adjure you, egg, by the living God’ from encrypted
Latin. She traces the use of amulets across the whole span of the Middle Ages,
and the ways it was affected by linguistic change and the spread of literacy.
With charms, spoken and written language took different trajectories. Recipes
generally gave oral incantations in vernacular: Old English, in the period
before 1100; Anglo-Norman French in the 12th and 13th centuries; and
Middle English in the 14th and 15th. By contrast, the texts inscribed on
amulets were almost always written in Latin, the mysterious language of
official religion. Before the Norman Conquest, some efficacious words were
composed in Old English. But after 1100 only around 1 per cent of recipes
specified any English for amulets – all of them variations on the same charm to
prevent a haw in a horse’s eye. Even as vernacular writing in every genre (and
even translations of the Bible) became common in the later Middle Ages,
amuletic texts continued to reserve a special efficacy for Latin.
Yet these texts were far from conservative. The more obtuse
the language, the more magical it might be. Amulets made free use of Greek
letters, Hebrew, runes and all kinds of luxuriant gibberish: ‘Byrnice, byrnice,
lurlure iehe aius, aius, aius’ (this is the charm for elf hiccups). It is
pleasing to learn that even ‘abracadabra’ is a term of great antiquity. In the
third-century writings of Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, circulated in the later
Middle Ages, readers are told to write out the phrase like this:
abracadabra
bracadabra
racadabra
acadabra
cadabra
adabra
dabra
abra
bra
ra
a
This amuletic triangle was to be worn around the neck
suspended from a linen thread, to protect against dangerous illness.
Amulets also drew on sham alphabets, pseudo-writing and
non-signifying marks. In a manuscript of the physician John Bradmore, a charm
for spasms instructed that the magical phrase ‘Thebal Guthe Guthanay’ should be
‘written in Greek letters lest they should be seen easily by anyone’. Although
he made a stab at Hellenising a few of the symbols, most look like some kind of
alien semaphore, an alphabet having a bad dream. Bradmore is better known for
inventing a device that safely pulled an arrow from the face of the future
Henry V, wounded in battle. I wonder what kinds of words issued from the royal
tongue.
Hindley argues that the 14th and 15th centuries
saw greater concern with the secrecy of amuletic texts, a surprising side
effect of the spread of literacy: as more people came to be able to read,
particularly in English, it became harder to maintain the idea that writing
contained occult power. Without mystery, there could be no efficacy. Another
copy of Bradmore’s spasm charm put it bluntly: the words must be ‘kept secretly
to prevent everyone from learning the charm, in case by chance it should lose
its God-given power’. Keeping medicinal knowledge mysterious was also a means
of preventing folk healers from horning in on the work of physicians. In 1382,
Roger Clerk was prosecuted in London for impersonating a physician, after
prescribing ‘an old parchment ... a leaf of some book’ for fevers.
Asked what was written there, he recited some Latin. But when the aldermen came
to read it, none of what he said was in fact on the sheet. He was sentenced to
be ridden through the city carrying the illicit tools of his trade: urine
flasks, a whetstone and the amulet itself.
Concern about fraudsters was married to a greater anxiety
about the efficacy of charm magic. Even the recipes themselves begin to hint at
the existence of doubt, including a note after a charm: ‘it is proven.’
Although there was no concept of scientific experimentation as we would
recognise it, writers chose to anticipate readers’ scepticism with an appeal to
experience. An elaborate 15th-century charm for festering wounds claimed to be
‘an experiment I proved, though [it] ... seems more that it be
witchcraft than wellness’. In some parts of Europe, there was a swell of fear
in the later Middle Ages about occult magic, leading to a number of witch
trials. But in England authorities were more worried about heresy: the Lollard
movement, which spread from the writings of John Wycliffe, threatened the
fundamental tenets of ecclesiastical authority by perceiving a great deal of
‘superstition’ in traditional religion itself. Lollards condemned the many holy
relics, miraculous shrines and weeping images of late medieval Catholicism as
false idols, and even challenged the transubstantiation of the Eucharist – not
Christ’s body, but a metaphor. In this context, it became much harder for
ecclesiastical authorities to sustain the long-standing accord between
quasi-magical folk practices and official Church teaching; Lollards loved
nothing more than to point out the similarities. Among the ‘Twelve Conclusions
of the Lollards’, a list anonymously posted on the doors of Westminster Abbey
in 1395, was a condemnation of the blessings of bread, wax, water, salt and oil
in parish churches up and down the country – ‘the very practice of necromancy
rather than of the holy theology’.
Lollards sought to purify religion of magic, to denude all
supernatural power by pointing to the rotten earthiness of an unenchanted
world. Margery Baxter, tried for heresy in Norwich in 1429, reasoned with her
inquisitor that ‘a thousand priests and more every day make a thousand gods [in
the form of the Eucharist] and they eat such gods ... and emit them
from the rear into foul stinking privies, where you can find as many gods as
you want if you care to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of
London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’.
But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people
who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a fervent belief in the power of
ritual words. In 1520, Henry Lillyngstone was charged by a Church court for
using magic to heal people. Asked how his cures worked, he replied that he had
just one medicine, an English charm: ‘Jesus that savid bothe you and me from
all maner deseasses I aske for seynt cherite our lord iff it be your wille.’
The judge asked him if he was literate; no, he said, ‘he had this knowledge
from the grace of God.’ He was told to hold the Book of Gospels and swear an
oath that he would stop.
As rates of literacy continued to rise, the use of charm
magic came to mark out people who remained at the margins of lettered society.
A manual for priests issued by Caxton in 1489 wearily addressed the continued
use of ‘wrytynges and bryvettes [letters] full of crosses and other wrytynges’
for protection against drowning, fire, sickness and general peril. People who
sold such amulets, or who refused to stop using them after being warned, should
be excommunicated. ‘But yf they be symple people and so ignoraunt ... they
[may] be excused.’
Through the Middle Ages spoken words had been granted a
special power in the fabric of social reality. They exercised a binding force
on people: marriage contracts, commercial bargains, formal accusations, oaths
of innocence. The social contract was not a metaphor – it consisted in the oral
promises that underlay almost every kind of relationship. Written charms could
stand enigmatically apart from this world, the magic of inscription efficacious
because it was distinctive. But the proliferation of writing in medieval
society unbalanced the ecology of the oral and the written. Increasingly,
everyday life was transcribed, registered and archived. In chanceries and
schoolrooms, in cabinets and deed chests, parchments and papers piled up like
some terrible curse run out of control; parishioners needed a certificate to
prove they had confessed before they took Easter communion, written
testimonials to prove they hadn’t been married before they took their vows. The
sorcery of writing had escaped the world of elves and begun to infuse the
enchantments of education and bureaucracy.
In an earlier era, it had been easier to maintain the holy
mysteries at the heart of inscription, to celebrate the strange relations of
meaning and reality. Thomas of Chobham, writing at the turn of the 13th century,
had it from the natural philosophers that ‘the force of nature is especially
placed in three things: in words, and herbs, and in stones. Although we know
something about the power of herbs and stones, about the power of words we have
known little or nothing.’ It’s a mystery we’re still unravelling.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment