Hysteria

from a Latin copy of Gynæcology by Soranus of Ephesus

Hysteria describes two different states: exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, and as a psychological disorder in which psychological stress can manifest physical symptoms. The word is derived from the Greek word for uterus, ὑστέρα [hystera]. Hysteria was once assumed to be solely a female medical problem.

It seems to have started with Hippocrates (c.460-c.370 BCE), who maintained that men and women had entirely different bodies: men's humors were hot and dry by nature, women's were wet and cold. Women also had different processes, such as menstruation. Hippocrates did not pass judgment on these differences; they merely needed to be addressed by the practitioner of medicine.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE), however, had other ideas. He postulated that processes like menstruation could be harmful to men, who should avoid women during that time. He also felt men's bodies were perfect and women's were flawed. Women were irrational and unbalanced—literally "unbalanced," because he believed that the uterus "wandered" in the body.

By the time medieval medicine came along, the authority of Aristotle made it clear: over-emotional women were suffering from being unbalanced because of their womb. Hysteria could be treated by removing the source of the unbalance, and the hysterectomy was "born." (Sorry.) Unfortunately, as summarized in this abstract:

The procedure was performed by Soranus of Ephesus 120 years after the birth of Christ, and the many reports of its use in the middle ages were nearly always for the extirpation of an inverted uterus and the patients rarely survived. [source]

The procedure wasn't considered remotely safe until antiseptic techniques began in the 19th century. Even so, it wasn't until the 20th century that diagnoses of hysteria declined, possibly because the general public came to understand that "hysteria" was too easily used as a label for anxiety.

Iconoclasm

The word "iconoclast" today usually denotes someone who challenges tradition, but the origin of the word was in the religiously and politically charged world of Constantinople in the Early Middle Ages.

To be honest, "iconoclast" (a destroyer of religious images belonging to his own culture) and its opposite, "iconodule" or "iconophile," were terms created much later by historians to describe the iconomachia (war of icons) of the late 8th and early 9th centuries in the Byzantine Empire.

Each side had its arguments, of course. The iconoclasts invoked the third of Moses 10 Commandments against "making graven images." They argued that any proper image had to be made from the same substance as the original, and therefore wood and stone were not appropriate to portray flesh. The only substance available to represent Christ was the Eucharist, which had been decreed to be Christ's flesh. Also, images were incapable of representing Christ's divinity as well as his humanity. Images had been condemned in churches by the Synod of Elvira in 305, because they might distract people from the true reason for being in church.

The iconodules had their own reasons. Once God incarnated as Jesus, representations of the divine on Earth became justified. God did tell Moses to add cherubim to the Ark. Although idols might be false, icons represented important real people and things. Also, there were miracles associated with icons, attesting to divine approval.

There were two periods, called the First Iconoclasm—from 726-787, begun by Emperor Leo III when he replaced an image of Christ with a cross at the entrance to the palace—and the Second Iconoclasm—in 814-842, when Emperor Leo V thought his military failures were the result of displeasing God. Leo III's major opponent was the venerable St. John of Damascus. Leo V had to contend with the prolific pen of St. Theodore of Stoudios.

Iconoclasm was largely an Eastern Christian conflict. Western Christianity never became seriously concerned with it, to the delight of art historians.

The First Abolitionist

St. Theodore of Stoudios (759-11 November 826 CE) was a highly educated member of a well-connected family in Constantinople. His father and uncle were public officials who controlled a large part of the finances in the reign of Constantine V (741-755). He was probably in line for a very nice civil service position, but his uncle's influence changed his fate.

The uncle, Platon, left civil service during the reign of Constantine's successor, Leo IV (775-780), and entered a monastery in Bithynia (east of Constantinople, on the shore of the Black Sea). Upon the death of Leo, Platon persuaded his sister's entire family to take monastic vows. They all returned with him to Bithynia, and established the Sakkudion Monastery on the family estate.

The family did not exactly stay away from politics, however. Leo was succeeded by Constantine VI (776-797), who decided to put aside his first wife and marry her lady-in-waiting. In the absence of evidence that the first wife was an adulterer, this was not easy for anyone to swallow. The Patriarch Tarasios eventually consented to the divorce, but he refused to perform the second wedding (as was customary for a ruler), leaving it to a priest named Joseph of the Hagia Sophia.

Despite the fact that the new wife was a cousin of Theodore, he objected to the whole affair and called for the excommunication of Joseph and everyone who received sacraments from him, which would necessarily include Constantine and his new wife. He had no authority to enforce this, so no actions were taken. The emperor tried to make peace with his new wife's relatives; they refused; Constantine sent troops to the monastery to disperse the community and send Theodore and other monks to exile in Thessalonika. A year later, however, Constantine was deposed and his mother became the Empress Irene. She undid many of her wayward son's actions, including lifting the exile on the monks of the Sakkudion Monastery and imprisoning Joseph.

When an Arab attack in Bithynia forced the monks of Sakkudion to flee to Constantinople, Empress Irene offered Theodore the leadership of the defunct Stoudios monastery. He set about restoring the library and scriptorium, and redecorating the church. (Theodore was opposed to the strong Byzantine element of iconoclasm that forbade images.) He also started writing letters; lots of letters, which he sent to fellow monks near and far. In one of them he makes the first known statement against slavery. Writing to one Nicolas, he says:

Do not obtain any slave nor use in your private service or in that of the monastery over which you preside, or in the fields, man who was made in the image of God. For such an indulgence is only for those who live in the world. For you should yourself be as a servant to the brethren like-minded with you, at least in intention, even if in outward appearance you are reckoned to be master and teacher. [source]

It is interesting that he seems to condemn slavery because it is a "worldly" activity, not necessarily because it is inherently "bad." But it was a start.

Making Parchment

The term parchment is often applied to any animal skin used for writing on, but historically it was used for sheep or goat skin. Cow or calf skin was also used, but was turned into vellum. Very fine vellum came from very young calves, or even still-born calves. These pages were smaller than the pages that could be made from adult animals.

Although vellum is from the same word as calf, Latin vitellus, parchment has nothing to do with the material. It derives from Pergamum, where it is said parchment was invented during a dearth of the export of papyrus out of Alexandria.* According to Pliny (27-79 BCE), this was under King Eumenes; he does not distinguish, however, if this was Eumenes I (263-241 BCE) or Eumenes II (197-158 BCE).

The person who turned animal skins into parchment in the Middle Ages was called a parchmenter. The parchmenter needed to pick skins carefully. The hair of the animal was a consideration, since the skin below would match it. Black-furred animals would yield darker parchment, less suitable for writing on.

Making parchment in the Middle Ages was fairly straightforward. The skin was placed in cold water for at least a day to clean off any blood and dirt. A lime solution was next, to eliminate the hair. For a week, the skins would be stirred with long wooden poles a few times each day. After the lime bath, they would be stretched on a wooden frame, with thread or leather thongs attached through numerous holes around the edge to ensure that it stretched and dried flat. The skin would be scraped with a curved blade to remove any remaining hair. The occasional oval hole seen in parchments was not the result of bookworms. Imperfections from tick bites in the living animal produced holes in the skins that would expand during the stretching and drying process.

Scraping the parchment was an ongoing process. By the 12th century, scraping skins to tissue thinness was common. Extensive rubbing with chalk and pumice helped produce a smooth surface that would take ink without spreading through the imperfections in the surface.

After the treatment, it was removed from the frame. It was soft and supple enough to roll up until needed, when it was cut into sheets that were usually sold by the dozen.

*Supposedly, Alexandria was using so much of the papyrus reed that it was being over-harvested; they simply could not afford to export any.

More About Books

We know that books were rare prior to the development of the movable type printing press, but they weren't unknown. They could be a status symbol, and so those who could afford them had books made (which usually meant copied from existing works) for their private libraries. The post-medieval Robert Cotton liked collecting books, including manuscripts from the generations prior to his.

How rare were books? Who had them? What would constitute "a lot" of books?

We know of about 76,000 wills that survive from the 14th and 15th centuries. You expect wills to be made by people who had items of value that were worth disbursing to specific people. An examination of one-tenth of these wills reveals that only 388 mention books. Presumably, books would be mentioned specifically, given the care and expense they represented. But there were books around, so who had them? Here's one case of a private library.

The Chaucer scholar Derek Brewer tells us about William Ravenstone, a schoolmaster at the Almonry* Cathedral School of St. Paul's in London. Ravenstone had 84 books, which was an extraordinary number for a private library. He had Latin books on grammar, poetry, mathematics, music, and various Roman authors. In 1358, his will left them all to the school (where some argue the students would have access to them).

Thirty years before the Ravenstone collection was left to the school, it received the collection of a previous almoner, William Tolleshunt. His library included books on logic, grammar, natural history, medicine, civil and canon law, and theology.

Winchester College in 1446 and Eton College's charter written in 1440 (Eton opened in 1443) established libraries. At Eton (as at other libraries of the time), the books were chained to desks so that they could be read but not taken away.

Each college required only a single room to house all their books.

*An almonry was a place where alms were given out to the poor; those who worked there distributing alms were called "almoners."

Medieval Meteors

Woodcut showing meteorite coming to Ensisheim.

Today is the anniversary of the first meteorite the exact date of whose fall to Earth has been recorded. It was in 1492, around noon, when a young boy heard an explosion and observed a rock fall from the sky, burying itself in a wheat field outside the town of Ensisheim in what is now France (but was then Austria). The sound of the explosion was heard up to 150 kilometers away. Townspeople came to investigate and found a 127-kilogram triangular rock in a pit a meter deep. They retrieved it from its trench and immediately started chipping pieces from it, until a local authority stopped them, ordering the rock to be delivered to the steps of the local church and preserved pending an investigation.

But that was far from the first meteor or meteorite recorded.* The Journal for the History of Astronomy in 1978 published "Meteors, Meteor Showers and Meteorites in the Middle Ages: From European Medieval Sources." The article lists every meteoritic phenomenon it could find by carefully scouring historical texts, and includes items such as:

453 or 454 — Tres magni lapides (three big stones). Three meteorites fell in Thrace 

518 — Alius ignis . . . instar scintillarum (another fire sparklike). A meteor. Date uncertain. Theophanis Chronographia 

557 — Discursus stellarum (moving stars). A shower lasting the whole night that caused terror. Date uncertain. G. Cedrenus

There are several pages of entries. Meteoric phenomena could be seen as good or evil, often depending upon their proximity to events in the lives of the observers.

As for the Ensisheim Meteor, it currently resides in the Ensisheim museum and is toasted every year by The Brotherhood of Saint-Georges of the Guardians of the Meteorite of Ensisheim. Maximilian I (1459-1519), son of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, visited the rock shortly after its fall and declared it a wonder from Heaven. He took some chips for himself and a friend. After years of people taking parts of it away, the rock is now roughly spherical and has been reduced to about 56 kilograms. I guess everyone wanted to have their little piece of Heaven.

*A meteor (first coined in the 16th century, from a Greek word meaning "lofty") is a rocky object that streaks through the atmosphere, heating up via friction and creating a streak of light; a meteorite is a meteor that reaches the ground. A small percentage of meteorites are composed of nickel and iron.

The Gorleston Psalter

A friend dared me to comment on this article on vulgar scenes from illuminated medieval manuscripts. Never one to avoid a challenge, I picked a particular (and the least vulgar) piece from a particular manuscript.

The Gorleston Psalter is so-called because of its association with the church of St. Andrew in Gorleston, Norfolk. Psalter is from an Old English word that originally came from Greek and refers to a stringed instrument. It is used to refer to personal prayer books, or books with the  Old Testament Psalms. They are frequently illuminated—by hand, since they were made decades before printing. The illuminations are frequently a far cry from any pious topic or image, and seem designed to distract the viewer from boredom.

The illuminations of the Gorleston Psalter are usually represented by a fox carrying a goose in its mouth (the duck is actually saying "queck"); this may be because it is the only straightforward image that doesn't take a left turn into the fantastical. Above (from the article) is a bishop bowing his head before the executioner's axe; the executioner is a rabbit.

Go here and see how the British Library has put the Psalter online. You can see the creature with a bill and a man's face coming out of its ass, and many other odd and exotic combinations of personified animals or human-beast hybrids.

Interest in the Gorleston Psalter was revived about a decade ago when the Macclesfield Psalter unexpectedly surfaced. The artwork in the Macclesfield was so similar to the Gorleston that it is accepted that the artist and copyist was the same for both. Internal cues link both to the church of St. Andrew's in Gorleston. The owner put the Macclesfield Psalter up for auction at Sotheby's. It was about to go to California until a coalition of several British celebrities began a funding campaign that matched the winning bid of £1.7 million and kept the Psalter in England.

The Ransom of Captives

St. Felix of Valois

Among other accomplishments, the Crusades created a large number of Christians held captive by non-Christians. These captives, held in far-off lands, could languish for years in horrible conditions. There was no Amnesty International to care about them. That changed, starting with an unassuming man named Felix of Valois (16 April 1127 - 4 November 1212).

Felix, born in the province of Valois, decided at an early age to renounce the worldly life and become a hermit in the woods of the Diocese of Meaux. His saintly reputation drew a priest, John of Matha, to come stay with him. John convinced Felix that they should found an order focused on redeeming captives held by non-Christians.

The two men traveled to Rome, where they met with Pope Innocent III. Innocent (who would later be responsible for approving the Franciscans) approved their order, The Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of the Captives. The members are called Trinitarians. They returned to France where King Philip Augustus offered them financial support. The first hermitage was built in Meaux, on the site where Felix had been a hermit for years. Within 40 years, 600 Trinitarian houses had been established.

Felix died at the age of 85. No record of canonization exists, but the Trinitarians claim he was canonized by Pope Urban IV on 1 May 1262. The order founded by him remains, as well as other signs of his legacy. A St. Felix Church exists in Clifton Springs, NY;* it is part of the Diocese of Rochester NY. His feast day is 4 November.

*It was originally dedicated to St. Agnes, but the name was changed in 1895.

Al-Gebra

Recent stamp commemorating al-Khwārizmī

Algebra—a method for doing computations using non-number symbols (such as "x" and "y") in equations—keeps coming up in conversations around me lately, and I realize I haven't addressed its Medieval origins yet.

Perhaps I should say Classical origins, since the Babylonians developed an arithmetical system for dealing with linear and quadratic equations. The Greeks, Chinese, and Egyptians used a kind of geometric algebra in the centuries BCE. A Greek mathematician in Alexandria in the 3rd century CE, Diophantus, is sometimes called the "Father of Algebra" based on his series of books, Arithmetica, that deal with solving algebraic equations.

Diophantus has a rival for that title, however.

An Arab mathematician named Muhammad ibn-Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (c.780-850) wrote a book in Baghdad in 825 called Kitab al-jabr wal-muqubala ["The book of restoration and balancing"]. Specifically, the process of turning the equation x - 2 = 12 to x = 14 was called jabr because one was "restoring" the x. The process of turning x + y = y + 7 into x = 7 was muqubala because one was "balancing" the two sides.

The word al-jabr, "restoration," eventually became the sole label for this method of mathematics.*

A Latin translation of his work was circulating in Europe in the 12th century. Fibonnaci is believed to have been exposed to Arabic mathematics, which might be why he was able to come close to solving the equation x³ + 2x² + cx = d.

So al-Khwārizmī gets the title "Father of Algebra" because the branch of mathematics is named for his book describing it. He also gets the honor of naming a different mathematical term: his name was Latinized into Algorithmus, from which we derive the term "algorithm."

*Interestingly, this word's non-mathematical definition of "restoration" made it suitable for other uses.  It made its way into European parlance via Arabic, and "algebrista" became a title for a "bone-setter." The term could also apply to barbers, because they did bone-setting as well as blood-letting. (The term for a blood-letter was "sangrador.")

Marshmallow

Yes, marshmallow. (Maybe Halloween has put me in mind of sweets.)

Althaea officinalia (the "marsh mallow") is a perennial that grows wild in salty marshes. Egyptians discovered that the root contained a sweet sap that could be used to sweeten cakes. The delicacy was reserved for Pharaohs.

The Greco-Roman world embraced the substance in mallows and believed it had medicinal value. The 1st century Dioscorides (cribbing from Pliny) wrote:

boiled in ... wine or chopped on its own, it works against wounds, tumors of the parotid gland[*], swellings in the glands of the neck, abcesses, inflamed breasts, inflammations of the anus, bruises, swellings, tensions of the sinews ... It works also against dysentery, blood loss and diarrhoea. [Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Pharmacological Knowledge in Fifth- and Fourth-century Greece, p.264]

Medieval Europe, willing to try anything suggested by the Classical world, discovered how sweet the mallow concoctions were and started using them as a sweet treat—with the bonus of them being healthful. An Italian cookbook of the 1400s—De Honesta Voluptuate et Valetudine [On Right Pleasure and Good Health], by Bartolomeo Platina—suggested several ways to season the substance. Medieval monks grew the mallow for its sweetness and medical properties. Herbalists turned it into treatments for sore throats and coughs, indigestion and toothache.

The marshmallow sap was used for liquids in the Middle Ages; it was 19th century French confectioners who whipped it into a solid candy by mixing it with egg whites and corn syrup. Nowadays it can be made without any recourse to the mallow plant. My personal favorite recipe is here (you would be surprised how easy it is to make, and how sticky it is to work with after it has "set"). If you would rather make it from actual marshmallow root, go here.

*The "parotid gland" is a salivary gland in the back of the mouth.

The First Witch Trial

Well, not exactly. It is the first recorded witch trial. That is, the first whose details are written down, rather than a terse "hanged for being a witch."

The trial began on 29 October 1390, in the Place de Châtelet, a public square in Paris. Two women were accused of magic. Jeanne de Brigue

specialized in recovering lost or stolen items, and her talents had actually been used about six years before her arrest and trial by the priest of a neighboring village. She also cured the sick and made healthy people ill by means of magic. [Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages: Documents and Readings, by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, p.178]

The other woman, Macette, readily confessed everything when she was questioned, including knowledge of how to bring harm to someone.

...capture two toads and put each of them separately into a new clay pot. Then she would have to take them, look at them, call here times upon Lucifer for help, recite three times the Gospel of St. John, Paternoster, and Ave Maria, put [the toads] back in the pot, and keep them under control with a bit of white bread and some breast milk. When she wanted to hurt her husband, ... she called Lucifer to her aid three times above each of the earthenware pots containing the toads before she uncovered them. After that, the recited the Gospel of St. John, and Paternoster, and Ave Maria. Once she had done this,  she opened the earthenware pots and stabbed the toads hard with long needles or small iron spikes, and the person she intended to hurt would suffer the same way the toads suffered, or something similar, and would not be able to rest anywhere, ... . [Ibid.]

Macette and de Brigue were both executed on 19 August 1391.

Happy Halloween.

Weird Alphabets

Even those of us who have studied some classical Greek would be surprised when first running across a pattern/practice called antistoichia [Greek (roughly): "standing opposite in pairs"]. We drilled ourselves to learn the alphabet by memorizing lines of five letters each:

alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon

zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa 

But this was not always the standard order. In the antistoichia pattern, the order of words in a lexicon (such as Suidas') might follow the order of the spelling of sounds. Words that begin with alpha+iota as a diphthong, for instance, would be a separate entry to follow words that are spelled with alpha, even if they included alpha+iota, because they sounded like a different letter.

For instance, a modern English alphabetized encyclopedia or lexicon would order the following words thusly:

A
aardvark
absent
Aida (the opera, where the "a" and "i" are pronounced separately)
air
aisle
apple

B
bad
bed
bid 

The antistoichia ordering, since, "aisle" had two vowels making their own sound and "Aida" is two vowels that are pronounced separately, would order that list thusly:

A
aardvark
absent
Aida
apple 

AI
air
aisle

B

bad
bed
bid

This can throw off reading of partial manuscripts unless the researcher is familiar with the old practice and can adjust expectations accordingly.

Chaucer's Enemy

William Thorpe before Arundel, 1407; a case of heresy

Yesterday's post discussed Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, and suggested that he was Chaucer's enemy. Let's discuss that assertion.*

England had become more liberal under Richard II. John Wycliffe had pushed for a more people-oriented approach to Christianity that focused far less respect on the hierarchy of the Church—the hierarchy of which Arundel had reached the pinnacle in England, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Wycliffe had even started producing parts of the Bible in English, accessible to more people. The followers of Wycliffe, called "Lollards," were considered heretical by many, and especially by Arundel. Prior to his exile, he had tried to curb that hotbed of Lollardy, Oxford, and had been rebuffed and insulted by its chancellor. Now, restored as archbishop under Henry IV, Arundel had a freer hand to pursue his goal of asserting harsher control over the moral fiber of the realm.

One of his targets, by necessity, would have been the popular poet whose freely circulated works showed numerous signs of Lollardy. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales constantly mocked the hierarchy of church officials, displaying their worldliness and corruption. The pilgrim who seems to have Chaucer's greatest respect is the antithesis of the worldly Arundel:

The Parson may be poor but he is rich in holy thought and works. He's a learned man—a clerk—and he truly teaches Christ's Gospel. He's benign and diligent and patient in adversity. He is loathe to excommunicate folk because they can't pay their tithes ... and he would rather give them from his own income and property. [Who Murdered Chaucer, p. 219]

But would Arundel's dislike of these portraits turn into action? Well, it was during the reign of Henry IV (in 1401, in fact) that England started burning heretics, and a few years after that (1407) Arundel made knowledge of the Bible by non-clergy a sign of heresy. He was controlling, heavy-handed, vengeful when it came to Oxford and Lollardy and of anything that attacked or mocked the hierarchy of the church.

Jones et alia assert that Arundel's need to change the tone in England may have been the guiding force behind Chaucer's difficulties at the end of his life (Henry IV officially confirmed Chaucer's annuity, but records show that the payments weren't actually forthcoming) and the obscurity with which he was treated when he died—although praised by fellow-poets during his life, there is no public notice taken of his death. Chaucer might have seen the writing on the wall; hence the Retraction he wrote for the Tales in which he asks forgiveness for his vulgar stories and prays for God's mercy, in a tone very different from everything else he has written.

*I give full credit for this theory to the authors of Who Murdered Chaucer, discussed in a previous post.

Thomas Arundel

Thomas Arundel, Lambeth Palace Collection

Let us talk about the "Worst Briton" of the 15th century, according to a 2005 poll of historians, and the man who may have been Chaucer's greatest enemy.

Thomas Arundel (1353-19 February 1414) was a well-born lad of 20 at Oxford when he was made Bishop of Ely. He showed no particular proclivity to the religious life (or the scholarly life, for that matter), but his father—who had considerable financial standing at the court of the increasingly feeble-minded Edward III—arranged it for his son. Ely was a very lucrative position, and Arundel might have been comfortable with it, but good and bad fortune were to follow.

The reign of Richard II, starting in July 1377, was tumultuous. The Peasants' Revolt, waves of the Black Death, financial excesses of the Crown, continuing tensions with France, and maybe just the fact that a France-raised child was now king—all these and more contributed to a general unrest in England. Parliament took steps to curb Richard's authority, creating several political crises as loyalists faced off against the elements of the aristocracy that wanted to increase their own power.

One of the elements that opposed the Crown was Arundel's brother, John FitzAlan, the 1st Baron Arundel. He helped get Thomas promoted to the prestigious position of Archbishop of York in 1388, and eventually pulled Thomas into the political intrigue, getting Thomas' support during a crisis of 1386-88. Thomas did his best to stay on Richard's good side, and succeeded to an extent: Richard even made him Archbishop of Canterbury in 1396, but then exiled him to Florence within a year when Richard had apparently regained enough power to take revenge against those who had opposed him in the 1380s. Richard got Pope Boniface IX to make Arundel the Bishop of St. Andrews in Scotland, a huge demotion.*

But how did any of this make Arundel into Chaucer's enemy?

In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke invaded England and attacked his cousin, Richard II, with the intent to take the throne from him. Arundel joined him, and upon Henry's ascendance to the throne as King Henry IV, Arundel once again became Archbishop of Canterbury, the most powerful prelate in the land. While Henry worked to reverse many of the political works of Richard's reign, Archbishop Arundel set about to change the moral climate of the realm, which he felt had become very slack.

To do that, he had to undo the damage to society perpetrated by two of his countrymen: John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer.

More on that tomorrow.

*And a huge problem, since the Avignon Crisis was going on at the time, and Scotland recognized the Avignon pope, not the Roman pope, who had already put his own Avignon-loyal bishop in St. Andrews. Boniface needed England's support against Avignon and was happy to help him in the Arundel matter.

The Death of Chaucer

The 25th of October 1400 is the date of the death of Geoffrey Chaucer. Based on the records that exist from 14th century England that refer to him (over 300 of them!), we assume a birthdate around 1340. That would make him about 60 years old at the time of his death, a perfectly respectable number from which one could die of old age.

Unless he was murdered.

Terry Jones, who once amazed us all as the logical Sir Bedivere in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, collaborated on a book that explored what he considers the unsatisfying approach history has given us about the death of the English poet. Who Murdered Chaucer asks why—given that Chaucer was a well-known poet as well as a well-connected civil servant in his lifetime—his death occurs in absolute historical silence.

In 1400 his name simply disappears from the record. We don't know how he died, where or when; there is no official confirmation of his death and no chronicle mentions it; no notice of his funeral or burial. He left no will and there's nothing to tell us what happened to his estate. [Who Murdered Chaucer? Terry Jones, et alia, St. Martins Press, 2003]

Jones and company have a theory, and it is because Chaucer was so integrated into the culture of his day. Besides having enjoyed several well-paying positions, Chaucer had done diplomatic work for his king and was probably more "connected" than most civil servants. When Henry Bolingbroke rebelled against King Richard II and wrested the throne from him—becoming King Henry IV on 30 September 1399—the regime change would have swept from office and political favor those like Chaucer.

In December of 1399, Chaucer had taken out a very long lease on his new apartment; would he have done so if he wasn't healthy and didn't expect a long life ahead of him? He hadn't finished his major work, The Canterbury Tales: according to the "plan" in the Prologue, each pilgrim would tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two tales on the way back; the approximately 120 tales would have "one-upped" the 100 tales of Boccaccio's Decameron. Perhaps Chaucer expected a long and peaceful retirement, continuing what he loved to do, out of the public eye.

The authors also point out that Chaucer's contemporary and friend, John Gower, changed the dedication of his great poem, the Confessio Amantis [Latin: Confession of the Lover], from Richard II and Chaucer to Henry Bolingbroke. Even if Gower decided he wanted to support Henry over Richard, why the omission of his friend Chaucer from the dedication? Was Chaucer becoming persona non grata [Latin: "person without grace" or "unwelcome person"] in the changing political climate?

But does all this mean that Chaucer was murdered? The title of Jones' book seems more than a little sensationalistic. Would the king really have taken such a personal interest in suppressing the fate of Chaucer?

Or did Chaucer have an even more oppressive and powerful enemy who held a grudge against him and would be motivated to suppress the poet?

Stay tuned...



[If you are interested in Chaucer and his time, consider the link in the upper-right of this webpage. A Death in Catte Street is my first historical mystery in a proposed series (a sequel is in the works). A young Chaucer finds himself in the middle of a mystery of which the rest of London is unaware. Curiosity and a sense of moral obligation inspire him to delve into the history of England.]