Tag Archives: middle ages

Medieval Monday – When Medicine was “Humorous”

Posted on May 21, 2012 | 1 Comment

In his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee traces the history of cancer as it has been seen in the past and continues on through the innovations in cancer treatment in the 20th century and on to the exciting research going on now and the possible future of cancer treatment.  It’s a really cool book.  But one of the things that struck me was his statement that cancer has always existed and has been identified since ancient times, but that other diseases generally killed people before cancer could take hold.

Mukherjee spends some time talking about cancer in the Middle Ages in his book.  The observations he makes about how Medieval doctors viewed what we would later call cancer are not only fascinating, they are surprisingly advanced.

Medical knowledge in the Middle Ages, as you might imagine, was light years behind what we know now.  This was before germ theory, before an understanding of contagion, and well before almost all effective surgery and anything but naturopathic medicines.

The concept of the Four Humors was originally devised by none other than Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine.  In around the 4th century BC he proposed the theory that the human body was comprised of four cardinal fluids, or humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm.  Sickness, in Hippocrates’ view, was caused by an imbalance of the humors.

Several hundred years later, in around 199AD, the Roman physician Claudius Galen advanced the theory by stating that all illnesses could be classified in relation to these four humors.  All of the humors were created inside of the body, rather than inhaled or ingested, but the foods that a person ate or the stage of life that someone was in could affect the balance of the humors.  To regulate the body and relieve illness it was sometimes necessary to purge the excess of one humor or another.

Galen and Hippocrates

This is where the long-held idea of bleeding in cases of fever came from.  Blood was the hot and moist humor, so if someone was too hot and moist they had too much blood.  Break out the leeches!

The ideas of Hippocrates and Galen shifted east after the fall of the Roman Empire.  In the Islamic world they were merged with similar medical theories coming out of India.  The idea of the humors continued and was used for centuries while medical knowledge in the west floundered.

The problem in the west after the fall of the Roman Empire was the same as any other problem of the Early Middle Ages.  Civilization became rural and isolated and knowledge was controlled by the Church, which had its own agenda.  Early Medieval medicine was a strange conglomeration of folklore and herbalism and Christian mysticism.  Medieval people were just as likely to consult with the local wise woman or blacksmith for herbal remedies and spells or charms as they were to pray for healing or go on a pilgrimage to a distant holy sight.

I have no idea, but it made me laugh. A lot.

Because in this time before germ theory, when the most scientific explanation offered for disease was an imbalance of humors, people were as likely as not to believe that an illness was caused by God’s wrath or some sin on the part of the afflicted.

But it’s not as if Medieval scholars weren’t trying to figure things out.

Medical knowledge and inquiry began to change in the 12th century, the High Middle Ages.  This was the same era that the great universities of Europe were established and began to flourish.  And you guessed it, one popular course of study was medicine.  Although medical advances were just as likely to be discovered and practiced at monasteries, which were some of the first hospitals of the Middle Ages.

Many Medieval medical advances were not so much new discoveries as deeper observation and understanding of long-held herbal remedies.  One increasingly popular theory was that God had created an herbal cure for every disease that existed.  He also “marked” herbs throughout the natural world with their use.  For example, skullcap, an herb used to cure headaches, looked like tiny skulls.  Medieval physicians might not have been aware of the exact properties of the herbs they cultivated or the chemistry of how they worked, but they built an extensive knowledge of what herbs cured which diseases.

Surgery also “advanced”, if you can call it that, to the point where simple operations could be performed with a fair success rate.  Although with the knowledge of infection and the importance of sterilization still hundreds of years off surgery had its own problems to overcome.

So what about cancer?  Mukherjee hints in his book that Medieval physicians discovered a few things about cancer that it would take modern doctors a while to catch on to.  What is that all about?

It all goes back to the humors.

When I first learned about the four humors there was one thing that baffled me.  Blood I get.  Phlegm is a pretty easy concept to understand as well.  Yellow bile makes sense when you consider things like urine and liver fluids.  But black bile?  What the heck was that?

There were only two conditions caused by black bile: cancer and depression.

I’m going to start a whole new paragraph because I believe that’s super important.  Cancer and depression.  Black bile.  The Medieval belief was that black bile was systemic.  It wasn’t located in just one place.  Unless there was something wrong and it built up in a particular area.  Those log-jam build-ups of black bile were also known as tumors.

One thing Galen knew that Medieval physicians agreed with was that if you had an imbalance of black bile, if you had cancer, it was inadvisable to attempt to lance or surgically remove the tumor.  The observation was that even if life wasn’t long, patients still lived longer if you did nothing than if you treated the disease.  This was the precursor to the modern discovery that often a tumor suppresses latent cancer elsewhere in the body.  Yes, medical research within the last few decades has discovered that if you remove a tumor, quite often the cancer metastasizes throughout the body, killing someone faster.  Score one for Medieval medicine!

But what I find even more fascinating is that modern research is confirming more and more that there is a link between depression and stress and cancer.  It is well-documented that patients with a more positive outlook live longer than those who give up.  Coincidence or did they know about that in the Middle Ages?  It goes beyond that.  Stress causes cancer.  More and more studies show a link.  And while that probably has a lot more to do with the physiological presentation of stress in the body, lowering the immune system and interfering with all sorts of other things, the fact that folks a thousand years ago had made the connection is pretty cool to this Medieval Apologist.

Oh, one other thing?  Years ago I worked for an herbalist for quite some time.  I have never been one for taking allopathic medicines.  I’ve always been hypersensitive to them.  I can’t take a Tylenol without being knocked flat.  Three baby aspirins are enough to get rid of my headaches.  So I have found that herbal medicines work really, really well for me.  I’ve taken several different things over the years with very good results.  I think that’s because I have a “clean” system … a Medieval system?  It’s enough to convince me that medicine back in the day was far more effective than modern hubris assumes it was.

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Medieval Monday – Death in the Middle Ages

Posted on May 14, 2012 | 5 Comments

I have always taken great offense to the idea that everyone in the Middle Ages died young.  Along with telling me Medieval people were dirty and ignorant, the quickest way to annoy the living daylights out of me is to tell me that hardly anyone in the Middle Ages lived past 40.

IT’S NOT TRUE.

So I started out a couple of weeks ago doing some research, compiling some names and dates of Medieval people along with their causes of death, so that I could do a blog post about life expectancy in the Middle Ages.

Then literally in the middle of that research I received a call telling me that my older brother was diagnosed with cancer.  Everything got put on hold.  I spent more than a week in Ohio with him and his family before I needed to come home.  Two days ago, on Saturday afternoon, my loud, vibrant, larger-than-life brother passed away.  His cancer wasn’t discovered until the very, very end.  He suffered a little for a very short time before passing peacefully out of this life and on to whatever is next.

That got me thinking.

While it is not true that everyone in the Middle Ages died before they reached 40, many people did.  Even I, Medieval Apologist that I am, can’t argue with the statistics.  But I think that people in the modern era looking back at the Middle Ages misunderstand what death was really like in that world.

My brother passed away in a hospital, surrounded by machinery that told an entire staff of nurses all kinds of statistics about his breathing, pulse, and blood pressure.  Had he lived in the Middle Ages his death would have been sudden, surprising, and baffling.  There would have been no MRI to find the tumors or nurses to give him pain meds.  The best doctors of the time might have examined him and determined that he had a fever or an imbalance of the humors or even that he was possessed.  I don’t think the actual cancer would have ever been discovered since autopsies were hardly known and considered a grave sin in the Middle Ages.

So what about all of those people who died in the Middle Ages?  What about the families and friends that were left behind?  What did they think of all this?

My research on life expectancies in the Middle Ages consisted of going on Wikipedia, looking up well-known figures and finding their date of birth and death and scanning the article for a cause of death.  I also followed all links to other people that were mentioned in the articles.  I figured Wikipedia was as good a place as any to do this because the information I was looking for was simple.  I had over 100 people and their dates and causes of death on my list before I stopped.  (I’ll do a full post on life expectancies once I do a little more research)

At least one third of all of the women on that list died in childbirth.  At least one third of the men on that list died of dysentery or other battlefield wounds while on campaign.  Other causes of death included the plague, food poisoning, murder, execution, unknown illness, and my personal favorite “struck down by the hand of God”.  A small number of people lived into their 60s and even 70s with no cause of death listed, leading me to believe they just got old.

From this I conclude that death in the Middle Ages came suddenly for most people.  While any woman going into labor or any man charging into battle would know there was a strong chance they wouldn’t make it out alive, few people had warning that the end was actually near.  Like my brother, they were probably blindsided by the cause of their death.  And because no one knew when death would come for them, life must have been conducted very differently than it is in the modern world.

There was actually a lot written in the 14th century by people who experienced the ultimate in Medieval death: The Black Death.  The shock of the plague left people throughout Europe reeling from the sudden, horrible demise of so many of the people they knew.  Boccaccio and his friends fled from Venice and kept themselves amused (and quarantined) by telling themselves salacious stories that were later written into the Decameron.  The reaction to death in this case was to live it up, to be as hedonistic as possible.  Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.

On the other hand, many people’s reaction to the Black Death was extreme piety.  If this world had nothing to offer but hardship and brutality, then why not cash in all your chips early and devote yourself to God.  Of course, in the case of the flagellates, this meant extreme physical punishment.  Which just underlines how miserable the 14th century was.

But what about the rest of the Middle Ages?  How did people react to death and dying in the prosperous and enlightened 12th century?  Or in the age of Charlemagne?  How did they react with the threat of Viking marauders or civil wars or Muslim invasions?

Well we don’t really know.  But I would posit that because of its sudden swoop and inevitable presence, death wasn’t actually as big of a bugaboo as it is today.  Yeah, you heard me.  If there’s one thing that Medieval people knew that I think modern folks have lost touch with it’s that life is meant to be lived without worrying about death.  Death will come soon enough, so act while you still can.

Why do I think this?  Because one of the other things I discovered in my research about life expectancy and the causes of people’s deaths in the Middle Ages is that people rarely stood still for death.  Just about every woman whose husband was struck down at an early age remarried within a year.  Every man who lost his wife found another one.  Military campaigns continued, monasteries continued to reform and help their surrounding areas, and educational institutions continued to advance learning.  Furthermore, I think that your average Medieval young person would be able to name so many more friends and loved ones who had died than a modern person would.  Death, sudden as it was, wouldn’t have been a shock.  It would have been as common as birth, marriage, or any other life event.

So while modern people discuss how unfortunate it was that Medieval people died so young, I think that Medieval people would shake their heads over how worked up modern people get about the end of a life.  After all, death is something we all experience at some point and none of us really know when.  Maybe we should approach life more like Boccaccio and his buddies and enjoy every moment that we live and breathe with joyful abandon instead of fighting tooth and nail to stave off the inevitable with drugs and machines and treatments that extend our length of life while lowering its quality.

As my niece told me about her dad, my brother, the doctors said that even if he had been diagnosed six months earlier the outcome would have been the same. But he would have spent those six months in emotional and probably physical agony due to chemotherapy.  My niece said she was kind of glad he spent those six months happy, not knowing anything was wrong.  I think I agree with her.  It was a very Medieval way to go.

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Medieval Monday – Theater in the Middle Ages

Posted on April 16, 2012 | 4 Comments

Theater, like pretty much everything else in the Middle Ages, disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire and was reborn in new forms.  Also like pretty much everything in the Middle Ages, it fell into two factions: Church-approved and not Church-approved.  As you might imagine, these two forms were dramatically different (see what I did there?).  One was loose and disorganized, the other was strictly formal and moralistic.  Neither was anything like what we see on stages today, but strangely enough, it was the evolving combination of the two that lead to what so many people consider to be the height of theater for all time: Shakespeare.

But let’s take a step back.

In Rome the theater was a popular form of entertainment.  It wasn’t terribly original though.  The great Greek dramatists of the Classical era had set the bar high.  Roman theater was a pale copy of the Greek original.  And when Rome collapsed the only part of the theater scene that survived in any recognizable form were the nomadic mines, storytellers, and jugglers.  They continued to travel throughout southern Europe, putting on shows to entertain the masses and occasionally appearing at one court or another.

Make no mistake, these folks didn’t perform plays.  Sure, storytellers gave dramatic representations, epic stories were reenacted, and there was even music involved.  But it certainly wasn’t Shakespeare yet.  Traveling minstrels, troubadours, and jesters were lucky if they could make a living performing for courts and town festivals.  There wasn’t enough money for elaborate settings, costumes, and certainly not anything as grand as a theater.

Theaters may not have existed yet, but stages certainly did.  By the High Middle Ages these traveling bands of actors and musicians were making more and more use of pageant wagons.  Keeping in mind that I’m condensing a LOT of theater history here, over time Medieval players made bigger and better use of these traveling stages.  They were transportable and allowed for slightly more elaborate sets than were available in the Early Middle Ages.  Best of all, they could be set up and taken down relatively quickly.  Especially useful if Church officials were on your tail.

The Church didn’t approve of these secular entertainments.  They had their own form of theater going.  Liturgical Drama of the Middle Ages evolved as a way to teach churchgoer about the Bible and Christian doctrine at a time when most common people couldn’t read.  Liturgical Dramas began as dramatizations of the stories in the Bible.  The Christmas story and Easter story were particularly popular.  Over time, however, the subject matter and text of these dramas became more involved.  It even became political.  But more about that in a second.

The earliest Liturgical Dramas were performed in the churches and cathedrals of Europe.  The scenes were played in each of the archways made by the columns that held the soaring cathedral ceilings up.  Sort of like the Catholic stations of the cross meets a traveling trunk show.  Because remember, in those days there were no pews in cathedrals and people could move around as the drama progressed.

These presentations of religious and moral subjects were tremendously popular in an illiterate culture that lived for festival days.  They were so popular, in fact, that after a while they began to be performed outside of the churches.  Raise your hand if you had to read the play Everyman in high school.  *raises hand*  That, my friends, was the blockbuster hit of 1510.  It was the culmination of a tradition that had been in the making for hundreds of years.  Plays that taught a moral lesson in a dramatic form captured the imagination of the Medieval person.

The Church, of course, knew this.  And that’s where everything fell apart – or came together, depending on how you look at it.

I wrote a whole series of blog posts last year about why the 14th century sucked.  Between the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the Papal Schism things were looking bleak.  It was around this time that the Church began to use drama as a way of swaying people’s opinions.  Morality plays?  They were a perfect way to spread propaganda about one political-religious cause or another.  The world after the 14th century saw the Church losing its power to secular kings who for the first time saw that they could take more power than the Church was willing to give.  One of the ways the Church reacted was by winning the hearts and minds of common people through religious drama.  So yes, theater has always walked the dangerous line of the political.

When Henry VIII ran into all his trouble with the Church and eventually ditched it to start his own he forbade religious-themed plays from being performed.  Queen Elizabeth I did the same thing in her reign to squelch the furor that the Protestant-Catholic struggles in her sister Queen Mary’s time had caused.  Other kingdoms throughout Europe followed suit.  But theater had become super popular by then and the people wanted more.  What to do?

The answer lay partially in those goofy bands of traveling players with their secular subjects and non-Church-approved delivery and in the rediscovery of the Greek classics at the dawn of the Renaissance.  The void was filled with non-religious material that sought to meld these elements with Humanist thought and ideas.  Think Dante.  The focus shifted away from Biblical ideals and towards the dramatization of human struggle and emotion.  Of which our dear William Shakepeare was the master.

But now we’re way, way beyond Medieval theater and into a whole new world of thoughts and ideas.

So was Medieval theater merely cheap entertainment for nobles and masses or the Church’s way of teaching people how to behave with visual representations?  Well, yeah, kind of.  But it’s important to remember that without the developments of thought and structure of storytelling in the Middle Ages, a genius like Shakespeare wouldn’t have had a hungry audience to play to.

 

[This installment of Medieval Monday is brought to you by the Masters in Theatre from Villanova University that I earned in 2002 and will be paying for until I'm 65.  Glad I could put it to use. ;) ]

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Great Romances – Tristan and Isolde

Posted on April 12, 2012 | 1 Comment

Ah!  You’ve got to love a centuries old love story, celebrated throughout the ages, a legend remade as an opera and a film, and enduring love story … that isn’t really a love story.

The story of Tristan and Isolde was one of the epic stories of the Middle Ages.  It was retold time and again with countless variations and outcomes.  It endured for centuries.  But for whatever reason it isn’t really talked about much today.  Sure, there was a pretty cool film made about it a couple of years ago starring James Franco and Sophia Myles, but other than that you don’t hear much about it these days.

It’s a crying shame.  Because it’s a good story.  And depending on which variation you hear it actually isn’t much of a love story at all.  Which is why it’s so cool.

Here is my favorite version of the tale.

Tristan was a great Cornish knight.  He fought in the service of King Mark, his surrogate father.  In some versions Mark is his uncle.  Tristan goes to Ireland, fights an epic battle, and kills Morholt.  Morholt just happens to be Isolde’s fiancé.  As a prize Tristan snatches up Isolde, intent on bringing her back to King Mark as his bride.

Isolde hates Tristan.  I mean, she seriously, seriously hates him.  He killed her fiancé, after all.  Isolde is also a powerful healer, capable of making amazing potions.  On the boat ride back to Cornwall she concocts a deadly poison, intent on killing Tristan.  But her nurse swaps out the deadly poison with a powerful love potion.  Bot Tristan and Isolde drink the potion (Isolde was feeling a little suicidal after the death of her fiancé).  And BOOM!  They fall in love.

(In some versions Isolde makes the love potion so that she will fall in love with her intended, King Mark, but she and Tristan drink it instead.)

So these two people who just can’t stand one another are suddenly magically hot for each other.  Tristan delivers Isolde to King Mark.  Isolde and King Mark get married.  Isolde actually likes King Mark.  He’s a nice guy.  But because of the dratted love potion she continues to burn for Tristan, and Tristan for Isolde.

They can’t help themselves.  The love potion forces them to seek each other out as lovers.  It takes some serious conniving, but they meet in the forest and proceed to have wild monkey sex all day … until King Mark (or his henchmen in some versions) find them.

Well, Tristan and Isolde manage to use trickery to escape adultery charges, but King Mark is heartbroken.  Especially since the forced lovers keep meeting up and getting caught.  Finally, really pissed off, King Mark decides to hang Tristan and burn Isolde at the stake.  But Tristan miraculously escapes and saves Isolde.

At least that’s one version.

In another version Tristan is so ashamed after he is caught with Isolde that he leaves and goes to France … and marries someone else named Isolde who looks exactly like the first Isolde.  Many years later, when Tristan is mortally wounded in battle, he knows that the only one who can save him is the real Isolde, because she’s an amazing healer.  He sends for her, but his wife Isolde number two is jealous and makes him believe she isn’t coming.  He dies in despair, and when Isolde arrives and finds Tristan dead she dies of a broken heart.

Of course, another version of the story is that the love potion only lasts for three years.  Then it wears off.  Personally, I think this version has the best potential of them all.  Imagine hating someone so much that you would try to poison them to death, drinking a love potion instead that caused the two of you to have wild monkey sex, then having it suddenly wear off one day years later.  Personally, I think that version could be awesome.

So yeah, I think it’s time we bring this classic story in all of its various glories out in public again.  It’s as good as any modern melodrama.

Does anybody have any other versions of the story that they’ve heard?

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Medieval Monday – Storytellers

Posted on April 2, 2012 | 2 Comments

I’ve often wondered who I would be if I lived in the Middle Ages.  I’m a writer.  It’s in my soul.  But were there writers in the Middle Ages?  More importantly, were there women writers?

Well, the answer to that is a resounding YES.  But depending on when and where you were it took a different form.

From the earliest days of the Middle Ages, those good old days when the Roman Empire was collapsing as Germanic tribes moved in and everyone’s way of life changed, there were storytellers.  In fact, there isn’t a time in all of human history when there were NOT storytellers.  As long as there have been people there have been stories.  In ancient cultures storytellers were revered as shamans and magicians.  The oral tradition meant that stories were passed down from generation to generation.  When the written word was invented, be that cuneiform, hieroglyphics, or runes, it was considered powerful magic.  It meant that the storyteller could miraculously tell their stories without even being present.  The stories would live on long after they did.  It was a miracle.

This oral tradition was what kept a lot of stories going in the Early Middle Ages.  Up until about the year 1000 there really wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity to write things down.  But the oral tradition, from stories told around the family hearth to bards and theatrical troupes performing in noble courts, was alive and kicking.  These court performers represented a combination of literary and theatrical tradition.  Depending on where you were, their stories could be anything from high-minded lessons in morality to bawdy tales that would make the faint of heart blush.

But none of this was particularly organized, nor was it written down.  In the Early Middle Ages the Church had the market cornered on the written word.  As you might expect, they were a little too busy copying and preserving the Bible and other religious tracts to spend any time writing down frivolous stories.

That all changed at the dawn of the High Middle Ages.

As early as 1050 manuscripts begin to appear that have nothing at all to do with religion, the Church, or Latin.  And remember, this was still a time before the introduction of the printing press, so these books and manuscripts involved a lot of time and effort.  The fact that suddenly it was seen as important to put the time and effort into creating them is key to understanding the development of the medieval mind.

This new literature was written in the vernacular.  It’s subject matter was secular.  And in the early days a lot of it was written by students at the newly formed universities of Europe.  The earliest of these universities were the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Paris (mid-11th century), and the University of Oxford (1196)*.  Granted, in a lot of cases those students were there to study religion, and law and medicine and science, but the point is that these schools were not monastic.

The students wrote about the kind of things that students wrote about.  They wrote about how much they hated their classes and professors, about their sexual conquests, and about beer.  Well, more or less.  The point was that they were writing, their work was being shared, and it was not stories about the high ideals of the Church and the spiritual life.  Although in the end a lot of these student stories came back around to hoping that God would forgive them for their excesses and take them up to Heaven where they could be with the angels.

So that was one kind of new High Medieval storytelling.  Another of great importance was the emergence of the troubadour tradition in the south of France.

Troubadour jam session

This is where the introduction of the concept of “courtly love” happened.  Of course, as just about any Medieval scholar will tell you, there’s a huge debate about what exactly “courtly love” means and whether it was practiced in reality or not.  The troubadours wrote and sang love songs in the vernacular.  But some of the stories were about pure and chaste love of a knight and his lady and some were explicitly sexual about affairs and the like.  Also, some of the troubadours were women.  Yes they were.  And quite often they would sing about their unrequited love or affairs that had gone wrong.

In the north of France (which includes England as well, seeing as post-Norman Conquest the nobility of England spoke French) a slightly different take on storytelling emerged.  Born out of the same tradition as the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (which I was forced to read in high school) came the adventure-romance.  These are stories like The Song of Roland and El Cid.  They usually involved an epic hero on a quest for a great monarch, frequently Charlemagne, who gives his life for his goal.  Again, secular but with a religious bent, told in the vernacular at court.  These stories were organized and formulaic.

There is a lot of evidence that these new forms of storytelling came to the West through its contact with the Muslim world through the Crusades and trade.  The traditions of romantic stories had existed in the Arab world for ages.  Think Arabian Nights.

But then something happened that was truly special.  Eastern influences met the southern French troubadours and their “love songs”.  The troubadour tradition spread north and bumped up against the heroic adventure tales.  Suddenly the flowering culture of the High Middle Ages developed a thirst for more.  They demanded a story that was both heroic and romantic and infused with spiritual elements.  They demanded literature that pulled even further away from the controlling Church and invested idealism in the individual and their personal quest.

Their demand for something more began to be answered by a secular clerk writing under the patronage of the bishop of Lincoln, Geoffrey of Monmouth.  His revolutionary work published in 1136, History of the Kings of Britain, was actually a compilation and retelling of stories from Geoffrey’s homeland of Wales.  And with the introduction of his most important character, King Arthur, a whole new world of storytelling and thought was born.

But more about that next week.

*These are the dates that people began teaching at these universities, although the University of Paris and the University of Oxford weren’t officially incorporated and recognized until a few decades later

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