Cadfael: Medieval Murders

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Cadfael, Derek Jacobi, Legal Stuff, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Medieval Wales, Monks and Nuns, Religious Stuff, Shrewsbury Abbery, TV Shows

I recently discovered that Amazon Prime has the 1990s tv series Cadfael, which is based on the Cadfael Chronicles of Ellis Peters, the pen name of English author Edith Pargeter, who produced a total of 20 well-received murder mysteries from the 1970s to the 1990s featuring a 12^th century English monk, Brother Cadfael (Derek Jacobi in the show), as her detective. None of the episodes really gives me enough for a blog post, so I figured I would just review the show as a whole.

Pargeter was a self-trained scholar with somewhat idiosyncratic interests. She was deeply interested in the history of Shropshire (where she was born and lived much of her life) and Wales (she had Welsh ancestry), and generally did an excellent job of researching the medieval background of her stories. She also worked for a period as a pharmacist’s assistant, which introduced her to traditional herbal remedies, which comes through in Cadfael, who has a deep knowledge of botany and plant-based medicine. She also taught herself Czech and translated Czech poetry into English.

As a result of this, the Cadfael Chronicles are generally quite well-researched and Pargeter was at pains to make them as historically accurate as possible. Although Cadfael is fictional, his life story (left Wales to participate in the First Crusade, lived in the Holy Land for several years where he learned herbalism, and then spent years as a sailor before feeling the call to become a monk in England) is basically possible from an historical standpoint, if perhaps a bit unlikely. (Incidentally, the Cadfael Chronicles are often credited with popularizing the genre of the historical murder mystery, although the first such work seems to be Agatha Christie’s Death Comes As the End, which is set in Middle Kingdom Egypt.)

In general, the episodes stick reasonably close to the plot of the novels, although in some cases the ending is tweaked for cinematic purposes or the killer is changed. The big exception is the last episode, The Pilgrim of Hate, which bares only a superficial resemblance to the novel.

The production quality of series, however, varies from season to season. The first season generally had decent costuming but sets that really feel like studio sets. The second season has better sets but much poorer costumes (in The Virgin in the Ice, Ermina is dressed in an atrocious velour dress with a floral print bib that looks like it was borrowed from a late Victorian spinster). The fourth season generally had much better sets, with the abbey scenes feeling like they might have been filmed in an actual monastery. But the layout of Brother Cadfael’s pharmacy keeps changing (its two doors keep moving around and the stove magically moves from one end of the building to the other. At one point, a character flees from the pharmacy by jumping up on a counter and kicking out a window despite the fact that there should be an unlocked door less than five feet to his right.

You can’t get a very clear look at it, but that dress is really atrocious

 

The Civil War

A major feature of the series is the Civil War between Stephen and Matilda. In 1135 King Henry I of England died leaving only a single legitimate child, his daughter Matilda (although he fathered a staggering 24 illegitimate ones). Although Henry had worked for more than a decade to ensure that his barons would accept Matilda as queen regnant, as soon as he died, his nephew Stephen usurped the English throne, triggering a civil war that would last in one form or another for two decades, ending only when Stephen agreed to disinherit his son in favor of Matilda’s son Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II.

Sean Pertwee, season 1’s Hugh Beringar, with Jacobi’s Cadfael

Claims that the civil war triggered two decades of anarchy are wildly exaggerated. Henry II had a vested interest in playing up the lawlessness of Stephen’s reign because it gave him an excuse to extend royal power in new ways, and most of the sources that describe the ‘anarchy’ date from his reign. But the Civil War created a situation where political loyalties were divided, and all royal officials and grants of privilege could be challenged by supporters of the other side. Some political figures, including the English bishops and the government of London, switched sides on multiple occasions.

Pargeter’s depiction of the violence and instability is broadly in keeping with mid-20^th century historical understanding of the Civil War and the ‘anarchy’, and she used the complexities of the Civil War effectively, with her novels all set in the period of greatest instability, from 1138 to 1145. Shrewsbury was always under Stephen’s authority, and Hugh Berengar, who as under-sheriff and later sheriff of Shropshire represents his authority, is always loyal to Stephen, But the possibility of political intrigue and side-switching lurks under the surface at Shrewsbury and features in a couple of the stories (St Peter’s Fair, The Raven in the Foregate), and the civil war comes to Shrewsbury in One Corpse Too Many, which opens during the Siege of Shrewsbury in 1138. Stephen really did order the hanging of the garrison of the castle after capturing it, and Pargeter skillfully inserts a murder mystery into the story when someone disposes of a murder victim among the 94 executed men.

So the show gets a solid A rating in terms of its fidelity to the political background, although in season 1, Shrewsbury has only a wood wall around it (note the picture above), when it probably would have had a stone wall.

 

Shrewsbury Abbey

Another facet of the show that is basically accurate is the depiction of the monastery at the heart of the story. It was a real place and the two abbots who govern it, Abbot Heribert (Peter Copley) and Abbot Radulphus (Terrence Hardiman), were real historical people, although Pargeter invented their personalities. The rather sour Prior Robert (Michael Culver), who is one of the thorns in Cadfael’s side throughout the series, eventually succeeded Radulphus as abbot in 1148.

The late medieval nave is the only part of Shrewsbury Abbey to survive the 16th Dissolution of the Monasteries

 

Virtually every episode shows the monks singing in the choir during various canonical hours (the daily cycle of the liturgy), and in some episodes there are visitors attending the services, which is plausible. But characters come and go during the service, particularly Cadfael and Brother Oswin (Mark Charnock) and never seem to be reprimanded for it. Skipping the liturgy was a big no-no, since it was central to the Benedictine conception of monasticism as ora et labora, “prayer and labor”.

The Devil’s Novice shows the monks sleeping collectively in a dormitory, which is very much in line with what the Benedictine Rule requires, and the novice’s nightmares understandable disrupt all the other brothers. When Brother Jerome discovers that the novice has kept a small memento of his secular life in violation of the Rule’s prohibition on owning private property, Jerome rightly confiscates it and, a bit maliciously, burns it.

Despite that, the cinematic Shrewsbury Abbey stands out as being rather lax in its observance of the Rule of St Benedict, because Cadfael comes and goes almost at will, as does Oswin, and female visitors to the abbey wander in and out and interact with various monks, particularly Cadfael, without any chaperoning. The 12^th century saw a growing sense of the sexual threat women posed to monks, so such free movement would have been highly irregular. Although Prior Robert is depicted in a negative light, his objections to Cadfael’s running around are in fact probably close to how would the abbots and prior would have responded to Cadfael’s inability to keep his vow of stability (staying in one place and not leaving the abbey). A common monastic saying in the period was “a monk out of his abbey is like a fish out of water”. Had Cadfael been a real person, he would certainly have been much more cautious about being alone with women.

In one episode, there’s a very nice scene where the monks are barbering each other. That’s exactly the way it was done. The monks would sit down in a line and half of them would barber the other and then they would switch places.

The Edith Pargeter window at Shrewsbury Abbey Church

 

St Winifred

The first novel, A Morbid Taste for Bones (which is the seventh episode of the series) deals with the translation of St Winifred’s body from Gwytherin in North Wales. This is a solidly historical event, and Prior Robert wrote an account of the translation of the saint’s body to Shrewsbury Abbey. St Winifred became an important English saint (despite actually being Welsh) as a result of Shrewsbury Abbey’s efforts to promote her cult.

The seal of the fraternity of Shrewsbury Abbey, depicting the beheading of St Winifred

The episode somewhat distorts the facts. Winifred was already revered at Gwytherin and therefore would have had a shrine that included her body in it, whereas in the show, she is buried in an unmarked grave and the monks cannot dig her up until the locals agree to show her where the grave is. (As a side note, A Morbid Taste for Bones is an excellent murder mystery, frequently ranked among the best ever written. If you’re a fan of murder mysteries, you should definitely read it.)

The show in general does a good job of showing the historical importance of the Cult of the Saints (the collection of religious practices around religious figures like St Winifred). In Morbid Taste, the show nicely depicts two competing claims to Winifred’s remains; the villages of Gwytherin view her as ‘their saint’ and resent the idea that the English monks want to take her away, while the monks claim that because Brother Columbanus had a vision in which she appeared to him, Winifred has demonstrated that she wants to be moved to Shrewsbury. The unctuous Brother Jerome (Julian Firth) is depicted as manipulating Columbanus into thinking that Winifred is appearing to him. Jerome’s motives are not stated very clearly, but medieval monks craved the prestige of having a saint buried at their house. It attracted pilgrims and donations, both of which were desirable.

St Winifred’s cult is featured in two other episodes, both of which also capture facets of medieval religious life. In The Pilgrim of Hate, pilgrims have come to Shrewsbury for ‘Cripple Day’, which appears to be an annual festival in which St Winifred sometimes heals cripples. While this is invented, so far as I can tell, it’s generally plausible. Many shrines had particular dates when pilgrimages were performed, and some saints ‘specialized’ in curing specific ailments. Winifred’s cult doesn’t seem to have had a specialty, although the saint was famous for causing healing springs to appear. But the show captures something of the way in which pilgrims would throng to a shrine and the monks would organize a line of pilgrims to touch the shrine while hoping for a cure.

Part of the Prologue to Prior Robert’s Life of St Winifred

A particular theme of that episode is fraudulent miracles. One pilgrim fakes being crippled and then is miraculously ‘cured’; he uses the ‘miracle’ in an attempt to bilk other pilgrims into giving him money. Another character is peddling what are pretty clearly fabricated relics for money. Both of these frauds were real phenomena, although they were probably less common than popular imagination would have it. (In general, though, the storyline of Pilgrim is the weakest in the show because it departs quite far from the novel and relies on cliched ideas about religious fanaticism that don’t make much sense.)

In The Holy Thief, the locals flock to the abbey to pray for protection from flooding, and are again shown lining up to access the box in which Winifred’s bones are kept, and paying for the privilege. More importantly, someone steals the reliquary and a three-sided dispute breaks out about who truly owns the body of St. Winifred: the monks of Shrewsbury Abbey, the monks of Ramsey Abbey who claim that one of their brothers has had a vision of Winifred beckoning to him the way she beckoned to Columbanus in Morbid Taste, or the nobleman who owns the land where the wagon carrying the reliquary broke down (who claims that Winifred indicated her preference for him by causing the wagon to break down on his land).

The murder happens when the monks of Ramsey, feeling stymied, resort to outright theft. Such things definitely happened. Monks might be convinced that a saint genuinely desired the relocation of their relics and thus felt that such furta sacra (“holy theft”) was justified, sometimes even claiming miracles were happening to assist the crime. (The episode changes the murderer, however.)

The dispute over the reliquary is resolved using bibliomancy. The claimants take turns opening a copy of the Gospels to random passages and using the resulting verses as a statement of who ought to own it. While bibliomancy was used during the Middle Ages, the Church generally condemned it, so it’s unlikely that the abbot would have resorted to it (although, given that the abbots in this series are generally quite lax about the Benedictine Rule, it’s not unreasonable to suppose they were also lax about this sort of practice.

A Few Other Details

In some places, however, the show gets things wrong. Nearly every episode has someone use the term ‘murder’ in the modern sense of an unlawful killing. But in this period, murdrum has a much more specific set of meanings. The Danes introduced the concept of murdrum, which was a killing in secret, legally distinct from an openly-known killing and much more serious. Since the whole series is built around secret killings, that might seen reasonable. But in English law between the 1060s and the 1270s, murdrum was not a crime committed by an individual but more of a fine imposed on a community.

In the absence of a police force in the modern sense, English law in this period relied on collective responsibility. All adult men were expected to be members of a tithing, a group of roughly ten men, all of whom were responsible for the legal offenses of any of their members. So if one member of the tithing committed a crime and failed to show up in court for it, all the members of his tithing would be fined for the offense. This in theory helped ensure that criminals would be made to show up to court. To discourage the killing of the new Norman elites that ruled England, if any unknown man were killed in a community, the victim was assumed to be a Norman and a murdrum fine would be imposed on the whole community. It might also be imposed on someone who killed in self-defense. In some of the episodes, the scenario might reasonably involve murdrum, but the characters almost never mean it the way the word was being used at the time.

Another problem with the series is that Cadfael basically invents forensic pathology about 700 years too early. In some cases, his observations can be passed off as simply the work of a very observant man. In Morbid Taste, it’s not unreasonable that he can deduce that the dead man was stabbed in the back with a knife and then after he was lying on the ground dead he was stabbed in the belly with an arrow, because the downward angle of the arrow would be impossible if the man had been standing. But in One Corpse he is able to figure out that the victim was strangled with a waxed cord. In Pilgrim, he boils a corpse down so he can examine the bones, deduces that the man was knocked out from a blow to the head, and then reassembles the body osteologically. Given that dissection of corpses was quite rare, it’s highly unlikely that Cadfael could have figured out the order in which the vertibre should go. (This doesn’t occur in the novel; Pargeter would almost certainly not have invented such an implausible detail.)

The practice of boiling corpses down, as done in Pilgrim, was historical. It was a way for nobles who died abroad, to be transported home for burial without the problem of rotting on the way. And the show does correctly term it the Mos Teutonicus, the ‘German custom’. But it wasn’t invented until a few years after the end of the series; as the name suggests it was a German practice originally, so Cadfael doesn’t have any plausible way to know about it. Prior Robert correctly objects that this was a practice reserved for nobles who were being transported for burial, not for purposes of figuring out how someone was killed.

Brother Jerome (Julian Firth) and Prior Robert (Michel Culver) outside the abbey church

Another small problem is the idea of inns, which feature somewhat in St Peter’s Fair. In that episode, inns are treated as taverns and presented as common enough that a character plans to just buy one. That character is depicted as performing in inns, and Shrewsbury is shown as having at least two. In reality, inns were distinct from taverns. A tavern, or public house, was a private residence where the housewife would sell home-brewed ale or later beer; it was essentially an outgrowth of domestic ale production. Taverns and ale-houses certainly existed in this period.

But Inns were something different. An inn was more like a hotel, a place not primarily for drinking, but for lodging (although they certainly did act like taverns). They only really emerged in the 14^th century as the economy of medieval Europe was becoming more sophisticated and long-range trade was becoming a regular rather than a seasonal activity as it was in the 12^th century. Inns provided shelter as people traveled between towns, and as such they were primarily a rural rather than an urban phenomenon. So it’s highly unlikely that a smaller town like Shrewsbury would have had inns in it in Cadfael’s day, both because it was a town and because inns weren’t really a thing then. 12^th century travelers would have had to make do with a combination of staying at monasteries (which had a duty to provide hospitality to travelers), persuading people to take them in for the night, and just camping on the road.

In The Raven in the Foregate, the Norman priest Father Ailnoth despises his Anglo-Saxon parishioners, which is odd because his name is Anglo-Saxon, strongly suggesting that he was himself not Norman but Anglo-Saxon. In the novel, he’s a dick, but not over ethnic issues, and Pargeter probably intended him to be Anglo-Saxon rather than Norman.

One final issue. Cadfael’s name ought, according to Welsh pronunciation, to be pronounced ‘KAD-vel’, with the F being sounded like a V. But Pargeter never explained that in her novels, something she regretted, and as a result throughout the series his name is pronounced ‘KAD-file’. We might write it off as English people not being able to get the Welsh right, except that the Welsh characters get it wrong too. (In general, the series is pretty loose about Welsh accents. Some of the Welsh characters have them but others don’t.)

Want to Know More? 

Cadfael is available on Amazon. If you like murder mysteries, you really should read A Morbid Taste for Bones or some of the other books in the series.

If you’re interested in the phenomenon of relic-stealing, the basic work on the subject is Patrick Geary’s Furta Sacra.

The Little Hours: Nuns Behaving Badly

Tags

Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Christianity, Dave Franco, Jeff Baena, Kate Micucci, Medieval Europe, Medieval Italy, Monks and Nuns, Religious Stuff, The Little Hours

The Little Hours (2017, dir. Jeff Baena) is, as the name suggests, a modest little film dealing with some immodest nuns. The film is set at a convent in 14^th century Italy and is strongly inspired by two genuine medieval tales, the 1^st and 2^nd stories from the 3^rd day of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning to see this film in the theater, you might want to wait to read this until after youv’e done so, since I discuss plot points, including the resolution of the film.

The Decameron, for those unfamiliar with it, is a medieval collection of stories with a loose frame-tale, sort of like the Canterbury Tales you might have read in your high school English class. Instead of a group of pilgrims telling stories as they head for Canterbury, Boccaccio’s ten story-tellers have fled Florence to escape the Bubonic Plague and have holed up in a villa outside the city for two weeks. To amuse themselves and to distract from the death outside, each day they take turns telling stories on a proposed theme (with two days off each week for chores and holy days), so they tell ten stories on each of ten days (hence the work’s title, ‘the Ten-Day Event’). That structure allows Boccaccio to tell a whole range of stories from the comic to the tragic to the morally instructional. The third day’s tales have as a theme something acquired or lost and regained with great difficulty.

The first tale deals with Masetto, a handsome young man who passes himself off as a deaf-mute in order to take work at a monastery of 8 nuns (in medieval usage, ‘monastery’ can refer to a house of either monks or nuns). Since they think he can’t speak, the nuns decide to explore the pleasures of the flesh with him, which he’s only too willing to allow. So he becomes their stud bull, servicing the nuns (including the mother superior) so frequently that he’s exhausted. Eventually he breaks down and demands that the nuns give him a set schedule, which they agree to because they don’t want to lose him or risk him spilling their secret. So he lives there the rest of his life, keeping the nuns happy and fathering a lot of children in the process.

The second tale deals with King Agilulf and Queen Theodolinda, Theodelinda has a servant who flirts with her and eventually he beds her by deceiving her into thinking he is the king. Theodolinda is fooled, but Agilulf realizes he has been cuckolded. He follows the servant back to the chamber where all the servants sleep and manages to figure out which one of the sleeping men in the darkened room is the guilty party. He cuts off a lock of the man’s hair to identify the man the next day. But after he leaves, the clever servant uses the scissors to cut off hair from each of the sleeping servants, so that in the morning the king cannot figure out which man to punish. He warns all the servants that he knows what is going on, but does it without harming his wife’s reputation.

 

The Film

About two-thirds of the Little Hours is drawn from these two stories. Masetto (Dave Franco) is the horny servant not of King Agilulf, but of Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman), an obnoxious blowhard whose wife loathes him. Masetto sleeps with her, but Bruno discovers it, leading to the whole hair-cutting sequence. Realizing that Bruno is on to him, Masetto flees and runs into Father Tommaso (John C. Reilly), a drunkard priest who befriends him (leading to a very funny drunken confessional sequence).

Tommasso is the priest for a small convent filled with unhappy and rather unspiritual nuns. Alessandra (Alison Brie), Ginevra (Kate Micucci), and Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) take out their boredom and frustration by physically and verbally abusing the convent’s male worker so much that the man quits. Tommasso introduces Masetto to Mother Marea (Molly Shannon), telling her that Masetto is a deaf-mute.

Three unruly nuns

This leads Alessandra and Fernanda into having sex with Masetto, while a rather confused Ginevra (who’s probably a lesbian anyway) thinks she’s had sex with him but doesn’t really understand what sex actually involves.

Then the film leaves its source material completely. Fernanda’s friend Marta (Jemima Kirke) is part of a witch’s coven, and the two of them decide to sacrifice Masetto in a fertility ritual. But Ginevra, tripping balls on belladonna, unintentionally breaks the ritual up, thus saving Masetto and accidentally exposing the whole shenanigans at the convent to Bishop Bartolemeo (Fred Armisen), leading to a rather amusing episcopal visitation of the house in which all is revealed.

Masetto gets sent back to Lord Bruno, but the three nuns help him escape back to the convent, where everything ends happily with the assurance that all the principal characters other than Bruno will be getting a lot of sex.

The humor of the film is rather broad, in keeping with its ribald source material. Baena, who is also the screenwriter of the film, has made the amusing choice to write the characters as anachronistically 21^st century in their dialog and outlook on life. Apart from Franco and Micucci, who do a lot of mugging for the camera, all the actors give rather understated performances. If, like me, you’re not a fan of hipster comedy, you’ll probably find Offerman and Armisen more grating than funny, but Franco and the nuns are well-cast for this story. Fernanda has a lot of anger and violence roiling within, Alessandra is sexually and romantically frustrated, and Ginevra is a follower rather than a leader, at least until her repressed desires explode out of her.

The film largely captures the spirit and much of the substance of medieval farces, which are often at least as bawdy as some modern comedies. If anything, the film down-plays and avoids some elements of medieval farce, which is frequently far more violent, scatological, and misogynistic than its modern descendants. In the film, Masetto only sleeps with two of the nuns a total of three times, whereas in the original, every nun in the house has her way with him non-stop. So whereas modern audiences might assume the film is exaggerating medieval humor, it’s actually downplaying it a little.

Franco’s Masetto pretending to be deaf

Despite its comedy, which milks the contrast between its medieval setting and the contemporary-minded characters for all its worth, the film actually has a lot to say about the 14^th century Italy. Late medieval authors loved mocking unspiritual clergy, and with the exception of one elderly nun, none of the women at the convent are actually following the rules (although Marea does seem to take her job seriously, apart from her affair with Tommasso). To modern audiences, the comedy is simply the contrast of supposedly pious nuns doing things such as swearing like sailors, threatening to assault people, and fornicating, but these are in fact exactly the sorts of things that many 14^th century people suspected nuns actually did. Alessandra is so unspiritual, she can’t even reflect on her own sins during confession; instead she steals Ginevra’s confession by eavesdropping on it. Tommasso the drunken, bumbling priest is another staple of medieval literature; one gets the sense that he would happily gossip about the confessions he hears.

The three young nuns are not in the convent because they feel a calling to the spiritual life, but because their families have put them there. Alessandra’s father is a merchant, and she thinks she’s there simply to be educated before getting married, at least until a visit from her father makes her realize that he’s probably planning on dumping her there permanently so that he doesn’t have to shell out for her dowry. Fernanda and Ginevra’s backstories are never clarified, other than a throw-away joke that Ginevra is actually Jewish, but Fernanda is played as a bored rich girl stuck at a boarding school when she’d rather be out partying with her friends (complete with a scene in which Marta sneaks into the convent and all the girls get drunk on sacramental wine and start making out with each other). To me, these characters ring true (apart from Ginevra’s Jewish ancestry) because that’s how many young women actually wound up as nuns. Alessandra’s story is played for laughs, but I’m certain more than a few young women tragically lived out exactly that story.

Similarly, the bishop’s visitation, a sort of trial in which the moral failings of the nuns are revealed and punished, is played for laughs, but records of dozens of such visitations still exist for both male and female houses, and they reveal large numbers of monks and nuns who evidently found life in a monastery not to their taste. Cases of run-away nuns abound, and fornication was a regular problem, as both actual events and moralizing tales make clear. Even the lesbianism in the film can be documented in period sources. To us, The Little Hours is funny because it’s absurd, but to 14^th century Italians, Boccaccio’s story is funny because it’s true.

A genuine medieval image of nuns harvesting a penis-tree

The nuns here are bored, and take out their frustrations on those around them. They live lives of dull manual labor, although the upper-class Alessandra cheerfully dumps her laundry onto Ginevra because the latter girl is “good at it.” Alessandra is apparently good at needle-work, which gets her out of some of the drudgery, but partway through the film Marea orders her to double her production, so even her social class can’t protect her from unpleasant work. The nuns abuse their male servants for no reason other than that they can; Fernanda has a habit of pulling weapons on people. Ginevra is a tattle-tale, constantly running to Marea to reveal every minor offense her sisters make. Underneath the humor is a revealing portrait of the way many monks and nuns actually responded to their living situation. By the 14^th century, most monks were likely to have actively chosen the life they were living, and were frequently permitted to leave their houses, but many nuns were there against their will, and the rule of enclosure (which stated that nuns were not supposed to leave their convents for any reason at all) meant that many of these women struggled with the mind-number sameness of their daily routine and chafed at the constant close contact with other nuns.

The film also has a sub-plot dealing with finance. The convent needs an income to support its residents. Alessandra’s father is supposed to be paying money to the convent for her, but he’s either stingy or business is going badly (as Tommasso gossips), so he’s not giving what he’s supposed to. The convent makes money by selling the embroidery of the sisters, using Tommasso as their business agent, but he drunkenly ruins one shipment by letting his cart tip into a stream. In addition to being the spiritual leader of the house, something she seems to have some interest in (to judge from the readings she delivers at meals), Marea’s also responsible for managing the finances of the convent, something she seems to have no talent for. Bartholemeo audits her books and apparently finds serious problems.

These were genuine issues at convents, because the rules about keeping nuns separate from men often meant that women with no business experience wound up having to make major financial decisions. In some cases, the abbesses rose to the challenge, either making good choices themselves or finding other nuns who had a head for business and thereby building their house into a financial power, but in others, poor choices produced fiscal crises that led to impoverishment.

Plaza’s Fernanda WILL cut you

The only truly false note in the plot (as opposed to the anachronistic attitudes) is the witchcraft element that brings the film to its climax. Although the 14^th century did see the beginnings of a concern about groups of witches engaging in abominable activities, what the film shows us is straight out of a 16^th century panic about witches’ covens, naked orgies, and human sacrifice (although instead of sacrificing adult men like Masetto, these post-medieval fantasies focused on the murder and cannibalism of babies). The film’s depiction of the witches also draws off of 20^th century neo-pagan ideas of witches as engaging in an alternate religious system. These witches seem to be housewives and young women who are performing a “fertility ritual” of some sort, and it’s not entirely clear that they plan to actually kill Masetto. Fernanda, at least, is not the malevolent baby-killer of early modern anxiety, and Marta doesn’t seem to be either, although her motives are not developed at all. Both women are like naughty college students looking for something the conventional religion of their society does not offer them. Boccaccio does not tell stories about witches, although in one story a character describes a supposed secret society of revelers that uses some of the stock charges about witches, but which are eventually revealed to all be a prank on a gullible doctor. Far from being a believer in witches, Boccaccio seems to be a skeptic, something that is true of far more medieval people than popular imagination would allow.

The Little Hours isn’t trying to recreate a story from the Decameron. Instead, in the phrasing so loved by Hollywood, it’s ‘inspired by’ the stories. It takes whatever pieces it wants from two tales and plays with them freely, which is exactly what medieval authors like Boccaccio and Chaucer did with their source material, and what Shakespeare was going to do a few centuries later. In that sense. Jeff Baena is true to the spirit of Boccaccio, and he manages, perhaps unintentionally, to give a reasonable lesson in what life in a 14^th century convent might have looked like.

 

Want to Know More?

The Little Hours is still in the theater, so it’s not available for purchase or streaming yet.

Boccaccio’s Decameron has more than a little in common with the somewhat more-famous Canterbury Tales, and it’s actually complete! Give it a read.

Graciela Diachman’s Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature looks at medieval stories of bad nuns and the historical evidence for them. Similarly, Judith Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renassance Italy looks at one particularly scandalous abbess, Benedetta Carlini, who not only had a sexual relationship with another nun but also faked visions and stigmata. She is perhaps the first well-documented lesbian in Western history.

Stealing Heaven: The Great Medieval Love Story on Film

Tags

Denholm Elliot, Derek De Lint, Heloise, Kim Thomson, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, Monks and Nuns, Paris, Peter Abelard, Stealing Heaven

Stealing Heaven

It’s been a while since I tackled a truly medieval film on this blog, so when a friend of mine suggested that I cover Stealing Heaven (1988, dir. Clive Donner, based on the novel by feminist author Marion Meade), I thought it was a good opportunity to get back to the Middle Ages with perhaps the most famous love-story to emerge from medieval history.

Peter Abelard

In the 12^th century the most important centers of European intellectual activity were a small number of schools attached to cathedrals. These cathedral schools were in theory intended for the training of clergy, but during the expansion of royal and ecclesiastical institutions in the 12^th century, cathedral schools began to attract large numbers of lay men who wished for advanced education so that they could serve in royal government, in a bishop’s household, or act as lawyers or physicians.

Of these schools, the cathedral school at Paris was arguably the most important. The cathedral issued teaching licenses to scholars, who were thereby empowered to charge a fee to teach any students who wished to study under them. In the early 12^th century, the most noteworthy of these teaching masters was Peter Abelard, a brilliant logician who attracted enormous attention and large numbers of students by his bold new approach. He was one of the first medieval scholars to develop a deep understanding of the logical methods of the ancient philosopher Aristotle, and his reputation was based substantially on his application of Aristotle’s logic to medieval philosophy and theology (although technically he was not qualified to teach the latter subject).

His most important work was the Sic et Non (“Yes and No”). In this text, he asks a series of 158 theological questions (such as “Must human faith be completed by reason, or not?” and “Does God know everything, or not?”) and then cites Biblical sources to answer the question first affirmatively and then negatively. Having demonstrated that the Bible apparently contradicts itself on the issue, Abelard then proceeds to reconcile the contradiction with logic, showing how the Bible in fact presents a consistent answer if one reads the texts carefully. In doing this, Abelard laid the foundation for the Scholastic Method that was to dominate medieval universities for the next several centuries; Sic et Non became a basic textbook for university students. And, in fact, the Cathedral School at Paris would, by the end of the 12^th century, evolve into the University of Paris.

Abelard was a rather arrogant man, making enemies of other scholars by poking holes in their ideas. In particular, he humiliated his former teacher, William of Champeaux in an intellectual debate. His skill at this made him extremely popular with his students.

Around 1115, he encountered Heloise, the niece of Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral of Paris. Her family background is unclear, but she was remarkably well-educated by the standards of the day, knowing Latin, Greek and Hebrew (the latter two languages not being common knowledge even among educated men). Having been raised at the convent of Argenteuil, by 1115, she was living in Fulbert’s household in Paris. Perhaps attracted by her reputation for education, Abelard proposed to Fulbert that he move into Fulbert’s household to tutor Heloise. Her age is uncertain, but it has been argued that she was probably in her mid-to-late 20s.

Abelard and Heloise debating

In the course of tutoring her, Abelard also seduced her. The affair became a subject of gossip, and Heloise eventually became pregnant. She gave birth to a boy named Astrolabe. Fulbert was upset about this, but Abelard agreed to marry her on the condition that the marriage be kept a secret, because scholars were expected to be single and celibate, and if word spread about his marriage, he would be unable to advance within the Church.

After the marriage, however, Fulbert began to spread word of it, to punish Abelard for the embarrassment he had caused Fulbert. Abelard sent Heloise to Argenteuil, but this caused Fulbert to fear that Abelard was trying to get rid of her, and so Fulbert hired a group of men to attack and castrate him.

Humiliated and apparently spiritually devastated by this turn of events, Abelard chose to enter a monastery, and insisted that Heloise become a nun at Argenteuil. Abelard established a new school at his monastery and soon began teaching theology as well as philosophy, once again attracting a crowd of students. He continued making enemies, which led to numerous conflicts, including one in which he was condemned for heresy.

He established a chapel, the Oratory of the Paraclete, where he again became a successful teacher. In 1129, the monks of St Denis gained control of the house at Argenteuil and evicted the nuns, including Heloise, who was by this time the prioress. Abelard installed Heloise and the other nuns at the Paraclate, where Heloise was made abbess, while he went to another house and again resumed teaching.

He published his theological masterpiece, Scito Te Ipsum (“Know Thyself”), in which he argues that the morality of a sin was strongly influenced by the intention behind the sin. In doing this, he became one of the first to argue that intention was as important as action in determining morality, a position which continues to have enormous influence in Western thought even today.

After that, Abelard became a target for Bernard of Clairvaux, who as a monk objected to Abelard’s rationalist approach to the mysteries of scripture. Bernard orchestrated another condemnation of Abelard for heresy. Fortunately for Abelard, Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny, one of the most important abbots of the day, intervened to protect Abelard, who died about two years later, in 1142. He was buried at the Paraclete.

 

Their Correspondence

After his brief reunion with Heloise at the Paraclete in 1129, the two seem to have never seen each other again. They corresponded for a while, and Heloise rebuked him for not writing more often. She outlived him by more than two decades, dying in 1163 and being buried alongside him. In the 19th century, their bodies are thought to have been moved to Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where lovers still go to pay tribute to them.

Their tomb, or perhaps cenotaph, at Pere Lachaise

Heloise’ letters reveal her to be a very unhappy woman who is still deeply in love with Abelard. When he requests burial at the Paraclete, she asks him not to talk about dying before her, because her life will have no meaning once that happens. She agonizes over her role in his physical suffering and social ruin. She is particularly distressed over what she sees as the bitter injustice of God.

…all the laws of equity in our case were reversed. For while we enjoyed the pleasures of uneasy love and abandoned ourselves to fornication…we were spared God’s severity. But when we amended our unlawful conduct by what was lawful, and atoned for the shame of fornication by an honourable marriage, then the Lord in his anger laid his hand heavily upon us and would not permit a chaste union though he had long tolerated that which was unchaste. The punishment you suffered would have been proper vengeance for men caught in open adultery. But what others deserve for adultery came upon you through a marriage which you believed had made amends for all previous wrong doing; what adulterous women have brought upon their lovers your own wife brought upon you.

Later in the letter, she explicitly accuses God of cruelty, and admits that she cannot find it in herself to be truly penitent for her feelings.

How can it be called repentance for sins, however great the mortification of the flesh, if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with its old desires….In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes…Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost.

She goes on to lament the fact that she became a nun, not to please God, but to please Abelard. Because she understands Abelard’s teaching on intention, she fears that nothing she does can please God, because her intentions are wrong.

Abelard’s response makes clear that he is motivated by a more sincere repentance than she. He urges her not to bring up such unhappy thoughts and reminds her that they both agreed that chastity was morally superior to marriage. In her response, she agrees to do as he asks, but one can’t help thinking that Abelard has run away from her pain without offering much comfort.

 

Stealing Heaven

Stealing Heaven (and I assume the novel on which it is based) focuses entirely on the love story of Abelard and Heloise. After a brief opening in which we see an elderly Heloise (Kim Thomson) behave mysteriously and die at the Paraclete, the film jumps back to her early life at Argenteuil, showing her arguing with the magistra who is teaching the nuns basic theology. Not too many movies pass the Bechdel test with a theological debate. Heloise hates being a nun, but is soon told that she will be sent to Paris to live with her uncle Fulbert (Denholm Elliot).

Thomson as Heloise

The film follows traditional scholarship by assuming that she was a young woman of about 17 when she came to Paris (whereas more recent scholarship has argued that she was about a decade older). As such the film assumes that Fulbert was planning to marry her off, whereas if she were older, that is less likely the reason he took her in.

The film erroneously sets its events about half a century too late. The cathedral of Notre Dame is under construction, which only began in 1163, way too late for Abelard and Heloise’ affair. Fulbert is charged with helping raise revenue to fund the construction project, and his efforts to marry of Heloise seem to be part of that project. He is also forging and selling relics to raise money, something which Heloise eventually tells him he is damned for doing. This is entirely fabricated for the story, with no basis in fact. The film also incorrectly identifies Suger, the Abbot of St. Denis, as the Bishop of Paris.

In the film, Abelard (Derek de Lint) has an established career as a teacher, with an enormous crowd of rowdy students and an envious fellow teacher. The students refuse to believe that Abelard is truly chaste, and pay a prostitute to try to seduce him in his room. He refuses to have sex with her, but he is accused of consorting with prostitutes, and Suger orders him to find new lodgings, which is how he comes to be living with Fulbert and thereby falls in love with Heloise.

Abelard’s classroom

The reality was quite different. Abelard wrote one of the earliest autobiographies in Western literature (the History of My Calamities). In it he says that he was attracted to Heloise by her reputation from learning, and decided that he wanted her in his bed. So he persuaded Fulbert to let him move in and teach Heloise. He presents himself as entirely the instigator of the affair, and Heloise says in one of her letters that she resisted him at first.

But in the film, they only begin to fall in love once the tutoring has started. Heloise is as attracted to him as he is to her, and in some ways she is the instigator. She burns a charm she has been given to confirm that he will be her true lover. Abelard repents quickly and wishes to break off the affair, but is unable to restrain himself.

However, once the film has gotten past their initial coupling, it follows historical events fairly closely. Their affair becomes public gossip, Fulbert learns of it and tries to separate them, she discovers that she is pregnant, he sends her off to Brittany where Astrolabe is born, and so on down to them both entering monastic orders, even though she truly does not want to. The film addresses the eviction of the nuns from Argenteuil and their arrival at the Paraclete, and tacks on a brief scene where Abelard brings Astrolabe to meet her.

De Lint brooding as Abelard

The film is largely Heloise’ story. She emerges as by the far the more interesting of the two lovers, having a forceful personality even at the start of the film, whereas Abelard comes off as somewhat irresolute, despite his initial commitment to chastity. She resists marrying him because it will harm his career in the Church, but gives in because her love for him is so intense that she cannot deny him anything, although after his castration, she refuses to abandon him even when he tells her to.

The film does not address the couple’s later correspondence, but it tries to explore the turmoil she felt in later life. Early in the film it is made clear that she dislikes convent life and has little aptitude for it. She resents being returned to Argenteuil after their marriage, and when she learns that Abelard has been castrated, she announces that she no longer believes in God. She declares that Abelard is her Crucified Lord, and later hides a feather she caught during their affair in the base of a crucifix so that when she reveres the cross, she is actually revering this symbol of their love. As she lies dying, she asks to see the crucifix, takes the hidden feather out, and throws away the crucifix. While none of this is historically accurate, it is at least an attempt to explore the spiritual crisis she experienced as a nun.

The film offers only the vaguest hint of what 12^th century intellectual life was about. It shows Abelard lecturing to his students, but it’s no more successful at capturing a 12^th century classroom than movies are at capturing modern university classrooms. In what passes for scholasticism in the film, Abelard points out the seeming contradiction between “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and Saul and David killing the enemies of Israel, and then lets his students joke about various vaguely related issues without bothering to offer any resolution to the issue. His debates with Heloise are similarly insipid attempts to mimic medieval scholastic thought, and bear little resemblance to any of Abelard’s actual ideas. The doctrine of intention, which is fairly central to Heloise’ sense of the relationship, is nowhere to be found.

Nor does the film address any of Abelard’s various controversies with scholars, or even point out that he continued as a teacher after he became a monk. It makes no effort to explain Abelard’s historical importance, so that once again, historical figures in film are reduced to romantic fodder. In the process, it strips away his less likable qualities, such as his intellectual arrogance and his pleasure in rousing controversy. It turns him from an arrogant intellectual into a brooding romantic. It situates the birth of their romance in a chance meeting rather than in his intentional plan to seduce her into his bed.

The film also ignores the fact that Heloise’ life story was not simply about romance; she was remarkably well-educated, a rare example of a medieval female author (although her surviving output is only a few letters) and she was an important abbess in a period when abbesses were declining both in educational attainment and social prominence.

Despite all its flaws, I still like this film. Heloise emerges as a fairly strong-willed woman. She has considerable agency; although she agrees to do what Abelard wants, she always does so as her choice, and rather than simply being seduced, she pursues her desire for Abelard as much as he pursues his for her. And her desire for him is not simply physical but intellectual; there is little doubt that she is his equal intellectually. So the film seems to have captured important elements of the real Heloise’ personality, and perhaps even exaggerated them slightly; Meade is a feminist author after all. Thomson’s performance is the heart of the film, and she brings real strength of personality to the role. And, somewhat interestingly, the sex scenes offer De Lint’s body for erotic consideration almost as much as Heloise’.

Is it a great movie? No. But it is a far better medieval romance than many other films. And it’s fun to see a film that at least tries to make intelligence and education seem sexy. As a university professor, I appreciate that.

Want to Know More?

Stealing Heaven is available on Amazon. Also, Marion Meade’s novel Stealing Heaven: The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard is available for Kindle.

Most of what we know about Abelard and Heloise’ lives comes from Historia Calamitatum: The Story of my misfortunes, one of the first autobiographies ever written. A small set of letters between Abelard and Heloise were known for centuries. There used to be a theory that Abelard wrote both his own and Heloise’ letters as an intellectual exercise, but Betty Radice has persuasively argued that Heloise wrote her half of the correspondence. You can read her emotionally tormented letters in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Not too long ago, however, Constant Mews argued that he discovered a much larger collection of letters between the two lovers, which he published as  The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (The New Middle Ages).

M.T. Clanchy’s Abelard: A Medieval Lifeuses Abelard’s life to explore 12th century culture, with a particular emphasis on the intellectual world of the time. There is also a wealth of scholarship focusing on Abelard’s important contributions to philosophy and theology. If you want to know more about that, try John Marenbon’s The Philosophy of Peter Abelard.

Ironclad: Vikings, and Templars, and Magna Carta, Oh My!

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Derek Jacobi, Ironclad, James Purefoy, King John, Knights Templar, Magna Carta, Medieval England, Military Stuff, Monks and Nuns, Paul Giametti

Recently I decided that I needed to review a film on Tudor history. I turned on Netflix and went looking for one of the classics—Anne of the Thousand Days, A Man for All Seasons or perhaps one of Cate Blanchett’s movies about Elizabeth. I discovered two things. 1) Netflix has no films on Tudor history at all, just a bunch of not very good-looking documentaries. 2) Ironclad (2011, dir. Jonathan English). I’m not sure why Netflix suggested this film, because the only thing it has in common with any of the above films is that it’s set in England. But I faintly remembered hearing about it when it first came out, so I watched it.

It’s a small independent film; the financing was apparently such a big challenge that at one point they had to recast all the supporting roles, after Megan Fox dropped out. But despite the modest budget, it’s the largest independent film ever made in Wales. And, a little improbably, it’s based quite solidly in history, albeit with some important liberties.

The Siege of Rochester Castle

On June 15^th, 1215, King John reluctantly signed the Magna Carta, a charter of liberties in which he agreed to a variety of restrictions on his powers as king and lord of vassals. Most of the charter was limited to John’s relationship with his vassals and therefore applied only to nobles, but a few details applied to everyone in the country, most notably the establishment of what can be called the right of due process for all non-serfs and the abolition of double jeopardy in trials.

However, soon after John signed it, he repudiated it, and Pope Innocent III declared John released from his oath to support it. This triggered the First Barons’ War, in which the rebellious barons, supported by King Louis VIII of France, essentially attempted to depose John. The rebels were also supported by Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury.

In October, Langton sent the nobleman William d’Aubigny to occupy Rochester Castle. The castle had been in John’s hands, but the Magna Carta had required John to return it to Langton because it was the property of the archbishopric of Canterbury. John persuaded the castellan, Reginald de Cornhill, to open the gates and D’Aubigny occupied the castle with a small force, much to John’s great frustration. Rochester Castle controlled the southern road to London, which the rebels had taken control of. John could not risk bypassing Rochester, and so he laid siege to the castle for two months.

Rochester Castle. Note how close it is to Rochester Cathedral

John’s forces occupied the city of Rochester and destroyed the bridge linking the city to London, thus making it difficult for the rebels to relieve the siege. For two months, d’Aubigny’s small band of men, variously numbered between 85 and 150, struggled to keep hold off John. John’s forces broke through the outer wall of the castle, forcing the defenders to retreat to the keep. John’s forces sapped the keep, digging a tunnel under it and then burning the tunnel supports. This caused part of the keep to collapse, but the rebels held out in the part of the castle that remained. Some of the less-able-bodied defenders were forced to leave because of dwindling supplies, and some sources report that John cut off their hands and feet. Eventually, the remaining defenders surrendered; John imprisoned all of them, including d’Aubigny, except one archer whom John executed because the man had served him from childhood but then rebelled.

Sadly for John, the capture of Rochester did not improve his position significantly. He was able to force the rebels into a stalemate, but suffered a setback when his baggage train was lost crossing a tidal estuary. He contracted dysentery or something similar and died on October 18^th, 1216, about a year after starting the siege of Rochester.

King John was a complex figure. He was widely disliked by his nobles, and his various defeats sharply colored his posthumous reputation, especially in comparison with his more famous and accomplished father Henry II and brother Richard the Lion-hearted. He has been remembered by derisive nicknames such as ‘Lackland’ and ‘Softsword’, and most historical literature treats him poorly; he is, after all, the main villain in modern Robin Hood stories, and The Lion in Winter makes him seem like a pathetic joke.

King John

But in recent decades scholars have tended to paint a more balanced picture of John. They have pointed out that he was an extremely skilled solider; his forces never lost a battle at which he was present, but his great tragedy was that the two most critical battles of his reign were ones he was unable to be at. He was a talented administrator, who paid far more attention to his kingdom than his older brother did. His servants were deeply loyal to him, but he lacked the skills to manage the nobles and clergy who truly mattered politically. Like his father, he was possessed of both enormous energy and a ferocious temper, but at key moments he seems to have been paralyzed by inaction; one historian has suggested that he might have been bi-polar. All in all, I like John, far more than I like his brother Richard.

Ironclad

The plot of Ironclad focuses entirely on the siege of Rochester, and it follows the events of the siege fairly closely, albeit with some significant deviations. The main character is the entirely fictitious Thomas Marshall (James Purefoy), a Templar knight with some sort of dark secret that is never revealed. The film claims that the Templars were the main reason that John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, which is completely untrue. John had good relationships with the Templars, and relied on the advice of Aymeric de St. Maur, the master of the Order in England at the time. Aymeric encouraged him to sign the Magna Carta, but that’s a far cry from claiming that the Templars forced him into it.

Like Arn the Knight Templar, this film seems to suggest that one joins the Templars like one joins the modern military. There are suggestions that Thomas might be allowed to “take a leave” from the Templars, and at the end, Archbishop Langton tells Thomas that he’s “earned his freedom.” But joining a monastic order was a permanent conversion; men did not leave the Order after a period of time. However, an archbishop would have had the authority to release someone from their monastic oaths, although it would have been highly unusual to do so. One of the reasons men joined monastic orders was that it was thought to significantly increase the chance of salvation, so leaving a monastic order would not have been seen as a good thing by most people at the time.

Also, the film claims that Templars had a “vow of silence”. Vows of silence were a real thing, but they’ve been badly misunderstood. In general, monks were expected to focus their thoughts on spiritual matters and to avoid frivolous conversations. Some orders employed a simple form of sign language so that monks could communicate simple ideas without speaking. But most orders allowed monks to talk, at least at certain moments. Monks met regularly in chapter meetings to discuss matters of importance. At meals, they heard texts read to them. Some monastic rules set aside time for the brothers to converse. And of course they sang the liturgy multiple times a day. But these are not formal vows of silence, which was a practice only employed by a minority of medieval monastic orders. The Templars most certainly did not maintain a vow of silence, since as soldiers, they needed to communicate orders on the battlefield. Clearly the screenwriter hasn’t thought this issue through.

Also, Thomas uses a Braveheart-style great sword. If it was too early for William Wallace, it’s way too early for an early 13th century Templar. Thanks, Mel Gibson. Now everybody apparently needs to use great swords.

Purefoy as Thomas Marshall, with his great sword

Early in the film, Thomas and William d’Aubigny (Brian Cox) are sent by Stephen Langton to hold Rochester Castle against John. They do a Seven Samurai number and recruit five more soldiers and then go to Rochester, where they convince Reginald de Cornhill (Derek Jacobi) to let them hold the castle, But Cornhill has only eleven men, so 18 soldiers and a few servants are left to hold off John’s forces. This is an absurdly small group to hold even a small castle; in an actual siege, a group that small would have been overwhelmed on the first day of battle.

Historically, John hired a mixed group of continental mercenaries during the Baron’s War, but in this film he hires a band of pagan Danish Vikings. This is the worst anachronism of the film. The Danes had been Christian for more than 200 years by the Baron’s War. The only purpose served by making John’s men pagan Vikings seems to be to make John look bad, for employing pagans when he’s allied to the pope. It’s an egregiously silly detail in a film that in many respects strives to be true to events.

King John (Paul Giametti) is actually quite well-handled. The script is written to make John seem like a complete asshole, but Giametti manages to capture John’s fierce temper in a way that humanizes him. When John’s forces break into the castle bailey and capture d’Aubigny, John gets a monologue that is written to make him seem petulant, but Giametti transforms it into an angry tirade fueled by John’s quite legitimate complaint that his rights as king are not being respected. It’s a speech that captures something of the actual attitude that medieval kings had about their position.

The best part of this film

The film is also rather naïve about the Magna Carta. It is referenced as being a document “for the people” in a rather vague and unspecified way, as if it were a proto-constitution instead of the peace treaty it actually was. The film frames the Baron’s War as being a conflict between a tyrannical John and a group of nobles who are somehow champions of the common man. John was definitely being unreasonable, but nothing that he did prior to 1215 would have been seen as illegal or tyrannical; rather his nobles felt that he was abusing his rights as their lord, using legal rights in ways they had not been intended.

Despite all these problems, the film does a remarkably good job of following the outlines of the siege. Rochester Castle is realistically depicted (although it’s located out in the countryside, instead of in a city and within an arrow’s flight of Rochester Cathedral). When I watched the film, I thought that the siege details were being a little improbable, but upon researching the actual siege, I saw that the film actually follows the basic sequence of events fairly closely, although it plays with the time-frame of events somewhat, extending the first part of the siege and then compressing the later parts somewhat. But all the major details of the siege in the film have at least some basis in the actual siege, other than Thomas’ romance with Cornhill’s wife, and the deaths of Cornhill and d’Aubigny, both of whom are known to have survived the siege.

An Orgy of Violence

If you decide to watch Ironclad, be warned; it’s extremely violent. I’ve seen my fair share of modern action films, and this film goes somewhat beyond them. The film dwells on graphic violence in ways that I found a little shocking. The camera watches a number of extreme injuries, including the top of a man’s head being chopped off and a man being cut from shoulder to waist. In one particularly graphic shot, a man’s arm is hacked off, with four strokes that gradually hack through the bone. The film also dwells on John’s order to cut off d’Aubigny’s hands and feet.

I’m of two minds about the film’s use of graphic violence. One part of me feels that the film was being true to its nature as a war film and showing what war really looks like. In most Hollywood films, the graphic violence is somewhat ludicrous; limbs are easily chopped off even though most medieval swords weren’t sharp enough to accomplish that feat easily. In this film, the dismemberments actually seem plausible (d’Aubigny’s hands and feet are braced against wooden blocks, for example). The violence is shown as being psychologically brutal to the defenders of the castle; at the end of the film, Thomas and the two other survivors all seem moderately traumatized by what they’ve been through.

However, the other part of me feels that the film is just indulging in the pornography of violence that has become so common in modern action films. Many Hollywood films have decided to take the Grand Guignol approach to storytelling, without paying much attention to the consequences of the violence. So if you watch the film, be prepared for some gore.

Overall, the film takes some liberties with the facts, but fewer liberties than I was expecting. It’s a bit like The Warlord in that it’s a small-scale film, focused on a single conflict within a much larger picture, and it has a similar ending, with the hero worn down by his struggles. While I have some problems with this film, I’d rather watch a dozen films like this than a Braveheart or 300. Now I just have to hunt down a copy of a film on Tudor history.

Update: I review the sequel here.

Want to Know More?

Ironcladis available on Amazon. The best book I know on King John is W.L. Warren’s King John (English Monarchs), but it’s getting on in years. For a more recent take, and one more closely connected to this film, try Stephen Church’s King John: And the Road to Magna Cartadoes a good job of examining the Baron’s War and how it led to Magna Carta.

Vision: The Difference between Historians and Film-makers

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Hildegarde of Bingen, Interesting Women, Margarethe von Trotta, Medieval Europe, Medieval Germany, Monks and Nuns, Vision

A couple weeks ago, I reviewed Vision: From the Life of Hildegarde von Bingen (2009, dir. Margarethe von Trotta; German with subtitles), a small German biopic about twelfth century German nun and author Hildegarde of Bingen. I want to come back to that film today because it offers a nice, if small, example of the difference between how an historian approaches the past and how a film-maker does.

There is a scholarly debate about exactly when Hildegard was enclosed at Disibodenberg. Her Vita (saint’s biography) says that Hildegarde was enclosed as an oblate when she was 8, along with an unrelated older girl named Jutta, which would have been around 1106, since Hildegarde was born around 1098. But another source tells us that Jutta was enclosed in 1112. This would mean that Hildegarde was enclosed when she about 14. So our two sources provide conflicting information about this important event in Hildegarde’s life. Was she enclosed when she was 8, or when she was 14? We cannot say for certain.

These kinds of small problems of chronology (and sometimes quite large problems of chronology) are rather common in ancient and medieval history. We often do not know when an important figure was born, got married, or died, for example. There are important battles that we know happened, but we don’t know when, or sometimes where, they happened. We have many documents whose author is unknown, whose date of writing is unknown, whose entire historical context is uncertain. These are the sorts of issues that scholars can spend years debating and researching.

As an historian, if I were writing about Hildegard’s life, I would have to lay out the evidence that she was enclosed at age 8 and the evidence that she was enclosed at age 14. After I had weighed the evidence I would either have to settle on one scenario and then explain why I feel the evidence best supports that scenario, or I would have to say that the evidence is inconclusive and that we cannot currently say exactly when she was enclosed. As a historian, I am limited by the evidence available to me, and when I go beyond it through speculation, I have to be clear that I am doing so.

However director Margarethe von Trotta is not a historian, but a film-maker, and she has different concerns than I do. She cannot lay out both scenarios and let the viewers make up their own minds about which version is correct. To do so, she would have had to film a scene in which 8 year old Hildegard gets enclosed and has her first meeting with the two Juttas, and then she would have to film a second scene with a 14 year-old Hildegard being enclosed. Such a Rashomon-like approach would be deeply confusing to many viewers, and it would probably knock them out of the suspension of disbelief that is necessary for watching a film. Given that Hildegard’s complex relationship with Jutta is an important theme in the film, it would also confuse the viewer about how this important relationship got started.

Instead, von Trotta made the choice to show Hildegard being enclosed at age 8. She meets the young Jutta and has a childish quarrel that allows von Trotta to set up a recurring theme about the nature of envy. When Jutta dies much later in the film, we see Hildegard lose a woman who is literally her oldest friend and a surrogate sister. Had von Trotta opted to show Hildegard being enclosed at age 14, the relationship with Jutta would have played differently on screen.

While I as a scholar have the luxury of not having to commit to one set of events when the facts are unclear, von Trotta as a story-teller does not have that same option. She has to show Hildegard’s entry into monasticism; it establishes the terms on which Hildegarde lives her life. It explains her relationship with Jutta, who feels envious that their surrogate mother loved Hildegard better. And when Sister Richardis joins the monastery, Hildegard herself becomes a surrogate mother, and then has to wrestle with feelings of abandonment when Richardis accepts her family’s request to move to a different monastery. Hildegard’s enclosure is a key event in the film, and so von Trotta has to show it. And that means making a choice about when the event happened.

Richardis’ mother and brother watching her veiling

But this has its own problems with it. I as a historian have to accept a certain degree of ambiguity when I write about the past. I frequently do not have enough evidence to answer all the questions I have, and often I have to qualify my narrative by saying “this is probably what happened, but I can’t completely exclude a different scenario.” To the average reader, this might get frustrating. My students hate it when I tell them that I don’t know what happened and that they will have to make up their own minds based on the evidence; they always want me to tell them what happened so they don’t have to think about it for themselves.

So from my perspective, von Trotta has gone beyond the available facts. She has taken an uncertain event and told her viewers that it happened at a time and in a way that we cannot actually know. She has crossed the line between history and fiction, and she has done so without even telling her viewers that she has done it. The average viewer will take away from this film the idea that we know when and how Hildegard of Bingen became a nun, and it will not even occur to most viewers that perhaps there is a scholarly debate or any uncertainty at all.

In taking this approach, von Trotta has made my work harder, because she is helping train audiences to think of history in terms of ‘what happened’ and not in terms of how historians carefully reconstruct the past out of judgments made about the uncertainties of the past. She has papered over my carefully constructed ambiguity with a simplistic made-up version of events.

Now obviously, it doesn’t matter too much to the world if people get a mistaken impression of how old Hildegard of Bingen was when she became an oblate. No wars will be fought and no social policies will be established based on this faulty knowledge. So von Trotta’s sin is a small one. The problem comes when film-maker after film-maker does the same thing von Trotta has done here. It trains viewers to expect narrative certainty from scholars and makes it harder for us to teach our students that history is sometimes ambiguous and that we need to understand the complex facts and scholarly debates before we can make an educated guess about what may have actually happened.

Was there any way for von Trotta to avoid doing what she did? I don’t know. I’m not a film-maker. Apart from not showing any scene that clearly shows when Hildegarde was enclosed, I can’t see any other option. But perhaps some film-maker wiser than me, more versed in cinematic story-telling techniques and willing to take directorial chances can find a solution. I don’t have any solutions here, but that’s why I’m an historian, not a film-maker.

Simplistic approaches to historical films encourage viewers to develop simplistic ideas about the past, and that’s not a good thing, because, as I recently argued to Sam Adams, historical accuracy in film matters.

Note: In an earlier edition of this post, I accidentally wrote that Hildegard could have been enclosed in 1006, instead of 1106. My apologies for the error.

Want to Know More? 

Vision – From the Life of Hildegard von Bingenis available on DVD through Amazon, although it’s a little pricey. In my opinion, it’s worth it.

If you want to know more about Hildegard, I’d suggest starting with Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Lifeby Sabina Flanagan. She does a good job of recounting Hildegarde’s life and works  and gives a sense of the enormous range of her work.

Arn the Knight Templar: We’re the Clergy; We Don’t Need Rules

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Arn the Knight Templar, Joakim Natterqvist, Knights Templar, Medieval Europe, Monks and Nuns, Religious Issues, Scandinavia

In my last post, I talked about the Holy Land portions of Arn the Templar Knight. In this post, I’m going to focus on the Sweden portions of the film. In order to understand what’s going in Sweden in this film, we need to look a little bit at 12^th century Swedish history. Swedish history in this period is particularly complex and turbulent, so I may have gotten some of the small details wrong—the books on Scandinavian history in my personal library weren’t a lot of help on this topic.

12th Century Sweden: Folkungs vs Sverkers

Much of the Swedish action in the film is based around the districts of Västergotland, particularly the Cistercian monastery of Varnhem, and Ostragotland in central Sweden. The two most powerful families were the Eriks and the Sverkers, whose members struggled for control of the throne throughout the later 12^th century; the Eriks enjoyed the support of the Folkungs of Ostragotland. In 1160, King Erik the Saint (Erik IX) was murdered, reportedly by Emund Ulvbane, a supporter of the Sverker dynasty. Power passed to Karl Sverkersson (Charles VII).

Finding a decent map of medieval Sweden on the internet is hard to do

While Karl held the throne, Erik’s son, Knut Eriksson went into exile and his wife, whose name is unknown, was placed in a convent to protect her. In 1167, Karl Sverkersson was assassinated by Knut’s supporters, and Knut became king (Knut I) (and was reunited with his wife), although he struggled with Karl’s sons for 6 years before he was entirely in control of Sweden. His most important supporter was his jarl, Birger Brosa (“Smiling Birger”). He remained king until 1196, when he fell ill and died. But his sons were only minors, and so he was succeeded by Sverker II, son of Karl Sverkersson.

Knut I

After his father’s death, Sverker was taken to Denmark to be raised among his Danish mother’s clan. When Knut died, Birger Brosa and other Swedish leaders brokered Sverker’s peaceful succession. In 1203, Sverker exiled Karl’s sons from Sweden. They returned in 1205 with Norwegian backing, but Sverker killed three of them and drove the fourth, Erik, out of the country. Erik returned again in 1208, and confronted Sverker at the battle of Lena. Sverker’s troops were commanded by his father-in-law, Ebbe Suneson, but Erik defeated them, drove Sverker out of Sweden, and became king (Erik X). In 1210, Sverker attempted an invasion but was killed at the battle of Gestilren.

By the 1240s, the dominant figure in Sweden was Birger Jarl, who was a great-grandson of Sverker I and nephew of Birger Brosa, thus straddling the divide between these two important families. After defeating a branch of the Folkungs at the battle of Sparrsätra (which involved the first documented use of cavalry in Sweden), he was able to orchestrate the election of his son Valdemar I as king of Sweden, although Birger Jarl remained the power behind the throne until his death in 1266. Valdemar reigned until 1275, when he was deposed by his younger brother, but in many ways, Valdemar’s reign saw the emergence of a fully-unified Sweden.

With all that in mind, let’s get to Arn the Knight Templar

The Opening of the Film

At the start of the film, Arn is given to the Cistercian monastery of Varnhem, in Västergotland, at age 5 after he falls sick and his mother prays for his recovery. He is raised by the monks there, and receives military training from Brother Guilbert, a former Templar. But as a young adult, the abbot Father Henry (Simon Callow) sends Arn (Joakim Nätterqvist) back to his family, who happen to be the Folkungs. He shows up just in time to help Birger Brosa. Birger is trying to achieve a reconciliation with the Sverkers, but the Sverker agent, Emund Ulvbane, insults the Folkungs and maneuvers the elderly Birger into a duel. Arn steps in at the last moment and defeats Emund, initially showing him mercy, but cutting off his hand when Emund treacherously tries to attack him again.

This is a nice example of a fictional character being inserted into a historical conflict. Very little seems to be known about Emund Ulvbane, so having Arn maim him is a nice bit of hypothetical history that doesn’t disrupt the known facts at all.

Arn falls in love with Cecilia Algotsdotter (Sofia Helin). It’s not entirely clear what her situation is at the start of the film. She seems to be in Godhem Convent (along with her sister Katarina), but only part of the time. She’s singing in a choir when Arn walks into the church and sees her.

Arn and Cecilia on their first date

He falls in love with Cecilia and they sneak off and have sex, and Cecilia gets pregnant. She tells her sister Katarina, who is envious of her because Katarina feels that their father only has the resources to marry off one girl. Katarina fears having to become a nun, so she tells Mother Rikissa (Bibi Andersson), who happens to be a Sverker. Mother Rikissa writes to her cousin the bishop and informs him of what has happened. A plot is hatched in which Katarina claims to have had sex with Arn, which allows the bishop to accuse Arn and Cecilia of fornication and Arn of incest (which in this period included sleeping with two sisters). He excommunicates them and imposes a strict 20 year penance on the lovers; Arn is sent to Varnhem Abbey and Cecilia to Godhem. This establishes the central conflict of the film; Arn has to become a Templar and serve in the Holy Land, while Cecilia has to live at Godhem and endure the torments of the hateful Mother Rikissa. She is saved when Cecilia Blanka arrives at the convent. Blanka is eventually revealed to be the wife of Knut Eriksson and when Knut becomes king, Blanka returns to him and takes Cecilia with him.

But there are various problems with this whole scenario. Just as the film is unclear about how the Templar Order operates, so too is it unclear about everything else about the medieval church. Arn is given to the monastery as a boy; this is clearly supposed to be an example of oblation, in which a child was given by his parents to a monastery to become a monk. But oblation was dying out in the 12^th century, and the Cistercians in particular refused to accept them because they found the presence of children disruptive. Furthermore, if he had been given as an oblate, he wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the monastery as an adult. Father Henry seems to be a rather lax Cistercian at a time when Cistercians were known for their strictness.

The abbot’s laxness is also shown in that he allows Brother Guilbert to just stand around practicing archery, and he allows Guilbert to teach Arn to fight, apparently just because Arn is good at fighting. Medieval monks, especially 12^th century Cistercians, followed a fairly regimented daily routine that wouldn’t have allowed much room for archery or sword play. Overall, this detail is wildly improbable.

Brother Guilbert teaching young Arn to use a bow

Mother Rikissa is just as lax as Father Henry, because she seems to allow Cecilia to come and go from the abbey at will, and she allows Arn to just walk into the convent for no apparent reason. Noble girls were frequently sent to convents to be raised, but the whole point of that is to help ensure their virginity, which Mother Rikissa distinctly fails to do. The convent also has a male choir director, which would have been extremely inappropriate. But overall, Mother Rikissa is a bigger problem because she’s dressed as a Cistercian even though the Cistercian Order didn’t accept nuns in the 12^th century.

Why is there a male choir director in a house of nuns?

The bishop’s punishment of them is also historically dubious. I’ve already dealt with the problem of forcing someone to become a Knight Templar, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. In church one day, the bishop brings the accusation of fornication and incest against Arn and Cecilia and imposes penance on them right there and then. This is roughly the equivalent of a modern judge calling a press conference to announce that he will prosecute someone for a crime and then declaring the sentence.

Contrary to popular imagination, the medieval Church had a complex body of law (canon law) that governed how a bishop’s court could proceed. In this period, there had to be a formal accuser (who would be punished if the charge could not be proven), and the bishop cannot bring the accusation himself because he or his official acted as the judge and therefore had to be objective (at least in theory). The defendants had to be summoned to appear in the bishop’s court, where a trial would be conducted, with the accused having the ability to defend himself. If found guilty, the bishop can then impose penance, but he can’t impose penance without a trial unless the accused confesses to a sin. Since there has been neither a trial nor a confession, the bishop has no authority to impose penance on Arn and Cecilia. Furthermore, excommunication was a tool to force someone to submit and receive penance; it’s not really a punishment in its own right. There was no point in an excommunicated person performing penance, because excommunication was essentially a threat of damnation, and until the excommunication was lifted, no amount of penance would achieve any spiritual benefit because the person would be going to hell. There was no point in an excommunicated person going on crusade, for just the same reason.

Sentencing Arn and Cecilia to 20 years’ penance at monasteries is probably excessive, but the bishop is evil and out to get Arn and Cecilia, so I suppose this detail is not implausible.

Overall, the film seems to just be making up the religious details as needed for the plot. This is not uncommon in popular films about the Middle Ages. The assumption is made that the Church had enormous and largely unrestricted power which the clergy could exercise or not as they saw fit. In reality, the clergy were as tightly bound by canon law as modern police and lawyers are bound by modern civil law. Some certainly abused their authority, but this was taken as seriously as abuse of power by law enforcement is today.

After Odysseus Arn Returns Home

The last 30 minutes or so of Arn are focused on the period after Arn gets back to Sweden and is reunited with Cecilia.  His return must be around 1188 or 1189. Despite Cecilia’s royal connections through Blanka and Arn’s distinguished military career, they go back to peasanting, which mostly consists of throwing nets in shallow creeks, cutting boards, and making love. Personally, if I had important political connections that could lift me out of poverty, I’m pretty sure I’d use them to avoid a life of drudgery and hard labor, but modern movies about the Middle Ages typically emphasize the moral value of simple peasant life over the moral compromises of the nobility.

After this, however, the historical train goes completely off the rails. The time scale seems to collapse here. The villainous Ebbe Suneson shows up and tells them that Knut is dying and Sverker will come to power, so we’ve suddenly jumped to about 1195. We get a training montage of Arn teaching peasants how to fight, and then Arn and his men head off to fight what seems to be the battle of Lena in 1208. The film entirely passes over Sverker’s legitimate and peaceful election as king, as well as the intervening political upheavals. Sverker is supported by Danish troops led by Ebbe Suneson. But I suppose Arn can win the battle because he’s had more than a decade to train them to fight.

The ensuing battle is a mélange of random bits of medieval warfare. Arn’s troops are equipped with chainmail or leather armor, mid-11^th century Norman helmets, a mixture of early medieval round shields and 12^th century heater shields, and Welsh longbows, which wouldn’t be introduced to the wider European world by the English until the late 13^th century. This is the equivalent of equipping Napoleon’s troops with AK-47s. Sverker’s forces include a lot of cavalry (which, remember, wasn’t introduced to Sweden until the 1240s), with everyone in chainmail and great helms (which is about right for the late 12^th century).

Arn and his troops at whatever battle this is supposed to be.

Arn defeats and kills Ebbe because Ebbe is unfamiliar with the dangers posed to cavalry by the Welsh longbow (understandable given that he couldn’t have ever seen them before). The battle itself is staged as a mixture of the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and Braveheart’s version of the battle of Stirling Bridge, and probably bears no actual resemblance to the battle of Lena.

Sverker has conveniently gotten his troops to wear red, to tell them from Arn’s troops

Arn is wounded in the battle and dies after returning home to Cecilia. The film concludes with a shot of his funeral, and an epilogue text explaining that Arn’s efforts brought peace to Sweden for many years and that Arn was the reason Sweden was unified. The novels position Arn as the grandfather of Birger Jarl, but in asserting that Sweden’s peace and unification was brought about because of Arn, the film essentially passes from historical fiction into alternate history. It’s sort of like ending Saving Private Ryan with an epilogue that explains that the US won World War II because of Captain America.

To my mind, the film is at its best when it’s focusing on Sweden. It explores a largely neglected period of history and introduces high medieval Sweden to a wider audience. But unfortunately, it doesn’t clearly explain the historical conflict it’s using as its backdrop and instead resorts of clichés about the Middle Ages that obscure more than they educate. Perhaps the fuller, two-film version does a better job explaining the history it’s working with. So while Arn the Knight Templar is a decent story, it’s very muddled history.

Want to Know More?

Arn: The Knight Templaris available on Amazon.

As I mentioned, it’s based on Jan Guillou’s Crusades trilogy: The Road to Jerusalem: Book One of the Crusades Trilogy; The Templar Knight: Book Two of the Crusades Trilogy; and Birth of the Kingdom: Book Three of the Crusades Trilogy

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen

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Hildegarde of Bingen, Interesting Women, Margarethe von Trotta, Medieval Europe, Medieval Germany, Monks and Nuns, Movies I Love, Religious Issues, Vision

Today’s film is a small biopic, Vision: From the Life of Hildegarde von Bingen (2009, dir. Margarethe von Trotta; German with subtitles). As the title explains, the film focuses on the life of the 11^th century German nun, Hildegarde of Bingen, one of the most important women of the Middle Ages. Von Trotta is an important feminist film-maker whose work has often focused on lesser-known female historical figures. While not overtly political, much of her work has focused on the complex relationships women have with other women, and that is certainly an important issue in this film.

The Historical Hildegarde

Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098-1179) was the daughter of a minor German noble in the German Rhineland. When she was a young girl, her parents offered to the nearby Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg as an oblate, a child-monk (or in this case, child-nun). She was enclosed under the guidance of an anchorite named Jutta von Sponheim. Anchorites were men or women who lived in a solitary room attached to a church, spending their lives in prayer and contemplation and offering spiritual guidance to visitors. Von Sponheim was somewhat unusual in that she was a well-educated woman, and she tutored Hildegard. Thanks to the help of Von Sponheim and Volmar, a monk of Disibodenberg, Hildegard became an extremely well-educated woman, arguably the most well-educated woman of her generation. Von Sponheim’s reputation for piety attracted a number of other women to seek admission to Disibodenberg, which was technically only a male house. When Hildegard was enclosed, there was another oblate living there, a young girl also named Jutta, who was to be a life-long sister nun of Hildegard.

The ruins of Disibodenberg

After von Sponheim’s death, Hildegard was unanimously elected as the magistra of the nuns at Disibodenberg. Technically, a magistra was a teacher, but since Disibodenberg was a male house with a small group of nuns attached to it, the magistra was functionally like an abbess for the nuns. The abbot of Disibodenberg, Kuno, asked her to accept the post of prioress, which would have given him formal authority over her. Hildegard, however, requested that the nuns be permitted to leave Disibodenberg and found a new independent monastery. He refused, but Hildegard was able to persuade the archbishop of Mainz to authorize the move, and the result was that she became the abbess of Rupertsberg.

More interesting, Hildegard was, from a very young age, a visionary. She periodically received visions, both visual and auditory. She came to understand that these visions came from God. In 1141, when she was about 42, she received an instruction to write down her visions. She hesitated to do so until she fell gravely ill; at that point, with the assistance of Brother Volmar and a nun, Richardis of Stade, she began to transcribe her experiences, something she continued to do for the rest of her life, ultimately producing three volumes of theology based on her visions.

Hildegard receiving a vision

Initially she was hesitant to publicize her writings, but eventually in 1147, she wrote to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the leading clergyman of the period. Bernard responded favorably, and helped Abbot Kuno promote her work at the Synod of Trier in 1148, where Pope Eugenius III formally encouraged her to continue.

Hildegard’s visions gave her a great deal of spiritual influence. She began to speak out against heresy and the corruption of the Church. Ultimately, her circle of correspondents and advice-seekers came to include 4 popes, 10 archbishops, and 1 German emperor, her distant cousin Frederick I Barbarossa. On several occasions she debated the Old Testament with a leading Jewish scholar from Mainz.

In her later years, she undertook a preaching campaign on her own initiative. In some ways this is the most startling aspect of her career. Preaching was legally restricted to the bishop of a diocese and those he chose to specially license for the task. Only the clergy were granted this privilege, and it was unheard of for a woman to preach. Unlicensed preaching was a common problem with heretics. And yet, despite this, Hildegard mounted at least four preaching tours of parts of Germany, and was not condemned.

Late in life, she defied the archbishop of Mainz and buried an excommunicated man in the Rupertsberg cemetery. She refused to allow his body to be dug up, and was briefly excommunicated for her stand. Ultimately, though, the archbishop relented.

Hildegard didn’t just publish her visions. She wrote a number of pieces of liturgical music, two treatises on natural medicine, two lives of saints, a commentary on the Gospels, and other short works. She authored the Ordo Virtutum, a piece of musical liturgical drama that stands as one of the first pieces of drama written since the Roman period. She invented her own language and wrote at least one text in it. She produced 400 surviving letters. She is the first woman to write on female sexuality.

Hildegard’s visions enabled her to release the full force of her personality into a society in which women were normally expected to be submissive to men. She boldly asserted her views of right and wrong, and felt comfortable enough to even rebuke the Emperor on occasion.

In short, Hildegard of Bingen was one of the most important authors and fascinating women of the Middle Ages, and she more than deserves to be the subject of a film.

The Movie

Vision does a good job of showing many of the major events in Hildegard’s life. It opens with her oblation as a young girl, and then jumps forward to the 1140s when Hildegard (Barbara Sukowa) begins to write down her visions and rise to fame. We see some of the opposition she encountered from male clergy who were suspicious of her claims. We see her struggle to achieve independence from Disibodenberg, and we watch the development of her relationship with Sister Richardis (Hannah Herzsprung). We see a performance of part of the Ordo Virtutum. The film frequently uses Hildegard’s own words, and much of the music is based on Hildegard’s liturgical compositions. Where possible, the film was shot in the ruins of several medieval monasteries.

The nuns of Bingen singing the liturgy

The film does take some liberties with the facts. The Ordo Virtutum was written after Richardis’ death (indeed, one of the characters is thought to be based on Richardis), but in the film, Richardis plays a role in the first performance of it. The film depicts Kuno as at different times both supporting and opposing her, but I’m uncertain that he opposed her except when she sought to leave Disibodenberg. Hildegard’s election was unanimous, but in the film, Sister Jutta (Lena Stolz) votes against it out of envy.

These changes, however, do not feel like serious errors to me. However, two other changes seem more egregious. In the mid-1140s, Hildegard was examined by a group of clergymen about her visions. They accepted her visions as genuine communications for God, but in the film they denounce her as inspired by the Devil, forcing her to seek validation from St. Bernard. This feels clichéd to me, and it’s really the low point of the whole film. The film also includes a sexual scandal to explain why Hildegard wanted her nuns to leave Disibodenberg; I’m highly suspicious that this was a made up detail, but it does allow the cinematic Hildegard to demonstrate the force of her personality.

A scholar who specializes in studying Hildegard or who knows more than I do about the technical details of monasticism may well spot other errors, but this is far from the worst depiction of monasticism I’ve seen on the screen. Rather than treating monasticism as something exotic or bizarre to gawk at, the film tries to normalize monasticism and explore what it meant to these women.

In fact, I think the film does a good job of trying to convey what life in a monastery was like. We see scenes of Hildegard teaching her students, using her medical knowledge to treat the sick, and leading the nuns in the liturgy. The film captures some of the challenge that medieval monks had in getting access to books; in one scene, when a traveling bishop stops at Disibodenberg, Hildegard is excited to be allowed to borrow one of his books. In another scene, she talks about a story that the Caliph of Cordoba has a library of 400,000 books, and laments that the best Western libraries have only 400. We get one scene that shows a monastic election, and another scene in which Hildegard, probably leading a chapter meeting, seeks advice from her sisters about how to discipline rebellious nuns.

The film captures some of the way that medieval monks and nuns thought about their environment. Sister Jutta is reluctant to leave Disibodenberg, because that is where her surrogate mother Jutta is buried, and the physical connection with Jutta’s grave, and therefore her spirit, is very important to her. She objects that Hildegard swore a vow to not leave Disibodenberg. So for Sister Jutta, the move to Rupertsberg is more than just changing homes; it is uprooting herself from the place that has powerfully defined her entire life. To modern Americans, who are so willing to move to other parts of the country for work or marriage, this deep connection to a place is quite alien, and Vision does a good job of making it understandable.

The movie also captures the emotional intensity that was a feature of some monastic writing in this period. Monks and nuns lived in a literally cloistered world, partly isolated from outside society, but intimately, inescapably, in contact with the other residents of their house. They were encouraged to confess their sins to each other, and an abbess was expected to treat her nuns as her daughters. Her relationships with Sister Jutta and Sister Richardis are defined by the theological principle of love. Jutta struggles to love Hildegard despite the intense feelings of envy she feels; she resents that Hildegard received more affection from their surrogate mother Jutta, and later, she resents Hildegard’s affection for Richardis. When Richardis chooses to leave Rupertsberg to become abbess of another house, Hildegard is furious with her over what feels like a profound betrayal.

The film makes an interesting choice to focus on the emotional impact of events rather than on simply relating a narrative of events. It doesn’t always show the viewer the outcome of an event. For example, during the move to Rupertsberg, some of the nuns rebel at the hard work that Hildegard is demanding of them. Hildegard seeks advice from the other nuns on how to handle this rebellion, but instead of showing how Hildegard finally dealt with the rebels, the film jumps ahead to another incident. For von Trotta, the important thing is not what Hildegard decided to do, but rather how Hildegard and the other nuns came to a group decision.

Most biopics do one of two things at the end. Either the film follows the main character to the end of his or her life (often opening with the protagonist’s death and then jumping back, as in Evita), or they cut the action and then offer epilogue text telling us what happened to the main characters later on. Vision does neither of these things. It simply ends after Hildegard takes her decision to start her first preaching tour. The effect of this choice is to focus the viewer’s attention on Hildegard as a person, not as an historical figure. Unlike Evita, which presents Eva Peron’s life in explicitly historical terms and asks the viewer to pass judgment on what her life meant, Vision takes a historical figure and asks us to understand her as a human being. It de-emphasizes the political and social context of Hildegard’s life and instead concentrates on trying to help us understand who she was as a woman (or rather, who von Trotta thinks she was).

It’s a really refreshing change of pace to see a film in which women are the main characters and their discussions are about their relationships with each other and not their relationships with men. This film doesn’t just pass the Bechdel Test; it aces it so well it sets a much higher standard for how women’s relationships can be depicted. In this sense, von Trotta’s feminist approach is readily apparent. Although the film is not always true to events, it strives to present a historically plausible personality in her own terms. I hope it brings a greater level of awareness to this intriguing woman.

Hildegard getting another vision

Want to Know More?

Vision – From the Life of Hildegard von Bingenis available on DVD through Amazon, although it’s a little pricey. In my opinion, it’s worth it.

If you want to know more about Hildegard, I’d suggest starting with Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Lifeby Sabina Flanagan. She does a good job of recounting Hildegard’s life and works  and gives a sense of the enormous range of her work. If you want to delve into her writings, an easy option would be Selected Writings: Hildegard of Bingen (Penguin Classics), which is organized by themes rather than individual works. Or you could look at Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias (Classics of Western Spirituality), which is her account of her visions. For a slightly different approach to her work, take a look at Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. These only scratch the surface of Hildegard’s writings.