An overview of how the Marvelous and the irrational survived the advent of Christianity in popular culture, with a particular focus on the apparitions of the dead and above all of the "furious army", the discussion of which will continue in second part of this comprehensive study
di Judith Failli
(first part of 2)
In the medieval West there was a term more or less equivalent to expressing what we now call the "Wonderful", and is the Latin plural mirabilia. The adjective that for us represents an intellectual category in the Middle Ages instead designated a material universe, in some respects closer to a collection than to a category.
Medieval Christian society, founded on heterogeneous cultural heritages, maintains marvelous elements belonging to the layers prior to the widespread diffusion of Christianity, which remain and can be traced above all in texts, hagiographies and popular beliefs. Almost always, in medieval literature, one encounters a marvel with irrefutable pre-Christian roots.
During the early Middle Ages, from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth century, the marvelous has an almost absent space in the sources due to the attempts of the Church to stem and repress one of the most seductive aspects of folkloric culture, globally qualified as pagan [1]. The situation is reversed in the following centuries, since starting from the twelfth century we witness a bursting entry into the scene of the marvelous even in learned culture. We can give two readings to this irruption of the "marvelous". On the one hand, the sociological interpretation proposed by E. Köhler [2], who reads in the marvelous cultural background to which the chivalry, a rising social class, drew to detach itself from the ecclesiastical culture proper to the aristocracy; not surprisingly, the marvelous is configured as an essential trait of courteous literature and the idealized knight. On the other hand, J. Le Goff reads there an absence of reasons, on the part of the Church, to erect bastions against the marvelous element, no longer feared but tamed, even recovered [3].
J. Le Goff distinguishes for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a diversification into the world of the supernatural, so framing the marvelous in relation to Christian religion and ecclesiastical culture. The French medievalist proposes a reading in three areas for the supernatural: amazing, magician, miraculosus [4]. mirabilis is the marvelous comprising pre-Christian inheritances, magician is the supernatural in its malefic meaning e miraculosus the typically Christian marvel, that is, the one that starts from miracle. The main difference that exists between the marvelous and the Christian miracle is all contained in the unpredictability-predictability dichotomy: the marvelous is in fact produced by a multiplicity of forces (a trace in the plural mirabilia) while the miracle can only have God as its author [5].
But the wonderful ei wonder, with their ancient heritage, they continue their existence in Western Christian society, placing themselves as one form of cultural resistance with respect to official Christianity and ecclesiastical culture. THE mirabilia in the medieval West they also represented a form of compensation with respect to the order, continuity and banality of everyday life; the collections of mirabilia they have tended to organize themselves as in an inverted universe: worlds of monsters, beasts, dead, vegetables and minerals. In the field of the marvelous, therefore, a dehumanization of the world takes place, in antithesis to the values of Christian humanism, whose bulwark resides in man made in the image of God.
And yet the marvelous is not, as we have seen, a pure concept detached from history and, as such, needs to be analyzed in its internal developments. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the marvelous undergoes a double evolution: a wonderful newspaper and a wonderful politician [6]. In the first case, the belonging relationship of the wonderful event with respect to everyday life seems to escape but, in the same way, its existence and its insertion into reality are perceived as indisputable. In the second case, however, it is a tendentious form destined for political ends. In the Middle Ages, numerous royal dynasties, noble families and cities have attributed mythical origins, finding their foundations in the recovery of the folkloric material inherent to the marvelous [7].
Apparitions of the dead in the mirabilia
Medieval literature of the mirabilia is particularly rich in stories related to apparitions of the spirits of the dead to the living. Normally, in the corpus of stories dedicated to this motif we find ourselves faced with two main categories: on the one hand the individual apparitions, on the other the collective apparitions of the dead who enter in large numbers, under the hitherto unknown name, "masnada by Hellequin» [8], to be part of the mirabilia starting from the XNUMXth century.
In medieval society, the form of existence attributed to the spirits of the dead depends on the performance of the "rite of passage" of death: the dead return when the funeral ceremonials could not be carried out adequately, in the event of violent death, suicides, women who died in childbirth, unbaptized children, brigands, unburied criminals [9]. The belief in spirits also originates from the cult of the dead typical of the pre-Christian cultural fabric, both of Greek-Roman and Germanic-Celtic matrix. [10].
The early medieval Church was very concerned about the belief that the dead can return to visit the living, as it embodied one of the survivals of paganism and, starting in the 1024th century, showed a strong will towards the Christianization of the pagan remnant of the cult of the dead. Between 1033 and XNUMX Cluny established, on 2 November, the feast of the dead, strategically placed the following day of All Saints' Day. The celebration immediately met with great fortune and quickly established itself throughout Western Christianity as the key moment in the liturgical commemoration of the dead.
In the second half of the XNUMXth century, following theinstitutionalization of Purgatory as a specific place of the afterlife [11], the beliefs linked to the spirits of the dead found new vital lymph: the dead were able to officially return to beg their loved ones to pray, say masses and make offerings to shorten their purgatory pains. In fact, staying in purgatory depended on personal aspects (good or bad deeds, repentance before death) and on the votes carried out by relatives and friends of the deceased. Following the institution of purgatory and paid suffrages for the dead, the Church became a great promoter and spokesperson for belief and stories about spirits; it is therefore no coincidence that the tales of individual apparitions of the dead multiply since the XNUMXth century, especially in the miraculous and in example.
But, at the same time, the name of Hellequin's gang also appears in the texts [12], something that is configured differently with respect to individual apparitions. In the mirabilia for the first time we are faced with an army of the dead.
THEexercitus mortuorum or Masnada by Hellequin
The theme of the threatening collective apparition of the dead, before its written appearance in the eleventh century, had had an almost absent space in previous literature, although it found an illustrious ancestor in the Germany of Tacitus, which he mentions when speaking of the Harii population, who, fighting at night, with shields and faces dyed black, assumed a ghostly aspect in the eyes of the Roman historian.
In the Christian era we see scant evidence of the collective apparitions of the dead, among the most important it is necessary to mention St. Augustine who De civitate Dei, II, 25 describes the clash between two armies of demons and, subsequently in the History of the Lombards, Paolo Diacono reports that, in the fifth century, on the occasion of a plague epidemic he felt like the roar of an army to accompany the scourge [13].
From the tenth century the apparitions become numerous and begin to crowd the ecclesiastical literature: the ranks of the dead present themselves as a procession of penitent dead, invoking prayers and asking for suffrages from the living or, more frighteningly, as a furious and noisy army, made up of armed men, horses and dogs.
in Stories (1028-1049) by Rudolph the Hairless, a Burgundian monk, the stories of mirabilia and among these also the descriptions of apparitions, including two stories have a prominent position within the corpus of collective apparitions: in one story the dead are religious who fought the infidels and suffered martyrdom, while in the second the dead constitute a real cursed army. Despite the first contradictory impression between the two texts belonging to the same collection, J.-C. Schmitt observes that the two stories are intimately linked to each other, in fact "the first follows the massacre caused by the Saracen raids, the second the incursions of Henry I [...] and together they represent the two extreme poles of the war. On the one hand, the war for the faith that leads to martyrdom and will take place in the crusade and, on the other, the war that Christians wage against each other " [14]. The apparitions reported by Rodolfo il Glabro therefore lead us to read in these visions the symbol of a contemporary political project, the pax christiana, and the implicit values of a just and an unjust war.
The oldest reference of Hellequin's gang, so named, is found in Ecclesiastical history, written between 1123 and 1137 by Orderico Vitale, Anglo-Norman monk of the abbey of Saint-Évroult, under the influence of Cluny. In this work, which according to the author's intention should have retraced the history of the Normans, numerous oral testimonies of Olderico's contemporaries are collected, including the appearance of the army of the dead to a Norman priest of Saint-Aubin de Bonneval named Guachelmo.
The apparition, narrated through the words of Guachelmo himself, takes place on the night of January 1, 1091 [15], when the priest, after hearing thunderous sounds like a marching militia, saw passing in front of him un exercise terrifying and composite, led by a giant and made up of recently dead people known personally, a throng of tortured women on horseback, clerics, black monks, and knights. Seeing the latter Guachelmo understood that he was in the presence of the "Herlechini familyHe had already heard of. In order to prove that he had met this infernal army, the priest decided to stop one of the knights, but the armor burned his hand and he would have risked being hit by the violent fury of these if another knight had not come to his defense, promptly. recognized as the brother of the priest, who begged him to pray for him and offer alms and say masses, in order to shorten his period of atonement. Following this apparition Guachelmo fell ill but lived another fifteen years, enough to allow Olderico Vitale to hear this testimony and to verify with his own eyes the indelible signs of the burns reported by the priest.
JC Schmitt notes in this example of mirabilia the non-randomness of the parade of the dead [16], composed of three main groups, subject to the trifunctional scheme, laboratories, oratories e bellatores, of medieval society from the tenth century [17]. In the text, the three orders are assigned an importance and a diversified treatment, and it is plausible to ask whether the "Hellequin family" is not an expression to be applied only to the group composed of knights, since Guachelmo has the impression of finding himself in front of the "family Hellequin ”only when he comes into contact with the military section of the torma. The ranks, in this and in a good part of the testimonies of the mirabilia, is therefore configured as a exercitus mortuorum, like a double compared to the feudal armies. According to the interpretation of J.-C-Schmitt, there is a relationship between the breaking into the scene of these damned knights and the contemporary measures taken by the Church in an attempt to stem feudalism and its violence, channeling these militias into monastic military orders, participants in the "just war" legitimized by the Church [18]. But, as noted by C. Ginzburg, the dead described do not appear really fearful, as they take on the traits of souls in purgatory [19], thus reflecting the then ongoing elaboration of the idea of Purgatory.
Starting from the XNUMXth century, the testimonies of the apparition of the ranks of the dead find a wide diffusion throughout Europe, becoming a progressively habitual subject for many mirabilia, coming close to being a popular literary motif.
In England, the Chronicle of Peterborough Abbey reports the history of the country following the Saxon invasion (346). The chronicler reports that on the night of February 6, 1127 there were many who saw a terrifying and noisy group of hunters on horseback, gigantic and black, accompanied by a crowd of terrifying dogs. It is in this testimony that we find for the first time the motif of the Wild Hunt associated toexercitus mortuorum. Always across the Channel, during the conquest of Ireland in 1169, the English army reports that it was attacked during the night by thousands of warriors who filled the sky. Giraldo Cambrense, Welsh historian, in the opera Expugnatio Hibernica, says that these apparitions in the night skies frequently accompany British military expeditions to Ireland [20].
In 1123 Saxony and, subsequently, all of Germany, were devastated by tumultuous revolts and bands of brigands sacked cities and villages, leaving the affected areas prey to famine and misery. Shortly afterwards, near Worms, a crowd of wandering armed knights was sighted: one of them assured that prayers and alms would allow their atonement. [21]. J.-C. Schmitt, reflecting on the character of these apparitions, affirms that "these fantastic knights, who come and go, are the doubles of the horde, which instead is real, of knight brigands" [22].
[end of first part]
Note:
[1] See M. Maculotti, From Pan to the Devil: the 'demonization' and the removal of ancient European cults, AXISmundi.
[2] Cf.. E. Köhler, The chivalric adventure. Ideal and reality in the poems of the Round Table, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1955, quoted in J. Le Goff, The wonderful and the everyday in the medieval West, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1983, p. 8.
[3] Idem.
[4] Ivi, P. 10.
[5] Le Goff also underlines how much, in the hagiographic context, the fulfillment of the miracle is absolutely predictable starting from the intervention of the saint in a given situation. In this case Le Goff speaks of a process of "emptying and rationalizing the marvelous", see J. Le Goff, The marvelous in the medieval West, op. cit., p. 11.
[6] Ivi, P. 13.
[7] An illuminating example is offered by the story of Mélusine, the snake-woman, claimed as the ancestor of many noble dynasties. However, it was the Lusignans who appropriated it, the first to name it as Mélusine and, subsequently, the Plantagenets who became king of England appropriated it.
[8] See also G. Mollar, The "Ghost Riders", the "Chasse-Galerie" and the myth of the Wild Hunt, AXISmundi.
[8] The common dead have no place in ecclesiastical literature and the apparitions of the dead, as we have seen, mainly concern the very evil dead or those who have not benefited from the funeral rites. An exception is obviously given by the saints, who, according to Fr. Brown's definition, are "very special deaths", who generally appear to clerics, monks or kings. To learn more see. P. Brown, The cult of saints: the origin and spread of a new religiosity, Einaudi, Turin, 1983.
[9] JC Schmitt, Spirits and ghosts in medieval society, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1995.
[10] View J. Le Goff, The birth of Purgatory, Einaudi, Turin, 1996. On the domestic cults of the ancient Romans, cf. M. Maculotti, Blood, Gens, Genius: familiar rites in ancient Rome, AXISmundi.
[11] JC Schmitt, "Superstitious" Middle Ages, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1992, p. 124. On the "birth" of Purgatory in countries of Celtic ancestry, cf. Jean Markale: the Other World in Druidism and Celtic Christianity, AXISmundi.
[12] See K. Meisen, The legend of the furious hunter and the wild hunt, Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria, 2001, p. 23.
[13] JC Schmitt, Spirits and ghosts in medieval society, op. cit., p. 140.
[14] The date used by Olderico is specious and strategic: January 1, in the Middle Ages, was a time opposed by the Church due to its link with the calends of January, the first day of the year in the Roman calendar. To eradicate this connection during the Middle Ages it was chosen to indicate the beginning of the year on Easter Day, due to the mobile nature of this holiday it was in fact possible to avoid a connection with previous pagan holidays. The new anniversary failed to establish itself universally, its use was gradually abandoned and the Church did not stop firmly opposing the celebrations and popular customs of January 1st..
[15] JC Schmitt, Spirits and ghosts in medieval society, op. cit., p. 132.
[16] G.Duby, The mirror of feudalism. Priests, warriors and workers, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1981.
[17] JC Schmitt, Spirits and ghosts in medieval society, op. cit., p. 135.
[18] C. Ginzburg, Charivari, youth associations and hunting Selvaggia in «Historical Notebooks», vol. 17, no. 49 (1), 1982, pp. 164-177.
[19] There, p. 148.
[20] K. Meisen, The legend of the furious hunter and the wild hunt, op. cit., p. 78.
[21] JC Schmitt, Spirits and ghosts in medieval society, op. cit., p 150.
Bibliography:
- Brown, P. The cult of saints: the origin and spread of a new religiosity, Einaudi, Turin, 1983.
- Duby, G. The mirror of feudalism. Priests, warriors and workers, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1987.
- Ginzburg, C. Nocturnal history, a deciphering of the Sabbath, Einaudi, Turin, 1989.
- Graf, A., Myths, legends and superstitions of the Middle Ages, Mondadori, Milan, 1984.
- Le Goff, J. The wonderful and the everyday in the Omedieval accident, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1983.
- Meisen, K. The legend of the furious hunter and the wild hunt, Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria, 2001
- Schmitt, J.-C. Spirits and ghosts in medieval society, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1995.
- Schmitt, J.-C., Religion, folklore and society in the medieval West, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1988.
- Schmitt, J.-C., "Superstitious" Middle Ages, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1992.
Contributions in magazine:
- Ginzburg, C. Charivari, youth associations and wild hunting, in «Historical Notebooks», vol. 17, no. 49 (1), 1982, pp. 164-177.
- Fiore, A. Furious line-up and wild hunt: a discussion and some perspective, in "Historical notebooks", 116 (2004), pp. 559-576
- Lanzinger, M. The choice of a spouse. Between romantic love and forbidden marriages, «Historically», 6 (2010), no. 4.
- Lazzerini, L. Harlequin, flies, witches and the origins of popular theaterand in «Middle-Latin and vulgar studies», XXV, 1977, pp. 93-155
- Lecco, M. The 'Charivari' of the 'Roman De Fauvel' and the tradition of the 'Mesnie Hellequin' in «Mediaevistik», vol. 13, 2000, p. 55–85.
He posted it back up DIAKOSMESIS.
Suggestive to the max, so true and enchanting, it is everything that is not part of our contemporary…