Benedetta: Naked Lust in Sinful Italy

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17th Century Europe, 17th Century Italy, Benedetta Carlini, Charlotte Rampling, Daphne Patakia, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Monks and Nuns, Paul Verhoeven, Religious Stuff, Virginie Efira

Sorry for my very long absence. Covid completely up-ended my work load in ways that have made doing any writing for pleasure nearly impossible. But this weekend my husband dragged me out of the house to go see a movie, and I felt I simply had to blog about it.

(And my subtitle is a riff on an old Benny Hill skit that reimagines Little Bo Peep as a 70s porn film. For some reason, that skit impressed me way too much as a kid.)

Spoiler Alert: If you plan on seeing this film in the theater, you may want to wait to read this until you have done so, since my review discusses major plot points.

Benedetta (2021, dir. Paul Verhoeven, French with English subtitles) tells the story of a lesbian nun in 17th century Tuscany. She is dedicated to a convent in the small town of Pescia when she is ten. Already at this age she feels a special connection to the Virgin Mary; the night after joining the convent, she kneels in prayer before a statue of the Virgin; the pedestal holding the statue breaks and the statue topples over onto her, pressing its exposed breast close to Benedetta’s face.

A decade later, Benedetta (Virginie Efira) is content with her life as a nun, although she doesn’t get along well with Sister Christina (Louise Chevillotte), who seems to be the biological daughter of the Mother Superior Felicita (Charlotte Rampling in a great performance). But she begins having visions in which Jesus appears to her, often defending her from bandits or snakes. She also begins to discover her sexual attraction to the rather coarse novice nun, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), when she accidentally sees the novice naked while bathing.

Benedetta’s visions are often accompanied by seizures, and so Felicita decides that Bartolomea should share a cell (or more properly just a curtained-off enclosure) with Benedetta to help her if she has a fit. During one vision, in which Benedetta sees Jesus on the cross and realizes he has a vagina instead of a penis, she receives the stigmata, the wounds of Christ.

Although the convent’s priest believes what Benedetta is experiencing, Felicita is more skeptical, pointing out that genuine stigmata are always accompanied with the wounds of the crown of thorns, which Benedetta does not have. Benedetta leaves the chamber but is soon found collapsed on the floor, bleeding from wounds to her scalp. In an unearthly voice that seems to represent Jesus, she declares that Benedetta is being persecuted. That resolves the question of authenticity for most of the nuns, and word begins to spread through Pescia that she is a saint. The priest pulls some strings and gets Benedetta appointed abbess, relegating Felicita to the status of a mere nun, which she accepts with equanimity.

One of the benefits of being mother superior is that Benedetta and Bartolomea now have a private room, and Bartolomea wastes no time in introducing Benedetta to lesbian sex. Unable to pleasure her deeply enough, Bartolomea carves a statue of the Virgin Mary into a dildo and the two carry on, not realizing that Felicita can spy on them though a hole in the wall.

Although Felicita can accept her demotion, Christina can’t. She tries to denounce Benedetta to the priest in the confessional, falsely claiming that she saw Benedetta cut the stigmata into herself with a piece of broken glass. The priest persuades her to make the accusation in front of the other nuns, but Felicita refuses to support Christina’s version of events and the priest orders Christina to flog herself. The whole incident traumatizes her so much she soon commits suicide by throwing herself off the convent roof.

That persuades Felicita to take action. Even though the Plague has broken out in Tuscany, she travels to Florence and denounces Benedetta to the Papal Nuncio (Lambert Wilson), who arrives and conducts an investigation. He tortures Bartolomea, who eventually reveals everything to him and gives him the dildo as proof. He orders Benedetta to be burned in the town square. But the local populace are not willing to see their saint die, especially since she had promised that Pescia would be spared from the Plague as long as she was alive. Benedetta displays the stigmata and denounces the Nuncio as her persecutor, and the townspeople riot and free her and kill the Nuncio while Felicita, infected with the Plague, throws herself on the flames.

Benedetta (Virginie Efira) displaying her stigmata

Afterwards, Bartolomea confronts Benedetta with a shard of pottery she found when she untied Benedetta from the stake. She accuses Benedetta of being a fraud and faking the stigmata. Benedetta responds that she doesn’t know what she does when she is having visions, and she returns to the convent, with an epilogue text telling us that she lived in solitary confinement for the next 30 years.

I really liked the movie up until the point where the Nuncio got involved, because at that point it degenerated into predictable clichés about tyrannical clergymen torturing and burning people. In particular it dwells at some length on a supposed torture instrument, the Pear of Anguish, which is used on Bartolomea. Supposedly these devices were inserted into an orifice and then cranked open, causing intense pain and damage to bone and tissue. But despite some uncertainty about what ‘pears of anguish’ were used for in the 17th century, they’re not torture devices because the few that aren’t 19th century forgeries aren’t designed to crank open but rather cranked closed; they spring open and don’t generate enough force to do anything more than be vaguely uncomfortable.

A supposed ‘pear of anguish’

But before that, the film offers a nice view of the complexities of convent life: the daily lives of the nuns; some of the work they do; the complex personal politics of the space; and the interplay between faith, skepticism, and politics. The film has a nice running motif of seeing that Verhoeven develops nicely to explore the issue of different kinds of vision.

Benedetta’s visions as they are showed to us are not unlike the visions some medieval nuns reported, and the film consistently refuses to take sides in the question of whether Benedetta’s visions are genuine or whether she suffers from some form of mental illness or epilepsy. Unfortunately, about the time Benedetta becomes mother superior, the film stops showing us her visions, so that element of the film gets somewhat forgotten.

My biggest complaint about the film, which will not be a surprise, is that a film written by two men and directed by one can’t help but indulge the male gaze too much. The nudity slowly becomes more explicit, especially when Bartolomea is stripped naked to be tortured, and in the last conversation between the two nuns both of the women are entirely nude. The two fairly explicit sex scenes feel rather gratuitous. Verhoeven simply can’t resist the lure of the more salacious elements of the story and succumbs to the temptation to treat these ‘lesbians’ with a prurient interest.

Benedetta being taking to the stake

Yeah, But Did It Happen?

A lot of it, yes.

In the early 1980s, historian Judith C. Brown discovered the records of two investigations into the nun Benedetta Carlini in the Florentine archives and was able to reconstruct a substantial amount of information about her. She was born in 1590 to a prosperous silk-worm farmer, Giuliano Carlini. Her birth was a difficult one and Guiliano vowed to dedicate the child to the service of the Virgin Mary if mother and child survived, which they did; ‘Benedetta’ means ‘blessing’. Giuliano, surprisingly, was literate and educated his daughter quite well, emphasizing her spiritual gifts.

As a young girl, she experienced strange things. A black dog mysteriously attacked her and then vanished, and a nightingale seemed to regularly imitate her singing. The family decided that the dog had been the Devil and the nightengale was sent by the Virgin. When she was 9, Giuliano decided that the time had come for Benedetta to enter a convent. She bid farewell to the nightingale and it flew away and was not seen again. She joined the Theatine house in Pescia, a group that were technically not nuns but laywomen living communally and following the Rule of St. Augustine, but Verhoeven can be forgiven for simplifying this detail, and to simplify I’ll just call the inhabitants nuns.

Soon after she joined the Order, Benedetta was praying in front of a statue of the Virgin when it fell over, which scared her but which she interpreted as evidence that the Virgin wished to kiss her. Beyond that, however, she seems to have been a fairly typical if highly obedient nun. Then in 1613, she began to report visions. In her first, she was in a heavenly garden with a beautiful fountain. In other visions, she was attacked by lions and other wild animals, only to be saved by Jesus, who appeared on horseback to defend her. These visions happened when she was praying, and others present reported that she seemed to be in a trance and often gesticulated and spoke incompressible words.

Benedetta and her confessor, Paolo Ricordati, agreed these were real visions, but wrestled with whether they were from God or the Devil. On Ricordati’s advising, she began to pray for struggles, because those would be more likely a gift from God rather than a seducing vision from the Devil. Two years later, her prayers were answered with painful attacks of paralysis. But in 1617, her visions resumed, this time being filled with frightening images of young men pursuing her with weapons; these visions could last for up to 6 to 8 hours. Eventually, she asked for help and it was agreed that a younger nun, Bartolomea Crivelli, was assigned to share her cell and to provide aid when Benedetta requested it.

In 1618, the nuns relocated to a new house, and Benedetta walked the entire route in a trance, seeing angels accompanying her and the Virgin greeting her at the new house. Three months later, she received a trance in which she saw the Crucifixion and received the stigmata, which Bartolomea described as looking like small rosettes.

One of the convents in modern Pescia (not Benedetta’s)

These developments deeply impressed the nuns. They voted to select Benedetta as their new abbess (which didn’t involve demoting their previous abbess). By Lent of 1619, Benedetta was in the habit of preaching sermons to the nuns, a highly irregular thing for an abbess to do. She preached in a trance, encouraging the nuns to scourge themselves as she did so. She spoke not as Benedetta Carlini but as an angel. Ricordati was troubled by this development, but felt that since Benedetta was not preaching per se but rather speaking as a prophetess channelling the words of an angel, it was acceptable.

In March of that year, she had a vision in which Jesus removed her heart. Three days later, he replaced it with his own heart, one that felt much larger. He also ordered her to never eat meat, eggs, or grains and drink only water. He also assigned her a guardian angel, Splenditello, who carried a branch that had flowers on one side to represent the good things she did and thorns on the other to represent her sins; when she erred, Splenditello would strike her with the thorny side, making her feel physical pain.

In May of 1619, Benedetta announced that she was to marry Jesus. (Note that by this time, she was about 30, not about 20 as she is in the film.) After a week of preparations (in which the nuns borrowed numerous items from other religious houses in the area), there was a complex wedding ceremony conducted; this too Father Ricordati was ok with. During the ceremony, Benedetta saw Jesus, the Virgin Mary, numerous saints, and many angels appear, and Jesus put a golden ring on her finger; she narrated all the details to the assembled nuns. Then she preached a sermon speaking as Jesus, declaring that Benedetta was the “empress of all nuns” and that those who did not believe in her would not be saved. The whole ‘marriage with Jesus’ element is something Verhoeven chose to entirely omit from the story, which is a pity because it plays an extremely important role in the actual events.

Benedetta’s behaviors are certainly unusual, but hardly unprecedented. Late Medieval and Early Modern nuns of a more mystical bent frequently had visions; Benedetta’s older contemporary, St Teresa of Avila, is perhaps the most famous example in her period, but Italian nuns such as St Catherine of Siena and St Angela Foligno also had such experiences, and Benedetta and her fellow nuns were highly aware of St Catherine’s example and many of her experiences mirrored Catherine’s, including prolonged fasting, visions, and stigmata. Female mystics frequently spoke of Jesus as the “bridegroom” or “lover” of their soul, and marital imagery was a common way to describe union of the soul with Jesus. And Benedetta was clearly familiar with St Catherine; she was eventually made the house’s patron saint. The two truly unusual elements in the story are the elaborate wedding ceremony, and Jesus and angels speaking directly through Benedetta, but apparently even these elements did not strike Ricordati as automatically problematic, especially since Benedetta had been able to demonstrate some control over the phenomena, thereby conforming to St Paul’s statement that Christians do not receive a spirit of disorder but of order.

St Catherine receiving the stigmata

However, Benedetta’s marriage ceremony coincided with her house’s application to be elevated to a full convent, and that process drew her to the attention of the papal authorities, who had requested that the provost of Pescia, Stefano Cecchi, give them a report. Cecchi was fully aware of the wedding ceremony, and was apparently uncomfortable with it, because he had tried to restrict who could be present at it. Then he forbade anyone to discuss the ceremony, and decided to conduct a formal investigation of the matter.

He examined Benedetta’s stigmata and determined that they produced fresh blood when the dried blood was washed off. He visited her a total of 14 times over the following months, and became more perplexed by her stigmata, because sometimes they seemed to be healing and other times they bled freshly. At one point she exited the examination and then rushed back in with blood pouring down her face and in great pain. Ultimately Cecchi concluded that she was a true visionary. The pope elevated the house to full status as a monastery and Benedetta was confirmed as its abbess. This whole series of events is simplified in the film into a single examination that happens before Benedetta becomes abbess; indeed, it’s really why she becomes abbess.

Two years later, Benedetta died. Ricordati came immediately and commanded Benedetta to live again, and to the nuns’ surprise, she revived and described another vision she had had. Perhaps Ricordati was familiar enough with the symptoms of Carlini’s seizures that he was able to recognize her as being merely unconscious. This incident also happens in the film, but later, during the second formal examination.

The second examination began sometime between August of 1622 and March of 1623. A new papal nuncio, Alfonso Giglioli, became interested in Benedetta for reasons that are unclear. He was far more skeptical of her than Ricordati or Cecchi. During his investigation, Giglioli identified several contradictions in her visions. The ring that she eventually produced as her wedding ring was a shabby one, quite different from what she had described.

The nuns, when questioned, also pointed to some odd behavior. Despite having announced her strict diet, one nun claimed to have seen her furtively eating salami and mortadella. Another said that when she preached and urged the nuns to courage themselves, she never actually struck herself with the scourge she felt but rather seemed to smear it with blood from her hand. Damningly, two nuns claimed they had repeatedly spied on Benedetta through a hole in a door and had witnessed her renewing her wounds with a needle. (There is a hole in the bedroom wall in the film, but Felicita uses it not to spy on Benedetta’s stigmata but on her sexual activities.)

The most startling testimony, however, came from Sister Bartolomea. She said that repeatedly, after she had disrobed, Benedetta would call to her for assistance and when she came over, Benedetta would throw her down on the bed, climb on top of her, and rub their bodies together. When Benedetta did this, she would speak as Splenditello and tell Bartolomea that what they were doing was not a sin because he was doing it, not Benedetta. Benedetta, when question by the investigators, denied having any memory of what she did when Splenditello was controlling her. This is the point where Verhoeven really deviates from the facts. Splenditello never plays any role in the movie at all, and in the film it is Bartolomea and not Benedetta who initiates sex. There was no dildo. The nuncio himself never showed up in Pescia, never tortured Bartolomea, never attempted to burn Benedetta, and was not killed in a riot (he actually died in 1630).

By November of 1623, the investigation had ended and the nuncio had issued a ruling. Benedetta’s stigmata had vanished and she said that she was no longer receiving any visions, although she does not seem to have admitted any imposture. It was concluded that all the apparent miracles were intentionally fabricated by Benedetta. She was removed as abbess. But exactly what the nuncio did beyond that is unclear because she mostly disappears from the records at that point. In 1661, a nun recorded in her diary that Benedetta had died at age 71 of a fever after spending 35 years in prison, by which she likely meant solitary confinement. If that nun was correct, however, that means that Benedetta was not put into solitary confinement in 1623, because that would have been 38 years earlier. Brown speculates that Carlini must have done something in 1626 that merited more harsh treatment than whatever she received in 1623, but we can only speculate about what might have happened. But the townspeople were apparently still quite interested in Carlini, because they sought to get access to her body and the nuns had to bar the monastery doors until she could be buried. Bartolomea died in 1660.

Much of the scholarly debate about Carlini has turned on the question of how to interpret her sexuality. Brown read her as being a lesbian, using the character of Splenditello to express her own lesbian desires, and therefore viewed her through the lens of the history of women’s spirituality and sexuality. But some critics have argued that doing this reads Carlini through a contemporary lens of sexual identities that would have been entirely foreign to Carlini herself; the very concept of ‘lesbians’ did not exist in the 17th century and it’s not even clear that Carlini, Bartolomea, and the investigators recognized Bartolomea’s description as being about sex. For most people of the era, sex required a penis being inserted into some orifice, so in the absence of a penis, they may not have recognized sex as happening. (And it’s worth noting the Verhoeven evidently can’t imagine lesbian sex without a substitute penis.)

Historian Brian Levack has approached Carlini from a very different standpoint. In his work on exorcism in the Early Modern period, he argues that demonic possession provided female ‘victims’ an opportunity to depart from normal social rules about meekness, passivity, and restraint by enacting a wide range of taboo behaviors, including convulsions, blasphemy, vomiting, exhibitionism, and so on. Thus possession was an opportunity for victims to perform a drastically different social role than the one they normally were bound by. (In a previous blog post, I discussed a similar reading of the Salem Witch Trials.) Levack thus views possession as a form of performance, situating Benedetta’s actions not in the history of sexuality but rather in the history of religious theater, and it is worth noting the degree to which Benedetta’s visions and seizures had a literally theatrical element to them; the most obvious example is her wedding ceremony, but also her move from the old house to the new one and a couple of religious processessions she orchestrated.

Finally, it is worth at least pondering the gender roles Benedetta maintained. Although she was a nun and underwent a spiritual marriage to become a literal bride of Christ, she occasionally adopted the persona of two male figures, Jesus and Splenditello. When she was Jesus, Benedetta was both bride and groom in one body, and when she had sex with Bartolomea, she played a male role both by initiating sex through seduction/deception and by being on top of Bartolomea. Is it possible that we should view Benedetta not as a lesbian but as an example of what we today would call a trans man or gender-fluid person? Unfortunately, that’s a question we can’t answer because the investigators didn’t ask Benedetta about how she understood her gender. She never engaged in any form of cross-dressing or breast-binding (that we know of), but she did engage in attempts to control her body through fasting and, apparently, through self-mutilation, both practices which some trans individuals today struggle with. Her seizures, the physical pain her body experienced, and her dramatic death and revival might also point to a sense of alienation from her body. And to borrow a point from Levack’s approach, her behavior while having visions and being possessed allowed her to temporarily put off her highly-restricted feminine identity and engage in male-coded behavior such as drawing attention to herself, preaching, taking a leadership role, and initiating sex. Thus it is not unreasonable to consider whether Benedetta was seeking to express a sense that she was male even if her body was not.

Benedetta does a nice job of calling attention to a fascinating and very obscure woman. The film does a very good job of exploring convent life and exploring some of Benedetta’s experiences. But by making Bartolomea the sexual aggressor and excluding the details about Splenditello, I think Verhoeven misrepresents Benedetta in a fairly key way, and the whole third act departs from the most fascinating elements of her story in favor of a clichéd false ending that seriously diminishes my appreciation for the film.

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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 understandably 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 Last Kingdom: the Law, the Church, and Marriage

Tags

Alexander Draymon, Alfred the Great, Amy Wren, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Religious Stuff, The Last Kingdom, Uhtred of Bebbanburg

Partway through the first season of The Last Kingdom, our hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Alexander Draymon) gets married to Mildreth (Amy Wren). This starts a plot thread dealing with a debt owed to the Church that I think is worth looking at, because, as usual whenever medieval law or religion is involved, things go wrong historically.

In the third episode, Uhtred presses Alfred (David Dawson) to give him land. Alfred counters by offering him a bride who has land, and he decides to take the offer. Episode 4 is where the marriage happens. Evidently there was a meeting not shown in the episode in which Uhtred negotiated the details of the marriage with her godfather, Odda. Her father is dead, but it seems a little odd that he would be negotiating with Odda instead of an actual kinsman of hers, since godparents did not have any legal rights over godchildren, but perhaps Odda is actually a kinsman as well as a godparent (which would be fairly irregular, since godparents were not typically relatives of the child) or perhaps her entire family is dead and it was decided that Odda as godparent was the only person around to be responsible for her.

Odda’s son, Odda Jr, (Brian Vernel) has the hots for Mildred and tries to bribe Uhtred to not marry her, presumably because he wants to marry her himself. Unfortunately for him, that would have been a no-no, because since his father is Mildrith’s god-father, he has a spiritual kinship with Mildreth that would render the marriage a form of incest. The show never explicitly says he wants to marry her, and he’s an all-around rotter anyway, so perhaps he just wants some semi-incestuous sexytime with her.

The unseen meeting is technically the engagement ceremony, the beweddung (the ‘wedding’), and it was normally the critical moment of the whole marriage as far as the law was concerned. Engagement was a legal contract, with witnesses, and was often accompanied by a feast to celebrate the establishing of new ties between the two men. Once the beweddung has taken place, groom and bride’s family are legally committed to the union, and if either of them tries to back out, they owe the other side a stiff fine. Socially this would have been an important moment as well, and Uhtred would probably have met Mildrith at that point. However, her presence was not legally required; what mattered was her father’s presence and Uhtred’s. The beweddung would eventually be followed by the gifta, the ‘giving’ of the bride at the nuptial ceremony. In the show, the gifta apparently happens a day or two after the beweddung, but the two ceremonies could actually be months or even years apart. The gifta was less important, but the show assumes it’s the more important one because for modern Westerners, the engagement has become a nominal practice and the nuptial ceremony has become the focus of all the attention as well as the legal heart of the arrangement.

The gifta

Uhtred pays a “bride price” of “33 pieces”, presumably of silver, that is, shillings. Technically this would have been the ‘handgeld’ or weotuma, paid by the groom to the family of the bride at the engagement ceremony. It compensated the family for the loss of their daughter and her labor and also demonstrated that the groom had the resources to support his wife. However, by Alfred’s time, the handgeld was given to the bride herself. In the show, Odda momentarily tries to keep the handgeld for himself, but it is finally presented to Mildrith by Odda Jr at the nuptials, although it turns out that he’s kept almost half of it without her knowing it. (Uhtred later correctly says that this money belongs to her legally, so Odda has cheated her.)

At the nuptials, Father Beocca (Ian Hart) blesses the wedding. Modern Americans would assume that this was necessary for the marriage to actually be a marriage, but as I’ve mentioned before, the participation of a priest was not a requirement for a marriage to be binding. It’s a social nicety and a religious blessing, but the beweddung was legally the key moment in the joining of the couple.

Then the couple rides to her estate, Lyscombe, which legally is his estate, since it would be the dowry from her family to him. Uhtred would have had control over the property. During the ride, Uhtred discovers there’s a complication involved in this deal, which we’ll get to later. When they get to Lyscombe, Mildrith proceeds to give away some or all of her handgeld to the peasants who have come to congratulate her on her marriage. From a financial standpoint, this is a very foolish thing to do, because that money was intended to help support her when she becomes a widow. It’s also a fairly extravagant gift, since a shilling was enough to purchase a couple acres of land. And, as we’ll see, she’s deeply in debt. However, generosity was an important Christian virtue and Mildrith later decides to become a nun, so perhaps she’s trying to emulate the extravagant disdain of wealth that saints were expected to demonstrate.

Then the newlyweds have sex. However, the show skips over another important moment. After sleeping with her, assuming she was a virgin, a new husband was obligated to pay his bride her morgengabe, or ‘morning gift’. The morgengabe was financial compensation to the bride for the loss of her virginity. The failure to pay this was a statement that the bride was not a virgin, and it was mattered legally. If he married her thinking her a virgin and then discovered that she wasn’t, he would have grounds to repudiate the marriage and sue her father for fraud. Like the handgeld, the morning gift was the bride’s personal property, outside her husband’s legal authority.

Amy Wren’s Mildrith

So there are three important moments in an Anglo-Saxon wedding: the beweddung, the gifta, and the payment of the morgengabe. The show has chosen to give us only one of them, the gifta, arguably the least critical of the three legally, out of the mistaken sense that it was the most important one. Modern audiences don’t care much about the legal niceties and assume that the blessing of the nuptials is the emotionally critical moment, but I’m far from convinced that an Anglo-Saxon would have seen it that way.

The Debt

On the ride to Lyscombe, Mildrith reveals that there’s a complication. As she explains it, her dead father made an arrangement with ‘the Church’. She says that to find favor with God he gave the Church 1/10^th of the yield of his estate, and ‘they’ demand this payment even when the crops fail or the Danes raid. The bishop sued her father. It’s not clear what court this was, but she says “the Church is the law, and the law decreed that my father owed them a huge sum.” He died right after that. Alfred, she says, could “remove the debt”, but he has chosen not to. Then she reveals that the amount owed is 2,000 shillings. There’s a lot wrong here, so let’s pick it apart.

In the Anglo-Saxon period, 1 librum (a ‘pound’) was worth 48 shillings, while 1 shilling was worth 4-6 pence (the exact exchange rate fluctuated over time, so let’s say it’s 5 pence to the shilling). 2,000 shillings is 10,000 pence or about 42 libra. Translating medieval currency into modern currency is quite difficult, since their economy was drastically different from ours. Instead of trying to declare an equivalent dollar amount, I’ll do what historians do and talk about prices in the Anglo-Saxon period so you can get a sense of the buying power of that money. One shilling was enough to purchase a ewe and lamb, so that sum would purchase a massive flock of sheep. A common house dog cost about 4 pence. A sword cost around 240 shillings. 1 librum could purchase around 120 acres of land, so that sum would purchase around 5,000 acres. In other words it’s a huge sum of money.

One of Alfred’s pence

Since that sum was accrued off of 1/10^th of Mildreth’s estates, either her father had a massive estate of which we don’t see much evidence (since her hall is a small house in need of repair), or else her father let that debt run up for a very long time. If her father controlled estates large enough to generate that sort of debt in a just a few years, why was her handgeld so low? If she’s that rich, why didn’t any other noble try to marry her? (She says there were other suitors but “none suitable”, perhaps a reference to her god-sibling Odda Jr.) In other words, these figures don’t make a lot of sense based on what little evidence we have to work with.

But honestly, the math is the least of the issues here. It’s not clear who her father made this deal with. Was it the local church attached to her father’s estates? A local monastery? One of the bishops of Wessex? It’s never explained. I doubt it’s the local “parish” church (in quotations because the actual parish system won’t develop for a few more centuries), because if it’s on his land, he would probably be the proprietor of the church and therefore he’d be making a deal with himself and could let himself out of it if need be. What would make the most sense historically is that he made this deal with a local monastery, since early medieval nobles frequently made donations to a monastery that had an association with their family, in exchange for being able to retire there late in life, but I suppose he could have done it with the bishop for some reason. The fact that the bishop is the one who sued him would suggest that it was a deal with the bishop, so that’s what I’m going to say.

It seems highly unlikely that he signed this deal with the bishop personally. Most Anglo-Saxon bishops were monks, who were trained to think about money as being evil, so most bishops probably won’t have accepted such a deal personally, for fear that the gift might lead them into sin. Instead, Mildrith’s dad probably made the deal with the local cathedral as an ecclesiastical institution. So he probably made the contract with the dean or the treasurer of the cathedral chapter (as the staff of a cathedral was collectively known) and gave the gift to the cathedral for its support and maintenance, or perhaps to build a new chapel or something.

But whatever deal he struck was very odd. Normally, if a noble wanted to give a gift to an ecclesiastical institution he would make it in either movable goods (livestock perhaps, or much less commonly cash) or else he would give land free and clear. He would give an estate to the cathedral and the cathedral would take it over and manage it and it would become part of the permanent endowment of the cathedral. But that’s not what Mildrith’s father did. Instead, he gave the cathedral not the land, but rather some sort of usufructory rights on the land; he gave the cathedral the income from the land but not the land itself. And even more strangely, he didn’t give whatever produce or livestock the estate produced. He guaranteed the cathedral a set revenue from the estate regardless of how much the estate actually produced. That’s pretty bizarre, and it was an idiotic thing to do unless he was rolling in money and absolutely certain that he could afford to make up the difference between what the land actually produced and the revenue he had guaranteed to the cathedral. I’m not a specialist in medieval land law, but I’ve never run across a deal like that in my own research and it sounds suspiciously like it was made up to create a situation where poor Mildrith just happens to owe a vast sum of money she can’t pay. But perhaps some specialist in Anglo-Saxon land law can correct me on this.

An Anglo-Saxon charter

But wait! There’s more! The bishop “took [her father] to law”. In what court? His own episcopal court? Her statement that the Church “is the law” seems to mean it was the bishop’s court. That strikes me as suspicious, because that would make the bishop simultaneously judge and plaintiff, a highly irregular situation. Technically, the archdeacon might have been the one to bring the suit, since they handled most of the bishop’s financial matters; perhaps Mildrith is just using ‘the bishop’ as short-hand for the clerical officials under the bishop, but it still amounts to the bishop bringing suit in his own court. Since the gift was probably made to the cathedral rather than to the bishop, it might have been the cathedral treasurer who brought the suit, in which case it would have been the treasurer as representative of the building suing Mildrith’s father in the bishop’s court, in which case the bishop did not bring the suit at all but instead sat in judgment. That’s the most likely scenario, if we assume that Mildrith is wrong about who brought the suit.

But if the suit was brought in the bishop’s court, it was done under canon law, which would explain her statement that the Church is the law. But if this was an entirely canon law matter, why can King Alfred ‘remove’ the debt? Does she mean that Alfred has the legal power as king to simply void the contract? The only way that makes sense is if the suit was brought in the royal court, following secular law, with the bishop (or deacon or treasurer) as plaintiff, Mildreth’s father as defendant, and Alfred (or one of his officials) as the judge, and even then it naively assumes that the king can just make up the law as he goes. If it was a secular court case under royal law, her claim that the Church controlled the proceedings is nonsense, and if it was an episcopal suit under canon law, her statement that Alfred can waive the debt makes no sense. Perhaps she means that Alfred has the money to pay the bishop what is owed and simply refuses to do so. But if that’s the case, why would she assume the king would intervene to pay her father’s debts?

Now, on top of all that, the show assumes that because Uhtred is Mildrith’s husband, he is now locked into paying this debt. A conversation between Odda and Alfred confirms that this was part of Alfred’s intention. He wants to test whether Uhtred is reliable or not. But he’s forgotten one tiny detail. Anglo-Saxon law allows the groom to divorce his wife and sue her kin for fraud, which is pretty much what Alfred and Odda have just perpetrated. They’ve gotten Uhtred to marry on false pretenses, leading him to think that Mildrith is much wealthier than she actually is. Luckily for them, he’s as ignorant of Anglo-Saxon law as whoever dreamed up this scenario in the first place. He accepts that he’s on the line for the debt and it drives the next several episodes’ worth of action as he tries to find a way to pay the debt.

The Penance

However, that legal gibberish is a masterpiece of detailed historical research compared to what happens in the next episode.

Uhtred leads an attack against the Danes and scores a major victory. He’s warned to present himself to Alfred before anyone else can claim credit for the victory, but instead he goes to Lyscombe to meet his wife and newborn son. This somehow allows Odda Jr to claim all the credit for the victory, because apparently no other Saxon at the battle noticed that Uhtred had single-handedly engineered it and because Alfred is apparently a gullible fool.

When Uhtred learns about this, he rides back to Winchester and barges into the royal chapel, interrupting a church service that Alfred seems to be leading personally (but, to be fair, there’s someone dressed like a bishop standing next to Alfred, so let’s assume the show understands that kings don’t get to lead church services). Uhtred rages at Odda Jr and draws his sword. This understandably pisses off Alfred, who declares that Uhtred has broken the king’s peace, broken the peace of Christ, and brought weapons into a sacred place. He declares that he will punish Uhtred and sends him out to wait in the courtyard.

Alfred being scowly

Eventually Ealdorman Wulfhere shows up with Aethelwold (Harry McEntire) in tow, who has been caught drunk. Wulfhere tells Uhtred that the punishment for drawing a sword on the king is death. That’s doubtful, since Anglo-Saxon criminal law focused almost entirely on what injury has been done (no harm, no foul, basically), and injuries are either avenged with an equal injury or else handled by fine. Drawing a sword on the king might be an injury to his dignity or his peace, but it’s not the same thing as killing the king, so it would have been handled with a fine. But Alfred is being merciful. Instead of killing Uhtred, Alfred (via Wulfhere) sentences Uhtred to perform penance instead.

There is so much wrong here, I’d put my hands through the tv screen and strangle the scriptwriter if I could. Unfortunately I can’t. So I’m just going to have to explain what the hell penance is so that you too can see how idiotic this is.

Penance began in early Christianity as a way to make up for having committed a major sin, like sleeping with your wife’s sister or sacrificing to an idol. The original idea was that while minor sins could be readily forgiven, once a person was baptized, they were expected to avoid all egregious sin. But if they committed an egregious sin, they had one chance to make things right by confessing the sin and performing a penance to atone for the failing, such as prolonged periods of fasting (for example, fasting on every holy day for a year), prayer, alms-giving, and so on. For a grievous sin, this was a one-time ritual and having performed it rendered one to some extent a second-class congregant; for example those who had performed penance could not be ordained as priests and they could not receive the Eucharist until the bishop reconciled them to the congregation. In other words, this was a very severe religious punishment for a severe sin. It was not automatically a public matter, but penitents frequently made a public confession of their sin as part of the process.

By the 7^th century, however, under the influence of early medieval monasticism, a new system emerged that is technically called Tariffed Penance. Under this system, penance was no longer simply for severe sins, but potentially for all sins. It was no longer a one-time ritual, but was rather to be performed repeatedly, as often as a sinner had need of it. Penance was now tariffed, meaning that the penance was graded according to the severity of the sin. This gradually gave rise to the sacrament of confession and penance employed in modern Catholicism (“say 10 Hail Marys” for that sin), which is still essentially Tariffed Penance.

Penitents being scourged by a bishop

But in order for penance to have any value, the sinner in question has to confess his sin to a priest and repent. And before he can do that, he has to actually be a Christian in the first place.

So there are several problems here. 1) Uhtred doesn’t see himself as a Christian and the people around him don’t see him that way either, although Alfred, Beocca, and Mildrith are trying to push him in that direction. There’s no point in him doing penance because he’s a pagan and is going to Hell regardless. 2) Uhtred hasn’t confessed any sin to a priest. He clearly doesn’t repent of anything he does in that scene because he’s convinced he’s right. No repentance, no confession. No confession, no penance. 3) Alfred isn’t a priest and doesn’t have the authority to impose penance on anyone. 4) Penance isn’t a punishment for a secular crime, which is specifically the thing that Wulfhere says Alfred is punishing Uhtred for. (Alfred did accuse Uhtred to two religious offenses–disrupting a church service and drawing a weapon in church–but that’s not what he’s actually punishing Uhtred for doing.) Penance is a punishment for sin, not crime.

So this is like Donald Trump sentencing someone who tweeted at him to say 10 Hail Marys. Actually that’s a poor analogy, because we have free speech laws. This is like Donald Trump sentencing someone who pulled a gun on him to say 10 Hail Marys. That’s not a great analogy either, because 10 Hail Marys isn’t a very serious penance. This is like is a scriptwriter who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about making up some bullshit because medieval people did penance and medieval people had kings, so clearly the two of those things must somehow intersect at some point.

As if all of that wasn’t dumb enough, the penance involves Uhtred and Aethelwold crawling through mud on their knees begging Alfred’s forgiveness while a crowd jeers and throws things at them. It’s true that some penances did have an element of public humiliation to them (condemned heretics sometimes had to participate in a barefoot public procession to a local church carrying a candle, for example), but while shame was a part of such procedures, it wasn’t meant to be a spectacle of ridicule like a public execution. Penance was intended to be a form of spiritual healing.

Uhtred and Aethelwold performing their penance

On this issue, The Last Kingdom is just another example of how people project nonsensical ideas about an all-powerful church back onto the medieval past while simultaneously making up whatever they want around law, because, hey, medieval law must not make any sense.

Want to Know More?

The Last Kingdom is available on Amazon, as well as on Netflix. The first book of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories is also called The Last Kingdom.

If you want to know more about Anglo-Saxon marriage, there are a number of good books on Anglo-Saxon women, but unfortunately they’re all out of print. Helen Jewell’s Women in Medieval England covers more than just the Anglo-Saxon period, but it’s a good introduction to the topic.

If you want to know more about penance, Robert Meens puts the ritual into its social context in Penance in Medieval Europe.

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.

The White Queen: Two Points about Priests

Tags

BBC, Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville, Kings and Queens, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Philippa Gregory, Religious Stuff, The White Queen

To wrap up my comments on The White Queen, I’ll end with two small points about late medieval religion.

We’re Going to the Chapel and We’re Gonna Get Married

In the first episode, Edward IV (Max Irons) has a clandestine marriage to Elizabeth Woodville (Rebecca Ferguson) before a priest, with her mother as the only real witness. Elizabeth assumes this means they are married, but then her brother Anthony (Ben Lamb) warns her that the whole thing could have been a sham marriage with a fake priest. That allows the rest of the episode to milk drama out of whether Edward will acknowledge the marriage or not.

But it’s a serious misrepresentation of the way medieval marriage law worked. By the 9^th century, it was becoming established that marriage was governed by canon law, the law of the Church, making religious officials the final arbiters of who was and wasn’t married. Initially, the emphasis was placed on two basic principles: only monogamous marriage was permitted and divorce was not. Other issues quickly got draw in as well, including the famous prohibition on consanguinity—medieval canon law defined a wide range of relationships as within the bounds of incest and therefore unacceptable as marriage partners (eventually, one could get a dispensation on this from high religious officials).

Edward and Elizabeth consummating their marriage

But it wasn’t until the 12^th and 13^th centuries that canon lawyers and theologians began to tackle one of the thorniest and most surprising questions. Was sex required for marriage? The obvious answer was ‘yes’. Since reproduction was seen as the purpose of marriage, it stood to reason that an unconsummated marriage was not a true one. But that ran smack up against one of the most celebrated pieces of medieval theology, the assertion that Jesus’ mother had remained a virgin her entire life. If sex was required for marriage, then Mary and Joseph were not married.

Such a conclusion was unacceptable, because it meant that Mary and Joseph were living together immorally and Jesus had been raised in sin. So by the 13^th century, canon lawyers had figured out a work-around–there was more than one way to make a marriage, and it all depended on what vows were exchanged. If the wedding vows were phrased in the present tense, then they constituted a legitimate marriage regardless of whether sex happens or not. If, on the other hand, the vows were phrased in the future tense, they constituted a legal marriage only if consummation happens later. So if Edward said to Elizabeth something like “I marry you” (using words of the present tense), they were married, even if they never have sex. But if he said “I will marry you” (using words of the future tense), the marriage was not truly made until the couple has sex. So medieval theologians could be certain that Mary and Joseph had been legally married because they must have exchanged their vows in the present tense.

On the other hand, canon lawyers said that there was one thing that wasn’t required for a legitimate marriage, and that was the presence of a priest. Unlike any other sacrament (except emergency baptism), marriage did not require the presence of a priest, although the Church strongly recommended that one be present to bless the couple and to act as a witness. This meant that clandestine marriages (like the one Elizabeth and Edward had) was a huge issue in late medieval law courts. There were numerous cases in which a person came forward claiming that they had secretly married someone else years before. This was most common in matters of inheritance, but other issues could come up as well.

A medieval marriage (note the absence of a priest)

The fact that clandestine marriages were still valid ones is the main reason for that old cliché in Hollywood marriage scenes—the moment when the priest says “If anyone can show a good reason why these two should not be joined in marriage, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.” What it’s basically saying is “Does anyone know if either of these people has already participated in a clandestine marriage?” That’s also why the traditional wedding vow is “I do,” not “I will.” It’s words of the present tense, to eliminate any uncertainty about whether the marriage was legitimate.

I suspect that most 15^th century nobles would have known this, since marriage was a huge issue politically and socially for them. So it’s likely that Anthony, Elizabeth, and Edward would probably all have understood that the language used at the ceremony was what mattered. So when Anthony is questioning his sister’s marriage, what he would have focused on is not whether Edward provided a fake priest, because a fake priest can still preside over a real marriage. What he would be asking is “what words did you use in the vow?” And if Elizabeth says “I will marry you,” he’d follow up with “have you had sex since then?”

The episode skips the actual ceremony but shows the couple in bed together soon afterward, so regardless of which vows they exchanged, by the time Anthony is talking to his sister, Edward and Elizabeth are husband and wife legally.

 

Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil

Several characters die in their beds in this series: Isabel Neville, Jacquetta, Edward IV, Lady Beauchamp, and Anne Neville. Isabel’s happens off-stage, but Anne shows up immediately afterward. and Margaret Beaufort (Amanda Hale) walks out of Lady Beauchamp’s before her mother dies. The other three all get to die on camera. But there’s something missing in all of these scenes. The priest.

Why is no one bleeding this man? He’s obviously dying!

Later medieval religion had a highly-developed body of rituals around the process of dying, because dying was one of the most spiritually-perilous things that could happen to a person. If the Devil tricked a dying person into abandoning their faith in a moment of despair, there was a strong chance that person would go to Hell. So it was assumed that the dying process was a moment when a person needed as much spiritual support and assistance as possible.

The ideal death, in the late medieval mind, was dying in bed surrounded by family and community and priest. This is not because it was a chance to say goodbye, but because these people would help the dying person to die well. In a full death-bed ritual, when it becomes clear (or seems likely) that someone will die soon, a priest is sent for and the local community and family of the person will gather at the death-bed. The priest will arrive and will do a variety of rituals: saying the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary with the dying person, anointing the person with consecrated oil, presenting the person with a crucifix and asking him or her to kiss it, asking the person to affirm their faith, and performing a final confession. Unlike the normal private confession, this confession is usually public, so the dying Edward will be asked about all his sins toward his loved ones gathered around him, and those gathered may well suggest things he ought to confess. Final reconciliations with those he has quarreled with may be sought, to reduce the time in Purgatory.

In the case of a king or queen, there’s an added political dimension. The king needs to make clear who is going to succeed him. This would already have been legally determined, but a death-bed statement helps strengthen the new king’s legitimacy. If the heir is a minor, the king needs to declare who ought to govern and have charge of his son. The death of a king or queen needs to be above reproach and clearly not a case of murder, so witnesses needed to be present who aren’t just the family, such as the Chancellor or the Treasurer.

Jacquetta’s death-bed

The White Queen mostly gets that part right. Edward is asked about who is going to governing for his son and so on. But for some reason, none of these important people die with a priest present, and the emphasis is entirely on the emotional reactions of their loved ones. There’s no hint these men and women lived in a society in which religion played a major role and that they probably had some concern for the state of their souls. The only character for whom religion seems to matter is Margaret Beaufort (Amanda Hale) and even she barely seems to interact with a priest; there’s no priest at her mother Lady Beauchamp’s death-bed and she spitefully quarrels with her mother, which medieval society would have seen as horrificially impious. Every high noble family would have had a chaplain on its staff, and kings and queens would have had personal confessors who functioned as spiritual advisors and guides, but none of these characters meet with a confessor.

Obviously, the religious elements have been largely stripped out of the story because modern audiences aren’t generally interested in such things, and elaborate death-bed rituals would get in the way of what modern audiences really want to see, which is lots of tearful goodbyes or final turns of the knife (in the case of Lady Beauchamp and her bitter daughter Margaret). But in a series that genuinely tried to get the basic historical facts right, it’s a damn shame that they didn’t include at least a few elements of the late medieval death ritual.

Also, because I doubt I’ll ever have a genuine reason to post it, I feel compelled to post what is, in my opinion, the greatest graphic for a scholarly book ever printed. It’s from James Brundage’s Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, and it flowcharts the sexual decision-making process that early medieval penitential manuals theoretically expected a couple to go through when deciding whether to have sex. By the 10th century, these manuals were no longer being so fussy, so there was only a period of about 200 years when this model might have applied. But it’s too beautiful to pass up.

 

Want to Know More?

The White Queen is available on Starz, and on Amazon. The three novels it is based on are The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter. They are also available as a set with two other novels.

If you want to know more about medieval ideas about marriage, a good starting point is Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages. Their books are directed more at laymen than scholars, and this one does a pretty good job of surveying the evolution of medieval ideas about marraige and family structure.

If you really want to dig into the legal issues around marriage, there is no better book than James Brundage’s Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. I had the pleasure of having Brundage as my undergraduate advisor, and that flowchart is absolutely typical of his dry sense of humor. But don’t be fooled; this is a very scholarly book and not for the faint of heart.

If you’re curious about late medieval dying rituals, John Hatcher’s The Black Death: A Personal History might be a good place to go. Although it’s specifically about the Bubonic Plague hitting England in 1347-48, it has a very good chapter on the rituals of dying (which the Black Death proved a perfect storm against).

Purchasing any of these books through their links is a great way to support this blog, since I get a small percentage of the proceeds and you get to learn something.

 

1776: Let’s Talk about God

Tags

18th Century America, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Deism, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Religious Stuff, The American Revolution, The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine

When 1776 (1972, dir. Peter H. Hunt) was being made, it adopted the standard approach to Christianity that most Hollywood films (and I’m guessing most Broadway plays) used, which was to include a few vague non-Denominational references to God and the Bible, which gave a nod to the cultural importance of religion in American life without actually saying anything that might offend anyone.

So for example, early in the film, John Adams (William Daniels) joking compares the Continental Congress to the Biblical plagues of Egypt and has a sort of conversation with God in which he reveals how frustrated he is at the inability to make progress on key issue of independence. Benjamin Franklin (Howard Da Silva) likewise offers a few witticisms about God. The overall impression the film gives is that the Founding Fathers were much like 20^th century Americans in their religious beliefs.

But doing so obscures the reality that a large number of the founding fathers, including Adams, Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, were adherents of an 18^th century religious movement known as Deism, which most modern Christians would probably say was not Christianity at all. So since 1776 is still fresh in my mind, I’m going to devote this column to looking at Deism among the Founding Fathers.

 

Deism

To simplify a complex story, Deism was an outgrowth of the Scientific Revolution and its implications for religion. By the end of the 17^th century, thanks to Isaac Newton and others, a view of the cosmos was emerging among the scientifically-educated that saw the solar system as a sort of enormous clock, whose internal mechanisms were the laws of physics, such as gravity. At the same time, a growing skepticism about magic and miracles was spreading among intellectuals. This worldview maintained that reason, observation, and science were far better guides to understanding the world than faith and traditional religious belief were.

The Scientific Revolution gave birth to the Enlightenment, which sought to critique and rationalize Western society the way the Scientific Revolution had critiqued views about the physical world, and religion was one of the biggest issues to be critiqued. Enlightenment thinkers argued that much of traditional Christianity was irrational and ‘superstitious’, and they wanted to make Christianity more rational.

If the universe functioned like a clock, operating on impersonal forces that playing out with 100% consistency, what room did that leave for God? The obvious answer was the God was the Celestial Clockmaker, who had created the cosmos and the laws by which it moved and then stepped back to allow His creation to run as he had intended. This Deist God was rational and benevolent, as demonstrated by the fact that He had created the world according to rationally-perceivable principles. But having set his Cosmic Machine in motion, He did not intervene. He did not communicate through Divine Revelation and He did not cause miracles to happen, because doing so would involve temporarily suspending the laws of physics that He had established; in this worldview, miracles would represent God breaking the clock, which Deists felt was irrational.

 

As Deism developed in the 18^th century, it rejected key elements of traditional Christian belief, including the Divine Inspiration of the Bible, the miracle stories of the Old and New Testament (as well as the miracle stories of Catholic saints), and the idea that Jesus was the physical incarnation of God. Humans were understood to be essentially good, if ignorant, and therefore were not sinful and in need of salvation in the traditional sense; the Deist God was too benevolent to condemn people to eternal torment for simple ignorance. If He judged people, it was on the basis of the virtue they demonstrated in their lives.

Unlike most forms of 18^th century Christianity, Deism possessed no formal clergy or hierarchy, no doctrines that followers were required to adhere to, and no initiation rituals. Rather, each Deist applied his or her reason to the problem of religion and decided what to believe based on what seemed most rational. So Deists adopted a wide range of attitudes toward religious issues. They did not especially seek to evangelize, and felt a confident sense of the superiority of their beliefs to those of more ignorant Christians; once a person was well-educated, Deists felt that the truth of Deism would simply become obvious.

Deists were all convinced that virtue and religion were important principles. Many of the Founding Fathers were convinced that a republic required virtue and religion to function (whereas monarchy was based on corruption and superstition). But they differed about the degree to which Christianity qualified as a religion rather than a superstition. Many of them felt that Christianity morality was valuable, but that Christian doctrine and teaching needed to be purged of false and superstitious ideas that had crept into it.

One of the challenges Deists had was to find a language to speak about God at a time when the word ‘God’ was assumed to refer to the Triune God of Christianity. So the Deists resorted to a variety of other terms such as “the Supreme Being”, “the Creator”, “the Almighty”, “the God of Nature”, and “the Divine Watchmaker.” To 21^st century Americans, these look like references to the Judeo-Christian God, because 19th century Christianity gradually co-opted these terms, but in 18^th century writing, these terms generally stood out as signaling a reference to Deism.

Let’s take a look at a few of the Founding Fathers and see what they had to say about religion.

 

Thomas Paine

Although Paine is not generally included in the vague grouping of Founding Fathers (which is often defined as those who signed either the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution), he was certainly one of the most influential figures of the Revolutionary War era (and he is at least mentioned in passing in 1776). His Common Sense was extremely important in helping to rally support for the Revolution (arguably more so than the Declaration of Independence). Indeed John Adams on more than one occasion claimed that Paine was the man who won the American Revolution.

Thomas Paine

 

Paine was perhaps the most aggressively anti-Christian Deist of all. He rejected the idea that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and that his death was the means of salvation as little more than “fabulous inventions” (using the word ‘fabulous’ in its sense of being like a fable). As Paine lays it out in his On the Religion of Deism and Christianity Compared,

“Every person, of whatever religious denomination he may be, is a DEIST in the first article of his Creed. Deism, from the Latin word Deus, “God”, is the belief of a God, and this belief is the first article of every man’s creed.

“It is on this article, universally consented to by all mankind, that the Deist builds his church, and here he rests. Whenever we step aside from this article, by mixing it with articles of human invention, we wander into a labyrinth of uncertainty and fable, and become exposed to every kind of imposition by pretenders to revelation…

“But when the divine gift of reason begins to expand itself in the mind and calls man to reflection, he then reads and contemplates God and His works, and not in the books pretending to be revelation. The creation is the Bible of the true believer in God. Everything in this vast volume inspires him with sublime ideas of the Creator. The little and paltry, and often obscene, tales of the Bible sink into wretchedness when put in comparison with this mighty work.

“The Deist needs none of those tricks and shows called miracles to confirm his faith, for what can be a greater miracle than the creation itself, and his own existence?

“There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found in any other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them….”

He then proceeds to attack the story of the Virgin Birth and to accuse the Catholic Church of having invented most of the traditional doctrines of Christianity as a way to delude people into supporting the clergy. So for Paine, as for most Deists, the existence of a Supreme Being was an immediately obvious and therefore rational belief, based on the existence of the universe, but he felt that reason could not go any further than that, and therefore that Christianity was irrational nonsense.

(Paine, incidentally, was not the only vehemently anti-Christian Deist among the Revolutionary generation. Ethan Allen was once prosecuted for blasphemy for his advocacy for Deism. He reportedly stopped his own wedding ceremony to clarify that the “laws of God” were those of the god of nature, and not the god of any organized religion.)

 

Benjamin Franklin

As a young man, Franklin read a series of lectures that intended to refute Deism, but found himself far more convinced by the Deist position as it was laid out in the text, and so became a Deist. When he became a printer, one of the first texts he published, in 1728, was his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion In Two Parts, in which he lays out his religious beliefs.

“I Believe there is one Supreme most perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves. For I believe that Man is not the most perfect Being but One, rather that as there are many Degrees of Beings his Inferiors, so there are many Degrees of Beings superior to him…”

Benjamin Franklin

 

In other words, Franklin is declaring himself a polytheist here. The Supreme Being has created many lesser gods beneath Him. As Franklin goes on, he explains how the universe contains a vast number of solar systems and planets, and therefore the Supreme Being cannot be interested in the worship of the insignificant inhabitants of one small planet. But human instinct gives him a drive to worship something, and therefore he concludes that each solar system must have its own god, who is worshipped by the inhabitants of that solar system. In other words, the Judeo-Christian God is not the Supreme Being, but only the god of this particular solar system.

In later years, Franklin seems to have backed away somewhat from this surprising polytheism (or at least stopped telling people about it). In 1790, not long before his death, Franklin was asked by the president of Yale College to write a statement of belief.

“Here is my Creed…I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him, is doing Good to his other Children. That the Soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this … As for Jesus of Nazareth … I think the system of Morals and Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw … but I have … some Doubts to his Divinity; though’ it is a Question I do not dogmatism upon, having never studied it, and think it is needless to busy myself with it now, where I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.”

In positioning Jesus’ moral teaching as the best ever produced by humanity, Franklin was expressing a very common Deist position. Jesus was a wise teacher, but not divine. Franklin maintained that Christianity was an excellent moral system for those who were not educated, but that as one became educated, one would realize that many elements of Christianity were improbable and therefore Deism was sort of a superior, rationalized Christianity.

 

George Washington

Like most American aristocrats and landowners, George Washington maintained a regular affiliation with a denominational church, in this case the Anglican Church that dominated Virginia. He took religion quite seriously, requiring his soldiers to attend Sunday worship services, ordering Thanksgiving ceremonies after military victories, and praying privately on a regular basis. But he also deviated notably from normal Anglican worship. He was never Confirmed in the Anglican Church, refused to kneel during prayer (as was standard at the time), and left Sunday services after the sermon but before Communion was celebrated. He was so conspicuous in doing this that he was once rebuked by a minister for it. (That said, Washington was hardly alone in leaving before Communion; it was in fact a very common practice in the 18^th century.)

Do I need to label this one?

 

Washington’s letters and speeches are conspicuous for their preference of Deist over Christian terminology. Rather than terms like “Father”, “Lord”, “Savior” or “Redeemer”, all of which obviously signal Christianity, Washington shows a marked preference for more Deist phrases like “Providence”, “the Deity”, “the Supreme Being”, “the Grand Architect”, “the Author of all Good”, and “the Great Ruler of Events.” He does this even when writing to Christian congregations and clergy. He never mentions Jesus in personal writings, and only rarely in public speeches.

So although there is no slum-dunk proof of Washington’s personal beliefs, the evidence strongly points to him being a Deist at heart, despite his regular Anglican worship.

 

John Adams

In contrast, there is little uncertainty about John Adams’ beliefs. He was a Unitarian, meaning that he did not believe in the Trinity but rather held that God was One. Unitarianism was essentially Christian Deism. Some Unitarians held that “Jesus was from above,” meaning that he was a divine or semi-divine messenger from God (but not actually God), while others maintained that “Jesus was from below,” meaning that God had chosen and elevated Jesus to semi-divinity because of his exemplary way of life and morality. Adams was solidly aligned with the From Below camp.

 

Unitarianism was an outgrowth of New England Congregationalism, and was therefore geographically restricted to that region of the country, just as Anglicanism was dominant in Virginia. As a young man, Adams attended a seminary and planned to enter the ministry, but changed his views when a theological controversy about whether humans were inherently sinful and depraved wracked Congregationalism. If being Christian requires a belief in the Triune divinity and the redemptive death of Jesus, Unitarians do not qualify. They were certainly not traditional Christians by 21st century American standards.

Although he did not believe in a Triune God or the full divinity of Jesus, Adams did believe in a personal God, the resurrection of Jesus, and the afterlife, and he rebuked Paine for his attack on Christianity. But he rejected the idea that humans were inherently sinful and in need of salvation, as well as the notion of predestination and the inerrancy of the Bible. He was a regular church-goer when he could attend a Unitarian church (often attending twice on Sundays).

For Adams, the study of nature was an important tool for understanding God and His will. In that sense, he was as thorough-going a Deist as Franklin was, as was his wife Abigail. The Bible and nature were both equally valid sources of knowledge about God.

In his public writings and speeches, Adams prefers phrases such as “the Redeemer of the World”, “the Great Mediator and Advocate”, and “the grace of His Holy Spirit”, all of which were acceptable to Unitarians as not contradicting the Unity of God and non-divinity of Jesus. Thus Adams’ Deism had much more room in it for Jesus than, say Franklin or Washington’s Deism.

Unitarianism, incidentally, still survives today, often combined with Universalism, originally so named for its belief that all Christians will be saved. Unitarian/Universalism has come a long way from Adams’ day, but it’s the most commonly-encountered form of Deism today.

 

Thomas Jefferson

Unlike Washington and Adams, Jefferson could read French, and was therefore more influenced by the more radical French school of Deism than by the more moderate English brand that shaped Adams. He was raised Anglican and attended Anglican services, but was very aware that his own personal beliefs were well outside Anglican orthodoxy; when he wrote about his beliefs to friends, he asked them not to repeat the information to others because he worried about the reaction. He also attended Baptist, Presbyterian, and other denominational services on occasion.

Thomas Jefferson

 

Like many Deists, Jefferson sought to restore the pure teachings of Jesus by purging them from the irrational elements that he felt had crept in. Because he did not believe in miracles or the supernatural, he literally took a pair of scissors and went through the New Testament, cutting out all the miracle stories and ending the Gospels with the Crucifixion. His edition omits all the rest of the New Testament except an expurgated Book of Acts and the Letter to the Hebrews. He had a particular dislike for the Book of Revelation, whose author he considered a raving madman.

As he said in one letter, Jesus was “no imposter himself, but a great Reformer of the Hebrew code of religion…It is not be understood that I agree with him in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sins, I require a counter-poise of good works to redeem it…” In this letter, Jefferson essentially puts himself on the same plane as Jesus, positioning both of them as moral thinkers who can debate key principles of religion.

Jefferson rejected any concept of salvation and might best be understood as an extreme From Below Unitarian, for whom Jesus was nothing more than a great moral teacher. Consequently, during the Election of 1800, when Jefferson was running against Adams, Adams’ supporters depicted Adams as a traditional Christian who would defend the Church against an atheistic Jefferson who wanted to outlaw the Bible. Both depictions are unfair and false.

Jefferson’s Bible

 

In this context, it’s worth noticing that the Declaration of Independence, written primarily by Jefferson and then revised by Franklin and Adams, signals its Deism in its most famous passage. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The use of “their Creator”, as well as the reference in the first paragraph to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” are, in 18^th century terms, a very clear indication that Jefferson, Adams and Franklin are not speaking of the Christian Triune God but the Deist one. (And in fact, “their Creator” was not in Jeferson’s original draft of the text at all, using rather the phrase “that equal creation”. Where exactly that change came in and which of them made it is unclear.) But changes in the way we use those terms today make the document seem to be a Christian one because of that ‘Creator’.

 

Madison and After

1776 doesn’t include any of the later presidents, but it’s worth saying a few words about them. James and Dolley Madison were only sporadic church-goers, and James was reticent to speak about his religious beliefs, to the point of opposing even religious proclamations as president. Several men who discussed religion with him came away with a sense that he was not a traditional Christian but perhaps a Deist; as one Episcopal bishop commented, their conversation “left the impression on my mind that his creed was not strictly regulated by the Bible.” His personal correspondence tends to favor Deist phrases over Christian ones, even when writing to clergy and his general views on religion (for example, what was acceptable behavior on Sundays) would likewise seem to point to a more Deist-influenced belief system than a traditional Christian one.

James Madison

 

James Monroe and his wife Elizabeth were Episcopalians, and raised their daughters in that denomination. His public writings favor Deist phrases like “the Divine Author” and “the Almighty”. His private correspondence makes almost no mention of religion at all, except one early letter to a sick friend, in which he writes “The blessed influence of heaven is, I hope, on you; beware of heresy: danger, ruin, and perpetual misery await it.” He was also a Freemason (like Franklin and Washington and possibly Madison); Masons were required to believe in a god and the afterlife, but tended to be Deists. So the evidence for Monroe is mixed, and a case could be made for either traditional Anglicanism/Episcopalianism or Deism. But religion doesn’t seem to have interested him very much at all.

James Monroe

 

John Quincy Adams began life as a Trinitarian, but converted to Unitarianism as he grew older. Late in life, he wrote “I reverence God as my creator. As creator of the world. I reverence him with holy fear. I venerate Jesus Christ as my redeemer; and, as far as I can understand, the redeemer of the world. But this belief is dark and dubious.” So he seems to have been uncertain exactly what he thought about the divinity and redemptive function of Jesus.

John Quincy Adams

 

Subsequent presidents were more traditionally Christian. Jackson was a Presbyterian, Van Buren a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, William Henry Harrison an Episcopalian, and so on. Fillmore and Taft were Unitarians, the closest any later president has come to not being a Christian, with one very important exception.

Scholars have had a great deal of trouble pinning down Abraham Lincoln’s beliefs, and in recent years most scholars seem to lean toward viewing him as a Deist. His parents were Baptists, but he never joined any church and was sometimes scornful of Christian revivalists, although he did occasionally attend services of various denominations. He is known to have enjoyed reading Deist writings such as Paine’s works. While some ministers who knew him insisted that he believed in a personal savior, close personal friends insisted that he did not. During his run for the House of Representatives, he had to issue a document saying he “never denied the truths of the Scriptures”, a statement so tepid that it probably did not persuade any of his opponents. As president, there were certainly spiritual elements to his speeches and writings, and there is a certain Christian flavor to them. For example when a minister said that he hoped the Lord was on the Union side, Lincoln responded “I am not at all concerned about that….But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.” His Second Inaugural Address refers to God in some 14 times in the space of 2 paragraphs, using both the Deist “the Almighty” and the more Christian-sounding “Living God” and “the Lord”. So the evidence for Lincoln’s beliefs is decidedly vague.

Lincoln is the only president who never formally belonged to any denomination, and if that is our metric for Christianity, he would be unique in being the only non-Christian president. But as I’ve shown, when you assess the more nuanced question of personal belief, most of the early presidents show signs of being Deists rather than traditional Christians, and a case can be made that Andrew Jackson was America’s first truly Christian president.

 

Want to Know More?

David Holmes’ The Faiths of the Founding Fathers is an excellent look at the religious beliefs of the first five individual presidents (and their wives). I strongly recommend it as an introduction to the issues.

 

 

 

Gods of Egypt: It was Watch This or Grade Exams

Tags

Alex Proyas, Ancient Egypt, Geoffrey Rush, Gerard Butler, Mythology, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Religious Stuff

So I forced my unfortunate husband to go to Gods of Egypt (2016, dir. Alex Proyas), because it was a way to get out of grading freshman exams for a while. After all the hoopla about it being an egregious example of whitewashing ancient history, I figured I had a duty to my readers to weigh in on it.

Let’s get that issue out of the way right at the start. It’s an appallingly bad example of whitewashing. Even allowing for some uncertainty about the ethnic composition of ancient Egypt, the film is awfully white. Of the main actors, one (Chadwick Boseman) is black, one (Elodie Yung) is half-Asian, and one (Gerard Butler) is wearing swarthy-face make-up. Everyone else is whiter than my untanned ass. There are lots of blacks and Middle Easterners in non-speaking roles, but literally just two with speaking parts (and one of them mostly just hisses, if memory serves). It’s so bad, it’s downright embarrassing, especially for Butler, who looks like he spent the morning exploring an alternative career as a chimney-sweep before deciding that being in this film was the better option pay-wise.

 

Gerard Butler looking swarthy

But, if you can see past that problem with the film (and I realize that’s a big but), what you see is a film with a whole host of other problems that make the racial issues feel like an afterthought. The acting is lousy, the plot is fairly predictable, the script is shudderingly bad, and the special effects are bloated and excessive. But, hey, they thought to cast a black man in a supporting role! So that’s something.

Normally, at this point, I’d give you a Spoiler Alert. But that implies that this movie could actually be spoiled by finding out what happens in it. You already know what happens in it, which is that it sucks a lot.

Basically, Osiris and Isis have ruled the Nile for a thousand years. They’re gods, which means they’re 9 feet tall while the human Egyptians are normal-sized. Osiris has decided it’s time to step down and let his son, Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), be king, so long as he agrees to let people call him Horus. And, because Osiris is a nice guy, he’s going to let all the Egyptians into the Afterlife for free. But his evil brother Set (Gerard Butler) interrupts the coronation ceremony to show off his new skin-bronzer and in the process manages to kill Osiris, beat the crap out of Jaime and rip out his eyes, and steal the crown of Egypt. And, because he’s a dick, he’s going to force people to buy their way into the Afterlife with treasure. Ain’t capitalism grand?

Nicholaj Coster-Waldau taking a break from Game of Thrones by playing Jaime Lannister in Egypt

Fortunately for everyone except the audience, there’s a plucky mortal hero, Bek (Brandon Thwaites), who’s a cheekily-disrespectful roguish thief, who only becomes intolerably annoying when the film hits the two-minute mark. He sets off to rescue his love, Zaya (Courtney Eaton), who’s been killed by Set’s evil architect. He steals one of Jaime’s eyes from Set’s treasure vault, tracks down Jaime and offers him a bargain: Bek will help Jaime recover his other eye (without which he can’t be really super-powerful) and Jaime will bring Zaya back from the dead (which turns out to be just a lie, but that’s the way the Lannisters do things, right?). So Jaime and Bek set out on a series of adventures to recover the missing eye.

That guy in the background is thinking “Dude, how did these two white people get cast as Egyptians?”

Along the way, they pay a visit to Jaime’s grandfather Ra (Geoffrey Rush) in his ship that drags the sun across the sky, where Ra fights the serpent Apophis every night. (Actually, this scene accidentally manages to be ok.) Then there are various fights with orcs and a couple of understudies for Lady Sylvia Marsh from Lair of the White Worm and some really boring scenes between Set and some goddesses in which nothing gets killed but we find out what the next movie in the franchise is going to be about.

Finally they get to meet up with Chadwick Boseman, who has cleverly hidden the first H in his name so that everyone else has to call him ‘Toth’ but he knows that his name is actually Thoth and so he gets to quietly feel smug about everyone else mispronouncing his name. And T(h)oth gets the Riddle of the Sphinx wrong the first two times but totally aces it on the third try but then…oh, fuck it. You don’t give a damn about a full plot synopsis and I can’t be bothered to figure out what the hell is actually going on in this movie that makes about as much sense as some of the freshman exams I’m currently grading.

Let’s just say that all of this turns out to be an excuse for Set to flog his daddy issues with Ra, who never loved him enough as a kid and couldn’t be bothered to watch his son’s baseball games because he was busy fighting the serpent that wants to devour the world. Set wants to be immortal, but to do that he needs to destroy the Afterlife so he can live forever in Egypt. So Set tries to kill Ra and steals his magic spear that’s necessary to kill the cosmic snake because he’s got Freud issues going on. Without Ra to stop him, Apophis goes crazy and starts eating the Nile because somehow that will destroy the Afterlife. And Jaime winds up having to fight Mecha-Set but opts to save Bek rather than recover his lost eye and then he wishes Zaya back to life because really this whole damn film is just a Very Special Episode of Blossom about the importance of gods and mortals respecting each other.

Mecha-Set

Fortunately the sequel gets killed off about halfway through the film.

 

So, Does This Film Have Anything to Do with Ancient Egypt?

I’m glad you asked that. No.

I mean, yes, it’s called Gods of Egypt and it’s set along the Nile, and it’s got some buildings that look sort of ancient Egyptian if you squint the right way, and the main characters mostly have the same name as various Egyptian gods. But as Proyas himself has said, “…the world of Gods of Egypt never really existed. It is inspired by Egyptian mythology, but it makes no attempt at historical accuracy because that would be pointless — none of the events in the movie ever really happened. It is about as reality-based as Star Wars — which is not real at all …Maybe one day if I get to make further chapters I will reveal the context of the when and where of the story. But one thing is for sure — it is not set in Ancient Egypt at all.”

So, really, the film could just as easily be called Gods of South Dakota, which from the ethnicity of the cast would probably be just about right.

The film basically picks bits at random from Egyptian mythology, without actually bothering to understand how any of it fits together or what it might mean, sort of like a freshman history student writing a mid-term.

The Afterlife features as a key plot point in the movie, but the film has only a minimal understanding of Egyptian notions of what happens after death. The Egyptian Underworld was called Duat, and it was pictured as being much like Egypt, only better. The problem was that getting to Duat was difficult, and a lot of things could go wrong. The deceased person’s body has to survive; without it, the dead person’s soul would be annihilated. The person’s name had to be preserved as well. There were complex rituals to embalm the corpse (hello, mummies!) and “open its mouth” so that the dead soul could speak the proper ritual formulas as it journeys through Duat, so it can get past various monsters and obstacles. The dead person’s heart was weighed against the feather of Ma’at, the Goddess of Truth, to ensure that the deceased had lived a proper life; if the feather was heavier than the heart, the heart and its soul were devoured. The deceased had to be able to make the 42 Negative Confessions, truthfully denying a long list of moral failures and crimes. Burial practices involved an array of spells, charms, and texts, designed to make sure the dead person knew what to say and when to say it, and that various difficulties could be overcome. And the body of a wealthy person was provided with expensive grave goods to ensure that he or she would live comfortably in Duat.

Weighing the feather of Ma’at against the person’s heart

Gods of Egypt, however, jettisons all that in exchange for a far dumber idea. There’s no burial or mummification required. In the Hall of the Two Truths, the dead just walk up to a scale containing the feather of Ma’at, dump their wealth into the other side of the scale as a bribe to the judges, and hope the bribe is big enough. Otherwise, they’re apparently sent to Hell, through a door that alternately flips between good stuff and bad stuff.

How dumb do you have to be to make a movie about the Egyptian afterlife that doesn’t even involve mummies? That’s like making a movie about a college professor grading exams that doesn’t involve tears, shouts of frustration, and abject misery.

Wait–they cast me to play an Egyptian? WTF?

And Osiris is the God of Duat, but in this film he just disappears after Set offs him. And Isis commits suicide. Wise choice. She doesn’t have to be in the rest of the film.

The biggest problem in the film is Set. He’s correctly associated with the Egyptian desert, which is probably why they gave Butler swarthy-face, to suggest all the time he spent out in the desert. If they’d wanted to be more appropriate, they should have made him red-faced, since the desert is red in Egyptian thought, while the soil of the Nile Valley is black.

Set’s function in Egyptian mythology is hard to explain. He’s a disorderly god, possibly contrasting the sterile, inhospitable nature of the desert to the fertile, orderly Nile Valley of Horus. He’s Ra’s protector when Ra journeys into Duat every night to fight Apophis. He’s the brother of Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys, but he’s also Osiris’ rival. He eventually murders Osiris and struggles with Horus. But ultimately he’s defeated and reconciled to Horus, as a symbol that the Pharaoh (the living embodiment of Horus) is master over everything that challenges Egypt. He’s most definitely not a god of evil, since he’s worshipped regularly in Egypt, alongside all the other gods. It’s only very late in Egyptian culture, when the country is conquered by outsiders, that he is reduced to simple villainy.

Set fighting Apophis

But Gods of Egypt just throws all that out and makes Set a sort of cosmic Donald Trump, gleefully breaking all the rules, terrorizing the Egyptians, respecting nothing but his own power, and building monuments to his own bloated ego and villainy because he’s got daddy issues.

In Egyptian mythology, Set and Horus have sex, because Set is trying to prove his dominance. But Horus catches Set’s semen in his hand and throws it in the Nile. Then he jacks off onto a piece of lettuce and tricks Set into eating it. Then they go to the gods of Egypt to settle the dispute. Set calls to his semen as proof that he dominated Horus, but the semen answers from the river, disproving his claim. Horus then calls to his semen, which answers from inside Set, thus proving that Horus had dominated Set. For some unfathomable reason, the film completely ignores this very important element of Set’s story.

That story would have made for an awesome movie. It would have made for a way better movie than Gods of Egypt, which just sucks. It’s almost worse than grading exams.

 

Want to Know More?

Stop that. This film sucks.

But if you want to know more about the actual gods of Egypt, take a look at a book like The Complete Gods and Goddess of Ancient Egypt by Richard Wilkinson. Or try Emily Teeter’s Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt.

 

The Physician: Getting More Things Wrong

Tags

Ben Kingsley, Medical Stuff, Medieval Islam, Medieval Persia, Movies I Hate, Religious Stuff, The Physician, Tom Payne

The majority of The Physician (2013, dir. Philip Stölzl, based on the novel by Noah Gordon) takes place in and around Isfahan sometime in the later 1020s, as we watch the Englishman Rob Cole (Tom Payne) studying medicine at the hospital run by the great Muslim intellectual Ibn Sina (Ben Kingsley). I really applaud the film for choosing a settling so unfamiliar to Western audiences, and for trying to depict one of the cultural glories of medieval Islam, namely its Golden Age, when Muslim intellectuals were at the forefront of human knowledge, well beyond Western Civilization. The film’s prologue text even foregrounds the superiority of Islamic medicine over Western medicine. Given the current tendency in the West to view Islam as a religion of violent, intolerant extremists, such an attitude is a nice corrective.

The film also deserves some credit for showing some of the religious complexity of the Islamic world. In the film, Isfahan is a Muslim city but it also hosts Jews and Zoroastrians. And the film acknowledges that the different religions are judged according to their own laws rather than Muslim law. So the film makes an attempt to show the relative tolerance that characterized Muslim society.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that the film actually gets things right. In fact, the film rather subtly undermines its message of Islamic medical superiority with its choice to make its hero an Englishman. And the film wildly bends the facts at a couple of key points.

The Plague

One of the major crises of the film occurs when the Bubonic Plague breaks out in Isfahan. People start dying, naturally, and the shah orders the gates locked, trapping everyone inside. But the brave scholars of the hospital reject the chance to leave before the gates are shut, deciding that they will stay and treat the sick.

Eventually, Rob realizes that the disease is transmitted by rat fleas, so Ibn Sina orders the use of rat poison and all the rats die, effectively ending the plague once the bodies are burned. There are problems with that idea; the poison isn’t likely to kill all the rats (especially since rats are notoriously cautious about what they eat), and the fleas that prefer to host on rats are more than capable of hosting on humans, since that’s how the disease gets passed to and between humans.

Ibn Sina (Kingsley) tracking the number of deaths from the Plague

Oh, and there’s also the small problem that there was no outbreak of the Black Death between the 7^th century and the 14^th century. This epidemic is entirely fictitious. (But, to  be fair, it’s not inconceivable that the Bubonic Plague could have broken out somewhere in this period.)

But the real problem to my eyes is that in a hospital full of Persian, Arabic, and Jewish scholars, including Ibn Sina, who is explicitly presented as the greatest living medical expert in the world, it’s the one plucky European who figures out that the Plague is transmitted by fleas. So while the film is presenting Islamic medicine as being superior to Western medicine, it takes a Westerner to figure out how to apply Islamic medicine to treat the problem.

The Dissection

During the epidemic, Rob suggests dissecting a corpse to see if the buboes could be surgically excised, but Ibn Sina refuses, saying that Islam forbids dissection. The lack of anatomical knowledge due to a supposed ban on dissection of corpses is a theme in the film. But although contemporary Islam does see medical dissection as a problematic issue, most contemporary experts on Islamic law agree that it’s permissible with a few limitations, and there’s no clear evidence that medieval Muslims were much different. A number of medieval Islamic medical experts supported the practice. So it’s unlikely that Ibn Sina would have refused to dissect a body in the middle of a medical crisis if doing so offered hope of a potential treatment.

But after the epidemic, Rob meets an elderly Zoroastrian man who is dying. When he learns that the Zoroastrians place no value on a person’s corpse, when the man dies, Rob hides his body in an ice cellar and over the next several weeks gradually dissects the corpse and draws what he sees.

Rob dissecting the old man’s corpse

However, there’s a villainous mullah in Isfahan, one who is in league with the Seljuk Turks who want to conquer Isfahan, and the mullah has agreed to cause trouble in the city. The mullah’s motives aren’t really clear, except that he’s a fanatic who thinks the shah is too lax. The mullah despises the hospital for being unislamic and orders his men to search it. They find the dissected corpse and drag Rob and Ibn Sina in front of the mullah, who sentences them both to death.

There’s a lot wrong here. It’s a wild misrepresentation of how Muslim communities operate. Mullahs are Shiite religious expects; they lead mosques, deliver sermons, and perform a variety of rituals that make them very loosely the equivalent of a Christian priest or minister. But like Christian priests, they have no legal authority and no power to compel people to obey them. The medieval Islamic court system was staffed by qadis, men who were trained in sharia (Islamic law) and then appointed to their office by the local ruler to act as a judge. Some mullahs were qualified to act as qadis, and vice versa, but the two offices were as distinct as a priest and a judge are today. And the villainous cleric is definitely a mullah; he’s shown preaching sermons in a mosque. So the mullah would not have any more legal authority to order someone’s execution than my Lutheran minister father did. And it’s highly unlikely that the shah would have allowed the execution of his star physician anyway. And, so far as I can tell, mutilating corpses was not a capital offense in medieval sharia. But, if I have learned anything in writing this blog, it’s that in the cinematic past, clergy just made up the law as they went, so they could use religion to justify absolutely anything they wanted.

 

The Operation

However, before Rob and Ibn Sina can be executed, the shah’s men arrive. The shah is having an attack of “side sickness”, Ye Olde Timey name for appendicitis, which won’t be medically recognized for another 500 years. And of course, appendicitis requires invasive surgery, which can’t be done without a good knowledge of anatomy, so there’s nothing to be done. Except that, totes coincidence!, Rob has just acquired a good knowledge of anatomy by dissecting that corpse. So Ibn Sina helps Rob operate on the shah and save his life by removing his appendix.

Again, the film glosses over a number of big problems here. Sure, Rob has learned a lot about anatomy, but how does he know that ‘side sickness’ is caused by the appendix as opposed to any other organ, and how does he know that removing the appendix is the right way to treat the condition? How do they deal with the problem of blood loss in an age that has no ability to perform transfusions? They drug with shah with opium to anesthetize him, so at least the script considers that issue. But the whole scenario is just wildly implausible.

And once again, the film resorts to the Westerner saving the day by employing Islamic medicine in a way that Muslims weren’t able to do, in this case because their religion is an obstacle to the advance of science. The greatest physician in the Muslim world is reduced to helping his English student perform an operation because the Englishman has miraculously surpassed him just by cutting open a corpse. So after establishing the superiority of Islamic medicine, the film subtly reasserts the notion that Islam is an obstacle to science.

And that view of Islam as backward is reinforced by the villainous mullah, who hates the hospital simply because it’s unislamic in some unspecified way. This point is driven home because, while Rob and Ibn Sina are operating on the shah, the mullah’s men are ransacking the hospital and lighting it on fire, and, for good measure, they attack the Jewish quarter as well, killing a lot of the Jews and burning down the synagogue. Rob conveniently finishes up the operation in time to rescue the Jews trapped in the synagogue’s mikvah. So once again, our Western hero saves the day from the forces of Islamic irrationality.

Rob and Ibn Sina watching the library burn

The film wants to show how scientifically advanced and religiously tolerant the Islamic world was, but it still somehow manages to fall prey to the clichés about Muslims being fanatical, hostile to non-Muslims, and anti-intellectual, and it resorts to the trope of the Westerner rescuing all the non-Westerners who are simply incapable of making the intellectual leaps that he is capable of.

Oh, and One More Thing

When Rob Cole gets back to England, he founds a hospital, 300 years before such things will exist in Western Europe. Have I mentioned lately that I hate this film?

Want to Know More?

The Physicianis available on Amazon. Noah Gordon’s The Physician (The Cole Trilogy) is available too.