Review: Everyday Life in Medieval Times, Pt. 2

    Here begins the second part of my notes regarding Marjorie Rowling's Everyday Life in Medieval Times; part one is here.

CH. 5 PILGRIMS & CRUSADERS

• pilgrimages made by Xians to Rome & Jerusalem as early as 4th c.
• Santiago de Compostela becomes famous in 11th c.
• hostels established along pilgrimage routes
• Germany called "Duchelond" by 15th-cent. writer
• firearms were discharged while crossing the Alps to trigger small avalanches before entering a narrow pass
• pilgrims docked in the port of Jaffa had to get "safe conduct" from the Governor of Jerusalem before they could disembark (it required some tribute)
• by beginning of 15th c. French was more commonly known than Latin outside of Europe
• guardians of the Holy Sepulchre locked in all year except Easter weekend & 13–14 Sept. (Vigil of the Holy Cross)
• in 1395 Venice claimed to have St. George's arm, St. Nicholas' staff, St. Paul's ear, & one of the jars from the wedding in Cana whose contents were turned to wine
• Venice also had one of Goliath's teeth, poss. an elephant molar? (ost. half a foot long)
• Louis XI supposed to have worn a cap adorned only w/ pilgrim badges
• Erasmus later mocks badge-wearing & thinks it superstitious/souvenir-y
• Rocamadour had a shitty misogynistic legend about loose women giving up their hair as penance (but if you look back, any cure will be undone!)
• Holy Vernicle is the cloth St. Veronica supposedly wiped Jesus' face with, the mere sight of which granted a pilgrim 12,000 years' indulgence
• "scrip" was a pilgrim's wallet for food; "burdon" was a staff w/ an iron point at one end; scrip hangs around the neck
• anti-clericalism & suspicion of "professional vagabonds" led to Charles VI of France outlawing pilgrimage to Rome w/out his personal approval & general criticism of pilgrimages as a whole (the example given is not terribly convincing tho')
• St. Anselm apparently recognized the hypocrisy of the Crusades
• Pope Urban II (who started the First Crusade) called the Norse "barbarians who live in remote islands & seek their living on the icy ocean as if they were whales"
• sounds like mostly a way to redirect internal warfare outward; not really mentioning the East-West schism & hopes of reconciliation
• red cross of the crusader sewn upon the right shoulder
• mocking the Scots as swamp-dwellers, but true of faith
• the People's Crusade pillaged their way across eastern Europe, & arrived in Constantinople only to be quickly ferried across the Bosphorus, where they were all slaughtered by the Turkish army
• First Crusaders whined a lot about the heat & losing their horses
• 9 crusades fought between 11th & 13th centuries & ended in total failure
• destruction of Constantinople in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade?
• crusades prob. sped up loss of feudal power & increase in trade
  

CH. 6 MONKS & FRIARS

• weird rhetoric & flowery descriptions of places I've never heard of
• immediate pivot to origins of monastic life as desert hermits
• mainly about seeking one's own salvation, not about saving others' souls thru prayer
• def. an ascetic tradition early on
• Ireland keeping monastic traditions & Latin literacy alive
• "driven like seeds before the blast" strange metaphor I don't recognize
• oh we're using Irish loughs like Scots lochs
• Viking raiders drove Irish monks to the Continent, incl. writer of Pangur Ban
• St. Columban's rule for monks stricter than St. Benedict's; Benedict's is the one that becomes the foundation for western European monasticism
• cellarer in charge of buying food & drink for monastery
• guest master managed guest-house
• midnight prayers interrupt sleep
• under Charlemagne, all monasteries ordered to adopt Rule of St. Benedict
• Duke William of Aquitaine founds Abbey of Cluny in 910 (mostly bc he felt guilty about having murdered someone) but the monks there were "forever free" from secular powers according to the chartered he sign
  
• wtf monks armed themselves & barred the door rather than admit Abbot Odo to Fleury
• monks had to use sign language, facial expressions, & even hissing to get around rule of silence
• when HRE Henry IV had his dispute w/ the Pope, he asked the abbot of Cluny to intercede on his behalf (which prob. led to imperial patronage)
• claim that elaborate services (e.g. those in Revelation of the Monk of Evesham) laid the foundation for miracle & mystery plays
• complaining about "worldly interests" pushing fancy liturgies in place of work & driving abbots into legal arguments over secular property rather than spending time w/ their fellow monks
• oh okay, the above specifically refers to Cluny, not all abbeys
• now laypeople consider monasteries necessary for the salvation of others via prayer
• around 1100, people like Stephen Harding (himself a monk) complained that the services & decorations at Cluny were too elaborate; Harding goes on to become abbot of Cîteaux & draw up the rule for Cistercian monks
• Cistercian Order must have spread very fast bc by ~1150 there were 350 houses in Europe
• after death of St. Bernard, "Cistercian order declined, largely because it began to grow immensely rich"
• Carthusian monks established at Chartreux but was unpopular bc too strict
  

CH. 7 SCHOOLS & SCHOLARS

• universitas means "guild"
• heavy restrictions on who could teach (hence magister controversy at Uni. of Paris)
• monks preserved medieval learning but cathedral schools were university's forerunners
• a freshman was called a "bajan" & bas. had to host a feast when accepted to uni (& poss. get hazed)
• had to converse in Latin during lessons
• "goliards" were wandering scholars
• Paris specialized in theology, Orléans in classics, Salerno in medicine, & Toledo in "magic"
  

CH. 8 CHURCH BUILDERS & ARTISTS

• Council of Nicaea said "the composition of religious imagery is not left to the initiative of the artists"
• artists were given models, mock-ups, & instructions for their designs by the church
• the pickled children in the St. Nicholas tale are supposed to be naked pagans in a baptismal font
• bishops having actual fits over whether the cross had headbar/footbar & nailed separately or together
• Martianus Capella was an African grammarian in the 5th c. who personified the 7 liberal arts as "beautiful women"
• church of St. Denis erected in 775
• Einhard, Charlemagne's secretary (& biographer I think), was described as "little Nard who runs to and fro like an ant"
• Charlemagne's era sees "conscious pride in a renewed Roman Empire"
• Bishop Suger rebuilt the Romanesque church of St. Denis in Gothic style ~1150
  

CH. 9 DOCTORS & PATIENTS

• the Brancas (father & son) performed plastic surgery in northern Italy
• Pope Boniface published a statute in 1300 forbidding the desecration of the dead; it was intended to stop people from boiling the flesh off crusaders' bones in order to send them home more easily, but resulted in the near-cessation of anatomy lessons

CH. 10 SCIENTISTS & TECHNOLOGISTS

• Bishop of Tournai in 1202 writes to the pope complaining of "long-haired adolescents" & new-fangled thinking
• translation of Aristotle's Physics & Metaphysics in early 13th c. brought Greco-Roman learning back to western Europe & spurred debate
• in 1210, University of Paris banned both books as well as commentaries on them
• church eventually said it was okay to read them if you ignored the heretical parts
• Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica attempted to reconcile Aristotle w/ orthodoxy
• translations of Arabic texts also intro'd alchemy & quest for transmutation
• Basil Valentine's The Twelve Keys uses a "fierce gray wolf" to symbolize antimony
• "charcoal-burners" also called "puffers" for the bellows that were always going
• Pope Sylvester II called "the greatest necromancer in France" & some ascribed his ascension to the papacy to demonic aid
• in standard cosmology, 🜨 surrounded by a watery layer, then air, then fire, then the sky ☾☿♀︎☉♂︎♃♄*
• paper-making intro'd to Spain c.1150
  

In conclusion, it is an excellent and informative book with only a few eyebrow-raising passages.  Anyone looking for a solid introduction to high or late medieval Europe would do well to read Everyday Life in Medieval Times.