Hunchbacks

In William Shakespeare's Richard III, someone refers to Richard as “that foule hunch-backt toade.” It's the first recorded instance of that term for someone who had a less-than-straight spine, and—putting aside the question of whether Richard was "hunch-backed"—the term gets used in the literature of the next couple centuries to indicate a bad person.

We know what a "back" is, but what is a "hunch"? I once mentioned Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De Proprietatibus Rerum ("On the Order of Things"), a 1240 work by a Franciscan scholar. It was a popular work that got printed and reprinted and translated for centuries. A 1398 English translation by John of Trevisa uses the word "bunch" to describe what Angelicas said about the back of a camel.  A 1582 re-printing of Trevisa's translation made some changes to "modernize" the English says the Dromedary camel “hath a hunch on his backe,” and "the camele of Arabia hath tweye bonches on the bak."

We have no other source of the origin of the word "hunch" to refer to a lump on someone's back. It might have been a typo, but the term "hunch-back" became the norm in English.

Earlier, the Wycliffe English translation of Leviticus 21:20 lists all the physical defects that prevent a man from being a priest, including "if he hath a botche"; this is translated as a hunchback; presumably "botche" is equivalent to the Trevisa "bunch" which later became "hunch."

Shakespeare shows how the physical deformity excludes a person from a normal life, such as athletic pursuits or romance:

But I that am not shapte for sportiue trickes,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glasse,
I that am rudely stampt and want loves maiesty,

Exclusion from normal life is seen centuries earlier than Shakespeare in the life of Charlemagne's eldest son, Pepin. He was called Pepin the Hunchback because of a spinal deformity. Years after his birth, Charlemagne had another son (Carloman) with a different woman but re-named him Pepin of Italy at his baptism by the pope. It seems obvious that Charlemagne was "replacing" his eldest Pepin with a new one. To be fair, the first Pepin was born with a concubine, and the second with a "church-legal" wife, so Charlemagne might have wanted a "proper" Pepin as a son and heir.

The original Pepin staged an unsuccessful rebellion, and I think he deserves his due. We'll discuss his treatment by his father and the rebellion next time. See you soon.

The Antipodes

As the unknown becomes close and familiar, imagination must seek new realms further away. Modern fiction doesn't write about alien life on the Moon or Mars or Venus, since we now "know" those spheres. In the Middle Ages, it was assumed that fantastical lands and creatures existed "over there." As far lands such as Africa, for instance, began to be explored and found mundane, the fantastical was mentally placed in a more distant spot.

The Antipodes (literally "opposite feet": the place on the globe directly opposite to where you are standing)* fascinated the Middle Ages for both philosophical and geographical reasons. On the one hand, the idea had come to them from the Classical World, and so was difficult to dismiss. This was the place that held creatures out of legend: Cyclopes, dog-headed men, Sciopods whose single large foot could be used as an umbrella when they lay on their backs, Blemmyae with faces on their torsos. On the other hand, the Medieval idea of symmetry demanded that there be lands to the far south, balancing the known lands in the north. Especially as the idea of earth's roundness took shape, Africa wasn't enough to satisfactorily balance Europe and Asia.

The Antipodes were also a natural extension of the theory of "zones." Since it became very cold up north, and hotter as you went south, it was assumed that the temperate zone enjoyed by most of Europe had a counterpart below the equator which was equally inhabitable. Below that, of course would be the area that is opposite the Arctic: the Anti-Arctic, or Antarctic.

The term was first used by Plato in his Timaeus. It was first used in English in 1398 in John of Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Order of Things):

Yonde in Ethiopia ben the Antipodes, men that haue theyr fete ayenst our fete.
(Yonder in Ethiopia are the Antipodes, men that have their fete against our feet.)

Some in the Middle Ages used the image of upside-down men as a reason to reject the Earth as a globe and opt for a flat Earth. Plato had addressed this himself, however, in an assumption of orientation that he does not call gravity but that works the same way:

For if there were any solid body in equipoise at the centre of the universe, there would be nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they are all perfectly similar; and if a person were to go round the world in a circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes of his former position, speak of the same point as above and below; for, as I was saying just now, to speak of the whole which is in the form of a globe as having one part above and another below is not like a sensible man.

But sensible men apparently did not read the Timaeus, or never grasped the concept of "up" and "down" being relative to where you were standing. A universally accepted map of the world was unknown; maps of the world typically took one of four forms, which we will look at tomorrow.

*Have fun finding your antipodal point here.