William of Norwich

The first case in England of "blood libel" (although more precisely it was only child sacrifice) was the case of William of Norwich, who died about 22 March 1144. The Peterborough Chronicle, an attempt to continue the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, had this to report:

In his time the Jews of Norwich bought a Christian child before Easter, and tortured him with all the same tortures with which our Lord was tortured, and on Long-Friday hanged him on a cross for love of our Lord, and afterwards buried him—imagined that it would be concealed, but our Lord showed that he was a holy martyr, and the monks took him, and buried him reverently in the minster, and through our Lord he performs wonderful and manifold miracles; and he is called St. William.

Here is what really happened. William was an apprentice to a tanner, whose body was found on Holy Saturday 1144 in Thorpe Wood, north of Norwich. An accusation was made by William's family against Jews currently living in the city, so Bishop William de Turbeville decided to investigate. He summoned members of the Jewish community to his court to endure trial by ordeal.

Before the bishop could subject his "guests" to trials, however, Sheriff John de Chesney showed up and stopped any proceedings, since the bishop had no legal authority to do so. Jews were considered to be under the king's protection (at that time, Stephen of Blois): the Angevin kings respected the money-lending (and money-taking) opportunities their presence afforded the crown.

Bishop de Turbeville moved the body to the monastery cemetery and tried to declare William a martyr and create a cult around him for the sake of attention and donations to the church, but it was slow going. There was no evidence that Jews were involved, so no great public execution or punishment of any kind that would cause a sensation.

The bishop was not ready to give up, however. He encouraged a Benedictine monk, Thomas of Monmouth, to write a book about the event. Thomas's The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich contained two chapters on his life and five chapters on miracles performed in his name afterward. Thomas created a story of a converted Jew who became a monk, Theobald of Cambridge, who explains to Thomas that the "ancient writings of his fathers" required an annual killing of a Christian. "Theobald" explains that this killing was ordered by a Jew in Narbonne, France, who claimed to be the Messiah.

Since the Jews at this time in Norwich had been there just under a decade, and came from Normandy, they were French-speaking, so the connection to Narbonne made sense to some. No one, however, seemed to notice that there was no evidence of an annual killing caused by Jews stretching back to the time of "ancient fathers." William's family was Anglo-Saxon, and there were many conflicts between indigenous Anglo-Saxons and the recently arrived Norman folk.

The cult of William of Norwich did not make Norwich rich, but it persisted. The bishop moved the body a few times, each time putting it in a more prominent place, ending up in a chapel built on the spot where the boy's body was found.

But now for a topic a little less grisly: when the bishop wanted to subject the Jews to trial by ordeal, what might that have entailed? There were many possible trial ideas, and I'll share them tomorrow.

Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich was a Christian mystic who lived (based on internal references in her writings) from about 1342 to 1415. We know little about her personal life: biography was not a common genre at the time. We are not even sure that he name is Julian; she is called that because she was an anchoress at the Church of St. Julian in Norwich, England.

Statue of Julian in Norwich Cathedral

She became deathly ill at the age of 30. While a priest held a crucifix over her while giving last rites, she began to experience visions. In her book Revelations of Divine Love, she describes the visions she had over the following 16 hours, after which she recovered from her illness. She wrote about the visions, starting immediately after her recovery. (This may be the first book written by a woman in the English language.) Many years later, she wrote her own explication of her visions in a much longer book, called The Long Text. (It was 63,500 words, whereas the Revelations was 11,000.)

This blog has previously discussed her metaphor of "God as Mother," but she was known for a couple other particular philosophies. She believed more in a God who loved and wanted to save everyone than a God who judged and condemned some to everlasting punishment. She felt that sin was the result of ignorance, not evil; people sinned through lack of knowledge, and through sinning gained the knowledge that God had a role in their lives. Sinning was failure, and through failure we learn; also, the pain that resulted from sinning mirrored the suffering that Christ endured, and therefore brought people closer to Christ.

Some of her ideas were very controversial; however, there is no evidence that she was criticized in her lifetime. This was not due to obscurity: she was very well-known in England and beyond. Copies of her texts were edited by well-known clerics of the day. It may be that the Church simply did not put much credence in her writings because of her sex. 

Julie Andrews & St. John

Paul the Deacon

Paulus Diaconus (c.720-c.799) wrote the hymn of St. John, and it goes like this:

Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris
Mi ra gestorum famuli tuorum,
Sol ve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.
So that your servants may,
with loosened voices,
resound the wonders of your deeds,
clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John!

What does this have to do with Julie Andrews? Nothing, until the 11th century, when Guido of Arezzo (c.992-1050) proposed an ascending diatonic scale for music.* He realized that the hymn was a perfect mnemonic for the scale, and so he described the scale using the syllables on which the ascending tones fell: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Around 1600, in Italy, a musicologist named Giovanni Battista Doni refined the scale by changing "ut" to "do" because he preferred the open vowel sound it created, and added a seventh note which he called "si" because of the SI initials from "Sancte Iohannes." So we had do re mi fa sol la si.

It was a long time later that a Norwich, England music teacher named Sarah Glover (1785-1867) developed a method she called Sol-fa for teaching a capella singing, and changed si to ti so that each syllable would start with a different consonant sound.

Glover published her ideas, and they were further refined (and sometimes independently developed) by people like John Curwen, Pierre Galin, Aimé Paris, Emile Chevé. I cannot draw a direct line from any of these to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but by the time R&H came along, "singing the scales" was a commonplace way of teaching the rudiments of music to children. When R&H needed a number for a scene in the 1959 musical "The Sound of Music" when Maria teaches the children to sing—after discovering they knew nothing of singing because their father had forbidden it—what was more natural than using the sung scales that had been developed over the past thousand years? Hammerstein turned each note to a homonym to flesh out the lyrics, and the rest is theatrical/cinematic history.

Hammerstein should be grateful that he didn't have to write a lyric for "ut."

*"Ascending" is important here: previously, the scale was described as a series of descending notes.

God as Mother

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious is making news, and my desire to make this blog not just interesting and varied but also relevant prompts me to talk about Julian of Norwich.

Mystics—people who attain knowledge of the divine not by rational study but by a direct connection or intuition, often during a state of ecstasy—are known in all faiths and all eras.

Julian of Norwich was an anchoress (a female anchorite, a hermit; she lived a life of religious seclusion) who had a series of mystic visions of Jesus in 1373 (she was about 31 years old) while on what was thought to be her deathbed. She recovered on May 13, and wrote down a short version of the visions. In about 1393 she wrote a much longer version, Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, possibly the first book written in English by a woman.

One of her most controversial habits is to refer to God and Christ as Mother as well as Father. One such passage:

And thus I saw that God rejoiceth that He is our Father, and God rejoiceth that He is our Mother, and God rejoiceth that He is our Very Spouse and our soul is His loved Wife.
...
God is Very Father and Very Mother of Nature...

Church authorities at the time did not challenge her. This cannot be because she wrote in obscurity: there are plenty of contemporary references to her, and she was operating in Norwich, the second most populated city in England. Either the church did not consider her ideas likely to become influential, or they were not shocked by them. After all, she did not say God was solely mother; she simply allowed for feminine qualities as well as masculine. Perhaps this all-inclusive approach was sufficiently non-threatening to be accepted as non-heretical. Perhaps the Middle Ages was willing to embrace the importance of the feminine along with the masculine.