Penn Press Log

Medieval Monday: Pope Gregory VIII, the Audita tremendi, and the Third Crusade

This excerpt from Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291, edited by Jessalynn Bird, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, features a translation of the Audita tremendi. This letter, written by Pope Gregory VIII in 1187, was in the words of  Bird, Peters, and Powell "not only the most impassioned plea for a crusade ever issued by a pope until then, but the fullest detailed account of crusaders’ spiritual and temporal rewards and privileges to date."

    The letter circulated widely throughout Europe, inspiring the group of military expeditions that came to be known as the Third Crusade. But the impact of Audita tremendi long outlasted the Third Crusade itself. It inspired a new generation of moral theologians to consider the needs of the Holy Land and to link these to the moral regeneration of Christian Europe, one of the great themes of twelfth and thirteenth-century history. Gregory’s emphasis on the bloody circumstances of the defeat at Hattin, the loss of the True Cross, and the first cities taken by Saladin (the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2, 1187, was not yet known in the West when Audita tremendi was issued) frame his insistence that God’s anger is the result of human sin, that penance is mandatory, not optional, and that a new expedition would be an opportunity for the salvation of Christian warriors. . . .

GREGORY, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to all Christ’s faithful who receive this letter, greeting and apostolic benediction.

    When we heard of the severity of the awesome judgment that the hand of God visited on the land of Jerusalem, we and our brothers were disturbed by such a great horror, afflicted by such sorrows, that we scarcely knew what to do or what we should do, save that the psalmist laments and says, ‘‘O God, the gentiles have invaded your inheritance, they have sullied your holy temple, they have laid waste Jerusalem; they have left the dead bodies of your saints as meat for the beasts of the earth and food the birds of the air . . .’’ [Ps 78:1–2]. In fact, because of the conflict which the malice of [Christian] men has recently brought on the land by the inspiration of the devil, Saladin approached those parts with a host of armed troops. They were confronted by the king and the bishops, the Templars and the Hospitallers, the barons and the knights, with the people of the land, and with the Lord’s cross (through which from memory and faith of the suffering of Christ, who hung there and redeemed the human race, was believed to be a sure safeguard and a desired defense against the attacks of the pagans), and after the battle was joined, our side was defeated and the Lord’s cross was captured. The bishops were slaughtered, the king captured, and almost all our men were either put to the sword or taken prisoner. Very few are believed to have escaped. Also, the Templars and Hospitallers were beheaded in his [Saladin’s] presence. With the army defeated, we do not think our letter can explain how they next invaded and seized every place so that only a few remained outside their power. Still, though we use the words of the prophet: ‘‘Who will give me water for my head and a font of tears for my eyes, and I will weep night and day for the death of my people’’ [Jer 9:1], we ought not despair now and decide to mistrust and believe that God is so angry with his people that in his anger with their commission of a multitude of sins he will not quickly pardon when he is pleased by their penance and, after tears and groans, will lead them to exaltation.

Medieval Monday: A Financial Aid Request from the Middle Ages

Lost Letters of Medieval Life: English Society, 1200-1250 just arrived in the Penn Press warehouse. Translated from Latin by the editors Martha Carlin and David Crouch, this collection of correspondence from thirteenth-century England reveals details about the everyday lives of people from all social stations. Carlin and Crouch selected writings from formularies, collections of model letters, maintained in the British Library and the Bodleian Library. The selections cover everything from real estate transactions to religious life.

Press staff have been looking forward to sharing a few examples from the collection. Since we're on a university campus, we'll start with a letter in the Student Life section. One of the Press work-study assistants was pretty amused by this letter from a University of Oxford student. Student B (who probably didn't even have a job) writes to his mother for money. His request contains the one-two punch of pity and shame, plus the threat of being likened to a "stepmother."

To his dearest mother A., B. her son sends greetings. A mother’s love for her child is bound to be strong and gracious, but if a widow changes her maternal habits she will be crueler than a stepmother. For until now, both in deed and in word, you showed me maternal piety. If you relieved my want through some lavishing of favor, would that your former feelings might endure in you, so that I might find you as I used to find you—and as I shall find you, God willing, because I have never offended nor shall I offend [you] in all my life. You will know, moreover, that I am well at Oxford, and as happy as possible, but I have been bare of clothing for a long time, and I am hungry because I have no money with which I may choose to allay thirst or hunger. And so I pour out pious prayers to Your Maternity, seeking anxiously that, with the right hand of largesse, you raise up your son, who has been lying until now in a lake of misery, in a manner more shameful than honorable. And thus, may you look to his immediate welfare, so that he might visit you in a better state and stay for a longer time. Farewell.

Did this letter actually move medieval mothers to pull their sons from the "lake of misery," or did it produce more smirks than sympathy?

Medieval Monday: "Pangur Bán" or "the Monk and His Cat" in Animal Encounters

 

from The Secret of the Kells

Pangur Ban, the cat from the acclaimed animated film The Secret of the Kells, has an interesting lineage. The feline character was taken from an Old Irish lyric called “Pangur Bán” or “The Monk and His Cat.” In the movie, the clever creature belonged to Brother Aidan the illuminator. In the poem, which appears in a ninth-century manuscript, a cat named Pangur Bán hunts for mice as intently as a monk hunts for meanings in his Latin texts. Here are a couple of stanzas from Seamus Heaney's translation:

All the while, his round bright eye
Fixes on the wall, while I
Focus my less piercing gaze
On the challenge of the page.

With his unsheathed, perfect nails
Pangur springs, exults and kills.
When the longed-for, difficult
Answers come, I too exult.

"The Irish lyric 'Pangur Bán' meditates on the symbiosis of a scholar's efforts and a housecat's hunting, to discover within their analogous work a precisely observed equivalence between their minds," says Susan Crane author of Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. In her new book, Crane describes the unique connection between people and other living creatures that existed in Irish and northern British monastic texts written between the seventh and ninth centuries. Far from Rome, these northern European monestaries were often simple clusters of huts emeshed in the environment. "Wild nature challenged monastic settlements and domesticated nature facilitated their work," writes Crane.

Her reading of the lyric "Pangur Ban" reflects the intricate bonds between animals, people, and religious culture of the time.

The cat's name, "Pangur Bán," means “white fuller,” a man who works with fuller's earth and comes to be covered in its pale dust. Given the high value of work and craft in the lyric, one might hazard that “white fuller” evokes both the cat's pale fur and his workmanlike behavior. The cat is next anthropomorphized as a net-wielding gladiator or perhaps a huntsman equipped with a net (his extended claws) as he performs “feats of valor.” Cat as workman and cat as valiant gladiator have mock-heroic potential that could reflect doubly on the cat, humorously inflating his worth in order to discredit it and distance him from the scholar. In a counterstrategy, however, the scholar shares mock-heroic status with the cat as "there falls into my net a difficult dictum with hard meaning." Both of them are attempting "feats of valor" that could look small from the net-wielding, death-defying gladiator's perspective. Anthropomorphism can cut in many directions, but in "Pangur Bán" the consistent strategy is to strike analogies that reinforce the scholar's bemused admiration for Pangur with his self-deprecating account of his own efforts to work well.

So, next time a prowling house cat distracts you from your work, don't get too upset. Instead, follow the monastic example by appreciating his skills. Maybe he will be more of an inspiration than a distraction.

Early Modern Monday: Where In the World is Tecamachalco?

Poor Tecamachalco, so unfortunate,
it never lacks some misfortune!
Diego de Trujillo, Spanish farmer, 1581

On July 21, 1578, the small Mexican town of Tecamachalco awoke to the news of a scandal. Nailed to the door of its church was a double-faced effigy denouncing Hernando Rubio Naranjo as a Jew who should burn at the stake. In Death by Effigy: A Case from the Mexican Inquisition, historian Luis R. Corteguera recounts the nine trials that followed this incident, revealing a story of dishonor, revenge, and the Inquisition's relentless determination to defend its symbols.

The rich history of Tecamachalco, now a municipality in the Mexican state of Puebla, plays an important role in the inquisitorial investigation into the misuse of church symbols. The following excerpt from Corteguera's new book sets the stage for a drama of social anxieties and religious authority.

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The menacing effigy of San Benito stood guard, waiting for everyone in Tecamachalco to heed its warnings. Meanwhile, across from the church, Hernando Rubio Naranjo slept inside his house, unaware of the scandal that would soon spread across the region.

Medieval Monday: Ruth Mazo Karras on a Case of Medieval Unmarriage

Ruth Mazo Karras, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota, discusses the case of an unmarried couple in fifteenth-century Paris. The incident is one of many in her latest Penn Press book, Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages. The legal and religious details of this extramarital union are particular to the Middle Ages, yet the likely motivations of the people involved seem timeless.

Those in search of simple, old fashioned models of love and marriage might be disappointed by some of the realities of medieval coupling. "Tradition is always invented," says Karras, who reminds us that the traditional marriage that people in the twenty-first century have invented for themselves is not really that similar to the state of matrimony in the Middle Ages.

Karras is the author of several books, including From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe and coeditor of Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe. She is also coeditor of the journal Gender & History and Series Editor for The Middle Ages Series published by Penn Press.